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The South Asian cyber espionage group known as Bitter (aka APT-C-08, APT-Q-37, Hazy Tiger, Orange Yali, T-APT-17, and TA397) has been observed targeting South Asian organizations with a previously unreported remote access trojan called PapRAT. "PapRAT has both C++ and Rust implementations," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said . "Its capabilities include command execution, file uploads and downloads, file deletion, directory and drive enumeration, and screenshot capture. The Rust variant adds PowerShell execution and other commands." The campaign is notable for making use of three different infection chains - A Windows Shortcut (LNK) file that abuses the native "ftp.exe" utility to run scripts and create scheduled tasks designed to maintain contact with a command-and-control (C2) server. A VHDX disk image containing a LNK file that launches a lure Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, while running an MSI installer in the background to d...

A system doesn't always need a complicated bug to let someone in. Sometimes, a blank password is enough. That's one of the bigger stories this week. And it gets worse when the tools meant to keep systems updated or running safely become part of the attack. Elsewhere, attackers are hiding inside normal web traffic, stealing credentials from network devices, and finding new uses for exposed systems. AI is helping some of them move faster, but old mistakes are doing plenty of the work too. Even forgotten settings and small changes made months ago are coming back to cause trouble. There's a lot packed into this week's news, including some strange research findings, fresh attacks, and a few warnings worth taking seriously. Here's the full recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenSSH Flaw Sees Exploitation Attempts — Threat actors are attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security flaw impacting OpenSSH that can enable sign-ins to accounts that have no password set....

The login systems behind two car brands' mobile apps could be taken over completely, two security researchers found, allowing them to access any customer's account and, for an owner with a connected car, unlock the doors and start the engine. Both apps signed customers in through ForgeRock , an identity platform now part of Ping Identity , and on those servers the researchers reached an administrator console that still used its default password. They tested the full attack only on their own and consenting owners' cars in the United States, in February 2026, and both systems were fixed about two hours after they reported the problem. Shubham Shah and Sam Curry published their work late last week. They had started with the apps: both brands signed customers in through the same platform, which runs in two parts: one for login and one, called OpenIDM , that holds customer records. OpenIDM comes with a built-in administrator console powered by the Apache Felix tool. For...

Some people who set up a Keplr crypto wallet with their Google or Apple account have had money stolen by an attacker. Keplr uses a company called Web3Auth to run that Google and Apple sign-in. The attacker used a security flaw at that company to reach the wallets, both companies said late last week. Web3Auth then used the attacker's own route to empty other at-risk wallets before the attacker got to them, it said. It moved that money, with help from the wallet maker, into recovery wallets for safekeeping. So an empty balance may mean the money was rescued, not stolen. Wallets made with a recovery phrase (a backup list of 12 or 24 words) or a hardware wallet are not affected, the wallet maker said. It has paused Google and Apple sign-in while it investigates. What Affected Users Should Do The wallet maker has given this  user guidance  for accounts created with Google or Apple login: Do not send new funds to the account. Do not re-import the account or recr...

Everyone running LNbits , a free, open-source Bitcoin Lightning wallet system, should shut down their servers now because of a wave of attacks, the project said yesterday. It has several security fixes to release and asked operators to be careful until they are out. One operator said new accounts used an exploit to withdraw 2,285,545 satoshis, about 0.023 bitcoin, from his server before he could stop it. The shutdown notice came about 80 minutes after a first, narrower warning. That warning asked operators to disable Paywall, an add-on that makes people pay to view content, while the project looked into a possible bug. As of 09:00 UTC today, the project had not released a fixed version. On X, it had not canceled the notice, offered another option, or told operators how to check whether their servers were hit before they were shut down. Ben Arc, an LNbits developer, said in a  patch estimate  yesterday that patches "should be merged and available within 24-48hrs." Cou...

A single attacker using AI agents pulled emergency dispatch records covering seven Taipei districts, researchers at Acronis's Threat Research Unit said last week. The agents also found a Taipei fire department platform exposing patient data from 2018, including ECG readings and ambulance video footage, without a login. The researchers are highly confident that the attacker is a single person based in Hualien City, Taiwan. He aimed the agents at hundreds of organizations in at least 11 countries, including emergency services, banks, universities and military systems. The agents collected data or accessed systems at about 10 of them in Taiwan, Mexico and Thailand. The evidence comes from the attacker's own server, which initially appeared to be a misconfigured development system. It turned out to be his operational attack platform, containing more than 90,000 files, including the agents' conversations, his command history, hacking tools, credentials, and victims' d...

The OpenAI engineer who was arrested and charged last month for planting a covert audio recording device in the company's office has pleaded not guilty. According to reports from Bloomberg and CNBC , Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan made an appearance in San Francisco federal court on Friday, where he entered the plea. His next hearing is scheduled for November 17, 2026. If proven guilty, the 35-year-old faces a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, followed by three years of supervised release. He has been held without bail since his arrest on October 9, 2026. Late last month, a grand jury indicted Alfozan on a single count of interception of oral communications. Prosecutors allege that the former OpenAI employee placed a "sophisticated recording device" in an executive OpenAI conference room in what has been described as an attempt to unlawfully record sensitive conversations. He was arrested three days before he, along with his wife and s...

