⚡ Weekly Recap: Chinese Spy Proxy, AI Agents Go Off-Task, Router Backdoors and More

The boring parts caused most of the trouble. A router shipped ready to listen. A fake check turned the user into the installer. Trusted systems collected traffic and passwords, then cleaned the logs. Old bugs formed new attack chains. Even an AI agent decided its assigned task was optional...

ValleyRAT Backdoor Hides in Signed Adware That Users Add to Antivirus Exclusions

The threat actor known as Silver Fox has been observed distributing the ValleyRAT backdoor disguised as a signed Chinese adware application, running the malware under a trusted process to slip past users who add such software to their antivirus exclusions. Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky...

Aurora Ransomware Operators Use Cursor AI in Attacks Against 10 Targets

Threat actors associated with Aurora aka Aur0ra ransomware have been observed using SpaceX's artificial intelligence AI-powered coding assistant Cursor to break into target networks, according to findings from CloudSEK and Gambit Security. The two independent analyses are based on exposed...

Securing Claude Code: The New Compliance API, Local Visibility, and Identity Governance

Claude Code reads files, runs shell commands, invokes MCP tools, and acts through the credentials available on a developer’s machine. Anthropic’s new Compliance API endpoints give security teams their clearest view yet into that activity. They also expose a larger problem: activity logs alone...

China-Linked Fire Ant Hijacks Cisco Routers to Steal Credentials and Blind Security Logs

A China-nexus cyber espionage actor tracked asFire Ant has expanded a long-running campaign beyond VMware hypervisors to compromise Cisco IOS XR routers, Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System TACACS servers, and Linux management hosts used to route, authenticate, and manage high-value...

DoJ Corrects China Hacking Claim, Says U.S. Agencies Were Targets, Not Victims

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ on Friday corrected a previously issued press statement that several of its agencies were victims of attacks carried out by Chinese threat actors, instead now pointing out that they were among those targeted. Last week, the DoJ said the National Aeronautics and...

TerminalFix Uses Fake Cloudflare CAPTCHAs to Deploy Reverse-Tunnel Backdoor

Microsoft has disclosed details of a new ClickFix variant, dubbed TerminalFix , that aims to trick users into running a malicious command in Windows Terminal or PowerShell. "While traditional ClickFix campaigns direct victims to the Windows Run dialog, TerminalFix campaigns apply the same techniq...

Five Critical WordPress Plugin and Theme Flaws Enable Site Takeover or RCE

Multiple critical security flaws have been disclosed in WordPress plugins and themes, including WPMU DEV Dashboard, Avada, TranslatePress, Pods, and GiveWP, that could lead to authentication bypass, account takeover, and arbitrary code execution. The vulnerabilities, according to Wordfence and...

Berlin Refuses to Pay Hackers Who Stole Data From the City's State Network

Berlin's state government has confirmed that it is the target of an extortion attempt following the August compromise of the city's state administrative network, and said it will not meet the extortionists' demands. The same statement disclosed that forensic work had found further data outflows i...

Cosmos EVM Flaw Exploited After Cosmos Labs Knew Every Blockchain Running It Was Vulnerable

Cosmos Labs has warned that a critical balance-handling flaw in the shared Cosmos EVM module was exploited to drain funds from six blockchains between August 20 and August 25, 2026. The vulnerability, designated GHSA-7g4w-cg88-2cq2 , is rated Critical by Cosmos Labs and was published without a CV...

Attackers Chain Two PaperCut Flaws to Execute Code Without Authentication

Malicious actors are exploiting a newly patched security flaw in PaperCut NG and MF to execute arbitrary code on susceptible instances, as the company released a fresh emergency fix with additional hardening. "This vulnerability gives an unauthenticated attacker remote control over PaperCut's...

Android 17 Adds OS-Wide ECH to Hide Website Visits From Network Providers

Google on Thursday announced new network security protections in Android 17 to bolster connection privacy, address cellular vulnerabilities, and safeguard the privacy of users' home networks. Topping the list is support for Encrypted Client Hello ECH, a privacy standard that prevents networks fro...

ownCloud Flaw Exploited to Steal Nuclear Records From Philippine Research Body

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA on Thursday added a critical security flaw impacting ownCloud to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities KEV catalog following reports that a Chinese-speaking threat actor weaponized the vulnerability to target a nuclear research body in...

