The Cronos blockchain network has resumed trading activity after a price-manipulation attack on the Tectonic cryptocurrency lending platform allowed an attacker to borrow $74 million. According to current information, the threat actor artificially inflated the price of Tectonic’s TONIC token by 100 times, then used it as collateral to borrow real assets. The price manipulation happened in 20 minutes. Despite the massive amount the exploit generated, the attacker only managed to steal roughly $6 million worth of Ethereum, the rest of the funds being “stuck” on Cronos, says blockchain security and data analytics company PeckShield. Cronos is an Ethereum-like blockchain network associated with Crypto.com, while Tectonic is a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending app running on Cronos.
Microsoft is investigating a widespread service issue causing authentication issues, connection problems, email delays and failures, and various other issues for Microsoft 365 customers. It first acknowledged this incident (tracked under EX1464935 in the admin center) at 5:30 PM UTC, when it began investigating a stream of reports from users on social media regarding multiple issues affecting Exchange Online. However, while Exchange Online is the most impacted service, Microsoft revealed in a new incident report (MO1465074) that this outage also impacts multiple other Microsoft 365 services, including OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft Defender XDR. According to outage tracking service Downdetector, tens of thousands of Outlook and Microsoft 365 users are affected and experiencing issues receiving emails via Outlook and accessing Microsoft cloud services.
ChatGPT Work is experiencing a partial outage, and users across multiple subscription plans may be unable to start or continue tasks. The outage started at approximately 11:04 AM ET on Monday, August 31, and is causing elevated latency and errors for ChatGPT Work users. Plus subscribers appear to be particularly affected, with Work mode currently unavailable for some users. If you are affected, you may be unable to start new tasks in ChatGPT Work or continue tasks that are already running due to elevated errors and latency. Thankfully, OpenAI is aware of these issues and has already acknowledged them on the status page. OpenAI says it has identified that users are experiencing elevated errors across the impacted services, with Plus users particularly affected because Work mode is currently unavailable.
Berlin’s city administration has confirmed that cybercriminals are attempting to extort the city after the Rhysida ransomware gang listed it on their data leak site. The attack was discovered in mid-August, and the threat actor claimed it publicly last Friday, on August 28. Kai Wergner, the Mayor of Berlin, stated that the city will not pay the attacker, and the State Criminal Police Office, the public prosecutor's office, and federal security agencies are now investigating the incident. Rhysida ransomware has been active since mid-2023, targeting healthcare organizations, state governments, education institutes, and critical infrastructure. The threat actor claims to have exfiltrated 5.79 TB of data, comprising approximately 1.44 million files, from Berlin’s administrative network.
Fire Ant hijacked Cisco routers, stole credentials and altered logs to hide its tracks, using trusted infrastructure to reach high-value networks. Chinese-linked cyber espionage group Fire Ant has spent the past year quietly graduating from hacking individual computers to hacking the infrastructure that connects them. Sygnia’s new report traces how the group expanded from compromising hypervisors into routers, authentication servers, and Linux management hosts, the unglamorous plumbing that decides who gets to log in where and what gets recorded when they do. The investigation started with something that looked like a minor configuration mistake. A tunnel interface showed up as active on a Cisco IOS XR router with no corresponding entry in the configuration history, no commit anyone could point to that explained how it got there. “The investigation began with an anomaly that appeared, at first, to be a configuration inconsistency: a tunnel interface became operational on a Cisco IOS XR router even though no corresponding running configuration or commit history could explain its creation. The interface was associated with a specific VRF and used GRE encapsulation, but standard configuration review did not provide a reliable explanation for how it appeared.” reads the report. “This discrepancy became a key investigative lead because it suggested that the device’s operational state could no longer be trusted to match the configuration and audit records visible to administrators.” That single inconsistency became the thread that unraveled the whole operation, because it meant the router’s own records could no longer be trusted to reflect what the device was actually doing. What Fire Ant built inside that router wasn’t generic malware bolted onto Linux. The toolkit was purpose-written for IOS XR’s own internals, hooking into logging, command execution, and routing functions directly. One component disguised itself as a legitimate boot service and ran on a bizarre