data breach | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Blockchain infrastructure provider Chainstack on Tuesday disclosed that it was targeted in a cyber attack that allowed an unauthorized party to gain access to some parts of its infrastructure. The incident is assessed to be part of a large-scale, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered attack campaign that came to light last week. "An external attacker gained unauthorized access to part of Chainstack's infrastructure through a third-party component," the company said . "We detected the intrusion, cut the access paths, and are hardening our systems." According to the timeline of events shared by Chainstack, the attacker gained access to a development environment on October 26, 2026, and then escalated their access to break into "some parts of our production environment." The intrusion was subsequently detected on October 31, 2026, and the attacker's access was cut off that same day, the company noted. As part of the digital break-in, the ...

Binance on Tuesday said the record-setting theft of $6.43 billion in assets from the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange was the culmination of a "sophisticated, multi-stage campaign" that involved the use of a tampered Homebrew installation and recruitment-themed social engineering attack targeting two of its engineers. "It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident," the company said . "The attackers combined a range of techniques, including social engineering by fake recruitment interviews, malicious software downloads, compromised internal AI tooling, endpoint compromise, and an advanced transaction-authorisation method." The starting point has been traced back to a supply chain attack targeting one of its engineers from the Wallet DevOps team (named "Engineer A"), who downloaded a trojanized Homebrew installer to install a popular artificial intelligence (AI) tool after searching for it on a search engine....

An attacker broke into the update system of the cPGuard security tool on November 2 and used it to send a malicious script to customers' Linux servers. The script installed a backdoor and collected password hashes and other sensitive files from servers that ran it, cPGuard maker OPSSHIELD said in an advisory . The attacker has since taken some of that data. cPGuard 5.88.25 and later versions remove the backdoor and the files the script left. Credentials the script copied may still work after the update, so any server that may have run the script also needs new passwords and keys. At 02:06 UTC, the attacker, who has not been identified, used compromised credentials to get into cPGuard's update system. The script went out in cPGuard versions 5.88.12 through 5.88.19. The attack was detected within 12 hours of those versions going out, according to OPSSHIELD. The company has cleared its infrastructure credentials and stopped the script from reaching more servers. It is sti...

BTCPay Server, a self-hosted, open-source cryptocurrency payment processor, has urged users to install the latest version of its software in response to reports of Bitcoin and Litecoin being stolen from hot wallets on instances running older versions. "Our investigation found that these attacks targeted servers running BTCPay Server 2.4.1 (released on 23 July 2026) or earlier," BTCPay Server said . "The attackers used a different method to exploit the vulnerability fixed in 2.4.2, released on 7 August 2026." Users who are running versions 2.4.1 or earlier are recommended to move to a fresh server with a new wallet, even in scenarios where users have not noticed a theft. In the event of stolen funds or suspected unauthorized access, it's imperative that users consider the entire machine and all secrets stored on it as compromised and follow the same recovery procedures. It's currently unknown when the attackers behind the campaign first began exploi...

Attackers posing as IT support on Microsoft Teams talked employees into giving them remote control of their PCs. They then used insecure Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) settings to obtain login certificates for privileged accounts, including one for a domain controller. Microsoft said in  a report  that it investigated two such intrusions, one of which resulted in company data being copied to an external server. The attackers exploited no flaw in Teams itself. They relied on social engineering and on AD CS that had been set up insecurely, and Microsoft did not tie the activity to any known group. How the Attacks Began Both intrusions started the same way, Microsoft said. The attackers messaged and called employees on Teams while posing as the company's own IT or help desk, working from outside tenants with support-themed names so the contact looked familiar. They talked each user into opening Quick Assist, a remote-help tool built into Windows, and rea...

Malicious code on the website of prediction market Polymarket sold some signed-in traders' positions and moved their funds to the hackers on October 29. The code had replaced a page-speed script that the site loaded from an outside company. Polymarket says  it is refunding about $2.7 million to 726 affected wallets.  Blockchain records  show crypto worth about $2.64 million reached the hackers' wallet in under an hour. The replaced script came from DebugBear, whose real user monitoring (RUM) tool measures how fast web pages load for real visitors. Researchers at Hudson Rock  downloaded the malicious file on October 29 from the address Polymarket's site used to load the DebugBear script. They also found a change in Polymarket's site code that removed the DebugBear script. DebugBear's DNS records were compromised through its domain registrar, the company said on X. Its early findings indicate the attack targeted one customer's website. It has seen no sign...

American blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said it was the target of a cybersecurity incident in which an external actor accessed non-sensitive customer data. However, the company noted that the breach did not result in unauthorized access to its investigation content, authentication credentials, or session tokens. "This month, Chainalysis detected an external actor using offensive agentic techniques to gain unauthorized access to Chainalysis systems and internal tools," Chainalysis said Friday. "Some non-sensitive customer data, such as user IDs, full names, email addresses, and organization role labels for users provisioned on our platform were accessed, including such information relating to your organization and users." The company said it's patching vulnerabilities and hardening its systems in response to the incident. The mention of "offensive agentic techniques" indicates that an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool was used ...

