justice.gov District of New Mexico | U.S. Government Seizes Online Marketplaces Selling Fraudulent Identity Documents Used in Cybercrime Schemes | United States Department of Justice
Thursday, August 28, 2025

The operators of VerifTools produced and sold counterfeit driver’s licenses, passports, and other identification documents that could be used to bypass identity verification systems and gain unauthorized access to online accounts.

ALBUQUERQUE – The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Mexico announced today the seizure of two marketplace domains and one blog used to sell fraudulent identity documents to cybercriminals worldwide. The operators of VerifTools produced and sold counterfeit driver’s licenses, passports, and other identification documents that could be used to bypass identity verification systems and gain unauthorized access to online accounts.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began investigating in August 2022 after discovering a conspiracy to use stolen identity information to access cryptocurrency accounts. The investigation revealed that VerifTools offered counterfeit identification documents for all 50 U.S. states and multiple foreign countries for as little as nine dollars, payable in cryptocurrency.

The FBI used the VerifTools marketplace to generate and purchase counterfeit New Mexico driver’s licenses, which were paid for with cryptocurrency. The FBI has identified the equivalent of approximately $6.4 million of illicit proceeds linked to the VerifTools marketplace. The following counterfeit documents are an example of New Mexico driver’s licenses obtained from VerifTools.

“The internet is not a refuge for criminals. If you build or sell tools that let offenders impersonate victims, you are part of the crime,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison. “We will use every lawful tool to disrupt your business, take the profit out of it, and bring you to justice. No one operation is bigger than us together. With our partners at every level of law enforcement we will protect New Mexicans and defend those who stand up for our community.”

"The removal of this marketplace is a major step in protecting the public from fraud and identity theft crime," said Philip Russell, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Albuquerque Division. "Together with our partners, we will continue to target and dismantle the platforms that criminals depend on, no matter where they operate."

Acting U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison and Acting Special Agent in Charge Philip Russell of the FBI’s Albuquerque Field Office made the announcement today.

The FBI’s Albuquerque Field Office investigated this case. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided valuable assistance.

The Justice Department collaborated closely with investigators and prosecutors from multiple jurisdictions in this investigation, including the District of New Mexico, Eastern District of Virginia, the Dutch National Police and the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service.

developers.googleblog.com
JULY 18, 2024
Sumit Chandel
Developer Relations Engineer

Understand how you will be impacted by our decision to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener.

Updated August 1, 2025: While we previously announced discontinuing support for all goo.gl URLs after August 25, 2025, we've adjusted our approach in order to preserve actively used links.

We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received.

Nine months ago, we redirected URLs that showed no activity in late 2024 to a message specifying that the link would be deactivated in August, and these are the only links targeted to be deactivated. If you get a message that states, “This link will no longer work in the near future”, the link won't work after August 25 and we recommend transitioning to another URL shortener if you haven’t already.

All other goo.gl links will be preserved and will continue to function as normal. To check if your link will be retained, visit the link today. If your link redirects you without a message, it will continue to work.

In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs.

Over time, these existing URLs saw less and less traffic as the years went on - in fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month.

As such, we will be turning off Google URL Shortener. Please read on below to understand more about how this may impact you.

Who is impacted?

Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025. We recommend transitioning these links to another URL shortener provider.

Note that goo.gl links generated via Google apps (such as Maps sharing) will continue to function.

What to expect

Starting August 23, 2024, goo.gl links will start displaying an interstitial page for a percentage of existing links notifying your users that the link will no longer be supported after August 25th, 2025 prior to navigating to the original target page.

Over time the percentage of links that will show the interstitial page will increase until the shutdown date. This interstitial page should help you track and adjust any affected links that you will need to transition as part of this change. We will continue to display this interstitial page until the shutdown date after which all links served will return a 404 response.

Note that the interstitial page may cause disruptions in the current flow of your goo.gl links. For example, if you are using other 302 redirects, the interstitial page may prevent the redirect flow from completing correctly. If you’ve embedded social metadata in your destination page, the interstitial page will likely cause these to no longer show up where the initial link is displayed. For this reason, we advise transitioning these links as soon as possible.

Note: In the event the interstitial page is disrupting your use cases, you can suppress it by adding the query param “si=1” to existing goo.gl links.

We understand the transition away from using goo.gl short links may cause some inconvenience. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us at Firebase Support. Thank you for using the service and we hope you join us in moving forward into new and innovative ways for navigating web and app experiences.

zscaler.com August 30, 2025
Zscaler swiftly mitigates a security incident impacting Salesloft Drift, and ensuring robust protection against potential vulnerabilities.
At Zscaler, protecting your data and maintaining transparency are core to our mission to secure, simplify and accelerate businesses transformation. We are committed to keeping you informed about key developments that may impact your organization.

What Happened?

Zscaler was made aware of a campaign targeted at Salesloft Drift (marketing software-as-a-service) and impacting a large number of Salesforce customers. This incident involved the theft of OAuth tokens connected to Salesloft Drift, a third-party application used for automating sales workflows that integrates with Salesforce databases to manage leads and contact information.

The scope of the incident is confined to Salesforce and does not involve access to any of Zscaler's products, services or underlying systems and infrastructure.

As part of this campaign, unauthorized actors gained access to Salesloft Drift credentials of its customers including Zscaler. Following a detailed review as part of our ongoing investigation, we have determined that these credentials have allowed limited access to some Zscaler Salesforce information.

What Information May Be Affected?

The information accessed was limited to commonly available business contact details for points of contact and specific Salesforce related content, including:

Names
Business email addresses
Job titles
Phone numbers
Regional/location details
Zscaler product licensing and commercial information
Plain text content from certain support cases [this does NOT include attachments, files, and images]

After extensive investigation, Zscaler has currently found no evidence to suggest misuse of this information. If anything changes, we will provide further communications and updates.

What Did Zscaler Do?

Zscaler acted swiftly to address the incident and mitigate risks. Steps taken include:

Revoking Salesloft Drift’s access to Zscaler’s Salesforce data
Out of an abundance of caution, rotating other API access tokens.
Launching a detailed investigation into the scope of the event, working closely with Salesforce to assess and understand impacts as they continue investigating.
Implementing additional safeguards and strengthening protocols to defend against similar incidents in the future.
Immediately launched a third party risk management investigation for third party vendors used by Zscaler.
Zscaler Customer Support team has further strengthened customer authentication protocol when responding to customer calls to safeguard against potential phishing attacks.

What You Can Do

Although the incident’s scope remains limited (as stated above) and no evidence of misuse has been found, we recommend that customers maintain heightened vigilance. Please be wary of potential phishing attacks or social engineering attempts, which could leverage exposed contact details.

Given that other organizations have suffered similar incidents stemming from Salesloft Drift, it’s crucial to exercise caution regarding unsolicited communications, including emails, phone calls, or requests for sensitive information. Always verify the source of communication and never disclose passwords or financial data via unofficial channels.

Zscaler Support will never request authentication or authorization details through unsolicited outreach, including phone calls or SMS. All official Zscaler communications come from trusted Zscaler channels. Please exercise caution and report any suspicious phishing activity to security@zscaler.com.

futurism.com Aug 27, 5:05 PM EDT by Noor Al-Sibai

OpenAI has authorized itself to call law enforcement if users say threatening enough things when talking to ChatGPT.

Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here.

For the better part of a year, we've watched — and reported — in horror as more and more stories emerge about AI chatbots leading people to self-harm, delusions, hospitalization, arrest, and suicide.

As the loved ones of the people impacted by these dangerous bots rally for change to prevent such harm from happening to anyone else, the companies that run these AIs have been slow to implement safeguards — and OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has been repeatedly implicated in what experts are now calling "AI psychosis," has until recently done little more than offer copy-pasted promises.

In a new blog post admitting certain failures amid its users' mental health crises, OpenAI also quietly disclosed that it's now scanning users' messages for certain types of harmful content, escalating particularly worrying content to human staff for review — and, in some cases, reporting it to the cops.

"When we detect users who are planning to harm others, we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team trained on our usage policies and who are authorized to take action, including banning accounts," the blog post notes. "If human reviewers determine that a case involves an imminent threat of serious physical harm to others, we may refer it to law enforcement."

That short and vague statement leaves a lot to be desired — and OpenAI's usage policies, referenced as the basis on which the human review team operates, don't provide much more clarity.

When describing its rule against "harm [to] yourself or others," the company listed off some pretty standard examples of prohibited activity, including using ChatGPT "to promote suicide or self-harm, develop or use weapons, injure others or destroy property, or engage in unauthorized activities that violate the security of any service or system."

But in the post warning users that the company will call the authorities if they seem like they're going to hurt someone, OpenAI also acknowledged that it is "currently not referring self-harm cases to law enforcement to respect people’s privacy given the uniquely private nature of ChatGPT interactions."

While ChatGPT has in the past proven itself pretty susceptible to so-called jailbreaks that trick it into spitting out instructions to build neurotoxins or step-by-step instructions to kill yourself, this new rule adds an additional layer of confusion. It remains unclear which exact types of chats could result in user conversations being flagged for human review, much less getting referred to police. We've reached out to OpenAI to ask for clarity.

