88 ID-verification breaches exposed billions of records, highlighting the growing risks of collecting sensitive identity and biometric data. A new report from Mysterium VPN compiles 88 documented incidents since 2011 where data collected specifically to verify someone’s identity or age got breached, exposed, or sold. The confirmed and researcher-verified total sits at 2.15 billion records, with attacker and seller claims piling another 4.54 billion on top of that. The most uncomfortable number in the whole dataset isn’t the total record count, it’s how much of it can’t be fixed after the fact. In 41 of the 88 incidents, what actually leaked included the source documents themselves: ID scans, verification selfies, fingerprints, full biometric templates. A password gets reset in thirty seconds. A face doesn’t. The timing makes the report especially concerning. Of the 88 incidents, 37, or 42%, happened between January 2024 and August 2026, when mandatory identity and age checks were spreading quickly around the world. The message is simple: the systems that collect your ID can be breached just like any other online service. “The pattern of this era is specific: the wall you are forced to hand your ID to is exactly as breachable as everything else on the internet.” reads the report. Some recent cases are particularly worrying. The Tea app, created as a women-only safety platform, exposed verification selfies through an open storage bucket, and the images later appeared on 4chan. Discord users who challenged age-verification decisions also had around 70,000 government IDs exposed through a third-party support provider, even as Discord continued expanding age checks. What makes this particularly damning is who’s actually running the verification layer for the internet’s biggest platforms. AU10TIX, which verifies identity for TikTok, Uber, and X, left admin credentials exposed for over a year. Sumsub disclosed a support-system intrusion that went undetected for 18 months. Persona, which handles age verification for Discord and Roblox, exposed its own frontend configuration. “In 41 of the 88 incidents, what leaked included the actual documents: ID scans, verification selfies, fingerprints, biometric templates. Unlike a password, none of that can be changed.” states the report. “Every major identity-verification vendor from the current era — AU10TIX, IDMerit, Sumsub, Persona, inVOID — has appeared in this timeline. The companies the internet now relies on to hold everyone’s identity documents safely haven’t demonstrated they can do it.” Governments haven’t fared any better with their own centralized registries. Argentina’s national identity system leaked 45 million records including ID scans and selfies. France’s ANTS, the agency that literally issues French identity documents, confirmed 11.7 million people affected in a 2026 breach. India’s Aadhaar system, Thailand’s visitor database, the Philippines’ voter rolls, Brazil’s tax registry, the pattern repeats at country scale roughly as often as it does at startup scale. The report isn’t blaming one company or one mistake. Its main point is that the growing use of ID and age checks is creating more opportunities for sensitive data to be exposed. Every new law that requires ID checks, every platform that adds age verification, and every company that stores identity data creates another valuable target. Putting permanent and highly sensitive information into systems with different levels of security creates a risk that’s hard to ignore. This doesn’t mean ID and age verification have no value. They can serve legitimate purposes. But companies deciding whether to build or outsource these systems should study this history carefully. Relying on a “reputable” third-party provider clearly isn’t enough. “The timeline makes something visible that individual breach reports obscure: this isn’t a series of unrelated failures. It’s one failure mode, repeated across 88 incidents, fifteen years, and every type of organization that has ever decided to collect this category of data.” concludes the report. “What varies is the victim. Sometimes, it’s a startup with inadequate security. Sometimes, it’s a national government that built a country-scale identity registry and watched it walk out the door. Sometimes, it’s a verification vendor that became the single point of failure for a dozen companies that outsourced their compliance obligations to them. “ Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, ID Verification Breaches)
INTERPOL’s Operation Jackal IV made 58 arrests and exposed global networks laundering money from scams, fraud and sextortion. INTERPOL announced that Operation Jackal IV, running from November 2025 to June 2026, led to 58 arrests and identified 263 suspects tied to West African organized crime networks, groups like Black Axe that are responsible for a huge share of the world’s romance scams, crypto fraud, and business email compromise (BEC) schemes. “Operation Jackal IV (November 2025 – June 2026) aimed to disrupt money laundering, identify high-value targets, seize assets, and support arrests and prosecution.” Interpol announced. “The operation, which brought together 22 countries from six continents, is a response to the escalating global threat posed by West African criminal networks – such as the Black Axe and other similar groups. These groups are responsible for a significant share of the world’s cyber-enabled financial fraud, typically through romance scams, cryptocurrency and investment scams or business