The Register

Also, Korean Air hacked, EmEditor installer hijacked, a perfect 10 router RCE vuln, and more

infosec in brief  The Trump administration has cleared a trio of individuals sanctioned by the Biden administration for involvement with the Intellexa spyware consortium behind the Predator surveillance tool, removing restrictions that had barred them from doing business with the US.…

Lock 'em down

interview  AI agents represent the new insider threat to companies in 2026, according to Palo Alto Networks Chief Security Intel Officer Wendi Whitmore, and this poses several challenges to executives tasked with securing the expected surge in autonomous agents.…

Netflix documentary part 2 in the works?

Ilya Lichtenstein, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges tied to the 2016 theft of about 120,000 bitcoins from the Bitfinex exchange and was sentenced to five years in prison, has been released after roughly 14 months in the slammer.…

For the bargain price of 6.5 bitcoin

A cybercrook claims to have breached Pickett and Associates, a Florida-based engineering firm whose clients include major US utilities, and is selling what they claim to be about 139 GB of engineering data about Tampa Electric Company, Duke Energy Florida, and American Electric Power. The price is 6.5 bitcoin, which amounts to about $585,000.…

Jacob Riggs is set to swap London for Sydney some time in the next year

A British security researcher has secured Australia's strictest, invite-only visa after discovering a critical vulnerability in a government system.…

Gavin Webb orchestrated Operation Cronos as it pulled off the legendary disruption sting

A senior British crimefighter has been awarded one of the country's highest tributes for public service for his role in the 2024 LockBit ransomware takedown.…

How network-led Cisco XDR helps teams see threats clearly and respond faster

Sponsored Post  Security teams are being asked to do more with less, while the environments they protect continue to grow in size and complexity. Alerts arrive from dozens of tools, each offering a partial view of risk. The real challenge is no longer finding potential threats, but deciding which ones matter and how quickly to act.…

As in past incidents, ESA says the impact was limited to external systems

The European Space Agency has suffered yet another security incident and, in keeping with past practice, says the impact is limited. Meanwhile, miscreants boast that they've made off with a trove of data, including what they claim are confidential documents, credentials, and source code.…

Funds in ‘Money Safe’ accounts are only available when customers appear for face-to-face verification

Hong Kong’s banks have a new weapon against scams: Accounts that require customers to visit a branch to access their funds.…

Pair became ALPHV affiliates to prey on US-based clients

A ransomware negotiator and a security incident response manager have admitted to running ransomware attacks.…

Zohran Mamdani appears not to understand that smartphones can be used for evil

New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has invited the city’s residents to join him at a block party to celebrate his inauguration but told attendees not to bring a Raspberry Pi to the event.…

You didn't think you'd get to enjoy your time off without a major cybersecurity incident, did you?

A high-severity MongoDB Server vulnerability, for which proofs of concept emerged over Christmas week, is now under active exploitation, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.…

One cert, in plaintext, on thousands of devices, led to what looks like years of crime

South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT has found that local carrier Korea Telecom (KT) deployed thousands of badly secured femtocells, leading to an attack that enabled micropayments fraud and snooping on customers’ communications – maybe for years.…

There's more where that came from, CEO says

Rogue insiders suspected of taking bribes to hand over Coinbase customer records to criminals are beginning to face justice, according to CEO Brian Armstrong.…

Extortion group Lovely claims to have stolen 40 million pieces of info from publisher Conde Nast

A criminal group is beating Conde Nast over the head for not responding sooner to its extortion attempt by posting stolen subscribers' email and home addresses and warning the publisher of Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Teen Vogue that it has 40 million more entries.…

Countries that banded together to challenge Boeing in the air try to do the same to AWS, Microsoft, and Google on the ground

Feature  More than half a century ago, a consortium of European aerospace businesses from the UK, France, Germany and Spain joined forces to take on America's Boeing. Fast forward to the 21st century and the countries are applying the same model needs to the world of cloud computing, giving the continent a fighting chance to reduce the digital domination of Big Tech.…

Former staffer of Korean e-tailer Coupang accessed 33 million records but may have done less damage than feared

Korean e-tailer Coupang claims a former employee has admitted to improperly accessing data describing 33 million of its customers, but says the accused deleted the stolen data.…

The human harms of cyberattacks piled up this year, and violence expected to increase

The knock-on, and often unintentional, impacts of a cyberattack are so rarely discussed. As an industry, the focus is almost always placed on the economic damage: the ransom payment; the cost of business downtime; and goodness, don't forget those poor shareholders.…

Practice makes perfect

It's the most wonderful time of the year … for corporate security bosses to run tabletop exercises, simulating a hypothetical cyberattack or other emergency, running through incident processes, and practicing responses to ensure preparedness if when a digital disaster occurs.…

In supercharged AI race, defenders need to keep up

interview  According to Remedio CEO Tal Kollender, the only way to beat the bad guys hacking into corporate networks is to "think like a hacker," and because not everyone is a teenage hacker turned cybersecurity startup chief executive, she built an AI to do this.…