While it's certainly a relief that AI conversations won't result in police wellness checks — which often end up causing more harm to the person in crisis due to most cops' complete lack of training in handling mental health situations — it's also kind of bizarre that OpenAI even mentions privacy, given that it admitted in the same post that it's monitoring user chats and potentially sharing them with the fuzz.

To make the announcement all the weirder, this new rule seems to contradict the company's pro-privacy stance amid its ongoing lawsuit with the New York Times and other publishers as they seek access to troves of ChatGPT logs to determine whether any of their copyrighted data had been used to train its models.

OpenAI has steadfastly rejected the publishers' request on grounds of protecting user privacy and has, more recently, begun trying to limit the amount of user chats it has to give the plaintiffs.

Last month, the company's CEO Sam Altman admitted during an appearance on a podcast that using ChatGPT as a therapist or attorney doesn't confer the same confidentiality that talking to a flesh-and-blood professional would — and that thanks to the NYT lawsuit, the company may be forced to turn those chats over to courts.

In other words, OpenAI is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The PR blowback from its users spiraling into mental health crises and dying by suicide is appalling — but since it's clearly having trouble controlling its own tech enough to protect users from those harmful scenarios, it's falling back on heavy-handed moderation that flies in the face of its own CEO's promises.

aws.amazon.com by CJ Moses on 29 AUG 2025
Amazon’s threat intelligence team has identified and disrupted a watering hole campaign conducted by APT29 (also known as Midnight Blizzard), a threat actor associated with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Our investigation uncovered an opportunistic watering hole campaign using compromised websites to redirect visitors to malicious infrastructure designed to trick users into authorizing attacker-controlled devices through Microsoft’s device code authentication flow. This opportunistic approach illustrates APT29’s continued evolution in scaling their operations to cast a wider net in their intelligence collection efforts.

The evolving tactics of APT29
This campaign follows a pattern of activity we’ve previously observed from APT29. In October 2024, Amazon disrupted APT29’s attempt to use domains impersonating AWS to phish users with Remote Desktop Protocol files pointed to actor-controlled resources. Also, in June 2025, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group reported on APT29’s phishing campaigns targeting academics and critics of Russia using application-specific passwords (ASPs). The current campaign shows their continued focus on credential harvesting and intelligence collection, with refinements to their technical approach, and demonstrates an evolution in APT29’s tradecraft through their ability to:

Compromise legitimate websites and initially inject obfuscated JavaScript
Rapidly adapt infrastructure when faced with disruption
On new infrastructure, adjust from use of JavaScript redirects to server-side redirects
Technical details
Amazon identified the activity through an analytic it created for APT29 infrastructure, which led to the discovery of the actor-controlled domain names. Through further investigation, Amazon identified the actor compromised various legitimate websites and injected JavaScript that redirected approximately 10% of visitors to these actor-controlled domains. These domains, including findcloudflare[.]com, mimicked Cloudflare verification pages to appear legitimate. The campaign’s ultimate target was Microsoft’s device code authentication flow. There was no compromise of AWS systems, nor was there a direct impact observed on AWS services or infrastructure.

Analysis of the code revealed evasion techniques, including:

Using randomization to only redirect a small percentage of visitors
Employing base64 encoding to hide malicious code
Setting cookies to prevent repeated redirects of the same visitor
Pivoting to new infrastructure when blocked
Image of compromised page, with domain name removed.
Image of compromised page, with domain name removed.

Amazon’s disruption efforts
Amazon remains committed to protecting the security of the internet by actively hunting for and disrupting sophisticated threat actors. We will continue working with industry partners and the security community to share intelligence and mitigate threats. Upon discovering this campaign, Amazon worked quickly to isolate affected EC2 instances, partner with Cloudflare and other providers to disrupt the actor’s domains, and share relevant information with Microsoft.

Despite the actor’s attempts to migrate to new infrastructure, including a move off AWS to another cloud provider, our team continued tracking and disrupting their operations. After our intervention, we observed the actor register additional domains such as cloudflare[.]redirectpartners[.]com, which again attempted to lure victims into Microsoft device code authentication workflows.

Protecting users and organizations
We recommend organizations implement the following protective measures:

For end users:

Be vigilant for suspicious redirect chains, particularly those masquerading as security verification pages.
Always verify the authenticity of device authorization requests before approving them.
Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all accounts, similar to how AWS now requires MFA for root accounts.
Be wary of web pages asking you to copy and paste commands or perform actions in Windows Run dialog (Win+R).
This matches the recently documented “ClickFix” technique where attackers trick users into running malicious commands.
For IT administrators:

Follow Microsoft’s security guidance on device authentication flows and consider disabling this feature if not required.
Enforce conditional access policies that restrict authentication based on device compliance, location, and risk factors.
Implement robust logging and monitoring for authentication events, particularly those involving new device authorizations.
Indicators of compromise (IOCs)

findcloudflare[.]com
cloudflare[.]redirectpartners[.]com
Sample JavaScript code

Decoded JavaScript code, with compromised site removed: "[removed_domain]"
Decoded JavaScript code, with compromised site removed: “[removed_domain]”

hole campaign using compromised websites to redirect visitors to malicious infrastructure designed to trick users into authorizing attacker-controlled devices […]

ncsc.gov.uk The NCSC and international partners share technical details of malicious activities and urge organisations to take mitigative actions.

GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre and international partners link three China-based companies to campaign targeting foreign governments and critical networks.
Commercial cyber ecosystem with links to the Chinese intelligence services has enabled global malicious activity.
New advisory supports UK organisations in critical sectors bolster their security against China state-sponsored cyber activity
Network defenders urged to proactively hunt for activity and take steps to mitigate threat from attackers exploiting avoidable weaknesses
The UK and international allies have today (Wednesday) publicly linked three technology companies based in China with a global malicious cyber campaign targeting critical networks.

In a new advisory published today, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) – a part of GCHQ - and international partners from twelve other countries have shared technical details about how malicious cyber activities linked with these China-based commercial entities have targeted nationally significant organisations around the world.

Since at least 2021, this activity has targeted organisations in critical sectors including government, telecommunications, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure globally, with a cluster of activity observed in the UK.

The activities described in the advisory partially overlaps with campaigns previously reported by the cyber security industry most commonly under the name Salt Typhoon.

The data stolen through this activity can ultimately provide the Chinese intelligence services the capability to identify and track targets’ communications and movements worldwide.

The advisory describes how the threat actors have had considerable success taking advantage of known common vulnerabilities rather than relying on bespoke malware or zero-day vulnerabilities to carry out their activities, meaning attacks via these vectors could have been avoided with timely patching.

Organisations of national significance in the UK are encouraged to proactively hunt for malicious activity and implement mitigative actions, including ensuring that edge devices are not exposed to known vulnerabilities and implementing security updates.

NCSC Chief Executive Dr Richard Horne said:

“We are deeply concerned by the irresponsible behaviour of the named commercial entities based in China that has enabled an unrestrained campaign of malicious cyber activities on a global scale.

“It is crucial organisations in targeted critical sectors heed this international warning about the threat posed by cyber actors who have been exploiting publicly known – and so therefore fixable – vulnerabilities.

“In the face of sophisticated threats, network defenders must proactively hunt for malicious activity, as well as apply recommended mitigations based on indicators of compromise and regularly reviewing network device logs for signs of unusual activity.”

The UK has led globally in helping to improve cyber risk management with leading legislation including the Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021 and the associated Code of Practice, for which the NCSC was the technical authority.

The government's forthcoming Cyber Security and Resilience Bill will further strengthen the UK’s cyber defences, protecting the services the public rely on to go about their normal lives.

The NCSC and government partners have previously warned about the growing range of cyber threats facing critical sectors and provides a range of guidance and resources to improve resilience.

The NCSC's Early Warning service provides timely notifications about potential security issues, including known vulnerabilities, and malicious activities affecting users’ networks. All UK organisations can sign up to this free service.

The three China-based technology companies provide cyber-related services to the Chinese intelligence services and are part of a wider commercial ecosystem in China, which includes information security companies, data brokers and hackers for hire.

The named entities are: Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Co Ltd, Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong Information Technology Co, and Sichuan Zhixin Ruijie Network Technology Co Ltd.

The NCSC has co-sealed this advisory alongside agencies from the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

nytimes.com By Farnaz FassihiRonen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti 2025/08/30

Israel was able to track the movements of key Iranian figures and assassinate them during the 12-day war this spring by following the cellphones carried by members of their security forces.

The meeting was so secret that only the attendees, a handful of top Iranian government officials and military commanders, knew the time and location.

It was June 16, the fourth day of Iran’s war with Israel, and Iran’s Supreme National Security Council gathered for an emergency meeting in a bunker 100 feet below a mountain slope in the western part of Tehran. For days, a relentless Israeli bombing campaign had destroyed military, government and nuclear sites around Iran, and had decimated the top echelon of Iran’s military commanders and nuclear scientists.

The officials, who included President Masoud Pezeshkian, the heads of the judiciary and the intelligence ministry and senior military commanders, arrived in separate cars. None of them carried mobile phones, knowing that Israeli intelligence could track them.

Despite all the precautions, Israeli jets dropped six bombs on top of the bunker soon after the meeting began, targeting the two entrance and exit doors. Remarkably, nobody in the bunker was killed. When the leaders later made their way out of the bunker, they found the bodies of a few guards, killed by the blasts.

