DreamHost is warning of a data breach after attackers gained access to its File Manager platform for two months and stole customers' FTP/SFTP usernames and passwords. This follows the American web hosting provider and domain registrar's announcement that it suffered a cybersecurity incident requiring users to reset their email and FTP/SFTP passwords. In a data breach notification, DreamHost now says the breach extended from August 2026 to October 23, 2026, the day it was discovered. "We discovered that an unauthorized third party accessed the server that runs our web-based File Manager at files.dreamhost.com," reads the notification. "The unauthorized third party exploited a vulnerability in that software and was able to access the FTP/SFTP usernames and passwords of individuals who logged into this File Manager between approximately August 2026 and October 23, 2026."
Cyberattacks disrupted refrigeration monitoring systems at three French blood banks, amid similar attacks targeting European supermarkets. A cyberattack has hit three regional blood banks in France, disrupting systems used to monitor and control refrigerated storage facilities. The incident took place overnight between Sunday and Monday, at roughly the same time hackers were targeting supermarket refrigeration systems across several European countries. The attack is particularly concerning because it targeted infrastructure that plays a direct role in protecting public health. Blood products must remain within specific temperature ranges to preserve their quality and ensure they’re safe for medical use. A disruption to refrigeration systems can therefore have consequences that go well beyond a conventional IT outage. According to the French Health Ministry, the incident affected several facilities operated by the French Blood Establishment (EFS). “Several regional facilities of the French Blood Establishment (EFS) were affected by a cybersecurity incident that impacted certain cold storage room monitoring and control systems,” the health ministry said in a statement. “The incident had no impact on blood supplies,” Reuters reported, quoting EFS spokesperson Charley Dubois. Staff working around the clock received alerts about the problems and moved blood products to refrigerators that weren’t connected to the affected systems. This response helped prevent the incident from disrupting blood supplies, demonstrating how important operational procedures and contingency plans are when technology fails. “The situation was under control on Wednesday,” the French Health Ministry said, according to Reuters, which also reported that remote access to the affected refrigerators had been disabled. Investigations are now underway to establish how the attackers gained access, which equipment was affected and when the systems can safely return to normal operation. The timing is also significant. The French blood bank incident coincided with attacks against supermarket refrigeration systems in eight European countries, including Sweden and Belgium. Those attacks forced retailers to discard large quantities of food after hackers interfered with cooling and freezer systems. This wasn’t the first time French supermarkets had faced csxk cx incident. In October, police investigated an attack in which hackers allegedly seized control of cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets, causing fires and significant food losses. These incidents share similarities that deserve attention. They point to a security problem beyond traditional corporate IT systems: the growing exposure of operational technology (OT), including industrial control systems, refrigeration equipment, and the remote management platforms kdch operate them. These systems are often connected to corporate networks or accessible through remote management services. If attackers compromise those access points, they may be able to interfere with physical processes rather than simply steal information or encrypt business data. The consequences can be serious. In a supermarket, an attacker who manipulates refrigeration controls can cause food losses and potentially create safety risks. In a blood bank, the same type of interference could threaten the integrity of medical supplies and disrupt services that hospitals depend on. The French incident didn’t affect blood supplies, but the outcome shouldn’t lead organizations to underestimate the risk. Staff intervention and the availability of independent refrigerators helped contain the damage. Not every facility will have the same resources, response procedures or ability to move critical products at short notice. Organizations operating critical infrastructure need to treat the security of connected equipment as a core operational requirement. This means identifying exposed systems, restricting remote access, enforcing strong authentication, segmenting operational networks and monitoring changes to equipment settings. They also need tested manual procedures that allow essential services to continue when digital systems become unavailable or untrustworthy. The European Union has already raised concerns about vulnerabilities in connected infrastructure amid heightened security tensions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. These latest incidents reinforce the need to consider cyberattacks against physical systems as a real operational and public safety risk, not simply an IT problem. “Investigations are under way into how the attack was carried out, what equipment may have been affected and when systems can safely return to service.” concludes the report. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, French Blood Banks)
A phishing campaign used Google Calendar invites, trusted redirects, and fake login pages to hijack corporate Google sessions and bypass MFA protections. Material Security examines how Operation CloudFire tracked the attacks, blocked malicious messages, and helped take down nearly 900 domains used by the attackers.
