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If your developers are using AI coding tools, you are probably already seeing the upside: faster development, more code, and less time spent on routine work. The harder part is what comes after. AI can also introduce open-source packages at a pace your security team was never built to handle. More dependencies mean more vulnerabilities to review, more remediation work, and a backlog that can quietly keep growing. Our latest AI Coding and Open Source Risk webinar examines what this means for security and engineering teams, drawing on data from 300 enterprise leaders. The Real Problem Is What AI Adds to Your Stack AI coding itself is not the issue. The problem is how quickly generated code can bring new open-source components into your environment. A developer can add a dependency in minutes. Your team may then need to assess vulnerabilities, licensing, maintenance, ownership, and whether that package should be there at all. That work does not disappear just because the co...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that several websites are still actively distributing a malware family known as Weedhack to gamers by masquerading as Minecraft clients. McAfee Labs said it detected and blocked more than 6,300 attempts to access malicious sites, adding that it found lookalike gaming websites designed to mimic legitimate projects, including branding, feature lists, FAQs, installation guides, developer credits, and links to genuine GitHub repositories. Notably, one of the sites has been built using Lovable , an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered website builder, highlighting how readily available tools can further lower the barrier and make it easier to launch convincing new malicious sites. Weedhack was first documented by the cybersecurity company back in June 2026, detailing its use of SEO poisoning and YouTube to redirect traffic to the bogus domains. The attack triggers a multi-stage sequence that culminates in the deployment of JAR payloads that can ...

A package gets installed. A login prompt opens. A box sits exposed to the internet. Nothing looks unusual yet. That’s roughly the mood this week. Trusted tools turn hostile, old weak spots get fresh attention, AI makes exploit work cheaper, and researchers keep finding attacks that sound harder than they actually are. Plenty to clean up. Here’s the short version. ⚡ Threat of the Week U.S. Warns of AI-Powered Attacks on Siemens PLCs — Threat actors are using AI to write exploit scripts targeting internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) used across water, energy, manufacturing, and other critical infrastructure sectors, according to the U.S. government. The agencies warned: "This is not a theoretical risk—it is an active threat." The exploitation of poorly secured PLCs could result in disruption of critical industrial processes, safety incidents, downtime or equipment damage, compromise of sensitive data, and compliance violations, not...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged two new malware families called WordlistLoader and SynkLoader that's used to deliver next-stage payloads and likely sell access to ransomware groups. According to findings from Gen Digital, WordlistLoader is being used to deliver Amatera Stealer (aka ACR Stealer or AcridRain Stealer) via ClearFake campaigns, which employ the ClickFix (aka FakeCaptcha) technique to dupe victims into running malicious commands under the pretext of completing CAPTCHA verification checks. "Once the visitor clicks on the 'I'm not a robot' checkbox, they're walked through the well-known ClickFix flow, where a malicious command is copied into their clipboard and the victim is instructed to paste it into the Windows Run dialog and execute it, leading to the download of WordlistLoader that ultimately results in the execution of Amatera," security researcher Vojtěch Krejsa said . The ClickFix prompts are displayed on real websites th...

Red Hat and the Keycloak project have released patches to address a critical security flaw in the open-source identity and access management server that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to take over any user account by forcing a password reset. The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2026-18963 , is rated 9.1 on the CVSS scoring system by Red Hat, which acts as the CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) for the flaw. It has been classified as a weak password recovery mechanism for a forgotten password (CWE-640). Users of upstream Keycloak are advised to update to version 26.7.2, released August 19, 2026, while customers running Red Hat build of Keycloak (RHBK) should apply the updates shipped for 26.4.15 and 26.6.6. There is no evidence that the flaw has been exploited, and no verified public exploit has been located as of August 24, 2026. Red Hat said in  its CVE advisory  that the root cause is "improper state validation within the reset-cred...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a cyber espionage campaign targeting Myanmar that uses graduation ceremony invitation lures to deliver a Go backdoor called QUICAgent. The campaign, codenamed Operation QUICSILVER , has been found to target government and information technology sectors, per Seqrite Labs. The activity is assessed to be the work of a China-nexus threat actor with moderate confidence. It was first observed in April 2026, when the attack was observed delivering a file named "HolidayNotice.pdf.exe" along with a lure that was a fabricated Belgian–Myanmar public holiday calendar. Two subsequent artifacts, each detected in June and July 2026, make use of a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file that activates the infection chain. Present within the VHD file is a Windows Shortcut (LNK) that mimics a PDF document. Opening the document displays a decoy PDF to the victim, an official graduation ceremony invitation that's written in Burmese and purports to be from t...

