Microsoft announced that it removed the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool from Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, as well as from Windows 11 beta builds released this week. WMIC is a legacy built-in Windows command-line utility that helps interact with the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) system using text commands. This move is part of a process announced in September, when the company said that WMIC will be removed after upgrading to Windows 11 25H2 and later. Microsoft deprecated WMIC in Windows Server 2012 (in 2016) and Windows 10 21H1 (in 2021), and it converted it into a Feature on Demand (FoD) starting with Windows 11 22H2 (in 2022), and announced in January 2024 that it would be removed altogether after first disabling it by default. "Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) has been removed in this release. This change is part of the ongoing deprecation and removal of WMIC from Windows," Microsoft noted on Monday.
Security researchers at Anthropic and Switzerland's EPFL have demonstrated that self-propagating payloads can spread from one artificial intelligence (AI) agent to the next through the editable system prompt files that autonomous agent harnesses use to carry state between sessions. The work, released as a preprint on August 10, 2026, tests the technique in a simulated six-agent coding
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously undocumented Python implant framework dubbed TWINLOOT. "TWINLOOT is a modular, PyArmor-hardened Python implant designed to operate its entire command-and-control infrastructure inside trusted Microsoft services," Ontinue said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Tasking flows through SharePoint Online file
SafePal has disclosed that an authorization flaw in an order-tracking plug-in exposed the names, email addresses, shipping addresses, phone numbers, and purchase details of approximately 39,798 customers. The hardware wallet maker said all affected customers were notified individually by email on August 16 from security@safepal.com, with the subject line "[Important] Your SafePal Order
Pokémon Center is notifying customers in the United Kingdom and Germany that it suffered a third-party data breach after hackers stole customer personal and order information from third-party logistics provider CEVA Logistics. While CEVA's systems were compromised in the cyberattack, the exposed records belonged to Pokémon Center customers who submitted orders on the site. The company then shared this information with the logistics provider to fulfill and ship PokemonCenter.com orders. CEVA Logistics is a subsidiary of the CMA CGM Group, the world's third-largest shipping company. The logistics provider operates 1,000 warehouses, handled 15 million shipments last year, and reported $18.3 billion in revenue in 2025. The company recently suffered a cyberattack in which attackers breached its servers between July 29 and August 1, affecting multiple retailers in Europe.
GitHub is down for some users as a widespread outage is causing errors across the website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and several other services. GitHub confirmed the outage at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026, when it said it was investigating reports of performance problems affecting some of its services. The problems quickly spread across several parts of GitHub that developers rely on, including API Requests, Actions, Webhooks, Issues, and Pull Requests. According to GitHub's status page, the company is seeing error rates of around 20% across its web experience and API traffic. GitHub says archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing error rates of approximately 50%. Likewise, authentication-related services are also having problems, with SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync affected by the incident.
Author: Len Noe, Solutions Architect, BeyondTrust Every mature Active Directory environment has a component that quietly holds more power than the people running it usually admit: the Certification Authority (CA). The thing your entire estate has agreed to believe. When it signs a certificate, every machine, service, and authentication flow downstream treats that signature as truth. That is an enormous amount of trust concentrated in one system, and most organizations manage it like a utility installed once and never thought about again. Certighost, tracked as CVE-2026-54121, is a reminder of what happens when that trust is misplaced. Researchers published a working proof-of-concept on July 24, 2026, demonstrating that a low-privileged Active Directory user (holding nothing more than a standard domain account) can coerce an Enterprise CA into issuing a valid authentication certificate for a Domain Controller, then use that certificate to become the Domain Controller.
The French Ministry of the Economy and Finance has disclosed a data breach after an attacker accessed the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) systems and stole data belonging to 678,000 individuals. This incident was discovered after a threat actor using the "ZeroBytes" handle claimed the attack and listed a stolen database for sale on August 12 on the PwnForums hacking forum. "The in-depth investigations conducted since August 12, 2026, have established that, prior to their interruption, these access points had been used to consult and extract data concerning a total of 678,000 individuals and professionals, including tax data such as reference tax income, family quotient, and withholding tax rate, and, for businesses, data such as their company name and SIREN number," the French Finance Ministry said.
On Friday, Microsoft confirmed it has begun working on a security patch for a Defender zero-day vulnerability named "ShieldBreak." A security researcher who uses the "Nightmare Eclipse" handle disclosed this privilege escalation vulnerability after Microsoft released the August 2026 Patch Tuesday security updates. "Microsoft is aware of the reported vulnerability and is actively investigating the validity and potential applicability of these claims," a Microsoft spokesperson told BleepingComputer when asked for a statement regarding the new ShieldBreak zero-day. "Microsoft is committed to investigating security issues and updating impacted products to protect customers as soon as possible." Nightmare Eclipse described ShieldBreak as a bypass for RoguePlanet, another Defender privilege escalation flaw disclosed in June, and shared a ShieldBreak proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that local attackers with limited permissions can use to gain SYSTEM privileges on fully patched Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server systems.