The attack threw Iran’s intelligence apparatus into a tailspin, and soon enough Iranian officials discovered a devastating security lapse: The Israelis had been led to the meeting by hacking the phones of bodyguards who had accompanied the Iranian leaders to the site and waited outside.

Israel’s tracking of the guards has not been previously reported. It was one part of a larger effort to penetrate the most tightly guarded circles of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus that has had officials in Tehran chasing shadows for two months.
According to Iranian and Israeli officials, Iranian security guards’ careless use of mobile phones over several years — including posting on social media — played a central role in allowing Israeli military intelligence to hunt Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders and the Israeli Air Force to swoop in and kill them with missiles and bombs during the first week of the June war.

“We know senior officials and commanders did not carry phones, but their interlocutors, security guards and drivers had phones; they did not take precautions seriously, and this is how most of them were traced,” said Sasan Karimi, who previously served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s current government and is now a political analyst and lecturer at Tehran University.

The account of Israel’s strike on the meeting, and the details of how it tracked and targeted Iranian officials and commanders, is based on interviews with five senior Iranian officials, two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and nine Israeli military and intelligence officials.

The security breakdowns with the bodyguards are just one component of what Iranian officials acknowledge has been a long-running and often successful effort by Israel to use spies and operatives placed around the country as well as technology against Iran, sometimes with devastating effect.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Israel? , and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Following the most recent conflict, Iran remains focused on hunting down operatives that it fears remain present in the country and the government.

“Infiltration has reached the highest echelons of our decision making,” Mostafa Hashemi Taba, a former vice president and minister, said in an interview with Iranian media in late June.

This month Iran executed a nuclear scientist, Roozbeh Vadi, on allegations of spying for Israel and facilitating the assassination of another scientist. Three senior Iranian officials and a member of the Revolutionary Guards said Iran had quietly arrested or placed under house arrest dozens of people from the military, intelligence and government branches who were suspected of spying for Israel, some of them high-ranking. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied a connection to those so accused.

Spy games between Iran and Israel have been a constant feature of a decades-long shadow war between the two countries, and Israel’s success in June in killing so many important Iranian security figures shows just how much Israel has gained the upper hand.

President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran attending a protest in Tehran on June 22, following the U.S. attacks on nuclear sites in Iran. Mr. Pezeshkian himself escaped an attack on a bunker on June 16.
Credit...
Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Israel had been tracking senior Iranian nuclear scientists since the end of 2022 and had weighed killing them as early as last October but held off to avoid a clash with the Biden administration, Israeli officials said.

From the end of last year until June, what the Israelis called a “decapitation team” reviewed the files of all the scientists in the Iranian nuclear project known to Israel, to decide which they would recommend to kill. The first list contained 400 names. That was reduced to 100, mainly based on material from an Iranian nuclear archive that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, had stolen from Iran in 2018. In the end, Iran said the Israelis focused on and killed 13 scientists.

At the same time, Israel was building its capacity to target and kill senior Iranian military officials under a program called “Operation Red Wedding,” a play on a bloody “Game of Thrones” episode. Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Aerospace Force, was the first target, one Israeli official said.

Ultimately, Israeli officials said, the basic idea in both operations was to locate 20 to 25 human targets in Iran and hit all of them in the opening strike of the campaign, on the assumption that they would be more careful afterward, making them much harder to hit.

In a video interview with an Iranian journalist, the newly appointed head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, said that although Israel had human operatives and spies in the country, it had tracked senior officials and scientists and discovered the location of sensitive meetings mostly through advanced technology.

“The enemy gets the majority of its intelligence through technology, satellites and electronic data,” General Vahidi said. “They can find people, get information, their voices, images and zoom in with precise satellites and find the locations.”

From the Israeli side, Iran’s growing awareness of the threat to senior figures came to be seen as an opportunity. Fearing more assassinations on the ground of the sort that Israel had pulled off successfully in the past, the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered extensive security measures including large contingents of bodyguards and warned against the use of mobile phones and messaging apps like WhatsApp, which is commonly used in Iran.

Those bodyguards, Israel discovered, were not only carrying cellphones but even posting from them on social media.

“Using so many bodyguards is a weakness that we imposed on them, and we were able to take advantage of that,” one Israeli defense official said.

Iranian officials had long suspected that Israel was tracking the movements of senior military commanders and nuclear scientists through their mobile phones. Last year, after Israel detonated bombs hidden inside thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, Iran banned many of its officials in particularly sensitive jobs from using smartphones, social media and messaging apps.

Smartphones are now completely off limits for senior military commanders, nuclear scientists and government officials.

The protection of senior officials, military commanders and nuclear scientists is the responsibility of an elite brigade within the Revolutionary Guards called Ansar al-Mehdi. The commander in chief of Ansar, appointed last August after the new government came into office, is Gen. Mohamad Javad Assadi, one of the youngest senior commanders in the Guards.

General Assadi had personally warned several senior commanders and a top nuclear scientist, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, that Israel was planning to assassinate them at least a month before they were killed on the first day of the war, according to two senior Iranian officials with knowledge of the conversation. He had also called a meeting with the team leaders of security details asking them to take extra precautions, the officials said.

The cellphone ban initially did not extend to the security guards protecting the officials, scientists and commanders. That changed after Israel’s wave of assassinations on the first day of the war. Guards are now supposed to carry only walkie-talkies. Only team leaders who do not travel with the officials can carry cellphones.

But despite the new rules, according to officials who have held meetings with General Assadi about security, someone violated them and carried a phone to the National Security Council meeting, allowing the Israelis to carry out the pinpoint strike.

Hamzeh Safavi, a political and military analyst whose father is the top military adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei, said that Israel’s technological superiority over Iran was an existential threat. He said Iran had no choice but to conduct a security shakedown, overhaul its protocols and make difficult decisions — including arrests and prosecution of high-level spies.

“We must do whatever it takes to identify and address this threat; we have a major security and intelligence bug and nothing is more urgent than repairing this hole,” Mr. Safavi said in a telephone interview.

Iran’s minister of intelligence said in a statement this month that it had foiled an Israeli assassination attempt on 23 senior officials but did not provide their names or details of their positions and ranks. It said in the months leading up to the war, Iran had discovered and foiled 13 plots by Israel that aimed to kill 35 senior military and government officials. (An Israeli intelligence official disputed the Iranian account, saying that Israel had not been carrying out operations ahead of the surprise attack in June that could have led to heightened alertness on the part of Iran.)

The statement also said that security forces had identified and arrested 21 people on charges of spying for the Mossad and working as field and support operators in at least 11 provinces around Iran.

Iran has also accelerated efforts to recruit its own spies in Israel since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war in the Gaza Strip and triggered aggressive Israeli military operations in Iran and Lebanon.

Over the past year, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, has arrested dozens of Israelis and charged them with being paid agents of Iran, accused of helping collect intelligence about potential targets for Iranian strikes on Israel.

Israel has made killing Iran’s top nuclear scientists an urgent priority as a way to set back the nation’s nuclear program, even poisoning two young upcoming scientists.

As Iran made steady progress over the years toward enriching its uranium stockpile into near-weapons grade material, Israeli military and intelligence officials concluded that the campaign of sabotage and explosions in the enrichment apparatus, which the Mossad had been engaged in for many years, had only a marginal impact.

In 2021, according to three Israeli security officials, the focus turned to what Israeli officials called “the weapon group” — a cadre of Iranian scientists who the Israelis believed met regularly to work on building a device to trigger the enriched uranium and cause a nuclear explosion. This is one of the most technologically difficult parts of a nuclear project. (Iran has said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, and the U.N.’s atomic watchdog and American intelligence agencies have long assessed that Iran has not weaponized its nuclear project.)

It was this group of scientists that became the focus of what Israel called Operation Narnia, the military plan to kill off scientists during the war’s early days this spring.

By the time of the June 16 national security meeting of top Iranian officials, Israel had already killed a number of high-profile figures associated with the nuclear program, including Mr. Tehranchi and Fereydoun Abbasi, another nuclear scientist, both killed just days earlier. The cellphones of their bodyguards helped Israel target all of them.

But Israel was also targeting a wide variety of Iranian leaders, including the heads of government branches at the national security meeting, and killed at least 30 senior military commanders through strikes during the war.

General Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ air force, assembled his leadership team, accompanied by their security units, at the very start of the war to monitor intelligence about possible Israeli strikes. Israeli warplanes swooped in and carried out a pinpoint strike on the bunker where General Hajizadeh had taken refuge, killing him and other top commanders.

Mr. Hajizadeh’s son Alireza has said that his father took extra caution with phones. On a video published on Iranian media, he said that “when my father wanted to discuss something important he would tell us to take the phones and smart devices out of the room and place it far away.”

The ability to track the bodyguards also helped lead the Israelis to the June 16 meeting. The attendees, in addition to Mr. Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, included the speaker of Parliament, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, and the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei. Also on hand were the ministers of the interior, defense and intelligence and military commanders, some brand-new to their jobs after their bosses had been killed in previous strikes.

The attack destroyed the room, which soon filled with debris, smoke and dust, and the power was cut, according to accounts that emerged afterward. Mr. Pezeshkian found a narrow opening through the debris, where a sliver of light and oxygen was coming through, he has said publicly.

