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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 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 can also grant permission to any Androi...

Some meetings last longer than it took attackers to jump on a newly disclosed security flaw this week. Within hours, they were already testing it. That's not much time to read the warning, let alone do something about it. But speed is only part of the problem. A secure connection didn't always mean a safe destination. People offering to fix a ransomware mess had questions to answer themselves. Malware got better at hiding its tracks. And some systems turned out to be easier to break into than anyone would like to admit. The odd part is how normal much of it looked until someone checked closer. There's more going on here than a few bad bugs and clever attacks. Some of the smaller stories are just as telling. This week's full recap is worth a read, especially the bits that didn't make the big headlines. ⚡ Threat of the Week Atlassian Flaw Exploited in the Wild — Threat actors have begun to exploit a newly disclosed critical security flaw impacting Atlassian...

The personal AI agents rollout is going about as smoothly as expected: Amazon now blocks Meta's Muse because it doesn't identify itself as a bot while browsing; Instinct keeps raising privacy concerns ; and the horror stories from pretty much every personal AI agent keep piling up. Regardless, the tech world is mesmerized by the capabilities and potential of these services. Less than a year after the first release of the open-source agent now called OpenClaw, the juggernauts are putting their weight behind the idea that each of us needs a personal assistant. You know what's coming: your employees will connect their personal agents to work systems. There's no stopping that. Their agents already manage their home time, and managing their work time is the next logical step. For them, that is. Not for your security. Given that personal agents will reach corporate systems whether approved or not, you might be wondering what the best way is to block them. If that’s yo...

Cryptocurrency hardware maker Ledger has temporarily paused sales of its products via CryptoBilis following reports of stolen funds linked to devices sold by the reseller. On Friday, the company said it was investigating reports of loss of funds from users in Southeast Asia who had purchased products from CryptoBilis. The incident is said to have resulted in losses totaling more than $86 million, according to pseudonymous blockchain investigator Specter . "We recommend Ledger users who purchased from this reseller in the last 90 days to not initiate set up if you have not done so yet," Ledger said in an X post. "If you have set up your Ledger device, consider moving assets to a new Ledger signer (with new seed)." The company has since revealed that one of the impacted users' devices contained an unauthorized hardware implant, and that it's reaching out to impacted users as part of an ongoing probe into the incident. Out of an abundance of caution, ...

Threat actors have been observed exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw in SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 appliances within days of public disclosure. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-102255 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a case of pre-authenticated server-side request forgery (SSRF) that could allow a remote attacker "to direct the appliance to issue requests on their behalf and reach internal functionality and perform unauthorized operations." Patches for the flaw were released by SonicWall on October 6, 2026, with versions 12.4.3-03670 (platform-hotfix) and 12.5.0-03082 (platform-hotfix). The vulnerability has since started witnessing active exploitation attempts, with first signs detected by threat intelligence firms Defused Cyber and Previdian on October 8, 2026. Data from Previdian shows that a total of 135 attempts have been observed to date from two unique IP addresses located in the U.S. SonicWall has yet to update the advisory ...

