Norway ’s shared government infrastructure suffered a third DDoS attack, disrupting digital services but showing no signs of data compromise. Norway ‘s shared digital government infrastructure has been hit by another distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that disrupted services used by citizens, businesses and public agencies. The incident began at 03:38 CEST on Monday, August 24, and targeted infrastructure operated by the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency, Digdir, together with its service provider Vivicta. The timing matters because this isn’t an isolated event. Digdir says it’s the third DDoS attack against its services in a short period, following incidents in June and on August 3. “The Norwegian Directorate for Digitalisation (Digdir) has been subjected to a denial of service attack (DDoS attack) that has been ongoing since 03:38 on the night of Monday, August 24.” reads the statement published by Digdir Agency. “This is the third time in a short time that this type of attack has been directed at Digdir’s solutions. Digdir is working closely with our subcontractor Vivicta. NSM and the Norwegian Data Protection Authority have also been notified of the case.” That status update refers to the test environment, but the underlying attack also affected production services. Digdir reported that several shared services became completely unavailable for short periods, while others remained accessible but suffered connection failures, slow responses and longer-than-usual login times. Digdir operates several pieces of Norway’s shared public-sector infrastructure. Among them are ID-porten, MinID, Maskinporten, eFormidling, eInnsyn, the Contact and Reservation Register, Ansattporten and other services used by government agencies and external applications. That makes an attack on Digdir more significant than an ordinary website outage. When a shared authentication service goes down, the disruption can propagate to services that aren’t themselves under attack. That’s exactly what happened. Altinn, Norway’s central platform for communication between citizens, businesses and government, was also affected, while other public services relying on ID-porten experienced login problems. Earlier attacks this summer produced similar effects, including disruption to access to Helsenorge, NAV and Skatteetaten. The technical distinction is important: the attackers didn’t need to break into every downstream service. They could create disruption simply by overwhelming a shared dependency. And that’s often the uncomfortable reality of modern public infrastructure. The weakest point isn’t necessarily the service citizens see on their screens. It can be the common authentication, messaging or data-exchange layer underneath it. Digdir has stressed that the incident is about availability, not evidence of a successful intrusion. The agency also says it has found no indication that personal data was exposed. Digdir has notified Norway’s National Security Authority, NSM, and the Data Protection Authority, Datatilsynet, as part of its response. “There are no indications that the attack has led to a security breach or that personal data has been compromised, says Director Frode Danielsen at Digdir.” continues the statement. That distinction deserves attention because cyberattack doesn’t automatically mean “data theft”. In this case, the confirmed impact is service disruption, while there is currently no evidence that attackers compromised Digdir’s systems or accessed personal information. The operational consequences are still serious. Public-sector users may see failed connections, slow responses or authentication problems even though the underlying applications themselves haven’t been compromised. The June incident already demonstrated how much disruption a DDoS attack against Digdir’s infrastructure can cause. That attack targeted ID-porten through Vivicta’s network infrastructure and temporarily affected services including ID-porten, MinID, Maskinporten, eInnsyn and eFormidling. Another attack followed on August 3. Digdir restored normal operations the following day, but the agency said the incident had again affected several shared services and that it would review the event together with Vivicta and other partners. Now there’s a third incident. That repetition is more interesting from a defensive perspective than the raw duration of any single outage. Digdir and Vivicta are clearly able to mitigate the attacks and restore services. The harder question is whether repeated attacks against the same shared infrastructure can keep generating enough operational friction to become a recurring problem for the wider public sector. This is where DDoS stops being just a bandwidth problem. A sufficiently persistent campaign can force defenders to keep changing traffic controls, filtering rules and protection measures, while legitimate users continue to depend on the same infrastructure. Digdir’s own status updates show that dynamic clearly. On August 24, the agency first reported improvement, then said several solutions were completely down, followed by further stabilization efforts. There is