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Google on Tuesday said it's rolling out improved safeguards in its Chrome browser to secure users against ClickFix attacks when Enhanced Protection is enabled. ClickFix is a popular social engineering technique in which bad actors trick users into copying and pasting malicious code directly into their computer's operating system, thereby bypassing conventional security controls. As part of these attacks, unsuspecting users who land on legitimate-but-compromised sites or malicious ads are redirected to phishing landing pages that display fake Cloudflare or Google reCAPTCHA verification or other non-existent errors and instruct users to copy and paste a command on the Windows Run dialog (or the Mac Terminal app) to address it. The moment a user presses the Enter key after pasting the command, it triggers a multi-stage infection chain that leads to the deployment of malware, such as information stealers or remote access trojans. In an attempt to blend in with regular act...

The iPhone of Vladan Đokić, rector of the University of Belgrade and a prominent supporter of Serbia's student protest movement, was infected with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware in 2026, the  Citizen Lab said  on October 19. The finding came six days before Serbia's October 25 snap parliamentary election. The infection used a zero-click exploit, meaning Đokić did not have to tap a link or open a file for it to work. The lab found the infection with high confidence, but its note provides no date within 2026, does not identify who was behind the attack, and notes that its investigation is ongoing. The election was  called in September  after nearly two years of protests that began when a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024, killing 16 people. The Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, analyzed forensic artifacts from the phone at Đokić's request, working with the Serbian digital-rights group SHARE Foundation. SHARE ...

WhatsApp's help pages carried hidden instructions for its support chatbot that told it not to recommend a data protection authority or regulator to users who could no longer delete their accounts, even though WhatsApp's own privacy policy for Europe tells users they can complain to one. The text sat in the pages' code, never shown on screen, until it was removed by October 18. Whether the chatbot ever followed the instructions is not known:  Redact , the data-deletion software company that found the text, read the instructions, not the chatbot's answers. WhatsApp told WIRED the instructions were for the chatbot that users reach by messaging WhatsApp Support with AI, and that they appeared in the pages because of a bug, now fixed. A second block of hidden text on the page about reporting and blocking told the chatbot that once a user mentioned a lawyer, a lawsuit, or a court, it should not cite privacy laws such as the GDPR, even when the user raised them. A W...

Someone built a tool to steal data, then decided it should scare the victim for fun. Yes, that’s an actual feature. And somehow, it fits right in with this week's security stories. The rest gets interesting in different ways. A small permission can lead to a big theft. A trusted login can hide the wrong person. Old bugs are finding new victims, familiar tools are being put to strange uses, and some flaws are so simple you wonder how nobody spotted them sooner. There's a lot more hiding in the details, including a few twists you probably wouldn't expect. Here's what made the list this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

The Indian government has directed telecom service providers (TSPs) in the country to mandatorily display callers' registered names along with their numbers for incoming calls starting November 1, 2026, in an effort to help people identify calls from unknown numbers and tackle spam or fraudulent calls. To that end, the Department of Telecommunications has issued a circular urging service providers to implement the Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) service. "At the time when a call is incoming, the calling name presentation service presents the calling name identity of the calling user on the user terminal of the called user," reads the circular released by the Indian Ministry of Communications dated October 13, 2026. "Calling name identity is the name of the calling user as recorded in subscriber data record of the originating telecommunication service provider and such identity is included in the calling line identification of such user." The caller...

A Saudi national and employee of OpenAI has been arrested for allegedly planting a hidden recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco offices to covertly record sensitive conversations. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, has been charged with using or endeavoring to use an electronic, mechanical, or other device to intercept oral communications. He was arrested by authorities on October 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said. Alfozan had been employed at OpenAI since July 2025, working as an engineering lead. He has since been terminated. According to Alfozan's LinkedIn profile, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a master's in data science in 2025. He was previously employed at Meta as a senior systems engineer and went on to become the founding engineer at Nash. "Abdulrahman Alfozan allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer's executive conference room to secretly capt...