schedule, active only during odd-numbered hours and shut off during even ones, apparently timed to dodge routine inspection windows. Another modified the router’s own syslog function so that any log message not containing the word “Health” would silently vanish instead of being recorded, a filter so specific it reads like something built to survive a very particular kind of audit. Following that anomalous tunnel led investigators to a second compromised machine, an aging Linux system acting as the tunnel’s far end. From there, Fire Ant wasn’t just maintaining access, it was actively scanning outward toward other high-value networks, probing SSH, RDP, and web ports on systems connected through the compromised infrastructure. “The actor appeared to use the compromised environment as an infrastructure platform from which it could explore reachability into connected high-value networks, including critical infrastructure.” states Sygnia. “In this model, routers, TACACS servers and jump hosts are not peripheral assets. They are the path to the target behind the target.” The authentication layer got its own dedicated attack, and this is the part that should concern anyone who thinks compromised credentials are the worst-case scenario. Fire Ant injected a malicious library directly into a running TACACS authentication daemon, the software responsible for approving administrator logins across network devices, then intercepted live sessions as they were accepted and quietly copied the credential material flowing through. That’s not stealing a password from a phishing page; that’s sitting inside the process whose entire job is deciding who to trust, watching every legitimate login happen in real time. “The acpid component embedded a modified IOS XR syslog library. In the modified evsyslog flow, log delivery was routed through a custom wrapper that checked for the string “Health” before calling mq_send. When the condition was not met, the wrapper returned a success-like value without forwarding the message, indicating selective manipulation of router log delivery.” states the report. Fire Ant also used deep, persistent backdoors on Linux systems. Some had remained dormant since 2025 and were disguised as normal system services, making them easy to overlook. One even posed as SentinelOne’s security agent and stayed active in memory after its file was deleted, making standard disk-based forensic checks ineffective on their own. Perhaps the most technically distinctive piece was a backdoor that didn’t listen on any port at all in the conventional sense. Instead it silently inspected raw network traffic, waiting for specific packets carrying an embedded magic string before it would activate and open an interactive shell. This design shares real code-level overlap with tooling publicly tied to UNC3886, a China-nexus espionage cluster Google and Mandiant have tracked for years, though the specific activation strings and packet-handling logic here differ enough from earlier public reporting that Sygnia treats it as an evolution rather than a straight reuse. “The key choice is notable because Mandiant previously documented UNC3886 TACACS credential-collection tooling in which captured credential records were also XORed with 0xEF before being written to a credential log file.” continues the report. Once inside, Fire Ant didn’t just avoid detection, it actively edited the evidence. Login records in Linux’s own wtmp, utmp, and btmp files got rewritten to swap out the router’s real IP address for an internal one, and sudo-related entries were stripped from system logs to erase any trace of privilege escalation. Sygnia’s core warning for defenders cuts against a habit most incident responders have built their careers on: logs are not automatically ground truth anymore, and any investigation into infrastructure this deeply compromised has to cross-check log evidence against memory, disk state, and network telemetry independently rather than trusting any single source on its own. The bigger concern is that Fire Ant was not mainly interested in the systems it first compromised. It used them as a stepping stone into more valuable networks connected through trusted routing and authentication relationships — what Sygnia calls the “target behind the target.” This means edge routers, TACACS servers and Linux jump hosts can be just as important to protect as systems holding sensitive data, especially when they connect to critical infrastructure. These often-overlooked systems can give a patient and well-resourced attacker a trusted path deeper into the environment, making them a valuable target rather than an unimportant middle layer. “The central lesson is that defenders must protect more than the systems that store sensitive data. They must protect the infrastructure that makes other systems reachable, trusted, and observable.” concludes the report. “When that layer is compromised, the impact extends beyond a single organization: the actor may gain a vantage point for collection, a path toward connected targets, and the ability to make trusted infrastructure tell an incomplete story.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Fire Ant)
