Authorities in Australia have arrested two men believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group blamed for perpetrating the longest running spree of software supply chain attacks ever.

In a statement released today, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said two men from Western Australia, aged 21 and 23, were arrested in connection with a “sophisticated cybercrime syndicate that allegedly created malicious open-source software to rob thousands of global businesses.”

The AFP did not name the defendants, but KrebsOnSecurity learned the 21-year-old suspect’s real identity in June, and has been communicating with him ever since. This story includes interviews with TeamPCP’s self-described spokesperson, and examines clues left behind by the TeamPCP leader that likely led to his undoing.

TeamPCP vaulted onto the cybercrime scene in late 2025, embedding malicious code in hundreds of open source software tools and extorting victims for profit. Members of the group made headlines by compromising corporate cloud environments using a self-propagating worm dubbed Shai-Hulud, which added malicious code to open source programs maintained by developers whose credentials at public code repositories like GitHub or NPM were phished or stolen.

Writing for Wired, journalist Andy Greenberg described TeamPCP’s core tactic as a kind of cyclical exploitation of software developers.

“The hackers gain access to a network where an open source tool commonly used by coders is being developed,” Greenberg wrote in May. “The hackers plant malware in the tool that ends up on other software developers’ machines, including some who are writing other tools intended to be used by coders. The malware allows TeamPCP’s hackers to steal credentials that let them publish malicious versions of those software development tools, too. The cycle repeats, and TeamPCP’s collection of breached networks grows.”

TeamPCP also has practiced something akin to cyclical recruitment. In May, the source code for the third iteration of Shai-Hulud was published online, and TeamPCP soon after launched a contest offering $1,000 in virtual currency to whichever participant could conduct the largest supply chain operation using the worm’s code. According to the contest rules, participants were scored based on the number of weekly and monthly downloads of packages they compromised — directly incentivizing them to target the most popular code libraries.

“TeamPCP has stated the competition is a recruiting opportunity and they intend to purchase all meaningful access harvested from participants’ campaigns,” the security firm Dataminr wrote. “The $1,000 XMR (Monero) prize is a recruitment floor and has been dismissed by the actor as ‘just like participation trophy,’ adding ‘if you find something good you will be paid way more,’ confirming the contest’s true function as talent identification and malicious access acquisition at scale.”

In March, TeamPCP executed a supply chain attack targeting AI infrastructure by compromising the code for LiteLLM, an open source AI gateway that connects users to more than 100 different large language models. A recent analysis by the security firm CloudSEK found TeamPCPs attack on LiteLLM harvested cloud service keys and other secrets from more than 2,500 organizations, including many of the world’s top technology companies.

In May, TeamPCP claimed credit for compromising at least 3,800 code repositories at the Microsoft-owned GitHub, after a GitHub developer installed a code extension that was compromised by TeamPCP’s malware.

MEET THE CYBERCATS

Security experts say TeamPCP is less of a hacker group than an amalgamation of threat actors from multiple cybercriminal gangs who sometimes work together toward similar goals.

“It is not a structured criminal crew with a single operator,” said Austin Larsen, a principal threat analyst with the Google Threat Intelligence Group. “It is a peer community of individually-skilled actors, with one clear center of gravity.”

That center of gravity is George Prepakis, an accomplished security researcher and self-described exploit developer who operates the Twitter/X profile @kernelstub. Earlier this year, @kernelstub tweeted a public invite link to a Matrix chat server he created and dubbed “Cybercats,” and TeamPCP and several other cybercrime entities have been using this server to communicate daily for the past several months.

Kernelstub, like other administrators in the Cybercats chat, has been using his Twitter/X profile name as his handle in these Matrix communications, frequently tweeting references to other members and to conversations taking place in the Cybercats chat. In a number of cases, the corresponding X accounts for members of the Cybercats chat taunted cybercrime victims publicly before the incidents were reported in the news media.

The Cybercats administrator listed at the top of the screenshot above — “Boxturtle” — is a close associate of TeamPCP who has been tweeting about the group’s conquests under the name @xpl0itrsturtle. This handle corresponds to a data breach broker active on Breachforums and Darkforums who has been selling data stolen in a wave of recent breaches at automobile manufacturers, including BMW Group, Audi, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Toyota, as well as data allegedly taken from Snapchat and SportRadar.

The Cybercats administrator “SeesawSec” in the screenshot above is the alias of whoever is behind the cybercrime group known as Fulcrumsec, which recently claimed credit for data extortion attacks against the pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the data broker LexisNexis, and Avnet, a Fortune 500 distributor of electronic components.

The Cybercats administrator “@pcpcasper” also has been using a similar name on X to discuss TeamPCP’s attacks and victims. This person has an extensive message history on Telegram, where their messages and shared videos show @pcpcasper is an active and vocal member of the National Socialist Network, a neo-Nazi political organization based in Australia.

At one point in these chats, @pcpcasper shared videos and images of what they claimed was their cat, and several of those videos place this user in Western Australia. One source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that @pcpcasper was one of the two arrested, a claim supported by messages that @kernelstub posted online this morning.

The Cybercats member roster pictured above also features an administrator with the username “T,” which is short for the now-banned Twitter/X profile @pcpcats, the account operated by the self-described TeamPCP spokesperson who was arrested today. As we’ll see in a moment, @pcpcats also is from Western Australia.

By the time @kernelstub tweeted a public invite link to the Cybercats Matrix server, T/@pcpcats was posting only infrequently to the group chat, with other members often inquiring as to his whereabouts and well-being. The group’s collective concern related to @pcpcats’s tendency to blame his increasingly extended absences on the use of hallucinogens and other narcotics that kept him awake for days on end, but also caused him to crash in bed for several days after the highs wore off.

WHO IS THE TEAMPCP LEADER?

The Cybercats member @pcpcats has used multiple nicknames on the cybercrime forums, including EllisD25/LSD on Darkforums, BulkDMT on Breachstars, and Express on Breachforums. These accounts are linked because they all advertised the same Tox ID and/or Session ID as instant message contact handles in their cybercrime forum posts. BulkDMT was also known on the forums as DMT Host, which was a virtual private server (VPS) hosting service that was peddled on Darkforums and Breachstars.

According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, Express registered on Breachforums using the email address shitstickpp@gmail.com. Intel 471 finds Express posted on Breachforums across a two-month period in 2025 using four different Internet addresses located in South Africa. On July 30, 2025, Express announced on Breachforums they were selling access to 14 gigabytes of data stolen from South Africa’s State Information Technology Agency.

The threat intelligence platform Flashpoint recorded more than a year’s worth of messages from the TeamPCP leader’s alter ego on Telegram — Persy_PCP —  who claimed they split their life living between two countries [full disclosure: Flashpoint is an advertiser on this blog]. “I have these [files] as well, problem is these are in another country,” Persy_PCP explained to another user inquiring about a stolen data set in November 2025.

Later that month, Persy_PCP complained, “My whole country is racist and they want people like me dead.” Flashpoint records show BulkDMT shared in September 2025 that “this country is going to fucking starve when they take the farmers land,” a likely reference to white landowners in South Africa who claim to be targeted by an ongoing genocide campaign.