The crooks have trust problems of their own. One ransomware affiliate decided to keep the profits for himself. Elsewhere, an attacker left a server exposed, complete with tools and traces of an intrusion. Apparently, keeping things secure is a problem on both sides of the fence. The rest of the week isn't much more reassuring. Malicious code turned up in developer packages and extensions that looked harmless. Familiar online services helped phishing emails appear legitimate. A basic file upload flaw gave attackers a way in, while weak session cookies made impersonation far too easy. Even AI assistants are getting their own instructions hidden inside phishing messages now. What's interesting is the gap between effort and results. Some attacks involve several stages, careful timing, and plenty of tricks. Others get surprisingly far because of a bad design choice or something nobody bothered to check. Both seem to be working well enough. Anyway, here's what else turned u...

Unauthorized parties have gained access to the names, addresses, and personal identification numbers of about 8.8 million people, living and dead, in Denmark's national population register, the country's digitalization ministry  said on October 5 . They used a private Danish company's lawful right to look up records in the Central Person Register (CPR). The ministry has told people never to give passwords or other confidential information to anyone who calls or emails, even someone who seems to know those details. The register's administration has stopped the company's access and reported the case to Datatilsynet, Denmark's data protection authority. Police are investigating. A very large number of automated lookups were made in the register to identify valid personal identification numbers, known as CPR numbers, Datatilsynet  said in a notice  on October 5. Its account comes from the notification it received from the register a day earlier. It has not y...

Apple has announced that it's taking steps to tighten controls around a macOS setting called Full Disk Access (FDA) due to security risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) agents. "Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history – without users' full knowledge and understanding," Apple said in a post. "For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with." Full Disk Access , accessed via Privacy & Security in the Settings app, was introduced by Apple in macOS Mojave (version 10.14). It offers users greater control over which applications can access their entire system and data from apps like Mail, Messages, Safari, and Time Machine backups. Once the setting is enabled for an application, it allows that program to bypass certain security restrictions and read and w...

This week, the useful words are boring ones: inspect, cache, compile, store, trust. Each sounds harmless. Each can become an attack path when a system does a little more than people expect. A model check can run code. A cache can mix up requests. A public secret can stay useful for years. That is the lesson running through the list. Attackers do not always need a brilliant new trick. They can hide commands in public infrastructure, reuse old flaws, abuse weak defaults, or let automation stitch together a rough path that still works. Faster tools are changing the pace, but basic mistakes are still doing plenty of the work. So the interesting question this week is not “what broke?” It is “what did we assume was safe because it looked ordinary?” The full list has answers. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

This week, the dangerous stuff keeps arriving dressed as something boring. An update. A login box. A search answer. A coding tool. A link you have clicked a hundred times before. That is the thread running through the pile. Trusted paths get poisoned. Old bugs find new jobs. AI tools leak more than expected. Fake prompts look real enough. And some attacks barely need an exploit at all — just one weak setting or one person doing what the screen tells them. Nothing here looks especially dramatic. That is what makes it useful. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Attackers keep finding new keys. The funny part is that defenders keep inventing where to store them. This week, those keys sit in AI tools, exposed services, old bugs, weak logins, and software sold like a monthly subscription. Some attacks use new tricks. Others just reuse what was already lying around. Both work often enough. So the threat landscape is not getting cleaner. It is just getting more places to make the same mistake. Here’s what showed up this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

A security breach at Gyazo , Helpfeel's image-sharing service, exposed about 23.62 million user records, including email addresses and password hashes, the Kyoto-based company said in a  notice  published Wednesday. It also exposed about 490 million image metadata records, mostly for images from January 2019 or earlier, including the IDs that make up Gyazo image links. Helpfeel said those IDs could be used to view the images without permission, and that it has temporarily disabled viewing of some of them. Helpfeel asked every Gyazo user to change their password and to change it on any other service that uses the same or a similar one. It also asked users to watch for suspicious emails or messages related to the incident. The attacker gained access through a vulnerability in Gyazo's image upload server, ran arbitrary commands on Helpfeel's systems, and accessed Gyazo's database, the company said. It has not said what kind of flaw it was. Helpfeel said no pay...

