Large-scale attacks designed to bring down Internet services by sending them more traffic than they can process keep getting bigger, with the largest one yet, measured at 7.3 terabits per second, being reported Friday by Internet security and performance provider Cloudflare.

The 7.3Tbps attack amounted to 37.4 terabytes of junk traffic that hit the target in just 45 seconds. That's an almost incomprehensible amount of data, equivalent to more than 9,300 full-length HD movies or 7,500 hours of HD streaming content in well under a minute.

Indiscriminate target bombing

Cloudflare said the attackers “carpet bombed” an average of nearly 22,000 destination ports of a single IP address belonging to the target, identified only as a Cloudflare customer. A total of 34,500 ports were targeted, indicating the thoroughness and well-engineered nature of the attack.

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Tech support scammers have devised a method to inject their fake phone numbers into webpages when a target's web browser visits official sites for Apple, PayPal, Netflix, and other companies.

The ruse, outlined in a post on Wednesday from security firm Malwarebytes, threatens to trick users into calling the malicious numbers even when they think they're taking measures to prevent falling for such scams. One of the more common pieces of security advice is to carefully scrutinize the address bar of a browser to ensure it's pointing to an organization’s official website. The ongoing scam is able to bypass such checks.

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Cybersecurity practitioners are voicing concerns over a recent executive order issued by the White House that guts requirements for: securing software the government uses, punishing people who compromise sensitive networks, preparing new encryption schemes that will withstand attacks from quantum computers, and other existing controls.

The executive order (EO), issued on June 6, reverses several key cybersecurity orders put in place by President Joe Biden, some as recently as a few days before his term ended in January. A statement that accompanied Donald Trump's EO said the Biden directives "attempted to sneak problematic and distracting issues into cybersecurity policy" and amounted to "political football."

Pro-business, anti-regulation

Specific orders Trump dropped or relaxed included ones mandating (1) federal agencies and contractors adopt products with quantum-safe encryption as they become available in the marketplace, (2) a stringent Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) for software and services used by federal agencies and contractors, (3) the adoption of phishing-resistant regimens such as the WebAuthn standard for logging into networks used by contractors and agencies, (4) the implementation new tools for securing Internet routing through the Border Gateway Protocol, and (5) the encouragement of digital forms of identity.

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Apple this week provided a glimpse into a feature that solves one of the biggest drawbacks of passkeys, the industry-wide standard for website and app authentication that isn't susceptible to credential phishing and other attacks targeting passwords.

The import/export feature, which Apple demonstrated at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, will be available in the next major releases of iOS, macOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. It aims to solve one of the biggest shortcomings of passkeys as they have existed to date. Passkeys created on one operating system or credential manager are largely bound to those environments. A passkey created on a Mac, for instance, can sync easily enough with other Apple devices connected to the same iCloud account. Transferring them to a Windows device or even a dedicated credential manager installed on the same Apple device has been impossible.

Growing pains

That limitation has led to criticisms that passkeys are a power play by large companies to lock users into specific product ecosystems. Users have also rightly worried that the lack of transferability increases the risk of getting locked out of important accounts if a device storing passkeys is lost, stolen, or destroyed.

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Millions of low-cost devices for media streaming, in-vehicle entertainment, and video projection are infected with malware that turns consumer networks into platforms for distributing malware, concealing nefarious communications, and performing other illicit activities, the FBI has warned.

The malware infecting these devices, known as BadBox, is based on Triada, a malware strain discovered in 2016 by Kaspersky Lab, which called it "one of the most advanced mobile Trojans" the security firm's analysts had ever encountered. It employed an impressive kit of tools, including rooting exploits that bypassed security protections built into Android and functions for modifying the Android OS's all-powerful Zygote process. Google eventually updated Android to block the methods Triada used to infect devices.

The threat remains

A year later, Triada returned, only this time, devices came pre-infected before they reached consumers’ hands. In 2019, Google confirmed that the supply-chain attack affected thousands of devices and that the company had once again taken measures to thwart it.

