Author: HackWatchit

Active police and government email accounts are being sold on the dark web for as little as $40, giving cybercriminals a direct line into systems and services that rely on institutional trust. According to new research from Abnormal AI, the accounts come from agencies in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, India, and Brazil, and are being traded on underground forums. Source: Abnormal AI Unlike spoofed or dormant addresses, these accounts are functional and still in use by legitimate agencies. Once compromised, they allow attackers to impersonate officials, send fraudulent subpoenas, or request sensitive data with a level of credibility…

New Cryptography Inventory Tool, Quantum-Optimized Firewalls and PAN-OS 12.1 Enable Quantum Readiness The cybersecurity landscape is rapidly shifting due to a risk that’s quietly brewing in the background: the race to achieve quantum supremacy. Quantum computing has long promised to redefine what’s possible in technology, with its ability to solve complex problems exponentially faster than classical computers. This technological breakthrough promises many benefits likely to unlock trillions in economic value but will also introduce major new risks to the cryptographic foundations of modern cybersecurity. Despite this significance, quantum is still often dismissed as a problem too far away to worry…

Privacy Rights Crushed by robots.txt: Sen. Hassan is on the warpath. The post Act Surprised: Data Brokers Seem to Scoff at California Privacy Act appeared first on Security Boulevard.

The Adversary’s Path to Achieving Persistence Once SCATTERED SPIDER gains access to a target organization, they work to ensure persistence in the environment. In one example, the adversary added unauthorized federated identity providers to Azure AD/Entra ID tenants, creating persistent backdoor access that bypasses standard security controls. This technique involves establishing trust relationships with attacker-controlled identity providers, allowing them to authenticate as legitimate users. Their federation manipulation remains effective even after password resets, making this a particularly dangerous persistence mechanism. This approach enables SCATTERED SPIDER to maintain access long after initial detection and remediation efforts. Falcon Next-Gen SIEM provides numerous…

In times of uncertainty, firms can’t afford to have payments among the unknown quantities they’re facing down.  Yet in B2B, money has always moved slowly, sometimes painfully so. For decades, corporate procurement and supplier payments were governed by entrenched terms, often designed to tilt the advantage toward one party.  The buyer sought to conserve cash; the supplier sought to get paid as quickly as possible. Between them lay a battlefield of net-30, net-60 or even net-90 payment terms, late fees and financing workarounds. Today, that battlefield is transforming into something more like a negotiation table. Under the combined weight of…

More than $300 million worth of cryptocurrency linked to cybercrime and fraud schemes has been frozen due to two separate initiatives involving law enforcement and private companies. One initiative is the T3+ Global Collaborator Program launched by the T3 Financial Crime Unit (T3 FCU), a joint effort deployed almost a year ago by intelligence firm TRM Labs, TRON, and Tether, with Binance joining as the first official member – all major forces in the blockchain space. According to intelligence firm TRM Labs, more than $250 million in criminal assets worldwide have been frozen since the program started in September 2024. This includes…

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the government may still expand its Bitcoin (BTC) holdings on Aug. 14, backtracking remarks made a few hours earlier.Bessent had told reporters during a television interview in the morning that the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve would remain at its current level.He said the reserve would consist of approximately $15 billion to $20 billion in Bitcoin that the government already controls, most of which was seized in criminal cases.Bessent also indicated that there were no active plans to purchase more Bitcoin for the reserve.However, later in the day, he posted on social media that the Treasury remained…

Cisco Talos researchers have discovered a dangerous new malware framework called PS1Bot. Active since early 2025, this sophisticated threat spreads through malvertising and is designed to steal cryptocurrency wallets, passwords, and other sensitive information. Hackread.com has learned about a new, highly active cyberattack from research carried out by cybersecurity experts at Cisco Talos. Their technical blog post, shared exclusively with us, details a new type of malicious software called PS1Bot. What is PS1Bot? PS1Bot is a powerful and sneaky malware framework that has been very active since early 2025. It gets its name, in part, from being created with PowerShell,…

Never miss a new edition of The Variable, our weekly newsletter featuring a top-notch selection of editors’ picks, deep dives, community news, and more. AI’s footprint is growing rapidly across roles and industries. As generative-AI tools move from the margins into core workflows, practitioners increasingly ask themselves a deceptively simple question: what does being good at one’s job mean these days? There’s no one answer, of course, but the articles we’ve selected for you this week point to a key insight: it might be time to redefine what “following best practices” mean, and to focus our understanding of performance around skills in…