As preparation for the UK’s planned social media ban, Ofcom has set out four ways social media platforms could check whether users are aged 16 or over. The government and Parliament will decide how the ban works in practice. Ofcom is the regulator for the communications services in the UK. The BBC reports that Ofcom identified four ways to check someone’s age that it considers “highly effective.” Here’s what those checks would involve: Photo ID matching: Comparing a live image of you with the…
Candiru spyware was delivered to devices at Al Jazeera Media Network via targeted online advertisements in a zero-click attack that required only rendering the malicious ads on the victim's device. [...]
Daiichi Kosho, a major Japanese entertainment system maker, disclosed that a malware infection at its contractor, Nippon Columbia, exposed more than 8.7 million customer and employee records. [...]
A North Carolina musician was sentenced to 18 months in prison for collecting more than $10 million in royalties from Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music in a massive streaming royalty fraud scheme. [...]
Over the weekend, Japanese publishing giant Nikkei disclosed that unknown attackers recently breached two employee email accounts and used one to send thousands of phishing emails. [...]
In this article Star Blizzard TTPs observed in 2026Defending against Star Blizzard and RedFlick-related activityMicrosoft Defender detectionsHunting queriesIndicators of compromise Since January 2026, Microsoft has observed Russian state threat actor Star Blizzard evolve their detection evasion capabilities through large-scale phishing campaigns, the use of accounts on compromised websites, and a novel malware delivery technique that Microsoft tracks as “RedFlick”. These changes represent a…
This week on the Lock and Code podcast… If you want AI to tell you a story, it will. If you want that story to sound like one of your favorite authors, it can. And if you’re one of the authors that AI can imitate, you might be a little upset at what feels like theft. In 2024, the authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic, the creator of Claude, alleging that the company had wrongfully digested millions of copyrighted works—including some of their very own—to…
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has seized the domains of 12 deepfake websites in what it called the largest known seizure of celebrity deepfake sites in history. The sites, which marketed themselves as deepfake pornography platforms, hosted AI-generated videos of over 1,200 people, including those in the public eye, ranging from politicians to actors, musicians, and social justice advocates. At least one allowed users to create their own deepfakes by grafting real faces and bodies…
Group-IB Threat Intelligence analyzes HEAVYGRAM, a Telegram-based Windows backdoor attributed with moderate confidence to the Iran-linked threat actor Handala Hack. Active since Fall 2023, it has been used to surveil Iranian dissidents, journalists and government opponents, enabling remote command execution, data exfiltration, and persistence over Telegram command-and-control.
Government agencies are warning that Iranian state-linked hackers are using a Windows malware strain named CHOSEN BRICK to target dissidents, activists, and journalists worldwide. [...]
According to the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Iran has used this and similar cyber activity to “support the repression of individuals who are seen as a threat to the regime, such as dissidents, activists and journalists.”
Researchers at Hudson Rock found that cybercriminals hijacked HBO Max’s verified Reddit account and used it to run 108 malicious ads over roughly 48 hours. The ads used HBO Max’s trusted corporate account to promote fake AI tools, developer software, and macOS utilities, lowering potential victims’ guards. Some ads directed users to convincing HBO lookalike sites that claimed to offer a native HBO Max app for macOS or a promotional download. But instead of providing an installer, the sites…
Hackers compromised HBO Max's official Reddit account and used it to push malicious ads that launched ClickFix attacks to infect Windows and macOS devices with information-stealing malware. [...]
Executive Summary Since the release of our May 2026 report detailing adversarial misuse of artificial intelligence (AI), Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has observed forward leaning adversaries transition from basic prompting to agentic AI workflows and AI-enabled automation. In these operations, human-in-the-loop latency is dramatically reduced, compressing the traditional window for defenders to respond. In Q2 2026, GTIG observed threat actors compromise a cloud resource, then plan,…
OverviewA new Linux toolkit, identified by Rapid7 Labs, has been targeting organizations across South Korea’s automotive and media industries with minimal detection. The campaign made use of a HAProxy instance named “ted backdoor”, alongside trojanized versions of crond, agetty, atd, sshd, and polkitd. This previously undocumented framework enabled threat actors to execute remote commands on compromised servers, inject malicious scripts into web traffic, perform credential harvesting, and…
The Dutch Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP) has advised Twitch users to opt out of sharing data with Amazon AI. Twitch launched as a live-video platform and is currently owned by Amazon. Its core product is live broadcasting with a built-in chat culture: streamers broadcast gameplay, commentary, performances or other live content while viewers interact in real time. Twitch is one of the world’s largest livestreaming platforms, with millions of people broadcasting and watching content every month…
A group of big tech firms is fighting to stop roughly 3,000 youth safety lawsuits from moving forward, and they just lost a critical procedural battle in court. The lawsuits, brought by attorneys general and families, allege that Meta, Google, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Snap knew their products were addictive to children and teens and harmful to their mental health, but continued marketing them to young users for profit. The tech companies tried to appeal against a federal court ruling that…