A lot of this week’s security news has the same awkward answer to one question: “Why was that allowed to work?” An extension asks for access and takes too much. A trusted service becomes part of a phishing chain. An old bug still gets results. An exposed system stays exposed. A package looks useful right up until it isn’t. Different stories, same basic problem: the path in was often already there. Nothing here needed magic. Mostly access, trust, weak edges, and someone willing to keep poking. That’s the week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

The worst part is how normal these attacks look. A call from IT. A shared file. A trusted app. A simple request to click “Allow.” Why break in when someone might open the door? That idea runs through this edition. Attackers use real tools, fake login pages, old account links, and software guides that point to unsafe downloads. One wrong letter in a web address can be enough. There is also ransomware, stolen ID data, hidden attack servers, and weak settings that should have been fixed long ago. Here’s the full list. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Google on Thursday announced new network security protections in Android 17 to bolster connection privacy, address cellular vulnerabilities, and safeguard the privacy of users' home networks. Topping the list is support for Encrypted Client Hello ( ECH ), a privacy standard that prevents networks from eavesdropping on which websites a user is visiting. "This new privacy standard works in tandem with private DNS to obscure the domain names you visit, hiding metadata that can be used to profile you," Google's Bram Bonné and Shuaibo Huang said . "By encrypting the destination website name from the very start, ECH helps ensure that, for supported websites and apps, network providers and network snoopers can no longer easily see which websites or apps you are accessing."

A fake login page. A fake security scan. A fake productivity app. Apparently, pretending to be useful is still one of the easier ways into a machine. The rest of the week gets stranger: botnets borrowing AI, command traffic hiding in public infrastructure, malicious tools waiting before showing their real behavior, exposed systems getting scanned, and exploit windows shrinking again. Different tricks, same advantage: attackers keep finding places where trust is cheap and friction is low. That sets the tone. Here’s the full list of what surfaced this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Meta on Tuesday announced a set of WhatsApp account security features, including support for multiple passkeys to a single account to help users with both iOS and Android devices sign into their accounts using the phishing-resistant method. The tech giant said more than 1 billion people use a passkey to log into WhatsApp. Support for passkeys was first introduced in Android in October 2023, before expanding to iOS in early 2024. Meta also followed it up by integrating passkeys into Facebook logins in June 2025. Users can manage their passkeys by navigating to Settings > Account > Passkeys. Along with the update, WhatsApp said it's adding a full password option as part of two-step verification, and users on Android will see more context on calls from people who aren't in their contacts. "Two-step verification is an extra protection layer that helps prevent someone from taking over your account, even if they get hold of your one-time passcode," WhatsApp...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced on Friday that ByteDance-owned TikTok will pay $400 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit accusing the company of violating child privacy laws in the country. As part of the settlement, the social media platform will pay $300 million immediately, and an additional $100 million "upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree entered against TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly," the DoJ said in a press release. A complaint filed back in August 2024 alongside the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused the company of "massive-scale invasions of children's privacy" by knowingly allowing children under 13 to create TikTok accounts and unlawfully collecting data from those who used it in "Kids Mode." It further alleged TikTok and its parent company ByteDance failed to "comply with parents' requests to delete their children's accounts and information." At the time, the company disputed...

A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something trusted doing exactly what it was allowed to do. Signed drivers get turned against defenses. Legitimate apps help malware blend in. A weak header check opens a path to code execution. Elsewhere, exposed systems, old bugs, odd hiding tricks, and AI-assisted exploit research keep lowering the effort needed to cause damage. Nothing here needs much decoration. The small gaps are doing enough work already. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.