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Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented Brazilian banking malware operation that delivers a toolkit called KREMLIN . Elastic Security Labs is tracking the activity under the moniker REF9334 . Active since at least May 2025, the threat actor has used lures that impersonate a dozen Brazilian banks and install a malicious browser extension on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. "The KREMLIN malware ecosystem employs multi-stage JavaScript loaders, custom C++ installers, and malicious browser extensions to steal credentials, session tokens, and sensitive data," security researchers Cyril François and Andrew Pease said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Malicious browser extensions bypass Chromium integrity mechanisms by manipulating Secure Preferences and regenerating required HMACs, and App-Bound encrypted hashes." A defining aspect of the operation is the use of blockchain to conceal the threat actor-controlled...

Cybersecurity agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have detailed a Windows malware that they say Iran's intelligence service uses to spy on dissidents, journalists, and activists around the world. The malware is controlled via the Telegram messaging app and can copy a target's emails and chat messages, take screenshots, and activate the microphone to record audio. The FBI calls it HEAVYGRAM , and the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) calls it CHOSEN BRICK . The  joint advisory  was published on September 15 by the NCSC , the FBI, and the Netherlands' intelligence service, the AIVD. The FBI also released an  updated analysis  of the malware that expands on a  March 2026 alert , the first to describe the campaign, with more technical detail and new indicators of compromise. The FBI attributes the malware to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), the country's main intelligence agency, and dates th...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a multi-platform campaign that uses the Message Queueing Telemetry Transport ( MQTT ) protocol as a communication channel to control Windows and Linux systems. The emerging malware family, codenamed BambooToken , is assessed to be active since at least February 2023 and put to use in attacks targeting organizations across Asia and South America. Activity linked to the malware has been detected as recently as July 2026. Lumen Black Lotus Labs said it discovered the previously undocumented malware on VirusTotal in early 2026, with evidence pointing to a skilled threat actor that has managed to stay undetected until now. The initial access vector used to deliver BambooToken remains undetermined. "The actor used Tendyron's 'OnKey' software to sideload agents into targeted machines," Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Tendyron creates hardware-based tokens employed in high-se...

With artificial intelligence (AI) shrinking the window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation and lowering the barrier to entry for bad actors, new findings from Sysdig show that skilled human operators can move just as swiftly after gaining initial access. In one instance highlighted by the cloud security company, the threat actor pivoted from a vulnerable Marimo notebook to an SSH bastion host in eight seconds using a custom Python toolkit they "wrote and debugged by hand" without any AI agent in the loop. "Eight seconds is the kind of speed we expect to see in AI-assisted attacks," the Sysdig Threat Research Team said . "This operator got there on skill alone, and along the way walked straight past a trap that every agentic threat actor (ATA) we've profiled against this same CVE fell into. Not only can skilled human attackers move at machine speed, but they can also often better evade defenders' detections." The attack chain ha...

Introduction Security teams have gotten pretty good at testing against what can hurt them. Can this EDR agent catch this payload? Will my organization fail the phishing simulation? Does this SIEM rule fire on this particular technique? And, in more mature organizations, this testing happens continuously rather than as a one-off exercise. But no matter how much you validate against these exposures, it doesn't fix the main problem the industry is facing: these are isolated, disconnected testing.  And real attackers, increasingly AI Powered ones, don't test techniques one at a time. They chain them. A phishing email leads to a credential harvest. That harvest leads to an initial foothold. The foothold leads to privilege escalation, then lateral movement, then data staging, then exfiltration… until the damage is irreversibly done.  Any one of those individual steps might be something a security control is theoretically capable of catching - but there's just too many po...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a mass-scanning campaign that has targeted Vite deployments siphon sensitive data. The first is an automated effort aimed at internet-exposed Vite development servers that's designed to steal cloud credentials, configurations from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure instances, and infrastructure state files, per F5 Labs . The credential harvesting activity, observed in August 2026, has been found to leverage an exploit for CVE-2026-39364 (CVSS score: 8.2), a high-severity security flaw in Vite that could permit an unauthenticated attacker to bypass security restrictions via query parameter manipulation and leak sensitive data, including files specified by server.fs.deny. "On the Vite dev server, files that should be blocked by server.fs.deny (e.g., .env, *.crt) can be retrieved with HTTP 200 responses when query parameters such as ?raw, ?import&raw, or ?import&url&inline are appended," Vite s...

A critical vulnerability in LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise could let a low-privilege website user gain root access on a shared-hosting server, cPanel warned in an  advisory published on September 14 . On such servers, many customers' sites run on a single machine, and an attacker with one of those hosting accounts could exploit the flaw to access or alter other sites and the server itself, according to the advisory. cPanel said it had received notice of the flaw, which affects versions before 6.3.7, and urged administrators to update to that release, which LiteSpeed  published on September 11 . The flaw can bypass the controls that keep hosting accounts apart, including  CageFS , cPanel said. CageFS is a CloudLinux tool that gives each hosting account a restricted view of the file system, so it cannot see other accounts or the server's configuration files. Neither cPanel's advisory nor LiteSpeed's release notes describe how the flaw works. LiteSpeed's an...

Cisco has warned that a new critical vulnerability impacting AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76461 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been described as a case of insufficient validation in the email parsing logic that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to run arbitrary commands with root privileges on the underlying operating system. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted email message that contains malicious SQL statements through an affected device," Cisco said in a Monday advisory. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary SQL statements, leading to command execution with root privileges on the underlying operating system." The shortcoming affects Cisco Secure Email Gateway, both physical and virtual, regardless of device configuration. However, the networkin...

