As if admins haven't had enough to do this week Ignore patches at your own risk. According to Uncle Sam, a SQL injection flaw in Microsoft Configuration Manager patched in October 2024 is now being actively exploited, exposing unpatched businesses and government agencies to attack.

Names, addresses, bank account numbers accessed but biz insists passwords and call data untouched The Netherlands' largest mobile network operator (MNO) has admitted that a breach of its customer contact system may have affected around 6.2 million people.

Years later, he read about his antagonist doing time for murder On Call Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader- contributed column that tells your tech support tales.

Are you a good bot or a bad bot? More than 30 malicious Chrome extensions installed by at least 260,000 users purport to be helpful AI assistants, but they steal users' API keys, email messages, and other personal data. Even worse: many of these are still available on the Chrome Web Store as of this writing.

As if snooping on your workers wasn't bad enough Your supervisor may like using employee monitoring apps to keep tabs on you, but crims like the snooping software even more. Threat actors are now using legit bossware to blend into corporate networks and attempt ransomware deployment.

Flaw abused 'in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals' Apple patched a zero-day vulnerability affecting every iOS version since 1.0, used in what the company calls an "extremely sophisticated attack" against targeted individuals.

Researchers say breaches link identity abuse, SaaS compromise, and ransomware into a cascading cycle Cybercriminals are turning supply chain attacks into an industrial-scale operation, linking breaches, credential theft, and ransomware into a "self-reinforcing" ecosystem, researchers say.

Whoever gets it will steer UK department's IT, AI strategy, and megabucks vendor deals The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is offering between 270,000 to 300,000 for a senior digital leader who will oversee more than 4.6 billion in spend

Meanwhile, IP-stealing 'distillation attacks' on the rise A Chinese government hacking group that has been sanctioned for targeting America's critical infrastructure used Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, to auto-analyze vulnerabilities and plan cyberattacks against US organizations, the company says.

Businesses are embedding prompts that produce content they want you to read, not the stuff AI makes if left to its own devices Amid its ongoing promotion of AIs wonders, Microsoft has warned customers it has found many instances of a technique that manipulates the technology to produce biased advice.

Add-ons with 37M installs leak visited URLs to 30+ recipients, researcher says They know where you've been and they're going to share it. A security researcher has identified 287 Chrome extensions that allegedly exfiltrate browsing history data for an estimated 37.4 million installations.

The more you share online, the more you open yourself to social engineering If you've seen the viral AI work pic trend where people are asking ChatGPT to "create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me" and sharing it to social, you might think it's harmless. You'd be wrong.

Attackers using social engineering to exploit business processes, rather than tunnelling in via tech Exclusive When fraudsters go after people's paychecks, "every employee on earth becomes a target," according to Binary Defense security sleuth John Dwyer.

Curious port filtering and traffic patterns suggest advisories werent the earliest warning signals sent Telcos likely received advance warning about January's critical Telnet vulnerability before its public disclosure, according to threat intelligence biz GreyNoise.

Smug faces across all those who opposed the WordPad-ification of Microsoft's humble text editor Just months after Microsoft added Markdown support to Notepad, researchers have found the feature can be abused to achieve remote code execution (RCE).

UK government grilled over progress made to prevent a second life-threatening leak Legacy IT issues are hampering key technical measures designed to prevent highly sensitive data leaks, UK government officials say.

Roses are red, violets are blue ... now get patching What better way to say I love you than with an update? Attackers exploited a whopping six Microsoft bugs as zero-days prior to Redmond releasing software fixes on February's Patch Tuesday.

Zero-click prompt injection can leak data when AI agents meet messaging apps, researchers warn AI agents can shop for you, program for you, and, if you're feeling bold, chat for you in a messaging app. But beware: attackers can use malicious prompts in chat to trick an AI agent into generating a data-leaking URL, which link previews may fetch automatically.

Operation Cyber Guardian involved 100-plus staff across government and industry Singapore spent almost a year flushing a suspected China-linked espionage crew out of its telecom networks in what officials describe as the country's largest cyber defense operation to date.

