AI firm DeepSeek is aiding China's military and intelligence operations, a senior U.S. official told Reuters, adding that the Chinese tech startup sought to use Southeast Asian shell companies to access high-end semiconductors that cannot be shipped to China under U.S. rules.
The U.S. conclusions reflect a growing conviction in Washington that the capabilities behind the rapid rise of one of China's flagship AI enterprises may have been exaggerated and relied heavily on U.S. technology.
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the technology world in January, saying its artificial intelligence reasoning models were on par with or better than U.S. industry-leading models at a fraction of the cost.
"We understand that DeepSeek has willingly provided and will likely continue to provide support to China's military and intelligence operations," a senior State Department official told Reuters in an interview.
"This effort goes above and beyond open-source access to DeepSeek's AI models," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to speak about U.S. government information.
The U.S. government's assessment of DeepSeek's activities and links to the Chinese government have not been previously reported and come amid a wide-scale U.S.-China trade war.
The ICO said over 150,000 U.K. residents had data stolen in the breach.
The U.K. data protection watchdog has fined 23andMe £2.31 million ($3.1 million) for failing to protect U.K. residents’ personal and genetic data prior to its 2023 data breach.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said on Tuesday it has fined the genetic testing company as it “did not have additional verification steps for users to access and download their raw genetic data” at the time of its cyberattack.
In 2023, hackers stole private data on more than 6.9 million users over a months-long campaign by accessing thousands of accounts using stolen credentials. 23andMe did not require its users to use multi-factor authentication, which the ICO said broke U.K. data protection law.
The ICO said over 155,000 U.K. residents had their data stolen in the breach.
In response to the fine, 23andMe told TechCrunch that it had rolled out mandatory multi-factor authentication for all accounts.
The ICO said it is in contact with 23andMe’s trustee following the company’s filing for bankruptcy protection. A hearing on 23andMe’s sale is expected later on Wednesday.
Jun 18, 2025, 19:09 GMT+1
Iran’s state broadcaster was hacked Wednesday night, with videos calling for street protests briefly aired.
Footage circulated on social media showed protest-themed clips interrupting regular programming.
"If you experience disruptions or irrelevant messages while watching various TV channels, it is due to enemy interference with satellite signals," state TV said.
The hacking of the programming on Wednesday night was limited to satellite transmissions, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) said.
Global banking giant UBS has suffered a data breach following a cyber-attack on a third-party supplier.
In a statement emailed to Infosecurity, a UBS spokesperson confirmed a breach had occurred, but it had not impacted customer data or operations.
“A cyber-attack at an external supplier has led to information about UBS and several other companies being stolen. No client data has been affected. As soon as UBS became aware of the incident, it took swift and decisive action to avoid any impact on its operations,” the UBS statement read.
Swiss-based newspaper Le Temps reported that information about 130,000 UBS employees had been published on the dark web by a ransomware group called World Leaks, previously known as Hunters International, following the incident.
This data includes business contact details, including phone number, their job role and details of their location and floor they work on.
The direct phone number of UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti was reportedly included in the published data.
UBS also confirmed to Infosecurity that the external supplier at the center of the incident was procurement service provider Swiss-based Chain IQ.
Another Chain IQ client, Swiss private bank Pictet, also revealed it had suffered a data breach as a result of the attack. Pictet said in statement published by Reuters that the information stolen did not contain its client data and was limited to invoice information with some of the bank's suppliers, such as technology providers and external consultants.
At the time of writing, it is not known whether any other Chain IQ customers have been impacted.
News broke today about "one of the largest data breaches in history," sparking wide media coverage filled with warnings and fear-mongering. However, it appears to just be a compilation of previously leaked credentials stolen by infostealers, exposed in data breaches, and via credential stuffing attacks.
To be clear, this is not a new data breach, or a breach at all, and the websites involved were not recently compromised to steal these credentials.
Instead, these stolen credentials were likely circulating for some time, if not for years. It was then collected by a cybersecurity firm, researchers, or threat actors and repackaged into a database that was exposed on the Internet.
Cybernews, which discovered the briefly exposed datasets of compiled credentials, stated it was stored in a format commonly associated with infostealer malware, though they did not share samples
An infostealer is malware that attempts to steal credentials, cryptocurrency wallets, and other data from an infected device. Over the years, infostealers have become a massive problem, leading to breaches worldwide.
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The infostealer problem has gotten so bad and pervasive that compromised credentials have become one of the most common ways for threat actors to breach networks.
The company has not disclosed how many users were affected or whether any wallets were compromised as a result of the exploit.