email compromise fraud, as well as other serious and violent crimes.” The goal wasn’t to chase individual scammers. Investigators followed the money behind the scams: shell companies, mule accounts and criminal services that help move and hide stolen funds. Tomonobu Kaya of INTERPOL’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre explained the approach: By following illicit financial flows across borders, we are attacking the very lifeblood of organized crime. Argentina turned up one of the operation’s biggest finds. Investigators identified 196 individuals connected to a crime-as-a-service network suspected of supplying website domains and laundering support specifically for West African criminal groups, resulting in 17 arrests. INTERPOL sent an Operational Support Team to help analyze seized data and map out the wider network of suspects, the kind of cross-border analytical work that individual national police forces usually can’t pull off on their own. South African authorities raided seven locations in Johannesburg linked to a group running romance and investment scams against retirees in English-speaking countries. The syndicate assigned members to specific roles, such as “conversion” and “retention” agents. The operation led to 39 arrests, $2.67 million seized and 257 bank accounts frozen, the largest number of arrests in the operation. Italy’s case shows how much damage a single laundering account can absorb. One individual was tied to a pan-European laundering network moving money through shell companies and remittance services, and investigators traced €845,000 laundered through a single account across 560 separate transactions using 20 different financial instruments. That’s not a careless operator; that’s someone who understood exactly how to fragment a large sum into a pattern designed to look unremarkable at every individual step. Romania’s case was the biggest by dollar value, and arguably the most brutal in its simplicity. A call center ran a fake investment scheme promising big returns on stocks and crypto, funneling victims’ money into wallets the operators controlled, and by the time authorities dismantled it, the estimated theft and laundering total had climbed to around €143 million globally. Eleven arrests and roughly €379,000 in cash and crypto seized, plus six properties and several luxury watches, is a real result, but it’s a fraction of what actually got stolen. “Beyond individual cases, Operation Jackal IV also enabled the analysis of critical and emerging trends, including a rise in West African organized crime groups using sextortion to target minors, with victims as young as 14. Offenders typically contact minors via social media, build trust and coerce them into sharing explicit images or videos.” concludes INTERPOL. “They then threaten to distribute this material to the victim’s contacts unless a ransom is paid.” The report’s darkest finding sits outside any single country’s arrest count. INTERPOL flagged a rising trend of these same criminal networks using sextortion against minors as young as 14, building trust through social media before coercing victims into sharing explicit images and then threatening to distribute that material unless a ransom gets paid. Some of these groups were even observed buying crime-as-a-service support through the dark web specifically to outsource pieces of that operation, treating exploitation infrastructure as just another service line alongside laundering and fraud. That’s the uncomfortable throughline connecting every case here: these aren’t scattered opportunists, they’re networks running organized business models with specialized roles, outsourced services, and financial engineering sophisticated enough to move hundreds of millions across borders. Twenty-two countries coordinating for eight months produced real numbers, real arrests, real frozen accounts. It also produced a fairly clear picture of how much more organized this side of cybercrime has become, and how much further there is to go. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Operation Jackal)
Uber faces an €825M GDPR fine for automatically suspending drivers without human review, highlighting the risks of AI decisions affecting workers. The Dutch Data Protection Authority handed Uber its largest privacy fine yet, and this one isn’t about data transfers or cookie consent. The regulator imposed an 825 million euro penalty, roughly $964 million, over Uber’s use of fully automated software to suspend driver accounts, sometimes permanently, with no human ever reviewing whether the system got it right. The violation is clear under EU law. The GDPR limits fully automated decisions when they can significantly affect a person’s life. An algorithm that can take away someone’s ability to earn a living, without any human review, falls directly into this category. The regulator also found that Uber failed to properly tell drivers when automated systems made these decisions, which the GDPR requires companies to disclose. “The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), the Dutch data protection authority, imposes a fine of 824,990,000 euros on Uber. The reason for this is that the AP has ruled that Uber made fully automated decisions about drivers. In case of suspicions of fraud or customer reviews that were too low, drivers’ accounts were automatically temporarily deactivated or, in case of persistent low customer reviews, permanently deactivated. As a result, their income was lost via Uber during the deactivation.” reads