data breach | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The next major breach hitting your clients probably won't come from inside their walls. It'll come through a vendor they trust, a SaaS tool their finance team signed up for, or a subcontractor nobody in IT knows about. That's the new attack surface, and most organizations are underprepared for it. Cynomi's new guide, Securing the Modern Perimeter: The Rise of Third-Party Risk Management , makes the case that TPRM is no longer a compliance formality. It's a frontline security challenge and a defining growth opportunity for MSPs and MSSPs who get ahead of it. The Modern Perimeter Has Expanded For decades, cybersecurity strategy revolved around a defined perimeter. Firewalls, endpoint controls, and identity management systems were deployed to protect assets within a known boundary. That boundary has dissolved. Today, client data lives in third-party SaaS applications, flows through vendor APIs, and is processed by subcontractors ...

Solana-based decentralized exchange Drift has confirmed that attackers drained about $285 million from the platform during a security incident that took place on April 1, 2026. "Earlier today, a malicious actor gained unauthorized access to Drift Protocol through a novel attack involving durable nonces, resulting in a rapid takeover of Drift’s Security Council administrative powers," the company said in a series of posts on X. "This was a highly sophisticated operation that appears to have involved multi-week preparation and staged execution, including the use of durable nonce accounts to pre-sign transactions that delayed execution." Drift noted that the attack did not exploit a vulnerability in its programs or smart contracts, and that there is no evidence of compromised seed phrases. Rather, the breach is said to have "involved unauthorized or misrepresented transaction approvals obtained prior to execution, likely facilitated through durable n...

A large-scale credential harvesting operation has been observed exploiting the React2Shell vulnerability as an initial infection vector to steal database credentials, SSH private keys, Amazon Web Services (AWS) secrets, shell command history, Stripe API keys, and GitHub tokens at scale. Cisco Talos has attributed the operation to a threat cluster it tracks as UAT-10608 . At least 766 hosts spanning multiple geographic regions and cloud providers have been compromised as part of the activity. "Post-compromise, UAT-10608 leverages automated scripts for extracting and exfiltrating credentials from a variety of applications, that are then posted to its command-and-control (C2)," security researchers  Asheer Malhotra and Brandon White said in a report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. "The C2 hosts a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) titled 'NEXUS Listener' that can be used to view s...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has disclosed details of a new phishing campaign in which the cybersecurity agency itself was impersonated to distribute a remote administration tool known as AGEWHEEZE. As part of the attacks, the threat actors, tracked as UAC-0255 , sent emails on March 26 and 27, 2026, posing as CERT-UA to distribute a password-protected ZIP archive hosted on Files.fm and urged recipients to install the "specialized software." The targets of the campaign included state organizations, medical centers, security companies, educational institutions, financial institutions, and software development companies. Some of the emails were sent from the email address "incidents@cert-ua[.]tech." The ZIP file ("CERT_UA_protection_tool.zip") is designed to download malware packaged as security software from the agency. The malware, per CERT-UA, is a remote access trojan codenamed AGEWHEEZE.  A Go-based malware, AGEWHEEZE...

Anthropic on Tuesday confirmed that internal code for its popular artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistant, Claude Code, had been inadvertently released due to a human error. "No sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed," an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement shared with CNBC News. "This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. We’re rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again." The discovery came after the AI upstart released version 2.1.88 of the Claude Code npm package, with users spotting that it contained a source map file that could be used to access Claude Code's source code – comprising nearly 2,000 TypeScript files and more than 512,000 lines of code. The version is no longer available for download from npm. Security researcher Chaofan Shou was the first to publicly flag it on X, stating "Claude code source code has been leaked via a map file in their npm re...

Secrets sprawl isn't slowing down: in 2025, it accelerated faster than most security teams anticipated. GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 report analyzed billions of commits across public GitHub and uncovered 29 million new hardcoded secrets in 2025 alone, a 34% increase year over year and the largest single-year jump ever recorded. This year's findings reveal three core trends: AI has fundamentally reshaped how and where credentials leak, internal systems are far more exposed than most organizations realize, and remediation continues to be the industry's Achilles heel. Here are nine strategic takeaways that matter. 1. Secrets are growing faster than the developer population Since 2021, leaked secrets have grown 152%, while GitHub's public developer base expanded 98%. More developers and more AI-assisted code generation mean more credentials in circulation, and detection alone can't keep pace. 2. AI services drove 81% more leaks year over year ...

Threat actors with ties to Iran successfully broke into the personal email account of Kash Patel, the director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and leaked a cache of photos and other documents to the internet. Handala Hack Team , which carried out the breach, said on its website that Patel "will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims." In a statement shared with Reuters, the FBI confirmed Patel's emails had been targeted, and noted necessary steps have been taken to "mitigate ​potential risks associated with this activity." The agency also said the published data was "historical in nature and involves no government information." The leak includes emails from ​2010 and 2019 allegedly sent by Patel. Handala Hack is assessed to be a pro-Iranian, pro-Palestinian hacktivist persona adopted by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security ( MOIS ). It's tracked by the cybersecurity community under the m...

