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:
Microsoft announced that IT administrators can now use quick machine recovery on Windows Server 2025 after installing the October 2026 security update. Quick machine recovery (QMR) lets IT admins fix critical boot failures with targeted Windows Update fixes without physical access to affected systems. When enabled, it boots into the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) and launches the QMR Tool if Windows 11 fails to start because of a configuration change or a new driver. It then sends crash data to Microsoft, which can remotely fix issues by adjusting settings or removing problematic drivers or updates. "With the October 2026 security update, quick machine recovery extends to Windows Server 2025," the company said in a message center update. "Quick machine recovery is designed to help restore devices experiencing widespread boot issues by using the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) to search Windows Update for applicable remediations."
French cloud and hosting provider OVHcloud is warning users that attackers compromised its open-source command-line interface (CLI) tool to distribute information-stealing malware. The attacker hijacked a developer’s GitHub account to gain access to the OVHcloud CLI repository and modify versions 0.11.0 through 0.15.0 of the tool. OVHcloud offers the CLI tool as an alternative for system administrators and developers to manage cloud and hosting services directly from a terminal, including for automating tasks. OVHcloud CEO Octave Klaba disclosed that the company’s CLI repository on GitHub had been compromised, urging users who downloaded the latest version yesterday to update or remove the tool. Klaba said that the compromised release appeared at 14:47 on October 19 and was detected and blocked at 16:21 after a customer reported it.
Ahold Delhaize, one of the world's largest food retail chains, confirmed that last week's cyberattack disrupted services at stores across Europe and the United States. Right before the cyberattack was disclosed, customers couldn't use websites, apps, and customer service platforms at Albert Heijn, Etos, and Gall & Gall stores in the Netherlands, and Delhaize in Belgium, while employees at the Stop & Shop American regional supermarket chain reported having trouble accessing their schedules and pay stubs. When BleepingComputer asked right after the incident whether it also affected both corporate and store systems and whether any devices were encrypted during the attack, an Ahold Delhaize spokesperson redirected us to the company's statement. In a Monday update, Ahold Delhaize said the cybersecurity incident announced last week forced it to take some systems offline, including its brands' websites and apps, causing service issues, although stores remained open to serve customers.
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.
Microsoft urges organizations to secure AI Agents as insider threats, using dynamic permissions, continuous risk monitoring and automated containment. Microsoft published a detailed blog post explaining how organizations should secure AI agents. Microsoft sees them as a growing insider threat, not just a possible risk in the future. AI agents are not dangerous by nature, but they can access critical systems and may fail, be manipulated, or be compromised. “The most trustworthy agentic system will not be the one with the model we trust most. It will be the one designed that enables us to trust the model least.” said Satya Nadella This is not just a theory. It is a principle that should guide how organizations design and secure AI systems. The post makes a distinction worth holding onto. An agent that starts a task with the right permissions and behaves correctly can still become dangerous if its context changes mid-run. A prompt injection in an external document, a piece of untrusted data that shifts the agent’s reasoning, a task that evolves in a direction nobody anticipated, none of these require the agent to be compromised in the traditional sense. The model produces variable outputs, the context changes, and the agent’s behavior drifts. At machine speed, the window between that drift starting and it causing damage is very short. Microsoft’s proposed answer is continuous containment rather than upfront trust. You define what the agent is allowed to do before it acts, you monitor what it actually does while it runs, and you adjust its permissions in real time as its behavior or the risk calculation changes. An expense approval agent should start with access scoped exactly to reviewing and approving expenses, nothing broader, and those permissions should shrink or disappear the moment the agent tries something outside that task. The post introduces Dynamic Permissions to apply the principle of least privilege to AI agents. An agent should not automatically get the same access rights as the employee who deployed it. It starts with no permissions and receives only the access needed for its approved task. These permissions remain active only while the task is running. “The employee retains the employee’s access.” Microsoft states. “The agent receives its own identity, permissions and its own authority scoped to its current task and for the duration of the task only.” Alongside that, Dynamic Agent Risk is a continuously updated score that combines signals from identity, endpoints, network, cloud, runtime, and the agent’s own behavior to assess whether what the agent is currently doing still matches what it was authorized to do. The response when risk rises is graduated rather than binary: preserve reads while blocking writes, narrow accessible resources, require human approval for high-impact steps, or stop execution entirely if the risk warrants it. “Dynamic Agent Risk combines signals from identity, data, endpoints, cloud, network, runtime, and the agent’s own activity. It considers how securely the agent is configured, what resources it can reach, the potential impact if something goes wrong, and whether its actions are drifting from the user’s or organization’s intent.” Microsoft states. “The result is not a one-time score assigned at onboarding. It is a continuously updated understanding of the agent’s current risk and whether its current authority still matches that risk. “ Organizations frequently have AI agents running locally or introduced through third-party tools that were never formally registered in any central system. Microsoft says it’s expanding discovery to 60 types of local agents, including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and GitHub Copilot. Getting those into a unified registry with accountable identities is the prerequisite for applying any of the governance controls described in the rest of the post. You can’t set least-privilege permissions for an agent you don’t know exists. You can’t detect behavioral drift from an agent that doesn’t have a tracked identity. The agent registration problem is logistically harder than it sounds, especially for organizations where individual employees can spin up agents without IT involvement, which is most organizations right now. Microsoft recognizes that organizations cannot manually review every risk alert when they run hundreds of thousands of AI agents. Its solution is Guardian Agents, AI agents focused on security. They follow playbooks created by human operators, investigate changes in risk, apply or recommend security measures, and use what they learn to improve security policies. Humans set the goals and approve important decisions, while the agents handle continuous monitoring and response. However, this approach raises another concern. Guardian Agents are also AI agents, so they can fail or be manipulated, just like the agents they are supposed to control. Microsoft says security controls must operate outside the AI model and must not be changed by it. But this raises an important question: how can organizations ensure these controls remain reliable when the system enforcing them is also an AI agent? This is a challenge that real-world deployments will need to address in the coming years. “Organizations are adopting agents to serve customers better, solve problems faster, and give people more time for the work that matters most. The goal is not to make every model perfectly predictable before it can be useful.” Microsoft concludes. “The goal is to build systems that remain secure even when the model is not.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, AI Agents)
Ransomware operators including Spikey Scorpius (aka Qilin) and Tarnished Scorpius (aka Inc) are exploiting PAN-OS vulnerability CVE-2026-0257. The post Threat Brief: Active Exploitation of PAN-OS CVE-2026-0257 (Updated October 19) appeared first on Unit 42.
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).
Hackers reportedly compromised AOMEI's servers to distribute malware through a built-in promotional feature in its backup software, briefly tampering with configuration files before restoring them to their original state to hide the attacks. The supply chain attacks took place between April and July 2026 and targeted the update and notification systems used by AOMEI Backupper, a Windows application for backing up data, cloning disks, and restoring systems. Researchers at ManageEngine's Threat Analysis Lab (METAL), working with Google's Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant, uncovered the campaign and investigated the attacks. In reports published by Google and ManageEngine, the activity is attributed to a threat actor tracked as UNC7017, who used the compromised infrastructure to distribute a previously unknown malware downloader called CROSSROAD and a backdoor named SHINYROAD.
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