Extortion group FulcrumSec claims they stole 86GB of Manchester Airports Group data after finding API credentials exposed in client-side JavaScript. Manchester Airports Group (MAG) disclosed a data breach on August 27 affecting customers of Manchester, London Stansted, and East Midlands airports. Two days later, BleepingComputer reports the extortion group FulcrumSec claimed responsibility, saying it stole roughly 86GB of data, considerably more detailed than what MAG’s original disclosure suggested. MAG’s own statement describes a relatively limited set of exposed data. It says the breach affected car park, lounge, Fast Track bookings, and airport WiFi registrations, exposing email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations, and postcodes. MAG disclosed that the data breach impacted 8.7 million customers, however, the company says most of those customers had only their email addresses exposed. FulcrumSec tells a different story. The group shared samples with BleepingComputer that included a 21.5GB export of Manchester customer data, with personal identifiers, historical booking details, and marketing information. BleepingComputer checked one record against a real traveler’s purchase history and found matching Fast Track bookings, arrival times, terminal information, and payment amounts. The alleged way into the system is particularly concerning. FulcrumSec says it found airport-specific Iterable API credentials inside client-side JavaScript. That code runs in users’ browsers, so anyone inspecting the website with developer tools could potentially see those credentials. “The group claims it obtained access using airport-specific Iterable API credentials exposed in client-side JavaScript and that the stolen material includes nearly 200,000 records related to upcoming travel during the remainder of 2026.” states the report. These records allegedly contain dates, times and booking information linked to personally identifiable information. FulcrumSec says it intends to publish the stolen data and a technical account of the intrusion. If the claim is accurate, attackers did not need a highly sophisticated technique. They simply found sensitive API credentials exposed in code that the website sent directly to customers’ browsers.” The most concerning specific claim is nearly 200,000 records tied to upcoming travel through the rest of 2026, complete with dates, times, and booking details linked to identifiable individuals. BleepingComputer couldn’t independently verify that number or the full scope of what was actually taken, and MAG declined to directly address FulcrumSec’s specific claims when asked, instead pointing to its existing statement that affected customers with upcoming bookings had already been contacted. MAG is confident that we have taken effective measures to protect our customers and we have contacted all those affected, a spokesperson said, without engaging with the 86GB figure or the exposed-credentials claim directly. FulcrumSec plans to publish the stolen data but may redact upcoming travel records because of the risk of real-world harm. UK postcodes can identify very small groups of addresses, and combined with vehicle registrations, parking dates and booking details, the data could enable highly convincing phishing messages targeting people with upcoming trips. UK postcodes make this exposure sharper than the equivalent breach might be in the US. Unlike American ZIP codes covering broad delivery areas, a full UK postcode typically identifies a small cluster of neighboring addresses, sometimes a single property, according to the Office for National Statistics. Combined with vehicle registrations, parking dates, and specific booking references, that’s more than enough raw material for a phishing message referencing a real upcoming trip that would be very hard to distinguish from a genuine MAG communication. Security researchers commenting on the broader incident have flagged a supply-chain angle worth watching. Airport operations increasingly run through third-party platforms for booking, parking, and loyalty services rather than systems the airport itself directly controls, and Iterable, the marketing platform whose API credentials FulcrumSec claims to have abused, is exactly that kind of outsourced dependency. This also isn’t aviation’s first bad year: a September 2025 ransomware attack on Collins Aerospace‘s check-in software had already grounded systems at Heathrow, Brussels, and Berlin, meaning UK and European aviation infrastructure has now taken two significant hits inside twelve months. MAG says no payment card or banking data was exposed, however, travelers who recently booked parking, lounge access or Fast Track should assume more travel data may be exposed and treat messages citing real booking details with caution. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Manchester Airports Group (MAG))
The Manchester Airports Group data breach has been claimed by extortion group FulcrumSec, which told BleepingComputer that it stole approximately 86 GB of data. Samples reviewed by BleepingComputer contained information consistent with MAG's disclosure while indicating that the breach exposed considerably more detailed customer, booking, and travel information than initially revealed. Manchester Airports Group (MAG), the United Kingdom's largest airport operator, disclosed on August 27 that an unauthorized third party had stolen customer data related to Manchester, London Stansted, and East Midlands airports. The company said the affected information came from car park, lounge, and Fast Track bookings and in-airport Wi-Fi registrations. In emails to BleepingComputer, FulcrumSec claimed responsibility for the attack and shared samples of the allegedly stolen data as evidence.
