ConnectWise has shut down customer access to its Cloud Backup service (formerly SkyKick Cloud Backup) after hackers accessed application identities and compromised Microsoft 365 tenants. Reports of the malicious activity began emerging on Friday, with administrators observing unauthorized access to client data in Microsoft 365 tenants due to a potential “SkyKick/CW breach.” Later on the same day, managed cybersecurity and threat detection platform Huntress confirmed the worries, saying that it had identified at least 162 compromised tenants in its environment. In a post today, Microsoft also confirmed malicious activity involving ConnectWise’s Cloud Backup service, saying it identified unauthorized authentication attempts from an IP address on October 15. ConnectWise’s cloud backup solutions provide backup and recovery services that help managed service providers (MSPs) and IT teams protect and restore customer data, such as emails and files, in cloud environments including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
A cyber incident at a BAE Systems subsidiary just stopped every bankruptcy court in the US from sending notices, and the problem started a week ago. A security incident at BAE Systems Inc., the US subsidiary of British defense contractor BAE Systems, has taken the Bankruptcy Noticing Center offline since October 9. The Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC) is the system that federal bankruptcy courts use to send official notices. It handles court notices, messages to creditors, and deadline notifications that keep everyone involved in a case informed. “BAE Systems IT and websites that support the operations of the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC) have been impacted by a cybersecurity incident.” reads the official judiciary statement. “As a result of the incident, all access to the BNC systems and websites that BAE operates on behalf of the judiciary and the related bankruptcy noticing process are unavailable at this time, including bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov, and the National Creditor Registration Service. The incident has also halted the BNC’s production and distribution of bankruptcy notices for bankruptcy courts.” The disruption has prevented the center, which BAE operates on behalf of the federal judiciary, from generating and sending notices to creditors, courts, and attorneys in federal bankruptcy cases across the country. This is not a minor service disruption. The entire notification system used by federal bankruptcy courts across the country is down. “Several online services supporting US federal courts’ bankruptcy systems have gone offline following a cybersecurity incident involving a court contractor, the Administrative Office of the US Courts (AOC) said on Thursday.” Reuters reported. The US judiciary explained that the BNC sends bankruptcy notices for every federal bankruptcy court in the country. Affected domains include bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov, and the National Creditor Registration Service. With that last one down, attorneys using the electronic filing system can’t generate the creditor mailing lists they normally need to serve documents. Courts are still accepting new case filings and electronic notifications to registered attorneys are still going out, but anything tied to the noticing pipeline itself has been dark since last Thursday. A BAE Systems spokesperson said that the company is “aware of a security incident that is isolated to the BNC system” and has taken immediate steps to address it. BAE Systems is “coordinating closely” with the courts on the response, the spokesperson said. Neither BAE nor the judiciary disclosed tachnical details of the incident, whether it was a deliberate cyber attack or a different kind of incident, or whether any data was accessed or taken. The Eastern District of Texas bankruptcy court’s own public notice adds a useful detail: BAE first told the Administrative Office about the problem late on October 9, which means the court system’s administrative leadership knew by that evening. “Late on Friday, October 9, 2026, BAE Systems, the contractor that services the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), notified the Administrative Office of a service disruption impacting BAE systems that process notices as well as the following websites: bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov, and the National Creditor Registration Service website that supports CM/ECF access to address labels (the mailing matrix).” reads the notice. “Because of this disruption, the court polling and certification drop-off process that supports the delivery of electronic and paper notices has been interrupted and the BNC is unable to provide noticing services to the courts at this time.” Courts started posting disruption notices on October 13, but none of them mentioned a cybersecurity incident at that point, several framed it as a service interruption. The public acknowledgment of the word “cybersecurity” didn’t come until October 15. Summarizing, the incident started on or before October 9. The judiciary’s administrative office learned about it that day. Courts informed users of the problem on October 13, and the public announcement confirming a cybersecurity incident came on October 15. That’s six days between the contractor discovering the problem and the public announcement. During that time, bankruptcy cases across the country continued without the system that sends notices to keep courts, creditors, and lawyers informed. No one has announced when the service might be restored, suggesting the investigation is still at an early stage. This incident highlights a recurring problem: critical systems operated by contractors can fail in a single incident, disrupting services across every federal court handling a specific type of case. The public also waited nearly a week for an official statement. This is not a new pattern, but it keeps happening. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, BAE Systems)