Infostealers can steal active Claude sessions, bypass 2FA and drain paid usage. Anthropic is revoking access and refunding unauthorized charges. Anthropic confirmed that several infostealer malware can hijack an active Claude login session and let attackers burn through your usage without ever touching your password. “Our investigation is ongoing. Our findings to date suggest that a computer you use with Claude is likely infected with infostealer malware, and may have been for some time. Phones and tablets do not appear to have been involved.” reads the notification sent to the impacted users. “We have no reason to believe that this malware is related to Claude, installed through Claude, or related to anything you did with Claude. It’s general-purpose malware that typically arrives with an unofficial download or a malicious app, and it quietly copies saved passwords, login cookies in browsers, and credentials for other apps running locally. Your Claude session was likely one of the many things it collected. It appears that a bad actor has now started picking the Claude sessions out of what it collected and using them.” Recently, Anthropic started signing some Claude users out and removing their saved payment cards. The reason? Infostealer malware on their computers stole active Claude sessions and gave attackers access to their accounts. “We recently signed you out of Claude and removed the payment method saved on your account, so you’ll need to log back in and re-add your card.” continues the report. “We’re sorry for the disruption. Here’s what happened and what we’ve done about it.” Anthropic detected the suspicious activity and identified multiple infostealer families affecting Windows and macOS. Infostealers bypass the login process by stealing authenticated browser sessions, allowing attackers to evade passwords, MFA and SSO and access paid Claude accounts. Revoking sessions or blocking fraudulent payments is not enough: if the malware remains on the device, it can capture the user’s next login and give attackers access again. Anthropic is also refunding users for any charges it identifies as unauthorized. BREAKING: Anthropic is signing Claude users out and deleting their saved card because infostealer malware on their machines handed a bad actor live Claude login sessions. Anthropic says its systems detected the activity, and the notification names six stealer families across… pic.twitter.com/0nX53PaeiH — International Cyber Digest (@IntCyberDigest) August 29, 2026 “”Our systems detected this activity on your account, and we’ve therefore removed your card on file and signed out the sessions involved to help block further unauthorized access.” continues the report. “If your usage limits looked like they refilled and then drained while you weren’t using Claude, this was likely the cause.”” Anthropic identified Vidar, LummaC2, StealC, RedLine and Acreed on Windows, plus Atomic Stealer on a small number of Macs. The company revoked affected Claude sessions, forcing users to log in again, and removed saved payment methods to prevent unauthorized charges. Existing plans will continue until the current billing period ends. After that, users will need to add their payment method again. Anthropic may also sign them out again if it detects suspicious activity. If you use Claude and haven’t checked your usage history recently, that’s worth doing today rather than next week. Anthropic’s advice is the standard but genuinely necessary response: run a full malware scan before logging back in, change your account password with two-factor authentication enabled, and treat any pirated download or unofficial app installer with the same suspicion you’d give a sketchy email attachment. An AI subscription being quietly drained isn’t the scariest thing an infostealer can do to you, but it’s a pretty reliable sign that something considerably worse, like your actual banking credentials, might already be sitting in the same haul. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Anthropic)
The boring parts caused most of the trouble. A router shipped ready to listen. A fake check turned the user into the installer. Trusted systems collected traffic and passwords, then cleaned the logs. Old bugs formed new attack chains. Even an AI agent decided its assigned task was optional. Elsewhere, fake apps, helpful support calls, cheap banking kits, exposed systems, and weak defaults kept
Threat actors associated with Aurora (aka Aur0ra) ransomware have been observed using SpaceX's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cursor to break into target networks, according to findings from CloudSEK and Gambit Security. The two independent analyses are based on exposed infrastructure associated with the Russian-speaking cybercrime group, leading to the discovery of its