This tracks with public reporting on TeamPCP. Cyberscoop reported in June that Google had traced TeamPCP’s residential and mobile Internet address connections to South Africa, “indicating the primary operator was located there during at least some of its attacks.”

BulkDMT also shared on the group chat at Breachforums that they were recovering from an addiction to methamphetamine. “My life is kinda fucked rn [right now], but that’s fine and there isn’t really a point in pouring so much emotional energy into that fact, my parents had money but I unfortunately got really addicted to some things so I don’t get to benefit from that. As long as I continue to survive, stay sober, and move closer towards my goals that’s enough drive and meaning.”

The identity threat protection company SpyCloud finds shitstickpp@gmail.com shows up in the registration of an account called ChristmasSnow on the cybercrime community Raidforums in 2022. Nearly all of the Internet addresses used to access that account came from ISPs in Perth, Australia, SpyCloud found.

KrebsOnSecurity looked up all of those Perth IP addresses in passive DNS records maintained by DomainTools.com, and found one of them — 211.27.196.111 — for several years was used as a private file server by a family in Perth with the last name of Thomson. Those records show at least three hosts — ithomson.direct.quickconnect.to (a remote Synology server), kthomson0061.direct.quickconnect.to, and joshuawthomson39.myqnapcloud.com (a QNAP network storage device) — persisted at that address between 2022 and 2025.

Searching on “joshuathomson39” in the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence reveals an account at the freight forwarding company kwe.com created in the name of Joshua Thomson from Perth, Australia. The open source intelligence platform Epieos finds the phone number attached to that kwe.com account was used to register a Facebook profile for Josh Thomson, which says his family includes a brother named Ruben, his father Ian, and his mom Cindy.

That Facebook profile also says Josh and his family are originally from Pietermaritzburg, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, but currently living in Cottesloe, a beach-side suburb of Perth. A search in DomainTools for Ian Thomson and Australia unearthed five domains by the same registrant, including securecomputing.au, thomson.org.au, and thomsonfamily.net.au. Ian Thomson is a dentist in Cottesloe, and a biography says he graduated from The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Constella finds a joshua@thomson.org.au registered a number of accounts online, but Josh doesn’t seem to have much of a connection to dodgy cybercrime forums. His brother Ruben, on the other hand, has quite the presence on these communities, dating back to at least 2018. Constella reports ruben@thomson.org.au frequently reused the password “joshuathomson1,” and Constella further finds that password was used by just a handful of accounts, including yolosolo17@gmail.com and surfinup8@gmail.com.

According to Intel 471, surfinup8@gmail.com was used to register the user Yolosolo17 on the crime forum Altenen in 2018, and that user account was registered from the Perth address 110.141.230.15. On Altenen, Yolosolo17 advertised free web proxies, as well as the domain rubenthomson.com, which was at one point used to sell steeply discounted iPhones. DomainTools says rubenthomson.com was hosted at 110.141.230.15 and registered to surfinup8@gmail.com.

SpyCloud reports 10.141.230.15 was used by the email address sheepstealing@gmail.com on Raidforums and surfinup8@gmail.com on Nulled, and that the same IP was used by the email addresses ian@thomsonfamily.net.au, jasper@yakuza.cc, and rubenthomson1@gmail.com. SpyCloud also shows that sheepstealing Gmail address is tied to the accounts Sheep420, YoloSolo117 and Yakuza.cc on Raidforums, and to the account “Sheep Stealing” on Hackforums. Intel 471 says sheepstealing@gmail.com was used to register the account DingoFlour on Breachforums in October 2023, as well Sheepx on Altenen.

Epieos reports that ruben@securecomputing.au is tied to an Airbnb account for Ruben, who described himself as a Web developer who went to school at the University of Western Australia and was living outside the country. “Hey, I’m Ruben, my friends call me Ellis. I’m a Perth creative who occasionally books rooms when visiting family and for photography.”

Epieos also finds sheepstealing@gmail.com registered an upwork.com profile under the name Ruben, who said his main skills are setting up secure server hosting solutions and PHP full-stack Web development.

“I’m familiar with Linux, working with relational databases (SQL),” the Upwork profile reads. “I also script in Python mainly for writing social media bots.”

Epieos further discovered sheepstealing@gmail.com is connected to a Microsoft account for Ruben Thomson, and to a now-defunct GitHub account called XmasSnow/XmasSnowisBack that scammed people on the forums in 2022 by claiming to sell exclusive exploits for recently-released software patches (recall that shitstickpp@gmail.com was used to register a forum account named ChristmasSnow).

This same sheepstealing email address registered a Twitter/X account in 2026 called “Gone Fishing” that lists its location as South Africa. That Gmail account also left several reviews for businesses listed on Google Maps over the past seven years, but all of those establishments are located on the west coast of Australia.

The people search service Pipl finds a 21-year-old Ruben Thomson in Western Australia who has a phone number ending in 979. A lookup on that number at Epieos reveals it is connected to a TikTok account under the name Ellis, and to a PayPal account in the name of Ruben Thomson.

Finally, a search on the name Ruben Thomson from Cottesloe at the Australian government’s record of registered businesses finds he has incorporated or served as an official in multiple companies created since 2024, including Secure Computing Solutions, Tensor Industries, and another entity ironically named OPSEC Express. Recall that Express was BulkDMT’s nickname on Breachforums.

It’s ironic because OPSEC is short for the term “operational security,” which refers to techniques and behaviors used to obfuscate and compartmentalize one’s real-life identity online, and using your cybercrime handle as part of your own company name is very much the antithesis of that practice.

There is at least one other major opsec failure by Ruben that exposed a link to TeamPCP. In June 2025, someone using the name Ruben Thomson registered on HackerOne, a popular “bug bounty” program that seeks to reward and recognize researchers who agree to work with affected software vendors to help fix the flaws before publishing about their findings. What was Ruben Thomson’s chosen HackerOne username? Deadcatx3, a nickname that has been flagged by multiple security firms as an alias used by TeamPCP.

INTERVIEW WITH ELLIS

In early July 2026, not long after having discovered clues about Ellis’s real life identity, KrebsOnSecurity interviewed the TeamPCP leader via Signal, where he was remarkably open about his activities and personal struggles [for the sake of simplicity, the TeamPCP spokesperson will be referred to from here on as Ellis].

Ellis claims he stopped doing cybercrime for TeamPCP in March 2026 — just before the attacks that compromised LiteLLM — and that at least one other individual has taken over the group’s leadership since then. Ellis shared that a year earlier he had just completed the latest in a series of detox and sobriety programs, and was two months sober when he reconnected with some old friends from the malware development scene.

“One year ago I needed help monetizing some [GitHub credentials], I was two months sober and needed a distraction and something to keep busy as well as people to speak to,” Ellis said. “I had largely disconnected from my old circle, they had become very toxic and I needed to get away from the substances. Previously I had done some mass exploitation campaigns and grew up doing [malware development] and [capture the flag] contests. There were some friends who were also vending but had stopped a while, and one of them introduced me to some chats where I posted access for sale.”

Prior to that, Ellis said, he was homeless and hopping between “some very unstable places.”

“Blackhatting is fun,” he said. “There are actual rewards and incentives to learn and you grow with your team. Without qualifications, no employer will even take the time to hear you out.”

