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:
South Korean police identified seven suspects linked to a cybercrime operation that breached more than 90 organizations in the country, with ARTEX AI pentesting framework used in most of the attacks. According to local media citing the Seoul Metropolitan Police, the gang leader has a background in penetration testing and worked at a cybersecurity company between 2019 and 2022. In 38 of the incidents, the threat actor demanded ransom payments of 360 million won ($270,000), promising in exchange not to leak stolen data. Authorities believe the threat actor stole 8.2 million records from compromised organizations, including educational institutes, hospitals, large corporations, and even golf courses. Yonhap News says that the gang leader is a self-taught 32 year-old hacker and started attacking organizations in September 2025.
Sansec tracks a Magento skimmer campaign that infected 953 stores, using five domains, bot filtering and malicious code hidden in CMS blocks. A criminal group has infected 953 online stores since July 2025, mostly Magento shops, according to Sansec researchers. The attackers add a small piece of code to store pages. When someone visits a shop, their browser contacts the attackers’ server to get further instructions. The server checks whether the visitor is a real shopper or a security scanner. If it detects a scanner, it hides the malicious activity. “deepveindrilling.com is the newest web address of a criminal group that breaks into online stores. The group adds a small piece of code to the store’s pages.” Sansec’s analysis states. “The group has done this to 953 stores since July 2025, mostly Magento shops. It moves to a new address every few months.” The group’s latest domain is deepveindrilling.com. Sansec found it in the CMS blocks of 83 stores, almost all running Magento. CMS blocks are content sections that Magento adds to store pages. The domain was registered on October 6, 2026, and the first stores began loading it the following evening. This is the fifth domain linked to a campaign that Sansec has tracked since July 2025 and reported in March as the PolyShell mass attack. Most stores using the latest domain had already been targeted. Of the 83 stores, 60 had previously loaded one of the group’s malicious scripts, and 34 had been doing so since October 2025. The domain sits behind Cloudflare, and its front page returns a 404. It only answers script requests from visitors of infected stores. The loader code lives in the cms_block table, and Sansec’s scanner, eComscan, found it there on 148 server installs over the campaign, never in core_config_data or theme files. eComscan first found the new loader at 21:54 UTC on October 7. By the end of October 8, Sansec’s crawler had found it on 74 stores, as two scripts. The first reads a value called fpCode from the visitor’s browser storage, and when the value is set, the script puts the stored code in an invisible div and clicks it. The browser then runs the code as an event handler, without using eval(). Nothing in the block writes fpCode, so the script from deepveindrilling.com has to set it. A visitor who received the payload once runs it again on every later page view, even when the domain is offline or blocked. The March version deleted its stored payload after one run. On October 23 the operator rewrote the blocks again, and the loader appeared on 9 more stores. All 71 stores Sansec re-crawled by October 24 run the new version. It replaces the plain script tag with an inline loader that sends a browser fingerprint to https://deepveindrilling.com/?s=49b7ca5f&fp=. The fingerprint flags automated browsers through navigator.webdriver, Selenium globals and ChromeDriver’s cdc_ properties. It also adds the GPU name from WebGL, CPU cores, memory, screen size, time zone, languages and client hints. The server picks its response from all of that. The filter works. When urlscan.io loaded an infected store with an automated Chrome browser, it got HTTP 200, and Sansec found no added content in the page. Sansec hasn’t captured the final payload yet. Older payloads give a hint of what real visitors get. Sansec Watch, the firm’s monitoring service for content security policies, shows what the earlier stage served. On December 12, 2025, a customer logged in to an infected store got a script from manulfie.click that loaded https://crypto-insider.top/ssl/ and, five minutes later, https://leqdger.click/ssl/. On December 15 and 16, neswnsssn.click inserted the same leqdger.click script on two more stores. leqdger.click is a misspelling of the crypto wallet brand Ledger. It was registered on September 12, 2025 and has since expired. Before October, the second script was the “Script (async)” integration of Keitaro, a commercial ad tracker that doubles as a traffic distribution system, a tool that sorts visitors. It sends the referrer, page title and query string to a base64 encoded URL such as https://additionalver.com/Mb2z8J?