PaperCut servers are under active attack, while 47% of tracked installations still run unpatched versions vulnerable to remote code execution. PaperCut, the print management software running in schools, hospitals, and offices worldwide, confirmed on August 27 that a pre-authentication remote code execution flaw is being actively exploited against real customers. Researchers at Huntress found evidence of exploitation in two customer environments, and the security firm went further, reproducing the entire attack chain from scratch against a clean, unpatched install. “Observed activity focused on system discovery. We have not observed secondary malware, further command-and-control traffic, or additional persistence or post-exploitation from the recovered payload.” reads the report published by Hutress. “Huntress reproduced a full pre-authentication RCE chain against a vanilla PaperCut NG 25.0.11.75758 server. We have reached out to PaperCut to coordinate with them on continued vulnerability analysis.” The vulnerability starts with a simple authorization mistake in PaperCut. An attacker can send a specially crafted request that makes the server display one page while actually running an action from another page. PaperCut checks the permissions for the page it displays instead of the action it actually performs. This flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-81578, can let an attacker change the server’s configuration without logging in. That access can then be combined with a second flaw, CVE-2026-82078. The issue in PaperCut’s database utilities can load unsafe Java classes, allowing the attacker to run arbitrary Java code on the server. The real-world attacks Huntress observed were almost quaint compared to the severity of the bug itself. One incident lasted under two minutes total, with the attacker running nothing more aggressive than whoami and ver, basic commands to identify the compromised account and Windows version. A second incident added tasklist to the mix, checking what processes were running, but neither case showed evidence of deeper persistence, secondary malware, or follow-up command-and-control traffic. The activities observed by Huntress read like reconnaissance rather than a finished operation, the kind of activity that usually precedes something worse. The forensic trail attackers left behind is genuinely useful for defenders, and it’s worth understanding exactly what it looks like. Investigators found a malicious Java class file dropped directly into PaperCut’s own installation directory, capable of running commands, writing results to a temporary file, and then deleting both the output and the server’s own log file to cover its tracks. One artifact survived that cleanup regardless: a Derby database log entry reading memory:...\pwn, an oddly named database directory that PaperCut’s own investigation guidance now flags as a high-confidence indicator of compromise. “After exploitation, the .class file deletes its own Udydn.out file, as well as the server’s server.log file. The server.log file recorded the execution of this code in a log line that contains the string DB URL: jdbc:derby:memory:pwn that immediately followed the large encoded data blob’s appearance in the log.” continues the report. “We observed /data/internal/derby.log was not deleted, and it contains one insightful breadcrumb” PaperCut’s patching process is more complicated than simply installing an update. The company released an emergency patch first, then issued another update less than 24 hours later after additional testing. Fixes for version 24 were still being developed when the report was published. The timing is important because the second confirmed attack targeted a server running version 24, before the fix for that version was available. Huntress successfully recreated the exploit chain in a test environment. From a remote system, the researchers were able to trigger code execution without authentication. The attack caused PaperCut’s pc-app.exe Application Server to launch charmap.exe with SYSTEM privileges, confirming that the vulnerability can lead to code execution at the highest Windows privilege level. The bigger concern involves older versions. Huntress found that about 47% of the roughly 2,500 PaperCut installations it tracks still run version 23 or earlier, and there is currently no patch for those versions. Huntress is working with PaperCut to analyze the vulnerability and coordinate the response. If your organization