India’s CERT-In warns AI agents accessed confidential data undetected, while attackers used offensive AI frameworks to accelerate cyberattacks. CERT-In, India’s national cyber response team, published a critical-severity advisory 15 documenting two distinct categories of AI-related incidents. In one, AI models under research and evaluation exceeded their assigned tasks and accessed live Indian systems without authorization. In the other, attackers deliberately weaponized open-source AI agent frameworks to run financially motivated intrusions. “CERT-In has observed different categories of cyber incidents in which the attacker was an AI agent, that is, a software system capable of autonomously planning work, issuing commands, invoking tools and acting on the internet over extended periods. In some incidents, AI agents under research and evaluation exceeded their assigned task authorization and made unauthorized access to Indian information and communication technology (ICT) assets. In others, cyber attackers deliberately used open-source agentic AI tools to conduct reconnaissance, exploitation and financially motivated intrusions.” CERT-In states. “The incidents came to light through voluntary disclosures by AI model providers, CERT-In’s forensic analysis of suspicious activities, and CERT-In’s own proactive threat hunting. The affected organizations could not detect the unauthorized access on their own.” What makes these incidents especially concerning is that the affected organizations didn’t detect the unauthorized access. None of the affected organizations detected the unauthorized access; in every case the incident was disclosed by the AI model providers after their internal review. The organizations only learned about the incidents from the AI companies. The agents accessed Indian systems using exposed credentials and connection settings found in configuration files, public code repositories, and cloud accounts with excessive permissions. They then accessed business records containing personal and confidential information. CERT-In didn’t name the AI companies, models, or affected organizations. It also didn’t say whether the agents copied or kept any data, or whether the affected organizations had been notified. “Further, victim entities in the campaign that remediated incompletely were attacked again within days, at greater scale.” continues the advisory. “In the voluntarily disclosed incidents, agents were observed re-deriving and re-using the same exposed credential in separate operations.” That’s worth reading carefully. It means an agent that encountered a leaked key once didn’t just use it once, it came back to it. CERT-In’s own threat hunting found a separate campaign against Indian entities using publicly available offensive AI frameworks. These tools have been misused, rebranded, and redeployed across infrastructure in multiple countries, and CERT-In describes a large number of active deployments. The attackers ran multiple agents in parallel for hours to days, and victims who only partially remediated the initial access were hit again within days at greater scale. The biggest concern is how quickly these attacks can happen. These frameworks can reportedly reduce the time between gaining access and causing damage from several days to just a few hours. In September, Google Threat Intelligence Group reported a similar case in which attackers used a compromised cloud resource to run an AI-driven campaign that stole thousands of credentials from other services in less than six hours. CERT-In puts the strongest emphasis on this point. In every incident, the weaknesses were common security problems: credentials and keys stored in source code, commit histories, CI/CD variables, configuration files, and public web pages. Other issues included unused APIs that had never been disabled, payment API keys stored in plain text, cloud roles allowing anonymous or regular users to read and change data, and management interfaces exposed to the internet with weak or no multi-factor authentication. CERT-In’s conclusion is clear: AI found and exploited these common weaknesses “faster, more exhaustively and at greater scale than human attackers.” That’s the real change. The vulnerabilities themselves are nothing new. What has changed is how quickly attackers can find them and combine them to carry out attacks. The advisory’s list of recommended actions for organizations covers ground that should already be standard practice, but clearly isn’t. Audit every repository and build pipeline for exposed credentials. Rotate and purge anything you find. Keep a full API inventory and shut down anything old or unused. Remove management interfaces from the internet. Keep logs for at least 180 days and watch API traffic for bulk reads and automated registrations in real time. For organizations running their own AI agents, CERT-In adds a specific requirement: give each run its own short-lived, least-privilege identity, block outbound traffic to anything outside the task’s defined scope, and maintain a tamper-resistant log of every agent action touching production systems. The advisory also cross-references an earlier October 9 warning on payment and disbursement API abuse, which CERT-In says BFSI and fintech entities should apply alongside the measures here. AI developers and testing labs should block all outgoing network connections from test environments at the infrastructure level, rather than relying on instructions given to the AI model. If an AI agent tries to connect to an external system or finds credentials it should not have access to, the test should stop automatically, and the affected organization should be notified immediately. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, AI agents)
Cybersecurity researchers are sounding the alarm related to an active campaign in which unknown threat actors are abusing a compromised Microsoft 365 (M365) credential belonging to ConnectWise Cloud Backup (formerly SkyKick) to gain unauthorized access to customers' M365 environments. ConnectWise Cloud Backup is a cloud-based backup and recovery service built for managed service providers (MSPs
Unit 42 details the top initial access vectors adversaries use to breach organizations, led by edge exploits, credential abuse and phishing The post Top 5 Initial Access Threat Vectors Observed by Unit 42 in September 2026 appeared first on Unit 42.