Anthropic is warning some Claude users that infostealer malware on their PCs has stolen active Claude login sessions, allowing attackers to access accounts and consume their usage. The company is signing affected users out of Claude, removing saved payment methods, and refunding charges it identifies as unauthorized. "We have recently become aware of a bad actor that is using common infostealer malware to steal Claude login sessions from people's computers, then using those login sessions to access Claude accounts and consume their usage," Anthropic said in an email sent to an affected user, who shared it on Reddit. "If your usage limits looked like they refilled and then drained while you weren't using Claude, this was likely the cause," Anthropic warned. It is also worth noting that infostealers can copy an already authenticated browser session, which means the attacker may not need to go through the normal password and 2FA login process again.
Multiple extensions for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge delivered a malware framework that deployed modules to steal cryptocurrency, sensitive data, and browser history, and to inject ClickFix lures. Researchers say all 16 malicious modules uncovered in the campaign serve distinct purposes and are designed to be "highly extensible." The operation was uncovered by application security company Socket, and the investigation indicates that it may have been active since early 2024. Socket says that when initially published on the Chrome Web Store, many of the extensions provided the advertised functionality and contained no malware. According to the researchers, five of the extensions were acquired from their original creators and injected with malware via updates delivered automatically. One example is the "Enable Right Click & Copy — Smart Unlock + OCR" extension, the only one in the campaign available for both Chrome and Edge, which had a Chrome user base of at least 70,000 when it turned malicious. The number of installs on Edge was 10,000 at the time.
Security Affairs Malware newsletter includes a collection of the best articles and research on malware in the international landscape Malware Newsletter Operation QUICSILVER: China-Nexus Actor Targets Myanmar Diplomats via VHD-Delivered Go Backdoor FTP Banners: The New Dead Drop Resolver Delivering Novel RATs The State of AI-Enabled Malware August 2026: From Brand Abuse to Agentic Execution 19 Chrome and Edge Extensions Deliver a Wallet Drainer and Credential-Stealing Payloads SLEEPWALKER: A Passive Backdoor With Its Own Command Language Tortoiseshell: New Toolset and Operational Infrastructure Exposed Dark Caracal Reloaded: New Malware, Same Hunting Grounds Cambodia-focused cluster uses multistage infection chain with localized lures BlueDelta Targets Defense and Diplomacy with HOOKEDGE XAI-Guided Graph-Based Feature Engineering and Heterogeneous Ensemble Learning for Android Malware Detection BotScan: An adaptive active probing approach for identifying live IoT Botnet C2 servers at scale EGAMA-RC: Risk-Calibrated Evidence-Gated Adaptive Malware Analysis for Robust and Interpretable Memory-Forensic Triage Survival of~the~Stealthiest: Evolving Low-Entropy Ransomware via~Genetic Algorithms Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
The latest version of the Brave browser, 1.94, introduces a feature called ‘Email Aliases’ that allows users to generate disposable email addresses when signing up to a new service. Using an alias address keeps the user's real email address hidden from the website while still forwarding messages from the service. Brave already uses data isolation to prevent websites from inferring user identities based on cookie-based or cache correlations; however, email addresses are still stored on website servers, creating a privacy gap. Brave’s new feature addresses this risk by blocking cross-site identity matching, reducing spam, and protecting users from threats such as phishing attacks that can follow data breaches. “If a website you signed up for is hacked, your information can be leaked and end up with data brokers or worse,” explains Brave in the announcement.
