Discover how Franz Regul, former CISO for the Paris 2024 Olympics, tackled unique cybersecurity challenges to protect the Games from evolving threats.
Drivers in the Russian city of Perm have been enjoying an unexpected bonus this week: free parking. Not because the city council suddenly decided to embrace generosity - but rather because hackers succeeded in knocking the city's payment system offline. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
A social engineering campaign impersonating PayPal and Amazon uses customer support interactions to acquire sensitive info.
The excitement around Cisco's latest SD-WAN bugs has inspired some light fraud, misunderstandings, and overlooked potential hazards.
Threat actors target nonprofits due to security gaps and highly coveted information, but a lack of sufficient data makes it difficult to grasp the entire picture.
If you're in the middle of applying for a planning or zoning permit, there is some unwelcome news: cyber-criminals have found a way to exploit the bureaucratic tedium of the process against you. Read more in my article on the Fortra blog.
Signal, the encrypted messaging app trusted by security-savvy users around the world, has confirmed that hackers have managed to takeover accounts - with government officials and journalists among those being targeted. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
A Wikipedia security engineer accidentally wakes a dormant JavaScript worm that hadn't stirred since 2024 - and within minutes, giant woodpecker images are plastered across the internet's favourite encyclopaedia. Meanwhile, a crypto contractor hired to help the US Marshals manage seized digital assets allegedly decides to help himself to $46 million of it - and then brags about it on a recorded Telegram call. Plus: Graham champions Asterix, Trisha discovers the fantasy novels of Robin Hobb, and someone called "Lick" ends up in the nick. All this, and much more, in episode 458 of the "Smashing Security" podcast with cybersecurity veteran Graham Cluley, and special guest Tricia Howard.
A hacktivist group with links to Iran's intelligence agencies is claiming responsibility for a data-wiping attack against Stryker, a global medical technology company based in Michigan. News reports out of Ireland, Stryker's largest hub outside of the United States, said the company sent home more than 5,000 workers there today. Meanwhile, a voicemail message at Stryker's main U.S. headquarters says the company is currently experiencing a building emergency.
Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing "zero-day" flaws this month (compared to February's five zero-day treat), but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from organizations using Windows. Here are a few highlights from this month's Patch Tuesday.
Elon Musk's social media site says it suspended 800 million accounts in a year for spam and manipulation - but with state-backed campaigns still flooding the platform, the real question is how many fake accounts remain. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
AI-based assistants or "agents" -- autonomous programs that have access to the user's computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task -- are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey.
In a co-ordinated public-private operation between law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity industry partners, Tycoon 2FA - one of the world's most prolific phishing-as-a-service platforms - has been dismantled. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
When a top cybersecurity firm discovered it had a leak, you would expect the FBI to be called. Instead, the person put in charge of the investigation was the actual leaker... who promptly sent an innocent colleague into a career-ending ambush. In this episode, we unravel the jaw-dropping tale of a defence contractor caught selling zero-day exploits to a Russia-linked broker. Plus: are nation states quietly poisoning AI models to bend reality itself? We explore how “foreign information manipulation interference” could target not just social media users, but the large language models we increasingly trust for answers — and what that might mean for truth, trust, and the future of online influence. All this, and much more, in episode 457 of the "Smashing Security" podcast with cybersecurity veteran Graham Cluley, and special guest Carl Miller.
South Korea's National Tax Service (NTS) has found itself in the middle of a deeply embarrassing - and costly - blunder after accidentally handing thieves the master key to a seized cryptocurrency wallet. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to assemble Kimwolf, the world's largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf -- who goes by the handle "Dort" -- has coordinated a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), doxing and email flooding attacks against the researcher and this author, and more recently caused a SWAT team to be sent to the researcher's home. This post examines what is knowable about Dort based on public information.
A new report claims that the cost of insider security incidents has surged 20% in two years, reaching an average of US $19.5 million per organization annually, with no sign that the alarming figure is flattening. Read more in my article on the Fortra blog.
There is a certain poetic justice in a cybersecurity-related story that has emerged from Moscow this week: A man has been accused of trying to extort money... from a notorious Russian ransomware gang. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
When the mysterious operator of an internet archiving-service decided to silence a curious Finnish blogger, they didn’t just send a stroppy email - they allegedly weaponised their own CAPTCHA page to launch a DDoS attack, threatened to invent an entirely new genre of AI porn, and tampered with parts of their own archive to smear the blogger's name. In this episode, we unravel how a website designed to preserve history may have trashed its own credibility - and how Wikipedia responded when trust went out the window. Plus a ransomware gang shoots itself in the foot with a classic case of buffoonery, accidentally corrupting the very keys victims would need to decrypt their data. When even the criminals can’t unlock your files, what happens next? All this, a surprisingly zen Pick of the Week, and a gloriously splenetic rant against web forms, on episode 456 of the award-winning "Smashing Security" podcast, with cybersecurity veteran Graham Cluley and special guest Paul Ducklin.
Amid a privacy backlash, a US $10,000 reward has been offered for anyone who can find a way to run Ring doorbell cameras locally, cutting off the flow of video data to Amazon's servers. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.