Ellis claims he’s earned a grand total of about $20,000 for his activities with TeamPCP, and that it was never about the money or fame for him. Asked whether his experiences with TeamPCP might prepare him for gainful employment in a legitimate IT job, Ellis said he doubted it.

“I am nowhere close to a skill level where I am comfortable, and this would take maybe half a decade of further experience,” he said. “I no longer have to choose between rent and food for that I’m grateful and so are the team members.”

Ellis expressed no remorse over his cybercrime activities, and said he was grateful for the friendships and relationships built throughout his engagement with TeamPCP. The young hacker also seemed resigned to his fate, and told KrebsOnSecurity that he’ll accept the consequences if he’s ever arrested.

“If I’ve already been found out then its out of my control, I’ll make peace with that,” he said. “Honestly, I think someone like me needs a lot of help that prison just can’t provide. If I had the funds to study different parts of the field and closer guidance, this would have turned out differently. But that’s a pipe dream and we both know this.”

It is clear from reading Ellis’s posts to the group’s Matrix server chats that his struggles with sobriety are ongoing. On Thursday, June 25, Ellis told @kernelstub he was about to “trip” with his “homie.”

“What kind,” @kernelstub inquired.

“Ketty and some DMT,” Ellis replied, referring to the dissociative anesthetic ketamine and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful psychedelic compound that is found naturally in some plants but is also synthetically produced in underground lab environments. “There’s a little 2cb so we might throw that in the mix,” he continued, referring to another psychedelic compound by its chemical shorthand.

Roughly two weeks before his arrest, Ellis told KrebsOnSecurity he was ready to leave his life of crime behind and was prepared to turn himself in, but that in the meantime he was making plans to tie up loose ends.

Less than 24 hours later, the TeamPCP leader posted an image on Telegram showing a yellowish powdered substance in a baggie and on a scale, possibly synthetic DMT. The image shows the powder being weighed next to a series of small vape cartridges, two of which are open on the table in front of the photographer.

The two defendants were arrested Wednesday morning. The AFP said the men face a combined 14 cybercrime offenses and are scheduled to appear in Perth Magistrates Court today.

Charlie Eriksen is a security researcher at Aikido Security who has closely followed TeamPCP’s cybercrime campaigns. Eriksen said TeamPCP are a good example of a new kind of threat actor that does not fit neatly into the usual categories.

“They are not a state actor, not quite organized cybercrime, and not purely ideological,” he said. “Their motivations seem to mix money, disruption, attention, and ideology.”

Eriksen said that historically there has always been a meaningful gap between reading about an attack technique and being able to reliably turn it into an operational campaign, but that large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence increasingly are helping threat actors to bypass that knowledge gap.

“You had to understand the research, adapt the code, troubleshoot it, build infrastructure around it, and then repeat that process across different targets,” he said. “LLMs have compressed that gap significantly.”

According to Eriksen, this creates an environment where threat actors suddenly have the ability to operate at significant scale without having developed the operational discipline that traditionally accompanies that level of capability. Put another way, it sets the stage for cybercriminals who are capable enough to cause significant damage, but not necessarily careful enough to understand or care about the consequences.

“They can be noisy, they can make mistakes,” he said. “They can leave evidence everywhere. They can take risks that a professional criminal group or intelligence service would consider completely unacceptable. But that does not necessarily make them less dangerous. In some ways, it can make them more dangerous.”

In a recent blog post, Eriksen called TeamPCP’s Shai-Hulud worm the “best thing to happen to supply chain security,” because it forced GitHub and other public coding platforms to erect new security safeguards.

In direct response to TeamPCP’s broad success at pushing poisoned versions of popular software packages, GitHub in late July introduced a three-day “cooldown” mechanism for Dependabot, the platform’s tool for auto-fetching newly shipped updates for any package dependencies. Cooldown periods are designed to help buy time for security tools and package maintainers to identify and remove any compromised versions. Other coding ecosystems like Python and various JavaScript platforms also added support for cooldown periods this year amid growing calls from security experts about the need for more widespread adoption of the safety feature.

Eriksen said TeamPCP’s legacy is that they achieved in the span of a few months what the supply chain security community has been unable to do for years.

“They managed to wake up Microsoft to the fact that they had become negligent in terms of security,” Eriksen said. “By compromising GitHub and stealing their source code, they humiliated Microsoft into action, making them finally act on what we had been asking them to do and take seriously for a while now.”

Update, 10:08 a.m. ET: A story this morning from ABC News in Australia confirms Ruben Ian Thomson of Cottesloe was one of the two arrested. The 23-year-old suspect thought to be @pcpcasper, Michael Gaebler, also was arrested in Perth. ABC News reports that Thomson was denied bail (Mr. Gaebler’s attorney reportedly did not request bail for his client), and that both men will be held in custody until their next court appearance on September 18.

When targeting an organization to steal information, maintaining a low profile is critical for attackers. They typically aim for long-term persistence, which requires avoiding security alerts while preserving access in case they’re detected and the organization initiates incident response or routine password resets. Malware such as infostealers or ostensibly legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools fail the first requirement: their use triggers EDR and generates suspicious events in SIEM consoles. Relying on stolen credentials conflicts with the second requirement: the moment the security team suspects a compromise, passwords can be changed immediately — terminating access. If attackers attempt to steal browser cookies instead of passwords, they face a different challenge: many online services now correlate device characteristics with the expected session cookie and block access if the cookie is used on an unrecognized device. Furthermore, cookie theft protection mechanisms implemented in Chromium-based browsers (such as Chrome, Edge, and Opera) this year have made this approach significantly more difficult.

To address this persistence challenge, the ToddyCat APT — whose main game is spying — developed a novel technique. Kaspersky experts discovered this method during an incident investigation and named it Shadow Token via Remote Debug (STRD). This technique allows the attackers to establish reliable, persistent access to a victim’s mailbox and other resources in Google Workspace. With minor adjustments, the same approach could potentially be adapted to target other services that grant third-party application access via OAuth 2.0 authentication.

How an STRD attack works

First, the attackers must compromise the victim’s system with malware. In past campaigns, ToddyCat gained initial access to organizations by exploiting known vulnerabilities in server software and distributing malicious loaders via messaging apps. The specific employee targeted by the attackers might not notice the intrusion at all. This can occur, for example, if the adversary first obtains privileged administrative credentials and uses them to deploy the malware onto targeted machines remotely. Crucially, the deployment and execution of this malware mustn’t trigger immediate security alerts.

Once active, the malware executes an STRD attack, connecting the attackers’ remote service to the victim’s mailbox using the OAuth 2.0 protocol. This process requires no user interaction and shows no visible activity on the screen. To the cloud environment (Google Workspace, in the case at hand), the activity appears as if the user has legitimately authorized a third-party app for email access or data backup.

After that, the malware can terminate its operations and even delete itself from the system. The adversary retains direct access to the mailbox using the acquired OAuth token — and they need no connection to the victim’s endpoint or to the corporate network for that. Depending on the organization’s Google Workspace configuration, this access can persist for an extended period and survive subsequent password resets.

