U.S. Government Entity Paid Kairos $1 Million in Data-Theft Extortion Case

A large batch of July 2026 security headlines: a U.S. government entity paid roughly $1M to stop a data-theft extortion (actor calling itself Kairos); widespread supply-chain and package-repository abuse (including 108 malicious packages/extensions in the North Korean-linked PolinRider campaign and npm packages mimicking Rollup tooling); multiple high-risk vulnerabilities and active exploits (Bad Epoll local privilege escalation, SharePoint RCE added to CISA KEV, Cursor sandbox-escape flaws); new malware/tooling (Avalon framework with CrownX ransomware capabilities, PamStealer for macOS, Pure-