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OS Palo Alto Unit 42

Perturbation Probing: A New Diagnostic for the Fragility of LLM Safety

New research reveals that AI safety refusal lives in a thin neural layer, highlighting the critical need for external, multi-layered security. The post Perturbation Probing: A New Diagnostic for the Fragility of LLM Safety appeared first on Unit 42.

Aug 28, 2026, 10:00 PM Read more →
OS Security Affairs

Love Electric Breach: 877,000 Driver Records Offered for $600

Love Electric’s alleged data breach exposes sensitive driver data and highlights the identity risks created by third-party salary sacrifice providers. A seller on an English-language data-breach forum claimed on August 26 that they had obtained the driver database of Love Electric, a UK broker that runs electric-vehicle salary sacrifice schemes. The seller, operating under the name “seraphims”, offered 877,000 records for $600 in cryptocurrency, with the price negotiable. That headline number needs a qualification. Ransomnews researchers examined a 999-row sample published with the listing and found strong evidence that the sample came from a genuine production database, but the claimed 877,000 records remain unverified. Love Electric had been contacted for comment at the time of publication. “The 999 rows split into 731 primary drivers and 268 additional named drivers. There are exactly 731 distinct quote IDs, and every quote has exactly one primary driver, 731 out of 731. All 268 additional drivers reference a quote that exists in the file, with no orphans.” reads the Ransomnews’s report. “The consent flag governing National Insurance processing is empty for precisely the 268 additional drivers and populated for every one of the 731 primary drivers. National Insurance numbers appear on primary drivers only. Those are constraints enforced by whatever application wrote the data, and they hold across all 999 rows without exception.” That matters because fabricated breach databases often fall apart when researchers examine the relationships between records. Here, the relationships hold: additional drivers point to existing quotes, the National Insurance processing flag appears where the underlying application logic would expect it, and National Insurance numbers appear only on primary drivers. Love Electric Financial Services Limited is an Edinburgh-based company that provides EV salary sacrifice administration, credit broking and related services to employers across the UK. Companies House identifies it as an active Scottish company, registered under number SC374952, while Love Electric’s own documentation confirms that it operates as a salary sacrifice administrator and FCA-regulated credit broker. The business model explains why its systems can contain information that many people would normally associate with payroll departments. Salary sacrifice arrangements require the broker to identify employees, process the scheme and support insurance and tax-related requirements, so the underlying records can include National Insurance numbers and driving licence information. Love Electric’s privacy policy also says it processes personal information under UK data protection law. “The seller published a free sample as a 999-row CSV with 24 columns, named in a way that indicates an export of a dbo.drivers table from a Microsoft SQL Server database.” continues the report. “The columns are: id, quote_id, user_id, title, first_name, last_name, email, phone_number, date_of_birth, address, address2, city, country, postcode, national_insurance_number, driving_licence_number, driving_licence_country, allow_processing_national_insurance, primary, created_at, updated_at, deleted_at, weekly_hours and occupation_id.” The fields included names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, addresses, postcodes, National Insurance numbers, driving licence numbers, quote IDs and consent-related fields. The data wasn’t uniformly populated, which is another reason the sample looks like a real production export rather than a synthetic dataset. Around 71% of the rows lacked a name, address or city, 74% had no phone number, and 85% had no National Insurance number, while 147 records contained a National Insurance number and 287 contained a driving licence number. The geography also made sense. Postcodes clustered around Edinburgh and central Scotland, with records extending into England, while dates of birth ranged from 1946 to 1999 and concentrated around people born in the 1970s and 1980s. Ransomnews then tested the driving licence numbers against the structure used by UK licences. Of the 108 full-length licence numbers in the sample, 98.1% had a surname block matching the surname in the corresponding record, 97.2% had an initial matching the first name, and 78.7% contained a date-of-birth encoding that matched the stored date of birth. The imperfections were just as interesting. Licence numbers appeared in many different lengths, only 53% of the National Insurance numbers present matched the expected HMRC format, and phone numbers appeared in three different formats. That kind of mess is exactly what you’d expect from users entering information into a live form, abandoning fields or making mistakes. “A UK driving licence number is not random. Characters one to five are the holder’s surname padded with the digit 9, characters six to eleven encode the date of birth with 50 added to the month for female holders, and character twelve is the first-name initial. Of the 108 full-length licence numbers in the sample, 98.1% have a surname block matching the record’s own surname field and 97.2% have an initial matching the first-name field. 