Binance reveals how fake job interviews, malware and internal AI abuse enabled attackers to steal $6.34 billion. The Binance security incident on October 29 shows how a fake recruitment process can become the entry point to critical financial infrastructure. The attackers combined social engineering, compromised developer tools, stolen credentials and abuse of an internal AI application to reach the cryptocurrency exchange’s wallet signing systems. “Woah – so the Binance hack was indeed via a dodgy job interview for one of its developers who was tricked into downloading malware as part of the “interview” – costing the company >$3bn…” the popular best seller author and cybercrime expert Geoff White wrote on LinkedIn. “Worth noting: – The 2016 hack of Bangladesh Bank also attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group of hackers was via a job application – The 2022 theft of $625m from video game Axie Infinity happened via offering an employee a juicy job offer RECRUITMENT IS RISK. If you’re not educating employees on this, start now… – The 2024 heist of $1.5b from Bybit relied on tricking an employee of its supplier into downloading a dodgy share trading app onto the work machine (so not using a recruitment lure, but still deceiving a target into downloading malware)” In its initial findings and response update, published on November 3, Binance described the operation as a “sophisticated, multi-stage campaign.” The company estimates that approximately $6.34 billion in digital assets were affected. The FBI attributed the incident to the North Korea-linked APT “TraderTraitor,” also tracked as Lazarus Group and APT38. “Our current investigation indicates that this was a sophisticated, multi-stage campaign. It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident.” reads the update published by the crypto firm. “The attackers combined a range of techniques, including social engineering by fake recruitment interviews, malicious software downloads, compromised internal AI tooling, endpoint compromise, and an advanced transaction-authorisation method.” The operation began months before the theft. In June 2026, an engineer from Binance’s Wallet DevOps team downloaded a tampered Homebrew installation while searching online for a popular AI coding tool. Binance detected the suspicious activity, replaced the device and rotated the associated credentials, but information about the engineer’s role and colleagues had already been exposed. The attackers then targeted another software engineer through a legitimate job-hunting platform. In September, someone posing as a Project Director arranged two interviews: first with an HR representative, then with someone claiming to be the CEO of a fictitious company. During the first video interview, the supposed HR representative shared a social media account containing personal photos and videos to establish credibility. At the end of the second interview, the engineer was asked to download a technical assignment containing a malicious code repository onto his work computer. The malware executed during setup, replacing a legitimate development tool component with a malicious version. It used obfuscation to evade detection, executed commands and established communication with an attacker-controlled server. Binance said its endpoint security tools didn’t detect the malware at the time. “The second interview was conducted in a popular social chat app, near the end of the interview, Engineer B was instructed to download an “assignment” containing a malicious code repository onto his work computer.” states the firm. “The repository contained malicious code that executed during the setup process, initiating a series of unauthorized activities.” The compromise then moved beyond the affected workstation. On October 20, attackers used the compromised computer to abuse an internal AI tool and gain access to the systems of two other employees, including the Wallet DevOps engineer initially targeted in June. They discovered that his computer contained a token with container deployment permissions. This is one of the more significant aspects of the incident. The report doesn’t identify a vulnerability in the AI model itself. Instead, it shows how an internal application can become an attack pivot when an adversary gains access to a compromised employee’s environment and the permissions available to that user. “The attacker leveraged the compromised computer of engineer B and used an internal AI tool to gain control over the Wallet DevOps Engineer A and another Wallet Software Engineer C.” states the report. “The attacker soon discovered Wallet DevOps Engineer A had a container deployment permission token on his computer.” On October 29, the attackers used stolen credentials to access another engineer’s computer, deploy a container and execute a malicious script. This gave them access to Binance’s internal wallet signing service, allowing them to initiate transactions outside the normal withdrawal process. The transfers involved several blockchain networks. Five Binance hot