X-Industry

Hackers, criminals, and spies are rapidly adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI), and considerable evidence is emerging of a substantial acceleration in AI-enabled crime.  This includes evidence of the use of AI tools for financial crime, phishing, distributed denial of service (DDoS), child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and romance scams.  In all these areas, criminal use of AI is already augmenting revenue generation and exacerbating financial and personal harms.  Scammers and social engineers,

The cybersecurity company ESET has disclosed that it discovered an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered ransomware variant codenamed PromptLock.  Written in Golang, the newly identified strain uses the gpt-oss:20b model from OpenAI locally via the Ollama API to generate malicious Lua scripts in real-time.  The open-weight language model was released by OpenAI earlier this month.  "PromptLock leverages Lua scripts generated from hard-coded prompts to enumerate the local filesystem, inspect target

Car tire manufacturer Bridgestone confirms it is investigating a cyberattack that impacts on the operation of some manufacturing facilities in North America. The company believes that its rapid response contained the attack at its early stages, preventing customer data theft or deep network infiltration.  Bridgestone Americas (BSA) is the North American arm of Bridgestone, a Japanese multinational tire manufacturer, the largest in the world by production volume.[1]

BSA operates 50 production fac

The popular Streameast illegal sports streaming site was taken down this past week as officials in Egypt arrested two men allegedly involved in the effort.  The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) said it worked with Egyptian authorities to shut down the piracy network, which had more than 80 associated domains and logged more than 1.6 billion visits over the past year.

ACE called Streameast the largest illicit live sports streaming operation in the world, giving people free access t

Modern vehicles are transforming into full-fledged digital devices that offer a multitude of features, from common smartphone-like conveniences to complex intelligent systems and services designed to keep everyone on the road safe. This digitalization, while aimed at improving comfort and safety, is simultaneously expanding the vehicle’s attack surface.

In simple terms, a modern vehicle is a collection of computers networked together. If a malicious actor gains remote control of a vehicle, they

Threat actors are abusing virtual private servers (VPS) to compromise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) accounts, according to an investigation by Darktrace.  The cybersecurity vendor identified coordinated SaaS account compromises across multiple customer environments, all of which involved logins from IP addresses linked to various VPS providers.  The compromised accounts were used to conduct follow-on phishing attacks, with threat actors taking steps to avoid detection and enable persistent access

They say necessity is the mother of invention.  As our reliance on digital infrastructure has grown, we have demanded more from our networks: seamless access, automated processes, uninterrupted user journeys, and effortless interoperability.   Each improvement has pushed us further toward a hyper-connected, “smarter” enterprise, but at a cost that rarely registers on the risk scale.  In the background, facilitating all of this is a new type of workforce, an army of AI bots and agents that keep t

A recent court decision by the United States Sixth Circuit has upheld the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) rules on data breach reporting, marking a significant development for the cybersecurity landscape.

The ruling means that telecommunications carriers are now explicitly required to report breaches involving both Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The decision stems from a legal challenge brought by several industry groups,

Everyone likes farmer, Right?  Apparently, hackers have decided to attack their insurance provider.  Their job is tough enough, let alone worrying about the loss of their information.  It is being reported that more than one million customers of Farmers Insurance and its subsidiaries were impacted by a cyberattack on a third-party vendor.  Farmers Insurance, Farmers Insurance Exchange and several other affiliated companies filed breach notification documents in Maine, California and Massachusett

Over the past year, FortiGuard Labs has been tracking a stealthy malware strain exploiting a range of vulnerabilities to infiltrate systems.  Initially disclosed by a Chinese cybersecurity firm under the name “Gayfemboy,” the malware resurfaced in July with new activity, targeting vulnerabilities in products from vendors such as DrayTek, TP-Link, Raisecom, and Cisco, and exhibiting signs of evolution in both form and behavior.  This Fortinet research presents an in-depth analysis of Gayfemboy, r

