Renaissance

Black October update: 55 new attacks in the last 48 hours 5 VERY serious attacks (among the biggest of a normal *year*) SUMMARY OF THE LAST 48 HOURS: - Hackers are holding an entire city hostage in Spain - Phones stopped working in Japan - Hackers sent Ukrainians nuclear "take shelter" warnings - Europe's food supply still under siege - 51 more: *** Year-level incidents (in a typical year, these would be among the biggest incidents of the year): 1. France: in an unprecedented attack, hackers went after the country's blood supply. They broke into the company that cools the national blood service's freezers and set freezers of plasma for transfusions to 110°C (230°F), hotter than boiling water. That plasma goes to accident victims, surgery patients and women bleeding after childbirth. An on-call technician caught it in time. 2. Europe's food supply: the freezer attacks are spreading. Hackers have hit supermarket fridges and freezers in at least 12 European countries, spoiling tons of food, and this week turned a Bavarian butcher's cold rooms up to 150°C (302°F). The EU's agriculture chief called it "a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain," and Britain's cyber chief says it's "really just sort of the foothills" of the threat. 3. Japan: Docomo, the country's biggest mobile carrier with about 90 million customers, was likely hacked. Overnight it shut its online shop after finding hackers had "highly likely" gotten in. By noon, likely from the same attack, calls, data and texts were failing nationwide, and it's still checking whether emergency calls got through. 4. France: hackers stole more than €100 million, likely about €118 million, from Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, a banking group with 5.6 million customers. They got in through a supplier, wired the money out of the bank's own account and turned it into crypto. 5. South Korea: hackers hit 37 banks, brokers, insurers and crypto exchanges in a single month, including Bithumb, one of the country's two biggest crypto exchanges, leaking 473,000 records. The regulator ordered checks of all 580 financial firms; its chairman said a firm that can't protect its customers' money and data "has already lost its reason to exist." *** Month-level incidents (In a typical month, these would be among the biggest incidents): 6. Ukraine: likely Russian hackers took over the Kyiv Independent, Ukraine's leading English-language news outlet, and emailed readers fake news, including that Zelensky had launched a nuclear warhead at Kyiv. 7. Brazil: a leak let outsiders watch São Paulo city cameras inside condo buildings and politicians' homes, including places linked to a Supreme Court justice and two former presidents, for 5 days. 8. Spain: hackers are holding a city government hostage. Ransomware shut down city services in La Laguna, a city of about 150,000 in Tenerife, and the hackers want $5 million. 9. Russia: hackers stole the digital keys to cars from Li Auto, one of China's biggest electric carmakers, and are holding them for ransom: some won't start, others lost their screens and climate control. Owners are asked for up to 45,000 rubles, a month's pay for many Russians. 10. Likely Russian state hackers rigged real websites and faked America250, the US government's 250th-birthday site, so that just visiting on a phone could hand over WhatsApp and Telegram messages, saved passwords, location and photos. 11. White House: researchers found strangers' internet traffic coming out of six White House network addresses 236 times in a month, through proxy services anyone can rent for a few dollars. Something on the network was letting outsiders use it. 12. Japan: hackers likely got records of about 1.1 million card customers of home goods chain Muji, including 345,000 full, still-valid card numbers with birth dates, what fraudsters need to shop on someone else's card. 13. Japan: hackers got into the arcade servers of video game giant SEGA, and arcades across Japan couldn't run games like Initial D and maimai. 14. Bristol, UK: hackers posted 320,000 files stolen from 39 schools on the dark web. 15. Russia: Belarusian and pro-Ukrainian hackers say they spent months inside the national statistics agency, wiped its servers and took war casualty figures the Kremlin doesn't publish. The agency confirms the attack. 16. mSecure, a password manager, the app that holds the keys to all your other accounts: a hacker likely stole its encrypted database of current and former users, and it told them to change their passwords. 17. South Korea: hackers poisoned the official PC launcher for NIKKE, a hit game with over 45 million downloads, so just opening it installed spyware that steals logins and crypto wallets. The publisher has apologized. 