A researcher chained two Unitree G1 flaws to gain root access remotely and showed how a compromised robot could attack others nearby. Security researcher Olivier Laflamme spent about three months digging into the Unitree G1 humanoid robot and eventually found a way to fully compromise it without plugging in a single cable. In his technical write-up, he details two vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-76639 and CVE-2026-76640, that can be chained across Bluetooth, Unitree’s cloud infrastructure, the mobile app, and the robot’s firmware to gain unauthenticated root access to any G1 within Bluetooth range. The first bug lives entirely inside the robot itself, no wireless attack surface needed if you can reach it over Ethernet. The G1’s AI chatbot service accepts a “knowledge” upload with almost no validation on the filename it writes to disk, and a classic path traversal payload lets an attacker write an arbitrary file anywhere on the filesystem, including into a directory that a separate service called bashrunner treats as trusted. Restart bashrunner, tell it to run the newly planted file, and you’ve got root-level shell execution with five DDS messages and zero authentication. The second chain is the one that should worry anyone deploying these robots at scale. It starts with a Bluetooth characteristic that accepts writes without pairing, something The Hacker News also covered in its own report on the disclosure. An unpaired device can request the robot’s encrypted key bootstrap blob, and Unitree’s cloud API would decrypt that blob for any free, logged-in Unitree account without ever checking whether the account actually owned that specific robot. “The blob is RSA-encrypted & the corresponding RSA private key is held by Unitree’s cloud infrastructure. This, in theory, is safe.. This is the security boundary Unitree appears to have relied on. Nearby devices can request the bootstrap blob, but only Unitree owns the RSA private key capable of opening it.” reads Laflamme’s report. “However, the Unitree mobile app reassembles the BLE notification chunks and slingshots that shit via a POST to Unitree’s cloud API /device/bindExtData on global-robot-api.unitree.com and the app stores the response body as gcmKey.” That decryption oracle is the crux of the whole chain, and Laflamme doesn’t undersell how convenient it made everything. “This single AES-128 key unlocks both the BLE protocol and the WebRTC signaling channels.” continues the report. Once an attacker has obtained it, they can authenticate to the robot’s Bluetooth handshake and unlock WiFi configuration commands that were previously locked behind that same key. From there, an oversized WiFi password triggers a fallback code path in Unitree’s own configuration script that inserts attacker-controlled text directly into a config file without escaping it, letting the attacker force the robot to join a hotspot they control, no physical access needed at any point. Going from “the robot connects to my Wi-Fi” to a full root shell required a buffer overflow in the G1’s Bluetooth server, and this is where the research gets particularly impressive. The server used a 500-byte buffer without proper bounds checking, allowing Laflamme to overwrite nearby memory with a carefully crafted 1,050-byte payload. He used that payload to create a fake cleanup structure that the program later interpreted as a legitimate function pointer, causing it to execute an attacker-controlled command with root privileges. There was one more obstacle: randomized memory addresses. To make the exploit work reliably, Laflamme first needed to discover where the vulnerable program was loaded in memory. He solved that by turning the first vulnerability into an information leak and using the result to make the second exploit work. In other words, one bug effectively helped unlock the other. The wormability is what turns this from an interesting security flaw into a much more serious operational risk. Once an attacker compromises one G1, that robot can use the same attack against other G1 robots within Bluetooth range, without requiring additional discovery or configuration. Laflamme tested the technique on just two robots in the same room, so the real-world reach of a chain reaction remains unclear. In a warehouse, laboratory, or campus where dozens of these robots operate close to each other, however, the possibility of one compromised machine spreading the attack to others is difficult to ignore. Unitree’s response gets genuine credit in the writeup, and it’s worth noting given how often vendor disclosure stories go badly. The company patched the cloud ownership-check flaw within about two months of the report, paid out a combined $5,000 bounty across both chains, and worked through verification quickly enough that Laflamme calls the collaboration close to ideal. “July 1-6 August, 2026 — Unitree implemented an account-to-robot cloud binding ownership check before returning the AES-128 key. Patching the “cloud-oracle” vulnerability discovered back in May. “August 6, 2026 — a $5,000 USD bounty was paid out, $4,000 for the BLE RCE and $1,000 for the chat_go