Cisco 0-Day, AI Agent RCE, ClickFix Attacks, ClickFix Surge, and Browser Hijacks – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

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 always more clarity.

Nothing here needs much drama. Just a lot of small doors left open. Here’s what happened.

⚡ Threat of the Week

Cisco Warns of Actively Exploited ISE Auth Bypass — Cisco warned of a fresh maximum-severity security flaw impacting Identity Services Engine (ISE) that has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76460 (CVSS score: 10.0), could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication. «This vulnerability is due to insufficient authentication control on an API endpoint,» Cisco said. «An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to an affected API endpoint. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to gain unauthorized access to the affected device by bypassing the web-based management interface.»

🔔 Top News

  • U.S. Seizes NightmareStresser Domains Linked to DDoS Attacks — A U.S. court-authorized operation seized two domains associated with NightmareStresser, which offered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)-for-hire service. NightmareStresser is assessed to have been used to launch hundreds of thousands of actual or attempted DDoS attacks against victims across the world since 2022. These attacks have targeted educational institutions, government agencies, gaming platforms, and millions of people, the U.S. Justice Department said.
  • Using Claude to Hack OpenAI — Hacktron said it used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 to chain two critical vulnerabilities – an SSO misconfiguration in OpenAI’s identity infrastructure and a libheif RCE in the Discourse community forum (CVE-2026-32882) – to gain unauthorized access to OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts and then use them to access internal OpenAI repositories. The issue was fixed 14 hours after responsible disclosure. Upstream, the flaw was fixed in libheif 1.22.0 in May 2026.
  • Plugin4Shell for 0-Click RCE in AI Coding Agents — AIR Security demonstrated a flaw called Plugin4Shell, a zero-click remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability that bypasses SHA-pinning verification in four major AI coding agents: Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, and Google Gemini CLI. «In this first-of-its-kind AI supply-chain attack, a trusted plugin is silently swapped for a malicious one and auto-installed past the agent’s SHA pinning — a flaw no marketplace can fix, so users must update their agent,» AIR Security said. «It is a plugin SHA-pinning bypass: the agent checks out the exact commit the marketplace pinned but never verifies it landed there, so an attacker who controls the plugin’s repo makes the checkout resolve to malicious code while the pin still looks honored. The result is zero-click remote code execution across Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, and Gemini CLI.»
  • OpenAI Reveals New Misalignment Incidents — OpenAI 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 progress of alignment research,» OpenAI said. «We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.»
  • KREMLIN Banking Malware Hijacks Chrome and Edge for Credential Theft — A previously undocumented Brazilian banking malware operation has been found to deliver a toolkit called KREMLIN. 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 Microsoft Edge. «The KREMLIN malware ecosystem employs multi-stage JavaScript loaders, custom C++ installers, and malicious browser extensions to steal credentials, session tokens, and sensitive data,» Elastic said. The activity is being tracked as REF9334.

‎️‍🔥 Trending CVEs

Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild.

Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first — CVE-2026-58138 (Orkes Conductor), CVE-2026-58704 (Google Pixel), CVE-2026-90894 aka ParaShells (Parallels Desktop), CVE-2026-82079 (Nintendo Switch), CVE-2026-89049 (AWS Systems Manager Agent), CVE-2026-43502 aka ZcopyReaper, CVE-2026-80844 aka DirtyAH6, CVE-2026-81000 aka TUNderflow, CVE-2026-68121 aka PPPoEject, CVE-2026-74469 aka DiagSpill (Linux kernel), CVE-2026-70416, CVE-2025-43936 (Dell ObjectScale and Elastic Cloud Storage), CVE-2026-68488 (Please Backup Manager), CVE-2026-56711, CVE-2026-73324 (VLC Media Player), CVE-2026-65638 (cPanel ConfigServer Security & Firewall), CVE-2026-85982, CVE-2026-78626, CVE-2026-78623 (Okta), CVE-2026-0310 (Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS), CVE-2026-85061 (MapLibre GL JS), GHSA-rvhw-4hpw-9vrx, GHSA-rrgq-978q-36mq, GHSA-4xhx-8cv5-wh62, GHSA-8v35-895w-232p (ArangoDB), CVE-2026-65812 (Microsoft Teams for Android), CVE-2026-80172, CVE-2026-61410, CVE-2026-80238 (Dell Secure Connect), CVE-2026-18851 (Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile), CVE-2026-91721, CVE-2026-91749, CVE-2026-91726, CVE-2026-93374, CVE-2026-93372 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-92033, from CVE-2026-92005 to CVE-2026-92013, from CVE-2026-92015 to CVE-2026-92020, from CVE-2026-92022 to CVE-2026-92029, from CVE-2026-92034 to CVE-2026-92038 (Mozilla Firefox), CVE-2026-15315, CVE-2026-15316 (TP-Link Tapo cameras), CVE-2026-82232, CVE-2026-77147, CVE-2026-73178 (Apache Syncope), CVE-2026-76669, CVE-2026-76670, CVE-2026-76672, CVE-2026-76673, CVE-2026-76674 (HPE Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN Gateways and SD-WAN Orchestrator), CVE-2026-73693, CVE-2026-73694, CVE-2026-73698, CVE-2026-73699 (FileRun), CVE-2026-39919 (Ghostscript), CVE-2026-91998 (Casdoor), CVE-2026-91932, CVE-2026-91931 (Flowise), CVE-2026-65400, CVE-2026-65414, CVE-2026-65346, CVE-2026-84607, CVE-2026-43790 (Apple), CVE-2026-90999 (Sentry Seer), CVE-2026-77692, CVE-2026-76163, CVE-2026-19667, CVE-2026-19666, CVE-2026-80274 (ISC BIND 9), CVE-2026-91843 (Check Point), CVE-2026-77179 (Docker), CVE-2026-81642, CVE-2026-82717 (Unbound DNS), Click2Shell (WordPress), CVE-2026-28326, CVE-2026-28323, CVE-2026-28309, CVE-2026-28306, CVE-2026-28308, CVE-2026-28310, CVE-2026-28314, CVE-2026-28313, CVE-2026-28307, CVE-2026-28305, CVE-2026-28317, CVE-2026-28304, CVE-2026-28312, CVE-2026-28316, CVE-2026-28311, CVE-2026-28302, CVE-2026-28321, CVE-2026-28315 (SolarWinds), CVE-2026-89026 (Issabel Framework), CVE-2026-78175 (Tutor LMS), an operating system command injection vulnerability in Dokploy, and a pickle deserialization vulnerability in MLflow.

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  • AI Attacks Move in Minutes. Here’s How to Stop Them at Runtime → AI-powered attacks are shrinking the time defenders have to react. By the time a traditional alert is investigated, the attacker may already have moved through the environment. This webinar shows how runtime identity security can make access decisions in real time, block risky activity earlier, and give security teams a better chance against machine-speed attacks.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • Google Doc Leads to ClickFix Attack — Huntress disclosed details of a ClickFix attack in which a security researcher was targeted in an X exchange by a threat actor posing as a crypto marketing executive. «The threat actor sent a link to a real Google Doc with a custom sidebar designed to trick the recipient into downloading malware: an AMOS infostealer on macOS, or a PowerShell loader chain on Windows,» Huntress said. «The Google Doc featured a sidebar displaying a fake decryption failure message, with supposed remediation instructions for users of different operating systems, including the option to copy and paste certain commands into the Terminal. This ClickFix lure, and the «manual update» button beside it, are what actually delivered the malware. The sidebar itself was a Google Apps Script bound to the document, so nothing had to be downloaded for it to run.» The Apps Script executed client-side in the victim’s browser, and collected the victim’s public IP address and geolocation and scanned for crypto wallets.
  • Brevo Supply Chain Attack Injects ClickFix Scripts on Customer Sites — Customer engagement platform Brevo fell victim to a supply chain attack that led to malicious code being injected into over 100,000 websites. «On 14 September 2026, an attacker used a compromised Brevo Cloudflare API key to deploy a Cloudflare Worker on our account,» Brevo said. «For about five and a half hours, the Worker injected a malicious script into pages of brevo.com and sibforms.com and into three JavaScript files that customers embed on their own websites.» The script showed selected visitors a fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA prompt that instructed visitors to paste and run a malicious command on their computer, a technique also called ClickFix. Sansec, which shared additional details of the attack, said the «attackers piggy-backed on embedded Brevo widgets to install WordPress malware on Brevo customer sites and launch ClickFix attacks against their visitors.» In all, the incident served malware to visitors of Brevo’s own site and over 100,000 customer sites. The malware featured two components: a malicious WordPress plugin that was installed when site admins visited their own site and a ClickFix overlay that was displayed to everyone browsing a customer site or clicking a link (including the unsubscribe link) in a Brevo-sent campaign email. Earlier this month, Brevo disclosed a separate incident wherein attackers hijacked customer accounts and launched phishing attacks targeting downstream users of Brevo’s customers. The attacker «exploited a flaw in the way Brevo handles SAML SSO to gain access to 138 Brevo accounts,» Brevo said. «6 of those accounts were used to send phishing emails to the contacts stored there, and for 43 accounts they exported the contacts.» Among those impacted were Trezor, CoinTracking, and BitBox.
  • Cryptocurrency Theft Campaign Abuses Google Visualization API for C2 — A new cryptocurrency-stealing campaign has been observed using Google Visualization API for command-and-control (C2), while fetching obfuscated JavaScript from a publicly published Google Sheets document and injecting it into the victim’s browser session. «The actors use a variation on ClickFix social engineering,» Cisco Talos said. «Instead of convincing targets to run commands against the operating system, they convince targets to paste JavaScript into the Chrome address bar or install it into the Tampermonkey browser extension, which also provides persistence.» The lure masquerades as leaked vulnerability reports describing non-existent API flaws at cryptocurrency swap services, meaning the campaign is aimed at aspiring cybercriminals who are willing to exploit such vulnerabilities for financial gain. The lures are distributed via Telegram, DarkForums, and paste sites. «The injected script functions as a web skimmer,» Talos added. «It hooks the browser’s fetch API, replaces cryptocurrency deposit addresses in server responses and the user’s clipboard, and displays counterfeit ‘bonus’ interface elements.» The campaign is said to have been ongoing since October 2025. A total of 49 BTC wallet addresses have been tied to the campaign, with 24 receiving funds amounting to $10,000 from victims as of early August 2026.
  • Shai-Hulud Resurfaces After 111 Days — Aikido Security said it discovered four npm packages – feishu-docx-mcp@0.3.2, bmc-i18n-extract-cli@1.1.1, blueai-cli@0.7.0, and bmc-translate-utils@1.1.1 – containing the Shai-Hulud worm previously discovered in the attack targeting AntV in May 2026. «Four packages is a small number attached to a larger fact: a payload with a known, published, indexed hash sat untouched in nobody’s toolchain for over three months and was then republished on a registry that, as of this year, explicitly scans every package before it goes live,» Aikido said. «That gap between what registry-level scanning claims to do and what a hash-identical reactivation shows it actually caught is the real story here.»
  • Google Debuts AndroidX Security State Libraries — Google announced the stable release of AndroidX Security State version 1.1.0 and Security State Provider version 1.0.0 libraries to bring more transparency into the security posture of an Android device. These libraries provide a «centralized mechanism designed to bring further transparency to the comprehensive security posture and pending updates across the Android ecosystem,» Google said. «Whether you develop security-critical, consumer-facing apps (such as banking, fintech, or healthcare) or Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions, these libraries enable you to verify the security state of the device per component programmatically. Rather than relying on a coarse, monolithic Security Patch Level (SPL), you can evaluate true component-level protection and whether remediations are actively pending via the androidx.security.state library. For OEMs and Over-The-Air (OTA) client developers, the companion androidx.security.state.provider library allows you to expose update availability via standardized mechanisms.»
  • Ukrainian Hacker Jailed in Switzerland for Ransomware Attacks — A Zurich court sentenced a Ukrainian IT specialist to 12 years and nine months in prison for developing ransomware used in extortion attacks on companies, including Stadler Rail. The court identified the defendant as the lead developer behind the Lockergoga, MegaCortex, and Nefilim ransomware families, although he claimed that he only worked as a consultant for an unknown client in the field of IT security and that he had been unaware that his software was being used for ransomware attacks. The activity led to $123 million in estimated losses.
  • Surfshark Discloses Security Incident — Surfshark disclosed that unknown threat actors accessed one of its internal test servers after a configuration error exposed it to the internet. «Due to a human error, an internal test server used by our engineering teams was misconfigured in a way that made it reachable from the internet,» Surfshark said. «It contained parts of the system binaries and internal configurations for certain services. Personal information was never held and accessible from here, VPN traffic and browsing activity are not logged or retained in the first place, and the apps and browser extensions on your devices were not altered in any way.» The incident was discovered on August 31, 2026.
  • New Panzer Ransomware Emerges — A ransomware group called Panzer, which emerged in early August 2026, has already claimed 32 victims on its data leak site. The group mainly targeted technology, manufacturing, government, and education sectors in Germany, Indonesia, France, Spain, and Italy. According to CyberXTron, «Panzer operates on an 80/20 revenue split, with 80% of ransom proceeds going to the affiliate and 20% retained as a platform fee. The group supports cross-platform builds for Windows, Linux, ESXi, and FreeBSD. Its stated rules prohibit targeting CIS countries and entities involving minors under 18.»
  • Review of Anthropic’s Project Glasswing Ledger — VulnCheck’s review of Anthropic’s Project Glasswing ledger found that only 202 of 26,153 claimed findings have been addressed after nearly five months, while 245 have been withdrawn and 2 have been marked as duplicates. «Five months into the project, the 202 fixed findings in the ledger span 113 unique projects, resulting in an average of just 1.79 fixed findings per project,» VulnCheck’s Patrick Garrity said. «The ledger has more withdrawn/duplicate findings than fixed vulnerabilities, which makes me question Anthropic’s 91.4% true-positive claim.» The analysis also showed a significant gap between Claude’s severity assessments and those of maintainers: Claude rated 91.5% of findings as critical or high severity, compared with only 51.3% from maintainers.
  • Google Unveils Agent Anomaly Detection — Google unveiled Agent Anomaly Detection in private preview on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which acts as a «reasoning-based oversight and audit layer» that examines what an agent actually does using its reasoning traces, tool calls, and execution flow across a session. «It reads the logs and OpenTelemetry traces your agents already emit, evaluates that activity to decide whether an agent is operating outside its intended boundaries, and flags behavioral anomalies, suspicious intent, and policy violations,» Google said.

Conclusion

The lesson this week is pretty basic: trust less, check more. A familiar tool, package, login flow, browser prompt, or cloud setup can still be the weak spot. Old payloads can come back, exposed systems still get found, and «trusted» does not mean «safe.»

The other lesson is speed. Attack paths are getting shorter, research is getting faster, and weak defaults do not stay quiet for long. Patch what matters, watch what is exposed, and do not assume the boring stuff is harmless. That is usually where the week starts.

VMware Exploits, Windows 0-Day, MCP Attacks, Browser Hijacks and More – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

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 lot of small openings turning into bigger problems. Here’s what stood out.

⚡ Threat of the Week

Suspected China APT Behind Exploitation of New VMware Flaw — A suspected China-nexus APT is assessed to be behind the exploitation of a newly patched security flaw in VMware vCenter. 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. In at least one compromised instance, the attacks led to the deployment of a backdoor and. a reverse SSH binary, with the attack ultimately leading to the deployment of Babuk-derived ransomware. «Based on the case we investigated, however, we do not believe ransomware was necessarily the primary objective,» QUIRSO said. «To us, its deployment looks more like a smoke screen intended to distract from the underlying intrusion and, importantly, hinder subsequent forensic analysis by encrypting evidence. We therefore see the ransomware activity in this case as potentially serving the broader intrusion rather than being its ultimate objective.»

🔔 Top News

  • Apple macOS Flaw Exploited to Drop Crypto Miner — A recently patched security flaw in Apple macOS has come under active exploitation in the wild to deploy a cryptocurrency miner. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-65400 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical authentication issue impacting the Screen Sharing component that could allow an attacker already on the network to authenticate to the built-in remote desktop feature service without valid credentials. The shortcoming was addressed as part of an emergency update in macOS Tahoe 26.6.1, macOS Sequoia 15.7.9, and macOS Sonoma 14.8.9 earlier this month. The Netherlands National Cyber Security Center (NCSC-NL) said it received a report indicating active abuse of the vulnerability across multiple systems on which port 5900 was accessible from the internet. «In all these cases, root had gained access to the affected system and placed a Monero crypto miner,» the agency said.
  • Lazarus Exploits New Windows 0-Day — 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 is part of Operation Dream Job, a long-running cyber espionage and social engineering campaign orchestrated by Pyongyang-backed hackers to target professionals worldwide with fake-but-compelling job offers to steal sensitive data and install malware. The attacks have been found to exploit CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS score: 7.0), a privilege escalation flaw affecting Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock («AFD.sys») that was patched by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for August 2026. The attacks have been observed to deliver ForestTiger and a new backdoor called Troy.
  • GeoServer Patches Critical Flaw Under Attack — GeoServer has released patches for a critical SQL injection vulnerability that can lead to remote code execution (RCE). The issue, which has yet to be assigned a CVE identifier, has been patched in versions 3.0.1, 2.28.5, and 2.27.6. Per watchTowr, the vulnerability witnessed active exploitation within hours of public disclosure and that it has seen hundreds of attempts originating from a small pool of IP addresses. GeoServer project maintainers told The Hacker News that the flaw was responsibly disclosed and was scheduled to be addressed in their regular release cycle, when details of the flaw became public knowledge last week.
  • Amnesia Stealer Goes Beyond Data Theft — A newly discovered macOS stealer family called Amnesia Stealer has been found to target macOS users via ClickFix attacks. The malware, besides stealing data from 16 Chromium-based web browsers as well as other sensitive information, such as passwords, cryptocurrency wallets, Apple Notes, documents, and iCloud Keychain data, includes a streaming module that allows the attacker to interactively control the victim’s web browser. One notable aspect of the stealer is its ability to copy the victim’s Chromium profile, including its authentication state, and load it into a headless browser on the infected system to access the authenticated sessions. The streaming module can duplicate user profiles in Chromium-based browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Arc, Opera, and Brave, and establish a WebSocket channel that connects to the operator’s relay and receives commands, such as navigation and mouse clicks. The remote-control component is built using the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). A second WebSocket channel connects to the local headless Chromium instance. «The operator receives a live screencast of the session at around 3fps and can drive it with a full input set: keyboard, mouse, scroll, navigation and tab management,» Jamf said. «In effect, the remote_stream command turns an infected host into a live, operator-driven browser running the victim’s authenticated sessions, which is a materially different level of access from file collection.» Amnesia Stealer is the first documented macOS malware to combine a cloned Chromium profile with CDP-based, real-time remote control to allow interactive access.
  • From GhostCommit to GhostSplice — A new attack technique called GhostSplice can sidestep guardrails built around AI coding assistants and parse malicious requests that are split and hidden in a different channel, such as an MCP tool description, a tool result, and a sampling message. Each of these requests is perfectly benign on its own and processed by the assistant without refusing them. «The entire attack rests on the following fact: All three of the tool channels discussed above, together with your files and your own chat, pour into one block of the assistant’s memory,» ASSET Group said. «There does not exist any marking that separates the content based on its respective source. Therefore, the assistant reads it all as a single page.» The attack has been described as a case of cross-channel trust fragmentation. «Due to the absence of a wall between content received from different sources (e.g., different tool channels), the attacker never needs any single one of this content to look dangerous. Instead, the idea is to embed a harmless piece in each source, and the assistant stitches them back into one instruction.»
  • Using Chrome DevTools Protocol for Data Theft — New research from SpecterOps detailed a post-exploitation technique that allows Chromium’s CDP protocol to be enabled inside a live Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge process on Windows with an end goal to steal cookies, saved data, and authenticated browser sessions provided an attacker already has code execution permissions on the compromised host. «Cookie protections like ABE and device-bound session cookies make it harder to steal and replay session material, but they do not remove the value of an authenticated browser to adversaries,» SpecterOps said. «Once CDP is enabled inside a Chromium browser, an operator can use the browser context to sidestep those replay protections, access authenticated applications, and collect saved data. Enabling CDP is a reminder that the next evolution of cookie theft may not require stealing the cookie DB and ABE key at all.»

