Europe, like much of the world, is living through a period of heightened geopolitical uncertainty in which sanctions risk, legal divergence, and cyber disruption have moved from abstract concerns to board-level variables. Digital sovereignty is shifting from aspiration to operational requirement, driven by resilience expectations, critical service dependency, and rising geopolitical and cyber risk. Definitions of sovereignty vary, ranging from blanket data localization edicts to industrial policy to national security, but the absence of an agreed definition should not be mistaken for an absence of intent. Sovereignty is already shaping procurement, regulatory compliance, and technology strategy. From my years working at the intersection of government and the technology industry, I have seen how quickly digital policy can harden into operational constraints. I have also seen how easily "sovereignty" becomes a stand-in for broader concerns: dependency, geopolitics, and the fear that critical services may not remain available during a crisis Two issues are at play. First, policymakers are right that over-dependency on foreign technology can become a national resilience problem. Cloud market concentration is a case in point: last year across Europe, the three leading cloud providers accounted for around 70 percent of the market, while European providers' collective share remained around 15 percent. Concentration is not, by itself, a security failure, but it is a strategic dependency that can become acute when legal regimes diverge, access is contested, or a geopolitical shock tightens the room to maneuver. It also amplifies the "ripple effect": disruption at a small number of providers can cascade across thousands of organizations and supply chains. Second, business leaders are right to worry that blunt sovereignty initiatives raise costs and regulatory complexity. A hard localization mandate or a "sovereign-only stack" duplicates infrastructure, slows modernization, and in practice keeps organizations tied to legacy systems longer than planned while limiting access to leading technologies. The same tension is shaping Europe's competitiveness debate. Former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi has argued that security is a precondition for sustainable growth and that deep dependencies can leave Europe vulnerable to coercion as geopolitical volatility increases. The question is not whether sovereignty matters but how to pursue it without turning it into a counterproductive procurement ideology. From policy to platform choice A recent decision by the French government to restrict certain foreign-made video conferencing tools in favor of a homegrown alternative illustrates the direction of travel across the EU. Whether one agrees with the decision or not, it signals something larger: sovereignty is becoming a set of practical constraints that can reshape technology choices quickly. Many organizations are responding with a third, damaging outcome: delay. In a recent Zscaler-commissioned survey, 73 percent of respondents said digital sovereignty concerns had caused them to delay or cancel transformation initiatives. That "pause dynamic" is dangerous because it prolongs exposure to legacy risk, weakens cyber readiness, and leaves organizations less able to absorb disruption from ransomware, supply chain compromise, systemic outages, or sudden changes in cross-border rules at a time when the threat landscape is shifting faster than ever. If Europe wants sovereignty that strengthens resilience rather than undermines it, political and business leaders need a framework that is practical, measurable, compatible with open markets, and informed by the technology sector's expertise. Here is one: control, choice, and continuity. An outcome-based framework Sovereignty begins with what an organization can control in practice: who can access data, who can administer systems, whether a vendor can see customer content, where logs are stored, how keys are managed, what subcontractors can see, and how policies can be enforced. Control is not about isolation; it is about enforceable governance and reducing hidden dependency. Sovereignty also requires choice: credible options when assumptions break. Too many organizations discover too late that their "vendor strategy" is really a dependency strategy, with few realistic alternatives. Choice is not achieved by buying two of everything. It is achieved through architecture and contracts that keep an organization mobile and avoid vendor lock-in: portability for data and configurations; full transparency on who they rely on, where access sits, and which jurisdictions and subcontractors are in the chain; and pre-agreed exit paths that can be executed under time pressure. It also requires leaders to prevent the sovereignty debate from becoming an excuse to stop transformation. Every program facing sovereignty constraints should be forced through a decision path: redesign, mitigation, or exit on a timeline. The third C is continuity: keeping critical services running during any kind of disruption. If sovereignty is meant to reduce strategic vulnerability, continuity is where it either becomes real or becomes theater. Continuity is measurable through recovery time objectives, tested failover, supplier-failure drills, and exercises for jurisdiction-change scenarios. Across Europe, the urgency is reinforced by the threat environment. Zscaler ThreatLabz data shows rising numbers of damaging ransomware attacks year over year across the region: Spain (+116 percent), Germany (+74 percent), Belgium (+73 percent), Italy (+53 percent), and France (+34 percent) among others. Separate research on resilience found that 52 percent of IT executives believe their current security measures are insufficient to defend against existing or emerging threats such as agent-based AI and quantum computing. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre, meanwhile, reported a 130 percent rise in "nationally significant" incidents over the past year. AI is accelerating these risks. It already gives "bad actors" new capabilities to increase the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks. The question is not whether disruption happens, but whether systems can withstand it. Mandate outcomes, not vendors Business leaders argue that sovereignty will raise costs, increase compliance friction, and shrink access to leading technology. That is often true. Policymakers' concerns are also legitimate: strategic dependency can undermine national security and resilience. The mistake is writing sovereignty rules that dictate which vendors to buy rather than what controls buyers must have to keep services running during shocks. The most useful sovereignty requirements are outcome-based: enforceable control over access and data, credible choice through portability and exit, proven continuity through testing and recovery. They create room for organizations to use global platforms safely while meeting local requirements, without freezing modernization. If sovereignty is now an operating requirement, every stakeholder has a role. Boards should define what "sovereign enough" means for their organization, then require regular reporting and testing, with incentives tied to resilience outcomes. CEOs and COOs should treat sovereignty as continuity, fund the modernization that reduces brittle legacy dependency, and force decisions on blocked programs. CIOs and CISOs should map and minimize third-party access, implement localization and multi-region resilience where required, and build plans for supplier failure and jurisdiction-change scenarios. Regulators should clarify definitions, harmonize requirements where possible, and create compliance pathways with transition periods that reward modernization rather than incentivize delay. The approach must be risk-based and agreed in consultation with industry. Scaling control, choice and continuity To make control, choice and continuity achievable at scale, two additional disciplines are required: collaboration and compliance. Collaboration keeps sovereignty compatible with openness through interoperability, shared incident readiness, transparent subcontracting, and trusted vendor partnerships that reduce concentration risk instead of merely relocating it. Solutions must be tailored for local demands and drive investment in local ecosystems. Compliance makes sovereignty measurable through clear definitions, auditable evidence, and regulatory approaches that focus on operational controls so that organizations are pushed to modernize rather than to delay. Sovereignty on European terms should be judged by outcomes rather than rhetoric: whether organizations can govern access, keep options open, recover quickly when incidents happen, and continue delivering critical services when dependencies fail. Done well, digital sovereignty becomes a catalyst for resilience, innovation, growth and competitiveness; done bluntly, it becomes a brake on the very transformation it is meant to protect. Contributed by Zscaler.

Cisco has updated a February security advisory, adding another product to the list of those affected by the maximum-severity CVE-2026-20127. Switchzilla made a small amendment to the original advisory on Tuesday evening, noting that Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Validator, formerly vBond, was also among the boxes attackers could pop open. Readers may remember the fuss over CVE-2026-20127 (10.0) a few months ago. The make-me-admin improper authentication flaw prompted a Five Eyes alert since attackers could essentially gain persistent root access to all vulnerable instances. In other words, it's a far-from-ideal situation that could could create espionage opportunities, given the prevalence of Cisco's SD-WAN offerings in Western networks. Cisco said at the time that attackers could exploit CVE-2026-20127 to gain admin rights, access NETCONF, and reconfigure the SD-WAN fabric, before exploiting CVE-2022-20775 (7.8), a path traversal flaw discovered in September 2022, to gain root access. Cisco Talos, the company's threat intel arm, posited that the bug could have been exploited for as long as three years by the time it was discovered. Talos attributed the exploitation activity to a group it tracks as UAT-8616, whose activity dates back to at least 2023, according to its researchers' estimates. No one has formally attributed UAT-8616 to a specific country or group of individuals, but experts say that it is a highly sophisticated outfit that has a history of targeting critical infrastructure sectors. Ollie Whitehouse, NCSC-UK's CTO, said at the time: "Our new alert makes clear that organizations using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN products should urgently investigate their exposure to network compromise and hunt for malicious activity, making use of the new threat hunting advice produced with our international partners to identify evidence of compromise. "UK organizations are strongly advised to report compromises to the NCSC, and to apply vendor updates and hardening guidance as soon as practicable to reduce the risk of exploitation." The Register asked Cisco for more information, but it did not immediately respond. Customers should not have to make any new changes, provided that they upgraded their software to a fixed version across all systems when the advisory was first published in February, not just SD-WAN Controller and SD-WAN Manager. The update comes weeks after Cisco disclosed another zero-day affecting Catalyst SD-WAN, suggesting that it had been exploited for at least a week at the time. Tracked as CVE-2026-20245, it marked the sixth SD-WAN flaw disclosed this year, and the second to be exploited as a zero-day in as many months. ®