The core concept of Shadow Token via Remote Debug

At the heart of this attack is a connection to Google Workspace services via OAuth 2.0. This is a legitimate workflow used whenever a third-party application requests access to calendar data, emails, or Google Drive files. For example, to display calendar meetings in Zoom and automatically generate conference links, a user must authorize Zoom to access Google services. Similarly, configuring a third-party email client or calendar app requires granting permission. During this authorization process, the service requesting access opens a new browser window. In this window, Google Workspace first prompts the user to select the appropriate account. Once the account is chosen, the subsequent screen displays the specific permissions requested by the third-party app, allowing the user to either approve or deny access. For this scenario to proceed seamlessly, the user must already be authenticated to Google services in their browser — which is typically the case in organizations using Google Workspace. If the user isn’t authenticated, additional steps for entering credentials and completing multi-factor authentication are introduced into the sequence.

The ToddyCat hackers developed a malicious tool called Umbrij to facilitate a two-step covert authorization process when the user is already authenticated in Google. First, the malware identifies the browsers installed on the system, and locates the specific folder storing the user’s active profile for each. The attackers target Chrome and Edge, as these are the browsers most likely serving as the primary ones within the organization.

Next, Umbrij copies the entire user profile folder to a different directory on the machine. It then launches an instance of the browser, specifying the path to the duplicated profile via the command line. Because this duplicate profile contains the user’s session cookies, websites with saved credentials won’t prompt for re-authentication. Furthermore, since this occurs on the exact same computer where the primary browser is running, online services detect no anomalies. The browsing history for this newly launched instance is isolated within the new folder, keeping it hidden from the user’s main account activity.

Crucially, the browser is launched in a dedicated debugging mode typically reserved for web development. The browser window and user interface don’t appear on the screen at all (headless mode). Instead, the browser can be controlled through a debugging port using the DevTools protocol, allowing the malware to issue commands and read the state of the screen. To orchestrate these actions, Umbrij leverages Puppeteer, a legitimate automation library.

After verifying that the debugging browser instance has launched successfully, Umbrij opens a legitimate Google Workspace OAuth screen within it. The request sent to Google is engineered to bypass additional security checks while requesting maximum access privileges. For the application ID — the identity supposedly requesting these extensive permissions — the malware impersonates one of two legitimate tools: Google Workspace Migration for Microsoft Outlook (GWMMO), or Google Workspace Sync for Microsoft Outlook (GWSMO).

When Google opens the window within the headless browser, Umbrij uses debugging tools to programmatically click on the corporate account name and the confirmation buttons. As a result, Google generates an authorization code for the app. Umbrij extracts and saves this code, subsequently forwarding it to the attackers’ command-and-control server. Finally, operating entirely within their own infrastructure rather than on the victim’s computer, the attackers exchange this authorization code for an OAuth access token. This single token is all they need to maintain long-term unrestricted access to the mailbox.

How to protect against OAuth token theft

If a Google Workspace account is compromised, incident response measures must include the following steps after collecting the necessary logs and other forensic data for investigation:

• Resetting the affected user’s password
• Terminating all active web sessions for the user
• Revoking OAuth tokens and third-party app permissions
• Reviewing and removing access granted through legacy App Passwords

In addition, security and IT teams must systematically audit issued OAuth permissions, revoke unjustifiable access rights, and restrict capabilities that allow excessive or unauthorized permission grants. We covered this topic in detail in our article on blocking unwanted AI assistants.

How to prevent exploitation of Shadow Token via Remote Debug

While Kaspersky users are protected against the Umbrij tool, security teams should proactively implement policies that prevent standard users from launching browsers in debugging mode. This functionality is intended exclusively for website and web app developers. This restriction can be enforced through the DeveloperToolsAvailability group policy (available for both Chrome and Edge).

Additionally, configure monitoring within your SIEM/XDR to track the launch of browser instances with an active debugging port. This event serves as a strong indicator of this specific attack technique.

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As AI rapidly reshapes industries, the role of the cloud has become even more critical. From automated customer experiences to intelligent cyber security and predictive analytics, AI transformations are increasingly being built on a cloud-first foundation. Over the past two years, AI has swiftly moved from an experimental state to an operational reality, with every leading organization embedding AI into the core of how they build, operate, and compete. However, security architectures have not kept pace with the AI transformation. Closing that gap requires more than incremental fixes. It demands a rethinking of how security is designed, deployed, and enforced […]

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A threat actor targeting Microsoft 365 and Azure production environments is stealing data in attacks that abuse legitimate applications and administration features. [...]

Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the public archive included files detailing how CISA builds, tests and deploys software internally, and that it represents one of the most egregious government data leaks in recent history.

On May 15, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Guillaume Valadon, a researcher with the security firm GitGuardian. Valadon’s company constantly scans public code repositories at GitHub and elsewhere for exposed secrets, automatically alerting the offending accounts of any apparent sensitive data exposures. Valadon said he reached out because the owner in this case wasn’t responding and the information exposed was highly sensitive.

The GitHub repository that Valadon flagged was named “Private-CISA,” and it harbored a vast number of internal CISA/DHS credentials and files, including cloud keys, tokens, plaintext passwords, logs and other sensitive CISA assets.

Valadon said the exposed CISA credentials represent a textbook example of poor security hygiene, noting that the commit logs in the offending GitHub account show that the CISA administrator disabled the default setting in GitHub that blocks users from publishing SSH keys or other secrets in public code repositories.

“Passwords stored in plain text in a csv, backups in git, explicit commands to disable GitHub secrets detection feature,” Valadon wrote in an email. “I honestly believed that it was all fake before analyzing the content deeper. This is indeed the worst leak that I’ve witnessed in my career. It is obviously an individual’s mistake, but I believe that it might reveal internal practices.”

One of the exposed files, titled “importantAWStokens,” included the administrative credentials to three Amazon AWS GovCloud servers. Another file exposed in their public GitHub repository — “AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv” — listed plaintext usernames and passwords for dozens of internal CISA systems. According to Caturegli, those systems included one called “LZ-DSO,” which appears short for “Landing Zone DevSecOps,” the agency’s secure code development environment.

Philippe Caturegli, founder of the security consultancy Seralys, said he tested the AWS keys only to see whether they were still valid and to determine which internal systems the exposed accounts could access. Caturegli said the GitHub account that exposed the CISA secrets exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository.

“The use of both a CISA-associated email address and a personal email address suggests the repository may have been used across differently configured environments,” Caturegli observed. “The available Git metadata alone does not prove which endpoint or device was used.”

Caturegli said he validated that the exposed credentials could authenticate to three AWS GovCloud accounts at a high privilege level. He said the archive also includes plain text credentials to CISA’s internal “artifactory” — essentially a repository of all the code packages they are using to build software — and that this would represent a juicy target for malicious attackers looking for ways to maintain a persistent foothold in CISA systems.

“That would be a prime place to move laterally,” he said. “Backdoor in some software packages, and every time they build something new they deploy your backdoor left and right.”

In response to questions, a spokesperson for CISA said the agency is aware of the reported exposure and is continuing to investigate the situation.

“Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident,” the CISA spokesperson wrote. “While we hold our team members to the highest standards of integrity and operational awareness, we are working to ensure additional safeguards are implemented to prevent future occurrences.”

A review of the GitHub account and its exposed passwords show the “Private CISA” repository was maintained by an employee of Nightwing, a government contractor based in Dulles, Va. Nightwing declined to comment, directing inquiries to CISA.