The alleged administrator of the LeakBase cybercrime forum has been arrested by Russian law enforcement authorities, state media reported Thursday. According to TASS and MVD Media , a news website linked to the Russian Interior Ministry, the suspect is a resident of the city of Taganrog. The suspect is said to have been detained for creating and managing a criminal site that allowed stolen personal databases to be traded since 2021. In addition, technical equipment and other items of evidentiary value were confiscated during a search of the suspect's residence. "The platform hosted hundreds of millions of user accounts, bank details, usernames, and passwords, as well as corporate documents obtained through hacking," said Irina Volk, an official spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. "More than 147,000 users registered on the forum could buy and sell this data, as well as use it to commit fraudulent acts against citizens." LeakBase was...

In September 2025, Anthropic disclosed that a state-sponsored threat actor used an AI coding agent to execute an autonomous cyber espionage campaign against 30 global targets. The AI handled 80-90% of tactical operations on its own, performing reconnaissance, writing exploit code, and attempting lateral movement at machine speed. This incident is worrying, but there's a scenario that should concern security teams even more: an attacker who doesn't need to run through the kill chain at all, because they've compromised an AI agent that already lives inside your environment. One that already has the access, the permissions, and a legitimate reason to move across your systems every day. A Framework Built for Human Threats The traditional cyber kill chain assumes attackers have to earn every inch of access. It's a model developed by Lockheed Martin in 2011 to describe how adversaries move from initial compromise to their ultimate objective, and it's shaped how secu...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said a Russian national has been sentenced to two years in prison for managing a botnet that was used to launch ransomware attacks against U.S. companies. Ilya Angelov, 40, of Tolyatti, Russia, was also fined $100,000. Angelov, who went by the online aliases "milan" and "okart," is said to have co-managed a Russia-based cybercriminal group known as TA551 (aka ATK236, G0127, Gold Cabin, Hive0106, Mario Kart, Monster Libra, Shathak, and UNC2420 ) between 2017 and 2021. "Angelov's group built a network of compromised computers (a 'botnet') through distribution of malware-infected files attached to spam emails," the DoJ said. "Angelov and his co-manager then monetized this botnet by selling access to individual compromised computers ('bots')." According to the sentencing memorandum , the threat group developed programs to distribute spam email and refined malware to bypass security tools...

A 26-year-old Russian citizen has been sentenced in the U.S. to 6.75 years (81 months) in prison for his role in assisting major cybercrime groups, including the Yanluowang ransomware crew, in conducting numerous attacks against U.S. companies and other organizations. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Aleksei Olegovich Volkov facilitated dozens of ransomware attacks across the U.S., causing more than $9 million in actual losses and over $24 million in intended losses. Volkov was arrested on January 18, 2024, in Italy and extradited to the U.S. to face charges. He pleaded guilty to the crimes in November 2025. Volkov is said to have served as an initial access broker responsible for obtaining unauthorized access to computer networks and systems belonging to various organizations and selling that access to other criminal groups, including ransomware actors. This was accomplished by exploiting vulnerabilities or finding ways to access the networks without authorizati...

AWS Bedrock is Amazon's platform for building AI-powered applications. It gives developers access to foundation models and the tools to connect those models directly to enterprise data and systems. That connectivity is what makes it powerful – but it’s also what makes Bedrock a target. When an AI agent can query your Salesforce instance, trigger a Lambda function, or pull from a SharePoint knowledge base, it becomes a node in your infrastructure - with permissions, with reachability, and with paths that lead to critical assets. The XM Cyber threat research team mapped exactly how attackers could exploit that connectivity inside Bedrock environments. The result: eight validated attack vectors spanning log manipulation, knowledge base compromise, agent hijacking, flow injection, guardrail degradation, and prompt poisoning. In this article, we’ll walk through each vector - what it targets, how it works, and what an attacker can reach on the other side. The Eight Vectors The XM ...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered malicious artifacts distributed via Docker Hub following the Trivy supply chain attack , highlighting the widening blast radius across developer environments. The last known clean release of Trivy on Docker Hub is 0.69.3. The malicious versions 0.69.4, 0.69.5, and 0.69.6 have since been removed from the container image library. "New image tags 0.69.5 and 0.69.6 were pushed on March 22 without corresponding GitHub releases or tags. Both images contain indicators of compromise associated with the same TeamPCP infostealer observed in earlier stages of this campaign," Socket security researcher Philipp Burckhardt said . The development comes in the wake a supply chain compromise of Trivy, a popular open-source vulnerability scanner maintained by Aqua Security, allowing the threat actors to leverage a compromised credential to push a credential stealer within trojanized versions of the tool and two related GitHub Actions "aquasec...

