Chinese state-sponsored hacking group Volt Typhoon has been using a framework that relies on rotating chains of connected devices compromised on demand, including for zero-day attacks targeting high-value systems. The framework has been dubbed Silent Train because the threat actor uses it against select targets, cleans it up after each operation, and refreshes it continuously. Researchers at Black Lotus Labs, the threat research division of communications company Lumen, have been tracking Silent Train for three years and confirmed that Volt Typhoon exploited at least four zero-day vulnerabilities in attacks targeting edge and management infrastructure. Targets include telecommunication firms, government agencies, defense contractors, educational institutes, utilities/critical infrastructure, satellite service providers, IT firms, MSPs, transportation, aviation, and emergency services.
Discover-Tech allegedly targeted Starlink users with digital ads to track their locations, according to sources cited in a new Reuters report. Digital defense firm TrendAI found that an Israeli ad tech company was heavily targeting users of satellite internet service Starlink, probably to spy on them. That’s according to six people familiar with the matter, speaking to Reuters. Raphael Satter reported it on October 27 in a Reuters story, and the claims rest on sources, not on a published attribution. “Researchers at TrendAI, a unit of Tokyo-based cybersecurity company Trend Micro, concluded the Israeli company Discover-Tech was one of the biggest sources of digital ads shown to users of SpaceX’s Starlink service and that the ads were likely being used to geolocate or otherwise surveil them, according to the six people.” Reuters states. TrendAI concluded that the company Discover-Tech was one of the biggest sources of digital ads shown to users of SpaceX’s Starlink. They believe the ads were likely used to geolocate users or otherwise surveil them. “TrendAI Research observed large-scale use of advertising infrastructure for geolocation tracking, advertising technology surveillance, and intelligence gathering. Data from these activities is valuable for precise targeting of key individuals in sensitive locations, including active conflict zones.” reads the report published TrendAI. “SHADOW-EARTH-79 is also the number one bidder in 105 individual countries in Starlink traffic that we observed. It accounts for approximately 13% of all winning bid events in Starlink traffic, five times higher than average (approximately 3%) bids for other bidders, and the highest of any high-volume buyer. Starlink is widely used in conflict zones where terrestrial networks are degraded.” SpaceX didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Discover-Tech and its chief executive didn’t respond over the past two weeks. Starlink users make attractive targets. Governments around the world are trying to get a grip on satellite internet terminals, which route data through SpaceX satellites and not through nationally regulated telecom firms. That lets them sidestep local internet restrictions, work in hostile areas or coordinate action across battlefields. Ukraine’s military relies on Starlink for frontline communications and for directing drone strikes. The findings come from advertising data collected by TrendAI. The data shows that Discover-Tech became one of the biggest bidders for ads shown to Starlink users worldwide. It was the top bidder in more than 100 countries, including several where Starlink is banned or restricted. Advertisers bid in online auctions to buy space for ads in browsers and apps. “In Starlink IP space traffic that we observed, SHADOW-EARTH-79 is the second-largest winning bidder by raw volume. However, examining the statistics and saturation of the group’s ad impression buying strategy reveals an obvious skew towards buying ad impressions on Starlink addresses, compared with its overall footprint.” continues the report. TrendAI published its report on October 15 but didn’t name Discover-Tech. Instead, it identified “an ad tech entity” called Shadow-Earth-79. Six sources say that’s TrendAI’s codename for Discover-Tech. TrendAI didn’t directly explain why it left out the company’s name. It said its naming policy helps prevent mistakes and avoids labels that could confuse security teams, lead them to focus on the wrong risks or prompt the wrong response. Starlink users are valuable targets for surveillance. Governments want more control over satellite internet services, which send data through SpaceX satellites rather than local telecom networks. Starlink lets users get around local internet restrictions, stay connected in dangerous areas and communicate on the battlefield. Ukraine’s military uses Starlink for frontline communications and to help direct drone strikes. Finding ways to track Starlink users has turned into a cottage industry. In May, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the website Intelligence Online separately reported that Israeli-owned businesses were pitching clients on ways to identify and track them. Haaretz said exploiting ad data appeared to play a key role. On the same day as TrendAI’s report, the Canadian cyber watchdog Citizen Lab and the New York ad tech firm Confiant named