Security news weekly round-up - 30th October 2026

I will take it; it's been a while since we covered vulnerabilities in this series. But, if you're online in the last few weeks or so, you should have read about the PHP bug that made headlines. Meaning, bugs still exist, they get discovered and patched accordingly. Only, this time, it's in a programming language that's used to power most websites on the internet.

With that said, people, I mean real people still lose their hard-earned money to scams. What about the effects on them? I am pretty sure that I can't put that into writing. And, malware? Yes, they are still a thing that you and I should be worried about. From the look of things, they are not going anywhere anytime soon.

She Heard Her Daughter Crying on the Phone. It Was an AI Clone, and It Cost Her $5,400

The first thing that you should do when you think that you're in this type of situation is to drop the line and call your relative directly. Please, remember that.

Here is how it all started:

The voice on the phone sounded exactly like Deborah Del Mastro's adult daughter. She was crying, terrified and begging for help. Then a man came on the line and said he had kidnapped her.

The caller kept Deborah Del Mastro on the phone for five and a half hours. He threatened her family and told her to send money by wire transfer. The California resident's ordeal, first reported by Fox News, ended only when she reached her real daughter, who was safe at work. By then, Deborah Del Mastro had lost $5,400.

Amatera: How the prolific infostealer works and spreads

Every time I read about infostealers, I am like: am I safe? Hopefully, I don't fall victim.

Here is what Amatera can do if it infects your machine:

Like many other infostealers, Amatera goes after a range of data spanning login credentials, session cookies, tokens, crypto wallet information, messaging data, files, and secrets from development environments.

The sheer breadth of the loot shows why infostealers are a mainstay of cybercrime – a single compromise can lead to account hijacking, financial fraud and crypto theft, as well as open the door into the organization where the victim works.

‘The assertion that the AI is an autonomous being is insane’: Cyber expert says companies should face criminal charges when their AI hacks

In simple terms: if you build it, it's yours and you're responsible for what it does.

From the article:

"AI is making the old vulnerabilities cheaper to discover and exploit, but on the other side, the defense side… that's not sped up as much," Junfeng Yang, a computer science professor at Columbia University, told Fortune. "While AI can generate a security patch quickly, it still takes a lot of human time to review and test it and coordinate disclosure and deployment across multiple organizations.

Shame and sleepless nights haunt scam victims long after the money is gone

That thought of: How did this happen to me? How will I recover from this? This can give anyone sleepless nights. I don't think that I am immune to this. Guess what? Neither are you. So, learn from this and be on alert always.

From the article:

Scams act as an acute trauma, while traditional identity theft acts as a chronic burden. Support for victims is as crucial now as it has ever been. Behind these numbers are real people enduring devastating trauma and shame. Lawmakers, companies and technology leaders cannot treat this as business as usual

Telegram Android Flaw Lets Attackers Run Code When Users Answer Voice Calls

Fixed in version 12.10.4 or later. Why include it again? There is a possibility that you're running an older version of Telegram and you need to update it now to keep your device safe.

Here is a brief description of the bug:

During a Telegram call, the two apps send each other short messages to set up the call and report its state. One type, called MediaState, reports whether the microphone is muted, whether the camera is on, and how the video is rotated.

The flaw was in the code that reads MediaState messages. That code did not handle missing fields correctly and accessed memory it should not

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.