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The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (DPA) has fined Xandr, an advertising unit owned by Microsoft, €8.6 million ($9.62 million) for illegally relaying ​Grindr users' sensitive data to advertisers. The administrative penalty is the largest issued by the data protection watchdog, arguing the case merited a high fine because of the "very serious" nature of the breach. The infringements occurred between July 2018 and April 2020. "Xandr acted as an intermediary that relayed the personal data of Grindr users in Norway, including data revealing sexual orientation, to potentially thousands of other companies," the Data Protection Authority said in a statement. The data protection authority said its investigation found that Xandr was a joint controller with Grindr, which meant it was responsible for obtaining users' consent before processing their data. Instead of ensuring they had the legal basis for their own processing of the data, Xandr pointed fing...

The dangerous part of a stolen identity isn't always the initial login. It's what an attacker can do with that access next. With AI accelerating reconnaissance, exploitation of vulnerabilities, and privilege escalation, attackers can move through systems faster than security teams can investigate. A compromised account that looks legitimate at first could become the starting point for a much larger attack. And that's where traditional identity security faces a serious problem: Checking who gets access isn't enough if you can't control what happens after. See How to Stop AI-Powered Identity Attacks — Register for the Webinar Why Traditional Identity Controls Are Falling Behind

Three vulnerabilities in LG's webOS can be chained to give an attacker on the same local network root access to certain smart TVs without a PIN or any interaction from the owner. LG has issued a fix, according to an advisory published by SSD Secure Disclosure on October 12. The chain was tested on two TV models, the 32LQ636BPSA and the 27TQ600SW, running webOS 7.5.7-25 on firmware 04.54.40. Whether other models or firmware versions are affected is not known. Owners of affected TVs should check for a firmware update. No workaround is available for those who cannot update yet. The attack enters through a service that the TV exposes on port 3001, which is used by the LG ThinQ app for pairing. An attacker replays a manifest from sync-demo, a built-in app already on the device, signed with a test certificate the firmware trusts. A permission in the manifest causes the pairing service to skip the PIN prompt and hand over a privileged key. With that key, the attacker laun...

A user opens a browser tab, pastes data into a chat assistant, and nothing is installed. A developer adds a coding assistant as an editor extension, and nothing shows up in the installed programs list. Someone downloads a local model runtime, a program that runs models directly on the machine instead of sending data to an external service, because they were told not to send company data outside. None of this reaches your software inventory. Tasked with controlling AI, an administrator often resorts to blocking well-known AI websites and taking enforcement action without knowing what is actually running. Bitdefender GravityZone AI Visibility and Control (AIVC) is the discovery and risk layer that answers the questions you have, first: Which AI software is present on your protected Windows endpoints, who is running it, and how much risk does each one carry. What Your Software Inventory Was Never Built to Watch AI Visibility and Control covers four classes of exposu...

Attackers took remote control of fridges and freezers at hundreds of French supermarkets on the night of October 11 and warmed them, forcing stores to throw food away, several retail chains said. The attackers reached them through the controller that runs all of a store's fridges and freezers, a device made by Danish company Danfoss that maintenance firms can manage remotely. Les Mousquetaires, which owns the Intermarché chain, said its fridges and freezers were put into defrost and heated to as much as 50°C. CERT-FR, the French government's computer emergency response team, said in an  alert published in French  on October 12 that it is aware of numerous compromises affecting two Danfoss controller series, the AK-SM and the AK-SC. It told operators to disconnect the controllers or filter access to them. CERT-FR is part of ANSSI, France's national cybersecurity agency. ANSSI's head, Vincent Strubel, called it urgent to take the two series off the internet or fil...

Two of 31 newly disclosed flaws in Progress Software's  MarkLogic Server  database could let an account given only some management privileges take administrator control of the server, the company says. Progress published all 31 on October 12 and scored five of them critical. Fixes have been available since September 10, in  MarkLogic 11.3.7  and  MarkLogic 12.1.0 . Affected releases, and the release that fixes each: MarkLogic 11.x before 11.3.7: upgrade to 11.3.7 MarkLogic 12.x before 12.1.0: upgrade to 12.1.0 MarkLogic 11.3 is the long-term support (LTS) line. The 12 line, which Progress calls an innovation release, has no patched 12.0 release. Its fix is 12.1.0, which also adds new features. Installing the fixes for the 10 MarkLogic flaws Progress disclosed in August is not enough. Those fixes arrived in 11.3.6 and 12.0.3, and both releases are affected by the new flaws. Progress's CVE records and its upgrade notes for the two releases do n...

GitLab has released patches for a maximum-severity security flaw impacting its Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that could result in arbitrary code execution. "GitLab has remediated an issue that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server via a specially crafted regular expression in a CI/CD configuration, due to insufficient regular expression validation," the company said in a Monday advisory. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-97229 , has been described as an integer overflow issue. It carries a CVSS score of 10.0. It affects the following versions - All versions from 19.2 before 19.2.8 All versions from 19.3 before 19.3.5, and All versions from 19.4 before 19.4.2 Patches for the flaw are available in versions 19.4.2, 19.3.5, and 19.2.8. Also addressed are three high-severity bugs - CVE-2026-92883 (CVSS score: 8.7) - A cross-site scripting vulnerability...