78.7% carry an encoded date of birth matching the date_of_birth column.” state the researchers. “The roughly one in five that disagree are consistent with people mistyping a sixteen-character string into a web form, which is exactly the error rate real self-reported data carries and synthetic data does not.” The email addresses provided another useful check. Most belonged to corporate domains associated with identifiable UK employers, Love Electric itself or a European software consultancy, rather than being dominated by Gmail and other consumer providers. That fits the way workplace salary sacrifice schemes operate because employees generally enter through their employer. The database structure also looked normal. It included a soft-delete field, integer foreign keys for quotes and occupations, regional values for Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and even a Jane Doe test record that appears to have survived from the system’s setup. Real databases leave fingerprints like these. Synthetic ones tend to be suspiciously tidy. The seller’s own history is less convincing than the database evidence. The “seraphims” account was created on July 22, 2026 and had published nine data listings by August 26, roughly two per week, but several of those listings were described by the seller as scrapes rather than breaches. The Love Electric listing had attracted no replies and only 52 views when Ransomnews checked it. The account’s reputation score of 30 came from a single positive vote posted on August 17 with the comment “keep scrapping”, which says more about the seller’s scraping activity than about a track record of selling verified breach data. That doesn’t make the Love Electric sample fake. The technical evidence points in the opposite direction. It does mean we should separate two questions: whether the sample appears genuine, and whether the seller really controls 877,000 records. The second claim is much harder to establish. Ransomnews saw only 0.11% of the alleged dataset, and the sample shows that database rows don’t map directly to individual people. The 999 rows corresponded to 731 quotes and only 58 distinct surname-and-date-of-birth combinations, with one person appearing 48 times. There’s another clue in the filename. The db2_ prefix suggests that the table may belong to one database among several, so the seller’s 877,000 figure could refer to a larger collection rather than this particular driver table. At this point, treating 877,000 as a confirmed number would go beyond the evidence. The timeline also deserves caution. The seller claimed an August 2026 attack involving a zero-day in a third-party system, but every sample row carries a created_at timestamp within a six-second window on August 14, 2022. That pattern looks like a bulk migration into a newer platform rather than 999 people signing up within six seconds. It tells us that the database contains legacy records. It doesn’t tell us when someone took them, how they obtained them or whether the seller’s claimed zero-day played any role. That last point matters for incident response. “Third-party zero-day” is a claim made by the seller, not an established fact, and attackers have plenty of reasons to make an access story sound more sophisticated than it was. Ransomnews says it has not verified that route. For the people potentially affected, the more immediate issue is the nature of the exposed information. A password can be replaced. A National Insurance number and a driving licence number can’t simply be rotated because someone has posted them for sale. That creates an obvious phishing risk. Someone who has a person’s name, date of birth, address, employer and National Insurance number can construct a much more convincing message pretending to be HMRC, a payroll team, an employer or a vehicle leasing provider. Drivers who used Love Electric should therefore treat unexpected messages about their vehicle scheme, payroll or tax affairs with suspicion. They should verify the sender through a phone number or website they already trust rather than using contact details contained in the message. Love Electric’s current public material says it works with more than 1,500 companies, which gives some sense of the scale of the service’s employer-facing footprint. That makes supplier security worth treating as an operational issue rather than a procurement checkbox. If a third-party provider holds National Insurance numbers, driving licence numbers, employment information and contact data, its security controls deserve the same level of scrutiny as any other system handling high-value identity information. The seller’s alleged third-party entry point is therefore worth investigating, but it shouldn’t become the centre of the story before someone verifies it. The useful evidence is already sitting in the sample: a production-style schema, consistent relationships, realistic user errors and identifiers that line up with real-world records. The other important detail is the price. $600 for a database containing National Insurance and driving licence numbers isn’t a serious valuation of the data. It’s a price designed to make a quick sale. And if the seller really has more than the published sample, multiple buyers could obtain the same information. That’s where the risk gets worse: the exposure doesn’t end with the first person who downloads it. Ransomnews says it did not access or probe Love Electric’s systems, purchase the full dataset, or validate the exposed identifiers against live services. It analysed the free sample, removed identifying information from its publication and notified Love Electric before publication, offering to share the listing and sample with the company’s incident-response team. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, data breach)

