Read More A flaw in Linux’s vhost subsystem lets a local user read and write kernel memory at will and become root across nearly a decade of kernel versions. In one virtualization setup, it lets an untrusted virtual machine write to the host’s memory and hijack the program that runs the virtual machine.

The bug is tracked as CVE-2026-74580 and named Vghost. Tencent Zhuque Lab, which found the 

Read More Security researchers ran their own code inside a protected part of Windows that is meant to stay sealed off even when the rest of the computer is taken over.

The protected area is a VBS enclave, an isolated slice of memory the operating system uses to guard secrets, and the one they broke into handles passwords for a Windows anti-phishing feature.

The work was done in a lab as a proof of 

Read More Microsoft on Tuesday shattered its own Patch Tuesday record by shipping patches for a whopping 1,413 vulnerabilities, including one that it said has come under active exploitation.

These include 1,102 flaws in Windows, 134 in Office, 61 in Developer Tools, 36 in SharePoint Server, and 22 in SQL Server. Of these, more than 670 relate to privilege escalation, followed by over 300 remote code 

Read More A Saudi National and employee of OpenAI has been arrested for allegedly planting a hidden recording device in an executive conference room at the company’s San Francisco offices to covertly record sensitive conversations.

Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, has been charged with using or endeavoring to use an electronic, mechanical, or other device to intercept oral communications. He was arrested by 

Read More 

Microsoft today issued updates to fix more than 1,400 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Today’s epic patch batch dwarfs September’s record of nearly 1,000 fixes, which was already about ten times the normal monthly patch load from Redmond.

Just one of the weaknesses patched this week is considered a “zero day,” or already exploited in the wild. CVE-2026-96951 is a security feature bypass in the Windows Shell that affects Windows 10 and 11 systems, as well as some Server versions.

Windows 10 users might be wondering if they can still expect security updates after this month. Microsoft had been slated to stop shipping updates for Windows 10 systems in October 2025, but ended up adding another year of free updates after considerable pushback. A few months ago, Microsoft quietly extended that support for another year (until October 2027).

At least 78 of the flaws fixed this month are rated “critical,” meaning they could be exploited with little or no action by the user, and most of those critical bugs allow an attacker to execute code of their choice on the vulnerable system.

While Microsoft said there are no signs anyone is exploiting it yet, a security feature bypass in the .NET Framework (CVE-2026-108398) was publicly disclosed prior to today, potentially giving attackers advance time to work out how to exploit the bug.

Satnam Narang at Tenable said the number of flaws fixed this month far surpasses the previous record-setting year 2020, when Microsoft patched 1,261 CVEs.

“We’ve now crossed the 4,000 CVE mark with two months left to go,” he said.

Microsoft credits large language models for the high volume of bug discovery, and presumably AI gets credit for many of the patches used to fix these flaw. Meanwhile, security experts have been warning that these unusually large patch volleys from Microsoft are placing extra strain on corporate security teams, which often have to test individual updates before deploying them across a network to ensure the fixes don’t cause problems for other software.

Tyler Reguly, associate director of security research and development at Fortra, notes that just 26 Microsoft vulnerabilities appeared in the “Known Exploited Vulnerabilities” (KEV) catalog maintained by the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) so far this year, and security teams would do well to prioritize patching those 26 vulnerabilities first.

“Security leaders should focus on exploitable risk, and ask whether their teams have the clarity, capacity and support to act,” Reguly said.

Which vulnerabilities deserve the most scrutiny in your organization? The folks at Cisco Talos have a useful roundup of the more noteworthy flaws that Microsoft fixed today, and of course the SANS Internet Storm Center has a reliable roundup that indexes vulnerabilities by severity, CVE number and affected software.

Read More Small artificial intelligence (AI) models may be months away from developing capabilities to self-replicate on IoT devices like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, according to a warning from Anthropic.

The frontier AI lab said small AI models could form autonomous, self-propagating worm botnets that are “challenging to shut down,” since “there’s no centralized point to shut off.” 

Read More A flaw in Docker Hub, the registry where container images are published and downloaded, let one user push, pull, or delete images as another user. Docker fixed the flaw on September 30 and says it found no evidence that anyone exploited it.

The flaw was in the feature that converts a personal account into an organization, Docker said in a security advisory on October 12. 

Read More An attacker chained three zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure, a VPN appliance, to run commands as root without logging in, security firm Volexity said on October 13. Ivanti has released fixes for two of the flaws and told customers on affected versions to “act immediately.” A fix for the third is still pending, according to Volexity.

Volexity, which reported the flaws to Ivanti, 

Read More A flaw in SAP’s Cloud SDK for Python can send an application’s OAuth2 client credentials to a server an attacker controls, SAP said in a security advisory on October 13. The flaw affects multi-tenant applications on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) that use the SDK, SAP’s official Python client for BTP services. An attacker must be able to control the tenant subdomain, 

Read More GitHub has taken the step of expiring unvalidated npm trusted publishing configurations 48 hours after creation after researchers found that it was possible for an attacker to push new versions of a different user’s package without having to steal their credentials.

“Your configuration becomes validated and exempt from expiry after its first successful publish,” the Microsoft-owned subsidiary 

Read More The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (DPA) has fined Xandr, an advertising unit owned by Microsoft, €8.6 million ($9.62 million) for illegally relaying ​Grindr users’ sensitive data to advertisers.

The administrative penalty is the largest issued by the data protection watchdog, arguing the case merited a high fine because of the “very serious” nature of the breach. The infringements 

Read More The dangerous part of a stolen identity isn’t always the initial login. It’s what an attacker can do with that access next.

With AI accelerating reconnaissance, exploitation of vulnerabilities, and privilege escalation, attackers can move through systems faster than security teams can investigate. A compromised account that looks legitimate at first could become the starting point for a much 

Read More Attackers took remote control of fridges and freezers at hundreds of French supermarkets on the night of October 11 and warmed them, forcing stores to throw food away, several retail chains said.

The attackers reached them through the controller that runs all of a store’s fridges and freezers, a device made by Danish company Danfoss that maintenance firms can manage remotely. Les Mousquetaires 

Read More Two of 31 newly disclosed flaws in Progress Software’s MarkLogic Server database could let an account given only some management privileges take administrator control of the server, the company says.

Progress published all 31 on October 12 and scored five of them critical. Fixes have been available since September 10, in MarkLogic 11.3.7 and MarkLogic 12.1.0.

Affected 

Read More GitLab has released patches for a maximum-severity security flaw impacting its Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that could result in arbitrary code execution.

“GitLab has remediated an issue that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server via a specially crafted regular expression in a CI/CD 

Read More Low-cost Android smartphones have been shipped with malicious software baked into the device firmware, allowing bad actors to covertly install apps, conduct ad fraud, and turn devices into residential proxies.

The activity, which targets Android devices built on MediaTek platforms across several brands, is being tracked by Bitdefender under the moniker Midnight Mimosa.

The preinstalled 

Read More Some meetings last longer than it took attackers to jump on a newly disclosed security flaw this week. Within hours, they were already testing it. That’s not much time to read the warning, let alone do something about it.

But speed is only part of the problem. A secure connection didn’t always mean a safe destination. People offering to fix a ransomware mess had questions to answer themselves. 

Read More The personal AI agents rollout is going about as smoothly as expected: Amazon now blocks Meta’s Muse because it doesn’t identify itself as a bot while browsing; Instinct keeps raising privacy concerns; and the horror stories from pretty much every personal AI agent keep piling up.

Regardless, the tech world is mesmerized by the capabilities and potential of these services. Less than a year 

Read More Cryptocurrency hardware maker Ledger has temporarily paused sales of its products via CryptoBilis following reports of stolen funds linked to devices sold by the reseller.

On Friday, the company said it was investigating reports of loss of funds from users in Southeast Asia who had purchased products from CryptoBilis. The incident is said to have resulted in losses totaling more than $86 

Read More Threat actors have been observed exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw in SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 appliances within days of public disclosure.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-102255 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a case of pre-authenticated server-side request forgery (SSRF) that could allow a remote attacker “to direct the appliance to issue requests on their 

Read More A maximum-severity security flaw impacting the Bricksforge plugin for WordPress has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to Patchstack.

The critical vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-85097 (CVSS score: 10.0), which allows unauthenticated attackers to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code on vulnerable WordPress websites, resulting in remote code execution (RCE). The 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a two-pronged artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented initial access campaign targeting WordPress sites, e-commerce platforms, and critical infrastructure entities in Ukraine.

The activity, which brings together commodity offensive tools like Cobalt Strike with an AI orchestration layer powered by Anthropic’s Claude Code, has been attributed 

Read More In environments studied for the 2026 State of Agent Security Report, roughly 1,280 third-party products now embed AI. About 282 of them sit behind single sign-on. The other thousand are invisible to identity infrastructure by default, not because anyone hid them, but because an identity stack can only govern what authenticates through it, and most agents never do.

That gap is the clearest 

Read More Anthropic on Friday said it’s cutting off live internet access for all its internal evaluations following the discovery of new incidents in which its artificial intelligence (AI) models exhibited misaligned behavior and targeted real websites.

The AI company said it identified four broad categories of unintended model actions during evaluations and internal use of Claude –

Claude Mythos 

Read More 

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Thursday arrested the co-founder of a Canadian cybersecurity firm in connection with an investigation into the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently relieved the FBI of sensitive data on thousands of agents, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity.

The New York Times reported today that the FBI has arrested a Canadian man in Pennsylvania on suspicion of assisting ShinyHunters. The Times story did not identify the man, nor did a statement on Twitter/X about the arrest from FBI Director Kash Patel.

One source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the Canadian person arrested this week was visiting Pennsylvania for a cyber insurance conference, and that the suspect’s company specialized in handling ransomware negotiations with cybercrime groups. Another shared that control over the ShinyHunters investigation has been centralized at an FBI field office in Texas.

An online search reveals the Cyber Risk Summit was held at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel between Oct. 5 and Oct. 7. The conference had several sponsors, but according to the summit’s website its biggest sponsor was a Canadian security company called Cypfer.

According to LinkedIn, Cypher was co-founded by a Canadian man named Edward Dubrovsky, who is now associated with another Canadian security firm and sponsor called CyberSteward. In a post to LinkedIn approximately one month ago, Dubrovsky said he had plans to attend the Cyber Risk Summit with the rest of the CyberSteward team.

Edward Dubrovsky’s LinkedIn profile.

“Looking forward to continuing conversations around strategy & compliant driven coercive (ransomware, extortion) advisory, negotiations and settlement services that are global and truly agnostic,” Dubrovsky wrote.

Federal court records show that on October 8, an Edward Dobrovsky (note the slight misspelling of the last name) was arrested in Pennsylvania on cyber extortion and conspiracy charges. Several of those documents — including the core complaint — are now sealed. But a handful of them were indexed at Courtlistener.com, including a summary of the complaint, which charges the defendant with “conspiracy to threaten to impair the confidentiality of information with the intent to extort money,” and “interference with commerce by threats.”

Image: Courtlistener.com

The inmate locator at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons website reports that a 54-year-old Edward Dubrovsky is currently being held at a federal facility in Philadelphia. But the court records indexed by CourtListener include a notice filed on October 9 that moved the case to the Eastern District of Texas, which sources say is now the epicenter of the FBI’s ShinyHunters investigation. The FBI declined to comment for this story.

Dubrovsky’s LinkedIn profile states he is the author of Cyber Extortion Strategic Response, a 252-page book that promises to “take readers beyond the ransom note and into the decisions that determine how an organization responds, recovers, and protects what matters.”

Edward Dubrovsky’s book, which centers on the intricacies of ransomware negotiations.

“At the heart of the book is a critical distinction: communicating with a criminal is not the same as negotiating a payment, and negotiating is not a commitment to pay,” reads an excerpt from the book’s listing on Amazon. “Engagement can serve other objectives, including testing claims, gathering information, creating time, and preserving options while the organization evaluates its next move.”

Mr. Dubrovsky could not be immediately reached for comment. KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from the other co-founder of CyberSteward, and will update this post in the event they respond. The available court records in Dubrovsky’s case show that he does not currently have an attorney and has yet to be appointed a public defender by the courts.

ShinyHunters typically uses phishing and stolen credentials to siphon data from corporate accounts at software-as-a-service companies, and then threatens to publish the stolen data online unless a ransom demand is paid. According to the FBI, the group has extorted more than $70 million from victims so far this year.

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity the FBI has been poring over devices that were seized last month when the Dutch police arrested the convicted cybercriminal Pepijn van der Stap in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation, and that charges against principals at other companies that specialize in ransomware negotiation may be forthcoming.

Immediately after Van der Stap’s arrest, another member of ShinyHunters named “Rey” assumed control over the group and began taunting the FBI over data the group stole from the agency’s online recruitment portal, which included each’s person’s unit and specialization, as well as medical and psychiatric records.

Last week, Reuters reported that Rey — identified as a teenager named Saif Al-din Khader — had been detained and was cooperating with FBI investigators. On October 7, we detailed how Rey was apprehended as the cybercrime group allegedly sought to extort a navigation and digital aviation unit that was divested by Boeing in late 2025.

This is likely to be a fast-moving story. Updates will be noted along with timestamps.

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an ongoing credential-theft campaign that has compromised two high-profile open-source maintainer accounts to push a malicious workflow into over 340 repositories.

“Using the account of Takashi Kitao, author of the 18,400-star game engine pyxel, the attacker pushed a malicious workflow to 27 repositories starting at 13:20 UTC,” StepSecurity 

Read More The FBI has arrested another suspected co-conspirator of ShinyHunters, FBI Director Kash Patel said on October 9 in a post on X.

ShinyHunters is the extortion group that said in September it had breached the FBI’s jobs portal and stolen sensitive data on almost all FBI agents and job applicants. The FBI has not named the suspect, and no charges have been made public.

The 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously unseen variant of the DarkSword iOS exploit kit called P7 DarkSword.

“Compared with the variants we usually observe, P7 reduces its on-device footprint, adds on-device keychain and crypto-wallet theft, and adds two way C2 communication with the attacker’s infrastructure,” iVerify said in a new report published Thursday.

The name 

Read More Four more U.S. states sued router maker TP-Link Systems on October 6, bringing the total to five, with  Texas filing a suit in February. Florida, Iowa, Montana and Nebraska allege the California company misled buyers about how secure its routers are and how separate it is from China. TP-Link denies the claims and says it will fight them in court.

TP-Link Systems is based in 

Read More Security researchers have published a full working exploit for a pre-authentication remote code execution flaw in AnyDesk Linux that gives attackers root access before anyone approves the connection.

AnyDesk patched the flaw in version 8.0.3 in June, but its changelog described the fix only as “fixed a bug that could lead to a crash,” with no CVE assigned and no security 

Read More Anthropic on Thursday unveiled OSS Scanner as an opt-in vulnerability scanner to help secure the open-source ecosystem using artificial intelligence (AI).

“It’s an opt-in service informed by our experience using Claude to find vulnerabilities during Project Glasswing,” Anthropic said. “Projects that join will receive thorough, periodic security scans by our strongest models at no cost.” 

Read More Threat actors have been observed exploiting two recently disclosed flaws in the AhsayCBS backup utility to seize control of affected devices and deploy web shells and XMRig cryptocurrency miners.

Details of the flaws are below –

CVE-2026-105133 (CVSS v4 score: 5.5) – An improper authentication vulnerability in the checkSysPwd() function in the “com/ahsay/obs/api/ApiStructsAction.java” 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added five security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following their abuse by a China-linked threat actor known as Flax Typhoon.

The vulnerabilities in question are listed below –

CVE-2015-3306 (CVSS score: 10.0) – An improper access control vulnerability in ProFTPD that could allow 

Read More As enterprises race to deploy autonomous AI agents to accelerate business, a new report reveals they are tethered to security architectures built for a different era. The “Horizons of Identity Security” report from SailPoint highlights a critical “velocity paradox,” in which organizations invest in AI-speed business operations while continuing to rely on human-speed security controls, creating a 

Read More A bug in GoBalance, a tool many dark-web sites use to stay reachable during attacks, lets anyone work out the secret key that controls a site’s .onion address using only public information, and then take that address over.

Searchlight Cyber, which disclosed the flaw on October 8, says an attacker who recovers the key can redirect the site’s visitors to a copy of the site they control. 

Read More Three research teams broke into Google’s Pixel 10 on October 8 at Pwn2Own Ireland, a hacking contest in Cork whose rules require every target to be fully patched. The contest pays researchers to show working exploits and passes the flaws to the vendors. One of the three Pixel exploits earned Ikotas Labs $300,000, the contest’s top prize, and made the team the overall winner.

Trend Micro’s Zero 

Read More Citrix has released patches for yet another critical security flaw impacting NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway that could result in remote code execution or denial-of-service (DoS) under certain conditions.

“CVE-2026-107406 is a memory overflow vulnerability that may lead to remote code execution or denial-of-service under specific configuration conditions,” Citrix said.

The vulnerability 

Read More The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice (DoJ) have announced the disruption of malicious tools used by a China-linked advanced persistent threat group known as Flax Typhoon.

To that end, the agencies seized several domains and blocked access to platforms that were used to scan, and in some cases infiltrate, U.S. critical infrastructure. The list of seized 

Read More Hackers tied to a Chinese cybersecurity company stole email from government organizations, law enforcement agencies, healthcare systems, and religious institutions in Southeast Asia, the FBI and agencies in 6 other countries said on October 8.

The company, Integrity Technology Group, has been sanctioned by the U.S. and the UK. The hackers scanned websites for flaws using a tool containing more 

Read More The crooks have trust problems of their own. One ransomware affiliate decided to keep the profits for himself. Elsewhere, an attacker left a server exposed, complete with tools and traces of an intrusion. Apparently, keeping things secure is a problem on both sides of the fence.

The rest of the week isn’t much more reassuring. Malicious code turned up in developer packages and extensions that 

Read More Attackers behind a string of personal data leaks at Japanese organizations have abused APIs for mobile apps and targeted known software flaws, the JPCERT Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) said.

The Tokyo-based center, which takes incident reports, based its October 8, 2026 alert on those reports and other information. The alert names no attacker and no affected organization.

JPCERT/ 

Read More The Russia-aligned threat actor known as UAC-0099 has been attributed to a previously undocumented .NET infostealer and remote access trojan (RAT) codenamed ASHVEIN.

According to TrendAI, the malware has been put to use in attacks targeting Ukrainian government personnel. The cybersecurity company is tracking the cluster under the name Earth Sirrush (previously SHADOW-EARTH-065).

ASHVEIN, 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a targeted campaign aimed at South Korean financial organizations that used an artificial intelligence (AI) pen testing tool named ARTEX to carry out the attacks.

The activity, per CrowdStrike Intelligence, was active from late September to early October 2026, and resulted in data exfiltration from various South Korea-based financial firms, 

Read More Phishing kits are no longer limited to copying a familiar login page and waiting for a victim to enter credentials. Attackers are increasingly building filtering, session management, and traffic controls into the infrastructure that delivers the phishing page itself.

ANY.RUN has identified Wazza, a new phishkit targeting banking, manufacturing, and government organizations across the US, Europe 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of 16 malicious Mozilla Firefox extensions that are capable of stealing cryptocurrency wallet recovery phrases and private keys.

“The extensions masquerade as wallet portals, desktop utilities, and browser tools, but their code intercepts recovery phrases and private keys during wallet import flows and attempts to send those secrets to 

Read More The U.S. State Department is offering up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of Zhang Yu, a Chinese national charged in the United States in connection with the 2021 Microsoft Exchange Server attacks known as HAFNIUM.

The reward is for information leading to his identification or location, the news outlet NTD reported this week, citing a notice 

Read More The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced charges against a 50-year-old U.S. and Israeli national for allegedly defrauding ransomware victims by secretly paying the attackers to obtain decryptors while claiming to use proprietary tools to recover their data.

Zohar Pinhasi (aka Zack Silver and Zack Green) has been charged with two counts of wire fraud and one count of wire 

Read More The npm package known as “tensorlake,” a TypeScript software development kit (SDK) for Tensorlake applications, sandboxes, and cloud services, was compromised as part of a ChainDrop / Shai-Hulud supply chain attack.

The malicious version 0.5.144 “contains obfuscated malware that harvests credentials, exfiltrates secrets, establishes persistence, and executes remotely supplied code,” Socket said 

Read More Attackers compromised three country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and obtained unauthorized HTTPS certificates for several Google domains, Google said on October 6.

Google’s own systems were not breached, but any domain ending in .gh (Ghana), .sl (Sierra Leone) or .as (American Samoa) was put at risk. With such a certificate, an attacker could pose as the real site over an encrypted 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a long-running npm supply chain malware campaign that pushes information stealers and remote access trojans (RAT) to compromised hosts.

The campaign has been codenamed MALFEX by CloudSEK and Checkmarx. The activity is assessed to be the work of a lone threat actor who appears to have published 12 packages since August 2023, eight of which have 

Read More SonicWall has released hotfixes for four flaws in its SMA1000 appliances, the gateways that give remote workers access to a company’s network and applications. The most serious could allow an attacker without a login to send requests through the appliance and reach internal functions.

SonicWall rates it 10.0 on the CVSS scale and says it has no evidence that any of the four flaws is being 

Read More A critical vulnerability in LMCache, open-source software that speeds up large language model (LLM) servers such as vLLM, lets an attacker run code on the cache server without logging in, and no fixed version is available.

The flaw is in LMCache’s multiprocess mode, where the cache runs as a standalone server that LLM workers reach over the ZeroMQ messaging library. A single network 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new malware family that has been observed targeting exposed artificial intelligence (AI) and large language model (LLM) infrastructure with an aim to deploy cryptocurrency miners and further expand the scale of the botnet.

The financially motivated campaign, dubbed Canto Incognito, has been found to install cryptocurrency miners, including 

Read More 

A teenager from Amman, Jordan suspected of leading the prolific data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has been detained and is reportedly cooperating with the FBI to identify other members of the hacking gang. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the suspect, who uses the hacker handle “Rey,” was detained as ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting a business unit recently divested by the global aerospace company Boeing, which manufactures the fleet of planes used by the employer of Rey’s father — Royal Jordanian Airlines.

The logo for Jeppesen ForeFlight, a business unit divested last year by the aerospace firm Boeing.

On October 3, Reuters cited three unnamed sources saying a suspected ShinyHunters member in Amman named Saif Al-din Khader was detained by Jordanian authorities and was cooperating with the FBI. KrebsOnSecurity identified Rey as Khader in a November 2025 profile, in which the young man admitted working with multiple ransomware groups.

Rey was featured again in a September 28 exclusive about the Dutch police arresting 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal Pepijn van der Stap on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by ShinyHunters. The story noted that immediately following the Dutchman’s arrest on the evening of September 15, Rey assumed control over the ShinyHunters brand and boasted publicly about stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the ransomware group Cl0p.

Rey taunted both the FBI and Cl0p with memes posted to his longtime account on Twitter/X, while simultaneously including images of the avatar used by Van Der Stap’s former hacker alias “Umbreon” in an apparent attempt to frame the Dutchman for both hacks.

A taunting meme uploaded to Twitter/X by Rey on Sept. 22. A giant sized version of the Pokemon character Umbreon can be seen in the bottom left.

As noted in our September 28 report, ShinyHunters gained access to the FBI site and other victims by exploiting a vulnerability (CVE-2026-35273) in PeopleSoft, a software-as-a-service platform from the tech giant Oracle that is broadly used by companies to manage hiring and human resources, benefits and payroll. Oracle quickly issued a fix for CVE-2026-35273, which ShinyHunters first began exploiting as a zero-day in June, and at the time Mandiant released web application firewall rules intended for organizations that couldn’t apply the security update quickly enough.

ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer in June that the original goal behind exploiting the PeopleSoft vulnerability was to breach the FBI’s own PeopleSoft database, but the hackers said those attacks were unsuccessful for some reason. In recent weeks, however, ShinyHunters turned to a well-known URL-encoding trick to bypass Mandiant’s suggested web application firewall rules.

In a report released Sept. 25, security experts at Mandiant and the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that ShinyHunters had mass-exploited the PeopleSoft vulnerability to steal data from dozens of systems across a range of industries, including higher education, technology, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and government.

Reuters reported October 5 that the FBI has removed a contractor at Accenture over their failure to patch the FBI recruitment website hacked by ShinyHunters, which exposed sensitive data on more than 5,000 FBI personnel, including each’s person’s unit and specialization, as well as medical and psychiatric records.

‘REY’ MEANS KING, AS IN ROYAL

According to two sources familiar with the ShinyHunters investigation, a navigation and digital aviation unit recently divested by the global aerospace company Boeing was among the victims that ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting when Rey was apprehended by Jordanian authorities.

Those sources said the FBI’s investigation into ShinyHunters gained renewed urgency with the group’s attempted extortion of the former Boeing unit, which allegedly included the theft of sensitive information that sources said could pose operational safety and security risks.

In a brief statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, Boeing acknowledged the extortion attempts by ShinyHunters, and said the incident concerned data stolen from Jeppesen ForeFlight, a subsidiary that Boeing sold in November 2025 to the private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $10.55 billion.

“We are aware of claims by a threat actor regarding data allegedly associated with Boeing and our former subsidiary Jeppesen ForeFlight,” a Boeing spokesperson shared. “We are actively reviewing the matter with the Jeppesen ForeFlight team.”

A spokesperson for Jeppesen ForeFlight shared a written statement in response to questions, saying the company has seen no impact on their end. “Based on our investigation to date into this claim and proactive security posture, there was no impact to our operations or products.”

Rey’s alleged involvement in attempting to extort the former Boeing unit is noteworthy because there is strong evidence that his father works for Royal Jordanian Airlines, which is mostly controlled by the Jordanian government and operates its long-haul fleet on passenger planes built by Boeing. Rey claimed on Telegram in early 2025 that his father was an airline pilot, although that could not be independently confirmed.

However, as noted in our November 2025 profile of Rey, his family’s shared computer was at one point compromised by password-stealing malware, and the data collected by that malware clearly shows Rey’s father used the same credentials to log in at multiple online portals for Royal Jordanian Airlines employees.

Royal Jordanian Airlines has not yet responded to a request for comment. In advance of our September 28 story, KrebsOnSecurity once again emailed Rey’s father to seek comment and update him on his son’s alleged activities. Neither of the Khaders have responded. But just hours after that request was sent, Rey began deleting his various social media accounts, including the Twitter/X account he previously used to taunt the FBI, Cl0p, and other ShinyHunters victims.

Rey may have nixed many of his social media profiles, but his cybersecurity blog on GitHub somehow escaped the purge, and it shows that Rey was fixated on the leaders of the Cl0p ransomware group. In March 2026, Rey’s blog featured a lengthy post that identified two Russian men as the core developers and hackers behind Cl0p.

Rey’s blog on GitHub. This post doxes two Russian men as the core operators behind Cl0p, one of the oldest and most established ransomware groups still in operation today.

MURDER FOR HIRE?

Meanwhile, news outlets in the Netherlands reported explosive new allegations leveled at Van der Stap, whose supposed personal transformation from convicted to reformed hacker has been widely covered in the tech news media. The Dutch daily RTL reported on Sept. 29 that investigators suspect Van der Stap tried to orchestrate at least two murders. According to RTL, the murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and there are indications Van der Stap gave the order for these attacks.

Van der Stap was released from prison after serving the better part of a four year sentence for data theft and extortion activity that prosecutors said netted between €1.5 million and €2.7 million. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on September 9, Van der Stap described his new role as “offensive security lead” at the Dutch cybersecurity company Neo Security, saying the job involved probing client networks for security vulnerabilities.

Neo Security’s owner Benjamin Korper told Reuters he has hired an outside firm to investigate whether Van der Stap had hacked Neo Security or its customers, but that so far investigators have found no evidence he acted against his employer or clients. Korper said Dutch forensic investigators visited his office on September 15, the night Van der ⁠Stap was arrested in a dramatic police raid that reportedly involved flash bang grenades.

A screenshot of a Sept 16 story by the Dutch news outlet at5.nl, describing a police raid on Van Der Stap’s residence that reportedly used flash-bang grenades.

Prior to his first arrest in 2023, Van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) — even as he was hacking into and extorting a number of large organizations.

When asked in a recent interview why anyone should believe the word of a self-described “reformed” cybercriminal who had so casually deceived countless friends, co-workers and journalists for years, Van der Stap replied that his work spoke for itself and there was nothing he could say that would convince his worst critics.

“You can throw a bunch of nice words at someone, but you can’t convince them if they don’t want to be convinced,” Van der Stap told KrebsOnSecurity on Sept. 9. “I’m doing what I can to repay victims, and that’s all I can do. If someone doesn’t want to believe me, then that’s on them.”

FRANCHISING AND BURNING A BRAND

Cybercriminals aligned with ShinyHunters have been responsible for dozens of data breaches involving billions of stolen records, and breaches claimed by the group stretch back to at least 2019. But experts say the people recently operating behind the ShinyHunters name are not the same core members that populated the group in its early days, most of whom are French citizens who have been arrested (if not also imprisoned) on at least one prior occasion for alleged cybercrime activity.

More to the point, ShinyHunters has become something of a franchise. Think the Dread Pirate Roberts character in the 1980s cult movie classic “The Princess Bride,” only succession by death is replaced with succession by arrest, and there can be multiple simultaneous Dread Pirate Robertses. Sources close to the investigation say the FBI is focusing on a remaining handful of cybercriminal freelancers or affiliates who have been feeding the group stolen credentials to various software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms used by major companies in exchange for a cut of any data ransoms later paid by victims.

In the days after the news broke of Van der Stap’s arrest, a cybercrime-focused chat server on Telegram that was allegedly operated by Rey erupted with hot takes, with most participants heaping ridicule on the teenage hacker after he publicly backed down from threats against the FBI and Cl0p, and again when the ShinyHunters’s darknet website suddenly went offline. Several commentators accused Rey of resurrecting the ShinyHunters brand after its core members were rounded up in France, and making a mockery of the group’s name and reputation ever since.

“He bought the old forum PGP key and used it to make new Breachforum websites and Telegram channels larping as ShinyHunters to ransom companies and then sell the used data or resell his forum when he goes broke,” one member recounted.

A relatively new Telegram channel called “The Battle” has been doxing and needling Rey and other alleged ShinyHunters members for several weeks, and it has gained a considerable readership among the cybercrime communities operating on Telegram. One of the coordinators of that harassment campaign repeatedly portrayed Rey as clueless greenhorn who sought to ride the coattails of a cybercriminal brand that has long enjoyed a reputation for ruthlessly selling or publishing data stolen from victim companies who refuse to give in to extortion demands.

“Rey (Saif Al-Din Khader) made a serious mistake when he started pretending to be a member of ShinyHunters,” wrote the administrators of The Battle server on Telegram. “That group had already been dismantled, with many of its members either arrested or imprisoned, yet Rey still chose to use its name while carrying out his crimes. We’re aware of claims that [Rey] caused over $200 million in damages and helped around 5–6 friend groups in the community make money by using Shiny Hunters group aliases to negotiate deals for a 25–30% cut over the past few months.”

In an interview with The Register, ShinyHunters claimed they hacked the FBI to counter the agency’s narrative in a May 2026 alert that advised victims against paying a ransom to the group, which came off looking unprofessional and capricious in the FBI’s advisory.

A flash notice on ShinyHunters released by the FBI on May 15, 2026.

The public notice warned the group has been known to pursue a number of different victim harassment strategies, from sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members to in some cases swatting victims. The FBI warned ShinyHunters members “may also falsely claim to have sensitive or compromising information, including embarrassing photographs or videos of victims, which frequently do not exist.”

The hackers told The Register their attack on the FBI “demonstrated our technical capabilities and directly refuted the misinformation disseminated by the FBI, journalists, and industry researchers.” At the same time, the group’s leaders seemed to acknowledge that the FBI’s warning materially harmed their prospects for convincing victims to pay, saying “this was fundamentally a public relations and marketing initiative for our business.”

Read More The 2026 findings are not just a year-over-year shift. They mark the latest point in a five-year arc where resilience, AI governance, human risk, and board scrutiny are converging inside the systems where work actually happens.

For years, the enterprise cybersecurity story has been told as a straight line of escalation: more attacks, more data loss, more pressure, and more urgency. That 

Read More The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Secret Service (USSS) on Tuesday warned that the FortiBleed credential harvesting campaign remains an active threat aimed at internet-facing Fortinet FortiGate firewalls and secure socket layer (SSL) virtual private network (VPN) gateways.

“The campaign exploits reused or leaked credentials and legacy SHA-256 password storage, enabling threat 

Read More Anthropic on Tuesday said it’s expanding a program that allows vetted cybersecurity professionals to test its advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models with reduced safeguards and blocking classifiers, as the company claimed its Project Glasswing initiative uncovered at least 129,000 verified software vulnerabilities between April and July 2026.

The company said it also found an additional 

Read More The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has identified more than 100 compromised websites that have been injected with malicious JavaScript to serve an information-stealing malware called LunexStealer (aka Psychedelic Stealer).

The activity, which was observed by the agency in September 2026, has been attributed to a threat cluster dubbed UAC-0277. It did not disclose who the 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a “human-operated phishing platform” that impersonates advertising products for artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Perplexity, Meta Muse, and Manus.

The products, which claim to offer campaign optimization, spend audits, and business-account connections, are designed with one goal in 

Read More Linux backdoors targeting telecom and network appliances in South Korea and Taiwan have been disguising their traffic as email services and seemingly legitimate processes to blend in and evade detection.

Threat actors are known to name their malicious software after a legitimate operating system component or a process as a defense evasion measure. By borrowing the name of a real binary, it may 

Read More A malicious spreadsheet can make LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice run an attacker’s code as soon as the file is opened, security researchers have shown. There is no warning first, of the kind either program shows before it runs a macro.

The attack works only when the program’s Java support is enabled. So far, it has only been shown as a proof of concept, and there are no reports of its use in 

Read More The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, has confirmed that it has discovered activity by rogue OpenAI agents on its platforms, including unsuccessful efforts to compromise Etherpad, a public note-taking tool, and edit Wikipedia pages.

“The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic, 

Read More In 2024, MCP (Model Context Protocol) set out to become the USB-C of AI: one standard for connecting models, agents, and IDEs to tools and data. The protocol delivered. Thousands of developers built servers, and enterprises plugged them into agent workflows.

The ecosystem around it fell short. Earlier this year, our team at OX Security,  traced critical vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s MCP 

Read More Google has stopped accepting product vulnerability reports through its bug bounty program for its open-source software.

The change, in effect since October 1, means researchers can no longer submit security flaws in the code of projects such as Go, Angular, and Protocol Buffers there for a reward. Reports about supply chain compromises are still accepted, and reports filed before October 1 are 

Read More A critical flaw in 8 Atlassian Data Center products, which customers host themselves, allows an attacker with no login access to read specific files in each product’s web application root directory.

The attacker must already know a file’s exact name and path and cannot list what the directory holds. Atlassian disclosed the flaw, CVE-2026-21589, on October 5, rated it 9.3 out of 10, and 

Read More The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has removed an Accenture contractor for their alleged role in a ShinyHunters-breach that led to the theft of personal details of thousands of bureau employees.

That’s according to a report from Reuters, citing two sources familiar with the matter.

“To date, our review has determined that the incident occurred as the result of a security failure ​ 

Read More Unauthorized parties have gained access to the names, addresses, and personal identification numbers of about 8.8 million people, living and dead, in Denmark’s national population register, the country’s digitalization ministry said on October 5.

They used a private Danish company’s lawful right to look up records in the Central Person Register (CPR). The ministry has told people never to 

Read More A new type of ClickFix attack is using compromised websites to trick users into executing a malicious payload cached in a web browser’s cache.

“Instead of downloading and executing remote payloads like the typical attack pattern, in this attack, the websites pre-fetch a script payload into the browser cache disguised as a PNG file,” the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a post on X. 

Read More Microsoft has released out-of-band security updates to address a high-severity flaw in Microsoft Exchange Server that could allow an attacker to escalate privileges under certain conditions.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-96940, is rated 8.8 on the CVSS scoring system.

