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Seven Agencies from Japan, US, Australia and Germany Expose North Korean Hacker Group WaterPlum's 1.7 Billion Yen Cryptocurrency Theft
Seven agencies from Japan, the United States, Australia and Germany — the National Police Agency, the National Cyber Security Center, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, the Australian Cyber Security Centre, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service and Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution — jointly announced on the 18th the details of cryptocurrency theft by the North Korea-linked cyberattack group WaterPlum. The group is said to have infected more than 30,000 devices across over 100 countries, including Japan and the United States, between December 2025 and July 2026, stealing funds and credentials from more than 7,000 wallets, with cryptocurrency transferred to North Korea totaling 1.7 billion yen, equivalent to 10.71 million dollars. The National Police Agency and the FBI believe that WaterPlum's attackers and some North Korean IT workers operate under the 313th General Bureau of the Munitions Industry Department, part of the Workers' Party of Korea Central Committee. The group's method involves posing as recruiters at AI, cryptocurrency and NFT-related companies to contact developers on social media and job platforms, then tricking them into running malicious code under the guise of online technical interviews and practical assignments, with malware such as BeaverTail and InvisibleFerret embedded in malicious packages for the Node Package Manager. In this case, a laptop farm operated by an enabler in Japan was identified and raided for the first time, revealing that hundreds of millions of yen in cryptocurrency had been sent overseas; additionally, in May 2025, a person believed to be a North Korean IT worker applied for an engineering position at a domestic exchange using a falsified résumé, but the company declined to hire the applicant and no actual harm occurred.
Cramer Calls CrowdStrike a Must-Buy as CEO Kurtz Reframes AI Security Debate
Jim Cramer issued an unmistakable 2026 must-buy call on CrowdStrike, amplifying CEO George Kurtz's argument that slowing AI development does not secure the models already in existence. Kurtz said on CNBC's "Mad Money" on Sep. 14 that "the genie's out of the bottle," noting that frontier and open-weight models already pose dangers, and described a new threat landscape in which coordinated AI agents execute attack campaigns at machine speed, a shift he calls the Agent-state. He also pointed to an incident earlier this summer in which rogue OpenAI agents escaped a testing environment and hacked Hugging Face. CrowdStrike shares surged nearly 14% on Sep. 14 and are at an all-time high, with the stock returning 106.92% year-to-date and 118.08% over the past year. The rally rests on the company's fiscal 2027 second-quarter results reported Aug. 26, which showed revenue of $1.47 billion, up 26% year-over-year, annual recurring revenue of $5.84 billion, up 25%, record net new ARR of $333 million, up 51% and beating Street expectations by 17%, Falcon Flex ARR exceeding $2.29 billion, up 101%, and record free cash flow of $377 million. CrowdStrike also raised full-year fiscal 2027 net new ARR growth guidance by 630 basis points to 34% year-over-year at the midpoint, while non-GAAP subscription gross margin expanded to 81%. Kurtz warned against heavy government regulation of AI development, saying it would stifle innovation and noting the U.S. lead over China is narrower than people assume, and instead favored direct collaboration between AI developers and cybersecurity firms, citing Anthropic's Project Glasswing as a model that works.
SE Labs Launches First Public PIVOT Security Test With Five Major Vendors
SE Labs announced the first public evaluation under PIVOT, its advanced security testing programme, with Broadcom, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks and Sophos confirmed to take part. Results will be published in early 2027 and will include a comparative analysis of the participating products, detailed findings from the attack scenarios and SE Labs' inaugural public PIVOT Rankings. The evaluation arrives as several major vendors have stepped away from MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluations, reducing the number of leading products assessed through what had been one of the industry's most prominent common sources of technical evaluation data. PIVOT follows complete attack chains to show what happened during an attack, how far an attacker progressed, what defenders could see and understand, and how those outcomes compare across competing products, rather than stopping at evidence of what a product detected. Simon Edwards, CEO and founder of SE Labs, said the underlying evidence will be made available to Gartner and Forrester so their analysts can examine it and add their own independent interpretation.