The UK Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office (IPCO) says in its 2025 annual report, ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 29 October 2026, that GCHQ has scoped the maximum number of items of removable media (USB sticks, external hard drives, compact discs, memory cards and other portable storage) that it cannot immediately locate and are therefore unaccounted for, some of which may contain data handled under the Investigatory Powers Act. IPCO calls this a very significant number, which GCHQ currently estimates to be in the thousands, and says GCHQ has a programme of work to locate as many as possible, after which it will be able to report how many devices are confirmed lost. The Commissioner writes that he remains concerned GCHQ has not yet established a sufficiently clear understanding of the scale, location and recoverability of the lost media, although the issues were first raised with him several years ago; IPCO says it is disappointed with the time GCHQ has taken to investigate, that a new GCHQ tool to monitor the issue, storage and location of removable media will come into use in 2026, and that it will require regular written progress reports throughout 2026. (source: IPCO) The Record reported on 30 October that a GCHQ spokesperson said its management system for removable media was previously not sufficiently robust to track the items registered for use, that it has taken action against all of IPCO's recommendations and the findings have been addressed comprehensively; the spokesperson declined to say whether unauthorised people had accessed any of the missing media. The Record notes the report does not allege any devices have fallen into the hands of adversaries. (source: The Record) Correction (31 Oct 2026): removed the reference to the Australian Information Security Manual (cyber.gov.au ISM, Guidelines for media) and its control numbers as a source, because this desk could not read that page in full; the card's facts come from IPCO's annual report and The Record. (source: IPCO)
IPCO — Annual Report 2025 (HC 253, ordered to be printed 29 Oct 2026; paragraphs 4.66–4.68)
CrowdStrike said in a blog post dated 29 October 2026 that its OverWatch team identified a VAPOR PANDA campaign using the ARTEX agentic penetration-testing framework alongside the Chinese-developed DeepSeek large language model and a second, subscription-based commercial LLM it could not confirm. CrowdStrike says that beginning on 17 October 2026 the group used ARTEX against more than 200 distinct organisations worldwide, including foreign ministries in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East; semiconductor, defence and think tank organisations in the US; and telecommunications providers in multiple regions, with activity from a single ARTEX controller against entities in at least 14 countries over an 11-day window. CrowdStrike says it confirmed post-exploitation activity at nine organisations, where the group deployed the BLOODALCHEMY backdoor and carried out credential spraying, network scanning and reconnaissance, and saw password-spraying and credential-scanning against at least 12 more. According to CrowdStrike, a human operator issued instructions in Chinese and steered planner and worker agents, which wrote web shells, extracted domain administrator passwords, chained an unsigned SAML assertion with an XXE flaw to reach a cloud Instance Metadata Service, read LAPS passwords, forged a mail server administrator token with keys not rotated since a 2022 export, and looked for Windows machines without the Falcon sensor; in a single intrusion the planning agents consumed on the order of 1.4 billion input tokens. CrowdStrike says the campaign is separate from the ARTEX activity reported under the Storm-0940 designation, that VAPOR PANDA has since 2021 primarily targeted government, think tank, energy and extractive organisations across Europe, North America, Oceania and the UK, and that this is its first observed use of AI-driven intrusion tooling. CrowdStrike publishes BLOODALCHEMY C2 domains, IP addresses and file hashes. (source: CrowdStrike) Correction (02 Nov 2026): removed The Hacker News as a source; removed details no other source gives. (source: CrowdStrike)
CrowdStrike — VAPOR PANDA Uses AI-Driven ARTEX to Scale a Global Espionage Campaign (29 Oct 2026)