Big security risks come in small packages. While enterprise security teams focus on policing the proliferation of employees using ChatGPT and Claude for quick drafting tasks, a more urgent threat is posed by a handful of AI super-adopters who are quietly hardcoding unvetted tools into critical business operations. According to new research published by Akamai, the top 5% of enterprise power users interact with AI models at 12 times the rate of the bottom 50% of the workforce. The findings, published in Akamai’s State of the Internet: Enterprise AI Usage Risk Report 2026 , are based on real-world usage and telemetry data as well as research and threat analysis.  These AI super-adopters are creating a disproportionate security risk by expanding the use of shadow AI, increasing opportunities for data leakage, and introducing autonomous AI agents that operate within the enterprise but outside its established guardrails. “Small groups of AI power users are casting outsized shado...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group dubbed UAT-10147 that's targeting Windows and Linux web servers globally across the education, media, technology, and gaming sectors. The vast majority of the targets are located in Brazil, Bolivia, China, Canada, and Vietnam. Details of the threat activity came to light following the discovery of an open directory hosted at "139.180.197[.]150," which was observed communicating with one of the compromised machines. "The actor leveraged publicly disclosed vulnerabilities to gain initial access at scale," Cisco Talos said in a two-part report published last week. The actor employed a mixture of open-source offensive frameworks, including Metasploit , ysoserial , PentestGPT , DeepAudit, and multiple privilege escalation exploits to automate intrusion operations and establish persistence." UAT-10147 has been described as a threat actor that conducts search engine op...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced on Friday that ByteDance-owned TikTok will pay $400 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit accusing the company of violating child privacy laws in the country. As part of the settlement, the social media platform will pay $300 million immediately, and an additional $100 million "upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree entered against TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly," the DoJ said in a press release. A complaint filed back in August 2024 alongside the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused the company of "massive-scale invasions of children's privacy" by knowingly allowing children under 13 to create TikTok accounts and unlawfully collecting data from those who used it in "Kids Mode." It further alleged TikTok and its parent company ByteDance failed to "comply with parents' requests to delete their children's accounts and information." At the time, the company disputed...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of trojanized npm packages that masquerade as working calendar and streak utilities but are engineered to stealthily deliver an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Linux implant dubbed RedC2 4.0. "When the module loads, it locates the bundled binary, marks it executable, and launches it as a detached background process," TrendAI, Trend Micro's enterprise cybersecurity business, said in a report published Thursday. "No install hook function call is needed; a single import anywhere in the dependency graph, even a transitive one, is enough to execute the payload." The list of identified packages is below - streak-metrics-math@1.0.0,1.0.1 kit-map-vim@1.0.0 streak-map-cache@1.0.0 streak-map-kit@1.0.0 map-streak-kit@1.0.0 streak-cache-map@1.0.0 streak-calc-metrics@1.0.0 streak-calc-math@1.0.0 streak-math-abz@1.0.0 streak-metricsaz@1.0.0 streak-math-metrics@1.0.0 streak-metrica...

