Cyber News & Articles
Smashing Security podcast #447: Grok the stalker, the Louvre heist, and Microsoft 365 mayhem
On this week’s show we learn that AI really can be a stalker’s best friend, as we explore a strange tale that starts with a manatee-shaped mailbox on a millionaire’s lawn and ends with Grok happily doxxing real people, mapping out stalking “strategies,” and handing out revenge-porn tips.
Then we go inside the Louvre heist, where thieves in hi-vis and a hire van waltzed off with the French crown jewels in broad daylight, exploiting our assumptions about what “looks normal” – the same kind of bias we’re now baking into security AIs.
Plus, Graham chats with Rob Edmondson from CoreView about why misconfigurations and over-privileged accounts can make Microsoft 365 dangerously vulnerable.
All this, and more, in episode 447 of the “Smashing Security” podcast with Graham Cluley, and special guest Jenny Radcliffe.
React2Shell Exploitation Delivers Crypto Miners and New Malware Across Multiple Sectors
React2Shell continues to witness heavy exploitation, with threat actors leveraging the maximum-severity security flaw in React Server Components (RSC) to deliver cryptocurrency miners and an array of previously undocumented malware families, according to new findings from Huntress.
This includes a Linux backdoor called PeerBlight, a reverse proxy tunnel named CowTunnel, and a Go-based
.NET SOAPwn Flaw Opens Door for File Writes and Remote Code Execution via Rogue WSDL
New research has uncovered exploitation primitives in the .NET Framework that could be leveraged against enterprise-grade applications to achieve remote code execution.
WatchTowr Labs, which has codenamed the “invalid cast vulnerability” SOAPwn, said the issue impacts Barracuda Service Center RMM, Ivanti Endpoint Manager (EPM), and Umbraco 8. But the number of affected vendors is likely to be
Ransomware may have extorted over $2.1 billion between 2022-2024, but it’s not all bad news, claims FinCEN report
A new report from the United States’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has shone a revealing light on the state of the criminal industry of ransomware.
The report, which examines ransomware incidents from 2022 to 2024, reveals that attackers extorted more than $2.1 billion over the three-year period.
Yes, that number is enormous – but it hides a more interesting story beneath it: that after peaking in 2023, ransomware payments actually started to decline.
Read more in my article on the Fortra blog.
Three PCIe Encryption Weaknesses Expose PCIe 5.0+ Systems to Faulty Data Handling
Three security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) Integrity and Data Encryption (IDE) protocol specification that could expose a local attacker to serious risks.
The flaws impact PCIe Base Specification Revision 5.0 and onwards in the protocol mechanism introduced by the IDE Engineering Change Notice (ECN), according to the PCI Special
Four years later, Irish health service offers €750 to victims of ransomware attack
Remember when a notorious ransomware gang hit the Irish Health Service back in May 2021? Four years on, and it seems victims who had their data exposed will finally receive compensation.
Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
Webinar: How Attackers Exploit Cloud Misconfigurations Across AWS, AI Models, and Kubernetes
Cloud security is changing. Attackers are no longer just breaking down the door; they are finding unlocked windows in your configurations, your identities, and your code.
Standard security tools often miss these threats because they look like normal activity. To stop them, you need to see exactly how these attacks happen in the real world.
Next week, the Cortex Cloud team at Palo Alto Networks
Warning: WinRAR Vulnerability CVE-2025-6218 Under Active Attack by Multiple Threat Groups
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a security flaw impacting the WinRAR file archiver and compression utility to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-6218 (CVSS score: 7.8), is a path traversal bug that could enable code execution. However, for exploitation
Microsoft Issues Security Fixes for 56 Flaws, Including Active Exploit and Two Zero-Days
Microsoft closed out 2025 with patches for 56 security flaws in various products across the Windows platform, including one vulnerability that has been actively exploited in the wild.
Of the 56 flaws, three are rated Critical, and 53 are rated Important in severity. Two other defects are listed as publicly known at the time of the release. These include 29 privilege escalation, 18 remote code
Fortinet, Ivanti, and SAP Issue Urgent Patches for Authentication and Code Execution Flaws
Fortinet, Ivanti, and SAP have moved to address critical security flaws in their products that, if successfully exploited, could result in an authentication bypass and code execution.
The Fortinet vulnerabilities affect FortiOS, FortiWeb, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager and relate to a case of improper verification of a cryptographic signature. They are tracked as CVE-2025-59718 and