ICE is developing its own version of smart glasses, with facial recognition tied to various databases.

A new rowhammer attack gives complete control of NVIDIA CPUs.

On Thursday, two research teams, working independently of each other, demonstrated attacks against two cards from Nvidia’s Ampere generation that take GPU rowhammering into new—­and potentially much more consequential—­territory: GDDR bitflips that give adversaries full control of CPU memory, resulting in full system compromise of the host machine. For the attack to work, IOMMU memory management must be disabled, as is the default in BIOS settings.

“Our work shows that Rowhammer, which is well-studied on CPUs, is a serious threat on GPUs as well,” said Andrew Kwong, co-author of one of the papers. “GDDRHammer: Greatly Disturbing DRAM Rows­Cross-Component Rowhammer Attacks from Modern GPUs.” “With our work, we… show how an attacker can induce bit flips on the GPU to gain arbitrary read/write access to all of the CPU’s memory, resulting in complete compromise of the machine.”

Update Friday, April 3: On Friday, researchers unveiled a third Rowhammer attack that also demonstrates Rowhammer attacks on the RTX A6000 that achieves privilege escalation to a root shell. Unlike the previous two, the researchers said, it works even when IOMMU is enabled.

The second paper is GeForge: Hammering GDDR Memory to Forge GPU Page Tables for Fun and Profit:

…does largely the same thing, except that instead of exploiting the last-level page table, as GDDRHammer does, it manipulates the last-level page directory. It was able to induce 1,171 bitflips against the RTX 3060 and 202 bitflips against the RTX 6000.

GeForge, too, uses novel hammering patterns and memory massaging to corrupt GPU page table mappings in GDDR6 memory to acquire read and write access to the GPU memory space. From there, it acquires the same privileges over host CPU memory. The GeForge proof-of-concept exploit against the RTX 3060 concludes by opening a root shell window that allows the attacker to issue commands that run unfettered privileges on the host machine. The researchers said that both GDDRHammer and GeForge could do the same thing against the RTC 6000.

DarkSword is a sophisticated piece of malware—probably government designed—that targets iOS.

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new iOS full-chain exploit that leveraged multiple zero-day vulnerabilities to fully compromise devices. Based on toolmarks in recovered payloads, we believe the exploit chain to be called DarkSword. Since at least November 2025, GTIG has observed multiple commercial surveillance vendors and suspected state-sponsored actors utilizing DarkSword in distinct campaigns. These threat actors have deployed the exploit chain against targets in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, and Ukraine.

DarkSword supports iOS versions 18.4 through 18.7 and utilizes six different vulnerabilities to deploy final-stage payloads. GTIG has identified three distinct malware families deployed following a successful DarkSword compromise: GHOSTBLADE, GHOSTKNIFE, and GHOSTSABER. The proliferation of this single exploit chain across disparate threat actors mirrors the previously discovered Coruna iOS exploit kit. Notably, UNC6353, a suspected Russian espionage group previously observed using Coruna, has recently incorporated DarkSword into their watering hole campaigns.

A week after it was identified, a version of it leaked onto the internet, where it is being used more broadly.

This news is a month old. Your devices are safe, assuming you patch regularly.

Polymarket is a platform where people can bet on real-world events, political and otherwise. Leaving the ethical considerations of this aside (for one, it facilitates assassination), one of the issues with making this work is the verification of these real-world events. Polymarket gamblers have threatened a journalist because his story was being used to verify an event. And now, gamblers are taking hair dryers to weather sensors to rig weather bets.

There’s also insider trading: a lot of it.

A sophisticated cybercriminal operation dubbed “AccountDumpling” has compromised approximately 30,000 Facebook accounts worldwide.

Discovered by Guardio Labs, this Vietnamese-linked campaign abuses Google’s AppSheet platform to bypass traditional email security filters.

