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A botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices, mostly TV set-top boxes, lost control of its servers in late October in a takedown led by Google. Google says  it is highly confident that device maker Videostrong intentionally put a backdoor in the boxes and sold access to criminals. They used the boxes for ad fraud and to pass other people's internet traffic through owners' home connections. The backdoor is still on the boxes, and owners cannot remove it themselves. Videostrong, based in Shenzhen, China, makes Android TV boxes and other devices under its own name and for other brands. The backdoor, called x.cpe, was built into many device models and brands over several years. Google does not believe a rogue insider or a mistake was to blame. Google used legal action to take down the domains and servers that controlled the botnet. It also took down the control domains of more than a dozen malware families loaded through the backdoor. Japan's National Police Agenc...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a cyber espionage campaign targeting Israel and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq by an Iran state-aligned threat actor between August and October 2026. According to a report published by Dream Research Labs, the campaign has led to the compromise of a high-profile individual in Israel, along with additional compromises affecting a government cloud environment in the Kurdistan Region. The activity has been attributed to a threat actor known as DarkBlinders , an Iran-nexus group assessed to be active since at least September 2024 and linked to attacks aimed at aviation infrastructure and telecommunications in the U.A.E. and Iraq. It exhibits no technical overlap with other known hacking groups. Attacks mounted by the group are known to rely on spear-phishing as an initial access pathway to lure recipients into opening trojanized utilities or clicking on attacker-controlled websites that host similar tools as direct downloads. Prev...

Two critical flaws in Langflow could let a remote attacker with no account bypass authentication or run arbitrary code,  IBM said last week . Langflow is an open-source tool for building AI agents and workflows, and its vulnerability reports go to IBM. Every release from 1.0.0 through 1.12.8 has the flaws, and the only fix is version 1.13.0. Neither flaw is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, as of the catalog's October 30 update. Six other Langflow flaws are listed there, most recently CVE-2026-9198, which was added in August . The four Langflow flaws in IBM's bulletin, first published on October 28 and updated the next day, are:

Forty percent of security teams now use AI every day, and another 56% are testing it. Only 4% have no plans to adopt it, according to Prophet Security's State of AI in Security Operations 2026 survey of more than 250 CISOs, SOC leaders and practitioners. For the teams still testing, the next decision is whether their own SOC is ready. AI SOC readiness has two parts: whether a SOC has the problems AI SOC agents are built for, and whether it has the data access, context, written standards and oversight rules that AI agents need to investigate alerts accurately in its environment. A SOC does not need to be far along a maturity model to be ready. AI agents do their first work on the bottom layer, alert handling, and the analyst hours they return give a team room to work on the layers above it. The next section describes those problems. Technical readiness covers four areas: access and context, an investigation standard with baseline metrics, rules for what the agent may do, and a...

