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.
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)
GitLab has released security updates to address a critical vulnerability impacting its Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that, under certain conditions, could allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely modify or delete public projects and user data. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-19478, has been rated Critical by GitLab and assigned a CVSS score of 9.4. Released on
Cybersecurity researchers have traced the continued evolution of the Cavern (aka Cav3rn) command-and-control (C2) framework used by Iranian nation-state hackers in attacks targeting entities in Israel. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky said its ongoing monitoring of the threat activity cluster since December 2025 has led to the discovery of previously unreported components that expand the
MCP servers can expose enterprise secrets through plaintext configuration files, over-permissioned access and prompt injection, often before security teams even know the server is running. As more organizations adopt AI agents into their systems, that exposure can silently become a major gap in MCP server security. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows AI agents to reach the tools and data,
Large DDoS attacks disrupted Threema, causing severe communication outages. Threema On-Prem users were unaffected by the attacks. Threema suffered multiple large-scale DDoS attacks that disrupted its secure messaging service and caused severe communication issues. Organizations using Threema On-Prem were not affected, as their deployments run on their own infrastructure. Threema is a Swiss paid secure messaging service, similar to WhatsApp or Signal, focused heavily on privacy and security. “If the attack originates simultaneously from multiple (and potentially changing) sources, it is referred to as a “Distributed Denial of Service” (DDoS) attack. This makes the attack significantly more difficult to defend against because it is not possible to simply block a single source.” reads the report. “Because sophisticated attackers constantly change their methods, sources, and attack patterns during an attack, a cat-and-mouse game ensues, with both sides continuously reacting to the other’s most recent action.” Users began reporting Threema outages on Tuesday evening. The company initially blamed a network issue at its colocation provider, but later confirmed it was facing a series of DDoS attacks. The attacks caused intermittent disruptions into Wednesday, with users in several countries still reporting problems even after Threema’s status page showed the service as operational. The company said a series of large-scale DDoS attacks also targeted its colocation partner, Nine. Attack patterns kept changing, making mitigation difficult. The service was unavailable for about four hours Tuesday evening, followed by intermittent outages Wednesday morning. Normal operations were restored at 12:23 p.m. CEST. “It is not entirely clear whether Threema was the primary target or whether the attacks were directed at multiple targets. In any case, they continued over an extended period and their patterns were constantly adapted, making them difficult to defend against.” continues the report. “As a result of these attacks, Threema was unavailable on Tuesday between 7:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. CEST. The page providing information on the current system status was initially not updated due to a technical issue unrelated to the attack. We therefore temporarily took it offline until the problem was resolved.” Threema communicated the service disruptions progressively through social media, while Threema Work customers received updates by email. To strengthen its defenses, Threema deployed additional upstream DDoS protection on August 14, filtering malicious traffic before it reached its infrastructure. The company also plans to improve its status page with an incident history and RSS feed, giving users and administrators another way to receive independent service updates. “We will also expand the status page in the coming days. The update will include an incident history and an RSS feed that interested users and Threema Work administrators can subscribe to in order to receive system updates through an independent channel.” concludes the report. “We apologize for any inconvenience caused and appreciate your understanding.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, DDoS) “Business customers using Threema Work were informed via email on Wednesday morning about the unstable service conditions, and account managers provided information on the current situation in response to inquiries.” To avoid similar incidents, the Swiss company has implemented “specialized DDoS protection as an additional measure” to filter attack traffic upstream and reduce the load on its infrastructure. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
Claude is experiencing a major outage, with users reporting login problems and degraded performance across several Anthropic services. The incident began on August 16, 2026, at around 21:58 UTC, and is affecting Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. According to Anthropic’s status page, the company first said it was investigating an issue preventing some users from authenticating to Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. A few minutes later, Anthropic reported a broader service disruption involving degraded performance on Claude.ai and platform.claude.com. For users, the outage can result in problems signing in, Claude failing to load, requests not completing, or other errors when using the affected services. Anthropic’s status page currently classifies Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork as experiencing a major outage. Claude Console and the Claude API are currently listed as operational.
Multiple distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeted the Threema secure messaging service earlier this week, causing severe disruptions to communications. Organizations using Threema On-Prem did not experience any issues because they rely on their own infrastructure. In a post-mortem report on Friday, the end-to-end encrypted instant messaging service said that the attacks were difficult to defend against because the threat actor constantly changed patterns. Threema is a paid messaging application developed by the Swiss technology company of the same name, with a heavy focus on security and privacy. The service relies on its own server infrastructure in various locations in Switzerland and promises “no ads, no profiling, no hidden data analyses.” On Tuesday around 6 PM UTC, users started to report service interruptions. The company responded about an hour later, saying that based on the information available at the time, the cause was “a network outage on our colocation partner’s side.”
