The BBC plans to use emergency FM radio to keep the UK informed during prolonged blackouts, with a self-sufficient studio ready for 72 hours. If electricity fails across the UK for days, the BBC says it has a plan to keep people informed. David Sillito, the BBC’s media and arts correspondent, explained the strategy in a BBC News report, starting with the 2015 Lancaster floods and ending with a simple lesson: when digital infrastructure fails, FM radio may be the most reliable way to reach the public. On December 5, 2015, the River Lune flooded Lancaster, cutting electricity to 61,500 people. Roger Kemp, an engineering professor at Lancaster University specializing in safety and electrical systems, was watching television when the power went out. The following day, he described the scene to the BBC as almost resembling a zombie movie, with residents searching for phone reception and queuing at the only working telephone box. Homes lost heating and lighting, while some water supplies stopped because their pumps depended on electricity. Railway stations, petrol stations and shops closed, cash machines stopped working, and traffic lights failed. Only two communication systems remained operational: copper landlines and FM radio. Local station The Bay continued broadcasting using an emergency generator and a single landline. Kemp’s subsequent report highlighted the irony: a society increasingly dependent on digital infrastructure had relied on technologies dating back decades to receive essential information. The incident illustrated the risk of a wider catastrophe known as a Black Sky event, in which electricity, water, shops and communications fail simultaneously. At a recent UK resilience summit, discussions focused on maintaining essential services for at least 72 hours. One expression often heard in civil contingency circles, “nine meals from anarchy”, captures the concern that three days without food could turn an emergency into widespread disorder. “We are nine meals from anarchy” is a phrase often heard in the civil contingency world. A brutal reminder of the fear that three days without food would be enough to turn a crisis into chaos. If a Black Sky event takes out electricity, water, shops and communications, there is a good reason the government wants us to have our own supplies.” BBC states. “In a major emergency, we are being told to hunker down and turn on an FM radio, as thousands did in Lancaster. This is why the BBC has its own Black Sky plan.” The government’s Be Ready campaign warns that severe weather and cyberattacks could disrupt essential services, although it says there is no specific threat to the electricity grid. According to government advice reported by the Express, households should maintain at least three days of food and drinking water and keep a battery-powered FM radio. Sillito also recommends a hand-cranked radio that can generate its own power. The BBC’s contingency plan revolves around precisely this technology. Around 100 people would operate a dedicated emergency radio studio, equipped with secure communications independent of the internet, alongside enough fuel, water and food to survive at least three days without resupply. Reports published by French outlet Telesatellite and Open magazine on November 7 describe a self-contained studio, generators powering transmission facilities and FM radio as the fallback communication channel. Only a small number of BBC staff know the complete details. The studio would broadcast pre-prepared government announcements, with scripts already published online. These include practical instructions on daily water consumption and disposing of toilet waste when flushing is impossible. Additional reporting would come from satellite vehicles and journalists stationed at emergency centres across the UK. Transmission towers, disconnected from the internet, would use diesel generators and storage tanks ranging from 5 to 40,000 litres, providing approximately three days of power. Satellite phones would support communications between teams, with agreed meeting points and procedures if those systems also failed. FM radio remains central because it can reach almost everywhere, even during a major blackout or disruptive cyberattack. The BBC’s planning assumptions have evolved. An insider told Sillito that the original scenario considered outages lasting five to seven days, while the latest advice from the National Energy System Operator suggests electricity could return within two to three days. The corporation’s contingency arrangements have surfaced before. In October 2022, media reports described leaked draft scripts for a national blackout, including half-hourly Radio 4 updates from an emergency broadcasting centre at an undisclosed rural location. There is, however, a discrepancy in the Express report, which claims that only around 100 people worldwide know the full details. The BBC says approximately 100 people would operate the emergency studio, while only a small number have access to the complete plan. Concerns about grid resilience are not new, but the massive blackout affecting Spain, Portugal and south-western France in April 2025 renewed attention to the issue. Lord Harris, chair of the National Preparedness Commission, argues that the consequences extend well beyond losing electricity. Water supplies could stop because pumping stations need power, while sewage systems could become blocked when water can no longer circulate. Governments across Europe increasingly advise citizens to maintain emergency supplies, and Harris believes the UK has been slow to prepare its population. Some initiatives are already underway. ARIA, the government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, is