Hackers exploited a vulnerability in CoinMarketCap’s front-end system, using a seemingly harmless doodle image to inject malicious code that triggered fake wallet verification pop-ups across the site.
The breach, confirmed by CoinMarketCap, used its backend API to deliver a manipulated JSON payload that embedded JavaScript into the homepage according to blockchain security firm Coinspect Security.
Business leaders need to stay up to date with geopolitics to keep their cybersecurity strategies up to date and mitigate the risks posed by state-backed hacker groups.
This is the message that Paul Chichester, director of operations at the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), delivered to attendees at a keynote session of Infosecurity Europe 2025.
The call to action from Chichester came as states known to support threat actors and engage in cyber attacks of their own step up efforts to disrupt critical infrastructure
Chichester said Russia’s cyber capabilities in particular have improved in recent years, with its invasion of Ukraine used as an opportunity to hone offensive cyber techniques. Along with Russia, Chichester focused on the threat China-backed groups pose to both public and private organizations.
“I'll come back to this a few times, but states don't do hacking for fun,” Chichester said.
“They do not do things for the sake of it. There is always a reason. We might not know the reason sometimes and that's quite a challenge for us, but we shouldn't assume that they're just doing it because they can.”
Chichester urged businesses who are being targeted by a state APT to carefully consider why and to assess how geopolitics feeds into their defensive strategies.
Imperva’s Offensive Security Team discovered CVE-2025-49763, a high-severity vulnerability (CVSS v3.1 estimated score: 7.5) in Apache Traffic Server’s ESI plugin that enables unauthenticated attackers to exhaust memory and potentially crash proxy nodes. Given ATS’s role in global content delivery[1], even a single node failure can black-hole thousands of sessions. Organizations should urgently upgrade to version 9.2.11 or 10.0.6 and enforce the new inclusion-depth safeguard.
Why reverse‑proxy servers matter
Every web request you make today almost certainly travels through one or more reverse‑proxy caches before it reaches the origin application. These proxies:
This vulnerability can be exploited via two different ways:
A threat actor could exploit an Edge Side Include injection and recursively inject the same page over and over again.
exploitation via esi injection
A threat actor could also host a malicious server next to a target, behind a vulnerable traffic server proxy and take down the proxy by triggering the ESI request avalanche. (see Fig 2).
exploitation via malicious error
This results in a full denial of service on edge proxy nodes, triggered remotely without requiring authentication.
Attacker rained down the equivalent of 9,300 full-length HD movies in just 45 seconds.
Large-scale attacks designed to bring down Internet services by sending them more traffic than they can process keep getting bigger, with the largest one yet, measured at 7.3 terabits per second, being reported Friday by Internet security and performance provider Cloudflare.
The 7.3Tbps attack amounted to 37.4 terabytes of junk traffic that hit the target in just 45 seconds. That's an almost incomprehensible amount of data, equivalent to more than 9,300 full-length HD movies or 7,500 hours of HD streaming content in well under a minute.
Indiscriminate target bombing
Cloudflare said the attackers “carpet bombed” an average of nearly 22,000 destination ports of a single IP address belonging to the target, identified only as a Cloudflare customer. A total of 34,500 ports were targeted, indicating the thoroughness and well-engineered nature of the attack.
The vast majority of the attack was delivered in the form of User Datagram Protocol packets. Legitimate UDP-based transmissions are used in especially time-sensitive communications, such as those for video playback, gaming applications, and DNS lookups. It speeds up communications by not formally establishing a connection before data is transferred. Unlike the more common Transmission Control Protocol, UDP doesn't wait for a connection between two computers to be established through a handshake and doesn't check whether data is properly received by the other party. Instead, it immediately sends data from one machine to another.
The government cited the recent hacks on Bank Sepah and cryptocurrency exchange Nobite as reasons to shut down internet access to virtually all Iranians.
Earlier this week, virtually everyone in Iran lost access to the internet in what was called a “near-total national internet blackout.”
At the time, it was unclear what happened or who was responsible for the shutdown, which has severely limited Iranians’ means to get information about the ongoing war with Israel, as well as their ability to communicate with loved ones inside and outside of the country.
Now Iran’s government has confirmed that it ordered the shutdown to protect against Israeli cyberattacks.
“We have previously stated that if necessary, we will certainly switch to a national internet and restrict global internet access. Security is our main concern, and we are witnessing cyberattacks on the country’s critical infrastructure and disruptions in the functioning of banks,” Fatemeh Mohajerani, Iran’s government spokesperson, was quoted as saying in a local news story. “Many of the enemy’s drones are managed and controlled via the internet, and a large amount of information is exchanged this way. A cryptocurrency exchange was also hacked, and considering all these issues, we have decided to impose internet restrictions.”