19 Chrome and Edge Extensions Found With Wallet-Stealing and Crypto-Draining Code

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of 18 Google Chrome and one Microsoft Edge extensions that were published over the last six months and harbored wallet secret stealing and cryptocurrency draining capabilities. The extensions, per Socket security researcher Karlo Zanki, share...

Two Unitree G1 EDU Humanoid Robot Flaws Enable Root RCE, One Starts Over Bluetooth

Security researcher Olivier Laflamme has disclosed two independent root remote code execution RCE chains affecting the Unitree G1 EDU , including a Bluetooth Low Energy BLE path that can reach root on the robot's Locomotion PC. The flaws are tracked asCVE-2026-76639 and CVE-2026-76640 , with the...

Key Reasons Why Identity Fabric Matters in 2026

An Identity Fabric knits fragmented identity systems into a coherent layer that observes how identities behave across applications, APIs, and infrastructure. As enterprise access spans more cloud services and automated workloads, identity security depends less on static configuration and more on...

Three CVSS 10.0 ServiceNow Flaws Could Let Unauthenticated Attackers Execute Code and SQL

ServiceNow has released patches for four security flaws impacting the ServiceNow AI Platform, three of them rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system and exploitable, in certain circumstances, by an unauthenticated attacker. The company said it deployed a security update to hosted instances and...

China-Made ZBT Routers Ship With Two Implants Giving Unauthenticated Attackers Root Access

VulnCheck has disclosed two previously undocumented factory implants in firmware for routers built by Shenzhen Zhibotong Electronics ZBT, each of which gives an unauthenticated remote attacker the ability to run commands as root on affected devices. The implants, named SPEAKINGSTONE and DARKLANTE...

Critical cPanel Flaw Could Let One Hosting Customer Take Root Control of a Whole Server

cPanel has released patches for a security flaw affecting domain parking and addon domain functionality in cPanel and WebHost Manager WHM, which could allow code execution as the root user. The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-65643 , impacts all supported versions of cPanel &...

PaperCut Zero-Day Exploited in Attacks, Affecting All NG and MF Versions

PaperCut has alerted customers that bad actors are actively exploiting a vulnerability impacting all versions of its PaperCut NG and PaperCut MF print management software in zero-day attacks. The company has released an emergency patch for v25 and v26 to address the issue. It said it's "aware of...

APT28-Linked HOOKEDGE Backdoor Targets European Government and Diplomatic Organizations

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a fresh set of campaigns targeting government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain, and Türkiye between late September 2025 and early April 2026. These campaigns, per Recorded Future Insikt Group, have led to the deployment of a previously...

OpenAI Says Reward Hacking Drove AI Agents to Exploit Zero-Days and Breach Hugging Face

OpenAI on Wednesday revealed that reward hacking was a key driver behind the artificial intelligence AI-powered hack of Hugging Face last month, adding that it found evidence of misaligned behavior as early as late May. The incident, the company said, took place during cybersecurity evaluations o...

Next.js Patches Critical AVIF and Windows Flaws Enabling Unauthenticated RCE

--- Credit: Hacktron Vercel has released security patches for two critical-severity vulnerabilities in the Next.js web framework, both of which allow unauthenticated remote code execution, one exploitable via specially crafted AVIF image files and the other through a path traversal flaw affecting...

ThreatsDay: 296K IoT Botnet, 100+ Water Systems Targeted, SharePoint RCE Chain + 27 New Stories

A fake login page. A fake security scan. A fake productivity app. Apparently, pretending to be useful is still one of the easier ways into a machine. The rest of the week gets stranger: botnets borrowing AI, command traffic hiding in public infrastructure, malicious tools waiting before showing...