“Weak authorization in Microsoft Exchange Server allows an authenticated attacker to elevate privileges over a 

Read More A blank field. A public repo. One reply to an email. A box left exposed. None of this sounds dramatic, which is partly the problem. This week’s threats keep finding leverage in small things that were easy to overlook.

There are actively exploited bugs in the mix, cleaner intrusion paths, smarter automation, and a long patch list waiting behind them. Some attacks are getting more capable. Others 

Read More Every modern enterprise depends on credentials. This is how humans, systems, and now AI, all connect to data, services, and each other securely. GitGuardian helps secure that credential layer through three connected capabilities: Detect, Remediate, and Prevent. The journey starts with detection, because organizations first need to understand what credentials exist, where they live, and what they 

Read More Threat actors have been observed attempting to exploit a now-patched critical security flaw impacting the Realtek Jungle software development kit (SDK) to deploy a botnet malware called Cling.

“Cling is notable not because it introduces a new propagation technique, but because it repurposes ordinary STUN behavior into a practical command-and-control channel,” Nozomi Networks said in a report 

Read More Apple has announced that it’s taking steps to tighten controls around a macOS setting called Full Disk Access (FDA) due to security risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

“Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history – without users’ full knowledge 

Read More A critical security flaw impacting Rejetto HTTP File Server (HFS) is witnessing active exploitation attempts, according to VulnCheck.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-61500 (CVSS score: 9.3), a case of session forgery stemming from the use of a weak pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that can lead to a predictable key, which an attacker can then use to gain unauthorized access and 

Read More Citrix has released security updates for a high-severity security flaw in NetScaler ADC and Citrix NetScaler Gateway that has been exploited as part of targeted zero-day attacks.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-88779, carries a CVSS score of 8.7 out of 10.0.

“CVE-2026-88779 is a memory overflow vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Citrix NetScaler Gateway that can lead to 

Read More A suspected member of the ShinyHunters digital extortion group, who goes by the online alias “Rey,” has been allegedly detained by authorities in Jordan, Reuters reported, citing three people familiar with the matter.

Rey, whose real name is Saif ‌al-Din Khader, is said to have been brought into custody on September 29, 2026, cooperating with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and 

Read More A new China-nexus cyber espionage group known as TA419 has been attributed to multiple credential phishing campaigns targeting artificial intelligence (AI) experts working for U.S. think tanks, universities, and legal sector organizations.

The campaigns have impersonated prominent economists and AI policymakers, as well as a prominent Anthropic employee, to single out an AI policy expert at a 

Read More The U.K.’s domestic intelligence and security agency has warned that more than 100 academics have helped China boost its intelligence gathering efforts on behalf of Beijing’s state security service.

In a “Security Service Espionage Alert” issued on September 30, 2026, MI5 said the “primary purpose of the China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI) 中国通用技术研究院 is to fund research that 

Read More The suspected China-linked threat actor known as Warlock is still continuing to weaponize Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities, likely both old and new, in attacks targeting organizations in Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries.

The activity, observed by the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team, has hit critical infrastructure, government, and education organizations.

“In the 

Read More Featuring:

Cybersecurity is being reshaped by the expansion of cloud infrastructure, AI, distributed systems, and increasingly complex digital environments. As organizations manage more identities, devices, data, and internet-facing infrastructure, security is shifting toward continuous visibility, control, and the ability to respond to risk at scale.

This report examines how core areas of 

Read More A critical flaw in GitLab’s AI Gateway could let a logged-in user with Duo Agent Platform access run commands on the gateway under certain conditions, GitLab said in an advisory.

The gateway is the service that connects a GitLab instance to AI models, and only organizations that host their own gateway need to act. The flaw is fixed in gateway versions 19.2.4, 19.3.2, and 19.4.1.

The flaw 

Read More Government and policy organizations across Asia have become the target of a new campaign orchestrated by a China-nexus threat actor.

The activity, which has targeted government and policy organizations in Taiwan, India, the Philippines, Cambodia, Pakistan, Thailand, and Myanmar, involves the deployment of a previously undocumented backdoor codenamed Antino. Cisco Talos is tracking the cluster 

Read More Dell has released security updates to address multiple critical security flaws in Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) that could be exploited by bad actors to take over susceptible systems.

The vulnerabilities are listed below –

CVE-2026-63688 (CVSS score: 10.0) – A missing authentication for critical function vulnerability in the csm-authorization-storage gRPC server that an 

Read More OpenAI has parted ways with three members of its safety team after they leaked private information in violation of company policies, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information,” a spokesperson for the company was quoted as saying. “Our investigation confirmed that these 

Read More The quarterly board meeting is two weeks out. The security team is pulling exports from the identity provider, the cloud posture tool, the vulnerability scanner, the SIEM and the EDR console. Someone is building a spreadsheet to reconcile them. Someone else is turning that spreadsheet into slides.

Then a board member asks three questions:

How secure is the organization, overall?
What is 

Read More Google has announced a new security measure that limits access to Android’s accessibility services to verified applications classified as Accessibility Tools when Advanced Protection is enabled.

With malicious Android applications abusing the API serving as the main conduit for malware and financial fraud, the tech giant said the move would block a major attack pathway. Advanced Protection is a 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), on Thursday, added a critical security flaw impacting Fortinet FortiMail to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following reports of active exploitation.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-104286 (CVSS score: 9.8), allows unauthenticated attackers to write arbitrary files on the underlying system.

“An improper 

Read More Police in Spain have arrested a 16-year-old whom investigators suspect of running the KillSec ransomware group. KillSec is accused of stealing data from organizations and threatening to publish it on its leak site unless they paid.

The 16-year-old was one of 3 people arrested on September 30, when police also took control of that site.

Investigators identified him as KillSec’s suspected 

Read More This week, the useful words are boring ones: inspect, cache, compile, store, trust. Each sounds harmless. Each can become an attack path when a system does a little more than people expect. A model check can run code. A cache can mix up requests. A public secret can stay useful for years.

That is the lesson running through the list. Attackers do not always need a brilliant new trick. They can 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a WordPress compromise in which threat actors deployed multiple persistence mechanisms to ensure that the final payload kept returning without having to infect the site again.

The backdoor has been codenamed SC after the “SC_” markers present in the injected content. Sucuri has described the malware as a “self-healing mesh” that’s 

Read More Every security leader at a bank, insurer, or asset manager has had a version of this conversation: Security wants to eliminate a class of vulnerabilities. Engineering explains what it would take to upgrade the platform where they live. Somebody prices out the regression testing. Somebody else raises the change-freeze calendar. The finding gets an exception, a compensating control, and a date 

Read More OpenAI on Wednesday said it identified and disrupted a coordinated distillation campaign that was designed to illicitly extract protected reasoning from its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

A “core cluster of the activity,” going back to the first week of July, has been attributed to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI company based in Beijing. It did not cite any 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a critical authentication bypass flaw impacting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV), following reports of active exploitation.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76504 (CVSS score: 9.8), could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access an affected system with 

Read More Google on Wednesday announced its latest frontier artificial intelligence (AI) model, Gemini 4 Argon, that it said is being rolled out to a set of trusted cyber defenders through its Fairwind Program.

“It delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense,” Koray Kavukcuoglu, 

Read More Security researchers have published the first public proof-of-concept for CVE-2026-86950, an Apple CoreGraphics flaw Apple says may have been used in attacks against specific targeted individuals.

The trigger is a malicious PDF with a crafted embedded font that crashes unpatched iPhones and Macs. The code causes a crash, not an execution error. Turning the memory corruption into a working 

Read More Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget on Wednesday confirmed that attackers who stole $387.5 million last week exploited a zero-day flaw in third-party security products, citing ongoing investigation findings from SlowMist.

“Their investigation identified malicious activity involving third-party security products, including a zero-day vulnerability, and recovered a customized tool used by the attacker 

Read More MetaMask on Thursday said it’s responding to what it described as an “ongoing security incident” impacting part of its infrastructure.

“We are actively addressing and remediating the issue internally, in coordination with external partners and security advisors,” the software cryptocurrency wallet maker said. “At this time, we have identified no immediate threat to MetaMask wallets.”

MetaMask 

Read More Threat actors have been observed exploiting a critical pre-authentication command injection vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway to drop web shells and attempt theft of configuration data.

LevelBlue’s Threat Hunt Operations & Research (THOR) team, which analyzed the exploitation activity across multiple customer environments, said it identified malicious NetScaler 

Read More Threat actors have weaponized a now-patched security flaw in Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) to deploy web shells and access mailbox data, according to findings from the Microsoft Security Research team.

The attack exploits CVE-2026-73570 (CVSS score: 8.9), an unauthenticated operating system command injection flaw that can lead to remote code execution when Simple Network Management Protocol 

Read More Microsoft has warned of phishing campaigns distributing an installer for the MSP360 Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software under the guise of meeting invitations, PDF-themed lures, software update prompts, and other social-engineering content.

“Once executed, the legitimate MSP360 installer, distributed under a deceptive file name established remote management access on affected 

Read More Attackers are exploiting a new critical zero-day flaw in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, the system companies use to manage their Cisco SD-WAN networks, Cisco said in an advisory on September 30.

The flaw, CVE-2026-76504, could allow a remote attacker with no login access to use the Manager’s API as the admin user. Fixed releases are available, and there is no workaround. It carries a 

Read More Threat actors are abusing ChatGPT Custom GPTs to disguise them as legitimate product offerings and direct unsuspecting victims to malicious sites that employ ClickFix lures to deliver malware.

Huntress, which observed the activity in late September 2026, said it marks the abuse of yet another feature in trusted artificial intelligence (AI) platforms. Prior campaigns have weaponized shared 

Read More Given that the browser is where business apps are accessed and used, it makes sense that attacks are happening there too. Most breaches today begin in a browser session. Often, they never leave it, with the entire attack chain from initial access to exfiltration playing out in the browser.

Here are the six most dangerous techniques that should be on every security team’s radar in 2026.

1. 

Read More AI coding agents asked to share screenshots of code changes for review have put internal company images in public GitHub repositories, security company Glow said.

Its researchers found more than 13,000 internal images from developers at over 300 organizations, including customer billing records and screens of features not yet released. In most cases, they sat under developers’ personal accounts 

Read More Unknown threat actors have been observed exploiting a newly patched security flaw in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances to target organizations in North America and Europe.

The activity, observed by Mandiant Consulting and Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) in September 2026, has targeted government, financial services, technology, education, and legal and professional 

Read More A High-severity OpenSSL flaw can leak heap memory to the other side of a DTLS connection or crash the program, OpenSSL said on September 29 as it released fixes.

DTLS, the TLS variant used for UDP traffic, resends a handshake message if no reply arrives before the timer expires. The leak or crash can happen when such a resend starts while a larger handshake message is stuck part-way 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed technical details of a recently patched critical security flaw in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway that has come under active exploitation in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-88772 (CVSS score: 9.5), has been described as a memory overflow bug in the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol handling that’s rooted in the NetScaler 

Read More An attacker used stolen passwords of staff at France’s tax administration to take tax data on hundreds of thousands of taxpayers and businesses in June and July.

Neither the tax administration nor France’s national cybersecurity agency saw the data leave. The attack was not sophisticated, the agency, ANSSI, says in a report (in French) published on Tuesday: it worked because of weak 

Read More A group of academics from VUSec and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna have disclosed details of a new Spectre CPU vulnerability variant that affects Just-In-Time (JIT) engines present in web browsers, language runtimes, and the operating system kernel, across multiple CPU vendors.

The new Spectre v2 variant has been codenamed Branch Target Reuse (BTR).

“The key insight is that, while modern CPUs 

Read More Russian state hackers known as Star Blizzard have been using fake event invitations to trick people into installing a backdoor on their Windows computers, according to Microsoft.

The campaigns, aimed at people and organizations tied to Ukraine, have affected more than 100 organizations since January, mostly in the U.S. and U.K. At least one computer was infected, but the number of breached 

Read More Kiteworks on Monday said it worked with federal intelligence authorities over the weekend as it identified and addressed a critical security vulnerability during the scheduled precautionary shutdown.

“During the shutdown, this activity led to the discovery of a previously unknown critical vulnerability confined to a capability that is enabled for less than 1% of the customer base,” the company 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have identified a cluster of 101 npm packages that are used to trap developers into a WhatsApp group subscriber campaign dubbed PhantomSub.

“The malicious packages abuse the ‘Baileys’ WhatsApp open source project to add the victims to groups without their consent,” OX Security researchers Nir Zadok, Moshe Siman Tov Bustan, and Vitalii Chepurko said in a technical 

Read More Dutch authorities have confirmed that they arrested a 24-year-old man from Amsterdam in connection with the ShinyHunters group.

“It is true that this month a 24-year-old man from Amsterdam was arrested in an investigation into the hacker group ShinyHunters,” the Politie Landelijke Opsporing en Interventies said in an X post Monday.

Police said the individual is expected to appear before the 

Read More A malicious MCP server could trick an application built on the official MCP Python SDK into handing over the OAuth credentials it uses to log in to a real service, the SDK’s maintainers said in a security advisory.

Affected versions sent the client secret, the authorization code, and the PKCE proof key to a token endpoint the attacker controlled. The fix is in versions 1.30.0 and 

Read More OpenAI on Monday shelved plans to release GPT-6.1 Astra, a next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) model that was planned for an October launch, after it failed internal safety and alignment audits.

The development was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The move “marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns,” the news publication said. 

Read More OpenAI said it has made the decision to pause training of its most powerful models after one of its agents during reinforcement learning (RL) training contacted an external chatbot by exploiting a loophole in its internet-access restrictions.

“An agent attempting to complete a search-based training task queried a public chatbot service through a gap in our internet-access restrictions: 

Read More Apple has released security updates to address a vulnerability in older versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that it said may have been exploited in targeted attacks.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-86950, refers to an out-of-bounds write impacting the CoreGraphics component that could lead to arbitrary code execution when processing a maliciously crafted file.

The iPhone maker said the 

Read More Hackers have used a malware family called NeedyMantis to maintain long-term access to networks they had already breached, Microsoft said in a technical analysis.

The malware has been seen in a small number of targeted intrusions at telecommunications organizations, universities, medical nonprofits, intergovernmental organizations, and government contractors. Its use goes back to at least 

Read More What is IAM for AI agents?

AI agents authenticate, invoke tools, and act across enterprise systems with delegated authority. IAM for AI Agents is the identity-control architecture that governs those actors. This guide covers the limits of conventional provisioning, the components that matter, how to evaluate framework choices, and what runtime evidence proves an agent behaved as intended. 

Read More The attacker who stole about $388 million from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitget gained access through a vulnerability in a third-party security product the exchange used, Bitget said on Monday.

The attacker exploited the flaw to obtain high-level internal credentials and then, on September 24, used them to send fraudulent withdrawal commands to Bitget’s wallet system.

Exchanges keep most 

Read More RatHat’s operators build and publish the Android banking trojan and control infected phones from a web console, according to security company Cleafy. Cleafy has traced nearly 100 deployments of that console since April 2026. It said this fits a malware-as-a-service model, in which each customer runs a separate copy.

The console stores what the malware collects from each phone, 

Read More 

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect’s arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks, stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the Russian ransomware group Cl0p.

According to three sources familiar with the matter, the Dutch man arrested by authorities this month is Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted cybercriminal from Almere and Lelystad in the Netherlands. Van der Stap was previously convicted in 2023 in connection with a string of data thefts and extortions that prosecutors said earned between €1.5 million and €2.7 million.

At his trial in late 2023, van der Stap admitted that he lived a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existence, secretly using the hacker handle “Umbreon” to extort victims and post their data on English language hacking communities like the now-defunct RaidForums and Breached. By day, however, van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), a nonprofit security research group.

Pepijn van der Stap’s alter ego “Umbreon” selling a database on RaidForums, offering information on 2.3 million people from The Netherlands in September 2021. This user’s avatar is a depiction of the Pokemon character Umbreon. Image: KELA.

Van der Stap confessed to his data theft and extortion activity, and was sentenced to four years in prison (one of which was suspended). During his trial, van der Stap opted to remain in custody for a time rather than at home, saying he could not find better treatment on the outside for his ongoing psychological issues, which he claimed included PTSD related to childhood trauma. He was released from prison in December 2025.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on September 9, 2026, Van der Stap cast himself as a reformed hacker who was trying to turn his life around and make a positive contribution to society. Van der Stap is currently employed as offensive security lead at the Dutch company Neo Security, which did not respond to requests for comment.

Van der Stap said he was still dealing with civil lawsuits and restitution related to his previous cybercrime victims, and that he was trying his best to make amends. But not long after that interview, the Dutch hacker abruptly stopped replying to messages. Efforts by others close to him also repeatedly failed to elicit a response for the past two weeks.

The LinkedIn profile for Pepijn van der Stap.

According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Van der Stap was arrested by Dutch authorities on or around September 16, and has been held in custody for questioning since. One source said a colleague of theirs personally witnessed Dutch authorities carting items out of Van der Stap’s residence.

Authorities in the Netherlands have been asking the public for help in identifying the voice in a recorded telephone call from February 2026 in which a native Dutch-speaking ShinyHunters member social engineered their way into Odido, the nation’s largest mobile telecommunications provider. In that intrusion, ShinyHunters tricked an Odido employee into logging in at a spoofed website, and then used that access to steal data on more than 6.2 million Dutch people.

Responding to Dutch news media, ShinyHunters confirmed that the suspect in the audio clip is indeed a member of the hacker collective.

“Our team member has our full support – emotionally, mentally, and financially,” the hackers said. “Everything has been arranged, including a criminal defense lawyer. We do not look down on our staff and members; we take excellent care of them,” reads a statement ShinyHunters shared with NL Times. It remains unclear if the Dutch police have matched the Odido caller to a confirmed real-life identity. The Dutch police unit handling the Odido incident did not respond to requests for comment.

The group also lashed out at the authorities in the Netherlands. “The Dutch police will need all the luck in the world – and everyone’s prayers – if they want to catch him before we carry out another large-scale data theft in the Netherlands,” the ShinyHunters statement said. “Frankly, the Dutch police are a big joke; they are incapable of doing anything. Incompetent. Irrelevant. Unimportant. Useless.”

FBI, CL0P HACKS

Just days after sources say Van der Stap was detained by Dutch authorities, ShinyHunters claimed credit for an unusually brazen breach at the FBI’s job application site apply.fbijobs.gov. According to reporting from 404 Media, the data stolen from the FBI site includes Social Security numbers and personal information on more than 5,000 officials.

404 Media and Reuters reported the FBI data included each person’s job title or team, such as special agent, threat intake examiner, major cybercrimes unit, and those investigating cyber threats from foreign state-backed actors. Reuters examined documents shared by ShinyHunters and found they included sensitive psychiatric and medical files of FBI staff. The FBI issued a brief statement confirming the hack.

ShinyHunters said it gained access to the FBI site and other victims by exploiting a recently patched vulnerability (CVE-2026-35273) in PeopleSoft, a software-as-a-service platform from the software giant Oracle that is broadly used by companies to manage hiring and human resources, benefits and payroll. Oracle quickly issued a fix for the Peoplesoft vulnerability that ShinyHunters reportedly began exploiting as a zero-day in June, and at the time Mandiant released web application firewall rules intended for organizations who couldn’t apply the security update quickly enough.

But on Friday, BleepingComputer reported that ShinyHunters used a URL-encoding trick to bypass Mandiant’s suggested web application firewall rules designed to mitigate the threat from the PeopleSoft flaw. In a report released Sept. 25, security experts at Mandiant and the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that ShinyHunters had mass-exploited the PeopleSoft vulnerability to steal data from dozens of systems across a range of industries, including higher education, technology, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and government.

Van der Stap’s former hacker alias Umbreon was hidden in plain sight throughout the imagery ShinyHunters used to spread news about the FBI hack: The defacement image that ShinyHunters left behind on the hacked FBI jobs site included an ASCII art design featuring the Pokemon character Umbreon. The message at the top read, “This site has been seized by ShinyHunters. rooting your systems since ’19 ;)” The image appears identical to a defacement message ShinyHunters used in their 2020 hack of the English-language cybercrime community Hackforums.

The defacement message left by ShinyHunters on the FBI jobs site included an ASCII art rendition of the Pokemon character Umbreon. Image: Bleeping Computer.

Multiple sources close to the ShinyHunters investigation said the group’s recent risky attacks against the FBI and one of Russia’s most venerated ransomware groups amounted to a major pivot away from the more measured tenor of the hacking gang’s operations. Those sources said the sudden shift came about after ShinyHunters was taken over by a teenage cybercriminal from Amman, Jordan who goes by the nickname Rey and operates as part of a cybercrime group called ScatteredLapsussHunters (SLSH), which experts say is an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters.

Those sources said Rey had an ongoing beef with the Dutch hacker over control of the ShinyHunters brand and data, and that the inclusion of the oversized Umbreon Pokemon image in the FBI jobs site defacement was likely an attempt by Rey to pin the hack on the Dutchman.

Rey was first publicly identified by the cybersecurity firm KELA in March 2025. In advance of our November 2025 profile of Rey, KrebsOnSecurity messaged Rey’s father and asked for permission to interview his teenage son. Rey’s dad merely forwarded the message to his son, who admitted to participating in ransomware attacks and said he was trying to extricate himself from the SLSH hacker group.

BLAMING UMBREON

Immediately after news of the FBI jobs site hack was picked up in the media, Rey’s main account on Twitter/X (Ryan Moran/@rmoskovy) was taunting the Cl0p ransomware group and the FBI, crudely depicting them as the twin towers in New York being struck by planes labeled “cl0p drama” and “fbi breach claim.” In the foreground of the city is the giant Pokemon figure of Umbreon.

A taunting meme uploaded to Twitter/X by Rey’s now-defunct account on Sept. 22. A giant float-sized version of the Pokemon character Umbreon can be seen in the bottom left.

On Sept. 24, KrebsOnSecurity again contacted Rey’s dad, asking to interview him and his son for a story on Rey’s apparent ascendency as the head of ShinyHunters. Just hours after that request, Rey deleted his longtime Twitter/X account. Meanwhile, Rey’s dad, who works for the Royal Jordanian Airlines, has failed to respond to a half-dozen emailed requests for comment about his son’s alleged activities.

Where does the bad blood between SLSH and ShinyHunters come from? According to a story in Wired this month, ShinyHunters and SLSH members briefly partnered earlier this year to help better monetize important stolen credentials collected by TeamPCP, an upstart group that was having great success compromising global code supply chains with malicious software but hadn’t been able to profit much from their stolen data (two alleged leaders of TeamPCP were arrested last month in Australia, and in an interview the TeamPCP leader claimed they made just $20,000).

The Wired story noted how Mandiant had infiltrated TeamPCP and was secretly responsible for having the crime group’s stolen credentials burned so quickly: Mandiant was secretly feeding those credentials to the major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft, who quickly invalidated the stolen keys. Meanwhile, the formerly cooperating hacker groups began to blame one another for causing the credentials to become worthless.

Wired’s Andy Greenberg reported that a few weeks after partnering with TeamPCP, “ShinyHunters went rogue, carrying out its own extortions with TeamPCP’s credentials but without giving the supply-chain hackers their cut.”

Mandiant researcher Austin Larsen told KrebsOnSecurity earlier this month that ShinyHunters has been enjoying a successful extortion spree so far this year, and is on track to pull in nearly $100 million in extortion payments from cybercrime victims in 2026.

Van der Stap claims he was never motivated by money and that his earlier hacker activity was driven by a desire to have the world’s most complete collection of stolen databases. Speaking with reporters from Bloomberg in 2024, Van der Stap said that singular focus in turn fueled his desire to carry out cyberattacks.

“The hacking was very easy for me, and it wasn’t a compulsion,” he told Bloomberg. “My habit was collecting. Collecting data, organizing data, downloading data, creating folders.”

DIVD, the nonprofit security research group where Van der Stap previously served as a volunteer, disclosed on LinkedIn last week that the organization was dealing with an internal cybersecurity incident that appears to have involved the malicious use of artificial intelligence. DIVD has released few details about that incident, but a spokesperson for the nonprofit told KrebsOnSecurity it does not appear related to ShinyHunters, nor are there any signs the matter involves the work of a previous volunteer.

Update: 3:44 p.m. ET: Corrected Van der Stap’s age, which is 24 (not 23).

Update, 4:54 p.m. ET: The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of a 24-year-old in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation. In a statement on Twitter/X, the Dutch police said the man will appear on Tuesday, September 29 before the chambers of the Rotterdam District Court, and that it will provide more information tomorrow.

Read More A domain used as harmless placeholder text showed up in roughly 1,700 repositories. Then somebody registered it and started serving malicious lures. That is the kind of week this was: forgotten assumptions turning into live attack surface.

Elsewhere, weak service accounts, old bugs, exposed systems, phishing kits, and strangely easy exploit paths kept doing useful work for attackers. Nothing 

Read More AI agents are moving into production faster than security teams can govern them. They are connecting to apps, handling data, calling APIs, and acting across business systems—often without the same controls applied to human users.

According to Okta’s Global CISO Insights 2026 report, only 47% of CISOs are confident they can identify every AI agent in their environment. Even among those who feel 

Read More The threat actor known as JADEPUFFER has been observed orchestrating destructive actions within a Microsoft Azure environment using compromised service principals.

Microsoft, which is tracking the activity under the name Storm-3168, has called it an evolution of the threat actor’s tradecraft. The attack took place in early June 2026 over a period of about 18 hours.

“The destructive operations 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Sunday added two critical Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following reports of active exploitation.

The vulnerabilities are listed below –

CVE-2026-88771 (CVSS score: 9.5) – An improper input validation vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to 

Read More Two new unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances that allow remote code execution are being actively exploited in the wild, security firm watchTowr said on September 26.

Citrix has not confirmed the flaws or published a fix. Some administrators say they have taken appliances offline rather than wait for one to be available.

NetScaler ADC and 

Read More The Psychedelic Stealer malware distributed via compromised Ukrainian websites using ClickFix-style Cloudflare verification checks is part of a wider malware-as-a-service (MaaS) platform called Lunex.

The new findings come from Ontinue, which described the activity as a four-stage attack chain aimed at targeting Ukrainian-speaking users.

“The attack chain begins with a fake CAPTCHA page and 

Read More Google is warning of renewed mass exploitation of a known security vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft as part of a campaign targeting multiple sectors globally.

The ShinyHunters-linked activity involves the weaponization of CVE-2026-35273 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical security flaw that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution.

The vulnerability was first exploited as a zero-day 

Read More The way we talk about AI agents is shifting, and the way we implement them requires an even more fundamental shift. While earlier discourse focused on how quickly organizations could stand up agents and how much productivity they could promise, a string of recent incidents, including a widely discussed intrusion at Hugging Face during an evaluation of OpenAI agents, has spurred organizations to 

Read More Details have emerged about a high-severity security flaw in the Elementor Website Builder WordPress plugin that could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to create rogue administrator accounts and take control of a site.

The cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability, which has yet to be assigned a CVE identifier, carries a CVSS score of 8.8 out of 10.0. It only affects versions 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added two security flaws impacting Microsoft SharePoint and Mikrotik RouterOS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.

The vulnerabilities in question are as follows –

CVE-2026-65660 (CVSS score: 8.8) – A code injection vulnerability in Microsoft Office SharePoint 

Read More Kiteworks (formerly Accellion) is urging customers to shut down their systems as a precautionary measure for nine hours over the weekend after it received threat intelligence about an imminent cyber attack.

“Kiteworks received credible threat intelligence from federal intelligence authorities indicating that a threat actor may attempt to target some Kiteworks systems,” said Frank Balonis, Chief 

Read More 

A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty to hacking into multiple telecommunications companies and stealing mobile call and text metadata for more than 100 million AT&T customers in 2024 was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison today and ordered to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution to victims.

One of several selfies from the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius.

Cameron John Wagenius, 22, was stationed at a U.S. Army base in South Korea when he adopted the cybercriminal persona “Kiberphant0m.” Working with three alleged co-conspirators, Kiberphant0m downloaded data from several large customers of the cloud data storage service Snowflake that had exposed credentials and did not enforce multi-factor authentication (Snowflake has since mandated MFA on all accounts).

In October 2024, Kiberphant0m bragged on the cybercrime forums that he’d stolen the call and text metadata (e.g. source and destination number, timestamp, duration, etc.) for tens of millions of AT&T customers. Kiberphant0m claimed to have hacked into more than dozen telecommunications companies worldwide, including Verizon’s Push-to-Talk business, and publicly extorted these companies in exchange for a promise not to publish the stolen data.

In late November 2025, KrebsOnSecurity warned that Kiberphant0m was likely a U.S. soldier stationed in South Korea. Less than a month later, Wagenius was arrested and charged in two separate federal indictments, and soon pleaded guilty to all counts in both cases.

At his sentencing hearing in Seattle today, Wagenius was sentenced to nearly six years in federal prison, and ordered to pay $294,978 in restitution.

Federal prosecutors said Wagenius was assisted in his efforts to extort victim companies by Kenneth Schuchman, a 28-year old man from Vancouver, Washington who has a lengthy cybercriminal history. In 2019, Schuchman pleaded guilty to operating the Satori botnet, a vast collection of hacked Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices that was used for large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Two other alleged co-conspirators of Wagenius are still facing charges in connection with the Snowflake data thefts; Conor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische,” of Kitchener, Ontario was arrested in 2024 and pleaded guilty in August 2026; and John Erin Binns, an American man currently living in Turkey who is also wanted for a 2021 data breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76 million customers.

Kiberphant0m also admitted to re-extorting victims, and threatening to disclose national security secrets. Immediately following Moucka’s arrest — after AT&T had already paid the extortion group a $370,000 Bitcoin ransom — Kiberphant0m posted on hacker forums what he claimed were the AT&T call logs for then President-elect Donald Trump and for then Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as schematics allegedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Paul Russell is a resident agent in charge at the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), the criminal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Inspector General. Russell said when DCIS received information that a soldier with secret clearance was allegedly involved in cybercrime and extortion, the agency began working the investigation alongside the FBI, the Army Criminal Investigative Division (CID), and the U.S. Secret Service.

“We don’t often get leads where there’s an active duty soldier with a secret clearance who’s creating hacking tools and trafficking in data,” Russell said. “That doesn’t happen every day, and so when that hits it really spins all of our partner organizations up. It was very serious from jump street, just because it was unique, it was an insider threat, and we weren’t sure what we were dealing with.”

A sentencing memo (PDF) filed Sept. 19 by federal prosecutors in Seattle notes that while Wagenius pleaded guilty almost immediately and has been remarkably cooperative, he recently got caught trying to find security vulnerabilities in the BOP’s computer network. The government’s memo notes that while incarcerated and awaiting sentencing, Wagenius violated the computer use policies of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in attempts to learn about vulnerabilities in BOP computer systems.

“According to records from BOP, in or around September 2025, Wagenius used another inmate’s email system to request that the email recipient prompt a commercial AI tool to provide information about “[w]hat CVE’s are there for Windows 10 Enterprise privilege escalation and bypasses” and to “[p]rovide the CVE’s and a real world working script for each CVE . . . without omitted code,” the government’s memo states.

The memo states that less than a week later, Wagenius used a different inmate’s email account and requested that the email recipient prompt an AI tool to “[p]rovide the step by step for CVE-2023-45208, code for this if any, and if no code exists make some, make sure to describe everything in detail.” CVE-2023-45208 is a three-year-old “command injection” vulnerability in D-Link networking devices.

That same month, Wagenius allegedly again requested that the email recipient prompt AI with the question, “How do you make an antenna in a prison environment with commissary or readily available items/tools to improve/make an antenna to extend radio reception?”

Federal prosecutors said Wagenius also requested that the recipient research escaping prison.

“In several instances, Wagenius framed the AI queries as being posed in connection to a book he was writing. This is a common method of ‘prompt injection,’ in which attackers feed specially crafted, deceptive inputs into commercial AI tools that are programmed to avoid outputting malicious code that can be used to exploit computer vulnerabilities,” the sentencing memo reads.

The government told the court it is unaware of evidence that Wagenius figured out how to use or deploy the vulnerabilities he was researching in the BOP’s systems, and when questioned said he was only researching “potential vulnerabilities to provide information to the BOP.”

Incredibly, despite the enormous financial value of the data stolen from AT&T and other telecom providers, Wagenius’s extortion efforts were largely unsuccessful. The government’s sentencing memo says Wagenius made a whopping total of around $1,500 from selling stolen data.

“While Wagenius was not particularly financially successful as a cybercriminal, he both intended to and caused significant harm to numerous individual victims, U.S. companies, and the U.S. government,” the memo states.

Read More Two actions-cool GitHub Actions have been disabled for a second time after the repositories became accessible last week, months after they were compromised during the May 2026 Mini Shai-Hulud campaign.

The affected GitHub Actions are listed below –

actions-cool/issues-helper
actions-cool/maintain-one-comment

Visiting either of the repositories now shows the message: “Access to this 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new version of PamStealer that ensures that the main payload can only be recovered using a server-side decryption chain.

The latest artifacts, per Jamf Threat Labs, continue to rely on the same JavaScript for Automation (JXA) dropper mechanism, but modify the lure and the delivery method.

“Where earlier variants embedded their payload key material 

Read More Security leaders keep debating whether AI will produce an entirely new class of cyberattack. The nearer change is quieter and already visible: AI has made a failed attack cheap to retry.

The routine version looks like this. An attacker lands on a low-privilege cloud account, and the first try at privilege escalation goes nowhere. That dead end used to cost hours of documentation reading, 

Read More Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget said suspected North Korean threat actors have stolen $351.6 million from its hot and warm wallets. 

“At 18:31 UTC on September 24, 2026, Bitget’s security systems identified unauthorized transfers involving a limited number of hot wallets,” BitGet said in a post shared on X. “Bitget’s cold wallets and the overwhelming majority of platform assets remain 

Read More The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security has warned that a now-patched Roundcube Webmail vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-48842 (CVSS score: 8.1), a pre-authentication SQL injection in the virtuser_query plugin of Roundcube Webmail versions 1.6.x before 1.6.16 and 1.7.x before 1.7.1.

The issue stems from a preg_replace() backslash 

Read More A flaw in Cloudflare Containers let a paying customer read data that other customers’ containers had left behind on the same server, Cloudflare and the researchers who found it said on Thursday.

The data came from disk space that earlier containers had used and given up, not from any live workload, and an attacker could not choose whose data they got, according to Cloudflare. The company 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), on Thursday, added two critical security flaws impacting WSO2 and Adobe Commerce and Magento to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation.

The vulnerabilities are listed below –

CVE-2026-5430 (CVS score: 9.8) – A path traversal vulnerability in  WSO2 API Control Plane, 

Read More A OnePlus 15 running the latest OxygenOS can be rooted by a malicious app the owner installs, one that asks for no special permissions. A researcher, Rasmus Moorats, chained two flaws in OnePlus’s own software to gain root access, the highest level of control over an Android phone.

OnePlus told him the same flaws affect many more of its own devices and those of OPPO, though it has not 

Read More This week, the dangerous stuff keeps arriving dressed as something boring. An update. A login box. A search answer. A coding tool. A link you have clicked a hundred times before.

That is the thread running through the pile. Trusted paths get poisoned. Old bugs find new jobs. AI tools leak more than expected. Fake prompts look real enough. And some attacks barely need an exploit at all — just 

Read More The “third-party[.]com” domain, commonly used as a documentation placeholder, has been observed serving a ClickFix lure to Windows browsers while displaying a harmless decoy to other users.

“third-party[.]com has been a generic documentation placeholder for years, the same role example.com plays,” Manifold Security’s Head of Research, Ax Sharma, said. “Unlike ‘example[.]com,’ third-party[.]com 

Read More An active ClickFix campaign has been observed compromising legitimate Ukrainian business websites to inject bogus Cloudflare verification pages and trick victims into downloading a previously undocumented information stealer called Psychedelic.

“When a visitor interacts with the page, the lure copies a Windows Installer command to the clipboard and instructs the visitor to paste it into the 

Read More The logistics sector has become the target of a new malicious cyber campaign that distributes an Android spyware codenamed Corp MDM.

