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Security researchers ran their own code inside a protected part of Windows that is meant to stay sealed off even when the rest of the computer is taken over. The protected area is a VBS enclave , an isolated slice of memory the operating system uses to guard secrets, and the one they broke into handles passwords for a Windows anti-phishing feature. The work was done in a lab as a proof of concept, has not been seen in real attacks, and Microsoft fixed the flaw in its September 8, 2026 update. The flaw is tracked as  CVE-2026-83498 . Microsoft rates it an elevation-of-privilege issue, Critical, with a CVSS score of 7.8, and says it has not been exploited and was not publicly known before the fix. Microsoft also says it found the same issue internally. The research, by the security firm  Doyensec , was published October 13, more than a month after the patch. A VBS enclave is a signed library that a normal Windows program loads but cannot read or change once it is runnin...

Microsoft on Tuesday shattered its own Patch Tuesday record by shipping patches for a whopping 1,413 vulnerabilities , including one that it said has come under active exploitation. These include 1,102 flaws in Windows, 134 in Office, 61 in Developer Tools, 36 in SharePoint Server, and 22 in SQL Server. Of these, more than 670 relate to privilege escalation, followed by over 300 remote code execution flaws and 250 information disclosure flaws. Over 70 flaws are rated Critical in severity. "Hundreds of CVEs in a single release used to be the exception; now it's the baseline," Dustin Childs, head of Threat Awareness at the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), said . "Is AI to blame? Partly. It's accelerating bug-hunting on both sides of the fence, so vendors are finding (and fixing) more flaws, and researchers are finding them faster too." "But AI isn't creating these bugs out of thin air; it's just shortening the time between a vulnerability existin...

A Saudi National and employee of OpenAI has been arrested for allegedly planting a hidden recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco offices to covertly record sensitive conversations. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, has been charged with using or endeavoring to use an electronic, mechanical, or other device to intercept oral communications. He was arrested by authorities on October 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said. Alfozan had been employed at OpenAI since July 2025, working as an engineering lead. He has since been terminated. According to Alfozan's LinkedIn profile, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a master's in data science in 2025. He was previously employed at Meta as a senior systems engineer and went on to become the founding engineer at Nash. "Abdulrahman Alfozan allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer's executive conference room to secretly capt...

Small artificial intelligence (AI) models may be months away from developing capabilities to self-replicate on IoT devices like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, according to a warning from Anthropic. The frontier AI lab said small AI models could form autonomous, self-propagating worm botnets that are "challenging to shut down," since "there's no centralized point to shut off." Prior work has demonstrated that AI agents can act like one by scanning their network, executing an exploit, and copying model weights to a target machine across a GPU cluster with an aim to generate tailored attack strategies and use compromised machines as a botnet to run large language models (LLMs) in order to sustain its reasoning and expand in scale. "Such an 'AI worm' could carry its model weights with it as it reproduces (or re-download them from a public hub), and then run inference directly on compromised hardware," Anthropic said . "Eff...

A flaw in Docker Hub, the registry where container images are published and downloaded, let one user push, pull, or delete images as another user. Docker fixed the flaw on September 30 and says it found no evidence that anyone exploited it. The flaw was in the feature that  converts a personal account  into an organization, Docker said in a  security advisory  on October 12. Conversion transferred the account's personal access tokens (PATs) to the user designated as the organization's owner. A PAT is used in place of a password in the registry, and the person who created each token can still use it. The access was limited to the registry. It did not reach the Docker Hub web interface, and it could not be used to change a password, email address, or two-factor settings, or to take over an account. Docker tracks the flaw as CVE-2026-105445 and rated it critical. The  CVE record  it published on October 13 gives the flaw a CVSS 4.0 score of 9.4. The ...

