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A security researcher has released working exploit code for four Linux kernel flaws that each let a local user gain root, the highest level of access on a machine. Kernel maintainers have fixed all four over the past few weeks, so a system running an up-to-date kernel is not affected. But the exploit code is now public, and any machine still running an older kernel should be updated. The flaws are called DirtyAH6 , TUNderflow , PPPoEject , and DiagSpill . Researcher Asim Manizada found them and reported them to the Linux kernel security team in mid-July. He published a technical  write-up  with working exploits on September 18, after a coordinated hold with Linux distributions so the fixes could be released first. So far, there are no reports of the four being used in real-world attacks. The exploits are Manizada's own, are tuned to specific kernel builds, and can crash a machine, so they are meant for isolated test systems. Still, public exploit code raises the ris...

WordPress today released patches to fix a new set of vulnerabilities in its core software, one of which could allow a crafted web link, opened by a logged-in administrator, to install a theme from the official WordPress.org directory without anyone clicking Install. The security firm pwn.ai , whose researchers reported the flaw, calls the attack chain Click2Shell . On its own the flaw only installs a real theme that the attacker picks, but the security research team showed it could be combined with a separate weakness in a theme to run the attacker's own code on the server.  The fix shipped on September 17 in WordPress 7.1.1 . Because this is a security release, WordPress advises updating right away. There is no sign the flaw has been used in real attacks. The installed theme stays switched off, so the site's own appearance does not change and nothing looks wrong. Reaching code execution needed a second, separate flaw in the theme that was installed. As pwn.ai wrote of t...

The Pakistan-aligned threat group tracked as Transparent Tribe (aka APT36 and Earth Karkaddan) has been attributed to a fresh set of cyber attacks targeting government and defense entities in India and Afghanistan. The attacks, per Zscaler ThreatLabz, involve the use of previously undocumented tools called RUSTYSHADE, RUSTYMOVE, PSNATCH, and BASHNATCH. The activity has been codenamed Operation RapidRust . "APT36 has maintained a high operational tempo and updated their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in continued attacks targeting government and defense organizations in India and Afghanistan," Sudeep Singh , senior manager of APT Research at Zscaler ThreatLabz, said in a technical report published this week. The discovery comes a little over a month after  Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) tied the long-running persistent threat group to another campaign aimed at Afghan telecom providers and South Asian critical infrastructure organizations using a backdo...

Microsoft has released fixes for a maximum-severity security flaw in Azure AI Foundry that could be exploited to achieve privilege escalation. No customer action is required. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-85889 , carries a CVSS score of 10.0. "Missing authentication for critical function in Azure AI Foundry allows an unauthorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network," Microsoft said in a Thursday advisory. Azure AI Foundry, also called Microsoft Foundry, is an enterprise platform designed to build, deploy, and manage generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications and agents. The Windows maker credited security researcher Rémy Marot (@R_Marot) for discovering and reporting the flaw. There is no evidence that the issue has been exploited in the wild. Also patched by Microsoft in recent days are a number of other critical flaws -

In July 2025, someone registered a domain that used to belong to a content delivery network.  The CDN had been wound down years earlier, and the domain it served assets from was allowed to expire. What it had not lost were its callers. Thousands of websites, code repositories, and documentation pages still carry hard-coded references to hostnames beneath it.  The new owner holds wildcard DNS across the entire domain, and any hostname under it now resolves to infrastructure that person controls. Today the apex serves an ad-heavy media downloader page, which is unremarkable. The remarkable part is that the decision about what those thousands of pages load next belongs to a stranger, and nobody involved has been notified, because from the outside nothing broke.  This pattern is not hypothetical, and it's not unheard of either. In June 2024, the polyfill.io domain (a JavaScript shim embedded in more than 110,000 sites) changed ownership and began serving conditional redi...

