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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new automated campaign called Megalodon that has pushed 5,718 malicious commits to 5,561 GitHub repositories within a six-hour window. "Using throwaway accounts and forged author identities (build-bot, auto-ci, ci-bot, pipeline-bot), the attacker injected GitHub Actions workflows containing base64-encoded bash payloads that exfiltrate CI secrets, cloud credentials, SSH keys, OIDC tokens, and source code secrets to a C2 server at 216.126.225[.]129:8443," SafeDep said in a report. The complete list of data harvested by the malware is below - CI environment variables, /proc/*/environ, and PID 1 environment Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials Google Cloud access tokens Instance role credentials obtained by querying AWS IMDSv2, Google Cloud metadata, and Microsoft Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) endpoints SSH private keys Docker and Kubernetes configurations Vault tokens Terraform crede...

1 Introduction This article provides a technical analysis of how many Windows kernel mode drivers can be interacted with from user mode without the hardware they were developed for. This work was motivated by driver-oriented vulnerability research and the need to evaluate the exploitability of individual findings, which frequently affect code whose reachability is hardware-gated. The methodology presented here should help anyone determine whether a particular Windows kernel mode driver vulnerability remains reachable - and thus potentially exploitable - even in the absence of the hardware the driver was developed for. The reader is expected to have basic Windows driver knowledge, especially regarding device objects. The rest of this article is written with the assumption that the reader is already familiar with the concepts described in the introduction article: Anatomy of Access: Windows Device Objects from a Security Perspective . Just like the introduction article, this resou...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday announced the arrest of a Canadian man in connection with allegedly operating a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet known as Kimwolf . In tandem, Jacob Butler (aka Dort), 23, Ottawa, Canada, has been charged with offenses related to the development and operation of the botnet. Kimwolf is assessed to be a variant of AISURU. "Kimwolf targeted infected devices which were traditionally 'firewalled' from the rest of the internet, such as digital photo frames and web cameras," the DoJ said . "The infected devices were enslaved by the botnet operators." "The operators then used a 'cybercrime-as-a-service' model to sell access to the infected devices to other cybercriminals. The operators and their customers forced the victim devices to participate in DDoS attacks, targeting computers and servers located throughout the world, including Department of Defense Information Network (DoDIN) IP ad...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added two security flaws impacting Langflow and Trend Micro Apex One to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2025-34291 (CVSS score: 9.4) - An origin validation error vulnerability in Langflow that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code and achieve full system compromise. CVE-2026-34926 (CVSS score: 6.7) - A directory traversal vulnerability in on-premise versions of Trend Micro Apex One that could allow a pre-authenticated local attacker to modify a key table on the server to inject malicious code to deploy to agents on affected installations. In a report published in December 2025, Obsidian Security said CVE-2025-34291 exploits three combined weaknesses: overly Permissive CORS, lack of cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection, and an endpoint that allows code execution...

Cisco has rolled out updates for a maximum-severity security flaw impacting Secure Workload that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access sensitive data. Tracked as CVE-2026-20223 (CVSS score: 10.0), the vulnerability arises from insufficient validation and authentication when accessing REST API endpoints. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability if they are able to send a crafted API request to an affected endpoint," Cisco said . "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to read sensitive information and make configuration changes across tenant boundaries with the privileges of the Site Admin user." The shortcoming impacts Cisco Secure Workload Cluster Software on SaaS and on-prem deployments, regardless of device configuration. Cisco said there are no workarounds that address the vulnerability. The issue has been addressed in the following versions - Cisco Secure Workload Release 3.9 and earlier (Migrate to a fixed releas...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Linux malware dubbed Showboat that has been put to use in a campaign targeting a telecommunications provider in the Middle East since at least mid-2022. "Showboat is a modular post-exploitation framework designed for Linux systems, capable of spawning a remote shell, transferring files, and functioning as a SOCKS5 proxy," Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. It's assessed that the malware has been employed by at least one, and possibly more, threat activity clusters affiliated with China, with correlations identified between command-and-control (C2) nodes and IP addresses geolocated to Chengdu, the capital city of the Chinese province of Sichuan. One such threat actor is Calypso (aka Bronze Medley and Red Lamassu), which is known to be active since at least September 2016, targeting state institutions in Brazil, India, Kazakhstan, Russia, Thailand, and Turkey. ...

