The new joint operation uses laser-based technology capable of detecting, tracking, and disabling commercial drones linked to human and drug trafficking.
The new joint operation uses laser-based technology capable of detecting, tracking, and disabling commercial drones linked to human and drug trafficking.
For 15 years, public cloud providers have defined the industry for most enterprises: on-demand, automatically metered services delivered over the open internet that give developers immediate access to storage, databases, compute, application development platforms, and AI capabilities. That model remains dominant because it is simple, well-instrumented, and universally supported. Yet an adjacent reality has always existed. Large-scale, off-market capacity deals where technology companies with surplus GPUs, storage, and compute sold blocks of capacity in bulk to other firms under nondisclosure agreements were once common. Those were cloud transactions in substance, since you were using somebody else’s servers. However, they lacked the automation, metering, and governance that define public cloud services, and they operated entirely outside the frameworks enterprises rely on for budgeting, compliance, and accountability.
A shadow market becomes visible
These arrangements are now becoming more visible and more formalized. Some are even openly auctioned. Meta’s entrance into the cloud capacity space, essentially offering its excess compute infrastructure to outside buyers, represents the maturation of a market that has existed in back rooms for years. Large, multiyear capacity commitments are no longer whispered about during boardroom lunches. They are being announced, financed, and tracked by analysts. This shift is creating a distinct layer in the cloud landscape, one that sits between traditional hyperscalers and true private clouds, and one that enterprises can no longer afford to ignore.
The practical implication is that the cloud market you thought you understood now has a parallel track. When a large enterprise needs maximum GPU capacity for model training or inference, it has more options than a year ago, and those options come with genuinely different trade-offs. You can go to a hyperscaler and pay the published rate for metered GPU as a service, receiving a fully managed platform with all the tools, governance, and integration you need. Or you can reach out to a technology provider that happens to have idle or excess GPU capacity and negotiate a bulk deal at a fraction of the published rate. The first option provides predictability and depth of service. The second offers raw cost savings if you have the operational capability to handle less-managed infrastructure.
This bifurcation is muddying procurement decisions. The gap in pricing between bulk off-market capacity and public cloud offerings can be substantial. Some analysts cite differentials ranging from 10 to 100 times. But headline GPU rates are only part of the evaluation. Bulk deals tend to come with minimal metering, limited monitoring, and a do-it-yourself culture around incident response and optimization. You are, in effect, purchasing wholesale energy. It is robust and capable, but it requires your own wiring and maintenance. Organizations accustomed to the instrumentation and service-level agreements of hyperscalers may find such a different operational reality a bit jarring. Those with mature cloudops teams may find the economics compelling.
Who benefits and who adjusts
The hyperscale incumbents will not be displaced overnight. They offer the complete ecosystem, not just GPU frameworks but development tools, hundreds of managed services, identity, compliance, and integration layers that are genuinely difficult to replicate. However, they are now facing a market where customers with intensive computational needs can source raw GPU capacity from alternative suppliers, particularly for bursty or cost-sensitive workloads. This is not necessarily a threat to hyperscaler dominance, but it is a complication. The hyperscalers will likely respond through partnerships, capacity-coverage agreements, and possibly acquisitions of promising capacity players. Effectively, they will become customers of the same off-market ecosystem they once ignored.
The cloud market is adding a new axis of choice: managed breadth versus specialized efficiency. Enterprises will increasingly construct hybrid operating models, keeping steady-state, security-sensitive, and toolchain-dependent workloads on hyperscaler platforms while offloading cost-intensive training runs and elastic inference to bulk-capacity providers. This is not a binary choice. It is an expanding continuum of sourcing options that demands more sophisticated procurement and architecture planning.
How to take advantage
Know your actual workload cost before you negotiate. If your AI workloads are compute-intensive, model training-heavy, or require burst capacity at unpredictable intervals, the economics of bulk capacity deals can be compelling. Run a pilot that captures total cost of ownership, including data movement, integration effort, operational overhead, and potential downtime during self-managed troubleshooting before you assume bulk is simply cheaper. Compare fully loaded costs, not GPU-hour sticker prices.