Les systèmes informatiques de la commune de Villars-sur-Glâne ont été la cible d’une cyberattaque. Des mesures ont immédiatement été prises pour la contrer et sécuriser l’infrastructure.
Selon les premiers éléments de l’investigation, des connexions non autorisées ont été effectuées sur certains serveurs de la commune mercredi matin. Il s'agirait d'une tentative d'attaque de type rançongiciel qui demanderait une somme d'argent en échange de la libération des données volées. Des mesures de protection immédiates ont été prises et aucun dommage supplémentaire n'est possible. Une analyse est en cours et permettra d'obtenir plus d'informations sur l'attaque.
"C'est à chacun de se rendre compte que l'informatique est à la fois extraordinaire pour la quantité de données que l'on peut conserver, mais c'est aussi extrêmement fragile si l'on n'a pas une approche rigoureuse", rappelle le syndic de Villars-sur-Glâne, Bruno Mamier.
L’incident a été signalé à la police cantonale, à l’Office fédéral de la cybersécurité (OFCS) et à l’autorité cantonale de la transparence, de la protection des données et de la médiation.
En raison de cet incident, les lignes téléphoniques principales ont été déviées. En cas de questions, les habitants de la commune peuvent se rendre à l'administration ou suivre l’évolution de la situation sur la page internet suivante.
Le syndic invite les personnes dont la démarche administrative n'est pas urgente à se rendre à l'administration communale la semaine prochaine.
Tonga’s National Health Information System (NHIS) suffered a ransomware breach this week, says Dr ʻAna ʻAkauʻola his evening. The system has been shut down, and staff moved to manual operations.
The breach came to light during a parliament debate on the MEIDECC budget, when Deputy PM Dr Taniela Fusimalohi alerted MPs to the intrusion. Dr ʻAkauʻola confirmed she learned of the hack earlier this week and immediately summoned system administrators. She noted that staff member managing the NHIS “was unaware that it was a serious breach.”
The minister disclosed that hackers encrypted the NHIS and demanded payment, assuring MPs “the hackers won’t damage the information on the NHIS.” She also said she promptly emailed Dr Fusimalohi when she knew of the breach, who engaged the Australian High Commission.
Dr Fusimalohi confirmed an Australian cyber team arrived in Tonga today to help resolve the issue.
June 19 (Reuters) - Tata Consultancy Services (TCS.NS), opens new tab said none of its "systems or users were compromised" as part of the cyberattack that led to the theft of customer data at retailer Marks and Spencer (MKS.L), opens new tab, its client of more than a decade.
"As no TCS systems or users were compromised, none of our other customers are impacted" independent director Keki Mistry told its annual shareholder meeting.
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"The purview of the investigation (of customer) does not include TCS," Mistry added.
This is the first time India's No 1 IT services company has publicly commented on the cyber hack. M&S did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TCS is one of the technology services providers for the British retailer. In early 2023, TCS reportedly, opens new tab won a $1 billion contract for modernising M&S' legacy technology with respect to its supply chain and omni-channel sales while increasing its online sales.
The "highly sophisticated and targeted" cyberattack which M&S disclosed in April will cost about 300 million pounds ($403 million) in lost operating profit, and disruption to online services is likely until July.
Last month, Financial Times reported that TCS is internally investigating whether it was the gateway for a cyberattack.
Mistry presided as the chairman at the company's annual shareholder meeting as Tata Group Chairman N Chandrasekaran skipped it due to "exigencies".
The chairman's absence comes as the Group's airline Air India plane with 242 people on board crashed after take-off in Ahmedabad last week, killing all passengers except one.
Reporting by Sai Ishwarbharath B and Haripriya Suresh, Editing by Louise Heavens
Securonix Threat Research uncovers SERPENTINE#CLOUD, a stealthy malware campaign abusing Cloudflare Tunnels to deliver in-memory Python-based payloads via .lnk phishing lures. Learn how this multi-stage attack evades detection, establishes persistence, and executes Donut-packed shellcode using Early Bird APC injection.
An ongoing malware campaign tracked as SERPENTINE#CLOUD has been identified as leveraging the Cloudflare Tunnel infrastructure and Python-based loaders to deliver memory-injected payloads through a chain of shortcut files and obfuscated scripts. For initial access, the threat actors are luring users to execute malicious .lnk files (shortcut files) disguised as documents to silently fetch and execute remote code. This kicks off a rather elaborate attack chain consisting of a combination of batch, VBScript and Python stages to ultimately deploy shellcode that loads a Donut-packed PE payload.
