U.S. Secret Service Seizes SIM Servers and Cards Near UN General Assembly

The French Interior Ministry confirmed a cyberattack on its email servers, detected between December 11 and 12, 2025. The breach allowed unauthorized access to document files, though data exfiltration remains unconfirmed. The ministry has tightened security protocols and launched an investigation to determine the origin and scope of the attack. Possible motives include foreign interference, activism, or cybercrime. On December 17, 2025, a 22-year-old suspect was arrested in connection with the attack. The suspect is accused of unauthorized access to an automated personal data processing system as part of an organized group. Investigations are being conducted by OFAC, France's Office for Combating Cybercrime. A BreachForums admin claimed responsibility for the attack, alleging it was in revenge for the arrests of forum moderators and admins. The forum post claims that data on 16,444,373 people from France's police records was stolen. In April 2025, France attributed a widespread hacking campaign to APT28, a group linked to Russia's GRU, targeting various French entities.

The INC Ransom gang has disrupted the OnSolve CodeRED emergency alert platform, stealing sensitive user data and forcing Crisis24 to decommission the legacy environment. The attack affected emergency notification systems used by state and local governments, police departments, and fire agencies across the United States. Data stolen includes names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and passwords. The gang claims to have breached the system on November 1, 2025, and encrypted files on November 10, 2025. Crisis24 is rebuilding the service using backups from March 31, 2025, which may result in missing accounts. The incident highlights the critical impact of cyberattacks on emergency services and the importance of robust cybersecurity measures. The INC Ransom group has published screenshots of stolen data and is selling samples of the stolen data, escalating concerns among affected agencies. An operational security failure by the INC ransomware gang allowed researchers to recover data stolen from a dozen U.S. organizations. The investigation, conducted by Cyber Centaurs, revealed artifacts from the legitimate backup tool Restic, which exposed attacker infrastructure. The researchers developed a controlled enumeration process that confirmed the presence of encrypted data stolen from 12 unrelated organizations.

Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) have issued a joint advisory warning of a malicious cyber campaign undertaken by a likely state-sponsored threat actor that involves carrying out phishing attacks over the Signal messaging app. The focus is on high-ranking targets in politics, the military, and diplomacy, as well as investigative journalists in Germany and Europe. Unauthorized access to messenger accounts not only allows access to confidential private communications but also potentially compromises entire networks. The campaign involves threat actors masquerading as 'Signal Support' or a support chatbot named 'Signal Security ChatBot' to initiate direct contact with prospective targets, urging them to provide a PIN or verification code received via SMS, or risk facing data loss. Should the victim comply, the attackers can register the account and gain access to the victim's profile, settings, contacts, and block list through a device and mobile phone number under their control. There also exists an alternative infection sequence that takes advantage of the device linking option to trick victims into scanning a QR code, thereby granting the attackers access to the victim's account, including their messages for the last 45 days, on a device managed by them. The security authorities warned that while the current focus of the campaign appears to be Signal, the attack can also be extended to WhatsApp since it also incorporates similar device linking and PIN features as part of two-step verification. Similar attacks have been orchestrated by multiple Russia-aligned threat clusters tracked as Star Blizzard, UNC5792 (aka UAC-0195), and UNC4221 (aka UAC-0185).

Conduent, a business services provider, has confirmed that a data breach in 2024 impacted over 10.5 million individuals. The breach, initially disclosed in January 2025, affected government agencies in multiple US states. The attackers accessed Conduent's network on October 21, 2024, and were evicted on January 13, 2025. The compromised data includes names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, health insurance details, and medical information. Conduent serves over 600 government and transportation organizations, and roughly half of Fortune 100 companies. The company has not provided an exact number of affected individuals, but breach notices indicate at least 10.5 million people were impacted, with the largest number in Oregon (10.5 million) and over 4 million in Texas. The Safepay ransomware group claimed responsibility for the attack in February 2025 and claimed to have stolen 8.5TB of data. Conduent provides services to several other states where specific data breach figures aren't published, potentially increasing the actual impact. As of October 24, 2025, there is no evidence that the stolen data has been misused. Additionally, Volvo Group North America disclosed that nearly 17,000 customers and/or staff had their personal details exposed in the Conduent data breach. Conduent is sending notifications to impacted parties, offering free membership to identity monitoring services for at least a year, along with credit and dark web monitoring, and identity restoration. Volvo Group North America has recently suffered a new data breach caused by a third-party supplier, Miljödata, exposing staff data such as full names and Social Security Numbers. The breach at Miljödata in August 2025 exposed the information of 1.5 million people, including Volvo Group employees in Sweden and the U.S. Ingram Micro, a major IT services provider, revealed a ransomware attack in July 2025 that affected over 42,000 individuals. The SafePay ransomware group was behind this attack, claiming to have stolen 3.5TB of documents. The attack triggered a massive outage and highlighted SafePay's growing activity as a significant ransomware threat.

