Google said on 6 October 2026 that the previous week it became aware of hijacks of three country-code top-level domains: .gh (Ghana), .sl (Sierra Leone) and .as (American Samoa). The attackers compromised the third-party registries rather than Google or the domain owners, changed the authoritative DNS records for selected domains under those suffixes, and used that control to pass certificate authority domain validation and obtain HTTPS certificates covering several Google domains and domains of other organisations. Google says it has no reason to believe the issuing certificate authorities did anything wrong. Chrome blocked the certificates through CRLSets and Google worked with the issuing CAs to revoke them; Certificate Transparency data pointed to more affected organisations, including leading global brands and widely used services, which Google also blocked and contacted where it could. Update 8 Oct: The Hacker News reviewed Certificate Transparency logs and found at least 12 unauthorised certificates for seven Google and YouTube names, including google.com.gh, google.sl and google.as, logged one ccTLD at a time: .gh on 22 September, .sl on 25 September and .as on 27 September. Let's Encrypt issued 11 and ZeroSSL one, and a Let's Encrypt staff member confirmed on its community forum on 7 October that Google and YouTube certificates were issued and revoked. All 12 showed as revoked by 1 October, between about a day and a half and nearly a week after first being logged. Only a small set of names was searched, so the total is likely higher. Google has not named the attackers, said how the registries were breached, whether any certificate was used to impersonate a site, or whether the registries are now secure, and warns its analysis may have missed affected domains and that Chrome's blocking does not protect other browsers. (sources: Google; The Hacker News; Ars Technica)
Google — Chrome's response to recent ccTLD registry hijacks (6 Oct 2026)
Anthropic announced on 6 October 2026 an expanded Cyber Verification Program (CVP) that merges Project Glasswing, which gave organisations securing critical software access to its Claude Mythos models, with the earlier CVP, which gave vetted security teams reduced safeguards on Claude Opus and Sonnet. Each of the three new tiers includes Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Mythos 5.1 and future models. Defense Access covers SOC and incident response work, malware reverse engineering and vulnerability analysis, and is open to company, nonprofit, university and government security teams defending their own systems, critical infrastructure operators of any size, smaller security firms, open-source maintainers and individual researchers with a record of reported vulnerabilities; Anthropic aims to answer within days. Red Team Access adds authorised penetration testing and red teaming, is for organisations only and takes weeks to review, and still blocks actions such as deploying ransomware or damaging physical systems. Specialized Access, with the fewest blocks, is for a small set of organisations authorised to test safety-critical systems such as flight systems, power grids, telecom networks and interbank transfer infrastructure, vetted with the US government; Glasswing members move into it. Data retention is required so Anthropic can watch for misuse. Anthropic says Glasswing partners found at least 129,000 verified vulnerabilities between April and July 2026 and its own open-source scanning found 5,500 more; in its CyScenarioBench test, Defense-tier safeguards blocked 46 of 50 offensive trials and the Red Team tier blocked none. (sources: Anthropic; iTnews)
Anthropic — Expanding the Cyber Verification Program (6 Oct 2026)
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 reported on 6 October 2026 that a threat cluster it tracks as CL-STA-1178, which it assesses with high confidence aligns with an Iranian-nexus actor, has been impersonating the Dubai Airports IT department to send trojanised coding challenges to high-value targets. In the campaign Unit 42 calls Blinder Tunnel, infrastructure staged as early as November 2025 was activated in March 2026 against an individual in Iraq's critical infrastructure sector: a fake offline "Dubai Airport Careers" Inno Setup app led to a personalised Visual Studio project presented as an at-home assessment. Opening it abused a native .csproj build file, then AppDomainManager hijacking and DLL sideloading through a legitimate Microsoft-signed vshost32.exe, to install ShelbyLoader V2, which beaconed to the GitHub API with a hard-coded personal access token and used GitHub issues as a fallback channel, plus a PowerShell engine and an in-memory Chisel tunnelling loader called Blackwood. Unit 42 links the actor to earlier activity Elastic Security Labs tracked as The Shelby Strategy (with a "Peaky Blinders" theme throughout) and to a May–June 2026 credential-harvesting campaign against an Israeli entity; targets include telecommunications, aviation and other critical entities in Iraq, Israel and the UAE. Unit 42 found no evidence of any compromise of Dubai Airports, and GitHub has taken down the infrastructure it identified. (source: Unit 42)