U.S. government agencies have warned that threat actors are actively targeting industrial refrigeration and cold-chain monitoring systems globally with an aim to cause service disruptions, fire hazards, and loss of inventory. "The actors may exploit vulnerabilities or weaknesses in unpatched or internet-accessible controllers to remotely alter settings and force units into continuous heating and defrost cycles, which can cause widespread inventory loss and equipment hazards," according to a joint advisory. According to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Department of Transportation (DOT), threat actors are likely to exploit authentication bypasses, arbitrary code injection, and weak configurations to gain access to these systems and cause the following effects - Change of temperature, which, in turn, could affect the service l...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a high-severity vulnerability impacting SonicWall SonicOS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports that it said may have been exploited in real-world attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-19868 (CVSS score: 7.1 / 7.5), has been described as an authentication reinforcement vulnerability via alternate authentication methods. "An authentication enforcement vulnerability in SonicOS SSL-VPN service may allow a user with valid credentials for an alternate authentication method to bypass SAML authentication controls. Successful exploitation may also bypass SAML-enforced multi-factor authentication (MFA)," SonicWall said in a Friday advisory. The company also acknowledged that it "investigated a report indicating potential exploitation of this vulnerability," urging customers to update to the latest version as soon as possible. SonicWall did not di...

Passwords and API keys that developers typed into commands they approved in Claude Code are sitting in public GitHub repositories, where anyone can read them. When a user selects " Yes, and don't ask again ," Anthropic's AI coding assistant can save the command, word-for-word, including the secret, in a project settings file. Software security company Apiiro said yesterday that 1,122 public copies of that file hold at least one secret, though it did not test whether any still work. One company the researchers notified earlier this week confirmed its key had been live. The file is .claude/settings.local.json. Removing it from a project does not undo the leak, because older versions stay in git history and in forks of the repository. The researchers' advice is to rotate first: change every password, token, and key the file has ever held, then clean up. How a Secret Lands in the File By default, Claude Code asks before it runs most shell commands. If the u...

Some WordPress sites can still be attacked while they install the fix for an actively exploited flaw, according to Umut Bayram, the Picus Security researcher who found it. The update that installs the fix still unpacks its files using the site's old, unpatched code, so an attacker who strikes at the right moment can run code on the server. The researcher advises blocking web access to the site's wp-content/upgrade folder before updating. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-119977 , affects WordPress 4.7 through 7.1.3. During a core update that uses a complete package, WordPress unpacks a copy of the new version into a temporary folder inside wp-content/upgrade. That copy includes the WordPress installer, and the web server can usually reach it. An attacker with no account who can determine the folder's name and access the installer before WordPress deletes the copy can end up running code on the server. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) ad...

Threat actors are attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security flaw impacting OpenSSH that can enable sign-ins to accounts that have no password set, according to Previdian . The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-123158 (CVSS score: 8.1) and codenamed SSHole (or *sshole), impacts Linux systems that run OpenSSH on the musl C library with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) disabled, including Alpine Linux's default OpenSSH server configuration. An unauthenticated attacker can supply an oversized password to access accounts that are deliberately configured without usable passwords, without having to steal credentials or SSH keys. The issue, discovered by security researcher Ozgun Kultekin, has been addressed in OpenSSH 10.6p2 . The underlying issue dates back to a patch introduced in 2016 to fix a username enumeration vulnerability tracked as CVE-2016-6210 . Under specific conditions, the password-handling behavior in OpenSSH mistakenly interprets a failed pas...

OpenAI on Thursday unveiled GPT‑6 Cyber , which it described as a major step forward in security research that brings together stronger cybersecurity capabilities with a step-change improvement in model alignment. The new model is "more capable at finding and fixing vulnerabilities, and far more reliable staying within the boundaries researchers set," OpenAI said . It has classified the model as Critical in cybersecurity under its Preparedness Framework. The artificial intelligence (AI) company said GPT‑6 Cyber is also better than its predecessors like GPT‑5.6 Cyber and GPT‑6 Astra when it comes to following task boundaries and avoiding exploiting out-of-scope services in 99.93% of cases, up from 94.49% for GPT-5.6 Cyber. It also scores 48.5% on ExploitGym, a cybersecurity benchmark that evaluates the capabilities of AI agents to autonomously turn known software vulnerabilities into functioning, real-world exploits. In comparison, GPT-5.6 Cyber scored 32.1%. OpenAI ...