Discover-Tech. Both said it abused the ad bidding process, which can leak data about internet users back to the bidder. Over time, a bidder can collect that data, collate it and merge it with other information to de-anonymize users and follow them around the web. In some cases it can also set them up for targeting with surveillance software. Citizen Lab and Confiant said the ads appeared inside dozens of sensitive networks belonging to media organizations, governments and tech firms. Google, Comcast and other companies said they removed Discover-Tech from their ad platforms. At least one big US tech company and one international organization recently started internal inquiries into whether Discover-Tech’s ads targeted their employees, according to one of the six people and a seventh person familiar with the matter. TrendAI’s report pointed to suspicious bidding patterns that suggested “targeting and tracking infrastructure” and not a commercial advertising operation. “Overall, the design of this “customer-facing” front-end makes us believe that the system is more likely designed as a “surveillance” and “intelligence gathering” platform, rather than simply a platform for advertisement management.” the report concludes. “The collected evidence indicates with moderate-to-high confidence that SHADOW-EARTH-79’s advertising presence functions as targeting and tracking infrastructure rather than a commercial advertising operation. The anomalous bidding behavior, heavy dominance in sanctioned and conflict states, and pronounced over-bidding for Starlink address space establish intent to reach specific audiences in sensitive geographies.” It noted an obvious skew toward Starlink-aimed ads. It also found that Shadow-Earth-79 was the top ad buyer in Syria, Libya, Yemen and South Sudan, and the second biggest in Afghanistan. Few Western brands are chasing shoppers in Libya at the moment, and the report says demand for legitimate Western advertising in sanctioned or active-conflict states is effectively zero. The entity also won an implausibly dominant share of bids in several other countries, including Hungary, Israel, Egypt, Azerbaijan and Venezuela. The researchers were convinced Discover-Tech was behind it and discussed naming it in the report, according to the six sources. They dropped the idea after TrendAI executives raised legal concerns, five of those sources said. It wouldn’t be the first time. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that Palo Alto stripped explicit references to China from a report on a global cyberespionage campaign, even though its researchers were confident Beijing was behind the hacking. Reuters said the report was watered down over fears that naming China would cause problems for Palo Alto’s operations there, which were already under scrutiny after a Beijing directive told domestic companies not to use its products. Palo Alto said the lack of attribution had nothing to do with China’s procurement rules and called any suggestion otherwise speculative and false. Executives fear that exposing surveillance operations could draw retribution, and industry experts tell Reuters the sector has a habit of staying quiet. “Self-censorship is common in the cybersecurity industry, especially when executives fear that exposing surveillance operations could draw retribution, industry experts say.” Reuters concludes. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Starlink)
Attackers are actively exploiting vulnerabilities across critical network infrastructure, and PHP flaws known as "PHP2Shell" put the web management interfaces of firewalls, VPNs, application delivery controllers, and other appliances at risk. The findings come from Eclypsium's October InfraTrust Pulse, a monthly report tracking security advisories affecting network devices, servers, firmware, chips, and other infrastructure. Between September 18 and October 14, InfraTrust tracked 133 new security advisories across 18 vendors, covering 2,813 vulnerabilities. Of those advisories, 37 were rated critical, five had a maximum CVSS score of 10.0, and 58 could be exploited remotely without authentication. Sixteen newly published advisories included vulnerabilities listed in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (KEV) as they were actively exploited.
PHP2Shell shows how quickly attackers can exploit critical vulnerabilities, often before organizations have time to patch. Token Security explains why limiting the access of service accounts, API keys, and AI agents is just as important as fixing vulnerabilities to reduce the damage from a breach.
On Tuesday, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed that hackers have begun exploiting a critical Brotli vulnerability known as Node2Shell, Broccoli2Shell, and HTTP2Shell. Tracked as CVE-2026-111497, this critical-severity flaw stems from an out-of-bounds write weakness in the Brotli decoder used to expand data compressed with Google's widely popular Brotli lossless compression algorithm. Unprivileged attackers can 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 libraries or binaries. The security issue was first identified in the Node.js JavaScript runtime environment, but it also affects HTTP servers and clients that rely on vulnerable Brotli implementations.