By routing fully authenticated phishing lures through legitimate channels, the attackers successfully harvest credentials and identity documents. These stolen Facebook Business accounts are subsequently monetized or resold back to victims through an illicit storefront.

The foundation of this campaign relies on hijacking platform trust rather than spoofing domains. The threat actors use Google AppSheet, a legitimate no-code app-building service, to distribute malicious notifications.

Because these emails are sent directly from Google servers using the address noreply@appsheet.com, they easily pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication checks.

Security defenders and spam filters consistently wave these messages through since Google genuinely owns the sending infrastructure. This forces victims to rely entirely on identifying the deceptive content within the message itself.

Attack and Evasion Methodologies

The operation is highly modular, employing four distinct phishing clusters to target victims based on different psychological triggers.

Cluster Type	Lure Strategy	Hosting Platform	Technical Features
Policy Violation	Fake Facebook Help Center notices threatening permanent account disablement	Netlify	HTTrack cloning artifacts, unique subdomains to evade blocklists, serverless functions for data exfiltration
Reward Promise	Invitations for Blue Badge verification or exclusive advertiser rewards	Vercel	Unicode obfuscation in preheaders, fake reCAPTCHA barriers, live credential validation scripts
Live Control	Urgent Meta notices disguised as a clean, single-image notification	Google Drive (Canva PDFs)	WebSocket-based live phishing panels enabling real-time, human-in-the-loop interaction
Social Engineering	Fake senior job offers from prominent tech companies like Meta and Apple	Off-platform communication channels	Cyrillic homoglyphs in sender display names, pivoting to live conversations to slowly build trust

Behind the sophisticated front-end lures, the AccountDumpling operation relies entirely on Telegram bots for its command-and-control exfiltration.

Stolen credentials, two-factor authentication codes, dates of birth, and government-issued ID photos are instantly routed to private Telegram channels.

Operators actively monitor these streams to validate the stolen data and execute account takeovers in real time. Telemetry from the recovered bot infrastructure indicates roughly 30,000 victim records have been processed.

Geographic analysis reveals that 68.6 percent of the targeted individuals and businesses are located in the United States.

Guardio Labs successfully traced the core of the operation to a Vietnamese threat actor through a critical operational security failure.

A Canva-generated PDF used in the third attack cluster retained its author metadata, exposing the real name “PHẠM TÀI TÂN”. Investigators connected this name to a public business persona in Vietnam that actively advertises Facebook account recovery and security services.

This reveals a circular criminal economy in which attackers steal valuable business assets, use them to run fraudulent campaigns, and then attempt to sell recovery services back to the original victims.

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The post Attackers Abuse Google AppSheet, Netlify, and Telegram in Facebook Phishing Campaign appeared first on Cyber Security News.

Someone pleaded guilty to secretly working for a ransomware gang as he negotiated ransomware payments for clients.

Researchers have reverse-engineered a piece of malware named Fast16. It’s almost certainly state-sponsored, probably US in origin, and was deployed against Iran years before Stuxnet:

“…the Fast16 malware was designed to carry out the most subtle form of sabotage ever seen in an in-the-wild malware tool: By automatically spreading across networks and then silently manipulating computation processes in certain software applications that perform high-precision mathematical calculations and simulate physical phenomena, Fast16 can alter the results of those programs to cause failures that range from faulty research results to catastrophic damage to real-world equipment.”

Another news article.

Lots of interesting details at the links.

That’s a lot. No, it’s an extraordinary number:

Since February, the Firefox team has been working around the clock using frontier AI models to find and fix latent security vulnerabilities in the browser. We wrote previously about our collaboration with Anthropic to scan Firefox with Opus 4.6, which led to fixes for 22 security-sensitive bugs in Firefox 148.

As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation...

The post Claude Mythos Has Found 271 Zero-Days in Firefox appeared first on Security Boulevard.

