The Register

13 governments sound the alarm about ongoing unpleasantness

China's Salt Typhoon cyberspies continue their years-long hacking campaign targeting critical industries around the world, according to a joint security alert from cyber and law enforcement agencies across 13 countries.…

Harvard researchers find model guardrails tailor query responses to user's inferred politics and other affiliations

OpenAI's ChatGPT appears to be more likely to refuse to respond to questions posed by fans of the Los Angeles Chargers football team than to followers of other teams.…

There's also a rogue Russian on the list

The US Treasury Department has announced sanctions against two Asian companies and two individuals for allegedly helping North Korean IT workers fake their way into US jobs.…

AI lowers the bar for cybercrime, Anthropic admits

comment  Anthropic, a maker of AI tools, says that AI tools are now commonly used to commit cybercrime and facilitate remote worker fraud.…

Fast-glob is widely used in government, security lab says

A Node.js utility used by thousands of public projects - and more than 30 Department of Defense ones - appears to have a sole maintainer whose online profiles identify him as a Yandex employee living in Russia.…

Stolen dev credentials posted to GitHub as attackers abuse CLI tools for recon

Nx is the latest target of a software supply chain attack in the NPM ecosystem, with multiple malicious versions being uploaded to the NPM registry on Tuesday evening.…

Don't let it happen to you

Storm-0501, a financially motivated cybercrime crew, recently broke into a large enterprise's on-premises and cloud environments, ultimately exfiltrating and destroying data within the org's Azure environment. The criminals then contacted the victim via a Microsoft Teams account that they'd also compromised in the attack, demanding a ransom payment for the stolen files.…

Attackers steal OAuth tokens to access third-party sales platform, then CRM data in 'widespread campaign'

Google says a recent spate of Salesforce-related breaches was caused by attackers stealing OAuth tokens from the third-party Salesloft Drift app.…

Vendor insists passkeys are the future, but getting workers on board is proving difficult

Infosec pros are losing confidence in their identity providers' ability to keep attackers out, with Cisco-owned Duo warning that the industry is facing what it calls "an identity crisis."…

Securing internet infrastructure remains a challenging endeavour

Systems Approach  I’ve been working on a chapter about infrastructure security for our network security book.…

Suspects this was Beijing-backed Typhoon and/or Panda crew targeting diplomats in Asia

Google has warned customers of a suspected state-backed attack after observing a web traffic hijacking campaign.…

Oh, look, a use case for OpenAI's gpt-oss-20b model

ESET malware researchers Anton Cherepanov and Peter Strycek have discovered what they describe as the "first known AI-powered ransomware," which they named PromptLock. …

From hardware security chips and trusted execution pipelines to open source Root of Trust modules

Hot Chips  Microsoft is one of the biggest names in cybersecurity, but it has a less-than-stellar track record in the department. Given its reputation, Redmond can't afford to mess around when it comes to securing its cloud customers' data and workloads.…

Remember that cost-cutting group once led by Elon Musk? Federal employees are still dealing with it

A Social Security Administration employee has filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Donald Trump's DOGE cost-cutting unit has put the records of every single American at risk by duplicating an agency database in an unauthorized cloud environment. …

'Many dozens' targeted in ongoing campaign, CheckPoint researcher tells The Reg

Cybercriminals are targeting critical US manufacturers and supply-chain companies, looking to steal sensitive IP and other data while deploying ransomware. Their attack involves a novel twist on phishing — and a photo of White House butlers. …

Criminals already abusing its latest zero-days

Citrix has pushed out fixes for three fresh NetScaler holes – and yes, they've already been used in the wild before the vendor got around to patching.…

Remy Ra St Felix led a vicious international crime ring

A violent home invader and gunpoint cryptocurrency thief will now spend more than 50 years behind bars after being found guilty of assaulting a witness.…

Crims raided third-party systems and lifted personal data, including license numbers and partial SSNs

US insurance giant Farmers Insurance says more than a million customers had personal data nicked after a third-party vendor was compromised.…

Everything's fine, the ad slinger assures us

Cloud security vendor Zscaler says customers of Google’s Play Store have downloaded more than 19 million instances of malware-laden apps that evaded the web giant’s security scans.…

PLUS: India bans ‘money’ games; SK Hynix cranks out 321-layer SSDs; Fastly re-thinking CDNs for Asia; and more!

Asia In Brief  Australia’s University of Melbourne last year used Wi-Fi location data to identify student protestors.…