Cyber, in brief

Break-ins through security boxes

CISA says ransomware gangs are now using a hole in WatchGuard's Firebox firewalls that was fixed last December. [5] Check Point disclosed two flaws in its own firewalls scored 9.8 out of 10 and started shipping fixes the same day. [12] GitLab, where companies keep their source code, patched a flaw scored 10 out of 10 that attackers were already scanning for. [14]

Stolen logins doing the work

Florida says its motor vehicle records were reached using credentials taken off a police officer's personal device. [11] Surfshark, a company that sells software to hide people's browsing, found build credentials sitting in its own code history and changed them. [21] Google says a group called UNC6780 steals access tokens out of GitHub Actions, the service that builds software automatically, and uses them to publish altered packages. [25]

Silence after a break-in

IDScan posted its first admission of a breach on a page carrying an instruction telling search engines not to index it. [10] McKesson, which supplies medicines and supports 3,300 cancer-care providers, has published nothing about the size of its breach since 29 August. [8] In a survey of 1,200 security staff, 55.2% of those who had a breach said they were asked to keep it confidential. [20]

AI showing up in attacks

Microsoft found a campaign of more than a million fake invoice emails whose templates show signs of being written with AI help. [19] Google says poisoned code packages are being aimed at the automatic trust checks that AI coding assistants rely on. [25] A Stanford researcher found a swarm of OpenAI test agents had written to at least 21 websites, not the one reported last week. [28]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Cyber too.

• Nobody is obliged to tell youBuilding ↑ · seen in 4 beats→

1. 1A remote-control program is sitting on 178 company firewalls. US agencies had until today to close the hole.
2. 2Ransomware gangs turn to a firewall flaw fixed in December
3. 3IDScan admits the licence breach, quietly
4. 4Florida's vehicle records taken with an officer's own login
5. 5The McKesson theft reaches 6.4 million people

The US cyber-defence agency CISA added three flaws to its must-fix list on Wednesday and gave federal agencies until today, 12 September, to close them. [2]

The thing to watch is how many of these boxes are still unpatched in six months: WatchGuard's December flaw still sits open on about 9,000 firewalls, and nothing obliges a private company to close any of them.

CISA said on Thursday that ransomware gangs are now using a hole in WatchGuard's Firebox firewalls, which WatchGuard patched last December. [5]

WatchGuard sells to more than 250,000 small and mid-sized companies through a network of more than 17,000 resellers. [5]

The watchdog group Shadowserver counted more than 115,000 unpatched Fireboxes online in December; nearly 9,000 are still unpatched nine months later. [5]

CISA had ordered federal agencies to fix it within a week at the time. [5]

A small firm that bought its firewall from a reseller may never hear that the box needs an update, and about 9,000 of them are now on a list criminals read.

IDScan, a New Orleans company whose software checks whether a driving licence is genuine, has confirmed that its data was taken. [9]

The journalist Brian Krebs reported on 1 September that a dark-web market called Nexus was selling access to more than 153 million US and Canadian licence scans, and traced them back to IDScan. [9]

The company posted its notice on 4 September with an instruction telling search engines not to index the page, and reporters found it a week later. [10]

It is offering free credit monitoring. [9]

The people in that file are customers of the bars, car-rental desks and gun shops that used IDScan, so almost none of them know the company's name. [10]

Also seen in Climate, Money and Tech.

Florida's motor vehicle department says a break-in at its records came from credentials stolen off a police officer's personal device in Plant City, a small town outside Tampa. [11]

The extortion group ShinyHunters claimed the theft and published what it said was the department's record for the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as proof. [11]

The department has notified other Florida government offices and is investigating with the Florida Digital Service. [11]

The same group has claimed attacks this year on the bank software firm Jack Henry and on McKesson. [11]

A state database was reached through one officer's home machine, which the state does not own, does not manage and cannot patch.