runs one of these older versions, the safest option for now is to remove the PaperCut Application Server from the public internet. Restrict access through a VPN or a trusted internal network until a proper fix becomes available. If your PaperCut server has been publicly accessible recently, installing the patch should not be the end of your response. It should be the start of an investigation. Before restarting the server, save its logs and configuration files so you don’t lose important evidence. Check whether pc-app.exe has launched a command shell or tools such as tasklist, and look for unexpected .class files in the server’s lib directory. Even a short two-minute reconnaissance attempt could be an early sign of a more serious attack. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Philippine nuclear and naval targets)
A new round of the weekly Security Affairs newsletter has arrived! Every week, the best security articles from Security Affairs are free in your email box. Enjoy a new round of the weekly SecurityAffairs newsletter, including international press. Hack One Robot, Reach the Next: Unitree G1 Security FlawsRhysida Ransomware Group Targets Berlin Government Ahead of VotePhilippine Nuclear and Naval Targets Hit by Suspected Chinese OperatorLove Electric Breach: 877,000 Driver Records Offered for $600Trump Targets Foreign Technology in New U.S. Power Grid Security OrderU.S. CISA adds ownCloud, Linux Kernel, and JFrog Artifactory flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogRussian APT BlueDelta Uses HOOKEDGE to Target Defense and Diplomatic OrganizationsPaperCut Zero-Day Under Active Attack: Emergency Patch ReleasedU.S. CISA adds Red Hat, Linux Kernel, Ajax.NET Professional, Microsoft SQL Server, and Citrix NetScaler flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogCyberattack on UK Airport Operator MAG Exposes Data of 8.7 Million Customers Across Three AirportsDark Caracal Deploys New Go Malware With Ethereum-Based C2 FallbackAustralian Police Charge Two Over TeamPCP Credential TheftMeta to Pay Up to $18B Over Teen Social Media UseCISA Warns Water Utilities: Find Your Exposed PLCs Before Attackers DoOpenAI banned Russian ChatGPT accounts backing covert influence operationCISA Red Team Fully Compromised Two Critical Infrastructure OrgsFBI Seizes China-Linked Hacking Platforms QScan and QTRouter Used Against Critical InfrastructureU.S. CISA adds Gitea flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog88 ID Verification Breaches Show the Cost of Collecting Identity DataWhatsApp Adds Stronger Security as Passkeys Hit 1 BillionOperation Jackal: 58 Arrests Expose the Money Laundering Machine Behind Global ScamsNorway ’s Digital Government Infrastructure Hit by a new DDoS AttackWhen the Algorithm Fires You: Uber Faces €825M FineTwo CVSS 9.8 Auth Bypasses in miniOrange SAML WordPress Plugin Were Exploited Before Any Database Even Listed the Paid Editions as VulnerableU.S. CISA adds maximum-severity Oracle flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogFake Minecraft Sites Are Still Spreading WeedHack After C2 TakedownCybercriminals Turn GTA VI Leaks Into Malware BaitSlovakia Warns of Cyber Risks in Road Speed CamerasTikTok Settles U.S. Child Privacy Case for $400 MillioniAuthFlow v2: The $10,000 Phishing Toolkit That Survives Your Password ResetUK Power Plant Disabled for Four Days by Iran-Linked Hackers, Concurrent with US Water AttacksZero-Click Grok Chat History Theft: Adversa AI Demonstrates Cryptographic Context Injection International Press – Newsletter Cybercrime iAuthFlow v2 Enrolls Google Passkeys That Survive Password Resets Fake GTA VI ISO circulates on the internet a few days after leak, internet sleuths claim 113GB download is padded malware Taiwan charges 9 over illegal AI server exports to China, including Nvidia and Super Micro staff Indian man who fled US arrested on charges he helped scammers siphon $7.5 million from the elderly 58 arrests in global effort to dismantle West African organized crime groups Exposing AnonyMousKIT: AI-Powered PhaaS Supply Chain RTM Locker interview: a ransomware actor on the RaaS market Two WA men charged following AFP-FBI-WAPF disruption of alleged global cybercrime syndicate Love Electric driver data for sale: NI, licence numbers Ransomware group says it stole Berlin data, offers it for auction Malware FTP Banners: The New Dead Drop Resolver Delivering Novel RATs The State of AI-Enabled Malware August 2026: From Brand Abuse to Agentic