A new Android malware named Manic targeting users in multiple European countries has a fallback mechanism for exfiltrating data through nearby infected devices. The malware has been active since at least February and combines spyware, banking fraud, and remote control capabilities. It targets at least 169 banking, government/eID, payment, crypto wallet, messaging, and authenticator/2FA apps, with users in Ukraine being the primary focus. Mobile security company ThreatFabric analyzed the Manic malware and found that it uses transparent overlays on the numeric keypads of legitimate applications to capture victims' taps and reproduce them through Android Accessibility, allowing the legitimate applications to continue functioning normally. After obtaining Accessibility and notification access permissions, the malware can capture the lock PIN/password, intercept notifications and SMS messages, collect files and location data, monitor the screen, and provide remote control to operators via WebRTC sessions.
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds an MLflow vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a Progress LoadMaster vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-64849 (CVSS score of 9.3), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. CVE-2026-64849 is a critical server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in MLflow, a platform for managing machine-learning workflows. The issue affects MLflow versions before 3.15.0 and a remote attacker can exploit the issue without authentication. The vulnerability allows attackers to make requests from an exposed MLflow server to internal services, including cloud metadata endpoints, potentially exposing temporary cloud credentials. Attackers are actively exploiting CVE-2026-64849 to access cloud metadata services and steal credentials and secrets. Cybersecurity firm watchTowr also observed widespread scanning for exposed MLflow instances just hours after the CVE was assigned on August 17, 2026. “watchTowr Intel is observing in-the-wild exploitation of a critical unauthenticated Server-Side Request Forgery vulnerability in MLflow (CVE-2026-64849), the open-source platform for managing the machine learning and AI development lifecycle, with over 60 million monthly downloads.” watchTowr said in a post on LinkedIn. “Attackers are exploiting the vulnerability to reach cloud metadata services directly, and exfiltrating cloud credentials and secrets. Within hours of the CVE being assigned, Attacker Eye, our global honeypot network, detected attackers indiscriminately scanning for exposed MLflow systems online, capturing attempts against cloud-hosted instances.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
The US charged 17 Iranians over a years-long hacking campaign that stole 31TB from universities, companies and government agencies worldwide. Eight years after the original indictment first went public, US prosecutors just added eight more names to the list. The Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment this week charging 17 members of the Mabna Institute, an Iran-based operation running hacking campaigns since at least 2013 on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other government and university clients. According to DoJ, the group compromised systems at 144 US universities and 178 foreign ones, plus at least 42 US private companies, 11 foreign companies, five federal and state government agencies, and two nongovernmental organizations. They pulled more than 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property out of those systems, along with entire employee email inboxes wherever they had access. “The Mabna Institute stole more than 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property from these universities, as well as the email accounts of employees at the private sector companies, government agencies, and NGOs.” reads the press release published by DoJ. “The defendants conducted many of these intrusions on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), one of several entities within the government of Iran responsible for gathering intelligence, as well as other Iranian government and university clients. Nine of the 17 defendants charged in the S2 indictment were previously charged in a 7-count indictment announced in March 2018. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman.” The hackers targeted more than 100,000 professor accounts worldwide and broke into about 8,000 of them in around 24 countries. They used stolen credentials to access research papers, theses, dissertations and academic journals, which were then sold online. The stolen material was offered through websites such as Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir. Customers could buy academic resources or use compromised professor accounts to access university libraries. The operation turned stolen academic credentials and research into a profitable business. One name on the new charge sheet connects this case to something much more publicly memorable. Behzad Mesri, listed among the newly added defendants, was separately charged years ago with breaking into HBO’s systems, stealing proprietary data, and attempting to extort the company for roughly $6 million in Bitcoin. This indictment ties him and four co-defendants to that same intrusion as part of the broader Mabna Institute operation, connecting a headline-grabbing entertainment industry hack to a much larger state-linked espionage campaign. The financial damage extends well beyond stolen research. According to the indictment, other defendants ran password spray attacks against private companies and at least two government entities, causing victims to spend more than $20 million investigating and cleaning up after the intrusions. ““Today’s charges, which include eight additional defendants, reveal the broader network allegedly behind a sweeping, state-sponsored campaign to steal research and intellectual property from American universities, businesses, and government institutions,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald for the Southern District of New York. “More than eight years after making the original indictment public, these charges make clear that the passage of time will not deter us from identifying and pursuing those who target the United States from abroad. Cyber operations have become a central instrument of national power, and attacks on American and allied institutions carry direct consequences for our security and economic strength. This office and our partners will continue to protect American innovation and pursue accountability for the individuals behind these attacks.”” Five of the newly charged defendants, Mesri, Galekuhi, Kahzadian, Fayaz, and Ballojeh, now carry a combined bounty attached to their names. The State Department’s Rewards for Justice program is offering up to $10 million for information leading to their location, funneled through a Tor-based tip line for anyone willing to share what they know. Given that most of these defendants are almost certainly still in Iran and unlikely to face a US courtroom anytime soon, that reward is really the only lever prosecutors currently have. An indictment isn’t a conviction, and every defendant here remains legally presumed innocent unless proven otherwise in court. But the FBI’s own framing of the case makes the intended message pretty clear regardless of what happens next: eight years between the original charges and this expanded version isn’t hesitation, it’s the department demonstrating that an open case file doesn’t have an expiration date, even when the people on it never set foot on American soil. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Iranians) Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Iranians)
A suspected ransomware affiliate is posing as a ransomware recovery service called "Ransom Busters," contacting victims before the attacks become public and claiming it can provide decryption keys and delete stolen data for a fee. GuidePoint Security's Research and Intelligence Team (GRIT) disclosed this activity after responding to several recent ransomware attacks in which victims received emails from Ransom Busters offering to help recover from the attack. The messages were suspicious because they were sent to victims before the attacks became public, raising questions about how they knew about the cyberattacks in the first place. Ransom Busters claimed it exploited vulnerabilities in administrative panels used by ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations, giving it access to encryption keys and data stolen from victims.