Extortion group FulcrumSec claims they stole 86GB of Manchester Airports Group data after finding API credentials exposed in client-side JavaScript. Manchester Airports Group (MAG) disclosed a data breach on August 27 affecting customers of Manchester, London Stansted, and East Midlands airports. Two days later, BleepingComputer reports the extortion group FulcrumSec claimed responsibility, saying it stole roughly 86GB of data, considerably more detailed than what MAG’s original disclosure suggested. MAG’s own statement describes a relatively limited set of exposed data. It says the breach affected car park, lounge, Fast Track bookings, and airport WiFi registrations, exposing email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations, and postcodes. MAG disclosed that the data breach impacted 8.7 million customers, however, the company says most of those customers had only their email addresses exposed. FulcrumSec tells a different story. The group shared samples with BleepingComputer that included a 21.5GB export of Manchester customer data, with personal identifiers, historical booking details, and marketing information. BleepingComputer checked one record against a real traveler’s purchase history and found matching Fast Track bookings, arrival times, terminal information, and payment amounts. The alleged way into the system is particularly concerning. FulcrumSec says it found airport-specific Iterable API credentials inside client-side JavaScript. That code runs in users’ browsers, so anyone inspecting the website with developer tools could potentially see those credentials. “The group claims it obtained access using airport-specific Iterable API credentials exposed in client-side JavaScript and that the stolen material includes nearly 200,000 records related to upcoming travel during the remainder of 2026.” states the report. These records allegedly contain dates, times and booking information linked to personally identifiable information. FulcrumSec says it intends to publish the stolen data and a technical account of the intrusion. If the claim is accurate, attackers did not need a highly sophisticated technique. They simply found sensitive API credentials exposed in code that the website sent directly to customers’ browsers.” The most concerning specific claim is nearly 200,000 records tied to upcoming travel through the rest of 2026, complete with dates, times, and booking details linked to identifiable individuals. BleepingComputer couldn’t independently verify that number or the full scope of what was actually taken, and MAG declined to directly address FulcrumSec’s specific claims when asked, instead pointing to its existing statement that affected customers with upcoming bookings had already been contacted. MAG is confident that we have taken effective measures to protect our customers and we have contacted all those affected, a spokesperson said, without engaging with the 86GB figure or the exposed-credentials claim directly. FulcrumSec plans to publish the stolen data but may redact upcoming travel records because of the risk of real-world harm. UK postcodes can identify very small groups of addresses, and combined with vehicle registrations, parking dates and booking details, the data could enable highly convincing phishing messages targeting people with upcoming trips. UK postcodes make this exposure sharper than the equivalent breach might be in the US. Unlike American ZIP codes covering broad delivery areas, a full UK postcode typically identifies a small cluster of neighboring addresses, sometimes a single property, according to the Office for National Statistics. Combined with vehicle registrations, parking dates, and specific booking references, that’s more than enough raw material for a phishing message referencing a real upcoming trip that would be very hard to distinguish from a genuine MAG communication. Security researchers commenting on the broader incident have flagged a supply-chain angle worth watching. Airport operations increasingly run through third-party platforms for booking, parking, and loyalty services rather than systems the airport itself directly controls, and Iterable, the marketing platform whose API credentials FulcrumSec claims to have abused, is exactly that kind of outsourced dependency. This also isn’t aviation’s first bad year: a September 2025 ransomware attack on Collins Aerospace‘s check-in software had already grounded systems at Heathrow, Brussels, and Berlin, meaning UK and European aviation infrastructure has now taken two significant hits inside twelve months. MAG says no payment card or banking data was exposed, however, travelers who recently booked parking, lounge access or Fast Track should assume more travel data may be exposed and treat messages citing real booking details with caution. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Manchester Airports Group (MAG))
The Manchester Airports Group data breach has been claimed by extortion group FulcrumSec, which told BleepingComputer that it stole approximately 86 GB of data. Samples reviewed by BleepingComputer contained information consistent with MAG's disclosure while indicating that the breach exposed considerably more detailed customer, booking, and travel information than initially revealed. Manchester Airports Group (MAG), the United Kingdom's largest airport operator, disclosed on August 27 that an unauthorized third party had stolen customer data related to Manchester, London Stansted, and East Midlands airports. The company said the affected information came from car park, lounge, and Fast Track bookings and in-airport Wi-Fi registrations. In emails to BleepingComputer, FulcrumSec claimed responsibility for the attack and shared samples of the allegedly stolen data as evidence.
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