Medical technology company Boston Scientific has been targeted in a cyberattack that disrupted some of its IT systems, causing operational disruptions globally. The company detected the incident on August 25 and says in an announcement today that it caused a network outage and "impacted access to certain operating systems and business applications, including the ability to process and ship customer orders." After identifying the intrusion, Boston Scientific activated its incident response procedures and contracted external cybersecurity experts to investigate the impact and help with containment efforts. The company said it does not yet know when all affected systems will be restored. “The incident has caused, and is expected to continue to cause, disruptions and limitations of access to certain of the Company’s information systems and business applications that support aspects of the Company’s operations, including the ability to process and ship customer orders,” Boston Scientific states.
Snowflake is ending password authentication for legacy service accounts, forcing organizations to migrate them to passwordless methods. Token Security explains why the harder challenge is identifying what uses each account, who owns it, and how much access it still needs.
Attackers are actively exploiting a critical-severity vulnerability in the Gitea self-hosted Git service, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Like cloud-hosted GitHub or GitLab SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms, Gitea provides a full suite of DevOps tools, but it is designed to be used as a self-hosted software development platform. Tracked as CVE-2026-60004 and reported by Salesforce security researcher Shai Rod, this code injection security flaw allows an authenticated user with repository write access to repositories hosted on vulnerable servers to execute arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the Gitea service account by submitting malicious patches via the diffpatch API endpoint. However, default-configured Gitea instances have self-registration enabled, allowing unauthenticated attackers to register an account, create a new repository, and trigger the vulnerability without prior credentials.
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Gitea flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added an Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle Weblogic Server Proxy Plug-in flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-60004 (CVSS score of 9,8), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. Gitea is an open-source platform for hosting and managing Git repositories. Think of it as a self-hosted alternative to GitHub or GitLab. CVE-2026-60004 is a critical remote code execution flaw that allows an attacker with write access to a repository to execute arbitrary shell commands as the Gitea service user. The flaw affects Gitea versions from 1.17 and was fixed in 1.27.1. The vulnerable diffpatch API can be abused to plant and execute a malicious Git hook. Because Gitea enables open registration by default, an unauthenticated attacker can create an account, create a repository, and exploit the flaw without existing credentials. A reported attack used the vulnerability to deploy a cryptocurrency-miner-like payload after an exposed Gitea instance allowed open registration and anonymous access to its web interface. According to Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, FCEB agencies have to address the identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect their networks against attacks exploiting the flaws in the catalog. Experts also recommend that private organizations review the Catalog and address the vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. CISA orders federal agencies to fix the flaw by August 28, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
88 ID-verification breaches exposed billions of records, highlighting the growing risks of collecting sensitive identity and biometric data. A new report from Mysterium VPN compiles 88 documented incidents since 2011 where data collected specifically to verify someone’s identity or age got breached, exposed, or sold. The confirmed and researcher-verified total sits at 2.15 billion records, with attacker and seller claims piling another 4.54 billion on top of that. The most uncomfortable number in the whole dataset isn’t the total record count, it’s how much of it can’t be fixed after the fact. In 41 of the 88 incidents, what actually leaked included the source documents themselves: ID scans, verification selfies, fingerprints, full biometric templates. A password gets reset in thirty seconds. A face doesn’t. The timing makes the report especially concerning. Of the 88 incidents, 37, or 42%, happened between January 2024 and August 2026, when mandatory identity and age checks were spreading quickly around the world. The message is simple: the systems that collect your ID can be breached just like any other online service. “The pattern of this era is specific: the wall you are forced to hand your ID to is exactly as breachable as everything else on the internet.” reads the report. Some recent cases are particularly worrying. The Tea app, created as a women-only safety platform, exposed verification selfies through an open storage bucket, and the images later appeared on 4chan. Discord users who challenged age-verification decisions also had around 70,000 government IDs exposed through a third-party support provider, even as Discord continued expanding age checks. What makes this particularly damning is who’s actually running the verification layer for the internet’s biggest platforms. AU10TIX, which verifies identity for TikTok, Uber, and X, left admin credentials exposed for over a year. Sumsub disclosed a support-system intrusion that went undetected for 18 months. Persona, which handles age verification for Discord and Roblox, exposed its own frontend configuration. “In 41 of the 88 incidents, what leaked included the actual documents: ID scans, verification selfies, fingerprints, biometric templates. Unlike a password, none of that can be changed.” states the report. “Every major identity-verification vendor from the current era — AU10TIX, IDMerit, Sumsub, Persona, inVOID — has appeared in this timeline. The companies the internet now relies on to hold everyone’s identity documents safely