Pharmaceutical company Inotiv has notified the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that its business operations took a hit after hackers compromised and encrypted its internal systems.  The incident, the organization said in a Form 8-K filing, occurred on 08 August 2025, and prompted Inotiv to initiate containment and remediation processes. “The company’s preliminary investigation determined that a threat actor gained unauthorized access to, and encrypted certain of, the company’s system

A recent report by Salt Security highlights a critical warning: without proper Application Programming Interface (API) discovery, governance, and security, the very technology meant to drive smarter customer engagement could open the door to cyber-attacks or data leakage.  The research also reveals an increasing trust gap between businesses that deploy agentic AI for external communications and consumers who are wary of sharing personal information due to security concerns.

Because APIs power AI

FortiGuard Labs recently identified a phishing campaign leveraging carefully crafted emails to deliver malicious URLs linked to convincing phishing pages.  These pages are designed to entice recipients into downloading JavaScript files that act as droppers for UpCrypter Malware that ultimately deploys various remote access tools (RATs).

The attack chain begins with a small, obfuscated script that redirects victims to a spoofed site personalized with the target’s email domain, enhancing credibili

A threat actor has been observed “patching” a vulnerability post exploitation, likely in a bid to lock out other adversaries and secure exclusive access.  The novel tactic was detected by Red Canary researchers in a cluster of activity targeting a flaw in Apache ActiveMQ, an open-source message broker, to gain persistent access on cloud-based Linux systems.  The critical vulnerability, CVE-2023-46604, allows for remote code execution (RCE) in Linux systems due to inadequate validation of throwab

A ransomware attack has forced drug research firm Inotiv to shut down critical systems, resulting in operational disruptions.  Inotiv is an analytical drug discovery and development service that works with various pharmaceutical companies.  It employs over 2,000 research specialists and reports an annual revenue of over $500 million.  According to a regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Inotiv discovered the cyber attack on 8 August.  “On August 8, 2025, Inotiv,

Canada's cyber security agency is investigating a significant data breach at the national parliament caused by an unknown threat actor targeting employee information.  The Canadian House of Commons has informed employees of an information breach and the Commons said that a malicious hacker was able to exploit a known Microsoft vulnerability to get access to a database that contains data used to manage computers and mobile devices.

The unknown attackers has used an exploit known as CVE-2025-53770

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a "significant spike" in brute-force traffic aimed at Fortinet SSL VPN devices.  The coordinated activity, per threat intelligence firm GreyNoise, was observed on 03 August 2025, with over 780 unique IP addresses participating in the effort.  As many as 56 unique IP addresses have been detected over the past 24 hours.  All the IP addresses have been classified as malicious, with the IPs originating from the United States, Canada, Russia, and the Netherlan

Why hack when hackers are willing to sell guaranteed access to breached networks?  Increasingly, cybercrooks agree they would rather outsource than bother with the tedium of actual network penetration, leading to a flourishing initial access market.  Remote access to a victim's network now retails for an average price of $2,700, although about 40% of what's being sold goes for much less $500 to $1,000, noted in a report from cybersecurity firm Rapid7.   Research is based on listings posted over

Cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler identified two unprotected, misconfigured databases containing nearly one million records linked to Ohio Medical Alliance LLC, a company better known under its brand name Ohio Marijuana Card.  Fowler, who reported the exposure to Website Planet, found that the databases were left open without encryption or password protection, allowing anyone with an internet connection to access names, Social Security numbers (SSN), dates of birth, home addresses, and hi

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is currently warning of a three-phase fraud scheme that uses tech support, bank, and government impostors to target elderly victims.  A cybersecurity expert warns of a scam that has been used to drain entire life savings or retirement accounts has become "devastating" for seniors.

The FBI in Los Angeles on 15 July posted a reminder on X about the Phantom Hacker Scam, which has cost Americans over $1 billion since at least 2024, according to the agency