The shortcut files are delivered via phishing emails that contain a link to download a zipped document, often themed around payment or invoice scams. This assessment is based on the naming convention of the ZIP files observed, many of which included the word “invoice.”
Attribution remains unknown, though the attacker demonstrates fluency in English based on code comments and scripting practices. Telemetry indicates a strong focus on Western targets, with confirmed activity observed in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and other regions across Europe and Asia. The use of Cloudflare for payload hosting allows the attackers to remain anonymous and since their infrastructure is secured behind a trusted network, monitored traffic to this network will rarely raise alarms or be flagged as suspicious by network monitoring tools.
The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) has discovered two linked local privilege escalation (LPE) flaws.
The first (CVE-2025-6018) resides in the PAM configuration of openSUSE Leap 15 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. Using this vulnerability, an unprivileged local attacker—for example, via SSH—can elevate to the “allow_active” user and invoke polkit actions normally reserved for a physically present user.
The second (CVE-2025-6019) affects libblockdev, is exploitable via the udisks daemon included by default on most Linux distributions, and allows an “allow_active” user to gain full root privileges. Although CVE-2025-6019 on its own requires existing allow_active context, chaining it with CVE-2025-6018 enables a purely unprivileged attacker to achieve full root access.
This libblockdev/udisks flaw is extremely significant. Although it nominally requires “allow_active” privileges, udisks ships by default on almost all Linux distributions, so nearly any system is vulnerable. Techniques to gain “allow_active”, including the PAM issue disclosed here, further negate that barrier. An attacker can chain these vulnerabilities for immediate root compromise with minimal effort. Given the ubiquity of udisks and the simplicity of the exploit, organizations must treat this as a critical, universal risk and deploy patches without delay.
The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) has developed proof-of-concept exploits to validate these vulnerabilities on various operating systems, successfully targeting the libblockdev/udisks flaw on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE Leap 15.
A cyberattack on the Zug-based procurement service provider Chain IQ apparently has far-reaching consequences for UBS: data from 130,000 employees, including the direct number of CEO Sergio Ermotti, is said to have ended up on the darknet.
US-designated terrorist organization ELN oversees a vast digital operation that promotes pro-Kremlin and anti-US content.
The National Liberation Army (ELN), a Colombian armed group that also holds influence in Venezuela, has built a digital strategy that involves branding themselves as media outlets to build credibility, overseeing a diffuse cross-platform operation, and using these wide-ranging digital assets to amplify Russian, Iranian, Venezuelan, and Cuban narratives that attack the interests of the United States, the European Union (EU), and their allies.
In the 1960s, the ELN emerged as a Colombian nationalist armed movement ideologically rooted in Marxism-Leninism, liberation theology, and the Cuban revolution. With an army estimated to have 2,500 to 6,000 members, the ELN is Colombia’s oldest and largest active guerrilla group, with its operation extending into Venezuela. The ELN has maintained a strategic online presence for over a decade to advance its propaganda and maintain operational legitimacy.
The organization, which has previously engaged in peace talks with the Colombian state, has carried out criminal activities in Colombia and Venezuela, such as killings, kidnappings, extortions, and the recruitment of minors. After successive military and financial crises in the 1990s, the armed group abandoned its historical reluctance to participate in drug trafficking. The diversification into illegal funding has meant that their armed clashes target criminal groups, in addition to their primary ideological enemy, the state forces.
In the north-eastern Catatumbo area, considered one of the enclaves of international cocaine trafficking, the group has been involved in one of the bloodiest confrontations seen in Colombia in 2025. Since January 15, the violence has left 126 people dead, at least 66,000 displaced, and has further strained the group’s engagement with the latest round of peace talks initiated by the current Colombian government. In that region, the ELN has battled with the state and other criminal groups, such as paramilitaries and other guerrilla groups, for extended control of the area bordering Venezuela, an effort to connect the ELN’s other territories of influence to Colombia, such as the north and, at the other extreme, the western regions of Choco and Antioquia.
The US Department of State reaffirmed the ELN’s designation as a terrorist organization in its March 5, 2025, update of the Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) list. This classification theoretically prevents the group from operating on major social media platforms, as US social media platforms, such as Meta, YouTube, and X, maintain policies prohibiting terrorist organizations from using their services. However, the DFRLab found that the group’s substantial digital footprint spans over one hundred entities across websites, social media, closed messaging apps, and podcast services.