An attacker chained three zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure, a VPN appliance, to run commands as root without logging in, security firm  Volexity said  on October 13. Ivanti has released fixes for two of the flaws and told customers on affected versions to "act immediately." A fix for the third is still pending, according to Volexity. Volexity, which reported the flaws to Ivanti, found the attack on one customer's appliance. The appliance was fully patched at the time and running version 22.8R2.4. The attacker, which Volexity tracks as UTA0576, began exploiting it on October 3. Ivanti said  on October 13 that it is aware of "limited exploitation in the wild." The first two flaws are an authentication bypass and a remote code execution flaw, tracked together as  CVE-2026-104935 . Together they let an attacker run code as the appliance's cgi-server user, and the third flaw, a privilege escalation, raises that to root, Volexity said. The CVE reco...

A flaw in SAP's  Cloud SDK for Python  can send an application's OAuth2 client credentials to a server an attacker controls, SAP said in a  security advisory  on October 13. The flaw affects multi-tenant applications on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) that use the SDK, SAP's official Python client for BTP services. An attacker must be able to control the tenant subdomain, the name such an application passes to the SDK to say which tenant a request is for. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-89111 and carries SAP's CVSS score of 10.0 out of 10. The advisory names  version 0.45.2 , released on August 21, as the fix. The SDK handles authentication for those services with the application's client credentials, a client ID and a client secret. Version 0.45.2 added a check that rejects any tenant subdomain that is not a simple name. Six later releases do not apply that check in every case, The Hacker News found. Versions 0.53.0 through 0.55.0, published betwe...

GitHub has taken the step of expiring unvalidated npm trusted publishing configurations 48 hours after creation after researchers found that it was possible for an attacker to push new versions of a different user's package without having to steal their credentials. "Your configuration becomes validated and exempt from expiry after its first successful publish," the Microsoft-owned subsidiary said . "Changing the repository or project identity requires a new trust relationship with a fresh 48-hour validation window -- ordinary edits don't restart the deadline." The change contains the risk associated with trusting a repository or project name that changes ownership, GitHub said, adding npm also rejects trusted publishing tokens from GitHub Actions issue_comment events going forward, along with the Existing pull_request_target restriction. In an update to its documentation, GitHub states that a newly created trusted publisher configuration must compl...

The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (DPA) has fined Xandr, an advertising unit owned by Microsoft, €8.6 million ($9.62 million) for illegally relaying ​Grindr users' sensitive data to advertisers. The administrative penalty is the largest issued by the data protection watchdog, arguing the case merited a high fine because of the "very serious" nature of the breach. The infringements occurred between July 2018 and April 2020. "Xandr acted as an intermediary that relayed the personal data of Grindr users in Norway, including data revealing sexual orientation, to potentially thousands of other companies," the Data Protection Authority said in a statement. The data protection authority said its investigation found that Xandr was a joint controller with Grindr, which meant it was responsible for obtaining users' consent before processing their data. Instead of ensuring they had the legal basis for their own processing of the data, Xandr pointed fing...

The dangerous part of a stolen identity isn't always the initial login. It's what an attacker can do with that access next. With AI accelerating reconnaissance, exploitation of vulnerabilities, and privilege escalation, attackers can move through systems faster than security teams can investigate. A compromised account that looks legitimate at first could become the starting point for a much larger attack. And that's where traditional identity security faces a serious problem: Checking who gets access isn't enough if you can't control what happens after. See How to Stop AI-Powered Identity Attacks — Register for the Webinar Why Traditional Identity Controls Are Falling Behind

Three vulnerabilities in LG's webOS can be chained to give an attacker on the same local network root access to certain smart TVs without a PIN or any interaction from the owner. LG has issued a fix, according to an advisory published by SSD Secure Disclosure on October 12. The chain was tested on two TV models, the 32LQ636BPSA and the 27TQ600SW, running webOS 7.5.7-25 on firmware 04.54.40. Whether other models or firmware versions are affected is not known. Owners of affected TVs should check for a firmware update. No workaround is available for those who cannot update yet. The attack enters through a service that the TV exposes on port 3001, which is used by the LG ThinQ app for pairing. An attacker replays a manifest from sync-demo, a built-in app already on the device, signed with a test certificate the firmware trusts. A permission in the manifest causes the pairing service to skip the PIN prompt and hand over a privileged key. With that key, the attacker laun...

