Microsoft today pushed updates to fix at least 56 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and supported software. This final Patch Tuesday of 2025 tackles one zero-day bug that is already being exploited, as well as two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.
An intermittent outage at Cloudflare on Tuesday briefly knocked many of the Internet’s top destinations offline. Some affected Cloudflare customers were able to pivot away from the platform temporarily so that visitors could still access their websites. But security experts say doing so may have also triggered an impromptu network penetration test for organizations that have come to rely on Cloudflare to block many types of abusive and malicious traffic.
Google is suing more than two dozen unnamed individuals allegedly involved in peddling a popular China-based mobile phishing service that helps scammers impersonate hundreds of trusted brands, blast out text message lures, and convert phished payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google.
The U.S. government is reportedly preparing to ban the sale of wireless routers and other networking gear from TP-Link Systems, a tech company that currently enjoys an estimated 50% market share among home users and small businesses. Experts say while the proposed ban may have more to do with TP-Link’s ties to China than any specific technical threats, much of the rest of the industry serving this market also sources hardware from China and ships products that are insecure fresh out of the box.
Aisuru, the botnet responsible for a series of record-smashing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this year, recently was overhauled to support a more low-key, lucrative and sustainable business: Renting hundreds of thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) devices to proxy services that help cybercriminals anonymize their traffic. Experts says a glut of proxies from Aisuru and other sources is fueling large-scale data harvesting efforts tied to various artificial intelligence (AI) projects, helping content scrapers evade detection by routing their traffic through residential connections that appear to be regular Internet users.
Cybercriminals are abusing a widespread lack of authentication in the customer service platform Zendesk to flood targeted email inboxes with menacing messages that come from hundreds of Zendesk corporate customers simultaneously.
The world’s largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy concentration of infected devices at U.S. providers is complicating efforts to limit collateral damage from the botnet’s attacks, which shattered previous records this week with a brief traffic flood that clocked in at nearly 30 trillion bits of data per second.
A cybercriminal group that used voice phishing attacks to siphon more than a billion records from Salesforce customers earlier this year has launched a website that threatens to publish data stolen from dozens of Fortune 500 firms if they refuse to pay a ransom. The group also claimed responsibility for a recent breach involving Discord user data, and for stealing terabytes of sensitive files from thousands of customers of the enterprise software maker Red Hat.
At least 187 code packages made available through the JavaScript repository NPM have been infected with a self-replicating worm that steals credentials from developers and publishes those secrets on GitHub, experts warn. The malware, which briefly infected multiple code packages from the security vendor CrowdStrike, steals and publishes even more credentials every time an infected package is installed.
Microsoft Corp. today issued security updates to fix more than 80 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and software. There are no known “zero-day” or actively exploited vulnerabilities in this month’s bundle from Redmond, which nevertheless includes patches for 13 flaws that earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label. Meanwhile, both Apple and Google recently released updates to fix zero-day bugs in their devices.
