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Candiru, an Israeli maker of spyware sold to governments, infected devices at the news network Al Jazeera through ordinary online ads, in attacks that needed no click or other action from the user, researchers at  the Citizen Lab  said Thursday. The hidden attack code ran the moment an ad loaded on the screen, and in some cases the ad loaded out of sight, in the background. The Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, said this is the first public, technical confirmation that mercenary spyware, meaning hacking tools sold to governments, has reached real devices through targeted ads. The method had been described before from leaked company documents, but not shown in a live attack. The researchers recovered the spyware itself from one device, but not the exploit that breaks into the browser or app to install it. That first break-in step is described from how the attack was set up, not from captured code. How the Attack Worked The ads were placed by...

The threat actor known as Silent Lynx has been attributed to a fresh set of attacks targeting government organizations across the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The activity, observed from June 2025 through August 2026, involves four different infection chains that make use of macro-enabled documents, PS2EXE downloaders, GitHub-hosted PowerShell, and crafted WinRAR archives exploiting CVE-2025-8088 . The attacks lead to the deployment of custom reverse shells like FoalShell, Chvost, Laplas, and PickleShell that facilitate interactive remote access to compromised hosts, according to Cisco Talos and Recorded Future Insikt Group, which are tracking the campaign under the monikers UAT-6275 and TAG-193.  "UAT-6275's targeting is concentrated in Central Asia, and the wider CIS region," security researcher Ashley Shen said . "Across the reviewed campaigns, observed victims and lure themes span nine countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenist...

A long-running Traffic Distribution System (TDS) known as Help TDS to a Russian-language affiliate program called Hotejka , which appears to be a rebrand of a traffic monetization operation dubbed ROI777. Help TDS is assessed to be active since at least 2017, offering PHP code templates to partners and affiliates that are installed into compromised websites with an aim to direct unsuspecting users to tech support scams. These scams make use of full-screen browser manipulation and exit prevention techniques to serve bogus Microsoft Windows security alert screens instructing victims to contact a Windows Support number to address the problem. "Help TDS delivers tech support scams (TSSs) that direct users to call centers, where social engineering is used to convince them to install remote desktop tools," Infoblox said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It's not simple credit card fraud: it's remote access, living-off-the-land malware operations. Once in,...

NGINX released versions 1.30.6 and 1.31.7 on October 14 to fix five vulnerabilities, one of them present in every release since May 2005. There are three memory bugs that F5, the company behind NGINX, says could crash a worker process or possibly let an attacker run code, and each requires a specific configuration to exploit. A fourth lets an attacker forge a TLS session that could get past client-certificate checks, though F5 calls the forgery non-deterministic and beyond the attacker's control. The fifth lets an HTTP/3 client slip extra bytes into a request that NGINX passes on to a backend. None of the five was in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog as of October 15, and neither NGINX nor F5 reports attacks.  NGINX rates all five medium . F5 scores the three memory bugs 9.2, Critical, on CVSS v4.0, the TLS flaw 8.3, and the HTTP/3 flaw 6.9. Which Configurations Are Exposed Every one of the five needs a directive you added: an alias...

Next.js released an  out-of-band security update  on October 14 that fixes two critical flaws allowing unauthenticated remote code execution, along with a high-severity denial-of-service flaw. One code-execution flaw is in React Server Components, and the other in librsvg, the open-source library Next.js uses through the sharp package to handle SVG images. The fixes are in Next.js 16.4.1 and 15.5.28, the current Active and Maintenance long-term support (LTS) releases. What Was Fixed The update covers three separate issues. Vercel, which develops Next.js, rated both code-execution flaws critical, each with a CVSS score of 9.5. The table lists the versions each issue affects and the version that fixes it. Issue Affected versions Fixed in Who is exposed Code execution through use cache ( GHSA-673q-mjm6-r5xr ...