According to Have I Been Squatted, the campaign uses fake Google Play pages branded as CEVA and TKW Logistics to distribute an Android Package Kit (APK) file that’s dressed up as a system service. The delivered app has the package name “com.corp.mdm”

Corp MDM 

Read More AI coding agents are changing how quickly developers can build and ship software as well as how quickly credentials can become exposed. According to GitGuardian’s 2026 State of Secrets Sprawl Report, commits identified as AI-assisted are leaking secrets at approximately twice the rate of human-written ones. Most of the fastest-growing categories of leaked credentials are now connected to AI 

Read More ClickFix has become the most common way attackers get into enterprise networks, and it does it without an exploit, an attachment, or a file on disk. Our new global threat report traces the technique from a novelty in late 2023 to a subscription product with on-chain infrastructure and a state-sponsored user base, and explains why blocking malicious domains is no longer a useful defense.

Read 

Read More An AI agent on an internal OpenAI research task bypassed access controls on an Australian government Medicare statistics portal in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.

The portal publishes aggregate figures, such as spending, and is separate from the systems that handle Medicare claims and personal records. The agent reached files on it that were not public, but no personal 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active TeamFiltration campaign codenamed UNK_CondorFiltration that has targeted over 5,700 accounts across 28 Microsoft 365 tenants.

According to Proofpoint, the activity has primarily focused on Chilean retail and financial institutions. It originated from 1,487 unique AWS EC2 source IP addresses.

“The campaign compromised 7 accounts – 

Read More Threat actors have begun to actively exploit a critical security flaw in WordPress within hours of public disclosure.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-87902 (CVSS score: 9.2), which could allow an unauthenticated attacker to obtain remote code execution (RCE).

“An unauthenticated attacker can make get_page_template() page-template resolution include a chosen readable local .php file 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed Go-based malware distributed via two Go Modules and two Terraform providers, marking the first time threat actors are using the centralized repository hosted by HashiCorp as a distribution vector for malicious payloads.

According to Aikido, the list of Terraform providers and Go modules is below –

gocommunity-io/dockerd (222 downloads)
kreuzwenker/ 

Read More The private email address GitLab gives you for filing issues by email is a credential. Anyone who gets it can email a patch that GitLab commits in your name, to any branch you can push to, including main, and can start CI/CD jobs that run as you.

GitLab shows each user this address behind a button labeled “Email work item to this project.” Mail sent to it opens an issue in that project, authored 

Read More Two MikroTik RouterOS SSH vulnerabilities chained together let attackers take full administrative control of Internet-exposed routers without a password, SSH key, or completed authentication.

The chain, which CERT Polska calls MikroTrick, combines an SSH state-machine flaw (CVE-2026-67279) with an argument-injection bug in the RouterOS login process (CVE-2026-86060). Attack logs date to at 

Read More A Windows malware called CLOSEDQUORUM is built to take orders from a vote of up to four AI models instead of an attacker’s server, Cisco Talos said on September 22.

The models can choose to steal Windows credentials, saved browser passwords, and crypto wallet data. Talos has not seen this setup work from start to finish, and the public version of the malware does not work as it is. 

Read More Unknown threat actors have managed to compromise two legitimate MemTensor packages across the npm and Python Package Index (PyPI) repositories to push a platform-specific Go-based implant dubbed sckit designed for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

According to reports from Aikido, SafeDep, Socket, and StepSecurity, the libraries in question below –

@memtensor/memos-cloud-openclaw-plugin versions 

Read More A flaw in cPanel’s CalDAV and CardDAV service lets anyone with a cPanel hosting account run code as root and take “full control of the server,” the company said on September 22.

A second bug in the WP Toolkit plugin, used to install and manage WordPress sites, allows an account holder to change databases that belong to other accounts.

cPanel has released fixed versions for both, 

Read More Autonomous security agents are getting good at finding bugs. Nobody has a good way to measure how good. Point one at a realistic target and what comes back is a report the agent wrote about itself: confident prose, a list of findings, and no way to tell which of them happened. Someone with a security background then sits down and checks every claim against the target. Which findings are real, 

Read More Anthropic and OpenAI on Tuesday announced new models, with both artificial intelligence (AI) companies noting that they are continuing to invest in improving alignment to combat risky behavior.

Opus 5.5, per Anthropic, is a “major step up from Opus 5,” and “achieves the best scores of any model to date on our automated behavioral audit, our alignment suite that tests Claude across thousands 

Read More Attackers are exploiting a critical flaw in F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) that lets them run code on a BIG-IP system without logging in, F5 says.

The flaw, CVE-2026-94127, affects only systems in which APM serves as an OAuth authorization server, issuing access tokens to applications. F5 disclosed it in an advisory on September 22 and has released engineering hotfixes. 

Read More A Chinese threat actor codenamed UTA0565 has been observed exploiting the recently disclosed Google Chrome-Microsoft Windows exploit chain as zero-days through fake websites.

The attacks, detected on September 3 and 4, 2026, involved the chaining of two vulnerabilities in Chrome (CVE-2026-85046, CVE-2026-87491) and one impacting Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call (CVE-2026-85880) to break 

Read More A new security vulnerability in Next.js could allow attackers to run code on a server via ImageResponse, the feature that generates Open Graph and other social preview images, Vercel said.

The risk applies when an app puts values an attacker controls, such as text read from the request URL, into the image. Vercel, which develops Next.js, fixed the flaw on September 22 in version 

Read More The cyber extortion group known as ShinyHunters on Tuesday claimed it had breached the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and stolen data belonging to current and former employees at the agency.

“We have compromised the FBI. We hold very sensitive data on almost ALL FBI Agents and individuals who filed an application with the FBI for a job,” the group said in a statement posted on their dark 

Read More Attackers exploited a previously unknown flaw in Check Point’s Security Management Server in a handful of targeted attacks on July 23, the company said.

The flaw, CVE-2026-93616, allows an attacker who can access the server’s web service to run scripts on it without logging in. Check Point released a fix on September 22 for the server that controls firewall policies for the Check Point 

Read More WordPress has fixed a critical flaw in its core software that lets an attacker with no account make a site load a PHP file from outside its theme folders.

On some servers, that can go further, allowing the attacker to run their own code. The fix shipped on September 22 in WordPress 7.1.2, with fixes for every branch the project still supports, back to 4.7, and WordPress is telling site owners 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a malicious npm package named “tw-pkgprobe-7731” that masquerades as a security tool targeting developers integrating Twilio into their applications, while stealthily attempting to harvest sensitive data.

The package, named “tw-pkgprobe-7731,” was first uploaded to the npm registry in mid-August 2026 by an npm account named “twdepprobe7731.” 

Read More Microsoft on Tuesday announced the takedown of the EvilTokens device code phishing service that it said used artificial intelligence (AI) “at every step of the attack chain.”

The action, carried out with authorization from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, involved the efforts of Health-ISAC, alongside Cloudflare, Coinbase, OpenAI, Railway, SpyCloud, The Shadowserver 

Read More A critical vulnerability in Bifrost, an open-source AI gateway that routes requests to more than 20 LLM providers, allows an unauthenticated attacker to run arbitrary commands on the gateway server with a single HTTP request.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-90898 (CVSS score: 9.8), affects all versions of the Bifrost HTTP transport before 2.1.0 when management authentication is 

Read More A zero-day proof-of-concept tool that stops Microsoft Defender from installing platform and signature updates by filling all available disk space was published on GitHub on September 19.

The tool, called BigDiskBuster, has no patch, no CVE, and no Microsoft advisory. Its author, Abdelhamid Naceri, is a former Microsoft security researcher whose earlier Defender exploits were used in 

Read More Security teams have spent decades asking whether an identity has too much access. AI agents raise a harder question: how can we determine which paths an autonomous system can discover, given the access it already has?

A person may try several ways to complete a task. A deterministic application follows the flow its developer wrote. But an AI agent is relentless in its pursuit of done. In May 

Read More The threat actor known as SideCopy has been observed using spear-phishing lures to target academic institutions in India, expanding their strategic focus beyond government entities.

“SideCopy campaign operations typically initiate through spear-phishing campaigns that leverage the abuse of mshta.exe to execute malicious scripts and circumvent standard security protocols,” Trellix researchers 

Read More Malware already running on a Mac can quietly take over Meta’s Muse assistant and use the broad access its owner granted the app, security researcher Patrick Wardle has shown in a proof-of-concept released on September 21.

It works by changing a hidden setting so that when the user taps the microphone and dictates a prompt, the words go to the attacker instead of Meta.

The flaw is in 

Read More A new flaw in WordPress core let an anonymous visitor leave a comment that planted a hidden script on the page. If a logged-in administrator later opened that page, the script could run code on the site’s server.

WordPress fixed the flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-93485 and dubbed “Comment2Shell,” on September 17 in version 7.1.1 and told site owners to update right away. The 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a now-patched security flaw impacting Zyxel GS1900 series switches to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-7273 (CVSS score: 8.8), is a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability that could result in arbitrary operating 

Read More A fake LastPass Authenticator installer offered on GitHub installs a Windows kernel driver that shuts off antivirus and other security software before a password stealer runs if a victim downloads and runs it, researchers at LastPass and Delphos Labs said on September 17.

Microsoft’s own hardware-compatibility program signs the driver, scored zero detections on VirusTotal when researchers 

Read More The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have compromised at least 30,000 devices located in more than 100 countries and siphoned funds or account credentials from over 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets, according to a new joint cybersecurity advisory.

The primary targets of the campaign are individual web designers, engineers, and specialists in cryptocurrency, 

Read More Google has been fined €403 million for breaking the EU’s data protection law, the GDPR, in the way three of its features handled people’s location data from May 2018 to February 2020.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), Google’s lead regulator in the EU, also ordered the company to make its processing comply with the law within 6 months. The DPC has not said publicly which 

Read More A browser. A plugin. A package. A login screen. Normal stuff. That is basically the problem this week.

The trouble keeps showing up inside things people already trust: code that takes a bad turn, old payloads coming back, exposed systems, weak checks, fake fixes, and attack paths that look almost too easy. Even the research side is getting messy, with more findings, more automation, and not 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign dubbed TASK#STOMP that delivers a PowerShell backdoor designed to harvest sensitive data from compromised hosts.

The backdoor “automatically harvests and exfiltrates business documents, watches the filesystem for new files in real time, steals Wi-Fi passwords and clipboard contents, takes screenshots, and accepts arbitrary 

Read More Threat actors are leveraging ClickFix-like lures to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called ChainScript.

“ChainScript has appeared under multiple build names, including ComponentTask33, UpdateDigital, HostShared, and OrchidViolet66, while presenting itself as Spotify, Zoom Workplace, and Microsoft Teams software,” Blackpoint Adversary Pursuit Group (APG) 

Read More The North Korean threat actor known as Jade Sleet has been attributed to the compromise of an India-based “much smaller organization” in the information technology (IT) services industry, once again highlighting how the adversary continues to target developers to breach target networks.

Cybersecurity company SentinelOne, which disclosed details of the activity, said it involved the use of Apple 

Read More Three researchers at the security firm Hacktron used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 to chain two flaws and take over the ChatGPT and Codex accounts of several OpenAI employees, then reach an internal OpenAI code repository.

The chain began with a bug in the software that runs OpenAI’s public help forum and moved through a weakness in OpenAI’s own login system.

This was security research, 

Read More Identity visibility is a starting point for modern identity security, because stolen and misused credentials are among the most frequently reported initial access vectors in breach research, including Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report. This article explains what identity visibility means in IAM, why cloud and multicloud environments complicate it, which capabilities matter in 

Read More SolarWinds has released security updates to address a high-severity flaw in Access Rights Manager (ARM) that, if successfully exploited, could lead to an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-28326, is rated 8.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. The issue affects all versions of Access Rights Manager 2026.2 and prior.

“SolarWinds 

Read More A critical vulnerability impacting Orkes Conductor is being actively exploited in the wild, according to Fortinet.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-58138 (CVSS v3.1 score: 9.8/CVSS v4 score: 9.3), which relates to a case of unauthenticated remote code execution.

“Orkes Conductor 3.21.21 before 3.30.2 contains an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability that allows remote 

Read More Google’s Gemini model has become the latest artificial intelligence (AI) system to access the internet and break into other companies during a cybersecurity evaluation. The development was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The incidents occurred in May 2026 as part of a test run conducted by Israeli company Irregular. The evaluation partner was also involved in similar hacks disclosed 

Read More An attacker copied about 170 of CrowdSec’s private GitHub repositories on May 22 using the account of an employee who had just left, CrowdSec said on September 18.

The French security company had kept his GitHub access open. CrowdSec says his laptop was compromised in May’s supply chain attack on TanStack, in which malicious versions of TanStack’s npm packages stole credentials from 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added three security flaws impacting the Linux kernel to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.

The vulnerabilities are listed below –

CVE-2025-39682 (CVSS score: 9.8) – An improper check for unusual or exceptional conditions vulnerability in the TLS receive path 

Read More A security researcher has released working exploit code for four Linux kernel flaws that each let a local user gain root, the highest level of access on a machine.

Kernel maintainers have fixed all four over the past few weeks, so a system running an up-to-date kernel is not affected. But the exploit code is now public, and any machine still running an older kernel should be updated.

The flaws 

Read More WordPress today released patches to fix a new set of vulnerabilities in its core software, one of which could allow a crafted web link, opened by a logged-in administrator, to install a theme from the official WordPress.org directory without anyone clicking Install.

The security firm pwn.ai, whose researchers reported the flaw, calls the attack chain Click2Shell. On its own the flaw only 

Read More The Pakistan-aligned threat group tracked as Transparent Tribe (aka APT36 and Earth Karkaddan) has been attributed to a fresh set of cyber attacks targeting government and defense entities in India and Afghanistan.

The attacks, per Zscaler ThreatLabz, involve the use of previously undocumented tools called RUSTYSHADE, RUSTYMOVE, PSNATCH, and BASHNATCH. The activity has been codenamed Operation 

Read More Microsoft has released fixes for a maximum-severity security flaw in Azure AI Foundry that could be exploited to achieve privilege escalation. No customer action is required.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-85889, carries a CVSS score of 10.0.

“Missing authentication for critical function in Azure AI Foundry allows an unauthorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network,” 

Read More In July 2025, someone registered a domain that used to belong to a content delivery network.  The CDN had been wound down years earlier, and the domain it served assets from was allowed to expire. What it had not lost were its callers. Thousands of websites, code repositories, and documentation pages still carry hard-coded references to hostnames beneath it. 

The new owner holds 

Read More A flaw in four widely used AI coding agents lets someone who controls a plugin’s code repository swap the plugin an agent installs for a malicious one, even when the agent locked that plugin to a specific reviewed version, security firm Air Security said on Thursday.

The firm said Anthropic has patched the flaw in Claude Code 2.1.179 and OpenAI in Codex 0.146.0, that GitHub Copilot has no 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of 13 npm packages that have been found to deliver a previously undocumented JavaScript stealer codenamed WeaselBiscuit.

The new malware family, per OpenSourceMalware, exhibits functional overlaps with two malware strains associated with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) Contagious Interview campaign: BeaverTail and 

Read More A financially motivated threat actor has been linked to the development and distribution of a JavaScript (JS)-based information stealer known as PhantomRaven via the npm package registry.

“The developer likely wrote the malware using a large language model (LLM), an assessment made with high confidence based on verbose comments, placeholder code, and statistical token-analysis patterns,” 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new Android malware called RatHat that’s assessed to be operated by China-based threat actors and features an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered system to navigate and control compromised devices.

“Distributed primarily via targeted smishing (SMS/text phishing) and malvertising campaigns leading to deceptive third-party download portals, RatHat uses 

Read More A critical vulnerability in Check Point’s Security Management and Log Servers could allow an attacker without login credentials to run code as root on those servers over the network.

The Security Management Server is the system that controls firewall policy and administrator access. Check Point has released a fix through its LivePatch update channel and says it has no indication that the flaw 

Read More Attackers keep finding new keys. The funny part is that defenders keep inventing where to store them.

This week, those keys sit in AI tools, exposed services, old bugs, weak logins, and software sold like a monthly subscription. Some attacks use new tricks. Others just reuse what was already lying around. Both work often enough.

So the threat landscape is not getting cleaner. It is just 

Read More Malicious code running inside a Docker Sandboxes virtual machine on macOS could escape the project directory shared into it and read or change files anywhere else on the host, Docker warns in a security announcement on September 15.

The escape runs with the rights of the host account that runs the virtual machine. The flaw, CVE-2026-77179, is rated Critical, affects versions 

Read More The Iran-linked “hacktivist” persona known as Handala Hack has been attributed to a Telegram-based surveillance backdoor called HEAVYGRAM and a Delphi-based utility known as CRUDEEXCLUDE.

“HEAVYGRAM offers builtin commands supporting remote command execution, system, network and process information discovery, data and Telegram session files exfiltration, screenshot capture, DLL sideloading, 

Read More Every release of the Unbound DNS resolver before 1.26.1 has a critical heap overflow in its DNSSEC validator, maintainer NLnet Labs said in an advisory on Wednesday.

An attacker who controls a malicious zone and queries a vulnerable resolver can trigger it, enabling remote code execution.

Unbound 1.26.1, released the same day, fixes the bug, tracked as CVE-2026-81642, along with 

Read More A new CVE drops. Your scanner finds it. The severity score looks ugly.

But that still does not answer the question that matters: Can it actually be exploited in your environment?

Mythos-class AI is compressing the time between disclosure and working exploitation, while many security programs still validate risk on weekly or quarterly cycles. The dangerous gap is no longer just technical. It is 

Read More Attackers now weaponize new vulnerabilities in about five days (Mandiant, part of Google Cloud). The median organization takes 43 days to patch one (Verizon DBIR 2026). A new free guide explains how autonomous AI agents are closing that gap, and what security leaders must demand before pointing one at production.

TL;DR

Exploitation is now the front door. It starts 31% of breaches (Verizon DBIR 

Read More The China-aligned state-sponsored threat actor known as FamousSparrow has been observed deploying a previously unreported backdoor called SparroWocky in attacks targeting multiple countries in Latin America since at least August 2025.

“SparroWocky is a modular, C++ backdoor,” ESET security researchers Alexandre Côté Cyr and Romain Dumont said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News 

Read More OpenAI on Wednesday disclosed six new instances of “unexpected or concerning model behavior” that took place over the past six months, while sharing a new framework for reporting, tracking, investigating, and disclosing model misalignment in a bid to improve transparency.

“As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the 

Read More 

The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long had a reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast empire of people-search services online. That reputation caught up with the company recently in a lawsuit alleging Radaris violated a New Jersey privacy law that provides for hefty fines against data brokers that publish personal information on state law enforcement officials. In the face of repeated stonewalling and prevarication by attorneys for Radaris, the judge in the case ordered that radaris.com and more than a dozen other data broker domains be transferred to the plaintiffs.

The radaris.com website, prior to the domain transfer to Atlas.

In February 2024, Radaris was sued by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company that has been pursuing data brokers alleged to be violating a New Jersey statute called Daniel’s Law. The statute allows state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from commercial data brokers and people-search services, and provides for fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore removal requests.

Less than a month after Atlas sued Radaris, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into the Radaris co-founders — Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky (also spelled Lybarsky) — Russian-born brothers living in Massachusetts who operate a dizzying array of people-search companies as well as a number of Russian language dating services and affiliate programs.

Attorneys for the Lubarsky brothers threatened to sue for defamation if the story wasn’t removed and an apology issued. Their attorney asserted that our reporting was wildly inaccurate, and that the true owners of the company were Ukrainians living in Ukraine.

The Lubarsky brothers Dmitry or “Dan” (left) and Gary/Igor.

KrebsOnSecurity doubled down and showed how the Lubarsky brothers built and operated Radaris and other data broker companies using a fictitious CEO’s name. Our follow-up story noted that Radaris’s attorney — a lawyer with the Boston Law Group named Val Gurvits — admitted his clients had invented the CEO pseudonym “Gary Norden,” and that Radaris also had issued multiple press releases over the years that quoted the fake CEO while seeking money from potential investors.

Attorneys for Radaris waited until the last minute to appear in court and contest what was all but certain to be a default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs, and then told the court that Atlas had failed to serve the real owners and operators of Radaris and several of its sister data broker companies.

Atlas re-filed the lawsuit in June 2025, this time dramatically expanding the number of Radaris family data brokers accused of violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, said Radaris turned to a tried-and-true playbook: Delaying in court until the last possible minute, and playing shell games with Radaris’s true country of origin and the individuals listed as owners and operators of these sites.

“We refer to this period as their island-hopping phase. Privacy policies changed constantly, and new entities kept appearing from places like the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Seychelles,” Adkisson told KrebsOnSecurity. “Behind the scenes, it felt like a shell game. Defense lawyers told the court that certain entities merely operated the domains and were the proper parties to sue. But by the time a judgment neared, those entities would be discarded and new entities would appear. Meanwhile, the lawyers claimed the other entities that actually owned the domains should not be held responsible.”

Adkisson said when the defendants updated their terms of service to state that Radaris was suddenly managed by a company in the Marshall Islands, Atlas hired an investigator in that country and soon learned the brand new entity that Radaris claimed was managing the company didn’t even exist yet.

Mr. Gurvits stepped forward as Radaris’s attorney in a class action lawsuit the company temporarily lost in 2017 because it never contested the claim in court. When the plaintiffs told the judge they couldn’t collect on the $7.5 million default judgment, the court ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name to the plaintiffs.

Mr. Gurvits appealed that verdict, arguing the lawsuit hadn’t named the actual owners of the Radaris domain name — a Cyprus company called Bitseller Expert Limited — and thus taking the domain away would be a violation of their due process rights.

The judge in the 2017 case ruled in Radaris’ favor — halting the domain transfer — and told the plaintiffs they could refile their complaint. Soon after, the operator of Radaris changed from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed (PDF) in the Marshall Islands in Oct. 2020. The plaintiffs never re-filed their lawsuit.

A mind map of various entities tied to Radaris and the company’s co-founders. Click to enlarge.

“That seemed to be their modus operandi,” said Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who handles most of the Daniel’s Law litigation for Atlas. “In the past, they won by attrition. Plaintiffs’ attorneys tired of the procedural games and just gave up. That strategy worked for a decade, and it probably would have worked in this case too, since any financial recovery from foreign actors will be difficult. But we were acutely aware of the threat this website posed to law enforcement officers and other public officials in New Jersey, and decided early on to commit whatever time and resources were necessary to remove that threat.”

On August 26, the judge in the New Jersey case found the defendants were given multiple chances to appear and defend the claims against them but had failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits declined to comment on the case, saying it had been assigned to another attorney, a Mr. Victor Worms. In response to questions, Mr. Worms asserted the New Jersey court transferred Radaris.com to Atlas as part of a default judgment against Radaris.com, which is not a legal entity.

“We have made a motion to vacate that default judgment on the grounds that it is void since a non-entity has no legal capacity to sue or be sued,” Worms replied. “We also intend to pursue all appropriate appeals because we believe the transfer of Radaris.com amounts to a forfeiture in violation of various constitutional principles.”

While radaris.com still comes up prominently in results when searching online for U.S. residents by name, the domain no longer sells detailed personal dossiers on millions of Americans. Its homepage now displays a notice from Atlas, as well as links to our previous reporting on Radaris.

EMAIL CONFIRMATIONS

Atlas told KrebsOnSecurity that it has obtained more than 10,000 emails and documents in the course of litigation, and that those messages confirm our previous reporting on the owners and operators of Radaris and its myriad companies.

Atlas said the emails clearly establish that the nominal legal vehicles — Radaris America, Inc.; Bitseller Expert Limited; Digital Orbit Corp; Core Solutions Group Inc; Lucky Solutions Inc; Virtura Corp; Veripages Inc.; Nuform Solutions Inc.; Growth Data Advisors Inc.; Property Experts, Inc — are all administered by the same three or four people from the same mailboxes, share one bank or payment card set, and are all managed from one virtual office address.

“The corpus establishes, with documentary evidence generated independently by banks, payment processors, hosting providers, registrars, software-as-a-service vendors and the operators’ own systems, that radaris.com and at least twenty-five other people-search websites are one operation run by a small Boston-area group whose administrative, financial and technical functions sit on the difive.com mail domain and its successors (centerex.com, scienteco.com, eprofit.com, realmo.com, pub360.com),” reads a summary shared by Atlas.

Atlas said the emails show Radaris.com earns approximately $42,000 a month, while Veripages.com earns around $45,000 monthly via its partnership with the Lifetime Value Company, a marketing and advertising firm whose brands include PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper, a car history site.

According to Atlas, the emails also showed the Radaris family of websites earns as much as $25,000 each month from their partnership with Onerep, a company that claims to help people remove their information from people-search sites. In March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how the Belarusian founder of Onerep had launched and operated dozens of people-search sites over the years and was continuing to operate one of them (Nuwber), effectively spreading the disease and selling the cure.

The domain radaris.com now redirects to this notice from Atlas about the court-ordered domain transfer.

All told, the New Jersey court has so far transferred 14 domain names from the Radaris family of companies to Atlas. Radaris.com now redirects to a notice of the court-ordered domain transfer.

THE ROAD AHEAD

The Radaris family of companies is still potentially facing fines of $1,000 per alleged violation of Daniel’s Law. For the time being, however, Daniel’s Law is facing a constitutional challenge from virtually all of the 150 other consumer data broker firms being sued by Atlas.

The data broker industry responded by having at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits moved to federal court, challenging the New Jersey statute as overly broad and a violation of the First Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has not yet issued a decision on the constitutional challenge, but either way the case is widely expected to be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, at least 14 other states have now passed laws modeled after the New Jersey statute, with more states considering similar measures. However, West Virginia’s Daniel’s Law was ruled facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment by a federal district court in August 2025.

Justin Sherman is a privacy expert and author of the forthcoming book “The Middlemen,” which examines how the data broker industry powers modern surveillance. Sherman said federal lawmakers have long faced intense lobbying by the technology industry against more restrictive U.S. data privacy laws, but that many powerful industries are now working against passing comprehensive data privacy legislation.

“These days at the federal level, add in the intense amount of lobbying against these laws from social media companies, big tech, cryptocurrency firms, and now AI proponents in the mix who claim that limiting their data scraping is somehow going to collapse the whole U.S. economy under Chinese rule,” he said.

Sherman said people-search companies will continue to thrive unless and until Congress enacts meaningful consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century. That’s because virtually all state privacy laws exempt records that might be considered “public” or “government” documents, including voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

At least 25 states have passed or implemented laws requiring age verification for residents seeking to access adult content online, but there is no federal law that limits how the companies that are scanning everyone’s drivers license can use, share or keep the data provided. Had such restrictions been enshrined in law, we may have avoided the recent breach at IDScan.net, which exposed the drivers license information on more than 153 million Americans when the records were briefly turned into a point-and-click identity theft service on the dark web.

“The average person can look at Daniel’s Law and have a perfectly normal reaction, which is that everyone should be covered, not just police and judges,” Sherman said. “But we don’t need more wake-up calls. We’ve had eight million wake-up calls already on the need for better privacy laws. The lack of comprehensive federal privacy law is not for a lack of knowledge, and anyone claiming otherwise is either not reading the news or kidding themselves.”

Read More A critical security flaw in Issabel Framework, a web-based framework for the open-source unified communications PBX software, has come under active exploitation.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-89026 (CVSS v3.1 score: 9.8/CVSS v4.0 score: 9.3), which can allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary operating system (OS) commands by taking advantage of a hard-coded 

Read More Enterprises in Russia have emerged as the target of three threat activity clusters tracked as NightEagle, Hacking Cat, and Toy Ghouls, according to multiple reports from Kaspersky.

The cybersecurity vendor said it has identified attacks mounted by NightEagle (aka APT-Q-95), a threat actor known to be active since at least 2023, that involve new techniques for persistence and lateral movement. 

Read More Security researchers at Forever Security have shown that one ordinary browser extension could take control of the AI assistants built into five Chromium-based products: Gemini Live in Chrome, Perplexity Comet, Microsoft Edge, Opera Neon and the Claude in Chrome extension.

Once the extension was installed, it could access each product’s built-in AI with a single click. On Comet, Edge, 

Read More Mandiant says an attacker hijacked an active AI coding-assistant session at an unnamed software-as-a-service provider and later spread Shai-Hulud across about 100 internal code repositories.

Before the repository spread, the assistant recommended software that the attacker had poisoned, and the recommendation was accepted. The worm stole repository secrets and source code for the 

Read More Parallels Desktop for Mac has a flaw that lets an ordinary local account run code as root, the highest level of access on a Mac, software company JFrog said this week.

The attack needs code already running on the machine as a normal user, so it does not work over the network. JFrog says the fix is in Parallels Desktop 27, a version that Intel Macs cannot install.

Yuval Moravchick, who leads 

Read More N0va is targeting organizations across North America and Europe with phishing campaigns that impersonate trusted services and abuse legitimate authentication flows. Successful attacks can give threat actors access to valid accounts without relying on obvious malware activity.

From there, a single compromised identity can open the door to sensitive data, business systems, and additional cloud 

Read More Google has disclosed that a high-severity security flaw in its Pixel Cellular Modem has come under exploitation in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-58704 (CVSS score: 8.0), is a privilege escalation flaw.

“In Cellular Modem, there is a possible permission bypass due to a logic error in the code,” according to a description of the bug in the NIST National Vulnerability Database 

Read More A leaked credential shows up in a criminal marketplace, or a vulnerability gets a disclosure advisory, and either one can be weaponized against a real target before most security teams have triaged the alert. Attackers are combining that kind of intelligence with AI-assisted exploitation to accelerate the path from exposure to breach faster than most security programs are built to react. 

Read More Acronis has warned that a high-severity security flaw in its Backup plugin for cPanel and Web Host Manager (WHM) deployments has been exploited in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-87886 (CVSS score: 7.8), is described as a case of local privilege escalation due to insecure file permissions. It affects the following versions –

Acronis Backup plugin for cPanel & WHM (Linux 

Read More Threat actors are exploiting a critical security flaw in WooCommerce Wholesale Lead Capture, a premium WordPress plugin that has more than 6,000 active installs.

“This vulnerability can be leveraged by unauthenticated attackers to upload arbitrary files, including PHP backdoors, and achieve remote code execution,” Wordfence said.

The WordPress security company said it has blocked over 

Read More A critical security flaw in WSO2 API Manager has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to findings from watchTowr.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-5430 (CVSS score: 9.8/10.0), is a case of improper verification of a cryptographic signature that could result in account takeover. Hacktron Team has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw.

“JWT authentication 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented Brazilian banking malware operation that delivers a toolkit called KREMLIN.

Elastic Security Labs is tracking the activity under the moniker REF9334. Active since at least May 2025, the threat actor has used lures that impersonate a dozen Brazilian banks and install a malicious browser extension on Google Chrome and 

Read More Cybersecurity agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have detailed a Windows malware that they say Iran’s intelligence service uses to spy on dissidents, journalists, and activists around the world.

The malware is controlled via the Telegram messaging app and can copy a target’s emails and chat messages, take screenshots, and activate the microphone to record 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a multi-platform campaign that uses the Message Queueing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol as a communication channel to control Windows and Linux systems.

The emerging malware family, codenamed BambooToken, is assessed to be active since at least February 2023 and put to use in attacks targeting organizations across Asia and South America. 

Read More With artificial intelligence (AI) shrinking the window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation and lowering the barrier to entry for bad actors, new findings from Sysdig show that skilled human operators can move just as swiftly after gaining initial access.

In one instance highlighted by the cloud security company, the threat actor pivoted from a vulnerable Marimo notebook to an SSH 

Read More Introduction

Security teams have gotten pretty good at testing against what can hurt them. Can this EDR agent catch this payload? Will my organization fail the phishing simulation? Does this SIEM rule fire on this particular technique? And, in more mature organizations, this testing happens continuously rather than as a one-off exercise.

But no matter how much you validate against these 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a mass-scanning campaign that has targeted Vite deployments siphon sensitive data.

The first is an automated effort aimed at internet-exposed Vite development servers that’s designed to steal cloud credentials, configurations from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure instances, and infrastructure state files, per F5 Labs.

The 

Read More A critical vulnerability in LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise could let a low-privilege website user gain root access on a shared-hosting server, cPanel warned in an advisory published on September 14.

On such servers, many customers’ sites run on a single machine, and an attacker with one of those hosting accounts could exploit the flaw to access or alter other sites and the server itself, 

Read More Cisco has warned that a new critical vulnerability impacting AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway has come under active exploitation in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76461, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been described as a case of insufficient validation in the email parsing logic that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker 

Read More A Chinese threat actor has been attributed to a spear-phishing campaign that exploits recently patched security flaws in Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows to deliver a malicious JavaScript backdoor called GRIMWEDGE.

Volexity, which is tracking the threat cluster under the moniker UTA0560, said the activity targeted multiple non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on September 1, 2026.

“The 

Read More Researchers have disclosed a new hardware attack, called DDRop, that breaks the memory protection in Intel and AMD confidential computing by silently dropping writes to a server’s memory, so the processor keeps reading old encrypted data as if it were current.

The attack requires an attacker who already controls the server’s software and can briefly access the machine to insert a small circuit 

Read More An attacker was operating inside the network of 3BB, one of Thailand’s largest broadband providers, and maintained remote control of internal machines using a legitimate management tool called MeshCentral, threat intelligence firm Hunt.io said.

The company uncovered the intrusion by examining a server the attacker had left open on the internet, which held the attacker’s own tools and a list of 

Read More A flaw in Telegram Desktop let a bot’s message plant hidden JavaScript inside chats that users exported to HTML files, security researchers at ExPatch said in a writeup published on September 12.

In Telegram, the message looked ordinary, with a link button, and the script ran only when someone opened the export file in a web browser. It could then copy every message in that file to 

Read More A suspected Chinese threat actor tracked as Red Heron has been attributed to the rapid exploitation of a recently disclosed security vulnerability in Gitea to compromise internet-facing instances as part of a multi-national campaign.

“Red Heron scanned 1,386 Gitea instances across seven countries and maintained a separate dataset of 477 Taiwan-based systems,” Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) 

Read More WordPress has announced it’s launching an automated security review for every release of a plugin before it’s distributed through the WordPress.org update API so as to analyze it for potential security issues and ensure there are no risks involved.

“New plugins are reviewed before they enter the directory, but updates ship continuously after that,” David Perez, WordPress Official Plugin 

Read More AI keeps showing up in the wrong places. Attackers are using it to speed up exploits, test defenses, and automate more of the job. Some models are also crossing lines on their own. That is not a great combination.

The rest of the week is more familiar: old bugs still working, fresh exploit chains, exposed systems, weak defaults, and simple paths that should have been harder to abuse. A few of 

Read More There’s a lot of noise around AI and cybersecurity right now. What’s actually important is far simpler, if often lost in the hubbub. Vulnerability discovery is getting faster and happening at a much greater scale, while defenders still have to work out which findings actually deserve their action.

In the first half of 2026, a whopping 35,853 CVEs were published, roughly 49% more than in the 

Read More A malicious cross-store Twitch browser extension has leaked OAuth tokens associated with nearly 31,000 users to proxy servers operated by a Russian commercial bot service.

The extension, named “Twitch Enhanced Viewer | JeetBot,” lists HISHIMIRO/jeetbot.cc as its developer and has the following identifiers on the Google Chrome Web Store and Mozilla Firefox Add-Ons store –

Chrome – 

Read More Microsoft has disclosed details of two campaigns in which threat actors are abusing third-party email delivery infrastructure to blast financial fraud scam messages and using passkey-themed social engineering to breach cloud environments.

The first campaign, per the tech giant, involved sending over a million scam emails between August 3 and 5, 2026, by masquerading as chief executive officers 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added five security flaws impacting JFrog Artifactory, ConnectWise ScreenConnect, and MikroTik RouterOS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild.

Details of the vulnerabilities are as follows –

CVE-2026-42016 (CVSS score: 8.1) – An incorrect authorization 

Read More Over the past year, we watched a new class of alert appear in enterprise security operations centers and grow faster than anything else in the stream: alerts that were triggered by AI tools and agents. Not attacks against AI, but the ordinary, everyday footprint of an organization using it, from developers running coding agents and non-technical staff signing consumer AI tools into corporate 

Read More The “major malicious attack” that targeted RubyGems in May 2026 was the work of a swarm of OpenAI agents, according to a new report published by researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx.