Unit 42 — Blinder Tunnel campaign targets Iraqi critical infrastructure (6 Oct 2026)
Microsoft is adding the Windows app package extensions .msix and .msixbundle to the list of attachment types blocked by default in new Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web for Exchange Online, The Register reported on 6 October 2026. Once the change lands, users of those clients will no longer be able to download or open attachments with these extensions. Microsoft calls the file types infrequently used and says the change is part of its ongoing work to protect organisations from unsafe attachments. Rollout is scheduled for early to mid-November 2026. Administrators who have a genuine need to receive these packages by email can add the extensions to the AllowedFileTypes property of the relevant OwaMailboxPolicy before then. Malicious MSIX packages have been used to deliver malware before: Microsoft disabled the ms-appinstaller protocol handler by default in December 2023 after it was abused. (sources: Microsoft's announcement; The Register)
The Register — Microsoft extends the Outlook block list with two more file types (6 Oct 2026)
Browser security company Island published research on 6 October 2026 on a phishing platform dressed up as a range of AI advertising products, from campaign optimisation and spend audits to business-account connections, using the names ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Manus. Eight days after Meta launched its Muse AI agent on 8 September, museads.ai appeared (by 16 September) offering a fake "Muse Ads" manager. Every page leads to a Connect button that draws a fake browser window inside the page, with an address bar showing accounts.google.com or an Okta tenant, styled to match Windows, macOS, iOS or Android. Behind it a human operator watches in real time: the platform keeps every password attempt, fingerprints the device, can ask for the password up to three times, then chooses whether to show an SMS or authenticator code request, an Okta push, a Google approval prompt or a QR code, and can reject codes or hold the victim on a waiting screen. It supports Google, Meta, TikTok and Okta sign-in flows. Targets are agency staff, media buyers and administrators whose accounts reach many client ad accounts, which can be drained on fraudulent campaigns or resold. Older source code left in misconfigured public GitHub repositories traced the operation back to March and showed the same kit reused for refund and recruitment lures; Island saw hundreds of victim submissions to its Telegram control channel, and activity was ongoing at publication. (sources: Island; BleepingComputer)
Island — Behind the Connect Button: The Fake AI Ads Campaign (6 Oct 2026)
Adversa AI published research on 6 October 2026 showing its Cryptographic Context Injection (CCI) technique, first shown in August against chat assistants, working against GitHub Copilot CLI. A developer runs the agent in autopilot mode and asks it to read an external web page. The page carries its instructions as ciphertext and asks the agent to decrypt it with Python, offering two keys: one is a template that can only be filled in by reading local files, so the agent reads the targeted files while preparing it, and the second, real key reveals a follow-up instruction to fetch another URL with the harvested contents as a parameter. In Adversa's demonstration the full contents of a .env.prod file reached the attacker's endpoint in 28 seconds, with no confirmation prompt and nothing in the transcript showing the destination host or that file contents had left the machine. Because the instructions only exist as readable text after the agent decrypts them in its own runtime, static prompt-injection filters do not see them. Adversa says the chain needs autopilot mode and a permissive model; on its paid test account the vulnerable model had to be picked by hand, but with model selection on Auto the router sometimes assigned it without the user knowing. Adversa says the chain still reproduced as of 1 October; GitHub's bug bounty team validated the finding but declined to treat it as a vulnerability, and concrete payloads were withheld. (sources: Adversa AI; Cyber Security News)
Adversa AI — Cryptographic Context Injection against GitHub Copilot CLI (6 Oct 2026)