investing £70 million in high-altitude aircraft designed to provide at least a week of emergency mobile and internet connectivity over the UK. Programme director Rico Chandra has warned that satellites alone have limitations when terrestrial networks fail. Harris argues that decades of efficiency-driven decisions have gradually removed essential redundancies. One example is the migration of emergency services from dedicated radio systems to mobile network technology, potentially exposing their communications to the same outages affecting the public. The government maintains that the transition to 4G and 5G provides reliable and resilient communications. “The UK has one of the most resilient electricity systems in the world, and there has never been a complete outage in the grid’s 75-year history.” The Cabinet Office states describing the UK electricity system. Government efforts to improve resilience predate the current debate. In May 2024, then deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden launched the previous Conservative government’s disaster preparedness initiative. During his investigation, Sillito also reconsidered the BBC’s isolated transmission infrastructure. What initially appeared outdated became a strength: independence from the internet could help keep broadcasting alive when digital networks collapse. Yet the UK is preparing to switch off its copper landline network on January 31, 2027, while the future of FM radio is also under review. The government’s position is that copper landlines, although useful during power cuts, have become unreliable and increasingly difficult to maintain. Kemp is less convinced that the country is moving in the right direction. Asked whether his report had improved national preparedness for a Black Sky event, he argued that the planned landline shutdown showed little consideration for how people would communicate during a prolonged power failure. Sillito experienced a smaller reminder while preparing his report: a power cut in his own street, leaking torch batteries, missing candles and an emergency radio he could not find. His conclus: “If anything, we’ve gone backwards,” he said. “Switching off the public switch telephone network, I think shows that there has been really no thought at all about how you communicate when you’ve no longer got power.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, BBC)
Japanese manufacturer Iris Ohyama, the operator of the Iris Plaza shopping platform, disclosed that personal information belonging to about 7.7 million people may have been exposed after unauthorized access to a third-party cloud service the company used.
Security Affairs AI-CYBERSECURITY newsletter includes a collection of the best articles and research on AI in the international landscape Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing cybersecurity, reshaping both the techniques used by attackers and the tools available to defenders. AI agents can automate tasks, analyze large amounts of data, discover vulnerabilities and accelerate offensive operations. At the same time, AI is creating new capabilities for threat detection, incident analysis and response. Security Affairs’ new newsletter follows this evolution, covering every week the latest threats, attacks, vulnerabilities and developments at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. ‘It’s 100 percent a national security threat’: Accenture contractor connected an AI agent to the Pentagon’s secure network, and then sent data to a high-risk website Security notice — malicious version of Anthropic.claude-code (2.1.312 and 2.1.313) identified in the Cursor VS Code Extension Marketplace UK and Germany to jointly develop military AI in 2027 Appraisal by AI: Model-driven victim prioritization in the VOLTA infostealer AI policy wonks declare ‘sovereign agents’ a threat to civilization Progress on provable inference for large language models The Rise of LLMJacking: How Threat Actors Monetize Compromised Cloud and Model Resources “Black October” for AI Developer Platforms ARTEX Exposed: Mapping the Infrastructure Behind the South Korean Bank Breaches A thousand fewer paths to root Securing Muse: More Than $1 Million in Bug Bounties Paid Out Free the Model, Sell the Gateway: Prompt Adware hidden in Jailbreak Bundles WorkOS October 30th, 2026 Data Security Incident Covert underperformance on safety research tasks GPT‑6 Cyber: Advancing the frontier of aligned cybersecurity agents ThisBash Escape: Claude Dispatch Flaw Enables Browser Extensions RCE on the OS Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
Hunt.io traced ARTEX servers and AI-powered hacking tools used in breaches affecting seven South Korean financial institutions. Between late September and early October 2026, seven South Korean financial institutions had data breached through internet-facing systems. About 66,000 to 67,000 people and around 2,200 corporations were affected, and personal, employment, income and loan data was exposed. Hunt.io dug into the infrastructure behind the campaign, and its findings add a lot to what CrowdStrike and Genians already published. CrowdStrike reported on October 7 and Genians Security Center on October 12, and both pointed to ARTEX, an open-source autonomous penetration testing framework developed in China and licensed under AGPL-3.0. CrowdStrike assessed with moderate confidence that a single Chinese-speaking individual motivated by money ran it, and not an established threat group. DeepSeek v4.1 Flash was the main model, with GLM 5.3 and Grok 4.6 as backups, reached partly through a reseller domain, xcai[.]pro. The public indicators were a server at 38.244.50[.]120, which hosted the ARTEX