On May 12, Maciej Mensfeld, senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io, disclosed details of a coordinated cyber attack that targeted the package manager for the 

Read More GitLab has released patches to address multiple flaws, including a maximum-severity security vulnerability that has witnessed in-the-wild probes within hours of public disclosure.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-85706 (CVSS score: 10.0), a path traversal issue in the repository commits API that could allow an unauthenticated user to read arbitrary files from the GitLab server under 

Read More Anthropic on Thursday said it identified and disrupted industrial-scale illicit distillation attacks against Claude from seven labs based in China, including Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek, Z.ai (aka Zhipu), and MiniMax.

Knowledge distillation by itself is a legitimate training method. It refers to a machine learning technique where a large, powerful AI model assumes the role of a “teacher” to 

Read More Anthropic has warned that cybercriminals and state-sponsored hackers alike are using its Claude models for cyber attacks, weapons design, propaganda, and mass surveillance between December 2025 and August 2026.

The threat actors, which the artificial intelligence (AI) company has branded Generative Threat Groups (GTGs), span state-sponsored groups, financially motivated criminals, commercial 

Read More Anthropic on Thursday revealed it disrupted a campaign mounted by a Russian state-sponsored threat actor that abused Claude for developing an AI-assisted workflow to get ahead of the detection curve.

The operation has been attributed to a cyber espionage group it calls GTG-20006 (where “GTG” stands for Generative Threat Group), which aligns with broader reporting linking the cluster to Midnight 

Read More Security teams have become exceptionally talented at finding vulnerabilities. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to optimizing the process for determining which of those vulnerabilities actually create a path to compromise.

A critical vulnerability may look alarming on a scanner report, but if it sits behind strong segmentation, identity controls, and other defenses that prevent an attacker 

Read More Attackers have chained two flaws in JFrog Artifactory, the repository that software build pipelines pull from, to take administrator control of self-hosted servers and plant backdoors, cloud security company Wiz said in a report.

Wiz saw the attacks between August 15 and September 8. JFrog had fixed both flaws before then, so only servers that had not been updated were open to them. 

Read More A China-linked hacking group exploited a flaw in Sogou Input Method, one of the most widely used tools for typing Chinese characters on Windows, to install a backdoor on victims’ computers, security company Gen Digital said in research published Thursday.

The attack started with a crafted link and ended with the attacker able to do anything the logged-in user could do. Tencent, which owns 

Read More PaperCut on Thursday released a new security maintenance release that replaces all previously published emergency patches that were pushed to address two security flaws that have come under active exploitation.

The software development company said PaperCut NG/MF versions 26.0.5, 25.0.13 and 24.1.10 are now available for customers to download.

“These are Regular Maintenance Releases (MR) that 

Read More Cisco has revealed that three distinct threat clusters linked to ransomware and state-sponsored attacks have been exploiting two recently patched Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) vulnerabilities.

The attacks leverage CVE-2026-20079 (CVSS score: 10.0), an authentication bypass vulnerability in the web interface of FMC software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass 

Read More A lot of this week’s security news has the same awkward answer to one question: “Why was that allowed to work?”

An extension asks for access and takes too much. A trusted service becomes part of a phishing chain. An old bug still gets results. An exposed system stays exposed. A package looks useful right up until it isn’t. Different stories, same basic problem: the path in was often already 

Read More Bad actors are misusing Google Play’s Early Access program to push deceptive apps that claim to offer money, rewards, casino winnings, and premium content.

Early Access apps are apps that haven’t been released on the official Android app marketplace. The main idea behind the program is for developers to solicit user feedback for new applications or features they may be working on before their 

Read More Check Point has patched two critical vulnerabilities in the way its firewall and management products handle VPN certificates. The company says both could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to run code, but only “under specific conditions” that it has not described.

One flaw affects Check Point’s Security Gateways, its firewall appliances. The other affects those gateways and the Security 

Read More A suspected Russian-speaking cyber actor has been attributed to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to devise exploits targeting a recently disclosed pair of security flaws in PaperCut NG/MF and break into hundreds of instances.

According to independent reports from Blackpoint Cyber and GreyNoise, the activity originates from “45.142.193[.]132,” an IP address that has been linked to 

Read More The Gigabud banking trojan now installs a second Android app that creates a work profile on an infected phone and drops a tampered banking app inside it, security firm Group-IB said in a report published on September 9.

A work profile is a separate space that Android typically reserves for employer apps, and what’s inside it is kept separate from everything in the personal space. That 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added three flaws, each impacting Cisco, Citrix, and Fortinet, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to apply the patches by September 12, 2026.

The vulnerabilities are listed below –

CVE-2026-20079 (CVSS score: 10.0) – An authentication 

Read More Nearly one in ten of the internet-facing LiteLLM servers that Wiz Research scanned in February accepted sk-1234, the example admin key in LiteLLM’s own setup guide.

LiteLLM is an open-source AI gateway, the software a company puts between its applications and the model providers it pays for. That key is the gateway’s administrator credential.

Anyone who holds it can read every 

Read More Anthropic on Wednesday disclosed a fourth incident in which its artificial intelligence (AI) model broke into real third-party systems, marking the latest in a growing list of cases that have raised concerns about the security risks posed by autonomous AI agents.

The AI company said the incident dates back to January 2026 and involved an early version of Claude Opus 4.6 that breached ” 

Read More The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced coordinated actions aimed at an illicit online marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee that offered scam services, including seizing Telegram channels used to run the service, confiscating two cryptocurrency wallets, and deploying the Scam Center Strike Force to Madagascar to help disrupt 13 scam compounds run by Chinese organized crime 

Read More Multiple espionage-motivated threat activity clusters have been found deploying a previously undocumented exploit kit called BlueMoon that chains together multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and Google Chrome.

The first in-the-wild use of BlueMoon has been attributed to the China-aligned state-sponsored group tracked as APT31 (aka Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, JungleBamboo, 

Read More Cybercriminals are hijacking artificial intelligence (AI) user accounts via information stealer logs to create “stolen keys” that grant illicit access to tools from model providers like Google, Anthropic, and others. 

Information stealers like Lumma Stealer or Vidar are equipped to harvest a wide range of data from compromised systems. This can include credential, session tokens, and API 

Read More A major vulnerability is disclosed. The alert lands immediately. Then comes the harder question: Are we actually exposed?

For many security teams, answering that means jumping between vulnerability scanners, endpoint tools, cloud inventories, SBOMs, repositories, and application data to build enough context to act.

As AI accelerates vulnerability discovery and research, that delay matters more 

Read More A flaw in DeepSeek Harness, DeepSeek’s open-source tool for running AI coding agents on a developer’s machine, let a sandboxed agent turn off its own sandbox with a single command.

The tool runs an agent’s commands inside an operating-system sandbox, so that an agent working on untrusted files cannot write outside its workspace. The agent could remove that limit by calling the tool’s own web 

Read More Bitcoin wallet company Alby has warned of a critical flaw in Alby Hub that could have let an attacker take over a wallet and send its funds, but only where the owner had made the Hub reachable from the internet.

Alby Hub is a self-hosted Lightning wallet, meaning the owner runs it on their own computer or server, and it holds their bitcoin. The flaw affects versions v1.7.0 through 

Read More U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have accused China-based artificial intelligence (AI) companies of conducting “systematic extraction” of proprietary functionalities and capabilities of American frontier models through distillation attacks.

The activity has been described as occurring at an industrial-scale and one that forms the “core” of their AI development strategy, according to 

Read More Google on Thursday released updates to patch 230 security vulnerabilities, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild.

The medium-severity vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-87491 (CVSS score: N/A), has been described as an out-of-bounds bug in V8, Chrome’s JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

“Out-of-bounds write in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 

Read More cPanel has patched a flaw that it says lets a single hosting account take control of an entire server. An authenticated account holder with mail-related privileges can create files of their choosing on the server through EmailTrack and, from there, run code as the root user.

cPanel published the advisory on September 8 and says every supported version of cPanel and WHM is affected. 

Read More Malware linked to break-ins at F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager appliances hides a PHP web shell in memory instead of in a file on disk, Sophos said in an analysis published on September 7.

When Apache loads any of the three appliances’ own PHP scripts, the malware adds the web shell to the copy held in memory, so a check of the file on disk can come back clean. Those three scripts are 

Read More The security researcher known as Chaotic Eclipse has dropped a proof-of-concept (PoC) for yet another zero-day in Microsoft Defender.

The vulnerability, codenamed ShieldCrash, is assessed to be a patch bypass for CVE-2026-69414 (CVSS score: 7.8), also called ShieldBreak, which the researcher reported last month.

“Microsoft has failed to properly patch ShieldBreak CVE-2026-69414,” Chaotic 

Read More SAP has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities, including a maximum-severity flaw in SAP Extended Passport (EPP) Processing that could have a severe impact on the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the application

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-44756 (CVSS score: 10.0), has been described as a case of memory corruption. Discovered and reported by SAP 

Read More Microsoft on Tuesday broke Patch Tuesday records by addressing an earth-shattering 974 vulnerabilities spanning its software portfolio, including two flaws that it said have been actively exploited in the wild.

These include 723 flaws in Windows, 111 in Office and Office 2016, 62 in SQL, and 22 in Developer Tools. Of these, over 110 shortcomings have been assigned a critical severity rating. 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a maximum-severity security flaw impacting N-able N-central to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to apply the fixes by September 11, 2026.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-86218 (CVSS score: 10.0), which has been described as a 

Read More 

Microsoft Corp. today issued updates to plug at least 974 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, by far its biggest single patch batch ever. Microsoft says artificial intelligence is helping to speed the discovery of vulnerabilities, but security experts warn that many organizations already are struggling to prioritize the more human-intensive endeavor of testing and deploying so many fixes each month.

Image: Shutterstock.com, Kirill Makarov.

This month’s patch bundle obliterates the software giant’s previous record set in July, when it released updates for at least 570 security vulnerabilities. September’s Patch Tuesday brings this year’s total to more than 2,600, more than twice Microsoft’s previous record-setting patch year in 2020 (1,245) and with three more months to go.

There are two “zero-day” flaws fixed this month that are being actively exploited: both CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 allow an attacker to elevate their privileges on Windows system.

Fully 113 of the bugs addressed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or miscreants to seize control over a vulnerable Windows machine with little or no help from the user.

Among the more serious critical flaws this month is CVE-2026-69730, a DNS weakness present in Windows Server 2012 onward and on Windows 10. Microsoft warns that an unauthenticated attacker could leverage this weakness simply by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected system, and that it is likely to be exploited.

Also scary is CVE-2026-69829, a critical, remote code execution flaw in the Windows Shell. This vulnerability has a CVSS base score of 9.8 (10 is the most severe), and can be exploited with low attack complexity, no privileges, and no user interaction.

Microsoft’s summary of the security updates released today. Image: msrc.microsoft.com.

Microsoft is hardly alone in shipping monster patch bundles lately. Many other large software companies, including Adobe, Cisco, Google, Mozilla and Oracle, all have recently credited AI-assisted research with increasing their patch cadence and volume (Google said today it is now going to ship security updates every two weeks).

Tyler Reguly, associate director of security research and development at Fortra, said one core challenge with deploying Windows updates is that they need to be tested before being installed across an organization because not all third-party software works seamlessly in the face of changes to the underlying operating system.

“It’s time to put our CISOs and CSOs on notice,” Reguly said. “How are you helping your teams through these difficult times? Do you have your teams deploy after hours and on weekends to avoid disruption to the business environment? Do you reward them for that effort? Time to dig into your budget and buy dinner for your teams that are working on Saturday to get patches rolled out before users return to work on Monday.”

Satnam Narang is senior staff research engineer at Tenable. Narang said it’s important to recognize that while the number of vulnerabilities being patched by Microsoft is rising, the number of flaws that can and will affect most organizations remains quite low.

“AI-assisted vulnerability discovery in 2026 is creating larger haystacks, but it isn’t finding more needles,” he said. “It’s critical that organizations understand which vulnerabilities actually apply to them, whether they pose a threat by being reachable and exploitable, and prioritize remediation based on this risk context.”

Of course, regular Windows users don’t need to test patches before deploying them, but they still need to open Windows Update periodically or else assent to the program’s nag notices about pending updates. And at the rate these Windows patch releases are ballooning in size, it’s probably best not to let them pile up month after month.

Enterprise Windows admins will want to keep an eye on askwoody.com for news of any updates that appear to be causing problems. As always, the SANS Internet Storm Center has a per-patch breakdown ordered by severity and urgency.

Read More A previously undocumented financially motivated threat actor has been linked to attacks targeting Brazilian financial institutions since at least March 2026.

Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is tracking the Brazil-based activity cluster under the name Slim Spider.

“The adversary demonstrates deep operational knowledge of Brazilian financial infrastructure, including the instant payment 

Read More Whoever took nearly 4,000 bitcoin from the Liquid Network on Sunday, September 6, returned 3,400 of it the next day, Bitcoin’s public record shows. About 598.5 bitcoin has not come back.

Liquid is a Bitcoin sidechain that holds real bitcoin to back a token called L-BTC. The network is still paused, so holders cannot turn that token back into bitcoin.

The 3,400 bitcoin was sent to a& 

Read More Check Point Research said in a report published today that a single instruction planted in a ChatGPT conversation could cause ChatGPT to quietly work for an attacker while answering the user’s question as usual.

In the company’s proof of concept, that hidden work read data from the user’s connected Gmail account and passed it to a second ChatGPT account through a hidden channel 

Read More Threat actors are continuing to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline their operations, with one financially motivated hacking group employing an autonomous, multi-agent attack framework to carry out a large-scale credential harvesting campaign within six hours.

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said it has observed attackers with diverse motivations targeting proprietary AI 

Read More Adobe on Monday released security patches to address a maximum-severity flaw impacting Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source that has come under active exploitation in the wild.

The vulnerability, now tracked as CVE-2026-75650 (CVSS score: 10.0), has been codenamed StyleSmuggler by Sansec, which discovered zero-day exploitation starting September 4, 2026.

“This update resolves a critical 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a sprawling search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning campaign that paves the way for malware deployment and tech support scams.

The campaign, discovered by the DFIR Report in March 2026, has been codenamed BengalSEO. It has operated out of the Indian state of Rajasthan since at least 2015, driven by two IT service providers named WeConnect 

Read More Online dating app Grindr has opted to pay £26 million ($35.1 million) to settle a lawsuit in the U.K. over allegations that it shared users’ personal information, including their HIV status, with third-parties.

Grindr, which is the largest LGBTQ+ dating app, was sued in April 2024, accusing it of violating U.K. privacy laws by sharing sensitive data for commercial purposes such as advertising. 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a complex Chromium-based post-exploitation toolkit called PEEP that masquerades as a bookmarks extension for the web browser.

“Requiring prior administrative or code execution access, its installer injects the extension directly into Chrome/Edge profiles, bypassing Web Store checks and user prompts by forging Chromium’s own Secure Preferences 

Read More Threat hunters have disclosed details of a widespread data theft and extortion threat cluster that’s targeting Microsoft 365 and other software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings through information technology (IT) help desk vishing, adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) token theft, and residential-proxy sign-ins.

The activity, which mainly singles out directors, vice presidents, and other executive staff 

Read More Turning off email images should at least stop the pictures. This week, attackers had a workaround: a scannable QR code built out of text. It still appears, even with images blocked. A small detail, but an annoying one if that was a precaution you were counting on.

Elsewhere, a trusted software source delivered code that stole credentials, and a protocol designed for secure network management 

Read More If managing security across multiple cloud providers wasn’t hard enough, each one fails in a different way. For the 2026 Cloud Security Index, Intruder analyzed misconfiguration data from 3,000 organizations across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and found that risk profiles across providers have almost nothing in common. Here’s what the data looks like.

How risk differs across cloud providers 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of worm-like activity that abuses ConnectWise ScreenConnect to distribute a malicious Visual Basic Script (VBScript) payload to newly connected systems.

According to Huntress, three unrelated incidents have been found to use diverse initial access methods, namely a Quick Assist tech-support scam, a phishing-delivered MSI installer, and a fake 

Read More A TantoSec proof-of-concept turns an AES-CBC “padding oracle” in Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX into unauthenticated remote code execution — but only against applications in a specific non-default configuration, and Progress patched the chain in July. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation in the wild.

Security firm TantoSec has published a working exploit chain targeting vulnerabilities 

Read More Every on-premises N-central build below 2026.3.1.14 — including servers updated to Hotfix 3 a day earlier — needs Hotfix 4. N-able’s incident notice says the flaw has been exploited in the wild; its release notes say that is unconfirmed.

N-able has released its fourth hotfix in five weeks for the N-central remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform, this time for a 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have unpacked JSCeal, a sophisticated compiled V8 JavaScript (JSC) malware with credential harvesting, surveillance, and traffic-interception capabilities.

“The payloads are protected with javascript-obfuscator, using multiple techniques including RC4-protected strings, control-flow flattening, proxy functions, and operation wrappers,” Check Point Research said in a 

Read More Attackers are exploiting MikroTik routers with their Secure Shell (SSH) remote-access service, which is reachable from the internet, to gain full administrative control without authentication, according to CERT Polska’s attack warning, published on September 5.

Successful attacks date to at least September 2. The Hacker News’s September 6 review of the warning found no victim count or 

Read More Elastic Security Labs has documented four previously unreported programs associated with REVSTEALER, an emerging Windows information stealer, that remain on an infected machine after the stealer deletes itself.

One of them switches off Windows Update and Microsoft Defender before running a cryptocurrency miner.

The company named the four programs ProManager, WinUpdate, SoftManager, and 

Read More Attackers are exploiting a new unpatched vulnerability in Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce that lets them run malicious code on an online store’s server without logging in, Dutch e-commerce security company Sansec said in an advisory published on September 5.

Sansec, which discovered the flaw and named it StyleSmuggler, said attacks started on September 4. “Sansec is 

Read More JetBrains is urging Cadence users to revoke and rotate all credentials following a security incident last month in which unidentified threat actors exploited a recently disclosed critical vulnerability in TeamCity to breach its own environment.

“Cadence users should immediately revoke or rotate all credentials and secrets that may have been used to run their Cadence executions,” JetBrains said. 

Read More Broadcom has released security updates for two security flaws impacting VMware Workstation and Fusion, including one critical bug that could result in arbitrary code execution under certain conditions.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-59346 (CVSS score: 9.3), is an integer-overflow vulnerability that a local attacker with elevated privileges can exploit to run arbitrary code.

“A 

Read More Hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor on Friday disclosed that another 67,000 customers from the U.S. have been impacted in a breach at its shipping provider ShipMonk.

The exposed information includes customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses, and order numbers between November 2019 and August 2021. The breach does not affect the security of the company’s hardware wallets 

Read More A group of AI safety researchers says a fleet of autonomous agents that identified themselves as OpenAI systems left about 18,000 posts on a dormant 25-year-old German wiki between May and July 2026, using the site as a shared board to pool answers to a timed web task and pass around a way out of their sandbox.

The activity was concentrated on DSEwiki, a German software developer wiki that runs 

Read More Threat actors are exploiting the newly disclosed PaperCut flaws to facilitate credential theft in attacks targeting the education sector in the U.S. and Europe.

The Arctic Wolf Adversary Research Team said it observed attackers exploiting CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078 – an authentication bypass and remote code execution chain – to conduct command execution and reconnaissance, as well as 

Read More Microsoft is alerting of a “high-volume phishing campaign” that’s using invisible Unicode tag characters to bypass email filters.

“Instead of using these characters to hide instructions from people while exposing them to AI models, the attacker used them to split financial lure words such as ‘funding’ to prevent email filters from parsing them,” the Microsoft Security Research team said.

The 

Read More PostgreSQL has released updates to address a security flaw that allows an account with the REPLICATION attribute to run arbitrary code as the operating-system user running the database server.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-6471 (CVSS score: 7.2), has been present since logical decoding was introduced in PostgreSQL 9.4 in 2014. Versions before PostgreSQL 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24 are 

Read More A previously undocumented Linux toolkit has been found compiled directly into the trojanized HAProxy load balancers of two South Korean organizations, where it intercepted web traffic and served altered pages to selected visitors.

The attackers named the implant ted in debug strings left in the binary. It is not a HAProxy vulnerability, and installing it requires code execution on the host and 

Read More Threat actors are exploiting two critical security flaws in WordPress plugins Super Forms and Elementor Pro, according to findings from Wordfence.

The vulnerabilities in question are –

CVE-2026-14894 (CVSS score: 9.8) – A missing file type validation vulnerability in Super Forms – Drag & Drop Form Builder that allows unauthenticated attackers to upload files of any type, including 

Read More Plex is urging users to update their instances to the latest version following the release of an update that patches multiple security flaws.

The fixes are available in Plex Media Server 1.43.3 and Plex Desktop 1.115.0. The streaming media service did not elaborate on what those issues are, but said CVE identifiers have been requested for them.

“We recommend all server owners and Desktop users 

Read More Google on Thursday released security updates to patch 12 vulnerabilities, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild.

The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-85046 (CVSS score: 8.8), has been described as a type confusion bug in V8, Chrome’s JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

“Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 152.0.7977.82 allowed a remote 

Read More OpenAI on Thursday officially unveiled GPT‑6 Astra, which it described as the “world’s most intelligent and aligned model.”

The development comes days after the artificial intelligence (AI) company said the model had reached the “Critical” cybersecurity capability threshold under its Preparedness Framework.

“Astra is state-of-the-art on computer use, browsing, software engineering, 

Read More The worst part is how normal these attacks look. A call from IT. A shared file. A trusted app. A simple request to click “Allow.” Why break in when someone might open the door?

That idea runs through this edition. Attackers use real tools, fake login pages, old account links, and software guides that point to unsafe downloads. One wrong letter in a web address can be enough.

There is also 

Read More Cisco has released patches to address a critical security flaw affecting 10 Silicon One-based Nexus 9000 switches that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute code as root, alongside an IOS XR hardening release bundling 7 umbrella CVEs, 2 of which are rated 9.8, with no workaround for any IOS XR version.

The Nexus vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20212 (CVSS score: 9.8), is 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a sophisticated Python-based Windows malware framework called BraZetsu that fuels an underground marketplace commercializing access to compromised hosts.

“Unlike the standard infostealer model, BraZetsu is a comprehensive master toolkit that empowers Initial Access Brokers (IABs) by turning compromised systems into highly valuable commercial 

Read More Thomson Reuters disclosed on Wednesday that an unauthorized party obtained files from C-Track, the court case management platform sold by its West Publishing Corporation unit, in March 2026, affecting courts in 11 U.S. states, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Ontario, Canada.

West Publishing said it discovered the activity on June 30, 2026. A subset of court records could contain individuals’ names 

Read More An RMM phishing campaign initially associated with Canadian targeting due to its use of Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) tax forms as lures has turned out to be part of a broader campaign spanning 46 countries.

Around 45% of observed activity was associated with the United States, making it the campaign’s top geographic target. ANY.RUN research connected 601 cases to the wider operation, which uses 

Read More Threat actors are leveraging the trusted Node.js JavaScript runtime in multiple cyber attacks as a way to deploy malicious payloads.

According to a new report published by the Symantec Threat Hunter Team today, the attack method has been put to use in attacks targeting government departments, technology companies, and hotels since February 2026.

“The technique’s appeal is that node.exe (the 

Read More In early August, GitGuardian researchers found that a recent Shai-Hulud infostealer worm variant had evolved to scan for credentials across 469 locations across developer environments, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tooling, cloud configurations, and even AI tool configs.

Earlier variants of the infostealer worm only checked 189 paths. The jump says a lot. Attackers have 

Read More The iPhone belonging to a member of Serbia’s student protest movement was infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, according to new findings from the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the SHARE Foundation.

“Our analysis confirmed that an iMessage zero-click exploit was used to infect the device with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware,” the Citizen Lab said. “We found high-confidence indicators of 

Read More The security researcher known as Chaotic Eclipse (aka INFINITE NIGHTMARE, MSNightmare, and Nightmare-Eclipse) has dropped a new zero-day dubbed FalconFlank, a privilege escalation flaw impacting Crowdstrike Falcon.

“FalconFlank is a 0day privilege escalation that abuses the office malicious macros remediation in CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor,” the researcher said in a GitHub README file, adding 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added seven security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog after they landed in attackers’ crosshairs.

The vulnerabilities are as follows –

CVE-2026-83548 (CVSS score: 10.0) – A server-side request forgery vulnerability in SonicWall SMA 1000 Appliances that could allow a remote unauthenticated 

Read More Google on Wednesday announced Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, which it described as its most capable cybersecurity model, and has made it available to a set of trusted defenders via a new initiative called the Fairwind Program.

“The Fairwind Program gives high-priority defenders (like governments, healthcare providers, and telecommunications services) early access to advanced models that help them 

Read More An active malware campaign is using bogus software-download websites to impersonate trusted vendors and distribute malicious installers.

“The campaign has targeted users looking to download popular software and has resulted in compromises across multiple organizations and industries, primarily affecting China-based operations of multinational organizations and Chinese-speaking users,” Microsoft 

Read More Manifold Security has disclosed eight security flaws across seven command-line AI coding agents in which a repository’s own Git configuration names a command that the agent runs on the developer’s machine, four of them still unpatched at publication.

The command executes as the user, outside the agent’s sandbox and without an approval prompt, and exploitation requires the repository to arrive 

Read More A Chinese-speaking cybercrime cluster known as Gambling Goblin has been observed installing malicious Apache modules on compromised web servers run by Brazilian government and educational institutions, and using them to divert visitors to attacker-controlled pages promoting online gambling and sports betting.

Check Point Research said it has tracked the campaign since mid-2025.

The modules 

Read More Virtualizor said hackers used a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijack to divert Softaculous traffic. The hackers then used the diverted update traffic to deliver a malicious Virtualizor package to some installations. A hosting-provider account separately said 5 of its 34 checked Virtualizor hypervisors sustained root-level compromise.

The incident window ran from approximately August 28 at 20:57 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Android banking trojan called StreamRat that was promoted to Spanish-speaking users through a fake television-streaming campaign on Meta and can give operators near-complete control of infected devices.

ThreatFabric said the campaign’s advertisement focused on Spain and reached an estimated 570,950 Meta accounts in the European Union 

Read More The debate about whether AI delivers business value is over. The challenge now is implementing it at scale and securely across every function while meeting board-level pressure to move fast. Organizations must focus on adopting AI at business speed without losing control of cyber risk. Download the full eBook here. 

The Business Reality 

In Sygnia’s 2026 CISO Survey Report, which 

Read More SonicWall has released security updates to address two security flaws impacting its Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series VPN appliances that have been exploited in zero-day attacks.

The vulnerabilities, discovered internally by SonicWall’s William Perry and Adam Babis, are listed below –

CVE-2026-83548 (CVSS score: 10.0) –  A pre-authentication SSRF vulnerability in the Appliance 

Read More Two vulnerabilities in GeoNetwork can be chained to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on the open-source geospatial metadata catalog, which sits behind many government and agency geoportals.

The project shipped fixes in versions 4.4.12 and 4.2.17 on July 8, 2026, and published the vulnerability details on August 31.

GeoNetwork originated at the United Nations Food and 

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Read More 

A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.

A record available at this identity theft service that includes the drivers license for U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is one of several high-ranking U.S. government officials whose drivers licenses can be found for sale.

On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit.

The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.

A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number: Running a blank search in Nexus (with no search parameters entered) returns approximately 11.5 million pages of results, with roughly 15 results displayed per page. It includes documents from people in both Canada and the United States, but the bulk of these records are on Americans: searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately 1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario (473,673 records).

Curiously, the identity records include not only drivers licenses but also marijuana dispensary cards. Some of the records list their “source” as “CDL,” presumably short for “commercial drivers license.” Other records carry the source notation of “CAC,” which may refer to Common Access Cards, government issued identity cards that grant physical access to government buildings and secure rooms.

The people behind Nexus claim the license images are coming from an active breach at “a major identity verification company” whose customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies.

The record totals listed by the Nexus identity theft service. The number of drivers license records increased by nearly 400,000 in the span of just 24 hours.

“We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database,” the service enthused in its introductory post on Exploit. “Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available.”

Indeed, over the past 24 hours, the number of drivers license records listed as available in Nexus has increased by nearly 400,000, suggesting that freshly stolen license data is being harvested and uploaded to this service on a semi-regular basis.

The record that features my drivers license includes six image files — three pairs of photos of the license’s front and back — a basic image scan — as well as infrared and ultraviolet versions of the same images. A date and timestamp is appended to each image file, and the timestamp on my license scan corresponds to a date in June 2025 when I took a flight to the midwest United States to attend a family funeral.

Some of the 153 million+ license scans — including mine — feature six image files with date and timestamps appended to the filenames. Not all records include photos, and some that do feature photos do not display the associated filenames.

Intent on discovering the source of this data, KrebsOnSecurity asked more than a dozen friends and family members for permission to search for their licenses in this service. Each person whose license could be found (nine of them) confirmed having traveled on or very close to the dates in the timestamps attached to their images. It is unclear what timezone these timestamps are in, but from reviewing car rental records shared by several people who helped with this research, it appears the timezone is set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

At first, I thought the source of the data might have something to do with airports. However, that theory went out the window when it became apparent there were no passports in this data set. Also, only some of those who helped with this research said they showed their drivers license at the airport on the day of their travel. One person whose license was in Nexus hadn’t flown at all recently, but was renting a car from Hertz for several months around the date of their timestamp.

Two of those who agreed to help are federal employees who said they shared other forms of government identification when passing through airport security. However, those individuals each said they shared their state-issued drivers licenses later that day when renting vehicles at their respective destinations, and that both rented their cars from Hertz.

After finding a note in my calendar for the day of my June 2025 flight reminding me to bring my passport, I remembered that I also never actually shared my drivers license when I went through security at Reagan National Airport on that day because I did not yet have a Real ID, a security-enhanced drivers license that is now required by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for all domestic travel. Instead, I showed the TSA agent my government-issued U.S. passport.

Here’s where it gets interesting: I was able to find my mother’s drivers license in this service as well, and the timestamps for her images are just a few seconds apart from mine. That’s notable because we both handed our licenses to the Hertz rental car representative at the same time.

According to my mom, the only place she gave her drivers license to that day was the rental car company, and if memory serves that is also true for me. I don’t recall if the rental car representative inserted our licenses into any kind of machine, but I remember they held onto them for several minutes behind the counter while we were signing various forms. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from Hertz and will update this story in the event they reply.

Zach Edwards is a well-known security and privacy researcher who recently launched a service called DecryptAds to help people better understand how online advertisers are tracking them. A scan of Edwards’s drivers license is available for purchase on this identity theft service, and Edwards said the timestamp on his record corresponds to the middle of a trip last month to Las Vegas for the annual DEFCON security conference.

Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity that although he did not rent a car in Vegas, he did hand over his license at the TSA checkpoint, at a marijuana dispensary in Vegas, and at his hotel (the Aria). But he said the only one of those three that for sure scanned his ID in some kind of device was the dispensary.

To enter Planet13’s weed dispensary in Las Vegas, one must pass through a red telephone booth. Image: Zach Edwards.

Edwards said the dispensary he visited that day was Planet13, a multi-state chain with stores in California, Florida, Illinois and Nevada. In 2022, the New Orleans-based identity provider idscan.net published a press release announcing an exclusive identity verification agreement with Planet13’s dispensaries nationally. IDScan says it processes ID verification for more than 1,000 marijuana dispensaries in 19 U.S. states.

The “trust” page of idscan.net states that the company provides identity verification services for numerous big brands, including Hertz, Target, Fedex, Motorola Solutions, the financial services giant Jack Henry, and Caesars Entertainment. And as idscan.net’s own documentation states, the technology scans IDs with both infrared and ultraviolet light. Idscan.net says the company’s systems and technology perform more than 21 million verifications monthly, at more than 20,000 locations around the world.

Image: idscan.net.

Contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, idscan.net said it was investigating the matter, but the company has not yet shared an official statement or a substantive reply to specific questions sent via email.

“At this point I’m not able to share any additional information, but the updates you have provided have been welcome, and helpful to our team’s investigation,” wrote Jillian Kossman, a marketing and operations leader at idscan.net.

During the course of my research for this story, word apparently got around to the FBI that I was poking at the apparent source of this new identity theft service’s data. Probably they were tipped off when I shared with a trusted source that Nexus also is selling the drivers license information for the assistant director of the FBI (I did not find FBI Director Kash Patel’s license in Nexus).

Earlier this afternoon, I was added to a conference call with a half-dozen FBI agents, including senior leaders from the agency’s cyber division. During that call, the FBI shared that earlier today their New Orleans field office opened an official investigation into an apparent breach involving idscan.net.

Edwards said that as more in-person and online experiences require sharing drivers licenses, vendors who collect this sensitive data need to be held to a higher standard.

“This episode should further strengthen the resolve for people who are fighting back against online ID schemes which are requiring countless providers to ask for drivers licenses in order to access services under the guise of protecting kids,” Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity. “These systems are putting sensitive data into more and more 3rd party vendors, and we don’t have nearly the oversight to ensure they are safe.”

Larry Baldwin is principal intelligence researcher at the cybersecurity firm Cybera. Baldwin said a front and back scan of his drivers license available at Nexus contains timestamps that correspond to the date of a car rental from Hertz on a recent vacation.

Baldwin said the Nexus identity theft service presents multiple serious security and privacy threats, noting that state-issued drivers licenses are commonly used as proof of one’s identity when opening new lines of credit. Baldwin said the service could also dangerously expose many people who do not wish to be found but who cannot meaningfully change their appearance (or at least not enough to fool today’s AI-based image matching tools).

This category of people, he said, includes those fleeing domestic violence, and even people who have been assigned a whole new life and identity as part of the federal government’s witness protection program, which is generally reserved for criminal defendants in racketeering and conspiracy investigations who agree to cooperate with federal authorities.

“Just when it seems like we’re making some headway in improving authentication controls through drivers license verification systems, this happens and the very thing those improvements are dependent on are compromised,” Baldwin said.

Update, 8:56 p.m. ET: Shortly after this story was published, the Nexus identity theft service website vanished from the darkweb, replacing its login page with a plain text message that reads, “This service is no longer available.”

This is a potentially fast-moving story. Any changes or updates will be noted here along with a timestamp.

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Read More The most common way into a company last year was to ask.

A web page tells the visitor to prove they are not a robot. While they read the instructions, it quietly places a command on their clipboard. Then it talks them through opening a terminal and pasting it in. The technique is called ClickFix, and it was the most common initial access method Microsoft’s team observed last year, accounting 

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CVE-2026-66066 aka 

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Read More The boring parts caused most of the trouble.

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CVE-2026-76581 (CVSS score: 9.8) – An authentication bypass flaw in 

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Affected versions are < 0.6.2 and >= 

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Read More Google on Thursday announced new network security protections in Android 17 to bolster connection privacy, address cellular vulnerabilities, and safeguard the privacy of users’ home networks.

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“This new privacy standard works in tandem 

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cPanel described the issue as a critical security vulnerability and said that an 

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Read More Credit: Hacktron
Vercel has released security patches for two critical-severity vulnerabilities in the Next.js web framework, both of which allow unauthenticated remote code execution, one exploitable via specially crafted AVIF image files and the other through a path traversal flaw affecting servers that use a Windows filesystem.

The Windows path traversal, tracked as CVE-2026-75604& 

Read More A fake login page. A fake security scan. A fake productivity app. Apparently, pretending to be useful is still one of the easier ways into a machine.

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Read More The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has charged two Western Australian men with a combined total of 14 offences over their alleged role in TeamPCP, the cybercrime group behind the March 2026 compromise of the open-source security scanners Trivy and Checkmarx KICS and the AI gateway LiteLLM.

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Read More AI is officially mainstream in security operations. According to Prophet Security’s State of AI in Security Operations 2026 report (produced from ViB’s survey of 250+ cybersecurity pros), 40% of security teams now use AI daily. Another 56% are currently testing it out, and only 4% have no plans to adopt it.