A seller claims 1.7M McDonald’s employee records were stolen from Azure. An 8,000-row sample appears genuine, but its age and full size remain unconfirmed. A seller on a data-trading forum posted an 8,000-row sample this week claiming it came from McDonald’s own Azure tenant, part of a supposed 1.7 million-record employee directory obtained using stolen credentials. Ransomnews’s technical breakdown found the sample holds up as genuine on every test that can be run against it. What it can’t confirm, notably, is exactly how old the data is or whether the full 1.7 million figure is real. “The listing is a straightforward private sale, posted at 4:08 AM forum time under the title “McDonalds 1.7M+ Azure Internal Employee Dump”. The seller, an account called TheHatman, writes that the data was “downloaded directly from Azure Tenant using compromised credentials” and that it contains “employee accounts, service accounts, and other tenant account records”. No price is named. Buyers are invited to make offers.” reads the report published by Ransomnews. “To evidence the claim, the seller attached a free 8,000-record sample. That file is the entire basis for what follows. Ransomnews analysed it offline. We did not access, probe or authenticate against any McDonald’s system, and we have redacted the sample’s download location from the screenshot below because it still resolves to real people’s contact details.” The file’s structure gives away exactly what it is before you even read a single row. Column names like FacsimileTelephoneNumber and PhysicalDeliveryOfficeName aren’t something anyone invents; they’re the exact property names Microsoft’s own PowerShell directory tools return when an administrator exports a user list from Entra ID, the modern name for Azure Active Directory. Whoever produced this file ran a standard Microsoft export command and saved the output, nothing more exotic than that. Every one of the 50 email domains found in the sample is genuinely McDonald’s-controlled, spanning corporate staff, restaurant crew accounts, franchisee logins, and vendor guest access across more than thirty countries. Three rows even carry the tenant’s own built-in Microsoft address, mcdonaldscorp.onmicrosoft.com, something that’s invisible from outside the organization and simply isn’t guessable or scrapeable. Add in 233 rows with the exact kind of garbled text encoding that happens when someone forgets to specify UTF-8 during an export, plus 85 job titles cut off at precisely 30 characters mid-word, the unmistakable fingerprint of a fixed-width HR system field bleeding into the directory, and you get a picture consistent with a real export rather than something assembled from public sources. “The file is broken in the ways real exports are broken. 233 rows contain mangled characters: Königswinter appears as “Königswinter”, München as “München”, and Ukrainian job titles are rendered as unreadable strings of Cyrillic run through the wrong character set. This is what happens when somebody runs Export-Csv without specifying UTF-8 encoding.” continues the report. “It’s a mistake, and it is not the kind of mistake anybody makes on purpose. A fabricated dataset doesn’t come with authentic encoding damage.” One detail actually reaches outside the file entirely. A restaurant entry for “556 Upton” on Upton By-Pass in Wirral, complete with phone number, matches a real, publicly listed McDonald’s location down to the digit. That’s a small anchor, but it’s the kind of anchor fabricated data doesn’t usually survive contact with. What the sample genuinely can’t settle is timing. There isn’t a single date field anywhere in the schema, no creation date, no last login, nothing to age a row by. “We can say with confidence that the data came out of McDonald’s directory. We cannot say from the file alone when it came out.” The best clue available is McDonald’s own market footprint: no Russian records at all, consistent with the company’s 2022 exit, and no Kazakh ones either, which points to sometime in 2023 or later, a wide window rather than a firm date. The 1.7 million headline number also isn’t something 8,000 rows can verify. That sample is under half a percent of the claim, and while nothing in it looks implausible given McDonald’s global workforce size, plausible isn’t the same thing as confirmed. A seller running a volume trade across multiple companies has every incentive to round the number up in the listing title. This McDonald’s post wasn’t an isolated event either. The same account, going by TheHatman, posted nine listings in total over sixteen days, claiming roughly 3.6 million records combined across McDonald’s, Vodafone, Gap, two hotel chains, and four major IT outsourcing firms including Kyndryl and Tata Consultancy Services. Every listing uses an identical 19-column schema and nearly identical wording, the kind of consistency you get from one person running the same export script against whatever tenant they currently hold a working login for, not from someone fabricating nine separate datasets by hand. That pattern points toward something fairly mundane and fairly common: infostealer malware harvesting saved credentials at scale, feeding a resale market that lets one operator walk into tenant after tenant using logins nobody bothered to protect with multi-factor authentication. Reading an entire company directory doesn’t require a sophisticated intrusion; it requires one working account in a tenant that hasn’t restricted user enumeration, which is Entra ID’s default setting unless an administrator has explicitly locked it down. For anyone at McDonald’s or one of the other eight listed companies, the real risk here isn’t account takeover, since there are no passwords or hashes in the sample at all. It’s social engineering: full names, job titles, direct phone numbers, and internal email formats are more than enough to make a fake helpdesk call or a fraudulent invoice sound completely legitimate. Treat unsolicited contact that already knows your role and your location with more suspicion than usual, because that’s precisely the kind of detail this file was built to hand someone. “For individuals named in the data, there is no action that removes the exposure.” concludes the report.”The realistic response is scepticism about unsolicited contact that arrives already knowing your role and your store, and a refusal to act on instructions that arrive by phone or email without out-of-band confirmation.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, McDonald’s)
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