Google has expanded its Cloud Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) with a new top-tier reward for high-impact architectural security flaws. Starting this month, researchers can earn $250,000 for Root-in-Cloud bugs, including tenant-isolation bypasses and complex cross-service logic flaws that let attackers gain full administrative control over arbitrary Google Cloud organizations. "To earn this premier reward, you must demonstrate full administrative control, the equivalent of 'roles/owner' or complete IAM control, over arbitrary Google Cloud organizations or projects with no prior access or special project setup," said Chris Betz, Google Cloud's Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). "Additionally, valid vulnerability reports demonstrating remote code execution (RCE) in underlying Google production infrastructure (Borg) or achieving root-in-prod will automatically be evaluated by the Google Cloud VRP panel for root-in-cloud eligibility."
Apple warns German Bundestag lawmakers of mercenary spyware attacks; BSI urges victims to assume compromise. The German government is warning politicians and public figures that they were targeted by government-backed spyware. The warning follows Apple’s notifications, which began reaching iPhones on October 29, according to the federal cybersecurity office, the BSI. The BSI says members of the Bundestag and other notable people got an Apple alert about an attack with so-called mercenary spyware. “The Federal Office for Information Security ( BSI ) has learned that several members of the German Bundestag and other public figures have received a threat notification from Apple on their devices since October 29, 2026. In the notification, Apple states that it has detected an attack using so-called mercenary spyware . This is commercially developed, advanced spyware that has frequently been used in the past by state actors against specific, targeted individuals.” reads the notice issued by BSI. “The BSI (Federal Office for Information Security) is unaware whether these notifications indicate actual compromises or merely signal attempted attacks.y “ “Germany’s digital minister, Karsten Wildberger, has confirmed that members of the Bundestag and the federal government received warnings from Apple that their iPhones may have been targeted by spyware.” states the report. Digital minister Karsten Wildberger confirmed it on ARD’s Bericht aus Berlin on Sunday, saying there had been “a notification from Apple that certain devices may have been compromised” and that members of both the Bundestag and the federal government were among those warned. Digital minister said the BSI had reacted super quickly and written to everyone affected. Wildberger didn’t say how many politicians got the alerts or who they are. “According to Wildberger, the BSI advised those affected to assume – as a precaution – that their device may have been compromised, because the alerts do not show whether an attack succeeded.” states Euronews. The German government has not revealed who was targeted. Government spokesperson Stefan Kornelius told the Financial Times that officials are taking the incident and Apple’s warning very seriously. However, he did not say which government members received the alerts or whether Chancellor Friedrich Merz was among them. Apple has not commented on the reports, according to Euronews. The Apple warning does not provide all the answers. Apple does not identify the governments behind these attacks, nor does it confirm whether a device was actually infected. Germany’s cybersecurity agency, the BSI, also says it is unclear whether the alerts indicate successful infections or only attempted attacks. Apple says mercenary spyware is far more advanced than common cybercrime tools and that most users will never be targeted. This commercial surveillance software is often used on behalf of governments to spy on specific individuals. It can infect devices through so-called zero-click attacks, which do not require victims to open a message or click a link. In most cases, victims do not notice anything unusual. Once a phone is compromised, the BSI says, attackers can read messages, including in encrypted apps, and access calls, contacts, calendars and location. They can also turn on the camera and microphone. That’s the whole phone, not a corner of it. For recipients the BSI’s advice is concrete. Update the operating system immediately, unless you plan a forensic analysis, and consider turning on Lockdown Mode, which makes new attacks harder but doesn’t remove an existing infection. Lockdown Mode limits some features such as message attachments, link previews and FaceTime calls from unknown people, while calls and plain text messages keep working. If the risk looks high, the BSI suggests replacing the device. That means resetting every account used on it and, to make repeat attacks harder, changing the phone number. Then set a new device passcode, change the passwords of your Apple account and email, and make sure two-factor authentication is on. The BSI recommends turning on Signal’s registration lock and WhatsApp’s two-step verification, with a new PIN for each. It also advises removing any linked devices you don’t recognize. Anyone who received a warning can email the BSI Service Center at service-center@bsi.bund.de. This helps the agency work out how many people may be affected. The agency says a genuine Apple warning never asks you to click links, open files, install apps or profiles, or share passwords and codes. These warnings appear on the lock screen, in settings, by email and at the top of account.apple.com after you sign in. The warnings weren’t limited to Germany. Beirut-based filmmaker Radwan Mortada said on X that Apple had warned him about another attack against his device. He had already been targeted by spyware in 2021. أمس، تلقيتُ إشعاراً أمنياً من شركة Apple تحذّرني فيه من تعرّض هاتفي الآيفون لهجوم تجسّسي موجّه، باستخدام برمجيات متطوّرة من النوع الذي تطوّره شركات مثل NSO Group، المعروفة ببرنامج «بيغاسوس». ولعلّ أخطر ما ورد في التحذير تأكيد Apple أنّ هذا النوع من الهجمات يستهدف أشخاصاً محدّدين… pic.twitter.com/2jFq6F3cvD — رُضوان (@radwanmortada) October 30, 2026 According to his notice, Apple sent the latest warnings to users in 99 countries. Nobody has publicly identified the attackers or the government that may have ordered the attacks. The BSI warned German lawmakers that Apple threat notifications may indicate compromised devices and urged recipients to contact the agency and take protective measures. “Those affected who have received a corresponding warning message from Apple should therefore assume that their device may have been compromised.” BSI concludes. “In a letter dated October 30, 2026, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) alerted members of the German Bundestag to the threat and informed them of necessary measures. Affected individuals were urged to contact the BSI directly .” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Bundestag)
BTCPay Server, a self-hosted, open-source cryptocurrency payment processor, has urged users to install the latest version of its software in response to reports of Bitcoin and Litecoin being stolen from hot wallets on instances running older versions. "Our investigation found that these attacks targeted servers running BTCPay Server 2.4.1 (released on 23 July 2026) or earlier," BTCPay Server
Synology is urging customers to update the DiskStation Manager (DSM) software powering its Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices following ransomware attacks. The Taiwanese vendor said it observed threat actors exploiting a vulnerability patched in December 2024 to target devices running outdated versions of DSM. "These attacks aim to encrypt data and extort ransom," it said in a statement
Attackers remotely changed the settings on refrigeration controls at supermarkets in Belgium, Sweden, Estonia and other European countries overnight into Monday, November 2, warming fridges and freezers. No chain reported more than several dozen affected stores, and some had to throw away chilled and frozen food or take it off the shelf. Danfoss, a Danish maker of refrigeration controls,&nbsp
Unit 42 details recent threat intelligence, highlighting cyberespionage, financial extortion, and the rapid adoption of AI across offensive workflows. The post Unit 42 Threat Intelligence Highlights - Nov. 2, 2026 appeared first on Unit 42.
Financial technology company Abrigo has restored its Sageworks risk management application, except for borrower-facing capabilities, following an outage triggered by "irregular activity" in its environment. On October 30, the company began emergency maintenance and took the Sageworks application offline to investigate suspicious activity detected earlier that day, with the outage continuing through the weekend. Abrigo provides cloud-based software and analytics solutions for community banks and credit unions across the United States. According to the company, it serves more than 2,400 entities. Its Sageworks product is a software platform that helps lenders process loan applications, analyze borrowers’ finances, assess creditworthiness, and monitor loan portfolios. Due to its nature, Sageworks handles sensitive information, including banking customer details.
VOLTA is an AI-powered infostealer that steals personal data, then uses LLMs to assess victims’ value and rank targets for attackers. Cisco Talos has analyzed a new Windows infostealer called VOLTA, which calls itself VOLTA-AUTODOXER. It steals the usual data, then hands the loot to a large language model that ranks what the victim is worth. Ryan Fetterman laid it out in a Talos report, after the malware turned up through the CAIRN research effort. “There is a new idea in the cybercrime world — cast a wide net, steal everything, and let AI sort out the specifics. A new malware self-named “VOLTA-AUTODOXER,” surfaced through the CAIRN research effort, is a self-deleting Windows infostealer that augments its post-theft workflow with an LLM-powered victim-profiling stage.” reads the report published by Talos. The malware deletes itself after running and does not use servers controlled by the attacker. Instead, it uses third-party systems to carry out its activities. The malicious code supports data-stealing features are advanced. It collects browser passwords, cookies and saved payment card details from Chromium browsers, as well as data from Firefox, Thunderbird and Outlook. It also steals Slack workspace information and login sessions from Discord, Telegram, Steam, Battle.net and Roblox. The malware also collects Microsoft OAuth tokens, SSH keys, cloud service credentials, screenshots and all saved Wi-Fi passwords. For crypto wallets, it tries to crack the wallet password directly on the infected device and saves the results in its report. To steal some browser tokens, it must bypass Chrome’s App-Bound Encryption. But VOLTA goes further. It also builds a detailed profile of the victim. This includes their location and home address, employer and company domain, estimated year of birth, the last four digits of payment cards, Slack workspaces and information about who created documents. It also looks for signs of iPhone backups and checks the current value of the victim’s Roblox account. “After harvesting the standard stealer haul, including browser passwords; cookies; payment cards; cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases; Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions; Microsoft OAuth tokens; SSH and cloud-provider keys; Wi-Fi profiles; and screenshots, VOLTA builds a structured evidence bundle about the person behind the machine.” states the report. It uses the victim’s own logged-in sessions to fill the gaps. It searches Gmail for receipts from Amazon, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Walmart and PayPal to confirm a home address, pulls order histories from Uber Eats and DoorDash, and adds detail to the victim’s Discord profile. Even a takeout history can now count as evidence. The bundle goes to OpenRouter, a routing service for AI models, with a system