GreatXML can bypass BitLocker on Windows systems where Defender Offline Scan was used, exposing encrypted drive data.
Category: encryption
The Gentlemen Ransomware Claims 478 Victims, Can Spread Like a Worm
“The group actively tracks and evaluates modern vulnerabilities, including CVE-2024–55591, CVE-2025–32433, and CVE-2025–33073, and combines them with technique-driven paths like backup and management-controller abuse and NTLM relay workflows, giving them a flexible exploitation pipeline,” Check Point said.
That’s not all. In March 2026, Hunt.io said it discovered an open directory hosted at “176.120.22[.]127:80” on the Russian bulletproof hosting provider Proton66 that exposed 126 files containing a complete ransomware operator toolkit attributed to a The Gentlemen RaaS affiliate.
This included tools for reconnaissance, privilege escalation, defense evasion, credential theft, lateral movement, persistence, and pre-encryption preparation, essentially spanning all phases of the intrusion lifecycle.
Predictive surrogates could cut quantum computing measurement overhead by more than 99.97%
Quantum computers, systems that process information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, have the potential of outperforming classical computers on some tasks. Despite their potential, the use of these systems remains very limited, due to their high cost and other challenges that have so far prevented their large-scale fabrication.
Researchers at the Henan Key Laboratory of Quantum Information and Cryptography and Nanyang Technological University have developed predictive surrogates, new computational models that can learn and reproduce the outputs of quantum processors.
These models, introduced in a paper published in Nature Communications, could be used to extract useful information from quantum computers and perform computations more efficiently with provable guarantees, even if users do not have direct access to advanced and expensive quantum computing hardware.
Google adds Android protection against AI deepfake scam calls
Google is introducing a new Android security feature that will detect and flag phone calls in which scammers use artificial intelligence to impersonate a user’s personal contacts.
Called “fake call detection,” the feature is rolling out globally this month to Android 12 and later devices, starting with Pixel devices, and will be enabled by default.
Once activated, it works automatically when both a caller and recipient are using Phone by Google: when a contact places a call, their device sends a silent, encrypted confirmation signal to the recipient’s device in real time.
The quantum internet, explained
The quantum internet is a network of quantum computers that will someday send, compute, and receive information encoded in quantum states. The quantum internet will not replace the modern or “classical” internet; instead, it will provide new functionalities such as quantum cryptography and quantum cloud computing.
While the full implications of the quantum internet won’t be known for some time, several applications have been theorized and some, like quantum key distribution, are already in use.
It’s unclear when a full-scale global quantum internet will be deployed, but researchers estimate that interstate quantum networks will be established within the United States in the next 10 to 15 years.
AI and ultralow-energy lasers enable an ultrafast authentication system
The security of modern communications heavily relies on systems that can rapidly and reliably verify users and the devices they are using. This process, known as authentication, essentially entails confirming that users or devices are legitimate (i.e., who or what they claim to be).
Conventional authentication systems rely on static cryptographic keys, fixed digital keys that allow encryption algorithms to scramble readable data into unreadable texts or vice versa. While these systems perform well in some contexts, they often struggle when networks include billions of devices that continuously connect and disconnect.
Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) recently developed a new system that could authenticate devices faster and more reliably in real time, even when they are connecting to large-scale networks, cloud services or virtual environments.
Perfect randomness realized for the first time
Creating perfect randomness is surprisingly difficult. Even modern random number generators never generate completely ideal random numbers: small systematic errors can result in some numbers appearing slightly more frequently than others. For many applications, this does not matter. In cryptography, however, even the tiniest deviations can be problematic.
Now, researchers at ETH Zurich led by Renato Renner and Andreas Wallraff in the Department of Physics have demonstrated how perfect randomness can actually be created using quantum physics. Their results, which have just been published in Nature, represent a milestone in this area of research.
Randomization can improve quantum computer performance in presence of noise
New research led by a graduating Ph.D. student in The University of New Mexico Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has shown that randomization can improve quantum computer performance in the presence of noise.
Ph.D. student Leeseok Kim led the research under the advice of Assistant Professor Milad Marvian, with support from Changhao Yi, a former member of Marvian’s group. Their findings, titled “Faster Randomized Dynamical Decoupling,” are published in the journal Physical Review Letters and were presented at QSim 2025, an international conference in quantum simulation.
Quantum computers have the potential to solve certain problems faster than classical computers, with promising applications in areas such as simulation and discovery of new materials, optimization, and cryptography. However, building quantum computers that can solve practically relevant problems at scale remains difficult because they are susceptible to noise. Reducing noise more effectively is therefore a key challenge.
