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)
Threat actors are abusing npm and its mirrors to host malicious HTML pages that impersonate Cloudflare CAPTCHAs to redirect visitors to attacker-controlled websites. The technique was previously spotted in July by security researcher inf0stache, who found a 'china_airlines' npm package that used a fake Cloudflare verification page to redirect visitors to a malicious domain, and was also reported by IntelFusions. In a later report, OX Security discovered 24 npm packages containing the same malicious HTML page hosted on npm and various mirrors. However, unlike the typical npm supply-chain attacks we've seen lately, installing the packages does not infect a developer's computer with malware or infostealers. Instead, attackers use the npm registry as free storage for malicious HTML pages, which are then copied by mirroring platforms like UNPKG and npmmirror.
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)
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.
Threat actors have already compromised over 270 Zimbra instances in remote code execution attacks targeting a high-severity Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) vulnerability. The ZCS email and collaboration suite is used by hundreds of millions of people and organizations, including thousands of businesses and hundreds of government agencies worldwide. Synacor patched the security flaw (tracked as CVE-2026-73570), which allows unauthenticated attackers to gain code execution remotely by exploiting a command injection weakness in the SNMP monitoring component when SNMP notifications are enabled, with the release of ZCS version 10.1.20 on July 20. CERT Polska, the Polish Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), first flagged the vulnerability as targeted in the wild last Monday, when it also warned security teams to check their logs for suspicious activity, including the Zimbra service restarting unexpectedly, and for files created in the /opt/zimbra/jetty/webapps/, /opt/zimbra/jetty_base/webapps/, and /tmp/ folders by user zimbra over the last 30 days.
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)
The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced fresh sanctions on Iranian cyber actors as part of what it called an "unprecedented, whole-of-government, economic campaign" against the nation and its enablers. "We are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime
Confirm this action.
Leaving now will discard your changes.