The US Justice Department said on 29 October 2026 that a federal district court in the Eastern District of Virginia sentenced Ahmad Umar Agha, also known as Th3Pr0, to 42 months in prison for his central role in a hacking conspiracy organised and led by members of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's inner circle, including the commander of Syria's General Intelligence Directorate, from as early as 24 August 2011 to 31 January 2024. According to the department, Agha hacked about 47 Western media entities, businesses, NGOs and US and allied government entities to spread the former Syrian government's propaganda; the conspiracy also collected intelligence for that government and tried to cause US service members to refuse duty. The department says Agha's hack of a news agency's Twitter account let him post on 23 April 2013 a false claim that President Obama was injured in two explosions at the White House, causing a temporary $136 billion flash crash in the value of Dow stocks, and that he redirected visitors to the US Marine Corps recruitment website, through the company hosting it, to an image urging Marines to refuse orders; about 3,500 visitors saw it. Court filings cited by the department say one victim company lost about $35,000 a day for roughly six months and one NGO lost $480,000 in total. Agha and co-conspirator Firas Dardar were charged by complaint in June 2014 and indicted in May 2018; the department says Dardar remains a fugitive. The FBI Washington Field Office investigated. (source: US Department of Justice) The Record reports that Agha was taken into US custody last year and that the department has not given details of his arrest. (source: The Record)
US Department of Justice — Syrian Man Sentenced for Wide-Ranging Hacking Conspiracy Conducted on Behalf of the Bashar Al Assad Regime (29 Oct 2026)
Cursor said in a security notice dated 29 October 2026 that a maliciously modified version of Anthropic's Claude Code extension, Anthropic.claude-code version 2.1.313, was available in the Cursor VS Code extension Marketplace between about 2:27am PT and 1:35pm PT that day (about 17:27 on 29 October to 04:35 on 30 October Perth time), and that the version was not developed by Anthropic. Cursor says at most 5,000 users were affected and that it will contact them directly. According to Cursor, the extension collects host and user information (including hostname, username, OS, environment variable names, configured Git email and public IP), adds an attacker-controlled SSH key labelled svc-telemetry to authorized_keys, tries to enable the local SSH service and open a persistent reverse SSH tunnel via a LaunchAgent on macOS or a scheduled task on Windows, and reports host details to the attacker's server. Cursor says enabling the SSH service needs admin rights the extension does not have on most macOS and Windows hosts, so on those hosts that step fails and the attacker could not have logged in through the tunnel, but the key, persistence and host-detail report still happen. Cursor says it removed the version, shut down the marketplace as a precaution, audited access and confirmed no other extensions were tampered with, rotated its keys, rebuilt and restored the marketplace, and worked with the hosting provider to take the attacker's server offline. It says it has no evidence that other versions of the extension or the official distribution are affected, and it published indicators of compromise and remediation scripts for macOS and Windows. (source: Cursor) UPDATE (31 Oct 2026): Felix Rieseberg, a member of Anthropic's technical staff, said in a post on X on 30 October (10:08 pm Perth): 'We're working with Cursor on this incident, but it wasn't a compromise of Anthropic's systems or employee laptops. A malicious actor used access to Cursor's marketplace to publish a tampered copy of the Claude Code extension, which we didn't build or publish.' (source: Felix Rieseberg on X) According to The Register, his post goes on to say the versions on Anthropic's official channels are not affected and that this only impacts Cursor users, and neither Cursor nor Anthropic has said how the malicious package reached the marketplace. (source: The Register)
Cursor — Security notice — malicious version of Anthropic.claude-code (2.1.313) identified in the Cursor Extension Marketplace (29 Oct 2026)
