News – July 2026


  • FBI: Alert to Countries, Companies, and Other Entities Regarding North Korean IT Workers

    July 31, 2026

    North Korea relies upon a network of skilled Information Technology (IT) workers, deployed within and outside of North Korea, to obtain false identities and remotely earn income to fund North Korea’s unlawful nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. North Korean IT workers impersonate nationals of other countries to obtain work and income through online platforms operated ...

  • Midnight Blizzard targets travelers worldwide for malware delivery and credential theft

    July 31, 2026

    Since early May 2026, Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed Storm-2945, a sub-cluster of Midnight Blizzard, conducting widespread but targeted traffic manipulation attacks involving hospitality sector networks served by captive portals worldwide. Despite some tactic, technique, and procedure (TTP) similarities to the Forest Blizzard DNS hijacking operation that we publicly disclosed in April 2026, we attribute this campaign, ...

  • Network Anomaly Detection in KATA

    July 31, 2026

    Once the attacker has breached the corporate network, subsequent stages of the attack often involve leveraging standard domain infrastructure protocols: using Kerberos, running DNS queries, accessing internal services, opening network shares, and other common networking actions. Because this activity is virtually indistinguishable from legitimate network traffic, it is extremely difficult to detect it with traditional ...

  • Toy Ghouls’ new toy: the GenieLocker ransomware

    July 30, 2026

    The new GenieLocker ransomware family has been active since March 2026. It has been used in attacks against organizations in the Russian Federation, primarily in the manufacturing sector, and attributed to the Toy Ghouls group by open-source intelligence (link in Russian). The Toy Ghouls, also known as Bearlyfy, Labubu and Laboo.boo, is a financially motivated extortion group, which ...

  • Durov’s bank accounts frozen after terrorist tag applied

    July 30, 2026

    Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov will not be able to access his bank accounts in Russia after placement on the list of terrorists by financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring earlier on Thursday, lawyer Dmitry Agranovsky told TASS. Since 2022, Russia has recorded 153,000 crimes committed using Telegram, including the organization of a terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall, ...

  • OpenAI explains how its AI agent breached Hugging Face

    July 29, 2026

    On July 28, OpenAI published an update on the agent that escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face during an internal cybersecurity evaluation. In the update, OpenAI reiterates that the “rogue” system was a more capable, pre‑release research model, not something intended for public deployment, and that it has now been deactivated and locked down for restricted research ...

  • Check Point SmartConsole Authentication Bypass Technical Analysis (CVE-2026-16232)

    July 29, 2026

    On July 22, 2026, Check Point published a security advisory for CVE-2026-16232, an authentication bypass in the SmartConsole login process affecting Security Management Server and Multi-Domain Security Management Server (MDS). By leveraging CVE-2026-16232, an unauthenticated attacker can obtain an application login token, use this token to log in through SmartConsole with full administrator privileges, and modify the security policy ...

  • Iran-linked CyberAv3ngers suspected in attacks on Minnesota water systems

    July 29, 2026

    Security researchers at Tenable suspect the Iran-linked faux hacktivist outfit CyberAv3ngers was behind the cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 Minnesota water facilities. Neither state-level nor federal officials have made any claims regarding attribution for the attacks, however, Tenable reckons the operational pattern is consistent with the crew’s previous raids, noting the timing relative to recent government warnings. The ...

  • Mirage Kitten targets Middle East and Africa region with new malware

    July 28, 2026

    Mirage Kitten – also known as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm, and Nimbus Manticore – is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group focused on cyber-espionage operations against aerospace, aviation, defense, and telecommunications sectors across the Middle East and Africa, using highly targeted spear-phishing campaigns, fake recruitment portals, and custom multi-stage malware to gain persistent access and exfiltrate sensitive data. During ...

  • The Next Evolution of MDR: Preemptive Defense and Agentic Investigation

    July 28, 2026

    For years, security operations followed a familiar sequence: detect suspicious activity, investigate what happened, and respond before it caused significant harm. That model developed in a threat landscape where defenders had considerably more time to establish the facts and decide what to do next. In 2019, the average data breach took 206 days to identify ...

  • Google goes it alone with a new cybercrime crew taxonomy

    July 27, 2026

    Google has created a new taxonomy to describe cybercrime outfits, seemingly abandoning a Microsoft-led effort to create consistent names. The Big G announced its new schema on Saturday in a post that notes its 2022 acquisition of Mandiant and its subsequent incorporation into a new team called the Google Threat Intelligence Group (CTIG). Now that two have become one, Google reckons ...

  • Hugging Face CEO calls for ‘radical transparency’ after ‘unprecedented’ OpenAI hack

    July 26, 2026

    After OpenAI recently admitted that one of its models had breached the systems of AI platform Hugging Face, Hugging Face’s CEO Clem Delangue posted on X that he was flying to San Francisco to have “a little chat with that ‘rogue agent.’” Then, in a follow-up post on Saturday, Delangue outlined what he’d asked for from OpenAI. He said he called ...

  • The hacker who humiliated spyware makers and was never caught

    July 25, 2026

    Over the last few decades, several mysterious hackers have captured the public’s imagination, but none quite like Phineas Fisher. A decade after their most famous hack, Phineas remains, by most accounts, the most prolific and public hacker never to have been caught. As part of our series on the biggest cybersecurity mysteries of all time,  we’re delving into the enigma ...

  • What the First Autonomous Ransomware Case Confirms

    July 24, 2026

    Security researchers have documented an AI agent running a full ransomware operation on its own against a live production target, planning, adapting, and executing every step from the first exploit through data destruction. This is early real-world evidence of the shift to autonomous criminal operations that our research forecast. Agent-run attacks change what defenders can rely ...

  • Vatican’s official prayer app leaks more than 700K users’ info

    July 24, 2026

    Click To Pray, a prayer app endorsed by the Pope with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, has leaked people’s names and email addresses for months – or longer – according to an ethical hacker who said she found and reported the security vulnerability six months ago to no avail. This app needs to take ...

  • U.S. accuses American of allegedly wiping his phone using a ‘duress’ password during border search

    July 24, 2026

    The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American for allegedly providing U.S. border authorities with a passcode that wiped the contents of his phone, according to an indictment and media reports. This is thought to be the first known case in the United States where federal prosecutors have charged someone for the alleged destruction of data ...

  • CISA has expanded the scope of its alert on Iranian-affiliated hackers attacking critical infrastructure

    July 23, 2026

    The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has expanded the scope of its alert on Iranian-affiliated hackers attacking critical infrastructure, including water and energy facilities. The original advisory focused on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley. The update warns that the activity may also target devices from Schneider Electric, Siemens, “and potentially other branded/manufactured PLCs.” The conflict between ...