Three senior officials said the president dug through the debris with his bare hands, eventually making enough of a space for everyone to crawl out one by one. Mr. Pezeshkian had a minor leg injury from a shrapnel wound and the minister of interior was taken to the hospital for respiratory distress, officials said.

“There was only one hole, and we saw there was air coming and we said, we won’t suffocate. Life hinges on one second,” Mr. Pezeshkian said recently, recounting the attack in a meeting with senior clerics, according to a video published in Iranian media. He said if Israel had succeeded in killing the country’s top officials it would have created chaos in the country.

“People,” he said, “would have lost hope.”

infosecurity-magazine James Coker
Deputy Editor, Infosecurity Magazine 29 Aug 2025

Recorded Future highlighted the vast capabilities of state actors to rapidly weaponize newly disclosed vulnerabilities for geopolitical purposes

The majority (53%) of attributed vulnerability exploits in the first half 2025 were conducted by state-sponsored actors for strategic, geopolitical purposes, according to a new report by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group.

The researchers said the findings demonstrate the growing ability of well-resourced state-sponsored groups to weaponize flaws rapidly following disclosure. Geopolitical purposes, such as espionage and surveillance, are the key motives for these threat actors.

“The significant state-sponsored involvement also implies that these threats are not just random or opportunistic but often targeted and persistent campaigns aiming at specific sectors or high-value systems,” they noted.

The majority of state-sponsored campaigns were conducted by Chinese state-sponsored actors. These groups primarily targeted edge infrastructure and enterprise solutions, a tactic that has continued since 2024.

Read now: Chinese Tech Firms Linked to Salt Typhoon Espionage Campaigns

The suspected China-linked group UNC5221 exploited the highest number of vulnerabilities in H1 2025. It demonstrated a preference for Ivanti products, including Endpoint Manager Mobile, Connect Secure and Policy Secure.

Financially motivated groups accounted for the remaining 47% of vulnerability exploits – 27% were made up of those actors involved in theft and fraud but not linked to ransomware and 20% attributed to ransomware and extortion groups.

The researchers predicted that the exploitation of edge security appliances, remote access tools and other gateway-layer software will remain a top priority for both state-sponsored and financially-motivated groups.

“The strategic value of these systems – acting as intermediaries for encrypted traffic and privileged access – makes them high-reward targets,” they noted.

Microsoft was the most targeted vendor, with the tech giant’s products accounting for 17% of exploitations.

Most Vulnerability Exploits Required No Authentication
Insikt Group’s H1 2025 Malware and Vulnerability Trends report, published on August 28, found that the total number of disclosed common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) grew 16% year-over-year.

Attackers exploited 161 distinct vulnerabilities in the six-month period, up from 136 in H1 2024.

Of the 161 flaws, 69% required no authentication to exploit, while 48% could be exploited remotely over a network.

“This heavy tilt toward unauthenticated, remote exploits means that attacks can be launched directly from the internet against vulnerable hosts, with no credentials or insider access needed,” the researchers commented.

Additionally, 30% of the exploited CVEs enabled remote code execution (RCE), which often grants an attacker full control over the target system.

ClickFix Becomes a Favored Initial Access Technique
The report observed that ransomware actors adopted new initial access techniques in H1 2025.

This included a significant increase in ClickFix social engineering attacks. ClickFix involves the use of a fake error or verification message to manipulate victims into copying and pasting a malicious script and then running it.

The tactic preys on users’ desire to fix problems themselves rather than alerting their IT team or anyone else. Therefore, it is effective at bypassing security protections as the victim infects themselves.

The Interlock gang was observed using ClickFix in campaigns in January and February 2025.

The group has also leveraged FileFix in later attacks. This tactic is an evolution on ClickFix, where users are tricked into pasting a malicious file path into a Windows File Explorer’s address bar rather than using a dialog box.

Inskit group assess that the success of ClickFix means this method will remain a favored initial access technique through the rest of 2025 unless widespread mitigations reduce its effectiveness.

Post-compromise, ransomware groups have increased their use of endpoint detection and response (EDR) evasion via bring-your-own-installer (BYOI) techniques, and custom payloads using just-in-time (JIT) hooking and memory injection to bypass detection.

nltimes.nl/ Thursday, 28 August 2025 - 12:50 -
Dutch intelligence agencies confirmed on Thursday that the country was targeted in the global cyberespionage campaign carried out by the Chinese state-linked hacker group Salt Typhoon. The campaign, which came to light in late 2024, focused on the international telecommunications sector.

The Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) and the General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) said they independently verified portions of a U.S. investigation attributing the campaign to Salt Typhoon. “We can confirm parts of the U.S. findings through our own intelligence,” the agencies stated.

The warning aligns with alerts issued by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as European intelligence services including Germany’s BND, Finland’s SUPO, the U.K.’s NCSC, and Italy’s AISE.

In the Netherlands, the targets were smaller Internet service and hosting providers rather than the major telecom operators. Investigations by the MIVD and AIVD indicate that the hackers gained access to routers of Dutch targets but, as far as is known, did not penetrate internal networks further. Where possible, the agencies and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) shared threat information with affected organizations.

The agencies emphasized that China’s cyber activities have become increasingly sophisticated. “These activities are now so advanced that continuous effort and attention are needed to detect and counter cyber operations against Dutch interests,” the MIVD and AIVD said. They added that while proactive measures can reduce risk, complete prevention is not possible, posing a significant challenge to national cyber resilience

www.root.io Root Security Bulletin - CVE: CVE-2025-48384 Date: August 26, 2025 Severity: High (CVSS v3.1 Score: 8.0)

Overview
A critical Git vulnerability, CVE-2025-48384, has been identified and is actively exploited in the wild, now listed in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. This flaw enables remote code execution (RCE) through malicious repositories and poses a significant risk to developers and CI/CD pipelines across Linux and macOS systems. Windows installations are unaffected due to filesystem restrictions.

The vulnerability impacts all Git versions prior to the patched releases issued on July 8, 2025. While Ubuntu responded immediately with security advisories, Debian has marked the issue "no-dsa," delaying fixes until future point releases—leaving many Debian-based environments exposed.

Technical Details
The vulnerability arises from an inconsistency in Git's configuration parsing logic:

When reading config values, Git strips trailing CRLF characters.

When writing, values with trailing carriage returns (CR) are not properly quoted, leading to discrepancies when read back.

Attackers can exploit this by creating malicious .gitmodules files with submodule paths ending in CR characters. When combined with symlinked hooks directories and executable post-checkout hooks, this enables arbitrary file writes and ultimately remote code execution.

Exploitation scenario: Victims running git clone --recursive on a malicious repository may initialize submodules in unintended filesystem locations. Security researchers (liamg, acheong08, and others) have published proof-of-concept exploits validating the attack's real-world impact.

Affected versions:

Git versions prior to v2.43.7, v2.44.4, v2.45.4, v2.46.4, v2.47.3, v2.48.2, v2.49.1, and v2.50.1

Systems: Linux, macOS (where control characters are allowed in filenames)

Not affected: Windows

CVSS v3.1 Vector: AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Base Score: 8.0 (High)

Impact
Active exploitation confirmed: CISA added CVE-2025-48384 to its KEV catalog on August 25, 2025, with a remediation deadline of September 15, 2025 for U.S. federal agencies.

Developer tools at risk: GitHub Desktop for macOS is particularly vulnerable due to its default use of recursive cloning.

Distribution disparity: Ubuntu issued immediate advisories and patches, while Debian deferred remediation, leaving production systems running Bookworm, Bullseye, or Trixie without timely fixes.

This uneven patching cadence underscores the supply chain risks when critical open-source infrastructure receives inconsistent remediation across ecosystems.

Timeline
July 8, 2025: Git project discloses CVE-2025-48384 and issues patched releases across eight version branches.

July 9-15, 2025: Security researchers publish multiple proof-of-concept exploits, confirming real-world exploitability.

August 8, 2025: Root tested, backported, and deployed patches for Debian Bookworm, Bullseye, Trixie, and all Slim variants, delivering them seamlessly across all Root users' environments without disruption.

August 15, 2025: Debian marked the issue as "no-dsa," opting for remediation only in future point releases.

August 25, 2025: CISA added CVE-2025-48384 to the KEV catalog, mandating U.S. federal agencies remediate by September 15.

Recommendations
For Debian Users
Confirm exposure: Determine if your systems use the git package maintained by Debian. Tools like Trivy or enterprise vulnerability scanners can quickly verify vulnerable versions.

Short-term mitigations:

Avoid git clone --recursive on untrusted repositories.

Inspect .gitmodules files before initializing submodules.

Consider compiling patched versions of Git from source where feasible.

For Root Users
Customers using Root's Agentic Vulnerability Remediation (AVR) platform are already protected. Root delivered patched and backported Git packages on August 8, 2025, covering Debian Bookworm, Bullseye, Trixie, and all Slim variants. Patches were deployed seamlessly across all user environments without disruption.

Users can verify their protection in the Artifact Explorer or trigger an on-demand remediation in under five minutes.

Extended availability: Root's patched versions are also accessible through partners such as Aikido and scanners using Trivy, where advanced tier subscribers receive immediate coverage.

For Non-Customers
Get free remediation: Sign up at app.root.io to remediate affected images and push them back to your repositories at no cost.

Root's Approach
Root’s Agentic Vulnerability Remediation (AVR) technology leverages AI-driven automation overseen by security experts, replicating the decision-making of seasoned engineers at scale.

