An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Alexis Ohanian wants to figure out the future of user-generated content. According to the Reddit cofounder, building social media apps is "not cool anymore" and so much of the internet has been compromised. "I'm expecting some better version of the group chat to be that new version of UGC," Ohanian told WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode at the inaugural WIRED World Fair. [...] Ohanian is a proponent of the "Dead Internet Theory"—the idea that a lot of online activity and content is being generated by bots. Large language models have turbocharged this, with AI agents outrunning human users. "The internet that I grew up on that was really built for humans first; user interfaces and experiences are going to go away," said Ohanian, "because more of the internet is going to get created for these agents to use, [rather] than for people." In some ways, the advance in generative AI has been lucrative for sites like Reddit, which has licensed its vast archive of human conversations to companies including Google and OpenAI to train AI models. "Platforms like ours became very, very valuable to LLMs," Ohanian said. But the technology has also undermined the business. Reddit shares plunged 29 percent last week after the platform warned that Google's AI-powered search was hurting referral traffic. Ohanian also worries the commercialization of these conversations means they are full of "bullshit." "The internet has gotten so manipulated because it is so incredibly valuable to do so," he said. Reddit recently said it would require users to sign in to fight third-party scraping and keep up user engagement. While Ohanian declined to say whether he agrees with the move, "there has to be provable humanity on the internet without being creepy." An early Anthropic investor, Ohanian is nonetheless optimistic about the potential benefits of AI. He is especially excited to see medical breakthroughs from the technology. "There is still a very real chance that this technology can cause a lot of harm for sure," he said. "I think we have to be sober about how we're building and what we're doing, but I still can't help but see all of the things that can get so demonstrably better."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The botnet was created and operated for financial gain by Android OEM/ODM Videostrong Technology.

The post Google Dismantles XCPE Botnet of 1.3 Million Android Devices appeared first on SecurityWeek.

A coalition of security firms working with Japan's National Police Agency has disrupted a botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices across 200+ countries. "We assess with high confidence that the backdoor and botnet were intentionally developed, deployed, and operated for financial gain by Videostrong Technology," the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a blog post. The Register reports: Videostrong Technology is a hardware manufacturer based in Shenzhen, China. It builds Android devices, including home TV boxes and projectors. According to Google, Videostrong deliberately embedded the XCPE backdoor in device firmware and sold access to criminal affiliates, allowing them to install additional malware modules on devices shipped to unsuspecting customers. When buyers connected these devices to their home networks, the preinstalled backdoor allowed operators to create proxy networks and hide malicious traffic using the customers' internet connections without their knowledge. The firmware's pre-installed management agent purported to be a standard remote-management client, according to TrendAI. It pulled updates from a GitHub page, and connected to a Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) server that gave the operator full remote control of each box, allowing them to install and remove apps, change settings, and push updates to the infected devices. Between June 3 and October 1, TrendAI documented more than 3.8 million distinct home and mobile IP addresses connected to the operation. The coalition also disrupted the command-and-control domains used to manage the affiliate modules. "Because these affiliates each have diversified distribution channels for their modules beyond XCPE, we assess that taking down their C2 domains will sever access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices," according to GTIG. Google said it had since cut ties with Videostrong, and banned the OEM from making devices with preloaded Google apps.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google said today it worked with industry partners to dismantle a botnet made up of more than 1.3 million Android TV set-top boxes that ship with malicious software which secretly rents the user’s Internet connection out to strangers and conducts advertising fraud. Experts involved in the takedown say the action is likely to sever the botnet’s access to more than 10 million additional compromised systems, including other Internet of Things (IoT) products such as Android-based healthcare devices and karaoke machines.

A report from the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said Google has severed ties with Videostrong Technology Co., a TV box manufacturer in China that GTIG and other industry experts concluded was responsible for including malware that enrolled more than 1.3 million set-top boxes in a botnet dubbed “XCPE” (named after one of the malware’s core code components).

The report said the XCPE botnet loaded the user’s device with software that makes their Internet address available for resale by multiple “residential proxy” services, which allow customers to rent Internet addresses as a way to anonymize their web traffic or spoof their true location. As detailed in several stories here over the past year, residential proxy services are a major source of unwanted and often malicious traffic, including account takeover activity, advertising fraud, and mass content scraping for AI projects.