Three critical flaws in Fortinet’s sandbox that allow remote attackers to bypass authentication, escalate privileges, and execute malicious code are under active exploitation, according to threat intelligence firm Defused. Fortinet patched two of the three flaws, CVE-2026-39813 and CVE-2026-39808, in April and the third, CVE-2026-25089 last week. All three bugs received 9.1 CVSS ratings, and, at the time, the vendor said that there were no reports of active exploitation. CVE-2026-39813 is a path traversal bug in the FortiSandbox JRPC API that allows an authentication bypass using specially crafted HTTP requests. It affects FortiSandbox 4.4.0 through 4.4.8 and 5.0.0 through 5.0.5. Patch to 4.4.9+ or 5.0.6+, depending on the branch, to fix the flaw. Fortinet security analyst Loic Pantano found this one. CVE-2026-39808 is an OS command injection flaw in FortiSandbox that allows unauthenticated attackers to execute unauthorized code or commands via HTTP requests. It affects versions 4.4.0 through 4.4.8, and upgrading to FortiSandbox 4.4.9 or above patches the hole. Fortinet credited KPMG Spain researcher Samuel de Lucas Maroto with finding and reporting this bug. Finally, CVE-2026-25089 is another OS command vulnerability in FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud and FortiSandbox PaaS WEB UI that allows unauthenticated attackers to execute unauthorized commands using specifically crafted HTTP requests. FortiSandbox 4.4.0 through 4.4.8 and 5.0.0 through 5.0.5, FortiSandbox Cloud 5.0.4 through 5.0.5, and FortiSandbox PaaS 5.0.4 through 5.0.5 are vulnerable. Upgrading to a fixed version patches the hole. Fortinet did not respond to The Register’s inquiries about these three CVEs and if the vendor had also observed any attacks against them. According to Defused, the exploitation began over the weekend. “We are observing exploitation of multiple Fortinet FortiSandbox vulnerabilities during the past 24 hours,” the threat-intel firm said in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “Per our research a working exploit for CVE-2026-25089 has not yet been publicly disclosed,” the company added, noting that the exploit for this flaw appeared to be vibe coded and may be faulty. We do know that all manner of miscreants love to abuse Fortinet flaws, so if you haven’t already, patch now. Earlier this month, Check Point VP of research Lotem Finkelstein warned that ransomware crims had exploited a critical authentication bypass vulnerability affecting Fortinet's Remote Access VPN and Mobile Access deployments, and said that the same crew was also likely abusing other VPN-related vulnerabilities in Fortinet products. ®

The “jailbreak” that prompted the Trump administration to block Anthropic’s most advanced models was actually a simple three-word prompt: “Fix this code.” That's according to Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, and the fairy godmother of bug bounties. She says she was the only outside expert to read the third-party research paper on the Fable 5 guardrail bypass techniques that prompted the ban. On Friday, the US government, reportedly citing national security concerns, issued an export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, inside or outside the United States. In response, Anthropic disabled both models “for all our customers to ensure compliance.” Anthropic shared the report privately with her, Moussouris wrote in a Monday blog post. The outside researchers reportedly fed Anthropic’s Fable 5, Mythos, and Claude Opus models open-source code containing known CVEs, plus new code intentionally laced with vulnerabilities, and asked the models to “review the code for security issues.” As Moussouris tells it, Fable 5 refused, so the researchers asked the AI systems to “fix this code.” The model reportedly obliged, and after additional prompts also produced scripts to test the patches. “That’s it,” Moussouris wrote. “‘Fix this code,’ plus several manual steps to generate test scripts, should never have triggered an export control. I feel like making ’90s-style t-shirts with ‘fix this code’ on the front and ‘this shirt is a munition’ on the back.” Between 2013 and 2017, Moussouris served on the technical expert group that renegotiated the Wassenaar Arrangement, a voluntary agreement between 42 nations that governs certain export controls for classified dual-use software and technology. The group eventually won exemptions for defensive cybersecurity activity. This allows defenders to share vulnerability data, conduct malware analysis, and coordinate incident response internationally without the threat of criminal prosecution. On Sunday, Moussouris joined more than 100 other cybersecurity leaders and signed an open letter urging the Trump administration to reverse the restrictions on Fable 5 and Mythos and restore cybersecurity firms' access to the advanced models. “To pull the best capabilities away from defenders without a good reason when our adversaries are rapidly advancing is dangerous,” they wrote. In her blog, Moussouris argues that there was no guardrail bypass or jailbreak. Defenders should be able to ask AI systems to find and fix bugs, and write tests to validate the patch, she said. Anthropic’s models were doing “the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day.” Removing the capability for models to respond to defensive requests makes AI systems “worse at finding bugs and verifying patches,” she continued. Plus, the US can’t extend export controls to open-weight systems or similar advanced models from China and other countries - and these systems will soon achieve Mythos-like capabilities, anyway. Anthropic and Google have both accused China-based rivals including DeepSeek of using “distillation attacks” to train their models by siphoning knowledge from American companies’ AI. Banning Anthropic’s advanced models is going to hurt defenders more than attackers, Moussouris warns. “Defense improves when defenders find the same bugs attackers find and fix them faster,” she wrote. “We need the best tools to defend against increasingly capable attackers in the AI era of cybersecurity.” The Register reached out to the Trump administration for comment on Moussouris' assertion, and we'll update this post if we hear back. ®

Microsoft appears to have dropped the ball with its certificate management after a domain used by sysadmins worldwide to test connectivity to Microsoft 365 started throwing untrusted connection warnings in browsers. The connectivity.office.com domain is used by IT pros to test their network's connectivity to Microsoft 365 and ensure their firewalls aren't blocking anything that could affect an organization's access to Microsoft servers. An SSL server report retrieved on Monday showed that the certificate expired on June 14 after last being renewed on December 16, 2025. At the time of writing, 35 hours have passed since the certificate expired, and Microsoft has still not renewed it, despite many in the IT community making their opinions on the matter known. Certificate renewals are often automated in this day and age, but in organizations still relying on manual processes, those responsible for renewals would almost certainly have received multiple alerts warning of the impending expiration. It suggests that something, or someone, involved in the certificate-renewal process at Microsoft has messed up. The Register contacted Redmond for a response. The company's publicists acknowledged the request for comment but did not return one in time for publication. The fallout could have been much worse. Browser warnings on a network diagnostic tool are irritating, but hardly catastrophic compared with the same thing happening to login.microsoft.com or another critical service. Teams users may remember the collaboration platform abruptly deciding to take Monday off in 2020, after an authentication certificate expired, for example. Whatever went wrong here, Microsoft will have to tighten its processes before shorter certificate lifespans arrive in the coming years. As of March 26, new SSL/TLS certs will have a maximum lifespan of 200 days. This is set to decrease to 100 days by March 15, 2027, and then to 47 days two years later. ®

