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
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)
CJIS v6.1 requires agencies to maintain strong authentication, account security, and audit controls while demonstrating ongoing compliance. Specops outlines five practical priorities covering MFA, account management, passwords, logging, and audit readiness.
A Nigerian national was sentenced to eight years in prison for his involvement in a series of spearphishing attacks targeting US tax preparation businesses since 2019. 40-year-old Chukwuemeka Victor Amachukwu (also known as Chukwuemeka Victor Eletuo and So Kwan Leung) has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and wire fraud after being extradited from France to the United States in August 2025. "Chukwuemeka Amachukwu believed he was operating safely offshore when he targeted his victims, but he has now been held to account and now faces a serious sentence for his crimes," said US Attorney Jamie McDonald in a Monday press release. "Amachukwu took part in sophisticated schemes to hack into US businesses, steal and use stolen identity information of victims, and commit fraud. These crimes imposed significant harm on the victims and the public, and so it is only appropriate that the crimes also come with a significant sentence for the defendant."
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).
Cybercriminals are selling forged identity documents, deepfake videos, and live verification services to help buyers bypass Know Your Client (KYC) checks. Flare examines how these underground services operate and the techniques used to create and maintain fraudulent verified accounts.
The UK Electoral Commission is building an AI system to alert candidates to damaging deepfakes within three hours. The UK’s Electoral Commission is building an AI-powered system to tell candidates about significant deepfakes within three hours of posting. Its chief executive, Vijay Rangarajan, said so at a panel at the Conservative Party’s annual conference last week, as Tech Policy Press points out that it’s a rare public intervention from a man who has run the regulator since 2024 and who mostly speaks to Parliament in evidence sessions. He began with an example from another country. During Ireland’s 2025 presidential election, a deepfake video falsely showed candidate Catherine Connolly saying the election had been cancelled and that she was withdrawing from the race. The video also urged her supporters not to vote. None of this was true, and Connolly went on to win the election. Rangarajan said a similar video during a UK election could influence a significant number of votes. However, he stressed that the Electoral Commission has clear limits to its role. It does not settle disputes over political claims made during a campaign. Its focus is on false statements that could disrupt the election process itself. ““If that happens to the British election, that will move a significant amount of votes,” he said, adding that it was not the Electoral Commission’s role to arbitrate rival claims made by candidates during the cut and thrust of a campaign, but rather to focus on statements such as this one that could undermine the administration of the election itself. “To address that risk, the commission conducted a pilot program during the UK’s local elections in May 2026, Rangarajan said. “We ran a full pilot, analyzed about three million posts through an AI,” he explained. “So, this is a good example of how AI can work: 147 bits of content were flagged. Humans then looked at those — not a terribly pleasant job in some cases — ten were really quite misleading, and we referred to the social media companies or to the police.”” Tech Policy Press reports. The Commission has tested the idea. During the local elections in May 2026 it ran a full pilot, and an AI analyzed about three million posts. It flagged 147 pieces of content, humans reviewed them (he called that unpleasant in some cases), and ten were really quite misleading, so they went to the social media companies or the police. Rangarajan said the posts had little impact. However, the trial showed that the Electoral Commission now has a system to help voters, journalists and political parties deal with deepfakes. He expects attempts to use them to disrupt UK elections. The pilot began earlier in 2026 and monitored fake audio and videos designed to mislead voters about the election process or falsely show candidates doing or saying things. The Commission said it would publish the results. The system has a clear focus. Identifying and prosecuting the people behind deepfakes can take weeks or months, often long after an election. Instead, the Commission aims to act without first identifying who created the content. AI scans social media posts in real time and flags suspicious material for human review. If a post meets the required criteria, the Commission alerts the relevant candidates or parties, ideally within three hours of its first appearance. Rangarajan said this is roughly the time it takes for content to go viral. That narrow scope has edges. Full Fact, whose AI tools were monitoring more than a thousand candidates in the May elections, found a Glasgow candidate’s campaign videos built with AI. The Commission told Full Fact the clips fell outside its pilot because each was labeled an illustrative AI scene, even though the label sat at the end of the caption. The legal backdrop is the real problem. Rangarajan said the Commission was set up for money and people, and now it’s all about information, so it has to work out how laws from 1983 or 2000 apply in 2026. Earlier this year the Guardian reported, according to a summary on the Resilient Media for Democracy Observatory, that the Commission was seeking legally enforceable takedown powers from the government. Then there’s the part with no legal answer at all. Rangarajan said he believes at least one social network showed signs of algorithmic bias at election time, though he didn’t name it. His scenario is a platform that changes its recommendations during an election without warning, suggesting neighbors with one political view and suppressing others, so users think their neighbors have changed their minds. The Commission believes it has already detected some algorithmic bias in social media campaigns, but Rangarajan said UK law offers no clear solution. Experts and campaigners have also raised concerns about X’s role in UK politics and TikTok’s Chinese ownership. The Commission faces 30,000 to 40,000 cyberattacks a month, sometimes reaching 10,000 a day, including botnet attacks and phishing. Rangarajan wants stronger, more independent security capabilities and believes major social media monitoring could be handled by another body. Tech Policy Press sees his comments as a call to update election laws and possibly create new offenses. The next general election must take place by August 2029, but it could be called earlier, and it remains unclear whether lawmakers will act in time. For now, what the Commission has is a three-hour promise and a pilot that worked at small scale. Rangarajan describes the threat it’s meant for as “an absolutely certain attempt to use some of these deepfakes against the UK.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Deepfakes)
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