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Hackers sabotage Iranian ships for a second time this year. Mass cybercrime arrests across Africa. South Korea extradites a Chinese man behind celebrity hacks and a French supermarket chain discloses a data breach. This is the risky bulletin prepared by Catalyn Kim Panu and read by me, Claire aird. Today is the 25th of August and this podcast episode is brought to you by Octa. A hacking group claims to have crippled the communications systems of more than 60 Iranian ships. The hack impacted 39 oil tankers and 25 cargo ships. The lab, Tuftengon Group, says it hacked the Iranian satellite communications company fnava. From there, it connected to the ships and wiped the satellite terminals on board. The same group carried out a similar attack on more than 100 Iranian ships in March. A ransomware attack is disrupting the operations of memory maker Data IO. The incident has impacted the company's production, shipping, communications and support operations. In an SEC filing last week, Data IO did not provide a timeline for recovery. French supermarket chain Ushant has confirmed that its loyalty card system was breached. The company has disabled all cards and customers have been instructed to pick up replacements in stores. Store Ushan suffered a separate security breach in November last year. The leader of a Chinese hacking group has been extradited from Thailand to South Korea. The group allegedly stole more than $275 million from celebrities after hacking a telco in 2023. They used the data obtained in the hack to access banking and brokerage accounts. A member of the K pop supergroup BTS was the most high profile victim. A Chinese national has been sentenced in the US to four years in prison for damaging his former employer's IT network. 55 year old Davis Liu left a kill switch in code he wrote while employed by the victim. The code was designed to delete all user profiles and lock everyone out of the network if Liu's name was removed from the company directory. The code was triggered in September 2019, a month after he wrote it. More than 1,200 cybercrime suspects have been arrested across 18 African countries. The individuals are accused of being involved in online scams, BEC and ransomware attacks. Authorities dismantled crypto mining operations, seized forged documents and domains, and recovered $97 million in stolen assets. The arrests were part of the joint Interpol led Operation Serengeti 2.0. A suspected Chinese espionage group has hacked at least 25 Vietnamese universities and education institutions. The campaign leveraged unpatched vulnerabilities for initial access. The hacks were discovered when the attacker left victim data in an open directory, according to researchers. The campaign may be linked to a Chinese APT known asearth Lumia. A suspected Pakistani APT group is targeting Indian government employees who use Linux workstations. The campaign delivers Linux.deskt short shortcuts via spear phishing emails. Once opened, the shortcut files download and execute malicious payloads. Security firms Cloudsec and Cipherma have linked the attacks to APT36, a group also known as Transparent Tribe. The House Homeland Security Committee will attempt to reauthorise the Cybersecurity Information Sharing act next month. The law provides liability protections for the private sector to share threat intel with the government. It was adopted for 10 years in 2015 and will expire at the end of September unless reauthorised by Congress. The US government will acquire a 10% stake in American chipmaker Intel. The investment converts an $8.9 billion grant awarded in 2024 through the US Chips act into a payment for common intel stock. Intel said the US Government won't have a seat on the board or play any role in making business decisions. The deal is likely to face legal challenges, and some experts believe it won't be enough to save the company. Multiple password managers are vulnerable to a clickjacking attack that can steal user data. The attack relies on luring users to malicious sites where the attackers can overlay their own UI over password managers. Clicks on the fake interface actually interact with the password manager beneath it. 11 password managers were vulnerable. The flaw has been fixed by five of them so far. Fixes have not yet been implemented for 1Password bitwarden, enpass, icloud passwords, lastpass and logmeonce. Researchers have successfully hidden malicious prompts inside high resolution images that only appear after downscaling for AI processing. The prompts are invisible to the human eye until the image is resized. Trailer bits Researchers demonstrated the attack against various AI agents, including Google Assistant and Google Gemini. Microsoft is retiring the Deception feature of its Defender security platform. It will be disabled for all customers at the end of October. The Deception feature generated and monitored decoy accounts, hosts and lures. It worked like a canary and raised security alerts when attackers interacted with the decoys. And finally, new Microsoft 365 tenants won't be able to send emails to more than 100 external recipients per day. Microsoft introduced the limit to combat spending Spamming threat actors have been creating Microsoft 365 accounts to send spam from the default on Microsoft.com domain. The limit does not apply if customers add their own domain to their accounts and that is all for this podcast edition. Today's show is brought to you by our sponsor, Octa. Find them@okta.com thanks for your company.
Podcast: Risky Bulletin
Host: Claire Aird (prepared by Catalyn Kim Panu)
Date: August 25, 2025
This episode of Risky Bulletin covers major global cybersecurity incidents and trends from the past week. Key stories include renewed cyberattacks on Iranian ships, sweeping mass cybercrime arrests across Africa, high-profile data breaches, significant legal developments in international cybercrime, groundbreaking research on AI attacks, and important updates from major tech companies.
This episode spotlights the growing scale and sophistication of cyberattacks—ranging from state-sponsored sabotage of shipping fleets to jailbreaking AI via images. It also illustrates the global response, with mass arrests, international extradition, and legislative action. The ongoing vulnerabilities in widely used tools like password managers and persistent threats facing major corporates and governments underscore the high stakes for all organizations in cybersecurity.
For a deeper dive, listen to the full episode or visit risky.biz for further analysis and discussion.