Drupal core has a critical flaw in its Field UI module that could let an attacker run code on the site's server, and fixes were shipped on October 14 in Drupal 11.4.10, 11.3.19, and 10.6.19. An attacker cannot reach the flaw through core alone, the Drupal Security Team said in  its advisory . Several exploit paths exist through contributed modules, and at least one known path needs no login. Tracked as CVE-2026-108097 , the flaw sits in Field UI, the core module behind the admin pages where site builders manage fields and how they display. Drupal rates it 19 out of 25 on its own risk scale, the level the project calls critical. The advisory does not name the contributed modules that open a path to the flaw, and custom code may also expose it. Drew Webber of the Security Team and Octavio Galland are credited with reporting it. What to Do Now The fixed release for each supported branch: Drupal 11.4.x: update to  11.4.10 Drupal 11.3.x: update to  11.3.19 ...

Attackers are impersonating popular AI products to distribute malware, steal browser sessions, and compromise business accounts. ANY.RUN linked 1,258 public sandbox analyses to fake AI campaigns between April and October of 2026.  The campaigns also increase operational pressure on MSSPs serving US businesses, which accounted for 16% of country-attributed targets.  Similar attacks appearing across different customers can trigger repetitive investigations, consume analyst capacity, and extend response times, making it harder to maintain consistent service levels as threat activity grows. How Fake AI Attacks Are Reaching US Businesses Fake AI attacks pose a serious risk to business security The campaigns investigated by ANY.RUN use familiar AI brands to encourage employees to execute malicious commands, install compromised applications, or submit credentials through fraudulent authentication pages.

Palo Alto Networks on Wednesday issued security updates for a high-severity flaw in PAN-OS software that has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-0322 (CVSS score: 8.6), is a case of remote code execution in the management interface. "A remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the management interface of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software enables an authenticated attacker with network access to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall," Palo Alto Networks said . The issue impacts PAN-OS software on PA-Series and VM-Series firewalls and on Panorama (virtual and M-Series). Cloud NGFW and Prisma Access are not affected by the vulnerability. Palo Alto Networks said that no special configuration is required to exploit the issue, but said the security risk can be minimized by restricting access to the management interface to only trusted internal IP addresses. "You can reduce the risk of exploitation by restr...

AI is already part of digital forensics and incident response work, with or without a policy in place to govern it. The issue is that these tools are growing more confident in their own output faster than practitioners are developing reliable ways to verify it. Without governance models and validation standards in place, that gap compounds and rarely stays contained to a workstation: an unverified finding can end up in a forensic report, a deposition, or in court.  At SANS, we created two new AI frameworks this year to help address this challenge: the Digital Forensics & AI Investigations Framework , which we mapped to the trusted standards established by the Scientific Working Group on Digital Evidence (SWGDE), and the Incident Response & AI Investigations Framework , which we mapped to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0. Both frameworks rest on the same principle: AI can accelerate investigative work, but the human examiner remains the final authority at every phase...

The Indian government has directed telecom service providers (TSPs) in the country to mandatorily display callers' registered names along with their numbers for incoming calls starting November 1, 2026, in an effort to help people identify calls from unknown numbers and tackle spam or fraudulent calls. To that end, the Department of Telecommunications has issued a circular urging service providers to implement the Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) service. "At the time when a call is incoming, the calling name presentation service presents the calling name identity of the calling user on the user terminal of the called user," according to a circular issued by the Indian Ministry of Communications dated October 13, 2026. "Calling name identity is the name of the calling user as recorded in subscriber data record of the originating telecommunication service provider and such identity is included in the calling line identification of such user." The cal...

The credential-theft campaign known as GhostAction has ramped up, targeting more than 30,000 repositories across 3,000 users and organizations. The spike, according to GitGuardian, was observed on October 8 and 9, 2026. "This resulted from compromising the GitHub accounts of about 1,900 users. It attempted to extract 3,174 secrets from public repositories' CI," security researchers Gaetan Ferry and Guillaume Valadon said . GhostAction is the moniker for a supply chain attack campaign targeting developer infrastructure on GitHub. Originally discovered in September 2025, it involves threat actors compromising legitimate developer accounts to inject malicious GitHub Actions automation workflows into software repositories. Attackers have been found to gain write access to repositories using stolen Personal Access Tokens (PATs) or credentials harvested from infostealer logs and dumps. Using the hijacked maintainer account, they push a malicious workflow file disguis...

