The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News

A previously undocumented financially motivated threat actor has been linked to attacks targeting Brazilian financial institutions since at least March 2026. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is tracking the Brazil-based activity cluster under the name Slim Spider . "The adversary demonstrates deep operational knowledge of Brazilian financial infrastructure, including the instant payment service Pix, digital asset platforms, and financial entities' cloud environments," CrowdStrike said . Slim Spider has been observed orchestrating a multi-stage intrusion at a Brazil-based financial institution in late March 2026, setting its sights on the entity's cryptocurrency assets and instant payment accounts. As part of the attack, the e-crime group is said to have developed custom Bash scripts that query the cloud instance metadata to steal temporary cloud credentials over socket connections. Upon establishing access to the organization's cloud environment, the t...

Whoever took nearly 4,000 bitcoin from the Liquid Network on Sunday, September 6,  returned 3,400 of it  the next day, Bitcoin's public record shows. About 598.5 bitcoin has not come back. Liquid is a Bitcoin sidechain that holds real bitcoin to back a token called L-BTC . The network is still paused, so holders cannot turn that token back into bitcoin. The 3,400 bitcoin was sent to a  Liquid Federation address  at 16:09 UTC on September 7, about 85% of what was taken. The federation is the group of operators that holds the bitcoin backing L-BTC. The remaining 598.5 bitcoin was not a separate payment. It is the change from that same transaction, sent back to the address the funds had come from. It was  still there on September 8 , according to the block explorer mempool.space. Neither Blockstream nor Liquid Network has said publicly whether that bitcoin is part of an agreement. In an  incident notice , Blockstream, which provides the technology f...

Check Point Research said in a report published today that a single instruction planted in a ChatGPT conversation could cause ChatGPT to quietly work for an attacker while answering the user's question as usual. In the company's proof of concept, that hidden work read data from the user's connected Gmail account and passed it to a second ChatGPT account through a hidden channel between the two. The reply the user saw said nothing about it. Check Point said the same channel could also copy out the chat history and the files in that conversation. How much an attacker could take depended on what the session could already access, including its data, tools, other connected apps, and permissions. The instruction had to be in the conversation before any of this worked. Check Point named three ways to get it there: a prompt the user pastes in, a shared ChatGPT conversation the user opens, or a custom GPT that holds it in its builder instructions, which are not shown to th...

Threat actors are continuing to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline their operations , with one financially motivated hacking group employing an autonomous, multi-agent attack framework to carry out a large-scale credential harvesting campaign within six hours. Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said it has observed attackers with diverse motivations targeting proprietary AI models across healthcare, government, and media sectors, exfiltrating API credentials, and co-opting victim cloud environments to sustain unauthorized AI workloads. This highlights growing attacker focus on enterprise AI assets for espionage, extortion, and resource theft. "At this point, we can assume that all threat actors are using AI in some capacity and their operations have benefited," John Hultquist, chief analyst at GTIG, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "Like everyone else, we're concerned about the vulnerability problem, but AI is being applie...

Researchers at the security firm Calif have built a worm that takes over a WeChat account via an incoming call and  demonstrated it spreading  among three test phones. The person being called does not have to answer or touch their phone for it to work, but the caller must already be one of their WeChat contacts. Calif reported the flaw to Tencent in July and says the company has since blocked the exploit for all users. No attacks using the flaw have been reported, and Calif does not say there were any. Attacks that require no action from the target, known as zero-click attacks, are not new. Last year, WhatsApp  patched a flaw  it said may have been used in targeted attacks. Answering the call does not stop the attack. Calif said a person who picks up hears nothing and the exploit still works. Declining the call ends that attempt, but the attacker can call again later, for example while the target is asleep. The caller has to be on the target's WeChat contac...

