Author: HackWatchit

A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty to hacking into multiple telecommunications companies and stealing mobile call and text metadata for more than 100 million AT&T customers in 2024 was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison today and ordered to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution to victims. One of several selfies from the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius. Cameron John Wagenius, 22, was stationed at a U.S. Army base in South Korea when he adopted the cybercriminal persona “Kiberphant0m.” Working with three alleged co-conspirators, Kiberphant0m downloaded data from several large customers of the cloud data storage service Snowflake that…

AI will run in many places. The enterprise fabric should remain one. Earlier this year at Cisco Live, our team spent an evening talking with several NeoCloud providers alongside colleagues from Cisco’s AI Infrastructure organization. We expected the conversation to revolve around GPUs, AI factories, and inference capacity. Instead, the same request kept surfacing. Their enterprise customers wanted an easier way to connect AI workloads running in these environments into their existing Cisco SD-WAN networks. They weren’t simply asking for another connection. These customers had already built routing, segmentation, security, and application policies into their SD-WAN fabric. They wanted that…

BaseRock IT Solutions, a UK specialist in industrial IT and manufacturing cybersecurity, recently announced a partnership with Radiflow, a global provider of OT cybersecurity and risk management solutions for industrial and critical infrastructure. Through the partnership, BaseRock will add OT risk assessment and continuous monitoring to its IEC 62443 advisory services, powered by Radiflow’s technology. The partnership closes a gap that most IEC 62443 programmes run into. An assessment gives a point-in-time view of risk, but once the consultants leave, manufacturers have little evidence of whether that risk is actually going down. With Radiflow, BaseRock can now help customers map…

Inside XCPE, the botnet that turned 1.3M set-top boxes into proxy servers Pierluigi Paganini November 03, 2026 Google dismantled a 1.3 million-device botnet allegedly built by Android TV box maker Videostrong to enable ad fraud and proxy abuse. Google and its partners dismantled a backdoor called XCPE that had enrolled more than 1.3 million set-top boxes in a botnet. The result of the investigation into the malware operation is the striking part: Videostrong Technology Co., an Android device maker, built and ran the botnet for money. Google says it is highly confident that Videostrong deliberately created, spread and operated the backdoor.…

The key point: CVE-2026-111497 now increasingly referred to as HTTP2Shell and initially reported as Node2Shell, is broader than a Node.js vulnerability.  The vulnerability is associated with Brotli decompression, so defenders need to find vulnerable implementations across applications and infrastructure, confirm whether untrusted compressed data can reach them, and patch the affected component. AT A GLANCE ·       CVE: CVE-2026-111497 ·       Affected layer: Brotli decompression implementations used by multiple runtimes and infrastructure components ·       Primary risk question: Can attacker-controlled Brotli-compressed data reach a vulnerable decoder? ·       Immediate priority: Discover, assess reachability, patch, redeploy, and hunt HTTP2Shell emerged shortly after PHP2Shell, but the…

The NHS has set an ambitious goal of achieving cyber resilience across healthcare organisations by 2030. Delivering on that vision requires technology, expertise and close collaboration across the public and private sectors. This is clearly a highly complex task, but one we’re delighted to help deliver in partnership with IBM. Through this partnership, Palo Alto Networks will provide advanced cloud-based perimeter technology, alongside IBM Consulting’s specialist guidance, implementation support and tailored onboarding for NHS organisations. As health and care services continue to modernise, maintaining resilient, secure digital infrastructure has never been more important. Healthcare organisations are operating in an increasingly…

Executive Summary October 19 Update Unit 42 has observed attempted exploitation of the May 2026 CVE-2026-0257 by ransomware operators, including Spikey Scorpius (aka Qilin) and Tarnished Scorpius (aka Inc). We’re also aware of public reporting attributing exploitation to threat actors using Settra ransomware. Fixes for this vulnerability have been available since May 2026. Palo Alto Networks has become aware of limited exploit attempts on unpatched PAN-OS devices without mitigations applied. Customers can mitigate the risk of this issue by taking any of the following actions: Use a dedicated certificate for Authentication Override cookies: Generate a new certificate exclusively for authentication…

Topic: The Future of Application Security: AI, Automation, & Continuous Protection Recording Coming Soon Abstract: The application security landscape is changing rapidly as organizations adopt cloud-native architectures, APIs, microservices, open-source components, and AI-powered development. Traditional approaches that rely heavily on periodic testing and manual remediation are increasingly challenged by the speed and complexity of modern software delivery. The current webinar explores how AI and automation are transforming application security, enabling organizations to identify vulnerabilities earlier, prioritize risks more intelligently, automate remediation workflows, and continuously monitor applications throughout their lifecycle. The webinar will discuss the evolution from traditional application security testing…

Apple expects slower services growth during the holiday quarter, at the same time that it absorbs the cloud-computing costs of Siri AI and prepares to charge customers for expanded access to certain artificial intelligence features. Speaking on his first earnings conference call as Apple CEO, John Ternus outlined plans for paid access during an analyst question about iCloud+ and Apple Intelligence. “There are going to be some usage limits on features that rely on server-side models, which include Siri AI and intelligent photo editing, some other things like that,” Ternus said, adding that “anyone who needs greater capacity will be…