Lukas Brandt writes: Criminals using the Amadey malware lost control of about 180,000 infected computers after operators from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) gained access to the operation’s backend and severed the connection between the controllers and the victims. “The next steps that we took were to disconnect that Amadey controller from all those victims,”…
Source: DataBreaches.net · 2026-10-29
Kalleigh Lane reports: If your school district used Frontline Central or School Health Management, your Social Security number, date of birth, or government ID could have been caught up in a cybersecurity incident. That risk applies to some adults and minors whose information was processed through those products. Frontline Education announced Oct. 26, 2026, that…
Source: DataBreaches.net · 2026-10-29
David DiMolfetta reports: Searchable records identifying more than 41,000 current and former Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors were published Wednesday, exposing contact information and details about sensitive assignments across the department, according to the organizations behind the release. The transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets — known as DDoSecrets — said it received…
Source: DataBreaches.net · 2026-10-29
Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive repository for fanfiction and creative writing, might be down for as long as a month after going down for “maintenance” on Thursday.
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted on its status page early Thursday morning that the site was down for maintenance. A few hours later, it updated the status to say that it was expected to take at least 12 hours. By Thursday afternoon, it said the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month.
“We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved. Please stay tuned for further info,” OTW wrote.
A spokesperson for OTW told 404 Media Thursday night that there are no more updates at this time beyond what’s on the status page. They did, however, say that they don’t expect there to be data loss. Early Friday morning, OTW added an update to the status page: “First, no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe,” it says. “Second, while we currently don’t believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out. The AO3 database contains account information that may include your username, email address, IP address, and a hashed version of your password.” They say they use hashing techniques to protect password data, but recommend users change their passwords on any other sites where they use the same password as on AO3, as a precaution.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of AO3 to fan culture, fanfiction writers and readers, and its influence on internet culture in general. As of September, the open-source fanfic repository hosted over 18.4 million works spanning over 82,900 fandoms. This status update means AO3 is expected to be down during much of hoa hoa hoa season, most of ACOTAR new book release week, and on the cusp of the month formerly known as NaNoWriMo. If you were going as Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way for Halloween, you are in our thoughts. And if you have something to share about AO3’s extended shutdown and how it will affect the fanfic community, I’d love to hear from you: sam@404media.co.
Updated to add OTW comment and Friday morning’s status page update.
Source: 404 Media · 2026-10-29
We start this week with Jason and Joseph’s article about leaked audio from a private police conference. In that audio, Flock’s CEO made all sorts of wild claims about the backlash to his company not being real, and his wife’s advice to never apologize. After the break, Sam tells us why former Yahoo CEO Marrisa Mayer can’t keep pretending ‘gender doesn’t matter.’ In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us about a woman who is facing years in prison because someone else opened a CashApp account in her name.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode’s bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
Source: 404 Media · 2026-10-29
EMBRACE affects AI coding tools Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex, VS Code and Claude Desktop, enabling code execution, file theft and browser address-bar spoofing.
Source: HackRead · 2026-10-29
Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”
In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
That exchange was just one of many that showed how Yen and other company executives are aggressively pushing Proton towards AI. Proton is a Swiss company that famously makes the encrypted email service Proton Mail and a suite of privacy and security-focused products, including an encrypted drive service, an authenticator app, a password manager, and more.
In the last few months, Yen set up an email address for employees to contact if they come across anything blocking adoption of AI at Proton, so leadership can “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity;” Proton installed software on workers’ computers that track how much AI code the company is generating; and Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.
That AI push came to head this week when 404 Media reported Proton said it would re-interview staff about their use of AI, with the clear implication that those interviews, and employees’ willingness to embrace AI, could decide whether a worker is fired or not.
404 Media spoke to eight current and one former Proton employees and reviewed Slack chats, meeting recordings, and an AI manifesto written by the company’s CTO. Our reporting reveals a culture of fear inside Proton, where many employees are hesitant to even mildly critique Yen’s views or discuss engineering problems. Workers describe an environment where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security products with AI, but feel unable to voice them, lest Yen berates them in front of everyone or threatens their employment at the company.
“The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” one of the sources told 404 Media.
Our reporting also paints a picture of Proton that is likely very different to the public’s perception of a company with a goal of carefully protecting privacy: one that in reality is barreling ahead with AI as quickly as possible so it can achieve the explicit goal of more annual revenue.
“Due to insufficient velocity,” Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year, one internal document obtained by 404 Media reads. Proton’s year-over-year growth is also “far away from what the market today considers to be good,” and, “By all metrics that matter, we’re an underperforming company.”
In response to detailed questions from 404 Media, a Proton spokesperson did not dispute any of our reporting or characterization of what’s happening inside of the company.
“It’s clear that some people at Proton are unhappy with our direction, or misunderstand it, and many people are anxious,” they said. “In our determination to move fast, we have sometimes been too blunt or too slow in explaining ourselves to our people. We will work on that, as their questions are the ones we most need to answer.”
Yen, a former CERN particle physicist, projects a measured approach in public, but internally he acts more like what one employee described as a “petulant child.” In May, Proton announced it was implementing post-quantum cryptography which should protect against future attacks from quantum computers. The work took years of effort, with one caveat that it would not work on older emails, only those written after the feature’s launch, at least for the moment. Yen was not happy that Proton was drawing attention to this limitation.
Source: 404 Media · 2026-10-29
New York, New York, 29th October 2026, CyberNewswire
Source: HackRead · 2026-10-29
Artem Stryzhak gets 70 months for Nefilim and Hive ransomware attacks targeting hospitals, government agencies and businesses in the US and overseas.
Source: HackRead · 2026-10-29