The platform operates in five phases:

Assessment – Mapping CVEs across known databases.

Recommendation – Identifying the optimal remediation path.

Application – Applying and backporting security patches where needed.

Validation – Rigorous testing against public frameworks.

Deployment – Delivering fully remediated, auditable images.

Unlike traditional vulnerability scanners, Root fixes vulnerabilities proactively—eliminating false positives, providing comprehensive SBOMs and VEX statements, and reducing remediation time to minutes.

Conclusion
CVE-2025-48384 highlights both the responsiveness of the Git project and the uneven patching practices across Linux distributions. While upstream patches were released promptly, Debian's deferred remediation created a critical exposure window that attackers are already exploiting.

Organizations relying on Debian-based containers cannot afford to wait for delayed point releases. Automated remediation platforms like Root AVR bridge this gap by providing continuous, proactive protection at container-build speeds—ensuring development teams remain secure without sacrificing velocity.

For broader industry analysis of what this vulnerability reveals about modern security approaches, see our blog post: CVE- 2025-48384: The Git Vulnerability That's Exposing a Broken System.

Take action now: Explore Root's remediation for CVE-2025-48384 at app.root.io

techcrunch.com Zack Whittaker
11:15 AM PDT · August 29, 2025
A spyware vendor was behind a recent campaign that abused a vulnerability in WhatsApp to deliver an exploit capable of hacking into iPhones and Macs.
WhatsApp said on Friday that it fixed a security bug in its iOS and Mac apps that was being used to stealthily hack into the Apple devices of “specific targeted users.”

The Meta-owned messaging app giant said in its security advisory that it fixed the vulnerability, known officially as CVE-2025-55177, which was used alongside a separate flaw found in iOS and Macs, which Apple fixed last week and tracks as CVE-2025-43300.

Apple said at the time that the flaw was used in an “extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals.” Now we know that dozens of WhatsApp users were targeted with this pair of flaws.

Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, who heads Amnesty International’s Security Lab, described the attack in a post on X as an “advanced spyware campaign” that targeted users over the past 90 days, or since the end of May. Ó Cearbhaill described the pair of bugs as a “zero-click” attack, meaning it does not require any interaction from the victim, such as clicking a link, to compromise their device.

The two bugs chained together allow an attacker to deliver a malicious exploit through WhatsApp that’s capable of stealing data from the user’s Apple device.

Per Ó Cearbhaill, who posted a copy of the threat notification that WhatsApp sent to affected users, the attack was able to “compromise your device and the data it contains, including messages.”

It’s not immediately clear who, or which spyware vendor, is behind the attacks.

When reached by TechCrunch, Meta spokesperson Margarita Franklin confirmed the company detected and patched the flaw “a few weeks ago” and that the company sent “less than 200” notifications to affected WhatsApp users.

The spokesperson did not say, when asked, if WhatsApp has evidence to attribute the hacks to a specific attacker or surveillance vendor.

This is not the first time that WhatsApp users have been targeted by government spyware, a kind of malware capable of breaking into fully patched devices with vulnerabilities not known to the vendor, known as zero-day flaws.

In May, a U.S. court ordered spyware maker NSO Group to pay WhatsApp $167 million in damages for a 2019 hacking campaign that broke into the devices of more than 1,400 WhatsApp users with an exploit capable of planting NSO’s Pegasus spyware. WhatsApp brought the legal case against NSO, citing a breach of federal and state hacking laws, as well as its own terms of service.

Earlier this year, WhatsApp disrupted a spyware campaign that targeted around 90 users, including journalists and members of civil society across Italy. The Italian government denied its involvement in the spying campaign. Paragon, whose spyware was used in the campaign, later cut off Italy from its hacking tools for failing to investigate the abuse.

darkreading.com
Robert Lemos, Contributing Writer
August 22, 2025

Some insurers look to limit payouts to companies that don't remediate serious vulnerabilities in a timely manner. Unsurprisingly, most companies don't like those restrictions.

Cyber insurers are testing out new ways to hold policyholders accountable for outdated security, limiting payouts when policyholders fall prey to attacks that use older vulnerabilities or take advantage of holes in the organizations' defenses.

Potential risk-limiting approaches include a sliding scale of accountability — and payouts — based on an unpatched vulnerability's half-life, or whether a company failed to fix a critical vulnerability within a certain number of days, according to a blog post penned by cyber insurer Coalition, which does not support such approaches. Dubbed CVE exclusions, after the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system widely used to assign identifiers to software security issues, the tactic is not yet widely adopted, and most examples are from insurers outside the US, the firm stated.

The limits could start showing up in companies' policies, however, if demand for cyber insurance continues to grow, creating a seller's market, says John Coletti, head of cyber underwriting at Coalition

"While we will not name names, there are specific examples of this occurring within the industry," he says. "A company should be highly skeptical of buying a policy with a CVE exclusion."

Cyber-insurance firms are struggling to find different ways to limit their vulnerability to large breaches and campaigns that hit a large number of policyholders. Following NotPetya, when companies used business insurance to cover disruptions to operations, efforts to deny payouts based on warlike-act exclusion clauses largely failed but led to enhanced wording in subsequent policies. Increasingly, cyber-insurance firms used data from policyholders or gleaned from cybersecurity assessments, or information from their own managed security services offerings to better determine risk.

Blame the Victim?
Yet requiring all companies to manage major vulnerabilities is a tall order. Currently, the software industry is on track to disclose more than 46,000 vulnerabilities in 2025, up from nearly 40,000 in 2024, according to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Of those, likely 30% would be considered of high or critical severity, typically defined as a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 8.0 or higher.

cyberscoop.com
article By
Tim Starks
August 27, 2025
Google says it is starting a cyber “disruption unit,” a development that arrives in a potentially shifting U.S. landscape toward more offensive-oriented approaches in cyberspace.

But the contours of that larger shift are still unclear, and whether or to what extent it’s even possible. While there’s some momentum in policymaking and industry circles to put a greater emphasis on more aggressive strategies and tactics to respond to cyberattacks, there are also major barriers.

Sandra Joyce, vice president of Google Threat Intelligence Group, said at a conference Tuesday that more details of the disruption unit would be forthcoming in future months, but the company was looking for “legal and ethical disruption” options as part of the unit’s work.

“What we’re doing in the Google Threat Intelligence Group is intelligence-led proactive identification of opportunities where we can actually take down some type of campaign or operation,” she said at the Center for Cybersecurity Policy and Law event, where she called for partners in the project. “We have to get from a reactive position to a proactive one … if we’re going to make a difference right now.”

The boundaries in the cyber domain between actions considered “cyber offense” and those meant to deter cyberattacks are often unclear. The tradeoff between “active defense” vs. “hacking back” is a common dividing line. On the less aggressive end, “active defense” can include tactics like setting up honeypots designed to lure and trick attackers. At the more extreme end, “hacking back” would typically involve actions that attempt to deliberately destroy an attacker’s systems or networks. Disruption operations might fall between the two, like Microsoft taking down botnet infrastructure in court or the Justice Department seizing stolen cryptocurrency from hackers.

Trump administration officials and some in Congress have been advocating for the U.S. government to go on offense in cyberspace, saying that foreign hackers and criminals aren’t suffering sufficient consequences. Much-criticized legislation to authorize private sector “hacking back” has long stalled in Congress, but some have recently pushed a version of the idea where the president would give “letters of marque” like those for early-U.S. sea privateers to companies authorizing them to legally conduct offensive cyber operations currently forbidden under U.S. law.

The private sector has some catching up to do if there’s to be a worthy field of firms able to focus on offense, experts say.

John Keefe, a former National Security Council official from 2022 to 2024 and National Security Agency official before that, said there had been government talks about a “narrow” letters of marque approach “with the private sector companies that we thought had the capabilities.” The concept was centered on ransomware, Russia and rules of the road for those companies to operate. “It wasn’t going to be the Wild West,” said Keefe, now founder of Ex Astris Scientia, speaking like others in this story at Tuesday’s conference.

The companies with an emphasis on offense largely have only one customer — and that’s governments, said Joe McCaffrey, chief information security officer at defense tech company Anduril Industries. “It’s a really tough business to be in,” he said. “If you develop an exploit, you get to sell to one person legally, and then it gets burned, and you’re back again.”

By their nature, offensive cyber operations in the federal government are already very time- and manpower-intensive, said Brandon Wales, a former top official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and now vice president of cybersecurity at SentinelOne. Private sector companies could make their mark by innovating ways to speed up and expand the number of those operations, he said.

Overall, among the options of companies that could do more offensive work, the “industry doesn’t exist yet, but I think it’s coming,” said Andrew McClure, managing director at Forgepoint Capital.

Certainly Congress would have to clarify what companies are able to do legally as well, Wales said.

But that’s just the industry side. There’s plenty more to weigh when stepping up offense.

“However we start, we need to make sure that we are having the ability to measure impact,” said Megan Stifel, chief strategy officer for the Institute for Security and Technology. “Is this working? How do we know?”
If there was a consensus at the conference it’s that the United States — be it the government or private sector — needs to do more to deter adversaries in cyberspace by going after them more in cyberspace.