CISA has not responded to questions about the potential duration of the data exposure, but Caturegli said the Private CISA repository was created on November 13, 2025. The contractor’s GitHub account was created back in September 2018.

The GitHub account that included the Private CISA repo was taken offline shortly after both KrebsOnSecurity and Seralys notified CISA about the exposure. But Caturegli said the exposed AWS keys inexplicably continued to remain valid for another 48 hours.

CISA is currently operating with only a fraction of its normal budget and staffing levels. The agency has lost nearly a third of its workforce since the beginning of the second Trump administration, which forced a series of early retirements, buyouts, and resignations across the agency’s various divisions.

The now-defunct Private CISA repo showed the contractor also used easily-guessed passwords for a number of internal resources; for example, many of the credentials used a password consisting of each platform’s name followed by the current year. Caturegli said such practices would constitute a serious security threat for any organization even if those credentials were never exposed externally, noting that threat actors often use key credentials exposed on the internal network to expand their reach after establishing initial access to a targeted system.

“What I suspect happened is [the CISA contractor] was using this GitHub to synchronize files between a work laptop and a home computer, because he has regularly committed to this repo since November 2025,” Caturegli said. “This would be an embarrassing leak for any company, but it’s even more so in this case because it’s CISA.”

NVIDIA has confirmed in a statement for BleepingComputer that GeForce NOW user information has been exposed in a data breach. [...]

There’s a lot to security that isn’t necessarily “cyber.” It’s not all hackers or complex network attacks.

Alongside traditional cyberattacks that deploy malware or exploit known software vulnerabilities, there are also less technical—yet equally devastating—forms of theft.

This doesn’t mean that well-known cybersecurity best practices don’t apply. Every small business owner should still use unique passwords for every account, turn on multi-factor authentication, keep their software and operating systems updated, and run always-on cybersecurity software.

But for the everyday small business owner juggling dozens of accounts, networks, devices, and the reams of data being created, stored, and shared across text messages, emails, and online portals, this advice is for you.

For National Small Business Week in the US, here are three ways to protect your business that require little technical prowess.

Don’t use your Social Security Number as your tax ID

In the US, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allows small business owners to use their personal Social Security Number (SSN) as the Federal Tax ID. It’s a small grace meant to simplify annual record-keeping for sole proprietors and owner-employees, but for cybercriminals, it’s a basic oversight they’d like every small business to make.

Using your Social Security Number as your Federal Tax ID means putting your Social Security Number in an ever-increasing number of hands. That’s because small business taxes are different from taxes for everyday salaried employees.

Whenever a small business takes on a new client or a contractor who pays for services costing at least $600, that small business has to share and receive what is called a W-9 form. This exact form isn’t filed with the IRS, but it is used to track payments for later filings.

What’s more important, though, is that this form asks for an owner’s name, address, and tax ID number.

This means that as a small business grows, its vulnerability to identity theft increases in tandem. Every W-9 filed that uses an owner’s SSN as their tax ID number is another opportunity for that SSN to be stolen. After just one year of operation, a small business owner’s SSN could end up in the inboxes, filing cabinets, and cloud drives of a dozen different people and companies.

This is exactly what cybercriminals want.

Equipped with a W-9 form about your business, a cybercriminal could impersonate you or your business. They could open a business credit line, file fraudulent returns that claim your small business income, or scam your clients.

How to stay safe:

Apply for a free Employer Identification Number (EIN) at IRS.gov. It’s quick to do and it separates your business tax identity from your personal tax identity. After that, put the EIN on W-9s, 1099s, and all other business paperwork instead of your SSN.

Keep your personal cloud storage personal

The most popular cloud storage for most small business owners is the cloud storage they already have—their personal Google Drive or iCloud.

Built to make memory archival as easy as possible, these tools can automatically back up and secure nearly every single moment that happens through your device, from the vacation photos you snapped last summer, to your kid’s first steps recorded on video, to the texts you sent, the notes you made, and the calendar appointments you managed.

But this type of automatic archival poses a threat to any non-personal information that you view, send, markup, or sign when using your personal smartphone. Suddenly, and often without thinking about it, your cloud storage has backups of signed contracts, tax returns, client intake forms, invoices, business financial statements, and photos of physical paperwork.

Above, we warned about using your SSN as your tax ID because it creates a risk if anyone in your business network is breached. But storing client information in your personal cloud storage creates a different problem: it puts that risk directly on you.

Compounding the threat here is the fact that many personal cloud storage accounts are shared with family members. More people accessing the same account means more exposure and more chances for mistakes, even if everyone has good intentions.

How to stay safe:

Go through the cloud backup settings on both your phone and your computer and manage what data is being synced. Move sensitive business files to a dedicated business storage account with proper access controls, sharing permissions, and audit logs—something that can tell you who opened a file and when.

If anything business-related has to live in a personal cloud account, give that account a strong, unique password, turn on multi-factor authentication, and don’t share access with anyone who isn’t you.

Protect device and account access in the home

Devices have a funny way of moving around. Your smartphone goes into your spouse’s hands as they override your music choices in the car. Your tablet ends most nights in your kid’s bedroom as they watch TV. And your laptop gets tugged around from couch to counter to kitchen table—each time fully opened and logged in, a portal to the web.

You trust everyone in your home to act safely online, but the path to online safety is full of mistakes.

A single errant click on a fake ad, a malicious search result, or a disguised download is all it takes to compromise your device today, along with all your small business records.

Aside from the threat of malware, someone using your device could make purchases, accidentally delete files, and overwrite important documents.

Remember, an “insider threat” doesn’t need to be malicious to cause damage—they just need to be inside your network (which in this, is your home).

How to stay safe:

Treat your devices that you use for work as work devices. That means requiring a passcode or password for device entry, along with multi-factor authentication for important business accounts.

Also, to ensure that any wrong click doesn’t lead to a malicious PDF download or a wayward malware installation, use always-on antimalware protection software, like Malwarebytes for Teams.

Secure your success

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with modern cybersecurity advice. Every week there are new vulnerabilities to patch, emerging scams to avoid, and novel viruses and pieces of malware that can seemingly take over your device, your data, and your business.

Thankfully, there are important steps you can take today that don’t require you to fiddle with internal settings or take a class on network engineering. Some of the most effective protections are simple: Limit how widely you share sensitive information, keep business and personal data separate, and control who can access your devices.

For everything else, try Malwarebytes for Teams to receive 24/7, always-on antimalware protection to shut out viruses, block malware attacks, and keep hackers out of your business.

There’s a lot to security that isn’t necessarily “cyber.” It’s not all hackers or complex network attacks.

Alongside traditional cyberattacks that deploy malware or exploit known software vulnerabilities, there are also less technical—yet equally devastating—forms of theft.

This doesn’t mean that well-known cybersecurity best practices don’t apply. Every small business owner should still use unique passwords for every account, turn on multi-factor authentication, keep their software and operating systems updated, and run always-on cybersecurity software.

But for the everyday small business owner juggling dozens of accounts, networks, devices, and the reams of data being created, stored, and shared across text messages, emails, and online portals, this advice is for you.

For National Small Business Week in the US, here are three ways to protect your business that require little technical prowess.

