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A Russian state-supported espionage group spent months reading Western mailboxes through a then-unknown flaw in Zimbra's webmail client. The payload goes after the last 90 days of email, the organization's entire email directory, the password saved in the browser and the codes kept for two-factor recovery. Opening the message was enough to start it. The NSA , CISA and partner agencies published a joint advisory on the campaign Thursday, alongside research from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 and Proofpoint. The advisory calls the technique "a view-based exploit that only requires a user to view a malicious email" in a vulnerable client. It says the actors have been targeting and compromising Western government and commercial organizations through Zimbra since at least July 2025. The flaw, CVE-2025-66376 , is a stored cross-site scripting vulnerability in Zimbra's Classic UI. A crafted HTML email abuses CSS @import handling to execute JavaScript inside a...

Most of this week's trouble came dressed as something useful. A package stole data. A fake extension opened remote access. A safety app became spyware. An image gave hidden orders to an AI agent. Other threats hid in open systems, weak code, and normal network traffic. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out. The danger was easy to miss because it looked ordinary. Here is the full list:

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a sandbox escape vulnerability in Anthropic's Claude Cowork that makes it possible to break out of the confines of a Linux virtual machine (VM) within which the agent runs to read or write files anywhere on the Mac. Accomplish AI, which shared details of the vulnerability with The Hacker News ahead of publication, said about 500,000 macOS users running local Cowork sessions were affected prior to it being patched. It has been codenamed SharedRoot . "We connected a folder to a fresh Claude Cowork session, sent one short message, and watched the agent escape the sandbox," Oren Yomtov, principal security researcher at Accomplish AI, said . "From inside the VM, it reached the host Mac and read and wrote files all over it, far outside the folder we'd connected, with no permission prompt anywhere." With this level of access, the agent can access any data stored on the Mac via the user's account, including SSH ke...

The Chaos ransomware group ran its command-and-control through the victim's own browser. Cisco Talos on Thursday detailed msaRAT , the Rust implant behind it, found on a compromised Windows machine ahead of the encryptor. The implant never opens an outbound connection of its own. Its process talks to 127.0.0.1 and nothing else. It starts Chrome or Edge in headless mode and drives the browser over the Chrome DevTools Protocol, the browser's own debugging API. Every C2 message travels out from there through a WebRTC data channel relayed by Twilio's TURN service, so what a defender sees on the wire is a browser calling Cloudflare and Twilio. The attacker's own server address never appears at all. Chrome Does the Talking msaRAT looks for Chrome or Edge through environment variables first, then falls back to the registry for Chrome. If no matching browser is found, the CDP path is skipped. When it finds one, it starts the browser without a visible window using -...

An exposed Alibaba Cloud server has revealed a China-nexus operation that Group-IB tracks as JadeProx . The cluster has targeted government, healthcare, and education organizations across Asia and Latin America with a previously undocumented Windows loader called TriBack Loader. Group-IB found the server in mid-April 2026 in Alibaba Cloud's Singapore region; it was offline by the time the report published on July 23, 2026. Its bash history, phishing packages, post-exploitation tools, and webshell paths laid the operation out: active intrusions against a Vietnamese public hospital's medical imaging system and Malaysia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, scanning and exploitation follow-up against Hong Kong education infrastructure, and a spear-phishing package addressed to the National Congress of Honduras. The operators reached the hospital's imaging server through webshells planted on an exposed Java management interface. One Loader, Four Builds TriBack Loader a...

Most people understand identity theft as an attacker stealing a real person's sensitive information and impersonating them. Synthetic identity fraud is much harder to catch. Instead of stealing a real identity, the attacker manufactures a new one, frankensteining together several real data points with fabricated ones to create a person who doesn't exist. Since no real victim monitors misuse, a fake identity can silently accumulate permissions and credibility over time before it's ever detected. This same principle has a largely unexplored parallel with Non-Human Identities (NHIs). Security teams are spending significant effort to protect NHIs from being stolen. Still, the machine-side equivalent of synthetic identity fraud is rarely discussed: identities that were never legitimately provisioned from the start. Following this approach, an attacker doesn't hijack an existing service account but instead fabricates one, blending real environmental attributes with fake o...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a large-scale campaign that has turned compromised GitHub repositories into distributed attack infrastructure designed to target cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) instances. The activity involves malicious Packagist development versions spanning 10 packages associated with a legitimate PHP and DevOps developer, dinushchathurya, between July 12 and 13, 2026. The list of affected Packagist packages is below - dinushchathurya/nationality-list dinushchathurya/srilankan-divisional-secretariats dinushchathurya/srilankan-gn-divisions dinushchathurya/srilankan-local-authorities dinushchathurya/srilankan-mobile-number-validator dinushchathurya/srilankan-state-hospitals dinushchathurya/srilankan-universities dinushchathurya/uk-mobile-number-validator dinushchathurya/uk-post-code dinushchathurya/websmslk "The PHP libraries were not the execution path," Socket said in a statement. "Attackers had added...