That’s a lot. No, it’s an extraordinary number:

Since February, the Firefox team has been working around the clock using frontier AI models to find and fix latent security vulnerabilities in the browser. We wrote previously about our collaboration with Anthropic to scan Firefox with Opus 4.6, which led to fixes for 22 security-sensitive bugs in Firefox 148.

As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation.

As these capabilities reach the hands of more defenders, many other teams are now experiencing the same vertigo we did when the findings first came into focus. For a hardened target, just one such bug would have been red-alert in 2025, and so many at once makes you stop to wonder whether it’s even possible to keep up.

Our experience is a hopeful one for teams who shake off the vertigo and get to work. You may need to reprioritize everything else to bring relentless and single-minded focus to the task, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are extremely proud of how our team rose to meet this challenge, and others will too. Our work isn’t finished, but we’ve turned the corner and can glimpse a future much better than just keeping up. Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.

They’re right. Assuming the defenders can patch, and push those patches out to users quickly, this technology favors the defenders.

News article.

Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced that its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, can autonomously find and weaponize software vulnerabilities, turning them into working exploits without expert guidance. These were vulnerabilities in key software like operating systems and internet infrastructure that thousands of software developers working on those systems failed to find. This capability will have major security implications, compromising the devices and services we use every day. As a result, Anthropic is not releasing the model to the general public, but instead to a ...

The post What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced that its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, can autonomously find and weaponize software vulnerabilities, turning them into working exploits without expert guidance. These were vulnerabilities in key software like operating systems and internet infrastructure that thousands of software developers working on those systems failed to find. This capability will have major security implications, compromising the devices and services we use every day. As a result, Anthropic is not releasing the model to the general public, but instead to a limited number of companies.

The news rocked the internet security community. There were few details in Anthropic’s announcement, angering many observers. Some speculate that Anthropic doesn’t have the GPUs to run the thing, and that cybersecurity was the excuse to limit its release. Others argue Anthropic is holding to its AI safety mission. There’s hype and counterhype, reality and marketing. It’s a lot to sort out, even if you’re an expert.

We see Mythos as a real but incremental step, one in a long line of incremental steps. But even incremental steps can be important when we look at the big picture.

How AI Is Changing Cybersecurity

We’ve written about shifting baseline syndrome, a phenomenon that leads people—the public and experts alike—to discount massive long-term changes that are hidden in incremental steps. It has happened with online privacy, and it’s happening with AI. Even if the vulnerabilities found by Mythos could have been found using AI models from last month or last year, they couldn’t have been found by AI models from five years ago.

The Mythos announcement reminds us that AI has come a long way in just a few years: The baseline really has shifted. Finding vulnerabilities in source code is the type of task that today’s large language models excel at. Regardless of whether it happened last year or will happen next year, it’s been clear for a while this kind of capability was coming soon. The question is how we adapt to it.

We don’t believe that an AI that can hack autonomously will create permanent asymmetry between offense and defense; it’s likely to be more nuanced than that. Some vulnerabilities can be found, verified, and patched automatically. Some vulnerabilities will be hard to find but easy to verify and patch—consider generic cloud-hosted web applications built on standard software stacks, where updates can be deployed quickly. Still others will be easy to find (even without powerful AI) and relatively easy to verify, but harder or impossible to patch, such as IoT appliances and industrial equipment that are rarely updated or can’t be easily modified.

Then there are systems whose vulnerabilities will be easy to find in code but difficult to verify in practice. For example, complex distributed systems and cloud platforms can be composed of thousands of interacting services running in parallel, making it difficult to distinguish real vulnerabilities from false positives and to reliably reproduce them.

So we must separate the patchable from the unpatchable, and the easy to verify from the hard to verify. This taxonomy also provides us guidance for how to protect such systems in an era of powerful AI vulnerability-finding tools.

Unpatchable or hard to verify systems should be protected by wrapping them in more restrictive, tightly controlled layers. You want your fridge or thermostat or industrial control system behind a restrictive and constantly updated firewall, not freely talking to the internet.