A joint law enforcement operation has dismantled LeakBase , one of the world's largest online forums for cybercriminals to buy and sell stolen data and cybercrime tools. The LeakBase forum, per the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), had over 142,000 members and more than 215,000 messages between members as of December 2025. Those attempting to access the forum's website (" leakbase[.]la ") are now greeted with a seizure banner that says it was confiscated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as part of an international law enforcement effort. "All forum content, including users' accounts, posts, credit details, private messages, and IP logs, has been secured and preserved for evidentiary purposes," the banner reads. Available in English and accessible over the clearnet, LeakBase offered hacked databases , including hundreds of millions of account credentials and financial information such as credit and debit card numbers, banking account ...

With one in three cyber-attacks now involving compromised employee accounts, insurers and regulators are placing far greater emphasis on identity posture when assessing cyber risk.  For many organizations, however, these assessments remain largely opaque. Elements such as password hygiene, privileged access management, and the extent of multi-factor authentication (MFA) coverage are increasingly influential in how cyber risk and insurance costs are evaluated. Understanding the identity-centric factors behind these assessments is critical for organizations seeking to demonstrate lower risk exposure and secure more favorable insurance terms. Why identity posture now drives underwriting With the global average cost of a data breach reaching $4.4 million in 2025, more organizations are turning to cyber insurance to manage financial exposure. In the UK, coverage has increased from 37% in 2023 to 45% in 2025, but rising claims volumes are prompting insurers to tighten underwrit...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an emergent ransomware family dubbed Reynolds that comes embedded with a built-in bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) component for defense evasion purposes within the ransomware payload itself. BYOVD refers to an adversarial technique that abuses legitimate but flawed driver software to escalate privileges and disable Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions so that malicious activities go unnoticed. The strategy has been adopted by many ransomware groups over the years. "Normally, the BYOVD defense evasion component of an attack would involve a distinct tool that would be deployed on the system prior to the ransomware payload in order to disable security software," the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "However, in this attack, the vulnerable driver (an NsecSoft NSecKrnl driver) was bundled with the ransomware itself." Broadcom's ...

Are ransomware and encryption still the defining signals of modern cyberattacks, or has the industry been too fixated on noise while missing a more dangerous shift happening quietly all around them? According to Picus Labs’ new Red Report 2026, which analyzed over 1.1 million malicious files and mapped 15.5 million adversarial actions observed across 2025, attackers are no longer optimizing for disruption. Instead, their goal is now long-term, invisible access. To be clear, ransomware isn’t going anywhere, and adversaries continue to innovate. But the data shows a clear strategic pivot away from loud, destructive attacks toward techniques designed to evade detection, persist inside environments, and quietly exploit identity and trusted infrastructure. Rather than breaking in and burning systems down, today’s attackers increasingly behave like Digital Parasites. They live inside the host, feed on credentials and services, and remain undetected for as long as possible. Public attent...

SmarterTools confirmed last week that the Warlock (aka Storm-2603) ransomware gang breached its network by exploiting an unpatched SmarterMail instance. The incident took place on January 29, 2026, when a mail server that was not updated to the latest version was compromised, the company's Chief Commercial Officer, Derek Curtis, said. "Prior to the breach, we had approximately 30 servers/VMs with SmarterMail installed throughout our network," Curtis explained . "Unfortunately, we were unaware of one VM, set up by an employee, that was not being updated. As a result, that mail server was compromised, which led to the breach." However, SmarterTools emphasized that the breach did not affect its website, shopping cart, My Account portal, and several other services, and that no business applications or account data were affected or compromised. About 12 Windows servers on the company's office network, as well as a secondary data center used for quality cont...

The Netherlands' Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) and the Council for the Judiciary confirmed both agencies (Rvdr) have disclosed that their systems were impacted by cyber attacks that exploited the recently disclosed security flaws in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM), according to a notice sent to the country's parliament on Friday. "On January 29, the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) was informed by the supplier of vulnerabilities in EPMM," the Dutch authorities said . "EPMM is used to manage mobile devices, apps, and content, including their security." "It is now known that work-related data of AP employees, such as names, business email addresses, and telephone numbers, have been accessed by unauthorized persons." The development comes as the European Commission also revealed that its central infrastructure managing mobile devices "identified traces" of a cyber attack that may have resulted in access to names and mo...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a "massive campaign" that has systematically targeted cloud native environments to set up malicious infrastructure for follow-on exploitation. The activity, observed around December 25, 2025, and described as "worm-driven," leveraged exposed Docker APIs, Kubernetes clusters, Ray dashboards, and Redis servers, along with the recently disclosed React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182, CVSS score: 10.0) vulnerability. The campaign has been attributed to a threat cluster known as TeamPCP (aka DeadCatx3, PCPcat, PersyPCP, and ShellForce). TeamPCP is known to be active since at least November 2025, with the first instance of Telegram activity dating back to July 30, 2025. The TeamPCP Telegram channel currently has over 700 members, where the group publishes stolen data from diverse victims across Canada, Serbia, South Korea, the U.A.E., and the U.S. Details of the threat actor were first documented by Beelzebub in December 2025...