‎️‍🔥 Trending CVEs

Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild.

Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first — CVE-2026-68820 (Microsoft Windows), CVE-2026-58231 (SAP Commerce Cloud), CVE-2026-48362, CVE-2026-71398, CVE-2026-27302 (Adobe), CVE-2026-20349 (Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance Software and Secure Firewall Threat Defense), CVE-2026-53413, CVE-2026-53414, CVE-2026-53415 (Zoom), CVE-2026-65400 (Apple macOS), CVE-2026-20337, CVE-2026-20338, CVE-2026-20339, CVE-2026-20345, CVE-2026-20346, CVE-2026-20347, CVE-2026-20348 (ClamAV), CVE-2026-18412 (OpenCart), CVE-2026-66147, CVE-2026-66145 (SonicWall), CVE-2026-6726, CVE-2026-6727 (Trusted Platform Module 2.0 reference implementation), CVE-2026-26035, CVE-2026-70468, CVE-2026-70465 (Fortinet), CVE-2026-65640 (WordPress), CVE-2026-65321 (PyAthena), CVE-2026-43637 (Cornac), CVE-2026-63720 (datamodel-code-generator), an SQL injection vulnerability in GeoServer, and multiple vulnerabilities in WireShark..

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  • AI Can Build Exploits in Minutes. Can Your Security Team Keep Up? → AI is collapsing the time between vulnerability disclosure and attack. Advanced models can now uncover flaws, generate working exploits, and chain them into complete attack paths at machine speed. This webinar presents a practical framework for gaining the visibility, context, and response speed needed to investigate and stop threats before attackers pull ahead.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • Security Flaw in FileRun — VulnCheck disclosed details of CVE-2026-14863 (CVSS score: 8.7), a high-severity operating system command injection flaw in FileRun that could lead to remote code execution. «FileRun’s thumbnail extractors build shell commands by pasting the uploaded file path into a double-quoted string and handing it to exec(), and the filename sanitizer lets $() through, so a file named $(payload).mp4 runs its payload the moment a thumbnail is generated,» security researcher Valentin Lobstein said. «Any authenticated user with upload permission gets code execution; when a public file request weblink exists, so does anyone who knows its token, no account required.» The issue, which affects versions up to and including 2026.2.0, has been fixed in 2026.2.1.
  • ClickFix Leads to ACR stealer and GhostPipe — ThreatLocker disclosed an attempted ClickFix attack that employs embedded scripts, steganographic payload extraction, and obfuscation to deploy an advanced iteration of ACR stealer and a secondary payload dubbed GhostPipe. The ClickFix attack originated from a fake CAPTCHA prompt being served on a compromised domain, resulting in the execution of a PowerShell command that downloads an MP3 file, which is then executed using MSHTA to launch a VBScript that’s responsible for running intermediate payloads designed to gather system information and extract from a remotely hosted JPG file a PowerShell script. The script serves as an in-memory module shellcode launcher to deploy ACR Stealer. The malware also contacts a C2 server to fetch secondary payloads, including a PowerShell script called GhostPipe. «This seemingly unknown script performs a proxy-based AiTM attack with the sole purpose of stealing Google logins,» ThreatLocker said. «The methods used are comprehensive and inherently support relaying MFA to successfully capture credentials.»
  • Flaw in Citrix NetScaler — Citrix appears to have silently addressed a heap overflow vulnerability in NetScaler that can be exploited to achieve remote code execution. The issue was patched as part of updates released towards the end of June 2026. watchTowr said the vulnerability likely corresponds to CVE-2026-8452, which has been described as a memory overflow vulnerability that could lead to unpredictable or erroneous behavior and denial-of-service when the appliance is configured as a Gateway or an AAA virtual server. The vulnerability, per the threat intelligence company, can be turned into code execution to drop a PHP web shell that can survive the NetScaler packet engine being respawned, and ultimately execute commands with root privileges. Shortly after details of the flaw became public, Defused Cyber said it observed active in-the-wild exploitation efforts two calendar days later.
  • Ethereum Malware Loader Goes After Portuguese-Speaking Users — Portuguese-speaking users are the target of a malware loader that uses the EtherHiding technique to dynamically locate attacker infrastructure and distribute additional payloads. «The multi-stage infection chain combines obfuscated JavaScript, Node.js, DLL side-loading, and a malicious Chromium browser extension capable of targeting Chrome and Microsoft Edge to collect cookies and web storage, capture screenshots, monitor browser activity, and receive remote commands,» WatchGuard Threat Lab said. The Israel National Digital Agency (INDA), in its own analysis of EtherHiding, said the technique has been used as a delivery backend, a C2 channel, a victim database, and skimming infrastructure. In another interesting twist, attackers have been found to shift to the BNB Smart Chain testnet, essentially eliminating gas fees and making the whole operation free. «Because writes there are free, unlimited, and leave no financial trail, recent reporting has found malware command-and-control backends running entirely on a testnet,» INDA said.
  • Thousands of Exposed Fuel Gauges Dropped from the Internet — BitSight said it observed a dramatic drop in internet-exposed Automatic Tank Gauge (ATG) systems in the U.S., with the number declining by more than half. «From March to June, there was over a 55% drop in exposed IP addresses,» it said. «Globally, exposure fell 49% from that same March peak, with the U.S. accounting for most of the decline. For ten months, from June 2025 through March 2026, the U.S. held a band of roughly 4,300 to 5,300 unique exposed IPs, averaging 4,815 across 2025. Then April fell 27.6% in a single month, May fell another 31.8%, and June continued down. By June, the exposed population was 56% below the March peak.»
  • Phantom Enigma Campaign Targets Brazil — An active PhantomEnigma campaign has been observed abusing compromised government infrastructure and fake police-themed documents to target banking and public-sector organizations in Brazil. The phishing messages are presented as official notices and bypass email security filters to deliver a modular Node.js backdoor that collects system data, sets up persistence, and connects to rotating C2 infrastructure. It can also execute JavaScript or deliver stealers, loaders, RMM software, and other malware. Some aspects of the activity overlap with prior reports from Positive Technologies.
  • F.B.I. Agent Charged With Unauthorized Crypto Withdrawals — An F.B.I. counterintelligence agent has been charged with illicitly obtaining about $1 million worth of cryptocurrency, largely through unauthorized withdrawals from a criminal target overseas. According to The New York Times, the agent claimed he had begun taking the money in late 2024 or early 2025, and made 10 or 12 withdrawals altogether by making use of a seed phrase to the suspect’s account that the F.B.I. had obtained during its investigation of the individual.
  • Ukraine Dismantles Fraudulent Call Centers — Ukrainian authorities disrupted 94 fraudulent call centers during a nationwide operation that involved more than 400 searches and the seizure of thousands of computers, phones, and SIM cards. Per the Ukrainian police, the call centers were associated with schemes relating to callers impersonating bank employees, fraudulent investment services, cryptocurrency platforms, and attempts to gain remote access to victims’ devices or trick them into handing over sensitive data under the guise of suspicious transactions. Some cybercriminals collected personal information about prospective victims and shared or sold those records to other operations. «Call centers were staffed by administrators, operators, and other participants in the schemes, and ready-made conversation scripts, databases of potential victims, special software, and tools for hiding and further withdrawing funds were used,» the police said. During the probe, 3,336 pieces of computer equipment, 1,346 phones, over 5,200 SIM cards, 90 bank cards, access to 20 crypto wallets, and 22 cars were seized. About $2 million, €64,000, cash in hryvnias, a kilogram of bank gold in bars, and jewelry were also confiscated.
  • North Carolina Man Sentenced for Cyber Extortion Scheme — Cameron Curry, 27, of Charlotte, North Carolina, was sentenced to 24 months in prison for carrying out an «extensive cyber extortion scheme» against an unnamed D.C.-based international technology company. In March 2026, Curry was convicted of six counts of transmitting or willfully causing interstate communications with the intent to extort a victim company. «Curry misused his position to access the victim company’s personnel and other sensitive corporate records, which he then used to carry out the cyber extortion scheme,» the U.S. Justice Department said. «Curry hatched his extortion scheme after he learned that his contract was not going to be renewed and that he would no longer be employed by the company.»
  • ExfilSquad’s Access to Data from 13 Organizations — A new analysis of data samples published by the ExfilSquad data extortion group has confirmed «they have access to sensitive data.» Fortra said the breaches were most likely limited to unauthorized access of D365 instances. «The leading theory on the initial attack vector that enabled exfiltration is misconfigured Microsoft Power Page portals that allowed for public read access,» it said. «The observed leaked data formats are consistent with Microsoft Dataverse exports, suggesting unauthorized read access may have been achieved, and victims found by crawling for misconfigured Microsoft Power Portals or other enumeration techniques.»
  • OpenAI Rolls Out Computer History in ChatGPT — OpenAI replaced Chronicle, which builds memories from screen captures to make ChatGPT and Codex more aware of context, with Computer History. «Computer History turns your activity across apps and websites into memories and a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can reference,» OpenAI said. «You can ask natural questions about recent work, pick up where you left off, understand patterns in how you work, and turn repeated workflows into skills or automations.» Computer History is off by default for ChatGPT Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in the ChatGPT desktop app on macOS. The feature is reminiscent of Microsoft’s controversial Recall, which attracted scrutiny for relying on periodic screenshots to capture and index relevant information. Unlike Chronicle, which also used screenshots, Computer History relies on capturing interactions (e.g., clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts, app switches, and context) to allow the AI to understand user workflows. «Computer History records interaction events and does not capture your screen or audio,» OpenAI said. «You control which apps and websites contribute, can see and pause collection from the macOS menu bar, and can inspect or delete your history at any time.» That said, it’s worth emphasizing that Computer History files can contain sensitive information. «They are not encrypted by Computer History, and other programs running as your macOS user may be able to access them,» OpenAI cautions. «Protect your Mac account and exclude sources you do not want included.» OpenAI also warned that Computer History increases the risk of prompt injection from content in apps and websites, as the AI system can follow instructions when visiting a website containing malicious instructions. Temporary interaction event files are retained for up to 48 hours before they are deleted. However, they can be used to create memory files that can remain for extended periods of time until users explicitly delete or clear them.
  • China-linked LightSpy Activity Detected in Over 13 Countries — The modular implant known as LightSpy has evolved into a broader surveillance tool that’s in use in more than 13 countries and regions, including Singapore, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Japan, China, Malaysia, Germany, the U.S., Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Austria and Turkey, Arctic Wolf Labs said. This includes previously unreported router-focused capabilities along with live router implants in Europe and Africa. «The findings expand the potential impact of the surveillance framework beyond individual devices: router access can provide visibility into every device connected to a home or office network and may persist after phones are replaced, devices are factory-reset, or operating systems are upgraded,» a spokesperson for the company said. LightSpy infrastructure spans several countries, including 117 servers and 35 domains impersonating Asian electronics manufacturers and router-management services. Evidence indicates that LightSpy functions as a commercialized surveillance platform, with customer branding, billing functionality, and a demonstration environment used to market the framework to prospective buyers. The platform is assessed to be the work of a Chinese contractor after one of the operators used the LightSpy administrator’s panel to place an order with KFC using their real name and office address.
  • Trivy Supply Chain Attack Exposed 2,500+ Companies — A new analysis from SOCRadar has revealed that 95% of organizations impacted by the LiteLLM supply chain attack earlier this year were exposed before, coinciding with the compromise of the Trivy scanner. «Organizations did not need to install LiteLLM directly to be exposed,» the cybersecurity company said. «The package could arrive through frameworks such as DSPy, MLflow, CrewAI, OpenHands, and Arize Phoenix, while its payload executed at Python startup without requiring a LiteLLM import.» The incident was attributed to a threat actor known as TeamPCP.
  • Massive Azure Exfiltration Campaign Exposes Millions of Enterprise Records — An active Microsoft Azure exfiltration campaign is being driven by a threat actor named «TheHatman,» who has «flooded» cybercrime forums with enterprise employee databases. The data is said to have been downloaded directly from the organizations’ Azure/Entra portals using compromised credentials, although the exact intrusion vector remains unknown. The campaign impacts multiple global enterprises across IT services, hospitality, telecommunications, retail, and logistics. Some of them include McDonald’s, TCS, Vodafone, HCL Technologies, Kyndryl, Gap, Hexaware, and Wyndham Hotels. «Judging by the massive size of the organizations impacted, it appears highly likely that this campaign originates from targeted exploitation of Infostealer infections rather than a systemic zero-day vulnerability in Azure,» Hudson Rock said.

Conclusion

That’s the week. Some attacks needed a real exploit. Others just needed an exposed system, a stolen login, or one weak link buried in the stack.

The useful part is knowing which kind you’re dealing with before it becomes your problem. Patch what matters, close what should not be public, and keep an eye on the boring stuff. It keeps winning.

AI Goes Rogue, Metabase 0-Day, MCP Supply-Chain Attacks, and Router Backdoors – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

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 everything else that made the Monday recap.

⚡ Threat of the Week

Anthropic’s Model Attempts to Poison Open-Source Project — A new evaluation conducted by the U.K. AI Security Institute (AISI) found that AI models with access to the internet reached out into the real world to target individuals and organizations autonomously across 10 of the total of 122 runs. Of 19 such actions recorded, 17 originated from Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and the remaining two involved OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol with cyber classifiers. In the most serious case, Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 spent 34 hours trying to get a malware dropper merged into a real open-source project and engaged in social engineering by creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project’s maintainer to approve the code. Ultimately, a human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code. «These attempts were unsuccessful, and our investigations have not evidenced any resulting real-world harm,» AISI said. But this is the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly, without specific prompting, in the real-world.»

🔔 Top News

  • Metabase 0-Day Exploited in Attacks — Metabase 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 administrator access to the instance. Armed with the elevated access, the attacker can change the application configuration, steal stored credentials for the connected databases, read any data accessible through those connections, and export data. One of the companies that has been affected is Framework.
  • New Interrupt Injection Attack Bypass Spectre v2 Defenses on Intel and AMD CPUs — A group of researchers demonstrated a way to bypass defenses for the Spectre vulnerability impacting modern CPUs. «The defenses work by wiping or isolating the processor’s prediction machinery, removing anything an attacker might have planted,» MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) said. «The catch […] is that the wipe and the moment the predictions get used can’t happen at the same instant. There is always a gap — sometimes only a handful of instructions wide. Anything that runs in that gap can dirty the machinery all over again. The researchers call this class of attack TONTOU.» The study found a reliable way to get code into that gap using a technique called Interrupt Injection to ultimately pull secrets out of memory.
  • New CSS Attacks Can Break Webmail Defenses — New research demonstrated at the Black Hat conference last week detailed attack chains spanning Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Fastmail, Proton Mail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail that can capture passwords, take over third-party accounts, leak tokens, hijack trusted UI actions, and manipulate AI tools that read email. «Trouble is you can create discrepancies between what the sanitizer thinks is safe and what the browser actually renders,» PortSwigger said. «Some webmail clients go a step further by letting the browser parse the HTML and CSS first, then filtering the browser’s interpreted output rather than the original source. Yet even this can be mutated into something malicious.»
  • UNC6671 Vishing Attacks Target Financial Firms — 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. The attacks employ voice phishing to target enterprise employees and trick them into visiting spoofed login portals where adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) infrastructure intercepts credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) tokens. The threat actors then leverage the captured data to establish session persistence and deploy automated Python and PowerShell scripts for data exfiltration from enterprise cloud environments and SaaS applications, including Microsoft 365 and Okta. UNC6671 has diversified its operations across multiple extortion brands including Redact, Pink (aka CL-CRI-1147), Helix, and Falcon (aka CL-CRI-1182). UNC6671 was previously said to have operated under the BlackFile (aka CL-CRI-1116) brand, targeting organizations via vishing and SSO compromise, before it was retired on May 11, 2026.
  • Chinese-Made Zbtlink Routers Ship With Backdoor — An analysis of firmware associated with Chinese router manufacturer Zbtlink has unearthed a factory-shipped backdoor that’s designed to phone home and run commands received from the server. The backdoors are designed such that they start automatically and attempt to beacon to Chinese command-and-control (C2) infrastructure as often as every 35 seconds. The backdoor is implanted in at least 20 router models. In response to the findings, Zbtlink reiterated that the «remote management component» is used only for after-sales technical support and to «assist customers with device troubleshooting and configuration only upon their explicit request and authorization.» The company also said it has never been used for unauthorized access. The company also said it’s developing and releasing firmware updates to address the issue.