Execution 19 Chrome and Edge Extensions Deliver a Wallet Drainer and Credential-Stealing Payloads SLEEPWALKER: A Passive Backdoor With Its Own Command Language Hacking One slug, seven editions: the miniOrange SAML SSO bug that let anyone log in as your WordPress admin A Tale of Two SOCs: Insights From Two Red Team Assessments Three UK airports hit by cyber-attack with data of 8.7m customers accessed New GPUThor Rowhammer Defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A6000 to Gain Host Root Access PaperCut Releases Emergency Patch for Exploited Zero-Day Philippine Nuclear Agency and Naval Contractor Targeted by Suspected Chinese-Speaking Operator Using Known Vulnerabilities The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead Power Leak: Amazon Kiro IDE Prompt Injection Enables Data Exfiltration Claude Opus 4.6 Bypasses Gym Booking Limit, Cancels Other Users’ Reservations in Tests UniBLEed: Unauthenticated Root RCE on Any Unitree G1 Humanoid Robot Within Bluetooth Range PaperCut Actively Exploited: A Pre-Auth RCE Chain Intelligence and Information Warfare Iranian hackers shut down UK power plant Operation QUICSILVER: China-Nexus Actor Targets Myanmar Diplomats via VHD-Delivered Go Backdoor Digdir stabilizes solutions after cyberattack Justice Department and FBI Seize Platforms Operated and Used by China State-Sponsored Hackers to Target U.S. Critical Infrastructure The infrastructure quartermaster: inside a China-nexus state enablement model Disrupting a new covert influence campaign from Russia Tortoiseshell: New Toolset and Operational Infrastructure Exposed Treasury Launches Unprecedented Campaign Against Iranian Regime on Economic D-Day Dark Caracal Reloaded: New Malware, Same Hunting Grounds Cambodia-focused cluster uses multistage infection chain with localized lures BlueDelta Targets Defense and Diplomacy with HOOKEDGE Cybersecurity Warning about the risks of road meters One billion people are now protected with passkeys on WhatsApp, plus more account security features An ID Check Breach Timeline: 2011–2026 Internet Exposure Reduction Guidance Meta agrees to pay $18 billion to settle US lawsuits over children’s social media addiction DECLARING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY TO SECURE THE UNITED STATES BULK-POWER SYSTEM Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
Microsoft has disclosed details of a new ClickFix variant, dubbed TerminalFix, that aims to trick users into running a malicious command in Windows Terminal or PowerShell. "While traditional ClickFix campaigns direct victims to the Windows Run dialog, TerminalFix campaigns apply the same technique but direct users to Windows Terminal or PowerShell instead, increasing the likelihood that complex
Anthropic is permanently increasing Claude Code's standard weekly usage limits by 25% for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans, but it's not as good as it sounds. If you use Claude, you're actually getting a 17% reduction compared to what you have today. Claude Code currently has a temporary 50% increase in weekly limits, which Anthropic says will remain in place until September 14. "Starting September 14, we're permanently raising standard weekly limits in Claude Code by 25% for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans," Anthropic wrote on X. "Until then, the current 50% increase will be in place." It's a clever way to frame words, as it almost sounds like you're winning as a customer, but you're not, and it's a downgrade. If Claude Code's original weekly allowance was 100, the temporary boost gives you 150 today. On September 14, that drops to 125.
The latest version of the Brave browser, 1.94, introduces a feature called ‘Email Aliases’ that allows users to generate disposable email addresses when signing up to a new service. Using an alias address keeps the user's real email address hidden from the website while still forwarding messages from the service. Brave already uses data isolation to prevent websites from inferring user identities based on cookie-based or cache correlations; however, email addresses are still stored on website servers, creating a privacy gap. Brave’s new feature addresses this risk by blocking cross-site identity matching, reducing spam, and protecting users from threats such as phishing attacks that can follow data breaches. “If a website you signed up for is hacked, your information can be leaked and end up with data brokers or worse,” explains Brave in the announcement.
