privilege escalation | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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"), which provides scanning, detection, and cleaning capabilities for its antivirus and antispyware software. The issue has been remediated in Microsoft Malware Protection Engine version 1.1.26060.3008, along with defense-in-depth updates to harden unspecified security-related features.  RoguePlanet was first disclosed by a security researcher named Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse), describing it as a race condition that could be abused to spawn a shell with SYSTEM-level privileges. This, in turn, grants the attacker the ability to run arbitrary code or perform unauthorized actions. The exploit has been found to work on systems running up-to-date versions of Wind...

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: 10.0) - An improper access control vulnerability in UniFi Connect Application that an attacker with access to the network could exploit to execute a command injection on the host device. (Affects versions 3.4.16 and earlier; fixed in version 3.4.20) CVE-2026-50747 (CVSS score: 9.9) - A series of authenticated SQL injection vulnerabilities in UniFi Talk Application that an attacker with access to the network could exploit to escalate privileges on the host device. (Affects versions 5.1.2 and earlier; fixed in version 5.2.2) CVE-2026-50748 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper input validation vulnerability in UniFi Access Application that an attacker with access to the network coul...

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. The flaw needs no special permission, no unusual settings, and no network access; ordinary threading calls from any local program are enough. Nebula turned it into a working root exploit that is 97% reliable in its testing and also escapes containers, and says Google awarded the team $92,337 through its  kernelCTF  bug-bounty program. No one is known to be exploiting it in the wild, but Nebula has published  working exploit code , so anyone can now run it. Patching is the priority. How the bug works The kernel has a system for keeping an urgent task from getting stuck behind a trivial one. Part of it is a cleanup step that tidies up after a task...

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 public proof-of-concept panics the host; the researcher claims that a separate, unreleased exploit turns the same bug into full host code execution. Security researcher  Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel) found and reported the bug. He described Januscape as the first guest-to-host exploit triggerable on both Intel and AMD, to the best of public knowledge. The flaw went unnoticed for roughly 16 years. According to Kim, the exploit was used as a zero-day submission in  Google's kvmCTF , the controlled KVM vulnerability reward program that offers up to $250,000 for full guest-to-host escapes. How It Works To run a virtual machine, KVM keeps its own private set of page tables that mi...

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 most powerful AI model, Mythos , recently found a different bug. The AI caught one flaw and missed this one. A researcher, Jaeyoung Chung, found it and built a working attack. How the Bug Works Epoll is a standard Linux feature that lets a program watch many files or network connections at once. Servers, network services, and web browsers all lean on it. You cannot simply switch it off. Bad Epoll is a "use-after-free" bug. Two parts of the kernel try to clean up the same internal object at the same time. One frees the memory while the other is still writing into it. That brief collision lets an attacker corrupt kernel memory, then climb from a normal account up to root...

A critical security flaw impacting Oracle E-Business Suite has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to Defused Cyber. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-46817 (CVSS score: 9.8), refers to an improper privilege management and authentication flaw in Oracle Payments that could be abused to take over susceptible instances. "Easily exploitable vulnerability allows unauthenticated attacker with network access via HTTP to compromise Oracle Payments," according to a description of the flaw in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). "Successful attacks of this vulnerability can result in the takeover of Oracle Payments." The shortcoming impacts versions from 12.2.3 through 12.2.15. Patches for the flaw were shipped by Oracle as part of its Critical Security Patch Update last month. CVE-2026-46817 has since come under active exploitation, with Defused Cyber noting on Monday that "over the weekend, we observed an actor exploiting t...

A flaw in the Linux kernel's traffic-control subsystem can let a local unprivileged user gain root on affected systems. CVE-2026-46331 , nicknamed " pedit COW ," is an out-of-bounds write in the packet-editing action (act_pedit) that corrupts shared page-cache memory. A  public, working exploit  appeared within a day of the CVE assignment on June 16. Red Hat  rates the flaw as important . The exploit never touches the file on disk. It poisons the cached copy of a setuid root binary (/bin/su) in memory, injects a small payload, and runs that altered image as root. File-integrity checks come back clean while a root shell is already open. The exploit needs two things: act_pedit being loadable and unprivileged user namespaces being open, giving the attacker a namespace-local networking capability (CAP_NET_ADMIN) needed to trigger the bug. On the tested RHEL and Debian targets, both conditions were present. How the Bug Works Linux's tc traffic-...