Threat actors are exploiting a critical security flaw in Langflow, according to an alert from Previdian. Langflow is an open-source platform that allows developers to build artificial intelligence (AI) applications and agentic workflows. In February 2025, DataStax, the parent company of Langflow, was acquired by IBM. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-105740 (CVSS score: 9.9), a case of authenticated remote code execution impacting versions prior to 1.9.0. "Any authenticated Langflow user can achieve Remote Code Execution (RCE) on the server by adding an MCP server with the 'stdio' transport," reads an advisory released last month. "The user-supplied command field is passed directly to bash -c "exec {command}" with zero validation, no allowlisting, and no sandboxing. The command executes immediately when the server list is fetched. Additionally, the env field allows arbitrary environment variable injection (e.g., LD_PRELOAD, PATH ove...

Singapore-based Ahsay Backup has released security updates to address two security flaws in AhsayCBS that have been exploited by bad actors to drop web shells and XMRig cryptocurrency miners. The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-105133 and CVE-2026-105134 , which could be chained to sidestep authentication and execute arbitrary commands on affected systems. In a report published earlier this month, Huntress said it observed threat actors combining the two flaws to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution and deploy web shells and cryptocurrency miners on exposed systems. Although the vulnerabilities were initially assumed to be addressed in AhsayCBS versions 9.15.2.59 and 10.3.4.0 released in August 2026, the software company has now confirmed that the patches did not completely plug them. The fixes are available in the following versions - AhsayCBS v10.3.4.45 hotfix AhsayCBS v9.15.2.70 hotfix "Given the severity of these risks, we strongly urge ...

Attackers are exploiting a critical flaw in Cisco Secure Email Gateway that lets a sender with no login write files to the appliance's operating system, Cisco  said in an advisory  on Wednesday. The attacker sends an email with a crafted attachment through the gateway and, if it succeeds, could then run commands as root. The appliance filters an organization's email for spam, malware, and other threats, and only a gateway with the File Reputation service enabled and a Content Scanner Tools package older than version 25.3.0.5525 is vulnerable. The fix has been shipping since September 14 in AsyncOS 15.5.5-014 and 16.5.0-780, the builds Cisco listed as fixed in a hardening release that day, which the company now says covered this flaw. It also arrives as a Content Scanner Tools update, version 25.3.0.5525 or later, which installs without a software upgrade or a restart. Cisco found the flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-76519 (CVSS score: 9.8), in its own internal security scanni...

Attackers exploited a flaw in an optional Nextcloud app,  Collabora Online - Built-in CODE Server , to plant web shells on Nextcloud servers. Three administrators  reported the issue on GitHub , with the first logged attack on September 10. A web shell is a small file that executes any command an attacker sends via a web request, with the rights of the web server account. The flaw allows an unauthenticated request to run a command on the server, but only when the app's local document server is not running, such as during a restart or upgrade, or after a crash. Collabora fixed it in  version 26.4.303  on September 11 and on October 14 published  an advisory  with the identifier  CVE-2026-110447 , warning that turning off the app does not help: it must be updated or removed. Who Is Affected The app, published by Collabora under the package name richdocumentscode, downloads a copy of Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) and runs it ...

Microsoft and Health-ISAC, along with the Japan Cybercrime Control Center (JC3) and a coalition of private sector companies, such as Resecurity, Cloudflare, Oracle, Proofpoint, and TRM Labs, announced the disruption of three phishing kits, CoGUI (aka NX or FA), Haozi (aka Phoenix), and Iron Man System . "Since January 2026, the threat actors behind these kits have been responsible for facilitating the sending of over one billion phishing emails and SMS messages to over 75 thousand organizations worldwide," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence and Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit said . The court-authorized operation is the result of an investigation that Microsoft launched in late 2025 after it was notified of malicious messaging campaigns targeting people in Japan. The  The Chinese-language cybercriminal ecosystem has been described as an interconnected network of phishing kit operators, developers, and an illicit marketplace and initial access broker (IAB) codenamed YAM ...