Build portability into your AI stack from the start. Bulk-capacity providers often lack the governance, compliance tools, and model life-cycle management enterprises need. Mitigate this risk by standardizing on containerized inference runtimes, open model formats, and CI/CD pipelines capable of deploying across multiple targets. This type of discipline turns vendor diversity into negotiating leverage rather than operational liability. It also ensures you can shift workloads as capacity markets fluctuate.
Treat capacity sourcing as a strategic procurement function. Bulk cloud capacity is not a niche quirk. It is becoming a recognized market that rewards supply-chain thinking. Diversify your supplier base, negotiate multi-vendor commitments where possible, and develop a reserve strategy for critical workloads. Keep your hyperscaler relationship for reliability and breadth, but maintain at least one secondary capacity arrangement for cost-sensitive or elastic workloads. The enterprises that treat capacity as a variable asset, rather than a fixed infrastructure decision will be better positioned as this market continues to expand and formalize.
The cloud market is no longer a simple fork between public and private. A defined middle ground of negotiated bulk capacity is now attracting billions in investment and reshaping how AI infrastructure costs are allocated. Enterprises that understand this landscape and build flexible, portable architectures that can span it will capture more value from AI investments than those who default to the familiar hyperscaler menu alone.
The United States Department of Justice has successfully secured a temporary pause on a legal order that would have forced it to gather documents from 14 federal agencies in an ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The temporary pause gives the government adequate time to formally appeal the initial discovery ruling, avoiding an immediate scramble to […]
Trezor has revealed that phishing attacks against its customers earlier this week targeted 347,000 email addresses and affected 2,500 users who clicked an embedded malicious link. [...]
A new Android malware strain called Mantax Otax combines ransomware and spyware capabilities to encrypt files, steal sensitive data, and spam and harass victims. [...]
With the release of Apple Watch Series 12, Apple has decided that it's ok to capture people's conversations without their consent. The latest Apple Watch comes with Audio Intelligence, a set of AI audio processing capabilities tuned for the company's S11 chip. Its features include: Sound Recognition, Music Recognition with Shazam, Live Rewind, and Siri Recap. "Live Rewind lets you instantly see the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text," Apple explains in its technical summary [PDF]. "Siri Recap summarizes conversations throughout your day and produces high-level Apple Intelligence-generated notes so you can stay present in the moment and catch up later." With the double-press of the Digital Crown – as Apple grandly refers to the button on its Watch – Live Rewind takes in an audio stream from the Watch microphone, processes it in a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, and routes the data to the user's nearby iPhone, which runs a speech-to-text algorithm on the 15-second audio segment. The resulting text is saved and the audio is discarded. The wearer's Watch emits an audible tone, even in silent mode, to alert those in the vicinity and provides a visual cue for those able to see the face of the device. Nonetheless, bystanders alerted to the recording – to the extent they recognize the meaning of the tone – have not consented to being recorded, which is a legal requirement in 11 US states that have all-party consent laws. Apple characterizes its implementation of brief eavesdropping as respectful of personal privacy. It makes that claim in a section titled, "How Live Rewind respects those around you," citing the audible chime and visual on-screen animation. Siri Recap, meanwhile, "summarizes conversations throughout your day and produces high-level Apple Intelligence-generated notes so you can stay present in the moment and catch up later." This too, Apple describes as an act of respect. "By design, Siri Recap does not create a recording, does not produce a verbatim transcript, and does not identify and attribute speakers," Apple's technical documentation explains. "The output is a brief, high-level summary, comparable to notes a person might write after a conversation. There is no audible signal because no raw audio is retained, and there is no way to reconstruct the original audio from a Siri Recap or share raw audio with anyone." The implication here is that Apple's non-consensual audio processing is less contemptuous of the public than the middle finger Meta has raised with its AI Glasses. That may be the case, but privacy advocates are still not impressed. "Our right to conversational privacy must include freedom from other people, without our clear opt-in consent, using technology to document what we are saying," said Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy litigation director Adam Schwartz in an email to The Register. "Otherwise, people will self-censor, and conversation will lose its spontaneity and intimacy. "So, EFF is disappointed that Apple is releasing a new Audio Intelligence feature that reportedly can create a transcript or written summary of what people are saying in the vicinity of an Apple Watch. People don't really have a practical means to consent or decline recording. "We suggest people should think twice before using this technology, out of respect to the conversational privacy of others. While it remains to be seen how state eavesdropping laws will apply to this new technology, it is clear that always-on monitoring of our conversations is an unacceptable burden on our conversational privacy." ®
153 million US driving licences have been leaked on a Russian cybercrime platform
Among those apaprently discovered in the stolen data is US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
The FBI is now investigating the leak, which has been traced to an identity verification company
A data leak of 153 million US drivers licenses is said to have been shared on a Russian cybercrime forum, with US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth among those leaked prompting an FBI investigation.