the statement published by the Dutch data protection authority. “According to the AP, Uber has violated the prohibition of fully automated decision-making under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The AP also found that Uber did not sufficiently inform drivers about automatic decision-making. Uber has now stopped the violations.” The fine covers Uber’s practices from 2018 to 2022, so it concerns systems the company has already discontinued. Uber highlighted this point in its response, arguing that the regulator examined old policies rather than practices still in use today. “Uber used software to track drivers’ (driving) behaviour and to track customer reviews. If that software detected a suspicion of fraud or customer reviews were too low, the accounts of the drivers concerned were automatically deactivated.” continues the Dutch authority. “There was no human assessment here. This occurred between 2018 and 2022.” Uber also said it takes decisions that affect drivers’ income seriously. The company pointed to human reviews, safeguards and an appeals process for drivers who believe the system made a mistake. The appeal will have to determine whether these protections existed during the period covered by the fine or came later. And Uber is appealing. The company has stated it disagrees with both the decision and the size of the fine, setting up another round in what’s become a recurring pattern between Uber and Dutch regulators specifically. This is the fourth time the Dutch authority has fined Uber, which on its own says something about the relationship here. The previous record holder was a 290 million euro fine in 2024 over transferring European drivers’ personal data to the US without adequate protections, a case Uber also appealed at the time. Four fines from a single regulator isn’t really a pattern of bad luck anymore; it’s a pattern of a company and a privacy regulator that keep disagreeing about the same basic question, how much human judgment has to sit between an algorithm’s decision and a person’s actual income. The case goes beyond Uber. Many gig-economy platforms in Europe use algorithms to manage workers, routes and account status. This ruling shows the cost of relying on automated decisions without human oversight. For companies that use algorithms to make decisions affecting people’s accounts or income, saying “the algorithm decided” is no longer enough. The €825 million fine makes that lesson very clear. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
Two CVSS 9.8 miniOrange SAML WordPress plugin auth bypasses were exploited while paid editions never appeared in any vulnerability database. Manual patch required. Two critical authentication bypass vulnerabilities in the miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On WordPress plugin, both rated CVSS 9.8, are under active exploitation. Both CVE-2026-61979 and CVE-2026-15981 allow an unauthenticated attacker to forge a SAML authentication response and arrive in /wp-admin as any existing user, including administrators. The bugs are independent and both have been confirmed exploited in the wild. CVE-2026-61979 is an algorithm confusion flaw. The plugin trusts the incoming SAML response to declare its own signature algorithm. An attacker sets that algorithm to HMAC-SHA1, which causes the plugin to use the identity provider’s RSA public key as the HMAC secret. The RSA public key is, by definition, public. That’s the whole attack: fetch the key from the metadata endpoint, sign your own forged assertion with it, and the plugin verifies it as genuine. CVE-2026-15981 is a PHP bug caused by incorrectly handling different types of values. The openssl_verify() function can return three results: 1 when a signature is valid, 0 when it is invalid, and -1 when OpenSSL encounters an error. The plugin treated the result like a simple true-or-false value. In PHP, -1 counts as true. An attacker can send a specially crafted signature that causes an OpenSSL error, making the function return -1. The plugin then treats it as a valid signature and allows the attacker to log in. It is a basic coding mistake, but particularly serious because the plugin handles authentication for WordPress admin accounts. The technical root cause is interesting. What happened around the bugs afterward is more interesting. The miniOrange SAML plugin ships under one WordPress slug, miniorange-saml-20-single-sign-on, but that one listing actually contains seven completely separate product editions, each with its own independent version numbering. Free runs from 3.x to 5.x. Premium runs 11.x to 13.x. Standard runs 15.x to 17.x. VIP editions start at 32.x and 35.x. No two editions share a version range. When the public advisories were written, they covered only the Free edition, which is the one anyone can download from WordPress.org. The fix for the Free edition landed at 5.4.5. “While that record is correct, when you apply it to the slug, every paid install carries a higher version number than 5.4.5, so every paid install reads as already patched.” reads Patchstack analysis. “Therefore, any WordPress site that was running a vulnerable version like 16.1.9 reported it as patched, along with every other (13.x, 20.x, 26.x, 32.x, and 35.x) vulnerable version.” Every database, scanner, and dashboard in the WordPress security ecosystem was telling paid-edition administrators their sites were safe when the exploitable code was still running on their servers. The update prompt problem makes it worse. Sites running a vulnerable