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Read More 

Authorities in Australia have arrested two men believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group blamed for perpetrating the longest running spree of software supply chain attacks ever.

In a statement released today, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said two men from Western Australia, aged 21 and 23, were arrested in connection with a “sophisticated cybercrime syndicate that allegedly created malicious open-source software to rob thousands of global businesses.”

The AFP did not name the defendants, but KrebsOnSecurity learned the 21-year-old suspect’s real identity in June, and has been communicating with him ever since. This story includes interviews with TeamPCP’s self-described spokesperson, and examines clues left behind by the TeamPCP leader that likely led to his undoing.

TeamPCP vaulted onto the cybercrime scene in late 2025, embedding malicious code in hundreds of open source software tools and extorting victims for profit. Members of the group made headlines by compromising corporate cloud environments using a self-propagating worm dubbed Shai-Hulud, which added malicious code to open source programs maintained by developers whose credentials at public code repositories like GitHub or NPM were phished or stolen.

Writing for Wired, journalist Andy Greenberg described TeamPCP’s core tactic as a kind of cyclical exploitation of software developers.

“The hackers gain access to a network where an open source tool commonly used by coders is being developed,” Greenberg wrote in May. “The hackers plant malware in the tool that ends up on other software developers’ machines, including some who are writing other tools intended to be used by coders. The malware allows TeamPCP’s hackers to steal credentials that let them publish malicious versions of those software development tools, too. The cycle repeats, and TeamPCP’s collection of breached networks grows.”

TeamPCP also has practiced something akin to cyclical recruitment. In May, the source code for the third iteration of Shai-Hulud was published online, and TeamPCP soon after launched a contest offering $1,000 in virtual currency to whichever participant could conduct the largest supply chain operation using the worm’s code. According to the contest rules, participants were scored based on the number of weekly and monthly downloads of packages they compromised — directly incentivizing them to target the most popular code libraries.

A screenshot of a message from TeamPCP’s Telegram account, announcing the supply chain hacking contest. Image: dataminr.com.

“TeamPCP has stated the competition is a recruiting opportunity and they intend to purchase all meaningful access harvested from participants’ campaigns,” the security firm Dataminr wrote. “The $1,000 XMR (Monero) prize is a recruitment floor and has been dismissed by the actor as ‘just like participation trophy,’ adding ‘if you find something good you will be paid way more,’ confirming the contest’s true function as talent identification and malicious access acquisition at scale.”

In March, TeamPCP executed a supply chain attack targeting AI infrastructure by compromising the code for LiteLLM, an open source AI gateway that connects users to more than 100 different large language models. A recent analysis by the security firm CloudSEK found TeamPCPs attack on LiteLLM harvested cloud service keys and other secrets from more than 2,500 organizations, including many of the world’s top technology companies.

In May, TeamPCP claimed credit for compromising at least 3,800 code repositories at the Microsoft-owned GitHub, after a GitHub developer installed a code extension that was compromised by TeamPCP’s malware.

MEET THE CYBERCATS

Security experts say TeamPCP is less of a hacker group than an amalgamation of threat actors from multiple cybercriminal gangs who sometimes work together toward similar goals.

“It is not a structured criminal crew with a single operator,” said Austin Larsen, a principal threat analyst with the Google Threat Intelligence Group. “It is a peer community of individually-skilled actors, with one clear center of gravity.”

That center of gravity is George Prepakis, an accomplished security researcher and self-described exploit developer who operates the Twitter/X profile @kernelstub. Earlier this year, @kernelstub tweeted a public invite link to a Matrix chat server he created and dubbed “Cybercats,” and TeamPCP and several other cybercrime entities have been using this server to communicate daily for the past several months.

A screenshot of the Matrix chat server “Cybercats,” whose members used hacker handles associated with multiple distinct cybercrime groups that have occasionally collaborated on a series of supply chain and data ransom attacks over the past nine months.

Kernelstub, like other administrators in the Cybercats chat, has been using his Twitter/X profile name as his handle in these Matrix communications, frequently tweeting references to other members and to conversations taking place in the Cybercats chat. In a number of cases, the corresponding X accounts for members of the Cybercats chat taunted cybercrime victims publicly before the incidents were reported in the news media.

The Cybercats administrator listed at the top of the screenshot above — “Boxturtle” — is a close associate of TeamPCP who has been tweeting about the group’s conquests under the name @xpl0itrsturtle. This handle corresponds to a data breach broker active on Breachforums and Darkforums who has been selling data stolen in a wave of recent breaches at automobile manufacturers, including BMW Group, Audi, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Toyota, as well as data allegedly taken from Snapchat and SportRadar.

The data leak site for the extortion group or handle “xpl0itrs.”

The Cybercats administrator “SeesawSec” in the screenshot above is the alias of whoever is behind the cybercrime group known as Fulcrumsec, which recently claimed credit for data extortion attacks against the pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the data broker LexisNexis, and Avnet, a Fortune 500 distributor of electronic components.

The data leak site of Fulcrum Security, a.k.a. Fulcrumsec.

The Cybercats administrator “@pcpcasper” also has been using a similar name on X to discuss TeamPCP’s attacks and victims. This person has an extensive message history on Telegram, where their messages and shared videos show @pcpcasper is an active and vocal member of the National Socialist Network, a neo-Nazi political organization based in Australia.

At one point in these chats, @pcpcasper shared videos and images of what they claimed was their cat, and several of those videos place this user in Western Australia. One source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that @pcpcasper was one of the two arrested, a claim supported by messages that @kernelstub posted online this morning.

The Cybercats member roster pictured above also features an administrator with the username “T,” which is short for the now-banned Twitter/X profile @pcpcats, the account operated by the self-described TeamPCP spokesperson who was arrested today. As we’ll see in a moment, @pcpcats also is from Western Australia.

By the time @kernelstub tweeted a public invite link to the Cybercats Matrix server, T/@pcpcats was posting only infrequently to the group chat, with other members often inquiring as to his whereabouts and well-being. The group’s collective concern related to @pcpcats’s tendency to blame his increasingly extended absences on the use of hallucinogens and other narcotics that kept him awake for days on end, but also caused him to crash in bed for several days after the highs wore off.

WHO IS THE TEAMPCP LEADER?

The Cybercats member @pcpcats has used multiple nicknames on the cybercrime forums, including EllisD25/LSD on Darkforums, BulkDMT on Breachstars, and Express on Breachforums. These accounts are linked because they all advertised the same Tox ID and/or Session ID as instant message contact handles in their cybercrime forum posts. BulkDMT was also known on the forums as DMT Host, which was a virtual private server (VPS) hosting service that was peddled on Darkforums and Breachstars.

DMT Host/EllisD25, posting on the English-language cybercrime community DarkForums in September 2025. Image: ke-la.com.

According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, Express registered on Breachforums using the email address shitstickpp@gmail.com. Intel 471 finds Express posted on Breachforums across a two-month period in 2025 using four different Internet addresses located in South Africa. On July 30, 2025, Express announced on Breachforums they were selling access to 14 gigabytes of data stolen from South Africa’s State Information Technology Agency.

The threat intelligence platform Flashpoint recorded more than a year’s worth of messages from the TeamPCP leader’s alter ego on Telegram — Persy_PCP —  who claimed they split their life living between two countries [full disclosure: Flashpoint is an advertiser on this blog]. “I have these [files] as well, problem is these are in another country,” Persy_PCP explained to another user inquiring about a stolen data set in November 2025.

Later that month, Persy_PCP complained, “My whole country is racist and they want people like me dead.” Flashpoint records show BulkDMT shared in September 2025 that “this country is going to fucking starve when they take the farmers land,” a likely reference to white landowners in South Africa who claim to be targeted by an ongoing genocide campaign.

This tracks with public reporting on TeamPCP. Cyberscoop reported in June that Google had traced TeamPCP’s residential and mobile Internet address connections to South Africa, “indicating the primary operator was located there during at least some of its attacks.”

BulkDMT also shared on the group chat at Breachforums that they were recovering from an addiction to methamphetamine. “My life is kinda fucked rn [right now], but that’s fine and there isn’t really a point in pouring so much emotional energy into that fact, my parents had money but I unfortunately got really addicted to some things so I don’t get to benefit from that. As long as I continue to survive, stay sober, and move closer towards my goals that’s enough drive and meaning.”

The identity threat protection company SpyCloud finds shitstickpp@gmail.com shows up in the registration of an account called ChristmasSnow on the cybercrime community Raidforums in 2022. Nearly all of the Internet addresses used to access that account came from ISPs in Perth, Australia, SpyCloud found.

KrebsOnSecurity looked up all of those Perth IP addresses in passive DNS records maintained by DomainTools.com, and found one of them — 211.27.196.111 — for several years was used as a private file server by a family in Perth with the last name of Thomson. Those records show at least three hosts — ithomson.direct.quickconnect.to (a remote Synology server), kthomson0061.direct.quickconnect.to, and joshuawthomson39.myqnapcloud.com (a QNAP network storage device) — persisted at that address between 2022 and 2025.

Searching on “joshuathomson39” in the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence reveals an account at the freight forwarding company kwe.com created in the name of Joshua Thomson from Perth, Australia. The open source intelligence platform Epieos finds the phone number attached to that kwe.com account was used to register a Facebook profile for Josh Thomson, which says his family includes a brother named Ruben, his father Ian, and his mom Cindy.

That Facebook profile also says Josh and his family are originally from Pietermaritzburg, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, but currently living in Cottesloe, a beach-side suburb of Perth. A search in DomainTools for Ian Thomson and Australia unearthed five domains by the same registrant, including securecomputing.au, thomson.org.au, and thomsonfamily.net.au. Ian Thomson is a dentist in Cottesloe, and a biography says he graduated from The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Constella finds a joshua@thomson.org.au registered a number of accounts online, but Josh doesn’t seem to have much of a connection to dodgy cybercrime forums. His brother Ruben, on the other hand, has quite the presence on these communities, dating back to at least 2018. Constella reports ruben@thomson.org.au frequently reused the password “joshuathomson1,” and Constella further finds that password was used by just a handful of accounts, including yolosolo17@gmail.com and surfinup8@gmail.com.

According to Intel 471, surfinup8@gmail.com was used to register the user Yolosolo17 on the crime forum Altenen in 2018, and that user account was registered from the Perth address 110.141.230.15. On Altenen, Yolosolo17 advertised free web proxies, as well as the domain rubenthomson.com, which was at one point used to sell steeply discounted iPhones. DomainTools says rubenthomson.com was hosted at 110.141.230.15 and registered to surfinup8@gmail.com.

A cached copy of the domain rubenthomson.com from 2017 shows a login page underneath a banded stack of money. Image: archive.org.

SpyCloud reports 10.141.230.15 was used by the email address sheepstealing@gmail.com on Raidforums and surfinup8@gmail.com on Nulled, and that the same IP was used by the email addresses ian@thomsonfamily.net.au, jasper@yakuza.cc, and rubenthomson1@gmail.com. SpyCloud also shows that sheepstealing Gmail address is tied to the accounts Sheep420, YoloSolo117 and Yakuza.cc on Raidforums, and to the account “Sheep Stealing” on Hackforums. Intel 471 says sheepstealing@gmail.com was used to register the account DingoFlour on Breachforums in October 2023, as well Sheepx on Altenen.

Epieos reports that ruben@securecomputing.au is tied to an Airbnb account for Ruben, who described himself as a Web developer who went to school at the University of Western Australia and was living outside the country. “Hey, I’m Ruben, my friends call me Ellis. I’m a Perth creative who occasionally books rooms when visiting family and for photography.”

Epieos also finds sheepstealing@gmail.com registered an upwork.com profile under the name Ruben, who said his main skills are setting up secure server hosting solutions and PHP full-stack Web development.

“I’m familiar with Linux, working with relational databases (SQL),” the Upwork profile reads. “I also script in Python mainly for writing social media bots.”

The Upwork profile for Ruben Thomson in Cottesloe, Australia.

Epieos further discovered sheepstealing@gmail.com is connected to a Microsoft account for Ruben Thomson, and to a now-defunct GitHub account called XmasSnow/XmasSnowisBack that scammed people on the forums in 2022 by claiming to sell exclusive exploits for recently-released software patches (recall that shitstickpp@gmail.com was used to register a forum account named ChristmasSnow).

This same sheepstealing email address registered a Twitter/X account in 2026 called “Gone Fishing” that lists its location as South Africa. That Gmail account also left several reviews for businesses listed on Google Maps over the past seven years, but all of those establishments are located on the west coast of Australia.

Business reviews in Western Australia left by the Google account sheepstealing at gmail.com.

The people search service Pipl finds a 21-year-old Ruben Thomson in Western Australia who has a phone number ending in 979. A lookup on that number at Epieos reveals it is connected to a TikTok account under the name Ellis, and to a PayPal account in the name of Ruben Thomson.

Finally, a search on the name Ruben Thomson from Cottesloe at the Australian government’s record of registered businesses finds he has incorporated or served as an official in multiple companies created since 2024, including Secure Computing Solutions, Tensor Industries, and another entity ironically named OPSEC Express. Recall that Express was BulkDMT’s nickname on Breachforums.

Australian companies connected to Ruben Thomson. Image: abr.business.gov.au.

It’s ironic because OPSEC is short for the term “operational security,” which refers to techniques and behaviors used to obfuscate and compartmentalize one’s real-life identity online, and using your cybercrime handle as part of your own company name is very much the antithesis of that practice.

There is at least one other major opsec failure by Ruben that exposed a link to TeamPCP. In June 2025, someone using the name Ruben Thomson registered on HackerOne, a popular “bug bounty” program that seeks to reward and recognize researchers who agree to work with affected software vendors to help fix the flaws before publishing about their findings. What was Ruben Thomson’s chosen HackerOne username? Deadcatx3, a nickname that has been flagged by multiple security firms as an alias used by TeamPCP.

The HackerOne profile for “Ruben Thomson” uses the nickname Deadcatx3, which multiple security firms have concluded is an alias used by TeamPCP. Image credit: flare.io.

INTERVIEW WITH ELLIS

In early July 2026, not long after having discovered clues about Ellis’s real life identity, KrebsOnSecurity interviewed the TeamPCP leader via Signal, where he was remarkably open about his activities and personal struggles [for the sake of simplicity, the TeamPCP spokesperson will be referred to from here on as Ellis].

Ellis claims he stopped doing cybercrime for TeamPCP in March 2026 — just before the attacks that compromised LiteLLM — and that at least one other individual has taken over the group’s leadership since then. Ellis shared that a year earlier he had just completed the latest in a series of detox and sobriety programs, and was two months sober when he reconnected with some old friends from the malware development scene.

“One year ago I needed help monetizing some [GitHub credentials], I was two months sober and needed a distraction and something to keep busy as well as people to speak to,” Ellis said. “I had largely disconnected from my old circle, they had become very toxic and I needed to get away from the substances. Previously I had done some mass exploitation campaigns and grew up doing [malware development] and [capture the flag] contests. There were some friends who were also vending but had stopped a while, and one of them introduced me to some chats where I posted access for sale.”

Prior to that, Ellis said, he was homeless and hopping between “some very unstable places.”

“Blackhatting is fun,” he said. “There are actual rewards and incentives to learn and you grow with your team. Without qualifications, no employer will even take the time to hear you out.”

Ellis claims he’s earned a grand total of about $20,000 for his activities with TeamPCP, and that it was never about the money or fame for him. Asked whether his experiences with TeamPCP might prepare him for gainful employment in a legitimate IT job, Ellis said he doubted it.

“I am nowhere close to a skill level where I am comfortable, and this would take maybe half a decade of further experience,” he said. “I no longer have to choose between rent and food for that I’m grateful and so are the team members.”

Ellis expressed no remorse over his cybercrime activities, and said he was grateful for the friendships and relationships built throughout his engagement with TeamPCP. The young hacker also seemed resigned to his fate, and told KrebsOnSecurity that he’ll accept the consequences if he’s ever arrested.

“If I’ve already been found out then its out of my control, I’ll make peace with that,” he said. “Honestly, I think someone like me needs a lot of help that prison just can’t provide. If I had the funds to study different parts of the field and closer guidance, this would have turned out differently. But that’s a pipe dream and we both know this.”

It is clear from reading Ellis’s posts to the group’s Matrix server chats that his struggles with sobriety are ongoing. On Thursday, June 25, Ellis told @kernelstub he was about to “trip” with his “homie.”

“What kind,” @kernelstub inquired.

“Ketty and some DMT,” Ellis replied, referring to the dissociative anesthetic ketamine and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful psychedelic compound that is found naturally in some plants but is also synthetically produced in underground lab environments. “There’s a little 2cb so we might throw that in the mix,” he continued, referring to another psychedelic compound by its chemical shorthand.

Roughly two weeks before his arrest, Ellis told KrebsOnSecurity he was ready to leave his life of crime behind and was prepared to turn himself in, but that in the meantime he was making plans to tie up loose ends.

Less than 24 hours later, the TeamPCP leader posted an image on Telegram showing a yellowish powdered substance in a baggie and on a scale, possibly synthetic DMT. The image shows the powder being weighed next to a series of small vape cartridges, two of which are open on the table in front of the photographer.

An image posted by the TeamPCP leader to Telegram, advertising his acquisition of some type of psychoactive substance, most likely a synthetic version of the powerful hallucinogen known as DMT.

The two defendants were arrested Wednesday morning. The AFP said the men face a combined 14 cybercrime offenses and are scheduled to appear in Perth Magistrates Court today.

Charlie Eriksen is a security researcher at Aikido Security who has closely followed TeamPCP’s cybercrime campaigns. Eriksen said TeamPCP are a good example of a new kind of threat actor that does not fit neatly into the usual categories.

“They are not a state actor, not quite organized cybercrime, and not purely ideological,” he said. “Their motivations seem to mix money, disruption, attention, and ideology.”

Eriksen said that historically there has always been a meaningful gap between reading about an attack technique and being able to reliably turn it into an operational campaign, but that large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence increasingly are helping threat actors to bypass that knowledge gap.

“You had to understand the research, adapt the code, troubleshoot it, build infrastructure around it, and then repeat that process across different targets,” he said. “LLMs have compressed that gap significantly.”

According to Eriksen, this creates an environment where threat actors suddenly have the ability to operate at significant scale without having developed the operational discipline that traditionally accompanies that level of capability. Put another way, it sets the stage for cybercriminals who are capable enough to cause significant damage, but not necessarily careful enough to understand or care about the consequences.

“They can be noisy, they can make mistakes,” he said. “They can leave evidence everywhere. They can take risks that a professional criminal group or intelligence service would consider completely unacceptable. But that does not necessarily make them less dangerous. In some ways, it can make them more dangerous.”

In a recent blog post, Eriksen called TeamPCP’s Shai-Hulud worm the “best thing to happen to supply chain security,” because it forced GitHub and other public coding platforms to erect new security safeguards.

In direct response to TeamPCP’s broad success at pushing poisoned versions of popular software packages, GitHub in late July introduced a three-day “cooldown” mechanism for Dependabot, the platform’s tool for auto-fetching newly shipped updates for any package dependencies. Cooldown periods are designed to help buy time for security tools and package maintainers to identify and remove any compromised versions. Other coding ecosystems like Python and various JavaScript platforms also added support for cooldown periods this year amid growing calls from security experts about the need for more widespread adoption of the safety feature.

Eriksen said TeamPCP’s legacy is that they achieved in the span of a few months what the supply chain security community has been unable to do for years.

“They managed to wake up Microsoft to the fact that they had become negligent in terms of security,” Eriksen said. “By compromising GitHub and stealing their source code, they humiliated Microsoft into action, making them finally act on what we had been asking them to do and take seriously for a while now.”

Update, 10:08 a.m. ET: A story this morning from ABC News in Australia confirms Ruben Ian Thomson of Cottesloe was one of the two arrested. The 23-year-old suspect thought to be @pcpcasper, Michael Gaebler, also was arrested in Perth. ABC News reports that Thomson was denied bail (Mr. Gaebler’s attorney reportedly did not request bail for his client), and that both men will be held in custody until their next court appearance on September 18.

Read More Individuals and organizations in Cambodia have emerged as the target of a new campaign that delivers an open-source remote access trojan (RAT) called Spark RAT.

“The samples employ diverse lure themes, suggesting an effort to appeal to a broad range of potential victims. These include government notices, public health materials, real estate-related content, and other topics,” Acronis Threat 

Read More Threat actors linked by Arctic Wolf to Dark Caracal with medium confidence deployed a previously undocumented Go-based malware framework, GoCaracal, during a June 2026 intrusion at an unnamed communications organization in Venezuela.

GoCaracal provides operators with remote shell access and payload execution, while the extended profile adds browser data theft, keylogging, remote desktop control 

Read More Academic researchers have disclosed a Rowhammer attack impacting NVIDIA workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory that defeats error correction codes (ECC), the mitigation NVIDIA recommends against GPU Rowhammer, and enables denial-of-service (DoS) and privilege escalation to a root shell.

Dubbed GPUThor, the attack was developed by researchers at the University of Toronto, who hammered four DRAM 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added six flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, including a high-severity security vulnerability impacting Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, citing evidence of active exploitation.

The vulnerabilities are listed below –

CVE-2019-1068 – A remote code execution vulnerability in  

Read More The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the disruption of two hacking platforms named QScan and QTRouter operated by Chinese threat actors to target critical infrastructure and other sensitive networks in the country.

The activity has been attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored group known as QTFY, employed by Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company (南京鑫玖维网络科技有限公司).& 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered additional infrastructure and previously undocumented malware associated with Nimbus Manticore, an Iranian state-sponsored hacking group affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Group-IB, in a new analysis published today, described the cyber espionage actor as among the most active Iranian APT groups in 2026. Nimbus Manticore (aka 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing toolkit called NovaCookies that’s used as a proxy to redirect Microsoft 365 sign-ins, while capturing authenticated sessions in the process.

In a report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication, Island characterized the $320/month service as a subscription-based phishing platform that 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published the results of two red team assessments it conducted simultaneously against two critical infrastructure organizations, using what it described as similar tradecraft while recording sharply different defensive outcomes.

Both organizations were fully compromised at the domain level, and in both, the red team also 

Read More The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has disclosed two unpatched vulnerabilities in Kaltura’s HTML5 video player library that allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to read arbitrary files from a server and execute code on it.

The flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-19913 and CVE-2026-19912, both stem from the same unsafe deserialization in the mwEmbedLoader.php endpoint of the mwEmbed player 

Read More The SOC we’ve always known was built around a model that guarantees most of the alert queue will never receive analyst review. There’s never time. In a traditional SOC, the typical progression follows a well-known pattern: an alert arrives; a detection engine assigns a severity score. The issue then waits for a human to decide if it should escalate to an investigation.

Given the volume of 

Read More Aikido Security has published research that recreates the Australian gym-booking incident in a synthetic environment, finding that Claude Opus 4.6, running on the OpenClaw agent harness, exploited a client-side-only booking restriction in 9 of 10 runs.

The original incident was first reported by ABC News on August 10, based on chat logs and screenshots the user supplied. He had asked an 

Read More OpenAI on Tuesday said it banned a cluster of Russian ChatGPT accounts that used VPNs to bypass access restrictions and run an influence operation, which relied on its artificial intelligence (AI) tool to generate social media posts and comments that were shared on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The accounts “were being used to promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a 

Read More An eight-month INTERPOL operation targeting West African organized crime groups has led to arrests of 58 people and the identification of 263 suspects.

“The operation, which brought together 22 countries from six continents, is a response to the escalating global threat posed by West African criminal networks – such as the Black Axe and other similar groups,” INTERPOL said.

“These groups are 

Read More An independent malware researcher has documented a previously unreported Windows backdoor, dubbed SLEEPWALKER, that stays inert in memory until a specifically crafted network packet reaches the machine and then runs commands written in a 23-instruction language of its own design.

The sample is an unsigned 64-bit Windows dynamic-link library (DLL) of 59,904 bytes, built to be side-loaded into& 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday warned of active exploitation efforts targeting a recently patched critical security flaw impacting Gitea.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-60004 (CVSS score: 9.8), a case of remote code execution that allows an attacker with ordinary write access to a repository to execute arbitrary shell commands as the 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform built to strip Apple’s Activation Lock from stolen devices, using rented AI voice agents that call theft victims posing as Apple Support and ask for their device passcode.

SOCRadar Threat Research Unit (STRU) said the platform, which it tracks as AnonyMousKIT, is credit-metered and drives lures across 

Read More The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced fresh sanctions on Iranian cyber actors as part of what it called an “unprecedented, whole-of-government, economic campaign” against the nation and its enablers.

“We are launching an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime 

Read More Oasis Security has disclosed a weakness in NVIDIA NemoClaw that could let an attacker-controlled webpage take unauthenticated control of the local Ollama instance serving an AI agent and plant hidden instructions inside the model itself.

The findings were shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication, and the report says Oasis Security reported them to NVIDIA’s Product Security Incident 

Read More Meta on Tuesday announced a set of WhatsApp account security features, including support for multiple passkeys to a single account to help users with both iOS and Android devices sign into their accounts using the phishing-resistant method.

The tech giant said more than 1 billion people use a passkey to log into WhatsApp. Support for passkeys was first introduced in Android in October 2023, 

Read More Marimo has addressed a high-severity security flaw in its notebook software that allowed an attacker to execute an attacker-supplied Model Context Protocol (MCP) command in a specially crafted notebook, according to VulnCheck’s CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) record.

The CNA record says the command can run as a local subprocess when the notebook is opened in edit mode.

The vulnerability, tracked 

Read More Thousands of companies have been affected by the Mirage2FA campaign from 2024 to 2026. The commercial phishing-as-a-service toolkit targets Microsoft 365 accounts by abusing legitimate login flows and bypassing two-factor authentication.

According to ANY.RUN research, 48% of targeted email addresses were potentially compromised. Most of the affected companies are US-based.

Mirage2FA Campaign 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that uses a cluster of 24 npm packages as free phishing infrastructure for redirecting to ClickFix-style fake CAPTCHA pages.

“While the malware is simply a single HTML page inside the npm package, and while downloading it wouldn’t do harm, the threat actor’s use of npm isn’t to infect developers who install it, but to use the 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign that employs FTP banners as dead drop resolvers (DDRs) to deliver two previously unreported remote access trojans (RATs) tracked as E4del and PINHOLE.

While threat actors are known to abuse legitimate services to point to additional command-and-control (C2) infrastructure and blend in with regular network traffic, the development 

Read More Bad actors are attempting to exploit two severe unauthenticated authentication bypasses in the Xecurify miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On plugin that make it possible for an attacker to sign in as any WordPress user, including administrators.

The vulnerabilities, as disclosed by Patchstack, are listed below –

CVE-2026-61979 (CVSS score: 8.1) – An unauthenticated privilege escalation 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a maximum-severity security flaw impacting Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-21962 (CVSS score: 10.0), allows an unauthenticated attacker with network access via HTTP to 

Read More If your developers are using AI coding tools, you are probably already seeing the upside: faster development, more code, and less time spent on routine work.

The harder part is what comes after. AI can also introduce open-source packages at a pace your security team was never built to handle. More dependencies mean more vulnerabilities to review, more remediation work, and a backlog that can 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have found that several websites are still actively distributing a malware family known as Weedhack to gamers by masquerading as Minecraft clients.

McAfee Labs said it detected and blocked more than 6,300 attempts to access malicious sites, adding that it found lookalike gaming websites designed to mimic legitimate projects, including branding, feature lists, FAQs, 

Read More A package gets installed. A login prompt opens. A box sits exposed to the internet. Nothing looks unusual yet.

That’s roughly the mood this week. Trusted tools turn hostile, old weak spots get fresh attention, AI makes exploit work cheaper, and researchers keep finding attacks that sound harder than they actually are.

Plenty to clean up. Here’s the short version.

⚡ Threat of the Week

U.S. 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged two new malware families called WordlistLoader and SynkLoader that’s used to deliver next-stage payloads and likely sell access to ransomware groups.

According to findings from Gen Digital, WordlistLoader is being used to deliver Amatera Stealer (aka ACR Stealer or AcridRain Stealer) via ClearFake campaigns, which employ the ClickFix (aka FakeCaptcha) 

Read More Red Hat and the Keycloak project have released patches to address a critical security flaw in the open-source identity and access management server that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to take over any user account by forcing a password reset.

The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-18963, is rated 9.1 on the CVSS scoring system by Red Hat, which acts as 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a cyber espionage campaign targeting Myanmar that uses graduation ceremony invitation lures to deliver a Go backdoor called QUICAgent.

The campaign, codenamed Operation QUICSILVER, has been found to target government and information technology sectors, per Seqrite Labs. The activity is assessed to be the work of a China-nexus threat actor with moderate 

Read More Big security risks come in small packages. While enterprise security teams focus on policing the proliferation of employees using ChatGPT and Claude for quick drafting tasks, a more urgent threat is posed by a handful of AI super-adopters who are quietly hardcoding unvetted tools into critical business operations.

According to new research published by Akamai, the top 5% of enterprise power 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group dubbed UAT-10147 that’s targeting Windows and Linux web servers globally across the education, media, technology, and gaming sectors.

The vast majority of the targets are located in Brazil, Bolivia, China, Canada, and Vietnam. Details of the threat activity came to light following the discovery of an open 

Read More The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced on Friday that ByteDance-owned TikTok will pay $400 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit accusing the company of violating child privacy laws in the country.

As part of the settlement, the social media platform will pay $300 million immediately, and an additional $100 million “upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree entered against 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of trojanized npm packages that masquerade as working calendar and streak utilities but are engineered to stealthily deliver an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Linux implant dubbed RedC2 4.0.

“When the module loads, it locates the bundled binary, marks it executable, and launches it as a detached background process,” TrendAI, Trend Micro’s 

Read More Check Point Research has disclosed a technique that uses Microsoft Defender’s own legitimately signed boot-time remediation driver to perform arbitrary kernel-level file and registry operations on Windows systems ranging from Windows 7 through Windows 11 25H2, with no software flaw exploited and no driver imported from outside the machine.

The driver, BTR.sys (Boot Time Removal Tool), is a 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malware family that’s specifically designed to infect Android-based vehicle head unit firmware developed by DoFun.

Kaspersky, which discovered the threat in June 2026, said the end goal of the malware is to serve a multi-stage downloader to enable ad fraud and creation of a proxy botnet.

“The malware spread through the built-in updaters of 

Read More Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of this decade’s defining technologies. From healthcare and finance to manufacturing and education, organizations increasingly rely on AI to automate repetitive tasks, uncover patterns hidden within large datasets, and support faster decision-making. Cybersecurity has experienced a similar transformation. While attackers employ AI to automate 

Read More Cisco has published another round of security updates for Crosswork platforms and Secure Workload Software as part of a continued comprehensive internal security review.

Four of the security vulnerabilities affect Crosswork Data Gateway, Crosswork Network Controller, and Crosswork Planning, regardless of the device configuration. A brief description of each of the flaws is below – 

Read More A newly disclosed security flaw in GitLab has come under active exploitation within days of public disclosure, according to watchTowr.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-19478 (CVSS score: 9.4), a case of code injection that allows an unauthenticated attacker to modify or delete publicly accessible GitLab projects and rewrite their data under certain conditions without requiring 

Read More Microsoft on Thursday warned of a maximum-severity security flaw in Entra ID that it said has been exploited in the wild, but noted that no customer action is required.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-69836 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a case of remote code execution impacting the tech giant’s cloud-based identity and access management service. It was previously called Azure Active Directory 

Read More The Rust Project has deleted malicious versions of three widely used Rust crates from crates.io after a compromised maintainer account published releases that added a typosquatted dependency whose build script downloaded and executed a remote payload during compilation.

The affected releases are arrayref 0.3.10, internment 0.8.7, and append-only-vec 0.1.9, all published from the same owner 

Read More Three distinct suspected Russian cyber espionage threat clusters have been observed leveraging legitimate authentication flows to single out individuals working in academia, aerospace and defense, governments, and think tanks across Europe, as well as academia and think tanks within the U.S.

These clusters include UNC6293, UNC7005, and UNC5976.

“These clusters engage in persistent, adaptive 

Read More A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something trusted doing exactly what it was allowed to do.

Signed drivers get turned against defenses. Legitimate apps help malware blend in. A weak header check opens a path to code execution. Elsewhere, exposed systems, old bugs, odd hiding tricks, and AI-assisted exploit research keep lowering the effort needed to cause damage.

Nothing here needs 

Read More The U.S. government on Wednesday warned of an “active threat” targeting critical infrastructure organizations in the country using artificial intelligence (AI)-generated exploit scripts.

The activity is targeting Siemens S7 SeriesProgrammable Logic Controllers (PLCs) to conduct reconnaissance and capability development using AI-generated scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. That 

Read More Adversa AI has disclosed an attack technique that it says can cause xAI’s Grok chatbot to send a user’s name, approximate location, subscription tier, and the prompts from the ongoing conversation to an attacker-controlled server after the user asks it to summarize an ordinary web page.

The AI security company, which has codenamed the technique “Cryptographic Context Injection,” said the 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw in isolated-vm, a popular open-source sandbox with more than 2,900 stars and 190 forks on GitHub, that could allow attackers to escape the confines of the isolated environment.

The vulnerability (“GHSA-864f-rcv7-6rh4”), which has yet to be assigned a CVE identifier, impacts all versions of the library before and including 7.0.0. 

Read More Citrix has released updates to address two security flaws impacting NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway deployments, including a critical-severity authentication bypass vulnerability.

According to the cloud computing and virtualization technology company, the issues affect customer-managed NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, including certain FIPS and NDcPP builds, as well as SecurAccess 

Read More A now-patched security flaw impacting Zimbra Collaboration (ZCS) has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to the Polish Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT Polska).

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-73570 (CVSS score: 8.9), which refers to a case of command injection that can lead to remote code execution.

“A remote code execution vulnerability exists in Zimbra 

Read More Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated an attack that revives expired Visa contactless credit cards for real in-store purchases by rewriting the expiration date a point-of-sale (POS) terminal reads over near-field communication (NFC), without breaking any of the card’s cryptography.

The attack, which the researchers named “Zombie Card,” requires physical 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a critical flaw in the Elementor Pro WordPress plugin that, if successfully exploited, could lead to remote code execution.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-32475, carries a CVSS score of 9.0 out of 10.0. It has been described as a case of unrestricted upload of a file with a dangerous type.

“The flaw lives in the Forms module’s File 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a remote Spectre attack against Cloudflare Workers that leaked a JSON Web Token (JWT) from a co-located Worker in the production environment at up to 12 bits per second, 360 times the rate of an earlier attack demonstrated in 2021.

The end-to-end experiment used an attacker Worker and a victim Worker controlled by the researchers, 

Read More OpenAI on Tuesday revealed that it paused reinforcement learning (RL) training for its latest artificial intelligence (AI) models for two weeks while it shored up additional defenses and increased the scope of its monitoring to avert another Hugging Face-like incident.

“As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow,” the AI company 

Read More A previously unreported cyber espionage operation dubbed SilkParasite has been observed targeting government bodies in Central Asia.

The intrusion set makes use of seven remote access tool (RAT) families, five of which have never been previously documented: DriveSilkRAT, CookiETagRAT, NomadRAT, GoginRAT, and NodeEdgeRAT. SilkParasite, first discovered in late 2025, is assessed to be a 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers at Hunt.io have disclosed details of a campaign that they say compromised more than 14,530 Dahua devices between June 17 and July 22, 2026, using credential attacks, two authentication-bypass flaws, and a peer-to-peer (P2P) relay technique.

The activity, codenamed Operation CameraSwarm, was reconstructed from a 407 MB exposed working directory containing 2,616 files 

Read More Most email defenses still do the job they did a decade ago. Scan the message, look for something malicious, block it. That worked when the danger sat in the payload, a bad link or an attachment. It stopped working when the danger moved into the message’s intent, and it is failing now that the sender is no longer a person.