haven’t demonstrated they can do it.” Governments haven’t fared any better with their own centralized registries. Argentina’s national identity system leaked 45 million records including ID scans and selfies. France’s ANTS, the agency that literally issues French identity documents, confirmed 11.7 million people affected in a 2026 breach. India’s Aadhaar system, Thailand’s visitor database, the Philippines’ voter rolls, Brazil’s tax registry, the pattern repeats at country scale roughly as often as it does at startup scale. The report isn’t blaming one company or one mistake. Its main point is that the growing use of ID and age checks is creating more opportunities for sensitive data to be exposed. Every new law that requires ID checks, every platform that adds age verification, and every company that stores identity data creates another valuable target. Putting permanent and highly sensitive information into systems with different levels of security creates a risk that’s hard to ignore. This doesn’t mean ID and age verification have no value. They can serve legitimate purposes. But companies deciding whether to build or outsource these systems should study this history carefully. Relying on a “reputable” third-party provider clearly isn’t enough. “The timeline makes something visible that individual breach reports obscure: this isn’t a series of unrelated failures. It’s one failure mode, repeated across 88 incidents, fifteen years, and every type of organization that has ever decided to collect this category of data.” concludes the report. “What varies is the victim. Sometimes, it’s a startup with inadequate security. Sometimes, it’s a national government that built a country-scale identity registry and watched it walk out the door. Sometimes, it’s a verification vendor that became the single point of failure for a dozen companies that outsourced their compliance obligations to them. “ Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, ID Verification Breaches)
INTERPOL’s Operation Jackal IV made 58 arrests and exposed global networks laundering money from scams, fraud and sextortion. INTERPOL announced that Operation Jackal IV, running from November 2025 to June 2026, led to 58 arrests and identified 263 suspects tied to West African organized crime networks, groups like Black Axe that are responsible for a huge share of the world’s romance scams, crypto fraud, and business email compromise (BEC) schemes. “Operation Jackal IV (November 2025 – June 2026) aimed to disrupt money laundering, identify high-value targets, seize assets, and support arrests and prosecution.” Interpol announced. “The operation, which brought together 22 countries from six continents, is a response to the escalating global threat posed by West African criminal networks – such as the Black Axe and other similar groups. These groups are responsible for a significant share of the world’s cyber-enabled financial fraud, typically through romance scams, cryptocurrency and investment scams or business email compromise fraud, as well as other serious and violent crimes.” The goal wasn’t to chase individual scammers. Investigators followed the money behind the scams: shell companies, mule accounts and criminal services that help move and hide stolen funds. Tomonobu Kaya of INTERPOL’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre explained the approach: By following illicit financial flows across borders, we are attacking the very lifeblood of organized crime. Argentina turned up one of the operation’s biggest finds. Investigators identified 196 individuals connected to a crime-as-a-service network suspected of supplying website domains and laundering support specifically for West African criminal groups, resulting in 17 arrests. INTERPOL sent an Operational Support Team to help analyze seized data and map out the wider network of suspects, the kind of cross-border analytical work that individual national police forces usually can’t pull off on their own. South African authorities raided seven locations in Johannesburg linked to a group running romance and investment scams against retirees in English-speaking countries. The syndicate assigned members to specific roles, such as “conversion” and “retention” agents. The operation led to 39 arrests, $2.67 million seized and 257 bank accounts frozen, the largest number of arrests in the operation. Italy’s case shows how much damage a single laundering account can absorb. One individual was tied to a pan-European laundering network moving money through shell companies and remittance services, and investigators traced €845,000 laundered through a single account across 560 separate transactions using 20 different financial instruments. That’s not a careless operator; that’s someone who understood exactly how to fragment a large sum into a pattern designed to look unremarkable at every individual step. Romania’s case was the biggest by dollar value, and arguably the most brutal in its simplicity. A call center ran a fake investment scheme promising big returns on stocks and crypto, funneling victims’ money into wallets the operators controlled, and by the time authorities dismantled it, the estimated theft and laundering total had climbed to around €143 million globally. Eleven arrests and roughly €379,000 in cash and crypto seized, plus six properties and several luxury watches, is a real result, but it’s a fraction of what actually got stolen. “Beyond individual cases, Operation Jackal IV also enabled the analysis of critical and emerging trends, including a rise in West African organized crime groups using sextortion to target minors, with victims as young as 14. Offenders typically contact minors via social media, build trust and coerce them into sharing explicit images or videos.” concludes INTERPOL. “They then threaten to distribute this material to the victim’s contacts unless a ransom is paid.” The report’s darkest finding sits outside any single country’s arrest count. INTERPOL flagged a rising trend of these same criminal networks using sextortion against minors as young as 14, building trust through social media before coercing victims into sharing explicit images and then threatening to distribute that material unless a ransom gets paid. Some of these groups were even observed buying crime-as-a-service support through the dark web specifically to outsource pieces of that operation, treating exploitation infrastructure as just another service line alongside laundering and fraud. That’s the uncomfortable throughline connecting every case here: these aren’t scattered opportunists, they’re networks running organized business models with specialized roles, outsourced services, and financial engineering sophisticated enough to move hundreds of millions across borders. Twenty-two countries coordinating for eight months produced real numbers, real arrests, real frozen accounts. It also produced a fairly clear picture of how much more organized this side of cybercrime has become, and how much further there is to go. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Operation Jackal)
