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This story is developing and was written before PHP's scheduled 14:00 UTC release on October 21. Once the release is out, the affected and fixed versions below are confirmed by the official advisory. PHP will ship an out-of-cycle security release at 14:00 UTC today, October 21, for two critical vulnerabilities that its security team has rated 9.2 on the CVSS v4.0 scale but has not described. Security researchers at watchTowr say the two flaws allow remote code execution. Only the four supported PHP branches, 8.2 through 8.5, can receive the fix, and no exploitation has been reported so far. The  advance notice  followed a leak. On October 20, a  post on HN  said two PHP remote code execution flaws, rated CVSS 10.0 and affecting versions from PHP 5 onward, would be disclosed on Thursday, October 22. The poster said they had "no evidence beyond 'source: trust me, bro'". watchTowr then posted on X that the leaked information was real, that the two flaws were...

Unknown threat actors breached TeamUpdraft's website and potentially gained unauthorized access to customers' connection keys for UpdraftCentral, UpdraftVault, and UpdraftClone, using them to backdoor WordPress sites. TeamUpdraft is the developer behind UpdraftPlus, a popular WordPress backup plugin with over four million active installations. The vendor also offers UpdraftCentral, a remote management service that's used for managing multiple sites remotely. A client component of UpdraftCentral is shipped within every copy of UpdraftPlus.  "Over the weekend of 17-18 October we identified unauthorized access to the teamupdraft.com website," TeamUpdraft said in a statement. "Our team responded straight away and worked through the night to contain it – we closed the access route, signed out every account and replaced the keys and credentials that could have been affected." As a result of the incident, threat actors are believed to have accessed its ...

U.S. federal civilian agencies must remove DeepSeek products from their information technology systems, along with any third-party products or services "developed using DeepSeek implementations," under a Department of Homeland Security order. They may also no longer buy information technology products or services from the Chinese AI developer or its affiliates Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin issued the order, dated July 24, 2026, under the  Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 , and the department published it in the  Federal Register  on October 20. The notice does not define " DeepSeek implementations. " The order names Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd., the developer of the R1 and V3 models, and covers its affiliates as defined in federal acquisition rules. The company's  privacy policy  says it collects, processes and stores users' personal data in the People's Republic of China. Under the 2018...

State Bank of India has identified 3,897 customer records containing personal information in a set of about 375,000 records available on the dark web, and it does not yet know where the data came from. The state-owned bank, India's largest, said in a  stock-exchange filing  dated October 21 that it "has experienced an incident involving the loss of certain data." The count is preliminary, and the bank has yet to establish whether the data is authentic, how far the exposure goes and what risk it poses to customers. The exposed information "reportedly included customers' registered mobile numbers, dates of birth, names, gender, email addresses, residential addresses, branch and CIF identifiers, lead IDs, and metadata associated with loan/lead records and other related files," in the filing's words. A CIF identifier is the customer information file number, the bank's internal ID for each customer. The bank has not said whether the 3,897 records b...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added four vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, including four vulnerabilities impacting Plex Media Server that's collectively called Plex2Shell . The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-96652 (CVSS score: 5.3) - Plex Media Server Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability CVE-2026-96654 (CVSS score: 6.9) - Plex Media Server improper neutralization of encoded URI schemes in a web page Vulnerability CVE-2026-96655 (CVSS score: 5.3) - Plex Media Server Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability CVE-2026-96656 (CVSS score: 8.6) - Plex Media Server external control of file name or path Vulnerability According to security researcher Zach Main, who discovered and reported the vulnerabilities, a remote attacker could chain the four vulnerabilities to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution. The issues were addressed in Plex Media ...

