“If we trust him, we lose.”
People in Tehran have reacted with scepticism to Donald Trump’s comments on “negotiations” with Iran, after he announced the US was pausing strikes on Iranian energy sites. Iran’s Foreign Ministry has denied the two sides are talking.
Published On 23 Mar 2026
Air traffic control repeatedly urged a fire engine to stop before it collided with an aeroplane and killed two pilots, recordings have revealed.
The vehicle was hit by an Air Canada regional jet at New York‘s LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night as it responded to another incident.
An audio recording reveals that a controller initially gave the fire engine clearance to cross runway four, telling “truck one and company” to “cross four, Delta”.
But the message then changes to “stop there, please”, before panic sets in and the controller pleads “stop, stop, stop, truck one, stop”.
For reasons that are so far unclear, the message went unheeded, and the aircraft’s nose ploughed into the fire engine, which rolled it over.
A flight attendant was found outside still strapped into her seat, sources told Sky’s US partner network NBC News, but the pilot and co-pilot were killed.
Authorities said two people in the fire engine were hurt, but their injuries were not life threatening.
The Bombardier CRJ-900 had just landed from Montreal, and was carrying about 70 passengers and four crew. Forty-one of them were taken to hospitals, some with serious injuries.
Images show the aircraft’s nose ripped off, with the damaged emergency vehicle on its side nearby.
The fire engine had been responding to reports of a strange odour on another plane.
One passenger, Rebecca Liquori, told local TV station News12 Long Island: “Everybody just jolted out of their seats. People hit their heads. People were bleeding.”
Audio from roughly 20 minutes after the crash appears to show the air traffic controller blaming himself.
“We were dealing with an emergency earlier,” he says. “I messed up.”
Jazz Aviation was operating the service, which normally takes about 90 minutes, on behalf of Air Canada.
More than 600 flights to and from LaGuardia had been cancelled by midday, according to FlightAware.com. The airport has since reopened.
Transport Secretary Sean Duffy said that the airport would operate on reduced capacity for “some time” in a press conference.
President Donald Trump told reporters it was a “terrible” situation, adding that there had been a “mistake”.
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There is a well-documented shortage of air traffic controllers in the US, but former Federal Aviation Administration air traffic control chief Mike McCormick told AP that LaGuardia is “not a control tower that has perennial staffing problems”.
The airport is also one of 35 in the US with an advanced surface surveillance system to track planes and other vehicles on the tarmac.
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A Democratic candidate in a key Wisconsin battleground is highlighting support from a major environmental group as her Republican opponent warns the endorsement could drive up energy costs and hurt farmers.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., blasted Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke’s endorsement by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Action Fund, arguing it signals policies that could raise costs for farmers and rural communities.
“Rebecca Cooke is completely out of touch with Wisconsin, touting an endorsement from the radical NRDC,” Van Orden told Fox News Digital. “It’s a clear sign of how quickly she’ll sell out Wisconsin farm families to please Washington Democrats.”
“Farmers and businesses across Wisconsin have time and again rejected the radical Green New Deal because it would increase the price of fertilizer, diesel and cover up more of our black dirt with solar wastelands,” he said.
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The clash underscores how energy costs and their impact on Wisconsin’s farm economy are emerging as a central fault line in one of the most competitive House races in the country, where control of the chamber could hinge on battleground districts like the 3rd.
Cooke, who is challenging Van Orden in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, recently touted the NRDC Action Fund endorsement.
“Growing up on a dairy farm I know how important it is to be steward to the land, I want to protect Western Wisconsin’s natural resources and ensure the next generation has clean air and clean water,” Cooke wrote following the endorsement. “Investing in clean energy will create good-paying local jobs and help lower costs for working families. I’ll work with anyone to strengthen our economy and help strengthen our community.”
Jed Ober, managing director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, said the group is “proud to support her campaign for Congress,” adding that Cooke “will be a champion for working families who are worried about rising energy costs.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund is the political arm of the environmental advocacy group focused on climate and conservation issues.
A Democratic candidate in a key Wisconsin battleground is highlighting support from a major environmental group as her Republican opponent warns the endorsement could drive up energy costs and hurt farmers. (Kayla Wolf/Getty Images)
Van Orden criticized Cooke’s embrace of the endorsement, telling Fox News Digital, “Rebecca Cooke is completely out of touch with Wisconsin, touting an endorsement from the radical NRDC. It’s a clear sign of how quickly she’ll sell out Wisconsin farm families to please Washington Democrats.”
