Google Cloud’s London outage disrupted Revolut payments and ATM withdrawals, while ING Germany reported online banking issues. Multiple Google Cloud services went offline in the London region this morning, according to Google’s status page, and the disruption didn’t stay contained to infrastructure dashboards. BREAKING: Revolut's app and cards have stopped working across Europe. Google Cloud's London region is affected by network failures. Revolut, and many other services, runs on Google Cloud. Revolut says money and data are safe but has not named a cause. pic.twitter.com/kyxOMlVaak — International Cyber Digest (@IntCyberDigest) October 20, 2026 British digital bank Revolut reported a widespread service outage at roughly the same time, and a person familiar with the matter told Reuters the two events were directly connected. “Multiple Google Cloud services experienced disruptions in the company’s London region on Tuesday, according to its service status page, while British digital bank Revolut also reported a service outage.” Reuters states, “A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut’s service outage was related to the Google Cloud service disruption.” The outage affected Google’s europe-west2 data center, its main facility in London. Google’s engineering team said they were investigating the problem. Alphabet did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for more information. This is common during an ongoing incident, but it leaves customers unsure when their cards will work again. Revolut’s own status page showed most services as unavailable or partially unavailable, including card payments and ATM withdrawals. For a bank that exists entirely as an app with no physical branches to fall back on, that’s not a minor inconvenience. “We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe. We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience.” the financial company wrote on X. We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe. We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience… — Revolut (@Revolut) October 20, 2026 That last sentence is the right thing to say, and it’s also exactly what every bank says during an outage regardless of whether the underlying cause is confirmed. Money and data being safe is a different question from whether you can pay for your coffee. ING Germany also reported problems on Tuesday. Customers had trouble logging into online banking and the mobile app because of a technical issue. Reuters did not link these problems to the Google Cloud outage, and ING has not explained the cause. Two major financial services companies experiencing problems on the same morning could be a coincidence. However, it also raises questions about how much European banks depend on a small number of cloud providers. Google Cloud’s europe-west2 region in London supports many UK and European fintech services. Revolut alone serves tens of millions of customers across Europe. When a major data center goes down, the impact can quickly reach customers, preventing them from paying or accessing banking services before the cause is fully understood. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Revolut)
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ordering federal civilian agencies to stop using DeepSeek products and remove them from government systems. The order also covers products from the Chinese AI company's affiliates and third-party products and services built using DeepSeek technology. DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd) develops large language models and offers a chatbot, API services, and models suitable for coding and reasoning tasks. Its AI tools became extremely popular early on, but were but were soon followed by reports of security risks [1, 2, 3, 4] and concerns about the potential for Chinese authorities to access users’ conversations. The DHS is now taking regulatory action to limit the use of DeepSeek and derivatives on critical systems in the United States, and has issued a notice of order for agencies to:
A data breach exposed AfD emails, while an anonymous site published AI summaries of 421,000 messages, raising questions about authenticity and privacy. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) confirmed on October 19 that its hosting provider was hacked in September and that mailboxes were copied. By the time the confirmation reached Bild, a website called hexane.cc had already been online for hours offering an index of what it claims are 421,179 internal party emails. “In September 2026 there was a hacking attack on a hosting provider used by our party.” By then the website hexane.cc had been online for several hours with an index of what it says are 421,179 of the party’s emails. In place of the emails, the site shows summaries written by software, sorted into categories that include racism and antisemitism and graded from Low to Critical. International Cyber Digest (ICD), a cybersecurity news account on X, examined it on 19 October and reported that the index includes Gauland’s mailbox and that the newest message is dated 12 September 2026. According to the summaries ICD relayed, Gauland, the party’s 85-year-old honorary chairman and former co-leader, forwarded a 2018 email about a “Hitler pilgrimage” by a former judge on the party’s internal court in Thuringia.” AfD told told Bild. “A district board member sent a Christmas card with a swastika and the words “Heil Hitler”. Staff at the party’s Berlin headquarters discussed luring a photographer to an event and throwing him out by force, in a thread signed off “hail and victory”. The AfD’s statement gave a limited account of the incident. The party said the attackers copied parts of a few mailboxes, most of which had not been used for years, and did not access the leadership’s current accounts. However, the online index includes messages dated as recently as September 12, 2026, raising questions about the party’s account. The website hexane.cc does not publish the emails themselves. Instead, it provides AI-generated summaries grouped into categories such as racism and antisemitism, with severity ratings from Low to Critical. The site operators have not identified the AI software used to create them. When users try to open a record, the site displays the message “source text not published for this record.” So far, none of the summaries has