currently no official attribution for the attacks. Norwegian media have raised the possibility of Russian involvement, but that remains speculation rather than an established finding. That distinction matters. A DDoS campaign can be politically motivated, financially motivated, conducted for disruption or simply intended to demonstrate capability. Without technical evidence and an official attribution process, assigning responsibility to a particular state or group would be premature. What is established is the target and the effect. The attacks repeatedly hit infrastructure that sits underneath a large number of Norwegian digital public services. That’s enough to make the incidents strategically relevant without adding an attribution story that the evidence doesn’t yet support. The Norwegian case is also a useful reminder that cybersecurity isn’t limited to confidentiality and integrity. Availability is a security property too, particularly when the affected systems provide national digital services. A compromised database is an obvious security incident. An authentication service that repeatedly becomes unavailable can create a different kind of problem: citizens can’t access services, businesses can’t complete procedures and government agencies may struggle to perform routine operations. Digdir says its services have largely stabilized, although some disruptions remain. As of the latest incident updates, ID-porten still had limitations, eSignering remained unavailable because of those ID-porten restrictions, and some users were still reporting connection problems or increased response times with Maskinporten. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
A large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has disrupted Norway’s shared government digital infrastructure since Monday, affecting services used by the public sector. The attack started at 03.38 CEST on Monday and has targeted the infrastructure supporting services operated by the Norwegian Digitalization Agency, Digitaliseringsdirektoratet (Digdir), and its operations provider, Vivicta. Digdir operates Norway’s shared digital government infrastructure, including public-service logins, electronic IDs and signatures, secure digital mail, government forms, public-record access, and data exchange between agencies. In an announcement published earlier today, the organization states that several services were completely unavailable for short periods. The agency says many affected systems have now been stabilized, although some services, like ID-porten and eSignering, remain partially inaccessible.
Healthcare and services provider Nutex is investigating a data breach incident where an unauthorized third party exfiltrated information from company servers. The organization has disclosed the cyberattack in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), noting that the stolen data includes details that may be private or confidential. “Based on preliminary findings from the Company’s ongoing investigation, the Company believes that certain information maintained on the Company’s servers was accessed and exfiltrated by an unauthorized third party, including some information that may be private and/or confidential,” Nutex says. Nutex Health is a for-profit healthcare company that operates 28 facilities across 12 states, including the Bayou City ER & Hospital in Texas and Green Bay ER & Hospital in Wisconsin.
Microsoft updated its Windows PowerToys toolset with a new utility dubbed "Window Hopper" that lets users switch between an app's windows more quickly. The Window Hopper added in this release works like the standard ALT + TAB Windows feature, but it only works for the currently focused app, helping users switch back and forth between its windows. "Once the utility is enabled, press the configurable Alt + backtick shortcut to cycle through that app's windows without stepping through everything else on your desktop," Microsoft explains. "It is especially useful when you're juggling multiple browser windows, terminals, File Explorer windows, or editor instances." Those who want to customize the default activation keyboard shortcut can also do so in PowerToys settings to switch to the next and previous app window.
WhatsApp has started rolling out several new account security features, including support for multiple passkeys and stronger two-step verification. While the instant messaging service already allowed users to add passkeys for secure logins via fingerprint, Face ID, or screen lock code, it now lets them create separate ones for each platform. "More than a billion people have already set one up, and you can now add more than one passkey to your account if you use both Android and iOS devices. To get started, go to Settings > Account > Passkeys," it said. WhatsApp has also updated its two-step verification security feature to allow alphanumeric passwords instead of six-digit PINs. "Until now it was a six-digit PIN, we've now upgraded it to a full password: longer, alphanumeric, and even with special ch@racters to make it harder to guess. If you've been using '123456,' this is your sign to upgrade," WhatsApp added.