DirtyClone is a new Linux kernel privilege escalation in the DirtyFrag family. JFrog Security Research published a working exploit walkthrough for the flaw on June 25, the first public demonstration for this variant. Tracked as  CVE-2026-43503  (CVSS 8.8), it lets a local user corrupt file-backed memory through a cloned network packet and gain root. The patch landed in mainline on May 21; if your kernel does not have it, update now. When the kernel copies a network packet internally, two helper functions drop a safety flag that marks the packet's memory as shared with a file on disk. That missing flag is the entire vulnerability. The attacker loads a privileged binary like /usr/bin/su into memory, wires those memory pages into a network packet, and forces the kernel to clone it. The cloned packet passes through an IPsec tunnel that the attacker controls, and the decryption step overwrites the binary's login checks with attacker-chosen bytes. The next time anyo...

An unknown threat actor exploited a recently disclosed high-severity security flaw impacting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN as a zero-day at least two months before it was publicly disclosed, according to new findings from Google-owned Mandiant. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20245 (CVSS score: 7.8), allows an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands with elevated privileges by supplying a crafted file to the affected system by taking advantage of the device's insufficient validation of user-supplied input. Earlier this month, Cisco acknowledged that it became aware of exploitation of this vulnerability, adding that a malicious actor must have netadmin privileges on an affected system to pull off a successful attack. "Throughout the intrusion, to maintain operational security and avoid detection, the threat actor consistently employed anti-forensic techniques, selectively deleting and restoring system configuration files that were modified during the...

Microsoft has formally disclosed that it's working to release a patch to address a Defender zero-day codenamed RoguePlanet . The vulnerability has now been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score: 7.8), with the tech giant describing it as a privilege escalation flaw. "Microsoft is aware of an elevation of privilege in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine in Microsoft Defender, publicly referred to as 'RoguePlanet,'" the company said. "We are working to provide a high-quality security update that addresses this vulnerability."  The development comes nearly a week after a security researcher named Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse) released RoguePlanet, calling the exploit a case of a race condition that grants attackers a shell with SYSTEM-level privileges. "The exploit is a race condition, so it's a hit or miss," the researcher noted. "I have managed to get a 100% success rate on some machines while it...

Cisco has released security updates for a medium-severity security flaw in Catalyst SD-WAN Manager that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20262 , carries a CVSS score of 6.5 out of 10.0. "A vulnerability in the web UI of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly SD-WAN vManage, could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to create a file or overwrite any file on the filesystem of an affected system," Cisco said in an advisory. The issue, the networking equipment company added, stems from inadequate validation of user-supplied input during a file upload process. An attacker could exploit this behavior to create or overwrite any file on the underlying operating system by sending crafted HTTP requests to an affected API endpoint. This, in turn, could be weaponized to elevate to the root. However, successful exploitation hinges on the attacker already having valid credentials with at least write access. The vulnerab...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a security flaw impacting LiteSpeed cPanel Plugin to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to apply the fixes by June 18, 2026. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-54420 (CVSS score: 8.5), which has been described as a case of privilege escalation. It allows a user with FTP or web shell access to escalate privileges to root on shared hosting servers running CloudLinux or CageFS. "LiteSpeed cPanel plugin before 2.4.8 (as distributed in LiteSpeed WHM PlugIn before 5.3.2.0) mishandles symlinks provided by a user with FTP or web shell access on a shared hosting server running CloudLinux/CageFS," according to a description of the vulnerability in CVE.org. It's currently not known how the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild and if any of those attacks have been successful, but LiteSpeed has urged users to ...

A default low-privilege account on a LiteLLM proxy can climb to full admin and run code on the server by chaining three vulnerabilities, researchers at Obsidian Security disclosed LiteLLM is a widely deployed open-source AI gateway that brokers calls to more than 100 model providers behind one OpenAI-compatible interface. A server takeover exposes every provider key it holds, the secrets that decrypt its stored credentials, and every prompt and response passing through it. Obsidian rates the full chain CVSS 9.9, in the Critical range. BerriAI , the maintainer, included the complete fix set in LiteLLM v1.83.14-stable, which GitHub lists as released May 2. Upgrade to that release or later to close the three-CVE chain. The three bugs The first link is CVE-2026-47101 , an authorization bypass. When a regular user (an internal_user) generates a virtual API key, LiteLLM stores the caller-supplied allowed_routes field without checking it against the user's role. The field is...

Security researcher Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse and MSNightmare) has released a new Windows BitLocker bypass dubbed GreatXML , a day after they published an exploit for Microsoft Defender. "This was an accidental discovery, it took a total of 4 hours to find this," the researcher said in a post on Blogger. "If you ever attempted to use Windows Defender Offline Scan , you're automatically vulnerable to a BitLocker bypass. I'm unsure if you can still trigger the bug without ever using the offline scan feature, because you can definitely." The exploit works as follows - Copy an XML file ("unattend.xml") and a recovery folder containing another XML file ("Recovery/WindowsRE/ReAgent.xml") to the root of the recovery partition. Reboot to Windows Recovery Environment ( WinRE ) by holding Shift while clicking Restart in the Windows power menu. If every step is followed correctly, the result is a shell spawned with unre...

Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for a record 206 security vulnerabilities impacting its software portfolio, including three flaws that have been publicly disclosed at the time of release. Of the 206 flaws, 39 are rated Critical, and 167 are rated Important in severity. This includes 63 privilege escalation, 56 remote code execution, 30 information disclosure, 27 spoofing, 20 security feature bypass, seven denial-of-service, and three tampering vulnerabilities. The patches also include two non-Microsoft CVEs, a privilege escalation vulnerability impacting Windows Kernel ( CVE-2025-10263 ) and a UEFI Secure Boot security feature bypass ( CVE-2026-8863 ). They are in addition to more than 350 security flaws that Google has addressed in Chromium, which is used in Microsoft's Edge browser. Topping the list of fixes is CVE-2026-45657 (CVSS score: 9.8), a use-after-free flaw affecting Windows Kernel that could result in remote code execution. "An attacker could exploi...

The anonymous security researcher going by the name Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse) has released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for yet another Microsoft Defender zero-day named RoguePlanet . "The exploit is a race condition, so it's a hit or miss," the researcher, who published the exploit under a new GitHub account "MSNightmare" said . "I have managed to get a 100% success rate on some machines while it struggled to work on others." Should the exploit succeed, the result is a shell with SYSTEM-level privileges, granting the attacker the ability to run arbitrary code or perform unauthorized actions. The researcher said the exploit has been tested on Windows 11 and 10 machines with the June 2026 Patch Tuesday updates installed, meaning the exploit works on the up-to-date versions of the desktop operating system. That said, the exploit does not work on Windows Server instances in its current form since "standard users cannot mou...

Security researchers have published a detailed, working exploit for a Linux kernel use-after-free that lets an unprivileged local user escalate to root and break out of a container. The flaw, CVE-2026-23111, sits in the kernel's nf_tables packet-filtering code and was patched upstream on February 5, 2026. Exodus Intelligence released its full technical walkthrough on June 8, and it is not even the first public exploit: FuzzingLabs published an independent reproduction back in April. The flaw came down to a single stray character, an inverted check in nf_tables, and the upstream fix removed it in one line. Ubuntu rates the flaw CVSS 7.8 (high). If your distribution's kernel package does not yet include the fix, update and reboot. The reachable setup is common: nf_tables plus unprivileged user namespaces, a Linux feature that lets an ordinary account act as root inside a private sandbox and reach kernel code it otherwise could not. Both ship by default on most desktop...

Cisco has warned that a high-severity security flaw impacting Catalyst SD-WAN Manager has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20245 , carries a CVSS score of 7.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. It affects the following deployment types - On-Prem Deployment Cisco SD-WAN Cloud-Pro Cisco SD-WAN Cloud (Cisco Managed) Cisco SD-WAN for Government (FedRAMP) "A vulnerability in the CLI of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly SD-WAN vManage, could allow an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root by supplying a crafted file to the affected system," Cisco said in an advisory. The network security company said the vulnerability is the result of insufficient validation of user-supplied input, which an attacker could exploit by uploading a crafted file to the affected system. This, in turn, could permit the attacker to perform command injection attacks and elevate their privileges as the root user. "To...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously unreported threat cluster dubbed OP-512 (where "OP" stands for "opponent") that has been observed targeting Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) servers to deploy a bespoke web shell framework. ReliaQuest has assessed with moderate to high confidence that the espionage-focused activity is linked to China. "OP-512 was highly likely conducting espionage through a compromised Internet Information Services (IIS) web server on an organization whose sector and geography align with China-linked intelligence priorities," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Although no overlaps have been found between OP-512 and other known China-aligned adversaries, it's the fourth such threat group after CL-STA-0048 , DragonRank , and GhostRedirector to single out IIS web servers over the past 12 months. As recently as last month, Cisco Talos revealed that multiple Chinese-speaking...

Google on Monday released patches for 124 security vulnerabilities impacting its Android operating system for the month of June 2026, including one high-severity flaw in the Framework component that has come under active exploitation. Tracked as CVE-2025-48595 (CVSS score: 8.4), the security flaw has been described as a case of privilege escalation without requiring any user interaction. The vulnerability impacts devices running Android versions 14, 15, 16, and 16 QPR2 (Quarterly Platform Release 2). "In multiple locations, there is a possible way to achieve code execution due to an integer overflow," according to a description of the vulnerability on CVE.org. "This could lead to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed. User interaction is not needed for exploitation." Google has acknowledged there are indications that CVE-2025-48595 may be under "limited, targeted exploitation." As is typically the case, the t...