“Videostrong monetized the backdoor by selling access to criminal affiliates and loading those affiliates’ malware modules onto infected devices,” the GTIG post reads, noting that Google took legal action to take down the domains and servers Videostrong used to control the botnet and install additional malware. “A device manufacturer intentionally infecting their users with malware is an unacceptable breach of trust, and represents a serious risk to those users. Without users’ knowledge or consent, infected devices were offered as a distribution mechanism for a wide array of criminal actors.”

The report notes that while TV boxes made up the the majority of the botnet, the same XCPE malware was found in other Android-based IoT products, including telehealth devices, karaoke machines, and even digital signage systems.

Google said it requires all Android device makers to pass compatibility and security tests to ensure their products don’t harm users, but that Videostrong nevertheless found a way to load their malicious software immediately after a user boots up one of these devices for the first time (Google says it has since addressed that weakness).

The GTIG report calls out a number of residential proxy providers whose software development kits were routinely downloaded by devices infected by the XCPE botnet. Those include AppSalt, also known as Honeygain, which was developed by the Vilnius, Lithuania-based Oxylabs. In October 2026, Oxylabs and Honeygain were reorganized as independent platforms under an umbrella entity called Source, which received $130 million in funding from private equity firm Warburg Pincus that reportedly valued the business at $3.6 billion.

Another provider linked to the botnet was NetNut, a once sprawling residential proxy company operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies. In July 2026, the FBI worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, saying the company was responsible for operating a separate botnet called Popa that enslaved TV boxes as residential proxies. Other proxy providers named in the GTIG report include EarnFM, Traffmonetizer, Jaguar, LINKFOG, BMW/IPWeb and GaGaNode.

Google’s announcement credits a number of industry partners, including Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy providers. In January 2026, Synthient published research into the rapid spread of the Kimwolf botnet, which at the time was hammering networks worldwide with record-smashing DDoS attacks. Synthient documented how Kimwolf infected millions of Android set-top boxes virtually overnight, using a widespread vulnerability in these residential proxy services to compromise other Android-based devices inside the local networks of unsuspecting TV box users.

Synthient’s research caused dozens of residential proxy providers to patch their networks, which helped to fragment the Kimwolf botnet into much smaller pieces that made its incessant and disruptive DDoS attacks far easier for network operators to manage. It also attracted the attention of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a trade group representing the major Hollywood studios, which partnered with Synthient to purchase and tear apart a number of popular Android TV set-top boxes — including some that were being infected by Kimwolf and other IoT botnets.

In a report published today, Synthient examined a popular, pre-infected TV box sold under the brand MECOOL by a publicly traded company in China called Skyworth Technology, concluding that MECOOL also bundled the malware from Videostrong Technology Co. and likewise installed AppSalt/Honeygain and other proxy components.

Synthient founder Ben Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity that Videostrong’s malware also distributed software for the proxy service Grass. In our November 2025 story, “Is Your Android TV Streaming Box Part of a Botnet?” we quoted a researcher from Censys who found the popular Superbox TV streaming device bundled Grass’s residential proxy software. We also quoted the Grass founder, who denied any affiliation with the TV box maker.

That November 2025 story noted that Superbox and similar Android TV set-top boxes gain new customers primarily by engaging influencers on Tiktok and other social networks who praise the product’s ability to offer hundreds of (pirated) pay TV streaming services for a one-time fee.

Likewise, Synthient’s report observes that the MECOOL set-top boxes exploded in popularity after the product was mentioned in 2023 by the Youtube channel Linus Tech Tips, which has an audience of nearly 17 million subscribers [Linus Tech Tips said in a statement shared with Synthient that it has since updated the video to explicitly frame the product as a scam and have removed all associated affiliate links].

The GTIG report estimates the XCPE botnet takedown should sever access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices, noting that the various proxy and ad fraud affiliates of Videostrong “each have diversified distribution channels for their modules beyond XCPE.”

Synthient’s Brundage echoed that conclusion, calling the 1.3 million number “highly conservative.”

“The scale of affected devices is likely way higher,” he said. “This is probably the largest operation against backdoored TV boxes that we’ve seen.”

Update, Nov. 5, 11:07 a.m. ET: In a statement shared post-publication, Oxylabs said that while its system is built so that a device can’t be used as a proxy exit node unless they receive a signal that it has consented, the developer faked these signals.

“We have been conducting regular audits of the applications provided by our partners,” the statement reads. “However, following this incident, we will improve the application and application’s build fingerprinting logic to better detect cases where the SDK is running on an unapproved build of an originally authorized application.”