Forever Security published 'EMBRACE: How We Hacked the Browsers Embedded in Top Five Desktop AI Assistants' on 29 October 2026. It says it researched the browsers embedded in Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex, VS Code and Claude Desktop and broke a core browser-security rule in every one, with impact ranging from running code on the host (Cursor) to reading and exfiltrating files on the disk (Codex, Claude Desktop, VS Code) to spoofing a tab's address to both the person and the agent (GitHub Copilot). According to Forever, Cursor's integrated browser let any page send text into the agent's composer, which it used to get the agent to run an npm install; it says success is probabilistic and depends on the model, that it disclosed the issue to Cursor on 10 September and that it was silently patched on 1 October. It says it found the address-bar spoof in GitHub Copilot 1.1.27 on 26 September and that GitHub fixed it independently in Copilot 1.1.29 on 13 October, before Forever sent a report. For Claude Desktop and VS Code, Forever says a local file:// page could read files outside the project folder from a web worker, and that Codex applied no such restriction at all. Its timeline says Anthropic declined its 23 July report as invalid for a 'Workspace Trust' gated security boundary and accepted the same issue from Noma Security on 24 July; that OpenAI never replied to its 27 July report; and that Microsoft declined its 10 September report on the same grounds. Forever says that at the time of publishing the Codex and VS Code issues were still open. (source: Forever Security) The Register reported at 23:12 UTC on 29 October (7:12 am Perth time, 30 October) that an OpenAI spokesperson said OpenAI is aware of the issue and working to address it, and that Cursor, GitHub, Anthropic and Microsoft did not respond to its questions. (source: The Register)
Forever Security — EMBRACE: [Technical Overview] How We Hacked the Browsers Embedded in Top Five Desktop AI Assistants (29 Oct 2026)
Google's Chrome Releases blog says the Stable and Extended Stable channels were updated on 29 October 2026 to 156.0.8078.79/.80 for Windows and Mac and 156.0.8078.79 for Linux, rolling out over the coming days and weeks, with 21 security fixes: one Critical, 19 High and one Medium. The Critical bug is CVE-2026-76024, memory corruption in MediaStream, reported by Xinyang Ge on 21 October. High-rated fixes include use-after-free and memory-corruption bugs in FileSystem, Autofill, CacheStorage, Network, Input, Frames, Skia, V8, GarbageCollection, Dawn, Quota, DOM, Editing and Blink; Google is credited with 12 of the 21 bugs. Google does not say any of the flaws is exploited and does not publish CVSS scores; bug details stay restricted until most users have updated. Chrome 156.0.8078.79 for Android, released the same day, contains the same security fixes as the desktop release unless otherwise noted. This follows the 156.0.8078.73/.74 update of 27 October, which is a separate card. (source: Chrome Releases)
Chrome Releases — Stable Channel Update for Desktop, Chrome 156.0.8078.79/.80 (29 Oct 2026)
Veeam published KB4961, 'Vulnerabilities Resolved in Veeam Management Pack for Microsoft System Center 13.1', on 29 October 2026. It lists three vulnerabilities, all fixed starting in Veeam Management Pack for Microsoft System Center 13.1 (build 13.1.0.334). CVE-2023-22793 (Critical, CVSS v4.0 9.3) is "A vulnerability allowing an unauthenticated attacker to perform remote code execution (RCE) on servers running the Veeam Virtualization Extensions service of Veeam Management Pack for Microsoft System Center." CVE-2026-107238 (High, 8.7) allows "an authenticated domain user to perform remote code execution (RCE) as the LocalSystem account" on servers running the Collector service, and CVE-2026-107239 (High, 8.8) allows "a member of the Veeam Virtualization Extensions Users group to perform remote code execution (RCE)" on servers running the Collector service. Affected: Veeam Management Pack for Microsoft System Center 9.1 and all earlier version 9 builds, including the Veeam Backup & Replication 13 compatibility patch. Veeam says: "A fix will not be provided for version 9.x. Customers running version 9.x should upgrade to 13.1.0.334." Veeam lists all three as discovered during internal testing; KB4961 does not mention exploitation. (source: Veeam KB4961)
Veeam — KB4961: Vulnerabilities Resolved in Veeam Management Pack for Microsoft System Center 13.1 (published 29 Oct 2026)
BleepingComputer reported on 29 October 2026 (US Eastern time) that prediction market platform Polymarket temporarily suspended trading after hackers compromised a third-party service to distribute cryptocurrency-draining JavaScript. Polymarket said: "One of our third party providers was compromised, and we have referred this to relevant law enforcement," and "Anyone who has been impacted will be made whole," according to BleepingComputer. (source: BleepingComputer) BleepingComputer says Polymarket placed its exchange into cancel-only mode at 2:05 p.m. ET (2:05 am Perth time on 30 October) and that the incident was marked resolved at 3:05 p.m. ET (3:05 am Perth time on 30 October). BleepingComputer says trading resumed about an