Cyber Defense Advisors

Month: May 2025

Breachforums Boss to Pay $700k in Healthcare Breach

In what experts are calling a novel legal outcome, the 22-year-old former administrator of the cybercrime community Breachforums will forfeit nearly $700,000 to settle a civil lawsuit from a health insurance company whose customer data was posted for sale on the forum in 2023. Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, a.k.a. “Pompompurin,” is slated for resentencing next month […]

Cyber News

Meta to Train AI on E.U. User Data From May 27 Without Consent; Noyb Threatens Lawsuit

Austrian privacy non-profit noyb (none of your business) has sent Meta’s Irish headquarters a cease-and-desist letter, threatening the company with a class action lawsuit if it proceeds with its plans to train users’ data for training its artificial intelligence (AI) models without an explicit opt-in. The move comes weeks after the social media behemoth announced […]

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Coinbase Agents Bribed, Data of ~1% Users Leaked; $20M Extortion Attempt Fails

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has disclosed that unknown cyber actors broke into its systems and stole account data for a small subset of its customers. “Criminals targeted our customer support agents overseas,” the company said in a statement. “They used cash offers to convince a small group of insiders to copy data in our customer support […]

Cyber News

Pen Testing for Compliance Only? It’s Time to Change Your Approach

Imagine this: Your organization completed its annual penetration test in January, earning high marks for security compliance. In February, your development team deployed a routine software update. By April, attackers had already exploited a vulnerability introduced in that February update, gaining access to customer data weeks before being finally detected. This situation isn’t theoretical: it […]

Cyber News

AI-Generated Law

On April 14, Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced that the United Arab Emirates would begin using artificial intelligence to help write its laws. A new Regulatory Intelligence Office would use the technology to “regularly suggest updates” to the law and “accelerate the issuance of legislation by up to 70%.” AI would create a “comprehensive legislative […]

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5 BCDR Essentials for Effective Ransomware Defense

Ransomware has evolved into a deceptive, highly coordinated and dangerously sophisticated threat capable of crippling organizations of any size. Cybercriminals now exploit even legitimate IT tools to infiltrate networks and launch ransomware attacks. In a chilling example, Microsoft recently disclosed how threat actors misused its Quick Assist remote assistance tool to deploy the destructive Black […]

Cyber News

Russia-Linked APT28 Exploited MDaemon Zero-Day to Hack Government Webmail Servers

A Russia-linked threat actor has been attributed to a cyber espionage operation targeting webmail servers such as Roundcube, Horde, MDaemon, and Zimbra via cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, including a then-zero-day in MDaemon, according to new findings from ESET. The activity, which commenced in 2023, has been codenamed Operation RoundPress by the Slovak cybersecurity company. It […]

Cyber News

Malicious npm Package Leverages Unicode Steganography, Google Calendar as C2 Dropper

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious package named “os-info-checker-es6” that disguises itself as an operating system information utility to stealthily drop a next-stage payload onto compromised systems. “This campaign employs clever Unicode-based steganography to hide its initial malicious code and utilizes a Google Calendar event short link as a dynamic dropper for its final payload,” […]

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New Chrome Vulnerability Enables Cross-Origin Data Leak via Loader Referrer Policy

Google on Wednesday released updates to address four security issues in its Chrome web browser, including one for which it said there exists an exploit in the wild. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-4664 (CVSS score: 4.3), has been characterized as a case of insufficient policy enforcement in a component called Loader. “Insufficient policy enforcement […]

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