Threats, breaches, and staying safe online in Australia.
In brief On October 22, 2026, Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner of the crypto investment firm Dragonfly, said cybersecurity is experiencing a wave of attacks “similar to the COVID-19 pandemic” — and that on-chain crypto hacks are the “canary in the coal mine” for the whole internet. Citing DefiLlama Research data, he said the number of … Read more
In brief On October 21, 2026, Microsoft said a China-state aligned group it tracks as Storm-0940 used an AI-driven penetration testing tool to compromise IT services firm ConnectWise — then used that foothold to target hundreds of organizations worldwide. The tool is ARTEX: an open-source, multi-agent AI framework, written in Go, that runs an entire … Read more
In brief On October 20, 2026, Google announced three additions to Chrome’s Enhanced Protection mode: a new two-tier site-warning system, server-side Gemini-powered scam detection, and clipboard inspection that warns you when you copy a dangerous ClickFix command. The new “suspicious site” warning covers lower-confidence verdicts — pages that look like scams but do not clear … Read more
In brief Illumio’s new report “Licensed to Act: How AI Autonomy Is Outrunning the Limits Placed on It,” published October 21, 2026, surveyed 1,100 IT and security decision-makers across 10 markets on how much authority they have handed to AI. The headline figures: 70% of organizations now let AI make decisions and take actions that … Read more
In brief Security researchers at Straiker have published the first investigation of a criminal group running AI-orchestrated attack operations from inside its own working environment — a system called CARLIY0S, operated by the CyberCartel-linked Tr4nsHack Team against Latin American banks and payment providers. CARLIY0S is not one AI doing one thing: it is a role-specialized … Read more
CrowdStrike and NVIDIA Want to Secure AI Agents in the Chip Itself In brief On October 21, 2026, at NVIDIA’s GTC 2026, CrowdStrike announced an expanded collaboration with NVIDIA to extend AI-agent security “from software to silicon.” The concrete part: CrowdStrike’s Falcon Guardian — its AI Detection and Response (AIDR) product — integrates with NVIDIA’s … Read more
In brief A joint advisory (AA26-293A), published October 20, 2026, by CISA, the FBI, the US Secret Service, Germany’s Landeskriminalamt Rheinland-Pfalz, and two UK agencies, names SafePay one of the most active ransomware operations of 2026. SafePay has affected at least 600 organizations across multiple critical infrastructure sectors since August 2024, with victims in North … Read more
In brief On October 21, 2026, the PHP project released emergency security updates for two critical vulnerabilities in the PHP language itself, collectively called PHP2Shell: CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. Both allow unauthenticated remote code execution — an attacker with no account can run code on the server. The flaws sit in PHP’s core engine, not in … Read more
ThreatLocker’s Zero Trust AI Control: The Answer to Agents Going Rogue? In brief On October 20, 2026, Orlando-based cybersecurity vendor ThreatLocker launched Zero Trust AI Control (ZTAIC) — a tool that governs what AI agents are allowed to access, execute, and connect to inside an organization. The design choice that matters: the controls sit outside … Read more
In brief TeamUpdraft disclosed on October 19 that attackers accessed its website over the weekend of October 17–18 and got into its customer database — which contained the connection keys for UpdraftCentral, UpdraftVault and UpdraftClone, plus customer account information. The attackers used the stolen keys to send properly signed remote-management commands that installed backdoor plugins … Read more