One knock on that idea has been that the United States can least afford to get into a cyber shooting match, since it’s more reliant on tech than other nations and an escalation would hurt the U.S. the most by presenting more vulnerable targets for enemies. But Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, said that idea was wrong for a couple reasons, among them that other nations have become just as reliant on tech, too.

And “the very idea that in this current bleak state of affairs, engaging in cyber offense is escalatory, I propose to you, is laughable,” he said. “After all, what are our adversaries going to escalate to in response? Ransom more of our hospitals, penetrate more of our water and electric utilities, steal even more of our IP and financial assets?”

Alperovitch continued: “Not only is engaging in thoughtful and careful cyber offense not escalatory, but not doing so is.”

news.sophos.com Written by Sophos Counter Threat Unit Research Team
August 26, 2025
This approach represents an evolution from threat actors abusing remote monitoring and management tools

In August 2025, Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) researchers investigated an intrusion that involved deployment of the legitimate open-source Velociraptor digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) tool. In this incident, the threat actor used the tool to download and execute Visual Studio Code with the likely intention of creating a tunnel to an attacker-controlled command and control (C2) server. Enabling the tunnel option in Visual Studio Code triggered a Taegis™ alert, as this option can allow both remote access and remote code execution and has been abused by multiple threat groups in the past.

The threat actor used the Windows msiexec utility to download an installer (v2.msi) from a Cloudflare Workers domain (files[.]qaubctgg[.]workers[.]dev). This location appears to be a staging folder for attacker tools, including the Cloudflare tunneling tool and the Radmin remote administration tool. This file installed Velociraptor, which is configured to communicate with C2 server velo[.]qaubctgg[.]workers[.]dev. The attacker then used an encoded PowerShell command to download Visual Studio Code (code.exe) from the same staging folder and executed it with the tunnel option enabled. The threat actor installed code.exe as a service and redirected the output to a log file. They then used the msiexec Windows utility again to download additional malware (sc.msi) from the workers[.]dev folder (see Figure 1).

Velociraptor creating Visual Studio Code tunnel

Figure 1: Process tree showing Velociraptor creating Visual Studio Code tunnel.

The Visual Studio Code tunneling activity triggered a Taegis alert that prompted a Sophos investigation. The analysts provided mitigation advice that enabled the customer to quickly implement remediations such as isolating the affected host, which prevented the attacker from achieving their objectives. Analysis suggests that the malicious activity would likely have led to ransomware deployment.

Threat actors often abuse remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools. In some instances, they leverage preexisting tools on the targeted systems. In others, they deploy the tools during the attack. The Velociraptor incident reveals attackers pivoting to using incident response tools to gain a foothold in a network and minimize the amount of malware they deploy.

Organizations should monitor for and investigate unauthorized use of Velociraptor and treat observations of this tradecraft as a precursor to ransomware. Implementing an endpoint detection and response system, monitoring for unexpected tools and suspicious behaviors, and following best practices for securing systems and generating backups can mitigate the ransomware threat. The impact of an attack is greatly reduced if it is caught prior to ransomware deployment.

The following Sophos protections detect activity related to this threat:

Troj/Agent-BLMR
Troj/BatDl-PL
Troj/Mdrop-KDK
To mitigate exposure to this malware, CTU™ researchers recommend that organizations use available controls to review and restrict access using the indicators listed in Table 1. The domains may contain malicious content, so consider the risks before opening them in a browser.

Indicator Type Context
files[.]qaubctgg[.]workers[.]dev Domain name Hosted tools used in August 2025 Velociraptor campaign
velo[.]qaubctgg[.]workers[.]dev Domain name C2 server used in August 2025 Velociraptor campaign
Table 1: Indicators for this threat.

openssh.com - OpenSSH supports a number of cryptographic key agreement algorithms considered to be safe against attacks from quantum computers. We recommend that all SSH connections use these algorithms.

OpenSSH has offered post-quantum key agreement (KexAlgorithms) by default since release 9.0 (April 2022), initially via the sntrup761x25519-sha512 algorithm. More recently, in OpenSSH 9.9, we have added a second post-quantum key agreement mlkem768x25519-sha256 and it was made the new default scheme in OpenSSH 10.0 (April 2025).

To encourage migration to these stronger algorithms, OpenSSH 10.1 will warn the user when a non post-quantum key agreement scheme is selected, with the following message:

WARNING: connection is not using a post-quantum key exchange algorithm.
This session may be vulnerable to "store now, decrypt later" attacks.
** The server may need to be upgraded. See https://openssh.com/pq.html
This warning is displayed by default but may be disabled via the WarnWeakCrypto option in ssh_config(5).

Background
A quantum computer (QC) is a device capable of performing computations with information encoded as quantum states. Such a device could quickly solve particular problems that are intractable for existing "classical" computers.

The mathematics that underpin a number of cryptographic algorithms are among the problems that quantum computers are believed to be able to effectively solve. This means that a sufficiently-powerful quantum computer (a.k.a a "cryptographically-relevant" quantum computer) will be able to break them. Most affected is the cryptography used for key agreement and digital signatures, both of which play important roles in SSH.

Fortunately, quantum computers of sufficient power to break cryptography have not been invented yet. Estimates for when a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer will arrive, based on the rate of progress in the field, range from 5-20 years, with many observers expecting them to arrive in the mid-2030s.

The entire privacy of an SSH connection depends on cryptographic key agreement. If an attacker can break the key agreement then they are able to decrypt and view the entire session. The attacker need not perform this attack in real time; they may collect encrypted SSH sessions now and then decrypt them later once they have access to a quantum computer. This is referred to as a "store now, decrypt later" attack (also as "harvest now, decrypt later").

Fortunately, improved "post-quantum" cryptographic algorithms have been devised that rely on different underlying mathematical problems that are understood to not be attackable by a quantum computer.

OpenSSH has supported post-quantum key agreement to prevent "store now, decrypt later" attacks for several years and it has been the default since OpenSSH-9.0, released in 2022.

FAQ
I received a warning from ssh that directed me to this page. What should I do?
As mentioned above, OpenSSH 10.1 started warning users when connections use cryptography that is not safe against quantum computers. If you received such a warning, it means that the server you connected to did not offer one of the two post-quantum key agreement algorithms that are being standardised for the SSH protocol: mlkem768x25519-sha256 and sntrup761x25519-sha512

The ideal solution is to update the server to use an SSH implementation that supports at least one of these. OpenSSH versions 9.0 and greater support sntrup761x25519-sha512 and versions 9.9 and greater support mlkem768x25519-sha256. If your server is already running one of these versions, then check whether the KexAlgorithms option has disabled their use.

If you are unable to update the server and/or you prefer to accept the risk of continuing to use quantum-unsafe cryptography then the warning may be silenced via the WarnWeakCrypto option in ssh_config(5). We recommend doing this selectively, for example:
Match host unsafe.example.com
WarnWeakCrypto no
Quantum computers don't exist yet, why go to all this trouble?
Because of the "store now, decrypt later" attack mentioned above. Traffic sent today is at risk of decryption unless post-quantum key agreement is used.

What about signature algorithms? You said they were at risk too
Yes, most currently-used signature algorithms (including RSA and ECDSA) can be broken by a quantum computer. However, there is no risk to existing traffic in this situation (i.e. there is no analogous "store now, decrypt later"). The only urgency for signature algorithms is ensuring that all classical signature keys are retired in advance of cryptographically-relevant computers becoming a reality. OpenSSH will add support for post-quantum signature algorithms in the future.

I don't believe we'll ever get quantum computers. This is a waste of time
Some people consider the task of scaling existing quantum computers up to the point where they can tackle cryptographic problems to be practically insurmountable. This is a possibility. However, it appears that most of the barriers to a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer are engineering challenges rather than underlying physics.

If we're right about quantum computers being practical, then we will have protected vast quantities of user data. If we're wrong about it, then all we'll have done is moved to cryptographic algorithms with stronger mathematical underpinnings.

These post-quantum algorithms are new. Are we sure they aren't broken?
We're wary of this too. Though post-quantum key agreement algorithms have received a lot of concerted cryptographic attention over the last few years, it's possible that new attacks might be found.

To defend against this happening we have selected post-quantum algorithms with good safety margins. This means that even if they turn out to be weaker than expected they are still likely to be strong enough to be considered fit for purpose.

Additionally, all the post-quantum algorithms implemented by OpenSSH are "hybrids" that combine a post-quantum algorithm with a classical algorithm. For example mlkem768x25519-sha256 combines ML-KEM, a post-quantum key agreement scheme, with ECDH/x25519, a classical key agreement algorithm that was formerly OpenSSH's preferred default. This ensures that the combined, hybrid algorithm is no worse than the previous best classical algorithm, even if the post-quantum algorithm turns out to be completely broken by future cryptanalysis.

incyber.org Marie De Freminville
26.08.25

La directive NIS2 (Network and Information Security 2), adoptée par l'Union européenne, devait être transposée par chaque État membre de l’UE en droit national, au plus tard en octobre 2024, avec des processus et plannings de transposition spécifiques à chaque pays.
Compte-tenu de l’augmentation des menaces cyber, elle impose des normes plus strictes en matière de cybersécurité, de gestion des risques, et de réaction aux incidents, que la directive NIS, datant de 2016.
Cette nouvelle directive élargit les attentes et le champ d’application. Elle a pour objectif d’anticiper les nouvelles formes d’attaques, de passer d’une approche réactive à une stratégie proactive, et de mettre en place une collaboration étendue, pour l’ensemble de l’écosystème, afin d’assurer la résilience des infrastructures critiques.

