Cyber, in brief

Fixes nobody has installed yet

PaperCut published its emergency fixes on 28 August. [1] Organisations were still being broken into through those two flaws twelve days later. [1] Attackers are also exploiting a flaw in Super Forms, a WordPress add-on that collects website forms, which has a fixed version waiting. [4]

Break-ins through people, not software

The law firms Greenberg Traurig and Eckert Seamans both say documents left after someone was tricked, not after their systems were broken. [2] Revolut, a British banking app, handed over copies of customer passports after fake requests arrived from a real government email address. [3] A former phone-shop employee in the United States was jailed for 16 months for moving customers' numbers to criminals' SIM cards. [4]

AI doing the attacker's legwork

One person used hundreds of AI helpers to break into 395 organisations. [1] Anthropic says Russia-linked spies used its Claude model to change their tools whenever security products flagged them. [5] Anthropic's report describes misuse across seven kinds of harm. [12]

Rules arriving after the harm

The UK government gave Apple and Google three months to block images of child nudity on phones. [8] That deadline passed on Tuesday and the UK government is now writing a law instead. [8] Researchers found more than 250 further child-abuse advertisements on Meta's platforms since the start of August. [7]

2 pressures seen across the day run through Cyber too.

• AI helpers doing the workHigh ↑ · seen in 3 beats→
• Treatments and fixes not reaching peopleBuilding ↑ · seen in 3 beats→

1. 1One person's AI helpers broke into 395 organisations. Two hundred of them were schools.
2. 2Law firms robbed through their own lawyers
3. 3Revolut sends passports to fake officials
4. 4Claude used for weapons work, Anthropic says
5. 5Russian spies used AI to dodge detection

Watch whether these break-ins turn into ransom demands; GreyNoise says the access may be passed to extortion crews. [1]

Also seen in Tech and Gaming.

Also seen in Mind & body and Biotech.

Greenberg Traurig, a US law firm with more than 3,200 lawyers, said on Thursday that an outsider reached a limited number of documents and posted them on the dark web. [2]

It told the state of Vermont that Social Security information was exposed, while insisting its own systems were never broken into. [2]

Eckert Seamans, a Pittsburgh firm, faces two proposed class actions after disclosing that one of its lawyers was tricked into granting access in August. [2]

The law firm BakerHostetler counted nearly 60 law-firm incidents last year, almost double the year before. [2]

Law firms hold other companies' deals, lawsuits and investigations, so one trick reaches clients who never chose the firm's security.

Quinn Emanuel, McDermott Will and Schulte, Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer and Goodwin Procter have all disclosed breaches in recent weeks. [2]

Revolut, a British banking app with no branches, confirmed on Saturday that customer information went to an outsider who sent fraudulent requests. [3]

The requests were sent from the email domain of a real government agency. [3] A message from a government domain is normally taken as official. [3]

The data included dates of birth, postal and email addresses, phone numbers, and copies of passports and driving licences. [3]

Revolut says it blocked the address, alerted the agency, law enforcement and the regulators, and that accounts and money are untouched. [3]

A passport copy cannot be changed the way a password can, so the people affected carry this for years, and Revolut has not said how many there are. [3]

The company is preparing a public share listing at a valuation of up to $200 billion. [3]

Anthropic, the American maker of the Claude AI models, published a report on Thursday on how people misused them. [6]

It says a China-based user built software to rank air-defence targets and model radar jamming, with one simulation holding 12 targets in Taiwan. [6]

A group in northern Yemen used Claude to help write software for a guided rocket and a planned longer-range missile. [6]

Russia-based users worked on control software for swarms of small attack drones. [6]

Anthropic banned the accounts behind the Taiwan work and says it has no evidence the Yemen group fielded a weapon. [6]

China's foreign ministry said it was unaware of the report and opposes smears against the country. [6]

Every part of this account is the company's own, and nobody outside it has seen the accounts. [6]

Anthropic says a Russia-linked spying group used Claude against more than 20 government, intelligence, diplomatic and defence bodies. [5]

Its methods match Midnight Blizzard, a group Western agencies attribute to Russia's foreign intelligence service. [5]

It got into the mailboxes of two drone-parts makers, then targeted a military drone maker and took a complete software kit for its vision system, which it used Claude to pick apart. [5]

Anthropic says most operations it disrupted were run by AI, with humans as overseers. [11] When security products flagged its tools, it used Claude to change them and put them back. [5]

Anthropic's own conclusion is that this pushes the cost back onto defenders, because a new detection used to slow an attacker down and can now be bypassed faster than defenders ship the next one. [5]

It also published technical fingerprints so other security teams can search their own records. [5]

One attacker set hundreds of automatic helpers on a flaw that was fixed twelve days earlier, and every organisation that had not installed the fix was found within minutes.