Security researcher Brian Krebs identified the leak – which included his own data – as originating from a hack of an identity verification service. Louisiana-based IDScan provided ID verification for various well-known companies, including FedEx and Hertz car hire.
The data was shared on a Russian forum called Exploit, a long-established online community of cybercriminals. Following news of the leak, the identity theft service “Nexus” has apparently scrubbed its existence from the Dark Web.
Driving licenses and more
It wasn’t just US driving licenses that were found in the archive of recently-collected personal data. Krebs’ investigation found that Nexus claimed other types of data, and found a further 1.1 million driving licenses from Canada.
Other identity documentation alleged to be in the leak include 10 million identification cards, three million travel documents and international IDs, and 579,000 medical cards. The data was available to browse, notes Krebs, with Nexus providing details: “Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available.”
The leak has a personal dimension for Krebs. Not only was his driving license in the collection, so was that of his mother. It has proved to be a useful coincidence, one that has enabled the security and privacy researcher to establish how the data was sourced by Nexus.
Both licenses were used for a car hire, which Krebs traced to Hertz. Others affected by the leak had also used the service, which has used New Orleans-based IDscan for identity verification.
The company, which claims to perform 21 million verifications a month, is yet to issue a statement on the matter. Its marketing and operations leader, Jillian Kossman, told the journalist: “At this point I’m not able to share any additional information, but the updates you have provided have been welcome, and helpful to our team’s investigation.”
Where is the data?
Krebs reports that he was alerted to the data on August 31, 2026, little over a week ago. Regular checking noted that the data was still being added to, increasing by “nearly 400,000” records prior to publishing his investigation on September 1.
Since then, however, it seems that Nexus has vanished, along with the data. But how widely was the data downloaded before that happened? While the FBI investigates, it falls on the American and Canadian public to be extra vigilant and wary of identity fraud.
LG is pushing back against claims that one of its TVs can record conversations without permission. The researchers behind the report stand by their findings.
An unknown attacker used hundreds of AI agents to exploit two PaperCut MF/NG bugs and break into at least 395 organizations. The victims were concentrated in the US education sector, and the intrusions moved fast. In one case, an American high school went from initial access to domain admin in seven minutes. These agents, powered by OpenAI’s Codex harness and a DeepSeek model, also allowed the miscreant to attack organizations at scale, according to threat-intel firm GreyNoise, which traced the campaign’s orchestration to 45.142.193.132 on August 31. “The adversary went from an empty workspace to first achieving RCE against a real victim in just under four hours, first domain admin in an additional two hours, and once the full campaign launched, compromised at least 11 organizations in 26 seconds,” GreyNoise analysts said in a Wednesday report. The security provider attributes these intrusions to a “likely Russian-speaking” criminal who used AI to develop exploits against the pair of PaperCut vulnerabilities disclosed just days earlier. On August 28, the print management software provider issued emergency patches for CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078, at the time warning that it was “aware of confirmed customer incidents and are treating this matter with the highest priority.” The flaws affect PaperCut NG and MF, which are self-hosted Java web applications that by default run with SYSTEM-level privileges on Windows. PaperCut’s CEO later said that the first reported compromise came in on August 27, and involved an education-sector firm. On Thursday, PaperCut published security maintenance releases, which replace the earlier emergency fixes. By now, however, at least 440 instances hosted by 395 identified victim organizations in 48 countries have been compromised, according to GreyNoise. “There are other real victims that could not be attributed to a named organization,” the threat signals team wrote. The human attacker told the agents to avoid targeting entities in 28 countries with the top five being Russia, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Iran. Several Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries are on the list, which is why GreyNoise says the crim is likely Russian-speaking. It’s typical for ransomware and other cybercrime operations to expressly avoid attacking Russia