been linked to an original email that can be verified. That’s an important detail that’s getting lost in the coverage. The summaries describe swastikas, Nazi greetings, Christmas cards bearing Heil Hitler, and a thread at the federal party headquarters signed off with “hail and victory.” If authenticated, some of this material would matter significantly in ongoing court proceedings about whether the party can be banned. But right now all of it is filtered through an anonymous operator’s software, and the original texts remain unpublished. Bild is the only German news outlet confirmed to have examined files from the archive directly, although it reviewed only a very small sample. The files appeared to be genuine party records, including identity documents, invoices, bank statements, membership applications, and regional member lists. They also included the identity card of Markus Frohnmaier, deputy leader of the AfD’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag. Berlin-based security researcher Lilith Wittmann, who exposed a flaw in the CDU’s campaign app in 2021, wrote on X that she believed the leak was genuine and the reported attack method was plausible. The hacker reportedly told the International Cyber Digest account on X that they gained access through “a single unpatched party website” and then reached the mail servers. The AfD has confirmed that its hosting provider was targeted, but the reported entry method has not been independently verified. The archive’s own file names offer another clue: one server is labeled “afd_exfil.” The term “exfil” is commonly used for a system that stages stolen data before attackers transfer it out of a network. The AfD is currently contesting in court its classification as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. Lawmakers in the Bundestag and Thuringia are separately debating whether to seek a formal party ban, which under German law can only come from the Federal Constitutional Court. The leak appeared on October 19, while the Cologne Administrative Court is actively weighing whether the intelligence agency may publicly apply the extremist designation, and two months before the AfD plans to seek the election of one of its leaders as state premier in Saxony-Anhalt. Within two hours of the first posts about the archive on X, some accounts were using it to argue that the AfD should be banned. If authenticated, the most legally relevant emails would be those showing how the party’s national headquarters operates and handles internal disciplinary cases. This is because a ban case focuses on the party as an organization, not on individual members. So far, none of the summaries has been linked to an original email. The website describes itself as an independent archive published in the public interest and claims to have minimized personal data. However, Bild found that the files it reviewed included membership applications and member lists containing full names and home addresses of people whose only apparent connection to the story was their party membership. By the afternoon of October 19, the site’s About, Method, and Support pages were returning server errors, leaving visitors unable to access its own explanations of how the archive was created and managed. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, AfD)
Fintech company Revolut is working to resolve a massive outage that disrupted most of its services worldwide earlier today. Since the incident began, thousands of users on the Downdetector outage tracking platform have reported issues with the Revolut app, mobile banking services, and transferring funds between accounts. In a statement today, the company said the outage has affected its services since Tuesday morning and added that customers' data and funds are safe. "We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe," Revolut said. "We've been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused." On its official status page, the company says the outage affects 28 services, including sign-ins, card payments, transfers, currency exchange, stock trading, and live support chat, which are now flagged as partially unavailable.
An attacker used a contributor's GitHub account to replace the download archives on five existing releases of OVHcloud's command-line tool on Monday, October 19. The account had been hijacked, and the new files were a build designed to steal secrets stored on the disk of any machine that runs it, the cloud provider says. They were live on GitHub for up to 94 minutes, from 12:47 to 14:21 UTC,
Nikkei Inc. disclosed a new data breach, the third in about a month, that exposed 1.83 million personal information records. The Japanese giant says subsets of the data contained personally identifiable information and other sensitive details, but most records contained no identifying info. The company said that 150,000 records contained at least one of the following data types: full names, email addresses, physical addresses, telephone numbers, and dates of birth. Email addresses appeared in 120,000 records. The remaining 1.68 million records contain no identifiers, the company said, and no credit card information was exposed. Nikkei Inc. is a major Japanese business news and financial information group, owner of Financial Times, the country’s largest business-focused media company. The company employs over 10,100 people and has an annual revenue of $2.5 billion (¥393.8 billion).
Staffing software company Bullhorn has disabled access to its platform to contain a cyberattack that caused a system-wide outage. The company says it has isolated the issue and eradicated the immediate threat. Currently, its team is working to restore services following thorough security reviews conducted with help from CrowdStrike specialists. Bullhorn is an American software company specializing in cloud-based staffing and recruitment solutions. Its platform helps staffing firms manage the recruitment lifecycle, including candidate tracking, onboarding, and payroll. The company says it serves more than 10,000 customers worldwide. According to a status page on the incident, customers started to experience issues with job posting in the Bullhorn application on Friday. The next day, the company said it was "experiencing a system-wide outage affecting the Bullhorn platform," and later confirmed that the issues were caused by a cyberattack.