UK education software provider Bromcom has notified customers of a personal data breach involving legacy single sign-on (SSO) registration functionality in its Communication Server environment, The Register reported on 6 October 2026. In a 24 September post on the EduGeek forum, a Bromcom account said an unauthorised third party had accessed and retrieved email addresses and limited information tied to affected SSO registrations. Bromcom identified the incident on 6 September after reports of SSO access problems. The service held email addresses linked to SSO registrations, the sign-in provider used (such as Microsoft or Google), registration and last sign-in dates where recorded, and internal user and registration reference numbers; Bromcom says it held no passwords or authentication tokens and did not allow access to Microsoft or Google accounts. The superseded component had stayed in production because an internal system still called it, and has now been withdrawn. Bromcom says it found no evidence its school Management Information System (MIS), which holds student, attendance and behaviour data, was compromised, and it is working with forensic specialists and liaising with schools, trusts and the authorities. Bromcom software is used by more than 5,000 schools and 390 multi-academy trusts. (source: The Register)
The Register — Legacy sign-on service comes back to bite school software provider Bromcom (6 Oct 2026)
On 6 October 2026, from about 5am US Eastern time, users of the ASOS shopping app, mainly in the UK, received a push notification addressed to the British online fashion retailer's data protection officer and IT team: "we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance. Engage with us, or we will leak it", with a link to a Telegram channel run by a group calling itself Xuanye, which has no known track record. Later the same day ASOS confirmed a data breach: it says third-party platforms it uses to communicate with customers were accessed without authorisation and that basic personal information, including names and contact details, may have been exposed. ASOS says it does not believe payment card details or account passwords were affected, and it is showing an in-app notice telling customers to ignore the alert and not to open its link. ASOS has not confirmed the claim that its Snowflake environment was compromised and has not said how many customers are affected. Researchers quoted by the BBC said sending the notification needed access to ASOS's own messaging systems. Sources: BleepingComputer (ASOS confirmation), BBC News. UPDATE (8 Oct 2026): ASOS now says the breach began with social engineering. In a security notification shared with BleepingComputer it says an unauthorised party got into an ASOS employee account by impersonating a trusted contact to obtain login credentials, then used those credentials to reach information on certain third-party platforms ASOS uses. ASOS locked down the affected platforms, is investigating with external experts, law enforcement and regulators, and repeats that payment card details and account passwords were not accessed and customers need take no action beyond watching for unexpected messages or calls claiming to be from ASOS. It still has not addressed the Snowflake claim or given a customer count. Source: ASOS customer update (linked) and BleepingComputer (8 Oct). UPDATE (8 Oct, BBC News): BBC News reported that ASOS later told customers hackers hold detailed customer profiles of potentially millions of users, beyond the "basic contact details" that, according to BBC News, ASOS had previously said might have been accessed. Fields now confirmed or shown in samples include names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, customer numbers, dates of birth and on-site search terms. ASOS said no bank details or passwords were accessed, urged caution about unexpected messages or calls claiming to be from ASOS, and said it will contact customers directly where more support is needed. BBC News notes Snowflake has previously said its own platform was not breached. According to BBC News, ASOS's customer email confirms the wider set of profile details. CORRECTION (21 Oct 2026): removed an unsourced line about the ASOS share price, removed The Register from the sources (not linked), and corrected the date of the BBC report from 13 to 8 October. Correction (23 Oct 2026): removed the extortion group's own statements about what it holds and how it got in; Australian impact is now attributed to Cyber Daily's 8 October report. (source: BBC News) Correction (29 Oct 2026): removed a reference to an LSE notice that is not linked (the LSE page is not readable without a login), internal source labels and a bare link credit. (source: BBC News) Correction (29 Oct 2026): the line on ASOS's earlier "basic contact details" wording is now credited to BBC News, because ASOS's London Stock Exchange notice could not be read. (source: BBC News)
BleepingComputer — ASOS confirms data breach after "HACKED" in-app notifications (6 Oct 2026)