RCE.” The BLE pairing and buffer overflow issues themselves, notably, sit deeper in the firmware and represent a harder, slower fix than a simple cloud-side ownership check. None of this required exotic tools or some cutting-edge attack technique. That is probably the detail that should get the most attention from anyone who still sees robot security as a niche problem. This was a $20,000 humanoid robot, the kind increasingly used in research labs and universities and likely to appear in more workplaces, compromised with a decompiled Android app, a firmware encryption scheme that researchers had already broken years ago, and a familiar class of buffer overflow that predates humanoid robots by decades. If your organization has a G1 sitting in a lab, lobby, or workspace, checking its patch status should be a priority. A 90-pound robot losing its collision-detection capabilities is not the kind of security incident you want to discover the hard way. “You could use the G1 to spy on people through audio and video, make it say obscene shit in public, swap out or backdoor the ResNet onboard AI models, tamper with perception and movement logic, disable collision detection and other safety checks (it weighs ~90lbs having that run into a kid, a wall, or even step on your toe will do some serious damage).” concludes the researcher. “They also cost a lot! I’d be pissed off if someone hacked into my G1, took control of it, and walked it off my factory/campus.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Robot)
Berlin ‘s government faces a Rhysida ransomware attack weeks before elections, with officials refusing to pay despite a claimed 5.79 TB data theft. Berlin’s state government confirmed this week it’s dealing with an extortion attempt following an August cyberattack on the city-state’s administrative network, and officials have already refused the requested ransom. The ransomware group Rhysida claimed responsibility on its leak site August 28, posting an entry titled simply “Berlin, Germany” and claiming 5.79 terabytes of data across roughly 1.44 million files, with personal information on 12,076 individuals allegedly included. Rhysida claims it stole 5.79 TB of data, covering around 1.44 million files. The alleged dataset includes: Personal data: 12,076 individuals, 16,389 email addresses, 11,963 phone numbers and 148 IBANs. Sensitive records: more than 5,000 personnel files, more than 5,000 administrative-offence files, payroll data and leadership information. Credentials: plaintext passwords and credentials for systems including GebäudAtlas, the ePayment PAYONE database and Z_ADMIN accounts. Government and legal material: disciplinary proceedings, court cases, supervisory documents, NDA records and Bundesrat committee protocols. Classified information: data related to classified-material handling and documents allegedly containing state secrets. Critical infrastructure: vulnerability analyses concerning Berlin’s water supply. Identity documents: passports and ID cards from personnel records. Other material: contracts, financial documents, HR records, infrastructure files, health data, password stores and SQL/PST archives. The group also claims that the material could involve violations of GDPR, German classified-information rules, criminal law and KRITIS/BSIG requirements. These are Rhysida’s claims and have not been independently verified. The timing makes this attack especially sensitive. Berlin will elect its state parliament on September 20, less than a month after the breach, so an attack on government systems just before the vote was bound to raise questions. Interior Senator Iris Spranger said the election remains secure and that, so far, the attackers haven’t taken any election-related data. Security officials support that assessment. Broadcaster RBB first reported on Thursday that Berlin had received ransom demands. “The state of Berlin will not submit to extortion,” Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner and Berlin’s interior senator, Iris Spranger, said in a joint statement on Friday, before the ransomware group claimed the attack on their Tor data leak site. That position follows long-standing advice from US federal agencies, which warn that paying a ransom doesn’t guarantee data recovery and can encourage more attacks. Saying no to the ransom is one thing; dealing with the consequences if the attackers publish the stolen data is another. Berlin first disclosed the compromise on August 17, isolating the Senate Department for Mobility, Transport, Climate Protection and Environment along with a second department from the network. Forensic investigators later found the actual data exfiltration happened earlier than the public disclosure, sometime between August 7 and August 12, with the affected department having flagged an initial outflow internally on August 7, a full week before the network got cut off. That gap between first internal detection and actual network isolation is the kind of detail that tends to get scrutinized hardest once the immediate crisis passes. Rhysida isn’t a new name to anyone tracking ransomware against government targets. The