In the last six months, Chainguard doubled its output from 500 million to more than 1 billion container build manifests. We also surpassed 3,000 unique container images and 675,000 image versions in our catalog. Those are the headline numbers, but I want to share what's actually behind them. The number itself is less interesting than the system that produced it, and why we had to fundamentally rethink that system to get here. What a build manifest actually represents Let’s be precise about what we're counting. How do we define a “build manifest”? Think of it as every time the Chainguard Factory produces a new, verifiable artifact: a fresh image for go:1.26.5 , a rebuild of nginx triggered by a libc patch, a new architecture variant, a regenerated SBOM after a dependency change - all these events cause a new build and therefore new artifacts. At our scale, a single project like Python might have dozens of supported versions, each with multiple architecture builds, each r...

A flaw in FreeIPA lets a client that has never logged in create a Kerberos identity of its own choosing in the directory and end up in the administrators group, Red Hat says. FreeIPA is the system that determines who may log in across a Linux domain and maintains all identities in a 389 Directory Server database accessed via LDAP. The attack needs a second flaw in that database software. The FreeIPA project has already fixed its side in  version 4.13.4 . Red Hat says it reproduced the chain twice on a default installation, most recently on a machine with no access at all. Red Hat tracks the FreeIPA flaw as  CVE-2026-76578  and rates it critical, with a CVSS score of 9.8. The same page says that score is preliminary and subject to review. Red Hat ships FreeIPA as its Identity Management product , where the package is called  ipa . FreeIPA ships an access control rule, called an ACI, that lets a user manage their own one-time-password token. The rule does no...

Adobe on Monday released security patches to address a maximum-severity flaw impacting Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, now tracked as CVE-2026-75650 (CVSS score: 10.0), has been codenamed StyleSmuggler by Sansec, which discovered zero-day exploitation starting September 4, 2026. "This update resolves a critical vulnerability that could result in arbitrary code execution," Adobe said , adding it's "aware that CVE-2026-75650 has been exploited in the wild targeting Adobe Commerce merchants." At its core, the flaw abuses Magento's template system through PHP code injection to generate a "Payment Transaction Failed Reminder" email, triggering code execution in the process.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a sprawling search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning campaign that paves the way for malware deployment and tech support scams. The campaign, discovered by the DFIR Report in March 2026, has been codenamed BengalSEO . It has operated out of the Indian state of Rajasthan since at least 2015, driven by two IT service providers named WeConnect Solutions LLC (previously iConnect Soft Solutions LLC) and Garage2Global. Although Garage2Global claims to be a website design, SEO, and digital marketing services provider, the cyber threat intelligence platform said it unearthed evidence indicating the company develops malicious web infrastructure used in SEO poisoning campaigns as part of the BengalSEO scam cluster. "This group utilizes its extensive SEO and web development capabilities to create and promote lure pages with multiple Black Hat SEO techniques," the DFIR Report said in a technical analysis published late last mo...

Online dating app Grindr has opted to pay £26 million ($35.1 million) to settle a lawsuit in the U.K. over allegations that it shared users' personal information, including their HIV status, with third-parties. Grindr, which is the largest LGBTQ+ dating app, was sued in April 2024, accusing it of violating U.K. privacy laws by sharing sensitive data for commercial purposes such as advertising. The claims were brought on behalf of more than 10,000 clients. According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 2, 2026, the California-based company said it settled the suit related to historical data practices before 2020, when it was managed by Kunlun. The Chinese gaming company sold the online platform to an investor group called San Vicente Acquisition LLC in May 2020. "The settlement includes no findings or admission of liability," read the filing. "While Grindr disputes the allegations, it recognizes and acknowledges the dist...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a complex Chromium-based post-exploitation toolkit called PEEP that masquerades as a bookmarks extension for the web browser. "Requiring prior administrative or code execution access, its installer injects the extension directly into Chrome/Edge profiles, bypassing Web Store checks and user prompts by forging Chromium's own Secure Preferences integrity values," SOCRadar said . "A native-messaging tool then extends it beyond browser telemetry to host-level command execution and file management." Once installed, the PEEP "extension" agent polls its command-and-control (C2) server ("206.237.30[.]232" or " xfjcc[.]fun ") every 30 seconds over plaintext HTTP for new commands, while exfiltrating browsing history, active-tab metadata, and session cookies. It also functions as a remote access and browser monitoring toolkit that runs host commands, steals credentials, hijacks sessions...