An alleged Chinese-speaking actor breached Philippine nuclear and naval targets by exploiting known flaws, stealing sensitive data. A suspected Chinese-speaking operator targeted a Philippine nuclear research body and a marine engineering company that supports the Philippine Navy, using well-known vulnerabilities in internet-facing ownCloud and WordPress systems. The activity was uncovered after Hunt.io found an exposed server in Amsterdam that contained attack scripts, logs, offensive tooling and data taken from the two organisations. “Hunt.io Attack Capture discovered an open directory containing tooling which documented intrusion activity against two Philippine organizations.” reads the report published by Hunt.io. “A recovered CSV references roughly 9 GB of material stolen from the nuclear agency, most absent from the current directories contents, and a compromise of a project management application, indicating a possible third victim.” Hunt.io disclosed the findings to CERT-PH under the TLP:AMBER sharing standard and delayed publication until 25 August 2026 so the national response team could notify the affected organisations. The incident arrives amid sustained tensions in the South China Sea and continuing reports of suspected Chinese cyber activity against Philippine government, defence and critical-infrastructure targets. “On August 13, 2026, Hunt.io Attack Capture identified an open directory on the host 31.58.209[.]241. The server staged custom Python scripts, per-file transfer logs, open-source offensive security tooling, and exfiltrated data from two Philippine organizations. The scripts targeted an ownCloud instance operated by a nuclear research body, using pre-signed URLs generated with an empty signing secret, which allowed for the unauthenticated retrieval of files over WebDAV.” states the report.”A separate intrusion was observed exploiting a WordPress site operated by a Philippine marine engineering and shipbuilding company that provides services to the Philippine Navy.” The server was not a sophisticated hidden service. It exposed a Python SimpleHTTP directory on port 8000, along with SSH, a self-hosted ownCloud login page and other services. The directory contained 1,310 files in 86 folders, totaling 1.17 GB, including scripts, stolen data and tools such as Sliver, Metasploit and Mettle. Researchers gained a rare view of the attacker’s operations after finding tools, logs and stolen files left exposed on the server. The main entry point was likely the nuclear research body’s internet-facing ownCloud service, compromised by exploiting CVE-2023-49105, an authentication-bypass flaw in ownCloud versions before 10.13.1. In this condition, an attacker who knows a valid username can generate WebDAV requests that the server accepts as if they were made by that user. No password is needed. Hunt.io found five custom Python scripts implementing this technique, four focused on individual accounts and a fifth capable of enumerating directories and recording every attempted download. hunt “In vulnerable instances when no such key was configured, a default state on new installs, the signing routine still executed using an empty secret. An attacker with knowledge of valid usernames on the instance could construct signed WebDAV requests that would be accepted by the server as authentication action by that user, without ever supplying credentials.” continues the report. “A total of five custom Python scripts saved from the directory implement this exact technique described above. Four target a single account each; the fifth moves further to include directory enumeration and logging.” The attacker used random delays to make data collection less noticeable and avoid volume-based alerts. Scripts, logs and folders consistently used Simplified Chinese, including labels for nuclear, radiation-safety, finance and IT files. This suggests a Chinese-speaking operator, but does not prove links to a specific government or threat group. The stolen data included nuclear reactor component databases, fuel inventories, radiation-safety documents, incident records and authorised-user lists. It also included strategic plans, IT documents, staff records, CVs, passport and travel data, and financial disclosures from Philippine officials. The exposed server held 176 files, about 372 MB in total. However, a