console, plus a Hong Kong address and nine proxies. Genians said the ARTEX GitHub repository and Docker image were removed on October 11, though forks and mirrors remain. “CrowdStrike assessed with moderate confidence that the operator was a single Chinese-speaking individual motivated by financial gain rather than an established threat group.” reads the report published by Hunt.io. “The infrastructure reportedly accessed these services in part through the reseller domain xcai[.]pro. Both reports described a two-server configuration, consisting of a Hong Kong-based IP address used as primary infrastructure and 38.244.50[.]120, which hosted the ARTEX console.” Hunt.io notified the relevant national CERT before publishing, and says the report holds no personal records or credentials. The company’s own scanning showed 38.244.50[.]120 sits on Cogent’s network in Los Angeles, with 15 open ports. The ARTEX login page, with a Chinese title meaning “autonomous penetration testing console”, appears on ports 443 and 8090. Other services include a Gemini2API admin console and a Tinyproxy server. Searching its AttackCapture platform for that address, Hunt.io found another open directory at 23.248.226[.]250, a jump server in Hong Kong on AS138415. It held 42 files in 2 subdirectories, 105 MB in all, and the platform had logged warnings on September 5, September 26 and October 5. A file in it names 38.244.50[.]120 as the jump host, and its own comment tells the operator never to paste the credentials into a session. It sat in an open directory. Three scripts back up the link. They keep reverse SSH tunnels alive, run a local relay, and copy files to the jump host, one tunnel is named grok2api, and the credentials file also holds keys for Zhipu AI’s GLM models, an OpenAI-compatible relay and a proxy service. That explains how several language models ran in one campaign. The AI setup is the most striking part. A state file shows the harness is Claude Code itself, version 2.1.221, started 510 times since August 4, but it isn’t talking to Anthropic. A small proxy, ds-models-shim.py, fixes a compatibility problem by faking a model list and sending requests to DeepSeek, and another, xcai-effort-shim.py, adds a reasoning setting because the DeepSeek backend otherwise skips its reasoning step. The route runs from Claude Code through Claude Code Router, an open-source project, to xcai and then to DeepSeek. “A small local proxy, ds-models-shim.py, addresses a compatibility issue: the official /v1/models endpoint returns a 404 response when queried against a non-Anthropic backend, preventing Claude Code from discovering the available models. The shim intercepts that specific request and returns a locally defined model list containing deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-flash. All other requests are forwarded to api.deepseek.com/anthropic.” states the report. The same file counts 19 custom skills, reusable instruction sets for the agent, with 147 recorded uses. They cover code audit, reconnaissance, web injection, WAF bypass testing, authentication testing, Telegram Mini Apps, APK download and decompiling, cloud phone control and payment logic testing. Next to the payment skill sat three self-registered test accounts with tokens for a cash-in deposit API, dated September 12, and a comment calls them an authorized, self-built test. The setup fits testing for insecure direct object reference flaws, a technique CrowdStrike and Genians described against Korean loan and inquiry services. The directory also held supporting tools. A script queried FOFA, a Chinese asset search engine like Shodan, through a third-party API, and a comment says the primary membership had expired and a backup key was in use. Proxy scripts enumerated a rotating proxy service at 154.201.79[.]246:443, where 79 unique exit IPs showed up among the first 100 identities tested. A separate directory at 23.248.226[.]250:8001 held a small staged setup for JNDI and LDAP exploitation, retrieved on October 5 at 03:42 UTC. It confirms command execution through a DNS callback, and one script lets web and LDAP traffic share a single port. Hunt.io’s analysis describes the tooling without publishing steps to reproduce it. Other recovered files include tools aimed at a cryptocurrency exchange’s admin session and withdrawals, Linux privilege escalation exploits, iOS probe source code and Android kernel and firmware utilities. Hunt.io says their connection to the Korean breaches isn’t confirmed. Hunt.io then showed how to hunt ARTEX servers. Searching for an ARTEX certificate issuer returned 19 IP addresses, and searching its malware classification returned 1,303 addresses across 30 countries, led by the United States, China and Hong Kong. Those figures show where addresses are registered, not where the operator sits. “The result returned 19 distinct IP addresses, including 38.244.50[.]120. This method is precise but limited to hosts that expose a matching certificate. Systems using a different certificate will not appear in these results.” continues the report. Matching the console’s page title returned about 1,300 IPs, and a looser search found 21 title strings, 19 of them likely ARTEX consoles, in English, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese and Vietnamese. A malware-name search in AttackCapture gave 280 results with open directories. One at 130.94.31[.]86:18888 in Seoul held two small scripts, and another at 156.251.11[.]39 held an SMB reconnaissance toolkit whose test script writes a file named artex_probe_11876.txt. More hosts held exploitation kits for DedeCMS and FangCMS, a CAPTCHA bypass suite, a RuoYi and Spring administrative console exploit and CAPTCHA-based login