A flaw in four widely used AI coding agents lets someone who controls a plugin's code repository swap the plugin an agent installs for a malicious one, even when the agent locked that plugin to a specific reviewed version, security firm  Air Security said on Thursday . The firm said Anthropic has patched the flaw in Claude Code 2.1.179 and OpenAI in Codex 0.146.0, that GitHub Copilot has no fix, and that Google will not patch the Gemini CLI, which it is retiring. The agents install add-ons called plugins from online marketplaces. To stay safe, a marketplace locks each plugin to a single reviewed version by its commit hash, a long string that identifies an exact snapshot of the code. Air found that the agents fetch that snapshot but never check that the code they end up with actually matches it. A branch is a named line of code in a repository. On a code host that lets someone create a branch whose name is made to look like the commit hash, the owner of a plugin's reposit...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of 13 npm packages that have been found to deliver a previously undocumented JavaScript stealer codenamed WeaselBiscuit . The new malware family, per OpenSourceMalware , exhibits functional overlaps with two malware strains associated with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK) Contagious Interview campaign: BeaverTail and OtterCookie . "It's smaller, lighter, and stripped down, with many of the heavier functions removed entirely," security researcher Paul McCarty (aka 6mile) said. The names of the packages are below - @biz44/id10-client @biz44/id12-client @biz44/id44-client @biz44/id79-client @biz44/id95-client @biz44/id99-client @biz44/process-runtime-utils @biz44/runtime-utils engin1 id79-client process-lhpm process-mite process-tailwind "It's a stripped down stealer that borrows several functions from DPRK's BeaverTail and OtterCookie,...

A financially motivated threat actor has been linked to the development and distribution of a JavaScript (JS)-based information stealer known as PhantomRaven via the npm package registry. "The developer likely wrote the malware using a large language model (LLM), an assessment made with high confidence based on verbose comments, placeholder code, and statistical token-analysis patterns," CrowdStrike's Counter Adversary Operations said in an analysis published this week. PhantomRaven was first flagged by Koi Security and DCODX in late October 2025, calling attention to a slopsquatting and typosquatted campaign in which more than 100 malicious packages were uploaded to npm to steal authentication tokens, CI/CD secrets, and GitHub credentials from developers' machines. The software supply chain attack used these packages as a cover to retrieve a remote dynamic dependency (RDD) from an external server so that the libraries themselves are not flagged by security ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new Android malware called RatHat that's assessed to be operated by China-based threat actors and features an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered system to navigate and control compromised devices. "Distributed primarily via targeted smishing (SMS/text phishing) and malvertising campaigns leading to deceptive third-party download portals, RatHat uses an automated multi-stage infection pipeline," Zimperium researchers Gianluca Braga, Vishnu Pratapagiri, and Fernando Ortega said . "Once deployed, it pairs Accessibility abuse with autonomous local ADB (Android Debug Bridge) self-pairing to break out of the standard Android application sandbox, staging independent native daemons that execute with shell-level privileges." RatHat is propagated via deceptive phishing sites promoted via malvertising, smishing campaigns, and third-party forums that trick unsuspecting users into installing malware-laced APKs. These pa...

A critical vulnerability in Check Point's Security Management and Log Servers could allow an attacker without login credentials to run code as root on those servers over the network. The Security Management Server is the system that controls firewall policy and administrator access. Check Point has released a fix through its LivePatch update channel and says it has no indication that the flaw has been exploited. Check Point told The Hacker News that the vulnerable path runs only through the Trusted Clients setting, which controls which hosts may connect to the management server through SmartConsole. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-91843 and rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale by Check Point, is a stack overflow in the login process, which handles requests before a user is authenticated. Internet scanning company Censys said the overflow is triggered by a login request that carries a very long username. Check Point said in a notice on its  CheckMates community  on...