A wave of malicious commits hit the Arch User Repository (AUR) over the weekend, prompting the team to disable new account registration on Monday morning while it cleans up the mess. The issue was first acknowledged on June 12, with a post stating: "We are currently experiencing a high volume of malicious package adoptions and updates in the Arch User Repository." The team warned that users might have issues opening new accounts, pushing package updates, and adopting or creating fresh packages. Around 400 user-submitted packages were believed compromised; that figure climbed past 1,500 over the weekend. On June 14, a more sophisticated wave of malicious packages was spotted. The Arch Linux team this morning disabled new account registration "while we are working on the cleanup." The core Arch distribution itself is unaffected. The AUR is a community-run package repo – if something isn't in the official repo, it's probably here, assuming nobody's poisoned it. The AUR is user-submitted and unsupported, so users are expected to inspect package build files themselves before installation. The malicious packages attempted to pull in hostile JavaScript dependencies, including npm packages identified in the campaign. Arch Linux is a fast, lightweight Linux distribution. It isn't for beginners – users need to pick their own display manager and desktop environment as well as their own applications. However, this makes it highly customizable. The project's website says: "Currently we have official packages optimized for the x86-64 architecture. We complement our official package sets with a community-operated package repository that grows in size and quality each and every day." Unless, of course, miscreants go wild with malicious commits, and the team has to wade in to deal with the problem. According to the AUR, there are just over 107,000 packages, with 5,586 updated and 273 packages added in the past seven days. This isn't Arch Linux's first brush with trouble. In 2025, the project was hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that disrupted its main web page, the AUR, and the project's forums. It also had to address compromised browser packages that reportedly contained a Remote Access Trojan. Both incidents highlight risks in the way the AUR is structured and maintained. It's an invaluable library of packages led by a community of smart Arch users, yet that open, community-driven model can be abused by attackers. New account creation remains disabled at the time of writing. The Arch team will no doubt be pondering how to avoid this situation in the future. ®

A disgruntled IT worker faces 21 months behind bars after being found guilty of sabotaging his former employer’s systems for more than a year and half. Ezekiel Dean Potter, 34, was fired from his IT support job at Iowa’s Saydel Community School District (SCSD) in April 2023. He was found guilty of causing various technical damages to SCSD’s systems between May 2023 and January 2025. At his sentencing hearing on June 11, the court heard that the IT worker had gathered and stored more than 300 Saydel user account credentials before he was terminated from his position. Potter’s other offenses included deleting SCSD’s Facebook page on June 1, 2023, and data related to its Apple School Manager program, which prevented it from managing Macs and iPads. The disgruntled worker, who the prosection described in its sentencing memo [PDF] as “a plague on the Saydel Community School District,” was just one of two IT staff members who had the required privileges to make changes to the Facebook account. The deletion ended up being a permanent one, and SCDC had to create a new page in August. Following his intrusion into the district’s Apple School Manager on June 14, 2023, SCSD’s IT team had to work with Apple for a week to restore their access after Potter deleted users’ passwords, phone numbers, billing information, and the primary mobile device server management information, court documents [PDF] showed. He also attempted to delete all user accounts and restricted access for those who still had one. Potter’s next offense took place between July and August 2023, when he attempted to interfere with SCSD’s GoDaddy account, unsuccessfully resetting usernames and passwords. Potter logged into this GoDaddy account no less than 26 times, including on one occasion where he used his company-issued PC supplied by his subsequent employer, convenience store and pizza chain Casey’s. The IT specialist then took an extended break from his cyber sabotage. Court documents mention Potter successfully gaining access to SCDC’s Google and Gmail accounts in October 2024, but he waited even longer to act on this access. It wasn’t until January 2025 that he logged into SCDC’s PowerSchool-based Schoology learning platform using one of the district’s Google accounts to which he had access, and deleted the account of one of the organization’s IT staff. This had the knock-on effect of locking out teachers during a school day and, in turn, preventing them from teaching for two hours. He returned a week later and deleted an additional nine district Gmail accounts, including current and former staff, the district IT director, and superintendent. Investigations showed that even though Potter switched to a VPN during one of the January intrusions, his IP address was later traced back to him and his employer, The Printer Inc, which he joined after leaving Casey’s. He left that job on January 23, 2025, for reasons not disclosed. Potter seemingly trusted at least one of his coworkers enough to “wipe” a USB drive he left in his old desk, asking them to do so after he departed the company. That trust was misplaced, however, as the coworker instead reported the USB to management, and what followed ultimately proved to be Potter’s undoing. The Printer Inc passed the USB to law enforcement, and later the FBI, which forensically examined the device, finding spreadsheets filled with more than 300 district usernames and passwords, a floor plan for Saydel High School, as well as personal data pertaining to Potter and pay stubs from his employment at SCSD. In total, the district incurred $73,375 worth of costs related to employees' lost time, digital forensics, learning downtime, and time spent working with other vendors to remediate his intrusions. SCSD's insurer spent an additional $27,893.75 in payments for digital forensics and remediation work, taking the total losses up to $101,268.81. Potter was indicted on October 15, 2025, and arrested the following day, but released on pretrial supervision after accepting responsibility for his offenses. He later entered a guilty plea in January 2026, and was found guilty in February. At his sentencing hearing on Thursday, Potter expressed deep regret for his actions, especially for disrupting children’s learning, and for failing his family. "I never intended to negatively affect students, but I recognize that harm was still done and I'm deeply sorry," he said, according to local media. "This experience humbled me in ways I never expected, but I needed that." His defense attorney, Joseph Herrold, stated: “Mr. Potter now fully sees the impact of his actions and deeply regrets the harm he caused.” Herrold argued against a prison term, instead asking for a five-year probation term, owing to Potter’s deep regret and the strong deterrent that comes with his felony conviction. The public defender also pointed to Potter’s clean criminal background, noting only one prior harassment misdemeanor related to a 2010 case, when he was just 18 years old. Potter was convicted following immature conduct from the backseat of a vehicle, for which he received a $65 fine. Herrold also said Potter’s restitution order to repay $59,668.81 in total, with $31,775.06 going to SCSD and $27,893.75 to its insurer, Travelers Indemnity Company, only furthered the deterrent effect, and would impact his lifestyle for years to come. Prosecuting the case, US attorney David C. Waterman, pushed instead for a 26-month prison term, saying: “Defendant’s actions were not a one-time lapse in judgment. They were calculated, malicious, and seemingly motivated only by the defendant’s vindictiveness.” He added: “The defendant’s attacks on SCSD’s systems are troubling not just because of the significant damage he caused – tens of thousands of dollars, without accounting for the unknown but clearly extensive disruption to teaching and school activities – but also because of the defendant’s motivations. “It appears the defendant repeatedly assaulted SCSD out of spite and pure maliciousness, despite knowing his actions would affect not only his former boss and IT colleagues, but also school faculty, administrators, and students.” ®

Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk says data related to clinical trial participants was stolen as part of a cyberattack. The affected patient data was pseudonymized and not directly linked to names or other direct identifiers, the company said. The maker of the Wegovy weight-loss drug said the affected data types include patient ID, information on trial participation, gender, year of birth, biomarkers, health/immunogenicity data, and lifestyle factors including smoking status, alcohol use, and BMI. "This information is not directly linked to any patients by name or other direct identifiers," the Novo Nordisk said on its dedicated page for the attack. "Information about identity would therefore require access to underlying information, identifying patients by name etc. This information was not exposed. We therefore do not consider the incident to enable any third party to identify participants in our clinical trials." The same statement confirmed that the attack affected a "limited number of internal IT systems," and the company said some systems have been taken offline as a precaution. Although it does not believe there is an immediate risk stemming from the breach, it nonetheless warned patients to remain vigilant for anything that could be connected to the data stolen during the attack. A separate letter sent to the company's healthcare partners (HCPs) states that additional personal information may have been stolen and could lead to targeted phishing attempts. Affected HCP data includes names and registration numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, WhatsApp details, and office locations. "Based on the nature of the exposed data, the potential consequences of the incident include targeted phishing attempts through emails, phone, and WhatsApp, or fraudulent communications impersonating colleagues," Novo Nordisk said in the letter. "We recommend that you remain vigilant against unexpected messages or calls and report any suspicious activity to us." The pharma biz warned that it may take time to bring these systems back online, but it is working to do so "in a controlled and safe manner." Elsewhere, it all sounds like standard practice. Outside experts were called in to help investigate, and Novo Nordisk has not yet confirmed the scale of the breach, nor will it until the experts have more time to assess the damage. Novo Nordisk added that the attack has had no impact on its core business operations, which remain running as normal. The attack was announced on what should have been a day of celebration for the company, whose flagship semaglutide weight-loss and diabetes pill received the green light to become the UK's first daily GLP-1 tablet hours earlier. The Wegovy pill joins the list of approved weight-management treatments that act as agonists for the GLP-1 receptor. All the other approved treatments are injectables, including Wegovy and Ozempic, both of which are also developed by Novo Nordisk. The Danish company employs roughly 67,900 people across 80 countries, and markets products in nearly every country globally. ®