wallets sent 233.46 million XRP to an attacker-controlled address, while other transfers involved approximately 970,500 SOL, 44.2 million OP and 18,270 BTC. The attackers also exploited Ethereum’s EIP-7702 authorization mechanism to grant a malicious smart contract partial execution rights over a Binance hot wallet. “EIP-7702 allows an account to delegate certain execution rights to a smart contract without exposing the private key. In this case, the attacker used that mechanism to give an attacker-controlled smart contract partial execution rights over a Binance hot wallet.” the company states. Suspending withdrawals wasn’t enough to stop the transfers because the malicious authorizations already existed on-chain and operated independently of Binance’s normal withdrawal infrastructure. Binance had to develop a specific procedure to revoke them. The use of Multi-Party Computation (MPC) meant there was no single private key that could immediately invalidate the unauthorized permissions. The final unauthorized transfer, involving 2,961.9 ETH, was finalized at 23:56 UTC. Binance cleared the malicious authorization at 00:10 UTC on October 30. The company estimates that approximately $6.34 billion in assets were affected, of which around $2.85 billion had been frozen or intercepted as of its November 3 update. Binance says it will absorb the financial impact and has already replenished 98% of the affected token assets, based on figures reported on October 31. The exchange has rebuilt the affected wallet infrastructure and internal AI tool, replaced compromised devices, revoked associated credentials and tokens, and strengthened endpoint monitoring and wallet-service controls. It is also engaging independent cybersecurity firms to review the incident. The attack highlights the need to treat recruitment processes, developer workstations and internal AI applications as part of the corporate attack surface. Technical assignments should run in isolated environments, deployment credentials should be short-lived and tightly restricted, and internal AI tools should never inherit unnecessary access to sensitive systems. Binance also said its security team had detected and prevented 57 suspected North Korea-linked cyber threat cases during 2026. These included fake job interviews, malicious developer tools, compromised software packages and browser extensions, fake video-conferencing applications and campaigns designed to steal credentials or deploy remote-access malware. The incident is another reminder that attackers don’t always need to break directly into critical infrastructure. Sometimes, compromising the people and tools that manage it is enough. “We are sharing this initial report because security improves when the industry learns together.” concludes the update. In September, Japan’s National Police Agency, the FBI, the US Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center, and intelligence agencies from Australia and Germany published a joint advisory about a group called WaterPlum, better known as Contagious Interview. The name says it all. The job interview is the infection vector. The numbers in the advisory are hard to shrug off. At least 30,000 devices infected across more than 100 countries, funds or credentials stolen from over 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets, and a total of 1.7 billion yen, roughly $10.71 million, funneled back to North Korea. The victims are almost always the same type: freelance developers and specialists in blockchain and Web3 work. Japan’s NPA and the FBI assess that both WaterPlum operators and some North Korean IT workers report to the same place, the 313 General Bureau of the Munitions Industry Department, under the Workers’ Party’s Central Committee. That’s not a loose affiliation. It’s an org chart. The trap itself is almost embarrassingly simple. WaterPlum actors pose as recruiters or hiring managers, often impersonating real AI, crypto, or NFT companies, and reach out on social media, job boards, and freelance platforms. Candidates get invited to a technical interview, then told to download a file to complete a coding test or fix a supposed bug on the video call. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Binance)
Large language model hijacking attacks, also known as LLMjacking, are generating large fraudulent cloud charges, with some organizations losing more than $100,000 per day. Companies can record costs as high as $1 million due to fraudulent calls using stolen API keys, researchers at Google's Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant in analyzed incidents. Based on their observations, there are "two distinct operational clusters coordinating to compromise and monetize enterprise LLM infrastructure." The researchers identified two categories of threat actors: those who scan for publicly exposed LLM endpoints and those who steal valid API keys from unprotected machines. After gaining initial access, the attackers sell it to services known as LLM mixers, which provide their subscribers with unauthorized access to LLMs.
