Cyber Security Headlines Cloudflare blames database, Crypto heist takedown, WhatsApp flaw exposed billions
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Nov 20, 2025 A major outage at Cloudflare was traced back to a database permissions change, impacting services like X and Canva. A California man pleaded guilty to laundering millions from a significant crypto heist. Researchers revealed a critical flaw in WhatsApp that exposed data of over 3.5 billion users. Meanwhile, Amazon reported cyber-enabled reconnaissance linked to Iran before missile attacks. A crackdown uncovered €47 million in piracy crypto and targeted Russian hosting providers supporting ransomware. Plus, a new ransomware player, Shiny Spider, emerges with a unique negotiation tactic.
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Internal Configs Can Cause Major Outages
- A Cloudflare database permissions change indirectly caused its worst outage since 2019 by breaking bot management feature files.
- The misconfiguration produced oversized files that repeatedly crashed Cloudflare's core proxy and caused widespread 5xx errors.
Guilty Plea In Massive Crypto Laundering
- A California man pleaded guilty to laundering at least $25 million from a $230 million crypto heist spanning Oct 2023 to Mar 2024.
- The scheme used young hackers, mixers, peel chains, and shell companies to move stolen funds.
Phone Lookup Scraping Threat On WhatsApp
- Researchers abused WhatsApp's phone-number lookup without effective rate limiting to compile a reverse phone book of over 3.5 billion users.
- The collected names, numbers, and profile images were deleted and no malicious use was found, highlighting massive scraping risk.