group has claimed roughly 280 victims since emerging in 2023, according to tracking services cited by Reuters, including nine in Germany alone and headline targets like the British Library and Chile’s army. Roughly half its victims sit in the US, with the UK, Canada, and Italy rounding out the next tier, a spread that suggests Rhysida isn’t picking targets based on geography so much as opportunity. A joint advisory from CISA, the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, first published in November 2023, lays out exactly how Rhysida typically gets in: compromised VPN credentials at organizations without multi-factor authentication, exploitation of the Zerologon vulnerability that Microsoft patched back in 2020, and old-fashioned phishing. None of those entry points are exotic or new, which is precisely the point; Rhysida doesn’t need novel techniques when so many organizations still haven’t closed gaps that have been publicly known for years. Berlin reconnected all Senate departments to the network on August 23, but forensic teams are still checking the systems. The state’s data protection commissioner and Germany’s federal cybersecurity agency, the BSI, are following the investigation. As of publication, neither Berlin’s data protection office nor the Senate Chancellery had given specific advice to the roughly 12,000 people whose data Rhysida claims to have stolen. If you’re among them and haven’t received any official message yet, don’t assume that means you’re safe. Investigators are still working to establish exactly what the attackers accessed and took. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Rhysida Ransomware)
An alleged Chinese-speaking actor breached Philippine nuclear and naval targets by exploiting known flaws, stealing sensitive data. A suspected Chinese-speaking operator targeted a Philippine nuclear research body and a marine engineering company that supports the Philippine Navy, using well-known vulnerabilities in internet-facing ownCloud and WordPress systems. The activity was uncovered after Hunt.io found an exposed server in Amsterdam that contained attack scripts, logs, offensive tooling and data taken from the two organisations. “Hunt.io Attack Capture discovered an open directory containing tooling which documented intrusion activity against two Philippine organizations.” reads the report published by Hunt.io. “A recovered CSV references roughly 9 GB of material stolen from the nuclear agency, most absent from the current directories contents, and a compromise of a project management application, indicating a possible third victim.” Hunt.io disclosed the findings to CERT-PH under the TLP:AMBER sharing standard and delayed publication until 25 August 2026 so the national response team could notify the affected organisations. The incident arrives amid sustained tensions in the South China Sea and continuing reports of suspected Chinese cyber activity against Philippine government, defence and critical-infrastructure targets. “On August 13, 2026, Hunt.io Attack Capture identified an open directory on the host 31.58.209[.]241. The server staged custom Python scripts, per-file transfer logs, open-source offensive security tooling, and exfiltrated data from two Philippine organizations. The scripts targeted an ownCloud instance operated by a nuclear research body, using pre-signed URLs generated with an empty signing secret, which allowed for the unauthenticated retrieval of files over WebDAV.” states the report.”A separate intrusion was observed exploiting a WordPress site operated by a Philippine marine engineering and shipbuilding company that provides services to the Philippine Navy.” The server was not a sophisticated hidden service. It exposed a Python SimpleHTTP directory on port 8000, along with SSH, a self-hosted ownCloud login page and other services. The directory contained 1,310 files in 86 folders, totaling 1.17 GB, including scripts, stolen data and tools such as Sliver, Metasploit and Mettle. Researchers gained a rare view of the attacker’s operations after finding tools, logs and stolen files left exposed on the server. The main entry point was likely the nuclear research body’s internet-facing ownCloud service, compromised by exploiting CVE-2023-49105, an authentication-bypass flaw in ownCloud versions before 10.13.1. In this condition, an attacker who knows a valid username can generate WebDAV requests that the server accepts as if they were made by that user. No password is needed. Hunt.io found five custom Python scripts implementing this technique, four focused on individual accounts and a fifth capable of enumerating directories and recording every attempted download. hunt “In vulnerable instances when no such key was configured, a default state on new installs, the signing routine still executed using an empty secret. An attacker with knowledge of valid usernames on the instance could construct signed WebDAV requests that would be accepted by the server as authentication action by that user, without ever supplying credentials.” continues the report. “A total of five custom Python scripts saved from the directory