French energy giant ENGIE, one of the world's largest power and natural gas providers, confirmed that attackers stole customer data after breaching a marketing platform used by business partners. ENGIE operates in renewable energy, infrastructure, and customer energy supply in 30 countries, employs over 90,000 people, and reported €71.9 billion in revenue last year. An ENGIE spokesperson told BleepingComputer that it cut off the attackers' access to the compromised platform and that they didn't breach the company's internal systems. "ENGIE's internal IT systems were not compromised. ENGIE recently identified unusual data access activity within a tool used by partners as part of their customer prospecting activities and the marketing of energy offers," the spokesperson said. The ENGIE spokesperson didn't say how many customers were affected, but told BleepingComputer the incident is limited to customers in France.
The University of Copenhagen in Denmark confirmed that hackers accessed one of its test environments containing personal data belonging to 525,000 people. The educational organization detected the breach last Tuesday and disclosed it on Friday. In an update yesterday, the university added another 20,000 staff and students whose PIN codes were exposed. “The University of Copenhagen has confirmed a cyber attack in which hackers gained access to one of the university’s test environments,” the university says. Founded in 1479, the University of Copenhagen is Denmark’s oldest university and one of its leading research institutions. It has approximately 36,800 students and 10,700 employees, with six faculties and more than 200 research centers. The University of Copenhagen is still investigating to determine the extent of the incident, but warns that the following information may have been exposed:
uCreater is Android spyware disguised as trusted apps, stealing credentials, messages and wallet data through a rentable platform. uCreater is a rentable Android spyware platform that hides inside repackaged legitimate apps, targeting messaging services and mobile wallets. Its YingGai framework can intercept one-time passwords, steal account and chat data, collect contacts, manipulate sessions and spoof camera feeds to bypass identity checks. Victims may install modified versions of Telegram, WeChat or GCash through sideloading or social engineering. Researcher Ovi found stolen data on a control server, but the number of victims and links between operators and customers remain unconfirmed. “The repackaged APK can be relatively thin: target-specific instrumentation is retrieved after installation from the operator’s Alibaba OSS and MinIO infrastructure, including buckets and paths named Huuk_<target> and fengzhuang-app (literally, “packaging”). Distribution hosts include telegram-apk.uzyzx.com.” researcher Ovi states. “I could reconstruct much of the post-installation execution chain from the recovered code, but I could not directly establish the initial delivery mechanism for every victim.” Ovi rebuilt most of the chain from recovered code but couldn’t establish how every victim got the first install. The product is older than the samples. The package com.ucreater.autotool dates to about 2014, Windows tools tied to ucreater.com were signed between 2016 and 2019, and the YingGai mobile line shows up in records from September 2021. The samples Ovi studied run from 2024 to 2026: uip.exe builds from February to December 2024, Telegram repacks from July and November 2024, the WeChat host and Telegram framework from December 2024, and the Onion Box client from March 2026. The control server’s ICP filing, 湘ICP备2024061212号, dates to 2024. The infrastructure hints at scale, though not at victim numbers. Ovi counts about 20 target apps with confirmed code support, six operator domains with dozens of subdomains, three Redis buses, two MQTT buses, and a cloud-phone cluster in Changsha spread across several ISPs. A Censys search for the operator’s Tengine gateway fingerprint returned roughly 48 hosts. It looks like a multi-year product sold to many downstream operators, but he can’t say how many customers used it or how many devices fell. Attributing the platform to a specific legal entity is more difficult. Hunan Youchuang Technology is linked to the ucreater.com brand and a self-signed certificate on videoflow.cn. Changsha Sukai Network holds the ICP filing for the control server’s main domain, qianxuncc.cn, while Changsha Zhuoqing E-commerce appears as the signing identity on uip.exe, using a DigiCert certificate. A common owner is plausible but unproven. Another lead involves hunanzhijing.com, a domain belonging to the Hunan Intelligent Police Public Safety Technology Research Institute. It shares the same gateway fingerprint, and an official Hunan document connects the institute to an intelligent-policing research project. However, shared cloud infrastructure establishes only co-tenancy, not ownership or operational involvement. There is no evidence that the police developed or operated uCreater. Other infrastructure links also require caution. A Thailand-based relay used by the Telegram component, hosted on Huawei Cloud, also served gambling websites, an advertising-account service and an SMS service. The cloud-phone web client displayed a certificate for another vendor, while the gateway served a Vue application titled 舆情交易, meaning “public-opinion trading”. These observations are leads for further investigation, not proof of common ownership. uCreater relies on app virtualization, a technique already identified by Zimperium as a growing mobile threat. VirtualApp runs another application inside a container, LSPatch merges code hooks into repackaged apps without requiring root access, and Pine hooks Android’s runtime. Together, these components allow malicious code to operate inside a legitimate app while it is signed in and has access to decrypted data. “uCreater is notable because it turns these techniques into a reusable, remotely managed product.” the researchers continues. Operators distribute modified versions of Telegram-X, Telegram-Web and other messaging apps, integrating modules through LSPatch or loading them from an asset called TgJarPine.dex. WeChat can instead run inside a VirtualApp container, including the va_vx or Onion Box host. LSPatch also stores the original APK under cache/lspatch/origin/*.apk. The presence of this path or the specific asset can help identify an infected device. The approach differs from GodFather, a banking trojan documented by Zimperium that runs apps in a virtual container and displays fake overlays to capture credentials. uCreater operates inside the real application without relying on an overlay. It uses XposedBridge