Don’t use your Social Security Number as your tax ID

In the US, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allows small business owners to use their personal Social Security Number (SSN) as the Federal Tax ID. It’s a small grace meant to simplify annual record-keeping for sole proprietors and owner-employees, but for cybercriminals, it’s a basic oversight they’d like every small business to make.

Using your Social Security Number as your Federal Tax ID means putting your Social Security Number in an ever-increasing number of hands. That’s because small business taxes are different from taxes for everyday salaried employees.

Whenever a small business takes on a new client or a contractor who pays for services costing at least $600, that small business has to share and receive what is called a W-9 form. This exact form isn’t filed with the IRS, but it is used to track payments for later filings.

What’s more important, though, is that this form asks for an owner’s name, address, and tax ID number.

This means that as a small business grows, its vulnerability to identity theft increases in tandem. Every W-9 filed that uses an owner’s SSN as their tax ID number is another opportunity for that SSN to be stolen. After just one year of operation, a small business owner’s SSN could end up in the inboxes, filing cabinets, and cloud drives of a dozen different people and companies.

This is exactly what cybercriminals want.

Equipped with a W-9 form about your business, a cybercriminal could impersonate you or your business. They could open a business credit line, file fraudulent returns that claim your small business income, or scam your clients.

How to stay safe:

Apply for a free Employer Identification Number (EIN) at IRS.gov. It’s quick to do and it separates your business tax identity from your personal tax identity. After that, put the EIN on W-9s, 1099s, and all other business paperwork instead of your SSN.

Keep your personal cloud storage personal

The most popular cloud storage for most small business owners is the cloud storage they already have—their personal Google Drive or iCloud.

Built to make memory archival as easy as possible, these tools can automatically back up and secure nearly every single moment that happens through your device, from the vacation photos you snapped last summer, to your kid’s first steps recorded on video, to the texts you sent, the notes you made, and the calendar appointments you managed.

But this type of automatic archival poses a threat to any non-personal information that you view, send, markup, or sign when using your personal smartphone. Suddenly, and often without thinking about it, your cloud storage has backups of signed contracts, tax returns, client intake forms, invoices, business financial statements, and photos of physical paperwork.

Above, we warned about using your SSN as your tax ID because it creates a risk if anyone in your business network is breached. But storing client information in your personal cloud storage creates a different problem: it puts that risk directly on you.

Compounding the threat here is the fact that many personal cloud storage accounts are shared with family members. More people accessing the same account means more exposure and more chances for mistakes, even if everyone has good intentions.

How to stay safe:

Go through the cloud backup settings on both your phone and your computer and manage what data is being synced. Move sensitive business files to a dedicated business storage account with proper access controls, sharing permissions, and audit logs—something that can tell you who opened a file and when.

If anything business-related has to live in a personal cloud account, give that account a strong, unique password, turn on multi-factor authentication, and don’t share access with anyone who isn’t you.

Protect device and account access in the home

Devices have a funny way of moving around. Your smartphone goes into your spouse’s hands as they override your music choices in the car. Your tablet ends most nights in your kid’s bedroom as they watch TV. And your laptop gets tugged around from couch to counter to kitchen table—each time fully opened and logged in, a portal to the web.

You trust everyone in your home to act safely online, but the path to online safety is full of mistakes.

A single errant click on a fake ad, a malicious search result, or a disguised download is all it takes to compromise your device today, along with all your small business records.

Aside from the threat of malware, someone using your device could make purchases, accidentally delete files, and overwrite important documents.

Remember, an “insider threat” doesn’t need to be malicious to cause damage—they just need to be inside your network (which in this, is your home).

How to stay safe:

Treat your devices that you use for work as work devices. That means requiring a passcode or password for device entry, along with multi-factor authentication for important business accounts.

Also, to ensure that any wrong click doesn’t lead to a malicious PDF download or a wayward malware installation, use always-on antimalware protection software, like Malwarebytes for Teams.

Secure your success

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with modern cybersecurity advice. Every week there are new vulnerabilities to patch, emerging scams to avoid, and novel viruses and pieces of malware that can seemingly take over your device, your data, and your business.

Thankfully, there are important steps you can take today that don’t require you to fiddle with internal settings or take a class on network engineering. Some of the most effective protections are simple: Limit how widely you share sensitive information, keep business and personal data separate, and control who can access your devices.

For everything else, try Malwarebytes for Teams to receive 24/7, always-on antimalware protection to shut out viruses, block malware attacks, and keep hackers out of your business.

Check Point has been honored Frost & Sullivan’s 2026 Technology Innovation Leadership recognition in WAF and API security, positioning us as a Company to Action shaping the future of cybersecurity. This recognition reflects a major shift in how application security must operate today. Application Security Has Fundamentally Changed Applications are no longer just web apps they now run on APIs, microservices, and AI-driven services, rapidly expanding across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Each release introduces new components, increasing the attack surface. At the same time, accelerated DevSecOps cycles are making both web and AI applications harder to secure, while threats continue […]

The post Check Point WAF Leads Application Security-Validated by Frost & Sullivan appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Unit 42 reveals how multi-agent AI systems can autonomously attack cloud environments. Learn critical insights and vital lessons for proactive security.

The post Can AI Attack the Cloud? Lessons From Building an Autonomous Cloud Offensive Multi-Agent System appeared first on Unit 42.

The Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks Partnership

As AI agents move into business-critical environments, they are transforming everything from security operations to internal workflows. However, scaling these AI applications introduces unprecedented hurdles for security executives, from detecting "shadow AI" and unsanctioned usage to governing complex nonhuman identities across multimodel environments.

To overcome these challenges, organizations need more than just tools; they need a layered architecture built on a foundation of platformization. The long-standing partnership between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud provides this essential framework, offering customers:

• Integrated Security Ecosystems: Seamlessly manage the full agent lifecycle with visibility and observability across your entire AI infrastructure.
• Jointly Engineered Solutions: Leverage over 80 co-engineered integrations designed to eliminate the tradeoff between a cloud-native experience and best-in-class security.
• Proven Scale and Performance: Benefit from a partnership that has already delivered impactful, AI-driven solutions to protect joint customers from evolving threats.

Google Cloud Marketplace enables customers to discover, try, buy and use industry-leading applications that have been validated to run on Google Cloud. Palo Alto Networks has closed $2.4 billion in GCP bookings, helping address evolving customer needs, such as simplified procurement and seamless deployment.

Kevin Ichhpurani, President, Global Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud:

We’re pleased to celebrate Palo Alto Networks as our Global Technology Partner of the Year… Palo Alto Networks has consistently delivered impactful, AI-driven security solutions that help Google Cloud customers better protect their organizations from evolving threats.

The extensive, long-standing collaboration between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud includes jointly engineered offerings, built on 80 solution integrations that help customers build, run and secure AI-enhanced cloud infrastructure and applications with end-to-end protection.

Palo Alto Networks Wins 2026 Global Technology Google Cloud Partner of the Year Award

At Google Cloud Next, Palo Alto Networks has been recognized with four 2026 Google Cloud Partner of the Year awards. By partnering with Google Cloud, we help customers securely leverage the power of the cloud and AI-driven growth with comprehensive cloud-native security offerings. Wins included the following:

• Global Technology
• Marketplace: Technology
• Marketplace: Security
• Security: Artificial Intelligence

These Partner of the Year Awards underscore our expanding partnership with Google Cloud. We share a mutual dedication to improve cloud, network security and AI observability, as well as the progress we’ve made in protecting our joint customers from today’s and tomorrow’s cyberthreats.

