Cybersecurity

When “bad actors” stop being hackers and start being… actual actors.

This week, Graham and special guest Jenny Radcliffe play “Hacker or Ham?” (yes, Steven Seagal, we’re looking at you), before diving into a campaign which saw an Iranian gang luring Israeli performers with fake casting calls for a serious film.

We unpack why positive lurescan short-circuit scepticism just as effectively as fear.

Plus, the UK’s ICO says students are increasingly hacking their own schools.

Meanwhile, Graham heads to 1960s Oxford with Endeavour, while Jenny investigates the Wirral’s mysterious “Catman”.

All this, and more, in episode 435 of the “Smashing Security” podcast.

The threat actor known as TA558 has been attributed to a fresh set of attacks delivering various remote access trojans (RATs) like Venom RAT to breach hotels in Brazil and Spanish-speaking markets.
Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky is tracking the activity, observed in summer 2025, to a cluster it tracks as RevengeHotels.
“The threat actors continue to employ phishing emails with invoice

Recent research released by the ICO say that school pupils should be considered as an “insider threat” by schools.

Read more in my article on the Fortra blog.

A China-aligned threat actor known as TA415 has been attributed to spear-phishing campaigns targeting the U.S. government, think tanks, and academic organizations utilizing U.S.-China economic-themed lures.
“In this activity, the group masqueraded as the current Chair of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as the

Quantum computing and AI working together will bring incredible opportunities. Together, the technologies will help us extend innovation further and faster than ever before. But, imagine the flip side, waking up to news that hackers have used a quantum computer to crack your company’s encryption overnight, exposing your most sensitive data, rendering much of it untrustworthy.
And with your

Generative AI has gone from a curiosity to a cornerstone of enterprise productivity in just a few short years. From copilots embedded in office suites to dedicated large language model (LLM) platforms, employees now rely on these tools to code, analyze, draft, and decide. But for CISOs and security architects, the very speed of adoption has created a paradox: the more powerful the tools, the

Cybersecurity researchers have tied a fresh round of cyber attacks targeting financial services to the notorious cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider, casting doubt on their claims of going “dark.”
Threat intelligence firm ReliaQuest said it has observed indications that the threat actor has shifted their focus to the financial sector. This is supported by an increase in lookalike domains

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday resentenced the former administrator of BreachForums to three years in prison in connection with his role in running the cybercrime forum and possessing child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Conor Brian Fitzpatrick (aka Pompompurin), 22, of Peekskill, New York, pleaded guilty to one count of access device conspiracy, one count of access device

Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit said it teamed up with Cloudflare to coordinate the seizure of 338 domains used by RaccoonO365, a financially motivated threat group that was behind a phishing-as-a-service (Phaas) toolkit used to steal more than 5,000 Microsoft 365 credentials from 94 countries since July 2024.
“Using a court order granted by the Southern District of New York, the DCU seized 338

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple critical security vulnerabilities in Chaos Mesh that, if successfully exploited, could lead to cluster takeover in Kubernetes environments.
“Attackers need only minimal in-cluster network access to exploit these vulnerabilities, execute the platform’s fault injections (such as shutting down pods or disrupting network communications), and perform