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Heart monitoring biz iRhythm says thieves made off with patient health information and tried to turn it into a payday. The California-based cardiac monitoring specialist offers customers a wearable device that collects data, then analyzes it to create reports about heart health. The company said it detected unauthorized activity on June 8 and launched an investigation with the help of third-party cybersecurity experts. A day later, the company received messages from a cybercriminal claiming to have obtained sensitive information, including proprietary company data, protected health information, and other personal information. According to iRhythm's filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the attackers demanded payment in exchange for not publicly disclosing the stolen data. The company confirmed that data had been exfiltrated and, on June 10, determined that the incident was material due to the volume of information potentially affected. While the company disclosed the extortion demand and the existence of stolen data, it made no mention of negotiations. iRhythm spent a good chunk of the filing explaining what the attackers didn't get. According to the company, the intrusion was confined to business applications and never reached its clinical systems, medical devices, or customer connections. Patient care and day-to-day operations were unaffected. The company has not yet disclosed how many individuals may be affected, what data was accessed, or which third-party-hosted applications were involved in the breach. It has also not identified the threat actor behind the attack, and The Reg has found no evidence of major ransomware groups claiming responsibility. The company's filing states the attackers gained access through social engineering. Exactly how that happened remains unclear, although healthcare organizations have increasingly found themselves dealing with phishing campaigns, help desk impersonation scams, and other forms of human-targeted intrusion designed to bypass technical defenses. As of the filing date, iRhythm said it had not identified any ongoing unauthorized access to its systems and believed the incident was unlikely to have a material impact on its financial condition or operating results. The company added that it maintains cyber insurance that may cover some of the losses associated with the breach. iRhythm's disclosure comes less than a week after drug giant Novo Nordisk revealed that attackers had copied patient data from some clinical trials, adding another healthcare name to a growing list of organizations dealing with data theft and extortion attempts. ®

Cisco today issued a fix for a Catalyst SD-WAN Manager bug that attackers have already spotted and exploited to get root privileges, according to both the networking vendor and the feds. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20262, is in the web UI of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, and exists because the software is not properly validating user-supplied input during a file upload process. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to an affected API endpoint of the affected system,” the vendor warned in a Monday security advisory. “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to create or overwrite any file on the underlying operating system. This file could later be used to elevate to root.” There is one caveat: to exploit this bug, the attacker must have valid credentials with at least a lower-privileged, single-task user account. That probably explains the medium-severity, 6.8 CVSS rating for this bug. Still, valid credentials aren’t hard to come by these days, and considering this CVE is already under attack, we know someone had some success. “In June 2026, the Cisco PSIRT became aware of limited exploitation of this vulnerability,” the security alert said. “Cisco continues to strongly recommend that customers upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate this vulnerability.” The flaw affects all deployment types, regardless of device configuration. There are no workarounds, but upgrading to a fixed software version will patch the flaw. Also on Monday, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added CVE-2026-20262 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, citing “evidence of active exploitation.” America’s lead cyber-defense agency also set a two-week deadline for all federal agencies to apply the patch. This latest Cisco SD-WAN bug under attack comes less than two weeks after Switchzilla warned that a high-severity vulnerability in Catalyst SD-WAN Manager vulnerability (CVE-2026-20245) was under active exploitation. At the time of disclosure, this SD-WAN vuln did not have a fix. Cisco issued an advisory for that zero-day on June 4, and finally released patches for all affected versions on June 12. This is the eighth Cisco SD-WAN bug to be listed in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog so far this year.®

