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Attackers can log in to accounts that have no password, such as SSH key-only accounts, on some Alpine Linux servers running the standard openssh-server package. They need network access to the server, an account name, and a password between 257 and 1,024 bytes long. OpenSSH, which rates the flaw critical, released version 10.6p2 today to block it. Alpine has published fixed packages for every release back to 3.16. The attack works when the OpenSSH server (sshd) checks passwords without the Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) interface, password logins are enabled, and at least one other account on the machine has a password. Alpine's openssh-server package is built without PAM, and password logins are on by default. The flaw comes from how sshd works with musl, the C library that Alpine is built on. Non-Linux systems, Linux systems built on glibc, and systems that check passwords through PAM are not affected, said Damien Miller of the OpenSSH project. He told anyone run...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched vulnerability that could be exploited to bypass Lockdown Mode protections in OpenAI ChatGPT. Lockdown Mode was introduced by the artificial intelligence (AI) company in June 2026 as an optional setting to minimize data exfiltration risks arising from prompt injections. "The flaw could enable silent chat data theft, phishing, and malware delivery, including zero-click data exfiltration in the ChatGPT desktop application," Eli Smadja, head of research at Check Point, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The problem stems from HTML page previews inside ChatGPT code blocks, which allow HTML content to be rendered directly within the application. Given that executing user-supplied HTML and JavaScript can introduce security risks of its own, the content is placed inside a sandbox so that it cannot access data from the app, such as cookies and local storage. The sandbox also prevents the rendere...

How much damage can someone do without breaking much? Quite a lot, it seems. A stolen login can open doors across several systems. A trusted setting can be used to lock people out. Even a simple file copy can reach places it shouldn't. And while new tools are helping find security holes faster, some important systems are still taking months, sometimes over a year, to get patched. Not exactly a great match. The stranger part is how little some attacks now need. Ransom demands without encrypted files. Fake websites that look real enough to steal money. AI tools picking up dangerous instructions while trying to help. Even the attackers are making mistakes in their own code. This week's stories are a reminder that the biggest problems don't always come from clever tricks. Sometimes the easy way works just fine. Here's what else happened. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

A critical finding can move through several security tools and still leave the organization exposed.  The vulnerability has a severity score, and a ticket has reached the queue. Progress then depends on information the finding may lack: who owns the system, whether attackers can reach it, what protection exists, and how a change could affect the business.  Each missing detail creates another investigation, another handoff, and another delay.  An exposure management platform should connect discovery with a clear priority, an appropriate response, and evidence that protection has improved.  Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) connects this work through scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization. These five tests establish whether a platform can support that process across infrastructure, identities, sensitive data, and external threats. Security teams often have several records of the same asset. A cloud platform identifies ...

OpenAI on Wednesday detailed a pipeline that employed an upcoming cyber-focused artificial intelligence (AI) model to validate and patch 948 local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Linux for $1.2 million in API costs. "Our prototype identified and analyzed 2,308 candidate Linux kernel findings, dynamically reproduced 1,724 vulnerabilities, and produced 948 local privilege escalation (LPE) exploits that could allow an unprivileged local user to gain root access," the AI company said . The findings build upon 24 LPE exploits that OpenAI revealed were discovered by its GPT‑5.5‑Cyber model back in June 2026. The latest research turns this process into an agentic pipeline comprising five stages - Vulnerability discovery, where agents identify high-value audit targets (i.e., parts of the codebase that are security-relevant and reachable by low-privileged users) and look for candidate findings Dynamic validation, where agents attempt to reproduce each candidate ...

October 2026 brought another wave of cyber threats targeting US businesses, with attackers exploiting trusted platforms, legitimate authentication processes, and everyday business workflows. For enterprises, these campaigns raise the stakes beyond individual security incidents, increasing the risk of financial losses, data breaches, and costly operational disruption. Below, we examine five active cyber threats through real-world sandbox investigations, revealing how they operate, the risks they pose to organizations, and how security teams can detect and contain attacks faster to minimize business impact. 1. SkyW4lker: Microsoft 365 Phishing Puts US Corporate Accounts at Risk SkyW4lker is an active phishing kit that exploits Microsoft's legitimate device-code authentication to compromise corporate accounts without stealing passwords or bypassing MFA. ANY.RUN researchers identified 618 related sandbox analyses between June and October 21, 2026, with 46% coming from the US. ...

