Cloud hosting provider Railway published an urgent warning to users after detecting suspicious activity on its systems that store customer environment variables earlier this week. The company says its investigation indicates that, in some cases, an unauthorized third party may have obtained decrypted variables and urges all users to proactively rotate secrets and credentials. “Our investigation to date indicates that an unauthorized third party may have accessed encrypted environment variables and, for some of them, obtained the decrypted contents,” Railway says. “Environment variables may contain secrets such as API keys or database and registry credentials,” the company clarifies. Railway is a cloud platform for developers to deploy and run applications, APIs, databases, and various backend services. It has around 4.8 million users and hosts more than 16 million services.
China-linked Storm-0940 used AI tool ARTEX to target 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, exploiting stolen ConnectWise credentials at machine speed. Microsoft published a detailed technical report naming Storm-0940, a China state-aligned group, as the actor behind the ConnectWise Cloud Backup supply chain compromise. The group used ARTEX, an open-source AI-driven penetration testing framework, to run attacks at machine speed against hundreds of organizations across aerospace, defense, energy, financial services, government, manufacturing, and more. “Several of these Storm-0940 ARTEX-driven attacks have resulted in the actor obtaining privileged access to an organization’s cloud infrastructure – including multiple instances where the time from initial targeting to privileged access was less than 3 hours.” reads the report. “Microsoft assesses that Storm-0940 was responsible for the recently disclosed ConnectWise supply chain compromise of a multi-tenant application.” Storm-0940 has been active since 2021 and has historically relied on password spraying and OAuth application abuse to get into Microsoft 365 environments. Adding ARTEX changed the scale of what they could do. In some attacks, the time between initial targeting and achieving privileged cloud access was under three hours. Before obtaining the ConnectWise credentials, Storm-0940 launched a password spraying attack between October 10 and 14. The attack came from the IP address 144.172.64[.]99. Microsoft recorded more than 151,000 failed login attempts against 327 accounts at eight organizations. Activity peaked on October 11, with 2,900 failed attempts per minute. Forty-eight accounts each received more than 1,000 failed attempts. None of these attempts succeeded. The situation changed on October 15, one day after the ConnectWise breach became public. The AI agents stopped trying passwords and switched to a different attack method. By then, Storm-0940 had obtained the credentials of several ConnectWise cloud application accounts. The agents used these credentials to log directly into customer Microsoft 365 environments. “Storm-0940’s use of ARTEX accelerated the speed of compromised application abuse to authenticate to Microsoft 365 customer environments through applications that had already been granted access.” Microsoft continues. “This allowed the threat actor to operate without requiring an interactive user sign-in. “ The agents used applications that already had permission to access their targets. This allowed the attackers to enter customer environments without requiring users to sign in interactively. In a subset of environments where authentication succeeded, the agents didn’t stop there. They moved into Microsoft Graph and ran directory reconnaissance, modified application credentials to establish persistence, and attempted changes to identities, groups, and privileged roles. Microsoft identified multiple customer environments with evidence of this follow-on activity. The persistence mechanism is the part defenders need to act on now, even if they’ve already disabled the ConnectWise connections. “These changes can remain active as a backdoor even after the original compromised application is mediated.” says the IT giant. An attacker who added their own credentials to a trusted application before you revoked access still has a working key. Reviewing all service principal credential additions since at least October 1 is the right starting point, not October 15 when the public breach was announced. ARTEX is not a tool used only by Storm-0940. Microsoft says threat actors in several regions have used the same framework. Originally open-source, ARTEX was written in Go and can use different AI models to plan and carry out tasks. Researchers at Zscaler and Recorded Future also found a Chinese-speaking group using it to target South Korean financial institutions. The setup used DeepSeek, GLM, and Grok as coordinated AI agents, with GLM checking DeepSeek’s work. After these attacks became public, the project went closed-source. However, anyone who already has a copy can still use it. The speed point is what Microsoft keeps coming back to in its report. Agents don’t take weekends, don’t sleep, and can run