New GigaWiper Windows Backdoor Bundles Disk Wiping, Fake Ransomware, and Spyware

Microsoft has taken apart a destructive Windows backdoor it calls GigaWiper. What stands out is how it is built: not one tool but three older destructive programs bolted into one, offered as commands the operator can choose from. Each is a different way to break a machine: wipe the whole disk,...

npm 12 Disables Install Scripts by Default to Reduce Supply Chain Risk

GitHub has officially announced the release of npm version 12 with install scripts disabled by default, along with deprecating granular access tokens GATs designed to bypass two-factor authentication 2FA. The Microsoft-owned subsidiary noted that the following npm install behaviors that used to r...

ThreatsDay: Cloud Bucket Hijacking, Windows LPE Chain, Global Fraud Bust + 17 More Stories

Most security mess starts as admin work. A link gets clicked. A tool gets trusted. A bucket name gets reused. A setting stays loose because nobody wants to touch it. This week is full of that kind of damage. Not loud. Not clever. Just small gaps doing big jobs. The worst part is how normal it all...

AI Attacks Move in Minutes. Join This Webinar on Building a Defense That Keeps Up

AI has changed how fast attacks move. Work that once took an attacker days now takes minutes. Using models like Mythos, attackers write tailored bait, pick targets, test what lands, and jump to the next host before your team clears the first alert. That is the gap, and it is not your fault. The...

Summer of Clearinghouses

Everyone seems to have announced a clearinghouse over the past few weeks. We did too. Ours is called Athena, and the main thing that sets it apart is that it was already real and running when we announced it — built quietly months earlier, heads down, taking findings and shipping fixes, because...

GodDamn Ransomware Uses PoisonX Driver to Disable Endpoint Defenses

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new ransomware family called GodDamn that employs the PoisonX kernel driver to neutralize security software as part of its defense evasion strategy. According to a new report published by the Threat Hunter Team from Symantec, the ransomware was first...

Microsoft Patches RoguePlanet Defender Flaw That Can Grant SYSTEM Privileges

Microsoft has released security updates for a Defender vulnerability known as RoguePlanet, nearly a month after details of the flaw became public. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-50656 CVSS score: 7.8, is a privilege escalation issue in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine "mpengine.dll...

Meta's New AI Image Tool Lets Others Use Your Public Instagram Photos in AI Images

Meta has announced that its new artificial intelligence AI model Muse Image lets people use public Instagram posts and reels to generate AI content, and it's enabled by default. "You can also @-mention Instagram accounts in the Meta AI app to bring specific Instagram profiles right into your...

Top AI Agents Built to Catch Malicious Code Can Be Tricked Into Running It

Ask an AI coding agent to scan open-source code for security holes, and it might run the attacker's code on your own machine instead. That is the finding in a proof-of-concept published Wednesday by the AI Now Institute, an attack it calls "Friendly Fire. " It works against Anthropic's Claude Cod...

GhostApproval Symlink Flaws Could Let Malicious Repos Run Code in AI Coding Agents

Researchers at Wiz found that a flaw in six popular AI coding assistants lets a booby-trapped code project quietly take control of a developer's computer. The assistant asks permission to edit one harmless-looking file, but the write lands on a sensitive one instead. The affected tools are Amazon...

Fake 7-Zip Installers Turn Devices Into Residential Proxy Nodes

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new threat actor dubbed Lurking Lizard that has been operating an end-to-end malicious residential proxy business using an infrastructure comprising more than 230 lookalike domains. The activity dates back to at least August 2022, according to...

AI Coding Agents Found Triggering Endpoint Security Rules Built to Catch Attackers

Sophos looked at a week of its own endpoint data and found that AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, and OpenAI Codex are setting off detection rules written to catch human intruders. The agents are not malicious. They just do a lot of things that, to a behavioral engine, look exactly li...

New HalluSquatting Attack Could Trick AI Coding Assistants Into Installing Botnet Malware

AI coding assistants have a habit of making things up. Ask one to fetch a popular tool, and it will sometimes hand back a real-sounding name for a project that does not exist. New research, which its authors call HalluSquatting , turns that habit into an attack: work out the fake names an AI...