Attackers are buying expired domains to exploit their reputation, traffic and DNS history, using them for malware delivery, scams and C2 infrastructure. Every day, roughly 65,000 domain names that once belonged to someone else get re-registered by a new owner. Infoblox Threat Intel calls these dropcatch domains, and in the first half of 2026 they accounted for nearly 20% of all new domain registrations, meaning one in five “new” domains has a prior life. Some end up with legitimate investors or researchers. Others end up with attackers who have figured out that a domain with history is worth more than a blank slate. “These domains can be particularly interesting, even dangerous, because they inherit reputation and sometimes connections from their previous life. For example, a domain that was originally registered 10 years ago, later dropped, and then acquired by someone else may still carry signals associated with its long history.” reads the report published by Infoblox. “Researchers, security products, and reputation-based algorithms may view it more favorably than a genuinely brand-new registration. Threat actors know this and take advantage of it.” Among gTLDs, the average is 50,400 per day, with 15 TLDs accounting for about 92% of all dropcatch activity. .net and .xyz have the highest rates, with nearly 30% of new registrations previously registered, while .com reaches 24.5%. Determining who buys these domains and how they are used remains difficult due to WHOIS privacy, transfers, parking, and auctions. The inherited value isn’t just a better reputation score. Expired domains also come with residual web traffic from old backlinks, email still arriving for the previous owner, cached search results, and in some cases lingering DNS records that point to infrastructure no longer under the original owner’s control. One in every five new domains has all of that already baked in before the new registrant does anything. Infoblox tracked one threat actor it calls Sable Squirrel, which has spent nearly $7 million acquiring expired domains to build a criminal operation spanning illegal sports streaming, gambling promotion, and malware infrastructure. The actor controls more than 10,000 domains and runs streaming platforms under brands like Xoilac, Cakhia, and 90phut that direct Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and Australian users toward betting sites, while a subset of those same streaming domains double as command-and-control servers for malware including Quasar RAT, AsyncRAT, DCRat, and Remcos RAT. Among the expired domains Sable Squirrel has acquired are healthymagination.com, originally a General Electric health initiative, and rezilion.com, a cybersecurity company whose assets were sold to GitLab in 2024. The actor bought the reputation of a defunct infosec firm and pointed it at malware infrastructure — which is either darkly ironic or exactly what you’d do if you understood how security tools evaluate domain age. “For threat actors specifically, the inherited reputation isn’t the only thing valuable about acquiring a dropped domain. They also come with a variety of lingering connections: email intended for the original domain holder (see watchTowr Labs’ The Perils of Expired Domains: We’re Reading Your Email), cached search results, inherited web traffic, and in some cases, a ready-made platform for code injection on already compromised sites.” continues the report. “Lingering DNS records can also create opportunities for threat actors. We previously discussed dangling CNAME attacks in our blog post, Who Knew Domain Hijacking Is So Easy?.” Once Sable Squirrel re-registers a domain, it moves fast: 24% go live the same day, 76% within seven days, 94% within two weeks. The whole point is to start capturing traffic before security systems have updated their assessments. Infoblox is also tracking three scavenger actors, Stuffy Squirrel, Shady Squirrel, and Swiping Squirrel, that operate differently: rather than buying domains wholesale for a planned operation, they acquire expired domains that were previously compromised by other attackers and simply inherit the existing infection traffic. Shady Squirrel, assessed to be Russian-speaking and active since at least July 2023, feeds that traffic to SocGholish and tech support scam networks. SocGholish reportedly regained access to thousands of compromised sites by teaming up with Shady Squirrel days after its own infrastructure was disrupted by law enforcement. The practical lesson for defenders is uncomfortable: domain age and reputation are inputs worth questioning, not trusting, because an old domain in new hands is only as trustworthy as whoever currently holds it. “This is just one story of how threat actors use dropcatch domains to further their schemes. We’ll cover many more in the next two parts of this research: Part 2, $7 Million in Expired Domains Fuel a Streaming Empire with a Malware Secret, where we examine Sable Squirrel, a threat actor that has spent millions of dollars acquiring dropped domains, and Part 3, Dropcatch Scavengers: Expired Malicious Domains Become Cash Cows, where we explore actors that scavenge expired malicious domains and inherit traffic from previously compromised websites.” concludes the report. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Expired domains)
Confirm this action.
Leaving now will discard your changes.