Aug 28, 2026, 08:14 PM Read more →
OS BleepingComputer CVE-2026-82078 ↗

PaperCut releases second emergency patch for exploited flaws

PaperCut has released a second emergency security update for two actively exploited vulnerabilities in its PaperCut NG and MF print management software after researchers discovered multiple ways to bypass the initial fixes. As BleepingComputer reported yesterday, PaperCut warned that hackers were exploiting a vulnerability in zero-day attacks against customer servers and released an initial emergency patch for PaperCut NG/MF versions 25 and 26. At the time, however, the company had not disclosed CVE identifiers or technical details about the vulnerabilities, saying it was withholding information while it investigated the attacks and gave customers time to apply emergency fixes. PaperCut has now shared technical details and CVE identifiers for the two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-82078 and CVE-2026-81578. These vulnerabilities can be chained to bypass authentication and execute code on vulnerable servers.

Aug 28, 2026, 07:08 PM Read more →
ICS Security Affairs

Trump Targets Foreign Technology in New U.S. Power Grid Security Order

Trump targets foreign-made power grid equipment, citing cyber, sabotage and supply-chain risks to U.S. national security. Executive Order 14420, signed on August 26, targets equipment and technologies that could expose the power grid to sabotage, unauthorized access, malicious remote activity or supply-chain disruption. The timing matters. The White House points to the rapid expansion of data centers, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and defense production as reasons why the United States now depends even more heavily on reliable electricity. A disruption that might once have been treated primarily as an energy problem can now affect defense operations, critical infrastructure, emergency services and large parts of the economy. The order frames the problem in two ways. Foreign-made equipment can introduce a direct cybersecurity risk, including the possibility of hidden digital access mechanisms, while dependence on overseas suppliers can create a second vulnerability if geopolitical tensions or trade disruptions suddenly cut off critical components. The White House’s language is unusually broad when describing the scope of the concern. “NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that the situation with respect to the foreign supply of bulk-power system electric equipment constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency with respect to that threat.” reads the Executive Order 14420. “This threat exists both in the case of individual transactions and when transactions are considered as a class. To deal with this threat, additional steps are required to protect the security, integrity, and reliability of bulk-power system electric equipment used in the United States.” That definition matters because the order isn’t aimed only at a specific piece of hardware from a specific country. It creates a framework under which the Energy Secretary can determine whether particular foreign entities, suppliers, countries or equipment present an unacceptable risk and then restrict transactions involving them. The restrictions apply to the acquisition, importation, transfer or installation of foreign-produced bulk-power equipment when the relevant transaction involves a designated Covered Foreign Entity and meets one of the risk conditions set out in the order. Those conditions include the possibility of sabotage, subversion, unauthorized access, malicious remote action or disruption of the power system and its supply chain. The order also reaches beyond the physical equipment itself. Its scope includes critical components, software, firmware, digital services, maintenance services and remote-access capabilities associated with covered equipment. “the transaction involves bulk-power system electric equipment — or any critical component, software, firmware, digital service, maintenance service, or remote-access capability associated with such equipment — designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a Covered Foreign Entity; and” continues the order. In practical terms, the government isn’t treating a transformer, an industrial controller and the software that manages it as completely separate security questions. That is particularly relevant to industrial control systems. The definition of covered equipment includes remote terminal units, programmable logic controllers, intelligent electronic devices, distributed control systems and safety instrumented systems, alongside transformers, generators, inverters, battery storage systems, protective relays, metering equipment and high-voltage circuit breakers. The order also allows agencies to consider software, firmware, remote access, update mechanisms and other supply-chain dependencies when deciding whether equipment falls within its security concerns. The geographical scope is also worth noting. The order defines the bulk-power system around interconnected transmission infrastructure and generation resources needed for grid reliability, including transmission lines rated at 69 kV or higher. Local electricity distribution facilities fall outside that definition. This isn’t only about equipment that companies might buy tomorrow. The Energy Secretary can also impose conditions on foreign-manufactured or foreign-operated equipment already installed before the order took effect. Depending on the risk, those