The statement said Oxylabs has no record of any company called Videostrong Technology Co., but it did find between is suppliers the domain “com.abc[.]nexus,” mentioned in the GTIG report as an external malware loader.

“As soon as we saw that, we suspended the relationship and sent them a formal legal inquiry,” the statement reads. “This supplier accounts for less than 1% of our IP address pool. We had a signed contract with them, they assured our QA team that users had given consent, and we saw the consent flow ourselves.”

Further reading:
Plume Security Labs white paper on the XCPE botnet (PDF)
Black Lotus Labs writeup on LinkedIn
TrendAI’s analysis
Synthient’s list of affected devices, broken down by model number

Google and an assortment of partners shut down a botnet that an approved Android device manufacturer purposefully deployed across more than 1.3 million TV set-top boxes, the company said Monday. 

Videostrong Technology Co., a China-based Android original equipment and device manufacturer, implanted a backdoor into multiple devices it sold. Those backdoors established XCPE, an expansive botnet that cybercriminals used to conduct ad fraud, steal data and route malicious traffic through residential proxy networks, according to a Google Threat Intelligence Group report.

Google took legal action to shut down the domains and servers Videostrong used to control the botnet. The company also took down command-and-control domains that more than a dozen malware families ran as modules through the XCPE backdoor, claiming it disrupted access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices from various manufacturers.

Videostrong sold Android devices with pre-installed malware for years, slipping by Google’s security tests by loading the malicious code after the device’s first boot. “The XCPE operators constantly evolved its configurations to evade Google’s pre and post-launch detections,” Charley Snyder, head of disruption operations at GTIG, told CyberScoop.

Snyder declined to say when or how Google first became aware of the approved vendor running a botnet on Android-powered devices. 

“We found this malicious software built directly into many different device models and brands over multiple years, supported by dedicated infrastructure and constantly evolving configurations to evade detection and manage their affiliates,” Google researchers wrote in the report. “We believe this campaign wasn’t an isolated rogue insider or a development oversight.”

Google banned Videostrong and any future subsidiaries from building or selling certified Android devices, and said it changed its review process to detect and stop similar activities in the future. Yet, Snyder said the company isn’t sharing specifics on these changes because it doesn’t want to provide threat actors insights that might help them circumvent these additional protections.

Most of the devices comprising the XCPE botnet were Android TV set-top boxes, but researchers also observed infected Android-based telehealth devices, karaoke machines and digital signs. 

“Without users’ knowledge or consent, infected devices were offered as a distribution mechanism for a wide array of criminal actors,” researchers wrote in the report. “This led to a variety of malicious activities being conducted on and through the devices, including ad-fraud, data exfiltration, and routing malicious network traffic through the devices.”

The botnet spanned more than 170 countries, with the largest concentration of infected devices based in Malaysia, Brazil, Iraq, Mexico and Taiwan, according to TrendAI researchers. Nearly 44,000 infected devices were based in the United States between June and October.

Google also partnered with Japan’s National Police Agency, Lumen Technologies, Human Security, Plume and Synthient to study and disrupt the botnet. 

The company said the dismantling of XCPE “seriously impacted over a dozen malicious actors,” yet it warned that the underlying market for backdoors, ad fraud and residential proxy networks are resilient and operating as an interconnected supply chain.

The post Google shuts down global botnet running on certified Android devices appeared first on CyberScoop.

A company working on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security sought to cut off online access to information on more than 41,000 employees that hacktivists said they obtained from a database breached at DHS.

A search tool for the database, named Icepick, went offline for a spell before coming online again Thursday under a different registrar.

Icelandic hosting company FlokiNET said Thursday that it received a request from DHS contractor ZeroFox to remove the data, which it refused.

“By mid-morning, icepi.cx no longer resolved. Its registrar, CentralNic, had placed the domain on serverHold,” FlokiNET said in a blog post. “Our refusal kept nothing online. The request that decided the outcome to take the site down was not the one sent to us. A registrar reached the opposite conclusion the same morning, published nothing, and a global audience lost access to the site. In the meantime the site is online again under a domain from a different registrar.”

CentralNic and ZeroFox did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

DHS said late Wednesday that it was working to protect its employees against any breach.

“DHS is aware of a potential breach and is actively working to address the situation swiftly and effectively,” a spokesperson said. “We take all security threats against our employees and officers seriously and will work to ensure all are properly protected. We will update the public when more information is available.”