A Belarus-aligned hacktivist group spent nearly two years within the network of a Russian healthcare organization. According to a report published by Russian cybersecurity firm Solar, the activity has been attributed to a threat cluster dubbed Partisan Zmiy , which is also known as the Cyber Partisans . Known to be active since at least 2020, the group has a track record of striking industrial enterprises and government agencies in Russia and Belarus with a backdoor called Vasilek that uses Telegram for command-and-control (C2) and data exfiltration. Some of the attacks have also leveraged phishing lures to deliver an installer that simultaneously deploys the legitimate FortiClient VPN program on the system as well as an open-source program known as DNSCat2 that allows attackers to gain control of the infected host. A notable aspect of the threat actor is their ability to stage destructive attacks with a wiper referred to as Pryanik, alongside taking steps to systematical...

The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate certificate authority (CA) certificates are compromised,  Mozilla  and  Google's Chrome Root Program  confirms on October 20. An intermediate CA signs the certificates that websites present, so anyone holding one of these keys could issue a certificate for any website that a browser would accept. A researcher reported the compromise to the root programs on the evening of October 17, and Chrome and Firefox blocked the eight certificates within hours, after Chrome verified the findings. No TLS certificate chaining to the six intermediates used for websites had been logged to  Certificate Transparency  (CT) before Chrome's block, so none could have been trusted by default in Chrome or any other browser that requires CT logging, the Chrome Root Program said. The keys did not have to be stolen. They were generated with too little randomness, so anyone can compute them from the public certificates,  Goo...

Cybersecurity researchers have released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a recently patched critical security flaw impacting Fortinet FortiSIEM that could result in arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-106173 (CVSS score: 9.4), is a critical path traversal flaw that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via specially crafted packets. Patches for the flaw were released last week by Fortinet in the following versions - FortiSIEM 7.5.0 (Upgrade to 7.5.1 or above) FortiSIEM 7.6 (Not affected) According to Horizon3.ai, the issue involves an unauthenticated attacker connecting to the gRPC service listening on TCP port 27918 and exploiting the flaw to overwrite an existing file outside of the intended directory and turn the arbitrary-file-write primitive into remote code execution. "The FortiSIEM gRPC QueryResultReq handler processes untrusted metadata without proper path validation," Horiz...

Palo Alto Networks has disclosed that it's continuing to observe exploitation of a now-patched security flaw impacting  PAN-OS and Prisma Access by ransomware actors. The activity relates to CVE-2026-0257 (CVSS score: 7.8), an authentication bypass flaw that could be exploited by bad actors to set up unauthorized VPN connections. It was patched by Palo Alto Networks in May 2026 and was added by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CSIA) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on May 13, 2026. "Ransomware operators exploiting CVE-2026-0257 include Spikey Scorpius (aka Qilin) and Tarnished Scorpius (aka INC)," Unit 42 researchers said in an update shared on Monday. The development comes days after ReliaQuest said it detected both Qilin and Settra ransomware groups actively exploiting the flaw in financially-motivated attacks. According to Unit 42, the threat actors are weaponizing the flaw to gain an initial foothold into corpo...

A Chinese-speaking criminal pointed autonomous AI agents at company websites and let them break in with almost no help, and a security researcher watched it happen because the operators left their control panels open on the internet. The agents tried more than 1,200 sites and reached websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including farm-equipment maker Deere, appliance company SharkNinja and engine maker Cummins,  according to Reuters , which reviewed the attacker's own records to identify them. How much data, if any, was taken is not known. The researcher, Snorre Fagerland of the security firm NorForge , found the operations by scanning the internet for exposed copies of  Cairn , an open-source AI tool popular with hackers. Beginning around October 2, he found about two dozen Cairn instances being used maliciously, which let him read the attackers' work in real time. He set out the findings on Monday, and Reuters, which saw the report before publication, named...

The iPhone of Vladan Đokić, rector of the University of Belgrade and a prominent supporter of Serbia's student protest movement, was infected with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware in 2026, the  Citizen Lab said  on October 19. The finding came six days before Serbia's October 25 snap parliamentary election. The infection used a zero-click exploit, meaning Đokić did not have to tap a link or open a file for it to work. The lab found the infection with high confidence, but its note provides no date within 2026, does not identify who was behind the attack, and notes that its investigation is ongoing. The election was  called in September  after nearly two years of protests that began when a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024, killing 16 people. The Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, analyzed forensic artifacts from the phone at Đokić's request, working with the Serbian digital-rights group SHARE Foundation. SHARE ...

