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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.

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© Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

© Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

© Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

Vulnerability reports and responsible disclosures are essential for website security awareness and education. Automated attacks targeting known software vulnerabilities are one of the leading causes of website compromises.

To help educate website owners about potential threats to their environments, we’ve compiled a list of important security updates and vulnerability patches for the WordPress ecosystem this past month.

The vulnerabilities listed below are virtually patched by the Sucuri Firewall and existing clients are protected.

Continue reading Vulnerability & Patch Roundup — January 2026 at Sucuri Blog.

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. [...]

Hackers compromised a MicroWorld Technologies update server and fed a malicious file to eScan customers.

The post eScan Antivirus Delivers Malware in Supply Chain Attack appeared first on SecurityWeek.

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. [...]

Last month, while working on a WordPress cleanup case, a customer reached out with a strange complaint: their website looked completely normal to them and their visitors, but Google search results were showing something very different.

Instead of normal titles and descriptions, Google was displaying casino and gambling-related content. We have been seeing rising cases of spam on WordPress websites. What made this even more confusing was where the spam was appearing.

Continue reading Shadow Directories: A Unique Method to Hijack WordPress Permalinks at Sucuri Blog.

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. [...]

From an Anthropic blog post:

In a recent evaluation of AI models’ cyber capabilities, current Claude models can now succeed at multistage attacks on networks with dozens of hosts using only standard, open-source tools, instead of the custom tools needed by previous generations. This illustrates how barriers to the use of AI in relatively autonomous cyber workflows are rapidly coming down, and highlights the importance of security fundamentals like promptly patching known vulnerabilities.

[…]

A notable development during the testing of Claude Sonnet 4.5 is that the model can now succeed on a minority of the networks without the custom cyber toolkit needed by previous generations. In particular, Sonnet 4.5 can now exfiltrate all of the (simulated) personal information in a high-fidelity simulation of the Equifax data breach—one of the costliest cyber attacks in history­­using only a Bash shell on a widely-available Kali Linux host (standard, open-source tools for penetration testing; not a custom toolkit). Sonnet 4.5 accomplishes this by instantly recognizing a publicized CVE and writing code to exploit it without needing to look it up or iterate on it. Recalling that the original Equifax breach happened by exploiting a publicized CVE that had not yet been patched, the prospect of highly competent and fast AI agents leveraging this approach underscores the pressing need for security best practices like prompt updates and patches.

AI models are getting better at this faster than I expected. This will be a major power shift in cybersecurity.