Distributed systems that are fundamentally interconnected should be traceable and should follow the principle of least privilege, where each component has only the access it needs. These are bog-standard security ideas that we might have been tempted to throw out in the era of AI, but they’re still as relevant as ever.

Rethinking Software Security Practices

This also raises the salience of best practices in software engineering. Automated, thorough, and continuous testing was always important. Now we can take this practice a step further and use defensive AI agents to test exploits against a real stack, over and over, until the false positives have been weeded out and the real vulnerabilities and fixes are confirmed. This kind of VulnOps is likely to become a standard part of the development process.

Documentation becomes more valuable, as it can guide an AI agent on a bug-finding mission just as it does developers. And following standard practices and using standard tools and libraries allows AI and engineers alike to recognize patterns more effectively, even in a world of individual and ephemeral instant software—code that can be generated and deployed on demand.

Will this favor offense or defense? The defense eventually, probably, especially in systems that are easy to patch and verify. Fortunately, that includes our phones, web browsers, and major internet services. But today’s cars, electrical transformers, fridges, and lampposts are connected to the internet. Legacy banking and airline systems are networked.

Not all of those are going to get patched as fast as needed, and we may see a few years of constant hacks until we arrive at a new normal: where verification is paramount and software is patched continuously.

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in IEEE Spectrum.

A new phishing campaign is actively targeting Indian taxpayers and businesses by impersonating the Income Tax Department of India.

Threat actors have built convincing fake websites that look nearly identical to official government portals, using urgent language to pressure victims into downloading malware-laced files without hesitation.

The attack relies on a fraudulent website displaying the label “Official Tax Notice – Income Tax Department, India.” Unsuspecting users who land on this page are presented with what appears to be a legitimate government notice.

The site prompts visitors to click a button labeled “DOWNLOAD ASSESSMENT ORDER & WORKINGS,” which immediately delivers a malicious archive file to the victim’s computer instead of any real government document.

"Official Tax Notice – Income Tax Department, India": https://zyisykm[.]shop/
pic.twitter.com/U57PycUwkN

— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) April 27, 2026

MalwareHunterTeam researchers identified and flagged the malicious domain zyisykm[.]shop on April 27, 2026, bringing even wider attention to this active threat. The post gained significant traction, accumulating over 2,700 views within hours of publication.

Their findings were quickly corroborated when security researcher Szabolcs Schmidt (@smica83) uploaded the sample delivered by the site to the MalwareBazaar threat repository at bazaar.abuse.ch, confirming that the download button was actively serving malicious content to visitors.

The impact of this campaign is significant because it takes advantage of the natural anxiety taxpayers feel around compliance deadlines. Many recipients, especially those with limited technical knowledge, are likely to believe that a government-branded notice carries real authority.

This psychological pressure makes them far more likely to follow instructions and download files without question, which is exactly what attackers are counting on. Indian individuals and businesses working in financial and corporate sectors remain at heightened risk as this type of campaign continues to spread.

This threat does not exist in isolation. Similar campaigns observed as recently as early 2026 have used fake tax emails to distribute dangerous malware families such as Blackmoon banking malware and XRed remote access trojans.

The growing frequency of these attacks during India’s tax filing season shows that cybercriminals deliberately time their operations to exploit periods of financial stress and regulatory urgency.

How the Infection Chain Works

Understanding how this attack unfolds from start to finish helps explain why it remains so effective. The attack begins when a victim receives a phishing email or visits a spoofed website carrying official government branding, complete with fabricated reference numbers, compliance deadlines, and official-sounding language designed to create urgency.

The victim is then directed to click a download button, which immediately fetches a malicious ZIP archive onto their device.

Once the victim extracts the downloaded ZIP file, they find an executable inside. This file is often an NSIS-based silent dropper, a type of installer that quietly unpacks and installs multiple malicious components in the background while the victim notices nothing suspicious.