A suspected ransomware affiliate is posing as a ransomware recovery service called "Ransom Busters," contacting victims before the attacks become public and claiming it can provide decryption keys and delete stolen data for a fee. GuidePoint Security's Research and Intelligence Team (GRIT) disclosed this activity after responding to several recent ransomware attacks in which victims received emails from Ransom Busters offering to help recover from the attack. The messages were suspicious because they were sent to victims before the attacks became public, raising questions about how they knew about the cyberattacks in the first place. Ransom Busters claimed it exploited vulnerabilities in administrative panels used by ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations, giving it access to encryption keys and data stolen from victims.
Japanese cloud and data center service provider Sakura Internet disclosed that hackers accessed its sales management system, where customer contract and membership information is stored. In an update today to the initial notification from Monday, the company says the incident may have impacted up to 1,360,563 member accounts. However, as the investigation continues, the exact number of affected accounts remains to be determined. Sakura Internet is a major Japanese digital infrastructure company providing web hosting, VPS, public cloud, data-center, and GPU computing services. It has been selected as a domestic provider for Japan’s Government Cloud program, making it a strategic entity in the country that reduces dependence on foreign hyperscalers. According to the firm’s announcement, hackers accessed its IT system on August 9. The incident was discovered later during the investigation of a separate breach at the Sakura Rental Server service.
U.S. healthcare IT company CareCloud disclosed that the data breach incident it suffered earlier this year has impacted more than 3.7 million individuals. The healthcare technology organization is publicly traded and provides electronic health records, medical billing, practice management, and revenue-cycle services. The company disclosed the incident in March via a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), noting that the attack caused an 8-hour network disruption on its platform and cut access to one of its databases. At the time, the firm said the compromised environment contained patient data, indicating the risk of sensitive medical information being stolen. Following the incident, CareCloud launched an investigation to determine its scope and how many people were potentially impacted.
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)
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said Tuesday that the Medusa ransomware gang has breached more than 500 critical infrastructure organizations in the United States since June 2021. This was revealed in a joint advisory in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). "As of April 2026, Medusa actors have impacted more than 500 victims across multiple critical infrastructure sectors, including Healthcare and Public Health, Defense Industrial Base, Critical Manufacturing, Government Services and Facilities, Information Technology, and Financial Services," they said. "Other victims include organizations in the medical, education, legal, insurance, technology, and manufacturing industries." This is an update to a joint report published in March 2025, which said the Medusa ransomware operation had impacted an estimated over 300 critical infrastructure organizations.
Comcast is promoting WiFi-based motion detection as a part of its new Xfinity Shield home protection platform, allowing routers and wireless devices to detect people moving through a home without cameras or motion sensors. This feature was announced as part of a new Xfinity Shield product offering on Tuesday, a new application suite that combines cybersecurity, physical home monitoring, and family safety features through Xfinity WiFi and the Xfinity app. Part of this new offering is WiFi Shield, which is included at no additional cost for Xfinity Internet customers with compatible gateways. It combines Xfinity's CyberSecure network protection, Family Settings, and WiFi Motion, with Home Watch, Away Watch, and Dark Watch modes used to control when notifications are generated. Comcast is also launching Shield Select for $15 per month, which adds an indoor camera, door/window sensor, cloud video storage, and 24/7 urgent response functionality.
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