Attackers keep finding new keys. The funny part is that defenders keep inventing where to store them. This week, those keys sit in AI tools, exposed services, old bugs, weak logins, and software sold like a monthly subscription. Some attacks use new tricks. Others just reuse what was already lying around. Both work often enough. So the threat landscape is not getting cleaner. It is just getting more places to make the same mistake. Here’s what showed up this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Malicious code running inside a Docker Sandboxes virtual machine on macOS could escape the project directory shared into it and read or change files anywhere else on the host, Docker warns in a  security announcement  on September 15. The escape runs with the rights of the host account that runs the virtual machine. The flaw,  CVE-2026-77179 , is rated Critical, affects versions 0.28.0 up to but not including 0.42.0 on macOS, and was fixed in  0.42.0  on September 7. Docker Sandboxes runs each AI coding agent in its own small virtual machine with the project directory shared in. The code that could escape is whatever runs inside that machine, such as a coding agent that has been turned against its user, or anything malicious the agent installs and runs. Docker has not reported any exploitation. CISA's added assessment on the CVE record lists exploitation as none, and the flaw is not in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog as of the ca...

The Iran-linked "hacktivist" persona known as Handala Hack has been attributed to a Telegram-based surveillance backdoor called HEAVYGRAM and a Delphi-based utility known as CRUDEEXCLUDE . "HEAVYGRAM offers builtin commands supporting remote command execution, system, network and process information discovery, data and Telegram session files exfiltration, screenshot capture, DLL sideloading, file cleanup, and persistence via Windows autorun registry keys," Group-IB said . On the other hand, CRUDEEXCLUDE is a Delphi-based Windows utility employed to prepare environments for the deployment of subsequent stages such as HEAVYGRAM. First observed in late July 2024, the malware is often disguised as a legitimate application with a graphical user interface (GUI), and configures Microsoft Defender exclusion paths for defense evasion. The findings build upon an alert the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) first issued in March 2026 and again earlier this wee...

Every release of the Unbound DNS resolver before 1.26.1 has a critical heap overflow in its DNSSEC validator, maintainer NLnet Labs said in an  advisory  on Wednesday. An attacker who controls a malicious zone and queries a vulnerable resolver can trigger it, enabling remote code execution. Unbound 1.26.1, released the same day, fixes the bug, tracked as  CVE-2026-81642 , along with eight other flaws. One of the eight,  CVE-2026-82717 , is a heap corruption bug in CNAME synthesis reported by Ben Morris of Anthropic. It could also lead to remote code execution "under certain systems and compilation options," NLnet Labs said. NLnet Labs has not reported exploitation of either bug, and CISA's entry for CVE-2026-81642 marked exploitation as "none" on Wednesday. NLnet Labs rates the DNSKEY flaw Critical, with a CVSS score of 4.0 (9.1), and its scoring lists a network attack vector requiring no privileges or user interaction. NVD listed the CVE as "Await...

A new CVE drops. Your scanner finds it. The severity score looks ugly. But that still does not answer the question that matters: Can it actually be exploited in your environment? Mythos-class AI is compressing the time between disclosure and working exploitation, while many security programs still validate risk on weekly or quarterly cycles. The dangerous gap is no longer just technical. It is measured in time. 📅 Save Your Spot Today: How to Prove You're Ready for Mythos-Class Attacks . Can’t join live? Register anyway. We’ll send the webinar recording after the session, so you can watch it later, whenever it fits your schedule, and still see the full, fresh CVE-to-validation workflow. Stop prioritizing on severity alone A high score tells you a vulnerability could be serious. It does not prove that an attacker can use it against you. Security teams need faster answers: Is the affected asset exposed? What attack techniques does exploitation require? Do ...

Attackers now weaponize new vulnerabilities in about five days (Mandiant, part of Google Cloud). The median organization takes 43 days to patch one (Verizon DBIR 2026). A new free guide explains how autonomous AI agents are closing that gap, and what security leaders must demand before pointing one at production. TL;DR Exploitation is now the front door. It starts 31% of breaches (Verizon DBIR 2026), the #1 initial-access vector, while annual pentesting leaves an estimated 90% of the estate untested. The capability is proven, not projected. An autonomous system topped HackerOne's US leaderboard in 2025 (XBOW), and peer-reviewed agents exploited 87% of one-day flaws unaided (Fang et al., 2024). Continuous beats periodic, measurably. Programmatic testing makes teams 4.5x more likely to fix criticals within three days (Cobalt, 2026). It's an AI agent in your production. Hold it to a bar. Provable coverage, an independent validator, blast-radius guardrails, and a...