prompt that tells the model to act as a forensic intelligence analyst drafting a target assessment. “The required output includes a section titled “WHAT THEY’RE WORTH” with valuables ranked by monetization with a low/medium/high tier, and a section on “THEIR OPSEC” containing an assessment of the victim’s security posture and password hygiene.” states the report. “The model is the operator’s triage analyst; it turns a raw credential log into a prioritized and citation-backed dossier of the victim and their monetizable assets.” It also needs a section called “THEIR OPSEC”, rating the victim’s security habits and password hygiene. In short, it’s a performance review for the person it just robbed. The prompt asks for something agents do well: connecting scattered facts. It pushes the model to link names, addresses or universities to patterns in the victim’s passwords. The model isn’t hunting for new data, only stretching what the malware already took. The operator wants a short, blunt assessment with a trail of citations. By default VOLTA calls Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6. If the model refuses, which VOLTA spots by scanning replies for phrases like “I can’t” or “I’m not able”, it moves on to Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 and then Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash. A low temperature setting of 0.2 keeps the output consistent. The requests are hand-built JSON with no software kit, and the malware still runs without the AI stage if no API key is present. Talos sees the fallback system as evidence that the malware’s author expected security protections and designed ways to bypass them. The AI analysis runs directly on the victim’s computer, using their own internet connection, before any data is sent out. The malware creates a file called Identity_Report.txt, receives the AI’s response in AI_Analysis.txt, and sends both files together in a ZIP archive called volta_dox.zip. The stolen data can be sent to the attacker in up to three stages. The first archive, volta_log.zip, contains the information collected by the malware. The second, volta_dox.zip, contains the AI analysis. A third archive, volta_doxnet.zip, is created if the malware finds additional network information. The attacker receives everything through a Telegram channel. The malware also has six configurable fields that can be changed when it is built. This suggests that its author may offer a builder service, allowing customers to create their own customised versions. The credentials stored in these fields are encrypted, but the encryption is weak because the key is stored inside the malware itself. Anyone who analyses the file can recover them. If VOLTA is sold as a commercial product, its AI feature could allow even inexperienced criminals to identify valuable victims and receive detailed, ranked profiles directly through Telegram. For defense, Talos suggests an application control policy that restricts which processes can launch Chrome with the –headless flag, which would block the App-Bound Encryption bypass. At minimum, alert when Chrome starts with –headless from any process outside a known developer set. Storing credentials in hardware-backed stores also helps. If you’re compromised, the main program may have deleted itself, but try to keep %APPDATA%\volta_debug.txt. It’s a timestamped log of what was collected and whether the AI call worked. Revoke any exposed tokens and change passwords. If a wallet’s seed phrase sat in plaintext on disk, treat the wallet as fully compromised and move the funds to a new wallet whose seed was generated on an air-gapped device. “VOLTA is a mature stealer with a late-stage AI layer added for one purpose: relieving the operator of analytical work. The axis of AI improvement here is not speed or scale but effort displacement; the same logic visible in CLOSEDQUORUM, though applied to a different phase.” concludes the post. “These implants reflect the same underlying logic: Identify the step that requires the most sustained human attention and replace it with a model call. The question for defenders is not whether this pattern will appear elsewhere, but which phase it touches next.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, malware)
A cyberattack on refrigeration systems has disrupted stores run by multiple supermarket chains across several European countries after hackers remotely changed temperature settings on freezers and cooling systems. In some cases, hackers shut down refrigerators or activated defrosting systems, causing temperatures to rise, resulting in significant product losses and forcing store managers to intervene early in the morning. Refrigeration failures were identified at dozens of supermarkets, but it is unclear whether they were hit in a coordinated attack or targeted individually. More than 115 stores in Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Estonia have been affected. Spokespersons for multiple chains confirmed the issues in statements for BleepingComputer. Supermarket chains that acknowledged refrigeration issues include:
Microsoft has resolved a known issue that prevented some users from activating the Smart App Control security feature after installing the October 2026 KB5127648 Windows 11 security update. Smart App Control uses Microsoft's code integrity features and app intelligence services, and it works alongside SmartScreen and Microsoft Defender to block potentially harmful apps or binaries. As the company explained when it acknowledged the issue last month, the Smart App Control option is grayed out and cannot be toggled on affected devices running Windows 11 24H2 and later. "After installing this update, some devices might be unable to turn on Smart App Control in the Windows Security app if it has been turned off. On affected devices, the option to turn on Smart App Control might be grayed out," Microsoft said in the KB5127648 advisory. "Devices where Smart App Control is already turned on are not affected and remain protected."
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