From Bad Content to Bad Intent to AI on Both Sides

Phishing 1.0 was bad 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a global cybercrime operation that abuses thousands of hacked WordPress websites as infrastructure to disseminate malware, commandeer infected hosts, store stolen documents, screenshots, and activity logs created to track the status of the activity.

“The operation doesn’t rely on a single piece of malware, but on a whole toolkit of criminal software 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added four critical vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, stating they are being exploited in the wild.

The shortcomings added to the KEV catalog are listed below –

CVE-2026-65400 (CVSS score: 9.8) – An improper authentication vulnerability impacting Apple macOS that could allow an 

Read More Microsoft Defender Experts have linked more than 30 web domains to MacSync Stealer, a macOS-focused information stealer, after correlating recurring endpoint and network behaviors across changing infrastructure, tracing the malware from payload retrieval through data collection, staging, and exfiltration.

The tech giant said it required multiple endpoint and network behaviors to align before 

Read More A JavaServer Pages (JSP) web shell deployed following the exploitation of a critical security flaw in PTC Windchill and FlexPLM servers is specifically designed for the enterprise Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software, according to new findings from ReliaQuest.

The cybersecurity company characterized the web shell as a fully equipped extortion platform capable of mapping sensitive vault 

Read More Varonis Threat Labs has disclosed three vulnerabilities in Microsoft Copilot Personal that it said could allow a single click on a crafted link to silently pull data from connected apps and other information available to the victim’s Copilot session.

The flaws, which the researchers collectively named CoSnitch, turn in part on an undocumented URL parameter that the assistant itself surfaced 

Read More Two critical vulnerabilities impacting MLflow, an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform, and FUXA, an open-source, web-based SCADA / HMI software built for operational technology (OT) and industrial automation, are witnessing malicious scanning and exploitation efforts.

According to independent reports from watchTowr and VulnCheck, the vulnerabilities in question are as follows – 

Read More A ransomware affiliate calling itself Ransom Busters has been spotted proactively sending emails to victim organizations and claims to delete stolen data from ransomware groups’ servers in exchange for a fee ranging from $20,000 to $60,000.

“In these messages, the third-party offers to help the victim recover from ransomware attack. This immediately stands out as anomalous,” GuidePoint Research 

Read More Security researchers at Anthropic and Switzerland’s EPFL have demonstrated that self-propagating payloads can spread from one artificial intelligence (AI) agent to the next through the editable system prompt files that autonomous agent harnesses use to carry state between sessions.

The work, released as a preprint on August 10, 2026, tests the technique in a simulated six-agent coding 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously undocumented Python implant framework dubbed TWINLOOT.

“TWINLOOT is a modular, PyArmor-hardened Python implant designed to operate its entire command-and-control infrastructure inside trusted Microsoft services,” Ontinue said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. “Tasking flows through SharePoint Online file 

Read More A single piece of infrastructure has been pulling records out of Salesforce and ServiceNow customer portals across multiple industries for more than a year, according to research published this week by agent security platform Reco.

The activity, which Reco has named the City Forum campaign after a domain tied to the attacker’s IP address, traces back to one server: 158.220.87.79, hosted on a 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new typosquatting campaign targeting RubyGems users with a Windows-based information stealer.

OpenSourceMalware, which discovered the activity on August 15, 2026, is tracking the threat under the moniker StubMaker. The complete list of packages published as part of the campaign is below –

ubnuler
ubnlder
ri18nr
reaker
rakier
orakw
joxn 

Read More SafePal has disclosed that an authorization flaw in an order-tracking plug-in exposed the names, email addresses, shipping addresses, phone numbers, and purchase details of approximately 39,798 customers.

The hardware wallet maker said all affected customers were notified individually by email on August 16 from security@safepal.com, with the subject line “[Important] Your SafePal Order 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a critical flaw impacting Ray to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.

Ray is an open-source, Python-native distributed computing framework designed to scale artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads. As of writing, the GitHub project has more than 

Read More GitLab has released security updates to address a critical vulnerability impacting its Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that, under certain conditions, could allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely modify or delete public projects and user data.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-19478, has been rated Critical by GitLab and assigned a CVSS score of 9.4.

Released on 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers at Wiz have disclosed a new GitHub Actions workflow injection vulnerability in Snowflake’s public snowflakedb/snowflake-connector-net repository that it said could be exploited through a crafted GitHub issue to execute commands in a workflow containing internal Jira credentials.

The issue was present in .github/workflows/jira_issue.yml, which ran when a 

Read More A critical security flaw has been disclosed in Forminator Forms, a WordPress plugin with more than 600,000 active installations, that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution on susceptible sites.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-15748, is rated 9.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It was discovered and reported by a security researcher who goes by the online alias ” 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have traced the continued evolution of the Cavern (aka Cav3rn) command-and-control (C2) framework used by Iranian nation-state hackers in attacks targeting entities in Israel.

Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky said its ongoing monitoring of the threat activity cluster since December 2025 has led to the discovery of previously unreported components that expand the 

Read More The expensive attacks are not always the clever ones.

This week had plenty of proof. Exposed services got hit, old bugs found fresh use, browser sessions became attack paths, and supply-chain problems kept spreading farther than the original compromise. A lot of it came down to access that was already there and defenses that assumed nobody would look too closely.

So, nothing magical. Just a 

Read More MCP servers can expose enterprise secrets through plaintext configuration files, over-permissioned access and prompt injection, often before security teams even know the server is running. As more organizations adopt AI agents into their systems, that exposure can silently become a major gap in MCP server security. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows AI agents to reach the tools and data, 

Read More Security researchers at SSD Secure Disclosure have published a two-stage exploit chain that achieves full Android kernel access on devices running Unisoc modem firmware through a VoLTE video call, with no fix from the chipset maker.

The advisory, published August 17, 2026, is the second stage of a chain that began in March 2026, when SSD disclosed remote code execution in the 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a previously undocumented Linux botnet family dubbed Evooo1Bot that derives its core functionality from the Mirai botnet source code and is equipped to turn internet-facing devices into SOCKS proxies.

“While the malware reuses the DDoS engine from the publicly leaked Mirai source code, it extends the original framework with numerous capabilities, including 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have attributed the exploitation of a newly patched security flaw in Broadcom VMware vCenter to a suspected China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT).

The attacks involve the exploitation of CVE-2026-59310 (CVSS score: 9.8), a severe directory-traversal vulnerability in the VMware vCenter server that could be weaponized by a malicious actor to execute arbitrary code 

Read More 

It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you.

A Decryptads summary of the advertising partnerships declared by espn.com.

The newly launched decryptads.com says it is constantly scraping the files that websites and apps make publicly available to disclose the companies that are permitted to run ads or collect user data. These files include:

–ads.txt: all of the adtech companies and data brokers that may run ads or harvest data from the site;
–app-ads.txt: entities that can harvest data from or display ads on mobile and smart TV apps;
–buyers.json/sellers.json: the entities buying, selling or reselling ad inventory for a given site or app.

Zach Edwards is chief research officer for DecryptAds and a threat researcher at the security company Infoblox. Edwards said he and two other founders decided the service was needed because the adtech data in these files is generally only useful when it can be cross-referenced to build a more complete picture of the advertising ecosystem for each website or app.

“It’s an adtech tool but we’re trying to approach adtech from a security perspective,” Edwards said. “It’s really built for a lot of privacy and security use cases that have been dramatically underserved.”

Those use cases, he said, include tracking down the source of malicious ads that try to foist malware on targeted users, identifying ad networks located in adversarial nations, and detecting the fast growing swarms of AI-generated slop websites and apps. And as decryptads.com demonstrates, these potential security and privacy threats are near impossible to detect just by viewing a single apps.txt or app-ads.txt file.

“Supply-chain integrity issues rarely live in a single file,” the site explains. “They show up as broken cross-references between ads.txt, app-ads.txt, and sellers.json files; as cloned declaration sets across unrelated domains; as seller removals that only make sense when viewed across exchanges; and even as supply paths in bid logs that never actually appear in any given publisher’s authorized-seller list.”

A search in DecryptAds for the hugely popular sports network espn.com reveals 143 ad partners and 19 registered data broker domains are listed within its ads.txt and app-ads.txt files. That data broker information is gradually becoming available because four states — California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont — have recently passed laws requiring data brokers to register if they buy or sell data on consumers from those states. DecryptAds reports that almost half of those data brokers are collecting geolocation data from espn.com visitors who aren’t blocking ads, while another three disclose that they collect device fingerprints and sensitive personal information.

A visual representation of the complex ad supply chain declared by espn.com. Image: decryptads.com.

HIGH-RISK AD PARTNERS

DecryptAds also makes it easy to learn the beneficiaries and national origins of the advertising firms lurking in apps and websites, displaying a conspicuous warning when adtech partners of an app or website are based in “geo-risk” areas like China and Russia, or in countries with strong financial and political ties to both — such as Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

According to DecryptAds, espn.com works with four different advertising entities that are based in either Russia, China or the UAE, including the adtech firm Between Digital, which lists a New York address. However, the dossier on Between Digital flags them as a Russian firm, showing that their publisher offers (PDF) are processed through Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private commercial bank and one of several financial institutions placed under U.S. sanctions in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from both Between Digital and the company’s founder, and will update this story in the event that either replies.

A search for several top U.S. military news websites — including armytimes.com, airforcetimes.com, defensenews.com, navytimes.com, marinecorpstimes.com and federaltimes.com — shows they all allow Between Digital to serve ads and track users, as well as two entities in the UAE and another in the ownership secrecy haven of Panama. DecryptAds reports that Between Digital is collecting ad data on approximately 55,000 partner websites.

The “Geo Risk” section of decryptads.com.

Pivoting on Between Digital’s app-ads.txt file reveals hundreds of domains featuring simple web-based games that are frequently interrupted by ads. Edwards said Between Digital’s own declarations show the company is listed as both a publisher and a reseller on approximately two-thirds of their portfolio.

“It means they are basically playing both sides of the bidding equation, which creates opportunities to direct client spend at your owned and operated properties or client infrastructure, essentially creating opportunities for conflicts of interest,” Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity. “The problem we have right now is that for years we’ve had almost no one policing these ads.txt and app-ads.txt files.”

The Opera Web browser remains quite popular, and probably many users are unaware that since 2016 it has been majority owned and controlled by the Chinese company Kunlun Tech (the operational headquarters of Opera remain in Oslo, Norway).

Opera.com’s profile at DecryptAds identifies 27 registered data brokers collecting information, including 15 adtech partners in the UAE, six in China, three in Cyprus, two in Russia and one each in Hong Kong and Ukraine. DecryptAds makes clear, however, that these companies represent just seven percent of the adtech partners specified in Opera.com’s ads.txt and app-ads.txt files.

LEGAL DOSSIERS

One feature of DecryptAds that sent this author down multiple hours-long research rabbit holes is its Legal Dossier lookup, which takes several minutes for each search but eventually churns out oodles of useful information about who owns a particular domain or app, when it was registered, and any aliases or relationships it may have to adtech companies and other websites or apps.

For example, last month KrebsOnSecurity wrote about researchers from Bitsight who found that an extremely popular line of TV streaming sticks called H96 quietly rent out each user’s Internet connection to strangers. Bitsight also discovered that when these devices aren’t being used to stream pirated video content, they are spoofing themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated slop websites.

Bitsight concluded that the same Chinese company that made several of the malicious apps common to all of these H96 streaming sticks — the Fengwo Group — also also ran the network of ads and AI slop websites being clicked on by tens of thousands of these devices that are pretending to be mobile phones.

Examples of ad landing pages linked to the Fengwo Group. These sites were designed to show ads only to H96 devices that were spoofing their device type as mobile phones. Image: Bitsight.

A DecryptAds legal dossier on the (now dormant) Fengwo Group domain name for the AI slop website pictured on the left in the screenshot above (medicalbeautyhub dot com) shows it shares a seller ID (1674071) with a gaming website — giacoloredstones[.]com — which features yet another seller ID (103488000).

Pivoting on that latter seller ID reveals hundreds of active websites within Russia’s Yandex ad system featuring extremely low-quality games or simple utilities that pepper visitors with ads.

QUIET REMOVALS

Edwards said that when advertising networks suspect a given advertiser is engaged in unauthentic clicks or displaying malicious ads, very often those networks will quietly remove the offender from their list of approved partners without letting anyone else know about their suspicions.

This practice, he said, makes it easier for dodgy adtech firms to avoid accountability and continue victimizing others. To address that visibility gap, DecryptAds features a quiet removals feed that records and correlates all of the sellers.json removals across ad exchanges for the same seller domain or name.

A screenshot of the Quiet Removals Feed at decryptads.com.

“The way the adtech industry works, someone will write a report about ad fraud and only share it with their own clients and they won’t make it public,” Edwards said. “The ban is just removing them from the sellers.json file, but they told nobody. One day it was there, the next it was gone. So if you’re trying to navigate who is suspicious, that’s usually tough to do because there are a lot of adtech companies removing things all at once.”

MALVERTISING AND AI SLOP

Malvertising, the term given to the practice of inserting malicious ads that foist malware or redirect visitors to phishing pages, remains an all-too-frequent occurrence in the modern adtech industry. But Edwards said these malicious ads are far more commonly found now on newly generated AI slop websites than on high traffic destinations that typically employ a variety of technologies and third party tools to quickly flag bad ads.

“None of these slop AI content farms are paying for that kind of protection,” he said. “They’re just signing up the lowest quality partners, and it essentially becomes a greased rail to target the users of those sites with malicious ads. Most malvertising attacks don’t happen on espn.com or huffpost.com, but rather [on] some lower quality content farm and someone just went there because it came up in a search.”

Edwards said the AI slop websites are populated with machine-generated blog posts and images, and cover a wide array of themes from home improvement and decorating to food recipes, hunting, cars and consumer technology. He said organizations that get hit with malicious ads are often at a loss for what to do next, unaware that in most cases the answer is one of the entities listed inside the website’s ads.txt or app-ads.txt file.

“A lot of serious organizations are starting to understand that if we’re not breaking down this ad data, we’re not going to know who’s targeting government people with zero-click payloads on an almost daily basis,” he said.

Edwards maintains that truly getting a handle on the malvertising and AI slop problems will require more data-sharing by the major ad networks. Specifically, he says those platforms do not broadly share what’s known as the “supply chain object” or SCO, structured data attached to each advertising bid request that lets buyers see every seller, reseller and intermediary involved in passing an ad impression from the publisher to the final buyer.

“That SCO tells you who sold it or resold it, and who was the final entity that bought the impression that served that malware payload,” Edwards explained. “You may see the malicious zero-click redirection, but without the supply chain object — which is only served server side — you won’t know who targeted your people with malware and won’t have a way to try and prevent it properly. But if we can encourage the adtech industry to expose that SCO, it will get easier to find the culprit behind any one bad ad.”

DecryptAds also offers an application programming interface (API) that allows researchers to automate queries and integrate the site’s functionality into popular AI platforms.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

The only sane reaction to the examples described above is to block all online ads outright. This approach is broadly endorsed by security experts because it also makes it more difficult for adtech firms and data brokers to build detailed profiles on you and track your movements around the web and in the real world.

However, much depends on how you normally prefer to browse the Internet, and how much trust you place in third party browser plugins and extensions. For those primarily surfing via a regular desktop or laptop Web browser, uBlock Origin Lite is an excellent free and well-maintained open source option. uBlock Origin also should work with mobile browsers like Firefox, but apparently only on Android-based devices.

Adblock Plus is a decent option for iPhone and iPad users. For power users, Adblock and uBlock Origin both support custom blocking rules from easylist.to, which publishes a frequently updated list that removes most advertisements from webpages.

The well established browser extension NoScript blocks all non-approved Javascript code, and it generally does a fine job blocking most ads from loading. However, script blockers like NoScript may not be suitable for average users who don’t enjoy constantly having to referee which scripts should be allowed to load so that each site displays properly.

More technically inclined/adventuresome readers should strongly consider a hardware approach to blocking ads at the local network level, because that is easily the cheapest, most secure and scalable way to do it. A tiny, low-cost and broadly available computer known as a Raspberry Pi can be turned into a powerful ad blocker for all devices on a local network when fitted with a microSD memory card and a free program called Pi-hole. Once you’ve set it up properly and changed your router’s network settings to use the Pi-hole’s DNS sinkhole and DHCP servers, it should prevent ads from displaying on any devices connected to that network.

Bear in mind that ad blockers often do little to block ads and/or tracking that occurs from within mobile apps that users have chosen to install on their devices. Many websites now push users to install a mobile app, supposedly in order to more fully access and enjoy the site’s services and content. But in my experience, they’re not doing this because the user experience is somehow way better on the app (as LinkedIn tries to convince us non-app users several times a week via email). On the contrary, I find most mobile apps to be horribly designed, annoying, and/or completely unnecessary, and when given the option I will almost always choose to interact with a website or service directly in a Web browser.

No, the cold truth is that big web destinations tend to get pushy with their apps because they make it easier for these companies to keep you on their platforms longer and to collect (and in many cases resell) far more precise data about who, what and where their users are. Also, companies pushing customers the hardest to install mobile apps always seem to liberally opt everyone in to having their data used to train large language models these days. So be cautious about the apps you install on your mobile devices (including any smart TVs!), and poke around their listings at DecryptAds if you want to learn more about their privacy practices and any relationships they may have to adtech firms.

Read More Threat actors have begun to exploit a newly disclosed Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability following the release of a proof-of-concept (PoC) code.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-55040 (CVSS score: 9.1), which refers to a critical security feature bypass that stems from weak authentication. It was patched by Microsoft as part of its July 2026 Patch Tuesday updates.

“The authentication 

Read More The North Korean threat actor known as Lazarus Group has been attributed to the zero-day exploitation of a newly patched security flaw impacting Microsoft Windows to deliver a never-before-seen backdoor targeting defense and aerospace companies across France, Germany, Brazil, and India.

The activity, per Check Point Research, is part of Operation Dream Job, a long-running cyber espionage and 

Read More A massive set of 737 free VPN and proxy extensions have been found to mainly target Russian-speaking users seeking access to blocked services with an aim to intercept browser traffic and route them through a proxy infrastructure.

The extensions, published across at least 40 Chrome Web Store developer accounts, racked up 75,486 installs. Of those identified, 274 have been found to impersonate 66 

Read More A newly disclosed flaw in the way OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google carried hidden AI reasoning between API calls let researchers recover internal reasoning and secrets from session logs, including API keys and passwords.

The weakness affected encrypted reasoning objects used by the providers’ reasoning APIs, where a block created in one session could be replayed into another and, during testing, 

Read More Enterprise defenses are tuned to catch the attacks that make noise. This year’s data shows attackers winning by making none.

According to Picus Labs’ new Blue Report 2026, which measured more than 338 million real attack simulations across actual client production environments in the first half of 2026, defenses are having one of their strongest years yet. Average prevention effectiveness 

Read More Adobe has shipped updates to address multiple critical security vulnerabilities impacting ColdFusion, Commerce, and Campaign Classic that, if successfully exploited, could result in arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation.

The most severe of the flaws are listed below –

CVE-2026-48362 (CVSS score: 10.0) – An operating system command injection vulnerability in ColdFusion that could 

Read More Threat actors have begun to actively exploit a recently patched critical security flaw in Broadcom VMware vCenter, according to new findings from QUIRSO.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-59310 (CVSS score: 9.8), a directory-traversal vulnerability in the VMware vCenter server that a malicious actor with network access can exploit to execute arbitrary code. Patches for the flaw were 

Read More Two malicious LiteLLM releases sat on PyPI for about 40 minutes in March carrying credential-stealing code capable of harvesting cloud keys, SSH keys, Kubernetes tokens, database passwords, and other secrets from systems that installed them.

Threat intelligence firm CloudSEK now says a dataset it obtained, built from roughly 434,000 files the attackers captured, maps potential exposure to more 

Read More SAP has released patches to address a maximum-severity security flaw impacting Commerce Cloud (Data Hub Adapter) that could result in arbitrary code execution.

The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-58231, is rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It has been described as a case of insufficient authorization checks and input validation.

“SAP Commerce Cloud allows an 

Read More The security researcher going by the name Chaotic Eclipse (aka INFINITE NIGHTMARE, MSNightmare, and Nightmare-Eclipse) has released a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a new Microsoft zero-day called ShieldBreak.

The vulnerability, rooted in Microsoft Defender for Windows, demonstrates a patch bypass for CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score: 7.8), otherwise known as RoguePlanet.

RoguePlanet has been described 

Read More Cisco has warned that a new vulnerability impacting Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software has been exploited in the wild.

The high-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20349 (CVSS score: 8.6), is a case of insufficient error checking when processing HTTP requests that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger 

Read More 

Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including one weakness that is already being actively exploited and two others that were publicly detailed prior to today.

Image: Shutterstock, Mallika Home Studio.

August’s overstuffed bundle of patch joy from Microsoft did not eclipse its recording breaking release of more than 570 security updates last month, but it is double June’s then-record batch of nearly 200 fixes. Microsoft has attributed the recent patch deluge to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence, and experts roundly agree that Windows users should get used to the idea of Patch Tuesdays (the second Tuesday of each month) covering hundreds of newly discovered security flaws.

Fully 42 of the 398 flaws that Microsoft patched today earned Redmond’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they are severe enough that malware or malcontents could exploit them to gain remote control over a Windows computer with little to no help from the user.

The sole known “zero day” bug fixed by Microsoft this month is CVE-2026-68820, a privilege escalation weakness in a core Windows component called afd.sys, which the security firm Automox describes as “the driver behind Windows socket connections on effectively every endpoint.”

“This isn’t a front-door bug,” Automox’s Landon Miles wrote in a Patch Tuesday blog post. “It’s step two in a chain: an attacker phishes their way into a low-privilege foothold, then uses the driver flaw to take the box. The 7.0 score reflects the high attack complexity, because race conditions are fiddly. The exploit has to be thrown over and over until the timing lands. Someone is clearly landing it anyway.”

CVE-2026-62832 is another privilege escalation flaw that Microsoft has labeled likely to be exploited; this flaw, in the Windows User Profile Service, may be related to the recent “LegacyHive” public disclosure from the prolific bug hunter known as Nightmare Eclipse. The other publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-72971, a low-impact local tampering vulnerability that Microsoft reckons is unlikely to be exploited.

Other major software makers are likewise increasing their patch volumes and cadence thanks to AI, including Adobe which last month moved to twice-monthly security bulletins published on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month. Cisco, Google, Mozilla and Oracle also are shipping updates far more frequently and abundantly.

By all accounts, AI is quite good at finding security holes in software. But for now at least, patching the resulting bugpocalypse remains a heavily human-centric endeavor, and the jury is still out on whether AI technologies will turn out to be as good at fixing vulnerabilities as they are at finding and exploiting them. This is an important question when one considers that these same AI technologies also are suggesting fixes for the vulnerabilities they find.

Researchers at 1Password recently examined what happens when different large language models (LLMs) generate vulnerability patches for newly disclosed, complex vulnerabilities. They found the LLMs produced patches that failed to fix the flaw or added a new weakness in the process (or both) more than half the time.

Ed Skoudis, president of the SANS Technology Institute, said his team has seen excellent results using AI to generate patches, provided there are humans in the loop to test the suggested fixes and push for iterative improvements.

“AI is rapidly becoming astonishingly good at finding vulnerabilities, but this research shows that fixing them is a very different problem,” Skoudis wrote in a SANS newsletter today. “Don’t expect one-shot AI patching to work reliably. Instead, iterate, test, challenge, improve, and verify. AI can be an extraordinary patching partner, but today it still needs a skilled human at the keyboard.”

Tyler Reguly at Fortra says while reports of Microsoft patching hundreds of vulnerabilities in one go have prompted some organizations to try to patch faster, it’s important to bear in mind that only one of the almost 400 bugs addressed today is known to be actively exploited. Reguly suggested security leaders check in with their teams to see how they’re handling the increasing workloads, which often involve testing fixes before deploying them in production environments.

“If you’re a chief security officer talk to your teams about how they are shifting or modifying their workflows to better accommodate the patching shift that we’re seeing and support them across various organizational units by enabling the changes they want to see made,” Reguly said. “There’s no need to rush these updates, no matter what various vendors and organizations try to tell you. You need to make sure that you are rolling out safe updates that will not negatively impact your systems.”

Speaking of the humans behind the keyboards, don’t neglect to backup your system and/or data before applying this month’s monster patch load. The day after each month’s Patch Tuesday is sometimes derisively referred to as Reboot Wednesday, but it generally doesn’t hurt to wait a few days to apply these huge update bundles because it sometimes takes a couple of days for the occasional misbehaving patch to get ironed out properly by Microsoft.

For a clickable, per-patch breakdown by severity and urgency, check out this roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center.

Read More Microsoft released its monthly security updates on Tuesday, and one of the flaws it closed is already being used in attacks.

The bug sits in a core Windows kernel driver that handles network socket operations. An attacker with code already running on a machine can use it to escalate to SYSTEM. That patch goes out first.

The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS score: 7.0) and is the only 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new version of the Kimwolf/AISURU Android and Internet of Things (IoT) botnet that comes with significant improvements to improve its operational resilience and conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

The new version, tracked as Kimwolf v7, was discovered by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in February 2026.

“Kimwolf v7 adds an HTTP/2-based 

Read More Anyone sharing their screen on a Zoom call could have taken over the computers of everyone watching, and anyone watching could have taken over the presenter’s.

The flaw sat in the annotation tool, the feature that lets participants draw and type on a shared screen, and it asked nothing of the victim beyond being in the meeting. No click, no download, no prompt, and nothing on screen to show it 

Read More The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has disclosed details of a new social engineering campaign orchestrated by Russian nation-state threat actors targeting IT workers in the country by masquerading as recruiters to trick them into installing malware.

CERT-UA pinned the activity on a threat cluster it tracks as UAC-0145, which is a subgroup within Sandworm (aka APT44, 

Read More Security researchers found a way to enter Microsoft SharePoint servers as any user, including an administrator, with no valid account. A significant part of the work that found it was done through an AI agent.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-55040 (CVSS 9.1), affects SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, SharePoint Server 2019, and SharePoint Server 2016. Microsoft’s 

Read More The ransomware group known as DeadLock has been observed using decentralized infrastructure to facilitate victim communications and data leak operations in a bid to improve operational resilience.

“Its recovery ecosystem combines the Session messaging network with blockchain-backed services that store and deliver resources used throughout the extortion process,” the Microsoft Threat 

Read More Attackers shut down a steam turbine and the process-water treatment system at a Polish combined heat and power plant by coming in over the private cellular network the local grid operator uses to reach remote equipment.

The plant supplies heat to roughly 50,000 residents. Recovery began at about 7:30 a.m. while the intruders were still active inside the network, and customers lost neither heat 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a supply chain compromise impacting WordPress plugin vendor BdThemes, prompting the content management systems (CMS) platform’s plugins team to temporarily disable their downloads.

“Unlike traditional software supply chain attacks, zero source code files were modified within the official WordPress.org repository,” Wordfence researcher Paolo Tresso said. 

Read More AI is helping development teams produce far more code, far faster. But security teams still have to review vulnerabilities, manage dependencies, prioritize fixes, and control risk at human speed.

When software output jumps 10 to 50 times, the problem is no longer just finding vulnerabilities. It is keeping security from becoming the bottleneck, or worse, losing control of what gets shipped. 

Read More Microsoft has disclosed that Storm-1175, a financially motivated threat actor linked to China, has deployed a previously undocumented ransomware strain called StormEncryptor.

The use of StormEncryptor marks a shift from the adversary’s previous use of Medusa ransomware, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Team said.

“StormEncryptor is written in C++ and appends the file name extension .encrypted 

Read More A lot of security problems still begin with someone doing a completely normal thing. Cloning a repo. Answering a call. Leaving a box exposed. Trusting the default.

That pretty much covers the mood this week. Old bugs are back, supply chains are getting stranger, and some exploit paths are so short you wonder what was supposed to stop them in the first place.

That’s only part of it. Here’s 

Read More North Korea’s state hackers are no longer content to type prompts into public chatbots. One of the country’s main espionage groups has begun running artificial intelligence (AI) offline on its own servers, connecting document-search tools to files in its possession, and collecting the software parts needed to build AI into its malware.

South Korean security firm Genians says it uncovered the 

Read More Three separate research efforts last week demonstrated ways to defeat passkey protections without breaking the cryptography they rest on.

Passkeys are designed to replace reusable passwords and resist phishing. The attacks instead reused signed authentication material that Windows had exposed, abused a cloud-synced passkey system from malware already on the victim’s machine, and used a  

Read More The threat actor known as Head Mare has been observed weaponizing security flaws in unpatched TrueConf servers once again in attacks targeting Russian companies spanning instrumentation, electronics, transport, energy, IT, and software development sectors.

Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said it detected the attacks in July 2026.

The activity involves exploiting a vulnerability chain 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension named Solidity Pro (“solidity-pro”) that has been observed delivering a browser wallet and credential stealer.

The names of the extensions are below –

helper-beeps.solidity-pro
web3devtoolsx.solidity-pro

Although neither of the extensions is now available on Open VSX, the GitHub repository 

Read More OpenAI has announced that it’s pausing some “internal activities” involving its upcoming artificial intelligence (AI) model Astra after an internal evaluation found it had made significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity.

In response to the discovery, the AI upstart said it’s implementing security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities, such as isolated 

Read More Attacker-controlled instructions can make Atlassian’s Rovo assistant collect Jira or Confluence data that a signed-in user can access, then send it to an outside server. Two security firms found that behavior independently, by different routes. Only one of those routes is confirmed closed.

PromptArmor, an AI security firm, hid the instructions in content Rovo reads. It said an uploaded file was 

Read More New research shows content inside an email can escape its message boundary and interfere with the webmail interface.

Across attack chains spanning Outlook, Gmail, Fastmail, Proton Mail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail, the techniques can capture passwords, take over third-party accounts, leak tokens, hijack trusted UI actions, and manipulate AI tools that read email.

PortSwigger researcher Gareth 

Read More Metabase has warned that a maximum-severity security flaw impacting its business intelligence and data visualization software package has been exploited in the wild as a zero-day.

The vulnerability (CVSS score: 10.0), which does not carry a CVE identifier, allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to inject arbitrary SQL into the Metabase application database, enabling them to gain 

Read More N-able has released a fresh round of hotfixes for N‑central as part of its investigation into ongoing exploitation of a recently disclosed security flaw in the Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) product.

“We are proactively expanding protections in response to ongoing monitoring of threat actors as they evolve their attack techniques,” the company said.

“This is not a duplicate of our 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added a critical-severity security flaw impacting Progress Kemp LoadMaster to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-8037 (CVSS score: 9.6), is a command injection flaw that could be weaponized to achieve arbitrary 

Read More A cluster of nearly 800 malicious packages has been published to the npm registry as part of a new campaign designed to deliver cross-platform malware targeting Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

“These packages appear to use AI slop squatted, or randomly generated typo-squatting package names, but all of them deliver a powerful RAT and infostealer payload,” OpenSourceMalware researcher Paul 

Read More ClickFix-style attacks are being used to deliver a Go-based malware capable of stealing cryptocurrency assets, as well as browser-stored passwords, Apple iCloud Keychain data, and cached credentials.

The macOS-focused infection chain is designed to deliver a shell script that profiles the host and then fetches a macOS malware payload that’s compatible with the computer’s CPU architecture.

” 

Read More A recent wave of cyber attacks targeting financial services, private equity, and professional services has been attributed to a data extortion group known as UNC6671.

“UNC6671 continues to rely on voice phishing (vishing) to target enterprise employees, posing as IT help desk staff facilitating mandatory, urgent security migrations. Significantly, the threat actor often contacts employees via 

Read More WordPress has fixed a pre-authentication reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in its login screen that affects every version of the content management system. pwn.ai demonstrated how the flaw can be chained into PHP code execution on the server when a logged-in administrator interacts with an attacker-controlled page.

Tracked as CVE-2026-64638 (CVSS score: 8.9), the high-severity 

Read More Open Source had a great childhood.

For two decades it got to be a kid. It ran around barefoot, gave everything away, trusted strangers, and never once thought about who was watching. It ran the kind of lemonade stand that took IOUs from anyone who wandered up — take what you need, pay me back whenever, no need to leave a name. It was idyllic. It was also, in retrospect, a little feral.

Then, 

Read More A use-after-free bug in Linux’s SCTP networking code can be turned into full root on a host, and Tencent researchers say they used it to escape a container and reach the machine underneath.

The flaw has existed since 2008. The fix already shipped: stable kernels 7.1.6, 6.18.42, 6.12.101 and 6.6.148, released August 3, close it. Anyone running an older kernel with SCTP reachable should update. 

Read More Security researcher Malcolm Stagg has disclosed a new attack class called NatJack that manipulates network address translation (NAT) connection state to hijack active TCP sessions, spoof DNS responses, expose mapped ports, and exhaust NAT tables.

Presented at Black Hat USA 2026, the research found affected behavior across independently developed implementations, including Windows and 

Read More Security researcher Malcolm Stagg has disclosed a new attack class called NatJack that manipulates network address translation (NAT) connection state to hijack active TCP sessions, spoof DNS responses, disclose victim IP addresses and mapped ports, and exhaust NAT tables.

Presented at Black Hat USA 2026, Stagg said the techniques were demonstrated across network infrastructure devices 

Read More A GitHub issue opened by an account with no repository privileges was enough to execute code on the CI runners behind Anthropic’s and Google’s own coding-agent repositories. On OpenAI’s, it was enough to hijack the next agent run.

Novee Security ran the attack against each vendor’s agent in the configuration that the vendor ships by default, and presented the work at Black Hat USA on August 5. 

Read More A new analysis has uncovered that the threat actor tracked as TeamPCP has been active on the cybercrime scene as far back as 2020, indicating the group has been compromising internet-facing infrastructure for years before training their sights on the software supply chain.

“The connection is supported by overlapping domains, malware deployment paths, staging techniques, backend infrastructure, 

Read More Zapscape, a new Linux kernel vulnerability, could allow an attacker with kernel privileges inside an L1 guest virtual machine (VM) to escape KVM isolation and execute code on the host. The risk applies when nested virtualization is exposed to untrusted guests.

The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-64561 and affects KVM/x86’s shadow memory management unit (MMU), which manages shadow page 

Read More Cisco has rolled out updates to address multiple critical security vulnerabilities impacting Catalyst SD-WAN and IOS XE Software as part of a comprehensive internal security review.

The security issues affect Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Software, regardless of device configuration, and Cisco IOS XE Software when it is running in autonomous or controller mode.

“These vulnerabilities were found 

Read More 

A 26-year-old Canadian man once described as one of the most consequential cybercrime threat actors of 2024 has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to hack and extort more than 165 organizations that used the cloud provider Snowflake. Connor Riley Moucka, of Kitchener, Ontario, also admitted to stealing call and text history records of more than 100 million AT&T customers.

A surveillance photo of Connor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische” and “Waifu,” dated Oct 21, 2024, 9 days before Moucka’s arrest. This image was included in an affidavit filed by an investigator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

The U.S. Justice Department said between February and October 2024, Moucka and co-conspirators used stolen login credentials to steal cloud-hosted data belonging to at least 165 customers of a U.S.-based software-as-a-service company.

The hackers targeted stolen credentials for Snowflake customer accounts that did not enforce multi-factor authentication, and extorted or attempted to extort a host of well-known companies, including TicketMaster, Lending Tree, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus. Snowflake responded to the data thefts by increasing password complexity requirements and enforcing multi-factor authentication.

Moucka adopted new nicknames frequently — sometimes operating multiple identities concurrently — but two of his best-known monikers were “Judische” and “Waifu.” Judische’s admitted role in the Snowflake data thefts was first documented by KrebsOnSecurity in a September 2024 story about the overlap between Western, English-speaking cybercriminals and extremist groups that harass and extort minors into harming themselves or others.

That September 2024 story identified Judische as a software engineer from Ontario who has been involved in numerous data breaches and voice phishing attacks against U.S. companies since at least 2020. A little more than a month later, Canadian authorities arrested Moucka on a provisional warrant from the United States.