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Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device, researchers have discovered. Google says it's investigating the abuse, which allows Meta and Yandex to convert ephemeral web identifiers into persistent mobile app user identities.

The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they're off-limits for every other site.

A blatant violation

“One of the fundamental security principles that exists in the web, as well as the mobile system, is called sandboxing,” Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, one of the researchers behind the discovery, said in an interview. “You run everything in a sandbox, and there is no interaction within different elements running on it. What this attack vector allows is to break the sandbox that exists between the mobile context and the web context. The channel that exists allowed the Android system to communicate what happens in the browser with the identity running in the mobile app.”

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Researchers have found malicious software that received more than 6,000 downloads from the NPM repository over a two-year span, in yet another discovery showing the hidden threats users of such open source archives face.

Eight packages using names that closely mimicked those of widely used legitimate packages contained destructive payloads designed to corrupt or delete important data and crash systems, Kush Pandya, a researcher at security firm Socket, reported Thursday. The packages have been available for download for more than two years and accrued roughly 6,200 downloads over that time.

A diversity of attack vectors

“What makes this campaign particularly concerning is the diversity of attack vectors—from subtle data corruption to aggressive system shutdowns and file deletion,” Pandya wrote. “The packages were designed to target different parts of the JavaScript ecosystem with varied tactics.”

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The FBI is warning people to be vigilant of an ongoing malicious messaging campaign that uses AI-generated voice audio to impersonate government officials in an attempt to trick recipients into clicking on links that can infect their computers.

“Since April 2025, malicious actors have impersonated senior US officials to target individuals, many of whom are current or former senior US federal or state government officials and their contacts,” Thursday’s advisory from the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said. “If you receive a message claiming to be from a senior US official, do not assume it is authentic.”

Think you can’t be fooled? Think again.

The campaign's creators are sending AI-generated voice messages—better known as deepfakes—along with text messages “in an effort to establish rapport before gaining access to personal accounts,” FBI officials said. Deepfakes use AI to mimic the voice and speaking characteristics of a specific individual. The differences between the authentic and simulated speakers are often indistinguishable without trained analysis. Deepfake videos work similarly.

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Threat actors, likely supported by the Russian government, hacked multiple high-value mail servers around the world by exploiting XSS vulnerabilities, a class of bug that was among the most commonly exploited in decades past.

XSS is short for cross-site scripting. Vulnerabilities result from programming errors found in webserver software that, when exploited, allow attackers to execute malicious code in the browsers of people visiting an affected website. XSS first got attention in 2005, with the creation of the Samy Worm, which knocked MySpace out of commission when it added more than one million MySpace friends to a user named Samy. XSS exploits abounded for the next decade and have gradually fizzled more recently, although this class of attacks continues now.

Just add JavaScript

On Thursday, security firm ESET reported that Sednit, a Kremlin-backed hacking group also tracked as APT28, Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, and Sofacy—gained access to high-value email accounts by exploiting XSS vulnerabilities in mail server software from four different makers. Those packages are: Roundcube, MDaemon, Horde, and Zimbra.

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Login credentials belonging to an employee at both the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Department of Government Efficiency have appeared in multiple public leaks from info-stealer malware, a strong indication that devices belonging to him have been hacked in recent years.

Kyle Schutt is a 30-something-year-old software engineer who, according to Dropsite News, gained access in February to a “core financial management system” belonging to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As an employee of DOGE, Schutt accessed FEMA’s proprietary software for managing both disaster and non-disaster funding grants. Under his role at CISA, he likely is privy to sensitive information regarding the security of civilian federal government networks and critical infrastructure throughout the US.

A steady stream of published credentials

According to journalist Micah Lee, user names and passwords for logging in to various accounts belonging to Schutt have been published at least four times since 2023 in logs from stealer malware. Stealer malware typically infects devices through trojanized apps, phishing, or software exploits. Besides pilfering login credentials, stealers can also log all keystrokes and capture or record screen output. The data is then sent to the attacker and, occasionally after that, can make its way into public credential dumps.

