Update on the ANTS breach we covered April 22: French police detained a 15-year-old on April 25, suspected of running the breach3d alias and stealing data from France Titres (ANTS), the agency that issues French ID cards, passports, and driver's licenses. The Paris Prosecutor's Office charged the minor on April 29 with three offenses carrying up to seven years in prison. ANTS now confirms 11.7 million accounts affected - lower than the original 19 million claim but still one of the largest leaks of French citizen identity data ever. Exposed data includes full names, email addresses, dates of birth, postal addresses, and phone numbers.
Guardio documented a Vietnamese-linked fraud operation that has stolen roughly 30,000 Facebook business accounts by abusing Google's AppSheet no-code platform as a phishing relay. Because the phishing emails come from noreply@appsheet.com (a real Google address), they pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks that normally catch fake-Meta emails. The lures impersonate Meta Support and threaten account deletion within 24 hours unless the user 'submits an appeal.' Stolen credentials, 2FA codes, and government ID photos are exfiltrated to Telegram. The operators then sell the stolen accounts back to victims through their own recovery service.
Kaspersky disclosed a previously undocumented cyber-espionage group called HeartlessSoul that has been targeting Russian government agencies and aviation companies since at least September 2025 to steal geographic information system (GIS) data - the specialized files containing detailed maps of roads, engineering networks, terrain, and strategic facilities. The targeting suggests state-aligned interest in Russian infrastructure mapping rather than financial gain. Kaspersky did not name a likely sponsor but the targeting profile is consistent with a Ukraine-aligned or Western-aligned operator. The group uses tailored phishing, custom malware, and persistent network access.
Trend Micro disclosed a China-aligned espionage cluster called SHADOW-EARTH-053 that has been targeting government and defense organizations across South, East, and Southeast Asia plus one NATO European country since at least December 2024. The group breaks in by exploiting unpatched Microsoft Exchange and IIS servers (using known flaws like ProxyLogon), drops a Godzilla web shell for persistent access, then uses DLL sideloading to load ShadowPad - a long-running Chinese implant. The targeting overlaps with Earth Alux and REF7707, suggesting either a shared operator or shared infrastructure across China-aligned groups. Targets include journalists and activists alongside government agencies.
CrowdStrike disclosed two cybercrime groups - Cordial Spider and Snarky Spider - running fast SaaS extortion attacks that stay almost entirely inside legitimate SaaS environments. The pattern: call employees pretending to be IT support, walk them through an 'MFA reset' that's actually a credential-harvesting site that mimics their company's branding, capture the password and MFA code, then immediately log into SSO and pivot through Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and other SaaS apps. The attackers register their own device for MFA and exfiltrate data within hours. Both groups overlap with the broader ShinyHunters ecosystem (UNC6240/UNC6661/UNC6671).
Google overhauled its Vulnerability Reward Program for Android and Chrome on May 1 in response to AI tools reshaping bug hunting. The maximum Pixel Titan M reward jumped to $1.5 million for a zero-click exploit with persistence. Chrome payouts dropped across categories. Google is rewarding 'actionable reports' with concrete exploits and suggested fixes rather than raw bug volume - a response to AI tools like Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.4-Cyber generating more vulnerability reports than security teams can triage. Google paid a record $17.1 million in 2025 (up 40% from 2024) and expects 2026 aggregate rewards to increase further despite per-bug cuts.
Anthropic launched Claude Security in public beta yesterday, an enterprise tool that scans code repositories for vulnerabilities, rates each finding's severity and confidence, and generates patch instructions that engineers can apply through Claude Code. The launch is direct response to Mythos and similar AI-driven offensive tools that have been compressing the time between vulnerability disclosure and active exploitation - LiteLLM was exploited 36 hours after disclosure last week, LMDeploy in 13 hours the week before. CrowdStrike, Microsoft Security, Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, Trend, and Wiz are integrating Claude Opus 4.7 into their platforms.
Brian Krebs published an investigation showing that Huge Networks, a Brazilian DDoS protection firm, has been running the Mirai-based botnet behind a years-long DDoS campaign against other Brazilian ISPs. An exposed open directory revealed Portuguese-language Python attack scripts that relied on the personal SSH keys of Huge Networks CEO Erick Nascimento. The botnet ran on compromised TP-Link Archer AX21 routers and unmanaged DNS servers, attacking Brazilian IP prefixes for 10-60 seconds at a time. Nascimento says a January 2026 intrusion compromised his SSH keys; he denies running the attacks. ISPs say the attacks have been ongoing since December 2024.
Google patched a critical flaw in Gemini CLI, the command-line tool developers use to interact with Gemini models from CI pipelines and dev workstations. CVSS 10.0. The bug let an attacker execute arbitrary code on the developer's machine by feeding crafted input to the CLI - specifically through the same pattern that compromised LiteLLM and several other AI tools recently. A separate but related set of flaws in Cursor, the AI-powered IDE, also enables code execution. The pattern across all these AI dev tools is the same: input validation gaps where attacker-controlled prompts or model output reach a shell or code execution path.
Update on the Mini Shai-Hulud campaign covered April 30: The same supply-chain worm that hit four SAP npm packages on Wednesday spread to two more major packages on Thursday. PyTorch Lightning, an AI training framework with 31,100 GitHub stars and hundreds of thousands of daily downloads, had malicious versions 2.6.2 and 2.6.3 published on PyPI for 42 minutes before being quarantined. Intercom-client, the official Node.js SDK for Intercom (361,510 weekly downloads), was compromised at 14:41 UTC. Intercom traced its compromise to pyannote-audio pulling Lightning as a dependency - showing the worm propagating through stolen credentials from the SAP victims.
TrustStrike Labs