and other CIS countries, whose governments often provide safe harbor for extortionists and financially motivated crims - especially if they also happen to work day jobs as state-sponsored hackers. Plus, local cops tend to ignore the digital break-ins unless the gangs infect any in-country organizations. However, the agents in the PaperCut attacks didn’t always follow these instructions, and in some cases still hacked organizations based in countries on the do-not-hit list. “It’s currently uncertain why the [attacker's] agents deviated,” GreyNoise said. “But it is a good example of agents gone wild.” The US and the UK were the countries with the highest victim count, at 98 and 59, respectively. Schools and other education-industry organizations were, by far, the hardest hit with 204 victims. For comparison, the No. 2 industry (other/unclassified) had 51, while retail/commercial/professional services ranked third with 38 victims. After using AI to develop exploits, achieve remote code execution, and harvest credentials in a self-hosted lab, the baddie set hundreds of AI agents loose on the open internet to find and attack public-facing, vulnerable instances. “This campaign appears to be opportunistic,” according to GreyNoise. “There is a high concentration of US-based targets in the education sector; however, it’s likely that is more attributable to the customer base of PaperCut NG/MF.” Interestingly, the attacker did not immediately set to work on post-compromise evil deeds with all of the victims. GreyNoise noted “multiple-day delays” between gaining initial access and achieving domain admin “but only due to a lack of action by the adversary.” The fastest time was five minutes, while the longest was 144 minutes. It’s also unclear if the criminal is only focused on gaining access to compromised organizations - and then plans to hand the attack off to affiliates or other data-theft, extortion, and ransomware groups - or if they plan to use this access for follow-on nefarious activities of their own. GreyNoise does note that, in at least one case, Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) blocked the attacker. “Fundamental hardening of environments still matters against AI-enabled threats,” they wrote. It’s also worth noting that GreyNoise has been tracking malicious use of 45.142.193.132 since early July, and says this IP has been used in attacks against internet facing technologies and devices from Palo Alto, Ubiquiti, Citrix, SonicWall, and Proxmox VE. ®
It’s no exaggeration to say that if you own an LG smart TV, it might be spying on you.
The widely respected computer hardware experts at the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus found that the company’s boob tubes and pricey OLEDs can scan your Wi-Fi network to search for the devices you own, secretly record audio logs of your conversations using built-in microphones, and keep tabs on what you’re watching and listening to.
It collects all this data, Gamers Nexus found, even when the TV is disconnected from the internet and appears to be off in standby mode.
To unearth these surreptitious practices, Gamers Nexus partnered up with independent security researchers and Level1Techs. Their resulting two-hour video report has since been picked up by other trusted cybersecurity voices like Malwarebytes.
By digging into the firmware and intercepting some of the data the TVs were sending, the team found that the TVs were extensively scanning local Wi-Fi networks to log what devices were on it, including phones, computers, and other smart-home devices like thermostats. It even collected the names of nearby Wi-Fi networks, creating an alarmingly detailed picture of all the devices in a user’s household.
Why might that information be relevant to LG? The TVs also use a controversial technology called automated content recognition (ACR) that routinely scans and determines what you’re watching so it can sell that data to advertisers.
Combined together, they build an advanced and disturbingly comprehensive profile of what you watch and the devices you use, Gamers Nexus warn. All this data is sent back to LG Ad Solutions, its lucrative advertising business.
LG TVs, on top of it all, can also listen to you. Tests showed that their built-in microphones could capture clean audio of nearby conversations and generate transcripts of them, even when the TVs were in standby mode, which most TVs default to when you think you’ve turned them off, with the display powering down. The recording feature continued even when the TVs were unplugged from the internet, storing the audio files locally and uploading them the moment the internet connection was restored.
The researchers also found a vulnerability that allegedly allow a hacker to remotely execute code, though they’re keeping the details on this light so they can responsibly disclose their findings.
Many LG owners are furious about the news.