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“Farmers and businesses across Wisconsin have time and again rejected the radical Green New Deal because it would increase the price of fertilizer, diesel, and cover up more of our black dirt with solar wastelands.”
“Energy prices are out of control in western Wisconsin because of Derrick Van Orden’s failed leadership. He voted to increase electricity costs while handing out tax breaks to the ultra-rich,” Cooke responded in a statement to Fox News Digital. “He’s cheerleading a war of choice in the Middle East that sent the prices of gas and diesel skyrocketing in less than a month. It’s hurting our farmers who have already been hit hard by the tariffs Van Orden has supported every step of the way.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council has backed efforts to curb fossil fuel production, including supporting restrictions on hydraulic fracturing and praising the Biden administration’s pause on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export approvals.
Republicans and industry groups argue those kinds of policies can raise energy costs in states like Wisconsin, where agriculture and fuel prices are closely linked.
Diesel powers much of the nation’s farm equipment, while fertilizer production is closely tied to natural gas — making energy prices a key concern for farmers.
Democrats argue that investments in clean energy can benefit rural communities through job creation and lower utility costs over time.
Rebecca Cooke, who is challenging Rep. Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, recently touted an endorsement from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Action Fund. (Provided by the office of Congressman Derrick Van Orden)
While Wisconsin does not have significant hydraulic fracturing operations, it plays a major role in the industry as a leading producer of silica sand used in fracking nationwide, meaning changes in domestic energy production can affect parts of the state’s economy.
The Natural Resources Defense Council also has opposed projects like the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline, which transports oil and natural gas liquids through the Great Lakes region. Supporters, including some industry and labor groups, say the pipeline is critical to maintaining reliable and affordable energy supplies in the Midwest, while environmental groups have raised concerns about environmental risks.
Cooke also received support from prominent Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Van Orden criticized Cooke’s embrace of the endorsement, telling Fox News Digital, “Rebecca Cooke is completely out of touch with Wisconsin, touting an endorsement from the radical NRDC. It’s a clear sign of how quickly she’ll sell out Wisconsin farm families to please Washington Democrats. (iStock)
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The race between Cooke and Van Orden is expected to be highly competitive, with both parties viewing Wisconsin’s 3rd District as a key battleground that could help determine control of the House.
With control of the chamber at stake, energy costs and their impact on Wisconsin’s farm economy are poised to be a central fault line in the race.
Imagine that your boss is too busy to show up at that meeting you called so she sends a bot of herself instead. With a digital twin, even your company’s CEO – the one who spends all his time on the corporate jet – could make an appearance at your powwow about the break room coffee machine. But would you want them there?
Computer scientists have started to explore the possibility of AI bots that resemble actual corporate leaders in voice and/or appearance, based on the belief that managerial avatars might be tolerated or even worthwhile.
One group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Emory have now published their findings in a pre-print paper titled, “When Your Boss Is an AI Bot: Exploring Opportunities and Risks of Manager Clone Agents in the Future Workplace,” scheduled to be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Barcelona next month.
To justify their study, the authors point to a handful of reports of bosses already “cloning themselves,” by having a digital twin attend a conference call, for example.
They also note, “Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (NVIDIA, 2022) and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (HeyGen, 2024) have released their AI avatars in public, while companies like Zoom (Peters, 2025) and Otter.ai (Boyle, 2025) pilot digital stand-ins for meetings and briefings.”
After interviewing 23 managers and workers about speculative scenarios where manager clone agents might be useful, they’ve come up with several possible roles that might work – with some caveats.
“Our findings reveal a fundamental tension between the promise and risks of manager clone agents,” the researchers report in the paper. “On the one hand, participants envisioned supportive roles, acting as proxy presences in meetings, conveying information across organizational layers, automating routine tasks, and amplifying managerial guidance.”
At the same time, they say, delegating these roles to software creates risks. For one, managers and workers expressed anxiety about accountability and about being replaced – a fear fanned by AI companies.
