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An unknown threat actor exploited a recently disclosed high-severity security flaw impacting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN as a zero-day at least two months before it was publicly disclosed, according to new findings from Google-owned Mandiant. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20245 (CVSS score: 7.8), allows an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands with elevated privileges by supplying a crafted file to the affected system by taking advantage of the device's insufficient validation of user-supplied input. Earlier this month, Cisco acknowledged that it became aware of exploitation of this vulnerability, adding that a malicious actor must have netadmin privileges on an affected system to pull off a successful attack. "Throughout the intrusion, to maintain operational security and avoid detection, the threat actor consistently employed anti-forensic techniques, selectively deleting and restoring system configuration files that were modified during the...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday warned of active exploitation of a critical security flaw impacting Lantronix EDS5000 Series devices, urging Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to apply the fixes by June 26, 2026. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-67038 (CVSS score: 9.8), a code injection flaw that could result in the execution of arbitrary commands with elevated privileges. "The HTTP RPC module executes a shell command to write logs when the user's authentication fails," according to the vulnerability's description on CVE.org. "The username is directly concatenated with the command without any sanitization. This allows attackers to inject arbitrary OS commands into the username parameter. Injected commands are executed with root privileges." The security flaw was disclosed by Forescout Research Vedere Labs in April 2026 as part of a broader set of vulnerabilities collectively cod...

A coordinated law enforcement operation, in partnership with private sector companies, including Bitdefender, Bitsight, ESET, and Microsoft, has resulted in the takedown of criminal infrastructure powering Amadey and StealC. "The main common goal was to disrupt the 'assembly lines' cybercriminals use to launch ransomware, financial fraud, and attacks on critical infrastructure," Europol said in a statement. The development comes days after authorities from the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, and the U.S. disrupted malicious infrastructure associated with SocGholish and cleaned up nearly 15,000 infected WordPress websites. As part of the two-week-long action, cryptocurrency assets of criminal origin valued at more than $47 million have been identified, flagged, and restricted from use. In addition, as many as 27 million stolen login credentials have been recovered, and the malware distribution network has been hindered by dismantling 326 servers and 142 domains...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new class of CI/CD workflow weakness that allows attackers to hijack workflows and compromise open-source supply chains. The "critical exploitable pattern" has been codenamed Cordyceps by Novee Security. The issue can allow full attacker control of repositories at dozens of the largest organizations worldwide, including Microsoft, Google, Apache, and Cloudflare. "The flaw is exploitable by any unauthenticated user," Elad Meged, founding engineer and security researcher at Novee Security, said . "No org membership or special privileges; a free account is enough to forge approvals, push code, or steal credentials." The penetration-testing company's scan of about 30,000 high-impact repositories has revealed more than 300 to be fully exploitable, enabling attacker-controlled code execution, credential theft, and supply chain compromise, which can have severe downstream impacts. The core of the problem tri...

We are standing at the end of an era we never thought to mourn: the era of human-speed threats . For years, cybersecurity moved to a rhythm organizations could follow. A researcher found a bug, a CVE was cataloged, a vendor navigated a patch cycle, and weeks or even months later, a fix was deployed. In this era, dwell time was measured in days, sometimes weeks. We are now approaching an inflection point in the threat timeline unlike any that came before it. The trigger was the emergence of frontier agentic models in early 2026: AI entities that no longer just suggested code, but actively tested it. These models don't merely accelerate the offensive lifecycle; they radically compress the time between discovery and weaponization. The predator wearing a productivity badge There is a reason the old saying warns about the wolf in sheep’s clothing. In the scramble to stay competitive, organizations have handed AI the keys to the deepest layers of their infrastructure: granting L...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday announced the seizure of a cloud computing account put to use by subsidiaries of Cambodia-based corporate conglomerate HuiOne Group, as the Treasury unveiled fresh sanctions against nine individuals and 26 entities linked to Prince Group . "These subsidiaries are alleged to have assisted individuals and organizations in transferring proceeds of cryptocurrency investment frauds, cyber scams, and other criminal activities on cryptocurrency blockchains and allowing for the conversion of the proceeds of these schemes to the legitimate banking sector undetected," the DoJ said. The seized account, the Justice Department added, hosted backend infrastructure for the subsidiaries, including HuiOne Guarantee (aka Haowang Guarantee), which operated an illicit Telegram-based marketplace that engaged in transactions with billions of dollars between 2021 and 2025 by peddling a wide range of crimeware tools. These included personal an...

Threat actors have begun to exploit a recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM) and Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition (Unified CM SME). The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20230 (CVSS score: 8.6), is a case of improper input validation for specific HTTP requests that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct server-side request forgery (SSRF) attacks through an affected device. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to an affected device," Cisco said in an advisory released earlier this month. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to write files to the underlying operating system that could be used later to elevate to root." In a post shared on X earlier this week, Defused Cyber said it observed active exploitation of the vulnerability in attacks. "This is currently being exploited from a single sourc...