Russian threat actors, specifically the Sandworm group, have targeted Ukrainian organizations and Poland's power sector using living-off-the-land (LotL) tactics and deploying data-wiping malware. The attacks, which began in June 2025, involved minimal malware to reduce detection and included the use of web shells and legitimate tools for reconnaissance and data theft. The threat actors exploited unpatched vulnerabilities to deploy web shells on public-facing servers, gaining initial access. They then used various tactics, including PowerShell commands, scheduled tasks, and legitimate software, to evade detection and perform reconnaissance. The attacks were characterized by the use of legitimate tools and minimal malware, demonstrating the actors' deep knowledge of Windows native tools. In addition to LotL tactics, Sandworm deployed multiple data-wiping malware families in June and September 2025, targeting Ukraine's education, government, and grain sectors. The grain sector, a vital economic sector, was targeted to disrupt Ukraine's war economy. The data-wiping malware used included ZeroLot and Sting, with initial access achieved by UAC-0099, who then transferred access to APT44 for wiper deployment. The activity is confirmed to be of Russian origin, with specific attribution to the Sandworm group. In December 2025, Sandworm targeted Poland's power sector with a new wiper malware called DynoWiper, aiming to disrupt the energy infrastructure. The attack, which occurred on December 29 and 30, 2025, targeted two combined heat and power (CHP) plants and a system managing renewable energy sources. The attack was unsuccessful in causing disruption, and Polish authorities attributed it to Russian services. The attack coincided with the tenth anniversary of Sandworm's 2015 attack on Ukraine's power grid. A new Russia-aligned threat activity cluster, InedibleOchotense, impersonated ESET in phishing attacks targeting Ukrainian entities starting in May 2025. This campaign involved sending spear-phishing emails and Signal text messages containing links to trojanized ESET installers, which delivered the Kalambur backdoor. InedibleOchotense is linked to the Sandworm (APT44) hacking group and has been observed conducting destructive campaigns in Ukraine, including the deployment of wiper malware ZEROLOT and Sting. Another Russia-aligned threat actor, RomCom, launched spear-phishing campaigns in mid-July 2025 exploiting a WinRAR vulnerability (CVE-2025-8088) targeting various sectors in Europe and Canada. RomCom also targeted a U.S.-based civil engineering company via a JavaScript loader dubbed SocGholish to deliver the Mythic Agent. The activity has been attributed with medium-to-high confidence to Unit 29155 of Russia's Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, also known as GRU. The targeted entity had worked for a city with close ties to Ukraine in the past. The ESET report noted that other Russian-aligned APT groups also maintained their focus on Ukraine and countries with strategic ties to Ukraine, while also expanding their operations to European entities. Gamaredon remained the most active APT group targeting Ukraine, with a noticeable increase in intensity and frequency of its operations during the reported period. Gamaredon selectively deployed one of Turla’s backdoors, indicating a rare instance of cooperation between Russia-aligned APT groups. Gamaredon’s toolset continued to evolve, incorporating new file stealers or tunneling services. The cyber attack on the Polish power grid in December 2025 was attributed with medium confidence to a Russian state-sponsored hacking group known as ELECTRUM. The attack targeted distributed energy resources (DERs) and affected communication and control systems at combined heat and power (CHP) facilities and systems managing renewable energy systems. ELECTRUM and KAMACITE share overlaps with the Sandworm cluster, with KAMACITE focusing on initial access and ELECTRUM conducting operations that bridge IT and OT environments. The attackers gained access to operational technology systems critical to grid operations and disabled key equipment beyond repair at the site. The attack was opportunistic and rushed, with the hackers attempting to inflict as much damage as possible by wiping Windows-based devices and resetting configurations. The majority of the equipment targeted was related to grid safety and stability monitoring. The coordinated attack on Poland's power grid in late December targeted multiple distributed energy resource (DER) sites across the country, including combined heat and power (CHP) facilities and wind and solar dispatch systems. Although the attacker compromised operational technology (OT) systems damaging "key equipment beyond repair," they failed to disrupt power, totaling 1.2 GW or 5% of Poland’s energy supply. Based on public reports, there are at least 12 confirmed affected sites. However, researchers at Dragos, a critical industrial infrastructure (OT) and control systems (ICS) security company say that the number is approximately 30. Dragos attributes the attack with moderate confidence to a Russian threat actor it tracks as Electrum, which, although it overlaps with Sandworm (APT44), the researchers underline that it is a distinct activity cluster. Electrum targeted exposed and vulnerable systems involved in dispatch and grid-facing communication, remote terminal units (RTUs), network edge devices, monitoring