Amazon Kiro Prompt Injection Can Exfiltrate Sensitive Data Through Kiro Powers

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a vulnerability in Amazon Kiro, an artificial intelligence AI-powered, agentic integrated development environment IDE, that could facilitate data exfiltration via prompt injection and Kiro Powers. The security flaw, which does not have a CVE...

Alleged TeamPCP Hackers Charged in Australia Over Major Supply Chain Attacks

The Australian Federal Police AFP has charged two Western Australian men with a combined total of 14 offences over their alleged role in TeamPCP , the cybercrime group behind the March 2026 compromise of the open-source security scanners Trivy and Checkmarx KICS and the AI gateway LiteLLM. Louis...

Learn How to Build Security Operations Ready for AI-Powered Attacks

Security teams have spent years trying to detect threats faster. AI is changing the harder part: how much time defenders have left to act. Advanced AI models can now help attackers discover vulnerabilities, generate exploit code, and move through weaknesses faster than traditional security...

What the Data Says About AI in Security Operations in 2026

AI is officially mainstream in security operations. According to Prophet Security's State of AI in Security Operations 2026 report produced from ViB’s survey of 250+ cybersecurity pros, 40% of security teams now use AI daily. Another 56% are currently testing it out, and only 4% have no plans to...

Spark RAT Targets Cambodia, Abuses Vulnerable OPSWAT Driver to Disable Security Tools

Individuals and organizations in Cambodia have emerged as the target of a new campaign that delivers an open-source remote access trojan RAT called Spark RAT. "The samples employ diverse lure themes, suggesting an effort to appeal to a broad range of potential victims. These include government...

GoCaracal Malware Uses Ethereum Smart Contract to Fetch Replacement C2 Address

Threat actors linked by Arctic Wolf to Dark Caracal with medium confidence deployed a previously undocumented Go-based malware framework, GoCaracal , during a June 2026 intrusion at an unnamed communications organization in Venezuela. GoCaracal provides operators with remote shell access and...

New GPUThor Rowhammer Defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A6000 to Gain Host Root Access

Academic researchers have disclosed a Rowhammer attack impacting NVIDIA workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory that defeats error correction codes ECC, the mitigation NVIDIA recommends against GPU Rowhammer, and enables denial-of-service DoS and privilege escalation to a root shell. Dubbed GPUThor ,...

CISA Adds Six Exploited Flaws to KEV, Including NetScaler, Linux, and SQL Server Bugs

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA on Wednesday added six flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities KEV catalog, including a high-severity security vulnerability impacting Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, citing evidence of active exploitation. The...

FBI Disrupts China-Linked QTFY Infrastructure Used to Steal Data From U.S. Organizations

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ on Wednesday announced the disruption of two hacking platforms named QScan and QTRouter operated by Chinese threat actors to target critical infrastructure and other sensitive networks in the country. The activity has been attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored...

Nimbus Manticore Expands Toolset With TWOSTROKE-Like Backdoor and SSH Tunneler

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered additional infrastructure and previously undocumented malware associated with Nimbus Manticore , an Iranian state-sponsored hacking group affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps IRGC. Group-IB, in a new analysis published today, described th...

NovaCookies Campaigns Abuse Genuine Docusign Notifications to Steal Microsoft 365 Sessions

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new adversary-in-the-middle AitM phishing toolkit called NovaCookies that's used as a proxy to redirect Microsoft 365 sign-ins, while capturing authenticated sessions in the process. In a report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication...

CISA Red Team Compromised Two Critical Infrastructure Orgs, One Detected Nothing

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA has published the results of two red team assessments it conducted simultaneously against two critical infrastructure organizations, using what it described as similar tradecraft while recording sharply different defensive outcomes...

Unpatched Kaltura mwEmbed Flaws Could Let Remote Attackers Read Files and Run Code

The CERT Coordination Center CERT/CC has disclosed two unpatched vulnerabilities in Kaltura's HTML5 video player library that allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to read arbitrary files from a server and execute code on it. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-19913 and CVE-2026-19912 , both stem...