Son champ d’application est plus large et s’étend aux entités considérées comme essentielles ou importantes (ex. : énergie, transport, santé, infrastructures numériques, administration publique, etc.). Pour plus de détails, consulter https://monespacenis2.cyber.gouv.fr/directive/.

NIS2 n’est pas directement applicable en Suisse. Néanmoins, une entreprise suisse, est concernée, notamment si elle fait partie de la chaîne d’approvisionnement critique d’entreprises de l’Union européenne soumises à NIS2. Par exemple en tant que fournisseur de services numériques, ou infrastructures critiques transfrontalières, ou si elle opère au sein de l’Union européenne, à travers une filiale, qui rentre dans le périmètre de NIS2 (champ d’application mentionné ci-dessus).

Au-delà de la stricte conformité, le respect des standards européens dans le domaine numérique constitue un pilier de la confiance entre les entreprises suisses et leurs partenaires ou clients européens, et l’application de ces standards renforcera la sécurité des entités suisses qui s’y conformeront.

Les principales questions à se poser:

Mon entreprise a-t-elle une filiale, succursale, ou entité juridique dans un pays de l’UE ?
Mon entreprise fournit-elle des services à des clients situés dans l’UE (entreprises, États, infrastructures critiques) ?
Mon entreprise héberge-t-elle, traite-t-elle ou transporte-t-elle des données de citoyens européens ?
Mon entreprise opère-t-elle dans un secteur “essentiel” ( énergie, santé, banques, transport, infrastructures numériques, eau, espace, administration publique) ou important (agroalimentaire, services numériques, recherche, chimie, déchets, fabrication critique)?
Si l’entreprise suisse répond à l’un de ces critères, ou si le contrat qui la lie à son client contient des obligations de conformité à NIS2, elle doit s’assurer que son dispositif de cybersécurité comprend notamment:

Un CISO ou responsable cybersécurité clairement identifié,
Une politique de cybersécurité formelle, validée par la direction,
Une procédure de gestion des incidents (notification ≤ 24h),
Des analyses de risques réguliers, des audits et tests, visant à s’assurer de la solidité du dispositif,
Des formations à la cybersécurité pour administrateurs et dirigeants.
Dans le secteur financier, les institutions bancaires ayant une filiale / succursale dans l’UE ou agissant en tant que sous-traitant ou partenaire de banques/acteurs européens devront mettre en place:

Une gouvernance de la cybersécurité au niveau du conseil d’administration, nommer un responsable cybersécurité (CISO) au niveau exécutif, réviser la stratégie de cybersécurité, mettre en place un comité de sécurité informatique.
Une cartographie et une gestion des risques liés à la sécurité des systèmes d’information : identifier les actifs essentiels au fonctionnement de la banque, inclure la chaîne d’approvisionnement, les fournisseurs IT et interconnexions.
Des procédures de notification d’incidents dans des délais très courts (24 heures), et un plan de réponse aux incidents cyber.
Des audits de conformité, et un tableau de bord (suivi des indicateurs de sécurité et des exigences NIS2).
Une vérification de la maturité des fournisseurs de services bancaires numériques, IT, cloud, etc. dans le domaine de la cybersécurité, c’est-à-dire leur imposer le respect des standards NIS2.
Un programme de sensibilisation et formation pour les collaborateurs, les dirigeants et le conseil d’administration.
Une mise à jour des contrats avec les fournisseurs IT, et une vérification des niveaux de sécurité des sous-traitants.
Le secteur bancaire est déjà très réglementé : la FINMA (autorité des marchés financiers en Suisse) impose des exigences strictes via ses circulaires, comme 2018/3 « Outsourcing » et 2023/1 « Gestion des risques informatiques », fondées sur le risque et la proportionnalité.

Les initiatives de la Confédération (NCSC) s’inscrivent aussi dans une logique de rapprochement avec les standards européens.

Autres entités essentielles du secteur financier, les IMF (Infrastructures de Marchés Financiers) : plateformes de négociation (bourses, MTF- Multi Trading Facilities, OTF- Organised Trading Facilities, systèmes de cotation), chambres de compensation (CCP), dépositaires centraux de titres (CSD), systèmes de règlement, fournisseurs d’indicateurs de référence critiques, opérateurs de données de marché réglementés.

En Suisse, ces entités incluent des acteurs comme SIX Group, SIX x-clear, SIX SIS, ou Swiss Interbank Clearing (SIC), qui gèrent des systèmes critiques nationaux, mais aussi interconnectés avec l’UE.

Bien que la Suisse ne soit pas soumise directement à NIS2, ses IMF opèrent à l’international, en particulier dans l’UE et traitent des données financières critiques, souvent partagées avec des contreparties européennes.

Bien qu’elles soient déjà soumises à des réglementations rigoureuses, comme LFIN, LBVM, Règlement sur l’infrastructure des marchés financiers, directives FINMA, standards ISO 27001/22301, etc., les IMF suisses devront démontrer leur conformité équivalente aux exigences NIS2, même de façon contractuelle ou opérationnelle.

Dans le secteur de la santé, les hôpitaux et cliniques, les laboratoires, les fournisseurs de soins critiques, les entreprises technologiques médicales (eHealth, MedTech, télémédecine) et les prestataires IT (cloud santé, DMP, plateformes de données médicales) collaborant avec l’UE, sont considérés comme entités essentielles (Annexe I de NIS2).

Comme dans l’industrie bancaire, les entreprises de ce secteur ont de nouvelles obligations et doivent être en mesure de produire les documents suivants:

Politique cybersécurité Santé (avec exigences NIS2),
Analyse de risques IT / DMP / IoMT,
Procédure de notification d’incidents,
Registre de conformité / tableau de bord,
Rapports d’audit / plans de remédiation,
Attestations de sensibilisation / format.
Dans le secteur de l’énergie, les opérateurs de réseaux, les producteurs, les fournisseurs, et les prestataires techniques (ex : SCADA: système de supervision industrielle, OT : operational technology, cloud industriel) doivent se conformer à NIS2, dans la mesure où ils doivent répondre aux attentes de partenaires européens et autorités européennes, avec un objectif de renforcer la résilience des infrastructures critiques.

Par ailleurs, les entreprises de ce secteur doivent anticiper l’évolution du droit suisse (LSI, OICN, etc.), qui doit converger avec NIS2, par le biais de l’Ordonnance sur la protection des infrastructures critiques (OICN) et les directives de l’OFEN et du NCSC.

Les particularités du secteur de l’énergie sont les suivantes:

Inclure l’OT, la production, les fournisseurs et la télégestion dans la politique de sécurité
Créer un comité cybersécurité interdisciplinaire avec les représentants IT, OT, opérations, conformité,
Cartographier les systèmes critiques : supervision automatisée, contrôle distribué, réseaux de distribution, postes haute tension, infrastructures partagées avec l’UE
Renforcer les mesures de sécurité sur les systèmes informatiques industriels (notamment séparation des environnements et contrôle des accès), détecter les incidents, mettre en place un plan de continuité d’activité / reprise des activités, revoir les contrats des fournisseurs IT avec une clause de conformité NIS2.
Former les administrateurs et dirigeants, mais aussi les opérateurs industriels et informatiques.
Dans le secteur des transports, la directive NIS2 couvre toutes les formes de transport critiques: aérien (compagnies aériennes, gestionnaires d’aéroports, contrôle aérien), ferroviaire (opérateurs ferroviaires, gestionnaires d’infrastructures, services d’aiguillage), maritime (ports, transporteurs maritimes, systèmes de navigation, opérateurs de fret), et routier (sociétés d’autoroutes, gestion du trafic, plateformes logistiques essentielles (moins prioritaire mais possible selon les pays membres)

La Suisse étant étroitement interconnectée avec les réseaux européens, est partie prenante d’accords transfrontaliers (ex : transport ferroviaire européen, sécurité aérienne avec l’EASA, corridors logistiques). Elle est soumise à ses propres cadres de cybersécurité (p. ex. OICN, LSI, exigences de l’Office fédéral des transports – OFT) et ses entreprises de transport sont donc fortement incitées à s’aligner volontairement sur NIS2, et notamment à sécuriser les systèmes industriels (isolation, segmentation réseau, surveillance des SCADA), identifierindemtifier les systèmes interconnectés avec l’UE.

Enfin, les infrastructures numériques suisses sont étroitement interconnectées à celles de l’UE ( interconnexion Internet, transit IP, cloud européens, réseaux transfrontaliers), elles sont susceptibles d’héberger ou transporter des données européennes (dans le cas d’acteurs cloud ou de services numériques globaux).

Elles sont soumises à la Loi sur la sécurité de l’information (LSI), la Loi sur les télécommunications (LTC), et aux recommandations du NCSC et du SEFRI.qui sont un pilier central de la directive NIS2.

Les fournisseurs d’infrastructure numérique suisses (fournisseurs de services DNS, registres de noms de domaine, services cloud critiques, data centers critiques, réseaux de diffusion de contenu, points d’échange Internet ) opérant en Europe ou servant des clients européens doivent démontrer un niveau de sécurité équivalent à celui exigé par NIS2, souvent via des audits, certifications ou clauses contractuelles.