As seen in related campaigns analyzed by security researchers, these droppers have been known to install Remote Access Trojans (RATs) and infostealers capable of harvesting sensitive data, logging keystrokes, and connecting back to attacker-controlled command-and-control servers for further instructions.

To make the deception complete, attackers include fake instructions inside the malicious package asking users to disable their antivirus software before running the file, claiming it is required to use the “Income Tax Department client”.

This is a well-known social engineering trick that removes the last line of defense before the malware fully executes on the target system.

Users who receive unsolicited tax notices by email or encounter unfamiliar websites claiming to represent the Income Tax Department should verify the source before downloading anything.

Always make sure to visit only the official government portal at incometax.gov.in for authentic communications. Never disable antivirus or security software based on instructions found inside any downloaded file.

Organizations should train employees to recognize phishing attempts and report suspicious emails to their IT teams immediately. If you believe your device has been compromised, isolate it from the network and contact a qualified cybersecurity professional right away.

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The post Hackers Using Fake Income Tax Department’s Notice to Deploy Malware appeared first on Cyber Security News.

Sent by a Spanish diplomat. Apparently people have been working on it since it was rediscovered in 1860.

Attackers exploit a Breeze Cache flaw (CVE-2026-3844) to upload files without login. Wordfence researchers detected over 170 attacks.

Threat actors are exploiting a critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-3844 (CVSS score of 9.8), in the Breeze Cache WordPress plugin, allowing them to upload files to a server without authentication. The vulnerability has already been used in over 170 attack attempts detected by Wordfence.

Breeze Cache is a free WordPress plugin developed by Cloudways that improves website speed and performance. It offers page and browser caching, file minification, Gzip compression, and CDN integration, helping reduce load times and optimize overall site delivery. The plugin is currently installed on over 400,000 websites.

The security researcher Hung Nguyen (bashu) discovered the vulnerability.

“The Breeze Cache plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to arbitrary file uploads due to missing file type validation in the ‘fetch_gravatar_from_remote’ function in all versions up to, and including, 2.4.4. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to upload arbitrary files on the affected site’s server which may make remote code execution possible.” reads the report published by Wordfence. “The vulnerability can only be exploited if “Host Files Locally – Gravatars” is enabled, which is disabled by default.”

Wordfence researchers say the flaw stems from missing file-type validation in the ‘fetch_gravatar_from_remote’ function, allowing unauthenticated attackers to upload arbitrary files. This can lead to remote code execution and full site takeover. According to the advisory, the exploitation is only possible if the “Host Files Locally – Gravatars” option is enabled. The issue affects Breeze Cache up to version 2.4.4 and is fixed in version 2.4.5.

Since the vulnerability is actively exploited, Breeze Cache users should update to the latest version immediately or disable the plugin temporarily.

At the time of this writing, Wordfence reported that it had blocked 3,936 attacks targeting this vulnerability in the past 24 hours.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Breeze Cache plugin)

Science news:

Scientists have finally cracked a long-standing mystery about squid and cuttlefish evolution by analyzing newly sequenced genomes alongside global datasets. The research reveals that these bizarre, intelligent creatures likely originated deep in the ocean over 100 million years ago, surviving mass extinction events by retreating into oxygen-rich deep-sea refuges. For millions of years, their evolution barely changed—until a dramatic post-extinction boom sparked rapid diversification as they moved into new shallow-water habitats.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

It was used to track a Dutch naval ship:

Dutch journalist Just Vervaart, working for regional media network Omroep Gelderland, followed the directions posted on the Dutch government website and mailed a postcard with a hidden tracker inside. Because of this, they were able to track the ship for about a day, watching it sail from Heraklion, Crete, before it turned towards Cyprus. While it only showed the location of that one vessel, knowing that it was part of a carrier strike group sailing in the Mediterranean could potentially put the entire fleet at risk.