“LG hardware is just spyware,” fumed a post on the r/LGOLED subreddit. “You[r] TV is wiretapping your whole house.”
Smart TVs collecting data on you isn’t new — ACR in particular is well-documented — but the reported findings here illustrate a degree of invasiveness the public could only speculate about previously.
It’s far from the first time LG has caused a stir over purported privacy violations, either. Another Gamers Nexus investigation last month found that LG monitors were sneakily installing pop-up ads onto customers’ computers. The ensuing controversy caught Microsoft’s attention, with the company demanding LG remove the ads.
Huntress warns fake GTA 6 ISOs spreading malware ahead of official Nov 19, 2026 release
Packages deliver RATs, infostealers, and Chaos ransomware disguised as game installers
Users urged to avoid pirated downloads; infected systems should be reimaged and credentials reset
Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6), one of the most anticipated computer games of all time, is due to launch on November 19, 2026 - so everything found online before that is almost certainly malware.
This is the warning sent out by security researchers Huntress, which said it recently saw one variant deploying all sorts of filth, from remote access trojans (RAT), across infostealers, to full-blown ransomware encryptors.
The story behind GTA 6
GTA 6 is a third-person action-adventure and open-world gam developed by Rockstar Games, which egan preliminary work more than a decade ago, and has allegedly spent more than a billion dollars during that decade and a half, which would make it, by far, the most expensive game ever developed.
It is also a sequel to GTA 5, a game that was sold in more than 230 million copies around the world, which made it one of the most popular games of all time.
In late August 2026, someone going by the alias LEEK claimed to have obtained a working, playable build of the game, roughly six months before the official release. They posted numerous screenshots and videos of them playing the game, even writing their nickname onto a wall, using a rifle to prove the authenticity. Truth be told, even without this, people would have still probably searched for, and downloaded, fake installers. This only made the problem worse.
And a major problem, it definitely is. Huntress is now saying it is seeing websites ranking relatively high (through SEO poisoning), offering for download an ISO of the game. Similar ISOs are circulating around different gaming forums, torrenting sites, and social media channels.
An ISO file is a digital copy of an entire disc, such as a CD, DVD, or Blu-ray, stored as one file. Users can download an ISO (which can weigh tens or hundreds of gigabytes), mount it into a virtual drive, and the computer will treat it like a physical disc.
Huntress found some ISOs weighing more than 100GB which was done just to make it seem authentic - the actual malware was “a factor smaller”. The ISOs they analyzed contained multiple variants, including NJRAT and CDRAT (two remote access trojans), Mercurial Grabber (an infostealer grabbing Roblox Studio cookies, Minecraft session data, Discord tokens, Chrome passwords and cookies, system information, IP addresses, and geolocation, Windows product keys, and screenshots), and Chaos Ransomware. The package also contained a legitimate, regular browser - “Just for kicks,” apparently.
A plausible failure
During the “game” installation, the installer displays a message in Russian, saying the product is unlicensed and that there is a good chance it won’t run. If that happens, the user is told to reach out to a specific Gmail address to receive an “updated crack”. After the installation completes, the victim will get that exact popup, saying “License not found”. All of this is just a smoke screen, to make the victim not suspicious as to why the “game” won’t run.
There is no way of telling how many people fell for the ruse and installed malware on their devices. Huntress says that generally speaking, trying to download cracked and pirated software is a bad idea, which is even worse if the game in question has not yet been released.
“This is fertile ground for scams and threat actors attempting to take advantage of the impatient and overeager,” the researchers said.
The good news is that all of the malware being distributed there is not new. Some of the variants contained in the ISOs are several years old, meaning most antivirus programs, such as Windows Defender for example, can easily detect it and stop it from compromising the system.
Those that do end up infected should disconnect the machine from the internet, reset all passwords, enable 2FA wherever possible, and do a complete reimage of the compromised system.
Apple does seem to have tried to ensure its controversial Audio Intelligence feature isn’t abused. Alongside the iPhone Duo and new iPhone 18 Pro range, Apple on Wednesday introduced a new Apple Watch equipped with a brand new feature it calls Audio Intelligence. The existence of this surprising tool was confirmed only on the eve of the launch event. Enabled by the new S11 chip on the latest Watch devices, this is actually a collection of four features:
Siri Recap, which creates high-level summaries of conversations during your day.