Hackers who breached Harvard University's Alumni Affairs and Development systems in November 2025 stole data linked to more than 850,000 unique email addresses, according to breach notification service Have I Been Pwned. Harvard is a private Ivy League research university with over 20,000 faculty and staff, over 24,500 undergraduate and graduate students, and more than 400,000 alumni worldwide. As the university discovered on November 18, 2025, the attackers gained access to the personal information of students, alumni, donors, staff, and faculty members, including email addresses, telephone numbers, home and business addresses, event attendance records, donation details, and "biographical information pertaining to University fundraising and alumni engagement activities." However, Klara Jelinkova, Harvard's Vice President and University Chief Information Officer (CIO), said the breached IT systems didn't store Social Security numbers, passwords, payment card information, or financial information.
NIS2 Article 20 makes management bodies answerable for the access controls they approve, and boards are starting to ask for proof that those controls work. NIS2 board accountability gives directors a more direct role in cybersecurity. Under Article 20, the management bodies of essential and important entities must approve the cybersecurity risk-management measures required by the directive, oversee their implementation, and can be held liable for infringements, subject to national law. That obligation is live across most of the EU, with four member states going to the Court of Justice in July for failing to notify full transposition. Access control is one of the required measures. Directors are not expected to decide who gets administrator rights or review individual user accounts. They do, however, need to know that access is being controlled, that someone has responsibility for managing the risk, and that problems are being addressed. An estimated 160,000 entities fall within the scope of NIS2 across the EU. Approval is only part of the job Article 20 requires management bodies to both approve cybersecurity risk-management measures and oversee their implementation. It also requires the members of those bodies to undergo cybersecurity training, and to offer comparable training to employees on a regular basis. The measures themselves are set out in Article 21. They include access control policies and asset management, along with the use of multi-factor authentication or continuous authentication solutions where appropriate. Many organizations have traditionally left these decisions to security and IT teams. Under NIS2, the board still needs to know whether the measures it approved are being implemented. Day-to-day responsibility can remain with the CISO and IT teams. The difficulty comes when the person responsible for a risk does not control the budget, systems, or people needed to address it. Greece’s implementation goes further in defining who carries that responsibility. Its NIS2 law requires essential and important entities to appoint a suitably qualified member of their organization as an Information and Communication Systems Security Officer. The officer coordinates compliance, must have the resources needed to do the job, and operates independently of the company’s data protection officer. Access problems also need to reach the board in terms that it can act on. If an MFA rollout has failed or administrators have more access than they need, the board needs to understand the risk of leaving it unresolved. The CISO may be responsible for the risk without controlling the budget or teams needed to fix it. The board needs evidence Board reports often show what the access control policy requires, rather than whether it is being followed. For example, a company policy will likely require MFA and the removal of accounts when employees leave. However, the board also needs to know about the exceptions, including old accounts that remain active, excessive privileges, MFA exemptions that have never been reviewed, and suppliers whose access has outlasted their contracts. The board needs information about how the controls are working in practice. In a NIS2 access management report from European password and secrets manager Passwork, regulators from two national cybersecurity authorities and independent security leaders describe boards that have absorbed the liability change and now ask for proof that controls work, where they once accepted a summary of the policy. Organizations should be able to show who can access critical systems, why that access was granted, who approved it, how long it is valid, and when it was changed or revoked. The board needs to know whether that evidence exists and what it says about material access risk. Personal liability raises the stakes Implementation is still catching up in parts of Europe. In July 2026, the European Commission referred Ireland, Spain, France, and the Netherlands to the Court of Justice of the European Union for failing to notify full transposition of NIS2 into national law. The Commission also asked the Court to impose financial sanctions. For organizations in countries where NIS2 has been transposed, regulators have significant enforcement powers. For essential entities, member states must set a maximum fine of at