CSV created by the attacker referred to roughly 9 GB of stolen data. This gap suggests the server contained only part of the haul and that the attacker may have accessed much more than researchers could recover. The material also included a KeePass database, AxCrypt-encrypted files and a BitLocker recovery key. Those artefacts matter because they can support follow-on access: a data theft operation can become a credential-theft operation, and a credential-theft operation can become a longer-term intrusion. Researchers additionally recovered a 192 MB SQL dump from a ZKTeco BioTime attendance and personnel system. Such a database can link people to badge identifiers, departments and access records, enabling an attacker to build a picture of who works where, who may have sensitive access and which people are worth targeting next. The same server also contained evidence of a breach involving a Philippine marine engineering and shipbuilding company that works with the Philippine Navy. The attacker exploited CVE-2024-28000, a privilege-escalation flaw in the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin. The flaw let attackers create a WordPress admin account without authentication by exploiting a predictable security hash through the REST API. Hunt.io found the exploit code, compiled tools and logs showing that the attacker successfully gained admin access. The attacker also used WordPress XML-RPC to test passwords for the admin account with the well-known rockyou.txt list. The logs show that this method also found valid credentials. That gave the operator redundancy. Even if one access path were closed, the attacker could retain an administrator account, a valid password or data such as WordPress hashes and secret values from the stolen site database. Redundant access is not glamorous. It is, unfortunately, effective. While examining the compromised WordPress site, Hunt.io also discovered an active EtherHiding-style injection that it believes may be unrelated to the Chinese-speaking operator. The malicious JavaScript used an Ethereum smart contract as a place to retrieve content, then displayed a fake Google verification page designed to push visitors into a ClickFix-style infection flow. The campaign used a service worker for persistence and collected visitor fingerprint data. Hunt.io found 174 unique IP addresses hosting pages with the same NoChain loader strings and smart-contract reference, but said the evidence did not link that activity to the operator who attacked the nuclear and naval-linked targets. That distinction matters. A compromised website can host multiple intrusions or payloads at once, often run by unrelated actors. Analysts should resist the temptation to treat every malicious artefact on one server as evidence of a single campaign. The technical lesson is blunt: old and known weaknesses still provide access to high-value targets. Organisations using ownCloud should upgrade to version 10.13.3 or later, apply the vendor’s relevant fixes and ensure that pre-signed URLs use a strong, non-empty signing key. Teams should also examine WebDAV logs for suspicious PROPFIND directory-enumeration requests, large volumes of file retrieval across multiple accounts, or recurring requests from a single source with artificial gaps between them. Low-and-slow collection is still collection. For WordPress, organisations should update LiteSpeed Cache to version 6.4 or later, remove or restrict XML-RPC when it is not needed, enforce strong unique administrator passwords and require multi-factor authentication. The XML-RPC compromise in this case succeeded against a password from a public wordlist, which is not a vulnerability in WordPress so much as an invitation nobody should leave on the doorstep. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Philippine nuclear and naval targets)
Healthcare and pharmaceutical distribution giant McKesson has disclosed a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to third-party applications and data theft, with the ShinyHunters extortion group claiming it stole 284 million patient data records.
New research reveals that AI safety refusal lives in a thin neural layer, highlighting the critical need for external, multi-layered security. The post Perturbation Probing: A New Diagnostic for the Fragility of LLM Safety appeared first on Unit 42.