A fix for CVE-2026-83844 , a remote code execution flaw in Windows Paint, is now in the Microsoft Store. Paint gets this fix only through a Store update, not through Windows updates. The fixed build, 11.2609.401.0, was the newest Paint build in all ten countries The Hacker News checked today. The flaw is an out-of-bounds read that could let an attacker run code over a network. Microsoft rates it as Important, with a CVSS score of 8.1, and says that a successful attack requires a deep understanding of the target system. The flaw was not known to be exploited or publicly disclosed when the company published it on October 13. Brian Vitko of RFF, a device-management software maker, checked which Paint builds the Store offered in six countries earlier this week. He found that the newest in each was 11.2605.81.0, a build without the fix. His test virtual machine has since moved to the fixed build on its own, through Store auto-update. That is one machine, and how quickly other PCs w...

A browser extension that can run scripts on claude.ai could make Claude Desktop run code on a person's computer, researchers at Forever Security, an endpoint security company, showed in a test. The attack needs Dispatch , a Claude feature that lets people send tasks from their phone to Claude Desktop. The flaw that makes this possible can still be exploited, the researchers said earlier this week. Claude Desktop is an AI agent that can run commands on the computer where it is installed. The researchers found that Dispatch also accepted an ordinary signed-in session on claude.ai, the Claude website, even though the site showed no link to it. That let an extension running on the site send Claude Desktop instructions as if the user had sent them. The researchers say Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, told them on October 13 that Dispatch would be retired, with the end of October as the target. The Dispatch help page, last updated late last week, does not mention a retire...

An update on Athena, and some unsolicited predictions on what's coming next On Saturday, Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier . I agree with him. Go read it if you haven't. I've spent the summer looking at what these models find, and the gap he describes between what they can do and what the rest of us are ready for is the one I've been staring at since May. The hardest piece of his plan is the one that asks governments to coordinate. They're in a difficult spot: regulate too little and a US company accidentally builds the weapon, regulate too much and it gets built somewhere else, and open source isn't governable either way. Where governments can act is on consumption: not what the models can do, but what happens to what they find. Who gets a vulnerability first, how fast a fix reaches the people running the code, whether the operators who can't move on an attacker's timeline get a head start. That's what Gold Eagle is. It matters...

Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis has revealed that its ongoing investigation into the agentic cyber attack targeting its systems also exposed names, usernames, password hashes and live tokens for all users. "While we investigated, we removed access to Reactor and Data Solutions," the company said. "At this time we continue to have no evidence that any investigations data has been accessed or Chainalysis attribution data has been manipulated." Chainalysis said it has implemented additional proactive monitoring systems to detect unusual activity, adding it took the Know Your Transaction (KYT) user interface and API offline, alongside other address screening products and the login page. Previously, Chainalysis said it was probing what it described as an "ongoing multi-front cyber attack," leading to the discovery of an "on-path attack" that exposed a subset of customer passwords. The company said the attack vector has since been addres...

A backdoor has been found hiding in the web server that runs Control Web Panel (CWP), a free panel for managing Linux hosting servers, researchers at QiAnXin's XLab said this week. The backdoored web server executes commands that attackers send via web requests, and those requests never appear in its access logs. Installing it takes root access, so the attackers must already control the server. The researchers, who named the backdoor cwpdoor , captured its installer, a shell script posing as a version update, on June 29. The installer handles only two versions of that web server, cwpsrv 1.15.10 and 1.24.0. The researchers do not yet know how attackers get the root access the installer needs. On September 30, an archive holding a copy of the backdoor was uploaded to VirusTotal from Brazil. The researchers say this indicates that "real victims already exist in the wild." They give no count of infected servers. The backdoor is cwpsrv itself, rebuilt with extra code...

Two flaws in Barracuda's Email Security Gateway , an email-filtering appliance, can be chained to run commands on it as root, its highest level of access, with no login required. The company released patches on Monday, and the security firm watchTowr detailed the attack chain on Thursday. One flaw, CVE-2026-116606 , is an authorization bypass. An unauthenticated attacker can use it to restore a crafted configuration backup and change the appliance's global settings. The other, CVE-2026-111560 , is a command injection. It runs commands as root but normally needs an administrator account, and on the Email Security Gateway the bypass gives an attacker that access. Chained, the two let an attacker reach root with no login. Affected Products and Fixes The authorization bypass affects only the Email Security Gateway. The command injection reaches five other products, but on those it still needs an administrator account. Mandiant, which assigned the two CVE records, rates...

Attackers can log in to accounts that have no password, such as SSH key-only accounts, on some Alpine Linux servers running the standard openssh-server package. They need network access to the server, an account name, and a password between 257 and 1,024 bytes long. OpenSSH, which rates the flaw critical, released version 10.6p2 today to block it. Alpine has published fixed packages for every release back to 3.16. The attack works when the OpenSSH server (sshd) checks passwords without the Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) interface, password logins are enabled, and at least one other account on the machine has a password. Alpine's openssh-server package is built without PAM, and password logins are on by default. The flaw comes from how sshd works with musl, the C library that Alpine is built on. Non-Linux systems, Linux systems built on glibc, and systems that check passwords through PAM are not affected, said Damien Miller of the OpenSSH project. He told anyone run...