automation. Together they show the framework attracting many operators. For defenders, the advice is plain. Remove public access and put administration behind VPNs or allowlists, and reset SSH passwords and rotate API keys, proxy credentials and tokens that exposed files may have revealed. Patch internet-facing services, watch for unexpected LDAP and JNDI activity, DNS callbacks and remote script downloads, and store secrets in a managed vault with least-privilege permissions. Also restrict access to model gateways, watch their requests, and enforce compliance rules on managed phones. Hunt.io’s lesson is that an investigation shouldn’t stop at the first list of indicators, because The company also published indicators of compromise in its analysis. “The findings highlight risks associated with exposed administrative services, reusable credentials, remote access tunnels, proxy infrastructure, and exploitation tooling.” concludes the report. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, ARTEX)
Software vendors can boost revenue by tracking customer usage across products, while AI accelerates pricing and consumption decisions. It is hard to find any software vendor that sells just one product. Portfolios have expanded from modules to editions, cloud services, add-ons, and now AI capabilities. A lot can be achieved through an expanded portfolio. IDC research commissioned by Thales shows that customers with consolidated agreements “spend more, churn less, and deepen their relationship with the vendor over time.” However, there is one thing to note. Purchasing four products from the same vendor does not mean they will be treated as a single vendor, as each product has its own licensing, measurement, and sales terms. The Size of the Prize Existing customers are an obvious place to look for growth. The possible upside could be considerable. According to IDC research on software vendors from June 2026, 55% of software vendors believe that enhanced monetization would bring a 6% to 10% uplift in revenue, and 29% expect more than 10%. IDC has also linked a SaaS provider’s ability to capitalize systematically on new features and capabilities to net revenue retention and growth. Companies that excel at this see it in their valuations too. McKinsey research shows top-quartile B2B SaaS companies achieve 113% net revenue retention, growing 13% from existing customers alone, against 98% for bottom-quartile peers. Capturing that opportunity becomes harder when the commercial systems behind the portfolio cannot see across it. Sales teams may know a customer well, but they also need to know what that customer has bought, what they are entitled to use, and how much of it they are consuming. That information is what turns a general cross-sell conversation into a relevant one. Where Portfolio Revenue Leaks Away Product launches or acquisitions might occur at different times, and the business units could operate independently. With time, each one may build its own licensing approach, customer database, product catalog, and commercial model. IDC’s vendor research found that only 25% of software vendors have centralized usage data. In practice, vendors need to at least unify the entitlement system first. All of the products need to sit in one catalog before the vendor can create a bundled offer across them. Getting there can stall for technical, organizational, or budget reasons. But the reason to overcome those barriers comes back to the customer experience. A company may be optimized internally around separate product lines or business units, while customers still have to go to multiple places to access and manage products they bought from the same vendor. Customer pressure has historically forced companies to restructure and centralize around that problem. Licensing and entitlement ownership can move out of individual product lines and into a central function, such as engineering operations, product operations, supply chain operations, or SaaS operations. For that to work, the central function needs real authority rather than existing in name only. A customer could be approaching the limits of Product A while another part of the company sells Product B, which would be a logical next purchase. The usage data contains the signal, but it may sit in a system that the team responsible for Product B never sees. AI can multiply this problem quickly. Vendors no longer need to launch an entirely new application before they have something new to monetize. A new model, agent, workflow, or premium feature could all require decisions about entitlements, usage, and price. Over time, however, customers can end up with a growing collection of meters, contract terms, entitlements, and invoice lines. The vendor sees one expanding portfolio. The customer sees the work required to understand and manage it. Buyers are already feeling this pressure. IDC’s customer research found that 45% struggle to reconcile purchased licenses with actual usage, while 39% cite inflexible licensing models as a challenge. At the same time, 60% of buyers report an active drive to reduce the number of software vendors they use. Consolidating with a strategic supplier becomes much less attractive if it leaves the customer managing the same complexity under a single company name. What Unified Portfolio Monetization Enables A shared entitlement system brings products from different business units into one catalog, giving vendors a consistent view of what customers have bought and what they can use. That common foundation is what makes portfolio-wide bundles and offers possible. Vendors do not necessarily have to wait for every commercial system to be consolidated before they get there. Thales can bring third-party