By combining our industry-leading security engineering with Google Cloud’s industry-leading cloud infrastructure and services, we’re providing advanced protection for every stage of a customer’s digital journey. We want customers to feel secure from the formative steps of lifting workloads into the cloud, to expanding digital innovation across platforms, to reaching new levels of business scale and velocity.

Protecting these journeys requires alignment and modernization of infrastructure (lift and shift), applications (refactoring) and user access models (zero trust). It requires an advanced AI drive security operations transformation across all IT domains, leveraging machine learning and sophisticated models to minimize human interventions and unguarded sides.

Our relationship with Google Cloud is based on a deep engineering relationship, yielding integrated solutions that help customers achieve better digital outcomes. Our partnership can help your organization eliminate tradeoffs between a cloud-native experience and best-in-class security. We have more than 80 co-engineered integrations, helping to improve and protect hybrid workers, cloud migrations and application modernization efforts.

We remain committed to our goals of outpacing cyberthreats, helping customers at every stage of their cloud journey, and creating a world where tomorrow is more secure than today.

Whether you’re just beginning your cloud journey or managing complex transformational projects, our jointly engineered, AI-driven solutions are designed to deliver seamless, scalable security. Explore the dynamic partnership between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud. Join us at Google Cloud Next '26 in Las Vegas from April 22-24 to discover how to secure your development lifecycle from code to cloud.

The post Scaling AI Agents with Confidence appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

AI is changing how software works. Applications no longer just process requests. They reason, make decisions, and take action. AI agents now retrieve data, invoke tools, and execute workflows across systems in real time. That shift introduces a new kind of risk. Because in an agentic world, security is no longer just about who has access. It’s about what AI is allowed to do. A new control point for agentic systems in Google Cloud Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform provides a centralized control point for agentic systems enabling identity, access, policy enforcement, and observability across how agents operate. This […]

The post From Access Control to Outcome Control: Securing AI Agents with Check Point and Google Cloud appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Today’s enterprises demand Zero Trust security, everywhere. Cloud security teams require high-performance protection without the burden of managing firewalls at scale. For this reason, organizations are seeking managed network security solutions that reduce operational overhead while improving consistency, visibility, and prevention across complex multi-cloud environments. Responding to that demand, Check Point is continuing rollout of an AI-powered cloud firewall as a service now available for preview on Google Cloud, as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.  There will be demos of the new firewall service at the Check Point Booth #3101 in the Google Next Solution Expo.  Check Point Cloud Firewall as a Service eliminates the complex overhead of managing firewall software infrastructure, giving busy DevOps and Security teams time to focus on policy management, compliance, and other strategic initiatives.   Continued Evolution of Cloud Firewalls  Cloud Firewall as a Service on Google Cloud marketplace delivers the power of Cloud Firewall (formerly Guard Network Security) with advanced threat prevention, AI-driven security intelligence, automated policy […]

The post Experience AI-Powered Check Point Firewall at Google Cloud Next appeared first on Check Point Blog.

A few months ago, we reported on a fake cloud storage alert that triggered a redirect chain to an app that has since been delisted from the Apple Store.

The threat of losing your photos is a powerful lure, so scammers are now using it to steal personal and financial details.

The Guardian warns about an iCloud-themed campaign that start with a few “your iCloud storage is full’ messages, then escalates to threats. If you don’t respond or take action, the emails claim your data will be wiped on a specific date.

US Consumer Affairs has urged users not to click any links and to contact Apple directly if they receive such messages.

The deadline in the emails is never far away, usually just two days. No scammer ever wants you to think things through before you act, so there is always time pressure.

We’ve seen these emails in English and Spanish. Oddly, the monthly rate is set at 99 pence or 99 euro cents respectively.

The 0.99 seems to be the magic number. In reality, scammers don’t care about the payment. What they want is for you fill out the form on their phishing site.

The screenshot above is just one of many examples. There are plenty of variations, but they all follow the same them: make a small payment to stop the files in your iCloud storage from being deleted.

The websites these emails link to also vary, but they all ask for personal and payment details to complete that payment.

How to stay safe

It’s worth remembering that Apple does notify users when their iCloud storage is nearing capacity, but those alerts appear within your device settings or as official system notifications. They don’t come through unsolicited text messages or emails with external links. If you need to check your storage, go directly to Settings on your device and review your iCloud usage.

So, to stay safe:

• Always access your account through our official website.
• Never share your password with anyone.
• Never click on links in unsolicited emails without verifying with a trusted source.
• Use an up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution with a web protection component.
• Do not engage with websites that attract visitors like this.

Pro tip: Malwarebytes Scam Guard would have helped you identify this email as a scam and provided advice on how to proceed.

---

Something feel off? Check it before you click.  

Malwarebytes Scam Guard helps you analyze suspicious links, texts, and screenshots instantly.  

Available with Malwarebytes Premium Security for all your devices, and in the Malwarebytes app for iOS and Android.  

Try it free → 

A few months ago, we reported on a fake cloud storage alert that triggered a redirect chain to an app that has since been delisted from the Apple Store.

The threat of losing your photos is a powerful lure, so scammers are now using it to steal personal and financial details.

The Guardian warns about an iCloud-themed campaign that start with a few “your iCloud storage is full’ messages, then escalates to threats. If you don’t respond or take action, the emails claim your data will be wiped on a specific date.

US Consumer Affairs has urged users not to click any links and to contact Apple directly if they receive such messages.

The deadline in the emails is never far away, usually just two days. No scammer ever wants you to think things through before you act, so there is always time pressure.

We’ve seen these emails in English and Spanish. Oddly, the monthly rate is set at 99 pence or 99 euro cents respectively.

The 0.99 seems to be the magic number. In reality, scammers don’t care about the payment. What they want is for you fill out the form on their phishing site.

The screenshot above is just one of many examples. There are plenty of variations, but they all follow the same them: make a small payment to stop the files in your iCloud storage from being deleted.

The websites these emails link to also vary, but they all ask for personal and payment details to complete that payment.

How to stay safe

It’s worth remembering that Apple does notify users when their iCloud storage is nearing capacity, but those alerts appear within your device settings or as official system notifications. They don’t come through unsolicited text messages or emails with external links. If you need to check your storage, go directly to Settings on your device and review your iCloud usage.

So, to stay safe:

• Always access your account through our official website.
• Never share your password with anyone.
• Never click on links in unsolicited emails without verifying with a trusted source.
• Use an up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution with a web protection component.
• Do not engage with websites that attract visitors like this.

Pro tip: Malwarebytes Scam Guard would have helped you identify this email as a scam and provided advice on how to proceed.

---

Something feel off? Check it before you click.  

Malwarebytes Scam Guard helps you analyze suspicious links, texts, and screenshots instantly.  

Available with Malwarebytes Premium Security for all your devices, and in the Malwarebytes app for iOS and Android.  