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The world has been abuzz for weeks now about the inclusion of a journalist in a group message of senior White House officials discussing plans for a military strike. In that case, the breach was the result of then-National Security Advisor Mike Waltz accidentally adding The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat and no one else in the chat noticing. But what if someone controlling or hacking a messenger platform could do the same thing?

When it comes to WhatsApp—the Meta-owned messenger that’s frequently touted for offering end-to-end encryption—it turns out you can.

A clean bill of health except for...

A team of researchers confirmed that behavior in a recently released formal analysis of WhatsApp group messaging. They reverse-engineered the app, described the formal cryptographic protocols, and provided theorems establishing the security guarantees that WhatsApp provides. Overall, they gave the messenger a clean bill of health, finding that it works securely and as described by WhatsApp.

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A jury has awarded WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages in a case the company brought against Israel-based NSO Group for exploiting a software vulnerability that hijacked the phones of thousands of users.

The verdict, reached Tuesday, comes as a major victory not just for Meta-owned WhatsApp but also for privacy- and security-rights advocates who have long criticized the practices of NSO and other exploit sellers. The jury also awarded WhatsApp $444 million in compensatory damages.

Clickless exploit

WhatsApp sued NSO in 2019 for an attack that targeted roughly 1,400 mobile phones belonging to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials. NSO, which works on behalf of governments and law enforcement authorities in various countries, exploited a critical WhatsApp vulnerability that allowed it to install NSO’s proprietary spyware Pegasus on iOS and Android devices. The clickless exploit worked by placing a call to a target's app. A target did not have to answer the call to be infected.

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A California man has pleaded guilty to hacking an employee of The Walt Disney Company by tricking the person into running a malicious version of a widely used open source AI image-generation tool.

Ryan Mitchell Kramer, 25, pleaded guilty to one count of accessing a computer and obtaining information and one count of threatening to damage a protected computer, the US Attorney for the Central District of California said Monday. In a plea agreement, Kramer said he published an app on GitHub for creating AI-generated art. The program contained malicious code that gave access to computers that installed it. Kramer operated using the moniker NullBulge.

Not the ComfyUI you’re looking for

According to researchers at VPNMentor, the program Kramer used was ComfyUI_LLMVISION, which purported to be an extension for the legitimate ComfyUI image generator and had functions added to it for copying passwords, payment card data, and other sensitive information from machines that installed it. The fake extension then sent the data to a Discord server that Kramer operated. To better disguise the malicious code, it was folded into files that used the names OpenAI and Anthropic.

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About a decade ago, Apple and Google started updating iOS and Android, respectively, to make them less susceptible to “juice jacking,” a form of attack that could surreptitiously steal data or execute malicious code when users plug their phones into special-purpose charging hardware. Now, researchers are revealing that, for years, the mitigations have suffered from a fundamental defect that has made them trivial to bypass.

“Juice jacking” was coined in a 2011 article on KrebsOnSecurity detailing an attack demonstrated at a Defcon security conference at the time. Juice jacking works by equipping a charger with hidden hardware that can access files and other internal resources of phones, in much the same way that a computer can when a user connects it to the phone.

An attacker would then make the chargers available in airports, shopping malls, or other public venues for use by people looking to recharge depleted batteries. While the charger was ostensibly only providing electricity to the phone, it was also secretly downloading files or running malicious code on the device behind the scenes. Starting in 2012, both Apple and Google tried to mitigate the threat by requiring users to click a confirmation button on their phones before a computer—or a computer masquerading as a charger—could access files or execute code on the phone.

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The FBI is offering $10 million for information about the China-state hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon and its intrusion last year into sensitive networks belonging to multiple US telecommunications companies.

Salt Typhoon is one of a half-dozen or more hacking groups that work on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. Intelligence agencies and private security companies have concluded the group has been behind a string of espionage attacks designed to collect vital information, in part for use in any military conflicts that may arise in the future.