license generators onto one platform, while Central Migrate and Thales’s internal migration expertise and best practices support the move from existing licensing systems. Shared credits or pooled consumption can provide another option. Customers have a single balance that can be used across multiple products or capabilities. As vendors add AI features with different consumption patterns, this gives them room to introduce new capabilities without automatically introducing a standalone commercial model for each. M&A Creates Another Portfolio Opportunity The same issue appears after an acquisition. CEOs are looking for the “1+1=3” outcome: creating more value from the combined business than the two companies could separately. The acquirer can sell its portfolio to the acquired company’s customers, while the acquired company’s products can be introduced to the acquirer’s customer base. The problem is that full M&A integration can take time, particularly when ERP and ordering systems are involved. Entitlement systems can be unified much sooner and with considerably less work than a full ordering-system integration. That allows portfolio monetization to run in parallel with the heavier systems work rather than waiting for it to finish. The business can start cross-selling across the combined customer base sooner, giving leadership a way to demonstrate acquisition ROI faster. Turning Usage Into Expansion Opportunities Usage data then becomes useful beyond billing. Vendors can see which customers own Product A but not Product B, which customers are consuming, and which customers are regularly reaching the limits of their current entitlement. They can also change the renewal conversation. Actual consumption provides a much stronger basis for discussing the next contract than assumptions made when the previous agreement was signed. It shows what customers are using heavily, what they are barely touching, and where there may be a natural opportunity for upselling and cross-selling. Buyers appear open to this kind of consolidation. IDC found that 86% are somewhat and extremely interested in a single licensing agreement covering multiple products from the same vendor. Runaway costs are the biggest concern around vendor consolidation, cited by 74%, followed by lack of flexibility at 62% and lack of transparency at 59%. Those concerns put some useful boundaries around portfolio monetization. Bringing more products into one commercial relationship needs to make them easier for the customer to understand and manage. Visibility into consumption, clear entitlements, and controls over spend become more important as the portfolio grows. Making a Larger Portfolio Easier to Buy AI is likely to keep adding features, agents, models, and new forms of consumption to software portfolios. Portfolio growth works better when the entitlement system cuts across product and business-unit silos. Customers can see what they own, understand what they are consuming, and use more of the vendor’s products without having to navigate a new commercial process each time. The IDC report shows that buyers already want greater flexibility, visibility, and control. The opportunity for vendors is to make expansion across the portfolio easier to buy and manage, even as the underlying technology becomes more complex. About the Author: Manoj Tharakan is Director of Product Management, CDI, at Thales, where he works on software licensing, SaaS billing, and monetization. With over 20 years across software licensing, SaaS billing, and monetization, he’s helped build the systems vendors rely on to actually get paid for the value they create. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, AI)
Passwords and API keys that developers typed into commands they approved in Claude Code are sitting in public GitHub repositories, where anyone can read them. When a user selects "Yes, and don't ask again," Anthropic's AI coding assistant can save the command, word-for-word, including the secret, in a project settings file. Software security company Apiiro said yesterday that 1,122 public
Layer3 found residential proxy traffic using the White House network, raising concerns about potential exposure of internal systems. Layer3 Intel says it found residential proxy traffic leaving through the White House network. The researchers spotted it while browsing their new Residential Proxy Observatory, a tool that gives a global view of residential proxy and anonymized internet activity. “While our team was looking through it, we noticed residential proxy exit activity on AS2650. AS2650 is registered to the Executive Office of the President, the federal agency that hosts the White House network.” reads the report published by Layer3. A residential proxy service allows customers to use everyday devices to route their internet traffic. This makes their activity look as if it comes from the device’s normal home internet connection. Layer3 detected this activity on AS2650, a network registered to the Executive Office of the President, the agency responsible for the White House network. Layer3 has not accused anyone at the White House of wrongdoing and says its data cannot identify who or what caused the activity. Between October 5 and November 3, Layer3 detected 236 connections through this network. The traffic came from six IP addresses and was recorded on 26 of those 30 days. A total of 28 residential proxy services were able to use the network. To check their findings, researchers compared the IP addresses with data from other security services, including Spur and Synthient. Both services also identify these addresses as residential proxy exit points. Getting this data took no special skill. Anyone can sign