WhatsApp's help pages carried hidden instructions for its support chatbot that told it not to recommend a data protection authority or regulator to users who could no longer delete their accounts, even though WhatsApp's own privacy policy for Europe tells users they can complain to one. The text sat in the pages' code, never shown on screen, until it was removed by October 18. Whether the chatbot ever followed the instructions is not known:  Redact , the data-deletion software company that found the text, read the instructions, not the chatbot's answers. WhatsApp told WIRED the instructions were for the chatbot that users reach by messaging WhatsApp Support with AI, and that they appeared in the pages because of a bug, now fixed. A second block of hidden text on the page about reporting and blocking told the chatbot that once a user mentioned a lawyer, a lawsuit, or a court, it should not cite privacy laws such as the GDPR, even when the user raised them. A W...

A sales manager builds an AI-assisted workflow to route leads. It connects to customer records, summarizes inbound requests, and posts updates to a shared channel. The workflow saves time, reduces manual work, and soon becomes part of the team’s daily routine. Across the same organization, employees are building useful apps, agents, and automations faster than existing processes can support them.  If you work in security, that success introduces a new set of questions. Whose credentials does the workflow use? Which records can it access? Who can see its output? If it starts exposing information it shouldn’t, can you trace what happened and stop further access?  Wild code takes root when useful builds spread faster than the processes for owning, securing, and maintaining them. It isn’t simply another name for unapproved software. Employees are creating new capabilities, not just adopting existing products. A small experiment can become an operational dependency before secu...

Go 1.27.3 and Go 1.26.10, released on October 20, make Go's certificate verifier reject any certificate chain that passes through one of  eight intermediate certificate authority keys. Programs built on the new release will refuse connections to sites and services whose certificates were issued under those keys. The Go team says the keys belong to one certificate authority it has not named, and that it is blocking them because of "specific security concerns around their operation." It handled the fix on its  URGENT track , the one reserved for its most serious issues, and recommends upgrading immediately. Two days earlier, on October 17, Mozilla added six intermediate certificates issued by eMudhra's emSign Root TLS CA - G3 to  OneCRL , the list Firefox uses to block certificates. The Mozilla bug behind those entries is  closed to the public , and neither Mozilla nor Go has said what prompted its action. Whether Chrome, Apple, or Microsoft have taken simil...

The Russia-linked state-sponsored threat actor tracked as APT28 (aka BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, and Forest Blizzard) has been attributed to attacks targeting two member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Symantec Threat Hunter Team, which is tracking the activity cluster under the moniker Swallowtail , involved the use of a backdoor called HOOKEDGE and a previously undocumented loader that is designed to decrypt and run an encrypted payload in memory by using a cryptographic key that's supplied at runtime. Targets of the activity included a law enforcement agency, a naval shipbuilder, and a manufacturer of military aircraft engines – entities that hold information that could be of use to a foreign intelligence agency, the Broadcom-owned threat intelligence unit said. "During one attack against the naval shipbuilder, operators returned to a compromised host repeatedly over the course of a week in what appeared to be hands-on-keyboard activity,...

ConnectWise on Monday said it has taken remediation measures, including strengthening administrative-access protections and resetting accounts and replacing application credentials, as it continues to respond to a security incident that led to unauthorized access to application identities associated with Cloud Backup. The company said it has completed the following actions since it began rolling out mitigations on October 17 at 5:00 a.m. UTC, three days after the incident was first identified - Disabling affected application connections and suspending Cloud Backup. Suspending SaaS Security and Cloud Management as a precaution because they are integrated with Cloud Backup. Enlisting the help of independent third-party specialists for incident response and remediation. Enhancing administrative-access protections. Publishing technical guidance to help partners investigate and remediate potential unauthorized activity in their own and managed customer environments. ...