Rituals, the Amsterdam-headquartered cosmetics and home fragrance retailer with roughly 1,000 stores across Europe, the Middle East, and North America, disclosed on April 23 that attackers stole personal information from its 'My Rituals' membership database. The company has not yet said how many members were affected, only that 'personal information' was exfiltrated. No payment card data is reported to have been compromised. Rituals' membership program collects name, email, postal address, and purchase history to drive a loyalty and personalization program, so the exposed fields are ideal material for branded-lookalike phishing and physical-mail fraud referencing real past purchases. The company says it has informed Dutch data protection regulator Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens and is working with an external incident response firm. Rituals did not attribute the breach to a named group and has not described the initial access vector; the disclosure follows a wider April 2026 pattern in which loyalty and membership databases are repeatedly showing up as soft targets for extortion actors looking for PII-heavy datasets.
The Everest ransomware group listed Citizens Financial Group and Frost Bank on its leak site on April 20 with a six-day deadline that expires today. Everest claims 3.4 million Citizens records (names, addresses, account numbers) and 250,000 Frost records with the more sensitive set: SSNs, tax IDs, mortgage rates, and income data. Both banks confirmed the breach traces to a third-party vendor - a statement-printing provider for Citizens, a tax-document fulfillment firm for Frost - rather than direct compromise. Citizens disclosed publicly April 21; class-action lawsuits were filed April 23.
BleepingComputer reported on April 23 that recent Trigona ransomware intrusions are using a purpose-built command-line exfiltration tool rather than off-the-shelf rclone or MEGAcmd. The custom utility is small, supports parallel uploads, filters by file extension and size before transferring, and logs progress in a format optimized for ransomware operator dashboards. Researchers say the tool reduces dwell time meaningfully - operators are now exfiltrating high-value files in hours rather than days. The shift fits a broader trend (Akira, Black Basta, Play) toward bespoke tooling and away from detectable third-party utilities, making static endpoint signatures less reliable.
Security Affairs covered new research on April 23 documenting a Linux port of the GoGra backdoor, originally seen as Windows-only. The Linux variant retains GoGra's defining feature: it uses Microsoft Graph API as its command-and-control channel, fetching commands from Outlook drafts in an attacker-controlled Microsoft 365 tenant and writing results back to the same drafts. Because the C2 traffic is HTTPS to graph.microsoft.com - the same endpoint legitimate clients hit constantly - it is invisible to most network-layer detections. The Linux port targets enterprise Linux servers with Outbound 443 access to Microsoft cloud services, broadening reach onto build servers and jump hosts.
ESET disclosed GopherWhisper, a previously undocumented China-linked spy group active since at least November 2023 and targeting Mongolian government systems. The group's defining trick: instead of building its own command-and-control servers, it sends instructions through ordinary cloud services - private Slack channels, Discord servers, Outlook draft email folders, and the file.io file-sharing service. Because the malware traffic looks like normal Slack and Discord usage, network monitoring tools largely ignore it. ESET extracted thousands of operator messages from the attackers' own Slack and Discord workspaces, and even found a 'How to write RATs.txt' file in their Downloads folder.
Microsoft released out-of-band security updates for a critical ASP.NET Core Data Protection flaw that lets unauthenticated attackers forge authentication cookies and escalate to SYSTEM privileges. The bug (CVE-2026-40372) is a regression introduced in the April 2026 Patch Tuesday: the Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection 10.0.0 through 10.0.6 NuGet packages compute the HMAC validation tag (the cryptographic signature that proves a cookie has not been tampered with) over the wrong bytes of the payload and then discard the hash in some cases. The broken check means attackers can forge payloads that pass DataProtection's authenticity checks and decrypt previously-protected data in auth cookies, antiforgery tokens, TempData, and OIDC state. Microsoft noticed the flaw only after users reported decryption failures in their apps after installing the .NET 10.0.6 update. Critical operational detail: updating to 10.0.7 stops future forgeries, but any tokens an attacker already got the app to legitimately sign during the vulnerable window (session refresh tokens, API keys, password reset links) remain valid forever unless you rotate the DataProtection key ring. Patching alone is not enough.