hour after the suspension and quotes Polymarket: "Trading is now fully back online. We'll make this right and are fully reimbursing all affected traders." (source: BleepingComputer) According to BleepingComputer, Hudson Rock researchers identified malicious JavaScript distributed through DebugBear's CDN that was designed to steal cryptocurrency and prediction-market holdings from Polymarket users; BleepingComputer's own analysis found it was designed to hijack authenticated Polymarket trading sessions, liquidate users' prediction-market positions and transfer assets to an attacker-controlled wallet, and that the wallet transferred approximately 28.6 million POL, valued at roughly $2.57 million, to three additional wallets. BleepingComputer said on 29 October that Polymarket had not disclosed how many users were affected, how much cryptocurrency was stolen, or how the reimbursement process would work. (source: BleepingComputer) According to BleepingComputer, DebugBear, a website performance-monitoring service, confirmed it is investigating an ongoing security incident and told customers: "We're impacted by an ongoing security incident. If you use our RUM product, please remove the embed code from your website." (source: BleepingComputer) Correction (31 Oct 2026): the card date has moved from 30 to 29 October 2026, the date BleepingComputer's report shows. (source: BleepingComputer) UPDATE (3 Nov 2026): In a postmortem on its status page dated 30 October (20:07 UTC, 4:07 am Perth time on 31 October), Polymarket said a third-party vendor whose performance-monitoring script loaded on polymarket.com was compromised and the attacker replaced the script with one built to target Polymarket users; for some people who had the site open during a small window, it used their active session to sell positions and move funds out of their wallet. Polymarket said it removed the compromised script and cleared every cache, paused trading and the relayer, reset all active login sessions, is redeploying third-party scripts with additional integrity controls and continuous monitoring, and has referred the case to law enforcement. It said it is returning $3.9M to traders in total, the $2.7M plus $1.2M to cover pause-related losses, with no claims or tickets needed, and that 95% of affected wallets had been refunded in full as of the afternoon it posted. (source: Polymarket status page) According to The Record, DebugBear said its initial findings indicate it was compromised through its domain registrar and that it had not seen any indication of a compromise of its internal systems. (source: The Record) Correction (03 Nov 2026): removed DebugBear's and Polymarket's posts on X as sources; removed details no other source gives. (source: Polymarket status page; BleepingComputer; The Record)
Polymarket status — Security incident - 3rd party vendor compromised (postmortem 30 Oct 2026, 20:07 UTC)
Pluto Security published 'Load/Mine: A Hugging Face Malware Campaign Returns After Takedown' on 29 October 2026. Pluto says it tracked 31 malicious repositories across seven Hugging Face accounts, that the 19 second-wave repositories have been downloaded more than 29,000 times and were still live eight days after it reported them, and that with linked models downloads pass 32,000, a figure that "measures downloads, not confirmed infections or unique victims." (source: Pluto Security) Pluto says loading one of the models with trust_remote_code=True runs the publisher's Python on the machine before any weights load, and that the payloads were written for GPU hosts running self-hosted inference, especially Xinference and GPUStack. It says the flagship payload scanned clean, that Hugging Face and ModelScope took down the first-wave accounts after its report, and that within days a second wave appeared under new accounts, with revised loaders and reverse shells in place of the hardcoded SSH key. Pluto lists MENXIANGYU/qwen2-tiny, which it calls a representative mining build, at 28,412 downloads on 28 October. (source: Pluto Security) BleepingComputer reported on 29 October that Hugging Face has disabled access to that model, but a near-identical copy uploaded on 25 October by another account was still live when it wrote, and BleepingComputer confirmed it contains the same miner and reverse shell. (source: BleepingComputer)
Pluto Security — Load/Mine: A Hugging Face Malware Campaign Returns After Takedown (29 Oct 2026)