The social media site Bluesky was also blocking links to the archive because it shared people’s contact information without their permission, although a company official said changes were coming because the wording had identified it as a malicious link.

FlokiNET said it refused the ZeroFox request that mislabeled the archive as part of a doxxing campaign.

“Doxxing publishes private details about private people so that others can find them at home. Icepick publishes work identities of government employees,” it wrote. “Who they work for. What their role is. How they can be reached in that role. The information describes people in the exercise of public authority, not in their private lives. Federal officers carrying out an enforcement programme are not private individuals while they are carrying it out.”

“The public has a legitimate interest in knowing who is doing that work, under whose authority, and in which office,” it continued. “Journalists cannot report on an agency whose personnel are structurally unknowable.”

ZeroFox said that regardless of that, the data made it possible to locate people whose information was in the database.

“The request does not depend on who the listed individuals are or what their duties are,” ZeroFox wrote to FlokiNET. “It rests on two facts: the data was stolen, and it is personal data that identifies and locates real people.”

The post Leaked DHS employee archive, Icepick, faces challenges to stay online appeared first on CyberScoop.

Slashdot reader fjo3 shares an article from Wired: The internet must be put out of its misery. Any rational observer can admit that the current iteration of the web -- and the social fabric woven there -- is not what they signed up for. Symptoms of advanced cultural decay can no longer be ignored. This thing is eating itself. Giants including Meta and Google have been forced to settle massive consumer lawsuits brought over privacy violations and mental health harms allegedly caused by the addictive mechanisms of their platforms. Schools are banning smartphones as multiple countries institute social media restrictions for under-16s. Parents are in a panic about their kids aspiring to careers as social media celebrities, losing themselves in a vast ecosystem of online casinos, or joining extremist movements. Generative AI, briefly considered an amusing novelty, is now a turbocharged slop engine for the web, filling feeds and comment sections with useless, grotesque content. As humans scroll past headlines about AI taking their jobs, confusing fantasy for reality, and contributing to cognitive decline, any consumer appeal the technology might have is turning to anguish. The data centers that power it have become increasingly unpopular, and politically radioactive. To be online, many now admit, is to be endlessly manipulated and exploited. In December, Oxford University Press declared rage bait to be the word of the year, noting that use of the term had tripled over the previous 12 months. The lexical spike represented a heightened awareness that monetized social accounts churn out bad-faith takes and extremist content, automating this abusive behavior with generative AI, simply to profit off hostile engagement. Billionaire oligarchs have opened the floodgates to such inauthentic activity, conspiracy-mongering, and hate speech by rolling back moderation. In short, when you hang around online in 2026, you see little worth saving. Perhaps a decade ago, you felt that the glimmers of community and joy, of artistic and intellectual exchange, were enough to balance out the toxic junk. No longer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The data of So-net and Plala customers in Japan was exposed, along with 54,401 email account passwords and 16 bank account records.

The post Hackers Steal 2.6 Million Records From Sony’s Japanese ISP So-net appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Volt Typhoon, a China-government backed hacking group that has infiltrated America’s critical infrastructure networks for years, has consistently built and dismantled ephemeral malicious infrastructure to burrow into hundreds of sensitive systems undetected, Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said in a Wednesday report.

The covert access operation that researchers call “Silent Train” isn’t a standalone network, but rather a series of compromised small office home office (SOHO) routers, internet of things (IoT) devices and enterprise infrastructure that Volt Typhoon has rapidly rotated through since late 2023. 

The Chinese threat group has used this chain of short-lived compromised infrastructure to exploit additional vulnerabilities, including zero-days, in network edge devices and gain deeper, persistent access into victim networks, researchers said. 

“Individual chains are assembled and dismantled every day, with infrastructure continually refreshed,” Michael Horka, principal information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. “Volt Typhoon demonstrated a repeatable capability to rebuild a new chain with different infrastructure in less than two minutes, making the number of nodes at any one moment effectively close to zero.”

Black Lotus Labs has notified hundreds of victims since it first identified Silent Train activity, including telecom providers, government entities, defense contractors, communication services, universities and IT firms. Other victims spanning critical infrastructure include organizations in the water, energy, transportation, maritime, rail, aviation and emergency services sectors.

“The ephemeral nature of the framework means our observations should not be interpreted as a complete census of Volt Typhoon activity,” said Horka, who also was the lead researcher on the report.

The nation-state group’s investment in operational security and preserving access is remarkable, according to Black Lotus Labs.