On June 16, GreyNoise observed exploit attempts targeting CVE-2023-28771 — a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Zyxel Internet Key Exchange (IKE) packet decoders over UDP port 500.
CVE: CVE-2023-28771
Exploit method: UDP port 500 (IKE packet decoder)
Date observed: June 16, 2025
Duration of activity: One day (June 16, 2025)
Unique IPs: 244
Top destination countries: U.S., U.K., Spain, Germany, India.
IP classification: All malicious per GreyNoise
Infrastructure: Verizon Business (all IPs geolocated to U.S.)
Spoofable traffic: Yes (UDP-based)
Observed Activity
Exploitation attempts against CVE-2023-28771 were minimal throughout recent weeks. On June 16, GreyNoise observed a concentrated burst of exploit attempts within a short time window, with 244 unique IPs observed attempting exploitation.
The top destination countries were the U.S., U.K., Spain, Germany, and India.
Historical analysis indicates that in the two weeks preceding June 16, these IPs were not observed engaging in any other scanning or exploit behavior — only targeting CVE-2023-28771.
SafetyDetectives’ Cybersecurity Team stumbled upon a clear web forum post where a threat actor publicized a database that allegedly belongs to VirtualMacOSX.com. The data purportedly belongs to 10,000 of its customers.
In a recent discovery, SafetyDetectives’ Cybersecurity Team stumbled upon a clear web forum post where a threat actor publicized a database that allegedly belongs to VirtualMacOSX.com. The data purportedly belongs to 10,000 of its customers.
What Is VirtualMacOSX.com?
According to its website, VirtualMacOSX serves 102 countries and has offered “Apple Macintosh cloud based computing since 2012. With the greatest range of cloud based Apple products and services available anywhere on the Web.”
Where Was The Data Found?
The data was found in a forum post available on the clear surface web. This well-known forum operates message boards dedicated to database downloads, leaks, cracks, and more.
What Was Leaked?
The author of the post included a 34-line sample of the database, the full database was set to be freely accessible to anyone with an account on the forum willing to either reply or like the post.
Our Cybersecurity Team analyzed a segment of the dataset to validate its authenticity. Although the data appeared genuine and we saw indicatives in invoices sent to VirtualMacOSX, we could not definitively confirm that the data belonged to VirtualMacOSX’s customers as, due to ethical considerations, we refrained from testing the exposed credentials.
The entire dataset consisted of 176,000 lines split across three separate .txt files named ‘tblcontacts,’ ‘tbltickets,’ and ‘tblclients.’
The sensitive information allegedly belonging to VirtualMacOSX’s customers included:
User ID
Full name
Company name
Email
Full physical address
Phone number
Password
Password reset key
We also saw customers’ financial data such as:
Bank name
Bank type
Bank code
Bank account
And User’s Support tickets containing:
User ID
IP Address
Full name
Email
Full Message
This type of data is critical as it might be employed by potential wrongdoers to plan and perform various types of attacks on the impacted clients.
The pro-Israeli hacktivist group Predatory Sparrow claimed on Tuesday to have hacked and taken down Iran’s Bank Sepah.
The group, which is also known by its Persian name Gonjeshke Darande, claimed responsibility for the hack on X.
“We, ‘Gonjeshke Darande,’ conducted cyberattacks which destroyed the data of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ ‘Bank Sepah,’” the group wrote.
The group claimed Bank Sepah is an institution that “circumvented international sanctions and used the people of Iran’s money to finance the regime’s terrorist proxies, its ballistic missile program and its military nuclear program.”
According to the independent news site Iran International, there are reports of “widespread banking disruptions” across the country. Iran International said several Bank Sepah branches were closed on Tuesday, and customers told the publication that they were unable to access their accounts.
Ariel Oseran, a correspondent for i24NEWS, posted pictures of ATMs in Iran displaying an error message.
TechCrunch could not independently verify the group’s alleged cyberattack. We reached out to two Bank Sepah Iranian email addresses, but the messages returned an error. Bank Sepah’s affiliates in the U.K. and Italy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Predatory Sparrow did not respond to a request for comment sent to their X account, and via Telegram.
The alleged cyberattack on Bank Sepah comes as Israel and Iran are bombing each other’s countries, a conflict that started after Israel began targeting nuclear energy facilities, military bases, and senior Iranian military officials on Friday.
It’s unclear who is behind Predatory Sparrow. The group clearly fashions itself as a pro-Israel or at least anti-Iran hacktivist group and has targeted companies and organizations in Iran for years. Cybersecurity researchers believe the group has had success in the past and made credible claims.