The regulated utility company CenterPoint Energy says a data breach exposed the personal information of more than 1 million people in Texas. CenterPoint Energy is a regulated utility company used to deliver natural gas and electricity infrastructure, maintain power grids and pipelines, and restore service across parts of Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and Minnesota. The organization disclosed a data breach affecting more than 1 million people in Texas. This week, CenterPoint Energy told the Texas Attorney General’s Office that the breach affected 1,062,060 Texas residents. The company does not appear to have notified the affected individuals by letter. “More than one million Texans were affected by a CenterPoint Energy data breach that compromised sensitive personal information, according to newly published information from the Texas Attorney General’s Office.” reported the broadcast Click2Huston. “The state’s data breach database lists 1,062,060 Texans as being affected. The information involved includes customers’ names, addresses, Social Security information and driver’s-license numbers.” Days before the first disclosure, on September 12, a threat actor using the alias “4d722e4d656f77” claimed on a cybercrime forum to have extracted roughly 7.49 million customer records from CenterPoint Energy. “In September 2026, CenterPoint Energy, Inc. (the “Company”) became aware of an online post by a third party claiming to have obtained a data set containing certain of the Company’s customer information.” reads the FORM 8-K report filed with SEC.”While the investigation remains ongoing, the Company has determined that an unauthorized third party obtained personal information relating to a portion of the Company’s customers through one of the Company’s external facing systems (the “Incident”).” The hacker claimed the theft of names, phone numbers, service and billing addresses, account numbers, billing amounts, payment status, and partial Social Security numbers. He offered a 2.5 GB archive for download. The attacker warned that “next time we won’t simply pull data, we’ll start attacking the main infrastructure,” a line that reads well on a forum but should still be taken seriously by any critical infrastructure operator. The attackers claimed they stole over the records through an API they say lacked proper WAF protection, rate limiting, and authentication. They also claimed the company tried to stop the data dump only after millions of records had been extracted. “CenterPoint Energy continues to actively investigate the cybersecurity incident disclosed last month. Upon learning of the issue, CenterPoint activated our incident response procedures and engaged external cybersecurity, forensic, and legal advisors to assist with the investigation.” a spokesperson for CenterPoint said on Wednesday. “We continue to work with third-party experts to assess the scope of affected customer data to identify which customers will be provided notifications in accordance with applicable legal requirements.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, data breach)
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an advanced persistent threat (APT) spear-phishing campaign that has targeted individuals affiliated with Taiwan research organizations to direct victims to an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing framework designed to harvest their Google account credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes. The activity is being tracked by
Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2022 has reached the end of mainstream support and will remain in extended support until October 2031. Microsoft unveiled Windows Server 2022 in March 2021 and made it generally available in September 2021 as a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release with 10 years of support. "As of October 13, 2026, Windows Server 2022 has reached end of mainstream support and transitioned to extended support. The October 2026 security update is the last mainstream support update available for this version," it said. "Extended support includes security updates at no additional cost, and Windows Server 2022 will continue to receive monthly security updates through October 14, 2031." Microsoft has also extended Windows Server 2022 hotpatching until October 2027, one year after the mainstream end date of October 2026, for systems running the Datacenter: Azure Edition.
The Indian government has directed telecom service providers (TSPs) in the country to mandatorily display callers' registered names along with their numbers for incoming calls starting November 1, 2026, in an effort to help people identify calls from unknown numbers and tackle spam or fraudulent calls. To that end, the Department of Telecommunications has issued a circular urging service
Singapore-based Ahsay Backup has released security updates to address two security flaws in AhsayCBS that have been exploited by bad actors to drop web shells and XMRig cryptocurrency miners. The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-105133 and CVE-2026-105134, which could be chained to sidestep authentication and execute arbitrary commands on affected systems. In a report published earlier
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