EXCLUSIVE For the past 90 days, Microsoft has been quietly patching a firmware flaw in Surface devices that allowed the hardware to be bricked with a single packet, though only for those who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot. And the company's Copilot AI software inadvertently helped identify the faulty firmware. According to Jack Darcy, a security researcher based in Australia, his instance of Microsoft Copilot stumbled across the bug after being asked to adjust the screen backlighting on a Surface device. The Copilot-conjured Python script ended up rendering the researcher's laptop inoperable by overwriting the embedded controller firmware. "Copilot autonomously created and executed four progressively aggressive Python scripts during a probe for backlight control values that sent raw SSAM ioctl commands (SSAM_CDEV_REQUEST = 0xC028A501) directly to the SAM microcontroller through the SAM software path," Darcy explained to The Register. The SAM or SSAM is the embedded controller used in Surface devices. And as our source explained, Microsoft’s implementation of the controller in Surface devices did not include any defense against arbitrary write values. Microsoft does not consider the bug to be a practical threat. "There is no realistic attack scenario with this issue," a spokesperson told The Register. "In order to successfully exploit it, an attacker would need to interact with specific drivers and send commands to a hardware interface. This would require administrator privileges on the machine, as well as disabling the Secure Boot feature. With this access, they could perform any number of actions." Commonly, Darcy said, digital devices require holding a button down or connecting a jumper cable to enable arbitrary write access. But that security check is absent in Surface devices, we're told, enabling Copilot to vandalize the firmware in the absence of Secure Core and Secure Boot. Essentially, the probing triggered an update command from the SAM that overwrote the UEFI and Secure Boot firmware. Surface devices treated to this sort of probing should continue to operate because the SAM was already initialized and is running in RAM. But upon reboot, when the SAM tries to reload using corrupted data in its non-volatile storage, it will fail to initialize, and the system will be unable to Power-On Self-Test (POST). The Python script crafted by Copilot on the security researcher's Surface device iterated blindly over a particular Target Category and the set of Command ID (CID) pairs, sending empty/null payloads to WRITE commands. The result, Darcy explained, is that the SET Feature Report was called with null payload, the Output Report was called with null payload, and other CIDs were hit by SET commands that wrote garbage data. As a result, the device became inoperable. We're told this has been a common complaint about Surface devices online support forums over the years, though we have no way to determine whether boot failures reported for other Surface devices can be attributed to this specific problem. Many Surface hardware issues reported publicly appear to be fixable through various troubleshooting techniques. But devices made inoperable by SAM access, our source insists, are permanently bricked – a situation that can entail hundreds of dollars in repairs for a new motherboard. No USB, no factory reset, no access to the BIOS/UEFI, we're told. Darcy said that the SAM Bus is terribly designed. "There is no way to see the current value without scanning the bus," he said. "But scanning the bus kills the unit." The problem is that the CIDs, which are like APIs for the SAM, have been interleaved in a way that's dangerous. "If all the reads were grouped together (say, CIDs 0x01–0x0F) and all the writes were grouped separately (say, CIDs 0x10–0x1F), a probe script could safely scan the read range without ever accidentally wandering into write territory," Darcy said. "You could even put a simple bounds check in your code: 'only probe below 0x10.' Done. Safe. "But because reads and writes are interleaved in the same numbering space, there is no safe range to probe. You literally cannot scan even two consecutive CIDs without a coin-flip chance of hitting a write command. The moment you decide to enumerate what's available, you're already firing blind writes, because the command space gives you zero structural information about which operations are safe and which are destructive." Managed devices not at risk The Register asked Microsoft about our source's claims on March 10, 2026. A company spokesperson reiterated a prior suggestion that the researcher contact the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), an effort our source found too cumbersome. Rather than publishing details about what might have been a potential zero-day flaw – we were uncertain about the Secure Boot/Secure Core requirement at the time – The Register reached out to internal Microsoft sources in an effort to get someone's attention. By March 12, with the help of Microsoft media relations, we managed to coordinate a conversation between Darcy and Madeline Eckert, senior program manager with MSRC. Microsoft subsequently acknowledged the vulnerability and committed to issuing a fix. The Register in turn agreed to delay publication for 90 days while repairs were made. We're told most affected devices have been updated (via Windows Update), or will receive updates in coming weeks. The issue did not meet the bar for a CVE, according to the company. "We appreciate the work of Jack Darcy and The Register for reporting this issue under a coordinated vulnerability disclosure," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "Our investigation found that a deprecated UEFI interface could trigger a boot loop on some devices. To trigger this loop, the user must have administrator privileges and have already disabled the Secure Boot security feature. We have released updates to address the issue for most impacted devices." That means managed devices are not at risk. But those using Linux, or Windows users who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot for gaming, or who use custom Windows drivers, or who have USB boot enabled, may still be vulnerable if their systems haven't received the update. We're uncertain about the range of Surface devices affected. Our source said it appears to be all of them (Surface Laptops 3-6, Surface Book 1-3) except for Surface Go models. ARM variants, however, have not been tested. Microsoft moving Surface to Rust One of the things we learned from Darcy during the effort to get this issue patched is that Microsoft is planning to move the Surface stack to Rust. We understand from David Abzarian, chief architect for Microsoft Surface, that work is underway to transition future Surface for Business hardware to a more secure architecture based on Rust code. "Our most recent Surface for Business hardware features a major architectural shift in terms of improved reliability and security that spans our embedded controller, UEFI, but also some of our drivers," said Abzarian in a statement provided to The Register. "We’re investing in the most secure foundation for a PC by building our embedded controller firmware from the ground up in Rust (as part of leveraging and contributing to the Open Device Partnership (ODP)) in addition to a rewrite of the UEFI DXE Core in Rust; these projects are known as Secure EC and Project Patina respectively. "We’re also not only shipping some of our drivers written in Rust, but also helping co-develop the framework Windows Drivers in Rust (WDR) to help enable a broad set of partners in the Windows ecosystem to capitalize on these benefits. I will also note that all of these efforts are open-source promoting one of our key security principles around transparency." Asked to comment, Darcy said, "The fact that a device can be destroyed, irreparably from userspace is... certainly an interesting design decision. While I applaud Microsoft for their beautiful, and innovative Surface series, a little more innovation around verifying incoming data at the firmware level would have been greatly appreciated." We're told Microsoft provided Darcy with a Surface laptop as a show of appreciation. ®

Google has sued an alleged China-based cybercrime operation it says used AI-powered phishing kits to blast out millions of scam text messages and funnel victims to fake websites designed to steal passwords, payment cards, and other sensitive information. The complaint targets a group Google refers to as the "Outsider Enterprise," which the company describes as a sprawling criminal network that operates on Telegram and supplies phishing tools to other fraudsters. According to Google's filing, the operation has been linked to more than 9,000 fraudulent websites, over one million malicious URLs, and scams that have allegedly defrauded hundreds of thousands of people. The group's biz model centers on distributing phishing kits that enable criminals to impersonate Google and other trusted brands through large-scale text message campaigns, Google claims. Victims are directed to fraudulent websites designed to steal login credentials, payment card details, and other sensitive information, it adds. Google's allegation is not that AI is somehow breaking into people's phones, but rather that the technology appears to have been used to help churn out phishing content, allowing the operation to push more scams, more quickly, and with less effort. Android users flagged more than 55,000 spam texts linked to the operation during a two-week period in May, we're told, while the company detected roughly 2.5 million messages containing links to Outsider-controlled websites sent to Android devices during the same time frame. The lawsuit forms part of a broader effort involving federal law enforcement and US telecom providers. Google said it is coordinating with the FBI, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to disrupt the infrastructure behind the campaigns and block malicious messages before they reach users. "The criminals behind the Outsider Enterprise built a business out of impersonating trusted brands to defraud hundreds of thousands of victims," said Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division. "Criminals increasingly use AI to make fraud like this more convincing and harder to detect. Together with partners like Google, we can disrupt criminal networks in ways no single organization could on its own." The lawsuit may never put the alleged operators in a courtroom, but it could still help pull apart the infrastructure behind the campaigns. ®