Apple has revealed that it plans to start checking public iCloud links for harmful content starting with iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, macOS 27.3, and visionOS 27.3. The change specifically applies to scenarios where users share iCloud content, such as photos in iCloud Photos or files in iCloud Drive, by sharing a link and making it accessible to "Anyone with the link." When users choose this option, it makes the content accessible to anyone who has the link, including Apple, the iPhone maker said. "Starting in version 27.3 or later of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, items shared using Anyone with the Link will be checked by Apple for harmful content," it said in a support document published Tuesday. Apple also explicitly noted that sharing an item that can be accessed by Anyone with the Link disables end-to-end encryption (E2EE), even if the owner or the recipients have turned on Advanced Data Protection , an optional setting that secures iCloud Backup, Photos...

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has disclosed that an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted threat actor it tracks as Crafty Falcon is targeting organizations in the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sectors in the country. Describing the threat as active and ongoing, the activity involves the use of publicly-available AI-driven offensive security tools like ARTEX, PentAGI, Cairn, and CyberStrikeAI . "These tools execute complete attack chains autonomously at machine speed, generate and refine large numbers of tailored attack scripts in rapid succession, and adapt their payloads based on target responses," CERT-In said . "The supporting attack infrastructure rotates IP addresses within hours to days." The agency said the attacks have also targeted cryptocurrency exchanges and digital asset service providers, resulting in the theft of keys and funds. The update follows an October 2026 alert issued by CERT-In, which wa...

Zyxel GS1900 network switches that received the vendor's earlier fix for an actively exploited flaw are still open to the exploit attackers used, researchers at Binarly found. The exploit lets anyone who can reach a switch's web management interface run commands on it without logging in. Zyxel has released new firmware for 10 GS1900 models that closes the hole. The earlier fix is the 2.90 Patch 2 firmware, named in a June 16 advisory for a flaw tracked as CVE-2026-7273 . The new 2.90 Patch 3 firmware fixes a flaw now tracked separately as CVE-2026-107441, which the exploit relies on. It was posted on October 23, and the vendor announced it in an advisory earlier this week. The researchers, who reported the flaw to the vendor on September 29, call it a zero-day. Attackers already had a working exploit for it by then. GreyNoise, which monitors attack traffic through a network of sensors, reported on September 21 that attackers took data from 996 GS1900 switches around Au...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a medium-severity security flaw impacting multiple Apple operating systems to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-27834 (CVSS score: 5.5), a case of improper authentication that could allow an attacker with arbitrary read and write capability to bypass Pointer Authentication. It was addressed by Apple in May 2024 with improved checks in iOS 16.7.8 and iPadOS 16.7.8, iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5, macOS Sonoma 14.5, tvOS 17.5, watchOS 10.5, and Safari 17.5. The vulnerability was demonstrated as a zero-day at the Pwn2Own Vancouver hacking contest held in March that year. The addition of CVE-2024-27834 to the KEV catalog follows a report from Sekoia that threat actors possibly linked to Russia exploited previously patched vulnerabilities in Safari and Google Chrome to deliver malware capable of harves...

A flaw in APT , the package manager for Debian and Ubuntu, allows an attacker who can modify package downloads to swap a checked package for their own. The attacker's code then runs as root, according to advisories that  Debian ,  Ubuntu , and  APT's developers  published on November 4. The attack needs APT to retry failed downloads, which it does by default from Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 onward. Debian has released fixed versions of APT for the flaw, CVE-2026-109518 . APT's developers, who call the flaw critical, say updates for Ubuntu and its Ubuntu Pro subscription service are being released. Ubuntu 14.04 users with Ubuntu Pro can already get one. Older releases, such as Debian 11 and Ubuntu 20.04, are not exposed by default, according to Ubuntu. But many user scripts may have turned on the retry setting, Acquire::Retries, on those releases anyway, APT's developers say. Debian's testing branch was still on the  vulnerable version 3.3.5  at...