measures could require operators to identify, isolate, monitor, secure, disconnect, replace or remove equipment. The order specifically requires officials to consider reliability, safety, the availability of secure replacements and continuity of essential services before demanding isolation or replacement. That last point is important because securing a power grid isn’t as simple as unplugging a suspicious device. Removing a component without a suitable replacement can itself create an operational problem. The order therefore leaves room for phased compliance and negotiated mitigation measures rather than assuming that every risky component can disappear overnight. The government also wants to avoid turning security screening into a permanent procurement bottleneck. The Energy Secretary can establish criteria for pre-qualified equipment and vendors, creating a list of products and suppliers that can receive exemptions from the baseline restrictions. At the same time, the order makes clear that pre-qualification doesn’t prevent the government from scrutinizing or restricting a transaction later if circumstances warrant it. The order doesn’t name a specific country as the target. Instead, it defines a Covered Foreign Entity broadly enough to include governments under certain U.S. arms embargoes or sanctions regimes, as well as entities that the relevant U.S. authorities determine are engaged in conduct detrimental to national security or foreign policy. SecurityWeek also noted that the structure resembles earlier Trump-era restrictions on foreign bulk-power equipment, including measures that previously focused on entities associated with China. The order does not mention any country by name. However, its structure is very similar to a 2020 Trump-era order on the U.S. power grid, which later led the Department of Energy to ban companies linked to China. The next phase will be regulatory rather than rhetorical. Within 120 days, the Energy Secretary is expected to issue rules or regulations needed to implement the order, including procedures for identifying covered entities, equipment and countries and for licensing transactions that would otherwise be prohibited. The administration also wants recommendations for changes to federal procurement rules that would give greater weight to national security risks and favor U.S.-manufactured energy infrastructure. Those procurement changes have their own timetable. The Energy Secretary has 180 days to develop recommendations for revisions to the Federal Acquisition Regulation, while the FAR Council would then have 90 days to consider proposing corresponding amendments for public comment. The policy fits into a wider push by the administration to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains for strategically important infrastructure. The Department of Energy said earlier this month that it is working to increase domestic production and availability of critical grid components, pointing to rapid growth in electricity demand and the need to strengthen the grid supply chain. For cybersecurity professionals, however, the most interesting part of the order isn’t the preference for domestic manufacturing. It’s the decision to treat supply-chain exposure, remote access and embedded technology as part of the attack surface of the power grid. That changes the question organizations need to ask about critical equipment. It’s no longer enough to know whether a device has a vulnerability today; operators also need to understand who made it, who controls the supplier, where critical software and firmware come from, who can remotely access the equipment, how updates reach it and what happens if that supply chain suddenly becomes unavailable. The uncomfortable reality is that a power grid compromise doesn’t necessarily begin with someone breaking through the perimeter of a utility network. It can begin much earlier, when an organization buys a component it can’t fully inspect, relies on a remote maintenance channel it doesn’t control, or becomes dependent on a supplier it can’t replace quickly. That’s the security problem Executive Order 14420 is trying to address. The White House has effectively moved part of the grid’s cyber defense line back into procurement, manufacturing and supply-chain decisions. And for critical infrastructure operators, that’s a much harder problem to solve than simply finding another firewall. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, power grid)

Aug 28, 2026, 06:00 PM Read more →
NETWORK BleepingComputer

68-year-old imprisoned after making $1.3 million by pirating IPTV services

A 68-year-old has been sentenced in the U.K. to more than six years in prison for operating an illegal IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) service that generated £980,812 ($1.3 million) over three years. An investigation by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) at the City of London Police found that Milan Ibrahim ran a "sophisticated operation" that provided illegal IPTV services to users in the UK and abroad. According to PIPCU, Ibrahim sold illegal broadcasts from major rights holders such as the BBC, ITV, Sky, the Premier League and the Motion Picture Association. The police seized and shut down all servers they found during the operation, disrupting the illegal streams that users of the IPTV service received. “The investigation revealed that the business operated on 80 servers from premises in Chorley and generated £980,812 over a three-year period,” announced the City of London Police.