&se_referrer=, where the path is the Keitaro campaign alias. The system then decides per visitor whether to return a payload, a redirect or nothing. “When Sansec requested the additionalver.com script as a Windows desktop visitor on October 24, it returned QWE=123;, a statement that does nothing, and set a cookie that marks the visitor for 24 hours. deepveindrilling.com drops Keitaro and moves the bot filtering into the loader.” continues the report. Here are the five loader domains over 15 months: DomainRegisteredFirst seen on storesStoresmanulfie.clickbefore July 2025, re-registered 2026-05-232025-07-09863neswnsssn.clickbefore December 2025, re-registered 2026-05-222025-12-12494lanhd6549tdhse.top2026-03-252026-03-30355additionalver.com2026-06-072026-06-08246deepveindrilling.com2026-10-062026-10-0783 Two other domains were found on a small number of stores: hdfdsi84j3h.top, registered three minutes after lanhd6549tdhse.top, and c85grt98sd.com. Two older domains, neswnsssn.click and manulfie.click, expired and were registered again in May 2026. Both now use the nameservers of abovedomains.com, a domain parking service. Between August and October 2026, Sansec still found the manulfie.click loader on nine stores and the neswnsssn.click loader on six. When visitors open these stores, their browsers send information about the previous page and the current page title to the new domain owner. The browsers also run any script returned by that domain. Sansec Watch received reports of visitors’ browsers connecting to all four earlier domains. One domain, additionalver.com, was linked to around 52,000 reports. The October activity did not rely on a new vulnerability. Of the 83 affected stores, 60 had already been infected. Earlier attacks appear to have exploited file upload flaws in Magento. In March, the group injected its malicious code into 471 stores in just one hour by uploading webshells through PolyShell (CVE-2026-48356). Some infected Magento stores had files uploaded through PolyShell or SessionReaper (CVE-2025-54236). In a separate group of 3,024 stores affected by another skimmer, the infection rate was 32%. One Magento 2.4.7-p1 store contained PolyShell webshells disguised as PNG images, alongside malicious code in a CMS block. The code switched from additionalver.com to deepveindrilling.com on October 7. The store had not installed Adobe’s PolyShell fix, APSB26-73. However, installing all patches does not guarantee a store is safe. Another store running Magento 2.4.7-p10 had no missing core patches but was infected on October 23. Earlier scans had already found a rogue admin account and a GSocket backdoor. Sansec recommends checking CMS content for malicious code, including base64-encoded domains. Administrators should search both the cms_block and cms_page tables for suspicious patterns such as fpCode and se_referrer. They should also inspect uploaded files for webshells, check for unknown admin accounts, and look for suspicious processes. Removing the malicious scripts is not enough: store owners must also identify and fix the vulnerability or backdoor that allowed the attackers in. After cleanup, change the database, admin and API integration passwords. Install APSB26-73 for PolyShell and APSB25-88 for SessionReaper. Sansec Shield blocks both attacks while you schedule the upgrade. Sansec lists the indicators of compromise at the end of its report. “If your store loads any domain from the indicators of compromise, the attacker can write to your database. Deleting the script does not remove that access. See How to check your store.” concludes the report. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Magento)
DreamHost has forced password resets for email and FTP/SFTP users following an incident that disrupted connections to the File Manager interface. The latest update from the web hosting provider notes that all affected account owners have received recovery instructions. Users will be unable to log in until their account owner sets new credentials. DreamHost is a U.S. web hosting provider and domain registrar that offers WordPress hosting, business email, virtual private servers, dedicated servers, and cloud services. According to the company page, it serves over 400,000 customers in more than 100 countries and supports at least 1.5 million websites and applications, including 750,000 WordPress installations. DreamHost initially reported connectivity problems affecting its File Manager interface on October 23, but the impact quickly expanded to other services.
A critical flaw dubbed 'HTTP2Shell' in Brotli, the C decoder library built into Node.js, could allow attackers to corrupt memory and access sensitive data. The security issue is tracked as CVE-2026-111497 and is also known as “Broccoli2Shell” and “Node2Shell.” It affects Brotli versions 1.0.3 through 1.0.9, 1.1.0, and 1.2.0. The vulnerability has been reported under several names because it was initially identified in Node.js before researchers found that the same flaw in the Brotli decoder could affect software across multiple ecosystems. The name HTTP2Shell reflects its impact on HTTP clients and servers, although the vulnerability is not specific to HTTP/2 and can affect other applications that decompress attacker-controlled Brotli data. Apart from Node.js, potentially affected software includes Python HTTP clients such as urllib3[brotli], requests, httpx, and aiohttp[speedups], when configured with a vulnerable Brotli decoder, as well as other applications and tools that use vulnerable Brotli implementations.