Another concern was that interpersonal relations might suffer due to lack of trust, lack of authenticity, and reduced interpersonal contact. There was also worry about what AI agents might do to organizational cohesion – study participants fretted that efficiency gains might flatten corporate hierarchies and weaken organizational ties. And workers in the study expressed suspicion that AI bossware might just be an excuse to surveil them.
The various scenarios explored with study participants underscored the importance of careful, thoughtful design and deployment of managerial doppelgangers, because both leaders and employees find the idea unsettling.
“Concerns centered on errors: agents misinterpreting intent, causing harmful outcomes, or introducing communication mistakes,” the authors explain.
Like workers or creative professionals, managers don’t want to be replaced by AI. Managers in the study defended their capacity for “higher-order decision-making, creative judgment, and relational work as difficult to automate,” even though some acknowledged an AI clone might be able to take over a portion of their responsibilities.
One manager participating in the study made it clear that AI clones wouldn’t be embraced with much enthusiasm, stating that “I probably don’t want to authorize him because if my own work could be done by my agent, then what is this job position for me to do?”
The key to making AI clones workable appears to be framing their role as an assistant rather than a substitute.
Because this study explored speculative scenarios about the future, workers also imagined the possibility that AI boss clones could reduce the need for human leaders.
“W3 frankly admitted: ‘If the inclusion of AI can diminish, or even overturn power structures like leader–worker dynamics, then as a worker I’m willing to support anything that can facilitate this transformation.’ In such visions, the absence of managers is not a loss but a condition for greater happiness, with more room for individuals to exercise agency.”
¡Viva la revolución de la IA! ®
Two people have died after an Air Canada plane struck a fire truck while landing at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport, one of the busiest airports in the United States.
Authorities are now investigating the cause of the collision, including whether air traffic control coordination may have played a role.
Here is what we know:
The CRJ-900 aircraft, operated by Jazz Aviation as Air Canada Flight AC8646 from Montreal, was landing at LaGuardia Airport in New York with 72 passengers and four crew members on board.
Minutes before the crash, a Port Authority fire truck was responding to a United Airlines flight that had reported an odour on board.
At approximately 11:40pm on Sunday (03:40 GMT on Monday), the Air Canada aircraft collided with the fire truck on the runway while landing.
Audio recordings reveal that an air traffic controller had initially cleared the truck to cross the runway, but as the Air Canada jet approached, the controller urgently tried to stop the vehicle, repeatedly shouting, “Truck One, stop, stop, stop!” in the seconds before the crash.
According to flight-tracking website Flightradar24, the aircraft struck the truck at about 39km/h (24mph). The site last recorded the plane’s data at 11:37pm on Sunday (03:37 GMT on Monday).
US and Canadian authorities are still investigating the incident, but early indications suggest they are focusing on air traffic control coordination.
Runway crossings require close communication between the ground controller, who manages vehicles and taxiways, and the tower controller, who manages the runway and aircraft movements. Controllers must ensure the runway is clear before giving a vehicle permission to cross.
Roughly 20 minutes after the collision, one of the controllers appeared to blame himself. “We were dealing with an emergency earlier,” the controller said. “I messed up.”
A key focus for investigators will be how air and ground traffic were managed at the time, said Mary Schiavo, a former US Department of Transportation inspector general.
“I don’t know how many wake-up calls the [US Federal Aviation Administration or FAA] needs, but this has been happening for years, and sadly, some of the most horrific air crashes in history happen on the ground at the airport,” Schiavo said.
The FAA has faced a long-running shortage of air traffic controllers, with recent estimates suggesting at least 3,000 more are needed.
However, former FAA air traffic control chief Mike McCormick said LaGuardia is “not a control tower that has perennial staffing problems”.
Still, the crash occurred during an overnight shift, when towers are typically staffed by fewer controllers. Investigators are expected to examine overtime, shift patterns and whether fatigue may have been a factor.
The incident also comes at a turbulent time for US airports more broadly.
In recent weeks, airports across the country have faced staffing shortages at the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) tied to the ongoing shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the TSA, as well as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies, and has been without funding since mid-February after Congress failed to reach a budget agreement.
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that ICE agents will help support airport security operations across the country.
LaGuardia was the 19th-busiest airport in the US in 2024, with more than 16.7 million passengers departing from the airport, according to FAA data released in 2025.
It is located in the New York City borough of Queens. It primarily handles domestic flights within the US and some short international flights to Canada and the Caribbean.