least €10,000,000 or 2% of the global annual turnover, whichever is higher. Important entities are subject to a lower maximum threshold, of at least €7,000,000 or 1.4% of their global annual turnover, in a similar capacity. Article 32 also allows competent authorities, in specific circumstances, to seek the temporary prohibition of someone at CEO or legal representative level from exercising managerial functions in an essential entity. This can happen where enforcement action has failed to produce the required response. It is not an automatic consequence of a cyber incident. Article 20 separately requires member states to ensure that management bodies can be held liable for infringements of Article 21, subject to the applicable rules under national law. Approving the policy is not the end of the board’s involvement. It also needs information on whether the policy is being followed and what is happening with known problems. Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found credential abuse somewhere in the chain of 39% of breaches, more than any other vector. Stolen credentials also circulate at scale, as the exposed database of 24 billion credential records reported in June showed. Directors should expect an answer on which accounts and credentials reach critical systems, who is responsible for them, and whether that access is being controlled. Give access risk an owner with authority CISOs briefing their boards should be able to say who owns access-control risk and whether that person has the authority to address it. The board also needs evidence of what is happening. When an access problem is identified, someone needs to be responsible for getting it fixed. That might mean removing unnecessary privileges or dealing with an MFA exception that has remained in place. If the fix depends on another team’s budget or resources, the board needs to know. Board reporting should show whether the controls it approved are working, flag significant exceptions that remain unresolved, and who is accountable for closing them. Author the author: Kirsten Doyle has spent 27 years writing about technology and has covered the industry through some of its most significant shifts. Her focus areas include cybersecurity, cloud, channel, enterprise IT, and data centre operations. She works across many formats: news, features, white papers, eBooks, and thought leadership. Kirsten has many years of experience in journalism and editing for both print and digital media, and has supported plenty of go-to-market and PR programmes with technically grounded writing that holds up to scrutiny. She is also a regular writer at Bora. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, NIS2)
Binance on Tuesday said the record-setting theft of $6.43 billion in assets from the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange was the culmination of a "sophisticated, multi-stage campaign" that involved the use of a tampered Homebrew installation and recruitment-themed social engineering attack targeting two of its engineers. "It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident,"
Google on Monday warned that threat actors are hijacking enterprise access to Large Language Models (LLMs) to fraudulently leverage expensive computing resources and AI services. The tactic is called LLMjacking, a form of resource hijacking adapted for the LLM era, where an attacker obtains an API key through phishing, source code leaks, misconfigured environments, or exposed client-side code
VOLTA is an AI-powered infostealer that steals personal data, then uses LLMs to assess victims’ value and rank targets for attackers. Cisco Talos has analyzed a new Windows infostealer called VOLTA, which calls itself VOLTA-AUTODOXER. It steals the usual data, then hands the loot to a large language model that ranks what the victim is worth. Ryan Fetterman laid it out in a Talos report, after the malware turned up through the CAIRN research effort. “There is a new idea in the cybercrime world — cast a wide net, steal everything, and let AI sort out the specifics. A new malware self-named “VOLTA-AUTODOXER,” surfaced through the CAIRN research effort, is a self-deleting Windows infostealer that augments its post-theft workflow with an LLM-powered victim-profiling stage.” reads the report published by Talos. The malware deletes itself after running and does not use servers controlled by the attacker. Instead, it uses third-party systems to carry out its activities. The malicious code supports data-stealing features are advanced. It collects browser passwords, cookies and saved payment card details from Chromium browsers, as well as data from Firefox, Thunderbird and Outlook. It also steals Slack workspace information and login sessions from Discord, Telegram, Steam, Battle.net and Roblox. The malware also collects Microsoft OAuth tokens, SSH keys, cloud service credentials, screenshots and all saved Wi-Fi passwords. For crypto wallets, it tries to crack the wallet password directly on the infected device and saves the results in its report. To steal some browser tokens, it must bypass Chrome’s App-Bound Encryption. But VOLTA goes further. It also builds a detailed profile of the victim. This includes their location and home address, employer and company domain, estimated year of birth, the last four digits