Microsoft released emergency .NET security updates to patch a critical vulnerability known as Broccoli2Shell, also tracked as Node2Shell and HTTP2Shell. Tracked as CVE-2026-111497, this critical-severity flaw was found by Imperva Red Team and stems from an out-of-bounds write in the Brotli decoder, which expands data compressed using Google's widely used Brotli lossless compression algorithm. Successful exploitation lets unprivileged attackers use a maliciously crafted Brotli-compressed stream to trigger crashes or memory leaks and, in some cases, gain remote code execution on devices with vulnerable Brotli binaries or libraries. According to a Microsoft advisory published Sunday, attackers can also exploit this flaw to remotely escalate privileges on systems with unpatched .NET installations that use non-default configurations.
Dutch police arrest two men over AI-voiced bank fraud that allegedly used a fake app to steal card data from 170 victims, causing €380,000 in losses. Rotterdam police have arrested two men over a new type of bank fraud that used AI-generated phone calls, a fake banking app, and NFC technology to steal bank card data. In just three weeks, the scheme allegedly cost 170 victims around €380,000. “Rotterdam police arrested two suspects accused of a new form of bank-helpdesk fraud. The operation allegedly caused around €380,000 in losses for 170 victims in just three weeks.” NL Times reports. “The suspects allegedly used AI-generated phone calls and a fake banking app to copy victims’ bank cards remotely, allowing accomplices to withdraw thousands of euros. Victims came from across the Netherlands and ranged in age; dozens were in their twenties and thirties.” The suspects allegedly used AI-generated calls to trick victims into believing their bank accounts were at risk. They then persuaded them to install a fake banking app and scan their bank cards with their phones. The app used NFC to capture card data, which accomplices could use to withdraw money. Victims came from across the Netherlands and included people of all ages, with dozens in their twenties and thirties. A 23-year-old man from Vaassen, in Gelderland, is suspected of developing the technology and directing the group. A 25-year-old from Ede, also in Gelderland, is suspected of coordinating the operation. On Tuesday, a Rotterdam court ordered both men to remain in custody for at least another 90 days while the investigation continues. The case started in mid-September, when Dutch banks reported the new fraud through the Electronic Crimes Task Force (ECTF). That’s a partnership of banks, police and prosecutors that shares information and expertise to fight financial and digital crime. Within days of consulting the task force, Rotterdam’s cybercrime team had identified the digital infrastructure used by the group. Investigators monitored the servers to understand how the operation worked. They traced the people behind the technology, the phone calls made to victims, and the cash withdrawals. The scam started with a recorded message warning victims about suspicious activity on their bank accounts. “The callers used artificial intelligence (AI) to produce dozens of recordings featuring different voices, banks, companies, and scenarios. Victims were asked to press 1 if they did not recognize the alleged activity.” states the report. “They were then connected to someone posing as a bank employee.” The message asked people to press 1 if they did not recognize the activity. They were then connected to someone pretending to be a bank employee. Following a prepared script, the caller pressured them to act quickly and take steps to block their bank cards. The fake employee told victims to download an app and hold their bank card against the phone to scan it. The criminals presented this as a way to secure the accounts. If a caller ever asks you to scan your card with an app, hang up and phone your bank on the number printed on the card. According to police, the app sent data from the card’s near-field communication (NFC) chip, the technology behind contactless payments, to an app run by an accomplice. That person waited at a cash machine or payment terminal and could withdraw thousands of euros without the victim realizing what was happening. “Police described this technical method as one they had not encountered before.” the report concludes. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, NFC)
Author: Len Noe, Solutions Architect, BeyondTrust The first question on any incident bridge isn’t about why it happened--it’s whose credentials were used. In my experience, whoever can answer that credential question in the first hour sets the pace for everything after it: what to isolate, what to revoke, whom to notify, and how far the damage could have spread. The teams that can’t answer it spend the first day reconstructing their answer from logs that were never designed to provide it. That discipline is about to be tested by a new kind of actor. On October 16, 2026, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the National Security Agency (NSA) jointly published ten voluntary practices for incident readiness and response when AI agents act in ways nobody directed.
A Chinese national was arraigned in California after being extradited from the Netherlands for his alleged involvement in a cryptocurrency investment scam that stole nearly $37 million from 174 victims in the United States. In these fraud schemes (also known as pig butchering or romance baiting scams), cybercriminals contact targets through social media, dating sites, and messaging apps, build trust, and lure them into fake investment schemes, stealing their money instead of investing the funds as promised. Prosecutors said that, together with accomplices in the United States and Cambodia, 44-year-old Zhen Zhao tricked victims into transferring large sums of money to attacker-controlled accounts, claiming that the funds would be invested in digital assets. The criminal ring Zhao was allegedly part of reached out to targets across the United States via unsolicited text messages, social media, phone calls, and even online dating services to gain their trust, promoting the fraudulent digital asset investments and saying that the victims' funds' value increased, when, in fact, their money was stolen.
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)
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