The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ordering federal civilian agencies to stop using DeepSeek products and remove them from government systems. The order also covers products from the Chinese AI company's affiliates and third-party products and services built using DeepSeek technology. DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd) develops large language models and offers a chatbot, API services, and models suitable for coding and reasoning tasks. Its AI tools became extremely popular early on, but were but were soon followed by reports of security risks [1, 2, 3, 4] and concerns about the potential for Chinese authorities to access users’ conversations. The DHS is now taking regulatory action to limit the use of DeepSeek and derivatives on critical systems in the United States, and has issued a notice of order for agencies to:
CJIS v6.1 requires agencies to maintain strong authentication, account security, and audit controls while demonstrating ongoing compliance. Specops outlines five practical priorities covering MFA, account management, passwords, logging, and audit readiness.
A Nigerian national was sentenced to eight years in prison for his involvement in a series of spearphishing attacks targeting US tax preparation businesses since 2019. 40-year-old Chukwuemeka Victor Amachukwu (also known as Chukwuemeka Victor Eletuo and So Kwan Leung) has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and wire fraud after being extradited from France to the United States in August 2025. "Chukwuemeka Amachukwu believed he was operating safely offshore when he targeted his victims, but he has now been held to account and now faces a serious sentence for his crimes," said US Attorney Jamie McDonald in a Monday press release. "Amachukwu took part in sophisticated schemes to hack into US businesses, steal and use stolen identity information of victims, and commit fraud. These crimes imposed significant harm on the victims and the public, and so it is only appropriate that the crimes also come with a significant sentence for the defendant."
Microsoft announced that IT administrators can now use quick machine recovery on Windows Server 2025 after installing the October 2026 security update. Quick machine recovery (QMR) lets IT admins fix critical boot failures with targeted Windows Update fixes without physical access to affected systems. When enabled, it boots into the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) and launches the QMR Tool if Windows 11 fails to start because of a configuration change or a new driver. It then sends crash data to Microsoft, which can remotely fix issues by adjusting settings or removing problematic drivers or updates. "With the October 2026 security update, quick machine recovery extends to Windows Server 2025," the company said in a message center update. "Quick machine recovery is designed to help restore devices experiencing widespread boot issues by using the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) to search Windows Update for applicable remediations."
French cloud and hosting provider OVHcloud is warning users that attackers compromised its open-source command-line interface (CLI) tool to distribute information-stealing malware. The attacker hijacked a developer’s GitHub account to gain access to the OVHcloud CLI repository and modify versions 0.11.0 through 0.15.0 of the tool. OVHcloud offers the CLI tool as an alternative for system administrators and developers to manage cloud and hosting services directly from a terminal, including for automating tasks. OVHcloud CEO Octave Klaba disclosed that the company’s CLI repository on GitHub had been compromised, urging users who downloaded the latest version yesterday to update or remove the tool. Klaba said that the compromised release appeared at 14:47 on October 19 and was detected and blocked at 16:21 after a customer reported it.
Ahold Delhaize, one of the world's largest food retail chains, confirmed that last week's cyberattack disrupted services at stores across Europe and the United States. Right before the cyberattack was disclosed, customers couldn't use websites, apps, and customer service platforms at Albert Heijn, Etos, and Gall & Gall stores in the Netherlands, and Delhaize in Belgium, while employees at the Stop & Shop American regional supermarket chain reported having trouble accessing their schedules and pay stubs. When BleepingComputer asked right after the incident whether it also affected both corporate and store systems and whether any devices were encrypted during the attack, an Ahold Delhaize spokesperson redirected us to the company's statement. In a Monday update, Ahold Delhaize said the cybersecurity incident announced last week forced it to take some systems offline, including its brands' websites and apps, causing service issues, although stores remained open to serve customers.