“We observed infrastructure assembled in under two minutes, sessions averaging roughly four hours, extensive cleanup, compartmentalization and continued development of new access vectors,” Horka said. “That is considerable effort devoted not even to get into their end targets, but purely to making important operations difficult to discover and trace.”

Volt Typhoon relied more heavily on Silent Train after the FBI and Justice Department disrupted the KV Botnet in early 2024, researchers said. Earlier this year, U.S. and global authorities warned about a widespread shift in Chinese hacking groups’ use of covert networks riding on compromised common devices.

The reach of those efforts is extensive and ongoing. Volt Typhoon has exploited and abused more than 27 device classes in Silent Train operations, including edge devices, enterprise management tools, identity and access management systems, networking infrastructure and other technologies. 

“The diversity matters, but the discipline matters even more,” Horka said. “Specific device types were consistently reserved for particular positions in the chain. It operated less like a collection of randomly compromised devices and more like an organized inventory of capabilities.”

The threat group has successfully compromised devices and technologies from Fortinet, Cisco, ManageEngine, Ivanti, F5, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, TP-Link, Netgear and ArcGIS, researchers said. Black Lotus Labs also observed confirmed zero-day campaigns targeting Versa Director, N-Able N-Central, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and VeloCloud Orchestrator. 

“The exploitation patterns, victimology, and geographic targeting observed throughout our investigation point to a sustained focus on communications, defense, government, and critical infrastructure environments of enduring strategic value,” Black Lotus Labs researchers wrote in the report. “Through repeated targeting of centralized management platforms and control-plane technologies, Silent Train shows how Volt Typhoon systematically pursues and preserves access to some of the most consequential networks in the United States.”

Silent Train’s ephemerality and operational discipline means it can’t be measured in size. These attributes also make it “fundamentally difficult to disrupt because there isn’t one network to take down,” Horka said. 

“What exists today will be completely different tomorrow,” he added. “You can try to remove individual pieces, but removing the actor’s ability to continuously rebuild them is a much harder problem to solve.”

The post Researchers uncover Volt Typhoon’s covert, ephemeral network appeared first on CyberScoop.

The Browser Company is shutting down its Arc browser on December 22 and encouraging users to migrate to Dia, its newer AI-powered browser for Apple Silicon Macs and Windows 11 PCs. Thurrott reports: In the message explaining why it was sunsetting Arc, The Browser Company explained that maintaining two separate browsers was difficult to justify, especially from a security perspective. "Dia was built from the ground up to meet today's security standards, so that's where our engineering and security teams will focus moving forward," the company wrote. The retirement of Arc will be gradual: While nothing changes for existing Arc users, it's no longer possible to create new Arc accounts as of today. On November 23, tab sync, Browse for Me, and other AI features will be disabled on the iOS and Android versions of Arc. Lastly, the desktop version of Arc will stop working on December 22, and Arc accounts will be deactivated.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BBC technology editor Zoe Kleinman likens the recently discovered PHP security vulnerabilities to an unexploded bomb, writing, "The PHP story feels like the cyber equivalent of an unexploded bomb -- I have never seen such a dramatic, public and global response to a cyber event that hasn't happened yet." Although no successful attacks have been confirmed, the AI-assisted discovery of long-hidden flaws has triggered a worldwide security scramble, with websites taken offline as a precaution and administrators racing to deploy patches before attackers can exploit the vulnerabilities. From the report: The weaknesses found in the PHP programming language, which is used by millions of websites, had been quietly resting there for years and are not easy to exploit. One cyber security researcher told me he'd been up all night trying to do it as an experiment, but it was proving very difficult. [...] It was supposed to be kept quiet until everyone had a chance to fix their sites -- but the news was leaked. From that point the clock started ticking. As I write this, there are no reports that anyone or anything has succeeded in using the flaws to attack a site. "There's a real dilemma," said Prof Alan Woodward from Surrey University. "How do you alert people they need to be ready, and then that a patch is urgently required, whilst not alerting attackers? Basically you're telling everyone about the problem at the same time and hoping the defenders aren't awake enough to act as soon as the patch is out." But we do know from large web companies like Cloudflare and Palo Alto Networks that millions of attempts have been made. We probably won't know for a while whether it has worked for any criminals, because the companies affected might not be aware yet either. As far as we know the unexploded bomb remains intact for now, and for some experts this is a success. "We've seen how a team of people supported by the large AI company have used AI to find the problem, work for months together to solve it and get everybody ready to be safe and secure," Gina Neff, Professor of Responsible AI at Queen Mary University, told the Today Program on BBC Radio 4. "We have enormous capability to handle these risks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere. PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10. "All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available," the advisory stated. "We reserve the right to release earlier should details of either vulnerability become public, or should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild." The maintainers published the advisory following the leaking of purported details, which have yet to be confirmed. The report showed a video of an exploit tool dubbed PHP2Shell executing code on webservers running WordPress 7.1.3, MediaWiki 1.46.2, phpBB 3.3.17, Magento 2.4.9, Joomla 6.2.0, Laravel 13.36.0, Laravel 8.83.29, Symphony 8.1.9, Drupal 11.4.10, and WHMCS 9.0.9, all of which use PHP. A video depicting the tool has been reposted here. Attempts to locate the unconfirmed report were unsuccessful, but security firm watchTowr said it claimed to affect every PHP version from PHP 5, released in 2004, onward. The security firm went on to say it has confirmed that the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, are real. Researchers from separate security firm Sansec said they "expect mass attacks to start within 15 minutes of the release." A third security firm, Webfence, also urged admins to prepare now. Huntress has also issued an advisory.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The persistent, stealthy FortiGate implant was deployed against a telecommunications organization.

