I have a Sunday ritual. I pour a coffee and read who got hacked this week. It's like checking the weather in someone else's city: hurricane over there, sunshine over here.

This week the ritual broke. I finished the list and realized it covered everything I have at home. My laptop. My code editor. Remote access to my grandma's computer. And my fridge. Okay, the fridge is only a suspect. But let's go in order.

Act One. The Laptop

Binance put its losses at roughly $6.3 billion.

The first theory was a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer. One laptop. I drop mine, spill coffee on it, leave it unlocked in cafés. The worst thing that ever happened to it was a Windows update in the middle of a client call. Meanwhile, somewhere out there is a person whose laptop is now worth more than the GDP of a small country.

Picture his Monday standup.

"So, what did you ship last week?"
"Uh… I became the leading theory."

Then Richard Teng, one of Binance's two co-CEOs, clarified: it was a complex attack, with malware that wiped its own traces. So the laptop didn't just get hacked. It cleaned up after itself. Mine can't even close its own browser tabs.

About $3 billion was frozen right on-chain, and Binance is covering losses from SAFU, its futures insurance fund and its own money. As of November 1, about 95% is covered. TRM Labs, Elliptic and then the FBI linked the attack to North Korea's TraderTraitor group. A country where most citizens barely have internet, but the state has a crypto quota. And apparently it's crushing it.

Next up, Polymarket, the place where people bet on the future. It halted trading on its international exchange; the US platform wasn't affected. Attackers used a compromised DebugBear analytics script to hijack logged-in sessions and drained, by analysts' estimates, at least $2.7 million through 710 wallets.

A script whose job is to measure how fast the page loads. The page loaded fast. The money left faster. Great Core Web Vitals, terrible quarter.

Polymarket is paying back $3.9 million: the $2.7 million stolen plus $1.2 million for losses caused by the trading pause. One question keeps me up at night, though. Was there a market on "Will Polymarket get hacked before Halloween?" Because if there was, someone made money this week completely legitimately.

Over in Japan, attackers breached the Onamae.com Desktop Cloud service and demanded about ¥8 billion from GMO Internet. GMO said no. The attackers started publishing customer data. And GMO responded in the most politely devastating way possible: it launched a bounty program with a total pool of up to $1 million for information on the attackers.

Translation: "You're not getting a single yen. But we do have a million dollars. For your friends."

That's not incident response anymore, that's psychological warfare. The pool is shared across the whole program, so anyone who knows these guys is now doing game theory: snitch now, or wait until somebody else does and split it with fewer people.

Act Two. AI Plays for Every Team

This week had a main character, and it wasn't human. AI attacked, AI defended, and AI got used as bait. Like a footballer who scores, saves a penalty, and then it turns out someone else was hiding in his boots the whole match.

Offense. CrowdStrike described a China-linked group it calls VAPOR PANDA. Using ARTEX, an open-source agentic pentest framework, they hit more than 200 organizations in at least 14 countries in 11 days, including foreign ministries. Intrusions were confirmed at nine.

The agents did the work. The human operator wrote instructions in Chinese and only stepped in at decision points. For example, to ask the agents to find Windows machines without Falcon.

That's the dream manager. Shows up only when it matters, gives one task, leaves. No standups. No "quick syncs."

In just one of those intrusions, the planning agents burned through roughly 1.4 billion input tokens. I get nervous when my agent burns an extra million tokens fixing a comma. Hackers used to be given away by their accent. Now it's their API bill.

Defense. Anthropic showed how its model, Claude, wrote an exploit for a Linux kernel bug, CVE-2026-98432, CVSS 9.8. An unauthenticated remote attacker gets root on a server with a multipath TCP listener.

And everyone ran off to disable multipath TCP. Hold on. The bug itself is in IPv4 TCP handling. Multipath is just the door the demo walked through. Turning off MPTCP is locking one door in a house with a hole in the wall. Patch the kernel. The fix is already in stable kernels; Ubuntu's packages were still in progress as of October 30.

AI found the hole. AI wrote the exploit. AI explained how it all works. There's one job AI still hasn't taken: updating the kernel on a Friday night. That's still ours. Possibly the last one.

Bait. For almost half a day, Cursor's extension marketplace served tampered versions of the Claude Code extension, 2.1.312 and 2.1.313, with an SSH backdoor. Anthropic didn't make them. According to Cursor, around 5,000 people may have installed one.

You install an AI assistant to code faster, and you get a second assistant you never hired. What saved most people is that the backdoor was also written in a hurry: thanks to its bugs, logging in through the tunnel failed on most machines. Everybody had a deadline, apparently. But it did add the attacker's SSH key and set up persistence, so go check your machine.

