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A newly discovered espionage implant has been using a hijacked Microsoft 365 calendar as its command channel, planting operator instructions and smuggling out stolen files as attachments on calendar events dated to the year 2050. Group-IB , which named the malware HollowGraph , says the approach moves tasking and stolen data through legitimate Microsoft Graph API traffic, so the activity looks like ordinary Microsoft 365 chatter and network controls keyed to attacker-owned destinations have nothing to flag. The implant is a .NET DLL that supports just two commands, get and send , and it never reaches out to an attacker-owned server for payloads. Instead, it treats the compromised mailbox's calendar as a two-way dead drop. To pull tasking, it queries the calendar for an event the operator has planted, buried at 2050-05-13 , so the mailbox owner is unlikely to ever scroll to it, and reads its instructions from an attached file. To exfiltrate, it does the reverse: encrypts th...

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. wa...

At least one Russian intelligence service is systematically hijacking internet-connected security cameras across Europe and Ukraine, using the feeds to watch military transport routes, weapons shipments bound for Kyiv , and the locations of Ukrainian troops. That is the finding of a cybersecurity advisory published July 10 by the AIVD and MIVD, the Netherlands' civilian and military intelligence services, which describe the operation as ongoing. In Ukraine, the surveillance has not stayed passive. Camera access there has been "used in attempts to neutralise Ukrainian military personnel" and destroy their equipment, the services say, turning an exposed roadside or business camera into a targeting aid. Across EU and NATO states, the services add, the same camera access is also collecting military intelligence that has nothing to do with the war. Getting in is rarely the hard part. The operators scan the internet for exposed devices, fingerprint IP cameras by bran...

The industry spent the initial months after Anthropic's April 7 Mythos reveal focused on volume . How many new CVEs would Mythos add to an already overloaded pipeline? How quickly would the flood of AI-driven discovery overwhelm triage capabilities? How long would it take adversaries to weaponize Mythos findings at scale? Those questions were and remain valid. Yet they all stop short of addressing the single metric that determines whether any of those vulnerabilities actually lead to a breach: the exposure window. The exposure window - the gap between the moment a vulnerability becomes exploitable and the moment your team fixes it - is the time an attacker has to do actual damage. That window is currently open far too wide. In 2025, the average eCrime breakout time dropped to 29 minutes . Even PCI DSS - the strictest compliance framework in the industry - allows 30 days to remediate a critical vulnerability. That's a 1,000-to-1 gap between how fast attackers move and how f...

Opening a crafted XZ archive in 7-Zip could let an attacker run code on the machine. The flaw, CVE-2026-14266 , is a heap-based buffer overflow in how the archiver processes XZ chunked data, and Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) detailed it on July 15. A fix shipped on June 25 in 7-Zip 26.02 . The overflow lets an attacker "execute code in the context of the current process," per the advisory. The code runs with the token 7-Zip itself holds and gains no privileges of its own. On Windows, a normally launched 7-Zip runs under a filtered standard-user token even on an administrator account, so the attacker inherits those limited rights unless the program was started elevated. The bug came in from Landon Peng of Lunbun LLC, who reported it to 7-Zip on June 5. ZDI rates the flaw 7.0, or High, not the Critical several write-ups reached for. The full CVSS 3.0 vector is AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H . The AV:L makes it a local attack vector, not a network-re...

A solo Russian-speaking threat actor known as " bandcampro " outsourced a chunk of their operations to Google's open-source Gemini CLI artificial intelligence (AI) and commandeered a live botnet. The findings come from an analysis of 200 Gemini CLI session logs between March 19 and April 21, 2026, which found the threat actor using AI, among other things, to crack passwords, set up a residential proxy, compromise WordPress merchants, and plan a phone-based cryptocurrency fraud scheme aimed at elderly people in the U.S. and Canada. "The logs documented how the threat actor used an AI agent to migrate a command-and-control (C&C) server, and to control a small-scale botnet, among other hacking activities," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen, Philippe Lin, Lucas Silva, Vladimir Kropotov, and Fyodor Yarochkin said . "The entire C&C operation fits in three plaintext files totaling roughly 5 KB, making it highly replicable and effectively disposa...

In an ironic twist, open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform Hugging Face revealed that it was the victim of a hack perpetrated by an autonomous AI agent system. The company said it detected and responded to the incident targeting its production infrastructure earlier last week. "We identified unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials used by our services," the company said in a statement. While an investigation into the intrusion remains ongoing, Hugging Face said it has found no evidence that the AI agent tampered with public, user-facing models, datasets, or Spaces, and its own software supply chain. The starting point of the attack was the data processing pipeline itself, with a malicious dataset abusing two code execution paths, viz., in its remote code dataset loader and a template injection in a dataset configuration, to run code on a processing worker.