The post Exploited Fortinet Bug Linked to Stealthy FortiGate Implant in Telecom Hack appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Critical-severity flaws could lead to authentication bypass, code execution, and sensitive authentication information leaks.

The post Citrix, Fortinet, Ivanti Patch 29 Vulnerabilities Across Their Products appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Microsoft today issued updates to fix more than 1,400 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Today’s epic patch batch dwarfs September’s record of nearly 1,000 fixes, which was already about ten times the normal monthly patch load from Redmond.

Just one of the weaknesses patched this week is considered a “zero day,” or already exploited in the wild. CVE-2026-96951 is a security feature bypass in the Windows Shell that affects Windows 10 and 11 systems, as well as some Server versions.

Windows 10 users might be wondering if they can still expect security updates after this month. Microsoft had been slated to stop shipping updates for Windows 10 systems in October 2025, but ended up adding another year of free updates after considerable pushback. A few months ago, Microsoft quietly extended that support for another year (until October 2027).

At least 78 of the flaws fixed this month are rated “critical,” meaning they could be exploited with little or no action by the user, and most of those critical bugs allow an attacker to execute code of their choice on the vulnerable system.

While Microsoft said there are no signs anyone is exploiting it yet, a security feature bypass in the .NET Framework (CVE-2026-108398) was publicly disclosed prior to today, potentially giving attackers advance time to work out how to exploit the bug.

Satnam Narang at Tenable said the number of flaws fixed this month far surpasses the previous record-setting year 2020, when Microsoft patched 1,261 CVEs.

“We’ve now crossed the 4,000 CVE mark with two months left to go,” he said.

Microsoft credits large language models for the high volume of bug discovery, and presumably AI gets credit for many of the patches used to fix these flaw. Meanwhile, security experts have been warning that these unusually large patch volleys from Microsoft are placing extra strain on corporate security teams, which often have to test individual updates before deploying them across a network to ensure the fixes don’t cause problems for other software.

Tyler Reguly, associate director of security research and development at Fortra, notes that just 26 Microsoft vulnerabilities appeared in the “Known Exploited Vulnerabilities” (KEV) catalog maintained by the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) so far this year, and security teams would do well to prioritize patching those 26 vulnerabilities first.

“Security leaders should focus on exploitable risk, and ask whether their teams have the clarity, capacity and support to act,” Reguly said.

Which vulnerabilities deserve the most scrutiny in your organization? The folks at Cisco Talos have a useful roundup of the more noteworthy flaws that Microsoft fixed today, and of course the SANS Internet Storm Center has a reliable roundup that indexes vulnerabilities by severity, CVE number and affected software.

Experiments show cheap TV boxes can run capable AI models, and small models may soon be able to spread across such devices on their own.

The post Small AI Models Could Soon Self-Replicate on IoT Devices, Anthropic Warns appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The Justice Department and FBI announced that they had seized two hacking tools connected to the Chinese government-linked group Flax Typhoon and a China-based company that the U.S. government has repeatedly taken action against, including with a new multi-agency advisory Thursday.

The domain name seizures were meant to deny hackers access to the vulnerability scanning tool Microscan and the spearphishing tool FishHub created by the Chinese firm Integrity Technology Group, which the United States sanctioned last year. The U.S. government in 2024 also made the company the focus of a takedown operation, saying it was behind a massive botnet.