The open-source AI coding project OpenCode has notified some users that stored API keys they used with external providers were exposed in a security breach. Multiple users reported that the incident led to unauthorized API charges and suspended projects in Google Cloud. According to the project maintainer, the breach affected 1.4% of OpenCode Console users, with some reporting more than $1,700 in unauthorized charges overnight. OpenCode is a model-agnostic AI coding agent that helps users understand code, write features, and fix bugs using natural-language instructions, through a terminal, desktop app, or code editor. Users can connect AI models from multiple AI providers to the OpenCode console to streamline and automate the development process. On Saturday, OpenCode announced that it suffered a large distillation attack that impacted only developers who linked external providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
The UK Electoral Commission is building an AI system to alert candidates to damaging deepfakes within three hours. The UK’s Electoral Commission is building an AI-powered system to tell candidates about significant deepfakes within three hours of posting. Its chief executive, Vijay Rangarajan, said so at a panel at the Conservative Party’s annual conference last week, as Tech Policy Press points out that it’s a rare public intervention from a man who has run the regulator since 2024 and who mostly speaks to Parliament in evidence sessions. He began with an example from another country. During Ireland’s 2025 presidential election, a deepfake video falsely showed candidate Catherine Connolly saying the election had been cancelled and that she was withdrawing from the race. The video also urged her supporters not to vote. None of this was true, and Connolly went on to win the election. Rangarajan said a similar video during a UK election could influence a significant number of votes. However, he stressed that the Electoral Commission has clear limits to its role. It does not settle disputes over political claims made during a campaign. Its focus is on false statements that could disrupt the election process itself. ““If that happens to the British election, that will move a significant amount of votes,” he said, adding that it was not the Electoral Commission’s role to arbitrate rival claims made by candidates during the cut and thrust of a campaign, but rather to focus on statements such as this one that could undermine the administration of the election itself. “To address that risk, the commission conducted a pilot program during the UK’s local elections in May 2026, Rangarajan said. “We ran a full pilot, analyzed about three million posts through an AI,” he explained. “So, this is a good example of how AI can work: 147 bits of content were flagged. Humans then looked at those — not a terribly pleasant job in some cases — ten were really quite misleading, and we referred to the social media companies or to the police.”” Tech Policy Press reports. The Commission has tested the idea. During the local elections in May 2026 it ran a full pilot, and an AI analyzed about three million posts. It flagged 147 pieces of content, humans reviewed them (he called that unpleasant in some cases), and ten were really quite misleading, so they went to the social media companies or the police. Rangarajan said the posts had little impact. However, the trial showed that the Electoral Commission now has a system to help voters, journalists and political parties deal with deepfakes. He expects attempts to use them to disrupt UK elections. The pilot began earlier in 2026 and monitored fake audio and videos designed to mislead voters about the election process or falsely show candidates doing or saying things. The Commission said it would publish the results. The system has a clear focus. Identifying and prosecuting the people behind deepfakes can take weeks or months, often long after an election. Instead, the Commission aims to act without first identifying who created the content. AI scans social media posts in real time and flags suspicious material for human review. If a post meets the required criteria, the Commission alerts the relevant candidates or parties, ideally within three hours of its first appearance. Rangarajan said this is roughly the time it takes for content to go viral. That narrow scope has edges. Full Fact, whose AI tools were monitoring more than a thousand candidates in the May elections, found a Glasgow candidate’s campaign videos built with AI. The Commission told Full Fact the clips fell outside its pilot because each was labeled an illustrative AI scene, even though the label sat at the end of the caption. The legal backdrop is the real problem. Rangarajan said the Commission was set up for money and people, and now it’s all about information, so it has to work out how laws from 1983 or 2000 apply in 2026. Earlier this year the Guardian reported, according to a summary on the Resilient Media for Democracy Observatory, that the Commission was seeking legally enforceable takedown powers from the government. Then there’s the part with no legal answer at all. Rangarajan said he believes at least one social network showed signs of algorithmic bias at election time, though he didn’t name it. His scenario is a platform that changes its recommendations during an election without warning, suggesting neighbors with one political view and suppressing others, so users think their neighbors have changed their minds. The Commission believes it has already detected some algorithmic bias in social media campaigns, but Rangarajan said UK law offers no clear solution. Experts and campaigners have also raised concerns about X’s role in UK politics and TikTok’s Chinese ownership. The Commission faces 30,000 to 40,000 cyberattacks a month, sometimes reaching 10,000 a day, including botnet attacks and phishing. Rangarajan wants stronger, more independent security capabilities and believes major social media monitoring could be handled by another body. Tech Policy Press sees his comments as a call to update election laws and possibly create new offenses. The next general election must take place by August 2029, but it could be called earlier, and it remains unclear whether lawmakers will act in time. For now, what the Commission has is a three-hour promise and a pilot that worked at small scale. Rangarajan describes the threat it’s meant for as “an absolutely certain attempt to use some of these deepfakes against the UK.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Deepfakes)