Cofense published 'Would Your Employees Join a Fake Anthropic AI Preview?' on 29 October 2026. It says: "Since September 2026, threat actors have been sending emails that appear to be an invitation to a private Anthropic AI meeting, but are actually attempts to steal Google and Microsoft login credentials." Cofense says the emails appear to abuse the legitimate GoTo Webinar service, with the sender name reading "Austin from nthropic", and that the link is generated by Zapier's URL shortener. A Cloudflare CAPTCHA leads to a Zoom-spoofing meeting page, then a second, custom sliding CAPTCHA that appears good at blocking VPN services, scanners, the Tor browser and other defender tools, before fake Google or Microsoft login pages. Cofense says the Google credential phishing page currently only captures usernames, while the Microsoft page captures both username and password, and that these emails bypass current email security technologies. (source: Cofense) Dark Reading reported on 29 October that Cofense found the emails getting through Proofpoint's Secure Email Gateway and Microsoft Defender for Office 365, and that from 28 October the actor began spoofing Anthropic's website instead of Zoom's, according to Cofense researcher Jacob Malimban. (source: Dark Reading)
Cofense — Would Your Employees Join a Fake Anthropic AI Preview? (29 Oct 2026)
Binance said in a post on its X account at 5:29 am Perth time (AWST) on 30 October 2026 (21:29 UTC, 29 October): "Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating. User funds are completely safe." The post said its security teams are reviewing all relevant information with urgency and warned users not to trust unofficial links, messages, or requests for account information. (source: Binance on X) In a later post at 8:13 am Perth time on 30 October (00:13 UTC), Binance said: "We are working non-stop to resolve this issue. Binance will cover all losses." It said all deposits and withdrawals are temporarily suspended while its team conducts security checks, freezes funds, and works with law enforcement, and that it will share a full post-mortem once the investigation is complete. (source: Binance on X) BleepingComputer reported on 29 October 2026 (US Eastern time) that the statements followed reports of billions of dollars in cryptocurrency being transferred from multiple Binance hot wallets to a newly created Ethereum address. According to BleepingComputer, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on X that Tether had frozen more than $1.567 billion in USDT and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said Circle had frozen more than $800 million in USDC linked to the incident. BleepingComputer notes that Arkham Intelligence's figure of about $5.78 billion is the value of assets held across the wallets it tracks, not a confirmed amount stolen from Binance, and that at the time of its report Binance had not confirmed whether the transfers were unauthorized, how the suspected breach occurred, or the total value of any stolen assets. (source: BleepingComputer) UPDATE (30 Oct 2026, Perth; Binance on X): At 8:52 am Perth time (00:52 UTC) Binance said: "The current verified total frozen amount is around $3 billion." At 10:25 am Perth time (02:25 UTC) it said: "Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak." The same post says "The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B", with about $3 billion frozen on-chain so far, and that Binance will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and the company's funds. Binance says it has revoked the affected address authorisation, engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence partners to trace and recover funds, and will publish a detailed technical post-mortem and an updated Proof of Reserves. In a service update at 12:36 pm Perth time (04:36 UTC), Binance said deposits "remain unaffected and continue to operate as normal" and that withdrawals remain paused while it completes "a security revamp of the withdrawal service and its related addresses", which it expects to finish within 48 hours. It said the incident "stems from multiple factors" and that its security team is tracing the full attack path through the compromised computer, which "may be the entry point of the incident". (source: Binance on X) UPDATE (30 Oct 2026, evening Perth; Binance on X): In an investigation update at 4:47 pm Perth time (08:47 UTC), Binance said: “Our initial investigation suggested that the security incident may have involved a compromised laptop, however our subsequent investigation has uncovered additional points of breach.” It called it “a complex attack”, said it is still gathering the facts with law enforcement, repeated that it will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and the company's funds, said it is still on track to resume withdrawals in 45 hours with