A Canadian ransomware negotiator faces extortion charges in the FBI’s ShinyHunters crackdown. Here’s what is known, and what isn’t. ShinyHunters is the focus of a global FBI investigation, and the crackdown has led to the October 8 arrest of a Canadian ransomware negotiator who now faces extortion charges. Reuters reported the arrest, citing court documents, prison records and a person familiar with the case. The group has also stolen information about FBI employees. Court documents filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which includes Philadelphia, accuse the defendant of conspiring to threaten the confidentiality of information to extort money and of interfering with commerce. “A Canadian ransomware negotiator was arrested Thursday and faces unspecified extortion charges, according to court documents, prison records and a person familiar with the matter, as the FBI cracks down on a hacking group that stole information about its employees.” Reuters states. “Edward Dubrovsky faces charges of conspiracy to “threaten to impair the confidentiality of information with intent to extort money” and “interference with commerce,” according to court documents, opens new tab filed with the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which covers Philadelphia.” Krebs on Security reports that the second charge involves threats. The main criminal complaint remains sealed, so the details of the defendant’s alleged role are not yet public. The records spell the last name two ways, Dobrovsky or Dobrosky, and they don’t list an age, a profession or an employer. A person briefed on the matter told Reuters the defendant is Edward Dubrovsky, a Canadian cybersecurity executive. Reuters couldn’t even settle the spelling, which tells you how early this is. “Federal court records show that on October 8, an Edward Dobrovsky (note the slight misspelling of the last name) was arrested in Pennsylvania on cyber extortion and conspiracy charges.” states the report. “Several of those documents — including the core complaint — are now sealed. But a handful of them were indexed at Courtlistener.com, including a summary of the complaint, which charges the defendant with “conspiracy to threaten to impair the confidentiality of information with the intent to extort money,” and “interference with commerce by threats.”” Federal prosecutors in Philadelphia didn’t return repeated messages about the discrepancies. Reuters also couldn’t reach Dubrovsky, his lawyers, or CyberSteward, the company named on his LinkedIn profile. According to Krebs, the available records showed no attorney yet. “An online search reveals the Cyber Risk Summit was held at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel between Oct. 5 and Oct. 7. The conference had several sponsors, but according to the summit’s website its biggest sponsor was a Canadian security company called Cypfer.” states Krebs. “According to LinkedIn, one of Cypfer’s “ex-founders” was Edward Dubrovsky, who is now associated with another Canadian security firm and sponsor called CyberSteward. In a post to LinkedIn approximately one month ago, Dubrovsky said he had plans to attend the Cyber Risk Summit with the rest of the CyberSteward team.” CyberSteward advertises itself as a specialist in threat actor engagement, cyber extortions, complex negotiations and settlement facilitation. On LinkedIn, Dubrovsky presents himself as an expert in negotiating ransom payments with cybercriminals. SecurityWeek notes he’s also the author of a book on responding to cyber extortion. Politico and Krebs reported the arrest first. Krebs says he was in Philadelphia for a cyber insurance conference. Federal prison records show a man with his name detained at a federal detention center in the city. ShinyHunters is the backdrop. Last month the group claimed it had stolen information on nearly every FBI employee, and it said it got into the bureau’s jobs website and other systems in response to an FBI report earlier this year warning about its activity. FBI blamed the intrusion on a contractor’s failure to patch vulnerable Oracle PeopleSoft software. When Reuters asked about the arrest, the FBI pointed to a statement from Director Kash Patel and declined further comment. Our agents in the field have arrested another suspected co-conspirator of the ShinyHunters group – the group believed to be responsible for the recent https://t.co/RG0D4I5KFS incident, which occurred on a platform managed by a third-party vendor. This is the latest arrest… — FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) October 9, 2026 Patel described the arrest as the latest in a series of actions against ShinyHunters over just a few days. According to SecurityWeek, he said the FBI will continue working to disrupt the remaining network. This is the third suspected arrest linked to ShinyHunters in recent weeks, following one in the Netherlands on September 15 and another in Jordan on September 28. The case has also moved to another court. A notice filed on October 9 transferred it to the Eastern District of Texas, where sources told Krebs on Security the FBI’s ShinyHunters investigation is focused. However, authorities have not publicly explained what the defendant allegedly did. Reuters reports that the charges have not been specified, and the main complaint remains sealed. Krebs on Security also reports, citing sources, that executives at other ransomware negotiation firms could face charges. The FBI says ShinyHunters has extorted more than $70 million this year. The latest arrest brings the number of suspected ShinyHunters members detained in recent weeks to three. On September 15, authorities arrested a suspected member in the Netherlands. A second alleged key member was reportedly arrested in Jordan on September 28 and is said to be cooperating with the FBI. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, ShinyHunters)
Anthropic announced that its internal AI models under “high-risk and cybersecurity evaluations” no longer have internet access following incidents involving U.S. government websites at the federal, state, and local levels. The instances leading to the decision include AI models that exploited website vulnerabilities, submitted forms, bypassed data restrictions, and circumvented safeguards. However, the company said that the misaligned behavior had a minimal real-world impact and assessed the behavior to be less severe than previously reported incidents. The AI company notified the White House about the unauthorized activity: Anthropic estimates that the agents may have been motivated by overly generous rewards during reinforcement learning, which may have encouraged them to find unauthorized workarounds rather than stop when a task was blocked or impossible.