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new software supply chain attack codenamed SleeperGem targeting the Ruby ecosystem after three malicious gems were published to RubyGems with the end goal of serving additional payloads. The rogue gems are listed below - git_credential_manager (versions 2.8.0, 2.8.1, 2.8.2, 2.8.3) - Published on July 18, 2026 Dendreo (versions 1.1.3, 1.1.4) - Published on October 14, 2017 fastlane-plugin-run_tests_firebase_testlab (version 0.3.2) - Published on February 06, 2018 "Each malicious release is a loader," StepSecurity said in an analysis. "It fetches a second stage from an attacker controlled Forgejo host, checks whether it is running in a build system and skips if it is, and on a developer machine it drops a native daemon and installs persistence." One aspect of the attack that immediately stands out is that "git_credential_manager" impersonates the official Microsoft Git Credential Manager, while t...

F5 has shipped fixes for a critical nginx flaw that lets a remote, unauthenticated attacker trigger a heap buffer overflow in the worker process with crafted HTTP requests. CVE-2026-42533 was patched on July 15 in nginx 1.30.4 (stable) and 1.31.3 (mainline) , and in NGINX Plus 37.0.3.1; anyone on an earlier build should upgrade. Triggering it can crash or restart the worker, causing a denial of service; where ASLR is disabled or can be bypassed, F5 says it may also allow remote code execution. The overflow lives in nginx's script engine, the code that assembles strings from directives at request time. It only surfaces under a specific configuration: a regex-based map whose output variable is referenced in a string expression after a capture from an earlier regex match. Under that pattern the engine's two-pass evaluation comes apart. The first pass measures how many bytes the result needs and allocates a buffer to fit; the second pass writes the bytes in. Both read the ...

Russian state-sponsored threat actors have been observed leveraging the infamous ClickFix strategy to trick Ukrainian targets into infecting their own machines with data-stealing malware. According to the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA), the activity has been attributed to UAC-0145 , a sub-cluster within Sandworm , an advanced hacking unit affiliated with GRU, Russia's primary foreign military intelligence agency. In these attacks, threat actors have been found to leverage fake CAPTCHA checks on compromised websites that instruct prospective targets to execute a PowerShell command in the terminal. "The mentioned command, as an example, could be intended for downloading and saving a VBS file in the Startup autorun directory; one of the variants of such a program was called GHETTOVIBE," CERT-UA said in an alert. The attacks also involve the use of SCOUTCURL, a PowerShell script that performs basic reconnaissance by harvesting details about t...

A previously undocumented threat actor has been attributed to the exploitation of recently disclosed SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series VPN appliances as zero-days prior their public disclosure since June 22, 2026. Cybersecurity company Volexity is tracking the activity under the moniker UTA0533 . The discovery was made following an incident response investigation earlier this 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," security researchers Sean Koessel and Steven Adair said in an analysis. 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 the vulnerabilities were released by SonicWall this wee...

Updated July 18, 2026: the two flaws now carry CVE IDs, the full mechanism has been published, a persistent-object-cache condition has surfaced, and a working proof-of-concept is public. The story below reflects all of it. An anonymous HTTP request can run code on a WordPress site. The bug is in core, so a bare install with zero plugins is exploitable. Every 6.9 and 7.0 site was in range until Friday, when WordPress shipped 6.9.5 and 7.0.2 and enabled what it calls forced updates through its auto-update system. wp2shell is two bugs, not one, and both now carry CVE IDs. CVE-2026-63030 is the REST API batch-route confusion; CVE-2026-60137 is a SQL injection in WordPress core. Chained, they take an anonymous request all the way to code execution. Since Friday, the full mechanism has been published, and a working proof-of-concept has gone up on GitHub. Adam Kues at Assetnote, Searchlight Cyber's attack surface management arm, found the batch-route bug and reported it throug...

Eleven bytes will make an unpatched OpenSSL server set aside up to 131 KB of memory for a message that never arrives. On the glibc systems Okta tested, that memory is gone until the process restarts. OpenSSL shipped the HollowByte fix in June with no CVE, no advisory, and no changelog entry pointing at it. Okta's Red Team, which reported the denial-of-service bug and named it, published the details on Thursday. The fixed releases are OpenSSL 4.0.1, 3.6.3, 3.5.7, 3.4.6, and 3.0.21 , all dated June 9. Every release on those branches before the fixed ones has it. Nothing in a normal patch pipeline will point you at them: there is no identifier for a scanner to match and no advisory to read. The flaw is that OpenSSL took the attacker's word for it. Every TLS handshake message carries a 4-byte header, three bytes of which declare how long the body will be. Older versions grew the receive buffer to that declared size the moment the header landed, before a single byte of the bo...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of seven malicious npm packages targeting the Vite frontend tooling ecosystem as part of a software supply chain attack. The malicious package campaign, codenamed ViteVenom by Checkmarx, marks an expansion of ChainVeil , which was observed using an "unprecedented" four-tier blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) infrastructure spanning Tron, Aptos, and Binance Smart Chain to deliver a remote access trojan (RAT) capable reverse shell, credential harvesting, file exfiltration, and persistent backdoor injection. "This tactic makes disabling or destroying the C2 infrastructure extremely difficult," Checkmarx researcher Pavan Gudimalla said in an analysis published last month. The activity has been attributed to a threat actor named SuccessKey, with evidence of malicious activity detected as far back as February 27, 2026, when cryptocurrency wallets linked to ViteVenom were activated. While the typosquats pub...