hooks, reflection and access to the app’s own database interfaces. This allows it to reach beyond login screens and potentially support any application for which the vendor develops a module. Ovi found no evidence linking the two platforms. One distinguishing feature is a local command server embedded in each hooked application. It exposes around 40 numbered handlers, with descriptions and parameters that allow operators to discover available functions. The code supports device monitoring, contact and SMS collection, installed-app enumeration, message sending, chat-history retrieval, session management and account-related actions. The Telegram module can execute SQL queries directly against the application’s live database through its own interface. Its Db_MessagesStorageRawQuery handler accepts operator-supplied SQL and returns results through compatibility classes that recreate Telegram objects. This can expose information that would otherwise be protected in the app’s encrypted or locally stored data while the application is running. The module also hooks Telegram’s SRPHelper.getX routine, capturing the two-step verification password in cleartext before hashing and storing it for exfiltration. The code provides functions to list or reset sessions, change or confirm a linked phone number, delete an account and lock users out. It can also remove its own session from the victim’s device list, potentially concealing the operator’s access. Ovi stresses that the source code demonstrates these capabilities, not that every action has been successfully performed against victims. The implant retrieves its control-server address from Redis using the Domain key, optionally selecting a value for a particular channel. It caches the address and can fall back to a hardcoded value, explaining why callback domains differ between builds. Signed JSON beacons report to endpoints under /api/callback/Tg*, while command requests include a device fingerprint and signature and use retries with increasing delays. Updates and additional code arrive through Alibaba Object Storage Service (OSS) and MinIO. The Telegram module retrieves an update manifest and hooks from designated storage paths, while a contacts.vcf file can supply contact information. The WeChat component subscribes to a Redis channel identified by a device-specific machine ID, with its host and credentials embedded in a child code file. The WeChat module focuses on account access rather than chat-history collection. Its _2_0_UploadAppLoginInfo command retrieves login identity information, after which the app data can be packaged, uploaded to OSS and used in account cloning. Ovi found no evidence that the examined sample accessed WeChat’s encrypted database. Ovi tested uCreater on a Pixel 10 Pro running Android 17 and found that its bundled Pine engine fails because of changes to Android’s internal APIs. The latest sample, dated July 29, 2026, still uses the outdated engine. Although this creates obstacles for operators, updating Pine could restore functionality, and other devices remain untested. Ovi also identified five samples that successfully contacted the control server, confirming active deployments targeting Telegram, Telegram-X and WeChat. Ovi and researcher Jurre discovered the platform’s source code after finding an exposed GitLab server. Other infrastructure was protected by IP allowlists, but this server contained the control platform’s source code, configuration and operational details. The repositories revealed Spring Cloud services for command dispatch, authorization capture, data collection, backups and message bridging, alongside a Vue-based administration console. Thirteen repositories contained commit histories identifying roughly three dozen developers, with activity timestamps consistent with China time. At least one commit used a corporate email domain associated with Tanzhou, a Changsha software firm. uCreater’s backend is a rented, multi-tenant platform that lets operators manage infected devices, steal account data and automate contact collection. Kafka, RocketMQ, Redis and Nacos coordinate commands and schedule activity to avoid triggering security controls. The infrastructure runs on Aliyun and Huawei Cloud, with control services and storage hosted in China. Although GitLab records identify developers behind key components, Ovi stresses they are not confirmed operators. The recovered backend did not appear to support Telegram, and some callback domains are no longer active. Ovi attributes the platform to a vendor in Changsha and Hunan operating through three companies, each linked to a different technical or infrastructure artifact. The reseller model, focus on mobile wallets and theft of authentication codes suggest financially motivated crime, but the researcher presents this as an assessment rather than a proven fact. The technical findings show that uCreater goes beyond a conventional banking trojan or a tool that merely steals credentials. By embedding code inside legitimate applications, it can manipulate sessions, access account data, collect contacts and potentially take control of messaging accounts. Its rented, multi-tenant architecture also allows different operators to use the same underlying platform. The scale of the infrastructure indicates a substantial operation, but neither the number of customers nor the number of compromised devices has been established. Likewise, infrastructure overlaps and developer records provide investigative leads, not conclusive proof of who operated the spyware or who was responsible for individual attacks. “Mapping points to a commercial resale structure, and targeting driven by wallets and OTPs. My assumption is financially-motivated crimeware.” concludes the report. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
