American clinical laboratory company Quest Diagnostics disclosed that patient records have been exposed after a threat actor gained unauthorized access to its Quanum LSM system. The company learned about the breach on October 21 and deployed its incident response protocol "to contain the activity, assess and investigate the nature and scope of the incident and implement appropriate remedial measures." “On October 21, 2026, Quest Diagnostics Incorporated learned of unauthorized access to its Quanum LSM system, which certain clients use to place test orders, receive and look up results,” the company says in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Quest Diagnostics is a major clinical laboratory company in the United States, providing diagnostic testing and services for a wide range of medical conditions.
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a large-scale campaign that has targeted exposed network edge devices such as Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect firewalls. "Artifacts from this investigation also indicate that operators in this campaign have obtained access to numerous organizations worldwide, and have attempted to further compromise some victims,
PHP2Shell attacks have surged into the millions, but no successful exploitation is confirmed. Patch it immediately. On October 21, PHP released emergency patches for two critical vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (CVSS score of 9.2), affecting every PHP version that handles web requests. The bug code dates back to PHP 5.4 from 2012, lives in the PHP engine itself rather than in any application, and allows unauthenticated remote code execution via crafted HTTP requests. Cloudflare researchers observed tens of thousands of exploit attempts within 45 minutes of public disclosure, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and millions by October 22. Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now. — Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) October 22, 2026 As of October 23, Censys counts over 34.4 million PHP services still running vulnerable versions. Governments, hospitals, and schools across Asia, Europe, and North America have preemptively taken services offline rather than wait. Below is an image showing the hosts potentially vulnerable to CVE-2026-109618 and/or CVE-2026-109619. Source Censys Security firms using honeypots report the same pattern: attackers are scanning many servers and trying to exploit the PHP flaws, but no successful remote code execution has been confirmed in real-world attacks. Sophos says this suggests that attackers are also struggling to exploit the vulnerabilities. Even its own security team needed more effort than expected, despite using AI, to develop a working exploit. However, the risk is growing. VulnCheck researchers have developed an exploit that bypasses ASLR, a security feature that randomizes where code is stored in memory. By combining both vulnerabilities, they can use a memory leak to bypass this protection and run code on the target system. The exploit works, even though there is no evidence of widespread use yet. The attempts that have been caught so far are mostly scanning, fingerprinting, and botnet delivery attempts. Cowrai’s analysis of PHP2Shell traffic in the wild found connections to a Mirai variant called Potassium, which contacts a C2 server, checks for an HTTP 200 response, then downloads a Linux executable as a follow-on payload. “The payload, a likely Mirai botnet variant known as Potassium, was not delivered since the exploitation attempt was unsuccessful due to being blocked by Sophos countermeasures.” states the report published by Sophos. “However, analysis of the sample revealed that is an updated and significantly expanded version of the Mirai-derived botnet variant identified in early 2026.” The malware can download additional files and disrupt networks. It contacts a hard-coded command-and-control server, checks that the server responds successfully, and downloads a file designed to run on Linux. If normal address lookup fails, it can use public DNS servers such as Google DNS and Cloudflare DNS. Like other Mirai malware, it can also launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Arctic Wolf found that both malware samples had Ethereum Name Service (ENS) resolution disabled, meaning the feature was available but not active. “ENS resolution was disabled in both samples, indicating that the capability was present but inactive.” states Arctic Wolf. “If enabled in future variants, it could complicate disruption by reducing reliance on registrars and DNS providers, requiring defenders to block the ENS names, RPC infrastructure, and resolved command-and-control addresses.” The botnet’s developers have already added the ability to use ENS to find command-and-control (C2) servers. This could help them keep their infrastructure online and make it harder for authorities to take down their domains, but the feature has not yet been enabled. Sophos blocked the attempted Potassium delivery before it succeeded. But analysis of the sample itself showed it’s a significantly expanded version of the Mirai variant spotted earlier in 2026, with added DDoS capabilities and fallback DNS resolution using public servers like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 hardcoded as backup. PHP2Shell is being compared to Log4Shell because it affects a huge number of systems. The flaw is in PHP itself, so it can affect websites, content management systems and shared hosting services. Even a basic WordPress site with no extra plugins is at risk if it uses a vulnerable PHP version. Fixes are available in PHP versions 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27 and 8.5.12. Older versions, including 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1, need fixes provided by their software distributors or an upgrade to a supported version. Cisco Talos notes that scanning for flaws and using public exploit code is easier than building attacks into custom tools. Advanced attackers may still be developing those tools, so administrators should use this time to patch vulnerable systems. “The true impact of this vulnerability will take time to evaluate.” concludes Talos. “These types of vulnerabilities that impact core technologies tend to cascade into other platforms and applications as they evaluate impact and provide associated patching, harkening back to the waves of exploitation that we saw after Log4J.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, PHP2Shell)
Japanese gaming giant Capcom has confirmed that hackers breached its membership service, CAPCOM ID, exposing more than 11.7 million customer email addresses and associated information. Apart from emails, exposed data includes account creation date, last login timestamp, number of logins, and the IP address used at the last login. Capcom found that for a small subset of 43 accounts, dates of birth, gender, nicknames, and countries were also exposed. For another subset of 196 accounts, the hackers changed the CAPCOM ID login passwords in an attempt to lock the owners out, but the company took action and reset them. In an alert today, the gaming company says that passwords for all other registered members have not been exposed and that credit card information remained unaffected. Capcom is a Japanese video game developer and publisher known for franchises such as Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, and Mega Man. The company has 4,000 employees and an annual revenue of $1.24 billion.
Amazon's Threat Intelligence team on Wednesday said it detected an attempt to exploit the newly disclosed PHP2Shell vulnerabilities dating back to October 17, 2026, against its MadPot honeypot service, as the flaws come under broad exploitation in the wild following the release of the patches. "The exploit attempt originated from an IP address associated with a commercial anonymization network,
Microsoft on Wednesday disclosed that a China state-aligned actor dubbed Storm-0940 was behind the recent supply chain compromise of the ConnectWise Cloud Backup application. During the incident, Storm-0940 used ARTEX, a Go-based agentic AI penetration testing framework that was made closed-source in the wake of its abuse in cyber attacks targeting South Korean financial institutions, to speed
Attackers took control of more than 300 Tor exit relays in early October and used them to redirect SSH connections to servers that stole login passwords, a researcher found. Exit relays are the last hop in a Tor circuit, where traffic leaves the network for its destination. Only a password login to an SSH server made through Tor between October 1 and 5, after accepting the interception
Microsoft says it mistakenly flagged a bug causing Always On VPN connection issues as fixed in the October 2026 Windows 11 cumulative updates. Always On VPN replaced the legacy DirectAccess technology and supports domain-joined, non-domain-joined, and Microsoft Entra ID–joined devices running Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server. It runs in the background and establishes secure tunnels back to the user's corporate network whenever their device connects to the internet. Microsoft first acknowledged the issue in a service alert sent to IT administrators in late September, saying it was triggered on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and later after installing the September 2026 security updates when the initial Always On VPN connection failed (e.g., when using automatic protocol selection with IKEv2 and SSTP).
State Bank of India has identified 3,897 customer records containing personal information in a set of about 375,000 records available on the dark web, and it does not yet know where the data came from. The state-owned bank, India's largest, said in a stock-exchange filing dated October 21 that it "has experienced an incident involving the loss of certain data." The count is
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)
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