and control systems, and Windows-based machines at DER sites. Electrum successfully disabled communications equipment at multiple sites, resulting in a loss of remote monitoring and control, but power generation on the units continued without interruption. Certain OT/ICS devices were disabled, and their configurations were corrupted beyond recovery, while Windows systems at the sites were wiped. Even if the attacks had been successful in cutting the power, the relatively narrow targeting scope wouldn’t have been enough to cause a nationwide blackout in Poland. However, they could have caused significant destabilization of the system frequency. "Such frequency deviations have caused cascading failures in other electrical systems, including the 2025 Iberian grid collapse," the researchers say. CERT Polska revealed that coordinated cyber attacks targeted more than 30 wind and photovoltaic farms, a private company from the manufacturing sector, and a large combined heat and power plant (CHP) in Poland on December 29, 2025. The attacks were attributed to a threat cluster dubbed Static Tundra, which is linked to Russia's Federal Security Service's (FSB) Center 16 unit. The attacks had a purely destructive objective but did not affect the ongoing production of electricity or the heat supply to end users. The attackers gained access to the internal network of power substations associated with a renewable energy facility to carry out reconnaissance and disruptive activities, including damaging the firmware of controllers, deleting system files, or launching custom-built wiper malware codenamed DynoWiper. In the intrusion aimed at the CHP, the adversary engaged in long-term data theft dating back to March 2025, enabling them to escalate privileges and move laterally across the network. The attackers' attempts to detonate the wiper malware were unsuccessful. The targeting of the manufacturing sector company is believed to be opportunistic, with the threat actor gaining initial access via a vulnerable Fortinet perimeter device. At least four different versions of DynoWiper have been discovered to date. The wiper's functionality involves initializing a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) called Mersenne Twister, enumerating files and corrupting them using the PRNG, and deleting files. The malware does not have a persistence mechanism, a way to communicate with a command-and-control (C2) server, or execute shell commands, and it does not attempt to hide the activity from security programs. The attack targeting the manufacturing sector company involved the use of a PowerShell-based wiper dubbed LazyWiper that scripts overwrites files on the system with pseudorandom 32-byte sequences to render them unrecoverable. The malware used in the incident involving renewable energy farms was executed directly on the HMI machine. In the CHP plant and the manufacturing sector company, the malware was distributed within the Active Directory domain via a PowerShell script executed on a domain controller. The attacker used credentials obtained from the on-premises environment in attempts to gain access to cloud services, downloading selected data from services such as Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint. The attacker was particularly interested in files and email messages related to OT network modernization, SCADA systems, and technical work carried out within the organizations. The attack on Poland's energy sector in December 2025 was the first large-scale attack against decentralized energy resources (DERs) like wind turbines and solar farms. The attack occurred during a period when Poland was struggling with low temperatures and snowstorms just before the New Year. Dragos assessed with moderate confidence that the activity reflects tradecraft and objectives in line with the Electrum threat group, which overlaps with Sandworm. Electrum has worked alongside another threat actor, tracked as Kamicite, to conduct destructive attacks against Ukrainian ISPs and persistent scanning of industrial devices in the US. Kamicite gained initial access and persistence against organizations, and Electrum executed follow-on activity. Dragos has tracked Kamicite activities against the European ICS/OT supply chain since late 2024. The attack on Poland's energy sector was significant because it was the first major attack against decentralized energy resources (DERs). There was no evidence that the adversary had full control of the DERs, and there was no attempt to mis-operate these resources. Poland was fortunate because DERs make up a smaller portion of its energy portfolio than some other countries. If this same style of attack happened in the US, Australia, or certain parts of Europe where DERs are more prevalent, it could have been potentially catastrophic for the system. The attack highlighted the ongoing threat faced by the energy sector, with threat actors gaining initial access through vulnerable Internet-facing edge devices before deploying wipers that damaged remote terminal units (RTUs). CISA advised OT operators to prioritize updates that allow firmware verification and to immediately change default passwords on things like edge devices. Dragos recommended that organizations ensure architecture is defensible through methods like strict authorization practices, OT/IT segmentation, strict vendor access governance, secure remote access, and ICS network visibility and monitoring.