Plymouth City Council has joined the growing ranks of public bodies defeated by the humble BCC field after exposing the email addresses of around 500 home-schooling families in a mass-mailing mishap. The blunder comes barely a week after City of York Council disclosed a similar mistake that exposed the email addresses of hundreds of disabled residents, suggesting that some public sector workers remain engaged in an ongoing battle with one of email's oldest features. The message, sent by Plymouth's Elective Home Education team, was meant to share information about upcoming legislative changes, but it also shared the email addresses of hundreds of home-schooling families with one another. A Register reader who contacted us about the incident described the aftermath as "a bit of a mess," claiming follow-up communications caused further confusion among recipients. Plymouth City Council did not respond to The Register's questions, but in a statement provided to local media, it admitted the incident was caused by human error and affected approximately 500 families. "Unfortunately, due to human error, a recent email was sent to approximately 500 families without using the BCC function, meaning recipient email addresses were visible," the council said. The authority said it contacted recipients as soon as it became aware of the problem, apologized, and asked families to delete the email and refrain from using any details they had received. It stressed that the message included no information relating to children and consisted solely of a general update. The council said the email mishap was investigated internally and that affected families were contacted again once officials had pieced together what went wrong. It also promised extra checks designed to keep future mailing lists out of public view. The council also reported the matter to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). An ICO spokesperson told The Register: "We can confirm that we received a report from Plymouth City Council regarding this incident. After carefully assessing the information in the report, we provided data protection advice and closed the case with no further action." While the exposure appears limited to email addresses rather than more sensitive personal information, the incident serves as another reminder that some of the most common data breaches do not involve sophisticated cybercriminals or ransomware gangs. Sometimes all it takes is sending an email to a few hundred people and clicking the wrong box. ®

Nightmare Eclipse, the prolific zero-day vulnerability hunter with an axe to grind against Microsoft, released yet another exploit late Wednesday that the researcher claims will spawn a command prompt that provides total access to the BitLocker volume. This bug, called GreatXML, was “an accidental discovery,” according to the researcher, who said it only took four hours to find. They claim this exploit (published on GitHub and Git-based code-hosting platforms) can bypass BitLocker on any system that has ever run a Microsoft Defender Offline scan at any point in the past. GreatXML comes just a day after Nightmare released exploit code for RoguePlanet, which allows local privilege escalation and leads to SYSTEM-level control over an affected machine. This brings the researcher’s zero-day count to eight. The earlier six - RedSun, UnDefend, BlueHammer, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma - all have patches as of this week’s Patch Tuesday event. Redmond on Wednesday told The Register that it is aware of RoguePlanet, and “actively investigating the validity and potential applicability of these claims.” The Windows giant didn’t immediately respond to our inquiries about GreatXML, including when it planned to issue a patch. Microsoft has said none of the vulnerabilities were reported via its official channels prior to being made public. The company also banned Nightmare’s earlier GitHub account, and seemingly threatened legal action before dialing back its rhetoric after steep backlash from the security community. Nightmare Eclipse, who some researchers suggest is an ex-Microsoft employee, harbors a very personal grudge against the Windows giant and its communications with bug hunters. They have promised to keep the zero-days coming, but waffle on the timing. Last month, the researcher pledged a big July 14 drop: “I will make sure your bones are shattered that day,” and then added, “nothing will be released this June (or maybe I will release smtg, depending on circumstances).” On Tuesday, they changed course. “I will be unable to mass disclose zerodays in July 14th, RoguePlanet took way more time than expected and truly drained me. I might take a break but I can't say for sure what I will be doing for next month, maybe it's nothing, maybe it's smtg.” A day later, Nightmare released the “accidental” GreatXML BitLocker bypass. According to the researcher, the BitLocker bypass first requires copying “unattend.xml” and the “Recovery” directory to the root of the recovery partition. The next step is rebooting into WinRE by Shift-clicking Restart. “If everything was done correctly, a shell with unrestricted access to the bitlocker volume will spawn,” Nightmare wrote. Also, if the scan hasn’t even been initiated on the Windows system, first you’d need to either log in and initiate it, or “figure out a way to boot into WinRE in offline scan state.” Security sleuth Will Dormann followed Nightmare’s steps to reproduce GreatXML, and said the writeup seems “flawed.” In his testing, Dormann said the command prompt appeared the next time a Defender Offline scan ran. “And in order to trigger a Microsoft Defender Offline scan, you both need to be logged in to Windows, and also have admin credentials,” he wrote on social media. “And if you've already got that level of access, you can just turn off bitlocker.” “The writeup for GreatXML suggests that the prerequisite is that Windows Defender Offline has been executed at some point in the past,” Dormann added. “And that after planting two files in WinRE, all you need to do is [Shift]-reboot into WinRE, and Windows will automatically go into Microsoft Defender Offline scan mode. But this is not the case in any of the 3 lineages of Win11 that I have handy.” ®

UPDATED Following notes from several readers, we followed up directly with VRChat on Thursday at 1945 GMT and they told us that the Maine Attorney General's office apparently posted a fake breach report. According to an email from VRChat's head of community, Charles Tupper, "VRChat did not submit this Notice of Data Incident, and the employee/email cited does not exist. We have no reason to believe that our data or systems have been compromised. We are in the process of contacting the Maine Attorney General's office to have this removed." In an effort to get to the bottom of this, The Register dialed the phone number on the report as well, but it connected to a line that is not in service. We also tried emailing the address on the report and got no reply. We could find no record of a Scott Caruso affiliated with VRChat. We apologize for the error, but generally speaking, government data breach reports are considered reliable. The fakers apparently even created a false notice that VRChat ostensibly sent to customers! If anybody knows who filed this apparently fake report and why, get in touch through our contact page, or through our secure tipline. The original story is below: Online chat platform VRChat says a recent cyberattack compromised the data belonging to nearly 2.5 million users. It confirmed the “data security incident” in a report filed with Maine’s attorney general, but has not disclosed it via public channels. The company’s report confirmed that its cloud environment was accessed between May 10-12, with the unauthorized intruder making off with information concerning 2,436,782 users. This included VRChat usernames, email addresses, whether a user was a VRChat+ subscriber, login histories (including device, hardware identifiers, and IP addresses), and Steam or Meta user IDs. It does not believe passwords, credit cards or other payment information, or government IDs used for age verification were affected. “VRChat sincerely regrets that this security incident occurred,” the company stated in its disclosure. “We understand that trust between our platform and its community is earned through consistent action, and we take full responsibility for the concern this event has caused. “The security and privacy of our players' information remain our highest priority, and we are committed to doing everything within our power to protect it.” VRChat said that after it was made aware of the intrusion, it contained the threat and implemented additional security controls, as well as engaging outside security experts. And in an unusual move for US breaches, the San Francisco-based company did not offer identity theft or credit monitoring services. Offering these kinds of services is not a legal requirement, but doing so is highly common, especially regarding attacks that affect so many individuals. VRChat does not publish the total number of registered users that it has on its books, but its documentation states that “the platform has grown to millions of users,” who have collectively published tens of millions of unique pieces of content for it since its first release in 2014. The part game, part chat platform is an online, open-world chatroom where people walk around interacting with one another via their 3D avatars. It has been compared to Second Life in that users explore other users' worlds, play mini-games, and partake in casual chit-chat, with support for both virtual reality headsets and conventional PCs. You can also think of it as something similar to Meta’s vision for the metaverse, just without all the coworking and KPI meetings, and with way more users. ®