Attackers remotely defrosted refrigerators at multiple French supermarket chains overnight in a cyberattack that reportedly targeted Danfoss refrigeration controllers. Victims include Intermarché, Coopérative U, Carrefour Market, Monoprix, Leclerc, and Super U, with French outlets reporting that the attack affected 250 to 350 stores, causing significant financial losses and food waste. The threat actors hijacked refrigeration controllers running older versions of Danfoss control software on Sunday night and used them to raise supermarket refrigerator temperatures by triggering a built-in automatic defrosting system. "Following a cyberattack reportedly affecting a service provider that manages refrigeration systems in stores, some fresh and frozen food display units are out of service," an Intermarché spokesperson told BleepingComputer when asked for more information on the incident. "Intermarché and Netto have taken all necessary precautions to remove the products from these units as quickly as possible. We don't have further information currently, nor a specific list of affected stores to share with you."
CyberXero used 51 AI agents to support cyberattacks, stealing 628,000 Ukrainian records, including sensitive data from energy infrastructure. CyberXero is an operation that combines traditional hacking tools with AI agents to carry out cyberattacks. According to SOCRadar researchers, the attackers use the same infrastructure for two different campaigns: one targets WordPress websites and e-commerce platforms worldwide, while the other focuses on Ukrainian energy and critical infrastructure. The actor behind CyberXero is a Russian-speaking, financially motivated threat actor. This type of attacker, known as an initial access broker, breaks into networks and sells access to other criminals instead of using it directly. One campaign focuses on attacking as many targets as possible, while the other involves carefully selected targets in Ukraine. “SOCRadar’s Threat Research Unit (STRU) has documented CyberXero, a Russian-speaking, financially motivated Initial Access Broker that pairs commodity offensive tooling with an AI orchestration layer running on its own infrastructure.” reads the report published by SOCRadar. “The operation runs two pipelines at once: a global, automated campaign against WordPress and e-commerce platforms, and a curated, manual campaign against Ukrainian energy and critical infrastructure. More than 628,000 Ukrainian individuals have confirmed data in the actor’s possession, including residents of Kharkiv, a city on an active war front.” The investigation only happened because the threat actor made one classic mistake, an open directory with zero access control sitting on a server. That single misconfiguration exposed the actor’s entire working directory, more than 90,000 files, including AI session logs, scripts with plaintext tokens, and already-stolen victim data. The exposed server was found at “46.21.250[.]135,” hosting a live Linux workstation’s complete contents. Session logs recording every planned target, every refused task, and every workaround attempt are, in practice, the offensive equivalent of a keylogger running against the attacker’s own operation. The global pipeline runs on a custom tool called wp2shell, which abuses a flaw in the WordPress REST API to inject SQL, plant a rogue admin account, and drop a webshell. The scale is genuinely industrial. A single automated run scanned 4,708 targets, confirmed access to 429 WordPress admin panels, and deployed 32 webshells, all within 61 seconds. That’s not a person clicking through targets one at a time, that’s infrastructure built to move at machine speed. The target list for this side of the operation exceeds 56,000 identified URLs, spanning e-commerce platforms and WordPress sites with no particular country or sector pattern. The second campaign is more targeted. The attacker manually selected targets in Ukraine, focusing on energy and utility companies, including the country’s national electricity transmission operator. Researchers confirmed data theft from four Ukrainian organizations. One of the most serious cases involved a district heating provider in Kharkiv, a city close to the front line. A password stored directly in the attacker’s script gave access to the provider’s systems. An automated tool then extracted more than 564,000 customer records, including home addresses and account numbers. SOCRadar warns that this data could put people at physical risk because Kharkiv is in an active war zone. Stolen customer information is usually a privacy concern, but in this situation, linking real names to home addresses could create much more serious dangers. “Because Kharkiv sits on an active conflict front, this dataset poses a potential physical risk to identifiable civilians that goes well beyond a conventional data breach.” continues the report. “The most elaborate chain, against an e-commerce portal, combined blind SQL injection, a time-constrained password-reset token extraction, and PHP deserialization to reach remote code execution and full database access.” The attacks stand out from typical cyber operations because the actor ran up to 51 specialized Claude Code agents on the primary workstation, assigned to roles like exploit chaining, lateral movement, and reconnaissance, plus a separate AI pentesting framework wired directly into a Cobalt Strike command server. SOCRadar’s researchers found the actor had also built a reusable script to get around model safety refusals, framing every request as an authorized penetration test on infrastructure the actor supposedly owned. That trick isn’t a technical bypass, it’s social engineering aimed at the model instead of a person. And it didn’t always work. The logs show the model declining