Imagine the SOC Without a Queue: From Alert Backlog to AI Hypothesis Engine

The SOC we've always known was built around a model that guarantees most of the alert queue will never receive analyst review. There's never time. In a traditional SOC, the typical progression follows a well-known pattern: an alert arrives; a detection engine assigns a severity score. The issue...

Claude Opus 4.6 Bypasses Gym Booking Limit, Cancels Other Users' Reservations in Tests

Aikido Security has published research that recreates the Australian gym-booking incident in a synthetic environment, finding that Claude Opus 4.6, running on the OpenClaw agent harness, exploited a client-side-only booking restriction in 9 of 10 runs. The original incident was first reported by...

OpenAI Bans Russian ChatGPT Accounts Used to Run Influence Operation

OpenAI on Tuesday said it banned a cluster of Russian ChatGPT accounts that used VPNs to bypass access restrictions and run an influence operation, which relied on its artificial intelligence AI tool to generate social media posts and comments that were shared on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook a...

INTERPOL Operation Jackal IV Arrests 58, Identifies 263 in Global Cyber Fraud Crackdown

An eight-month INTERPOL operation targeting West African organized crime groups has led to arrests of 58 people and the identification of 263 suspects. "The operation, which brought together 22 countries from six continents, is a response to the escalating global threat posed by West African...

New SLEEPWALKER Backdoor Waits for One Crafted Packet, Then Runs Its Own Bytecode

An independent malware researcher has documented a previously unreported Windows backdoor, dubbed SLEEPWALKER , that stays inert in memory until a specifically crafted network packet reaches the machine and then runs commands written in a 23-instruction language of its own design. The sample is a...

Critical Gitea RCE Actively Exploited as Reported Attack Drops Miner-Like Payload

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA on Tuesday warned of active exploitation efforts targeting a recently patched critical security flaw impacting Gitea. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-60004 CVSS score: 9.8, a case of remote code execution that allows an...

Fake Apple Support AI Calls Target Stolen-Device Owners for Passcodes and 2FA Codes

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a phishing-as-a-service PhaaS platform built to strip Apple's Activation Lock from stolen devices, using rented AI voice agents that call theft victims posing as Apple Support and ask for their device passcode. SOCRadar Threat Research Unit STRU...

U.S. Sanctions Iran-Linked Hackers Behind Critical Infrastructure Breaches

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced fresh sanctions on Iranian cyber actors as part of what it called an "unprecedented, whole-of-government, economic campaign" against the nation and its enablers. "We are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around t...

A Malicious Webpage Could Poison Your Local AI Model Behind NVIDIA NemoClaw

Oasis Security has disclosed a weakness in NVIDIA NemoClaw that could let an attacker-controlled webpage take unauthenticated control of the local Ollama instance serving an AI agent and plant hidden instructions inside the model itself. The findings were shared with The Hacker News ahead of...

WhatsApp Adds Multiple Passkeys for Phishing-Resistant Sign-Ins Across iOS and Android

Meta on Tuesday announced a set of WhatsApp account security features, including support for multiple passkeys to a single account to help users with both iOS and Android devices sign into their accounts using the phishing-resistant method. The tech giant said more than 1 billion people use a...

Marimo Notebook Flaw Could Run MCP Commands Before Cells Execute in Edit Mode

Marimo has addressed a high-severity security flaw in its notebook software that allowed an attacker to execute an attacker-supplied Model Context Protocol MCP command in a specially crafted notebook, according to VulnCheck's CVE Numbering Authority CNA record. The CNA record says the command can...

Mirage2FA Surge Hits 4,500 US and EU Companies, Abusing Microsoft 365 Login Flows

Thousands of companies have been affected by the Mirage2FA campaign from 2024 to 2026. The commercial phishing-as-a-service toolkit targets Microsoft 365 accounts by abusing legitimate login flows and bypassing two-factor authentication. According to ANY.RUN research, 48% of targeted email...

24 npm Packages Abuse unpkg Mirrors to Host Fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA Pages

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that uses a cluster of 24 npm packages as free phishing infrastructure for redirecting to ClickFix-style fake CAPTCHA pages. "While the malware is simply a single HTML page inside the npm package, and while downloading it wouldn't...