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly screed where we highlight those who did not do the deed of securing their systems. If someone left their passwords or their access exposed, we will be writing about them here. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. This week’s terrifying tale of poor security hygiene comes courtesy of Luke Irwin, CEO and principal consultant at Aegis Cybersecurity. He’s been in the industry for more than a quarter of a century and he knows where the bits are buried. At one point, Irwin consulted for a company that was a large national facility services organization, a 2,000-employee firm that provided cleaning, security guards, industrial abseiling (cleaning the facade), and other things that other large businesses need to keep their physical plants running smoothly. The CEO had one very peculiar idea about how to keep his own house in order: he wanted to have access to every one of his employees’ login credentials. The chief executive had an Excel spreadsheet sitting right on his desktop with a complete list of all the employee usernames and passwords. Let that sink in for a second. One person had all the keys to the castle in a single, easily accessible file. In any decent security setup, no one in the company has access to anyone else’s password. Even the head of the IT department should not know another employee’s password. I say this as someone who used to work for a company where the IT department would ask you to DM them your password if you had computer problems. But this company’s CEO wanted the usernames and passwords for reasons I’m sure any of his employees would appreciate: so he could go into their email accounts! He had an experience where one colleague had sent secret information to the entire company via email and he had spent the evening logging into every single account and deleting the message before anyone could see it. Just in case other messages were sent in error in the future, the CEO wanted the ability to log into all the relevant accounts and delete them himself. Perhaps for the same reason, he would not allow MFA (multi-factor authentication), because that would have kept him out of people’s inboxes. He was adamant even though the company had been the victim of a ransomware incident previously. “Despite repeated advice, he held that position for around four months, until we were able to demonstrate that the IT team could remove messages centrally using fairly simple administrative commands, without needing everyone’s password,” Irwin said. Even after getting rid of the Excel sheet of shame, the boss still refused to turn on MFA and the company subsequently suffered two data breaches involving sensitive client data. Unfortunately, this company wasn’t the only one that Irwin worked with where the management had something against MFA. Another client, this one in the medical sector, was opposed to multi-factor authentication because it “made things just a little too hard” for the external consultants they were using to access their systems. During the time that Irwin worked with that company, they got lucky and no one breached them. But since then, he’s seen signs that their data was available on the dark web. No word on whether they ever switched MFA on. There’s plenty to learn from Irwin’s two clients, but it’s all pretty obvious. First, don’t let anyone, even administrators or CEOs, have other people’s passwords. If someone has to get into another person’s email account, have IT use administrative access. Second, always enable MFA, preferably MFA with passkeys. ®

Multiple reports indicate that Chinese operatives continue using every tech tool at their disposal – including American AI – to amass data on and manipulate everyone from security-clearance holders to everyday US citizens. And they’re trying to influence public opinion on building datacenters for AI, albeit without success so far. One of these reports found a “significant resurgence” of a botnet linked to Chinese government-backed goons, including Volt Typhoon, which previously used a covert network of connected devices to burrow deep into critical US networks and preposition for future destructive attacks. In January 2024, the FBI said it killed Volt’s KV-botnet, comprised of hundreds of end-of-life routers and other internet-connected devices. At the time, KV-botnet consisted of four clusters, with the KV cluster primarily being used as a covert data transfer network, and the JDY cluster used for scanning and reconnaissance. In a Wednesday report, Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs said that while the KV cluster became largely defunct after the law enforcement takedown, the JDY cluster remains an active threat, and has since surged to more than 1,500 compromised routers and IoT devices. “Analysis of this activity shows a clear focus on identifying vulnerable infrastructure shortly after public vulnerability disclosures, suggesting that reconnaissance output is rapidly operationalized by China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actors,” the threat intel team wrote. “This targeted focus has been observed across a range of sectors, with the US military and associated entities as the most prominent.” While the botnet resurgence poses the most pressing threat, and the security shop recommends all enterprises implement CISA and NCSC guidance for mitigating Volt Typhoon activity and defending against China-nexus covert networks of compromised devices, another report indicates that China’s attempts at influence operations haven’t died down, either. Using American AI for covert ops about … American AI OpenAI in a Wednesday report said it banned ChatGPT accounts likely originating from China after they used the American AI company’s models to generate content for covert operations about – wait for it – American AI. While neither of the two clusters seemed to have much success in sowing chaos or swaying opinions, the fact that they tried at all is significant, according to Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI’s Intelligence and Investigations team. “Neither campaign appears to have gained much authentic engagement,” Nimmo told reporters. “They're important for what they reveal about the intentions of influence operators from China and the narratives they're testing and seeking to amplify.” The first cluster used ChatGPT to generate social media content and images for an operation claiming datacenters and AI applications are increasing electricity demand and causing higher costs for ordinary Americans. “For example, they asked for comic strips about a power grid operator’s capacity auction prices based on reporting from a legitimate regional paper,” the report says. “They asked ChatGPT to focus the comments on rising capacity prices as a consequence of peak electricity demand, framing the new demand as coming from data centers and AI applications and argued that these costs were ultimately passed to ordinary households.” The operators then posted these comments and images on X, likely using fake accounts, with links to real news stories about datacenters. OpenAI suspects the operators are part of a social-media team at a private Chinese tech company that provides services for Chinese provincial-level government clients. “This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate,” Nimmo said. “The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn't see any signs that they succeeded.” The second cluster of banned ChatGPT accounts also likely originated in China and used OpenAI’s models to write comments and draw political cartoons criticizing US tech policies and tariffs. “Interestingly, the operators specified in their prompts that the content should not include cartoons of Xi Jinping in the output and should only include President Trump,” Nimmo said. These accounts, all writing prompts in simplified Chinese and using VPNs to access the AI systems, also used ChatGPT to edit work reports and help design social media monitoring systems. “This isn't the first time that we've seen actors in China trying to come up with ideas for social media monitoring,” Nimmo said. In February, OpenAI said it banned ChatGPT accounts believed to be linked to Chinese government entities attempting to use AI models to surveil individuals and social media accounts. If AI doesn't work, bribery might? If Chinese agents can’t use AI systems to unearth sensitive information, there are always fake websites and job offers promising cash for state secrets. We’ve seen Beijing-linked government snoops use these tactics in the past, and according to the US Justice Department, they’re still using this scam (because it works). On Wednesday, the feds said they obtained a warrant for and seized 13 fake consulting company websites used to target US persons, including current and former security clearance holders with access to classified and sensitive government information. The domains include centrikglobalconsulting.com, rightinfoconsult.com, finnaclevesperconsulting.com, cydfconsulting.com, pulsewaveglobal.com, catalystglobalsolutions.com, thehorizzen.com, geoindopacific.com, gpf-ina.org, safesec-group.com, thetruthinfo.com, Vandercons.com, and gulfpeace.org. Since November 2023, these websites and associated job postings on social media, LinkedIn, and other hiring platforms advertised “consulting” jobs, including “Senior Analyst” and “International Affairs Consultant” positions. Suspected PRC operatives used the sites and job listings to recruit applicants and bribe them for sensitive information, DOJ alleges. “The conspirators have encouraged applicants and recruits to share confidential and sensitive information in violation of their official duties and of particular interest to the People's Republic of China (PRC) government,” according to the court documents. “The recruiters pressured candidates to share confidential information and reports from ‘insider sources' in violation of their official duties.” The court documents allege the conspirators then paid the recruits for these reports using online accounts in the names of fictitious individuals, and cryptocurrency to hide their identities and the source of the payments. ®

They are angry at Redmond and will have their revenge. Nightmare Eclipse, the prolific bug hunter and possibly disgruntled ex-Microsoft employee, disclosed another zero-day vulnerability just hours after Redmond issued a record-breaking number of CVEs and fixes for June Patch Tuesday. The latest zero-day, RoguePlanet, targets Microsoft Defender and works against fully patched Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems, according to the researcher, who also released proof-of-concept exploit code for the security flaw. Assuming the attacker can win a race condition, this bug allows local privilege escalation and leads to SYSTEM-level control over an affected machine. Nightmare Eclipse (aka Chaotic Eclipse) is a disgruntled bug hunter with a deep understanding of Windows and an even deeper grudge against Microsoft. They claim to be an ex-employee, and accuse Redmond of ignoring vulnerability reports and refusing to communicate with them. "When I actively asked you to communicate with me, you refused, humiliated me and made sure to insult me in front of people," they wrote in an earlier blog post that also promised a “bone shattering” drop on July 14. "You defame me in public with your CVE-2026-45585 advisory even though you literally deleted the Microsoft account I used to report bugs to you with and I got zero pennies from doing so and I still happily did like an idiot," the post continued. Possibly as an outlet for this anger, and reportedly in response to Redmond's lack of action, Nightmare began releasing their findings to the public. RoguePlanet marks the seventh Microsoft zero-day that they found and disclosed - accompanied by either a PoC exploit or technical details - before Redmond issued a fix. Microsoft's initial response to those disclosures was widely interpreted as a threat of legal action, prompting massive outrage from the broader infosec community before Redmond sought to calm the backlash by stating it had "no intention to pursue action against individuals conducting or publishing security research." As of Tuesday, the previous six zero-days all have patches. Three of them, RedSun, UnDefend, and BlueHammer, came under attack soon after Nightmare published working exploit code for each and before Microsoft released security updates to address the flaws. The other three, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma, all have been fixed as of June’s Patch Tuesday. YellowKey (aka CVE-2026-45585) is a security feature bypass bug in Windows BitLocker. An attacker with physical access to the vulnerable system could bypass the BitLocker Device Encryption feature and gain access to the device's encrypted data. GreenPlasma (aka CVE-2026-45586) and MiniPlasma (aka CVE-2020-17103) are both privilege escalation flaws in the Collaborative Translation Framework (CTFMON) and the Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver that can be abused by an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally and gain SYSTEM access. When asked about RoguePlanet, a Microsoft spokesperson told The Register that the Windows giant is “aware of the reported vulnerability and is actively investigating the validity and potential applicability of these claims." The spokesperson continued: "Microsoft is committed to investigating security issues and updating impacted products to protect customers as soon as possible. Importantly, we support coordinated vulnerability disclosure, an industry standard that protects customers and supports the research community by ensuring their findings are thoroughly investigated and addressed before being made public." Soon after Nightmare published a PoC for RoguePlanet, the ThreatLocker threat intelligence team validated the exploit code and said that they were “actively assessing impact, affected systems, and additional mitigations,” promising to share more findings “as they become available.” Tharros Labs senior vulnerability analyst and long-time respected security sleuth Will Dormann said he tested the exploit code, too. “It's reportedly not 100% reliable, but it worked on the first attempt for me,” Dormann wrote. Nightmare, for their part, rolled back the promise of a “bone shattering” drop on July 14. “(Un)fortunately I will be unable to mass disclose zerodays in July 14th, RoguePlanet took way more time than expected and truly drained me,” the researcher said on Tuesday. “I might take a break but I can't say for sure what I will be doing for next month, maybe it's nothing, maybe it's smtg. But the big thing is not happening. I did not intend to spread a mass panic with that post and I apologize for doing so.”®