A broad and significant cyber campaign

The agency on Thursday published a statement offering up to $10 million, relocation assistance, and other compensation for information about Salt Typhoon. The announcement specifically sought information about the specific members of Salt Typhoon and the group's compromise of multiple US telecommunications companies last year.

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Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds.

When Recall was first introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings. They also noted that there was nothing stopping Recall from preserving sensitive disappearing content sent through privacy-protecting messengers such as Signal.

Enshittification at a new scale

Following months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended Recall. On Thursday, the company said it was reintroducing Recall. It currently is available only to insiders with access to the Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 preview version. Over time, the feature will be rolled out more broadly. Microsoft officials wrote:

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Google is hosting dozens of extensions in its Chrome Web Store that perform suspicious actions on the more than 4 million devices that have installed them and that their developers have taken pains to carefully conceal.

The extensions, which so far number at least 35, use the same code patterns, connect to some of the same servers, and require the same list of sensitive systems permissions, including the ability to interact with web traffic on all URLs visited, access cookies, manage browser tabs, and execute scripts. In more detail, the permissions are:

• Tabs: manage and interact with browser windows
• Cookies: set and access stored browser cookies based on cookie or domain names (ex., "Authorization" or "all cookies for GitHub.com")
• WebRequest: intercept and modify web requests the browser makes
• Storage: ability to store small amounts of information persistently in the browser (these extensions store their command & control configuration here)
• Scripting: the ability to inject new JavaScript into webpages and manipulate the DOM
• Alarms: an internal messaging service to trigger events. The extension uses this to trigger events like a cron job, as it can allow for scheduling the heartbeat callbacks by the extension
• :: This works in tandem with other permissions like webRequest, but allows for the extension to functionally interact with all browsing activity (completely unnecessary for an extension that should just look at your installed extensions)

These sorts of permissions give extensions the ability to do all sorts of potentially abusive things and, as such, should be judiciously granted only to trusted extensions that can’t perform core functions without them.

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Spammers used OpenAI to generate messages that were unique to each recipient, allowing them to bypass spam-detection filters and blast unwanted messages to more than 80,000 websites in four months, researchers said Wednesday.

The finding, documented in a post published by security firm SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs, underscores the double-edged sword wielded by large language models. The same thing that makes them useful for benign tasks—the breadth of data available to them and their ability to use it to generate content at scale—can often be used in malicious activities just as easily. OpenAI revoked the spammers’ account after receiving SentinelLabs’ disclosure, but the four months the activity went unnoticed shows how enforcement is often reactive rather than proactive.

“You are a helpful assistant”

The spam blast is the work of AkiraBot—a framework that automates the sending of messages in large quantities to promote shady search optimization services to small- and medium-size websites. AkiraBot used python-based scripts to rotate the domain names advertised in the messages. It also used OpenAI’s chat API tied to the model gpt-4o-mini to generate unique messages customized to each site it spammed, a technique that likely helped it bypass filters that look for and block identical content sent to large numbers of sites. The messages are delivered through contact forms and live chat widgets embedded into the targeted websites.

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A leak of 190,000 chat messages traded among members of the Black Basta ransomware group shows that it’s a highly structured and mostly efficient organization staffed by personnel with expertise in various specialties, including exploit development, infrastructure optimization, social engineering, and more.

The trove of records was first posted to file-sharing site MEGA. The messages, which were sent from September 2023 to September 2024, were later posted to Telegram in February 2025. ExploitWhispers, the online persona who took credit for the leak, also provided commentary and context for understanding the communications. The identity of the person or persons behind ExploitWhispers remains unknown. Last month’s leak coincided with the unexplained outage of the Black Basta site on the dark web, which has remained down ever since.

“We need to exploit as soon as possible”

Researchers from security firm Trustwave’s SpiderLabs pored through the messages, which were written in Russian, and published a brief blog summary and a more detailed review of the messages on Tuesday.

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A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned.

The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.

A significant threat

“This technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection,” the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday. “Malicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations.”

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