Threat hunters have disclosed details of a widespread data theft and extortion threat cluster that's targeting Microsoft 365 and other software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings through information technology (IT) help desk vishing, adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) token theft, and residential-proxy sign-ins. The activity, which mainly singles out directors, vice presidents, and other executive staff, is being tracked by Arctic Wolf under the moniker PREY-0058 . The operation shares significant tradecraft similarities with a data extortion group that Google-owned Mandiant calls UNC6671 . It also said that the data extortion threat actor known as Cinder likely represents yet another rebrand or a possible continuation of Pink operations, citing overlaps between organizations listed on the Cinder leak site and those connected to Pink. It's worth noting that the ever-evolving labels do not correspond to a single proven actor identity, but rather an amorphous set of affiliates, s...

Turning off email images should at least stop the pictures. This week, attackers had a workaround: a scannable QR code built out of text. It still appears, even with images blocked. A small detail, but an annoying one if that was a precaution you were counting on. Elsewhere, a trusted software source delivered code that stole credentials, and a protocol designed for secure network management gave outsiders useful clues before login. Add active attacks on browsers, routers, and online stores, and there’s plenty to check—even for teams that have kept up with the patches. Read the full recap for the week’s major developments, plus more research, attacks, and security news beyond what we covered last week. ⚡ Threat of the Week N-able Patches Critical N-central Flaws — N-able has released hotfixes to address two severe N-central flaws (CVE-2026-86206 and CVE-2026-86207) that could allow an unauthorized party to bypass authentication controls and gain full access to the platform. ...

If managing security across multiple cloud providers wasn't hard enough, each one fails in a different way. For the 2026 Cloud Security Index , Intruder analyzed misconfiguration data from 3,000 organizations across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and found that risk profiles across providers have almost nothing in common. Here’s what the data looks like. How risk differs across cloud providers Intruder grouped every misconfiguration into one of six categories: weak identity and access management (IAM), missing logging, misconfigured services, permissive firewalls, exposed services, and weak encryption. For each category, they compared how many accounts had at least one issue in it across the three providers. Weak IAM controls and missing logging are near-universal, affecting between 80% and 98% of accounts regardless of provider. The other four categories are where things diverge: Exposed services: AWS (76%) , Azure (64%) , Google Cloud (8%) Permissive firewalls: AWS...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of worm-like activity that abuses ConnectWise ScreenConnect to distribute a malicious Visual Basic Script (VBScript) payload to newly connected systems. According to Huntress , three unrelated incidents have been found to use diverse initial access methods, namely a Quick Assist tech-support scam, a phishing-delivered MSI installer, and a fake Geek Squad refund form lure, to activate a four-stage VBScript chain that leads to rogue ScreenConnect installations. However, once the ScreenConnect instances were installed, the cybersecurity company said it observed the clients repeatedly spawning "wscript.exe" to execute VBScripts named 1.vbs, 2.vbs, 3.vbs, and 4.vbs. The incidents were observed in August 2026. The details of the three attacks are below - A social engineering attack that persuaded a user into executing Quick Assist as part of a tech support scam, after which a rogue ScreenConnect remote access client was d...

A TantoSec proof-of-concept turns an AES-CBC "padding oracle" in Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX into unauthenticated remote code execution — but only against applications in a specific non-default configuration, and Progress patched the chain in July. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation in the wild. Security firm TantoSec has published a working exploit chain targeting vulnerabilities in Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX that can allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute remote code on the server hosting a vulnerable application. Progress Software patched the flaws in July, and exploitation requires a non-default configuration — but the release pairs a detailed write-up with a ready-to-run tool and two payloads, putting a complete attack path in public hands for the first time. The underlying flaws are not new. Progress shipped the fix in version 2026.2.708 (2026 Q2 SP1) on July 8 and published the CVEs and advisory on July 22. What changed on September 7 is t...