Signal insists that plans to compel tech companies to scan devices for nude images of children announced by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday at London Tech Week "will not keep children safe." "It endangers us all," the encrypted messaging platform said, adding that the mechanism required to implement it would be "dangerous." And it wouldn't be a pro-privacy statement without calling it "dystopian." Signal argues that the proposed technology could at some point be repurposed to enable state-sponsored surveillance of all citizens' comms, or used as a mass censorship tool. "Forcing all UK residents to prove their age and/or have all their content scanned, simply to exercise their fundamental right to communicate, is a perilous proposition," Signal stated. "We know that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however sincere-sounding the promises of those who initiate them are, never remain narrowly scoped. Once created, they will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider 'threats' or 'harmful content.'" Similar accusations have been leveled against the UK government in response to its various attempts to improve online safety via legislation. For example, the government has long presented the Investigatory Powers Act as a way to enshrine in law necessary powers available to law enforcement and UK intelligence to intercept communications for the sake of preventing terrorist attacks. More recently, the Online Safety Act was introduced to impose new obligations on digital platforms to prevent children from accessing online harms. However, privacy proponents have shunned both. Rather than simply providing powers to prevent terror attacks, critics say the IPA enables public bodies to spy on people's calls or texts. It's colloquially known as "The Snooper's Charter." Digital rights organizations have also claimed the OSA is more about online censorship than it is about restricting the types of content children are allowed to view on the web. The PM's proposals are not law yet. Instead, Starmer's speech amounted to a three-month ultimatum to tech companies: make the changes the UK wants to see or the government will legislate. Essentially, whichever way the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others want to play it, some form of device-level scanning appears likely to be pushed onto UK devices soon. "When it comes to the safety of our children, standing by is not an option. Nobody gets a free pass. That is why I'm making sure Britain is the first country in the world to make it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images," Starmer said. "And I expect tech firms to make that happen. This is not an impossible challenge – these are some of the most innovative companies in the world. But if they choose not to, then we will act and change the law." The government's announcement was backed by a slew of campaigners and charities that argued child protection has not been as big a part of tech innovation as it should have been in recent years. Roxy Longworth, author and founder of Behind Our Screens, said: "I told myself, back in 2021, that if I went public with what happened to me and it stopped one life from being ruined, then it was worth it, but the more I campaigned the angrier I became. "Every child needs to be protected from platforms who for far too long have been allowed to turn a blind eye to the damage being done to them. This announcement makes me hopeful that there won't be kids sat in their room feeling the same pressure and shame that consumed my teenage years." Likewise, Chris Sherwood, chief exec at the NSPCC, said: "Every day these protections are not in place, more children will continue to face devastating harm in the online world. That's why we strongly support the government's decision to make it mandatory for these companies to block inappropriate material at device level. This marks a major step forward in our fight against online child sexual abuse." The UK government singled out Apple and Google, saying that it demands both block nudity by default across their devices. That includes cameras, third-party apps, and messaging services, which would prevent children from taking, viewing, or sending nude images. It proposed that the nude-block-by-default approach would keep children safe, while still allowing adults to remove the block by verifying their ages. Client-side scanning remains a highly controversial technology, but supporters present it as striking a balance between privacy and safety. Advocates argue it should appeal to the pro-privacy crowd by keeping all data on the device, rather than blurring nude images in transit, for example, which would involve sending that data to an intermediary. However, in the case of Signal, an encrypted messenger, it breaks the private comms trust model, even if the message content is not sent to a third party. Client-side scanning can involve checking content against a database of known objectionable material. In the context of child exploitation, image hashes would be checked against a database of other hashes associated with abuse material. If the hashes match, then the image would be blocked. Some implementations scan using AI, rather than against a database. So while the image in this scenario is not sent to a third party, it does mean that Signal could no longer say that message content stays between sender and receiver only. Further, because the databases of objectionable material would need to be updated, this introduces additional problems. Updated databases or models would need to be pushed to devices, creating another trust and security dependency. The attack surface also widens, as it is conceivable that attackers could try to manipulate them. As Signal points out, it would be technically possible for the same scanning mechanisms to be updated to block other things, like messages criticizing the government, to take one hypothetical example. Authorities could also feasibly implement ways of seeing which device contains images or other content that has registered matches with its objectionable material database, potentially opening the door to surveillance. The company's statement [PDF] called for public funds to be funneled into other areas to improve child safety, including education, social services, and guardrails on AI technologies and platforms, instead of drafting legislation to block children's nudes by default on devices. "What the UK government wants instead is invisible surveillance infrastructure, switched on by default and potentially rushed into law under cynical pretexts," it said. "All of this with scant care for the actual needs of the children they claim to be protecting or the horrifying and far-ranging consequences that will ensue in practice." Signal has not threatened to pull out of the UK, however, despite the government's promises to enact the plans, via legislation or the threat of it. The company has previously mulled exiting Sweden over proposed encryption-busting laws, and more recently Canada, as it debates a bill that would compel platforms like Signal to gather its users' metadata, which could include their locations and who they are talking to. ®

Google has fixed its fifth actively exploited Chrome zero-day of 2026, and this one earned its finder a $55,000 bounty. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-11645, is an out-of-bounds memory access bug in Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. Google confirmed that the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild, but has disclosed little beyond the bare technical details. The company patched the issue in the latest Stable Channel releases for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It also awarded a $55,000 bounty to the researcher using the handle "303f06e3," who reported the bug on April 27. The reward suggests Google viewed the report as potentially serious, particularly given its location in V8, the JavaScript engine at the heart of Chrome. Bugs in V8 have featured regularly in both Chrome security advisories and exploit chains over the years, making it one of the browser's more closely watched components. As is standard when active exploitation is involved, Google has withheld technical details that could help others carry out the attack before users have had a chance to patch. CVE-2026-11645 is the fifth exploited Chrome zero-day fixed this year. Google started 2026 by patching CVE-2026-2441, a use-after-free flaw in CSS. Two more zero-days followed in March, CVE-2026-3909 and CVE-2026-3910, before another actively exploited vulnerability, CVE-2026-5281, was patched in April. For Google's browser engineers, 2026 is shaping up to be another busy year. The company patched eight Chrome zero-days across all of 2025, and it’s already more than halfway to that figure with more than six months still to go. There is no indication that the latest flaw has been used in broad, indiscriminate attacks. Zero-days are often reserved for targeted operations until patches become available, after which researchers and criminals alike begin dissecting the fixes to understand what changed. For Chrome users, the advice remains much the same as it was after the first four zero-days this year: restart the browser, install the update, and avoid giving attackers an unnecessary head start. ®