Threat actors have already compromised over 270 Zimbra instances in remote code execution attacks targeting a high-severity Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) vulnerability. The ZCS email and collaboration suite is used by hundreds of millions of people and organizations, including thousands of businesses and hundreds of government agencies worldwide. Synacor patched the security flaw (tracked as CVE-2026-73570), which allows unauthenticated attackers to gain code execution remotely by exploiting a command injection weakness in the SNMP monitoring component when SNMP notifications are enabled, with the release of ZCS version 10.1.20 on July 20. CERT Polska, the Polish Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), first flagged the vulnerability as targeted in the wild last Monday, when it also warned security teams to check their logs for suspicious activity, including the Zimbra service restarting unexpectedly, and for files created in the /opt/zimbra/jetty/webapps/, /opt/zimbra/jetty_base/webapps/, and /tmp/ folders by user zimbra over the last 30 days.
Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock (LockA locked padlock) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Staying Secure at Eventsno-cost Cyber ServicesCybersecurity Awareness MonthKnown Exploited Vulnerabilities CatalogReport A Cyber Issue WASHINGTON – Today, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published an advisory about lessons learned from red team assessments performed at the request of two critical infrastructure organizations to help organizations strengthen detection, response and protections in information technology (IT), cloud, and operational technology (OT) environments.
Law enforcement agencies from 22 countries helped identify 263 suspects and arrested 58 individuals linked to cybercrime networks coordinated by African crime groups. The "Operation Jackal IV" international joint action targeted West African criminal networks between November 2025 and June 2026. The operation also focused on disrupting the Black Axe cybercrime syndicate, known for its involvement in global-scale cyber-enabled financial fraud. Most commonly, Black Axe and similar criminal rings are targeting victims in romance scams, cryptocurrency and investment scams, or business email compromise fraud, but they've often also been linked to violent crimes. During Operation Jackal IV, Argentinian law officers made 17 arrests, and they linked 196 suspects to a major Crime-as-a-Service network that provided West African organized crime groups with web domains and money-laundering support.
Explore Unit 42 research on AI-enabled malware. Learn how existing behavioral detection and endpoint analytics stop AI-authored code before execution. The post The State of AI-Enabled Malware August 2026: From Brand Abuse to Agentic Execution appeared first on Unit 42.
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Oracle 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-2026-21962 (CVSS score of 10,0), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. CVE-2026-21962 is a critical, unauthenticated vulnerability affecting the Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in for Apache HTTP Server and IIS. An attacker does not need an account or valid credentials. With network access, they can exploit the flaw remotely through HTTP and potentially compromise the affected server. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to access, modify or delete critical data, potentially gaining broad access to information available through the affected components. “Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in contain an improper access control vulnerability that can result in unauthorized creation, deletion, or modification access to critical data as well as unauthorized access to critical data or complete access to all Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in accessible data,” CISA reports. The vulnerability also has a scope-change impact, meaning an attacker who exploits it could potentially affect other systems or applications connected to the vulnerable Oracle components. The flaw affects versions: 12.2.1.4.0, 14.1.1.0.0 and 14.1.2.0.0. In practical terms, this is dangerous because an internet-accessible Oracle WebLogic proxy component could provide an attacker with a path into critical backend systems without requiring authentication. In March 2026, CloudSEK researchers detected attacks targeting several known flaws in Oracle WebLogic against its honeypot network. Attackers also targeted CVE-2026-21962 along with older WebLogic RCE vulnerabilities, including CVE-2020-14882/14883, CVE-2020-2551 and CVE-2017-10271. “This report analyzes attack data collected from a high-interaction honeypot simulating a vulnerable Oracle WebLogic Server (v14.1.1.0.0) over a 12-day period (Jan 22 – Feb 3, 2026). The primary focus is the immediate and widespread exploitation of the newly disclosed, critical unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability, CVE-2026-21962 (CVSS: 10.0).” ” reads the report published CloudSEK. “In addition to CVE-2026-21962, the honeypot captured attacks targeting other persistent, critical WebLogic RCE flaws, including CVE-2020-14882/14883 (Console RCE), CVE-2020-2551 (IIOP RCE), and CVE-2017-10271 (WLS-WSAT RCE). This confirms that threat actors continue to rely on a small set of highly-effective, simple-to-exploit vulnerabilities to compromise WebLogic environments.” 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 27, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
Confirm this action.
Leaving now will discard your changes.