multiple attack paths simultaneously. “This activity demonstrates how threat actors are integrating agentic AI into existing offensive security workflows and allows them to scale their operations exponentially.” Microsoft concludes. “Agents are not constrained by factors affecting humans – they can work around the clock, on weekends, and on holidays and attempt multiple breach paths simultaneously enabling significantly reduced time from selecting a target to achieving objectives, increasing the speed and impact of complex attacks like supply chain compromises.” When Storm-0940 had valid application credentials, they didn’t have to iterate slowly. They hit 2,250 tenants with 2,900 sign-in attempts per minute, a pace at which manual detection and response simply can’t keep up. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, ARTEX)
Japanese gaming giant Capcom has confirmed that hackers breached its membership service, CAPCOM ID, exposing more than 11.7 million customer email addresses and associated information. Apart from emails, exposed data includes account creation date, last login timestamp, number of logins, and the IP address used at the last login. Capcom found that for a small subset of 43 accounts, dates of birth, gender, nicknames, and countries were also exposed. For another subset of 196 accounts, the hackers changed the CAPCOM ID login passwords in an attempt to lock the owners out, but the company took action and reset them. In an alert today, the gaming company says that passwords for all other registered members have not been exposed and that credit card information remained unaffected. Capcom is a Japanese video game developer and publisher known for franchises such as Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, and Mega Man. The company has 4,000 employees and an annual revenue of $1.24 billion.
Right now, there is probably an AI agent running on a laptop somewhere in your network. It stores API keys and database passwords, can access your internal systems, and works without anyone watching. Nobody reviewed its access. Nobody owns it. If an employee had that much reach with that little oversight, you would call it an insider risk. So why do we still call the agent a productivity tool?
Unit 42 explores modern OAuth threats and actionable steps organizations can take to protect their environments. The post The Current Landscape of OAuth Attacks appeared first on Unit 42.
Attackers can steal credentials and begin exfiltrating data within minutes, often before security teams can respond. Exaforce examines real-world attacks involving stolen GitHub tokens, malicious AI installers, and MFA phishing, explaining why faster detection and automated containment are critical.
Law enforcement agencies have disrupted nearly 11,000 cybercriminal networks and arrested more than 1,400 people in Operation Serengeti III, which targeted business email compromise, ransomware, and online scams. Coordinated by Interpol, the operation involved authorities from 21 countries and private partners like Team Cymru, Kaspersky, Group-IB, and Fortinet, in a major crackdown on cybercrime across Africa. The action unrolled between June 29 and August 31 and led to the recovery of more than $105 million in illegal funds. In a press release today, Interpol says that Operation Serengeti III has resulted in the arrest of 1,462 suspected cybercriminals and the dismantling of 10,909 malicious networks. The investigation identified 65,929 victims and estimated financial losses at more than $385 million.
SafePay ransomware has hit 600+ organizations since 2024, using stolen credentials, VPN access and double extortion to pressure victims into paying. CISA, the FBI, the US Secret Service, Germany’s Landeskriminalamt Rheinland-Pfalz, and two UK law enforcement agencies jointly published an advisory this week on SafePay, a ransomware group they describe as one of the most active operations currently running. The group has breached at least 600 organizations across critical infrastructure sectors since August 2024, spanning North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. “Since August 2024, SafePay ransomware group’s operations have affected a wide range of businesses and critical infrastructure in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. SafePay ransomware was among the most active ransomware groups in 2026. The SafePay threat actors have impacted at least 600 separate victims from multiple critical infrastructure sectors.” reads the joint advisory, “The authoring agencies encourage organizations to implement the recommendations in the Mitigations section of this advisory to reduce the likelihood and impact of SafePay ransomware incidents.” SafePay appeared in mid-2024 as an independent ransomware group that operates without affiliates. This is unusual because many major ransomware groups work like franchises, allowing other criminals to use their tools and services. SafePay grew as groups such as BlackCat and LockBit declined, and its activity has continued. The advisory includes findings from FBI, US Secret Service, and German investigations