He got faster at doing the same break-in four hundred times, and the people installing the fix work at the speed they always worked at.

the same step repeats: the attacker's side of the loop is now automatic, while a new detection still has to be written and shipped by people

2.37 million messages a day were generated, and the filter that would catch them is updated by hand

the adverts were made in bulk by software, and the review that was supposed to stop them is the slow, human part

the fixed version exists and is being attacked anyway, because each site owner installs it separately

The law-firm break-ins and the Revolut requests needed no flaw at all, so nothing about them would have been slower.

Almost every machine any of us rely on is patched by somebody in that position, and none of them is told which flaw is being copied this week.

Researchers at the Tech Transparency Project found more than 250 further advertisements containing child sexual abuse material on Facebook, Instagram and Threads since the start of August. [7]

Meta had removed about 50 such adverts a month earlier and said new AI tools would catch them. [7]

Some of the new ones used photographs of real children, including one taken from a European royal family's official website. [7] Many led to apps that undress people in pictures. [7]

All were reported to the US centre that collects child-abuse reports. [7]

Meta's own rules say every advert is reviewed before it runs, and these ran anyway. [7]

The researchers say that in some cases Meta took a week to act on an advert they had reported while it was live. [7]

In June the UK government gave technology companies three months to make taking, viewing or sharing images of child nudity impossible on their devices. [8]

The deadline passed on Tuesday, and the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, told lawmakers the work done does not meet the scale of the problem. [8]

Under the planned law, companies that do not build the protections into phones and tablets sold in the UK would face fines, and their bosses could face criminal liability. [8]

Apple says it has shared future plans with officials. [8]

The messaging app Signal accused the UK government in June of using child safety to rush surveillance powers into law. [8]

Nandy says she will reassess the legislation if the companies ship something while it is being drafted. [8]

The US criminal trial of Huawei, a very large Chinese telecommunications company, opened in a Brooklyn federal court on Wednesday. [9]

A Justice Department lawyer told jurors the company stole trade secrets from five American firms, including router software from Cisco and a phone-testing robot arm from T-Mobile. [9]

Huawei's lawyer said the case is about competition rather than conspiracy, and that prosecutors are cherry-picking isolated events. [9]

The case began with a 2018 indictment over sanctions and bank fraud, and is expected to last three months. [9]

The charges include racketeering, which treats the alleged thefts as one long business practice rather than separate incidents by individual staff. [9]

Microsoft says attackers hid invisible characters inside ordinary words, such as funding, in phishing emails. [4]

A filter reads a word that is not the word the person sees, so mail trained to spot money scams does not match. [4]

The campaign ran from February to June and sent as many as 2.37 million messages a day. [4] The same trick is used to smuggle hidden instructions into AI systems. [4]

Microsoft says the trick can disrupt filters that learn from patterns in past mail. [4]

Kenneth Carter, a former AT&T employee in the United States, was sentenced to 16 months in prison for moving customers' phone numbers onto criminals' SIM cards. [4]

A SIM swap moves a phone number onto a new card, so texts sent to that number reach whoever holds the new card.

The criminals used that to take over bank accounts. [4] Three victims faced intended losses of nearly $600,000. [4]

Carter was typically paid $1,000 to $2,000 for each swap. [4]

Carter abused his role at a phone store, which is the place a number gets moved to a new card. [4]

Intruders reached water and wastewater treatment equipment across the United States in July, and the US cyber-defence agency counted more than 100 compromised systems. [10]

Most of that equipment was reachable over public mobile networks rather than the city's own network, so no city asset list or network scan included it. [10]

A pump station in Clayton County, Georgia failed at about 1am on 27 July, and the boil-water notice was lifted the next day. [10]

Waco's former chief information officer wrote that those mobile links appear nowhere except the phone bill. [10]

He argues that in a typical city nobody is accountable for the whole shared network, and that the plant answers to public works rather than to an IT department. [10]

He now advises a company selling the technology he bought while he ran the city's systems, and the article says so. [10]

The FBI, the United States' federal police force, warned that attackers are getting lasting access to accounts without stealing a password. [4]

They impersonate someone the target trusts and send them to an app that asks permission to read their email and files. [4]

The permissions look normal because real apps ask for the same ones. [4] The FBI calls the access persistent, meaning it keeps working after the first sign-in. [4]

The FBI says no password is stolen in this, so the account's own password was never the thing protecting it. [4]

Attackers are exploiting a flaw in Super Forms, an add-on that collects contact and order forms on WordPress websites. [4]

The flaw lets a stranger with no account upload a file to the site. [4] That can hand over control of the whole website. [4]

A fixed version, 6.3.314, is available, and whoever runs the site has to install it. [4]

The advice is to update to 6.3.314, and until each site's owner does that, the site stays open to it. [4]

Researchers demonstrated an attack they call InjectEave, in which a radio signal aimed at an ordinary device makes its electronics leak information. [4]

They tested 11 commercial products, including headphones, office phones, smart fans and lamps. [4]

They recovered private audio in some cases, and in others could tell whether an appliance was switched on. [4] Nothing had to be touched or modified. [4]

The researchers showed it in tests on their own equipment, and it describes a way in that no software update would close. [4]