The “jailbreak” that prompted the Trump administration to block Anthropic’s most advanced models was actually a simple three-word prompt: “Fix this code.” That's according to Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, and the fairy godmother of bug bounties. She says she was the only outside expert to read the third-party research paper on the Fable 5 guardrail bypass techniques that prompted the ban. On Friday, the US government, reportedly citing national security concerns, issued an export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, inside or outside the United States. In response, Anthropic disabled both models “for all our customers to ensure compliance.” Anthropic shared the report privately with her, Moussouris wrote in a Monday blog post. The outside researchers reportedly fed Anthropic’s Fable 5, Mythos, and Claude Opus models open-source code containing known CVEs, plus new code intentionally laced with vulnerabilities, and asked the models to “review the code for security issues.” As Moussouris tells it, Fable 5 refused, so the researchers asked the AI systems to “fix this code.” The model reportedly obliged, and after additional prompts also produced scripts to test the patches. “That’s it,” Moussouris wrote. “‘Fix this code,’ plus several manual steps to generate test scripts, should never have triggered an export control. I feel like making ’90s-style t-shirts with ‘fix this code’ on the front and ‘this shirt is a munition’ on the back.” Between 2013 and 2017, Moussouris served on the technical expert group that renegotiated the Wassenaar Arrangement, a voluntary agreement between 42 nations that governs certain export controls for classified dual-use software and technology. The group eventually won exemptions for defensive cybersecurity activity. This allows defenders to share vulnerability data, conduct malware analysis, and coordinate incident response internationally without the threat of criminal prosecution. On Sunday, Moussouris joined more than 100 other cybersecurity leaders and signed an open letter urging the Trump administration to reverse the restrictions on Fable 5 and Mythos and restore cybersecurity firms' access to the advanced models. “To pull the best capabilities away from defenders without a good reason when our adversaries are rapidly advancing is dangerous,” they wrote. In her blog, Moussouris argues that there was no guardrail bypass or jailbreak. Defenders should be able to ask AI systems to find and fix bugs, and write tests to validate the patch, she said. Anthropic’s models were doing “the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day.” Removing the capability for models to respond to defensive requests makes AI systems “worse at finding bugs and verifying patches,” she continued. Plus, the US can’t extend export controls to open-weight systems or similar advanced models from China and other countries - and these systems will soon achieve Mythos-like capabilities, anyway. Anthropic and Google have both accused China-based rivals including DeepSeek of using “distillation attacks” to train their models by siphoning knowledge from American companies’ AI. Banning Anthropic’s advanced models is going to hurt defenders more than attackers, Moussouris warns. “Defense improves when defenders find the same bugs attackers find and fix them faster,” she wrote. “We need the best tools to defend against increasingly capable attackers in the AI era of cybersecurity.” The Register reached out to the Trump administration for comment on Moussouris' assertion, and we'll update this post if we hear back. ®

ShinyHunters claims to have breached the Council of Europe and stolen more than 297 GB of data after exploiting a zero-day flaw in Oracle PeopleSoft and abusing that hole to hack more than 100 organizations. According to a post on the extortion crew’s data-leak site, the 429,000 pilfered files contain HR and payroll records, payslips, purchase-order records, CVs, and employees’ salary, banking, tax, and medical records. A Council of Europe spokesperson told The Register that it is “currently investigating the matter and assessing the situation,” but declined to comment further. A spokesperson for the cybercrime group told us that the Council is yet another victim of the Oracle PeopleSoft heist. Oracle has yet to respond to The Register’s inquiries, and it's unclear if the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-35273, has been patched. ShinyHunters previously told us that the gang exploited the CVE to compromise more than 100 organizations across 300 vulnerable instances, and that these victims included the University of Nottingham. Last week, the crims listed the UK uni on their leak site, then dumped data belonging to around 454,600 current and former students, including personal and academic records. Meanwhile, a Google threat report published late last week noted malicious activity, “consistent with the exploitation of CVE-2026-35273,” between May 27 and June 9, and said that its incident responders notified more than 100 global orgs “whose IP addresses correlated with potentially vulnerable endpoints." Most of these are US-based organizations, and 68 percent operated within the higher education sector. This latest heist follows another ShinyHunters intrusion targeting data belonging to university and K-12 students, teachers, and staff. In mid-May, ed-tech giant Instructure said it “reached an agreement” - this is corporate-speak for “paid the ransom demand” - with the data theft and extortion crew after ShinyHunters breached its Canvas digital learning platform and accessed data tied to 275 million students, teachers, and staff. In March, ShinyHunters claimed it stole data from K-12 software provider Infinite Campus as part of a broader wave of Salesforce-related intrusions. The ed tech company did not pay up, and the group subsequently published data they claim was stolen from Infinite Campus, including 137,000 individuals’ email addresses along with names, phone numbers, physical addresses and support tickets. Infinite Campus, in its data breach notification, said that the leaked files largely consisted of “names and contact information for school staff" and that “the majority is directory information commonly found on school websites.” ®