Attackers stole ConnectWise application credentials to access Microsoft 365 tenants, prompting the company to suspend cloud services. ConnectWise suspended its Cloud Backup service and took both SaaS Security and Cloud Management offline over the weekend after discovering that unknown attackers had obtained unauthorized access to seven of its application identities. The company discovered the incident on October 14 through internal monitoring, disabled the compromised identities on October 17, and is still investigating how attackers obtained the credentials. “We have taken protective action following unauthorized access to application identities associated with ConnectWise Cloud Backup, formerly known as SkyKick. Our investigation remains ongoing. Since implementing the mitigations described below, we have not observed successful threat activity in the environments we monitor.” reads the alert published by the company on October 17. “Out of an abundance of caution, we suspended Cloud Backup service by revoking certificates used for affected application connections across all users. This removed ConnectWise’s access through those connections. The shared credentials previously used for Cloud Backup are no longer valid and cannot be used. In addition to mobilizing our internal security teams and Security Operations Center (SOC), we have engaged a reputable third-party incident response firm to support our investigation and containment efforts. Together, these teams are actively monitoring our backup infrastructure and broader environment, with the investigation extending across all partner-facing services. At this time, we have no indication that any other ConnectWise product, service, or offering is impacted.” This was not a case of attackers stealing individual customers’ passwords. ConnectWise’s applications already had permission to access customer Microsoft 365 environments to manage services and run backups. After stealing the application credentials, the attackers could pretend to be ConnectWise’s own applications and request access tokens from Microsoft Entra ID. They did not need to steal any customer passwords. Depending on the permissions granted to these applications, the attackers could access mailboxes, SharePoint documents, Teams messages, and directory data. ConnectWise explained that disabling the affected connections prevents new authentication through those connections; however, it does not reverse changes previously made inside a tenant. In other words, disabling the compromised connections stops new access through them, but it does not undo what the attackers may have already done inside customer environments. Any changes made before the connections were disabled may remain. Here’s what makes this particularly hard to clean up. An attacker who used a stolen application credential to get into a tenant could add their own client secret to a different trusted application already registered in that tenant, or create an entirely new application and grant it permissions. Either path gives them a second key that still works even after ConnectWise’s original compromised credential is revoked. “The larger risk is what happens when that access is used to gain more. If an application can assign directory roles, as we saw in one tenant, it can make itself a Global Administrator, and an administrator can add credentials to other applications, create new applications and grant them permissions, reset passwords and authentication methods for users, and change Conditional Access policies.” reads the analysis published by cybersecurity firm Huntress. “Each of those steps gives the attacker another way back in that does not depend on the original vendor credential, which is why rotating the vendor credential is necessary, but not enough.” Huntress identified malicious sign-ins from IP address 144.172.64.128 through October 15 at around 14:20 UTC, and a second targeted wave later that same day aimed specifically at 16 tenants in the policy, national security, trade, and critical minerals sectors. That second wave appeared to be manual rather than automated and hit Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, Azure Resource Manager, Entra, and Office 365 Management APIs in rapid succession. All 16 attempts in the second wave failed, but the fact that they were manually targeted at sensitive sectors is the detail worth sitting with. Of about 1,000 Microsoft Entra tenants that recorded sign-in activity from the suspicious IP address, around 300 sign-ins were successful. However, a successful sign-in did not always give the attackers access to a tenant. In some cases, they could not proceed because the required service principal was missing. This was a result of the tenant’s configuration, not a security measure that had been deliberately put in place. ConnectWise said its Cloud Backup archives remain encrypted, isolated, and preserved, with no evidence that attackers accessed or compromised them. “Cloud Backup remains suspended. Scheduled backups are not running, and access to affected backup archives and restoration capabilities remains unavailable.” continues the ConnectWise’s alert.”Existing archives remain encrypted, isolated, and preserved. We have no evidence that these archives have been accessed.” However, while the service remains offline, backups cannot run and customers cannot restore their data. This creates an operational risk for organizations that depend on the service to recover their systems and information. Huntress’s recommendation for anyone using ConnectWise Cloud Backup or Cloud Management is to review both their own Microsoft 365 tenant and every managed customer tenant, including any with dormant SkyKick connections. Look specifically for sign-in activity from 144.172.64[.]128 starting October 13. Before doing anything else, preserve available sign-in and audit logs, because containment steps can overwrite the evidence you need to understand what actually happened. The list of what to check is long: application credentials and federation trusts, directory role assignments, consent grants, recent policy changes, mailbox forwarding rules, and delegated mailbox access. Any of these could be the thing an attacker quietly added before the connection was killed. Full ConnectWise advisory and ongoing updates are available here. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, ConnectWise)
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