Love Electric’s alleged data breach exposes sensitive driver data and highlights the identity risks created by third-party salary sacrifice providers. A seller on an English-language data-breach forum claimed on August 26 that they had obtained the driver database of Love Electric, a UK broker that runs electric-vehicle salary sacrifice schemes. The seller, operating under the name “seraphims”, offered 877,000 records for $600 in cryptocurrency, with the price negotiable. That headline number needs a qualification. Ransomnews researchers examined a 999-row sample published with the listing and found strong evidence that the sample came from a genuine production database, but the claimed 877,000 records remain unverified. Love Electric had been contacted for comment at the time of publication. “The 999 rows split into 731 primary drivers and 268 additional named drivers. There are exactly 731 distinct quote IDs, and every quote has exactly one primary driver, 731 out of 731. All 268 additional drivers reference a quote that exists in the file, with no orphans.” reads the Ransomnews’s report. “The consent flag governing National Insurance processing is empty for precisely the 268 additional drivers and populated for every one of the 731 primary drivers. National Insurance numbers appear on primary drivers only. Those are constraints enforced by whatever application wrote the data, and they hold across all 999 rows without exception.” That matters because fabricated breach databases often fall apart when researchers examine the relationships between records. Here, the relationships hold: additional drivers point to existing quotes, the National Insurance processing flag appears where the underlying application logic would expect it, and National Insurance numbers appear only on primary drivers. Love Electric Financial Services Limited is an Edinburgh-based company that provides EV salary sacrifice administration, credit broking and related services to employers across the UK. Companies House identifies it as an active Scottish company, registered under number SC374952, while Love Electric’s own documentation confirms that it operates as a salary sacrifice administrator and FCA-regulated credit broker. The business model explains why its systems can contain information that many people would normally associate with payroll departments. Salary sacrifice arrangements require the broker to identify employees, process the scheme and support insurance and tax-related requirements, so the underlying records can include National Insurance numbers and driving licence information. Love Electric’s privacy policy also says it processes personal information under UK data protection law. “The seller published a free sample as a 999-row CSV with 24 columns, named in a way that indicates an export of a dbo.drivers table from a Microsoft SQL Server database.” continues the report. “The columns are: id, quote_id, user_id, title, first_name, last_name, email, phone_number, date_of_birth, address, address2, city, country, postcode, national_insurance_number, driving_licence_number, driving_licence_country, allow_processing_national_insurance, primary, created_at, updated_at, deleted_at, weekly_hours and occupation_id.” The fields included names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, addresses, postcodes, National Insurance numbers, driving licence numbers, quote IDs and consent-related fields. The data wasn’t uniformly populated, which is another reason the sample looks like a real production export rather than a synthetic dataset. Around 71% of the rows lacked a name, address or city, 74% had no phone number, and 85% had no National Insurance number, while 147 records contained a National Insurance number and 287 contained a driving licence number. The geography also made sense. Postcodes clustered around Edinburgh and central Scotland, with records extending into England, while dates of birth ranged from 1946 to 1999 and concentrated around people born in the 1970s and 1980s. Ransomnews then tested the driving licence numbers against the structure used by UK licences. Of the 108 full-length licence numbers in the sample, 98.1% had a surname block matching the surname in the corresponding record, 97.2% had an initial matching the first name, and 78.7% contained a date-of-birth encoding that matched the stored date of birth. The imperfections were just as interesting. Licence numbers appeared in many different lengths, only 53% of the National Insurance numbers present matched the expected HMRC format, and phone numbers appeared in three different formats. That kind of mess is exactly what you’d expect from users entering information into a live form, abandoning fields or making mistakes. “A UK driving licence number is not random. Characters one to five are the holder’s surname padded with the digit 9, characters six to eleven encode the date of birth with 50 added to the month for female holders, and character twelve is the first-name initial. Of the 108 full-length licence numbers in the sample, 98.1% have a surname block matching the record’s own surname field and 97.2% have an initial matching the first-name field. 