encryption | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Quantum computing and AI working together will bring incredible opportunities. Together, the technologies will help us extend innovation further and faster than ever before. But, imagine the flip side, waking up to news that hackers have used a quantum computer to crack your company's encryption overnight, exposing your most sensitive data, rendering much of it untrustworthy. And with your sensitive data exposed, where does that leave trust from your customers? And the cost to mitigate - if that is even possible with your outdated pre-quantum systems? According to IBM, cyber breaches are already hitting businesses with an average of $4.44 million per incident, and as high as $10.22 million in the US, but with quantum and AI working simultaneously, experts warn it could go much higher. In 2025, nearly two-thirds of organizations see quantum computing as the biggest cybersecurity threat looming in the next 3-5 years, while 93% of security leaders are prepping for daily AI-driven a...

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to probe Microsoft and hold it responsible for what he called "gross cybersecurity negligence" that enabled ransomware attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure, including against healthcare networks. "Without timely action, Microsoft's culture of negligent cybersecurity, combined with its de facto monopolization of the enterprise operating system market, poses a serious national security threat and makes additional hacks inevitable," Wyden wrote in a four-page letter to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, likening Redmond to an "arsonist selling firefighting services to their victims." The development comes after Wyden's office obtained new information from healthcare system Ascension, which suffered a crippling ransomware attack last year, resulting in the theft of personal and medical information associated with nearly 5.6 million individuals . The ransomware attack, which al...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a new sophisticated malware campaign that leverages paid ads on search engines like Google to deliver malware to unsuspecting users looking for popular tools like GitHub Desktop. While malvertising campaigns have become commonplace in recent years, the latest activity gives it a little twist of its own: Embedding a GitHub commit into a page URL containing altered links that point to attacker-controlled infrastructure. "Even when a link seems to point to a reputable platform such as GitHub, the underlying URL can be manipulated to resolve to a counterfeit site," Arctic Wolf said in a report published last week. Exclusively targeting IT and software development companies within Western Europe since at least December 2024, the links within the rogue GitHub commit are designed to funnel users to a malicious download hosted on a lookalike domain ("gitpage[.]app"). The activity was first detected on August 19, 2025. The first...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a stealthy new backdoor called MystRodX that comes with a variety of features to capture sensitive data from compromised systems. "MystRodX is a typical backdoor implemented in C++, supporting features like file management, port forwarding, reverse shell, and socket management," QiAnXin XLab said in a report published last week. "Compared to typical backdoors, MystRodX stands out in terms of stealth and flexibility." MystRodX, also called ChronosRAT, was first documented by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 last month in connection with a threat activity cluster called CL-STA-0969 that it said exhibits overlaps with a China-nexus cyber espionage group dubbed Liminal Panda. The malware's stealth stems from the use of various levels of encryption to obscure source code and payloads, while its flexibility allows it to dynamically enable different functions based on a configuration, such as choosing TCP or HTTP for network co...

Cybersecurity company ESET has disclosed that it discovered an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered ransomware variant codenamed PromptLock . Written in Golang, the newly identified strain uses the gpt-oss:20b model from OpenAI locally via the Ollama API to generate malicious Lua scripts in real-time. The open-weight language model was released by OpenAI earlier this month. "PromptLock leverages Lua scripts generated from hard-coded prompts to enumerate the local filesystem, inspect target files, exfiltrate selected data, and perform encryption," ESET said . "These Lua scripts are cross-platform compatible, functioning on Windows, Linux, and macOS." The ransomware code also embeds instructions to craft a custom note based on the "files affected," and the infected machine is a personal computer, company server, or a power distribution controller. It's currently not known who is behind the malware, but ESET told The Hacker News that PromptLoc arti...