[…]

Navy officials reported that the tracker was discovered within 24 hours of the ship’s arrival, during mail sorting, and was eventually disabled. Because of this incident, the Dutch authorities now ban electronic greeting cards, which, unlike packages, weren’t x-rayed before being brought on the ship.

A new GoGra Linux malware uses Microsoft Graph API and an Outlook inbox to deliver payloads, making it stealthy and hard to detect.

A new Linux version of the GoGra backdoor uses Microsoft’s Graph API and an Outlook inbox to deliver malicious payloads stealthily. The malware is linked to the Harvester cyberespionage group, which is believed to be a nation-state actor. The malicious code blends in with legitimate traffic, making detection more difficult and increasing its effectiveness in targeted cyber espionage operations.

“The Harvester APT group has developed a new, highly-evasive, Linux version of its GoGra backdoor. The malware uses the legitimate Microsoft Graph API and Outlook mailboxes as a covert command-and-control (C2) channel, allowing it to bypass traditional perimeter network defenses.” reads the report published by Broadcom Symantec. “The Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team linked this new Linux malware to a previously known Windows espionage campaign by Harvester due to similarities in code, demonstrating that the threat actor is actively expanding its cross-platform capabilities.”

Initial evidence suggests the campaign targeted South Asia, with early samples submitted from India and Afghanistan and the use of localized decoy documents indicating a tailored approach. The Harvester group, active since at least 2021 uses both custom malware and public tools, including Graphon, a backdoor similar to GoGra that relies on Microsoft infrastructure for command-and-control.

The GoGra backdoor abuses Microsoft cloud services by using hardcoded Azure AD credentials to obtain OAuth2 tokens. It polls a specific Outlook mailbox folder via Microsoft Graph API, looking for emails with commands. These are decrypted and executed on the system, while results are encrypted and sent back.

“It uses OData queries to poll a specific mailbox folder, named “Zomato Pizza”, at two-second intervals. OData (Open Data Protocol) query is the syntax used to filter, sort, and shape data when interacting with the Microsoft Graph API. Interestingly, the Windows version of the malware used a mailbox named “Dragan Dash”. Dragan Dash Kitchen is a food delivery restaurant located in in the Indian city of Hyderabad.” continues the report. “The backdoor filters for incoming email messages with a subject line starting with the word ‘Input’. Upon receiving an email, it decrypts the base64-wrapped message body using AES-CBC encryption, and executes the payload on the host via /bin/bash -c.”

Afterward, the malware deletes the messages to erase traces and remain stealthy.

The researchers noted that Linux and Windows versions of GoGra share a nearly identical codebase, indicating a cross-platform development effort by the Harvester group. Despite different OS targets, both variants keep the same command-and-control logic and even share identical coding mistakes, suggesting a single developer.

Both versions use the same AES key and similar modules, but differ in architecture, beacon timing, and mailbox names used for command delivery.

“The use of a new Linux backdoor shows that Harvester is continuing to expand its toolset and actively develop new tooling in order to go after a wider range of victims and machines.” concludes the report. “While we did not see victims in this activity, it seems clear that the group continues to retain an interest in the South Asia region for espionage purposes. “

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, malware)

404 Media reports (alternate site):

The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database….

The news shows how forensic extraction—­when someone has physical access to a device and is able to run specialized software on it—­can yield sensitive data derived from secure messaging apps in unexpected places. Signal already has a setting that blocks message content from displaying in push notifications; the case highlights why such a feature might be important for some users to turn on.

“We learned that specifically on iPhones, if one’s settings in the Signal app allow for message notifications and previews to show up on the lock screen, [then] the iPhone will internally store those notifications/message previews in the internal memory of the device,” a supporter of the defendants who was taking notes during the trial told 404 Media.

EDITED TO ADD (4/24): Apple has patched this vulnerability.

ICE has admitted that it uses spyware from the Israeli company Graphite.

Grupo Seguritech is a Mexican surveillance company that is expanding into the US.