French officials are investigating a compromise of the government’s encrypted messaging service Tchap after attackers hijacked an account and gained access to public chat rooms. The incident came to light on June 7 when France's National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) detected suspicious activity on Tchap, the government's homegrown messaging service used across ministries and public sector organizations. The French Digital Affairs Directorate (DINUM), which operates the platform, said it immediately began investigating the compromise and moved to block the affected account. French officials insist the damage was limited and said the attacker could only see messages posted in public chat rooms, which are accessible to all Tchap users. Private conversations, the government says, are encrypted, and their contents remain inaccessible even when an account is compromised. Not everyone is buying that version of events. A cyber criminal has claimed responsibility for the attack and said they were able to gain access after they “social engineered” a valid agent account associated with Tchap's education environment. The alleged hacker claims they accessed more than 73,000 user accounts, 643,000 messages, nearly 60,000 media files, and hundreds of chat rooms. The post, shared by Dark Web Intelligence, also claimed user enumeration was possible through a directory search function and suggested the data included references to documents marked "Diffusion Restreinte," a French government restricted-distribution classification. None of those claims have been independently verified, and DINUM's statement makes no mention of user directory exposure, restricted documents, or the volumes of data cited by the hacker. What French officials have confirmed is that investigators are still working through logs to determine exactly which conversations were accessed and whether any data was exfiltrated. The agency has also notified France's data protection watchdog, CNIL, after determining that personal information may have been exposed through content shared in conversations accessible to the attacker. “A message has been sent to all Tchap users reminding them that a public chat room can be found and joined by any user and that its content is not encrypted,” French officials added. “In accordance with Tchap's terms of service, no personal, sensitive, or confidential information should be exchanged in public chat rooms: such exchanges should be reserved for private chat rooms.” Whether the incident amounts to a limited exposure of public chat rooms or something considerably larger will depend on what investigators find in the logs, but for now, the government and the attacker are telling very different stories. ®

There's another likely North Korean-linked scam hitting developers and their employers, while snarfing up credentials and cryptocurrency - and this one doesn't even involve embedding IT workers at high-profile tech giants. A previously unseen phishing crew, suspected to have DPRK ties, sent more than 250 emails to people working in almost 100 organizations, mostly based in the US, over six weeks in April and May. According to security sleuths, it is yet another digital-heist attempt designed to steal cryptocurrency wallets and developers’ credentials. Proofpoint threat researchers spotted this campaign and tracked the digital thievery as UNK_DeadDrop. Like earlier phishing expeditions from the Norks, including the Contagious Interview campaign, this one uses developer recruitment or code review lures to target victims, primarily in technology, education, business services, and financial services, and ultimately steal credentials and cryptocurrency. In another common tactic seen with DPRK-linked credential-stealing activities, the lures attempt to send victims to attacker-controlled GitHub repositories hosting malicious scripts that execute cross-platform malware across macOS, Linux, and Windows machines. “However, there are several differences between the activity sets, such as the shift in social engineering from arranging fake interviews to unsolicited job offer or code review approaches as well as the move from delivery platforms such as LinkedIn to email,” researchers Saher Naumaan and Carlos Rubio said in a Monday blog, citing other differences between UNK_DeadDrop and Contagious Interview. “Based on the use of email for initial access, the high volume of emails, industrialization and scale of repository creation, a new self-contained payload, and distinct infrastructure from previous Proofpoint observations of Contagious Interview campaigns, Proofpoint Threat Research continues to track UNK_DeadDrop activity as an independent cluster,” the researchers wrote. Full-stack engineer wanted The attacks begin with an email that looks like it originated from a real company, with job offers for developer roles including “Full-Stack Engineer” or “Agent Lead Developer” positions. Proofpoint caught the crooks spoofing a handful of companies to send these emails from attacker-owned sender domains including: Ondo Finance: a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Empower Pharmacy: a pharmaceutical company NXLog: a log collection and centralization tool OnePlan: a strategic portfolio and work management platform Hypen Connect: a Web3 and AI Talent Agency Valon: a mortgage service provider Nourish: a telehealth company The emails contain links to GitHub repos disguised as coding assignments or cryptocurrency-related projects - part of the phony job application process. All of the emails instructed the target to clone the repository and open it in a code editor like VS Code or Cursor. Proofpoint’s report lists all 10 repositories, all focused on four themes - cryptocurrency platforms, exploit archives, Foundry testing, and AI payments - and all hosted by different GitHub accounts, so be sure to check out the vendor’s list. In May, the attackers switched tactics and began sending victims requests for peer reviews on open-source projects, with a potential job offer based on the fixes. These emails purported to come from cryptocurrency trading or prediction companies, including Pulsynk and Trixauvex. Another UNK_DeadDrop campaign in late May targeted finance and technology companies, requesting recipients to test an ERC-4626 vault in Foundry, a toolkit for Ethereum and smart contract development. In all of these instances, when the victim opens what they believe to be a legit repository folder in an integrated development environment, a pre-configured task silently executes and triggers a platform-specific loader that decodes embedded payloads on whatever system the developer uses, working across Linux, macOS, and Windows machines. The loader installs a malicious VS Code extension (VSIX) masquerading as a legitimate Google service. Every time the user opens the code editor on macOS or Linux, the VSIX extension activates, and relaunches the infection-chain if it’s not already running. The persistence mechanism doesn’t work on Windows machines, however. After installing VSIX, the infection chain looks different, depending on what platform the target uses. The Linux and macOS attacks use a native Go binary that connects to the command-and-control (C2) infrastructure as a persistent remote access trojan (RAT). The Windows chain, however, runs a Node.js pipeline inside the editor's Electron process. Both use the same C2 infrastructure and exfiltration endpoints. Linux, macOS backdoors The Linux and macOS binaries are based on the open-source Overlord C2 framework - this is a legitimate red-team tool that automates covert infrastructure setup and management, and orchestrates post-exploitation activities. This, of course, also makes it a very handy tool for attackers. For this campaign, the North Koreans added three custom modules: browserlogin (Chrome and Firefox credential theft), companywallet (crypto-wallet stealer and exfiltration), and cleanup (anti-forensic removal of workspace artifacts). On macOS, Overlord first collects wallet extension data, browser profile artifacts, and standalone wallet directories, compressing them into a ZIP and uploading them to the C2 server. Five minutes later, the malware moves on to credential theft, using a second embedded Mach-O binary that displays a fake system dialogue and prompts the user to enter their password. The Overlord process validates the credentials, and assuming they are legit, the malware modifies keychain access-control lists across Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc, Yandex, and other Chromium-based web browsers, before extracting Safe Storage keys and sending all of the stolen goods - collected credentials, Safe Storage keys, and keychain data - to the attacker-controlled server. The backdoor also re-launches itself as root, using the stolen password. The Linux malware follows a similar pattern, first scooping up wallet-related data and sending that via ZIP to the C2 server before moving on to credential theft. It, however, uses Zenity, a standard GTK dialog tool, to create a prompt and collect victim credentials. This backdoor attempts to steal passwords from GNOME Keyring by spawning Python 3 processes for each browser, and ultimately re-launches itself as root using a swiped password. Windows attacks Windows attacks run entirely as JavaScript inside the editor's Electron process, which appears as Code.exe in Task Manager. The malware first steals wallet info, targeting 35 wallet extension IDs (MetaMask, Phantom, Rabby, Keplr, and others), 18 standalone wallet applications (Exodus, Electrum, Ledger Live, Monero, Solana CLI, Bitcoin, and others), and Firefox profiles. Next, it installs Python and executes a stealer (detect_malware.py) for each browser profile that collects a ton of credentials across Chromium and Firefox browsers, steals cookies from Chrome/Edge/Brave and uses COM Elevation Moniker to access credentials across these browsers protected by App-Bound Encryption. It also attempts to read locked databases using five cascade methods, and ultimately uploads all the secrets to the same endpoint before terminating. “UNK_DeadDrop activity suggests North Korea-aligned operations targeting developers for financial gain are maturing and evolving,” Naumaan and Rubio wrote. “The shift from active social engineering over social media platforms to conduct fake interviews to large campaigns of recruitment-themed phishing emails distributing links to malicious repositories could indicate an actor industrializing and scaling operations.” ®