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From the CISO series, it's Cybersecurity Headlines

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these are the cybersecurity headlines for Wednesday, March 4, 2026. I'm Rich Stroffelino. Quantum Decryption Gets Theoretically Easier when we talk about quantum computers breaking cryptography, we're specifically referring to their ability to solve the factorization problem used by RSA and ECC algorithms. This has been based on Shor's algorithm, but it's required an estimated 1 million qubits, which is still far from feasibility. However, the Advanced Quantum Technologies Institute announced a new Jesse Victor Gharabaghi JVG quantum decryption algorithm that claims to require fewer than 5,000 qubits to break current encryption. Both SHOR and JVG algorithms use a combination of classical and quantum systems, but JVG offloads more work to classical Shor's algorithm has been studied for years, so further evaluation by researchers is needed to verify the claims of JVG. OpenAI alters the deal with the Pentagon Last week, OpenAI agreed to terms with the Pentagon to use its AI models on classified military information following an end to negotiations with Anthropic. At the time, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed the agreement contained more guardrails than previous agreements with Anthropic. However, this week, Altman said it was working with the Department of Defense to add terms to its contract to exclude usage by the National Security Agency and to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance or monitoring of US Persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information. South Korea Leaks Crypto Keys for All to See Last Thursday, South Korea's National Tax Service decided to give itself a well deserved pat on the back, announcing it seized 8.1 billion won worth of digital assets from 124 tax evaders. That's about US$5.6 million. The press release featured some photos of the seizures, including a note that had the seed phrase for a hardware crypto wallet. By Friday morning, the wallet was drained of about US$4.8 million worth of PRTG tokens. While certainly egg on the face of the nts, it should be noted that those tokens account for about 40% of the entire PRTG supply, with transaction volumes in the hundreds of dollars on a typical day. So actually cashing out those tokens or moving them to another platform would put up a massive red flag. Red Alert Spyware Hits Israel if we've learned nothing else from the ongoing war in Ukraine, the chaos of war creates the perfect breeding ground for a cyberattack Cloudsec saw a new campaign exploding the Israel Iran conflict with threat actors using a spoofed version of an app for missile strike notifications from the Israel Defense Forces home front command. This app relays legitimate alerts but runs a surveillance payload on the side. This app must be sideloaded and gives telltale red flags like asking for gps, SMS access and contact sharing permissions. The app shows significant sophistication, however, spoofing the legitimate app's sign in credentials, altering installation data to make it look like it came from the Play Store, and using proxy hooks to get around Android's built in integrity checks. And now a huge thanks to our sponsor Adaptive Security this episode is brought to you by Adaptive Security, the first security awareness platform built to stop AI powered social engineering. Attackers don't need malware anymore, they need trust. Set a simple passphrase for high risk actions like wire requests or urgent account recovery, especially within finance teams and families. And if the caller can't answer it, pause and verify adaptive runs, deepfake and vishing simulations so employees practice this before it's real. Learn more@adaptivesecurity.com Coalition Building Security Foundations for 6G we're still a long way from finalizing any spec for what 6G networks will look like with only broad strokes about ultra low latency AI integration and linking satellite and terrestrial systems. But that doesn't mean it's too early to think about security. The uk, us, Canada, Japan, Australia, Sweden and Finland announced the formation of the Global Coalition on Telecoms to set out non binding principles aimed at developing 6G with a secure by design approach. Their initial guidance calls for stronger threat containment, diversification of the 6G supply chain to prevent systemic threats, and support for quantum resistant cryptography. This is meant to guide vendors, academics and trade groups in 6G development. Honeywell Spars with researcher on vulnerability severity Cybersecurity researcher Joko Kristick is known for investigating building control systems. Most recently turning his attention to Honeywell's iQ4 controller, he found that out of the box, these controllers expose management interfaces without authentication by default and could allow for external access to lockout admins. He reported this to Honeywell in December 2025. However, the company declined to make any changes, arguing the device is for on premises use only and not exposed to the Internet. Kristick countered that he found 7,500 Internet exposed instances, with about 20% of those accessible without any authentication. Telling Security Week, I've seen installations where the user account has not been created and I was able to write changes to components. Kristick reached out to the CERT Coordination center at Carnegie Mellon University to mediate the vulnerability. Disclosure dispute with Honeywell LexisNexis confirms data breach the data analytics company confirmed that threat actors access customer and business information in a recent cyber attack. This disclosure comes after the group FulcrumSec leaked about 2 gigabytes of files from LexisNexis on illicit forums. FulcrumSec claims they exploited the React2Shell vulnerability in an unpatched REACT frontend applied to access the company's AWS infrastructure. LexisNexis claims most stolen data were legacy files from prior to 2020 and included customer names, surveys, IP addresses, support tickets, and business contact information. FulcrumSec claims that the data includes contact information from government employees and that they unsuccessfully tried to extort LexisNexis. A look at Cybercriminal Demographics I don't know if the picture of the classic hacker as a teenager in a hoodie was ever representative of cybercriminals, Orange Cyber Defense's latest Security Navigator report shows it's definitely an outlier today. In an analysis of hundreds of public arrests and takedown notices Globally from between 2021 and 2025, 37% of all cases involved threat actors aged 35 to 44. Those dang millennials are still hacking. The next most common demo was 25 to 34, accounting for 30% of all instances, followed by 21% of 18 to 24 year olds and and less than 5% were under 18. The 1824 demo most commonly got arrested for illicit system Access involved in 30% of those cases. The 25 to 34 year old demo focused on selling stolen data and cyber extortion most commonly, While the Elder 35 to 44 demo focused on cyber extortion and deploying malware. The CISO Series is going bi coastal this month. We're doing a live CISO Series podcast on March 6th in Orlando as part of Zero Trust World. Then we'll have our monthly San Diego meetup on March 11th before another live CISO series podcast at BSides SF on the 21st just ahead of RSA Conference. If you've wanted to experience a live CISO Series event, there's never been a better time. Just head on over to our events page@cisoseries.com for more info and for some discounts on registration. And if you have some thoughts about the news from today or about the show in general, be sure to reach out to us feedbackisoseries.com we would love to hear from you. Reporting for the CISO series, I'm Rich Strofalino, reminding you to have a super sparkly day.