Exclusive: ‘This is a blatant and disturbing disregard for the law and for people’s security,’ digital rights advocate says

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Australian platforms used by real estate agents to upload documentation for renters and landlords are leaving people’s personal information exposed in hyperlinks accessible online.

An analysis of seven rent platforms provided to Guardian Australia by a researcher, who wished to remain anonymous, revealed millions of leasing documents could be accessed by threat actors.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

© Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

© Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

OpenAI previously confirmed that it's testing ads in ChatGPT for free and $8 Go accounts, and now we're seeing early signs of that rollout, at least on Android. [...]

OpenAI has confirmed that it's retiring ChatGPT's most popular model called GPT-4o and several other models, including GPT-5 Instant, GPT-5 Thinking, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and o4-mini. [...]

A U.S. federal jury has convicted Linwei Ding, a former software engineer at Google, for stealing AI supercomputer data from his employer and secretly sharing it with Chinese tech firms. [...]

Over the past few months, a large-scale cloud storage subscription scam campaign has been targeting users worldwide with repeated emails falsely warning recipients that their photos, files, and accounts are about to be blocked or deleted due to an alleged payment failure. [...]

Mandiant says a wave of recent ShinyHunters SaaS data-theft attacks is being fueled by targeted voice phishing (vishing) attacks and company-branded phishing sites that steal single sign-on (SSO) credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes. [...]

A researcher has released detailed evidence showing some Instagram private accounts exposed photo links to unauthenticated visitors. The issue was later fixed, but Meta closed the report as not applicable and did not respond to multiple requests for comment. [...]

Illegal cryptocurrency flows hit a record $158 billion in 2025, reversing a three-year trend of declining amounts from $86B in 2021 to $64B in 2024. [...]

Microsoft announced that it will disable the 30-year-old NTLM authentication protocol by default in upcoming Windows releases due to security vulnerabilities that expose organizations to cyberattacks. [...]

The latest phase of the global law enforcement action resulted in seizing three industrial-scale illegal IPTV services. [...]

Microsoft has fixed a known issue that prevented Microsoft 365 customers from opening encrypted emails in classic Outlook after a recent update. [...]

Microsoft has released the KB5074105 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 systems, which includes 32 changes, including fixes for sign-in, boot, and activation issues. [...]

Some end of service NETGEAR products provide "TelnetEnable" functionality, which allows a magic packet to activate telnet service on the box.

Microsoft has linked recent reports of Windows 11 boot failures after installing the January 2026 updates to previously failed attempts to install the December 2025 security update, which left systems in an "improper state." [...]

A new Android malware campaign is using the Hugging Face platform as a repository for thousands of variations of an APK payload that collects credentials for popular financial and payment services. [...]

Ivanti has disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM), tracked as CVE-2026-1281 and CVE-2026-1340, that were exploited in zero-day attacks. [...]

Topic: BoidCMS v2.1.2 Apache .htaccess Rule Bypass Leading to Information Disclosure Risk: Low Text:# Title: Apache .htaccess Rule Bypass Leading to Information Disclosure # Author: nu11secur1ty # Date: 2026-01-29 # Vendor: ...

Topic: Nginx 1.25.x Server Version Information Disclosure Risk: Low Text:During security testing, the target web server was found to expose its exact Nginx version (1.25.x) via HTTP response headers....

Posted by Andrey Stoykov on Jan 29

# Exploit Title: Elgg - Username Enumeration
# Date: 1/2026
# Exploit Author: Andrey Stoykov
# Version: 6.3.3
# Tested on: Ubuntu 22.04
# Blog:
https://msecureltd.blogspot.com/2026/01/friday-fun-pentest-series-47-lack-of.html

// HTTP Request - Resetting Password - Valid User

POST /action/user/requestnewpassword HTTP/1.1
Host: elgg.local
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:148.0)
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/148.0
Accept:...

Posted by Andrey Stoykov on Jan 29

# Exploit Title: Elgg - Lack of Password Complexity
# Date: 1/2026
# Exploit Author: Andrey Stoykov
# Version: 6.3.3
# Tested on: Ubuntu 22.04
# Blog:
https://msecureltd.blogspot.com/2026/01/friday-fun-pentest-series-48-weak.html

// HTTP Request - Changing Password

POST /action/usersettings/save HTTP/1.1
Host: elgg.local
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:148.0)
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/148.0
Accept:...