This week starts small. A token leaks. A bad package slips in. A login trick works. An old tool shows up again. At first, it feels like the usual mess. Then you see the pattern: attackers are not always breaking in. They are using the parts we already trust. That is what makes it worrying. The danger is in normal things now - updates, apps, cloud buttons, support chats, trusted accounts. AI does not make the attacks magic. It just helps people try more things, faster. Here's what showed up this week. 47 zero-days exposed 47 0-Days Discovered in Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 The Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 hacking contest has concluded, with security researchers collecting $1,298,250 in rewards after exploiting 47 zero-day flaws in various products from Windows, Linux, VMware, and NVIDIA. DEVCORE won the event with 50.5 Master of Pwn points and $505,000 in rewards throughout the three-day contest after hacking Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft E...

Microsoft has disclosed that a privilege escalation and a denial-of-service flaw in Defender has come under active exploitation in the wild. The former, tracked as CVE-2026-41091 , is rated 7.8 on the CVSS scoring system. Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. "Improper link resolution before file access ('link following') in Microsoft Defender allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally," Microsoft said in an advisory. The second vulnerability under exploitation is CVE-2026-45498 (CVSS score: 4.0), a denial-of-service bug impacting Defender. The two vulnerabilities have been addressed in Microsoft Defender Antimalware Platform versions 1.1.26040.8 and 4.18.26040.7, respectively. Although Microsoft has not formally confirmed, the vulnerability descriptions for CVE-2026-41091 and CVE-2026-45498 overlap with that of RedSun and UnDefend , two Defender zero-days that were disclosed by Chaotic Eclips...

Consider a cached access key on a single Windows machine. It got there the way most cached credentials do - a user logged in, and the key stored itself automatically. Standard AWS behavior. No one misconfigured anything or violated a policy. Yet that single key, which was easily accessible to a minor-league attacker, could have opened a path to some 98% of entities in the company's cloud environment - nearly every critical workload the business depended on.  This real-world exposure was caught before an attacker could use it. But the takeaway is clear: identity itself, and every permission it carries, has become the attack path. Your environment runs on identity. Active Directory, cloud identity providers, service accounts, machine identities, and AI agents - all of these carry permissions that span systems and trust boundaries. A single stolen credential hands the attacker a legitimate identity - along with every permission attached to it.  Despite this, most security pro...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a vulnerability in the Linux kernel that remained undetected for nine years. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-46333 (CVSS score: 5.5), is a case of improper privilege management that could permit an unprivileged local user to disclose sensitive files and execute arbitrary commands as root on default installations of several major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. It's also codenamed ssh-keysign-pwn. According to Qualys, which discovered the flaw, the problem is rooted in the kernel's __ptrace_may_access() function and was introduced in November 2016. "The primitive is reliable and turns any local shell into a path to root or to sensitive credential material," Saeed Abbasi, senior manager of Threat Research Unit at Qualys, said . Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit a local attacker to disclose /etc/shadow and host private keys under /etc/ssh/*_key, as well as execute arbitrary...

GitHub on Wednesday officially confirmed that the breach of its internal repositories was the result of a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned version of the Nx Console Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension.  The development comes as the Nx team revealed that the extension, nrwl.angular-console , was breached after one of its developers' systems was hacked in the wake of the recent TanStack supply chain attack. Other companies that were impacted by the TanStack compromise include OpenAI, Mistral AI , and Grafana Labs . "We have no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub's internal repositories, such as our customer's own enterprises, organizations, and repositories," Alexis Wales, Chief Information Security Officer of GitHub, said in a statement. "Some of GitHub's internal repositories contain information from customers, for example, excerpts of support interactions. If any impact is discov...

Drupal has released security updates for a "highly critical" security vulnerability in Drupal Core that could be exploited by attackers to achieve remote code execution, privilege escalation, or information disclosure. The vulnerability, now tracked as CVE-2026-9082 , carries a CVSS score of 6.5 out of 10.0, per CVE.org. Drupal said the vulnerability resides in a database abstraction API that is used in Drupal Core to validate queries and ensure they are sanitized against SQL injection attacks. "A vulnerability in this API allows an attacker to send specially crafted requests, resulting in arbitrary SQL injection for sites using PostgreSQL databases," it said . "This can lead to information disclosure, and in some cases privilege escalation, remote code execution, or other attacks." Drupal noted the security flaw can be exploited by anonymous users, and impacts only sites that use PostgreSQL. The following versions address the issue - Drupal 11.3.10 ...