U.S. cybersecurity agencies warn that threat actors are using AI-generated scripts to exploit Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in U.S. critical infrastructure. PLCs are industrial computers used to automate and control machinery and physical processes in factories and other critical infrastructure. The NSA, CISA, FBI, Department of Energy, and Environmental Protection Agency issued the joint advisory Wednesday, saying the attacks are ongoing. "This advisory relates to an active threat to Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs)," reads the advisory. "However, ongoing PLC targeting activity is broader than Siemens PLCs. All PLC owners and operators should apply relevant mitigations to reduce the risk to their devices and systems." The critical infrastructure sectors most targeted include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater Systems, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities. The agencies also note that Siemens S7 PLCs are used in the Defense Industrial Base, which could also be targeted.
Huntress observed a 155x increase in password spraying attacks in H1 2026, including a campaign that generated more than 81 million login attempts in two weeks. The attacks exploited legacy authentication and gaps in MFA policies that left some login flows unprotected.
Over 50,000 exposed Stripe API keys show how leaked secrets can enable fraud, data access and account abuse within hours. Ransomnews researchers have documented a large-scale leak of Stripe merchant API keys found exposed in public code repositories, GitHub Actions logs, and misconfigured web servers, with over 50,000 unique keys identified in total. The research is practical rather than theoretical: the team tested a sample of the keys, found a meaningful portion still active, and documented exactly how quickly a fraudster could exploit them. The answer is fast. “A dataset published on a data-trading forum on 18 August 2026 contains live Stripe API keys for 659 merchant accounts, along with roughly 35 GB of customer and payment data pulled from them.” reads the report published by Ransomnews. “Ransomnews analysed the files offline and reported the exposure to Stripe before publishing. Stripe itself was not compromised. The keys belong to merchants.” Researchers said that after finding an active Stripe API key, they were able to access a merchant’s customer list, create a fraudulent payment link and make a $1 test charge within 17 hours. The key alone was enough to perform these actions, highlighting the risks of exposed credentials and insufficient API protections. The operations a live Stripe secret key unlocks are extensive: listing customers and their stored payment methods, creating charges and payment intents, issuing refunds to attacker-controlled accounts, modifying webhook endpoints to intercept future payment notifications, and in some cases accessing connected accounts if the merchant had enabled Stripe Connect. A secret key is not a partial credential. It’s full API access. The sources of the leaked keys are unsurprising to anyone who has done developer security work. GitHub repositories — both public and accidentally made public, account for the largest share, typically through hardcoded keys in configuration files, .env files committed without a corresponding .gitignore entry, or keys left in code comments. GitHub Actions build logs are the second major source: when a workflow prints environment variables for debugging, any secret that wasn’t properly masked ends up in a log that anyone with repository access can read. Misconfigured web servers are another major source of exposed Stripe API keys. Researchers found over 3,000 servers revealing Stripe-related strings, with about 12% containing keys that worked against the Stripe API. The source of the 659 exposed merchant keys is unclear, but likely includes infostealer logs, public repositories, exposed environment files and misconfigured backups. The collector’s real advantage was systematically validating the keys, accessing each account and organizing the stolen data. “The dataset doesn’t say, and we are not going to guess at a single source for 659 separate merchants. The realistic candidates are the ordinary ones: secret keys sitting in infostealer logs lifted from developer machines, keys committed to public repositories, keys left in exposed environment files, keys pulled out of misconfigured backups. Stripe’s own documentation says the company scans for exactly this, and describes finding merchant keys on repositories and package registries.” concludes the report. “What the collector added was patience. Gathering keys is common. Validating several hundred of them, then systematically walking the API for each account and archiving the results into a consistent folder structure, is a different level of effort.” Stripe does provide automatic secret scanning through GitHub’s partner program, which flags Stripe keys found in public repositories and can trigger automatic revocation when a merchant opts in. The problem is that opt-in rate is low, the scanning doesn’t cover private repositories, and it has no coverage over build logs, web server misconfigurations, or other platforms where keys surface. Ransomnews also found that some merchants had rotated their keys after a GitHub exposure but left the old keys active, possibly because Stripe doesn’t revoke keys on rotation unless you explicitly delete the old one. The remediation is not complicated. Audit your current Stripe keys against your version control history to see if any have ever been committed. Rotate any key that has touched a public repository, a build log, or a configuration file that wasn’t explicitly protected. Enable Stripe’s restricted keys for any integration that doesn’t need full account access — a webhook handler doesn’t need the ability to create charges. And enable Stripe Radar rules to flag unusual charge patterns that might indicate someone else is using your key before you’ve noticed it’s gone. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, data leak)
Cybersecurity researchers at Hunt.io have disclosed details of a campaign that they say compromised more than 14,530 Dahua devices between June 17 and July 22, 2026, using credential attacks, two authentication-bypass flaws, and a peer-to-peer (P2P) relay technique. The activity, codenamed Operation CameraSwarm, was reconstructed from a 407 MB exposed working directory containing 2,616 files
Most email defenses still do the job they did a decade ago. Scan the message, look for something malicious, block it. That worked when the danger sat in the payload, a bad link or an attachment. It stopped working when the danger moved into the message's intent, and it is failing now that the sender is no longer a person. From Bad Content to Bad Intent to AI on Both Sides Phishing 1.0 was bad
Two critical vulnerabilities impacting MLflow, an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform, and FUXA, an open-source, web-based SCADA / HMI software built for operational technology (OT) and industrial automation, are witnessing malicious scanning and exploitation efforts. According to independent reports from watchTowr and VulnCheck, the vulnerabilities in question are as follows -
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.
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