‎️‍🔥 Trending CVEs

Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild.

Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first — CVE-2026-34348, CVE-2026-18497 (stb TrueType), CVE-2026-63508, CVE-2026-56162, CVE-2026-65667, CVE-2026-50515, CVE-2026-62830, CVE-2026-59115, CVE-2026-50481 (Microsoft Windows), CVE-2026-64638 (WordPress), CVE-2026-64564 (Linux SCTP), CVE-2026-56181 (Microsoft Windows NAT), CVE-2026-63913 (Linux), CVE-2026-64561 (Linux kernel), CVE-2026-20303, CVE-2026-20304, CVE-2026-20310, CVE-2026-20267, CVE-2026-20272 (Cisco), CVE-2026-18830 (AWS AgentCore), CVE-2026-18236 (Google ADK), CVE-2026-64650, CVE-2026-64651 (Vercel), CVE-2026-41679, GHSA-x8hx-rhr2-9rf7 (Paperclip), CVE-2026-58073, CVE-2026-58072 (Veeam), CVE-2026-16498, CVE-2026-16496, CVE-2026-14869 (HashiCorp), CVE-2026-15307 (GeoDjango), CVE-2026-64531 (Linux kernel Open vSwitch), CVE-2026-18577, CVE-2026-18556 (N-able N‑central), CVE-2026-59774 (Gitea), CVE-2026-58048 (cPanel), CVE-2026-17583 (Thermo Fisher Scientific), CVE-2026-8496 (Alinto SOGo), CVE-2026-65400 (Apple macOS Tahoe, macOS Sequoia, and macOS Sonoma), CVE-2026-19137, CVE-2026-19149, CVE-2026-19154, CVE-2026-19157, CVE-2026-19170, CVE-2026-19172 (Google Chrome), CVE-2013-3821 (Oracle PeopleSoft), CVE-2025-8943 (Flowise), and an SQL injection in Metabase.

🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars

  • Build a Security Strategy for AI-Speed Development → AI is pushing software delivery far beyond the pace traditional security programs were designed for. This session shows security leaders how to govern AI-built software, reduce risk without slowing teams down, and build controls that scale with machine-speed development.
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  • Build a Security Operations Strategy for Machine-Speed Attacks → AI can now find vulnerabilities, generate exploits, and build attack paths at machine speed. This session gives security leaders a practical framework to assess AI threat readiness, improve attack-surface visibility, and accelerate investigation and remediation before existing processes become the bottleneck.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • New Shai-Hulud Version Weaponizes the MCP Registry — A new version of the Shai-Hulud worm spread through the open-source ecosystems is equipped to deliver the payload via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Registry. «While earlier iterations of Shai-Hulud tampered with local AI coding client configs, this marks the first time we observed a Shai-Hulud payload being delivered directly through the official Model Context Protocol (MCP) Registry (registry.modelcontextprotocol.io),» OX Security said. The attack works like this: the npm and PyPI package linked by the MCP server is completely clean, but opening or cloning the linked MCP server GitHub repository («jUXTAPOSITION1/V.A.P.E») inside Claude Code or VS Code triggers the malware, leading to the collection of developer tokens, cloud credentials, and session keys. The worm spread through 440 unique npm packages.
  • China Launches Review of Palo Alto Networks — China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has announced it’s conducting a review of Palo Alto Networks’ products. «In order to ensure the safe and stable operation of critical information infrastructure, prevent hidden risks of network security, and safeguard national security, in accordance with the National Security Law of the People’s Republic of China and the Cyber Security Law of the People’s Republic of China, the Network Security Review Office implements network security review of products sold by Palo Alto in China in accordance with the ‘Network Security Review Measures,’» the CAC said.
  • Papyrus Uses Fake Novel Reading Apps for Ad Fraud — A new mobile ad fraud scheme dubbed Papyrus has been observed leveraging a «cluster of novel-reading applications that monetize users’ reading sessions by running hidden browser activity in the background,» Integral Ad Science said. «While users believe they’re simply reading a story, the apps are secretly using their phone to visit websites, generate clicks, and create fake engagement behind the scenes. The apps present themselves as entertainment products built around long-form fiction and serialized stories, but IAS observed them covertly navigating to web domains under the direction of command-and-control infrastructure.» Papyrus is built around BootNova, an orchestration layer that controls hidden browser activity inside the app. When the app runs, BootNova contacts remote command-and-control infrastructure for configuration. The remote configuration can control enablement, timing, geographic targeting, retry behavior, the number of WebViews to run, destination URLs, and the interaction logic applied to those pages. Papyrus has been linked to more than 800 domains and nearly 8,000 unique hostnames.
  • Estimated $30M Stolen in Violent Crypto Attacks in 2026 — An estimated $30 million is said to have been stolen in violent «wrench attacks» in 2026, according to Chainalysis. «Home invasions now account for 37% of incidents in 2026, up from 26% in 2023,» it said. «Kidnappings have remained relatively stable year-over-year (YoY) in terms of share of total attacks.» In contrast, annual value stolen in violent attacks peaked at $58 million in 2025.
  • 26 Ransomware Attacks Per Day in July 2026 — According to Comparitech, July 2026 saw nearly 26 ransomware attacks per day, up from 22 per day in June. The number of ransomware attacks jumped from 668 in June to 799 in July. «The education sector saw a significant increase (up 44%), as did finance companies (up 71%), tech firms (up 62%), and businesses operating within the healthcare sector, e.g. pharmaceutical manufacturers and medical billing providers (up 46%),» Comparitech said. The most prolific groups were The Gentlemen (135), Qilin (125), DragonForce (41), INC (36), and CRPx0 (33).
  • Device Code Phishing Evasion Techniques Detailed — Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said it identified four evasion techniques that are currently being used in device code phishing campaigns. This includes CAPTCHA gates, multi-step flows that go through multiple SaaS hosting platforms separating the initial link from the phishing content to evade URL reputation checks, blob URL delivery, and the use of Cyrillic characters in place of Latin letters, zero-width spaces, and strings inside tags to break content-based detection.
  • From LLMJacking to Token Jacking — A growing number of security incidents involving AI token jacking have resulted in financial losses for victims. «The financial loss comes from criminals gaining access to API keys used by legitimate developers for access to popular AI platforms,» Unit 42 said. «The unrelenting frenzy of AI adoption and soaring costs of model access are converging into an irresistible opportunity for cybercriminals. Premium pricing on scarce AI processing power means stolen access via tokens can generate a quick and easy profit for attackers. Complex, patchwork billing management and limitless scaling by default can lead to massive financial losses in short periods.»
  • ScarCruft Leverages RokRAT in New Attacks — Spear-phishing emails disguised as materials for actual academic events and seminars are being used to deliver RokRAT, a remote access trojan linked to a North Korean group known as ScarCruft. «Although the file was disguised as a PDF, it actually delivered a malicious ISO file through a cloud storage link,» Genians said. «The ISO contained an executable disguised as a PDF document, using the ‘.pdf,’ ‘.pif’ extension to induce the user to run it. The attack loaded the shellcode payload into memory and injected a RokRAT variant into a process.»
  • Kimsuky Uses New Gomir Variant — Speaking of North Korean threat groups, the threat actor tracked as Kimsuky is said to have gained control of internet-facing servers through vulnerability exploitation and spear-phishing and deployed a new variant of a backdoor called Gomir, a Linux variant of the Windows-based GoBear backdoor. «Kimsuky developed Gomir variants with significantly altered C2 communication methods to evade detection, including leveraging Google Drive as a C2 channel and implementing a new custom protocol,» ENKI said. In at least one case in December 2025, the threat actor has been found deploying HttpTroy, which is then used to install additional tools, including DWAgent and a proxy tool. Kimsuky has also been observed setting up local large language model (LLM) environments using Ollama, GPT4All, and Msty to augment its operations and target foreign diplomatic missions, as well as the military, security, and virtual asset sectors. The attacks have leveraged Git-based repositories as C2 and distribution channels for encrypted AsyncRAT payloads. The activity has been codenamed Operation GitPower, citing similarities with FlowerPower. Last year, the group was tied to campaigns that involved abusing OpenAI’s ChatGPT to forge deepfake military ID cards in a spear-phishing campaign against South Korean defense-affiliated entities and other individuals focused on North Korean affairs, such as researchers, human rights activists, and journalists.

Conclusion

Maybe the real problem is not that security keeps failing in surprising ways. It’s that the “surprising” part usually disappears the moment someone shows how little it took.

That’s worth remembering. Attackers do not need perfect conditions. They just need one assumption nobody checked, one shortcut nobody revisited, or one old weakness that quietly stayed useful.

WordPress RCE, SonicWall 0-Days, AI Service Attacks, SharePoint 0-Day and More – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

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 recap of what broke, what was exploited, and what needs attention now.

⚡ Threat of the Week

New wp2shell WordPress Core Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Run Code – Searchlight Cyber disclosed a pre-authenticated remote code execution vulnerability in WordPress Core that can be exploited anonymously on a standard WordPress installation, without requiring any plugins or other special conditions. It is a combination of CVE-2026-63030 (REST API batch-route confusion) and CVE-2026-60137 (SQL injection in WordPress core) that can be chained to turn an anonymous request into code execution. watchTowr said it’s already seeing proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits in circulation and that it’s beginning to see the first signs of in-the-wild exploitation. «This is going to hurt,» watchTowr CEO Benjamin Harris said. «WordPress runs on hundreds of millions of websites globally. Some of those will be auto-patched by their hosting providers, but plenty will not, and that is where the damage will be done. Our advice is simple: patch as fast as you possibly can, and do not stop there. Put the controls and investigations in place to determine whether an attacker got there first and to detect and remove any backdoors that may already have been dropped before you patched.» The cybersecurity company said it’s the latest example of vulnerabilities being surfaced by AI-assisted tooling and how the technology is being abused by attackers to weaponize them.

🔔 Top News

  • SonicWall SMA Zero-Days Exploited as 0-Days – A previously undocumented threat actor codenamed UTA0533 has been attributed to the exploitation of recently disclosed SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series VPN appliances as zero-days prior to their public disclosure since June 22, 2026. The discovery was made following an incident response investigation initiated earlier this month. The impacted organization has not been identified. «This threat actor was observed using multiple zero-day exploits, malware designed specifically for SonicWall SMA VPN appliances, as well as other attacker tradecraft,» Volexity said. The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-15409 (CVSS score: 10.0) and CVE-2026-15410 (CVSS score: 7.2), both of which could be chained to facilitate arbitrary command execution and take over susceptible devices. Patches for both vulnerabilities were released by SonicWall last week.
  • DoS Flaw in OpenSSL – The Okta Red Team disclosed details of HollowByte, a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw in OpenSSL. «By sending a malicious payload of just 11 bytes, a remote, unauthenticated attacker can force a server to allocate disproportionate chunks of memory before any security handshake even begins,» Okta said. Put differently, an unauthenticated attacker — through 11 bytes of carefully crafted data — can convince OpenSSL to reserve up to 128 KB of heap memory for a handshake message that never actually arrives, causing a server to exhaust available RAM and trigger a DoS condition. The OpenSSL team resolved the issue in versions 4.0.1, 3.6.3, 3.5.7, 3.4.6, and 3.0.21. «Instead of trusting the header outright, OpenSSL now grows the buffer only as bytes actually land on the wire. A claim with no follow-through now costs the server nothing,» Okta said.
  • CISA Adds New SharePoint RCE Zero-Day to KEV Catalog – The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) 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, CVE-2026-58644 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a critical deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability that allows an unauthorized attacker to execute arbitrary code. Patches for the flaw have been released as part of the Patch Tuesday updates released on July 14, 2026. Microsoft revised its bulletin to clarify that CVE-2026-58644 has been exploited in the wild, meaning the shortcoming was weaponized as a zero-day prior to the fixes becoming available. The development came as Microsoft shipped its largest Patch Tuesday on record, addressing 622 vulnerabilities.
  • OkoBot Malware Framework Infects Windows to Phish Crypto Seed Phrases – A new malware framework called OkoBot is designed to capture the contents of cryptocurrency wallet windows. OkoBot is an updated version of TookPS, which is a downloader for retrieving malicious commands and scripts from attacker-controlled servers to further propagate attacks, including a Python-based infostealer and a remote access trojan called TeviRAT. «This campaign differs from previous activity in that it uses a new framework to deliver all malicious modules and orchestrate them via an SSH tunnel,» Kaspersky said. «In total, the framework includes more than 20 malicious payloads and implants, covering a wide variety of functions. At the time of writing, the threat remains active.» The infection chain makes use of ClickFix and malware distributed through GitHub that masquerades as legitimate software for initial access. It also comes with a web browser extensions loader to deliver Rilide, a browser-based stealer, as well as inject an implant into Trezor Suite, Ledger Wallet, and Ledger Live processes to collect seed phrases, log keystrokes and clipboard content, take screenshots, and capture keystrokes and the video stream of the target application’s window using the OkoSpyware module. Hundreds of victims of the OkoBot campaign have been detected in more than 25 countries, with the highest concentration in Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and Türkiye. The activity remains unattributed.
  • NadMesh Scans Exposed AI Services for Cloud Keys and Kubernetes Tokens – A new Go botnet called NadMesh has been observed hunting for exposed AI services related to ComfyUI, Ollama, n8n, Open WebUI, Langflow, and Gradio to steal AWS keys and Kubernetes tokens. «It folds scanning, exploitation, and credential/AI-service intelligence harvesting into a single autonomous platform,» QiAnXin XLab said. «On the victim, the bot agent establishes persistence along three independent paths: an SSH public-key backdoor (.ssh/authorized_keys), persistence files in multiple locations (/dev/shm/.a, /var/tmp/.a, /tmp/.a), and hidden cron watchdogs (/etc/cron.d/.sys_monitor, /etc/cron.d/.s).»

‎️🔥 Trending CVEs

Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild.

Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first – CVE-2026-63030, CVE-2026-60137 (WordPress Core), CVE-2026-58644, CVE-2026-56164 (Microsoft SharePoint Server), CVE-2026-56155 (Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services), CVE-2026-53412 (Zoom Desktop Client for Windows and Zoom VDI Client for Windows), CVE-2026-44747, CVE-2026-27690, CVE-2026-44761 (SAP), CVE-2026-57219, CVE-2026-57221 (RabbitMQ), CVE-2026-59208, CVE-2026-54305 (n8n), CVE-2026-60105 (Monsta FTP), CVE-2026-14960, CVE-2026-14961 (tdeio64.sys driver), CVE-2026-33894, CVE-2026-33895 (Digital Bazaar node-forge), CVE-2026-6875 (ServiceNow AI Platform), CVE-2026-42533, CVE-2026-60005, CVE-2026-56434 (F5 NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source), CVE-2026-20296, CVE-2026-20297 (Splunk Enterprise), CVE-2026-15265 (Tenable Agent), CVE-2026-6423 (ESET Inspect Connector), CVE-2026-15053 (Tanium Server), CVE-2026-44909, CVE-2026-59173, CVE-2026-59762 (HTTP/2 server implementations), CVE-2026-14890 (SGLang), CVE-2026-14266 (7-Zip), CVE-2026-59084 (Apache Tomcat), CVE-2026-15682 (AnyDesk), and CVE-2026-54523 (Kyverno).

🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars

  • Your AI Agent Has Credentials. Can You Stop It When It Goes Rogue? Hands-on testing of OpenClaw shows how agentic AI can expose secrets, bypass safety controls, and create a powerful new attack surface. Join Okta Threat Intelligence Director Jeremy Kirk to examine how attackers are abusing AI agents and learn practical ways to control access, enforce least privilege, detect shadow AI, and shut down risky agents before they cause damage.
  • When AI Ships 50× More Code, Human Review Stops Scaling → AI-assisted development is pushing code production beyond what traditional security reviews and CVE-driven remediation can handle. This webinar gives security leaders a practical framework for governing the expanding attack surface, building secure-by-default controls, and enabling teams to develop at machine speed without surrendering control of software risk.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • New Campaign Delivers Remcos RAT – A new malware distribution campaign has abused the credibility of government institutions to increase the likelihood of infection success. The activity targets Indian businesses and taxpayers using Goods and Services Tax (GST)-related themes to distribute malware. «The threat actors impersonated legitimate government departments and distributed malicious emails disguised as official notifications related to taxation, refunds, compliance requirements, and regulatory matters,» Seqrite Labs said. «The threat actors employ convincing documents and filenames that closely resemble official GST notifications, making it difficult for recipients to distinguish malicious content from legitimate government correspondence.» The end goal is to deploy Remcos RAT and steal sensitive information.
  • India’s Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant Suffers a Data Leak – The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant located in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu suffered an accidental exposure after Reliance Infra (RPOWER) got hit by a ransomware group called World Leaks, a spin-off of Hunters International, which, in turn, is another variant of the Hive ransomware family. The leak consists of 18,997 files, totalling 14.3GB of data, per security researcher Rakesh Krishnan. They contain purported blueprints for the ventilation and cooling systems used in Unit 3 and Unit 4, along with a complete floor layout of a «common control room». It’s assessed that Reliance Infra was not impacted directly, but rather through a third-party vendor named Yotta.
  • Blind Eagle Shows No Signs of Stopping – Nearly a year after Blind Eagle’s activities were documented, a new report from LevelBlue has found the threat actor to be active, moving part of its VBScript delivery infrastructure onto the Russian bulletproof hosting provider Proton66 as of June 2025. The group has also devised a bespoke string-obfuscation scheme, a RunPE loader built entirely on a bare AutoIt3 interpreter, and an upgraded version of AsyncRAT that introduces Windows Notification Facility (WNF) process injection, a custom Base28 payload encoding, a full Hidden VNC (HVNC) banking-fraud module with browser profile cloning, and a Chrome App-Bound Encryption (ABE) bypass, per LevelBlue.
  • Qilin Ransomware Use of EDR Killer – Qilin ransomware operations have been observed adopting aggressive, kernel-level defense evasion to blind and disable endpoint security products before its main ransomware payload is executed on a victim’s network. The EDR killer, packed via the Shanya packer, is sold on illicit marketplaces for $2,000. «The EDR killer compares the returned locale to a known locale blacklist to avoid attacking any Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries such as Russia and Belarus,» Flashpoint said. «The EDR killer then writes a vulnerable driver to disk and loads this driver via Service Manager. This driver is the ThrottleStop driver from TechPowerUp LLC’s free and legitimate application of the same name, used to bypass CPU throttling. However, the driver suffers from a vulnerability, allowing the malware to map physical memory to kernel-mode virtual memory to perform direct kernel read and write operations.» Also put to use is a custom Rust-written loader that performs reflective Portable Executable (PE) loading of the ransomware payload.
  • DefiTuna Suffers a Security Incident – DeFiTuna, an Automated Market Maker (AMM) on the Solana blockchain, was exploited on July 16, 2026, for $569,601 USDC. «The attackers created a highly illiquid TUNA/USDC pool and used it as the destination for borrowed USDC routed through Jupiter,» CertiK said. «Because the swap returned only a negligible amount of TUNA, DeFiTuna’s value calculation rounded the position’s total assets down to zero. The protocol then incorrectly treated the position as healthy, allowing the attackers to bypass the solvency check and withdraw the USDC through attacker-controlled liquidity positions.»
  • Next.js Opts for Scheduled Security Releases – Vercel announced that Next.js is adopting a formal security release program, replacing ad-hoc patches for security fixes following a surge in AI-assisted vulnerability discovery. «This kind of scheduled, pre-announced security release has become standard practice for major open source projects, and we think it’s the right model for Next.js at its current scale,» Vercel said. «Here’s what you can expect going forward: roughly once a month, we’ll publish advance notice of upcoming security releases. Each announcement will include the expected release timeline and the highest anticipated severity among the vulnerabilities it covers. This lead time lets you plan your upgrades, and it lets us coordinate with hosting providers and other platform partners to deploy mitigations, such as firewall rules, that help protect applications that haven’t been patched yet.»
  • Disguised Gambling Apps Target Brazil – A new analysis from 9to5Mac has revealed more than 60 «jacket apps» on the App Store that are disguised as simple games and utilities that become online betting platforms when accessed from Brazilian IP addresses. Most of the apps are published by developer accounts with only a single App Store listing, with further investigation linking them to a «public GitHub repository containing instructions for a Cursor agent to create simple, vibe-coded apps that serve as fronts for the betting platforms.»
  • Ransomware Stats for Q2 2026 – The Gentlemen has become the most active ransomware group for Q2 2026, claiming 300 victims, surging past Qilin (289), DragonForce, Akira, and LockBit. Another group named Deadlock resurfaced after 11 months of silence with 75 June victims. In all, the top 11 tracked groups accounted for 1,368 of Q2’s victim claims across 99 countries. «What sets The Gentlemen apart is its packaging, where affiliates receive ready-made tools that ship and update faster than most competing programs,» ReliaQuest said.
  • 2 Members of Chinese Money Laundering Network Charged with Laundering $43M in Investment Fraud – The U.S. Justice Department unsealed charges against a New York man and woman for conspiracy to launder money derived from cyber investment fraud scams. «Between 2020 and 2022, Zhuoying Chen, 27, of Brooklyn, New York, and Haojie Zhang, 38, of Queens, New York, managed a network of more than a dozen individuals based in Queens and Brooklyn, who opened 140 bank accounts in the name of approximately 45 shell companies to launder at least $43 million in proceeds of investment scams,» the department said. «Then, Chen and Zhang allegedly conspired with China-based co-conspirators to transfer the funds involved in the fraud schemes abroad. The fraud schemes consist of perpetrators contacting victims via messaging services or social media applications. The perpetrators would initiate relationships with the victims and gain their trust, convincing victims to send money for lucrative investment opportunities. The perpetrators would show the victims fake profits on the purported investment and encourage the victims to invest more. The perpetrators would then steal the victim’s funds.»
  • U.S. Cyber Agency Uses Mythos to Audit Government Code – Reuters reported that the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is using Anthropic’s AI model Mythos to audit government software for defects that could potentially offer a pathway for foreign spies and cybercriminals, citing three people familiar with the matter.

🔧 Cybersecurity Tools

  • VisionSec → It is an open-source, self-hosted threat intelligence platform that combines domain monitoring, phishing detection, exposed-service scanning, GitHub secret discovery, breach checks, email security assessments, and Telegram alerts in a modular Docker-based deployment. The project remains at an early stage, with no published releases at the time of writing.
  • owLSM → It is an open-source Linux security agent that uses eBPF LSM to run stateful Sigma rules inside the kernel, block malicious activity, correlate events across multiple probes, and provide detailed context for security monitoring and response.

Disclaimer: This is strictly for research and learning. It hasn’t been through a formal security audit, so don’t just blindly drop it into production. Read the code, break it in a sandbox first, and make sure whatever you’re doing stays on the right side of the law.

Conclusion

That is the week: exposed systems, weak checks, old tools, and attackers moving faster than patch cycles.

Review what applies, fix the obvious gaps first, and assume anything public has already been tested.

Chrome 0-Day, UniFi Exploits, macOS Stealers, VPN Flaw and More – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

Stuff broke again. Not in a movie way. An old tool was left exposed. An abandoned package was abused. A deprecated feature was still running in prod.

This week is the same lesson in a new form: phishing kits are easier to rent, AI names are useful bait, old login paths still fail, and forgotten software keeps becoming someone else’s entry point.

Scroll through the full Monday Cybersecurity Recap below for the news, tools, webinars, and fixes worth your time this week.

⚡ Threat of the Week

Google Patches Actively Exploited Chrome 0-Day – Google released security updates to address 74 vulnerabilities, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-11645 (CVSS score: 8.8), has been described as an out-of-bounds memory access in V8, Chrome’s JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. Google acknowledged that an «exploit for CVE-2026-11645 exists in the wild,» but stopped short of sharing additional specifics to ensure that a majority of the users are updated with a fix and to prevent further exploitation. Google has addressed a total of five actively exploited Chrome zero-days since the start of the year. This includes CVE-2026-2441, CVE-2026-3909, CVE-2026-3910, and CVE-2026-5281.

🔔 Top News

  • ShinyHunters Gang Exploits Oracle PeopleSoft Zero-Day – The ShinyHunters (aka UNC6240) extortion crew exploited an unpatched flaw in Oracle PeopleSoft (CVE-2026-35273, CVSS score: 9.8) to break into enterprise networks. The vulnerability relates to a missing authentication for a critical function that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to obtain takeover of PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools. According to Google Mandiant, the exploitation activity was observed between May 27 and June 9, 2026. Following a successful compromise, the attackers have been observed conducting targeted internal reconnaissance using MeshCentral, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, giving Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies until June 15, 2026, to apply the fixes. The campaign has mainly targeted the higher education sector; 68% of the more than 100 notified organizations were universities and colleges. «The observed exploitation targeted PeopleSoft’s Environment Management Hub (PSEMHUB) endpoints, and data stolen during the campaign was published on the ShinyHunters Data Leak Site (DLS) on June 9, 2026,» Rapid7 said.
  • 100s of Arch Linux Packages Compromised to Push Rootkit and Stealer – Unknown threat actors have managed to compromise hundreds of legitimate-but-abandoned packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR) and modify them with preinstall scripts that download and execute a malicious npm package called atomic-lockfile. The campaign has been codenamed Atomic Arch by Sonatype. «Analysis of atomic-lockfile, the malicious dependency, found a bundled Linux payload with functionality tied to credential harvesting, stealth, anti-debugging, and potential data exfiltration,» the company said. Although the initial number of affected packages was 400, it has since risen to over 1,500. As of June 12, 2026, Arch Linux developers have deleted all the malicious commits they are aware of.
  • Outside PhaaS Enterprise Taken Down – The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said it took down a number of domains linked to Outsider, a Chinese phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) software kit behind an estimated 3,870,000 stolen credit cards and a corresponding estimated $1.9 billion in losses since July 2023. In tandem, Google said it pursuing legal action against the operators, who weaponized Gemini to «help generate fraudulent phishing pages and deploy massive SMS phishing (‘smishing’) attacks, often through text messages impersonating legitimate brands, alerting recipients of ‘brokerage account issues’ or insisting they are eligible for ‘rewards through their mobile phone carrier.» According to a complaint filed by Google, the group «built, maintains, and uses a turn-key, online software suite that enables criminals, regardless of technical skill, to publish fraudulent websites designed to rob victims and enrich themselves.» The toolkit costs $88 per week or $200 per month, offering access to more than 290 pre-built templates that mimic legitimate websites. The goal is to steal passwords and corresponding multi-factor authentication codes, as well as financial information in real-time. «Part of the Outsider software’s appeal is the ease with which someone with limited technical expertise -like many members of the Enterprise – can purchase the software, execute various phishing attacks, and, upon purchase, meet other members of the Enterprise who are proficient in other areas,» the tech giant added.
  • Critical Check Point VPN Flaw Exploited in Limited Attacks – Check Point warned of active exploitation of a critical vulnerability CVE-2026-50751 (CVSS score: 9.3) impacting Remote Access VPN and Mobile Access deployments that are configured to use the deprecated IKEv1 key exchange protocol. The security flaw is a case of a logic flow weakness in certificate validation that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass user authentication and establish a remote access VPN connection without a valid user password. The Israeli cybersecurity company said it first observed indications of suspicious activity on June 4, 2026, with the earliest observed exploitation dating back to May 7, 2026. Exploitation efforts are said to have ramped up starting this month. The exploitation activity, Check Point added, has been limited to a «few dozen targeted organizations globally.» In one case, the post-exploitation phase has been associated with a Qilin ransomware affiliate.
  • The Gentlemen Ransomware Claims 478 Victims – A new analysis of The Gentlemen operation revealed that the financially motivated threat group initially operated as an affiliate responsible for conducting double extortion attacks, while leveraging resources from various ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) schemes like LockBit (aka Tenacious Mantis), Qilin (aka Pestilent Mantis), and Medusa (aka Venomous Mantis). The group, which it tracks as Phantom Mantis, is led by a Russian-speaking cybercriminal it calls LARVA-368, who goes by the online aliases hastalamuerte, ArmCorp, zeta88, nobody0, and santamuerte. The Gentlemen is known to be active since March 2025, claiming a total of 478 victims to date. Microsoft, which is tracking the cluster under the moniker Storm-2697, said the operation «initially started as a closed ransomware group then began offering its RaaS to affiliates in September 2025.»

‎🔥 Trending CVEs

Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild.

Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first – CVE-2026-11645 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-50751 (Check Point Remote Access VPN and Mobile Access), CVE-2026-35273 (Oracle PeopleSoft), CVE-2026-5027 (Langflow), CVE-2026-44963 (Veeam Backup & Replication), CVE-2026-23111 (Linux kernel), CVE-2026-45447 (OpenSSL), CVE-2026-44748, CVE-2026-27671 (SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP and ABAP Platform), CVE-2026-22732 (SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Data Hub), CVE-2026-40128 (SAP NetWeaver Application Server Java Web Container), CVE-2026-10520 (Ivanti Sentry), CVE-2026-28252, CVE-2026-28253, CVE-2026-28254, CVE-2026-28255, CVE-2026-28256 (Trane Tracer SC+ HVAC controller), CVE-2025-46412, CVE-2025-41426 (Vertiv Liebert IS-UNITY-DP network cards), CVE-2026-0274 (Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR and Cortex XSIAM), CVE-2026-20253 (Splunk Enterprise), CVE-2026-9648 (Haskell TLS software stack), from CVE-2026-12007 through CVE-2026-12011 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-45034 (PhpSpreadsheet), PTT-2026-004, PTT-2026-005, an authentication bypass vulnerability (phpBB), and a maximum-severity code injection vulnerability in Wazuh (no CVE).

🎥 Expert Webinars

  • Find Out What Your Automated Pentest Is Missing Before Attackers Do → Automated pentesting is useful. It is also easy to overread. A tool that proves an exploit path worked does not prove your SIEM saw it, your EDR reacted, or your team could respond before damage spread. This webinar cuts through that gap: what automated pentesting actually validates, why repeat runs start returning fewer useful findings, and how BAS helps show which controls failed, not just which vulnerabilities exist.
  • Stop AI-Speed Attacks Before Your Legacy Controls Catch Up → AI has changed the pace of cyberattacks. Lures get sharper, campaigns adapt faster, and attackers can test what works before defenders finish investigating. This webinar breaks down how AI-powered threats like Mythos get in, move, and scale, then shows how to fight back with tighter access, reduced attack surface, blocked lateral movement, and in-line controls that stop risky behavior before it becomes an incident.
  • Stop Employees From Leaking Source Code, Contracts, and PII Into AI Tools → Employees are already pasting company data into AI tools. Source code, contracts, customer records, and internal notes can leave the business through one prompt. This webinar shows how to move from after-the-fact detection to real-time prevention, with browser-level controls that stop risky AI use at the point where data is about to leak.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • Campaigns Use AI Brands as Lures – Microsoft warned of campaigns capitalizing on the global interest around artificial intelligence (AI) as a social engineering lure in campaigns. «These campaigns, which don’t represent compromise of services, span phishing, malvertising, and search engine optimization (SEO)-driven attacks that ultimately lead to credential theft, financial fraud, or malware infection,» the company said. Some of the campaigns include a ChatGPT-themed lure that leads to a phishing kit collecting credit card data, a Claude-themed phishing campaign collecting credentials and access tokens, an «Awesome AI Windows Plugin» malvertising campaign deploying Vidar Stealer, and Fake DeepSeek V4 installers on GitHub delivering Vidar Stealer. The tech giant said it «observed the initial access broker Storm-3075 employing AI-themed malvertising to deliver payloads, including malware signed by the malware-signing-as-a-service (MSaaS) offering attributed to the financially motivated threat actor Fox Tempest, on behalf of multiple downstream actors.»
  • macOS Users Targeted by Fake Installers – Deceptive installers for popular software are being used to push information stealers to macOS users. «The infection chain almost always starts inside a web browser,» Huntress said. «Threat actors lean heavily on search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning to hijack search results, or they seed compromised links across torrent networks and cracked software forums. A user drops their guard, clicks the malicious link, and downloads what they assume is an authentic installer.» The DMG files, once executed, aim to bypass Apple Gatekeeper protections to realize their goals. In 2024, more than 65% of newly reported macOS malware was classified as infostealers.
  • History of Chinese-Language Guarantee Marketplaces – Flare has shed light on the «guarantee model» that powers various illicit online Telegram marketplaces like HuiOne Guarantee and Tudou Guarantee. «These marketplaces are third-party escrow services for illicit transactions,» security researcher Chris d’Eon explained. «The marketplace operator stands between buyer and seller, holds the buyer’s funds in escrow, releases them to the seller only when the buyer confirms delivery, and adjudicates disputes when something goes wrong. In return, the operator collects deposits from vendors who want to advertise under its brand, fees on transactions, and revenue from paid promotional slots.» The model, which has its roots in legitimate Chinese consumer-internet trust architecture launched by Alipay in 2003, facilitates the sale of money laundering services, stolen data, fraud kits, fake identity documents, recruitment for scam compounds, retail fraud, deepfake services, and the physical infrastructure that drives human trafficking and forced-labour compounds. Law enforcement crackdown has led to «fragmentation but not elimination» of the criminal enterprise. More than 30 successor marketplaces have emerged following the takedown of HuiOne and Xinbi, almost all of them managing their operations via Telegram owing to its reach, bot infrastructure, and improved resilience despite the platform’s efforts to crack down on such activities. These include Tiancheng, Dabai, Ouyi, Yinuo, Jin Bo, Haihua, Timi, and Lao Niu.
  • UniFi OS Flaws Exploited – The UniFi OS Server remote code execution chain, comprising CVE-2026-34908, CVE-2026-34909, and CVE-2026-34910, is now being actively exploited, according to Defused Cyber, following a report from Bishop Fox about how the three flaws could be combined to achieve unauthenticated code execution as root. The attacks culminated in the deployment of commodity malware.
  • Khmer Shadow Targets Cambodian Government Entities – A targeted cyber espionage campaign against Cambodian government entities has leveraged a meeting-themed SFX archive to sideload a custom C++ loader dubbed NIGHTFORGE, which then decrypts and executes a Havoc Demon payload in memory. «NIGHTFORGE has demonstrated a moderate level of sophistication, combining advanced defense-evasion techniques such as NTDLL unhooking and Hell’s Gate syscall resolution, a method that enables direct system calls and helps evade user-mode monitoring, with operational shortcomings that suggest the tool is still under active development,» Acronis said. The activity has been attributed to any known threat group, but it’s «likely aligned with regional intelligence collection interests in Southeast Asia.»
  • How Attackers Could Exploit Cloud Logging Services – Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 has warned that threat actors could exploit cloud logging services, which are crucial for security monitoring, to «create weak spots, evade detection, and in certain scenarios, establish continuous visibility within a target’s environment.» Attackers could tamper with resources within the cloud logging service (e.g., disabling, altering, or deleting logs, or even impairing logging) to hide their presence or attempt to route logs to their own accounts, establishing continuous visibility over the victim’s environment, performing continuous discovery, and passively monitoring all activity.
  • Operation TaxShadow Delivers Multi-Stage Malware Framework – An Indian tax-themed phishing campaign has been observed delivering a sophisticated multi-stage malware framework through a mix of social engineering, phishing infrastructure, and memory-resident malware execution techniques. «The campaign begins with a fraudulent tax notification email impersonating an official Indian tax authority, leveraging government branding, urgency-based messaging, and compliance-related threats to manipulate victims into interacting with a malicious phishing website,» CYFIRMA said. «Victims are subsequently instructed to download a malicious ZIP archive containing three staged payload components: कर विवरण.exe, SbieDll.dll, and SbieDll.bin, which collectively establish the complete infection lifecycle.» The attack makes use of a highly modular malware architecture, coupled with advanced defense-evasion and anti-analysis techniques, to launch a payload in memory. The malware also establishes persistent WebSocket-based communications.
  • MagicAd Displays Background Ads on Android Devices – A new Android trojan called MagicAd has been found to bypass operating system restrictions to display background ads. «One of these methods is universal, while the others are designed for devices from specific manufacturers,» Russian cybersecurity company Doctor Web said. «These include exploiting third-party software and using the system media player.» The malware is distributed via apps on GetApps, the official app catalog for Xiaomi devices. It has been discovered in more than 50 games and apps. The campaign is assessed to have commenced in 2025, with the threat actors behind it also leveraging the Samsung Galaxy Store as a distribution mechanism. Currently, none of the apps are available for download.
  • Residential Proxies in the Wild – Residential proxies are designed to relay internet traffic through devices that belong to regular consumers, such as home routers, mobile devices, IoT devices, and devices with applications embedded with proxyware. One way this is achieved is that application developers themselves can embed software development kits (SDKs) provided by the residential proxy networks into their products as a way to monetize their software, allowing them to receive a small amount of money on each installation. In an analysis published last week, Infoblox said monthly queries to residential proxy domains steadily grew from nearly 400 billion to over 500 billion between January 2025 and April 2026 across its customer base, an increase of about 25%. «There are likely several explanations for this: certainly, the rise in AI-related training, which often requires scraping websites, is a major driver of residential proxy demand,» it said. «Residential proxies bypass many anti-scraping measures, as the traffic appears to be coming from the devices of real people.» Some of the most commonly observed proxy services queried include Bright Data, Hola VPN, Oxylabs Proxy, Honeygain, and Grass. The DNS threat intelligence firm said many residential proxy services operate in a grey space.
  • SHEET#CREEP Drops C# Remote Access Trojan – An ongoing cyber espionage campaign dubbed SHEET#CREEP has leveraged a diplomatic-themed ISO phishing lure to distribute a C# remote access trojan (RAT). The activity was previously flagged by Zscaler and Bitdefender, attributing it to a threat actor known as Transparent Tribe. «The RAT abuses the Google Sheets API as its command-and-control (C2) channel, authenticating via an embedded GCP service account private key and using individual spreadsheet tabs per victim for bidirectional communication,» Securonix researchers Shikha Sangwan, Akshay Gaikwad, and Aaron Beardslee said. «The LNK triggers a C# dropper that extracts a bait PDF, drops the RAT payload into the Windows Vault directory, and establishes persistence through a scheduled task, before melting (self-deleting) to remove forensic traces.» The cybersecurity company said it identified 91 active victim tabs in the C2 spreadsheet, including a high-confidence target located in Pakistan.
  • Malware Distributed via npm and PyPI Packages – A cryptocurrency-focused software supply chain campaign has used malicious npm packages to facilitate credential harvesting, wallet theft, remote payload delivery, and blockchain-based command-and-control. «Technical analysis uncovered capabilities including cryptocurrency wallet interception, private key and mnemonic phrase theft, SSH credential harvesting, environment variable collection, sensitive file discovery, remote activation mechanisms, blockchain-based infrastructure retrieval, and multi-stage malware deployment,» CYFIRMA said. A second campaign, codenamed Solana FakeFix, has targeted Solana developers with 20 bogus npm and PyPI packages to steal wallet keys, cloud credentials, source-control tokens, SSH keys, and environment secrets, while a third campaign, CMS Windows Loader, has used five npm packages to load remote executables and JavaScript code dynamically. In a related development, two versions of the dbmux npm package (2.2.5 and 1.0.5) were flagged for containing malware. «Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer,» according to a GitHub advisory. «The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.»
  • Ransomware Attack Uses Easyupload.io for Data Exfiltration – In one ransomware attack investigated by Huntress, a threat actor accessed the victim’s hypervisor and created a new virtual machine (VM) as a staging location from which they launched the Akira ransomware. The threat actor rapidly progressed through the attack, disabling Microsoft Defender and installing WinRAR, an archival tool typically used by threat actors for staging data. «The threat actor used the Microsoft Edge browser to access Bing, and search for the term ‘eayupload’ before settling on Easyupload.io, a website that provides access to file uploads via drag-and-drop,» the cybersecurity company said. «Shortly after accessing the LimeWire website, presumably to exfiltrate staged archives, the threat actor launched the akira.exe file encryptor against several mounted shares.»