Attackers posing as IT support on Microsoft Teams talked employees into giving them remote control of their PCs. They then used insecure Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) settings to obtain login certificates for privileged accounts, including one for a domain controller. Microsoft said in  a report  that it investigated two such intrusions, one of which resulted in company data being copied to an external server. The attackers exploited no flaw in Teams itself. They relied on social engineering and on AD CS that had been set up insecurely, and Microsoft did not tie the activity to any known group. How the Attacks Began Both intrusions started the same way, Microsoft said. The attackers messaged and called employees on Teams while posing as the company's own IT or help desk, working from outside tenants with support-themed names so the contact looked familiar. They talked each user into opening Quick Assist, a remote-help tool built into Windows, and rea...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a cyber espionage campaign specifically targeting Linux infrastructure associated with government entities and state-affiliated infrastructure. The activity, observed by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 between October 2025 and April 2026, has been tracked under the moniker CL-UNK-1211 , where "CL" refers to cluster and "UNK" stands for unknown motivation. A notable aspect of the campaign concerns the use of large language models (LLMs) and/or automated artificial intelligence (AI) agents to generate payloads and execute malicious code. "The attackers behind this cluster of activity focused on Linux environments to conduct extensive reconnaissance and maintain persistent network access to support intelligence-gathering," researchers Roey Porat and Tom Fakterman said . "The attackers attempted to dump sensitive databases and exfiltrate government mailboxes to access social media accounts." T...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Windows infostealer malware called VOLTA-AUTODOXER (aka VOLTA) that makes use of a large language model (LLM) to rank a victim's stolen data by their monetization value. Like other typical stealer families, VOLTA is equipped to harvest passwords and cookies from Chromium-based web browsers; data from Outlook profiles and Slack workspaces; payment cards; cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases; Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions; Microsoft OAuth tokens; SSH and cloud-provider keys; Wi-Fi profiles; and screenshots. "VOLTA builds a structured evidence bundle about the person behind the machine," Cisco Talos researcher Ryan Fetterman said . "This bundle contains geolocation and home address, employer and employer domain, inferred birth year, card last-4 digits, Slack workspaces, document authorship metadata, iPhone backup indicators, and a live Roblox account valuation." To make this information more va...

A critical flaw in Canonical's LXD and MicroCloud let an attacker log in as a trusted client without holding that client's private key. To do it, the attacker had to reach their HTTPS API over the network and have the trusted client's public certificate. Once in, the attacker would act as that client, with access to the cluster and its virtual machines. If the impersonated account is privileged, the attacker could gain "root access to the host machine," Canonical said. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2026-112816 , carries a maximum CVSS score of 10.0, and Canonical has  released fixed versions  of both products. How the Flaw Works LXD and MicroCloud let remote clients access their APIs over mutual TLS, a setup in which the client presents a certificate to prove who it is. A client is trusted when its certificate is in the server's trust store, the list of identities the server will accept. The flaw was in how the server checked that certificate. It compa...

Malicious code on the website of prediction market Polymarket sold some signed-in traders' positions and moved their funds to the hackers on October 29. The code had replaced a page-speed script that the site loaded from an outside company. Polymarket says  it is refunding about $2.7 million to 726 affected wallets.  Blockchain records  show crypto worth about $2.64 million reached the hackers' wallet in under an hour. The replaced script came from DebugBear, whose real user monitoring (RUM) tool measures how fast web pages load for real visitors. Researchers at Hudson Rock  downloaded the malicious file on October 29 from the address Polymarket's site used to load the DebugBear script. They also found a change in Polymarket's site code that removed the DebugBear script. DebugBear's DNS records were compromised through its domain registrar, the company said on X. Its early findings indicate the attack targeted one customer's website. It has seen no sign...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has officially attributed the theft of more than $6 billion in virtual assets from Binance to TraderTraitor , a North Korea-aligned elite hacking group also tracked as Jade Sleet, Pressure Chollima, PUKCHONG, Slow Pisces, and UNC4899. The FBI, along with the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), said it observed the threat actor converting stolen assets primarily into Ethereum (ETH). "It is expected these assets will then be further laundered by converting them using DeFi and instant swap services as they prepare them for further laundering stages," the FBI said in a statement. The agency has also provided a list of wallet addresses that the attackers are said to be using to launder the stolen assets. The development comes as Binance said it has resumed phase one of withdrawals starting today between 6 and 9 a.m. UTC after they were paused in the wake of the incide...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of what has been described as a "highly sophisticated infection chain" targeting government organizations in Asia. The activity, detailed by Kaspersky this week, targeted a custom Windows 10 build used exclusively by government entities in Asia and involves the deployment of a previously undocumented .NET assembly-loading framework codenamed NetamLoader . The attack has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. Nor is it clear if the intrusion compromised more than one system and allowed the hackers to steal any sensitive information. The Russian cybersecurity company said the artifact was detected in the first half of 2026, packaged inside a Windows cabinet archive (CAB) file placed in a directory that stores Windows operating system update packages. It's suspected the operation involved a supply chain attack , in which bad actors compromised a trusted third-party vendor to gain access to downstrea...

American blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said it was the target of a cybersecurity incident in which an external actor accessed non-sensitive customer data. However, the company noted that the breach did not result in unauthorized access to its investigation content, authentication credentials, or session tokens. "This month, Chainalysis detected an external actor using offensive agentic techniques to gain unauthorized access to Chainalysis systems and internal tools," Chainalysis said Friday. "Some non-sensitive customer data, such as user IDs, full names, email addresses, and organization role labels for users provisioned on our platform were accessed, including such information relating to your organization and users." The company said it's patching vulnerabilities and hardening its systems in response to the incident. The mention of "offensive agentic techniques" indicates that an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool was used ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added two security flaws impacting Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-111357 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A missing authentication for a critical function vulnerability that could allow a local authenticated attacker to escalate their privileges. CVE-2026-118527 (CVSS score: 4.3) - A generation of predictable numbers or identifiers vulnerability that could allow a remote authenticated attacker to upload files with attacker-controlled content to a known location on disk. It's worth noting that the security bugs are part of an exploit chain that was first documented by Volexity earlier this month as weaponized in conjunction with an authentication bypass flaw (CVE-2026-104935, CVSS score: 8.6) by a previously undocumented threat actor dubbed UTA0576. CVE-2026-10493...

A malicious ChatGPT share link could run an attacker's code in the logged-in session of anyone who opened it, allowing them to read their private conversations, researchers at the security firm Parameter showed. The researchers reported the flaw through  OpenAI's bug bounty program  on October 18, and OpenAI fixed it eight days later and rated it P1, its most serious category. The trap was an ordinary ChatGPT conversation shared via its public link. It could be sent the same way as any real shared chat: by email, as a chat message, as a support ticket, or as a social post. The victim did not have to install anything, join a workspace, or sign in through the attacker. In the most reliable version of the attack, they opened the link and clicked ChatGPT's Preview button once. In a later version, Parameter set the page to open Preview on its own, so opening the link was the only step. What the Attacker Could Do Once the link opened, the attacker's code ran ins...

Threat actors are launching about 8,226 network-layer distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks per hour, Cloudflare revealed Thursday. The web infrastructure and security company said it autonomously mitigated 18.2 million network-layer (L3) DDoS attacks and 14.4 trillion HTTP DDoS requests in the third quarter of 2026. That amounts to 197,400 attacks per day, or one attack every 0.44 seconds. In comparison, a total of 13.2 million and 10.0 million L3 DDoS attacks were recorded in Q2 and Q1 2026, respectively. The increase has been linked to DDoS-for-hire booter or stresser services that are responsible for hundreds of thousands of attacks.  "Short-burst, low-bandwidth attacks lasting under 10 minutes and 1 Gbps surged by 208%," the Cloudforce One threat intelligence team said in its quarterly DDoS Threat Report shared with The Hacker News. An interesting trend is the decline of hyper-volumetric attacks exceeding 1 Tbps by 69% from the previous quarter – going ...

Chinese state-sponsored threat actors have been observed using a Go-based artificial intelligence (AI)-powered penetration testing framework called ARTEX in attacks aimed at high-value targets simultaneously. The activity has been attributed by CrowdStrike to a China-based "targeted intrusion adversary" it tracks under the moniker Vapor Panda (previously VexatiousTemper). First identified in February 2021, the hacking group overlaps with a threat cluster detailed by Trend Micro as Earth Estries . "Agentic tooling like ARTEX enables this scale of expansion at speed, allowing a small team to pursue a wider target set than manual operations would support, rather than a wholesale shift away from the adversary's established access-development mission," CrowdStrike said in a Thursday analysis. Starting October 17, 2026, Vapor Panda is said to have used the AI tool against more than 200 distinct organizations across the world, including foreign ministries in ...