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Attackers have begun to exploit two critical vulnerabilities in WordPress that, when combined together, enable unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) and complete compromise of vulnerable websites. The two security flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137 , have been codenamed wp2shell . "By the early hours of Saturday morning (UTC), successful exploitation was already well underway, initially using public exploit code to exfiltrate hashed credentials, with remote code execution following once additional details were made public," Jake Knott, principal security researcher at watchTowr, told The Hacker News in a statement. "From our vantage point across a global client base, we are seeing widespread impact of this vulnerability across organizations of every size and every vertical." Telemetry data captured by KEVIntel shows that 13 unique IP addresses from Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., Indonesia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Singapore h...

Researchers at Sysdig have linked a second attack on the same Langflow server to JADEPUFFER , the AI-agent-driven operator it first documented earlier this month. The same operator has now been spotted deploying ENCFORGE , a new compiled Go ransomware designed to encrypt model weights, vector indexes, training datasets, and other AI infrastructure files across the host filesystem. The entry point did not change. Langflow versions before 1.3.0 expose the /api/v1/validate/code endpoint without authentication, allowing any remote attacker to execute arbitrary Python on the server. The flaw, CVE-2025-3248 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and has been in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog since May 5, 2025. As The Hacker News reported earlier this month, the prior operation used throwaway Python code and MySQL's AES_ENCRYPT() function to encrypt and destroy data in Nacos (Alibaba's configuration server) and production databases. The new ENCFORGE payload re...

Threat actors are now exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting ServiceNow AI Platform, according to Defused Cyber . In a post shared on X, the threat intelligence firm said it's observing in-the-wild exploitation of CVE-2026-6875 (CVSS score: 9.5), a sandbox escape vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated user to run arbitrary code. Patches for the flaw were released by ServiceNow throughout June in the following versions - Brazil EA and Brazil GA Australia Patch 2 Zurich Patch 7b and Zurich Patch 9 Yokohama Patch 12 Hot Fix 1b and Yokohama Patch 13 Searchlight Cyber, which disclosed additional technical specifics, said it reported the issue on April 1, 2026, adding it allows a complete compromise of the ServiceNow instance as well as all connected proxy servers. Besides rolling out a fix, ServiceNow is "enhancing instance security by severely restricting the type of code that can run in sandbox contexts," securit...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered nearly 7,600 malicious GitHub repositories, out of which more than 800 pose as artificial intelligence (AI) skills or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to deliver a malware family known as SmartLoader as part of an ongoing campaign codenamed FakeGit . "FakeGit uses copied projects, lookalike developer profiles, convincing READMEs, and malicious ZIP files to deliver SmartLoader malware," Oleg Zaytsev, lead security researcher at Island, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The end goal of these attacks is to leverage the access afforded by SmartLoader to establish persistence and push secondary payloads, such as StealC, an information stealer capable of harvesting a wide range of data from compromised systems. It's worth mentioning here that the use of trojanized MCP servers to distribute SmartLoader and StealC was flagged earlier this year by Straiker AI and subsequently by Derp.ca . But a concerning aspect ...

A malware operator left its delivery server wide open, and Rapid7 pulled down the whole toolkit: 1,048 files spanning lure templates, filename-spoofing tests, execution experiments, droppers, builder notes, and two campaign chains. One was already live against Windows users in Mexico, delivering an infostealer through a fake government ID-lookup site over WebDAV. What makes it more than a payload dump: it caught the operation mid-build. Testing notes, failed experiments, documentation, and live delivery logs sat in one place, the kind of complete development trail defenders rarely see. Rapid7 reads the artifacts, down to a hardcoded path pointing at an open-source AI coding tool, as an operator using generative AI to produce, test, and document phishing delivery at speed. The most developed test set focused on CVE-2025-33053 (CVSS 8.8, now in CISA's KEV catalog ), the WebDAV working-directory hijack Check Point documented last year in its Stealth Falcon reporting. The...

A newly discovered espionage implant has been using a hijacked Microsoft 365 calendar as its command channel, planting operator instructions and smuggling out stolen files as attachments on calendar events dated to the year 2050. Group-IB , which named the malware HollowGraph , says the approach moves tasking and stolen data through legitimate Microsoft Graph API traffic, so the activity looks like ordinary Microsoft 365 chatter and network controls keyed to attacker-owned destinations have nothing to flag. The implant is a .NET DLL that supports just two commands, get and send , and it never reaches out to an attacker-owned server for payloads. Instead, it treats the compromised mailbox's calendar as a two-way dead drop. To pull tasking, it queries the calendar for an event the operator has planted, buried at 2050-05-13 , so the mailbox owner is unlikely to ever scroll to it, and reads its instructions from an attached file. To exfiltrate, it does the reverse: encrypts th...

A single request should not be able to do this much. But this week, small inputs led to code execution, memory loss, stolen keys, and disabled security tools. The paths were often simple: exposed systems, weak checks, old drivers, fake prompts, and public code used for malware delivery. Some bugs were new. Others were already being used before defenders had time to patch. Here is the full recap of what broke, what was exploited, and what needs attention now. ⚡ Threat of the Week New wp2shell WordPress Core Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Run Code - Searchlight Cyber disclosed a pre-authenticated remote code execution vulnerability in WordPress Core that can be exploited anonymously on a standard WordPress installation, without requiring any plugins or other special conditions. It is a combination of CVE-2026-63030 (REST API batch-route confusion) and CVE-2026-60137 (SQL injection in WordPress core) that can be chained to turn an anonymous request into code execution. wa...

