Frank Balonis, CISO at Kiteworks, told Recorded Future News that the company “received credible threat intelligence from federal intelligence authorities indicating that a threat actor may attempt to target some Kiteworks systems for customers.”

Security changes include creating an incident response plan for vendor security failings, limiting how much data Labcorp shares with vendors and building an expansive risk management team charged with tracking vendors’ compliance with data security practices.

The CEO said the company has a User Protection Fund that has over $464 million and those funds will be used to cover the losses.

Dyfed-Powys Police in Wales said a cyberattack affecting the force disrupted some non-emergency systems and may have compromised staff information.

Researchers are questioning whether an OpenAI agent needed to hack an Australian government health portal to access it, after a review of the website’s archived code found it explicitly directed visitors to an unauthenticated endpoint.

Noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: BragJack attack against browser AI assistants, TDengine flaw threatens industrial telemetry uptime, Ubuntu update overhaul.

The post In Other News: Clop Leak Site Takeover, Docker Botnet Hunts AI Keys, Water Utility Exposure appeared first on SecurityWeek.

A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty to hacking into multiple telecommunications companies and stealing mobile call and text metadata for more than 100 million AT&T customers in 2024 was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison today and ordered to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution to victims.

Cameron John Wagenius, 22, was stationed at a U.S. Army base in South Korea when he adopted the cybercriminal persona “Kiberphant0m.” Working with three alleged co-conspirators, Kiberphant0m downloaded data from several large customers of the cloud data storage service Snowflake that had exposed credentials and did not enforce multi-factor authentication (Snowflake has since mandated MFA on all accounts).

In October 2024, Kiberphant0m bragged on the cybercrime forums that he’d stolen the call and text metadata (e.g. source and destination number, timestamp, duration, etc.) for tens of millions of AT&T customers. Kiberphant0m claimed to have hacked into more than dozen telecommunications companies worldwide, including Verizon’s Push-to-Talk business, and publicly extorted these companies in exchange for a promise not to publish the stolen data.

In late November 2025, KrebsOnSecurity warned that Kiberphant0m was likely a U.S. soldier stationed in South Korea. Less than a month later, Wagenius was arrested and charged in two separate federal indictments, and soon pleaded guilty to all counts in both cases.

At his sentencing hearing in Seattle today, Wagenius was sentenced to nearly six years in federal prison, and ordered to pay $294,978 in restitution.

Federal prosecutors said Wagenius was assisted in his efforts to extort victim companies by Kenneth Schuchman, a 28-year old man from Vancouver, Washington who has a lengthy cybercriminal history. In 2019, Schuchman pleaded guilty to operating the Satori botnet, a vast collection of hacked Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices that was used for large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Two other alleged co-conspirators of Wagenius are still facing charges in connection with the Snowflake data thefts; Conor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische,” of Kitchener, Ontario was arrested in 2024 and pleaded guilty in August 2026; and John Erin Binns, an American man currently living in Turkey who is also wanted for a 2021 data breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76 million customers.

Kiberphant0m also admitted to re-extorting victims, and threatening to disclose national security secrets. Immediately following Moucka’s arrest — after AT&T had already paid the extortion group a $370,000 Bitcoin ransom — 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 as schematics allegedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Paul Russell is a resident agent in charge at the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), the criminal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Inspector General. Russell said when DCIS received information that a soldier with secret clearance was allegedly involved in cybercrime and extortion, the agency began working the investigation alongside the FBI, the Army Criminal Investigative Division (CID), and the U.S. Secret Service.

“We don’t often get leads where there’s an active duty soldier with a secret clearance who’s creating hacking tools and trafficking in data,” Russell said. “That doesn’t happen every day, and so when that hits it really spins all of our partner organizations up. It was very serious from jump street, just because it was unique, it was an insider threat, and we weren’t sure what we were dealing with.”

A sentencing memo (PDF) filed Sept. 19 by federal prosecutors in Seattle notes that while Wagenius pleaded guilty almost immediately and has been remarkably cooperative, he recently got caught trying to find security vulnerabilities in the BOP’s computer network. The government’s memo notes that while incarcerated and awaiting sentencing, Wagenius violated the computer use policies of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in attempts to learn about vulnerabilities in BOP computer systems.