78.7% carry an encoded date of birth matching the date_of_birth column.” state the researchers. “The roughly one in five that disagree are consistent with people mistyping a sixteen-character string into a web form, which is exactly the error rate real self-reported data carries and synthetic data does not.” The email addresses provided another useful check. Most belonged to corporate domains associated with identifiable UK employers, Love Electric itself or a European software consultancy, rather than being dominated by Gmail and other consumer providers. That fits the way workplace salary sacrifice schemes operate because employees generally enter through their employer. The database structure also looked normal. It included a soft-delete field, integer foreign keys for quotes and occupations, regional values for Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and even a Jane Doe test record that appears to have survived from the system’s setup. Real databases leave fingerprints like these. Synthetic ones tend to be suspiciously tidy. The seller’s own history is less convincing than the database evidence. The “seraphims” account was created on July 22, 2026 and had published nine data listings by August 26, roughly two per week, but several of those listings were described by the seller as scrapes rather than breaches. The Love Electric listing had attracted no replies and only 52 views when Ransomnews checked it. The account’s reputation score of 30 came from a single positive vote posted on August 17 with the comment “keep scrapping”, which says more about the seller’s scraping activity than about a track record of selling verified breach data. That doesn’t make the Love Electric sample fake. The technical evidence points in the opposite direction. It does mean we should separate two questions: whether the sample appears genuine, and whether the seller really controls 877,000 records. The second claim is much harder to establish. Ransomnews saw only 0.11% of the alleged dataset, and the sample shows that database rows don’t map directly to individual people. The 999 rows corresponded to 731 quotes and only 58 distinct surname-and-date-of-birth combinations, with one person appearing 48 times. There’s another clue in the filename. The db2_ prefix suggests that the table may belong to one database among several, so the seller’s 877,000 figure could refer to a larger collection rather than this particular driver table. At this point, treating 877,000 as a confirmed number would go beyond the evidence. The timeline also deserves caution. The seller claimed an August 2026 attack involving a zero-day in a third-party system, but every sample row carries a created_at timestamp within a six-second window on August 14, 2022. That pattern looks like a bulk migration into a newer platform rather than 999 people signing up within six seconds. It tells us that the database contains legacy records. It doesn’t tell us when someone took them, how they obtained them or whether the seller’s claimed zero-day played any role. That last point matters for incident response. “Third-party zero-day” is a claim made by the seller, not an established fact, and attackers have plenty of reasons to make an access story sound more sophisticated than it was. Ransomnews says it has not verified that route. For the people potentially affected, the more immediate issue is the nature of the exposed information. A password can be replaced. A National Insurance number and a driving licence number can’t simply be rotated because someone has posted them for sale. That creates an obvious phishing risk. Someone who has a person’s name, date of birth, address, employer and National Insurance number can construct a much more convincing message pretending to be HMRC, a payroll team, an employer or a vehicle leasing provider. Drivers who used Love Electric should therefore treat unexpected messages about their vehicle scheme, payroll or tax affairs with suspicion. They should verify the sender through a phone number or website they already trust rather than using contact details contained in the message. Love Electric’s current public material says it works with more than 1,500 companies, which gives some sense of the scale of the service’s employer-facing footprint. That makes supplier security worth treating as an operational issue rather than a procurement checkbox. If a third-party provider holds National Insurance numbers, driving licence numbers, employment information and contact data, its security controls deserve the same level of scrutiny as any other system handling high-value identity information. The seller’s alleged third-party entry point is therefore worth investigating, but it shouldn’t become the centre of the story before someone verifies it. The useful evidence is already sitting in the sample: a production-style schema, consistent relationships, realistic user errors and identifiers that line up with real-world records. The other important detail is the price. $600 for a database containing National Insurance and driving licence numbers isn’t a serious valuation of the data. It’s a price designed to make a quick sale. And if the seller really has more than the published sample, multiple buyers could obtain the same information. That’s where the risk gets worse: the exposure doesn’t end with the first person who downloads it. Ransomnews says it did not access or probe Love Electric’s systems, purchase the full dataset, or validate the exposed identifiers against live services. It analysed the free sample, removed identifying information from its publication and notified Love Electric before publication, offering to share the listing and sample with the company’s incident-response team. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, data breach)
PaperCut has released a second emergency security update for two actively exploited vulnerabilities in its PaperCut NG and MF print management software after researchers discovered multiple ways to bypass the initial fixes. As BleepingComputer reported yesterday, PaperCut warned that hackers were exploiting a vulnerability in zero-day attacks against customer servers and released an initial emergency patch for PaperCut NG/MF versions 25 and 26. At the time, however, the company had not disclosed CVE identifiers or technical details about the vulnerabilities, saying it was withholding information while it investigated the attacks and gave customers time to apply emergency fixes. PaperCut has now shared technical details and CVE identifiers for the two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-82078 and CVE-2026-81578. These vulnerabilities can be chained to bypass authentication and execute code on vulnerable servers.
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