Low-cost Android smartphones have been shipped with malicious software baked into the device firmware, allowing bad actors to covertly install apps, conduct ad fraud, and turn devices into residential proxies. The activity, which targets Android devices built on MediaTek platforms across several brands, is being tracked by Bitdefender under the moniker Midnight Mimosa . The preinstalled malware ("com.android.system.lite") runs with system-level privileges, which make it possible to install or uninstall a rotating set of at least 32 disguised apps, grant itself additional permissions to accessibility services, notifications, and SMS, and load arbitrary code supplied remotely by the operators. Specifically, it fetches a remote configuration from an external server and then downloads and executes additional payloads designed to conduct ad fraud and silent installation or removal of partner apps. These apps incorporate proxyware, ad fraud, and code execution features. It...

Some meetings last longer than it took attackers to jump on a newly disclosed security flaw this week. Within hours, they were already testing it. That's not much time to read the warning, let alone do something about it. But speed is only part of the problem. A secure connection didn't always mean a safe destination. People offering to fix a ransomware mess had questions to answer themselves. Malware got better at hiding its tracks. And some systems turned out to be easier to break into than anyone would like to admit. The odd part is how normal much of it looked until someone checked closer. There's more going on here than a few bad bugs and clever attacks. Some of the smaller stories are just as telling. This week's full recap is worth a read, especially the bits that didn't make the big headlines. ⚡ Threat of the Week Atlassian Flaw Exploited in the Wild — Threat actors have begun to exploit a newly disclosed critical security flaw impacting Atlassian...

The personal AI agents rollout is going about as smoothly as expected: Amazon now blocks Meta's Muse because it doesn't identify itself as a bot while browsing; Instinct keeps raising privacy concerns ; and the horror stories from pretty much every personal AI agent keep piling up. Regardless, the tech world is mesmerized by the capabilities and potential of these services. Less than a year after the first release of the open-source agent now called OpenClaw, the juggernauts are putting their weight behind the idea that each of us needs a personal assistant. You know what's coming: your employees will connect their personal agents to work systems. There's no stopping that. Their agents already manage their home time, and managing their work time is the next logical step. For them, that is. Not for your security. Given that personal agents will reach corporate systems whether approved or not, you might be wondering what the best way is to block them. If that’s yo...

Cryptocurrency hardware maker Ledger has temporarily paused sales of its products via CryptoBilis following reports of stolen funds linked to devices sold by the reseller. On Friday, the company said it was investigating reports of loss of funds from users in Southeast Asia who had purchased products from CryptoBilis. The incident is said to have resulted in losses totaling more than $86 million, according to pseudonymous blockchain investigator Specter . "We recommend Ledger users who purchased from this reseller in the last 90 days to not initiate set up if you have not done so yet," Ledger said in an X post. "If you have set up your Ledger device, consider moving assets to a new Ledger signer (with new seed)." The company has since revealed that one of the impacted users' devices contained an unauthorized hardware implant, and that it's reaching out to impacted users as part of an ongoing probe into the incident. Out of an abundance of caution, ...

Threat actors have been observed exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw in SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 appliances within days of public disclosure. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-102255 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a case of pre-authenticated server-side request forgery (SSRF) that could allow a remote attacker "to direct the appliance to issue requests on their behalf and reach internal functionality and perform unauthorized operations." Patches for the flaw were released by SonicWall on October 6, 2026, with versions 12.4.3-03670 (platform-hotfix) and 12.5.0-03082 (platform-hotfix). The vulnerability has since started witnessing active exploitation attempts, with first signs detected by threat intelligence firms Defused Cyber and Previdian on October 8, 2026. Data from Previdian shows that a total of 135 attempts have been observed to date from two unique IP addresses located in the U.S. SonicWall has yet to update the advisory ...