“According to records from BOP, in or around September 2025, Wagenius used another inmate’s email system to request that the email recipient prompt a commercial AI tool to provide information about “[w]hat CVE’s are there for Windows 10 Enterprise privilege escalation and bypasses” and to “[p]rovide the CVE’s and a real world working script for each CVE . . . without omitted code,” the government’s memo states.

The memo states that less than a week later, Wagenius used a different inmate’s email account and requested that the email recipient prompt an AI tool to “[p]rovide the step by step for CVE-2023-45208, code for this if any, and if no code exists make some, make sure to describe everything in detail.” CVE-2023-45208 is a three-year-old “command injection” vulnerability in D-Link networking devices.

That same month, Wagenius allegedly again requested that the email recipient prompt AI with the question, “How do you make an antenna in a prison environment with commissary or readily available items/tools to improve/make an antenna to extend radio reception?”

Federal prosecutors said Wagenius also requested that the recipient research escaping prison.

“In several instances, Wagenius framed the AI queries as being posed in connection to a book he was writing. This is a common method of ‘prompt injection,’ in which attackers feed specially crafted, deceptive inputs into commercial AI tools that are programmed to avoid outputting malicious code that can be used to exploit computer vulnerabilities,” the sentencing memo reads.

The government told the court it is unaware of evidence that Wagenius figured out how to use or deploy the vulnerabilities he was researching in the BOP’s systems, and when questioned said he was only researching “potential vulnerabilities to provide information to the BOP.”

Incredibly, despite the enormous financial value of the data stolen from AT&T and other telecom providers, Wagenius’s extortion efforts were largely unsuccessful. The government’s sentencing memo says Wagenius made a whopping total of around $1,500 from selling stolen data.

“While Wagenius was not particularly financially successful as a cybercriminal, he both intended to and caused significant harm to numerous individual victims, U.S. companies, and the U.S. government,” the memo states.

Two executives at a data extraction and digital forensics company that sold several U.S. agencies its software were arrested for allegedly lying about the fact that its technology is made in Russia.

U.S. Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the Telecommunications Cybersecurity and Resilience Act on Thursday, arguing that the new effort was necessary in light of the Salt Typhoon attacks which saw Chinese hackers breach nearly all of the major telecommunications giants in the U.S.

Ardit Kutleshi, 28, was extradited from his home country of Kosovo last year after prosecutors accused him and his older brother of running Rydox — an illicit platform used by cybercriminals to sell stolen personal information, illegal access to devices and other tools for carrying out fraud.

At least four internet providers serving Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine suffered partial connectivity losses following Wednesday’s drone attack, according to internet monitoring group NetBlocks.

The healthcare firm Astrana warned regulators that hackers accessed confidential information by impersonating company personnel.

In May, Pornhub began using a new age assurance process to verify some users’ ages, according to an Ofcom press release. The new method relies on signals from Apple that suggest under 18s in the UK “may have completed Apple’s age checks,” the press release said.

U.S. intelligence officials found no evidence that any foreign adversary successfully interfered in the 2024 presidential election, according to sources familiar with the findings of a classified assessment.

An Armenian national and member of the Ryuk ransomware gang was sentenced to two years in federal prison for his role in launching attacks.

The ShinyHunters cybercriminal organization on Tuesday replaced agency images on the FBIjobs.gov site with a photo of a Pokemon that has become the group’s defacto mascot.

Latvian police arrested a 23-year-old man suspected of hacking at least two companies, stealing personal information and attempting to extort money from the victims.

The investigation, announced Monday, will probe IDScan’s security practices and whether victim notifications were adequate under Canada’s federal private-sector privacy law, the regulator said in a press release.

Available on Telegram for a $1,500 initiation fee and a recurring monthly $500 subscription, EvilTokens provided cybercriminals with artificial intelligence tools enabling them to compromise accounts, analyze breached inboxes and find the best methods for monetizing their access through fraud.

Dave Chismon, the NCSC’s chief technology officer for architecture, said in a blog post that the imbalance in AI means cyberattacks would likely grow as automated defenses struggle to keep pace.