real requests multiple times, including four separate refusals to install a backdoor, disable a firewall, move laterally, or deploy a webshell. Safety measures held in plenty of individual sessions. The actor’s workaround was just opening a new session each time, since a refusal doesn’t carry forward once the context resets. Researchers identified the operator by combining several clues: a paid AI subscription linked to a personal email address, a forum post using the same online alias, and activity that consistently matched Moscow time. The campaign affected more than 40 organizations across Ukraine, Poland, China and Pakistan. The main lesson for defenders is to protect AI agent session logs as carefully as passwords and other sensitive credentials. These logs can reveal an attacker’s plans, the systems they accessed, what worked and where their attempts failed. If exposed, they can provide a detailed picture of the entire operation. The report includes Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) for this campaign along with detection and hunting guidance. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CyberXero)
CyberLeek threatens to leak a playable GTA 6 build if its Solana meme coin hits a $30 million market cap, but the build remains unverified. CyberLeek, the anonymous figure behind this summer’s wave of GTA 6 leaks, just raised the stakes considerably. After dropping 25 minutes of gameplay footage earlier last week, including nudity and dev menu access, they’re now threatening to release a complete, playable build of the game, start to finish. “A GTA 6 leaker has reportedly threatened to put out a complete, playable build of the game, start to finish.” reads Eurogamer.net. “The threat was posted on CyberLeek’s website after the leaker shared 25 minutes of footage from the game earlier this week.” CyberLeek posted the threat on its own website. The demand is simple: if its cryptocurrency reaches a $30 million market value, the leaker will release the playable build of GTA 6, including the full story mode, from start to finish, with the ending credits. CyberLeek says Take-Two can avoid the leak only by providing physical copies of the game and issuing a public apology. This sounds more like a challenge than a serious negotiation. “Here’s the deal, nice and clean,” the leaker states. “CyberLeek hits 30 million marketcap, the build goes out — full story mode, played to the end, credits and all. Don’t believe it has full story mode? Ask for what you want to see, and it gets provided. Take-Two gets one way out: physical disks and a public apology. They can take it at any moment. Or they can gamble that CL is bluffing. Everyone knows which one they’ll pick.” This is not CyberLeek’s first leak. Rockstar previously said the situation was painful and that this was not how it wanted fans to see the game after years of waiting. Take-Two, Rockstar’s parent company, has been trying to identify the leaker and even sought a court order requiring Discord to share information about their identity. The company is actively trying to stop the leaks rather than waiting for the situation to pass. Take-Two, Rockstar’s parent company, has been actively hunting for the leaker and tried subpoenaing Discord for identifying information, so this isn’t a studio sitting back and hoping it blows over. The efforts to stop the leaks have not worked so far. CyberLeek went silent for a while, then returned with new footage showing Jason fully naked and Lucia topless. Eurogamer reported that the video appears to be real and carries CyberLeek’s usual watermark. CyberLeek did more than leak game footage. It also launched a Solana meme coin and uses the videos to promote it. Reports said the coin reached a market value of $25 million in late August, with more than $36 million in trading volume in a single day. Its value then fell sharply after Rockstar released official gameplay footage on Netflix and interest in the leaks declined. The new $30 million target is important because reaching it could trigger the release of a playable version of GTA 6 before the official launch. Whether CyberLeek genuinely has a full playable build worth leaking is still unverified. “The knowledge that a playable build of GTA 6 might be online has unsurprisingly encouraged hackers to lure curious users searching for it on unfamiliar websites.” states TechSpot. “Files labeled as the build have recently appeared on torrent websites, but these are certainly malicious. There is no evidence that CyberLeek or anyone else has, or even can, release an early version of the game.” Fake downloads claiming to be the leaked build have already started circulating on torrent and piracy sites, several reportedly carrying malware, so anyone tempted to go looking is more likely to get infected than to get an early copy of GTA 6. Take-Two has already lost close to $2.8 billion in market value over a 48 hour stretch tied to this leak saga, which tells you how seriously the market is taking the threat, even unverified. GTA 6 is still set for a November 19 release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and neither Rockstar nor Take-Two has commented on this latest ultimatum. Extortion tied to a crypto pump scheme is a genuinely new flavor of leak drama, and it probably won’t be the last time someone tries combining the two. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, GTA 6)
Some meetings last longer than it took attackers to jump on a newly disclosed security flaw this week. Within hours, they were already testing it. That's not much time to read the warning, let alone do something about it. But speed is only part of the problem. A secure connection didn't always mean a safe destination. People offering to fix a ransomware mess had questions to answer themselves.
