@BushidoToken Threat Intel

  What Happened On 5 May 2026, new data revealed that British romance scam victims were defrauded of a staggering £102 million last year, representing a 29% surge in reported cases. The figures come from information  gathered  by Report Fraud (f.k.a ActionFraud), which is a City of London Police-run service that logged 10,784 romance scam reports in 2025. According to the data, cybercriminals are reportedly pocketing roughly £280,000 everyday by exploiting online relationships, with individual losses averaging £9,500 and in extreme cases, reaching up to £1 million per victim.  This wave of scam victims is part of the growing trend where scammers blend emotional manipulation with fake cryptocurrency investment schemes, heavily weaponising AI-generated profiles, and focusing on lonely victims aged 55 to 74. Analyst Comment  When analysing fraud statistics, it is important to remember that underreporting is very common, with many victims staying silent out of shame...

  What Happened: On 11 May 2026, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined South Staffordshire Water £963,900 after the Cl0p ransomware group lurked completely undetected in its network for nearly two years. Initial access reportedly occurred via a malicious phishing email in September 2020, which downloaded Cl0p’s Get2Loader malware and their SDBBOT backdoor to establish persistence. The breach itself, however, was only discovered two years later in July 2022 when staff began investigating IT performance slowdowns and  ultimately found out that 4.1 terabytes of data was exfiltrated and the personal data of 633,887 customers and employees being published in August 2022 on Cl0p’s Tor data leak site. The ICO’s investigation also revealed a staggering list of systemic failures, such as  South Staff’s outsourced Security Operations Center (SOC) was blind to 95% of the network and that they conducted zero internal or external vulnerability scans over an 18-month win...