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.
Drupal has patched two critical vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to execute code remotely on websites running any supported version of the content management system. The security issues impact the software core's Field UI module and the contributed Entity List module. Drupal issued an advance warning at the beginning of the week, urging administrators to apply updates promptly because attackers could develop exploits shortly after the vulnerabilities’ disclosure. “The Drupal Security Team urges you to reserve time for core updates at that time because exploits might be developed within hours or days,” the project's security team warned. “We recommend updating to the latest supported patch (bugfix) release for your site's version of Drupal before October 14, so that you can address any other upgrade issues before the security window.”
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Fortinet Multiple Products and BeyondTrust Remote Support flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the following vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog: CVE-2025-61624 Fortinet Multiple Products Path Traversal Vulnerability CVE-2026-102764 BeyondTrust Remote Support Authentication Bypass by Spoofing Vulnerability This week, Palo Alto Netwoks researchers reported that PEERSTITCH malware exploited FortiManager to expose 500+ firewalls, evade detection inside FortiOS memory, and maintain stealthy access. The attackers exploited CVE-2025-61624, a path traversal flaw in the FortiOS auto-script engine, to deploy a new implant called PEERSTITCH. The flaw CVE-2026-102764 is an input validation vulnerability in internal components of BeyondTrust Remote Support. BeyondTrust Remote Support is a remote technical support tool that allows IT help desks and support teams to securely access and troubleshoot users’ computers and other devices over a network. From a cybersecurity perspective, the software is important because it can provide privileged access to systems and allow technicians to perform sensitive operations. The components do not properly validate the origin of incoming messages, potentially allowing an attacker to perform file operations on the appliance under certain conditions. “CISA is aware of critical authentication bypass vulnerability CVE-2026-102764 , affecting BeyondTrust Remote Support (formerly Bomgar) versions 26.2.3 and earlier. Patches are available for supported versions (24.3.1 and later); organizations using older versions must upgrade first.” CISA warns. “Cyber threat actors are actively exploiting the vulnerability to gain initial access, then establishing persistence, escalating privileges, and moving laterally. “ According to Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, FCEB agencies have to address the identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect their networks against attacks exploiting the flaws in the catalog. Experts also recommend that private organizations review the Catalog and address the vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. CISA orders federal agencies to fix the flaws by October 19, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
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 have discovered a malicious npm package that's part of a recently disclosed software supply chain attack campaign dubbed MALFEX. The package, named "imgdecode," was uploaded to the package registry on September 30, 2026, by a user named "malfexteste8." It has been downloaded 979 times as of writing and is still available on npm as of writing. The latest version of
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
Researchers warn that hackers could soon exploit a maximum-severity vulnerability (CVE-2026-103849) affecting Magento and Adobe Commerce, potentially allowing them to execute arbitrary PHP code on store servers. According to e-commerce security firm Sansec, attacks leveraging the vulnerability, dubbed BlockStrap, have not yet been observed, but threat actors are expected to find a way to exploit it. The researchers based their assessment on identifying four potential attack paths involving CVE-2026-103849 in less than 24 hours. The flaw impacts September versions of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source through 2.4.9 and Adobe Commerce B2B through 1.5.3. The security firm warned that Adobe’s “priority 2” rating of this flaw does not reflect the danger and urgency in this case, despite the more complex attack path.
Candiru spyware was delivered to devices at Al Jazeera Media Network via targeted online advertisements in a zero-click attack that required only rendering the malicious ads on the victim's device. Researchers at Citizen Labs investigating the attacks referred to this technique as AdFection, noting that their report is the first public technical confirmation of mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads. A similar method was documented in late 2025 by Amnesty International, involving ads that infected targets with Predator spyware without them clicking anything. That infection mechanism was called Aladdin and surfaced due to a collection of marketing files and documents leaked from the Intellexa surveillance company that researchers studied and corroborated with technical details from forensic investigations.
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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