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Suppose an AI agent is asked to sort support tickets and look up account details. A ticket contains instructions that lead the agent to export records to an unfamiliar destination. The agent can make the request because its identity has access to the records and its connected tools allow the action. That kind of scenario raises a response question: what does “stop the agent” actually mean? A team may be able to pause the model while a workflow, credential or existing connection remains active. Those pieces can require separate controls. An October 2026 roundup from the OWASP GenAI Security Project describes evaluation agents reaching beyond their intended scope and recommends testing whether containment can revoke both credentials and network access. The roundup is a selected collection, not an exhaustive survey of incidents. Turning off the model may not stop the work An AI agent is usually part of a larger system. A model may choose an action, but an orchestrator runs the w...

A newly identified spying group used hacked equipment inside Asian mobile operators to intercept the calls and texts of selected people, mostly in Taiwan. Enea , a telecom and cybersecurity software company based in Stockholm, found the group's attack sources in at least six Asian countries and named it SilentAir this week. It assessed with high confidence that SilentAir is a state-level actor, but linked its activity to China only with low confidence. The company has told the operators where it found SilentAir sources. It said SilentAir has been disrupted for now but could return. The report does not say whether those operators have cleaned up the hacked equipment. Mobile operators use the SS7 and Diameter protocols to exchange signaling messages that route calls and texts and enable roaming. This traffic crosses a shared network called the IPX , which runs on a high level of trust between operators. SilentAir sent its attacks into the IPX from the hacked equipment. For i...

An international police operation took down servers behind Gootloader , CastleRAT and StealC this week. Criminals used the three malware tools to gain access to computers, steal passwords, and launch ransomware attacks. Police also seized about 6.4 million stolen logins belonging to more than 40,000 victims, according to Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). Gootloader is a loader: once on a computer, it could download other malware, especially ransomware. It spread through fake legal documents placed on hacked websites, often WordPress sites. Criminals used SEO poisoning to push those sites high in search results. Gootloader has infected at least 25,000 computers worldwide since 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said. Its operators used those computers to infect more computers, then sold access to the new ones to ransomware criminals. In the U.S., Gootloader was used in ransomware attacks against at least 44 victims, resulting in about $28.8 million in losses. G...

An unknown threat actor has been observed targeting unpatched Check Point Security Gateways to obtain initial access via the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities and then a previously unreported local privilege escalation flaw in Gaia OS  to deploy a backdoor called TSGA . The activity, detailed by Check Point, began on October 30, 2026, and targeted Israeli organizations, with a broader follow-up wave on November 2, 2026, that targeted organizations across multiple countries and sectors. Some of the organizations singled out in the first wave have also been at the receiving end of destructive actions that include the deployment of wiper malware. "PHP2Shell provided initial access, followed by privilege escalation through the DynamicCLI interface, tracked as CVE-2026-123039 ," Check Point said. "The attackers then deployed PHP web shells, the persistent TSGA backdoor, and its embedded TSProxy networking component." "The attackers pivoted from the gateway to a VMw...

N-able on Thursday said it's taking additional precautions in the wake of public disclosure of a new set of flaws tracked as 4EverAble2Shell and Agent2Shell . "We are restricting certain N-central features and integrations," the company said in a Thursday update. "These measures may affect some functionality, but we believe taking additional precautions while remediation is completed is the right action to protect our partners and their customers." The following actions have been applied to Hosted environments - Legacy API is turned off by default in the product. Intune integration has been turned off while additional protections are implemented and validated. Hosted customers are also being recommended to follow N-able's previous guidance to upgrade Agents and Probes on N-central version 2026.4 HF1 and above, as the update introduces changes in how the Probe and Agent communicate. "N-able N-central 2026.4 HF1 updates legacy componen...

Security teams have more alerts, logs, and monitoring tools than ever. Yet when an attack happens, one simple question can still take too long to answer: Who or what is behind this activity, and what can they access? A suspicious login might belong to an employee. An unusual API call could come from a machine account. Or an AI agent might be accessing sensitive systems using permissions nobody has reviewed recently. Your SIEM or EDR may catch the activity. But without knowing who owns that identity, what permissions it has, and which systems it can reach, your SOC is missing a critical part of the story. And that missing context can turn a manageable incident into a much bigger problem. Join this expert-led webinar to learn how real-time identity context can help your SOC investigate threats faster, understand what's at risk, and respond with confidence. The Blind Spot Between Identity and Security Operations Here's the problem. Identity and access management (...