deposits unaffected, that outflows ceased when it paused withdrawals, and that around $3 billion has been frozen so far. At 6:55 pm Perth time (10:55 UTC) Binance said it has begun recovering affected assets for users and has reserved over $6.34B of company funds to cover the incident, $5B of it already held in the exact token assets that were impacted, and that it is buying the remaining token assets through market and OTC channels. It said these figures do not include frozen or protected assets, and that all user funds will be verified publicly through its Proof of Reserves. (source: Binance on X) Correction (31 Oct 2026): the card date has moved from 30 to 29 October 2026, the date BleepingComputer's report shows. (source: BleepingComputer) UPDATE (31 Oct 2026; TRM Labs): Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs says in a blog post dated 29 October 2026 that it attributes the attack to TraderTraitor, which it calls North Korea’s elite hacking unit, based on on-chain and off-chain intelligence, and that it makes this judgment with high confidence; this is TRM’s assessment, and Binance has not named an attacker in the posts cited on this card. TRM says an attacker moved about USD 6.36 billion out of Binance wallets on ten blockchains, most of it in about 20 minutes starting at 20:05 UTC on 29 October (4:05 am Perth time, 30 October), using EIP-7702 delegation with 50 pre-signed authorisations, which in TRM’s assessment points to a compromise of Binance’s hot wallet signing infrastructure. TRM says Tether, Circle, Ripple and World Liberty Financial froze about USD 2.67 billion and the Arbitrum Security Council froze 8,426 ETH and 74.6 million ARB, about USD 2.7 billion in total, and that the attacker still held more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC, about USD 2.4 billion, as of 00:30 UTC on 30 October (8:30 am Perth). (source: TRM Labs) UPDATE (02 Nov 2026, Perth; FBI): The FBI said in a cyber alert dated 31 October 2026 that North Korea was responsible for the theft of more than $6 billion USD in virtual assets from cryptocurrency exchange Binance on or about 29 October 2026, activity the FBI refers to as "TraderTraitor". The FBI says it, the USSS and IRS-CI have observed TraderTraitor actors converting stolen assets primarily into Ethereum (ETH), expects further laundering through DeFi and instant swap services, and urges THORNode and RPC node operators, instant exchanges, DeFi services, blockchain analytics firms and other virtual asset service providers to block transactions with or derived from the addresses it lists. (source: FBI)
Binance on X — investigation update: additional points of breach uncovered; withdrawals to resume in 45 hours (30 Oct 2026, 4:47 pm AWST)
BleepingComputer reported on 29 October 2026 that a fake cryptocurrency trading app called Padre Terminal, previously available on the Apple App Store for iOS, has been linked by blockchain investigator Iris to the theft of approximately $23,000 from 27 Solana wallets since 25 October 2026. (source: BleepingComputer) Iris confirmed that one victim was compromised through the App Store app but has not determined how the other wallets were compromised, and says the app drains wallets after users import their private keys into it, according to BleepingComputer. Iris says the legitimate Padre service, now Terminal by pump.fun, is web-only, so any mobile app impersonating it is malicious. (source: BleepingComputer) BleepingComputer says the malicious listing (App Store ID 6802739263) has since been removed and returns a 404 error, that the drainer stayed active after the removal with the latest reported theft at 17:06 UTC on 29 October (30 October 01:06 Perth), and that Apple had not responded to its request for comment at publication. According to Iris, the attacker converted remaining USDC into SOL on 29 October. Iris also flagged four other suspected crypto-brand impersonator apps on the App Store but has not independently confirmed theft for them, BleepingComputer says. (source: BleepingComputer) Correction (30 Oct 2026): this card's date is now 30 October (Perth). BleepingComputer's feed timestamps its report 15:23 on 29 October US Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4), which is 3:23 am on 30 October in Perth; the earlier pass read that time as UTC. (source: BleepingComputer) Correction (31 Oct 2026): the card date has moved back to 29 October 2026, the date BleepingComputer's report shows; the report gives no time zone, so its date is used as written. (source: BleepingComputer)
BleepingComputer — Fake crypto app on Apple App Store linked to $23K wallet theft (29 Oct 2026)