implement this exact technique described above. Four target a single account each; the fifth moves further to include directory enumeration and logging.” The attacker used random delays to make data collection less noticeable and avoid volume-based alerts. Scripts, logs and folders consistently used Simplified Chinese, including labels for nuclear, radiation-safety, finance and IT files. This suggests a Chinese-speaking operator, but does not prove links to a specific government or threat group. The stolen data included nuclear reactor component databases, fuel inventories, radiation-safety documents, incident records and authorised-user lists. It also included strategic plans, IT documents, staff records, CVs, passport and travel data, and financial disclosures from Philippine officials. The exposed server held 176 files, about 372 MB in total. However, a CSV created by the attacker referred to roughly 9 GB of stolen data. This gap suggests the server contained only part of the haul and that the attacker may have accessed much more than researchers could recover. The material also included a KeePass database, AxCrypt-encrypted files and a BitLocker recovery key. Those artefacts matter because they can support follow-on access: a data theft operation can become a credential-theft operation, and a credential-theft operation can become a longer-term intrusion. Researchers additionally recovered a 192 MB SQL dump from a ZKTeco BioTime attendance and personnel system. Such a database can link people to badge identifiers, departments and access records, enabling an attacker to build a picture of who works where, who may have sensitive access and which people are worth targeting next. The same server also contained evidence of a breach involving a Philippine marine engineering and shipbuilding company that works with the Philippine Navy. The attacker exploited CVE-2024-28000, a privilege-escalation flaw in the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin. The flaw let attackers create a WordPress admin account without authentication by exploiting a predictable security hash through the REST API. Hunt.io found the exploit code, compiled tools and logs showing that the attacker successfully gained admin access. The attacker also used WordPress XML-RPC to test passwords for the admin account with the well-known rockyou.txt list. The logs show that this method also found valid credentials. That gave the operator redundancy. Even if one access path were closed, the attacker could retain an administrator account, a valid password or data such as WordPress hashes and secret values from the stolen site database. Redundant access is not glamorous. It is, unfortunately, effective. While examining the compromised WordPress site, Hunt.io also discovered an active EtherHiding-style injection that it believes may be unrelated to the Chinese-speaking operator. The malicious JavaScript used an Ethereum smart contract as a place to retrieve content, then displayed a fake Google verification page designed to push visitors into a ClickFix-style infection flow. The campaign used a service worker for persistence and collected visitor fingerprint data. Hunt.io found 174 unique IP addresses hosting pages with the same NoChain loader strings and smart-contract reference, but said the evidence did not link that activity to the operator who attacked the nuclear and naval-linked targets. That distinction matters. A compromised website can host multiple intrusions or payloads at once, often run by unrelated actors. Analysts should resist the temptation to treat every malicious artefact on one server as evidence of a single campaign. The technical lesson is blunt: old and known weaknesses still provide access to high-value targets. Organisations using ownCloud should upgrade to version 10.13.3 or later, apply the vendor’s relevant fixes and ensure that pre-signed URLs use a strong, non-empty signing key. Teams should also examine WebDAV logs for suspicious PROPFIND directory-enumeration requests, large volumes of file retrieval across multiple accounts, or recurring requests from a single source with artificial gaps between them. Low-and-slow collection is still collection. For WordPress, organisations should update LiteSpeed Cache to version 6.4 or later, remove or restrict XML-RPC when it is not needed, enforce strong unique administrator passwords and require multi-factor authentication. The XML-RPC compromise in this case succeeded against a password from a public wordlist, which is not a vulnerability in WordPress so much as an invitation nobody should leave on the doorstep. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Philippine nuclear and naval targets)
Multiple critical security flaws have been disclosed in WordPress plugins and themes, including WPMU DEV Dashboard, Avada, TranslatePress, Pods, and GiveWP, that could lead to authentication bypass, account takeover, and arbitrary code execution. The vulnerabilities, according to Wordfence and Patchstack, are listed below - CVE-2026-76581 (CVSS score: 9.8) - An authentication bypass flaw in
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