A user opens a browser tab, pastes data into a chat assistant, and nothing is installed. A developer adds a coding assistant as an editor extension, and nothing shows up in the installed programs list. Someone downloads a local model runtime, a program that runs models directly on the machine instead of sending data to an external service, because they were told not to send company data outside. None of this reaches your software inventory. Tasked with controlling AI, an administrator often resorts to blocking well-known AI websites and taking enforcement action without knowing what is actually running. Bitdefender GravityZone AI Visibility and Control (AIVC) is the discovery and risk layer that answers the questions you have, first: Which AI software is present on your protected Windows endpoints, who is running it, and how much risk does each one carry. What Your Software Inventory Was Never Built to Watch AI Visibility and Control covers four classes of exposu...

Attackers took remote control of fridges and freezers at hundreds of French supermarkets on the night of October 11 and warmed them, forcing stores to throw food away, several retail chains said. The attackers reached them through the controller that runs all of a store's fridges and freezers, a device made by Danish company Danfoss that maintenance firms can manage remotely. Les Mousquetaires, which owns the Intermarché chain, said its fridges and freezers were put into defrost and heated to as much as 50°C. CERT-FR, the French government's computer emergency response team, said in an  alert published in French  on October 12 that it is aware of numerous compromises affecting two Danfoss controller series, the AK-SM and the AK-SC. It told operators to disconnect the controllers or filter access to them. CERT-FR is part of ANSSI, France's national cybersecurity agency. ANSSI's head, Vincent Strubel, called it urgent to take the two series off the internet or fil...

Two of 31 newly disclosed flaws in Progress Software's  MarkLogic Server  database could let an account given only some management privileges take administrator control of the server, the company says. Progress published all 31 on October 12 and scored five of them critical. Fixes have been available since September 10, in  MarkLogic 11.3.7  and  MarkLogic 12.1.0 . Affected releases, and the release that fixes each: MarkLogic 11.x before 11.3.7: upgrade to 11.3.7 MarkLogic 12.x before 12.1.0: upgrade to 12.1.0 MarkLogic 11.3 is the long-term support (LTS) line. The 12 line, which Progress calls an innovation release, has no patched 12.0 release. Its fix is 12.1.0, which also adds new features. Installing the fixes for the 10 MarkLogic flaws Progress disclosed in August is not enough. Those fixes arrived in 11.3.6 and 12.0.3, and both releases are affected by the new flaws. Progress's CVE records and its upgrade notes for the two releases do n...

GitLab has released patches for a maximum-severity security flaw impacting its Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that could result in arbitrary code execution. "GitLab has remediated an issue that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server via a specially crafted regular expression in a CI/CD configuration, due to insufficient regular expression validation," the company said in a Monday advisory. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-97229 , has been described as an integer overflow issue. It carries a CVSS score of 10.0. It affects the following versions - All versions from 19.2 before 19.2.8 All versions from 19.3 before 19.3.5, and All versions from 19.4 before 19.4.2 Patches for the flaw are available in versions 19.4.2, 19.3.5, and 19.2.8. Also addressed are three high-severity bugs - CVE-2026-92883 (CVSS score: 8.7) - A cross-site scripting vulnerability...

Low-cost Android smartphones have been shipped with malicious software baked into the device firmware, allowing bad actors to covertly install apps, conduct ad fraud, and turn devices into residential proxies. The activity, which targets Android devices built on MediaTek platforms across several brands, is being tracked by Bitdefender under the moniker Midnight Mimosa . The preinstalled malware ("com.android.system.lite") runs with system-level privileges, which make it possible to install or uninstall a rotating set of at least 32 disguised apps, grant itself additional permissions to accessibility services, notifications, and SMS, and load arbitrary code supplied remotely by the operators. Specifically, it fetches a remote configuration from an external server and then downloads and executes additional payloads designed to conduct ad fraud and silent installation or removal of partner apps. These apps incorporate proxyware, ad fraud, and code execution features. It...