of payment cards, Slack workspaces and information about who created documents. It also looks for signs of iPhone backups and checks the current value of the victim’s Roblox account. “After harvesting the standard stealer haul, including browser passwords; cookies; payment cards; cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases; Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions; Microsoft OAuth tokens; SSH and cloud-provider keys; Wi-Fi profiles; and screenshots, VOLTA builds a structured evidence bundle about the person behind the machine.” states the report. It uses the victim’s own logged-in sessions to fill the gaps. It searches Gmail for receipts from Amazon, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Walmart and PayPal to confirm a home address, pulls order histories from Uber Eats and DoorDash, and adds detail to the victim’s Discord profile. Even a takeout history can now count as evidence. The bundle goes to OpenRouter, a routing service for AI models, with a system prompt that tells the model to act as a forensic intelligence analyst drafting a target assessment. “The required output includes a section titled “WHAT THEY’RE WORTH” with valuables ranked by monetization with a low/medium/high tier, and a section on “THEIR OPSEC” containing an assessment of the victim’s security posture and password hygiene.” states the report. “The model is the operator’s triage analyst; it turns a raw credential log into a prioritized and citation-backed dossier of the victim and their monetizable assets.” It also needs a section called “THEIR OPSEC”, rating the victim’s security habits and password hygiene. In short, it’s a performance review for the person it just robbed. The prompt asks for something agents do well: connecting scattered facts. It pushes the model to link names, addresses or universities to patterns in the victim’s passwords. The model isn’t hunting for new data, only stretching what the malware already took. The operator wants a short, blunt assessment with a trail of citations. By default VOLTA calls Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6. If the model refuses, which VOLTA spots by scanning replies for phrases like “I can’t” or “I’m not able”, it moves on to Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 and then Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash. A low temperature setting of 0.2 keeps the output consistent. The requests are hand-built JSON with no software kit, and the malware still runs without the AI stage if no API key is present. Talos sees the fallback system as evidence that the malware’s author expected security protections and designed ways to bypass them. The AI analysis runs directly on the victim’s computer, using their own internet connection, before any data is sent out. The malware creates a file called Identity_Report.txt, receives the AI’s response in AI_Analysis.txt, and sends both files together in a ZIP archive called volta_dox.zip. The stolen data can be sent to the attacker in up to three stages. The first archive, volta_log.zip, contains the information collected by the malware. The second, volta_dox.zip, contains the AI analysis. A third archive, volta_doxnet.zip, is created if the malware finds additional network information. The attacker receives everything through a Telegram channel. The malware also has six configurable fields that can be changed when it is built. This suggests that its author may offer a builder service, allowing customers to create their own customised versions. The credentials stored in these fields are encrypted, but the encryption is weak because the key is stored inside the malware itself. Anyone who analyses the file can recover them. If VOLTA is sold as a commercial product, its AI feature could allow even inexperienced criminals to identify valuable victims and receive detailed, ranked profiles directly through Telegram. For defense, Talos suggests an application control policy that restricts which processes can launch Chrome with the –headless flag, which would block the App-Bound Encryption bypass. At minimum, alert when Chrome starts with –headless from any process outside a known developer set. Storing credentials in hardware-backed stores also helps. If you’re compromised, the main program may have deleted itself, but try to keep %APPDATA%\volta_debug.txt. It’s a timestamped log of what was collected and whether the AI call worked. Revoke any exposed tokens and change passwords. If a wallet’s seed phrase sat in plaintext on disk, treat the wallet as fully compromised and move the funds to a new wallet whose seed was generated on an air-gapped device. “VOLTA is a mature stealer with a late-stage AI layer added for one purpose: relieving the operator of analytical work. The axis of AI improvement here is not speed or scale but effort displacement; the same logic visible in CLOSEDQUORUM, though applied to a different phase.” concludes the post. “These implants reflect the same underlying logic: Identify the step that requires the most sustained human attention and replace it with a model call. The question for defenders is not whether this pattern will appear elsewhere, but which phase it touches next.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, malware)
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