A maximum-severity security flaw impacting the Bricksforge plugin for WordPress has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to Patchstack. The critical vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-85097 (CVSS score: 10.0), which allows unauthenticated attackers to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code on vulnerable WordPress websites, resulting in remote code execution (RCE). The security flaw impacts Bricksforge versions up to and including 3.1.8.9. Patches have been released in version 3.1.8.10. Bricksforge is a WordPress plugin that's advertised as a "Swiss Army knife" for Bricks, a visual website-building tool for WordPress, with support for animations, advanced forms, and scrolling video sequences. WordPress security company Patchstack said it detected exploitation efforts targeting the flaw on October 7, 2026, at 9:47 p.m. UTC. "Bricksforge validates a file's MIME type when it is first uploaded. When a form is later submitted, however, it ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a two-pronged artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented initial access campaign targeting WordPress sites, e-commerce platforms, and critical infrastructure entities in Ukraine. The activity, which brings together commodity offensive tools like Cobalt Strike with an AI orchestration layer powered by Anthropic's Claude Code, has been attributed to a Russian-speaking, financially motivated initial access broker codenamed CyberXero . The threat actor is assessed to be active since at least July 2026. "The operation runs two pipelines at once: a global, automated campaign against WordPress and e-commerce platforms, and a curated, manual campaign against Ukrainian energy and critical infrastructure," SOCRadar said in a report published last week. The global campaign specifically focuses on known security flaws like wp2shell (CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137) and CVE-2026-4815 , an SQL injection vulnerability impactin...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously unseen variant of the DarkSword iOS exploit kit called P7 DarkSword . "Compared with the variants we usually observe, P7 reduces its on-device footprint, adds on-device keychain and crypto-wallet theft, and adds two way C2 communication with the attacker's infrastructure," iVerify said in a new report published Thursday. The name "P7" is a nod to the threat actor's use of the "p7_" variable prefix in changes made to the original DarkSword code. DarkSword was first publicly documented earlier this March by Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), iVerify, and Lookout, detailing its ability to target iPhones running iOS versions between iOS 18.4 and 18.7. The kit was detected in the wild in November 2025. The toolkit is engineered to chain multiple iOS vulnerabilities to escape the browser sandbox, escalate to kernel privileges, and inject the main payload into SpringBoard, t...

In environments studied for the 2026 State of Agent Security Report , roughly 1,280 third-party products now embed AI. About 282 of them sit behind single sign-on. The other thousand are invisible to identity infrastructure by default, not because anyone hid them, but because an identity stack can only govern what authenticates through it, and most agents never do. That gap is the clearest expression of a shift the security industry is only starting to name. For several years, "AI security" solved a first-party problem: the company decided to use AI, procured licenses, deployed a model behind a gateway, and security pointed controls at the thing the business had chosen. Agents do not arrive that way. They arrive inside software the enterprise already runs, and they arrive without a decision. Why the decision point mattered more than the controls Every control in the first-party toolkit assumes a moment exists: model scanning assumes a model was selected, prompt inspect...

Anthropic on Friday said it's cutting off live internet access for all its internal evaluations until further notice following the discovery of new incidents in which its artificial intelligence (AI) models exhibited misaligned behavior and targeted real websites. The AI company said it identified four broad categories of unintended model actions during evaluations and internal use of Claude - Claude Mythos Preview exploiting SQL or command injection flaws in unspecified third-party software to run commands on a university server, either because its own tools were intentionally limited or because an outside service it needed was unavailable, causing it to use other tools hosted on a third party's site to complete the task. Claude Haiku 4.5 and a non-frontier research model submitting a sensitive form on a real website when it was not authorized to do so. This occurred in scenarios where instructions were ambiguous or due to environment misconfigurations that preve...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an ongoing credential-theft campaign that has compromised two high-profile open-source maintainer accounts to push a malicious workflow into over 340 repositories. "Using the account of Takashi Kitao, author of the 18,400-star game engine pyxel, the attacker pushed a malicious workflow to 27 repositories starting at 13:20 UTC," StepSecurity said . "Eight hours later, the account of Henry Wu (henrywoo), the original author of Uber's athenadriver, was used to push the same workflow to 318 repositories in a 16-minute window, 21:10–21:26 UTC." As of October 9, 2026, Socket said it has identified more than 500 GitHub accounts that committed the malicious workflow to tens of thousands of repositories since October 7, 2026. The activity has been attributed to GhostAction , a massive supply chain attack campaign that first came to light in September 2025. The activity impacted 817 repositories across 327 GitHu...