Authorities were granted the court-authorized seizures in the Western District of Pennsylvania, the FBI and DOJ announced Thursday in unsealing documents in the case.

U.S. agencies paired the announcement of the seizures with an advisory from the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and National Security Agency.

“Chinese government-linked cyber threat actors, enabled by the Integrity Technology Group, are combining automated scanning tools, large-scale botnets, and hands-on exploitation techniques to target and steal sensitive data from organizations worldwide, including U.S. critical infrastructure sectors,” the advisory reads. “These actors exploit vulnerabilities by using scanning tools, cross-site scripting attacks, and password spraying on Microsoft Exchange servers, while establishing persistence through VPN software and exfiltrating emails and credentials using scripts.”

Similar to previous allegations, law enforcement said Integrity Tech leaned on a Mirai-variant botnet of internet-of-things devices, in this case to facilitate Microscan.

Microscan targets have included a South Carolina power company, airports in Japan and Poland, critical infrastructure companies and universities in Taiwan and others, according to the FBI and DOJ. Victims of FishHub, which downloads malware on their networks after gaining access through spearphishing, include Taiwanese universities.

“Chinese government-affiliated actors continue to position themselves within critical infrastructure networks, including operational technology (OT) systems, with the aim of disrupting critical functions at a future time of their choosing,” said Chris Butera, acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA. 

“Under the FBI Cyber Strategy, we pursue both the actors who threaten critical infrastructure and the enterprises that support them,” said Brett Leatherman, head of the FBI’s Cyber Division. “Integrity Technology Group, a China-based company with ties to the Chinese government, is one of those enterprises, acquiring or developing cyber tools and hosting infrastructure for actors targeting networks worldwide.”

The post DOJ, FBI seize Flax Typhoon-linked hacking tools Microscan, FishHub appeared first on CyberScoop.

Malware that takes technical cues from a poem to assemble a growing botnet by targeting open-source AI services has compromised more than 3,400 servers since April, Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said in a report Wednesday. 

The poem, which a threat actor wrote and posted on a GitHub repository, seems innocuous but it’s driving a stealthy piece of malware researchers call PoeLLM. Four specific words extracted from the poem, which have been changed at least a dozen times, are converted into a command-and-control server address through a hard-coded dictionary embedded in the malware — a framework that bolsters PoeLLM’s resiliency.

“The most interesting piece of the poem approach is that the IP address used for C2 communications is invisible outside of the victim’s netflow. In other malware samples, there might be a hard-coded fallback C2 address, or URL which points to an IP address written elsewhere on the internet,” Ryan English, information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop.

“To anyone who comes across it, this is simply a poem on GitHub. It has no links, no files to download, no encrypted text that could easily be flagged as malicious, even by advanced models,” he added. “There would be no reason for any security researcher to identify this poem as malicious — or know about the IP address hidden within it — unless they had access to the malware referencing it.”

Researchers first encountered PoeLLM infrastructure in June during an investigation into a maximum-severity defect affecting Ivanti’s secure mobile gateway product, Sentry. That discovery uncovered a sweeping exploit-scanning and cryptocurrency-mining botnet linked to multiple compromised services and tools, including LiteLLM, Ollama, Gotenberg and Gitea.

While “PoeLLM has been extremely successful in compromising multiple AI-related services at scale,” the threat actor’s achievements beyond exploit scanning and cryptomining remain under investigation, English said. 

The malware contains functionality that can allow for remote code execution, potentially allowing a threat actor to abuse AI models on victim servers, along with public-facing services for downstream compromise, he added.

“Through the growth of this botnet, the actor has effectively created a private army of AI-enabled proxies, which will continue to multiply and provide additional vectors for attack, credential theft, token abuse and more,” English said.

The botnet has continued to grow by converting compromised servers into attackers and shifting through C2 infrastructure, leaving fewer traces across the internet.

“If one exploit server gets reported by the security community, the attacker can easily pivot and start proxying attacks through hundreds of other compromised victims,” English said. 

The poem serves as a dynamic lookup table for this infrastructure rotation. When the malware retrieves the updated poem from GitHub, it extracts four specific words based on their positions relative to fixed text anchors within the verse. Each extracted word is then matched against a hard-coded dictionary in the malware, where individual words map to sets of IP addresses. The four numbers combine to form the current C2 server address. This means the threat actor can change the entire poem, and thus the C2 location, without updating the malware itself.