A Chinese threat actor has been attributed to a spear-phishing campaign that exploits recently patched security flaws in Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows to deliver a malicious JavaScript backdoor called GRIMWEDGE . Volexity, which is tracking the threat cluster under the moniker UTA0560 , said the activity targeted multiple non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on September 1, 2026. "The emails contained a message encouraging the users to click a link that led to the website of a U.S.-based university," researchers Ankur Saini, Conor Quigley, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, and Tom Lancaster said . "These links abused a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on the website, redirecting recipients to threat-actor-controlled infrastructure hosting a multi-stage exploit chain." The exploit chain, as previously highlighted by Proofpoint, involves three separate flaws – two in Chrome and one in Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC). It first ab...

Researchers have disclosed a new hardware attack, called DDRop , that breaks the memory protection in Intel and AMD confidential computing by silently dropping writes to a server's memory, so the processor keeps reading old encrypted data as if it were current. The attack requires an attacker who already controls the server's software and can briefly access the machine to insert a small circuit board, called an interposer , between the processor and a memory module. The interposer costs under $200 to build. DDRop works against Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP, the hardware that cloud services use to keep customer data private while it is in use, even from the cloud provider. Confidential computing keeps a server's memory encrypted, so that even someone with physical access to the machine sees only scrambled data. To cover the large amount of memory that a cloud server uses, though, these designs omit a guarantee called freshness. The processor can confi...

An attacker was operating inside the network of 3BB , one of Thailand's largest broadband providers, and maintained remote control of internal machines using a legitimate management tool called MeshCentral, threat intelligence firm Hunt.io said. The company uncovered the intrusion by examining a server the attacker had left open on the internet, which held the attacker's own tools and a list of machines already under their control. The researchers captured the exposed server on June 3, 2026, while the operation was still live. The tools on it had been run from a computer inside 3BB's own network, and one recovered file showed the attacker gaining full administrative control, known as root, of an internal server. To maintain that access, the attacker installed MeshCentral , a free tool that IT teams typically use to manage computers remotely. The recovered settings show it was configured as a hidden backdoor, with the agents reporting to a control server that the atta...

A flaw in Telegram Desktop let a bot's message plant hidden JavaScript inside chats that users exported to HTML files, security researchers at ExPatch said in a  writeup  published on September 12. In Telegram, the message looked ordinary, with a link button, and the script ran only when someone opened the export file in a web browser. It could then copy every message in that file to an attacker-controlled server, or rewrite what the page displayed. Telegram shipped  a fix  in July, but the app update does not update files exported with earlier versions, so old HTML exports can still carry the script. Telegram Desktop, Telegram's app for Windows, macOS, and Linux, can save a single chat or all chats from an account as HTML pages that open in a browser. Bots can attach rows of buttons under their messages, which Telegram calls inline keyboards, and the bot chooses the text shown on each button. Until the fix, the export code wrote that button text directly ...

A suspected Chinese threat actor tracked as Red Heron has been attributed to the rapid exploitation of a recently disclosed security vulnerability in Gitea to compromise internet-facing instances as part of a multi-national campaign. "Red Heron scanned 1,386 Gitea instances across seven countries and maintained a separate dataset of 477 Taiwan-based systems," Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) said in an analysis. "The activity progressed from source-code theft to persistent access, credential collection, and lateral movement, including root-level access to a three-node Proxmox cluster." The activity is said to have resulted in confirmed compromises affected organizations in Canada (2), Argentina (1), Taiwan (4), the U.S. (4), Qatar (1), and Sri Lanka (1), with the threat actor using Simplified Chinese labels to classify targets spanning defense, election, energy, aerospace, telecommunications, government, public safety, and research sectors. The Singapore ...

WordPress has announced it's launching an automated security review for every release of a plugin before it's distributed through the WordPress.org update API so as to analyze it for potential security issues and ensure there are no risks involved. "New plugins are reviewed before they enter the directory, but updates ship continuously after that," David Perez, WordPress Official Plugin Repository Team Co-Lead, said . "A plugin can be secure today and introduce a vulnerability, or malicious code, in a future release." WordPress said the lack of a "consistent review step" between the commit of a release and the release of a plugin to downstream users meant that it could open the door for malicious attacks. The content management system (CMS) platform noted that its automated review detected a backdoor committed to a release of a plugin with about 20,000 active installations on July 28, 2026. Because the release was within a cooldown window, ...

AI keeps showing up in the wrong places. Attackers are using it to speed up exploits, test defenses, and automate more of the job. Some models are also crossing lines on their own. That is not a great combination. The rest of the week is more familiar: old bugs still working, fresh exploit chains, exposed systems, weak defaults, and simple paths that should have been harder to abuse. A few of these stories are clever. Most are just easy. Here’s what mattered this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenAI Agents Behind May 2026 Attack on RubyGems — The "major malicious attack" that targeted RubyGems in May 2026 was the work of a swarm of OpenAI agents, according to researchers. The event was driven by a cluster of OpenAI agents that engaged in en masse publication of thousands of packages to RubyGems in May and June 2026. "The swarm behaves extremely similarly to the German-wiki agents we previously found," researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von...

There's a lot of noise around AI and cybersecurity right now. What’s actually important is far simpler, if often lost in the hubbub. Vulnerability discovery is getting faster and happening at a much greater scale, while defenders still have to work out which findings actually deserve their action. In the first half of 2026, a whopping 35,853 CVEs were published, roughly 49% more than in the year before. Yet only 495 were catalogued as exploited in the wild during that same period, and 116 were already under attack on the day they became public. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s own disclosure data shows Mythos-class models surfacing 26,153 vulnerability candidates in open-source software, with only 421 of those getting patched upstream. That small exploited subset is a very important point. It tells defenders that treating every vulnerability with a High or Critical CVSS rating as an emergency is not only impossible, it’s actually the wrong model . The critical task security teams fa...