🔧 Cybersecurity Tools

  • SpooNMAP → It is a Python tool that wraps Nmap and Masscan to make port scanning easier and faster. It guides users through scan options, supports small, medium, large, full, and custom scans, can grab service banners with Nmap, and lets users scan target IPs or CIDR ranges from a file.
  • CVE MCP Server → It connects Claude to 27 security intelligence tools across 21 data sources, helping analysts look up CVEs, check EPSS and CISA KEV status, find PoCs, scan dependencies, review IP reputation, and generate risk reports from one place.

Disclaimer: This is strictly for research and learning. It hasn’t been through a formal security audit, so don’t just blindly drop it into production. Read the code, break it in a sandbox first, and make sure whatever you’re doing stays on the right side of the law.

Conclusion

This week’s lesson is simple: attackers do not need magic. They need old code, busy teams, weak defaults, and one forgotten box nobody wants to claim.

That is the uncomfortable part. The next big incident may already be sitting in your stack, quietly working as designed.

Linux Rootkits, Router 0-Day, AI Intrusions, Scam Kits and 25 New Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

This week starts small.

A token leaks. A bad package slips in. A login trick works. An old tool shows up again. At first, it feels like the usual mess. Then you see the pattern: attackers are not always breaking in. They are using the parts we already trust.

That is what makes it worrying. The danger is in normal things now – updates, apps, cloud buttons, support chats, trusted accounts. AI does not make the attacks magic. It just helps people try more things, faster.

Here’s what showed up this week.

That’s the problem with weeks like this. Nothing feels shocking for more than five minutes, because the next thing is already waiting. A fake app here, a bad package there, a cloud trick in the middle. Same fire, new room.

Patch what matters. Watch what you trust. And do not ignore the boring alerts just because they look familiar. That is usually where the story starts.

Exchange 0-Day, npm Worm, Fake AI Repo, Cisco Exploit and More – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

Monday opens with a trust problem. A mail server flaw is under active use. A network control system was targeted. Trusted packages were poisoned. A fake model page pushed a stealer. Then came the familiar ransom claim: the data was returned and deleted.

The pattern is clear. One weak dependency can leak keys. One leaked key can open cloud access. One cloud foothold can become a production incident. AI is speeding up vulnerability discovery, attackers are moving quickly, and old exposure still keeps paying off.

Patch the quiet risks first. Let’s get into it.

⚡ Threat of the Week

On-Prem Microsoft Exchange Server Exploited in the Wild—Microsoft disclosed a security vulnerability impacting on-premise versions of Exchange Server, which has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42897 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been described as a spoofing bug stemming from a cross-site scripting flaw. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. Microsoft is providing a temporary mitigation through its Exchange Emergency Mitigation Service, while it’s readying a permanent fix for the security defect. There are currently no details on how the vulnerability is being exploited, the identity of the threat actor behind the activity, or the scale of such efforts. It’s also unclear who the targets are and if any of those attacks were successful. 

🔔 Top News

  • Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller Flaw Under Attack—A sophisticated threat actor tracked as UAT-8616 has been attributed to the exploitation of CVE-2026-20182, a critical authentication bypass in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller. «8616 performed similar post-compromise actions after successfully exploiting CVE-2026-20182, as was observed in the exploitation of CVE-2026-20127 by the same threat actor,» Cisco Talos said. «UAT-8616 attempted to add SSH keys, modify NETCONF configurations, and escalate to root privileges.» UAT-8616 is the same threat actor that was behind the weaponization of CVE-2026-20127 earlier this year to gain unauthorized access to SD-WAN systems. Cisco isn’t the only security vendor facing a barrage of attacks on its customers, but it is among the most heavily targeted, along with Fortinet and Ivanti. «For nation-state operators, a bug like this (as seen with the actively exploited CVE-2026-20127) is ideal for pre-positioning,» Rapid7 said. «They are usually not looking for a smash and grab. They want persistence. They want access that blends in. They want to sit in the right place long enough to observe, influence, and pivot when the time is right. An SD-WAN controller is a great place to do that, because it lives in the middle of trust relationships most organizations rarely question.»
  • Blast Radius of TeamPCP Attacks Expands—A new wave of the Mini Shai-Hulud campaign compromised dozens of TanStack npm packages as part of a broader supply chain attack worming through developer ecosystems, including packages tied to UiPath, Mistral AI, OpenSearch and PyPI. The activity has been attributed to TeamPCP, which has orchestrated a series of high-profile supply chain attacks targeting popular open-source projects in recent months. The goal is the same across all attack campaigns — use poisoned, open-source software to deploy stealer malware and harvest user credentials, API keys, SSH keys, and other secrets. TeamPCP is said to be weaponizing credentials and secrets obtained in the supply chain attacks to access organizations’ cloud infrastructure, not to mention turn into an initial access broker for follow-on attacks like ransomware by teaming up with other cybercrime groups. In some waves, the attackers used the Trufflehog scanner to validate those credentials. The escalating attacks show that TeamPCP prioritizes speed rather than subtlety and stealth. Supply chain attacks have become an increasingly serious concern because of the sheer scale at which trusted dependencies are reused. A single poisoned package can rapidly propagate into thousands of downstream applications, enterprise environments, and production systems. The development coincided with the compromise of the node-ipc package to distribute a stealer malware. It’s currently not known who is behind the attack. Since the library is a dependency for hundreds of other packages, which in turn could be dependencies for even more packages, the attack could have cascading consequences.
  • Apple and Google Roll Out Cross-Platform E2EE for RCS Messages—End-to-end encrypted (E2EE) Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging is being rolled out in beta between iPhone and Android devices, closing one of the biggest interoperability gaps in mainstream mobile messaging. The feature is available to iPhone users on iOS 26.5 with supported carriers and to Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. Encrypted conversations are marked with a padlock icon in the chat interface. The wider rollout to iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS will follow in future software updates, Apple said. 
  • Instructure Reaches Ransom Agreement with ShinyHunters—Instructure, the developer of school information portal Canvas, said it struck a deal with the ShinyHunters group, which breached its systems, stole a massive amount of data, and disrupted thousands of schools that rely on the company’s software. The company did not say what it had given the threat actors in exchange for the destruction of the data, but it’s fair to say it likely made the controversial decision to make a ransom payment. The company said it also received «digital confirmation» that the hackers destroyed any remaining copies in the form of «shred logs.» In addition, the agreement included the return of the stolen data, assurances that affected customers would not be extorted, and a commitment that individual institutions would not need to engage with the threat actor. While it remains to be seen if the threat actors will keep their side of the bargain, it’s worth highlighting a key problem with paying a ransom: once attackers have a victim’s data, there is no guarantee it was not copied or shared with others. As of May 12, the listing for Instructure has been removed from the ShinyHunters’ data leak site. The group said: «The data is deleted, gone. The company and it’s [sic] customers will not further be targeted or contacted for payment by us.»
  • Fake Hugging Face Repository Delivers Stealer Malware—A malicious Hugging Face repository managed to take a spot in the platform’s trending list by impersonating OpenAI’s Privacy Filter open-weight model to deliver a Rust-based information stealer to Windows users. The project, named Open-OSS/privacy-filter, masqueraded as its legitimate counterpart, released by OpenAI late last month (openai/privacy-filter), including copying the entire description verbatim to trick unsuspecting users into downloading it. The description accompanying the fake model diverged from the legitimate project in one aspect: instructing users to run start.bat on Windows or execute python loader.py on Linux and macOS to deploy the stealer. Access to the malicious model has since been disabled by Hugging Face. The incident highlights how public AI model registries are emerging as a new software supply chain risk for enterprises, emphasizing why AI model supply chain security needs the same level of rigor as software supply chain security. It’s essential to verify publisher identity, check model card provenance, and scan for unexpected binary downloads.
  • OpenAI Announces Daybreak—OpenAI announced Daybreak, a new initiative based on its frontier large language models (LLMs) and its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant, Codex, to help developers secure their software from the ground up. Like Anthropic’s Mythos and Project Glasswing, the initiative makes it possible to scan a codebase to identify flaws and fix them, triage vulnerability backlog and prioritize fixes by severity, impact, or exploitability, and automate vulnerability detection, validation and response. In a related development, Microsoft detailed its own AI-assisted vulnerability discovery system called MDASH, which orchestrates more than 100 specialized AI agents across multiple frontiers and distilled AI models to find vulnerabilities in the tech giant’s own codebases. MDASH is designed to run a structured pipeline that goes through distinct stages: preparation, scanning, validation, deduplication, and proof construction. The emergence of Daybreak and MDASH comes amid a spike in vulnerability discovery, mainly fueled by the use of AI tools. Five months into 2026, Microsoft has already patched more than 500 vulnerabilities in its software, a rate that could see the company break its own annual record for the most number of security fixes in a year. The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has also warned organizations that they should prepare for a surge of software updates driven by AI-assisted vulnerability discovery. At this stage, access to these advanced tools is tightly controlled. OpenAI has framed the access controls as a response to the dual-use nature of the underlying technology. The same AI capabilities that allow defenders to identify vulnerabilities and accelerate remediation could be misused by bad actors. Per Google, hacking groups are already using AI models to boost the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks, as well as perform reconnaissance and build better malware. 

🔥 Trending CVEs

Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild.

Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first — CVE-2026-42945 (NGINX Plus and NGINX Open), CVE-2026-44112 (OpenClaw), CVE-2026-42897 (Microsoft Exchange Server), CVE-2026-41096 (Microsoft Windows DNS), CVE-2026-42826 (Microsoft Azure DevOps), CVE-2026-20182 (Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller), CVE-2026-44338 (PraisonAI), CVE-2026-46300, CVE-2026-46333 (Linux Kernel), CVE-2026-45185 (Exim), CVE-2026-8043 (Ivanti Xtraction), CVE-2026-44277 (Fortinet FortiAuthenticator), CVE-2026-26083 (Fortinet FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud, and FortiSandbox PaaS), CVE-2026-34260, CVE-2026-34263 (SAP), CVE-2026-42231, CVE-2026-42232, CVE-2026-44791, CVE-2026-44789, CVE-2026-44790, CVE-2026-42236, CVE-2026-42230 (n8n), CVE-2026-6815 (Casdoor), CVE-2026-2291, CVE-2026-4890, CVE-2026-4891, CVE-2026-4892, CVE-2026-4893, CVE-2026-5172 (dnsmasq), CVE-2026-6787, CVE-2026-6788 (WatchGuard Agent on Windows), CVE-2026-23479, CVE‑2026‑25243, CVE-2026-25588, CVE‑2026‑25589 (Redis), CVE-2026-41002, CVE-2026-40982, CVE-2026-40981, CVE-2026-41713, CVE-2026-41712, CVE-2026-41705 (Spring), CVE-2026-6722 (PHP ext-soap), CVE-2026-43824 (Argo CD), CVE-2026-27174 (MajorDoMo), CVE-2026-25254, CVE-2026-25293 (Qualcomm), CVE-2026-28819, CVE-2026-43668, CVE-2026-28972 (Apple macOS), CVE-2026-44413 (JetBrains TeamCity), CVE-2026-42010, CVE-2026-33845, CVE-2026-42009, CVE-2026-33846, CVE-2026-1584 (GnuTLS), CVE-2026-30905, CVE-2026-30906 (Zoom), CVE-2026-4782, CVE-2026-4798 (Avada Builder plugin), CVE-2026-43898 (SandboxJS), CVE-2026-8509, CVE-2026-8510 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-44578 (Next.js), CVE-2025-14177 (PHP), CVE-2026-33439 (OpenAM), CVE-2025-66335 (Apache Doris MCP), an authentication validation bypass in Apache Pinot MCP, and an information disclosure flaw in Alibaba RDS MCP.

🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars

  • AppSec Tools Blind to Lethal Chains: Code → Pipeline → Cloud Attacks: Your AppSec tools are drowning in alerts but completely blind to how real attackers breach you. Modern threats don’t exploit single bugs — they chain tiny weaknesses across code, pipelines, and cloud into lethal attack paths. Join the webinar to discover the 3 deadliest cross-lifecycle patterns from Wiz experts (ex-Okta/GitLab) and learn how to map & stop them.
  • AI is making DDoS attacks dangerously intelligent. Are you ready? AI is turning DDoS attacks into smart, adaptive weapons that scan weaknesses in real-time, mimic legit traffic, and dodge traditional defenses. With a 358% surge in incidents, it’s time to upgrade your strategy. Join the webinar to learn the latest tactics and how to defend effectively.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • Flaw in Apple’s Memory Integrity Enforcement —Calif said it discovered a new way of circumventing Apple’s Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), a new hardware-assisted memory safety system, and achieved privilege escalation. The discovery was made possible while testing an early version of Anthropic’s Mythos Preview in April. «It’s the first public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on M5 silicon, surviving MIE,» Calif said. «The exploit is a data-only kernel local privilege escalation chain targeting macOS 26.4.1 (25E253). It starts from an unprivileged local user, uses only normal system calls, and ends with a root shell. The implementation path involves two vulnerabilities and several techniques, targeting bare-metal M5 hardware with kernel MIE enabled.» Additional details are currently withheld to give Apple time to address the issues.
  • Mustang Panda Delivers Updated FDMTP Tool —A new campaign consistent with tradecraft associated with Mustang Panda has been observed targeting the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) region to deliver an updated version of FDMTP using DLL side-loading. The malware is designed to connect to an external server and receive commands from the remote server, profile compromised hosts, and load additional plugins to handle scheduled tasks, manage Windows Registry persistence, or retrieve files or commands. The activity has been spotted since September 2025.
  • New Flaw in Burst Statistics Plugin Exploited —Threat actors are exploiting a critical flaw in the Burst Statistics WordPress plugin (CVE-2026-8181, CVSS score: 9.8), which «allows unauthenticated attackers who know a valid administrator username to fully impersonate that administrator for the duration of any REST API request, including WordPress core endpoints such as /wp-json/wp/v2/users, by supplying any arbitrary and incorrect password in a Basic Authentication header,» per Wordfence. An attacker could exploit this flaw to create a new administrator-level account with no prior authentication and seize control of the site. The plugin has over 200,000 installations. Wordfence said it has blocked thousands of attacks targeting this vulnerability.
  • CISA and Others Release Guidance to Strengthen AI Supply Chain —Multiple government cyber agencies issued a joint guidance to help public and private sector stakeholders improve transparency in their AI systems and supply chains. «A software bill of materials (SBOM) acts as an ‘ingredients list’ for software that better positions organizations to understand their supply chains and make risk-informed decisions about how to protect their critical systems,» the agencies said. «Because AI systems are software systems, these recommendations should be considered in addition to the general minimum elements for an SBOM.»
  • Stealer Malware Continues to Evolve —Cybersecurity researchers disclosed details of various new and emerging information stealers like Salat, Gremlin, and Reaper, the last of which is a new SHub macOS stealer variant that spoofs Apple, Google, and Microsoft across a multi-stage attack chain to steal credentials, exfiltrate business files, and establish persistent backdoor access. According to a report published by Flare.io last week, one in four infostealer victims has active access to corporate infrastructure: VPN credentials, SaaS sessions, cloud platforms. «One in six gaming-related infections involves a user with corporate infrastructure access,» it said. «16% of victims infected through gaming lures also held active credentials for VPNs, SaaS platforms, or cloud environments, creating a direct pipeline from personal device use to enterprise compromise.»
  • Flaws in myAudi Platform —Multiple security flaws have been discovered in the myAudi connected car platform, allowing anyone with knowledge of a vehicle’s VIN to add it to their account as a guest and access sensitive data. The leaked information included the embedded SIM’s IMEI and ICCID identifiers, the GPS location of the primary owner when they triggered a «honk & flash» command, and vehicle lock status. One of the identified issues has been fixed by Audi and CARIAD. 

🔧 Cybersecurity Tools

  • Rustinel → It is an open-source endpoint detection tool for Windows and Linux. It collects system activity using ETW on Windows and eBPF on Linux, checks events against Sigma rules, YARA rules, and IOCs, and writes alerts in ECS NDJSON format for use in SIEM or log pipelines. It is built for blue teams, detection engineers, researchers, and testing environments, not as a full replacement for commercial EDR.
  • Giskard → It is an open-source Python tool for testing and evaluating LLM agents and AI systems. It helps developers check whether an AI app behaves correctly, stays grounded in context, follows safety rules, and handles multi-turn conversations reliably. Its current version focuses on lightweight evaluation workflows, while related scanning and RAG evaluation features are still being developed or are available in older versions.
  • VanGuard → It is a cross-platform incident response toolkit for Windows and Linux that lets security teams collect evidence, run triage, perform threat hunting, capture memory, gather disk artifacts, manage Velociraptor workflows, and generate reports from a single portable binary without installation. It includes 28 pre-built investigation workflows, supports offline use, and tracks evidence with hashing, chain of custody, and audit logging.

Disclaimer: This is strictly for research and learning. It hasn’t been through a formal security audit, so don’t just blindly drop it into production. Read the code, break it in a sandbox first, and make sure whatever you’re doing stays on the right side of the law.

Conclusion

The message is simple: trust less, check more. Bad packages, fake pages, weak plugins, leaked keys, and old bugs all lead to the same place.

Patch first. Rotate keys. Review what you run in prod. That’s the work. That’s the recap.

MiniPlasma Windows 0-Day permite escalar privilegios del SISTEMA en sistemas completamente parcheados – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

Chaotic Eclipse, el investigador de seguridad detrás de las fallas de Windows recientemente reveladas, YellowKey y GreenPlasma, ha publicado una prueba de concepto (PoC) para una falla de día cero de escalada de privilegios de Windows que otorga a los atacantes privilegios de SISTEMA en sistemas Windows completamente parcheados.

nombre en clave miniplasmala vulnerabilidad afecta a «cldflt.sys», que hace referencia al controlador de minifiltro de archivos en la nube de Windows y reside en una rutina denominada «HsmOsBlockPlaceholderAccess». Fue reportado originalmente a Microsoft por el investigador de Google Project Zero, James Forshaw, en septiembre de 2020.

Aunque se suponía que Microsoft solucionó la deficiencia en diciembre de 2020 como parte de CVE-2020-17103Chaotic Eclipse dijo que una investigación adicional ha descubierto que «exactamente el mismo problema […] en realidad todavía está presente, sin parchear.»

Ciberseguridad

«No estoy seguro de si Microsoft nunca solucionó el problema o si el parche fue revertido silenciosamente en algún momento por razones desconocidas. La prueba de concepto original de Google funcionó sin ningún cambio», añadió el investigador. «Para resaltar este problema, utilicé el PoC original como arma para generar un shell de SISTEMA. Parece funcionar de manera confiable en mis máquinas, pero la tasa de éxito puede variar ya que es una condición de carrera».

El investigador señaló además que es probable que todas las versiones de Windows se vean afectadas por esta vulnerabilidad.

En una publicación compartida en Mastodon, el investigador de seguridad Will Dormann dijo que MiniPlasma funciona de manera «confiable» para abrir un mensaje «cmd.exe» con privilegios de SISTEMA en sistemas Windows 11 que ejecutan las últimas actualizaciones de mayo de 2026. «Observaré que no parece funcionar en la última versión Insider Preview Canary de Windows 11», Dormann señaló.

En diciembre de 2025, Microsoft también abordó otra falla de escalada de privilegios en el mismo componente (CVE-2025-62221, puntuación CVSS: 7,8), que identificó como explotada por actores de amenazas desconocidos.

Axios Hack, Chrome 0-Day, Fortinet Exploits, Paragon Spyware and More – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

This week had real hits. The key software got tampered with. Active bugs showed up in the tools people use every day. Some attacks didn’t even need much effort because the path was already there.

One weak spot now spreads wider than before. What starts small can reach a lot of systems fast. New bugs, faster use, less time to react.

That’s this week. Read through it.

⚡ Threat of the Week

Axios npm Package Compromised by N. Korean Hackers—Threat actors with ties to North Korea seized control of the npm account belonging to the lead maintainer of Axios, a popular npm package with nearly 100 million weekly downloads, to push malicious versions containing a cross-platform malware dubbed WAVESHAPER.V2. The activity has been attributed to a financially motivated threat actor known as UNC1069. The incident demonstrates how quickly the compromise of a popular npm package can have ripple effects through the ecosystem. The malware’s self-deleting anti-forensic cleanup points to a deliberate, planned operation. «The build pipeline is becoming the new front line. Attackers know that if they can compromise the systems that build and distribute software, they can inherit trust at scale,» Avital Harel, Security Researcher at Upwind, said. «That’s what makes these attacks so dangerous — they’re not just targeting one application, they’re targeting the process behind many of them. Organizations should be looking much more closely at CI/CD systems, package dependencies, and developer environments, because that’s increasingly where attackers are placing their bets.» Ismael Valenzuela, vice president of Labs, Threat Research, and Intelligence at Arctic Wolf, said the Axios npm compromise reflects a broader trend where attackers infiltrate trusted, widely used software components to obtain access to downstream customers at scale. «Even though the malicious versions were available for only a few hours, Axios is so deeply embedded across enterprise applications that organizations may have unknowingly pulled the compromised code into their environments through build pipelines or downstream dependencies,» Valenzuela added. «That downstream exposure is what makes these incidents particularly difficult to spot and contain, especially for teams that never directly chose to install Axios themselves. This incident reinforces that security teams need to treat build‑time tools and dependencies as part of the attack surface and not just trust tools by default.»

🔔 Top News

  • Google Patches Actively Exploited Chrome 0-Day—Google released security updates for its Chrome web browser to address 21 vulnerabilities, including a zero-day flaw that it said has been exploited in the wild. The high-severity vulnerability, CVE-2026-5281 (CVSS score: N/A), concerns a use-after-free bug in Dawn, an open-source and cross-platform implementation of the WebGPU standard. Users are advised to update their Chrome browser to versions 146.0.7680.177/178 for Windows and Apple macOS, and 146.0.7680.177 for Linux. Google did not reveal how the vulnerability is being exploited and who is behind the exploitation effort.
  • TrueConf 0-Day Exploited in Attacks Targeting Government Entities in Southeast Asia—Chinese hackers have exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the TrueConf video conferencing software in attacks against government entities in Southeast Asia. The exploited flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-3502 (CVSS score of 7.8), exists because of a lack of integrity checks when fetching application update code, allowing an attacker to distribute a tampered update. «The compromised TrueConf on-premises server was operated by the governmental IT department and served as a video conferencing platform for dozens of government entities across the country, which were all supplied with the same malicious update,» Check Point said. The activity, which began in January 2026, involved the deployment of the Havoc framework. Most infections likely began with a link sent to the victims. TrueConf is used widely across organizations in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, serving about 100,000 organizations globally.
  • Fortinet FortiClient EMS Flaw Under Attack—Fortinet released out-of-band patches for a critical security flaw impacting FortiClient EMS (CVE-2026-35616) that it said has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability has been described as a pre-authentication API access bypass leading to privilege escalation. Exploitation efforts against CVE-2026-35616 were first recorded against its honeypots on March 31, 2026, per watchTowr. The development comes days after another recently patched, critical vulnerability in FortiClient EMS (CVE-2026-21643) came under active exploitation.
  • Apple Backports DarkSword Fixes to More Devices—Apple expanded the availability of iOS 18.7.7 and iPadOS 18.7.7 to a broader range of devices to protect users from the risk posed by a recently disclosed exploit kit known as DarkSword. The update targets customers whose devices are capable of upgrading to the newest operating system (iOS 26), but have chosen to remain on iOS 18. Apple has taken the unprecedented step to counter risks posed by an exploit kit called DarkSword. The broader availability of the patches underscores the level of threat that malware like DarkSword poses. The fact that a large number of users were still using iOS 18, combined with the leak of a new version of DarkSword on GitHub, has pushed Apple towards releasing the fix so that they can stay protected without the need for updating to iOS 26. The leak is significant as it puts it within reach of less technically savvy cybercriminals out there.
  • ClickFix Attack Leads to DeepLoad Malware—The ClickFix technique is being used to deliver a stealthy malware named DeepLoad that’s capable of stealing credentials and intercepting browser interactions. The malware first emerged on a dark web cybercrime forum in early February 2026, when a threat actor, using the alias «MysteryHack,» advertised it as a «centralized panel for multiple types of malware.» According to ZeroFox, «DeepLoad’s design is explicitly focused on actively facilitating real-time cryptocurrency theft, which almost certainly makes it an attractive malware suite in the cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) environment.» The malware has since been distributed to Windows systems through ClickFix under the guise of resolving fake browser error messages. Besides stealing credentials, the malware drops a rogue browser extension to intercept sensitive data and spreads via removable USB drives. DeepLoad’s actual attack logic is buried under layers of obfuscation, raising the possibility that some parts of the malware were developed using an artificial intelligence (AI) model.
  • Claude Code Source Code Leaks—Anthropic acknowledged that internal code for its popular artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistant, Claude Code, had been inadvertently released due to a human error. Essentially, what happened was this: When Anthropic pushed out version 2.1.88 of its Claude Code npm package, it accidentally included a map file that exposed nearly 2,000 source code files and more than 512,000 lines of code. The source code leak has since revealed various features the company appears to be working on or that are built into the service, including an Undercover mode to hide AI authorship from contributions to public code repositories, a persistent background agent called KAIROS, combat distillation attacks, and active monitoring of words and phrases that show signs of user frustration. The leak also quickly escalated into a cybersecurity threat, as attackers pounced on the surge in interest to lure developers into downloading stealer malware.

🔥 Trending CVEs

New vulnerabilities show up every week, and the window between disclosure and exploitation keeps getting shorter. The flaws below are this week’s most critical — high-severity, widely used software, or already drawing attention from the security community.

Check these first, patch what applies, and don’t wait on the ones marked urgent — CVE-2026-35616 (Fortinet FortiClient EMS), CVE-2026-20093 (Cisco Integrated Management Controller), CVE-2026-20160 (Cisco Smart Software Manager On-Prem), CVE-2026-5281 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-3502 (TrueConf), CVE-2026-27876, CVE-2026-27880 (Grafana), CVE-2026-4789 (Kyverno), CVE-2026-2275, CVE-2026-2285, CVE-2026-2286, CVE-2026-2287 (CrewAI), CVE-2025-14819 (Notepad++), CVE-2026-34714, CVE-2026-34982 (Vim), CVE-2026-33660, CVE-2026-33696 (n8n), CVE-2026-25639 (Axios), CVE-2026-25075 (strongSwan), CVE-2026-34156 (NocoBase), CVE-2026-3308 (Artifex MuPDF), CVE-2026-1579 (PX4 Autopilot), CVE-2026-3991 (Symantec Data Loss Prevention Agent for Windows), CVE-2026-33026 (nginx-ui), CVE-2026-33416, CVE-2026-33636 (libpng), CVE-2026-3775, CVE-2026-3779 (Foxit PDF Editor), CVE-2026-34980, CVE-2026-34990 (CUPS), and CVE-2026-34121 (TP-Link).

🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars

  • Learn How to Close Identity Gaps Using Insights from IT Leaders → Identity programs face rising risk from disconnected apps, manual credentials, and expanding AI access. Based on 2026 insights from 600+ IT and security leaders, this session shows what to measure, fix, and do now to close identity gaps and regain control.
  • Learn How to Build Secure AI Agents Using Identity, Visibility, and Control → AI agents are already being used, but most teams don’t know how to secure them properly. This session shows a clear, practical way to do it using three key ideas: identity, visibility, and control.You will see what real deployment looks like, how to track what agents do, and how to manage their behavior safely.It also explains how to secure AI systems today without waiting for standards to settle.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • Device Code Phishing Attacks Surge —Device code phishing attacks, which abuse the OAuth device authorization grant flow to hijack accounts, have surged more than 37.5x this year. Push Security said it detected a 15x increase in device code phishing pages at the start of March 2026, indicating that the technique has finally entered mainstream adoption. «The technique tricks a user into issuing access tokens for an attacker-controlled application (not a device, confusingly),» the company said. «Any app that supports device code logins can be a target. Popular examples include Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, GitHub, and AWS. That said, Microsoft is, as always, much more heavily targeted at scale now than any other app.» This has been fueled by the emergence of EvilTokens (aka ANTIBOT), the first reported criminal PhaaS (Phishing-as-a-Service) toolkit that supports device code pushing. EvilTokens features a Cloudflare Workers frontend and a Railway backend for authentication. Early iterations of the PhaaS kit emerged in January 2026. Another closed-source PhaaS kit called Venom offers device code phishing capabilities similar to EvilTokens. Some of the other PhaaS kits that have incorporated this technique include SHAREFILE, CLURE, LINKID, AUTHOV, DOCUPOLL, FLOW_TOKEN, PAPRIKA, DCSTATUS, and DOLCE.
  • LinkedIn Comes Under Scanner for BrowserGate —A newly published report called BrowserGate alleged that Microsoft’s LinkedIn is using hidden JavaScript scripts on its website to scan visitors’ browsers for thousands of installed Google Chrome extensions and collect device data without users’ consent. «LinkedIn scans for over 200 products that directly compete with its own sales tools, including Apollo, Lusha, and ZoomInfo,» the report said. «Because LinkedIn knows each user’s employer, it can map which companies use which competitor products. It is extracting the customer lists of thousands of software companies from their users’ browsers without anyone’s knowledge. Then it uses what it finds. LinkedIn has already sent enforcement threats to users of third-party tools, using data obtained through this covert scanning to identify its targets.» The report also claimed LinkedIn loads an invisible tracking pixel from HUMAN Security, along with a separate fingerprinting script that runs from LinkedIn’s servers and a third script from Google that runs silently on every page load. In response to the findings, LinkedIn told Bleeping Computer it scans for certain extensions that scrape data without members’ consent in violation of its terms of service. The company also claimed the report is from an individual who is «subject to an account restriction for scraping and other violations of LinkedIn’s Terms of Service.»
  • ICE Confirms Use of Paragon Spyware —The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed it uses spyware developed by Paragon to «identify, disrupt, and dismantle Foreign Terrorist Organizations, addressing the escalating fentanyl epidemic and safeguarding national security.» Paragon’s Graphite spyware has been found on the phones of journalists. WhatsApp last year said it disrupted a campaign that deployed the spyware against its users. The governments of Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore are suspected to be customers of the Israeli company.
  • Ex-Engineer Pleads Guilty to Extortion Campaign —Daniel Rhyne, 59, of Kansas City, Missouri, pleaded guilty to a failed data extortion campaign that targeted his former employer. Rhyne was arrested in September 2024. According to court documents, Rhyne worked as a core infrastructure engineer at a U.S.-based industrial company headquartered in New Jersey. In November 2023, the defendant executed a ransomware attack against the company and sent an extortion email to its employees, threatening to continue shutting down the firm’s servers unless he was paid about 20 Bitcoin, which was valued at $750,000 at the time. Last month, the U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) announced the conviction of Cameron Curry (aka Loot), a 27-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, for carrying out a cyber extortion scheme against a D.C.-based international technology company called Brightly Software. «Trial evidence established that Curry misused his position to access the victim company’s personnel and other sensitive corporate records, which he then used to carry out the cyber extortion scheme after he learned that his contract was not going to be renewed and that he would no longer be employed by the company,» the DoJ said. Between December 11, 2023, and January 24, 2024, Curry sent more than 60 emails to company executives and employees, stating he would disclose sensitive information unless he was paid $2.5 million in cryptocurrency. Brightly ended up paying $7,540 in Bitcoin.
  • Residential Proxies Bypass Reputation Systems —Threat intelligence firm GreyNoise’s analysis of 4 billion sessions targeting the edge over a 90-day period from November 29, 2025, to February 27, 2026, found that 39% of unique IP addresses targeting the edge originated from home internet connections, and that 78% vanish before any reputation system can flag them. «78% of residential IPs appear in only 1–2 sessions and are never observed again,» it said. «IP reputation is structurally broken against residential proxies. The rotation rate exceeds the update cycle of any feed-based defense.» This behavior also makes source IPs indistinguishable from a legitimate user’s connection. The data also showed that 0.1% of residential sessions carry exploitation payloads, in contrast to 1.0% from hosting infrastructure, indicating that they are primarily used for network scanning and reconnaissance. The residential proxy traffic is generated by IoT botnets and infected computers, with the networks also resilient against takedown efforts. «After IPIDEA lost 40% of its nodes, operators backfilled within weeks,» GreyNoise said. «Every major takedown produces the same result — temporary disruption, then regeneration.» The company also recommended that «Detection must shift from ‘where is the traffic from?’ to ‘what is the traffic doing?» Device fingerprinting provides more durable detection because fingerprints survive IP rotation.»
  • Suspected N. Korea Campaign Targets Cryptocurrency Companies Using React2Shell —A new campaign has been observed systematically compromising cryptocurrency organizations by exploiting web application vulnerabilities such as React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182), pillaging AWS tenants with valid credentials, and exfiltrating proprietary exchange software containing hardcoded secrets. «Their targeting spans the crypto supply chain, from staking platforms, to exchange software providers, to the exchanges themselves,» Ctrl-Alt-Intel said. The threat intelligence firm has assessed the activity with moderate confidence to be aligned with North Korean cryptocurrency theft operations.
  • India Extends SIM-Binding Mandate —The Indian government has extended its SIM-binding mandate through December 31, 2026, while shelving plans to require messaging apps to forcibly log out web-based sessions like WhatsApp Web every six hours. The decision comes after the Broadband India Forum, which represents Meta and Google, warned the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) that the directions were unconstitutional. Under the framework announced in November 2025, a messaging app account would be tied exclusively to the physical SIM card during registration. This meant that the users could access the messages and other content only when that SIM is present in the device. Companies were given 90 days (i.e., until the end of February 2026) to comply. While SIM binding has been proposed as a way to combat spammers and conduct cross‑border fraud, the move has raised feasibility and user experience concerns. According to Moneycontrol, WhatsApp is said to be beta testing SIM binding on Android.
  • Russian Threat Actors Looking to Regain Access Through Compromised Infrastructure —Russian threat actors like APT28 and Void Blizzard are attempting to regain access to computer systems they previously compromised to check if access is still available and whether the obtained credentials remain valid, CERT-UA has warned. «Unfortunately, these attempts sometimes succeed if the root cause of the initial incident has not been completely eliminated,» the agency said.
  • OkCupid Settles with FTC for Privacy Violations —OkCupid and its owner, Match Group, reached a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it did not inform its customers that nearly three million user photos were shared with Clarifai, a company that develops AI systems to identify and analyze images and videos. The complaint also accused the dating site of sharing users’ location information and other details without their consent. As part of the settlement, OkCupid and Match did not admit or deny the allegations but agreed to a permanent prohibition that prevents them from misrepresenting how they use and share personal data.
  • New Android Malware Mirax Advertised —A sophisticated new Android banking trojan named Mirax is being advertised as a private malware-as-a-service (MaaS) offering for up to $2,500 per month. The malware enables customers to gain remote control over devices and includes specialized overlays for more than 700 different financial applications to steal credentials and other sensitive information. It can also capture keystrokes, intercept SMS messages, record lock screen patterns, and use the infected device as a SOCKS5 proxy.
  • Venom Stealer Spreads via ClickFix —A new malware-as-a-service (MaaS) platform dubbed Venom Stealer is being sold on cybercrime forums as a subscription ($250/month to $1,800 for lifetime access). It’s marketed as «the Apex Predator of Wallet Extraction.» Unlike other stealers, it automates credential theft and enables continuous data exfiltration. «It builds ClickFix social engineering directly into the operator panel, automates every step after initial access, and creates a continuous exfiltration pipeline that does not end when the initial payload finishes running,» BlackFog said. The development coincides with a new ClickFix variant that replaces PowerShell with a «rundll32.exe» command to download a DLL from an attacker-controlled WebDAV resource. The attack leads to the execution of a secondary loader called SkimokKeep, which then downloads additional payloads, while incorporating anti-sandboxing and anti-debugging mechanisms. In the meantime, recent ClickFix campaigns have also leveraged searches for installation tutorials for OpenClaw, Claude, and other AI tools, as well as for common macOS issues to push stealer malware like MacSync.
  • More Information Stealers Spotted —Speaking of stealers, recent campaigns have also been observed using procurement-themed email lures and fake Homebrew install guides served via sponsored search results to deliver Phantom Stealer and SHub Stealer. Some other newly discovered infostealer malware families include Storm, MioLab, and Torg Grabber. In a related development, CyberProof said it observed a surge in PXA Stealer activity targeting global financial institutions during Q1 2026. Another malware that has gained notoriety is BlankGrabber, which is distributed through social engineering and phishing campaigns. Data gathered by Flare shows that a single stealer log can be devastating, with individual logs containing up to 1,381 pieces of personally identifiable information. In an analysis published by Whiteintel last month, the company found that a single careless download of cracked software by one employee can hand criminal groups direct access to an entire corporate network in under two days. «An employee downloads cracked software on Tuesday afternoon,» it said. «By Thursday morning, their credentials are listed on the Russian Market for $15. Corporate VPN access, AWS credentials, session tokens that bypass MFA – all packaged and ready for purchase.»
  • Phishing Campaign Targets Philippine Banking Users —An ongoing phishing campaign targeting major banks in the Philippines is using email phishing via compromised accounts as the initial vector to harvest online banking credentials and one-time passwords (OTPs) for financial fraud. According to Group-IB, the campaign began in early 2024, distributing over 900 malicious links as part of the coordinated scheme. Clicking on the link embedded in the email message triggers a redirection chain that uses trusted services like Google Business, AMP CDN, Cloudflare Workers, and URL shorteners before taking the victims to the final landing page. «The campaign enables real-time financial fraud by bypassing MFA mechanisms through the theft of valid One-Time Passwords (OTP), allowing attackers to perform unauthorized fund transfers,» the company said. «Telegram bots were used as exfiltration channels, enabling threat actors to automatically collect victims’ login information in real time.» The activity has been attributed to a threat group called PHISLES.
  • Chrome Extensions Harvests ChatGPT Conversations —A malicious Chrome extension, named «ChatGPT Ad Blocker» (ID: ipmmidjikiklckbngllogmggoofbhjikgb), found on the Chrome Web Store masquerades as an ad-blocking tool for the AI chatbot, but contains functionality to «steal the user’s ChatGPT conversations data by systematically copying the HTML page and sending to it to a webhook on a private Discord channel,» DomainTools said.
  • Iran Conflict Triggers Espionage Activity in Middle East —In the aftermath of the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict, Proofpoint said it has recorded an increase in campaigns from state-sponsored threat actors likely affiliated with China (UNK_InnerAmbush, which uses phishing emails to deliver Cobalt Strike payload), Belarus (TA473, which has used HTML attachments in emails for reconnaissance), Pakistan (UNK_RobotDreams, which has sent spear-phishing emails to India-based offices of Middle East government entities to deliver a Rust backdoor), and Hamas (TA402, which has used compromised Iraq government email addresses to conduct Microsoft account credential harvesting) targeting Middle East government organizations. The enterprise security company said it also identified the Charming Kitten actor targeting a think tank in the U.S. to trick recipients into entering their Microsoft account credentials. One activity cluster that remains unattributed is UNK_NightOwl. The email messages include a domain that spoofed Microsoft OneDrive, leading the victim to a credential harvesting page. If the user enters credentials and clicks the sign-in button, the target is redirected to «hxxps://iran.liveuamap[.]com/,» a legitimate open-source platform called Liveuamap with news updates on the Middle East conflict.
  • U.K. Warns of Messaging App Targeting —The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) became the latest cybersecurity agency to warn of malicious activity from messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Signal, where threat actors could trick high-risk individuals into sharing their login or account recovery codes, or linking an attacker-controlled device under their accounts.

🔧 Cybersecurity Tools

  • Dev Machine Guard → It is an open-source script that scans a developer machine to list installed tools and detect security risks across IDEs, AI agents, extensions, and configurations, without accessing source code or secrets, helping expose gaps traditional tools miss in developer environments.
  • Pius → It is an open-source tool that maps a company’s external attack surface by discovering and cataloging internet-facing assets, helping security teams identify exposure and reconnaissance risks that could be targeted by attackers.

Disclaimer: For research and educational use only. Not security-audited. Review all code before use, test in isolated environments, and ensure compliance with applicable laws.

Conclusion

The lesson is simple. Small things matter. Most issues now start from normal parts of the system, not big, obvious gaps.

Don’t trust anything just because it looks routine. Updates, tools, and background systems can all be used in the wrong way. If it seems low risk, check it again. That’s where the problems are starting now.

Qualcomm 0-Day, iOS Exploit Chains, AirSnitch Attack & Vibe-Coded Malware – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

Another week in cybersecurity. Another week of «you’ve got to be kidding me.»

Attackers were busy. Defenders were busy. And somewhere in the middle, a whole lot of people had a very bad Monday morning. That’s kind of just how it goes now.

The good news? There were some actual wins this week. Real ones. The kind where the good guys showed up, did the work, and made a dent. It doesn’t always happen, so when it does, it’s worth noting.

The bad news? For every win, there’s a fresh headache waiting right behind it. New tricks, old tricks dressed up in new clothes, and a few things that’ll make you want to go touch grass and never log back in. But you will. We all do. So here’s everything that mattered this week — the wins, the warnings, and the stuff you really shouldn’t ignore.

⚡ Threat of the Week

Tycoon 2FA and LeakBase Operations Dismantled — The infrastructure hosting the Tycoon2FA service, which Europol said was among the largest adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing operations worldwide, has been dismantled by a coalition of security companies and law enforcement agencies. «Taking down infrastructure associated with Tycoon 2FA and identifying the individual allegedly responsible for creating this prolific hacking tool will have a significant impact on overall MFA credential phishing, and hopefully strike a blow to the world’s most prolific AitM phishing-as-a-service,» Proofpoint said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. Phishing kits and PhaaS platforms have become an Achilles’ heel in recent years, streamlining and democratizing phishing attacks for less technically savvy hackers by providing them with a suite of tools to create convincing emails and phishing pages that unsuspecting victims will engage with. For a relatively modest fee, aspiring cybercriminals can subscribe to these services and carry out phishing attacks at scale. In a similar development, authorities also took down LeakBase, one of the world’s largest online forums for cybercriminals to buy and sell stolen data and cybercrime tools. While the disruption is a positive development, it’s known that such takedowns typically create only short-term disruptions, as the ecosystem adapts by migrating to other forums or more resilient distribution channels, like Telegram. 

🔔 Top News

  • Anthropic Finds 22 Firefox Vulnerabilities in Firefox — Anthropic said it discovered 22 new security vulnerabilities in the Firefox web browser using its Claude Opus 4.6 large language model (LLM)as part of a security partnership with Mozilla. Of these, 14 have been classified as high, seven have been classified as moderate, and one has been rated low in severity. The issues were addressed in Firefox 148, released late last month. The vulnerabilities were identified over a two-week period in January 2026. The company noted that the cost of identifying vulnerabilities is cheaper than creating an exploit for them, and the model is better at finding issues than at exploiting them.
  • Qualcomm Flaw Exploited in the Wild — A high-severity security flaw impacting Qualcomm chips used in Android devices has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-21385 (CVSS score: 7.8), a buffer over-read in the Graphics component that could result in memory corruption and arbitrary code execution. There are currently no details on how the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild. However, Google acknowledged in its monthly Android security bulletin that «there are indications that CVE-2026-21385 may be under limited, targeted exploitation.»
  • Coruna iOS Exploit Kit Uses 23 Exploits Against Older iOS Devices — Google disclosed details of a new and powerful exploit kit dubbed Coruna (aka CryptoWaters) targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS versions between 13.0 and 17.2.1. The exploit kit featured five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits, the company said. What makes it different is that it started with a commercial surveillance vendor in February 2025, got picked up by what seems like a Russian espionage group targeting Ukrainians in July 2025, and ended up in the hands of financially motivated attackers in China going after crypto wallets by the end of the year. Coruna began its life as a surveillance exploit kit, but by the time it reached the Chinese cybercrime gang, it was heavily focused on financial theft. It’s not known how the exploit kit got passed between multiple threat actors of varied motivations. This has raised the possibility of a secondhand market where it’s resold to other threat actors, who end up repurposing them for their own objectives.
  • Transparent Tribe Unleases Vibeware Against Indian Entities — In a new attack campaign detected by Bitdefender, the Pakistan-aligned threat actor known as Transparent Tribe has leveraged artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding tools to vibe-code malware and use them to target the Indian government and its embassies in multiple foreign countries. These tools are written in niche programming languages like Nim, Zig, and Crystal so as to evade detection. «Rather than a breakthrough in technical sophistication, we are seeing a transition toward AI-assisted malware industrialization that allows the actor to flood target environments with disposable, polyglot binaries,» the company said.
  • Iranian Hackers Target U.S. Entities Amid Conflict — The Iranian hacking group tracked as MuddyWater (aka Seedworm) targeted several U.S. companies, including banks, airports, non-profit, and the Israeli arm of a software company, as part of a campaign that began in early February 2026, and continued after the joint U.S.-Israel military strikes on Iran towards the end of the month. The development comes against the backdrop of hacktivist-fueled cyber attacks, with wiper campaigns targeting Israeli energy, financial, government, and utilities sectors. «The trajectory is clear: what began as nation-state-level ICS capability in 2012 [with Shamoon wiper] has become, by 2026, something any motivated actor can attempt with free tools and an internet connection,» CloudSEK said in a report last week. «The technical barrier has collapsed. The threat pool has expanded. And the US attack surface has never been larger.» Another targeted campaign has distributed a trojanized version of the Red Alert rocket warning Android app to Israeli users via SMS messages impersonating official Home Front Command communications. Once installed, the malware monitors and abuses the granted permissions to collect sensitive data, including SMS messages, contacts, location data, device accounts, and installed applications. The campaign is believed to be the work of a Hamas-affiliated actor known as Arid Viper. There are currently no details available on the scope of the campaign and whether any of the infections were successful. Acronis said it highlights how trusted emergency services can be weaponized during periods of geopolitical tension using social engineering.

‎️‍🔥 Trending CVEs

New vulnerabilities show up every week, and the window between disclosure and exploitation keeps getting shorter. The flaws below are this week’s most critical — high-severity, widely used software, or already drawing attention from the security community.

Check these first, patch what applies, and don’t wait on the ones marked urgent — CVE-2026-2796 (Mozilla Firefox), CVE-2026-21385 (Qualcomm), CVE-2026-2256 (MS-Agent), CVE-2026-26198 (Ormar), CVE-2026-27966 (langflow), CVE-2025–64712 (Unstructured.io), CVE-2026-24009 (Docling), CVE-2026-23600 (HPE AutoPass License Server), CVE-2026-27636, CVE-2026-28289 (aka Mail2Shell) (FreeScout), CVE-2025-67736 (FreePBX), CVE-2025-34288 (Nagios XI), CVE-2025-14500 (IceWarp), CVE-2026-20079 (Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center), CVE-2025-13476 (Viber app for Android), CVE-2026-3336, CVE-2026-3337, CVE-2026-3338 (Amazon AWS-LC), CVE-2026-25611 (MongoDB), CVE-2026-3536, CVE-2026-3537, CVE-2026-3538 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-27970 (Angular), CVE-2026-29058 (AVideo) a privilege escalation flaw in IPVanish VPN for macOS (no CVE), and and a remote code execution vulnerability in Ghost CMS (no CVE).

🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars

  • Automating Real-World Security Testing to Prove What Actually Works → Running a security test once a year and hoping for the best? That’s not a strategy anymore. This webinar shows you how to continuously test your defenses using real attack techniques — so you actually know what holds up and what quietly breaks when no one’s looking.
  • When AI Agents Become Your New Attack Surface → AI tools aren’t just answering questions anymore — they’re browsing the web, hitting APIs, and touching your internal systems. That changes everything about how you think about risk. This webinar breaks down what that means for security, and what you actually need to do before something goes wrong.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • New AirSnitch Attack Shows Wi-Fi Client Isolation May Not Be Enough — A group of academics has developed a new attack called AirSnitch that breaks the encryption that separates Wi-Fi clients. Xin’an Zhou, the lead author of the research paper, told Ars Technica that AirSnitch bypasses worldwide Wi-Fi encryption and that it «might have the potential to enable advanced cyber attacks.» The attack, at its core, leverages three weaknesses in client isolation implementations: (1) It abuses the group key(s) that are shared between all clients in the same Wi-Fi network, (2) It bypasses client isolation by tricking the gateway into forwarding packets to the victim at the IP layer by taking advantage of the fact that many networks only enforce client isolation at the MAC/Ethernet layer, and (3) It allows an adversary to manipulate internal switches and bridges to forward the victim’s uplink and downlink traffic to the adversary. As a result, they enable the attacker to restore AitM capabilities even if client isolation protections exist. «We found that Wi-Fi client isolation can often be bypassed,» Mathy Vanhoef said. «This allows an attacker who can connect to a network, either as a malicious insider or by connecting to a co-located open network, to attack others.»
  • Google Tracked 90 Exploited 0-Days in 2025 — Google said it tracked 90 zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in-the-wild in 2025, up from 78 in 2024 and down from 100 in 2023. «Both the raw number (43) and proportion (48%) of vulnerabilities impacting enterprise technologies reached all-time highs, accounting for almost 50% of total zero-days exploited in 2025,» the company said. Of these, vulnerabilities in security and networking appliances made up about half (21) of the enterprise-related zero-days in 2025. Mobile zero-days rebounded from nine in 2024 to 15 in 2025, with commercial surveillance vendors (15, plus likely another three) leading the charge in exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities than state-sponsored cyber espionage groups (12) for the first time. The names of the commercial spyware companies were not disclosed. Microsoft had the largest number of actively exploited flaws at 25, followed by Google (11), Apple (8), Cisco (4), Fortinet (4), Ivanti (3), and Broadcom VMware (3). Memory safety issues accounted for 35% of all exploited zero-day vulnerabilities last year. Financially motivated threat groups, including ransomware gangs, also targeted enterprise technologies and accounted for nine zero-days in 2025, double the five attributed to them in 2024.
  • Velvet Tempest Deploys ClickFix Attack — Velvet Tempest (aka DEV-0504) has been observed using a ClickFix lure, followed by hands-on-keyboard activity consistent with Termite ransomware tradecraft. According to a report by Deception.Pro, the attack used the social engineering technique to drop payloads like DonutLoader and CastleRAT. «Follow-on activity included Active Directory reconnaissance (domain trusts, server discovery, user listing) and attempted browser credential harvesting via a PowerShell script downloaded from 143.198.160[.]37,» it said. «Telemetry and infrastructure in this chain align with a modern initial-access playbook: rapid staging, heavy use of living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBins), and long-lived command-and-control (C2) traffic that blends into normal browser noise.» No ransomware was deployed in the attack that took place between February 3 and 16, 2026.
  • Ghanaian National Pleads Guilty to Role in $100M Romance Scam — A Ghanaian national pleaded guilty to his role in a massive fraud ring that stole over $100 million from victims across the U.S. through business email compromise attacks and romance scams. 40-year-old Derrick Van Yeboah pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and agreed to pay more than $10 million in restitution. «Van Yeboah personally perpetrated many of the romance scams by impersonating fake romantic partners in communications with victims,» the U.S. Justice Department said. «Many of the conspiracy’s victims were vulnerable older men and women who were tricked into believing that they were in online romantic relationships with persons who were, in fact, fake identities assumed by members of the conspiracy.» The conspirators, part of a criminal organization primarily based in Ghana, also committed business email compromises to deceive businesses into wiring funds to the enterprise. In total, the scheme stole and laundered more than $100 million from dozens of victims. After stealing the money, the fraud proceeds were laundered to West Africa. The defendant is scheduled to be sentenced in June 2026.
  • Taiwan Indicts 62 People for Cyber Scams — Prosecutors in Taipei indicted 62 people and 13 companies for their involvement in cyber scam operations organized throughout Asia by the Prince Group. Chen Zhi, the founder of the Prince Group, was indicted by U.S. prosecutors last year on money laundering charges. Taipei prosecutors said those associated with Prince Group laundered at least $339 million into Taiwan and used the stolen funds to buy 24 properties, 35 vehicles, and other assets amounting to approximately $1.7 million. In all, authorities seized about $174 million in cash and assets. Prince Group «effectively controlled 250 offshore companies in 18 countries, holding 453 domestic and international financial accounts. By creating fictitious transaction contracts between these offshore companies, the group laundered money through foreign exchange channels,» they added.
  • Ransomware Actors Use AzCopy — Ransomware operators are ditching the usual tools like Rclone for Microsoft’s own AzCopy, turning a trusted Azure utility into a stealthy data exfiltration mechanism and blending into normal activity. «The adoption of AzCopy and other familiar tools by attackers represents a similar logic to living-off-the-land in the final and most critical phase of an operation: exfiltrating data out of an organization,» Varonis said. «Spinning up an Azure storage account takes minutes and requires only a credit card or compromised credentials. The attacker gains the benefits of Microsoft’s global infrastructure while security teams struggle to distinguish between malicious uploads and legitimate traffic.»
  • Threat Actors Exploit Critical Flaw in WPEverest Plugin — Threat actors are exploiting a critical security flaw in WPEverest’s User Registration & Membership plugin (CVE-2026-1492, CVSS score: 9.8) to create rogue administrator accounts. The vulnerability affects all versions of User Registration & Membership through 5.1.2. The issue has been addressed in version 5.1.3. Wordfence said the plugin is susceptible to improper privilege management, which enables the creation of bogus admin accounts. «This is due to the plugin accepting a user-supplied role during membership registration without properly enforcing a server-side allowlist,» it said. «This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to create administrator accounts by supplying a role value during membership registration.»
  • MuddyWater Evolves Its Tactics — The Iranian hacking group known as MuddyWater has been observed leveraging Shodan and Nuclei to identify potential vulnerable targets, as well as using subfinder and ffuf to perform enumeration of target web applications. The findings come from an analysis of the threat actor’s VPS server hosted in the Netherlands. MuddyWater is also said to be attempting to scan and/or exploit recently disclosed CVEs related to BeyondTrust (CVE-2026-1731), Ivanti (CVE-2026-1281), n8n (CVE-2025-68613), React (CVE-2025-55182), SmarterMail (CVE-2025-52691), Laravel Livewire (CVE-2025-54068), N-Central (CVE-2025-9316), Citrix NetScaler (CVE-2025-5777), Langflow (CVE-2025-34291), and Fortinet (CVE-2024-55591, CVE-2024-23113, CVE-2022-42475), along with SQL injection vulnerabilities in BaSalam and an unspecified Postgres development platform for initial access. One of the custom tools identified in the server is KeyC2, a command-and-control (C2) framework that allows operators to remotely control compromised Windows machines over a custom binary protocol on port 1269 from a Python script. Two C2 tools used by the adversary are PersianC2, which relies on standard HTTP polling to receive commands and files via JSON API endpoints, and ArenaC2, a Python-based program that operates over HTTP POST requests. Also detected is a PowerShell loader that leads to the execution of obfuscated Node.js payloads that appear similar to Tsundere Botnet. The infrastructure is assessed to have been used to target entities in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the U.A.E., and the U.S. Some aspects of the activity overlap with Operation Olalampo.
  • 2,622 Valid Certificates Exposed — A new study undertaken by Google and GitGuardian found over a million unique private keys leaked across GitHub and Docker Hub, out of which 40,000 were mapped to 140,000 real TLS certificates. «As of September 2025, 2,600 of these certificates were valid, with more than 900 actively protecting Fortune 500 companies, healthcare providers, and government agencies,» GitGuardian said. «Our disclosure campaign achieved 97% remediation, but at the cost of 4,300 emails sent, 1,706 entities contacted, 9 bug bounty submissions, countless follow-ups, and days of meticulous attribution work employing multiple OSINT techniques. The high success rate masks the extraordinary effort required to protect organizations that fail to protect themselves.»
  • Context7 MCP Server Suffers from ContextCrush — A critical security flaw in Upstash’s Context7 MCP Server, a widely used tool for delivering documentation to AI coding assistants, has been discovered. Dubbed ContextCrush, the vulnerability could allow attackers to inject malicious instructions into AI development tools through a trusted documentation channel. Noma Security, which disclosed details of the flaw, said it’s rooted within the platform’s «Custom Rules» feature, which allows library maintainers to provide AI-specific instructions to help assistants better interpret documentation. «Context7 operates both as the registry, where anyone can publish and manage library documentation, and as the trusted delivery mechanism that pushes content directly into the AI agent’s context,» security researcher Eli Ainhorn said. «The attacker never needs to reach the victim’s machine. Instead, the attacker can plant malicious custom rules in Context7’s registry, and Context7’s infrastructure delivers them through the MCP server to the AI agent running in the developer’s IDE. As agents are execution machines and run whatever is loaded into their context, all the victim’s agent does is execute the attacker’s instructions on the victim’s machine, using its own tool access (Bash, file read/write, network). In this scenario, the agent has no way to distinguish between legitimate documentation and attacker-controlled content because they arrive through the same trusted channel and from the same trusted source.»
  • German Court Sentences Key Person Behind Call Center Scam — A German court has sentenced a suspected central figure in the so-called Milton Group call-center fraud network to seven-and-a-half years in prison. Although the court did not publicly name the defendant, court records reviewed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) indicate the person convicted was Mikheil Biniashvili, a citizen of Georgia and Israel. In addition to the prison sentence, the court ordered the confiscation of €2.4 million ($2.8 million) linked to the operation. Between 2017 and 2019, the defendant ran a call-center operation in Albania that used trained agents to persuade victims to invest in fraudulent online trading schemes. The scheme caused losses of about €8 million ($9.4 million) to victims, mostly in German-speaking countries. The operation employed up to 600 people at its peak. Call-center agents allegedly posed as investment advisers, building trust with targets before persuading them to deposit funds into fake trading platforms controlled by the network by promising large investment returns. Biniashvili was arrested in Armenia in 2023 and extradited to Germany in 2024.
  • Multiple Flaws in Avira Internet Security — Three vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Avira Internet Security that could allow for arbitrary file deletion (CVE-2026-27748) in the Software Updater component, an insecure deserialization (CVE-2026-27749) in System Speedup, and an arbitrary folder deletion over TOCTOU (CVE-2026-27748) in the Optimizer. «The file delete primitive is useful on its own,» Quarkslab said. «The other two both result in Local Privilege Escalation to SYSTEM.»
  • Russian Ransomware Operator Pleads Guilty in U.S. — Evgenii Ptitsyn, a 43-year-old Russian national, has pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to running the Phobos ransomware outfit that targeted more than 1,000 victims globally and extorted ransom payments worth over $39 million. Ptitsyn was extradited from South Korea in November 2024. «Beginning in at least November 2020, Ptitsyn and others conspired to engage in an international computer hacking and extortion scheme that victimized public and private entities through the deployment of Phobos ransomware,» the Justice Department said. «As part of the scheme, Ptitsyn and his co-conspirators developed and offered access to Phobos ransomware to other criminals or ‘affiliates’ to encrypt victims’ data and extort ransom payments from victims. The administrators operated a darknet website to coordinate the sale and distribution of Phobos ransomware to co-conspirators and used online monikers to advertise their services on criminal forums and messaging platforms.» Ptitsyn faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for wire fraud charges.
  • Fake Google Security Check Leads to RAT — A bogus website resembling the Google Account security page is being used to deliver a Progressive Web App (PWA) capable of harvesting one-time passcodes and cryptocurrency wallet addresses, and proxying attacker traffic through victims’ browsers. «Disguised as a routine security checkup, it walks victims through a four-step flow that grants the attacker push notification access, the device’s contact list, real-time GPS location, and clipboard contents – all without installing a traditional app,» Malwarebytes said. «For victims who follow every prompt, the site also delivers an Android companion package introducing a native implant that includes a custom keyboard (enabling keystroke capture), accessibility-based screen reading capabilities, and permissions consistent with call log access and microphone recording.»
  • Phishing Campaign Abuses Google Infrastructure — A new email phishing campaign is leveraging legitimate Google infrastructure to bypass standard security filters. The activity uses Google Cloud Storage (GCS) to host initial phishing URLs that, when clicked, redirect unsuspecting users to a malicious site designed to capture their financial information or deploy malware. «By hosting the initial link on Google’s servers, the attackers ensure the email passes authentication checks like SPF and DKIM,» security researcher Anurag Gawande said.
  • Client-Side Injection Conducts Ad Fraud — A new malicious client-side injection originating from a malicious browser extension impersonating Microsoft Clarity has been found to overwrite referral tokens to redirect affiliate revenue to unknown threat actors. «A browser extension is injecting obfuscated JavaScript from msclairty[.]com, a typosquatted domain impersonating Microsoft Clarity,» c/side’s Simon Wijckmans said. «The domain is not serving analytics. It is delivering an obfuscated JavaScript payload that performs affiliate cookie stuffing, tracking cookie deletion, and Fetch API hijacking inside the visitor’s browser. This prevents a competing tracking service from recording the real traffic source. The attacker does not just want credit for the visit. They actively block other trackers from capturing any attribution data that would conflict with their fraudulent cookie.» The script has affected sites across multiple unrelated sectors, including transportation, SaaS platforms, sports management, and government payment portals. Impacted visitors primarily span Chrome versions 132, 138, and 145, and originate from U.S.-based IP addresses on the East and West coasts.
  • Illinois Man Charged with Hacking Snapchat Accounts to Steal Nudes — U.S. prosecutors have charged a 26-year-old Illinois man, Kyle Svara, with conducting a phishing operation that made it possible to break into the Snapchat accounts of approximately 570 women to steal private photos and sell them online. «From at least May 2020 to February 2021, Svara used social engineering and other resources to collect his targets’ emails, phone numbers, and/or Snapchat usernames,» the Justice Department said. «He then used those means of identification to access his targets’ Snapchat accounts, which prompted Snap Inc. to send account security codes to those women. Using anonymized phone numbers, Svara posed as a representative of Snap Inc. and sent more than 4,500 text messages to hundreds of women, requesting those Snapchat access codes.» Svara is alleged to have accessed the Snapchat accounts of at least 59 women without permission to download their nude or semi-nude images and sell them on internet forums.
  • Meta Sued Over AI Smart Glasses’ Privacy Concerns — Meta is facing a new class action lawsuit over its AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta glasses, following a report from Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Goteborgs-Posten that employees at a Kenya-based subcontractor are reviewing intimate, personal footage filmed from customers’ glasses. Meta said subcontracted workers might sometimes review content captured by its AI smart glasses for the purpose of improving the «experience,» as stated in its Privacy Policy. It also claimed that data is filtered to protect people’s privacy. But the investigation found that this step did not always consistently work. «Unless users choose to share media they’ve captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user’s device,» Meta told BBC News. «When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do.»
  • Total Ransomware Payments Stagnated in 2025 — The total ransomware payments in 2025 stagnated, even if the number of attacks increased. According to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, total on-chain ransomware payments fell by approximately 8% to $820 million in 2025, even as claimed attacks rose 50%. «While aggregate revenue stagnated, the median ransom payment grew 368% year-over-year to nearly $60,000,» the company said. «The 2025 total is likely to approach or exceed $900 million as we attribute more events and payments, just as our 2024 total grew from our initial $813 million estimate this time last year.» The decline in payment rates from 63% in 2024 to just 29% last year indicates that fewer victims are yielding to attackers’ ransom demands, it added. The development comes amid increased fragmentation of the ransomware ecosystem and threat actors shifting towards more stealthy methods, such as defense evasion and persistence techniques, to prioritize data theft and prolonged, low-noise access.
  • Mobile Blockchain Wallet Found Vulnerable to Severe Flaws — An unnamed mobile blockchain wallet app for Android has been found susceptible to two independent severe vulnerabilities, allowing untrusted deep links to trigger sensitive wallet flows and trick users into approving phishing-driven transactions, as well as retain cryptographic private keys from the device despite deleting an account. This meant that an attacker with later device access could re-import the account using its public address and regain full signing authority without re-entering the keys. According to LucidBit Labs, the vulnerabilities have been patched by the developer. «The main strength of crypto wallets lies in their cryptographic foundations,» security researcher Assaf Morag said. «However, when these wallets are implemented as user-facing applications, the overall orchestration of the system becomes just as critical as the cryptography itself. As the saying goes, a system’s security posture is defined by its weakest link. In this case, the two vulnerabilities demonstrate how flaws at the application layer can undermine the entire security model, despite the strength of the underlying cryptography.»
  • Kubernetes RCE Via Nodes/Proxy GET Permission — New research has identified an authorization bypass in Kubernetes Role-based access control (RBAC) that allows a service account with nodes/proxy GET permissions to execute commands in any Pod in the cluster. The issue exploits a bug in how Kubernetes API servers handle WebSocket connections. «Nodes/proxy GET allows command execution when using a connection protocol such as WebSockets,» security researcher Graham Helton said. «This is due to the Kubelet making authorization decisions based on the initial WebSocket handshake’s request without verifying CREATE permissions are present for the Kubelet’s /exec endpoint, requiring different permissions depending solely on the connection protocol. The result is anyone with access to a service account assigned nodes/proxy GET that can reach a Node’s Kubelet on port 10250 can send information to the /exec endpoint, executing commands in any Pod, including privileged system Pods, potentially leading to a full cluster compromise.» The Kubernetes project has declined to address the issue, stating its intended behavior. However, it’s expected to release Fine-Grained Kubelet API Authorization (KEP-2862) next month to address the attack. «A targeted patch would require coordinated changes across multiple components with special-case logic,» Edera said. «This is the kind of complexity that could lead to future vulnerabilities. Once KEP-2862 reaches GA and sees adoption, nodes/proxy can be deprecated for monitoring use cases.»
  • Other Key Stories on the Radar — The Israeli government is working on the country’s first cybersecurity law, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) published Zero Trust Implementation Guidelines (ZIGs) to help organizations safeguard sensitive data, systems, and services against sophisticated cyber threats, Google Project Zero found multiple vulnerabilities that could be used to bypass a new Windows 11 feature called Administrator Protection and obtain admin privileges, threat actors are continuing to abuse Microsoft Teams functionality by leveraging guest invitations and phishing-themed team names to impersonate billing and subscription notifications, and a loader named PhantomVAI has been used in the wild over the past year to deploy other payloads, such as Remcos RAT, XWorm, AsyncRAT, DarkCloud, and SmokeLoader.

🔧 Cybersecurity Tools

  • DetectFlow → It is an open-source detection pipeline from SOC Prime that matches streaming log events against Sigma rules in real time — before they ever reach your SIEM. Instead of relying on your SIEM to do the heavy lifting, it tags and enriches events in-flight using Apache Kafka and Flink, then passes the results downstream to wherever you need them. Built on 11 years of detection intelligence, it’s designed for teams who want faster detection, more rule coverage, and less dependency on SIEM-imposed limits.
  • ADTrapper → It is an open-source platform that analyzes Windows Active Directory authentication logs and flags threats using 54+ built-in detection rules — covering everything from brute force to AD CS attacks. It runs in Docker, deploys with one command, and supports SharpHound data for deeper AD analysis.

Disclaimer: For research and educational use only. Not security-audited. Review all code before use, test in isolated environments, and ensure compliance with applicable laws.

Conclusion

That’s your week. A lot happened. Some of it was bad, some of it was worse, and a little bit of it was actually good. The scoreboard is messy, like it always is.

Same time next week — and if history is any guide, we’ll have plenty more to talk about. Stay patched, stay skeptical, and maybe don’t click that link.