Elles doivent donc cartographier les clients/services exposés à l’UE, renforcer détection, résilience, surveillance, définir des procédures claires, audits, documentation, contrôler leurs sous-traitants et leur conformitéconformiter à NIS2 (clause à introduire à leurs contrats).

En conclusion, bien que la Suisse impose à ses entreprises des réglementations dans le domaine des risques cyber, les attentes et le champ d’application ne sont pas exactement les mêmes que dans la directive NIS2.

Il est donc important de vérifier, pour les entreprises suisses qui entrent dans le champ d’application NIS2, et qui opèrent avec l’UE, quelles actions mener pour renforcer le dispositif de cybersécurité, indispensable pour maintenir des relations de confiance avec les clients et partenaires, et pour répondre à leurs exigences règlementaires.

www.usine-digitale.fr Alice Vitard
26 août 2025

Dans le cadre du Cyber Solidarity Act, l'Agence de l'Union européenne pour la cybersécurité se voit confier la gestion de la réserve européenne de cybersécurité. Grâce à une enveloppe de 36 millions d'euros, elle est chargée de sélectionner et de coordonner des prestataires capables d'intervenir en cas d'incidents de grande ampleur.

La Commission européenne et l'Agence de l'Union européenne pour la cybersécurité (European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, ENISA) ont annoncé le 26 août avoir signé un accord de contribution qui confie à l'Enisa l'administration et le fonctionnement de la réserve européenne de cybersécurité. Une enveloppe de 36 millions d'euros sur trois ans lui a ainsi été attribuée.

Répondre aux incidents à grande échelle
Cette réserve est prévue à l'article 14 du Cyber Solidarity Act, texte adopté en 2024 pour doter l'Union de moyens renforcés pour détecter, préparer et répondre aux cyberattaques à grande échelle. Elle doit permettre à l'UE de disposer de capacités communes de réponse aux incidents majeurs.

En pratique, la réserve est conçue comme un mécanisme de soutien mobilisable en cas d'incident transfrontalier significatif. Il s'appuie sur un réseau de prestataires de services managés de confiance, pré-sélectionnés via des appels d'offres publics. Ces prestataires peuvent intervenir pour contenir une attaque, assurer une continuité de service ou encore accompagner la reprise après incident.

A noter que le dispositif inclut une clause de flexibilité. En effet, si les services pré-engagés ne sont pas utilisés pour des réponses à incident, ils pourront être convertis en services de préparation (tests de sécurité, exercices de crise et audit de résilience).

La réserve ouverte à un panel d'acteurs
Dans le détail, la réserve sera ouverte aux secteurs critiques définis par la directive NIS 2, aux institutions, agences et organes de l'UE. Sous certaines conditions, les pays tiers associés au programme "Europe numérique" pourront également y avoir accès.

L'Enisa se voit confier quatre missions : lancer et gérer les marchés publics pour sélectionner les prestataires, évaluer les demandes d'assistance provenant des Etats membres, transmettre les demandes de pays tiers à la Commission européenne pour validation ainsi que de suivre et contrôler l'exécution des services fournis par les prestataires de services.

L'accord de contribution prévoit un financement de 36 millions d'euros sur trois ans. Ces fonds s'ajoutent au budget annuel de 26,9 millions d'euros. Ils sont alignés sur la durée de mise à disposition des services. Leur utilisation est contrôlée par l'exécutif européen.

Combler le manque de réponse coordonnée
En mutualisant les ressources, la réserve européenne a pour objectif de combler une lacune de longue date : l'absence d'une capacité de réponse coordonnée aux attaques de grande ampleur. Dans ce cadre, le Cyber Solidarity Act prévoit également le déploiement de SOC transfrontaliers ainsi que des financements européens spécifiques pour soutenir la montée en capacité des Etats membres en matière de sécurité informatique.

therecord.media Alexander Martin
August 27th, 2025

A suspected ransomware attack on a Swedish software provider is believed to have impacted around 200 of the country’s municipal governments.

A suspected ransomware attack on Miljödata, a Swedish software provider used for managing sick leave and similar HR reports, is believed to have impacted around 200 of the country’s municipal governments.

The attack was detected on Saturday, according to the company’s chief executive Erik Hallén. The attackers are attempting to extort Miljödata, police told local newspaper BLT.

Swedish Minister for Civil Defence Carl-Oskar Bohlin wrote in a short update on social media: “The scope of the incident has not yet been clarified, and it is too early to determine the actual consequences.”

Hallén told Swedish press agency TT that around 200 municipalities and regions were affected by the incident. Sweden has 290 municipalities and 21 regions.

Several regional governments have confirmed using Miljödata systems to handle employee data, including “for example, medical certificates, rehabilitation plans, work-related injuries, and more,” according to the local government of the island of Gotland.

Hallén reportedly said Miljödata was “working very intensively with external experts to investigate what happened, what and who was affected, and to restore system functionality.”

“The government is receiving ongoing information about the incident and is in close contact with the relevant authorities,” Bohlin, the civil defense minister, said.

“CERT-SE, which has the task of supporting Swedish society in handling and preventing IT security incidents, has offered advice and support to both the company in question and the affected customers,” the minister added. “The national cybersecurity center is coordinating the measures of the relevant authorities. A police investigation is also underway.”

He stressed the incident underscored the need for high levels of cybersecurity throughout society, and said the Swedish government planned to present a new cybersecurity bill to the Swedish parliament in the near future “that will impose increased requirements on a wide range of actors.”

https://hackread.com
by
Deeba Ahmed
August 28, 2025

A supply chain attack called “s1ngularity” on Nx versions 20.9.0-21.8.0 stole thousands of macOS developer credentials with the help of AI tools.

Asophisticated cyberattack, dubbed the “s1ngularity” attack, has compromised Nx, a popular build platform widely used by software developers. The attack, which began on August 26, 2025, is a supply chain attack, a type of security breach where hackers sneak malicious code into a widely used piece of software, which then infects all the people who use it.

The attack was designed to steal a wide variety of sensitive data, including GitHub tokens, npm authentication keys, and SSH private keys. These credentials are essentially digital keys that provide access to a user’s accounts and systems.

The malicious software also went a step further, targeting API keys for popular AI tools like Gemini, Claude, and Q, demonstrating a new focus on emerging technologies. In addition to stealing data, the attackers installed a destructive payload that modified users’ terminal startup files, causing their terminal sessions to crash.

GitGuardian’s analysis shared with Hackread.com revealed some surprising details about the attack and its victims. The firm found that 85% of the infected systems were running macOS, highlighting the attack’s particular impact on the developer community, which frequently uses Apple computers.

In a curious turn, GitGuardian found that of the hundreds of systems where AI tools were targeted, many of the AI clients unexpectedly resisted the malicious requests. They either outright refused to run the commands or gave responses suggesting they knew they were being asked to do something wrong, showing a potential, though unintentional, new layer of security.
The stolen credentials were not only valuable but also widespread. GitGuardian’s monitoring platform, which tracks public GitHub activity, discovered 1,346 repositories used by the attackers to store stolen data.

To avoid detection, the attackers double-encoded the stolen data before uploading it. This number is far higher than the ten publicly visible repositories, as GitHub was quickly working to delete the rest. An analysis of these repositories revealed 2,349 distinct secrets, with over 1,000 still valid and working at the time of the report. The most common secrets were for GitHub and popular AI platforms.

For anyone who used the malicious Nx versions 20.9.0 through 21.8.0, the most crucial step is to immediately assume that their credentials have been exposed. GitGuardian has created a free service called HasMySecretLeaked that allows developers to check for compromised credentials without ever revealing their actual keys.

This attack reminds us that simply deleting a compromised file is not enough; the actual secret keys and tokens must be revoked and rotated to prevent further access by the attackers.

www.swissinfo.ch August 28, 2025 -
Swiss health groups found national cyber-security centre to warn against cyber attacks.

The cantonal hospital authorities of Ticino and Graubünden are among the founders of the Healthcare Cyber Security Centre (H-CSC).

The premise is that “hospitals are tempting targets for cybercriminals, since they handle large quantities of sensitive data,” said H-CSC as it was officially established in Thurgau.

The initiative in Ticino was also joined by the Gruppo ospedaliero Moncucco, which brings together the Moncucco clinics in Lugano and Santa Chiara in Locarno, and a Graubünden foundation made up of health care associations, including the Thusis hospital.

Founding members also include the university hospitals of Basel, Bern and Zurich, but not in Geneva and Lausanne.

French-speaking institutions are clearly under-represented – the Fribourg and Valais hospitals are the only members from this region. But H-CSC is set to grow. “Membership of the association will be open from 1 September 2025 to all hospitals with a public service mandate”.

The H-CSC project was launched last year on the recommendation of the Federal Office for Cyber Security. The aim of the association is to offer tailor-made security services for hospitals in the field of cyber security.

The H-CSC (https://www.h-csc.ch/) will serve as a platform to promote knowledge exchange and collaboration between hospitals, expand existing competencies and create synergies that will “sustainably strengthen their ability to prevent, detect and contain cyber incidents”, the association’s website states.

Such incidents can “severely compromise the functioning (of hospitals), causing the postponement of surgeries, encryption and/or disclosure of sensitive patient data, or the inoperability of medical devices.”