Aug 28, 2026, 04:36 PM Read more →
OS BleepingComputer

AI Is Accelerating Vulnerability Discovery. Can Defenders Keep Up?

AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery, putting pressure on systems built to enrich, prioritize, and remediate flaws at a slower pace. Action1 explains why defenders increasingly need to correlate multiple intelligence sources and turn vulnerability data into faster remediation.

Aug 28, 2026, 02:00 PM Read more →
OS Security Affairs CVE-2023-49105 ↗

U.S. CISA adds ownCloud, Linux Kernel, and JFrog Artifactory flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds ownCloud, Linux Kernel, and JFrog Artifactory 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-2023-49105 ownCloud Improper Authentication Vulnerability CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Vulnerability CVE-2026-66384 JFrog Artifactory Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory Vulnerability  CVE-2023-49105 (CVSS score of 9.8) is an improper-authentication flaw in ownCloud Server’s WebDAV functionality. An unauthenticated attacker who knows a victim’s username can read, alter, or delete that user’s files when no signing key is configured, because the application can accept pre-signed URLs without properly validating that condition. The issue affects ownCloud core versions 10.6.0 through 10.13.0, before version 10.13.1. Organisations running affected ownCloud instances should treat remediation as urgent, review exposed WebDAV services, and investigate unusual file access, deletion, modification, or downloads. CVE-2026-53362 (CVSS score of 7.8) is an out-of-bounds memory-write vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s IPv6 networking subsystem. A local attacker who can create UDP sockets could exploit an incorrect parameter-length calculation during fragmented IPv6 packet handling to overwrite kernel memory, potentially causing a system crash, corrupting data, or escalating privileges.access. Shortly after the Hugging Face incident became public, OpenAI said its models had identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability in JFrog’s Artifactory package registry manager. The report also describes a separate incident on July 19. In that case, some AI agents exploited the Linux kernel vulnerability, CVE-2026-53362, to gain higher privileges inside an OpenAI environment. The agents detected that the Linux kernel on their machine was vulnerable, found a public exploit, modified it to work in their environment, and used it to gain root access to the underlying worker node. This allowed them to escape the Artifactory container and move laterally to other parts of the connected environment. CVE-2026-66384 (CVSS score of 5.3) is a path-traversal vulnerability in JFrog Artifactory’s Docker cache handling. Under specific remote-repository conditions, an authenticated user can manipulate a file path and write data outside the intended cache directory, potentially affecting other locations on the Artifactory host. 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 flaw CVE-2026-66384 by September 10, while the remaining must be addressed by August, 30, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)

Aug 28, 2026, 01:54 PM Read more →
OS BleepingComputer

Windows 11 KB5120998 update released with 35 changes and fixes

Microsoft released the KB5120998 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 versions 25H2 and 24H2, which comes with 35 changes, including improvements to the Start menu, taskbar, and Windows search. KB5120998 is a preview update that lets IT administrators test Windows bug fixes, improvements, and new features before they roll out to all users during next month's Patch Tuesday release. However, unlike cumulative updates, monthly optional updates do not include security fixes and provide only quality improvements. After installing the August 2026 preview update, users can move the taskbar to the bottom, top, left, or right side of their screen in Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Taskbar behaviors > Taskbar position, with most customization settings, like never combining taskbar icons, working in every position.