An eight-month INTERPOL operation targeting West African organized crime groups has led to arrests of 58 people and the identification of 263 suspects. "The operation, which brought together 22 countries from six continents, is a response to the escalating global threat posed by West African criminal networks – such as the Black Axe and other similar groups," INTERPOL said. "These groups are
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform built to strip Apple's Activation Lock from stolen devices, using rented AI voice agents that call theft victims posing as Apple Support and ask for their device passcode. SOCRadar Threat Research Unit (STRU) said the platform, which it tracks as AnonyMousKIT, is credit-metered and drives lures across
A newly uncovered phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform called AnonyMousKIT automates the retrieval of codes used to unlock stolen Apple devices and disable the Activation Lock feature. The illegal service has been active since early 2024 and is powering a structured ecosystem that sells stolen iPhones, harvests Apple IDs, accesses iCloud backups, and Keychain credentials. Researchers at threat intelligence platform SOCRadar took advantage of the platform operator's use of bare relative paths to gather information on how the service works, its operators, and infrastructure. SOCRadar found that AnonyMousKIT is connected to 506 domains and is fueling a sprawling business with 168 storefront brands acting as resellers. The researchers recovered records of 200 calls made to victims between August 2025 and May 2026, using 55 distinct interaction transcripts handled by a voice AI agent operating under five personas.
Uber faces an €825M GDPR fine for automatically suspending drivers without human review, highlighting the risks of AI decisions affecting workers. The Dutch Data Protection Authority handed Uber its largest privacy fine yet, and this one isn’t about data transfers or cookie consent. The regulator imposed an 825 million euro penalty, roughly $964 million, over Uber’s use of fully automated software to suspend driver accounts, sometimes permanently, with no human ever reviewing whether the system got it right. The violation is clear under EU law. The GDPR limits fully automated decisions when they can significantly affect a person’s life. An algorithm that can take away someone’s ability to earn a living, without any human review, falls directly into this category. The regulator also found that Uber failed to properly tell drivers when automated systems made these decisions, which the GDPR requires companies to disclose. “The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), the Dutch data protection authority, imposes a fine of 824,990,000 euros on Uber. The reason for this is that the AP has ruled that Uber made fully automated decisions about drivers. In case of suspicions of fraud or customer reviews that were too low, drivers’ accounts were automatically temporarily deactivated or, in case of persistent low customer reviews, permanently deactivated. As a result, their income was lost via Uber during the deactivation.” reads the statement published by the Dutch data protection authority. “According to the AP, Uber has violated the prohibition of fully automated decision-making under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The AP also found that Uber did not sufficiently inform drivers about automatic decision-making. Uber has now stopped the violations.” The fine covers Uber’s practices from 2018 to 2022, so it concerns systems the company has already discontinued. Uber highlighted this point in its response, arguing that the regulator examined old policies rather than practices still in use today. “Uber used software to track drivers’ (driving) behaviour and to track customer reviews. If that software detected a suspicion of fraud or customer reviews were too low, the accounts of the drivers concerned were automatically deactivated.” continues the Dutch authority. “There was no human assessment here. This occurred between 2018 and 2022.” Uber also said it takes decisions that affect drivers’ income seriously. The company pointed to human reviews, safeguards and an appeals process for drivers who believe the system made a mistake. The appeal will have to determine whether these protections existed during the period covered by the fine or came later. And Uber is appealing. The company has stated it disagrees with both the decision and the size of the fine, setting up another round in what’s become a recurring pattern between Uber and Dutch regulators specifically. This is the fourth time the Dutch authority has fined Uber, which on its own says something about the relationship here. The previous record holder was a 290 million euro fine in 2024 over transferring European drivers’ personal data to the US without adequate protections, a case Uber also appealed at the time. Four fines from a single regulator isn’t really a pattern of bad luck anymore; it’s a pattern of a company and a privacy regulator that keep disagreeing about the same basic question, how much human judgment has to sit between an algorithm’s decision and a person’s actual income. The case goes beyond Uber. Many gig-economy platforms in Europe use algorithms to manage workers, routes and account status. This ruling shows the cost of relying on automated decisions without human oversight. For companies that use algorithms to make decisions affecting people’s accounts or income, saying “the algorithm decided” is no longer enough. The €825 million fine makes that lesson very clear. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
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