A data breach exposed AfD emails, while an anonymous site published AI summaries of 421,000 messages, raising questions about authenticity and privacy. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) confirmed on October 19 that its hosting provider was hacked in September and that mailboxes were copied. By the time the confirmation reached Bild, a website called hexane.cc had already been online for hours offering an index of what it claims are 421,179 internal party emails. “In September 2026 there was a hacking attack on a hosting provider used by our party.” By then the website hexane.cc had been online for several hours with an index of what it says are 421,179 of the party’s emails. In place of the emails, the site shows summaries written by software, sorted into categories that include racism and antisemitism and graded from Low to Critical. International Cyber Digest (ICD), a cybersecurity news account on X, examined it on 19 October and reported that the index includes Gauland’s mailbox and that the newest message is dated 12 September 2026. According to the summaries ICD relayed, Gauland, the party’s 85-year-old honorary chairman and former co-leader, forwarded a 2018 email about a “Hitler pilgrimage” by a former judge on the party’s internal court in Thuringia.” AfD told told Bild. “A district board member sent a Christmas card with a swastika and the words “Heil Hitler”. Staff at the party’s Berlin headquarters discussed luring a photographer to an event and throwing him out by force, in a thread signed off “hail and victory”. The AfD’s statement gave a limited account of the incident. The party said the attackers copied parts of a few mailboxes, most of which had not been used for years, and did not access the leadership’s current accounts. However, the online index includes messages dated as recently as September 12, 2026, raising questions about the party’s account. The website hexane.cc does not publish the emails themselves. Instead, it provides AI-generated summaries grouped into categories such as racism and antisemitism, with severity ratings from Low to Critical. The site operators have not identified the AI software used to create them. When users try to open a record, the site displays the message “source text not published for this record.” So far, none of the summaries has been linked to an original email that can be verified. That’s an important detail that’s getting lost in the coverage. The summaries describe swastikas, Nazi greetings, Christmas cards bearing Heil Hitler, and a thread at the federal party headquarters signed off with “hail and victory.” If authenticated, some of this material would matter significantly in ongoing court proceedings about whether the party can be banned. But right now all of it is filtered through an anonymous operator’s software, and the original texts remain unpublished. Bild is the only German news outlet confirmed to have examined files from the archive directly, although it reviewed only a very small sample. The files appeared to be genuine party records, including identity documents, invoices, bank statements, membership applications, and regional member lists. They also included the identity card of Markus Frohnmaier, deputy leader of the AfD’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag. Berlin-based security researcher Lilith Wittmann, who exposed a flaw in the CDU’s campaign app in 2021, wrote on X that she believed the leak was genuine and the reported attack method was plausible. The hacker reportedly told the International Cyber Digest account on X that they gained access through “a single unpatched party website” and then reached the mail servers. The AfD has confirmed that its hosting provider was targeted, but the reported entry method has not been independently verified. The archive’s own file names offer another clue: one server is labeled “afd_exfil.” The term “exfil” is commonly used for a system that stages stolen data before attackers transfer it out of a network. The AfD is currently contesting in court its classification as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. Lawmakers in the Bundestag and Thuringia are separately debating whether to seek a formal party ban, which under German law can only come from the Federal Constitutional Court. The leak appeared on October 19, while the Cologne Administrative Court is actively weighing whether the intelligence agency may publicly apply the extremist designation, and two months before the AfD plans to seek the election of one of its leaders as state premier in Saxony-Anhalt. Within two hours of the first posts about the archive on X, some accounts were using it to argue that the AfD should be banned. If authenticated, the most legally relevant emails would be those showing how the party’s national headquarters operates and handles internal disciplinary cases. This is because a ban case focuses on the party as an organization, not on individual members. So far, none of the summaries has been linked to an original email. The website describes itself as an independent archive published in the public interest and claims to have minimized personal data. However, Bild found that the files it reviewed included membership applications and member lists containing full names and home addresses of people whose only apparent connection to the story was their party membership. By the afternoon of October 19, the site’s About, Method, and Support pages were returning server errors, leaving visitors unable to access its own explanations of how the archive was created and managed. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, AfD)
Nikkei Inc. disclosed a new data breach, the third in about a month, that exposed 1.83 million personal information records. The Japanese giant says subsets of the data contained personally identifiable information and other sensitive details, but most records contained no identifying info. The company said that 150,000 records contained at least one of the following data types: full names, email addresses, physical addresses, telephone numbers, and dates of birth. Email addresses appeared in 120,000 records. The remaining 1.68 million records contain no identifiers, the company said, and no credit card information was exposed. Nikkei Inc. is a major Japanese business news and financial information group, owner of Financial Times, the country’s largest business-focused media company. The company employs over 10,100 people and has an annual revenue of $2.5 billion (¥393.8 billion).
Hackers reportedly compromised AOMEI's servers to distribute malware through a built-in promotional feature in its backup software, briefly tampering with configuration files before restoring them to their original state to hide the attacks. The supply chain attacks took place between April and July 2026 and targeted the update and notification systems used by AOMEI Backupper, a Windows application for backing up data, cloning disks, and restoring systems. Researchers at ManageEngine's Threat Analysis Lab (METAL), working with Google's Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant, uncovered the campaign and investigated the attacks. In reports published by Google and ManageEngine, the activity is attributed to a threat actor tracked as UNC7017, who used the compromised infrastructure to distribute a previously unknown malware downloader called CROSSROAD and a backdoor named SHINYROAD.