Cryptocurrency giant Binance said on Thursday that a "security incident" on its platform has impacted about $6.3 billion worth of assets. The world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange said nearly $3 billion of those assets have been frozen on-chain so far.  Tether and Circle said they have frozen more than 1.567 billion USDT and 800 million USDC related to the incident, respectively. The Arbitrum Security Council is said to have executed a transaction to freeze about $30.5 million from the Binance Exploit.  "Initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions," Binance said in an update. The company said there is no evidence of a wallet private key leak, adding it will cover all losses from the Secure Asset Fund for Users ( SAFU ) fund and its own funds. Out of an abundance of c...

Japan's GMO Internet Group is  offering up to $1 million in total  for tips that help catch the attackers who breached its Onamae.com Desktop Cloud service, after refusing to pay an extortion demand. The reward program opened on October 28 and pays only if a tip helps lead to an arrest or an international wanted notice. The service  hosts Windows desktops  used for FX trading, and a broker has linked unauthorized trades on some of its customers' accounts to logins leaked from the service. GMO says the attackers took customer information. It received a demand for about  $50 million (about ¥8 billion)  on October 21 from people it believes carried out the attack. They have also threatened its customers' trading accounts and data. On October 27, the attackers posted material on their website that they say is information about GMO and its customers. The site's domain, including its mirror sites,  was shut down  at about 4 a.m. Japan time on O...

The critical Oracle PeopleSoft bug that ShinyHunters has exploited since May is not one flaw but three chained together, the researchers who reported it said this week. Oracle patched all three under a single identifier,  CVE-2026-35273 , in June. Its root is a server-side request forgery (SSRF) that reaches an internal management interface because PeopleSoft trusts its own loopback address by default, opening the door to remote code execution without a login. The breakdown comes from Bobby Gould of the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), whose team reported the flaw to Oracle. In  its analysis , ZDI said it reported three distinct vulnerabilities across two PeopleSoft components, and that it is working with Oracle to assign a separate CVE to each. As of this week, the one June identifier is still the only one on the record. CVE-2026-35273 affects PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools versions 8.61 and 8.62, carries a CVSS score of 9.8, and lets an unauthenticated attacker take o...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of three cyber attacks targeting organizations in Japan in which artificial intelligence (AI) was a key element, either in the driving seat or to assist a human operator. TrendAI, which analyzed three exposed server environments used by threat actors to conduct the malicious cyber operations, described them as distinct from previously published attacks that have leveraged ARTEX , an autonomous AI penetration testing framework, to single out entities in South Korea and Japan. "These environments held reconnaissance and attack tools, scripts, target lists, results, logs, and command histories," security researchers Bakuei Matsukawa and Joseph C Chen said. "They ranged from workspaces used largely by hand by skilled operators to AI-agent platforms that automated the entire workflow, including command and control." The first of the three attacks has been found to abuse CyberStrikeAI , another open-source penetra...

An attacker who gained access to Keystone's website obtained the key that its hardware wallets use to prove they are genuine, the company said in a  statement  on October 26. Someone with that key could build counterfeit devices that pass the online check owners use to verify a Keystone. A buyer who trusted a counterfeit could have their crypto stolen, but the incident did not involve owners' recovery phrases or wallet private keys. Keystone will destroy 18,835 unsold devices that carry the key, and all new devices will get a new one. Keystone found the unauthorized access on October 20, and its advice to owners depends on when a device arrived. For a device received after that date with the old key, the company said: "Even if such a device passes authentication, we cannot completely rule out the possibility that it is counterfeit." Owners of such a device should contact Keystone support and use it only after the company confirms it is genuine. A device del...