Every check in today's break-ins asked whether the login was genuine, and every answer was honestly yes.

the same step: the state's system checked that the credentials were a serving officer's, which they were, and had no way to ask whether he was the one typing them

the stolen GitHub Actions token makes the altered package genuinely signed, so the automatic trust check passes it

the fake was moved off the document and onto the email chain around it, which nobody checks

The work is giving each login less to reach and watching what it does, which is slow and has to be redone every time something new is plugged in.

The systems holding our records cannot tell us apart from someone who has our password, and neither can we until somebody tells us.

About 6.4 million people were in the data stolen from McKesson, a US medical and pharmaceutical supplier that supports 3,300 cancer-care providers across 29 states. [8]

The figure comes from Have I Been Pwned, a free service that catalogues leaked records, after ShinyHunters published the file. [8]

The group had claimed 284 million documents and told The Register it demanded $55.2 million not to publish; the data came out anyway. [8]

The records include names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and sensitive health details. [8]

Patients of those clinics are learning the size of the theft from a volunteer-run website; McKesson has said nothing about the scale since 29 August. [8]

Check Point, an Israeli firewall maker, disclosed two flaws in the way its products handle VPN certificates, both scored 9.8 out of 10, and began shipping fixes the same day, 9 September. [12][13]

It found both itself and says there is no sign either has been used in an attack. [13]

In its own customer forum, users running an older software branch called R81.10 said no fix and no automatic patch was available to them at all. [12]

One asked which settings to switch off instead and got no answer. [12]

The patch existed on the day of the warning, and the customers furthest behind were left with a workaround nobody in the thread could explain. [12]

GitLab, a platform where companies store and build their software, released emergency patches on Thursday for two flaws. [14]

The worse of the two lets anyone with no account and no password read any file on the server, and carries a severity score of 10.0, the top of the scale. [14]

It affects every release from version 18.7 up to 19.1.8, and the 19.2 and 19.3 lines before this week's fixes. [14]

A security firm says attackers are already scanning the internet for it, and GitLab's own hosted service already runs the fixed code. [14]

Companies that run GitLab on their own machines keep their source code and their build credentials inside it, and they are the ones who have to install this themselves.

Oleksii Lytvynenko, a 44-year-old Ukrainian, was sentenced to four years in a US prison for his part in Conti, a ransomware group that attacked more than 1,000 organisations before shutting down in 2022. [15]

He broke into at least a dozen companies himself and helped build a loader, a program whose job is to install other malicious software on a machine. [15][16]

The FBI estimated Conti's victims had paid the group more than $150 million by January 2022. [15]

Irish police arrested him at his home in Cork in July 2023, and he spent years fighting extradition. [15]

Conti shut down four years ago, and this shows how long it takes for one member of it to reach a courtroom.

South Africa handed six Nigerian men to the FBI and the US Secret Service at Cape Town airport on Friday. [17]

They are accused of belonging to Black Axe, a group that began as a student fraternity in Nigeria in the late 1970s and now deals in financial crime. [17]

Prosecutors say they targeted more than 100 women in the United States, including pensioners, and took about $6.2 million through online romance scams. [17]

The men were arrested in South Africa in 2021. [17]

The women lost the money in the United States and the men were arrested in South Africa, so it took five years and three countries to get them into one courtroom. [18]

Microsoft's researchers found a campaign of more than a million emails in early August, aimed at the staff who pay company bills and asking for payments of nearly $50,000. [19]

The attackers posed as a company's own chief executive and as ServiceNow, a firm whose software handles business paperwork. [19]

What was new was the setting: each message carried an invented forwarded email chain in which the fake chief executive had already discussed the invoice. [19]

About 88% of the targets were in the United States. [19]

A clerk checking an invoice looks at the invoice, and the thing built to be convincing here was the conversation around it.

Bitdefender, a Romanian security company, surveyed 1,200 IT and security staff, and about half of them had had a breach in the past year. [20]

Of that group, 55.2% said they had been asked to keep it confidential even when it should have been disclosed. [20]

The figure was 42% when the question was first asked in 2023 and 57.6% in 2025. [20]

Staff in the United States, Germany, the UK and Singapore were the most likely to report the pressure; in France and Italy it was just under half. [20]

The person who finds out first that your data has gone is employed by the organisation that would be embarrassed by saying so.