Google on Thursday announced a new way for users to sign-in to their accounts by letting them take a selfie video. The selfie for sign-in , per the tech giant, is another option on top of existing recovery methods to log in to an account, including an email address or a phone number. The idea is to use a video selfie as a way to regain access if a user ever gets locked out or doesn't have access to their usual phone or computer. As part of the process, users are required to set up a selfie video by just looking into the device's camera and completing a "few short, guided head movements" to capture their face from different angles. Should users have any trouble signing in to their accounts with the selfie method at a later stage, they can just take another selfie to sign back in. "Selfie video compares the new video to the one you set up to confirm it is really you and help you get back into your account," Google said in a blog post shared with The Ha...

RefluXFS , a new Linux kernel flaw disclosed on July 22 and tracked as CVE-2026-64600 , lets an unprivileged local user overwrite root-owned files on an XFS filesystem and gain persistent root access. Qualys said default installations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives, Fedora Server, and Amazon Linux can meet the conditions for exploitation. The company demonstrated the race against /etc/passwd and setuid-root binaries. The overwrite lands at the block layer. It survives a reboot and leaves the target's ownership, permissions, timestamps, and setuid bit untouched, so a modified setuid-root binary still runs as root. The fix was merged on July 16, and Linux vendors have begun shipping backported kernels. The patch traces the bug to Linux 4.11 in 2017: a Fixes: tag naming commit 3c68d44a2b49 and a stable backport request marked # v4.11 . Who is exposed Exploitation requires three conditions: The system runs Linux 4.11 or later without the RefluXFS fi...

Check Point has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities impacting Security Management and Multi-Domain Management (MDSM) products, including a critical flaw that has come under active exploitation in the wild . The security flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-16232 (CVSS score: 9.3), is an authentication bypass affecting the Check Point SmartConsole login process that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to obtain an application login token and use it to authenticate with full administrative privileges. "Successful exploitation allows the attacker to modify security policies and security configurations," according to a description of the flaw in CVE.org. "Remote exploitation requires internet access to the Management Server IP address and a configuration that does not restrict Trusted Clients." Lotem Finkelstein, vice president of research at Check Point, said the company is aware of a small number of customers being targeted by this flaw, ...

Beginning July 27, 2026, GitHub will cut public bug bounty payouts by at least half at every severity level. Critical findings will drop from $20,000-$30,000+ to a fixed $10,000, while its permanent invite-only VIP tier will pay $30,000 or more. Reports filed before that date, including those already in GitHub's growing triage queue, will retain the previous payout terms. GitHub said the changes are intended to reduce noise while giving established researchers faster responses, higher rewards, and closer access to its security engineering team. "You don't earn more by submitting more," the company said. "You earn more by submitting better." The public program is moving from flexible ranges to fixed payments: Low: $250, down from $617-$2,000 Medium: $2,000, down from $4,000-$10,000 High: $5,000, down from $10,000-$20,000 Critical: $10,000, down from $20,000-$30,000+ The Hacker News calculated that the new public rates are 50% lower f...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability in snap-confine that an unprivileged user can trigger to obtain root access and gain complete control of a target environment. The high-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-8933 (CVSS score: 7.8), impacts default installations of Ubuntu Desktop 24.04, 25.10, and 26.04. The disclosure comes as 442 security flaws in Linux have been publicized over the past three days. "The issue stems from a security hardening change that inadvertently introduced a race condition during sandbox initialization," Saeed Abbasi, head of Threat Research Unit (TRU) and director of product at Qualys, said. Snap-confine is a program used internally by snapd to construct the execution environment for snap applications. Snapd is the background service or daemon that manages snap packages on Linux systems. Snaps are nothing but a software packaging format devised by Canonical that allows an app...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched vulnerability chain in the Adobe Acrobat Chrome extension that has over 314 million users, which, if exploited, could facilitate a silent hijack of a user's WhatsApp data. The shortcoming has been codenamed HermeticReader by Guardio Labs. It's officially tracked as CVE-2026-48294 (CVSS score: 7.4), with the vulnerability described as a case of universal cross-site scripting (UXSS)-class cross-origin data disclosure vulnerability. It affects all versions of the extension (ID: efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj ) prior to and including 26.5.2.2. Successful exploitation of the flaw can bypass the browser's same-origin policy and access data linked to the victim's session across origins. The only prerequisite is that it requires user interaction. A victim must be convinced into visiting a maliciously crafted URL or interact with a compromised web page that triggers the extension's vulnerable code ...

A high-severity security flaw impacting open-source developer platform Windmill has come under active exploitation in the wild, per VulnCheck. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-29059 (CVSS score: 7.5), a case of unauthenticated path traversal impacting Windmill's "get_log_file" endpoint ("/api/w/{workspace}/jobs_u/get_log_file/{filename}"). "The filename parameter is concatenated into a file path without sanitization, allowing an attacker to read arbitrary files on the server using ../ sequences," according to an advisory published by Windmill in March 2026. "The primary sensitive value exposed by this vulnerability is the SUPERADMIN_SECRET environment variable, readable via /proc/1/environ. When set, this secret can be used as a Bearer token to authenticate as a superadmin and execute arbitrary code through the job preview API." However, it's worth noting that SUPERADMIN_SECRET is not set by default, and for standalon...