The government says Moucka and others used their unauthorized access to steal billions of sensitive customer records and download terabytes of information, “including individuals’ non-content call and text history records, banking and other financial information, payroll records, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registration numbers, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, social security numbers and other personally identifiable information. They then extorted victims by threatening to publish data online.”

Moucka also threatened and harassed government officials and security researchers who were helping to track him down. The Justice Department said the conspirators made over $2.5 million in ransom payments, and that in at least one instance, Moucka re-extorted a victim with threats of further disclosure of the victim’s stolen data.

“Moucka used the stolen data of a government officer and members of a then-former government officer’s immediate family in this re-extortion attempt,” reads a statement from the Justice Department.

One of Moucka’s admitted co-conspirators is Cameron “Kiberphant0m” Wagenius, a U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty in July 2025 to extorting AT&T and Verizon for their customer account data. Less than a month before Wagenius’s arrest, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into Kiberphant0m’s various Telegram and Discord identities over the years, revealing how the owner of the accounts told others they were in the Army and stationed in South Korea.

One of several selfies on the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius.

Kiberphant0m also re-extorted victims. Immediately following Moucka’s arrest, Kiberphant0m posted on hacker forums what he claimed were the AT&T call logs for then President-elect Donald Trump and for then Vice President Kamala Harris, as well schematics allegedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Wagenius is set to be sentenced on September 3, 2026. The government says he faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a maximum penalty of five years in prison for extortion in relation to computer fraud, and a mandatory two-year sentence consecutive to any other prison time for aggravated identity theft.

The third alleged co-conspirator is John Erin Binns, 26, an elusive American man who fled the United States after being indicted for his admitted role in a 2021 breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76 million customers.

Sources close to the investigation said Binns, also known as “IRDev” and “IntelSecrets,” was until recently incarcerated in a Turkish prison, but that he has since been released and has resurfaced online. Those sources said Binns also recently obtained Turkish citizenship, and under Turkish law a citizen cannot be extradited to a foreign country.

An image of a passport that Binns shared in an email to KrebsOnSecurity in Feb. 2023.

Moucka pleaded guilty to four criminal counts, including computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy. He is slated to be sentenced on Oct. 27 and faces a mandatory minimum penalty of two years in prison on the aggravated identity theft count, as well as a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison on the remaining counts. Ultimately, it will be up the federal judge how much time Moucka actually serves for his extensive cybercriminal rap sheet.

For an interview with Moucka prior to his arrest and a deeper look at Binns, see our original report on Moucka’s arrest.

Read More An unprivileged Linux program can time a hardware interrupt to land in the gap between a processor sanitizing its branch predictor and the kernel using it, re-poisoning the predictor after the defense has run.

MIT CSAIL researchers Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan named the technique INTERRUPT INJECTION. On an AMD Zen 2 machine running Linux 6.14 with every default Spectre v2 mitigation on, 

Read More Apparently, opening the thing is now enough. A repo can run before the first prompt, a package can hide among hundreds, and a harmless-looking PDF can finish the job.

This week runs on cheap leverage: exposed servers, recycled bugs, poisoned agent instructions, remote-access tools dressed as support software, and trusted defaults doing attackers a favor.

Nothing here is especially mystical. 

Read More Forescout found 22 internet-facing Rockwell Automation programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in cities hit by recent cyberattacks on US water utilities. Nineteen used the same mobile carrier network.

Its August 3 scan counted 4,407 exposed Rockwell controllers worldwide, including 2,844 in the United States, but Forescout could not confirm any were compromised. That figure counts exposed 

Read More Coinspect has identified CryptoJS.lib.WordArray.random() as the weak random number generator behind the Ill Bloom wallet drains.

Introduced in the JavaScript cryptography library 12 years ago, the function supplied weak entropy that affected wallet apps used to generate recovery phrases. Coinspect’s on-chain analysis puts the measured theft across two sweeps since late May at a lower bound of 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security issue with Apple’s iCloud Private Relay tool that can expose a user’s real IP address.

Introduced with iOS 15, iCloud Private Relay employs a dual-hop architecture to ensure users’ privacy by routing their Safari web traffic through two relays so that no single third-party, including Apple, can determine where the request is originating from 

Read More Attackers broke into an organization’s Oracle database through a SQL injection flaw in a public-facing web application, then installed a post-exploitation toolkit without writing an executable to disk. They fed Java source code to the database, let Oracle compile it into stored schema objects, and ran commands from inside the database engine.

Huntress, which tracks the toolkit as khunt, 

Read More Security flaws in agent infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Vercel let untrusted or forged instructions reach an agent’s tools with no check that a model turn had authorized them.

In several of the attack paths, the model never ran at all, so system prompts, content filters, and model-level guardrails never got a chance to intervene.

The affected products include Amazon 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a “factory-shipped backdoor” implanted in at least 20 Chinese router models from Zbtlink.

According to a new report from VulnCheck, the implant appears in all 21 firmware images currently available from Zbtlink that span more than 2 years. The backdoors are designed such that they start automatically and attempt to beacon to Chinese 

Read More A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, sentenced Maksim Silnikau to 16 years in prison on August 5 for creating and running Ransom Cartel, the ransomware-as-a-service operation he stood up in 2021.

Between 2021 and 2023, Ransom Cartel conspirators attacked at least 18 companies, including firms in California, New York and Nebraska, and others abroad, according to the Justice Department. 

Read More A newly patched security flaw impacting on-premise versions of JetBrains TeamCity has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-63077 (CVSS score: 9.8), a case of deserialization of untrusted data that could allow an unauthenticated attacker with access to a TeamCity server 

Read More Connor Riley Moucka pleaded guilty in Seattle federal court on Wednesday to computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and a related conspiracy over the 2024 breaches of Snowflake customer accounts.

The intrusions reached at least 165 organizations and exposed records belonging to at least 100 million people. Moucka, 26, of Kitchener, Ontario, personally took at least $495,000 from 

Read More A macOS ClickFix operation spanning more than 250 front-end domains now fingerprints visitors before deciding whether to show them a malware lure, a change Microsoft Threat Intelligence tracked on infrastructure it had been watching for weeks.

The server-side gate hides the malicious page from crawlers and sandboxes while presenting selected Mac users with a fake software download. Microsoft 

Read More OpenAI said it disrupted a Cambodia-based scam operation that used its generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT to facilitate a wide range of investment, romance, gambling, and law enforcement impersonation schemes.

To that end, it banned a coordinated network of ChatGPT accounts likely originating from Southeast Asia and operating from the city of Poipet, a region with extensive 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered more than half-a-dozen services advertisements for illegal access to artificial intelligence (AI) models on underground cybercrime forums and messaging platforms.

One such service, Poison Claude, claims to offer access to Anthropic’s large language models (LLMs), including Opus 4.8, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.6, and Sonnet 4.6.

“Advertisements for Poison Claude 

Read More Two security flaws in Paperclip could let attackers execute commands on a network server or a developer’s computer. Paperclip is an open-source control plane for teams of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, and both paths rely on importing a malicious agent and starting it.

A third flaw could expose sensitive data and control-plane details through application programming interface (API) routes 

Read More HashiCorp, Veeam, and the Django Software Foundation have patched 11 vulnerabilities across Terraform MCP Server, Veeam Service Provider Console, and Django.

The three most serious:

An unauthenticated flaw in Veeam’s console that hands over a managed agent’s credentials, rated 9.5
A cross-tenant flaw in HashiCorp’s MCP server that lets one user’s Terraform token be reused for later users’ 

Read More An agent running Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 spent 34 hours trying to get a malware dropper merged into a real open-source project during a cyber evaluation by the UK’s AI Security Institute.

When a bystander publicly warned that the code was malicious, the agent denied it, force-pushed a rewritten branch history to erase the evidence, and posted from a second account it controlled to vouch for 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), on August 5, 2026, added three flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild.

The list of vulnerabilities is as follows –

CVE-2026-9198 (CVSS score: 9.8) – A code injection vulnerability in Langflow that allows unauthenticated attackers to achieve full remote 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what has been described as a “long-standing supply chain attack” on QuickFox, a virtual private network (VPN) and network acceleration tool designed for overseas Chinese users.

According to Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, the supply chain attack has been ongoing since at least August 2025 and involves a trojanized version of the application to deliver FDMTP, a 

Read More The commercial phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit known as Greatness has become the latest crimeware solution to add support for device code phishing, a rapidly growing cyber threat that abuses the legitimate OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant to bypass Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and seize control of user accounts.

“Greatness supports AiTM [adversary-in-the-middle] credential and 

Read More A credential-stealing npm worm that first appeared in keyv@6.0.0 spread beyond the Keyv and Cacheable namespaces into hundreds of packages across multiple organizations on August 4, 2026.

SafeDep verified 353 poisoned versions across 79 package names in the npm registry. Its monitoring put the wider footprint at 442 versions across 353 names, while Aikido later reported at least 868 packages 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active, multi-wave campaign that employs social engineering lures themed around Adobe and Zoom software updates, business document reviews, and system maintenance utilities to stealthily deploy Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) programs like ConnectWise ScreenConnect.

The campaign has been codenamed SMOKE#SCREEN by Securonix Threat 

Read More The cybersecurity industry has spent decades assuming that offensive capability scales with technical expertise.

That assumption is starting to break.

Security teams have long estimated risk by ranking attacker sophistication. Nation-state actors sat at one end. Organized criminal groups followed. Inexperienced attackers, dismissed as “script kiddies,” sat at the other end, running public 

Read More Google deleted three AI agent workflows from its Agent Development Kit (ADK) Python repository. Pillar Security showed that a public GitHub issue could manipulate a triage agent into triggering a privileged code-fixing agent.

The researchers said the public agent could be prompt-injected into posting /adk-issue-fix as adk-bot. They identified the bot as a collaborator, so that comment satisfied 

Read More cPanel has patched a flaw that let an authenticated hosting customer execute SQL in the database’s root context, crossing the privilege boundary between a cPanel account and the server’s administrative database identity. It shipped in a targeted security release that closes two other routes past account boundaries.

The database bug is tracked as CVE-2026-58048 (CVSS 4.0 score: 9.4) and affects 

Read More A new Russian loader-as-a-service (LaaS) codenamed DOUBLECUP has been using ClickFix lures as a way to stage malware-laced PNG images in victims’ browser cache and ultimately deliver CountLoader and a previously undocumented remote access trojan called DeviceManager.

“The first stage drops a steganographic PNG image into the browser’s cache, retrieves its hidden content, and executes the second 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a high-severity security flaw impacting N-able N-central to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog following reports of active exploitation in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-18577 (CVSS score: 8.2), is a case of incomplete patching for CVE-2026-18556 (CVSS score: 8.2) that allows 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new set of malicious npm packages that target users of Alibaba developer tools with a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) as part of a sophisticated, targeted software supply chain attack targeting Chinese-speaking environments.

One of the packages in question is “lib-mtop,” an unscoped package with the same name as a private Alibaba package 

Read More Malware running as an ordinary user on a Windows machine can sign into a victim’s passkey-protected accounts without a fingerprint, a PIN, or anything at all appearing on the victim’s screen.

Unit 42 detailed three attack paths against Chrome’s Google Password Manager cloud authenticator, which it calls Pass-ta-key, Silver Pass-ta-key and Golden Pass-ta-key; the strongest targets the master key 

Read More The INC Ransomware operation has emerged as the “dominant threat actor” exploiting the recently disclosed security flaws in SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series VPN appliances.

In a report published over the weekend, Resecurity said it observed the INC Ransomware accelerating its activity since the beginning of August 2026, listing multiple victims on its data leak site. Per 

Read More This week kept coming back to permission. A model crossed a boundary. A wallet trusted bad randomness. Webmail kept an intruder around. Public systems, package feeds, hotel networks, and login flows all gave away more than intended.

Some of it was clever. Most of it was just access left lying around: old bugs, exposed gear, poisoned dependencies, weak defaults, and tooling that moved from 

Read More AI is moving incredibly fast, and every security leader is feeling the pressure to keep up.

AI platforms like Claude, Codex and Cursor are already helping security teams write detections, investigate alerts, summarize incidents, and automate repetitive work. The conversation has evolved from whether AI belongs in the SOC, to where each type of AI delivers the most value.

With so many new AI 

Read More An unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor has been observed running a campaign targeting Apple iOS devices by leveraging a publicly leaked version of the DarkSword exploit kit.

Attack surface management platform Censys said it identified the threat actor running more than 100 web properties, most of which are fake Amazon Web Services (AWS) sign-in pages on a domain that also hosts the exploit 

Read More The Police National Legal Database (PNLD) has confirmed that police, government and customer contact information was compromised and published on the dark web.

The data included names, organisations and work email addresses belonging to police officers, police staff, criminal justice professionals, government partners and customers.

The incident, identified on July 26, also exposed some names 

Read More Thermo Fisher Scientific has patched a flaw in select Applied Biosystems human identification software that could allow data files to be altered before analysis software loads them.

The vendor’s July 31 security bulletin says nearly undetectable changes to .fsa and .hid outputs could occur if laboratory controls are circumvented.

Thermo Fisher tracks the issue as CVE-2026-17583 and rates it 

Read More N-able said attackers exploited an authentication bypass in N-central to gain remote administrative access and reach the customer systems managed through those servers.

Its first fix was incomplete. CVE-2026-18577 affects N-central builds prior to 2026.3.1.7. N-able shipped build 2026.3.1.7 on August 2 as the first unaffected version.

N-central is the remote monitoring and management platform 

Read More Three high-severity security flaws have been disclosed in Hugging Face’s Diffusers library that could allow crafted model repositories to stealthily execute arbitrary code on machines that load it, opening the artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain to security risk.

“These vulnerabilities are bypassing trust_remote_code, the safeguard designed to stop unreviewed code from running in the 

Read More An attacker drained 1,196 Bitcoin addresses in 41 minutes on July 30, taking 1,082.65 BTC worth about $70.2 million at the time. Galaxy Research mapped the sweep and tied it to a firmware flaw in Coldcard, the Bitcoin-only hardware wallet made by Canadian firm Coinkite.

A March 2021 firmware integration error routed seed generation to a deterministic software pseudorandom number generator (PRNG 

Read More Attackers modified a JavaScript file served by advertising technology company Adform, turning it into a browser-side tool that rewrites cryptocurrency wallet addresses.

Adform detected the incident on July 27, 2026, removed the malicious code, notified affected clients, and reported it to authorities.

Anyone who visited a site carrying the affected script on July 27 and copied a Bitcoin, 

Read More Adobe has released security updates to address a maximum-severity security flaw in Campaign Classic (ACC), its enterprise-focused marketing automation platform, that could result in arbitrary code execution.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-48449, carries a severity score of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system.

It has been described as a case of incorrect authorization that could result in 

Read More A fake browser update served over hijacked hotel Wi-Fi has been used to deliver CornFlake, a remote access trojan (RAT) that can capture webcam images, microphone audio, and keystrokes, Microsoft said in its latest report.

Researchers track the operation as CaptiveCrunch and attribute it to Storm-2945. It assesses Storm-2945 to be an operational sub-cluster of Midnight Blizzard, also known as 

Read More A Chinese-speaking threat actor is suspected to be behind a fresh wave of cyber attacks targeting government organizations mainly located in Central Asia, including Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the Syrian Arab Republic, since January 2025.

These targeted organizations operate across several sectors, such as healthcare, research, government offices, 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented Go-based loader framework called HollowFrame and a Rust-based malware family tracked as Matryoshka.

According to Blackpoint Cyber, the intrusion sequence begins with a spear-phishing message containing a link to an encrypted archive, which holds a Windows Shortcut (LNK). Executing the file triggers a multi-stage chain that 

Read More Bitsight says some cheap Android TV boxes have shipped with apps that rewrite their hardware identity to mimic Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, or Vivo phones, then click ads on websites run by the same operators.

Researchers named the operation Fuyao and attributed it to Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd., a mainland China company founded in 2019.

The same apps have a second job. When a box 

Read More Google on Thursday announced that it fixed a whopping 1,072 security bugs in Chrome versions 149 and 150, surpassing the total number of flaws the company fixed across the prior 23 milestones combined.

Both versions were released last month. In its latest patch for Chrome 151, released Wednesday, the tech giant resolved 370 flaws, out of which 349 were reported by Google itself. Seven of the 

Read More An academic study has disclosed a “widespread class” of security vulnerabilities impacting 4G and 5G core networks that, if successfully exploited, could trigger denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and even session hijacking, allowing an attacker to seize control of a user’s network session.

The findings have been released by a group of researchers from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University 

Read More Device code phishing – the abuse of the OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant to steal access tokens – has evolved from a niche red-team technique to an industrial-scale threat in under six months.

Designed for input-constrained devices like smart TVs, printers, and so on, the device authorization login flow has been adopted by a wide range of apps and use-cases that it wasn’t originally 

Read More Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 says a Chinese-speaking threat actor used DeepSeek through the open-source Hermes Agent framework to launch attacks autonomously.

After an initial Telegram instruction, the agent found internet-facing systems and selected public exploits. The researchers recovered no further operator input in the session.

The operator, tracked through the aliases knaithe and KnYuan, 

Read More Anthropic on Thursday became the latest artificial intelligence (AI) company to reveal that three of its models, including Claude Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an unnamed research model, had breached three unnamed organizations during cybersecurity testing without its knowledge.

The AI firm said the earliest incidents date back to April 2026, adding it made the discoveries after launching a ” 

Read More Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been attributed to a sophisticated macOS malvertising campaign that involves redirecting users to fake web pages displaying a full-screen non-existent update sequence to deliver malware as part of a new iteration of the long-running Contagious Interview campaign.

The defining aspect of the attack is that bogus macOS software update screen stealthily 

Read More 

Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user’s Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated websites as part of a sprawling operation that seeks to defraud online merchants and advertising networks.

Pedro Falé is a threat researcher with the security firm Bitsight. Falé told KrebsOnSecurity he was able to peer inside a vast and complex ad fraud network by registering an expired domain name that was used to coordinate fake ad clicks across a particularly popular brand of these streaming devices known as H96.

An H96 TV streaming device currently advertised for sale on Amazon.

Falé said the domain he scooped up was previously used for telemetry, periodically collecting full hardware information and the entire list of installed apps from tens of thousands of H96 streaming sticks plugged into television sets around the globe. But upon inspecting the traffic being funneled to the domain, he discovered nearly all of the TV boxes transmitting data claimed to be mobile phone models from a variety of manufacturers, including Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, and Xiaomi.

“We noticed something was wildly wrong,” Falé said. “Multiple devices reporting to this factory Android TV Box backdoor were ‘phones.’”

Image: Bitsight.

The researcher found all of the devices reported having the same two apps installed, and that those apps were made by a company called Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Ltd, an entity founded in 2019 in mainland China which operates an ad-publishing portfolio under the name Fengwo Group. Further investigation into the Fengwo Group revealed it has registered multiple patents that match the inner workings of these apps.

“Bitsight TRACE identified several Hong Kong, Singapore, and single person ‘legal’ shell identities used to collect the monetization and traced the operation back to a mainland China company known as Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd, which operates under the Fengwo Group,” Falé wrote in a report released today about their findings.

Falé said an analysis of the apps shows they help to coordinate an ad fraud network that uses these H96 devices as a captive traffic source to click on ads at AI-generated websites operated by the Fengwo Group.

Bitsight discovered the websites contain machine-generated news articles and graphics across a range of categories, including finance, health, education, gaming, music and food blogs. But they also found none of those sites displayed ads unless the device visiting the page matched the spoofed mobile profile of these H96 devices.

AI DIGITAL HUMANS

The domain for the Fengwo Group — fwgcloud[.]com — claims the company is “redefining the boundaries of human-AI interaction,” and that it has created more than 120,000 “AI digital humans” available to rent for everything from emotional companionship to 24/7 customer service and creative design.

The homepage for fwgcloud dot com.

Falé said the Fengwo Group’s domain shared its SSL certificate data with other domains associated with the apps found on H96 devices, specifically the phone spoofing mechanism. He noted the domain also has an internal wiki platform that directly ties the Fengwo Group to a proprietary implementation of a Google-built visual programming language called Blockly, which was originally designed to help kids learn how to write software.

According to Bitsight, the Fengwo Group’s employees use Blockly to build the sham websites, allowing low-skilled operators to drag blocks of code together in their Blockly editor — without any need to understand what the underlying code blocks do or how they work.

The Blockly homepage.

“An operator can drag blocks together in their Blockly editor, to define each fraud routine, given a task type,” reads Bitsight’s report. “Once the routine is saved, it gets exported as JavaScript and uploaded to the S3 buckets. An operator doesn’t need as much understanding of the underlying technicalities, as it is all set in place for ease of use.”

Bitsight even found one of the Fengwo Group app developers mentioning exactly these advantages, noting the developer remarked that “only a small number of highly-skilled developers are needed to build the template execution-unit images,” and that “developers who create execution units from those templates have significantly lower technical requirements, greatly reducing the company’s operating costs.”

Falé said if a user’s H96 streaming stick is selected for a specific fraud task, it will be pushed the appropriate Blockly module according to the task desired, which can include silently launching a web browser, visiting websites, browsing pages, managing tabs, and clicking on ads.

To ensure the TV boxes masquerading as mobile phones can reliably click on ads displayed via the AI-generated websites, the Fengwo group “fuses three vision and reasoning systems into a single interface,” allowing the bots to correctly identify an ad on the webpage and navigate the site much like a human would, the Bitsight report observed.

Examples of ad landing pages linked to the Fengwo Group. Image: Bitsight.

TV ON? PROXY. TV OFF? AD FRAUD

Bitsight found the H96 devices were either relaying residential proxy traffic or participating in ad fraud, but never both at the same time. In fact, they concluded that when these TV boxes detect an HDMI signal from an attached television — indicating the user intends to stream video content — the box is usually functioning as a residential proxy. When the TV is off, it switches back to waiting for ad fraud jobs.

Falé said he believes the TV boxes are set up this way because its ad fraud activities are far more resource intensive and could interfere with the device’s stated purpose — streaming video content over the Internet.

Despite repeated warnings from the FBI and security industry leaders about the security and privacy risks of using these streaming devices, major e-commerce providers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and others continue to sell hundreds of different models and brands that bundle unofficial versions of Google’s Android operating system and are frequently marketed (via online influencers) as a way to access a broad array of streaming services and live broadcasts without a subscription.

Image: fbi.gov.

In addition to enlisting the user’s TV box in ad fraud networks, these off-brand streaming devices almost universally come with residential proxy software pre-installed. This software rents the user’s Internet address out to anonymous paying customers, who run the gamut from aggressive content scraping firms to ticket scalpers and outright cybercriminals.

What’s more, because these generic (and generally dirt cheap) TV boxes are all horribly insecure by default and bereft of any kind of authentication, installing one on your home or office network only invites further mischief. In January, the proxy tracking service Synthient documented how multiple botnets had rapidly enslaved millions of TV boxes using a complex interplay of security vulnerabilities in both the residential proxy software and the streaming devices themselves.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Bitsight said it tracked approximately 38,000 TV boxes globally phoning home to the expired Fengwo Group domain, and based on that number the report estimates this ad fraud network brings in revenues of close to $50,000 a day (not counting substantial revenue from the residential proxy side of the business). However, Falé emphasized that these estimates are highly conservative and based on telemetry from just one of the Fengwo Group’s core (but older) domains.

As for the Fengwo Group’s claim to have 120,000 “digital humans” at their disposal, Bitsight’s report concludes it could be just a clever marketing scheme and/or a way to avoid drawing suspicion to the company’s operations.

“Historically, when dealing with proxy services or DDoS, we sometimes see these websites undertake inconspicuous facades, so as not to advertise their DDoS capability or botnet size,” Falé wrote in the report. “This could also be the case here.”

If the Fengwo Group truly does have tens of thousands of “AI humans” at its beck and call, it does not appear to have dedicated any of them to fielding inquiries from its own website. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from the Fengwo Group by emailing the contact address listed on the company’s homepage, but the request bounced back with the reply, “Your message couldn’t be delivered to postmaster@fwgcloud[.]com. Their inbox is full, or it’s getting too much mail right now.”

As Bitsight’s analysis shows, when it comes to TV boxes and streaming sticks, it’s best to stick to name brands from reputable manufacturers, and then to be sparing and careful with any apps you choose to install on the device — as many of those can bundle residential proxy software as well. Google says consumers can confirm whether or not a device is built with the official Android TV OS and Play Protect certification by following these instructions.

Additionally, Synthient maintains a running list of IoT devices that have been known to ship to consumers with residential proxy software and other malicious apps pre-installed. Careful readers will notice Synthient’s list includes other IoT devices apart from streaming sticks and boxes: As the FBI has warned, residential proxy software has also been found in other popular consumer IoT devices from random brands, particularly digital photo frames.

Read More A lot of security still comes down to trusting the wrong screen.

This week, that screen might be a login page, an install guide, a recruiter call, or a familiar service behaving slightly wrong. Behind it: reused credentials, exposed systems, quiet loaders, abused trust, and exploit paths that should have been harder.

Some defenses improved. The loose parts still got found first. Anyway, 

Read More A now-patched vulnerability in Azure Cosmos DB could have let an attacker escape the service’s Gremlin query sandbox and obtain full read and write access to databases across customer tenants, according to Wiz.

Wiz, which codenamed the chain CosmosEscape, said the exploit chain began with a crafted query against a Gremlin database controlled by the attacker. From there, code execution on a 

Read More Hidden instructions in a Word document can make Microsoft 365 Copilot rewrite figures in a report, then copy the same instructions into the finished file. Håkon Måløy disclosed the technique on July 28, 144 days after reporting it to Microsoft.

In his proof of concept, the internally generated file triggered the same behavior when it was used in a second Copilot drafting session.

Måløy’s 

Read More Network firewalls are the workhorses of modern cybersecurity. They are trusted to protect the network, blocking malicious traffic and preventing intrusions and breaches. And for decades, network security teams have built controls around a relatively stable model: users connect to applications, applications exchange data, and security tools inspect packets, protocols, and destinations. Firewalls 

Read More South Korean authorities and four security firms have disclosed a state-sponsored campaign that compromised trusted domestic websites. The attackers used those sites to exploit locally installed financial-security software and infect targeted visitors with SIGNBT or COPPERHEDGE backdoors.

A compromised page could infect a system running a vulnerable AnySign4PC version without a prompt or 

Read More The Chinese cybercrime group known as Silver Fox has been observed using new drivers as part of bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) attacks targeting a Japanese organization in the industrial manufacturing sector to ultimately deliver ValleyRAT (aka Winos 4.0) for persistent remote access.

“In this campaign, the group combines new vulnerable-driver abuse, newly observed abuse of legitimate 

Read More The Russian threat actors recently linked to the exploitation of a now-patched vulnerability in Zimbra have been observed exploiting another vulnerability, this time in Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA), to target U.S. and European government entities, as well as the telecommunications, financial, hospitality, and aerospace sectors.

The activity, which began on July 22, 2026, involves the 

Read More The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) added foreign-produced mobile robots and networked power inverters to its Covered List on July 28. The move generally prevents new models from receiving the equipment authorization required for import, marketing, or sale in the US.

Previously authorized models can still be sold, and devices people already own are unaffected. Federal purchases and use 

Read More Amazon has tied the September 2025 hijack of the npm packages debug and chalk to North Korea. For ten months, the incident sat in the public record as crypto theft: a maintainer phished through a lookalike npm domain and a wallet-draining script pushed into at least 18 packages carrying more than 2 billion weekly downloads between them.

The original Aikido and Wiz reports did not attribute the 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a newly disclosed security flaw impacting Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) Software to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following reports of zero-day exploitation.

The vulnerability, assigned CVE-2026-20316 (CVSS score: 5.3), could permit an unauthenticated, remote attacker to log 

Read More Ruby on Rails has released fixes for a critical Active Storage vulnerability that could let unauthenticated attackers read arbitrary files from application servers through crafted image uploads.

Tracked as CVE-2026-66066 (CVSS score: 9.5), the flaw can expose the Rails process environment and secrets such as secret_key_base, the Rails master key, database passwords, cloud storage credentials, 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a maximum-severity security flaw in Ruflo, an open-source agent meta-harness for Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-59726 (CVSS score: 10.0), impacts all versions of the project before version 3.16.3. It has been codenamed RufRoot by Noma Security’s 

Read More Broadcom has released security updates to address multiple security flaws impacting VMware ESX, vCenter, Workstation, and Fusion, three of which have been designated as critical in severity.

The first of the three critical-rated flaws is CVE-2026-59309 (CVSS score: 9.8), which has been described as an authentication bypass in VMware vCenter.

“A malicious actor with network access to vCenter 

Read More A coordinated cyberattack targeted operational technology at more than 30 Minnesota community water systems on July 26 and 27, triggering a statewide cybersecurity response.

Braham, Plymouth, South St. Paul and Maple Plain have publicly described a plant outage, communications failures or affected automated controls.

Braham’s water plant went offline, and the city asked residents to minimize 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a large-scale fraud campaign that involves creating lookalike websites of major Russian companies with an aim to siphon funds from international firms for more than nine years.

According to Russian cybersecurity vendor F6, the threat actors have set up clone websites of Russian companies across fertilizer manufacturers, petrochemical companies 

Read More AI is compressing exploit timelines. The real question isn’t whether your vulnerability management playbook needs to change, it’s which part of it you’ve been getting wrong all along.

The conversation happening in security circles right now goes something like this: Mythos is here. Exploit timelines are collapsing. Does the vulnerability management playbook need to change?

The honest answer is 

Read More Nebula Security says a patched Firefox JIT flaw could be triggered by simply visiting a malicious webpage and was also used to compromise Tor Browser.

Tracked as CVE-2026-10702, the bug provides arbitrary code execution inside the browser’s renderer process. Mozilla rated it High and fixed it in the Firefox 151.0.3 update.

“No settings or additional user interaction are required,” Eten Zou, 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have shared additional technical details about a recently patched critical security flaw impacting Check Point Security Management Server and Multi-Domain Security Management Server (MDS) that has come under active exploitation in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-16232 (CVSS score: 9.3), is an authentication bypass in the SmartConsole login process that 

Read More OpenAI on Tuesday revealed the rogue artificial intelligence (AI) agent that escaped its sealed evaluation environment and broke into Hugging Face’s production environment also hacked multiple third-party accounts and services as part of the attack.

The latest disclosure shows that the security incident, which stemmed from an internal security test, was more extensive in scope than previously 

Read More Gitea, the self-hosted Git platform, has patched a critical remote code execution vulnerability. A user with ordinary repository write access can turn attacker-controlled patch content into a live Git hook and run shell commands as the Gitea service account.

Tracked as CVE-2026-60004 (CVSS score: 9.8), the flaw affects Gitea versions 1.17 and later before 1.27.1 and is fixed in 1.27.1. The 

Read More Source code for the Flying Eagle Android remote access trojan (RAT) framework is circulating through criminal Telegram channels. Hunt.io and independent researcher NetAskari traced matching control panels and certificates to 170 internet servers.

They linked the framework to a fake “公安一网通办” Public Security service application targeting Android users in China. The kit supports payment-password 

Read More Beta release versions of two npm packages in the @joyfill namespace have been compromised to deliver a remote access trojan (RAT) associated with the DEV#POPPER malware family.

The list of affected packages is as follows –

@joyfill/layouts@0.1.2-2773.beta.0
@joyfill/components@4.0.0-rc24-2773-beta.4

The two packages “contain an import-time JavaScript implant that resolves encrypted code 

Read More Anthropic says Claude Mythos Preview helped derive an end-to-end key-recovery attack against HAWK-256 and a 200- to 800-fold speedup for an attack on seven-round AES-128.

The HAWK attack exploits a previously unused symmetry in the lattice behind the signature scheme. Anthropic’s released implementation gives an expected end-to-end runtime of about three hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server 

Read More A new Mirai-derived botnet called Tengu can use a compromised Linux device’s hardware watchdog to trigger a reboot when defenders kill its main process.

If that happens, Tengu’s other persistence mechanisms get another chance to relaunch it. Nozomi Networks Labs observed the dropper reaching its honeypots through Telnet credential brute force.

Tengu supports 25 distributed denial-of-service ( 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have sounded an alert after finding more than 36,000 Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) management interfaces exposing Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) protocol to the public internet.

Of the 36,872 internet-exposed server-management interfaces running IPMI, 24,650 have been found to disclose password-derived authentication hashes before login due to 

Read More JFrog has confirmed that OpenAI models exploited a zero-day in self-hosted Artifactory while trying to reach the open internet from a sealed evaluation environment.

Artifactory is JFrog’s software repository manager. OpenAI says the models then escalated privileges and moved laterally until they reached an internet-connected node. JFrog says it has since developed and released fixes for cloud 

Read More OpenWrt has shipped version 24.10.8 to close a critical DHCPv6 stack overflow and a wider set of remotely triggerable flaws in network services enabled by default.

The critical issue, tracked as CVE-2026-53921 and rated 9.8 on CVSS 3.1 in OpenWrt’s GitHub advisory, lets an unauthenticated attacker able to reach the DHCPv6 server overwrite a stack buffer in odhcpd through a crafted DHCPv6 

Read More The Iranian state-backed hacking group tracked as Nimbus Manticore (aka GalaxyGato, Mirage Kitten, Smoke Sandstorm, Subtle Snail, and UNC1549) has been attributed to a fresh set of attacks targeting entities across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.

The intrusions involve the use of a previously undocumented Windows backdoor called NightLedger and two custom WebSocket tunnelers, 

Read More JetBrains is urging customers of on-premise versions of TeamCity to update to the latest version following the discovery of a critical security issue that could result in arbitrary code execution.

The vulnerability, assigned CVE-2026-63077 (CVSS score: 9.8), affects all TeamCity On-Premises versions. It has been addressed in versions 2025.11.7 and 2026.1.3. TeamCity Cloud instances have already 

Read More STAR Labs has published a Linux kernel exploit that turns an ordinary local user into root on the CentOS Stream 9 build it targeted. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-53264 (CVSS score: 7.8), is a use-after-free race in the kernel’s network traffic-control subsystem.Researcher Lee Jia Jie said artificial intelligence (AI) helped him find the bug and speed up exploit development. This is local 

Read More Microsoft has launched its first cybersecurity-specific model inside MDASH, its multi-model vulnerability identification and remediation harness.

The company says MDASH, using MAI-Cyber-1-Flash and GPT-5.4, scored 95.95% on CyberGym. It also claims the configuration costs 50% less than its current best MDASH combination of GPT-5.4, GPT-5.4 mini, and GPT-5.3 Codex. Access is limited to approved 

Read More A maximum-severity security flaw impacting on-premises versions of Arista VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) has come under active exploitation in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-16812 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a case of operating system command injection that could pave the way for arbitrary code execution.

“VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) on-prem has a security issue where this issue 

Read More NVIDIA and 36 other organizations have formed the Open Secure AI Alliance to develop and share open technologies, techniques, and tools for securing software and artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

The 37-member group spans cloud, security, enterprise software, and AI companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Hugging Face, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, and the Linux 

Read More Dysphoria, an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet line tracked by CNCERT and XLab, has adopted blockchain-based name services and infected-device relays after a March law-enforcement operation against JackSkid infrastructure. The researchers say the design makes the botnet harder to disrupt.

CNCERT, China’s national computer emergency response team, and XLab, the threat-intelligence lab of Chinese 

Read More Public exploit details released on July 27 show how an unauthenticated request can reach PHP’s eval() function inside vBulletin and execute code on an unpatched forum server. The attack requires no account, administrative access, or interaction from another user.

SSD Secure Disclosure lists vBulletin 6.2.1 and earlier, and 6.1.6 and earlier, as affected, but does not give a lower version 

Read More Monday starts with the usual promise that everything is under control. Then the logs wake up.

This week, trusted tools crossed lines, old flaws found new work, exposed systems stayed exposed, and attackers kept hiding inside normal-looking services. Nothing looked strange at first. That helped.

That is the mood. Here is the full recap.

⚡ Threat of the Week

OpenAI Says Its AI Agent Went Rogue 

Read More n8n has patched a high-severity expression-sandbox escape that could let an authenticated workflow editor execute operating-system commands on the server running the automation platform. Security Joes found the flaw while probing n8n’s February fix for CVE-2026-27577 for another bypass.

