🚨Cyber Alert ‼️ 🇬🇧UK - 𝗣𝘄𝗖 The Everest hacking group claims to have stolen 590.69 GB of data from PwC, comprising 108,426 files allegedly originating from its internal HR and learning systems. The data reportedly includes employee information, employment and training records, internal audit methodologies, confidential documents, and SSO source code. The alleged breach affects multiple PwC regional operations, including Australia, China, Canada, and the UK, with one HR dataset reportedly containing 213,084 records. Threat actor: Everest Sector: Professional Data exposure (claimed): 590.69 GB of data (108,426 files) Data type: Employee records, personal data, training records, internal audit documents, SSO source code and configuration files Observed: Oct 22, 2026 Status: Pending verification ESIX©: 6.37 Full details and impact assessment on HackRisk.io

Security called me at 6:12 AM today. "Patch every PHP server immediately." I asked what happened. "Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required." Cool. How many PHP servers do we have? According to inventory: 12 According to reality: Nobody knows. We found one running WordPress. Three running old internal tools. One under someone's desk. Two inside vendor appliances. A forgotten employee directory from 2016. And a server named: PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH Naturally, that one runs payroll exports. Then we found a PHP 5.6 box. I asked who owned it. The documentation said: BRIAN. Brian left in 2019. We called Brian. He said: "Oh wow, that's still running?" Excellent. By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call. CEO: "Can hackers actually get in?" Security: "Potentially yes." CEO: "Without a password?" Security: "Yes." CEO: "Then why do WE need passwords?" Not the lesson. Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue. Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers. Finance asked for a cost comparison. At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline. Marketing refused. "Our campaign is live." So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover. We finally patched everything we could find. Then our scanner discovered another PHP server. Hostname: TEMP-PHP-2014 Uptime: 4,512 days. Nobody knows what it does. Nobody owns it. Nobody can shut it down. But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels. Security has classified it as critical infrastructure. It is running PHP 5.4. The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees. The emergency patch took four hours. Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven. The internet isn't held together with code. It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.