Modern phishing campaigns can compromise American businesses without relying on traditional credential theft. Attackers can abuse legitimate cloud services, authentication mechanisms, and trusted business workflows to gain access to corporate accounts while leaving fewer obvious signs behind. ANY.RUN's analysis of Skyw4lker, a device code phishing campaign primarily targeting U.S. organizations
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Google Brotli and Adobe Commerce and Magento flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added Google Brotli and Adobe Commerce and Magento vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog: Below are the flaws added to the catalog: CVE-2026-111497 (CVSS score: 9.2) – An unchecked return value vulnerability in Google Brotli that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to corrupt decoder memory, expose sensitive information, cause a denial-of-service, or potentially execute arbitrary code by sending a specially crafted Brotli-compressed stream. CVE-2026-48356 (CVSS score: 9.3) – An unrestricted file upload vulnerability in Adobe Commerce and Magento that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user, potentially gaining elevated access or taking control of the victim’s account or session. Brotli is a data-compression algorithm developed by Google.It reduces the size of web content, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other text-based resources. Security researchers have observed exploitation attempts targeting CVE-2026-111497 (aka Node2Shell), a critical flaw in Google’s Brotli library. Previdian recorded one attempt by October 27, while ELLIO researchers recently detected traffic carrying a public exploit that could execute code on vulnerable systems. The activity may indicate attempts to exploit the flaw on a larger scale, but its scope remains unclear. An attacker can trigger the vulnerability to cause crashes, expose sensitive memory or remote code execution when applications decompress attacker-controlled Brotli data. Because Brotli is widely used, multiple projects and vendors have released security updates, including Node.js, PHP, Bun, and Microsoft .NET. Cybersecurity firm Wiz warned that 91% of cloud environments contain resources vulnerable to the flaw, while 82% have publicly exposed Node.js instances. The second flaw added to the catalog is an unrestricted file upload vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-48356, dubbed PolyShell. Recently WordPress security firm Sansec warned of attacks exploiting CVE-2026-48356 to infect at least 953 of online stores. The attackers reportedly used a Magento CMS block to insert a malicious loader capable of retrieving and executing a payload hosted under their control. So far, researchers have not recovered the subsequent payload, leaving the campaign’s ultimate objectives unclear. The activity is believed to have been underway since at least July 2025 and remains ongoing. According to Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, FCEB agencies have to address the identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect their networks against attacks exploiting the flaws in the catalog. Experts also recommend that private organizations review the Catalog and address the vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. CISA orders federal agencies to fix the flaws by October 29, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
A Ukrainian national was sentenced to 70 months in prison for his role in Nefilim and Hive ransomware attacks targeting hospitals, government entities, and high-revenue businesses worldwide between 2018 and 2021. The sentence follows the extradition of 35-year-old Artem Aleksandrovych Stryzhak to the United States on April 30, 2025, after authorities arrested him in Spain in June 2024. "Artem Stryzhak is a prolific cybercriminal who worked with multiple ransomware groups to target U.S. businesses and hospitals," said Brett Leatherman, the FBI's Cyber Branch Operations Director. "These groups disrupted patient care and caused more than $100 million in losses. Today's sentence reflects the seriousness of Stryzhak's crimes and demonstrates the FBI's global reach and extensive network of international partners."
The GMO Group has urged customers to disconnect their systems from the internet and shut down computers after a threat actor who breached the company’s Onamae Desktop Cloud threatened to launch a ransomware attack today. The company later confirmed that data belonging to both the company and its customers had been published online. The alert concerns a cyberattack on Onamae Desktop Cloud, a popular VPS provider in Japan operated by GMO Internet, a member of GMO Internet Group and one of Japan's largest domain registrars. Last week, the company announced it detected an intrusion on October 20 that could have installed malware on up to 26,739 customers' servers. To minimize the risk, the company shut down the servers and reduced service availability before launching an investigation. The internet company assured customers that their payment information had not been exposed but warned that MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 (MT4/MT5) credentials and trading-account details may have been exposed or compromised. It urged customers to reset their passwords and terminate active sessions.
The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center disclosed a cyberattack that caused system outages and disrupted patient care and academic activities. On Monday, UNM Health, the university’s healthcare provider, began temporarily limiting new patient admissions, diverting ambulances to nearby hospitals, and suspending outpatient surgeries and appointments. In an update on the incident, UNM said UNM Hospital and Sandoval Regional Medical Center remain open, and all clinics will resume scheduled appointments and procedures starting today, Tuesday, October 27. Regarding emergencies, the healthcare organization advised that people should call 911. However, today’s classes at its four health sciences schools are canceled, and nonessential HSC employees were instructed to stay home. UNM Health is a major statewide provider of specialist care with more than 1 million patient visits annually.
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