Act Three. Your Data Is in Safe Hands. Several of Them

So-net leaked 2,141,986 records, plus another 443,495 from plala. On top of that, passwords for 54,401 mailboxes on add-on mail services, including VAIO Mail and PostPet.

PostPet is an email service where your messages are delivered by a pink teddy bear. If you just thought "wait, that still exists?", so did the attackers. They just thought it first.

In Florida, attackers breached a state student financial aid website. Up to about 4.9 million people may be affected: Social Security numbers, names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers. Students came for tuition money and got a free course in identity theft. Hands-on. With homework for the next ten years.

In the US, data on more than 40,000 Department of Homeland Security employees leaked: about 21,000 from CBP, about 10,000 from ICE and HSI, and about a thousand from CISA. The hacker calls themselves the Department of Peace. The Ministry of Peace hacked the Ministry of Security. Orwell would say, "Guys, that's a bit much, even for me."

The hacker claims the data came through Okta SSO. Okta says it has no evidence its systems were compromised. And here's the part that hurts: about a thousand records from CISA. The agency whose whole job is teaching the country how to defend itself. Like a swimming instructor getting his life ring stolen. Mid-lesson.

In South Korea, Daishin Securities reported a leak of 38,490 customers' data. The same day, Mirae Asset Global Investments and the crypto exchange Bithumb reported breaches too. As far as anyone knows so far, customer data wasn't taken there: Mirae is talking about internal employee systems, and Bithumb is still checking. Like a party guest where the hosts are sure of only one thing: he definitely got into the fridge, but probably not the bedroom.

Remember the fridge. It'll be back.

And New Mexico. An attack claimed by a new extortion group called BYOD knocked out UNM Health, the university's medical center: ambulances were diverted to other hospitals, surgeries were postponed. By the next day critical systems were back, with no ransom paid. According to UNM, only some endpoint devices were affected. BYOD claims 36,000 systems.

Then it gets weird. The group promised free decryption keys to healthcare providers. As for patients, reports disagree. According to BleepingComputer, BYOD promised each affected patient up to $2,500. According to The Record, it offered to delete people's data if they paid $2,500.

The first extortion crew where nobody can tell who's paying whom. A loyalty program where your cashback might turn out to be an invoice. The group keeps the stolen data either way. UNM asked people not to engage with them at all. The most sensible advice of the week, and it's free.

Act Four. The Fridge

I promised the fridge would come back.

According to Reuters, the Pentagon is investigating freezer failures in at least six commissaries on military bases as a likely cyberattack. The failures happened in August; Reuters only now reported that the Pentagon treats them as a suspected hack. I guess the investigation was kept on ice too.

Investigators are in touch with France, where in October attackers hijacked refrigeration in more than 350 businesses.

The most powerful military on Earth. Aircraft carriers. Satellites. A nuclear umbrella. And somewhere on a base there's a freezer that might be taking orders from someone else. They defended everything except the frozen pizza.

And since we're home anyway. In Tailscale, one of the bugs gave a peer with SSH forwarding rights access to root-owned sockets like Docker's; fixed in 1.104.4. TeamViewer patched CVE-2026-111585: a compromised remote machine could, depending on the platform, execute code on the computer of whoever connects to it; fixed in 15.83.

You connect to help your grandma with her computer. And grandma's computer helps itself to yours. For twenty years we taught grandmas not to open suspicious emails. Now grandmas have to teach us not to connect to suspicious grandmas.

Finale. The Only Honest Hack

That leaves PHP2Shell. CISA confirmed active exploitation of CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. Honeypots run by the Delft Threat Intelligence Lab counted more than 10,500 requests that tried to execute code. Attempts on honeypots, not confirmed breaches.

And in the middle of all that, UK pentester Jaydip Modhwadia used PHP2Shell to break into the Steal My Bitcoin contest site and claimed the $2,000 prize. The site was literally called "Steal My Bitcoin." He was politely asked. He spent about three hours and politely stole it.

So, the week. Billions walked out through a laptop. Millions through a script that measures page speed. Passwords leaked even from a teddy bear. Military freezers, maybe, too. And the only person who hacked something and got paid legally did it by invitation.

Moral: in 2026, an honest hack is one where they told you "steal" first. Everything else is just a Tuesday.

Homework, so you're not in next week's edition:

  • Patch your Linux kernel. Disabling MPTCP alone is not enough.
  • If you installed Claude Code 2.1.312 or 2.1.313 in Cursor, check that machine.
  • TeamViewer to 15.83, Tailscale to 1.104.4, PHP to 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35.
  • Take a good look at your fridge. It knows something.

Which story of the week hit you hardest? Tell me in the comments.

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