A critical Signal flaw could keep calls active after hang-up, exposing microphone or camera. Update to a fixed version immediately. A critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-113380 (CVSS score 9.3 of 10), in Signal ’s calling library could allow a malicious caller to interfere with call termination, potentially leaving the victim’s microphone and camera active after they believe the conversation has ended. The flaw affects versions before 2.72.0 of the library RingRTC, which the messaging app uses to provide voice and video calling. It highlights a security problem that deserves attention beyond a single messaging application: ending a call should be an immediate control action, not something that can be delayed by traffic coming from the other participant. According to the technical report published on GitHub, the vulnerability stems from how RingRTC handles events in the finite-state machine (FSM) that manages a call. The application places events in a queue for processing, but a malicious peer can flood that queue with events and prevent the local hang-up operation from being handled in a timely manner. “A local hang-up is not a kill switch: it is just one more event placed at the back of the call’s finite-state-machine event queue. The remote peer is trusted with that queue — there is no rate limit on peer-originated events and no priority lane for hang-up.” reads the technical report published on GitHub, “Flood the queue with junk and the hang-up waits behind attacker noise forever, so the call (microphone, possibly camera) is never torn down.” People expect that pressing the hang-up button ends the call and turns off the microphone and camera. But if the system is too busy processing other events, it may delay the command to end the call, leaving the audio or video active longer than expected. The report explains that someone taking part in a call could exploit this weakness by sending enough events to overload the system’s queue. This could stop the other person from ending the call properly, potentially keeping the microphone active and possibly the camera too. The underlying problem is not that Signal’s end-to-end encryption has been broken. Rather, it concerns the handling of call state and the reliable termination of a session. Encryption cannot protect users from every flaw in the software that controls when a communication session begins or ends. The vulnerability concerns RingRTC versions earlier than 2.72.0 and can affect Signal clients that embed a vulnerable build of the library. According to the CSIRT Toscana advisory, the affected application versions are Signal for Android before 8.27.0, Signal for iOS before 8.30.0, and Signal Desktop before 8.29.0. The official RingRTC fix and the comparison between versions 2.71.0 and 2.72.0 document the software changes. Users should install the latest available Signal release for their device rather than relying on the library version alone. The technical report also includes a conceptual Python proof of concept. It models the difference between a queue in which a flood can bury a hang-up event and one in which critical events receive priority. The demonstration is synthetic and offline, with no network activity or real calls, so it illustrates the underlying logic rather than providing a working exploit. This is an important distinction. The fact that the vulnerability has been made public does not mean attackers are already exploiting it. However, because it could expose private conversations, updating Signal promptly is a sensible precaution, especially for people who use it to discuss sensitive matters. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, mobile)
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
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)
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.
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).
Burger King Japan disclosed a breach exposing 11.18 million app users’ personal data after attackers accessed its membership system in early October. Burger King Japan has disclosed a data breach that exposed the personal information of approximately 11.18 million official app members. Burger King Japan, the company operating the fast-food chain in the country, said attackers accessed the system managing customer membership information between October 2 and October 7, 2026. The company disclosed the incident on October 15, after discovering the data leak two days earlier. In its official notice published on October 15, the company confirmed the unauthorized access and apologized to affected customers. The announcement doesn’t identify the attackers or explain how they gained access. BK Japan says it’s working with external security specialists to determine the cause. “We have confirmed that customer membership information from the official app has been leaked externally following unauthorized access by a third party.” reads the data breach notification. The compromised data includes membership IDs, email addresses, names in Japanese characters and kana, phone numbers, dates of birth, gender, prefecture of residence, and membership registration type. The exposed information also indicates whether a customer has a mobile ordering history and whether their email address has been verified. These details can be useful to criminals even without payment data or passwords. Attackers can use them to craft convincing phishing emails, text messages, or phone calls that refer to a customer’s real identity and relationship with Burger King. A message that includes a person’s name, phone number, and other accurate details may look far more credible than a generic scam. Burger King Japan confirmed it does not store credit card numbers and found no evidence that passwords were exposed, with no confirmed cases of fraud so far. However, these factors do not completely rule out the risk of future misuse. According to the company, unauthorized access took place from October 2 through October 7, and the leak was confirmed on October 13. BK Japan says it blocked access from the source of the unauthorized communications as soon as it became aware of the incident. The company has also introduced temporary countermeasures, established an incident response team, and reported the breach to Japan’s Personal Information Protection Commission. It says permanent security improvements, further investigation with external specialists, and email notifications to affected customers are ongoing. “At present, we have confirmed that the unauthorized access was carried out by a third party.” continues the notification. The company has not yet disclosed the precise circumstances that made the intrusion possible, and the investigation is continuing. Until more details emerge, it’s too early to draw conclusions about the initial access vector or attribute the attack to a particular threat actor. Large-scale data breaches create long-lasting risks for follow-on attacks, as criminals can use stolen details for phishing, impersonation, and highly convincing scams. BK Japan urges customers to stay vigilant against fraudulent emails, texts, and calls, warning them never to click unverified links or share sensitive credentials. The core danger is that attackers no longer need network access to cause harm; they can leverage existing stolen data to target customers directly through social engineering. “Please do not access URLs, open attachments, or enter membership information or passwords if you receive a suspicious communication.” concludes the report. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Burger King Japan)
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