Apple released out-of-band iOS and iPadOS updates to fix a Notification Services flaw that kept notifications marked for deletion sitting in internal storage, where they could be pulled off the device later. The bug (CVE-2026-28950) landed after 404 Media reported that the FBI recovered Signal messages from a suspect's iPhone even after the user deleted them and even after Signal itself was uninstalled. The recovered text did not come from Signal's encrypted message store - it came from iPhone's internal notification buffer, which silently preserved incoming notification contents that the app and the OS both thought had been erased. Apple's advisory does not name the FBI case but describes exactly the data-persistence behavior 404 Media documented. Signal's team publicly thanked Apple for the fix. Beyond Signal users, this flaw matters for anyone who assumed that deleting a message or uninstalling an app wiped the underlying notification data from the phone - it did not. Forensic extraction of an unlocked iPhone could have surfaced any sensitive content ever pushed as a notification.
Shadowserver data shows 1,300+ internet-exposed Microsoft SharePoint servers remain unpatched against CVE-2026-32201, a spoofing flaw Microsoft confirmed as a zero-day and CISA added to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog the same day the fix dropped in April Patch Tuesday. Fewer than 200 systems have been patched since the update shipped last week. The flaw affects SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016, SharePoint Server 2019, and SharePoint Server Subscription Edition. An unauthenticated attacker can perform network spoofing through improper input validation in a low-complexity attack that needs no user interaction, letting them view sensitive information and modify data, though not affect availability. Microsoft has not described the exploitation technique or attributed the attacks to a specific group, which is unusual for a zero-day and hints at an ongoing investigation. CISA ordered federal agencies to patch by April 28 under Binding Operational Directive 22-01, and given ongoing in-the-wild abuse, private-sector operators should treat that as their own deadline. SharePoint's habit of holding cached Office 365 tokens, SharePoint-signed refresh tokens, and IP on sensitive business processes makes any compromise a serious lateral-movement foothold, not a minor information disclosure.
A critical sandbox-escape flaw in Cohere AI's open-source Terrarium project lets code running inside the sandbox break out and execute arbitrary commands as root on the host Node.js process. Terrarium is a Python sandbox built on Pyodide (a browser- and Node.js-compatible Python distribution running in WebAssembly) and deployed as a Docker container to safely run untrusted code submitted by users or generated by a large language model. That exact use case makes the blast radius real: any AI product using Terrarium to evaluate LLM-generated Python code is giving its models a direct path to root on the container and, from there, potentially on the host. The flaw (CVE-2026-5752, CVSS 9.3) stems from JavaScript prototype chain traversal in the Pyodide WebAssembly environment: sandboxed code can reach parent and global object prototypes to manipulate objects in the host, a technique SentinelOne describes as prototype pollution bypassing the intended security boundaries. Exploitation needs local access to the sandbox but no special privileges or user interaction. The project has been starred 312 times and forked 56 times. Because Cohere is no longer actively maintaining Terrarium, the flaw is unlikely to ever be patched. Security researcher Jeremy Brown reported the issue.
Follow-up: this is the origin-story update to the Vercel breach disclosed April 19 (which our publication did not cover at the time). Hudson Rock traced the initial compromise to a Context.ai employee whose laptop was infected by Lumma Stealer malware in February 2026 after the user downloaded Roblox 'auto-farm' scripts and game-exploit executors - a notorious delivery vector for infostealers. The malware harvested that employee's Google Workspace credentials plus access keys and logins for Supabase, Datadog, and Authkit. The haul also included the support@context.ai account, letting the attacker escalate inside Context.ai, reach its AWS environment, and then pivot through compromised Google Workspace OAuth tokens into a Vercel employee's enterprise workspace that had granted the 'AI Office Suite' app 'Allow All' permissions. The attacker (ShinyHunters, now selling the data for $2M on BreachForums) read Vercel environment variables not flagged as 'sensitive.' Google pulled the Context.ai Chrome extension (ID omddlmnhcofjbnbflmjginpjjblphbgk) on March 27 - it embedded an OAuth grant for read access to users' entire Google Drive. The lesson is brutal: one employee's personal risky behavior on a work device cascaded through four SaaS platforms into a supply-chain breach that a threat actor is now auctioning.
TrustStrike Labs