Because of heavy traffic and limited runway space, LaGuardia is known for being a congested airport, where takeoffs and landings are tightly scheduled and closely coordinated by air traffic control.
The pilot and co-pilot who were killed were both based in Canada, as the cockpit and front section of the aircraft were destroyed in the collision.
In total, 41 passengers were taken to the hospital, along with two firefighters who were in the truck. Thirty-two people have since been released, but some passengers remain in the hospital with serious injuries.
A flight attendant was found alive outside the aircraft, still strapped into her seat. She was taken to the hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injuries.
The seat reportedly fell through a hole in the aircraft’s floor.
Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One on Monday, Trump described the crash as “terrible”, saying aviation is “a dangerous business” and that “a mistake was made”.
Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney said his thoughts were with the victims and all those affected by the crash, adding that Canadian officials are assisting with the investigation.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said this was a “tragic collision” and thanked first responders for their quick actions, which he said helped save lives.
New York State Governor Kathy Hochul also described the incident as “heartbreaking”, saying her thoughts were with the victims, their families and all those affected.
According to reports, the airport was closed following the crash, but security checkpoints began reopening at around 1:30pm local time (17:30 GMT).
According to a BBC report, the first plane scheduled to depart LaGuardia appears to be a Frontier flight to Atlanta at 2pm (18:00 GMT).
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Jessie J was rushed to the hospital after nearly breaking her neck.
The English singer-songwriter smashed her head into the roof of a car while on her No Secrets tour in China.
“I don’t mind squashing in the back,” Jessie J can be heard saying in a video shared to Instagram as she attempted to crawl into the back of an SUV.
“I should have minded squashing in the back,” she wrote in the caption.
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Jessie J said she injured her neck and back after smashing her head on the roof of an SUV. (Getty Images, Instagram: Jessie J)
The video then cuts to Jessie J in the hospital undergoing an MRI scan.
The 37-year-old jumped back into music afterward.
“Yeah, I just can’t move my head,” she said during tour rehearsals. “I’m alright, I’ll just have to take some painkillers and march right through it. I just wanna kinda run down the show…”
“I thought I broke my neck, but I haven’t,” Jessie J added. “But I have really hurt my neck and my back. Don’t say it.”
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Jessie J has been on her No Secrets tour. (Bruce Glikas/WireImage via Getty Images)
Jessie J has struggled with her health recently.
The “Price Tag” singer announced her breast cancer diagnosis in June 2025. Originally, doctors told Jessie J the lump was likely a cyst before finding out it was cancerous.
“I just burst into tears,” she recalled. “I think because I was convinced it wasn’t going to be anything … [The doctors] tell you the result, and then they’re like, ‘We’ll be in touch.’ That’s when you’re just like, ‘Right, what happens next?’”
Jessie J admitted at times she thought she was going to die early on after finding out about the cancer diagnosis.
“I had been scared. I was like, ‘I’m going to die,’” she said on the podcast. “I had moments where I was like, ‘This is going to go left, and I’m going to die.’ At that point, I didn’t know if I was going to have extensive treatment. I didn’t know what it was going to be.”
Jessie J shared a video of herself getting an MRI. (Getty Images)
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Jessie J recently battled breast cancer. (Katja Ogrin / Getty Images)
Six weeks after the double mastectomy, Jessie J was hospitalized for a suspected blood clot in her lungs.
“I had breast cancer and I had surgery,” she said at the time, according to Billboard. “The possibility of a blood clot is quite high and that’s what they were concerned about, so that’s why they took me in and did extensive tests.”
“I have very few other symptoms now, so I’m hoping it’s just a viral [illness],” she said. “My immune system needs a little bit more love, but I am resting guys, and I also am feeling better. I’m no worse. Yeah, I’m not feeling any worse, and I am resting, and I promise I shower.”
A California county sheriff and Republican contender for the state’s gubernatorial race has seized 650,000 physical ballots from Riverside County, saying they were part of an investigation into election fraud tied to redistricting wars.
State officials and election security experts say that the underlying allegations are spurious and local law enforcement do not have the authority to unilaterally investigate or validate election results.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said at a news conference Friday that he intended to conduct a hand count of the ballots, which were tied to elections last November, and “compare that result to the total votes recorded.”
