Cybersecurity writer and analyst. Covering breaches, threats, and vulnerabilities — analysis beyond the headline.
Cyber Crime
A federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia convicted Sohaib Akhter on May 7, 2026 for his role in deleting roughly 96 U.S. government databases at federal contractor Opexus on the day he and his twin brother were fired in February 2025. The case is also notable for an unprecedented detail:
Application Security
RansomHouse claimed responsibility on May 7 for the Trellix breach the cybersecurity firm disclosed last week — and Cybernews researchers say screenshots posted by the group show internal VMware, Rubrik, and Dell EMC dashboards. That's a much wider compromise than Trellix's "portion of our source code
Threat Intelligence
Kaspersky researchers reported on May 7-8 that pro-Ukraine hacktivist groups BO Team (also known as Black Owl) and Head Mare appear to be coordinating their cyber operations against Russian organizations — sharing infrastructure including command-and-control systems on the same compromised host. BO Team had previously operated more autonomously than other hacktivist
shinyhunters
ShinyHunters defaced Canvas login pages worldwide on May 7 — disrupting finals week at Harvard, Penn, Duke, and Virginia Tech. The group claims 275 million records from 9,000 schools and is now telling individual schools to negotiate ransom payments by May 12. Instructure had declared the May 1 incident contained
Application Security
WIRED's Andy Greenberg published an investigation on May 7, 2026 reporting that the Israeli cybersecurity firm RedAccess found roughly 380,000 publicly accessible web assets built with AI "vibe-coding" platforms — Lovable, Base44, Replit, and Netlify — of which around 5,000 exposed sensitive corporate data and another
Fraud
404 Media's Joseph Cox published an investigation on May 7, 2026 in which he obtained, installed, and personally tested Haotian AI — a Chinese realtime deepfake software marketed to scammers — and watched a Cambodia-based operator's face shapeshift into his own during a live Microsoft Teams call. Haotian
phishing
The Australian Signals Directorate's Australian Cyber Security Centre published an advisory on May 7, 2026 warning that pro-criminal threat actors are using compromised legitimate Australian WordPress websites as launch pads for ClickFix social-engineering attacks delivering the Vidar Stealer information-stealing malware. Visitors to compromised Australian business websites are shown
Malware
Kaspersky disclosed on May 5, 2026 that Daemon Tools — disk-imaging software with millions of users worldwide — has been distributing trojanized installers from its official website since April 8, 2026. The compromised binaries were signed with valid AVB Disc Soft developer certificates. Thousands of machines across approximately 100 countries received a
Vulnerabilities
Ivanti disclosed CVE-2026-6973 on May 7 — a CVSS 7.2 EPMM flaw under active exploitation. CISA gave federal agencies just three days to patch (May 10 deadline). It's the third EPMM zero-day of 2026, and Ivanti hints attackers are using credentials stolen during January's campaign. On
Cyber Crime
Marlon Ferro, a 20-year-old Santa Ana, California man also known online as "GothFerrari" and "Marlo," was sentenced to 78 months in federal prison on May 7, 2026 for serving as the home-invader and money-launderer for a 14-person "Social Engineering Enterprise" that stole more than
Threat Intelligence
Dragos published an intelligence brief on May 6, 2026, documenting a cyber-attack against Servicios de Agua y Drenaje de Monterrey — a municipal water utility in northern Mexico — between December 2025 and February 2026 in which attackers used Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT to plan the operation,
Policy & Government
Poland's Internal Security Agency (ABW) published a public report on May 7, 2026 — its first activity summary in 12 years — warning that hackers targeted water treatment stations in five Polish municipalities, gaining access in some cases to industrial control systems and developing the ability to alter technical parameters