The affected ranges are <2.31.5 and >=2.32.0,<2.32.1. n8n fixed the flaw in versions 2.31.5 and 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a Microsoft Teams-themed phishing campaign that employs “secure document” lures to deliver legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools.

“The victim was directed through compromised web infrastructure to a counterfeit Microsoft Store page claiming that Microsoft Teams had to be updated before the shared document could be opened,” ZeroBEC said in 

Read More The China-linked cybercrime group behind the use of income tax-related phishing lures targeting Indian taxpayers, tax professionals, and corporate finance teams has been observed using a sophisticated crypter service called Cruciferra.

According to a new analysis by Proofpoint, Cruciferra has been utilized by various unrelated cybercriminal threat clusters to deliver a wide array of remote 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged fresh malicious cyber activity by a threat actor with ties to East Asia targeting government entities in the Middle East.

The intrusions have resulted in the deployment of previously unreported malware families dubbed TELESHIM, MIXEDKEY, and BINDCLOAK, according to Zscaler ThreatLabz. The cybersecurity firm said it detected the campaign earlier this month. 

Read More GitHub has announced a new cooldown mechanism in Dependabot, allowing the tool to wait at least three days after a release is published before opening a pull request.

“The cooldown configuration option in the dependabot.yml still controls the behavior, though, so you can choose a different cooldown parameter that fits your project,” the Microsoft-owned subsidiary said.

According to GitHub, the 

Read More A malvertising operation dubbed SourTrade is making victims’ browsers build the final Windows executable themselves, using a legitimate Bun runtime as its base instead of serving one complete malicious file from a fixed URL.

Confiant, which detailed the campaign on July 23, 2026, said it has operated since late 2024 and impersonated TradingView, Solana, and Luno to target retail traders and 

Read More Security firms ThreatBook and Imperva say attackers are targeting a critical flaw in Fastjson, Alibaba’s JSON library for Java. In affected Spring Boot applications, a malicious JSON request can execute code without authentication, with the privileges of the Java process.

Tracked as CVE-2026-16723, the vulnerability carries an Alibaba-assigned CVSS score of 9.0. The confirmed chain requires 

Read More For years, phishing campaigns targeting financial institutions followed the same playbook. Victims were tricked into entering usernames and passwords, attackers collected the credentials, and accounts were compromised later when an opportunity arose.

That model is changing.

Recent investigations into insurance-focused phishing operations reveal a more immediate approach. Instead of harvesting 

Read More Threat actors linked to the Cl0p (aka Chubby Scorpius, FIN11, Graceful Spider, and Lace Tempest) ransomware campaign are exploiting flaws in internet-exposed PTC Windmill and FlexPLM deployments as part of a new data extortion campaign.

“Attackers chain a pre-authentication information disclosure in the FlexPLM WSDL endpoint with a server-side flaw in the Windchill login servlet, enabling 

Read More The operators of the DevMan ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) scheme are maintaining a dedicated web platform that offers affiliates the ability to build payloads, oversee earnings, and manage various aspects related to victims.

Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT is tracking the centrally administered RaaS operation under the name Funky Mantis.

“The portal combined build generation, finance, 

Read More Security researcher Yuhang Wu at depthfirst has published a working proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that executes commands as git on an unpatched self-managed GitLab 18.11.3 server.

An ordinary authenticated user triggers it by committing two crafted Jupyter notebooks and requesting their diff. The chain needs no administrator rights, continuous integration (CI) runner access, victim interaction 

Read More The North Korean threat actors behind the ClickFix-style campaigns that employ typosquatted Zoom and Microsoft Teams domains have been found to operate an active phishing kit to impersonate the videoconferencing platforms in social engineering campaigns designed to deliver malware.

“BlueNoroff has operationalised trust abuse by combining compromised industry contacts, social engineering, wallet 

Read More Researchers H0j3n and Aniq Fakhrul published a working exploit on July 24 that lets a low-privileged Active Directory user obtain a certificate for a Domain Controller and authenticate as that machine.

They codenamed the flaw Certighost. Because Domain Controller accounts carry directory replication rights, the resulting Kerberos credential can retrieve the krbtgt secret through DCSync. 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical vulnerability in OpenAI’s ChatGPT Workspace Agents that could have allowed a single phishing link to stealthily build, authorize, and deploy an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent inside a victim’s organization.

The vulnerability has been codenamed AgentForger by Zenity Labs. The issue has since been addressed by OpenAI as of June 8, 

Read More A crafted SVG submitted to Bing’s image search ran commands as NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM on Microsoft’s production image-processing workers, and as root on the Linux machines in the same fleet.

XBOW’s testing got the same result on workers across different hosts and network ranges, so the problem sat in Bing’s image tier, not on one bad machine. Microsoft issued two critical CVEs, CVE-2026-32194 and 

Read More AI agent security is moving through a familiar maturity curve: adoption, then visibility, and finally, control. But what we’ve collectively discovered is that enforcing least privilege for AI agents is harder than we ever imagined. This is why there are so many approaches, from prompt filtering to identity-layer access controls. Where we’ve collectively landed is that understanding the intent of 

Read More Someone installed a popular AI assistant on a rented server, switched off the setting that makes it ask permission before running risky commands, and pointed it at Thailand’s Ministry of Finance, which runs the country’s treasury and tax collection.

The agent then worked through the ministry’s network on its own, checking hosts for ways to gain root access, hunting through file systems, and 

Read More The threat actors behind the Golden Chickens malware-as-a-service (MaaS) ecosystem have resurfaced with four new malware families, indicating that the operators are showing no signs of stopping despite extensive public disclosures into their inner workings.

The malware families in question are: TinyEgg, ChonkyChicken, a modularized variant of ChonkyChicken, and a modified web browser credential 

Read More Eight security flaws in NodeBB went public on Wednesday, along with the code to exploit them. Aikido Security rates all eight as high severity and says its AI pentest agents found them in a six-hour review of the forum software’s source code.

Every version before 4.14.0 is affected. NodeBB has fixed them all, and administrators should be on 4.14.2.

The simplest one takes a settings change. A 

Read More Redis shipped seven security releases on July 23 after researchers published authenticated RCE PoCs for stock Redis 6.2.22, 7.4.9, 8.6.4, and 8.8.0.

All four chains require RESTORE. The Streams chains also need EVAL and XGROUP; the 8.8.0 chain needs EVAL and the bundled RedisBloom module. Redis says the underlying memory flaws may lead to remote code execution.

Redis 6.2.23, 7.2.15, and 7.4.10 

Read More The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a new campaign that involves the use of a malicious program that’s dressed up as a Notepad++ plugin to compromise Windows systems.

The activity has been attributed by the agency to a threat cluster it tracks as UAC-0099, a Russia-aligned group that has previously observed weaponizing security flaws in WinRAR software to 

Read More A Russian state-supported espionage group spent months reading Western mailboxes through a then-unknown flaw in Zimbra’s webmail client.

The payload goes after the last 90 days of email, the organization’s entire email directory, the password saved in the browser and the codes kept for two-factor recovery. Opening the message was enough to start it.

The NSA, CISA and partner agencies published 

Read More Most of this week’s trouble came dressed as something useful.

A package stole data. A fake extension opened remote access. A safety app became spyware. An image gave hidden orders to an AI agent. Other threats hid in open systems, weak code, and normal network traffic.

The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

The danger was 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a sandbox escape vulnerability in Anthropic’s Claude Cowork that makes it possible to break out of the confines of a Linux virtual machine (VM) within which the agent runs to read or write files anywhere on the Mac.

Accomplish AI, which shared details of the vulnerability with The Hacker News ahead of publication, said about 500,000 macOS users running 

Read More The Chaos ransomware group ran its command-and-control through the victim’s own browser. Cisco Talos on Thursday detailed msaRAT, the Rust implant behind it, found on a compromised Windows machine ahead of the encryptor.

The implant never opens an outbound connection of its own. Its process talks to 127.0.0.1 and nothing else. It starts Chrome or Edge in headless mode and drives the browser 

Read More An exposed Alibaba Cloud server has revealed a China-nexus operation that Group-IB tracks as JadeProx. The cluster has targeted government, healthcare, and education organizations across Asia and Latin America with a previously undocumented Windows loader called TriBack Loader.

Group-IB found the server in mid-April 2026 in Alibaba Cloud’s Singapore region; it was offline by the time the report 

Read More Most people understand identity theft as an attacker stealing a real person’s sensitive information and impersonating them. Synthetic identity fraud is much harder to catch. Instead of stealing a real identity, the attacker manufactures a new one, frankensteining together several real data points with fabricated ones to create a person who doesn’t exist. Since no real victim monitors misuse, a 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a large-scale campaign that has turned compromised GitHub repositories into distributed attack infrastructure designed to target cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) instances.

The activity involves malicious Packagist development versions spanning 10 packages associated with a legitimate PHP and DevOps developer, dinushchathurya, between July 12 and 13, 

Read More Google on Thursday announced a new way for users to sign-in to their accounts by letting them take a selfie video.

The selfie for sign-in, per the tech giant, is another option on top of existing recovery methods to log in to an account, including an email address or a phone number. The idea is to use a video selfie as a way to regain access if a user ever gets locked out or doesn’t have access 

Read More Check Point has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities impacting Security Management and Multi-Domain Management (MDSM) products, including a critical flaw that has come under active exploitation in the wild.

The security flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-16232 (CVSS score: 9.3), is an authentication bypass affecting the Check Point SmartConsole login process that allows an 

Read More Beginning July 27, 2026, GitHub will cut public bug bounty payouts by at least half at every severity level. Critical findings will drop from $20,000-$30,000+ to a fixed $10,000, while its permanent invite-only VIP tier will pay $30,000 or more.

Reports filed before that date, including those already in GitHub’s growing triage queue, will retain the previous payout terms.

GitHub said the 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability in snap-confine that an unprivileged user can trigger to obtain root access and gain complete control of a target environment.

The high-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-8933 (CVSS score: 7.8), impacts default installations of Ubuntu Desktop 24.04, 25.10, and 26.04. The disclosure comes as 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched vulnerability chain in the Adobe Acrobat Chrome extension that has over 314 million users, which, if exploited, could facilitate a silent hijack of a user’s WhatsApp data.

The shortcoming has been codenamed HermeticReader by Guardio Labs. It’s officially tracked as CVE-2026-48294 (CVSS score: 7.4), with the vulnerability 

Read More A high-severity security flaw impacting open-source developer platform Windmill has come under active exploitation in the wild, per VulnCheck.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-29059 (CVSS score: 7.5), a case of unauthenticated path traversal impacting Windmill’s “get_log_file” endpoint (“/api/w/{workspace}/jobs_u/get_log_file/{filename}”).

“The filename parameter is concatenated into 

Read More Security leaders who build fast, visible paths to AI adoption are becoming the most valued partners in their organizations. AI governance done right gives security teams the visibility they need, employees the tools they want, and CISOs the strategic influence they have earned.

According to McKinsey’s State of AI report, 76 percent of employees now use AI in some capacity at work, up from 55 

Read More The cycle is over. For years, cybersecurity followed a familiar pattern: defenses improved, attackers adapted, and the back-and-forth continued. Today, AI-equipped attackers are simply outpacing defenses. Most intrusions now bypass endpoint and malware-based detection entirely.

The CrowdStrike Global Threat Report estimates around 79% of attacks are malware-free, as threat actors rely on 

Read More German and US law enforcement have taken down the core infrastructure of Kratos, described by German investigators as one of the world’s most widely used criminal phishing kits, and Indonesian authorities arrested the man they say developed and ran it.

In a joint announcement on Monday, the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s cybercrime unit (ZIT) and Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a NuGet typosquat that’s unlike the typical information-stealing malware distributed via package registries: usual info-stealers: it’s designed to rig live game results on Digitain.

The package, named “Newtonsoftt.Json.Net,” masquerades as the Newtonsoft.Json library and is a trojanized fork. Seven versions of the package have been published to the 

Read More A single invisible comment in an Azure DevOps pull request can turn a reviewer’s own AI coding agent against them, driving it into projects the attacker has no rights to reach and quietly leaking what it finds.

The flaw is in Microsoft’s official Azure DevOps MCP server, and it works because one of its tools returns pull request descriptions without a prompt-injection guardrail the company had 

Read More OpenAI on Tuesday said a combination of its artificial intelligence (AI) models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and an “even more capable pre-release model,” was behind the security incident that targeted Hugging Face’s production infrastructure last week.

The AI company said the models were operating with “reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes” that might otherwise limit their ability to 

Read More 

The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG’s webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a user’s TV.

Proxy SDK prevalence among smart TV apps for LG (webOS) and Samsung (Tizen OS) televisions. Image: Spur.us.

On July 2, we featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps. Spur found more than 42 percent of apps available for download on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television in a proxy node indefinitely, and that more than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components.

Responding to questions about Spur’s research, LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the company was working with app developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. Developers that fail to comply, he said, will find their apps suspended.

“A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform,” Taylor said. “If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended.”

Taylor said LG is committed to keeping residential proxy networks out of its smart TV apps going forward, and that the company’s review of those apps is “well underway now.”

“As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance platform quality and the user experience, LG will continue to strengthen our evaluation process for developer-submitted apps, including those that incorporate residential proxy SDKs,” Taylor wrote in an emailed statement.

App makers looking for ways to monetize their creations can turn to residential proxy providers, which pay developers to include SDKs that turn the user’s device into a residential proxy node that is rented to paying customers. In the case of LG and Samsung smart TVs, Spur found residential proxy SDKs bundled with everything from simple games like Pac-Man to screensavers and file utilities.

A Pac-Man smart TV app from Bright Data offers users the choice between viewing ads in the game or agreeing to allow their TV to serve as a residential proxy node. Image: Spur.us.

Spur’s report found the residential proxy network Bright Data accounted for a majority of proxy SDKs across both Samsung and LG smart TVs. Bright Data did not respond to requests for comment.

Bright Data and other proxy providers named in Spur’s report all say they follow rigorous know-your-customer processes to validate legitimate uses of their services, which is often heavily tied to content-scraping activities by said customers. The proxy companies also say they incorporate technological countermeasures to prevent proxy service customers from being able to interact with and control other devices on the proxy user’s local network.

Spur argues the problem is not that residential proxy networks exist, but rather that they are being embedded at scale in devices that most consumers do not think of as computers and are not equipped to audit.

“A one-time consent prompt buried in a TV app is not a substitute for meaningful transparency, ongoing control, and platform oversight,” Spur’s Trevor Sutter wrote. “The risk is amplified when consent comes from individuals within the household who use the device but shouldn’t give consent, such as minors.”

LG’s announcement that it is culling residential proxy SDKs from its app store is welcome news, but the company recently came under fire for another questionable partnership: Pimping McAfee security products via software drivers included in its high-end LCD monitors.

Earlier this week, the Youtube channel Gamers Nexus showed that certain LG LCD monitors will automatically install an app that promotes paid McAfee antivirus subscriptions, and that the app arrives through Windows Update without an approval prompt.

Read More Apple has moved to address a security flaw in its Hide My Email service that enabled users’ real email addresses to be unmasked, effectively undermining the feature’s privacy guarantees.

404 Media reported Tuesday that a fix for the issue was deployed by Apple on July 3, 2026, after more than a year, when it was disclosed to the company by Tyler Murphy, co-founder of EasyOptOuts.

Hide My Email 

Read More Hidden text on a web page was enough to make Kiro, AWS’s agentic coding IDE, rewrite its own configuration file and run an attacker’s code on a developer’s machine, with no approval step able to stop it.

Intezer, in research with Kodem Security, found that a request as ordinary as asking Kiro to summarize a page could end in remote code execution. AWS has patched the issue, and no CVE has been 

Read More Google’s DeepMind on Tuesday announced the release of Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a specialized artificial intelligence (AI) model built atop 3.5 Flash that’s designed to discover, validate, and patch vulnerabilities quickly and efficiently.

According to the tech giant, the model will be exclusively available to governments and trusted partners via CodeMender as part of a limited-access pilot 

Read More A third SharePoint Server flaw patched by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday update for July 2026 has come under active exploitation, per watchTowr.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-50522 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical deserialization of untrusted data in Microsoft Office SharePoint that could allow an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. Microsoft credited DEVCORE 

Read More Threat actors have been observed exploiting a now-patched high-severity Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS vulnerability as an entry point to deploy Qilin (aka Agenda) ransomware on victim environments.

Arctic Wolf Labs said it investigated multiple intrusions in June 2026 that began with the exploitation of CVE-2026-0257 (CVSS score: 7.8), an authentication bypass flaw affecting the portal and gateway 

Read More Zimbra has rolled out fixes to address multiple critical security issues, including a command injection flaw in the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) monitoring component.

As many as nine security vulnerabilities have been patched in Zimbra 10.1.20. Topping the list is a command injection vulnerability in the SNMP monitoring component when SNMP notifications are enabled.

Also patched 

Read More An Android app that can draw over other windows and write to shared storage can slip instructions to the AI agent driving that phone, in text no human eye will ever see. Two more steps, and the same app is running commands on the PC driving the agent.

Researchers demonstrated that chain, plus six other attacks, against five open-source mobile agent frameworks: AppAgent, AppAgentX, 

Read More Attackers have begun to exploit two critical vulnerabilities in WordPress that, when combined together, enable unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) and complete compromise of vulnerable websites.

The two security flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137, have been codenamed wp2shell.

“By the early hours of Saturday morning (UTC), successful exploitation was already well 

Read More Researchers at Sysdig have linked a second attack on the same Langflow server to JADEPUFFER, the AI-agent-driven operator it first documented earlier this month.

The same operator has now been spotted deploying ENCFORGE, a new compiled Go ransomware designed to encrypt model weights, vector indexes, training datasets, and other AI infrastructure files across the host filesystem.

The entry 

Read More Threat actors are now exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting ServiceNow AI Platform, according to Defused Cyber.

In a post shared on X, the threat intelligence firm said it’s observing in-the-wild exploitation of CVE-2026-6875 (CVSS score: 9.5), a sandbox escape vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated user to run arbitrary code.

Patches for the flaw were 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered nearly 7,600 malicious GitHub repositories, out of which more than 800 pose as artificial intelligence (AI) skills or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to deliver a malware family known as SmartLoader as part of an ongoing campaign codenamed FakeGit.

“FakeGit uses copied projects, lookalike developer profiles, convincing READMEs, and malicious ZIP 

Read More A malware operator left its delivery server wide open, and Rapid7 pulled down the whole toolkit: 1,048 files spanning lure templates, filename-spoofing tests, execution experiments, droppers, builder notes, and two campaign chains. One was already live against Windows users in Mexico, delivering an infostealer through a fake government ID-lookup site over WebDAV.

What makes it more than a 

Read More A newly discovered espionage implant has been using a hijacked Microsoft 365 calendar as its command channel, planting operator instructions and smuggling out stolen files as attachments on calendar events dated to the year 2050.

Group-IB, which named the malware HollowGraph, says the approach moves tasking and stolen data through legitimate Microsoft Graph API traffic, so the activity looks 

Read More A single request should not be able to do this much. But this week, small inputs led to code execution, memory loss, stolen keys, and disabled security tools.

The paths were often simple: exposed systems, weak checks, old drivers, fake prompts, and public code used for malware delivery. Some bugs were new. Others were already being used before defenders had time to patch.

Here is the full 

Read More At least one Russian intelligence service is systematically hijacking internet-connected security cameras across Europe and Ukraine, using the feeds to watch military transport routes, weapons shipments bound for Kyiv, and the locations of Ukrainian troops.

That is the finding of a cybersecurity advisory published July 10 by the AIVD and MIVD, the Netherlands’ civilian and military intelligence 

Read More The industry spent the initial months after Anthropic’s April 7 Mythos reveal focused on volume. How many new CVEs would Mythos add to an already overloaded pipeline? How quickly would the flood of AI-driven discovery overwhelm triage capabilities? How long would it take adversaries to weaponize Mythos findings at scale? Those questions were and remain valid. Yet they all stop short of 

Read More Opening a crafted XZ archive in 7-Zip could let an attacker run code on the machine. The flaw, CVE-2026-14266, is a heap-based buffer overflow in how the archiver processes XZ chunked data, and Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) detailed it on July 15. A fix shipped on June 25 in 7-Zip 26.02.

The overflow lets an attacker “execute code in the context of the current process,” per the 

Read More A solo Russian-speaking threat actor known as “bandcampro” outsourced a chunk of their operations to Google’s open-source Gemini CLI artificial intelligence (AI) and commandeered a live botnet.

The findings come from an analysis of 200 Gemini CLI session logs between March 19 and April 21, 2026, which found the threat actor using AI, among other things, to crack passwords, set up a residential 

Read More In an ironic twist, open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform Hugging Face revealed that it was the victim of a hack perpetrated by an autonomous AI agent system.

The company said it detected and responded to the incident targeting its production infrastructure earlier last week.

“We identified unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials used by 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new software supply chain attack codenamed SleeperGem targeting the Ruby ecosystem after three malicious gems were published to RubyGems with the end goal of serving additional payloads.

The rogue gems are listed below –

git_credential_manager (versions 2.8.0, 2.8.1, 2.8.2, 2.8.3) – Published on July 18, 2026
Dendreo (versions 1.1.3, 1.1.4) – 

Read More F5 has shipped fixes for a critical nginx flaw that lets a remote, unauthenticated attacker trigger a heap buffer overflow in the worker process with crafted HTTP requests. CVE-2026-42533 was patched on July 15 in nginx 1.30.4 (stable) and 1.31.3 (mainline), and in NGINX Plus 37.0.3.1; anyone on an earlier build should upgrade.

Triggering it can crash or restart the worker, causing a denial of 

Read More Russian state-sponsored threat actors have been observed leveraging the infamous ClickFix strategy to trick Ukrainian targets into infecting their own machines with data-stealing malware.

According to the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA), the activity has been attributed to UAC-0145, a sub-cluster within Sandworm, an advanced hacking unit affiliated with GRU, Russia’s 

Read More A previously undocumented threat actor has been attributed to the exploitation of recently disclosed SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series VPN appliances as zero-days prior their public disclosure since June 22, 2026.

Cybersecurity company Volexity is tracking the activity under the moniker UTA0533. The discovery was made following an incident response investigation earlier this 

Read More Updated July 18, 2026: the two flaws now carry CVE IDs, the full mechanism has been published, a persistent-object-cache condition has surfaced, and a working proof-of-concept is public. The story below reflects all of it.

An anonymous HTTP request can run code on a WordPress site. The bug is in core, so a bare install with zero plugins is exploitable. Every 6.9 and 7.0 site was in range until 

Read More Eleven bytes will make an unpatched OpenSSL server set aside up to 131 KB of memory for a message that never arrives. On the glibc systems Okta tested, that memory is gone until the process restarts.

OpenSSL shipped the HollowByte fix in June with no CVE, no advisory, and no changelog entry pointing at it. Okta’s Red Team, which reported the denial-of-service bug and named it, published the 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of seven malicious npm packages targeting the Vite frontend tooling ecosystem as part of a software supply chain attack.

The malicious package campaign, codenamed ViteVenom by Checkmarx, marks an expansion of ChainVeil, which was observed using an “unprecedented” four-tier blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) infrastructure spanning Tron, 

Read More A Go botnet called NadMesh turned up in early July hunting exposed AI services, and the operator’s own dashboard claims 3,811 unique AWS keys.

A Shodan harvester keeps the scan queue stocked with ComfyUI, Ollama, n8n, Open WebUI, Langflow, and Gradio: the image generators, local model runners, and workflow builders that teams stand up fast and firewall late.

The intel feed behind that counter 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have attributed the April 2026 DigiCert security incident to a threat activity cluster dubbed CylindricalCanine.

Expel, which shared technical details of the event, described the threat actor as a sub-group of GoldenEyeDog (aka APT-Q-27, Dragon Breath, and Miuuti Group), a Chinese cybercrime group known for its targeting of the gambling and gaming sectors using 

Read More North Korean threat actors linked to the Contagious Interview campaign have been observed employing steganography in SVG image files to conceal malicious payloads as part of a campaign using fake job postings and coding challenges.

“Any user who ran the project ended up with a four-stage payload aligned with OTTERCOOKIE: a browser credential and crypto wallet stealer, a file stealer, a 

Read More The European Commission on Thursday ordered Google to give rival AI assistants the same reach into Android that Gemini already has: the camera, the microphone, whatever is on screen, a wake word that fires with the display off, and the ability to drive other apps in the background by imitating taps and typing.

Google has to ship it in the next major release, Android 18, and by 1 August 2027 at 

Read More Military forces are under increasing pressure to field autonomous capabilities faster than ever before. Across the U.S., UK, and NATO, new investment, evolving defense strategies, and accelerated acquisition pathways are transforming how capability is delivered, rewarding programs that can move from concept to operational deployment at commercial speed.

Now the focus shifts to the trusted 

Read More Armenia has held a Russian tourist named Aleksandr Ermakov in a detention center since June 28, on a U.S. extradition request for a REvil ransomware suspect named Aleksandr Ermakov.

His wife, Maria Yurova, told REN TV that border officers pulled him out of the departure hall at Yerevan’s Zvartnots airport, held up a phone with a photo of him off his VKontakte page, and walked him into a side 

Read More ACR Stealer, an infostealer in circulation since 2024, is walking out of enterprise networks with saved browser passwords, live session tokens, PDFs, Microsoft 365 documents, and files from synced OneDrive and SharePoint folders.

It gets in because someone pasted a command into a Run box and pressed Enter. Microsoft laid out two of the delivery chains on Thursday. Its Defender Experts team, the 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented malware called GoSerpent that has been put to use in cyber attacks targeting entities in Southeast Asia since late 2025 with a focus on long-term access and intelligence gathering.

Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky, which uncovered the activity in February 2026, said it was aimed at government and diplomatic entities in 

Read More The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a newly patched security flaw impacting Microsoft SharePoint Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to apply the fixes by July 19, 2026.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-58644 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical deserialization 

Read More Owen Flowers, 18, and Thalha Jubair, 20, were each sentenced to five and a half years at Woolwich Crown Court on Thursday, 16 July 2026, for the 2024 hack of Transport for London.

The attack left 148 TfL systems inoperable and forced all 27,000 of the transport authority’s employees into an office to get their passwords reset in person. Both the NCA and the CPS put TfL’s losses and recovery 

Read More A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something that looks close enough.

A familiar repo. A useful installer. A harmless sync setting. Then the handoff goes bad, the box starts talking to someone else, and the damage moves faster than the explanation.

Old bugs are back, weak defaults are earning their keep, and some attack paths are so plain they barely feel like research. Here’s the mess. 

Read More n8n, the workflow automation platform, handed out the wrong accounts at login. On Enterprise instances configured to trust more than one external token issuer, it matched an incoming JWT to a local user on the sub claim alone and ignored iss.

A valid token from issuer A carrying a sub that belongs to someone under issuer B logged you in as them. Their password never 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a new modular malware called TELEPUZ that’s been spreading via websites infected with ClickFix lures since late April 2026.

“The malware is full-featured, lightweight, and modular,” Elastic Security Labs researcher Cyril François said in a technical report. “While the number of C2 [command-and-control] domains is currently small, the daily 

Read More ClickLock Stealer, a new macOS infostealer, answers a victim’s refusal by killing their apps on a loop until they hand over the login password. It arrives as a command pasted into Terminal, asks for the password behind a fake system dialog, and when the victim cancels, installs two LaunchAgents and quietly exits.

At the next login, Finder, the Dock, Spotlight, Terminal, Activity Monitor, and 

Read More More than 20 Brazilian government websites were hijacked and turned into malware delivery channels in an active PhantomEnigma campaign uncovered by ANY.RUN, a leading provider of interactive malware analysis and threat intelligence solutions.

The investigation revealed previously undocumented backdoor behavior, hidden infrastructure relationships, and multiple attack arms behind a campaign 

Read More Ask an AI agent to summarize the reviews on a product page, and a single planted review can make it click “Buy Now” instead. Ask a coding assistant to apply a maintainer’s fix from a GitHub thread, and a fake comment can make it run a stranger’s command on your computer.

Neither trick hijacks the agent’s task. Each one just corrupts the facts it trusts and lets it carry on with the job you 

Read More An advanced malware previously attributed to a China-linked threat actor has resurfaced after more than four years within a Taiwan manufacturing firm, along with a previously unreported backdoor dubbed Stupig.

Daxin (“srt64.sys”), as the kernel-mode rootkit is referred to, was first documented by Broadcom-owned Symantec in March 2022, with evidence indicating its use in targeted attacks aimed 

Read More Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing offensive security, but it has not changed the standard that matters most: a finding has to be proven before it becomes useful. AI-assisted tools can read code quickly, generate payloads, summarize attack surfaces, explain unfamiliar APIs, and run repetitive testing workflows at impressive speed. That is a real advantage for security teams. It also 

Read More Pull the certificate off the flash of a Shark RV2320EDUS robot vacuum, and you can run root commands on other people’s Shark vacuums across the same AWS region: watch the camera, drive the robot, read the map of the house, and take the Wi-Fi password in plaintext.

A researcher publishing under the handle tokay0 put the method online on Monday, having tested it only against vacuums he 

Read More OpenAI has disclosed details of GPT-Red, an internal automated red-teaming model that scales prompt injection vulnerability discovery with an aim to fix issues before the tools are deployed widely.

“GPT‑Red is a strong red-teamer, and our previous models are highly vulnerable to its prompt injection attacks,” the artificial intelligence (AI) company said. “We use GPT‑Red to adversarially train 

Read More Zoom has released security updates for a critical security flaw impacting Zoom Workplace for Windows that could facilitate account takeover.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-53412 (CVSS score: 9.8), affects Zoom Desktop Client for Windows, Zoom VDI Client for Windows, and Zoom Meeting SDK for Windows.

“Improper Input Validation in Zoom Desktop Client for Windows, Zoom VDI Client for 

Read More Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously unreported Internet-of-Things (IoT) botnet framework dubbed TuxBot v3 Evolution that shows signs of being developed with assistance from a large language model (LLM), albeit with not so successful results.

“While the AI complied with their request to generate botnet code, it included a safety disclaimer that the developer failed 

Read More A malware framework called OkoBot has been running on Windows machines since April 2025, and one of its modules is built to con hardware wallet owners out of their recovery phrase.

On an infected PC, the request comes from inside the wallet’s own desktop software. Sometimes it waits until you plug the device in first. The page is malicious. The app around it is the real one you installed, and 

Read More Mozilla has released updates to address two critical flaws in Firefox for which it warned that exploit code has been published.

The vulnerabilities are listed below –

CVE-2026-15718, an invalid pointer in the JavaScript: WebAssembly component
CVE-2026-15719, a site isolation in the DOM: Navigation component

“We are aware that exploit code for this is public, however we are not aware of 

Read More For years, routing traffic through cloud proxies was good enough. Then work moved to the browser, AI entered the workflow, and the inspection model stopped keeping up.

Enterprise workflows now live across SaaS applications, browsers, and an expanding ecosystem of generative AI tools, unsanctioned browser extensions, and autonomous agents. Employees routinely paste intellectual property into 

Read More Security researcher Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse) has released a new proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit called LegacyHive.

It has been described as a Windows User Profile Service arbitrary hive load elevation of privileges vulnerability. The Windows User Profile Service, also referred to as ProfSvc, is a core system component that manages user accounts and environments.

“The PoC requires 

Read More A single approved marketing tag can quietly load fourth-party code your security team has never seen, granting full access to your forms, customer data, and checkout pages.

This on-demand webinar reveals how this Approval Gap forms, and gives your team the blueprint to close it before an auditor, regulator, or attacker finds it first.

The Reality of the Approval Gap

It’s a pattern every 

Read More Open a repository in Cursor on Windows and, if a file named git.exe is sitting in the project root, Cursor runs it. No click, no approval dialog, no warning that anything in the folder is about to execute.

Whatever that binary does, it does as you, with your source, your SSH keys and your cloud tokens. Cursor keeps re-running it for as long as the project stays open.

No prompt 

Read More Four compromised npm packages in the @asyncapi namespace have been observed distributing a multi-stage botnet loader, according to findings from OX Security, SafeDep, Socket, and StepSecurity.

The affected packages are listed below –

@asyncapi/generator-helpers@1.1.1
@asyncapi/generator-components@0.7.1
@asyncapi/generator@3.3.1
@asyncapi/specs(v6.11.2, v6.11.2-alpha.1)

“The 

Read More SonicWall has warned of active exploitation of two zero-day vulnerabilities impacting Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series appliances, one of which could be exploited to achieve arbitrary command execution.

The vulnerabilities are listed below –

CVE-2026-15409 (CVSS score: 10.0) – A Server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability that a remote unauthenticated attacker could exploit to 

Read More Microsoft shipped its largest Patch Tuesday on record today, and two of the fixes close holes that attackers are already exploiting. The release covers 622 of Microsoft’s own CVEs by its Security Update Guide count, more than triple June’s previous high of around 200.

Those two live bugs are the ones to grab first. Microsoft credits incident responders for both. Both are 

Read More 

Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence.

Nearly 60 of the bugs quashed in July’s Patch Tuesday earned a “critical” severity rating, meaning miscreants or malware could use them to seize remote control over a Windows device with little or no help from the user. Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws, including two that are already being exploited in the wild.

Two of the zero-day weaknesses allow an attacker to elevate their user rights on a Windows system, as do approximately 250 other elevation of privilege flaws fixed this month; they include CVE-2026-56155 — an Active Directory Federation Services bug — and CVE-2026-56164, a Microsoft Sharepoint vulnerability.

CVE-2026-50661 is a security feature bypass in Windows BitLocker that could allow attackers to gain access to encrypted data if they have physical access to the device. Microsoft said this bug has been detailed publicly, but that it is not aware of any active exploitation.

In a blog post on July 9, Microsoft Executive Vice President Pavan Davuluri wrote that Windows users will notice “a higher volume of security updates included in each security release” as a result of AI aiding in the discovery of vulnerabilities.

“The pace of vulnerability discovery is changing with advances in AI making it possible to find more issues, faster, across more code, with new mechanisms that can accelerate both discovery and analysis,” Davuluri wrote.

Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, called attention to CVE-2026-48561, a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Copilot (with a 9.6 CVSS threat score) that allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over the network. Microsoft says an attacker could exploit this bug by hosting a malicious website that causes Microsoft Edge for Android to automatically send crafted prompts to Copilot when a user visits the site.

As AI advances the state of vulnerability discovery and remediation, it is also making it easier for attackers to quickly devise working exploits for known software flaws. Microsoft has long labeled security bugs using its “exploitability index,” which is Redmond’s best guess as to how likely it is that attackers will be able to figure out a reliable way to exploit a given vulnerability.

But Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, argues that Microsoft’s exploitability index needs to do a better job of shifting with the machine speed of discovery. For example, Microsoft originally gave this month’s SharePoint zero-day an exploitability rating of “less likely,” although the flaw was added to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list on July 1.

“Anthropic’s Red Team’s own findings for known vulnerabilities (n-days) revealed how fragile this system has become, with its Mythos Preview model being able to produce proof-of-concept exploits for 13 of 14 vulnerabilities that were rated ‘Exploitation Less Likely’ or ‘Exploitation Unlikely,’” Narang said. “What this means is that our way of looking at Patch Tuesday has changed, because the exploitability index is centered around humans, not AI tools, and as these tools continue to improve, defense needs to improve alongside it.”

Chris Goettl at Ivanti observed that the record patch numbers from Microsoft come as a number of other major software makers are increasing their patch cadence, including Adobe which announced today it is moving to twice-monthly security bulletins published on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month (Adobe also cited AI for accelerating their patch cycles). Cisco, Mozilla and Oracle also are shipping updates more frequently, while Google’s patch batches in June 2026 totaled more than 900 security fixes, Goettl noted.

Backing up your Windows system and/or data is always a good idea before applying operating system updates. Given the volume of patches addressed this month it may be wise for end users to wait a few days before applying these fixes. It’s not uncommon for security patches to introduce system stability issues, and those chances probably increase quite a bit with the gigantic patch count released today.

Further reading:

Action1’s Patch Tuesday blog

Automox’s rundown

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