The FBI has arrested another suspected co-conspirator of ShinyHunters, FBI Director Kash Patel said on October 9 in a  post on X . ShinyHunters is the extortion group that said in September it had  breached the FBI's jobs portal  and stolen sensitive data on almost all FBI agents and job applicants. The FBI has not named the suspect, and no charges have been made public. The suspect is a Canadian citizen who was arrested in Pennsylvania, according to  The New York Times  and  CBS News . Both cited unnamed sources. The Times reported that the arrest was made on suspicion of involvement in the theft of FBI data. A law enforcement source told CBS News that the suspect is believed to have been directly involved in the hack. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the Times report, CBS News said. Patel's post does not say whether the suspect took part in the breach. It calls ShinyHunters "the group believed to be responsible for the recent FBIjobs.g...

Four more U.S. states sued router maker TP-Link Systems on October 6, bringing the total to five, with   Texas filing a suit in February . Florida, Iowa, Montana and Nebraska allege the California company misled buyers about how secure its routers are and how separate it is from China. TP-Link  denies the claims  and says it will fight them in court. TP-Link Systems is based in Irvine, California. Until a 2024 restructuring, it was affiliated with TP-Link Technologies, a Chinese company that the suits do not name as a defendant. The complaints from  Florida ,  Montana  , and  Nebraska  do not allege that the Chinese government has obtained customers' data through TP-Link. They describe that as a risk under Chinese law. Separately, they say state-backed hackers have exploited flaws in TP-Link routers. Iowa's announcement is worded more strongly in places. Attorney General Brenna Bird's office said TP-Link firmware gives the Chinese governm...

Security researchers have  published a full working exploit  for a pre-authentication remote code execution flaw in AnyDesk Linux that gives attackers root access before anyone approves the connection. AnyDesk patched the flaw in version 8.0.3 in June, but its  changelog  described the fix only as "fixed a bug that could lead to a crash," with no CVE assigned and no security advisory. The exploit, called AnyPwn, targets a heap buffer overflow in AnyDesk's session protocol, a remote desktop tool. The code was released on GitHub on October 8. Administrators should update AnyDesk Linux to at least version 8.0.3. The latest release is 8.1.0. What the Exploit Demonstrates The published exploit works only over direct TCP connections on port 7070. The exploit is probabilistic: the heap layout must place a target object adjacent to the overflowed buffer; otherwise, the service crashes instead of executing the attacker's command. The offsets in the published code...

Anthropic on Thursday unveiled OSS Scanner as an opt-in vulnerability scanner to help secure the open-source ecosystem using artificial intelligence (AI). "It's an opt-in service informed by our experience using Claude to find vulnerabilities during Project Glasswing," Anthropic said . "Projects that join will receive thorough, periodic security scans by our strongest models at no cost." Anthropic also noted that the outputs of the scanner will be fully model-generated and do not require human review or triage, thereby facilitating faster and more frequent scanning. These reports are expected to be generated by its strongest models, including Claude Mythos. The company pointed out that it expects to use a set of criteria similar to Google's OSS-Fuzz to pick projects, while emphasizing that the process may evolve over time. Project maintainers are advised to provide a short description  explaining the importance of their project in cases where "...

Threat actors have been observed exploiting two recently disclosed flaws in the AhsayCBS backup utility to seize control of affected devices and deploy web shells and XMRig cryptocurrency miners. Details of the flaws are below - CVE-2026-105133 (CVSS v4 score: 5.5) - An improper authentication vulnerability in the checkSysPwd() function in the "com/ahsay/obs/api/ApiStructsAction.java" component. CVE-2026-105134 (CVSS v4 score: 9.3) - An operating system command injection vulnerability in the Replication Receiver component. A remote attacker could chain the two vulnerabilities to bypass authentication and execute arbitrary commands on affected systems. It's worth noting that CVE identifiers for these flaws were not published until October 4, 2026. According to Huntress, exploitation efforts aimed at the two flaws began on October 7, 2026, at 11:20 p.m. UTC, with unidentified threat actors weaponizing them to achieve remote code execution on impacted hosts...