Attackers exploit Plex2Shell flaws to install crypto miners and proxy software. Admins should update their Plex Media Server. Plex Media Server is designed to make movies, music, and other media available across devices. But when a server is exposed to the internet and runs vulnerable software, it can become an entry point for attackers who have little interest in your film collection. On October 16, 2026, security researcher Zach Main published technical details and proof-of-concept (PoC) code for a vulnerability chain dubbed Plex2Shell. Within a day, researchers had observed attackers using the exploit against an internet-facing honeypot, deploying cryptocurrency-mining malware and proxy software. The incident is a reminder of how quickly a public exploit can be weaponized by threat actors. The chain combines four vulnerabilities in Plex Media Server: CVE-2026-96652, CVE-2026-96654, CVE-2026-96655, and CVE-2026-96656. Together, they can allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable servers without valid credentials, provided the required conditions are met. The code runs with the privileges of the Plex service, giving attackers an opportunity to install additional software and abuse the host. The technical details are available in Main’s original analysis, Plex2Shell. Plex had been notified of the vulnerabilities on July 27 and acknowledged the report on August 4, awarding a bug bounty. The company released fixes in September, before the exploit code became public. The loader does not check the library’s name, executable permissions, digital signature, or symbols. As a result, the library’s ELF constructor can run with the same privileges as the Plex service. “It doesn’t check for a lib prefix, doesn’t require the execute bit, doesn’t verify any signature, and doesn’t look for any specific symbol.” reads the report published by zmain.com. “When dlopen loads a shared object, it runs the ELF’s DT_INIT_ARRAY (constructor functions) before doing any symbol resolution. A .so that only has a constructor and no exported symbols will still execute its code on load. We then trigger a second transcode. The codec directory gets re-enumerated, the .so we wrote in Stage 4 gets loaded, and the constructor runs as uid=1000(plex).” That detail matters because the final stage can exploit how Plex loads shared libraries. The chain uses a setting related to transcoding to influence execution, allowing a specially crafted library to run when Plex loads it. The result can be code execution under the service account, without requiring the attacker to obtain an interactive login first. The first confirmed activity appeared on October 17, when a researcher monitoring a vulnerable Plex honeypot reported seeing exploitation in the wild. “My honeypot mostly saw scanning and generic exploitation attempts. As of this morning (Oct 17th), I finally saw in the wild exploitation.” reports the researcher on BoredHackerBlog. “So by default, I don’t allow outbound traffic from my honeypots but due to how this vuln works, I had to go modify my settings later on so sadly I didn’t get payloads for all the attacks. It’s possible that I have partial data. I haven’t gone through pcaps and I had to modify settings for tcpdump anyway. The attacker could be using slightly modified code & technique too.” The attackers used the publicly available exploit to deploy an XMRig-based cryptocurrency miner. Later that day, the researcher found a second payload named myawesomeproxy, which turns the compromised system into a proxy node and may allow others to use its internet connection. Cryptomining consumes computing resources and electricity, while proxy software creates a different risk. Attackers can route traffic through compromised residential or business connections, potentially using their reputation and IP addresses to reach services or networks that might otherwise block suspicious infrastructure. A Plex server can therefore become more than a source of unwanted costs: it can provide an attacker with a foothold for further activity. Plex released patched versions in September, and administrators should ensure they’re running Plex Media Server 1.43.3.10861 or later. This includes installations running on NAS devices, virtual machines, and Docker containers. Updating the application is the immediate priority, particularly for servers exposed directly to the internet. Administrators should also investigate unexpected child processes launched by Plex, unexplained CPU usage, unfamiliar files in the Plex Codecs directory, and outbound connections to unrecognized IP addresses. The appearance of cryptocurrency miners or proxy processes deserves particular attention. Because attackers can change filenames, infrastructure, and payloads, detection shouldn’t depend on a fixed list of indicators alone. The honeypot findings provide evidence of exploitation, but they don’t establish how many real-world systems have been compromised or identify the operators with certainty. Organizations should treat the activity as a warning to check exposure and patch promptly, rather than assume that every vulnerable server has already been attacked. “I wouldn’t be surprised if threat actors deploy more sophisticated things. Plex may be hosted on residential IP and I think threat actors would love to have residential IP proxy to access corporate VPNs and emails. (edit: see update at the bottom. i do see proxy being deployed now)” the researchers adds. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Plex2Shell )
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