Ubiquiti Patches Critical UniFi Flaws Across Connect, Talk, Access, Protect, and OS

Ubiquiti has shipped updates to address multiple critical security flaws impacting UniFi Connect, UniFi Talk, UniFi Access, UniFi Protect, and UniFi OS that could result in privilege escalation and arbitrary command execution. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2026-50746 CVSS score:...

New Ghost Phishing Wave Is Breaking Traditional Email Security

A recent EvilTokens campaign targeting businesses across the US and Europe is exposing a new email security blind spot. This “ghost phishing” technique keeps the malicious page hidden until it decrypts and comes to life inside the victim’s browser. For security leaders, the risk is clear:...

SCMBANKER Malware Uses ClickFix Lures to Target Mexican Banking Users

A new banking fraudulent operation is targeting customers of Mexican banks, fintech, payment processors, and cryptocurrency exchanges using ClickFix lures. The activity cluster, tracked by Elastic Security Labs under the moniker REF6045 , involves infecting victims through fake CAPTCHA verificati...

GitHub 'Verified' Commits Can Be Rewritten Into New Hashes Without Breaking Signatures

New research shows that a signed Git commit's hash is not the one-of-a-kind name that much of the software world assumes it to be. Given any signed commit, someone without the signing key can mint a second commit with the same files, author, and date, and a valid signature, GitHub still stamps...

The Verification Step Is the New ATO Battleground in 2026

For years, account takeover ATO followed a predictable script. Attackers bought stolen credentials in bulk, ran them through automated tools, and waited for matches. Credential stuffing was cheap, scalable, and for defenders, relatively well understood. That era is ending. Not because attackers...

GitHub Copilot Refuses Harmful Requests in Chat, Then Writes Them in Code

An AI coding assistant that refuses to answer a dangerous request in its chat box can answer it anyway if the same request is broken into small, ordinary-looking steps inside a code editor. That is the finding of a new study of GitHub Copilot by researchers Abhishek Kumar and Carsten Maple. The...

China-Linked UAT-7810 Expands ORB Network With New LONGLEASH Malware

A Chinese threat actor tracked as UAT-7810 is actively refining its bespoke malware to expand its Operational Relay Box ORB network by breaking into internet-facing networking devices. According to findings from Cisco Talos, UAT-7810 is an advanced persistent threat APT actor that's responsible f...

15-Year-Old GhostLock Flaw Enables Root and Container Escape on Most Linux Distros

Researchers at Nebula Security have disclosed GhostLock CVE-2026-43499, a 15-year-old Linux kernel flaw that lets any logged-in user take full root control of a machine that has not been patched. The vulnerable code has shipped by default in essentially every mainstream distribution since 2011. T...

CISA Adds 4 Actively Exploited Adobe, Joomla, and Langflow Flaws to KEV

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA on Tuesday added four security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities KEV catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-48282 CVSS score: 10.0 - A path traversal vulnerability i...

RedWing MaaS Packages Android Bank Fraud as a Telegram Rental Service

A new Android malware operation called RedWing is being rented out on Telegram as a ready-made bank-fraud service. It lets even low-skill criminals take over a victim's phone, steal their banking logins, and capture the one-time codes that protect their accounts. Zimperium's zLabs, which found th...

Rogue Agent Flaw Could Have Let Attackers Hijack Google Dialogflow CX Chatbots

A critical flaw in Google's Dialogflow CX could have let an attacker with edit rights on one Code Block-enabled agent compromise other Code Block-enabled agents in the same Google Cloud project. From there, they could read live conversations, steal the data users shared, and make the bots send...

DEBULL Tooling Abuses Microsoft Device-Code Flow to Target M365 Accounts

A Microsoft 365 device code phishing campaign has been observed leveraging collaboration-themed lures to take control of victim accounts between the last week of June 2026 and into early July, per findings from ZeroBEC. "The campaign did not depend on a fake Microsoft password page. It used a...