Live Rewind, which transcribes the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as text.
Music recognition, which relies on Shazam.
Sound recognition, which can identify things like sirens or alarms.
All of these features must be consciously enabled by the user and are not on by default.
What they have in common is use of artificial intelligence along with always-on microphones. While all four of these tools are being presented as opt-in, their existence will inevitably — and justifiably — raise privacy concerns.
Apple saw those concerns coming, and to make the features work it has placed a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip inside the latest watches. This is a dedicated secure buffer on the chip that processes audio privately on the fly. It does so without creating a recording of ambient sound around you, and the data it works with is isolated from the rest of the system. That Exclave pairs with the iPhone’s Enclave using “a new audio-verified pairing mechanism that exists in addition to Bluetooth pairing,” Apple explains in a detailed white paper about how it works.
For Siri Recap, the process works like this:
Apple Watch recognizes a conversation is taking place.
If so, audio flows into the Secure Exclave, encrypted, and transmitted to a similarly Secure Enclave on your paired iPhone.
The audio is then immediately deleted from the Watch.
The phone will decrypt and transcribe the audio, condense it, and send that transcript to Private Cloud Compute for processing.
The short summary is then made, returned, and deleted after seven days.
Speakers are not identified, recordings are not made, and detailed transcripts are not created or retained.
The company has also introduced safeguards for those around you. The system will deliberately omit some information, including potentially harmful content, financial data, or personal identifiers. When you use the Live Rewind tool, an audible chime plays on your device to alert nearby people that you are using the feature.
Challenges will emerge
For one thing, we don’t yet know whether the company will provide enterprise IT with device management tools to disable the feature on managed devices. It’s crystal clear that devices that are constantly gathering data will be seen as potential security risks — particularly in regulated industries. And it seems far more logical to provide new APIs to disable Audio Intelligence on managed devices than it would be to insist anyone wearing an Apple Watch put it in a lead-lined box before beginning the next safeguarding, healthcare, or product development meeting.
Another problem I see concerns Europe’s Digital Markets Act. It is, after all, inevitable that competitors (maybe including Meta) will want their devices to have equal access to the information gathered by Audio Intelligence. Based on the decisions Apple has made so far, it seems equally likely it will want to refuse such access; this is why these new features will not initially be available in the EU.
There is also no doubt hackers will attempt to break into the system, though doing so will not be at all easy on account of the intentional way the company has built in security. I suspect, but do not know, that attempts will focus on the points at which data is exchanged across devices, rather than when the information sits within secure enclaves on those devices. It also makes sense that everyone who uses iCloud services for their data should put 2FA in place and pick strong passwords.
What about iCloud storage?
The other challenge will be encryption, specifically ongoing attempts to penetrate iCloud data encryption by some nations, led by the UK. Even so, if access could be achieved to iCloud-stored Audio Intelligence text, what is obtained would only be summary data, not a recording. The system is architected so recordings are never made.
Apple’s white paper on the feature explores this in more depth: “Audio from the microphone enters the Secure Exclave of Apple Watch, where it is initially processed for speech, sounds, or music, without transcribing or storing the raw audio. This buffer is a continuously overwritten stream that exists only within the protected hardware and never creates an audio recording.”
Once you decide to keep a Recap or Life Rewind text, the raw audio is not saved to iCloud, only the text, and then only if you use 2FA and a device passcode. No one else, including Apple, can access the encrypted data you save, Apple said.
This implies a new chip with Silicon Enclave for AirPods Pro, a similar exchange of information in real time for summary and determination of context and content, and a process in which no recordings are made and media access beyond brief, time-limited summaries, is available. In short, Apple will use the same security model.
What about the rest of them?
That’s fine as far as it goes. But the other subtext is that while Apple seems genuine in its attempt to deliver relatively intrusive tech advances right, others will show less commitment to privacy and security. So, while it’s furthering the conversation about using these tools, Apple is also pushing public acceptance of such technologies.
I’m not entirely sure we’re ready.
Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon
A threat actor, likely Russian-speaking, used hundreds of AI agents to develop and launch a global exploitation campaign targeting vulnerable PaperCut NG/MF servers. [...]
Cisco Talos says two recently patched Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) vulnerabilities have been exploited by three separate threat clusters linked to ransomware and state-sponsored attacks. [...]
Proofpoint detailed BlueMoon, an exploit kit chaining two Chromium flaws and one Windows bug
Four groups, including China‑aligned TA412, used it loudly against NGOs, aerospace, and manufacturing targets
Exploits were “patch‑gap” zero‑days; all flaws now patched
Four hacking groups, including some tied to the Chinese government, were seen using the exact same exploit kit in a span of a week, suggesting a certain “fear of missing out” among the criminals, experts have warned.
Security researchers Proofpoint have detailed BlueMoon, an exploit kit that leverages three vulnerabilities: two in Chromium, and one in older versions of Windows: Windows 10 (October 2018 Update), Windows Server 2019, Windows 10 2004, WIndows Server 2022, and the initial release of Windows 11.
The kit was first seen being used on August 28 2026, by a threat actor tracked as TA412, a China-aligned state-sponsored threat actor that was observed in the past targeting businesses using Microsoft SharePoint. TA412, also known as Violet Typhoon, used BlueMoon to “repeatedly target a small number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mining companies, and physical commodity trading firms in the United States.”
Soon after that, three others were spotted: UNK_LateNight, another China-aligned espionage group which targeted multiple US aerospace companies, UNK_DoubleCheck, a group going after a Vietnamese manufacturing entity, and UNK_QuietRacket, a threat actor taking aim at organizations across Singapore and Indonesia.
What all of these groups have in common is the fact that they did not try particularly hard to hide their activity. This is rather unusual, since a stealthy approach usually guarantees that a vulnerability can be exploited for longer.
Front running the Chromium supply chain train
BlueMoon takes advantage of three flaws, two in Chromium and one in older Windows variants. The Chromium vulnerabilities were found in V8, the JavaScript engine that the browsers use to allow applications to run efficiently. The first one is a “type confusion bug”, tracked as CVE-2026-85046, and assigned a severity score of 8.8/10 (high). The latter is a “sandbox escape” flaw, for which Google did not assign a CVE or a severity score.
The Windows bug, on the other hand, is tracked as CVE-2026-85880, and was given a severity score of 7.8/10 (high). It is described as a “heap-based buffer overflow” vulnerability in Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call, allowing malicious actors who can already execute code inside a low-privilege AppContainer to escape the sandbox and elevate privileges to SYSTEM. No additional user interaction is required.
Proofpoint has a theory as to why the crooks decided to be loud, instead of flying under the radar. Apparently, there is a very short window of opportunity between Google patching a Chromium vulnerability, and it being deployed to a browser such as Edge, or Brave, This window of opportunity also allows crooks to see how Google fixed a flaw, reverse-engineer it, and deploy an exploit before the browser is patched. This would mean that there is no time to be stealthy.
No time to hide
“Both V8 vulnerabilities were ‘patch-gap’ zero-days at the time of the observed activity,” Proofpoint said. “In other words, while they were known vulnerabilities already fixed in public upstream Chromium source code, they remained unpatched in the latest stable releases of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers available to the public. It is likely that the exploit kit developer used these publicly available Chromium patches to weaponize the browser exploit chain.”
Another important factor is Artificial Intelligence. It would seem that AI has made flaw detection significantly faster, reducing the barrier to entry and making threat actors move more loudly.
“A fully weaponized Chrome exploit chain has historically been a high-value, rare capability. BlueMoon was developed, deployed rapidly, and shared across multiple threat actors within days in a manner that had high detection signals. This may reflect a reduced cost and barrier to entry for this class of capability, as AI agents increasingly enable threat actor exploit development,” Proofpoint stressed.
All three flaws have since been patched, so make sure you’re running the latest version of both the OS and the Chromium browser.
Identity verification company IDScan has confirmed that hackers accessed customer data stored in its cloud platform, days after reports linked the company to a massive database containing more than 153 million driver's license scans. [...]
Login