A maximum-severity security flaw impacting the Bricksforge plugin for WordPress has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to Patchstack. The critical vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-85097 (CVSS score: 10.0), which allows unauthenticated attackers to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code on vulnerable WordPress websites, resulting in remote code execution (RCE). The
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a two-pronged artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented initial access campaign targeting WordPress sites, e-commerce platforms, and critical infrastructure entities in Ukraine. The activity, which brings together commodity offensive tools like Cobalt Strike with an AI orchestration layer powered by Anthropic's Claude Code, has been attributed
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds ProFTPD, ONLYOFFICE Docs, Strapi, Apache Struts, and ISC BIND to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the following vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog: CVE-2015-3306 (CVSS score of 10.0) – An access control flaw in ProFTPD that could let remote attackers read or modify arbitrary files by abusing the SITE CPFR and SITE CPTO commands. CVE-2021-3199 (CVSS score of 9.8) – A path traversal flaw in ONLYOFFICE Docs when JSON Web Token (JWT) is enabled. Attackers could exploit a /.. sequence in an image upload parameter to potentially execute code remotely. CVE-2023-22894 (CVSS score of 7.2) – A vulnerability in Strapi that exposes sensitive information stored in cleartext. An attacker with admin panel access could use query filters to retrieve confidential user details. CVE-2016-3081 (CVSS score of 8.1) – A command injection flaw in Apache Struts that could allow remote attackers to run arbitrary code through method: prefixes when Dynamic Method Invocation is enabled. CVE-2015-5477 (CVSS score of 7.5) – A reachable assertion vulnerability in ISC BIND that could be triggered by remote TKEY queries, potentially causing a denial-of-service condition. The five vulnerabilities have been added to a broader list of flaws linked to cyber operations attributed to China-linked actors associated with Integrity Technology Group, a China-based cybersecurity company. The update coincides with a joint advisory issued by Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. U.S. authorities have also taken action against tools associated with Integrity Tech and used in cyber espionage operations. The activity reportedly involved the exploitation of eight vulnerabilities, including the five listed above, to gain initial access to targeted networks and steal sensitive information. The attackers used scanning tools, cross-site scripting (XSS) and password-spraying attacks against Microsoft Exchange servers. They also relied on VPN software to maintain access and scripts to extract emails and credentials. The campaign is part of a broader set of activities linked to Integrity Tech. The U.S. Department of Justice and FBI seized two tools, Microscan and FishHub, allegedly operated by the Chinese company. Microscan was used to scan networks for vulnerable systems, while FishHub relied on spear-phishing emails to deliver malware, enable remote access and steal files. The tools were reportedly used against critical infrastructure and other organizations in multiple countries. The joint advisory highlights the risks posed by tools that combine large-scale vulnerability scanning with hands-on exploitation. The coordinated action by seven countries and the U.S. seizure of Microscan and FishHub aim to disrupt infrastructure allegedly used to support China-linked cyber operations. 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 11, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
Canadian cybersecurity executive Edward Dubrovsky has been arrested in Pennsylvania in connection with alleged extortion activity that multiple reports have linked to the FBI's ongoing crackdown on the ShinyHunters hacking group. Dubrovsky, 54, has had senior roles at cybersecurity firms that help data breach and ransomware victims negotiate extortion payments with cybercriminals. Yesterday, FBI Director Kash Patel announced that agents had arrested "another suspected co-conspirator of the ShinyHunters group". The New York Times reported that the suspect was a Canadian citizen arrested in Pennsylvania and believed to be a primary co-conspirator in the recent ShinyHunters FBI Jobs hack. Last night, both Politico and KrebsOnSecurity reported that Dubrovsky was arrested in Pennsylvania, where he was attending a cybersecurity conference.
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