Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked credentials.
Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the public archive included files detailing how CISA builds, tests and deploys software internally, and that it represents one of the most egregious government data leaks in recent history.
Artificial intelligence platforms may be just as susceptible to social engineering as human beings, but they are proving remarkably good at finding security vulnerabilities in human-made computer code. That reality is on full display this month with some of the more widely-used software makers — including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Oracle — fixing near record volumes of security bugs, and/or quickening the tempo of their patch releases.
Microsoft today pushed software updates to fix a staggering 167 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a SharePoint Server zero-day and a publicly disclosed weakness in Windows Defender dubbed “BlueHammer.” Separately, Google Chrome fixed its fourth zero-day of 2026, and an emergency update for Adobe Reader nixes an actively exploited flaw that can lead to remote code execution.
Hackers linked to Russia’s military intelligence units are using known flaws in older Internet routers to mass harvest authentication tokens from Microsoft Office users, security experts warned today. The spying campaign allowed state-backed Russian hackers to quietly siphon authentication tokens from users on more than 18,000 networks without deploying any malicious software or code.
A financially motivated data theft and extortion group is attempting to inject itself into the Iran war, unleashing a worm that spreads through poorly secured cloud services and wipes data on infected systems that use Iran’s time zone or have Farsi set as the default language.
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.
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.
Most phishing websites are little more than static copies of login pages for popular online destinations, and they are often quickly taken down by anti-abuse activists and security firms. But a stealthy new phishing-as-a-service offering lets customers sidestep both of these pitfalls: It uses cleverly disguised links to load the target brand’s real website, and then acts as a relay between the target and the legitimate site — forwarding the victim’s username, password and multi-factor authentication (MFA) code to the legitimate site and returning its responses.
Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 50 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including patches for a whopping six “zero-day” vulnerabilities that attackers are already exploiting in the wild.