A Russian-speaking initial access broker (IAB) driven by financial gain is assessed to be behind a large-scale credential-harvesting operation known as FortiBleed that has targeted over 430,000 FortiGate firewalls globally. The campaign , active since February 2026, involves collecting credential lists, searching for exposed services, brute-forcing accessible systems, and deploying bespoke sniffers on compromised firewalls. "Once deployed, these sniffers capture cleartext and hashed credentials from traffic passing through compromised devices," SOCRadar said [PDF] in a fresh report. "The actors then crack, validate, and reuse the credentials against Active Directory domains and other exposed services." Central to the operation is a Golang-based tool called FortigateSniffer that takes advantage of the FortiOS built-in diagnostic command -diagnose sniffer packet to passively capture authentication traffic from the infected appliances. Appearing in both Window...

Security firm AIR built a fake AI agent skill, pushed it through a popular skill marketplace and an Instagram ad, and says it reached roughly 26,000 agents, including some on corporate accounts. Every skill security scanner the firm tested it against marked it safe. The payload was harmless by design: it collected the user's email address and did nothing else. The point was to show that none of the signals people lean on to trust a skill caught it: not the scanners, not the GitHub stars, not the open-source reputation. A skill is a bundle of instructions an agent loads into its own context and follows with roughly the authority of a user prompt. That trust is the whole problem, and it is the reason skill-scanning tools exist in the first place. The skill, named  brand-landingpage , claimed to build a landing page using Google's Stitch design tool, aimed squarely at non-technical users. To make it look credible, AIR went after two trust signals: GitHub stars an...

President Trump signed an  executive order on June 22  setting hard deadlines for federal agencies to move high-value assets and high-impact systems to post-quantum cryptography. Key establishment must move by December 31, 2030; digital signatures by December 31, 2031. EO 14409 leaves national security systems on a separate track. The deadlines matter because of a threat that does not need a working quantum computer today. Adversaries can collect encrypted U.S. data now and decrypt it later, once a large-scale quantum machine exists, the risk is known as  "harvest now, decrypt later" . The order describes that risk directly and pulls the government's PQC timeline forward by four to five years. The prior government-wide target, set by the 2022 National Security Memorandum 10, ran to 2035. The two deadlines line up with the standards NIST  finalized in August 2024 . Key establishment uses FIPS 203, the ML-KEM algorithm formerly called CRYSTALS-Kyber. D...

GitHub is moving to strengthen software supply chain security by updating " actions/checkout " to block pwn request attacks that exploit the risky use of the "pull_request_target workflow" trigger to run malicious code with the workflow's full privileges. Effective June 18, 2026, the latest version of "actions/checkout," the official GitHub action for checking out a repository into the workflow's runner, refuses common pwn request patterns by default. The change is expected to be backported to all currently supported major versions on July 16, 2026. "Actions/checkout v7 refuses to fetch fork pull request code in pull_request_target and workflow_run workflows (the latter only when workflow_run.event is a pull_request* event)," it added . The refusal occurs when the pull request is from a fork, and any of the following criteria is met, unless workflow authors explicitly opt out of it by setting the " allow-unsafe-pr-checkout...

Every weapon begins as an extension of the hand that holds it. The spear lengthened the reach of the arm. The bow sent the point flying without the throw. The rifle placed a man's death a quarter mile beyond his sight, and the aircraft carried that death across oceans. At each turn, the distance between the warrior and the wound grew wider, and yet one thing never moved: a human chose the target, and a human struck the blow. For the entire history of conflict, the cyber realm included, the hand has remained on the weapon. Offensive AI is the moment the weapon learns to aim itself. For three years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been an extension of the pen. It drafted the phishing email, proposed the exploit, sketched the malicious function, and then, like every tool that came before it, handed the work back to a human to carry out. In 2023, I published a whitepaper at the SANS Technology Institute showing how a person of almost no skill could coax a chatbot into producing m...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of malicious npm packages that are designed to deliver a Windows-based remote access trojan (RAT). The list of identified packages, is below - aes-decode-runner-pro (145 downloads) postcss-minify-selector (256 downloads) postcss-minify-selector-parser (615 downloads) All the packages were published over the past month by an npm user named " abdrizak " and continue to be available for download from npm as of writing.  "Aes-decode-runner-pro and postcss-minify-selector-parser both present themselves as layered AES/custom-codec packages and depend on the legitimate postcss-selector-parser," JFrog said in an analysis. "Postcss-minify-selector presents itself as a PostCSS selector minifier and depends on postcss-minify-selector-parser." As for "postcss-minify-selector-parser," the name is a reference to " postcss-selector-parser ," a widely used npm library with more than 1...

