Risky Bulletin: Gemini finally did some crimes

0:03Google's Gemini hacked three companies. Hackers claim a breach of Russia's election commission. OpenAI was behind RubyGem's May incident. And the Coast Guard and FBI board two ships to investigate cyber attacks. This is the Risky Bulletin, prepared by Katalin Kimpanu and read by me, Claire Aird. Today is the 21st of September, and this podcast episode is brought to you by SpectreOps. In today's top story, Google has confirmed its Gemini AI model escaped its sandbox and hacked three companies. The model escaped testing environments that were run by Irregular, the same AI security company that saw similar incidents with Anthropic and Meta.

0:48Google has notified the hacked companies and said Gemini did no damage. Meantime, OpenAI has disclosed six new incidents of AI models misbehaving and then covering their tracks. Models made up data, hid their mistakes from users and uploaded files to the internet without permission. They also searched public repositories for exposed API keys and then used them and hosted secret communication boards on both public sites and internal OpenAI systems. This comes on the back of revelations that open AI agents were behind a wave of malicious packages published on the RubyGems package repository in May.

1:31The Shiny Hunters hacking group has breached and defaced the Klopp ransomware gang's leak site. The Shiny Hunters group is demanding all the money that Klopp made from its Oracle EBS hacking campaign. The hack appears to have taken place after a disagreement between the leaders of both groups. Hackers have breached image-sharing service Giazo and stolen data on more than 23 million of its users. The hack took place on September 11 after the attackers exploited a vulnerability in the company's image upload server. The hackers only had access for a few hours. Stolen data includes names, email addresses, password hashes and device details.

2:15Hackers have hijacked the itorrents.org portal and added malware to its torrent files. The attackers replaced the content of all torrents with EXE files that installed the movie Reaper malware. The incident took place in mid-August. A threat actor has stolen cryptocurrency from users of FOMO Peak, a mobile app used to track large accounts. Security firm Slow Mist traced the theft to two malicious modules that made their way in the iOS version of the app. The modules loaded malicious code that extracted and stole crypto wallet private keys. It's unclear how many users were hacked or the total amount stolen.

2:56The US Coast Guard and the FBI boarded two American tankers in the Gulf of Mexico to investigate suspected cyber attacks. One tanker lost access to its communications systems. The second, an LNG tanker, suffered an undisclosed cybersecurity event. Both incidents took place days apart in late August. A new hacking group named Tsiklik says it breached Russia's Electoral Commission and stole data from some of its contractors. The group dumped some of the data online last week, days before the Kremlin was set to hold parliamentary elections. The leaked data allegedly contains secret documents and internal developer chats.

3:39foreign hackers breached two small water utilities in colorado last month the hackers changed equipment settings altered pumping cycles and disabled remote access and alarms colorado officials say the disruptions were brief the intrusions occurred at the same time that the fbi warned of iranian cyber attacks targeting water utilities across the u.s colorado officials didn't attribute the attacks. A threat actor is targeting the core team members behind the Rust programming language. The Rust team says attackers lured targets to video calls where they attempted to trick them into installing malware.

4:18Some of the attacks involved fake job offers or project collaborations. Rust says the attack style is used by North Korean groups but has not attributed the campaign to any country or group yet. Ukraine has updated its criminal code to make it easier to prosecute cyber scam call centre operators. New articles now criminalise creating, running, participating in or recruiting personnel for scam call centres. The bill passed days after members of the country's Office of the Prosecutor General were arrested for accepting bribes to protect cyber scam call centres. A Malaysian man has been sentenced to almost two years in a Singaporean prison for SMS blasting.

5:01Ong Kak Seng owed money to Chinese loan sharks and agreed to drive the SMS blasting device around to repay his debts. Ong was given a choice of driving in Singapore or Hong Kong. He chose the former because he could use his own car and avoid renting one. The device sent out SMS spam that lured victims to WhatsApp phishing sites. A Ukrainian national has been sentenced to almost 13 years in a Swiss prison over his role in a series of ransomware attacks. The man, a 52-year-old IT specialist, has also been banned from entering Switzerland for another 10 years. Authorities say he worked as a coder for the Lokogoga, Megacortex and Nephilim ransomware groups.

5:46The US Department of Justice has seized the domains of DDoS service provider Nightmare Stressor. The service launched in 2022 and has been linked to hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks. It was one of the oldest DDoS Buddha services still in operation. A suspected North American APT group has pivoted from hacking Chinese organisations to targeting Russian companies. According to Kaspersky, the Night Eagle Group breaches corporate VPNs using valid credentials. The group uses open source utilities to move through networks, plant backdoors and steal email correspondence. Israeli company BlackCore is helping the Angolan government run covert social media influence operations.

6:33According to Citizen Lab, the company trained government employees earlier this year. The training sessions allegedly covered how to create fake personas, shape narratives and flood comment sections with pro-government sentiment. North Korea's remote IT worker scheme accounted for most of the money raised by North Korea's overseas labour force in 2025. The Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team, a former UN agency, estimated that remote IT workers made up to$800 million for Pyongyang last year. North Korea's overseas labor force is believed to include more than 100 ,000 individuals and most of them operating out of China and Russia.

7:17Cybersecurity and law enforcement agencies from multiple countries have linked the Waterplum APT group to North Korea's munitions industry department. The group is involved in North Korea's contagious interview operations. These campaigns lure IT professionals to fake job interviews, then infect them with malware and steal their cryptocurrency. Authorities say the group has infected more than 30 ,000 devices and stolen more than$10 million worth of crypto. Hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Cisco's Identity Services engine to gain access to Cisco devices. The bug is one of the engine's internal APIs.

7:57It allows attackers to bypass authentication on the web-based management interface. The bug has a severity rating of 10 out of 10. Cisco released a patch for the bug last week, just days after it patched another zero day in its secure email gateway product. The WordPress security team patched a remote code execution attack last week. The vulnerability allows attackers to run malicious code on WordPress sites after tricking administrators to click on a fake link. This is the third WordPress remote code execution attack to be patched recently, following WP2 Shell in July and XSS2 Shell in August.

8:38The latest attack has been dubbed Click2 Shell. And some sad news to finish on. Argentinian security researcher Andres Blanco has passed away. He was 44 years old. Blanco worked at Core Security, Onapsis, Fingerprint and Immunity. He also presented at Black Hat and DEF CON. And that is all for this podcast edition. Today's show was brought to you by our sponsor, SpecterOps. Find them at specterops.io. Thanks for your company.