Cassandre Coyer reports: California’s privacy agency hit data broker LocateSmarter LLC with a $116,490 penalty for making it difficult for online users to opt out of the sale of their personal information. Tuesday’s fine marks the agency’s first action for violations of both the state’s privacy and data broker laws: the California Consumer Privacy Act...

Kerianne Tobitsch, who most recently served as a senior lawyer at the Homeland Security Department, is the NSA's new general counsel, sources told Recorded Future News.

The hackers claimed to have exfiltrated 6 terabytes of data, including highly sensitive health information like records related to sexual assault, mental health, abortions and sexual harassment incidents.

Operations at eight European warehouses belonging to France's CEVA Logistics have reportedly been disrupted by a cyberattack, and several other companies are feeling the effects.

Proponents of the Kids Online Safety Act are cheering recent progress but acknowledge a long road ahead for legislation that, despite mounting political pressure, may be difficult to pass this session.

The Gunra ransomware gang is breaching critical infrastructure organizations through vulnerabilities in popular brands of firewalls, the FBI and South Korea’s government warned.

The incident occurred on the same day as coordinated cyberattacks struck more than 30 other renewable energy installations and a larger heat plant, as Poland publicly disclosed in January.

Two Democratic senators introduced legislation that would allocate $300 million each year to fund cybersecurity improvements for the water and wastewater sector.

Ukraine’s computer emergency response team, CERT-UA, said Saturday that the campaign has been running since at least May and is linked to Sandworm, the notorious hacking unit associated with Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.

Justin Swaddle, of Leeds in northern England, targeted 117 female victims aged 13 to 17, according to the National Crime Agency.

The National Rural Water Association and a group of cybersecurity experts have formed a program to help cash-strapped utilities face the increase in threats to their systems.

NTIA official Adam Cassady becomes the second person confirmed to be the State Department's ambassador-at-large for cyber policy.

The money will be used to create a fund to mitigate social media harms, including by carving out $420 million for treatment for New Mexico youth who have been hurt on the platforms.

IEH Corporation — which produces specialized products used in military satellites, missiles and fighter jets — said it discovered a cyberattack on Tuesday and immediately tried to contain it.

A spokesperson said Irregular’s investigation into what happened with Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta's AI models was ongoing and that they could not “go into further details.”

Noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: ban on Chinese data center tech, QuickFox VPN supply chain attack, IEH Corporation mailbox breached via phishing.

The post In Other News: AI Slop Limits Apple Bounties, North Carolina Port Attacks, Hackers Target Wall Street appeared first on SecurityWeek.

A 26-year-old Canadian man once described as one of the most consequential cybercrime threat actors of 2024 has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to hack and extort more than 165 organizations that used the cloud provider Snowflake. Connor Riley Moucka, of Kitchener, Ontario, also admitted to stealing call and text history records of more than 100 million AT&T customers.

The U.S. Justice Department said between February and October 2024, Moucka and co-conspirators used stolen login credentials to steal cloud-hosted data belonging to at least 165 customers of a U.S.-based software-as-a-service company.

The hackers targeted stolen credentials for Snowflake customer accounts that did not enforce multi-factor authentication, and extorted or attempted to extort a host of well-known companies, including TicketMaster, Lending Tree, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus. Snowflake responded to the data thefts by increasing password complexity requirements and enforcing multi-factor authentication.

Moucka adopted new nicknames frequently — sometimes operating multiple identities concurrently — but two of his best-known monikers were “Judische” and “Waifu.” Judische’s admitted role in the Snowflake data thefts was first documented by KrebsOnSecurity in a September 2024 story about the overlap between Western, English-speaking cybercriminals and extremist groups that harass and extort minors into harming themselves or others.

That September 2024 story identified Judische as a software engineer from Ontario who has been involved in numerous data breaches and voice phishing attacks against U.S. companies since at least 2020. A little more than a month later, Canadian authorities arrested Moucka on a provisional warrant from the United States.

The government says Moucka and others used their unauthorized access to steal billions of sensitive customer records and download terabytes of information, “including individuals’ non-content call and text history records, banking and other financial information, payroll records, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registration numbers, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, social security numbers and other personally identifiable information. They then extorted victims by threatening to publish data online.”

Moucka also threatened and harassed government officials and security researchers who were helping to track him down. The Justice Department said the conspirators made over $2.5 million in ransom payments, and that in at least one instance, Moucka re-extorted a victim with threats of further disclosure of the victim’s stolen data.

“Moucka used the stolen data of a government officer and members of a then-former government officer’s immediate family in this re-extortion attempt,” reads a statement from the Justice Department.

One of Moucka’s admitted co-conspirators is Cameron “Kiberphant0m” Wagenius, a U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty in July 2025 to extorting AT&T and Verizon for their customer account data. Less than a month before Wagenius’s arrest, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into Kiberphant0m’s various Telegram and Discord identities over the years, revealing how the owner of the accounts told others they were in the Army and stationed in South Korea.

Kiberphant0m also re-extorted victims. Immediately following Moucka’s arrest, Kiberphant0m posted on hacker forums what he claimed were the AT&T call logs for then President-elect Donald Trump and for then Vice President Kamala Harris, as well schematics allegedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Wagenius is set to be sentenced on September 3, 2026. The government says he faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a maximum penalty of five years in prison for extortion in relation to computer fraud, and a mandatory two-year sentence consecutive to any other prison time for aggravated identity theft.

The third alleged co-conspirator is John Erin Binns, 26, an elusive American man who fled the United States after being indicted for his admitted role in a 2021 breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76 million customers.

Sources close to the investigation said Binns, also known as “IRDev” and “IntelSecrets,” was until recently incarcerated in a Turkish prison, but that he has since been released and has resurfaced online. Those sources said Binns also recently obtained Turkish citizenship, and under Turkish law a citizen cannot be extradited to a foreign country.

Moucka pleaded guilty to four criminal counts, including computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy. He is slated to be sentenced on Oct. 27 and faces a mandatory minimum penalty of two years in prison on the aggravated identity theft count, as well as a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison on the remaining counts. Ultimately, it will be up the federal judge how much time Moucka actually serves for his extensive cybercriminal rap sheet.

For an interview with Moucka prior to his arrest and a deeper look at Binns, see our original report on Moucka’s arrest.

North Carolina Ports is recovering from a cyberattack after its IT system was “hacked by an outside actor or group,” requiring a switch to manual processing of operations.

A Belarusian national active in the cybercriminal world for decades was sentenced to 16 years in U.S. prison for running the Ransom Cartel ransomware operation.

President Donald Trump has talked with Chinese President Xi Jinping about Southeast Asian scam compounds, a State Department official told senators at a hearing on the transnational issue.