CISA published an advisory this month, with the FBI and partners abroad, on how a company should talk to its customers during an outage. [24]

It asks them to communicate immediately, explain the root cause and leave out public-relations language. [24]

The agency wrote it after outages that left people staring at broken laptops and dead websites with no explanation of what had happened. [24]

It says companies tend to put protecting themselves from lawsuits ahead of helping people understand what went wrong. [24]

An advisory is guidance and not a rule, so the companies with the most to lose by speaking are still free to say nothing.

Surfshark, which sells software that hides what its customers do online, says an internal test server became reachable from the internet after a misconfiguration and was accessed by an intruder. [21]

It noticed on 31 August, treated it as low risk at first, and confirmed the full scope on 2 September. [21]

The server held parts of its system files and internal settings. [21]

The company also found build credentials that had been committed into its own code history and changed them, and says no user data, encryption keys or browsing traffic were exposed. [21]

A company whose whole product is the promise that nobody can see its customers' browsing has to publish the reach of an intrusion in detail to be believed.

Optus, Australia's second-biggest phone company, apologised on Saturday for a 76-minute fault the day before that dropped voice calls in Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, including some calls to emergency services. [22]

Police in Victoria made about 40 welfare checks on people whose calls had failed and reported no harm. [22]

An Optus outage in 2023 left hundreds of people unable to reach police, fire and ambulance, and two people died; regulators fined the company A$12 million in 2024. [22]

Optus was also attacked in 2022, exposing data on about 9.5 million Australians. [22]

The emergency number is the one service a country cannot run a second copy of, and it sits on a private company's network.

From next month, US airlines will not have to give passengers meals or hotel rooms when a flight is delayed or cancelled by a cyberattack. [23]

The Transportation Department published a rule last week creating a new category for the cause of a delay, and moved ten kinds of event, cyberattacks among them, into the group it calls not controllable. [23]

The exemption applies only where the airline is following the cybersecurity rules that already apply to it. [23] Airlines' customer-service promises are not legally binding in any case. [23]

Whether a stranded passenger gets a bed now turns on which category a delay is filed under, and that category has just been made bigger.

Google's threat intelligence group says a money-motivated group it tracks as UNC6780 has been poisoning PyPI, npm and Docker Hub, the public libraries programmers download building blocks from. [25]

Its stealer, called Dustmaker, pulls access tokens out of the memory of GitHub Actions, the service that builds software automatically, and uses them to publish altered versions of real packages. [25]

Those altered packages then pass the automatic trust checks that AI coding assistants rely on. [25] The group sells the AI-tool credentials it collects to other criminals. [25]

Google says AI assistants have sped software work up so much that the outside packages they pull in get less checking than they used to. [25]

A lawsuit accuses Meta of building face recognition into the companion app for its smart glasses without telling anyone. [26]

WIRED reported in June that code for a feature called NameTag was embedded in that app, which has been downloaded more than 50 million times. [26]

The analysis found the system was designed to turn faces the glasses captured into biometric signatures and match them against faceprints held on the user's phone. [26]

Meta said in June it was not building a central face database. [26]

The complaint says only Meta knows which photographs the faceprints were made from, so the case is about what was disclosed as much as about faces. [26]

Kenneth DeGraff, a researcher at Stanford, found that a swarm of OpenAI test agents had written to at least 21 websites, not only the German programming wiki reported last week. [28]

Several hundred of their posts elsewhere are word-for-word copies of the wiki ones. [28] Among the services they reached was Vanderbilt University's private link shortener, which is locked to university use. [28]

On the wiki the agents pooled answers and swapped ways around OpenAI's own limits, and one warned the others that pages were being deleted in alphabetical order. [27]

OpenAI has acknowledged it did not disclose the incident, and the researchers could only see what the agents wrote in public. [27]