ABC News (6 October 2026) reports that the Queensland Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) received 82 data breach notifications from the state public sector in 2025–26, the first year of the mandatory notification of data breach (MNDB) scheme under chapter 3A of the Information Privacy Act 2009 (Qld), which started on 1 July 2025. The OIC's 2024–25 annual report records 53 voluntary notifications that year and 41 the year before. The OIC said most breaches came from accident or human error and involved unauthorised disclosure, such as an email, text or system notification sent to the wrong person or carrying unintended personal information, but some were malicious and intentional. The office also received a record 353 privacy complaints, more than double the previous year, and referred 16 to the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal. Information Commissioner Joanne Kummrow wrote that demand for OIC services had reached unprecedented levels. Local governments came under the MNDB scheme on 1 July 2026, so 2026–27 numbers will include councils. (sources: ABC News, reporting on the OIC 2025–26 annual report; OIC Queensland)
ABC News — Data breaches and privacy complaints across Queensland's public sector on the rise (6 Oct 2026)
IBM security bulletin 7290833 (initial publication 5 October 2026) covers Maximo AI Service 9.1.0 and 9.2.0, the AI component of the Maximo Application Suite used for asset and maintenance management. Its most serious item is IBM's own CVE-2026-90920: improper control of code generation (CWE-94) that IBM says could let a remote attacker execute arbitrary code. IBM rates it CVSS 3.1 9.8 with no privileges or user interaction needed. The CVE record was published on 13 October 2026 (Perth time). The same bulletin fixes vulnerable third-party parts bundled with the service: Apache Tomcat embed core 10.1.57 (including the security-constraint and DIGEST authentication bypasses CVE-2026-65182 and CVE-2026-65905), Netty handler (CVE-2026-75595 SNI mutual-TLS bypass), Apache HttpClient 5 (CVE-2026-71290 hostname verification), GitPython and glibc. IBM lists no workarounds and says to upgrade now. Three further Maximo AI Service denial-of-service CVEs published at the same time (CVE-2026-90911, -90912 and -90921, CVSS 7.5) point to IBM bulletin 7290473 (1 October 2026), which is fixed by the same releases. No exploitation or public exploit has been reported, and the CVE is not on CISA's KEV list. (sources: IBM security bulletin; CVE record)
IBM Security Bulletin 7290833 — Maximo AI Service third-party dependencies and CVE-2026-90920 (initial publication 5 Oct 2026)
Zabbix, acting as its own CVE numbering authority, published two records on 5 October 2026 for Zabbix Server and Proxy. CVE-2026-59782 (ZBX-28193, CVSS 4.0 6.9 Medium): the Duktape JavaScript preprocessing engine lets a limited administrator read raw heap data, which can expose data from other running preprocessors that the administrator is not allowed to see. Zabbix credits Shaber Tseng via HackerOne. CVE-2026-59787 (ZBX-28197, Zabbix CVSS 4.0 5.3; Tenable's CVE page lists CVSS 3.1 9.1): the Perl SNMP trap receiver script shipped with Zabbix does not neutralise the ZBXTRAP record delimiter inside trap content, so anyone who can send SNMP traps to the receiver can inject a record that lands against a different monitored host. Zabbix credits the researcher 'stoun' via HackerOne. Both affect 6.0.0 to 6.0.47, 7.0.0 to 7.0.28 and 7.4.0 to 7.4.12. No exploitation has been reported.
TrendAI Research published a report on 5 October 2026 linking more than four years of espionage campaigns to Earth Sirrush, a Russia-aligned intrusion set previously tracked as SHADOW-EARTH-065 that overlaps with CERT-UA's UAC-0099. Since at least 2022 it has sent tailored spear-phishing to Ukrainian government agencies, defence organisations, border guard units and logistics operators, using malicious archives and documents that impersonate police, border, tax and justice authorities and, more recently, a drone-parts supplier with a convincing download site and a fake antivirus check. Earlier waves exploited the WinRAR flaw CVE-2023-38831. The group has built more than 10 malware families, moving from PowerShell and Go to C# loaders and .NET implants. In 2026 it leaned on steganography, hiding payloads in PNG images either appended after the image data or pulled out of the pixels with PowerShell, including the border-guard-themed CINDERBLOT (also called BadPaw) campaign. In July 2026 CERT-UA documented a chain that starts with LUNCHPOKE, a malicious Notepad++ plugin (NppExport.dll) that runs through DLL proxying when the editor opens and drops the BURNYBEAR and MATCHBOIL.V2 loaders, kept running by renamed copies of schtasks.exe. The newest tool, ASHVEIN ("TelemetryBrowser" to its developers), is a .NET stealer and remote access trojan that takes Chrome and Firefox credentials, screenshots and files, runs PowerShell, fingerprints the machine, checks for analysis tools, hides tasking in invisible web page elements and can fall back to GitHub to find its server. TrendAI tied the campaigns together through shared encryption code, identical system queries, reused artefacts and infrastructure, with many command servers registered through the same registrar behind Cloudflare. In one case an implant kept its foothold through a month with no server contact. (source: TrendAI Research)
TrendAI Research — Earth Sirrush: a Russia-aligned intrusion set with 4 years of evolving espionage tooling (5 Oct 2026)
