Google has moved up its post-quantum encryption migration target to 2029. "This new timeline reflects migration needs for the PQC era in light of progress on quantum computing hardware development, quantum error correction, and quantum factoring resource estimates," said vice president of security engineering Heather Adkins and senior staff cryptology engineer Sophie Schmieg in a blog post. CyberScoop reports: Google is replacing outdated encryption across their devices, systems and data with new algorithms vetted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Those algorithms, developed over a decade by NIST and independent cryptologists, are designed to protect against future attacks from quantum computers. While Google has said it is on track to migrate its own systems ahead of the 2035 timeline provided in NIST guidelines, last month leaders at the company teased an updated timeline for migration and called on private businesses and other entities to act more urgently to prepare.

Unlike the federal government, there is no mandate for private businesses to migrate to quantum-resistant encryption, or even that they do so at all. Adkins and Schmieg said the hope is that other businesses will view Google's aggressive timeframe as a signal to follow suit. "As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it's our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline," they wrote. "By doing this, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but also across the industry."

The European Commission is investigating a breach after a threat actor allegedly accessed at least one of its AWS cloud accounts and claimed to have stolen more than 350 GB of data, including databases and employee-related information. AWS says its own services were not breached. BleepingComputer reports: Sources familiar with the incident have told BleepingComputer that the attack was quickly detected and that the Commission's cybersecurity incident response team is now investigating. While the Commission has yet to share any details about this breach, the threat actor who claimed responsibility for the attack reached out to BleepingComputer earlier this week, stating that they had stolen over 350 GB of data (including multiple databases).

They didn't disclose how they breached the affected accounts, but they provided BleepingComputer with several screenshots as proof that they had access to information belonging to European Commission employees and to an email server used by Commission employees. The threat actor also told BleepingComputer that they will not attempt to extort the Commission using the allegedly stolen data as leverage, but intend to leak the data online at a later date.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Iran-linked hackers have broken into FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email inbox, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet, the hackers and the bureau said on Friday. On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said Patel "will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims." The hackers published a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum.

The FBI confirmed that Patel's emails had been targeted. In a statement, bureau spokesman Ben Williamson said, "we have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity" and that the data involved was "historical in nature and involves no government information." Handala, which presents itself as a group of pro-Palestinian vigilante hackers, is considered by Western researchers to be one of several personas used by Iranian government cyberintelligence units. [...] Alongside the photographs of Patel, the hackers published a sample of more than 300 emails, which appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence dating between 2010 and 2019.

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: The TeamPCP hacking group continues its supply-chain rampage, now compromising the massively popular "LiteLLM" Python package on PyPI and claiming to have stolen data from hundreds of thousands of devices during the attack. LiteLLM is an open-source Python library that serves as a gateway to multiple large language model (LLM) providers via a single API. The package is very popular, with over 3.4 million downloads a day and over 95 million in the past month. According to research by Endor Labs, threat actors compromised the project and published malicious versions of LiteLLM 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 to PyPI today that deploy an infostealer that harvests a wide range of sensitive data.

[...] Both malicious LiteLLM versions have been removed from PyPI, with version 1.82.6 now the latest clean release. [...] If compromise is suspected, all credentials on affected systems should be treated as exposed and rotated immediately. [...] Organizations that use LiteLLM are strongly advised to immediately:

- Check for installations of versions 1.82.7 or 1.82.8
- Immediately rotate all secrets, tokens, and credentials used on or found within code on impacted devices.
- Search for persistence artifacts such as '~/.config/sysmon/sysmon.py' and related systemd services
- Inspect systems for suspicious files like '/tmp/pglog' and '/tmp/.pg_state'
- Review Kubernetes clusters for unauthorized pods in the 'kube-system' namespace
- Monitor outbound traffic to known attacker domains