Update on the Canvas breach covered May 4, 8, and 12: Instructure paid an undisclosed ransom to ShinyHunters on Tuesday to stop publication of the 3.65 TB dataset covering 8,809 educational organizations and 275 million students and staff. Hours later, the US House Education Committee launched a formal inquiry requesting testimony from Instructure leadership about the breach and the decision to pay. This is the largest known education-sector ransom payment. The FBI's 'don't pay' guidance now collides with Congressional scrutiny of the payment decision.
Update on the Instructure breach we covered May 4: ShinyHunters has shifted from extorting Instructure itself to extorting individual schools and universities with their own Canvas data. BleepingComputer and Krebs on Security report that 8,800+ institutions have received direct ransom demands referencing real student records, teacher accounts, and gradebook data from their own Canvas tenants. The campaign mirrors the 2025 PowerSchool aftermath. Some schools are receiving demands sized to the institution. Krebs notes affected schools are scrambling to comply with state student-privacy laws while negotiating with attackers.
Update on the Trellix breach we covered May 2: RansomHouse claimed the attack on its leak site Thursday and published screenshots that suggest the intrusion reached well beyond the source code repository Trellix originally acknowledged. Cybernews researchers reviewed the dumped images and identified internal dashboards for VMware vCenter, Rubrik backup, and Dell EMC storage - the systems that hold backups, credentials, and virtual machine images for the entire company. RansomHouse says the intrusion happened April 17 and resulted in data encryption. Trellix told BleepingComputer it's 'aware of claims of responsibility' and looking into them. RansomHouse currently lists 170+ victims on its Tor leak site.
Update on the Head Mare campaign we covered April 28: Kaspersky now reports that BO Team (also known as Black Owl) and Head Mare appear to be coordinating cyber operations against Russian organizations, sharing command-and-control infrastructure on the same compromised hosts. The likely division of labor: Head Mare phishes for initial access, then BO Team takes over for malware deployment. BO Team has shifted from destructive attacks to covert espionage, and in Q1 2026 hit 20 Russian organizations across manufacturing, telecoms, and oil and gas. The group uses BrockenDoor and Remcos backdoors. Earlier BO Team campaigns hit a Russian drone supplier and the federal digital signature authority.
Update on the cPanel ransomware wave covered May 3: attackers have shifted focus and are now targeting governments and managed service providers exploiting CVE-2026-41940. Security Affairs reports the operation is no longer just opportunistic mass-encryption of small business websites - the actors are deliberately looking for hosting accounts owned by government agencies and IT firms that manage downstream customers. CISA added the cPanel flaw to its KEV catalog Friday with a federal patch deadline of May 21. With 44,000 cPanel hosts already compromised in the initial wave, the secondary phase targeting MSPs has the potential to multiply impact through customer-tenant relationships - much like the 2023 Kaseya VSA campaign.
Update on the Instructure breach we covered May 2: Instructure confirmed Saturday that names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and private messages between students and teachers were exposed. ShinyHunters now claims 275 million individuals across 9,000 schools worldwide are in the dataset, totaling 3.65+ TB of data including billions of private messages. The group set a pay-or-leak deadline of May 6 - this Tuesday. The Salesforce instance was also breached. This is Instructure's second breach in eight months. PowerSchool's January 2025 breach with similar scope produced a $17.25 million settlement.
Update on the cPanel flaw covered April 30: attackers are now mass-exploiting CVE-2026-41940 to deploy a Linux ransomware called 'Sorry' that encrypts websites and demands payment to unlock them. Shadowserver confirms at least 44,000 cPanel hosts have been compromised, with hundreds of victim sites already showing up in Google search results. The Sorry encryptor is written in Go, uses ChaCha20 with an embedded RSA-2048 public key (so victims cannot recover files without the attacker's private key), and appends '.sorry' to filenames. KnownHost reports the cPanel flaw was being exploited as a zero-day since at least February 23.
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.
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.
Update on the ADT breach we covered April 25: Have I Been Pwned added the leaked dataset yesterday with 5,488,888 unique email addresses confirmed - lower than ShinyHunters' original 10 million claim but still the largest US home-security customer leak on record. Beyond the email, name, phone, and address fields ADT originally disclosed, the leak includes details ADT downplayed: account creation dates, premise types, internal account flags, ADT installer IDs, and prospect/customer status. None catastrophic alone, but combined gives attackers enough context to run convincing 'security audit' phone scams against named customers with real install dates and installer names.
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