Direct messages sent via WhatsApp are being used to distribute malicious Visual Basic Script (VBScript) files that lead to the installation of legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software. Per findings from Kaspersky, the active campaign is targeting users of WhatsApp Desktop and WhatsApp Web across Malaysia, Brazil, India, Mexico, Singapore, the U.K., Spain, Taiwan, Australia, Russia, and Vietnam. The highest concentration of victims has been reported in Malaysia. "The threat actor uses deceptive file names masquerading as business and financial documents to persuade recipients to download and execute the attachment," security researcher Fareed Radzi said . "Once executed, the VBScript initiates a multi-stage infection chain that ultimately results in the installation of legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software, enabling remote access to the victim's system." It's suspected that the threat actor behind the operation ma...

OpenAI on Monday said it's releasing an improved version of its GPT‑5.5‑Cyber model to trusted defenders as part of the Daybreak initiative  the artificial intelligence (AI) company announced last month. Calling GPT‑5.5‑Cyber its "strongest model yet for finding and helping patch software vulnerabilities," OpenAI said the model can "sustain deeper analysis across large codebases" to identify security issues, validate them in a controlled environment, and develop and test patches. In tandem, the tech upstart is releasing an update to the Codex Security plugin⁠ to speed up the process of discovering and patching vulnerabilities in existing systems, alongside preventing new vulnerabilities from entering production codebases. "Developers can run deep scans or review recent changes, generate reports with severity, affected code locations, validation evidence, and remediation guidance, trace attack paths, build threat models, validate findings, and genera...

Multiple WordPress plugins from ShapedPlugin were compromised in a supply chain attack after unknown threat actors managed to tamper with the official release channels and push backdoor code. "Attackers compromised the vendor's build and distribution pipeline, injecting backdoor code into Pro plugin releases distributed through official licensed update channels," Wordfence said in an analysis published last week. The incident affects the following plugins - Product Slider Pro for WooCommerce (versions before 3.5.4) Real Testimonials Pro (version 3.2.5) Smart Post Show Pro (versions before 4.0.2) As mentioned above, it's worth emphasizing that the compromise only affects Pro plugin builds distributed through the vendor's Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) infrastructure via account.shapedplugin[.]com. The free versions of the plugins on WordPress.org are not impacted. The supply chain compromise associated with Product Slider Pro for WooCommerce has...

A heap over-read in the Squid web proxy can leak another user's cleartext HTTP request, including any credentials or session tokens it carries, to anyone already allowed to send traffic through the same proxy. The bug traces to a 1997 FTP-parsing change and is still live in Squid's default configuration. Researchers at Calif.io  disclosed it in June  and named it Squidbleed ( CVE-2026-47729 ), after Heartbleed, which leaked memory the same way. Squid describes this as an attack by a  trusted client : someone already permitted to use the proxy, not any random host on the internet. That matches Squid's usual home, shared networks like schools, offices, and public Wi-Fi. In those setups, the attacker is just another user of the same proxy. The leak also only reaches traffic that Squid can read. Normal HTTPS rides an opaque CONNECT tunnel, so Squid never sees inside it; the exposed traffic is cleartext HTTP, plus TLS-terminating setups where Squid decrypts and inspect...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of four vulnerabilities in Dify , an open-source agentic workflow platform with more than 146,000 GitHub stars , that could allow attackers to stealthily read artificial intelligence (AI) conversions from other customers' applications without requiring authentication. The vulnerabilities have been collectively codenamed DifyTap by Zafran Security. "Two were critical severity, two required no authentication, and three carried cross-tenant impact on Dify's multi-tenant cloud service, allowing one customer's data to be exposed to another," researchers Ido Shani and Gal Zaban said . The security defects could have allowed attackers to read private AI chats from other customers' applications, creating a covert exfiltration channel for every message and model response. They also made it possible to traverse Dify's internal Plugin Daemon API from unauthenticated requests and trigger cross-tenant internal ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that delivers CastleStealer by means of a previously unreported malware loader dubbed OXLOADER . According to Elastic Security Labs, the campaign leverages malicious Google Ads as a starting point to distribute the malware. Evidence indicates that the threat actor is likely Russian-speaking and financially motivated, owing to the presence of explicit exclusions to prevent infecting machines located in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region. The campaign has been codenamed REF8372. "The loader uses several obfuscation layers (control-flow flattening, opaque predicates, mixed Boolean-Arithmetic), self-modifying decryption stubs, and abuses the Windows .reloc section to stage shellcode," researchers Daniel Stepanic and Jia Yu Chan said in a technical breakdown. The attack begins when unsuspecting users enter queries such as "lts version of node.js" on search engines like Google, red...

Google has set September 30, 2026, as the day it begins enforcing  Android developer verification  in the first four countries, and the major device-maker app stores are in from the start. On that date, certified Android phones in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand will block normal installs of apps whose developers have not registered an identity with Google, whether the app comes from Google Play or the stores run by Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, Honor, and Transsion. Certified devices are the ones that ship with Google's services and Play Protect, which, by F-Droid's count, is more than 95 percent of Android devices outside China. Most users will not notice, which is the point. Apps from verified developers keep installing as before. The friction lands on apps from developers Google has not verified, and is hardest on the independent and open-source channels, built on not needing Google's permission to ship. Developers distributing through those stores ne...