At least one Russian intelligence service is systematically hijacking internet-connected security cameras across Europe and Ukraine, using the feeds to watch military transport routes, weapons shipments bound for Kyiv , and the locations of Ukrainian troops. That is the finding of a cybersecurity advisory published July 10 by the AIVD and MIVD, the Netherlands' civilian and military intelligence services, which describe the operation as ongoing. In Ukraine, the surveillance has not stayed passive. Camera access there has been "used in attempts to neutralise Ukrainian military personnel" and destroy their equipment, the services say, turning an exposed roadside or business camera into a targeting aid. Across EU and NATO states, the services add, the same camera access is also collecting military intelligence that has nothing to do with the war. Getting in is rarely the hard part. The operators scan the internet for exposed devices, fingerprint IP cameras by bran...

The industry spent the initial months after Anthropic's April 7 Mythos reveal focused on volume . How many new CVEs would Mythos add to an already overloaded pipeline? How quickly would the flood of AI-driven discovery overwhelm triage capabilities? How long would it take adversaries to weaponize Mythos findings at scale? Those questions were and remain valid. Yet they all stop short of addressing the single metric that determines whether any of those vulnerabilities actually lead to a breach: the exposure window. The exposure window - the gap between the moment a vulnerability becomes exploitable and the moment your team fixes it - is the time an attacker has to do actual damage. That window is currently open far too wide. In 2025, the average eCrime breakout time dropped to 29 minutes . Even PCI DSS - the strictest compliance framework in the industry - allows 30 days to remediate a critical vulnerability. That's a 1,000-to-1 gap between how fast attackers move and how f...

Opening a crafted XZ archive in 7-Zip could let an attacker run code on the machine. The flaw, CVE-2026-14266 , is a heap-based buffer overflow in how the archiver processes XZ chunked data, and Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) detailed it on July 15. A fix shipped on June 25 in 7-Zip 26.02 . The overflow lets an attacker "execute code in the context of the current process," per the advisory. The code runs with the token 7-Zip itself holds and gains no privileges of its own. On Windows, a normally launched 7-Zip runs under a filtered standard-user token even on an administrator account, so the attacker inherits those limited rights unless the program was started elevated. The bug came in from Landon Peng of Lunbun LLC, who reported it to 7-Zip on June 5. ZDI rates the flaw 7.0, or High, not the Critical several write-ups reached for. The full CVSS 3.0 vector is AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H . The AV:L makes it a local attack vector, not a network-re...

A solo Russian-speaking threat actor known as " bandcampro " outsourced a chunk of their operations to Google's open-source Gemini CLI artificial intelligence (AI) and commandeered a live botnet. The findings come from an analysis of 200 Gemini CLI session logs between March 19 and April 21, 2026, which found the threat actor using AI, among other things, to crack passwords, set up a residential proxy, compromise WordPress merchants, and plan a phone-based cryptocurrency fraud scheme aimed at elderly people in the U.S. and Canada. "The logs documented how the threat actor used an AI agent to migrate a command-and-control (C&C) server, and to control a small-scale botnet, among other hacking activities," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen, Philippe Lin, Lucas Silva, Vladimir Kropotov, and Fyodor Yarochkin said . "The entire C&C operation fits in three plaintext files totaling roughly 5 KB, making it highly replicable and effectively disposa...

In an ironic twist, open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform Hugging Face revealed that it was the victim of a hack perpetrated by an autonomous AI agent system. The company said it detected and responded to the incident targeting its production infrastructure earlier last week. "We identified unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials used by our services," the company said in a statement. While an investigation into the intrusion remains ongoing, Hugging Face said it has found no evidence that the AI agent tampered with public, user-facing models, datasets, or Spaces, and its own software supply chain. The starting point of the attack was the data processing pipeline itself, with a malicious dataset abusing two code execution paths, viz., in its remote code dataset loader and a template injection in a dataset configuration, to run code on a processing worker.

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new software supply chain attack codenamed SleeperGem targeting the Ruby ecosystem after three malicious gems were published to RubyGems with the end goal of serving additional payloads. The rogue gems are listed below - git_credential_manager (versions 2.8.0, 2.8.1, 2.8.2, 2.8.3) - Published on July 18, 2026 Dendreo (versions 1.1.3, 1.1.4) - Published on October 14, 2017 fastlane-plugin-run_tests_firebase_testlab (version 0.3.2) - Published on February 06, 2018 "Each malicious release is a loader," StepSecurity said in an analysis. "It fetches a second stage from an attacker controlled Forgejo host, checks whether it is running in a build system and skips if it is, and on a developer machine it drops a native daemon and installs persistence." One aspect of the attack that immediately stands out is that "git_credential_manager" impersonates the official Microsoft Git Credential Manager, while t...

F5 has shipped fixes for a critical nginx flaw that lets a remote, unauthenticated attacker trigger a heap buffer overflow in the worker process with crafted HTTP requests. CVE-2026-42533 was patched on July 15 in nginx 1.30.4 (stable) and 1.31.3 (mainline) , and in NGINX Plus 37.0.3.1; anyone on an earlier build should upgrade. Triggering it can crash or restart the worker, causing a denial of service; where ASLR is disabled or can be bypassed, F5 says it may also allow remote code execution. The overflow lives in nginx's script engine, the code that assembles strings from directives at request time. It only surfaces under a specific configuration: a regex-based map whose output variable is referenced in a string expression after a capture from an earlier regex match. Under that pattern the engine's two-pass evaluation comes apart. The first pass measures how many bytes the result needs and allocates a buffer to fit; the second pass writes the bytes in. Both read the ...