In a March 6 letter, California Attorney General Rob Bonta directed Bianco to pause the investigation until the state could review “the factual and legal basis” for the probe and seizure.
Based on an initial review of the warrants and affidavits in the case, Bonta wrote that his “office has serious concerns as to whether probable cause existed to support the issuance of the warrants, and whether your office presented the magistrate with all available evidence as required by law.”
While Bonta’s letter does not describe the underlying content of the search warrants, it points to a public presentation made by a resident at a Feb. 10 Riverside County Registrar of Voters meeting that “addresses the alleged vote discrepancy that appears to be the basis of your investigation.”
In that meeting, an individual identifying himself as “Errol” — wearing a “Trump 2028” hat — alleged the council had participated in local, state and federal election fraud.
At several points, the individual said he relied on Google for information on individuals and companies he was accusing of receiving improper payments. At another point, he claimed the Riverside County auditor would not disclose the purpose behind thousands of pages of county payments, before saying “you’re not getting the files, I got them put away.”
“We have a lot of problems, you guys. You’ve committed serious fraud here, forever,” the individual alleged, adding that he hoped the members of the council were imprisoned.
Bonta accused Bianco of “flagrantly violating my directives” under the California State Constitution, and threatened court action should he proceed with the investigation and hand recount.
The act by Bianco — who is running third in the state’s open primary for governor this month, per an Emerson College poll — is the second such seizure of ballots to take place this election cycle, following the FBI’s raid of Fulton County, Georgia’s election office.
Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice, told CyberScoop that the election allegedly being investigated wasn’t a close race. Further, like virtually every other election, candidates or parties have opportunities to contest irregularities or results, including automatic recounts or recounts paid by candidates or campaigns — along with state courts that regularly adjudicate questions of election outcomes.
“It’s important for people to know none of those processes involve someone coming in and haphazardly coming in and grabbing the ballots,” she said, adding: “I worry if it happens closer to an actual election what it could do to interfere with it.”
Ramachandran said that by seizing physical ballots, which she called “the gold standard” we use for determining ground-level truth about voter intent, Bianco was disrupting the chain of custody that is one of the key processes designed to give voters trust in their elections.
“It should just be a really high bar, not just, ‘I’m suspicious, I want to do a fishing expedition,’” she said. “That’s not enough to have someone who doesn’t have any experience in counting ballots or keeping them safe [to] just come in and grab all that stuff.”Bonta’s suggestion that Bianco did not materially inform the courts echoes what Fulton County officials alleged in their own lawsuit, which accused the FBI of presenting the judge with a “flagrantly misleading narrative” that omitted key evidence, undermining the government’s basis for investigating the 2020 ballots.
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As the suspect in the killing of Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman faces charges, scrutiny is growing over the policies her family said left the accused in a position to commit the crime.
Jose Medina-Medina, the 25-year-old Venezuelan national charged with Gorman’s murder, entered the U.S. illegally under the Biden administration before being apprehended and released into the country, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Sunday.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson speaks during a press conference on the fifth floor of City Hall on Jan. 27, 2026, in Chicago. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)
DHS also confirmed that Medina had been previously arrested for shoplifting in Chicago.
Veteran Chicago reporter William J. Kelly called the killing “the single most avoidable loss of life” in Chicago’s history Monday on “Fox & Friends” and claimed Medina had been arrested multiple times for “deportable offenses.” He slammed Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson‘s catch-and-release approach to migrant crime while praising the work of the Chicago Police Department (CPD).
“This suspect never should have been in the country to begin with… And God bless the CPD, the Chicago police, because they have been arresting this guy, despite the fact that Mayor Johnson is endlessly telling them not to touch the illegals, not to detain them, not to turn them over to ICE,” he said.
Sheridan Gorman was allegedly killed by Jose Medina-Medina. (Sheridan G. Gorman via Instagram and DHS)
Kelly argued the mayor has no good answer for his decisions that led to what he called a “revolving door.” And although Medina is now behind bars, his apprehension brought Kelly no great comfort.
“Guess what? There are thousands of Jose Medinas that are in a revolving door that’s going by, going around so fast… that I’m surprised that they’re not flying out of the jail, because this is exactly the policies that got Sheridan Gorman killed,” he said.