A maximum-severity security flaw impacting the Bricksforge plugin for WordPress has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to Patchstack. The critical vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-85097 (CVSS score: 10.0), which allows unauthenticated attackers to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code on vulnerable WordPress websites, resulting in remote code execution (RCE). The security flaw impacts Bricksforge versions up to and including 3.1.8.9. Patches have been released in version 3.1.8.10. Bricksforge is a WordPress plugin that's advertised as a "Swiss Army knife" for Bricks, a visual website-building tool for WordPress, with support for animations, advanced forms, and scrolling video sequences. WordPress security company Patchstack said it detected exploitation efforts targeting the flaw on October 7, 2026, at 9:47 p.m. UTC. "Bricksforge validates a file's MIME type when it is first uploaded. When a form is later submitted, however, it ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a two-pronged artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented initial access campaign targeting WordPress sites, e-commerce platforms, and critical infrastructure entities in Ukraine. The activity, which brings together commodity offensive tools like Cobalt Strike with an AI orchestration layer powered by Anthropic's Claude Code, has been attributed to a Russian-speaking, financially motivated initial access broker codenamed CyberXero . The threat actor is assessed to be active since at least July 2026. "The operation runs two pipelines at once: a global, automated campaign against WordPress and e-commerce platforms, and a curated, manual campaign against Ukrainian energy and critical infrastructure," SOCRadar said in a report published last week. The global campaign specifically focuses on known security flaws like wp2shell (CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137) and CVE-2026-4815 , an SQL injection vulnerability impactin...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously unseen variant of the DarkSword iOS exploit kit called P7 DarkSword . "Compared with the variants we usually observe, P7 reduces its on-device footprint, adds on-device keychain and crypto-wallet theft, and adds two way C2 communication with the attacker's infrastructure," iVerify said in a new report published Thursday. The name "P7" is a nod to the threat actor's use of the "p7_" variable prefix in changes made to the original DarkSword code. DarkSword was first publicly documented earlier this March by Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), iVerify, and Lookout, detailing its ability to target iPhones running iOS versions between iOS 18.4 and 18.7. The kit was detected in the wild in November 2025. The toolkit is engineered to chain multiple iOS vulnerabilities to escape the browser sandbox, escalate to kernel privileges, and inject the main payload into SpringBoard, t...

In environments studied for the 2026 State of Agent Security Report , roughly 1,280 third-party products now embed AI. About 282 of them sit behind single sign-on. The other thousand are invisible to identity infrastructure by default, not because anyone hid them, but because an identity stack can only govern what authenticates through it, and most agents never do. That gap is the clearest expression of a shift the security industry is only starting to name. For several years, "AI security" solved a first-party problem: the company decided to use AI, procured licenses, deployed a model behind a gateway, and security pointed controls at the thing the business had chosen. Agents do not arrive that way. They arrive inside software the enterprise already runs, and they arrive without a decision. Why the decision point mattered more than the controls Every control in the first-party toolkit assumes a moment exists: model scanning assumes a model was selected, prompt inspect...

Anthropic on Friday said it's cutting off live internet access for all its internal evaluations until further notice following the discovery of new incidents in which its artificial intelligence (AI) models exhibited misaligned behavior and targeted real websites. The AI company said it identified four broad categories of unintended model actions during evaluations and internal use of Claude - Claude Mythos Preview exploiting SQL or command injection flaws in unspecified third-party software to run commands on a university server, either because its own tools were intentionally limited or because an outside service it needed was unavailable, causing it to use other tools hosted on a third party's site to complete the task. Claude Haiku 4.5 and a non-frontier research model submitting a sensitive form on a real website when it was not authorized to do so. This occurred in scenarios where instructions were ambiguous or due to environment misconfigurations that preve...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an ongoing credential-theft campaign that has compromised two high-profile open-source maintainer accounts to push a malicious workflow into over 340 repositories. "Using the account of Takashi Kitao, author of the 18,400-star game engine pyxel, the attacker pushed a malicious workflow to 27 repositories starting at 13:20 UTC," StepSecurity said . "Eight hours later, the account of Henry Wu (henrywoo), the original author of Uber's athenadriver, was used to push the same workflow to 318 repositories in a 16-minute window, 21:10–21:26 UTC." As of October 9, 2026, Socket said it has identified more than 500 GitHub accounts that committed the malicious workflow to tens of thousands of repositories since October 7, 2026. The activity has been attributed to GhostAction , a massive supply chain attack campaign that first came to light in September 2025. The activity impacted 817 repositories across 327 GitHu...

The FBI has arrested another suspected co-conspirator of ShinyHunters, FBI Director Kash Patel said on October 9 in a  post on X . ShinyHunters is the extortion group that said in September it had  breached the FBI's jobs portal  and stolen sensitive data on almost all FBI agents and job applicants. The FBI has not named the suspect, and no charges have been made public. The suspect is a Canadian citizen who was arrested in Pennsylvania, according to  The New York Times  and  CBS News . Both cited unnamed sources. The Times reported that the arrest was made on suspicion of involvement in the theft of FBI data. A law enforcement source told CBS News that the suspect is believed to have been directly involved in the hack. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the Times report, CBS News said. Patel's post does not say whether the suspect took part in the breach. It calls ShinyHunters "the group believed to be responsible for the recent FBIjobs.g...

Four more U.S. states sued router maker TP-Link Systems on October 6, bringing the total to five, with   Texas filing a suit in February . Florida, Iowa, Montana and Nebraska allege the California company misled buyers about how secure its routers are and how separate it is from China. TP-Link  denies the claims  and says it will fight them in court. TP-Link Systems is based in Irvine, California. Until a 2024 restructuring, it was affiliated with TP-Link Technologies, a Chinese company that the suits do not name as a defendant. The complaints from  Florida ,  Montana  , and  Nebraska  do not allege that the Chinese government has obtained customers' data through TP-Link. They describe that as a risk under Chinese law. Separately, they say state-backed hackers have exploited flaws in TP-Link routers. Iowa's announcement is worded more strongly in places. Attorney General Brenna Bird's office said TP-Link firmware gives the Chinese governm...