Try it free → 

Securing the AI-Powered Hybrid Multicloud

At the core of every modern enterprise is a fundamental need: The ability to innovate across hybrid environments without sacrificing security. For over five years, Palo Alto Networks and Nutanix have partnered to meet this need, building a collaborative ecosystem where industry-leading infrastructure meets the world’s most comprehensive AI-powered security.

As we look toward the future of the enterprise at Nutanix .NEXT 2026, our focus remains on a shared vision for the "Secure Nutanix Cloud."

2026 Global Security Partner of the Year

We are deeply honored to be named the Nutanix 2026 Global Security Partner of the Year. This recognition reflects our commitment to delivering integrated, automated security that feels like a native part of the Nutanix experience. Together, we have helped thousands of joint customers move from reactive security to a proactive, zero trust posture that spans the data center, the edge and the public cloud.

The Existing Partnership Is the Foundation of Trust

Our partnership is built on the belief that security should be invisible, automated and inseparable from the infrastructure it protects. We’ve worked alongside Nutanix to enable enterprises to scale their hybrid multicloud, and their security posture scales with it. Current integrations provide zero trust protection across the Nutanix environment:

• VM-Series Virtual Firewalls – Seamlessly integrated with Nutanix AHV and Flow Network Security, our virtual firewalls provide Layer 7 visibility and advanced threat prevention for east-west traffic. This integration leverages Nutanix Flow service chaining to automatically steer traffic through VM-Series firewalls for deep packet inspection without manual reconfiguration. It delivers full functional parity and operational continuity for Nutanix AHV environments, allowing security teams to maintain high-performance standards using familiar Panorama® management and persistent, tag-based policies that migrate with workloads across clusters.
• Hybrid Cloud Security – We provide consistent security for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on both AWS and Azure, enabling your policies to follow your workloads wherever they reside.
• Automation & Orchestration – Leveraging the Panorama® plugin for Nutanix, teams can automate security provisioning and use Dynamic Address Groups to sync application attributes instantly.

New Integration Secures Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI)

Building on this foundation, the highlight of this year’s show is our groundbreaking integration designed to accelerate Enterprise AI adoption. NAI provides a simplified, cloud-native stack that allows organizations to deploy and scale large language models (LLMs) across their choice of infrastructure with push-button simplicity. We are collaborating on a first-of-its-kind, end-to-end security solution for NAI.

This integration, launching soon, will bring AI Model Security and AI Red Teaming directly into the NAI, creating a seamless experience where security is built in, not bolted on. By allowing only Prisma AIRS™ validated models to reach production, we eliminate security friction at the start of the AI lifecycle. Every model will undergo rigorous scans for known vulnerabilities before deployment, providing a "clean room" environment for AI development. Providing a proactive test of AI defenses, Prisma AIRS AI Red Teaming will be available within NAI as an autonomous solution that integrates seamlessly into the development pipeline, utilizing a combination of a profiler and an attacker agent to perform contextual iterative simulations that mirror real-world attacker behavior. By providing detailed reports that map vulnerabilities directly to the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs and NIST AI RMF, it equips teams with the precise context needed to secure AI applications continuously and effectively.

By proactively identifying and neutralizing emerging threats, we will give organizations the confidence to deploy AI bravely, knowing their innovation is anchored in the world’s most robust security platform.

Powered by Prisma AIRS, this integration will bring a "security-first" approach to your AI deployments:

• AI Model Security – Scans AI models during the download phase to block malicious code and hidden backdoors before they reach your environment.
• AI Red Teaming – Provides continuous, autonomous vulnerability hunting on models, application and agent endpoints, testing your AI behavior against more than 750 real-world attack scenarios and contextual agentic risk assessment.
• Unified Visibility – Provides a complete overview of your AI risk posture and scan summaries directly within your NAI dashboards.

Benefits:

Seamless and Frictionless Deployment

We will prioritize a fast and frictionless deployment experience, ensuring that robust AI security does not come at the cost of development speed. By integrating these controls directly into the NAI workflow, organizations will be able to deploy and scale their AI initiatives with "push-button" simplicity, removing the traditional complexity and friction associated with securing large language models.

Proactive Protection Against Emerging Threats

Leveraging our deep expertise in threat prevention, this solution will proactively identify and block vulnerable or malicious models before they can impact the enterprise environment. By scanning models for hidden backdoors and malicious code during the initial download phase, we will stop threats at the perimeter, allowing only validated, secure models to ever reach your production environment.

A Comprehensive Enterprise Cloud AI Solution

This integration will deliver a comprehensive enterprise cloud AI solution, merging Nutanix’s industry-leading infrastructure with our next-generation security controls. The result will be a unified, cloud-native stack where security is built in rather than bolted on after the workload deployment, providing a secured deployment environment, which is consistent across the data center, the edge and public cloud.

Evolving Insights and Real-Time Remediation

The vulnerability insights from AI Red Teaming are coupled with remediation insights. The platform will provide a prioritized list of remediation steps that are tailor-made for the endpoint. This allows organizations to battle-test their inference endpoints before deploying them at scale.

Key Takeaways

• A Proven, Award-Winning Partnership: Celebrating five years of collaboration, Palo Alto Networks has been named the Nutanix 2026 Global Security Partner of the Year, highlighting a shared commitment to delivering native, automated zero trust security for hybrid multicloud environments.
• Seamless Zero Trust for Hybrid Workloads: Through deep integrations with VM-Series virtual firewalls and Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), organizations can maintain consistent Layer 7 visibility and tag-based security policies that automatically follow workloads across on-premises data centers and public clouds.
• Securing the AI Lifecycle with Prisma AIRS: The new integration with NAI, launching soon, will bring a security-first approach to AI adoption, utilizing Prisma AIRS to scan LLMs for vulnerabilities during download, and perform autonomous Red Teaming to neutralize emerging threats before they reach production.

Don’t Miss Our Speaking Session

Want to see the integration in action? Join our experts, Shrikant Brahmbhatt (Palo Alto Networks) and Ashwini Vasanth (Nutanix), on Tuesday April 7 3:30-4pm for an exclusive look at how we are securing the "Challenge of Hybrid AI." We’ll dive into the architecture that allows you to discover, assess and protect your entire AI ecosystem (apps, agents and models alike).

Visit Us at Booth #G2

Stop by the Palo Alto Networks booth (#G2) to meet our team of over 19,000 active threat researchers and see live demos of our joint solutions. Whether you are building the next generation of agentic AI or securing your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), we have the tools to help you innovate at machine speed.

Ready to secure your journey? Visit the Palo Alto Networks partner directory or learn more about Prisma AIRS.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog, including, without limitation: developments and changes in general market, political, economic, and business conditions; risks associated with managing our growth; risks associated with new products and subscription and support offerings; shifts in priorities or delays in the development or release of new offerings, or the failure to timely develop, release and achieve market acceptance of new products and subscriptions as well as existing products and subscription and support offerings; failure of our business strategies; rapidly evolving technological developments in the market for security products and subscription and support offerings; our customers’ purchasing decisions and the length of sales cycles; our competition; our ability to attract and retain new customers; and our ability to acquire and integrate other companies, products, or technologies. We identify certain important risks and uncertainties that could affect our results and performance in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time-to-time, each of which are available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements in this blog are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

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