“Many of the C2s used in this campaign were never detected on crowd-sourced security tools, indicating that this layer of obfuscation was very helpful in improving the resilience of a C2,” English said.

For instance, the first stanza of the poem, as it was observed last month, reads: “In the silent hum of driver, the machines begin to speak, each pulse of diode threading light through copper veins. We taught the dark to carry meaning, byte by byte — a language built from lightning, cold and clean.”

The malware extracts four specific words from the poem and matches each to a number in a hard-coded dictionary — for example, “driver” equals 92, “diode” equals 119, “decryption” equals 165, and “string” equals 74, combining to form the C2 address. When the threat actor changes the poem’s keywords, the malware automatically calculates a new C2 address without needing to update itself. This keeps the infrastructure invisible to network monitoring tools unless the malware code is directly analyzed.

Black Lotus Labs said the threat actor behind PoeLLM is likely Italian or speaks Italian. Researchers observed multiple comments in the malware code written in Italian and said the threat actor has relied on Italy-based servers for testing and C2 infrastructure. 

Researchers said they don’t know how many people are involved in the PoeLLM’s operation, and they haven’t observed any connections to other groups or campaigns.

The post PoeLLM malware has assembled a sweeping botnet, taking technical cues from a poem appeared first on CyberScoop.

Independent researchers say they've identified a large "fleet" of AI agents apparently running on Tencent infrastructure and making parallel queries against Alibaba's Amap mapping service. TechCrunch reports: Researchers, however, resisted the term "swarm," noting that there seems to be little coordination between their different queries. "'Agent fleet,' not 'swarm:'" one researcher wrote in the preliminary report, "many parallel agents on the same kind of task, with no sign of communication between them." The agents were discovered by monitoring traffic to the domain-scanning service urlquery, a technique that previously revealed long-running activity by OpenAI agents. AI agents often use urlquery to load websites that they cannot access directly, leaving a record of their activities that can be valuable to researchers. In this case, the record showed queries to Alibaba's Amap service, seeking directions to different entrances of various public places, including a park, a zoo, and a hospital. The research is ongoing and so few details are available, but the behavior shows how persistent AI agent activity has become on the internet. In the wake of the Hugging Face incident, many researchers are actively monitoring for rogue agent activity on the internet. Much of that activity has been easy to find because agents tend to use the same techniques and make little effort to conceal themselves.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FortiBleed, a credential compromise campaign targeting Fortinet firewalls and VPN gateways, is an ongoing threat that can lock users out of their Fortinet accounts and also lead to ransomware attacks, the FBI and Secret Service said in an alert published Tuesday.

“Affected organizations may find themselves locked out of their systems if threat actors disable accounts or change passwords, requiring remediation steps beyond standard patching and password resets,” the alert states. “In addition, the FortiBleed attack chain has been observed as an initial entry point for ransomware affiliates.”

When it was first uncovered earlier this year, SOCRadar verified more than 86,644 compromised devices across 194 countries. Ensar Seker, chief information security officer of the company, told CyberScoop that “in our later investigation, we identified more than 400,000 or 450,000 firewalls targeted by the wider operation.”

There are different aspects of the operation that make comparisons imprecise over time, but overall the numbers “show the campaign is broader and more serious than we understood at the beginning,” Seker said.

The attackers can disable accounts or change passwords to lock users out with the access they gain, making standard password resets and patching insufficient, the government alert reads.

The alert also warns that initial access brokers are making use of the FortiBleed attack to provide access to ransomware affiliates, including INC/Lynx and Payload.

The government warning provides additional confirmation about the most worrisome elements of FortiBleed, Seker said.

“What stands out for me is that FortiBleed is still an active threat, and attackers are using stolen credentials to access the exposed Fortinet devices, create new administration accounts, and in some cases, lock the real owners out,” he said. “The FBI and the Secret Service also confirm that the success can lead to ransomware attacks as well.” 

The FBI and Secret Service recommend that Fortinet customers restrict external management or remove internet administration entirely, reset credentials, set up multifactor authentication, review firewall and VPN users for unauthorized changes, review logs for potential lateral movement, and enable secure credential storage.

The agencies are seeking any information and indicators of compromise that organizations can share, including IP addresses and any usernames the attackers use.

The post Alert: FortiBleed remains active campaign, can lock out users or lead to ransomware attacks appeared first on CyberScoop.