LiteLLM on Friday revealed that an Agent Platform master key accidentally published to a public GitHub repository in late May 2026 ultimately allowed the threat actor to push a malicious version of the popular Python package. "On May 27, 2026, a configuration file was committed to the public LiteLLM-Labs/lite-harness repository which inadvertently contained the master key to a deployment of the LiteLLM Agent Platform, an open source tool we use for orchestrating agents," LiteLLM's Oliver Jensen and Mateo Wang said . "The error was quickly identified, the commit force-pushed over, and we identified the exposed keys as requiring revocation. However, key revocation did not occur for the master key." LiteLLM said the unknown attacker (operating from "69.48.229[.]143") used this unrevoked key on October 10, 2026, to gain access to the Agent Platform and extracted a GitHub CLI OAuth token the service was configured with to allow self-hosted cloud a...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven intrusion ecosystem run by affiliates of the INC and The Gentlemen ransomware groups. Central to the operation is an "Autonomous Red Team Kill Chain Framework" referred to as Phantom. The threat actor is assessed to be Russian-speaking and functions both as an intrusion and data-extortion operator, as well as an infrastructure provider supporting different partners across the ransomware ecosystem. "The operators exploited edge and remote-access systems at scale, including FortiClient EMS, SimpleHelp, cPanel, and VPN gateways," SOCRadar said . "They used AI-managed knowledge bases to track victims, stolen credentials, and campaign progress." A notable aspect that defines the campaign is its "AI-executed, human-approved operating structure" in which a human operator provides a victim-specific prompt and reviews every step, while the intrusions themselves are e...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a large-scale campaign that has targeted exposed network edge devices such as Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect firewalls. "Artifacts from this investigation also indicate that operators in this campaign have obtained access to numerous organizations worldwide, and have attempted to further compromise some victims, resulting in persistent remote access and data exfiltration," according to a joint investigation published by Group-IB and NyxLab. The widespread exploitation activity has been attributed to a threat actor known as k0t, who also goes by the aliases CryptoFeel, Member19, and QazWsxShop. The cybercriminal actor was first seen in the wild on October 22, 2025. The threat actor is assessed to share connections with ransomware groups such as Qilin and The Gentlemen, likely operating as an initial access broker or an affiliate. Analysis of the threat actor's dark web activity reveals a k...

Social media giant Meta was ordered to pay 25 billion in penalties by a New Mexico court on Wednesday as part of a data privacy lawsuit that sprang from the company's Cambridge Analytica data scandal , which came to light in 2018. According to multiple reports from the Associated Press , the New York Times , Reuters , and the Wall Street Journal , state District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew called out Meta and Facebook for making misleading statements about the privacy of consumers in the state. "Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data," Mathew wrote in his ruling. "This was false." The penalty relates to more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices law. The case, filed in 2021, was filed in the aftermath of revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, obtained data belonging to millions of Facebook users without their consent to build psychographic profiles. The data was ...

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Railway on Wednesday disclosed "anomalous activity" related to systems that store customer environment variables. Upon further investigation, the company found that an unauthorized third party may have gained access to encrypted environment variables, and, in some cases, obtained the decrypted contents. The impact, it said, is limited to a "subset of users," although it did not disclose an exact number. Environment variables refer to user-defined key-value pairs that are used to store sensitive data like API keys, database credentials, or feature flags. They are configured at the operating system or container environment level instead of hard-coding the values directly into a program's source code. Railway said the incident is likely part of a series of attacks designed to target platform companies with the ultimate goal of compromising artificial intelligence (AI) inference providers. The company also said it has n...

LiteLLM on Wednesday disclosed that threat actors compromised "multiple independent security controls" to push a malicious version of the Python package containing a credential stealer and a backdoor. On October 21, 2026, LiteLLM's release pipeline was compromised to push 1.107.0 to the Docker Hub registry and the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository. The incident took place around 4:00 a.m. PST. The following compromised versions were published - LiteLLM v1.107.0 (PyPI) v1.107.0, latest, main-latest, and main-stable (Docker) v1.107.0, latest, main-latest, and main-stable (GHCR) Users who downloaded an unpinned version of LiteLLM between 11:39 a.m. and 1:23 p.m. UTC via pip or used the Docker image v1.107.0, latest, main-latest, or main-stable between 11:46 a.m. and 2:20 p.m. UTC are impacted. The poisoned version incorporated code to harvest credentials and keys, and run arbitrary code from a remote server every hour, turning it into a remote acce...

Unknown threat actors breached TeamUpdraft's website and potentially gained unauthorized access to customers' connection keys for UpdraftCentral, UpdraftVault, and UpdraftClone, using them to backdoor WordPress sites. TeamUpdraft is the developer behind UpdraftPlus, a popular WordPress backup plugin with over four million active installations. The vendor also offers UpdraftCentral, a remote management service that's used for managing multiple sites remotely. A client component of UpdraftCentral is shipped within every copy of UpdraftPlus.  "Over the weekend of 17-18 October we identified unauthorized access to the teamupdraft.com website," TeamUpdraft said in a statement. "Our team responded straight away and worked through the night to contain it – we closed the access route, signed out every account and replaced the keys and credentials that could have been affected." As a result of the incident, threat actors are believed to have accessed its ...

State Bank of India has identified 3,897 customer records containing personal information in a set of about 375,000 records available on the dark web, and it does not yet know where the data came from. The state-owned bank, India's largest, said in a  stock-exchange filing  dated October 21 that it "has experienced an incident involving the loss of certain data." The count is preliminary, and the bank has yet to establish whether the data is authentic, how far the exposure goes and what risk it poses to customers. The exposed information "reportedly included customers' registered mobile numbers, dates of birth, names, gender, email addresses, residential addresses, branch and CIF identifiers, lead IDs, and metadata associated with loan/lead records and other related files," in the filing's words. A CIF identifier is the customer information file number, the bank's internal ID for each customer. The bank has not said whether the 3,897 records b...