SonicWall has warned of two vulnerabilities impacting end-of-life Global Management System (GMS) systems that it said will not be patched. Details of the security flaws, which affect SonicWall GMS 9.5.2 and earlier versions, are below - CVE-2026-109593 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An unauthenticated file read vulnerability that could allow an attacker with network access to read internal GMS files, potentially exposing sensitive information. CVE-2026-109594 (CVSS score: 6.8) - A post-authentication SQL injection vulnerability that could allow an authenticated attacker to access or modify information stored in the GMS database under specific conditions. "The affected product has reached End-of-life (EoL)," SonicWall said in a Tuesday alert. "As a result, no remediation or security update will be released for these vulnerabilities. Organizations using the product should be aware of the associated security risks and are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the SonicWa...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an OpenAI Codex jailbreak bundle that's designed to modify an artificial intelligence (AI) agent's trusted instructions to insert advertisements for a third-party AI gateway. The phenomenon has been codenamed prompt adware by Check Point Research. Called Haiou (meaning Seagull in Chinese), the jailbreak modifies OpenAI Codex's configuration files to inject advertisements for the jailbreak author's website into subsequent agent responses. "The advertised service is an opaque, OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway, a middleware between an application and an LLM provider," Check Point Research said in a technical report. "The likely business model is to use the freely distributed jailbreak bundle as an acquisition channel for the paid gateway service." Adware is a type of software that displays unwanted advertisements, which can appear on users' computers or mobile devices, often in the form of ...

The Russia-linked threat actor known as APT29 is presumed to be behind a large-scale watering hole campaign targeting iOS and Android users through compromised websites, fake domains, and a supply chain attack involving a Ukrainian web analytics service called Plerdy SEO Tracker. "The injected JavaScript code collects browser and device attributes," Sekoia researchers Amaury-Jacques Garçon and Félix Aime said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Then, the delivery infrastructure delivers a platform-specific N-day exploit chain targeting either iOS or Android." The end goal of the attacks is to serve payloads capable of stealing browser cookies, and in some cases, Wi-Fi passwords or full mobile device data. The activity, codenamed Poisoned Source , was discovered by the French cybersecurity company in mid-October 2026. A defining aspect of the campaign is the use of three infection vectors - Compromise of legitimate websites to inject mal...

A critical flaw in Ruby on Rails could allow an unauthenticated attacker to write arbitrary files on an app's server by uploading a crafted file if the app processes uploads using ImageMagick . The Rails project disclosed the flaw in  an advisory  and fixed it in versions 8.1.4.1 and 8.0.5.2. The flaw is in Active Storage, the part of Rails that handles file uploads. Some apps store uploaded files using Active Storage's Disk service, which stores them on the server's disk. In those apps, an attacker could also read any file the app can read. Those files typically include the app's secret_key_base and its credentials for other systems, according to Rails. Reading them may in turn allow remote code execution or lateral movement into those systems. Rails rates the flaw 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale. It is tracked as GHSA-f3w6-w445-fwh9 and does not yet have a CVE identifier. ImageMagick selects a format handler, which it calls a coder, based on the file's c...

Two flaws in the Xen hypervisor allow a malicious guest virtual machine (VM) to read and write the memory of other VMs on the same host, including dom0. Dom0 is the VM that, by default, has full permissions and manages the others. Patches are out, and there is no known mitigation, the Xen Project said in an  advisory  on November 3. All Xen versions from 4.6 onward are vulnerable, while 4.5 and earlier are not. The flaws are tracked as CVE-2026-102703 and CVE-2026-102704 , under Xen advisory XSA-523. The Xen Project credited AI company Anthropic with finding the flaws using its Claude model. Stephan Lipp of Ada Logics then validated the finding, and the CodeAnt AI Security Research Team later independently reported the same issue. The flaws are in grant copy, the operation Xen uses to copy data between VMs. Each VM tells Xen which of its memory pages other VMs may use, and Xen checks those permissions. To save time on a batch of copies within the same memory page, ...