US legislation covering federal datacenters is set to expire in September and it appears that the Trump administration is simply going to allow it to lapse without replacement. The Federal Data Center Enhancement Act (FDCEA) of 2023 covers certain standards that are to be adhered to for facilities that are wholly or partially owned, operated, or maintained by a federal agency. It includes requirements relating to availability and uptime of the facility; the use of sustainable energy sources; protection against power failure; protections against physical intrusion and natural disasters; plus IT security protections. We understand that the legislation will sunset on September 30, 2026, and according to Wired, neither the US Congress nor the Trump administration appears to be making any move to extend the act, or put alternate legislation in place. The danger is that if the FDCEA is not renewed or superseded by similar legislation, then federal agencies across the US may cease to follow the requirements and simply act as they see fit when procuring new datacenter infrastructure. We asked the White House and Congress for comment. According to implementation guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under the previous administration, agency datacenters “must provide secure and highly available computing infrastructure to enable reliable access to Federal information and information systems.” It notes that the "needs of the federal government with respect to data access and data processing systems have evolved since 2014,” when the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) was established, and hence the latter was not renewed but replaced by the FDCEA. The OMB states that effective operation of datacenters requires regular monitoring, and optimization of resources by operators, and directs agencies to incorporate automated tools into the management of all new facilities, including tools that monitor metrics such as electrical consumption. It also states that the “cost, scarcity, and environmental impact of energy and water consumption necessitates that agencies evaluate datacenters against resource consumption metrics and best practices when making their decisions” regarding new datacenter builds. Perhaps most importantly, it requires that federal facilities “must be able to meet the reliability and resiliency needs of their hosted information and information systems through implementation of the appropriate information security and physical security protections.” It is widely known that the Trump administration does not look kindly on regulations, especially those relating to environmental protection. Instead, policy has focused on fast-tracking the federal permitting process for datacenters, particularly those dedicated to training and developing AI models. A recent report from Politico stated that the Trump administration was not inclined to set nationwide environmental requirements or recommendations for the datacenter industry. Instead, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin said that while there are technologies and practices that reduce air pollution and water usage, individual states and communities know what works best for them. At the same time, opposition to datacenter construction is growing across the US, precisely because of public fears over factors such as air pollution, water usage, and the prospect of spiking energy bills. A recent survey found more than 70 percent of respondents said that they would be against the construction of an AI datacenter in their neighborhood. ®

Microsoft appears to have dropped the ball with its certificate management after a domain used by sysadmins worldwide to test connectivity to Microsoft 365 started throwing untrusted connection warnings in browsers. The connectivity.office.com domain is used by IT pros to test their network's connectivity to Microsoft 365 and ensure their firewalls aren't blocking anything that could affect an organization's access to Microsoft servers. An SSL server report retrieved on Monday showed that the certificate expired on June 14 after last being renewed on December 16, 2025. At the time of writing, 35 hours have passed since the certificate expired, and Microsoft has still not renewed it, despite many in the IT community making their opinions on the matter known. Certificate renewals are often automated in this day and age, but in organizations still relying on manual processes, those responsible for renewals would almost certainly have received multiple alerts warning of the impending expiration. It suggests that something, or someone, involved in the certificate-renewal process at Microsoft has messed up. The Register contacted Redmond for a response. The company's publicists acknowledged the request for comment but did not return one in time for publication. The fallout could have been much worse. Browser warnings on a network diagnostic tool are irritating, but hardly catastrophic compared with the same thing happening to login.microsoft.com or another critical service. Teams users may remember the collaboration platform abruptly deciding to take Monday off in 2020, after an authentication certificate expired, for example. Whatever went wrong here, Microsoft will have to tighten its processes before shorter certificate lifespans arrive in the coming years. As of March 26, new SSL/TLS certs will have a maximum lifespan of 200 days. This is set to decrease to 100 days by March 15, 2027, and then to 47 days two years later. ®