up to a public residential proxy service, pay a few dollars and send requests through it. Layer3 says it didn’t target the network or try to steer its probes there, and it caught the activity by chance, simply by requesting global rotating access through these services. The timing suggests something more than a guest network. About half the activity falls between 5 p.m. and midnight Eastern time, and almost none happens in the early morning. Layer3 reads that as a person, not public guest Wi-Fi: someone regularly on the White House network late into the evening whose device carries a proxy SDK, a software kit that turns a device into an exit point. “Past research has shown that poorly secured proxy SDKs can allow internal network access and lateral movement. This is how past botnets have spread. In A Broken System Fueling Botnets, the researchers at Synthient documented how the Kimwolf botnet reached at least 2 million devices, mostly Android devices with an exposed ADB service, through residential proxy networks.” continues the report. “If an SDK on this network has the same kind of flaw, anyone buying proxy access could use it to reach internal systems.” That matters because poorly secured proxy SDKs have let attackers into internal networks before. Synthient’s research, A Broken System Fueling Botnets, documented how the Kimwolf botnet reached at least 2 million devices, mostly Android devices with an exposed ADB service, through residential proxy networks. If an SDK on the White House network has the same kind of flaw, anyone buying proxy access could reach internal systems. Layer3 doesn’t claim that’s the case here, and it describes the risk as conditional. The White House isn’t the only surprise. The observatory also finds residential proxies in some of the most isolated places on the planet. Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, a South Atlantic territory that includes the most remote inhabited island in the world, shows 413 addresses and more than 32,000 observations, split between Starlink and the local provider, Sure Saint Helena. Layer3 also detected three instances of proxy activity in Antarctica. All came from a Cloudflare WARP address linked to McMurdo Station. The researchers jokingly noted that penguins are not suspects. On Pitcairn Island, they found one Starlink address and one observation. Norfolk Island had one Norfolk Telecom address with four observations, while Svalbard had one Starlink address in Longyearbyen with three observations. The researchers also found 388 addresses in the Falkland Islands, 43 in the Chagos Islands, 21 in Tokelau and seven in South Georgia. These findings suggest that residential proxy networks now operate in almost every corner of the world. For security teams, the main concern is that devices connected to protected networks could unknowingly become proxy exit points, potentially exposing those networks to outside traffic. However, Layer3 says its data only shows where proxy traffic exits. It cannot identify the device being used or the person behind it. As the company explains, “Our data shows the exits, not the device or the person behind them.” “Residential proxies have infected every corner of the world, and it looks like there is no place they cannot reach. Layer3 Intel tracks residential proxy and anonymization infrastructure worldwide. Even when the proxies hide in networks on the farthest corners of the planet, we can still observe them, leaving threat actors no place to hide.” concludes the report. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, proxy traffic)
QNAP urges users to update Plex Media Server to the latest version available in the QNAP App Center, as hackers are exploiting the Plex2Shell vulnerability chain. The vendor said it had received multiple reports of suspected compromises involving customers’ network-attached storage (NAS) devices. "QNAP has received reports from some users that Plex Media Server on their NAS appears to have been compromised through [Plex2Shell] vulnerabilities, and QNAP Technical Support is assisting the affected users,” the company says in an advisory today. Plex2Shell is a chain of four vulnerabilities in the Plex Media Server, tracked as CVE-2026-96652, CVE-2026-96654, CVE-2026-96655, and CVE-2026-96656. Security researcher Zach Main discovered and reported the flaws to Plex on July 27. Exploitation started shortly after the full technical details became public on October 16.
Some WordPress sites can still be attacked while they install the fix for an actively exploited flaw, according to Umut Bayram, the Picus Security researcher who found it. The update that installs the fix still unpacks its files using the site's old, unpatched code, so an attacker who strikes at the right moment can run code on the server. The researcher advises blocking web access to the
In April 2026, BleepingComputer reported that Canadian authorities arrested three men for operating an “SMS blaster,” a device that pretends to be a cell tower to send phishing texts to nearby phones. It’s a close cousin of the IMSI catcher, the fake-tower device used for surveillance. Both work by tricking phones into connecting to the strongest signal and sharing information before anything is authenticated. One of the main things a fake tower can collect this way is your IMSI, the identifier tied to your SIM, but it’s far from the only thing your phone gives away. Your phone has several radios that connect to different kinds of signals and share different information. The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios share hardware addresses, which modern phones randomize or rotate to reduce tracking.
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