A search result isn't always safe. An access request isn't always harmless. And a familiar account doesn't always mean a familiar person is using it. Simple things to remember. Yet a surprising amount of this week's trouble starts right there. Attackers are using fake websites, stolen access, and trusted tools to get into places they shouldn't be. AI is helping them build attacks faster, while also giving them new systems to target. Some intruders are staying hidden even after security holes are fixed. Others are moving stolen money through a maze of transactions. And researchers keep finding small coding mistakes that can cause much bigger problems. Different stories, but much of the trouble comes down to making something dangerous look normal. There is some good news, too. Criminal servers have been seized, and a few defenses are getting stronger. Still, plenty of things are going wrong in ways that shouldn't be this easy. Here's what turned up this w...

Public exploit code released earlier this week claims that a local Windows user can gain SYSTEM privileges through the Common Log File System driver. The proof of concept, called SignDrop , targets a log-authentication feature added to the driver last year. It abuses how clfs.sys creates companion files when a privileged process opens a prepared log, using path redirection to take control of the operation. Microsoft has not confirmed the claimed flaw, assigned a CVE, or released a fix. The researcher behind the exploit, who publishes under the name MSNightmare , released the code and a detailed writeup on GitHub on Tuesday, the same day the company published its November security updates. CLFS is a logging subsystem built into Windows. Its driver has been a frequent target for privilege escalation: 10 CLFS flaws appear in CISA's catalog of vulnerabilities known to have been exploited in attacks, including one used in ransomware campaigns in April 2025. To reduce that expo...

A critical flaw in Red Hat Quay allows an attacker who can access a Quay registry to read and overwrite private container images in every repository. Quay enables anonymous access by default, and while it is enabled, the attacker needs no account. When it is off, anyone with a valid account can still exploit the flaw, Red Hat said yesterday. The company has released fixed builds for eight Quay 3 branches. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-123710 (CVSS score: 9.8). Quay uses keys it trusts to sign the access tokens that allow image pushes and pulls. The flaw lets an attacker add their own key to the keys Quay trusts, with no expiry date. Quay then accepts tokens signed with that key for any repository. With those tokens, an attacker can retrieve private images and any secrets or credentials stored within them. The attacker can also push or overwrite images, and the change propagates to every system that later pulls those images. The planted key survives restarts until someone ...

Citrix has released patches for multiple critical security flaws impacting NetScaler ADC, Citrix NetScaler Gateway, and NetScaler Console that could lead to denial-of-service (DoS) or an authentication bypass. The critical vulnerabilities that impact NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway are listed below - CVE-2026-120868 (CVSS score: 9.3) - A memory overflow vulnerability in Packet Processing can lead to unpredictable or erroneous behavior or DoS. (All NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway deployments) CVE-2026-107407 (CVSS score: 9.3) - A memory overflow vulnerability in SMPP traffic can lead to unpredictable or erroneous behavior or DoS. (NetScaler ADC configured with a Load Balancing or Content Switching virtual server of type SMPP) CVE-2026-107408 (CVSS score: 9.3) - A memory corruption vulnerability in DNS / DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) can lead to unpredictable or erroneous behavior or DoS. (NetScaler ADC configured for DNS load balancing and recursive DNS resolution) C...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that lookalike domains masquerading as artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being used to serve ClickFix -style lures, browser-hijacking malware, and a set of extensions that hijack user searches. This delivery pattern has been codenamed TypoPrompting by Island. "AI-app lookalikes that turn an attempt to reach a familiar tool into a prompt to verify, install or run something else," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. In all, the campaign spans 186 bogus domains spanning 27 AI brands, including Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), Microsoft Copilot, SpaceXAI Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral, Perplexity, Midjourney, ElevenLabs, Lovable, and Cursor. While one category leads to a ClickFix lure that serves a PowerShell command via a fake Cloudflare verification page, the second route takes unsuspecting users to "Security Check" pages that del...