Public GitHub Issue Could Trick GitHub Agentic Workflows Into Leaking Private Repo Data

A public issue can trick GitHub Agentic Workflows into leaking the contents of an organization's private repositories, researchers at Noma Security have shown. The attacker needs only to open a normal-looking issue on a public repository, with no stolen credentials and no access to the...

Writer AI Flaw Could Let Agent Previews Leak Session Tokens Across Tenants

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched critical session isolation vulnerability in Writer, an enterprise generative artificial intelligence AI platform, that could result in cross-tenant compromise. The one-click vulnerability has been codenamed WriteOut by the Sand...

Court Filing Reveals Windows Device ID Helped FBI Trace Alleged Scattered Spider Hacker

U.S. prosecutors linked an alleged Scattered Spider hacker to a break-in at a luxury jewelry retailer using a persistent Windows device ID, according to a newly unsealed federal complaint. Microsoft records tied that ID first to the account the attackers used to keep access during the May 2025...

What Changes When Your Software Supply Chain Includes AI Writing Your Code?

Software supply chain security was hard enough. Then AI joined the build pipeline. For five years, "software supply chain security" meant one question: what's in your code? Which open-source packages, which versions, which transitive dependencies three layers deep that nobody chose on purpose?...

Suspected China-Aligned Hackers Exploit Roundcube Flaws Against Universities

A suspected China-aligned threat activity cluster has been observed exploiting Roundcube webmail software belonging to physics and engineering departments of U.S. and Canadian universities as part of a new campaign. The activity involves the exploitation of now-patched, critical security flaws in...

CERT/CC Warns of Hidden Admin Backdoor in Tenda Router Firmware

Several versions of firmware released by Chinese network device manufacturer Tenda have been found to embed an undocumented authentication backdoor that enables administrative access to the devices' web management interfaces, the CERT Coordination Center CERT/CC warned Monday. "An attacker can...

BeyondTrust Patches Critical Auth Bypass Flaws in Remote Support and PRA

BeyondTrust has released updates to address two critical security flaws affecting Remote Support RS and Privileged Remote Access PRA products that, if successfully exploited, could allow unauthenticated attackers to take control of susceptible devices. The vulnerabilities are listed below -...

Iran-Linked Hackers Use New Cavern C2 Framework to Target Israeli Organizations

An Iranian hacking group affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security MOIS has been wielding a previously undocumented modular command-and-control C2 framework dubbed Cavern aka Cav3rn targeting Israeli organizations. The activity, which has primarily singled out IT providers and...

16-Year-Old Linux KVM Flaw Lets Guest VMs Escape to Host on Intel and AMD x86 Systems

A use-after-free bug in Linux's KVM hypervisor can be triggered from a guest virtual machine to corrupt the shadow-page state of the host kernel that runs it. Dubbed 'Januscape' and tracked as CVE-2026-53359, the flaw sits in the shadow MMU code that KVM shares across both Intel and AMD. The publ...

Threat Actors Probe Gitea Docker Flaw CVE-2026-20896 13 Days After Disclosure

Threat actors have been observed attempting to exploit a recently patched critical security flaw in Gitea Docker images, according to Sysdig. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-20896 CVSS score: 9.8, a vulnerability that stems from the DevOps platform trusting the "X-WEBAUTH-USER" header...

⚡ Weekly Recap: Proxy Botnets, Browser Ransomware, AI Agent Tricks, Fake PoC Malware and More

A streaming box should not need a threat model. Neither should a username field, a demo repo, a reset flow, or a browser permission prompt. That is the irritating part this week: the risky pieces were ordinary. Home devices became a routing cover. Clean code pulled dirt from a dependency. Identit...

How to Evaluate an AI SOC Platform in 2026: 6 Capabilities That Separate Leaders from Bolt-On AI solutions

Building a shortlist for an AI SOC evaluation can be tough. SIEM, SOAR, and pureplay AI SOC vendors are all saying the same thing. But behind the identical label sit very different products, from chat assistants bolted onto a legacy SIEM to agent platforms that run detection, triage, investigatio...