18. WordPress: hackers are now using a hole in WordPress itself, the software behind over 40% of the world's websites, to take over sites while they update, no login needed, the US cyber agency says. 19. GitBook, which hosts help pages for many crypto and software companies: an attacker using AI agents broke in and likely took the keys to customers' connected systems. Large crypto exchange PancakeSwap pulled its pages offline. 20. South Korea: workers at an arm of the national power company and at Korea Airport Security are being told their ID numbers and salaries likely leaked, as the hack of payroll software maker Douzone Bizon keeps spreading. Also serious: 21. Australia: NSW Health, which runs the public hospitals for Australia's biggest state, declared a "major incident." A hacker says they took about 100,000 documents and only stopped because they crashed the server by accident. Officials say no patient records were taken. 22. Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines say hackers got passengers' booking data through Amadeus, which runs bookings for much of the airline industry. Other airlines' stolen records included passports. 23. Taiwan: hackers got into a supplier of SinoPac Bank's mobile banking system and moved $1.3 million out of 419 customers' accounts. 24. UK: when ransomware hit a group of schools in September, an AI was likely typing the attackers' commands, one every 40 to 100 seconds. 25. Harvard: last year's hack took the details of more than 850,000 students, alumni, parents, faculty and donors. That's a ready-made list for scammers. 26. Japan: hackers got into the roadside-assistance contractor of Sompo Japan, one of the country's biggest insurers, and about 65,000 car-insurance customers' details likely leaked. 27. Japan: hackers broke into gift-card seller Giftee and issued fake e-gift vouchers, an expected loss of about $3.6 million. 28. Zyxel: hackers used an unknown flaw to take over nearly 1,000 office network switches and steal their passwords before a fix existed. Smaller, but still notable: 29. Washington State's elections office says a cyberattack hit its website during election week. Vote counting wasn't touched. 30. Louisville, Kentucky: a breach at the staffing software of Kentucky's biggest school district likely exposed Social Security numbers and home addresses of 37,000+ current and former staff. 31. Poland: hackers hit the culture ministry's grants system, likely exposing ID numbers and bank details of about 24,000 artists and students. 32. The Japan Times, the country's oldest English-language newspaper: a ransomware attack likely leaked former employees' national ID (My Number) data. Suspected or claimed, not confirmed yet: 33. Ukraine: hackers reportedly broke into the control panel of "Air Alert", the air raid warning app millions of Ukrainians rely on, and sent fake alerts. Ukraine blames Russia. 34. Argentina: a hacker claims 26 GB from the Federal Police, including officers' biometric data and wiretap recordings. 35. US: the hack of the FBI likely reached Justice Department employees' data too, the department warned. 36. Online stores: hackers are reportedly using an unpatched hole in Adobe's store software to take over the servers where shoppers type their card numbers. 37. Russia: hosting giant Beget reportedly went down in a cyberattack, with hackers deleting the websites and files of businesses that host there. 38. Holcim, one of the world's biggest cement makers, was reportedly hit by a cyberattack, with hackers claiming 360 GB of data 39. Pro-Russian hacker groups claim they were behind the European freezer attacks. Plus 16 more we didn't have room for: Holiday Inn owner IHG, investment bank Nomura, Japan Post, Turkey's Pegasus Airlines, Berlin's city government, crypto network Polkadot, Denmark's top department store, meal-voucher company Pluxee, crypto exchange BitMart, crypto server company Chainstack, 27 companies via stolen Microsoft logins, two AI developer platforms, a flaw in Linux updates, a French city hall, a Korean city's delivery app and a Bavarian town's records. Updates on earlier incidents: - Ahold Delhaize, the grocery giant behind Albert Heijn, Food Lion and Stop & Shop: last month's cyberattack will cost it €200 to 250 million in lost sales. - Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange: the $6.3 billion theft, the biggest crypto heist ever and likely the biggest heist of any kind, started when an engineer looking for an AI coding tool downloaded a booby-trapped installer. - Japan email-service breach: the toll keeps growing, with 15.8 million records at outings site Asoview, up to 14.9 million emails at electronics chain Bic Camera and about 1.2 million at two airlines. *** This post was researched and written by Claude Opus 5.5. I'm having it do a daily roundup for me and figured I'd share them here, since it's so hard to stay on top of everything going on