The ongoing campaign targeting ConnectWise ScreenConnect deployments involves the exploitation of a now-patched critical security flaw in the remote access software, and not a new vulnerability, it has emerged. Blackpoint Cyber's Adversary Pursuit Group (APG), which shared the details with The Hacker News, said the recovered attacker toolkit exploits CVE-2026-84869 (CVSS score: 9.9), an improper privilege management and missing authorization vulnerability that could allow an attacker to file transfer and execute through an active remote session without authorization or host confirmation. The cybersecurity company confirmed that testing against a fully patched ScreenConnect client successfully prevents execution of the exploit's payload. "Our testing confirmed that the exploit targets CVE-2026-84869 and that the existing patch successfully blocks it," APG researchers Sam Decker and Nevan Beal said. "That's an important finding for security teams....

Google Cloud VMs on AMD Turin chips need a guest OS patch and a stop-and-start to protect against three CPU side-channel flaws, Google said this week. The company has already applied mitigations against attacks between VMs, and between VMs and the host. Inside a VM, the flaws may let an attacker with code on the same processor core infer data from other processes or the kernel. The affected machine series are C4D, N4D, H4D, Z4D,, and G4, including bare-metal instances of C4D and Z4D. Turin is the code name for fifth-generation AMD EPYC processors. All three flaws are Transient Scheduler Attacks (TSA). Two of them, TSA-SQ (CVE-2024-36350) and TSA-L1 (CVE-2024-36357), were first disclosed on July 8, 2025, for earlier EPYC processors. AMD now says its Zen 5 processors, which include Turin, are "impacted differently from previously characterized AMD processors." The third flaw, CVE-2026-0004, is new. It may let an attacker who can run code on a system infer data in the p...

N-able on Thursday said it's investigating a new public disclosure containing claims of additional vulnerabilities in on-premise versions of N-central running version 2026.4.1 HF2. "Based on our initial review, the server issue described depends on a non-default configuration in which the Legacy API is turned on and exposed to the public internet," N-able said in a new advisory. "Legacy API is turned off by default in the product and is not recommended." The company is urging customers to disable Legacy API immediately, if not already. It also noted that hosted environments are not affected by this issue. The incident impacts the following services - N-central On-premise (Americas) N-central On-premise (APAC) N-central On-premise (Europe) The development comes days after N-able released 2026.4.1.26 to address a number of security flaws disclosed by independent security researcher Sean Bales earlier this week. The vulnerabilities are collec...

Since mid-August 2026, a phishing operation has been stealing live Google sessions from corporate users. Every check defenders normally lean on to judge a link came back clean, and the operator designed it that way on purpose. The Threat Research team at Material Security spotted the campaign and has since taken down hundreds of attacker domains in an effort the team calls Operation CloudFire. Here’s what the researchers found. The lure: Google Calendar invites The messages show up as Google Calendar invites. Some arrive by BCC, and many come from an organization the recipient has already traded email with. The pretexts are deliberately boring: voicemail notifications, RFP and RFI requests, court summonses, and missed payment notices. Nothing about them stands out in a busy inbox. Most of the links point to Google itself. The usual pattern runs through Google’s own /url redirector, with the real destination tucked into a query parameter. Other waves used share.google and Driv...

PTC has released patches for a new critical vulnerability impacting Windchill and FlexPLM software that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution. The security flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-126325 , carries a CVSS v4 score of 9.2 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been described as a case of improper input validation and deserialization of untrusted data that could result in remote code execution via crafted requests. "A critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability has been reported in PTC Windchill and PTC FlexPLM," according to a description of the flaw on CVE.org. "The vulnerability may be exploited through the deserialization of untrusted data." The CVE record lists the following versions as affected - PTC Windchill: 11.0 M030, 11.1 M020, 11.2.1.0, 12.0.2.0, 12.1.2.0, 13.0.2.0, 13.1.0.0, 13.1.1.0, 13.1.2.0, 13.1.3.0, 13.1.4.0 PTC FlexPLM: 11.0 M030, 11.1 M020, 11.2.1.0, 12.0.2.0, 12.1.2.0, 13.0.2.0, 13.1.0.0, 13.1.1.0, ...