through August 2026. SafePay’s preferred entry points are exposed credentials, brute force password attacks, and VPN access. “The FBI, USSS, and cybersecurity researchers observed SafePay threat actors obtaining initial access [TA0001] to organizations through various means, including credential exposure, implementing brute force password attacks [T1110], and exploiting virtual private network (VPN) access.” states the advisory. “SafePay threat actors use the IP addresses of the VPN provider “Mullvad” to attain initial access—specifically, SafePay threat actors use phished account profiles to access victim networks to exploit the following known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) for edge device products” Security teams should watch for unusual login attempts coming from Mullvad VPN IP addresses. SafePay also uses stolen account credentials and automated scripts to exploit known vulnerabilities in internet-facing devices. These include Cisco VPN flaws from 2020 and 2023, a Veeam vulnerability, and a SonicWall access control issue. Once inside a network, the attackers rely on common tools rather than specialized malware. They use PsExec, WinRM, RDP, and PowerShell to move between systems. A PowerShell script called ShareFinder.ps1 helps them find shared folders and identify valuable data. Mimikatz is used to steal credentials, while AnyDesk and TeamViewer provide remote access. To steal data, the group uses tools such as FileZilla, RClone, WinSCP, and even OneDrive. Encryption uses a ChaCha20 stream cipher combined with RSA for key exchange, with methods customized based on file type and size. Files get the .SafePay extension appended. “Data encrypted with the SafePay ransomware variant (appended with .SafePay) cannot be recovered without the decryption key. SafePay threat actors hold the encrypted data for ransom and typically demand a subset of company revenue in cryptocurrency in exchange for decryption software.” states the advisory. “SafePay threat actors leave a ransom note on the victim’s system, typically on the desktop or root directory, advising them that SafePay locked their system and to reach out over a chat portal at a TOR .onion website link with a victim ID as the login. “ Paying the ransom remains the only path to decryption for encrypted files, and even that isn’t guaranteed to work. The group runs a double-extortion model: steal first, encrypt second, threaten to post the stolen data publicly if the victim doesn’t pay. After encryption, SafePay sends victims to a Tor-based chat portal for negotiations. A representative also makes phone calls to apply pressure. If no payment comes, everything goes on the leak site. The group also deletes Volume Shadow Copies and resets network-attached backup devices to factory settings, which is the operational equivalent of cutting off every exit before the fire starts. The advisory recommends several basic security measures. Keep internet-facing devices, especially VPNs and firewalls, up to date. Prioritize vulnerabilities listed in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for VPNs, webmail, and accounts that access critical systems. Limit the number of accounts allowed to use administrative tools. SafePay relies on legitimate Windows tools to move through compromised networks, making its activity harder to detect. Organizations should also keep backups offline, encrypted, and immutable so attackers cannot access, change, or delete them. CISA also recommends reviewing all accounts with admin privileges, setting time-limited access where possible, and disabling command-line tools for any account that doesn’t need them. The advisory includes IOC files in STIX XML and JSON format, full MITRE ATT&CK mapping, and complete file and IP indicators. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, ransomware)
Amazon's Threat Intelligence team on Wednesday said it detected an attempt to exploit the newly disclosed PHP2Shell vulnerabilities dating back to October 17, 2026, against its MadPot honeypot service, as the flaws come under broad exploitation in the wild following the release of the patches. "The exploit attempt originated from an IP address associated with a commercial anonymization network,
Chrome is getting new scam protections that use Gemini to detect deceptive websites and warn users when they copy suspicious commands from ClickFix attacks. The changes are part of Enhanced Protection in Safe Browsing, which Google claims makes users ten times safer from phishing, social engineering, notification abuse, and other scams compared with Standard Protection. Chrome is also adding a new "suspicious site" warning for pages that show deceptive patterns but haven't reached the confidence level required for its existing full-page red warning. "Suspicious site warnings notify users when a page exhibits deceptive patterns commonly associated with known malicious sites," the company explained. "By tailoring the warning UI in this way, we are able to safely expand our coverage to display a higher volume of protective warnings."
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