Standard edition 16.x see no available updates in their WordPress admin panel because the fix is on the 17.x line, and WordPress’s built-in update mechanism doesn’t offer cross-line jumps automatically. The path from vulnerable to patched requires a manual plugin upload, which site owners can’t do if they don’t know they’re affected, and every system they rely on was telling them they weren’t. “There was no advisory to read and no vulnerability database entry flagged the paid edition for these vulnerabilities. The plugin reported itself as fully up to date. In other words, every signal that normally warns of a problem suggested that everything was fine.” continues the report. “So, how did DigitalOcean catch the exploit? It had nothing to do with plugins or versions. An anomalous WordPress administrator session attempt appeared from outside their trusted network and was blocked. The attacker had already used the bypass to obtain a WordPress admin session cookie, but was stalled because the admin panel operations themselves sat restricted behind the trusted network. “ DigitalOcean, the team that found all of this, caught the exploit not through any of those systems but through a network anomaly: an authenticated WordPress administrator session arriving from outside their trusted network perimeter. The attacker had already used one of the auth bypasses to generate a valid admin session cookie. The cookie worked. The session was blocked because the admin panel itself was restricted to trusted network ranges. Defense in depth, doing exactly what it exists to do, on a system where every other detection layer had already failed. DigitalOcean then traced both bugs to specific lines of code in the plugin and its bundled XML security library, confirmed the affected version ranges across all seven paid editions (which miniOrange had not published anywhere), wrote two narrowly scoped hotfixes to buy time, and handed the full analysis to Patchstack for publication. Patchstack worked with miniOrange to get the complete edition and version matrix, then updated its database with all seven affected ranges, the first time any public database held that information. Attackers are actively scanning miniOrange SSO endpoints from six IP addresses in Belgium, Nigeria, the U.S. and Germany. The activity appears opportunistic, with attackers checking websites that use the plugin without first identifying the specific version or edition. That makes the silent patch especially concerning. Attackers can probe systems without knowing what version they run, while website owners may not realize whether their plugin has received the fix. “Vulnerability databases are only as good as the version data vendors publish publicly. When a vendor runs seven independently numbered editions under one slug and patches six of them without a public advisory, the entire ecosystem downstream of them goes blind at once: databases, scanners, dashboards, and the site admins relying on all three.” concludes the report. For anyone running this plugin, the full version table per edition is in the Patchstack article. The short version: find your edition, compare your version against the patched column, and expect to do the upgrade as a manual upload rather than through the WordPress dashboard. If you can’t update immediately, two narrowly scoped hotfixes covering both CVEs are published there alongside the IPs to check in your logs for prior exploitation attempts. Check the passkey and admin account list while you’re in there. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, miniOrange SAML WordPress Plugin)
Healthcare and services provider Nutex is investigating a data breach incident where an unauthorized third party exfiltrated information from company servers. The organization has disclosed the cyberattack in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), noting that the stolen data includes details that may be private or confidential. “Based on preliminary findings from the Company’s ongoing investigation, the Company believes that certain information maintained on the Company’s servers was accessed and exfiltrated by an unauthorized third party, including some information that may be private and/or confidential,” Nutex says. Nutex Health is a for-profit healthcare company that operates 28 facilities across 12 states, including the Bayou City ER & Hospital in Texas and Green Bay ER & Hospital in Wisconsin.
Attackers are increasingly targeting the processes used to establish or recover identity rather than attacking the login itself. Specops explains how stronger identity verification can help organizations prevent fake workers and social engineering attacks from gaining legitimate access.
Microsoft updated its Windows PowerToys toolset with a new utility dubbed "Window Hopper" that lets users switch between an app's windows more quickly. The Window Hopper added in this release works like the standard ALT + TAB Windows feature, but it only works for the currently focused app, helping users switch back and forth between its windows. "Once the utility is enabled, press the configurable Alt + backtick shortcut to cycle through that app's windows without stepping through everything else on your desktop," Microsoft explains. "It is especially useful when you're juggling multiple browser windows, terminals, File Explorer windows, or editor instances." Those who want to customize the default activation keyboard shortcut can also do so in PowerToys settings to switch to the next and previous app window.
Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock (LockA locked padlock) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Staying Secure at Eventsno-cost Cyber ServicesCybersecurity Awareness MonthKnown Exploited Vulnerabilities CatalogReport A Cyber Issue WASHINGTON – Today, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published an advisory about lessons learned from red team assessments performed at the request of two critical infrastructure organizations to help organizations strengthen detection, response and protections in information technology (IT), cloud, and operational technology (OT) environments.
Explore Unit 42 research on AI-enabled malware. Learn how existing behavioral detection and endpoint analytics stop AI-authored code before execution. The post The State of AI-Enabled Malware August 2026: From Brand Abuse to Agentic Execution appeared first on Unit 42.
WeedHack Minecraft Malware Survives C2 Takedown: Fake Client Sites Still Active, SEO Poisoning Puts Malicious Downloads at the Top of Google McAfee Labs published a follow-up report on the WeedHack Malware-as-a-Service campaign this week, documenting ten active malicious sites and multiple file-hosting accounts that are still spreading the infostealer despite a disruption to its command-and-control infrastructure. Over the past month alone, McAfee WebAdvisor blocked more than 6,300 user attempts to reach these sites. WeedHack was first spotted in early June 2026 when McAfee researcher Aayush Tyagi documented a Malware-as-a-Service operation that had been running since January and had logged 116,464 infected systems, adding between 2,000 and 3,000 new victims every day. The operation offered a free tier that anyone with a Discord account could access, a premium tier with webcam surveillance capability for $5 a month, and a dashboard letting operators view stolen credentials, configure custom payloads, and monitor victims in real time. It spread through fake Minecraft client websites, YouTube videos linking to malicious downloads, and SEO poisoning that pushed those fake sites to the top of search results for popular Minecraft tool names. The malware stole session cookies, passwords, browser data, and cryptocurrency wallet contents, and used EtherHiding, a technique that fetches the attacker’s active server address from the Ethereum blockchain, to maintain contact with its infrastructure even when individual servers were shut down. “During our investigation of this campaign, we observed that most of these websites appear legitimate, as they are well-crafted and often mimic legitimate websites. We observed a series of dedicated brand-impersonation attacks targeting several popular Minecraft clients.” reads the report published by McAfee. “We published the original article in the first week of July, and, as a result, we’ve seen a disruption in WeedHack’s campaign: its C2 server is no longer active. Consequently, we have observed a shift in tactics by these attackers. “ The dashboard is gone. The distribution sites are not. Each fake website copies the real tool’s features, FAQs, installation steps, developer information and even links to legitimate GitHub repositories. The sites look detailed and convincing, so most users have little reason to suspect anything. The attackers also use search rankings to reach victims. Researchers found that the first two Google results for “Xenon Client,” a popular Minecraft client, led to fake sites distributing WeedHack. The sites offered installation guides, free and paid downloads, and links to the real Xenon Client GitHub repository. A player searching for the tool, clicking the first result and downloading the file could easily end up installing malware. The campaigns exploit a structural weakness in the Minecraft modding community: many popular tools don’t have official websites, only GitHub pages and Discord servers. Nova-client.com is a fake website for a client that has no real website; the attackers built one and ranked it above the genuine GitHub repository. 22qq-client.com does the same for a Crystal PVP mod. For nova-client.com, the researchers specifically noted that the credits section lists generic team names instead of anyone who actually worked on the project, which is one of the cleaner ways to spot an impersonation if you know who the real developers are. One site in the campaign was built using lovable.app, an AI-powered web application builder that accepts natural language instructions and produces working sites. The platform is legitimate; the use here is not. The ready availability of tools like this means the cost and technical skill required to launch a new convincing fake gaming site is now close to zero. McAfee found that most malicious links came through Discord (49.6%), followed by MediaFire (23.4%), GitHub (8.2%) and Dropbox (4.6%). One Discord channel promoting fake DonutSMP clients had more than 1,900 members, while another site offered eight different mods that all delivered the same malware. The campaign also spread through trusted Minecraft communities such as Planet Minecraft and EndMods, making the scams harder to spot because users already trusted these platforms. McAfee recommends downloading mods and clients only from official developer repositories or trusted platforms such as Modrinth and CurseForge. If a tool asks you to disable antivirus protection, treat it as malware. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, malware)
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