Suspected China-Nexus Hackers Use Fake Indian Tax Filing Utility to Deploy DcRAT

A suspected China-nexus threat activity cluster has been observed targeting Indian taxpayers, tax professionals, and corporate finance teams to deliver a remote access trojan designed to steal sensitive data from compromised hosts. The multi-stage campaign, codenamed Operation DragonReturn by...

New TrojPix Attack Leaks Data From Air-Gapped Systems via Video Cable Emissions

Researchers at Shandong University have shown a fast new way to pull data off computers that are cut off from every network. The technique, called TrojPix, tweaks on-screen pixels in ways the eye cannot see, so that the video cable carrying them radiates a faint radio signal a nearby receiver can...

New Java-Based QuimaRAT MaaS Built to Run on Windows, Linux, and macOS

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a novel Java-based remote access trojan RAT called QuimaRAT that's capable of targeting Windows, Linux, and macOS environments. According to LevelBlue, the cross-platform malware is advertised under a malware-as-a-service MaaS model, costing anywhere between...

Opera GX Flaw Let Malicious Sites Auto-Install Mods to Steal Data From Visited Pages

Researchers found a flaw in Opera GX, the gaming-focused version of the Opera browser, that let a malicious website silently install a browser add-on and use it to lift specific data from the pages a victim visits. In a proof of concept, they reconstructed a signed-in user's full Gmail address fr...

SkillCloak Lets Malicious AI Agent Skills Evade Static Scanners with Self-Extracting Packing

Scanners meant to catch malicious add-on "skills" for AI coding agents can be fooled by a few simple changes that leave the malware working, according to a new study from researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Their strongest trick slipped past every scanner tested mor...

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

A U.S. government entity paid about $1 million to keep stolen files from being leaked, according to a new case study by Rakesh Krishnan for Ransom-ISAC, built on a leaked negotiation chat and the blockchain trail the payment left. The odd part: the group that took the money calls itself Kairos ,...

North Korean Hackers Publish 108 Malicious Packages and Extensions in PolinRider Campaign

The North Korean threat actors linked to the Contagious Interview campaign have been observed publishing 108 unique packages and web browser extensions spanning npm, Packagist, Go, and Google Chrome as part of an ongoing activity referred to as PolinRider. "The campaign remains active, and new...

Unpatched Flaws Disclosed in Filesystem Bundled Into Millions of Embedded Devices

Security firm runZero has disclosed seven vulnerabilities in FatFs, a small filesystem library that lets a device read and write the FAT and exFAT formats used on USB drives and SD cards. The flaws matter because FatFs is nearly everywhere. It ships inside the firmware that runs security cameras,...

New "Bad Epoll" Linux Kernel Flaw Lets Unprivileged Users Gain Root, Hits Android

A newly disclosed Linux kernel flaw called Bad Epoll CVE-2026-46242 lets an ordinary user with no special access take full control of a machine as root. It affects Linux desktops, servers, and Android, and a fix is out. Bad Epoll sits in the same small stretch of kernel code where Anthropic's mos...

New Avalon Malware Framework Packs CrownX Ransomware Capabilities

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented modular malware framework codenamed Avalon that's distributed by means of a multi-stage phishing chain capable of bypassing traditional security controls. Avalon combines credential collection, lateral movement, remote access,...

North Korea-Linked npm Packages Mimic Rollup Polyfills to Steal Developer Secrets

Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been linked to a fresh set of malicious npm packages that masquerade as Rollup polyfill tooling to facilitate remote access and data theft. According to JFrog, the packages "rollup-packages-polyfill-core" and "rollup-runtime-polyfill-core" mimic the...

Armored Likho Targets Government Agencies, Power Sector with BusySnake Stealer

A previously undocumented threat actor known as Armored Likho has been attributed to cyber attacks targeting government agencies and the electric power sector across Russia, Brazil, and Kazakhstan. "Armored Likho blends financially motivated campaigns targeting private individuals with targeted...

European Parliament Member Investigating Spyware Was Hacked With Pegasus

A new report from the Citizen Lab has revealed that former Member of the European Parliament Stelios Kouloglou had his mobile device repeatedly hacked with the notorious Pegasus spyware while serving on a committee that was tasked with investigating the abuse of such commercial surveillance tools...