Aug 28, 2026, 09:10 AM Read more →
OS Security Affairs CVE-2015-3246 ↗

U.S. CISA adds Red Hat, Linux Kernel, Ajax.NET Professional, Microsoft SQL Server, and Citrix NetScaler flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Red Hat, Linux Kernel, Ajax.NET Professional, Microsoft SQL Server, and Citrix NetScaler 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-2015-3246 Red Hat Libuser Race Condition Vulnerability CVE-2015-5287 Red Hat Automatic Bug Reporting Tool Privilege Escalation Vulnerability CVE-2019-1068 Microsoft SQL Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2021-23758 Ajax.NET Professional Deserialization of Untrusted Data Vulnerability CVE-2022-0995 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Vulnerability CVE-2026-8452 Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer Vulnerability CVE-2015-3246 is a race condition in Red Hat libuser that could let an authenticated local user corrupt /etc/passwd to cause denial of service or escalate privileges. CVE-2015-5287 is a privilege escalation bug in Red Hat Automatic Bug Reporting Tool that could allow local users with certain permissions to gain higher privileges via a symlink attack on a predictable file. CVE-2019-1068 is a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft SQL Server that could allow an attacker to execute code in the context of the SQL Server Database Engine service account. CVE-2021-23758 (CVSS score not specified in the KEV notice) is a deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability in Ajax.NET Professional that could allow for remote code execution via arbitrary .NET classes. CVE-2022-0995 (CVSS score not specified in the KEV notice) is an out-of-bounds memory write vulnerability in Linux Kernel that could allow a local user to gain privileged access or cause a denial of service on the system. CVE-2026-8452 (CVSS score not specified in the KEV notice) is an improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway that could lead to denial-of-service and has been observed under active exploitation in the wild. 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 CVE-2019-1068 and CVE-2026-8452 by August 29, 2026, while the remaining must be addressed by September 9, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)

Aug 28, 2026, 09:07 AM Read more →
NETWORK Security Affairs

Cyberattack on UK Airport Operator MAG Exposes Data of 8.7 Million Customers Across Three Airports

A cyberattack on Manchester Airports Group exposed data of 8.7 million customers across Manchester, Stansted, and East Midlands airports. Manchester Airports Group disclosed that an unauthorised third party accessed customer data belonging to approximately 8.7 million people across three of England’s busiest airports: Manchester, London Stansted, and East Midlands. “Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports have been hit by a cyber-attack in which hackers accessed the data of about 8.7 million customers.” reads the report published by The Guardian. “The incident involved data related to “car park, lounge and fast-track bookings and in-airport wifi sign-ups”, and the hackers obtained email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registration numbers and postcodes, said Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which operates the three hubs.” MAG says it learned about the incident on Tuesday, August 25, after attackers breached the system over the weekend. The affected data included car park bookings, lounge and fast-track security reservations, and airport Wi-Fi sign-ups. Attackers accessed email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registration numbers, and postcodes. The system did not store bank or payment details. According to MAG, most of the 8.7 million affected customers only lost their email addresses, while the impact varies depending on which services they used. The attack did not disrupt airport operations or flights. As a precaution, MAG temporarily suspended its Manage My Booking service, but all existing reservations remain valid. Customers who need to change a booking within the next 72 hours can use a dedicated phone line. “We would urge you to be particularly cautious of unexpected emails, calls or text messages claiming to be from us. We will never contact you unexpectedly to ask for payment or banking information. We apologise for any inconvenience or concern this may cause.” reads the email sent by Stansted to affected customers. That warning is relevant because the combination of an email address, a phone number, and the knowledge that someone recently made a parking or lounge booking gives a convincing starting point for a targeted phishing message. Attackers don’t need payment data if they can impersonate the airport convincingly enough to obtain it themselves. The timing adds pressure. The attack landed during the peak summer travel season, with millions of families flying back into the UK before the school year begins. The three airports combined handled around 54 million passengers last year, and MAG recently reported a record 66 million passengers across its network. The scale of the data exposure reflects the sheer volume of ancillary services these airports sell, and how much personal data those services routinely collect. The wifi registration system is the detail worth noting: signing into airport wifi typically requires a name, email, and phone number at minimum, and that information now belongs to whoever executed this breach. MAG says it quickly contained the incident, brought in external cybersecurity experts and notified the relevant authorities. No group has claimed responsibility, and investigators have not publicly linked the attack to any specific actor. The incident adds to a growing list of cyberattacks against UK infrastructure. Earlier in August, Iran-linked hackers took a British power plant offline for four days, marking the first confirmed case of Iranian actors shutting down a UK generator. Last year, attacks disrupted production at Jaguar Land Rover and targeted Marks & Spencer, Harrods and the Co-op. Heathrow also faced flight delays and cancellations after attackers disrupted check-in and boarding systems used by several European airports. MAG’s breach adds further pressure on UK infrastructure operators to strengthen their cyber defenses. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, UK Airport Operator MAG)

Aug 28, 2026, 07:56 AM Read more →