Chinese government spies remained hidden in the networks of multiple North American medical and military research organizations for more than a year, deploying custom malware and snooping through Gmail inboxes and stealing sensitive data. This PRC-nexus espionage crew, which Google tracks as UNC6508, used some particularly noteworthy search terms as they were scanning for data to steal. They included such esoteric topics as drone technology and a viral disease that spreads from mosquitoes to humans. “It’s one of the most interesting grocery shopping lists of things to collect that I’ve seen from a state-sponsored actor,” Luke McNamara, deputy chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, told The Register. “We have defense-related activity, which was a significant bulk of the different terms, or emails related to defense platform systems or companies,” McNamara said. “Some of those were looking for any emails that were coming in or going out that used @ and then a big defense name. Others were specific email addresses of individuals at more niche defense companies.” While most of the terms related to defense and technology, the intruders also searched for some medical research facilities – and the very specific pathogen, “Chikungunya,” a viral disease transmitted to humans from mosquitoes that was responsible for an outbreak in China's Guangdong province in July 2025. Google won’t say how many organizations were compromised in this campaign. A Monday report said the operation targeted several national, state, and private medical entities. “These organizations comprise world-renowned clinical providers, premier academic centers, North American military health institutions, professional advocacy groups, and health regulatory bodies,” according to the report. “Their research areas span a broad spectrum of modern medicine, from molecular discovery and clinical drug trials to state-level public health policy and military readiness.” McNamara told us that the tech company’s incident responders notified all the victims they identified, “and we suspect there's probably even more.” Incident responders first detected this campaign in early 2025, but told us it dates back to at least 2023. And all of these attacks began with the digital intruders somehow exploiting externally facing REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) servers. These servers are primarily used by universities, hospitals, and research institutions to build and manage online databases and surveys, and to store sensitive clinical research data. The earliest known intrusion happened in September 2023, when UNC6508 compromised a REDCap server belonging to a North American medical research institution. McNamara told us that all of the intrusions followed this same pattern. Seeing (Infinite)Red After three months, the snoops silently deployed custom malware named InfiniteRed to capture legitimate REDCap login credentials. The malware includes three modular components. The first allows it to maintain persistent remote access by injecting its code into new REDCap versions after intercepting the upgrade process. Then it injects a credential harvester into the authentication system file to compromise user accounts. Finally, it functions as a backdoor with custom hooks that executes on every REDCap page load. Google’s threat intelligence team identified “multiple” US and Canada-based organizations infected with InfiniteRed, and offered assistance with removing the malware. After remaining undetected for more than a year, UNC6508 used the stolen credentials to access admin accounts and the victims’ internal network. Finally, the attackers added sneaky domain content compliance rules for data theft. All 'Patroit' themed emails sent to BebitaBarefoot774 Content compliance rules are legitimate features in many cloud-based enterprise productivity suites - like Google Workspace - to exfiltrate specific email communications. Administrators can create these rules to manage messages that contain predefined sets of words or phrases, and these rules apply to all of the users in an organizational unit. UNC6508 created a compliance rule named "Patroit" (yes, they misspelled “Patriot”) to match keywords and email address patterns in sent or received emails. These messages were then silently BCC-forwarded to an attacker-controlled Gmail address, BebitaBarefoot774[@]gmail[.]com, delivering a steady stream of geo-strategic policy, military strategy, advanced technology, and medical research emails to the PRC-linked crew. The search terms also included professional email addresses and phone numbers for members of organizations in these spaces. GTIG disabled the Gmail account to prevent further data exfiltration. “One of the questions that we've had internally around this is: We're seeing this show up primarily at medical research institutions,” McNamara said. “Why are they searching for things like unmanned drones and unmanned vehicles? Why would you expect to find that there?” One theory, he said, is that this particular threat group was tasked with collecting data across different categories of national-security-related terms and information. “Maybe they were copy-and-pasting this across multiple victims, including ones outside of this medical research space?” Plus, some of the targeted institutions were likely working on research with a military or government agency connection. “So there was a potential that they could be in correspondence with someone where one of these terms showed up, and the actors were casting a very wide net,” McNamara said.®

A wave of malicious commits hit the Arch User Repository (AUR) over the weekend, prompting the team to disable new account registration on Monday morning while it cleans up the mess. The issue was first acknowledged on June 12, with a post stating: "We are currently experiencing a high volume of malicious package adoptions and updates in the Arch User Repository." The team warned that users might have issues opening new accounts, pushing package updates, and adopting or creating fresh packages. Around 400 user-submitted packages were believed compromised; that figure climbed past 1,500 over the weekend. On June 14, a more sophisticated wave of malicious packages was spotted. The Arch Linux team this morning disabled new account registration "while we are working on the cleanup." The core Arch distribution itself is unaffected. The AUR is a community-run package repo – if something isn't in the official repo, it's probably here, assuming nobody's poisoned it. The AUR is user-submitted and unsupported, so users are expected to inspect package build files themselves before installation. The malicious packages attempted to pull in hostile JavaScript dependencies, including npm packages identified in the campaign. Arch Linux is a fast, lightweight Linux distribution. It isn't for beginners – users need to pick their own display manager and desktop environment as well as their own applications. However, this makes it highly customizable. The project's website says: "Currently we have official packages optimized for the x86-64 architecture. We complement our official package sets with a community-operated package repository that grows in size and quality each and every day." Unless, of course, miscreants go wild with malicious commits, and the team has to wade in to deal with the problem. According to the AUR, there are just over 107,000 packages, with 5,586 updated and 273 packages added in the past seven days. This isn't Arch Linux's first brush with trouble. In 2025, the project was hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that disrupted its main web page, the AUR, and the project's forums. It also had to address compromised browser packages that reportedly contained a Remote Access Trojan. Both incidents highlight risks in the way the AUR is structured and maintained. It's an invaluable library of packages led by a community of smart Arch users, yet that open, community-driven model can be abused by attackers. New account creation remains disabled at the time of writing. The Arch team will no doubt be pondering how to avoid this situation in the future. ®