Check Point Research has disclosed a technique that uses Microsoft Defender's own legitimately signed boot-time remediation driver to perform arbitrary kernel-level file and registry operations on Windows systems ranging from Windows 7 through Windows 11 25H2, with no software flaw exploited and no driver imported from outside the machine. The driver, BTR.sys (Boot Time Removal Tool), is a required Windows component, which means it cannot be added to Microsoft's Vulnerable Driver Blocklist or blocked via Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) without disrupting Defender itself. Jiří Vinopal, a threat researcher and reverse engineer at Check Point Research, presented the findings as a main-stage briefing at Black Hat USA 2026 and DEF CON 34 in Las Vegas and published the accompanying research paper alongside a proof-of-concept tool, BTR_CLI, on August 20, 2026. Check Point Research said it found no evidence the technique has been used in real-world attacks. "Dur...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malware family that's specifically designed to infect Android-based vehicle head unit firmware developed by DoFun. Kaspersky, which discovered the threat in June 2026, said the end goal of the malware is to serve a multi-stage downloader to enable ad fraud and creation of a proxy botnet. "The malware spread through the built-in updaters of Android-based automotive head unit firmware," security researcher Dmitry Kalinin said. "This is the first documented case of malware found on a car head unit with an infection chain specific to that type of device." The activity has been attributed with high confidence to the MoYu Group , which was outed by the HUMAN Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team last year as part of a broader ad fraud and residential proxy scheme dubbed BADBOX. In July 2025, Google filed a lawsuit against 25 unnamed individuals or entities in China for allegedly operating the BADBOX botnet a...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of this decade's defining technologies. From healthcare and finance to manufacturing and education, organizations increasingly rely on AI to automate repetitive tasks, uncover patterns hidden within large datasets, and support faster decision-making. Cybersecurity has experienced a similar transformation. While attackers employ AI to automate cyberattacks and accelerate vulnerability discovery, defenders are adopting AI to improve threat detection and enhance incident response. Security Operations Centers (SOCs) receive a high volume of alerts from endpoints, cloud workloads, network devices, identity providers, and business applications. Although SIEM and XDR platforms provide visibility into these environments, analysts often spend considerable time correlating alerts, searching documentation, and determining the next investigative steps. AI offers a practical way to augment analysts by providing contextual explanations, summarizing ...

Cisco has published another round of security updates for Crosswork platforms and Secure Workload Software as part of a continued comprehensive internal security review. Four of the security vulnerabilities affect Crosswork Data Gateway, Crosswork Network Controller, and Crosswork Planning, regardless of the device configuration. A brief description of each of the flaws is below - CVE-2026-20030 (CVSS score: 10.0) - An SQL injection vulnerability CVE-2026-20357 (CVSS score: 10.0) - A missing authentication for critical function vulnerability CVE-2026-20358 (CVSS score: 10.0) - An external control of file system vulnerability CVE-2026-20359 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An insufficiently protected credentials vulnerability The issues affect Cisco Crosswork Release version 7.2.1 and earlier, and have been addressed in version 7.2.1-SP. Cisco has also released fixes to remediate five vulnerabilities affecting Cisco Secure Workload, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) a...

A newly disclosed security flaw in GitLab has come under active exploitation within days of public disclosure, according to watchTowr. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-19478 (CVSS score: 9.4), a case of code injection that allows an unauthenticated attacker to modify or delete publicly accessible GitLab projects and rewrite their data under certain conditions without requiring credentials, user interaction, or obscure configuration. The following versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) are affected by the flaw - 18.2 before 18.11.11 19.0 before 19.0.8 19.1 before 19.1.6 19.2 before 19.2.4 In an alert released earlier this week, GitLab said the issue could be exploited via a GraphQL directive. Fixes for the flaw were rolled out in GitLab CE and EE versions 19.2.4, 19.1.6, 19.0.8, and 18.11.11. Preemptive exposure management firm watchTowr told The Hacker News that it was able to reproduce the vulnerability within minutes of ...

Update: The story was updated after publication to note that the vulnerability has not been exploited. Although the security bulletin originally marked the "Exploited" field under the Exploitability Assessment table as "Yes," on August 21, 2026, Microsoft corrected the "Exploited" status to "No" after The Hacker News contacted the company for comment. It also noted, "this vulnerability was not exploited in the wild." "We identified and addressed this issue with a fix and released CVE-2026-69836 for greater transparency . There are no additional actions customers need to take,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Hacker News. The headline has been edited to reflect this change. The original story follows below - Microsoft on Thursday warned of a maximum-severity security flaw in Entra ID that it said has been exploited in the wild, but noted that no customer action is required. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-69836...