HR outsourcer Conduent confirms intruders accessed benefits-related records tied to US personnel Nearly 17,000 Volvo employees had their personal data exposed after cybercriminals breached Conduent, an outsourcing giant that handles workforce benefits and back-office services.

Troops fitted with new comms kit as part of Project ASGARD British soldiers are to get an array of AI-ready kit that should mean they don't have to wait to see the "whites of their eyes" before pulling the trigger.

So many CVEs, so little time Digital intruders exploited buggy SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD) instances in December to break into victims' IT environments, move laterally, and steal high-privilege credentials, according to Microsoft researchers.

By default, the bot listens on all network interfaces, and many users never change it It's a day with a name ending in Y, so you know what that means: Another OpenClaw cybersecurity disaster.

Staff data belonging to the regulator and judiciary's governing body accessed The Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) says it was one of the many organizations popped when attackers raced to exploit recent Ivanti vulnerabilities as zero-days.

Moving 40% of semiconductor production to America is 'impossible' says vice premier Taiwan's vice-premier has ruled out relocating 40 percent of the country's semiconductor production to the US, calling the Trump administration's goal "impossible."

Security devs forced to hide Boolean logic from overeager optimizer FOSDEM 2026 The creators of security software have encountered an unlikely foe in their attempts to protect us: modern compilers.

Average Swiss salaries dwarf those on offer across the rest of the continent European techies looking for the biggest payday are far better off in Switzerland than anywhere else, with average salaries eclipsing all other countries on the continent.

Officials explore issue affecting infrastructure after CERT-EU detected suspicious activity Brussels is digging into a cyber break-in that targeted the European Commission's mobile device management systems, potentially giving intruders a peek inside the official phones carried by EU staff.

PLUS: China broadens cryptocurrency crackdown; Australian facial recognition privacy revisited; Singapore debuts electric VT

PLUS: OpenClaw teams with VirusTotal; Crypto kidnappings in France; Critical vulns at SmarterMail; And more Infosec In Brief So-hot-right-now AI assistant OpenClaw, which is very much not secure right now , has teamed up with security scanning service VirusTotal.

Research shows productivity and judgment peak decades after graduation A growing body of research continues to show that older workers are generally more productive than younger employees.

Attackers may have snapped user locations and activity information, message warns Legacy image-sharing website Flickr suffered a data breach, according to customers emails seen by The Register .

UK leaps to sixth in global flood charts as mega-swarm unleashes 31.4 Tbps Yuletide pummeling Cloudflare says DDoS crews ended 2025 by pushing traffic floods to new extremes, while Britain made an unwelcome leap of 36 places to become the world's sixth-most targeted location.

Businesses still chase the cheapest option, but politics and licensing shocks are changing priorities, says OpenNebula Interview Sovereignty remains a hot topic in the tech industry, but interpretations of what it actually means and how much it matters vary widely between organizations and sectors. While public bodies are often driven by regulation and national policy, the private sector tends to take a more pragmatic, cost-focused view.

Right on cue, petulant hacktivists attempt to disrupt yet another global sporting event Italy's foreign minister says the country has already started swatting away cyberattacks from Russia targeting the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.

The end isn't nigh after all Chrome's latest revision of its browser extension architecture, known as Manifest v3 (MV3), was widely expected to make content blocking and privacy extensions less effective than its predecessor, Manifest v2 (MV2).

Skills marketplace is full of stuff - like API keys and credit card numbers - that crims will find tasty Another day, another vulnerability (or two, or 200) in the security nightmare that is OpenClaw.

Contact details were accessed in an intrusion that went undetected for months, the blogging outfit says Newsletter platform Substack has admitted that an intruder swiped user contact details months before the company noticed, forcing it to warn writers and readers that their email addresses and other account metadata were accessed without permission.

And their toolkit includes a new, Linux kernel rootkit A state-aligned cyber group in Asia compromised government and critical infrastructure organizations across 37 countries in an ongoing espionage campaign, according to security researchers.

Breach-tracking site flags dataset following impersonation-based intrusion Breach-tracking site Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) claims a cyberattack on Betterment affected roughly 1.4 million users although the investment company has yet to publicly confirm how many customers were affected by January's intrusion.