Sheridan Gorman, a New York native, was reportedly only a few months away from completing her freshman year at Loyola University Chicago in Illinois. (Sheridan G. Gorman via Instagram)
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Gorman’s family released a statement in which they excoriated “the policies and failures that allowed this individual to remain in a position to commit this crime” after multiple arrests.
“Sheridan was 18. She had her entire life ahead of her… All of that was taken in a moment, and there is no way to repair the loss,” the statement read in part.
Simply walking near her campus was an ordinary act, they wrote, refusing to allow her murder “to be dismissed as ‘wrong place, wrong time.’ This was not random misfortune. This was a violent and preventable act.”
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Gorman’s family demanded complete accountability, rejecting the idea of “second chances that put others at risk.”
“When systems fail — whether through release decisions, lack of coordination, or unwillingness to act — the consequences are not abstract. They are real. And in our case, they are permanent.”
Fox News Digital Matt Finn, Emma Bussey and Bill Melugin contributed to this report.
A major plane accident occurred late Sunday night at New York’s La Guardia Airport. An Air Canada plane collides with a fire truck during landing. The pilot and co-pilot of the plane died in this horrific collision. Many other people have been injured in this accident.
Popular anime streaming platform Crunchyroll is investigating a breach after hackers claimed to have stolen personal information for approximately 6.8 million people.
“We are aware of recent claims and are currently working closely with leading cyber security experts to investigate the matter,” Crunchyroll told BleepingComputer.
This statement comes after a threat actor contacted BleepingComputer last Thursday and claimed they breached Crunchyroll on March 12th at 9 PM EST, after gaining access to the Okta SSO account of a support agent working for Crunchyroll.
This support agent is allegedly an employee of the Telus International business process outsourcing (BPO) company, who has access to Crunchyroll support tickets. The threat actors claimed to have used malware to infect the agent’s computer and gain access to their credentials.
From screenshots shared with BleepingComputer, these credentials gave access to various Crunchyroll applications, including Zendesk, Wizer, MaestroQA, Mixpanel, Google Workspace Mail, Jiro Service Management, and Slack.
Using this access, the attackers say they downloaded 8 million support ticket records from Crunchyroll’s Zendesk instance. Of these records, there are allegedly 6.8 million unique email addresses.
Samples of the support tickets seen by BleepingComputer and then deleted contain a wide variety of information, including the Crunchyroll user’s name, login name, email address, IP address, general geographic location, and the contents of the support tickets.
While other reports on the incident claim that credit card information was exposed, BleepingComputer has confirmed that credit card details were exposed only when the customer shared them in the support ticket.
For the most part, this included only basic information, such as the last four digits or expiration dates, and only a few contained full card numbers, according to the threat actor.
The support tickets seen by BleepingComputer all reference Telus, supporting the threat actor’s claim that they compromised a BPO employee.
The attacker says their access was revoked after 24 hours, letting them steal data up to mid-2025.
The hacker claims to have sent extortion emails to Crunchyroll, demanding $5 million in exchange for not publicly leaking the data, but did not receive a response from the company.
While this attack targeted a Telus employee, BleepingComputer was told it was not related to the massive breach at Telus Digital by the ShinyHunters extortion gang.
Business process outsourcing companies have become high-value targets for threat actors over the past few years, as they often handle customer support, billing, and internal authentication systems for multiple companies.
As a result, threat actors can compromise a single BPO employee and gain access to large amounts of customer and corporate data across multiple companies.
In the past year, threat actors have exploited BPOs by bribing insiders with legitimate access, social engineering support staff into granting unauthorized access, and compromising BPO employee accounts to reach internal systems.
In one of the most prominent cases, attackers posed as an employee and convinced a Cognizant help desk support agent to grant them access to a Clorox employee account, allowing them to breach the company’s network.
Major retailers also confirmed that social engineering attacks against support personnel enabled ransomware and data theft attacks.
Marks & Spencer confirmed that attackers used social engineering to breach its networks, while Co-op disclosed data theft following a ransomware attack that similarly abused support staff’s access.
In response to the attacks on M&S and Co-op retail companies, the U.K. government issued guidance on social engineering attacks against help desks and BPOs.
In some cases, hackers target the BPO employee accounts themselves to gain access to the customer data they manage.
In October, Discord disclosed a data breach that allegedly exposed data from 5.5 million unique users after its Zendesk support system instance was compromised.
Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.
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