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AI is helping development teams produce far more code, far faster. But security teams still have to review vulnerabilities, manage dependencies, prioritize fixes, and control risk at human speed. When software output jumps 10 to 50 times, the problem is no longer just finding vulnerabilities. It is keeping security from becoming the bottleneck, or worse, losing control of what gets shipped. In our latest webinar with Chainguard experts, “ The True Cost of Building at Machine Speed ,” you can now watch how security teams can keep AI-driven development fast without letting risk scale with it. For years, application security followed a familiar cycle: developers wrote code, scanners found problems, security teams prioritized them, and engineers fixed what mattered most. AI puts that model under pressure. If teams can suddenly create many times more code, security can also end up with many more components, dependencies, findings, and fixes to manage. More scanning alone does no...

Microsoft has disclosed that Storm-1175 , a financially motivated threat actor linked to China, has deployed a previously undocumented ransomware strain called StormEncryptor . The use of StormEncryptor marks a shift from the adversary's previous use of Medusa ransomware, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Team said. "StormEncryptor is written in C++ and appends the file name extension .encrypted to files it encrypts," Microsoft noted in a series of posts on Bluesky. "It then drops a ransom note named !!!README_FIRST!!!.txt to every scanned directory." Although the exact vulnerability exploited by the threat actor as part of this campaign is unclear, the tech giant said it likely involves the exploitation of CVE-2026-18577 , a newly disclosed security flaw in N-able N‑central, to obtain initial access. The vulnerability is assessed to be a patch bypass for CVE-2026-18556, both of which allow authentication bypass and account takeover in susceptible vers...

A lot of security problems still begin with someone doing a completely normal thing. Cloning a repo. Answering a call. Leaving a box exposed. Trusting the default. That pretty much covers the mood this week. Old bugs are back, supply chains are getting stranger, and some exploit paths are so short you wonder what was supposed to stop them in the first place. That’s only part of it. Here’s everything else that made the Monday recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week Anthropic's Model Attempts to Poison Open-Source Project — A new evaluation conducted by the U.K. AI Security Institute (AISI) found that AI models with access to the internet reached out into the real world to target individuals and organizations autonomously across 10 of the total of 122 runs. Of 19 such actions recorded, 17 originated from Anthropic's Mythos 5 and the remaining two involved OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol with cyber classifiers. In the most serious case, Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 spent 34 hours trying...

North Korea's state hackers are no longer content to type prompts into public chatbots. One of the country's main espionage groups has begun running artificial intelligence (AI) offline on its own servers, connecting document-search tools to files in its possession, and collecting the software parts needed to build AI into its malware. South Korean security firm Genians says it uncovered the setup after months of tracking and log analysis on infrastructure tied to Kimsuky, a hacking unit under North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau. Genians found no evidence that the group had trained an AI model of its own, and the firm does not offer that as reassurance. It describes an actor in a "research and knowledge acquisition" stage, assembling and testing existing tools rather than making new models, with the apparent aim of folding AI through the operation, from writing malware to analyzing data. For an intelligence unit that has spent years phishing governm...

Three separate research efforts last week demonstrated ways to defeat passkey protections without breaking the cryptography they rest on. Passkeys are designed to replace reusable passwords and resist phishing. The attacks instead reused signed authentication material that Windows had exposed, abused a cloud-synced passkey system from malware already on the victim's machine, and used a  Windows Hello for Business  key from a compromised user session without a fresh PIN or biometric check. None cracked the math. The impact is not the same in all three cases. SpecterOps showed a Windows and Microsoft Entra ID chain that could impersonate privileged users while satisfying phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA); that chain reused signed authentication material rather than stealing the authenticator's private key. Unit 42 showed attacks against  Google Password Manager in Chrome , including a path that recovers the private keys for a victim's synced p...

The threat actor known as Head Mare has been observed weaponizing security flaws in unpatched TrueConf servers once again in attacks targeting Russian companies spanning instrumentation, electronics, transport, energy, IT, and software development sectors. Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said it detected the attacks in July 2026. The activity involves exploiting a vulnerability chain in the TrueConf videoconferencing server to replace the original TrueConf client installers with poisoned versions that deliver the PhantomCore backdoor and remote access trojan (RAT) into susceptible systems. The vulnerabilities, tracked as KLCERT-26-057 and KLCERT-26-058, enable arbitrary code execution with elevated privileges. The attack impacts TrueConf server versions 5.3.x up to 5.3.9, 5.4.x up to 5.4.9, 5.5.x up to 5.5.5, and earlier. The attack chain is as follows - Attackers connect to the TrueConf server on TCP port 4307, which is open by default. Upon successful conn...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension named Solidity Pro ("solidity-pro") that has been observed delivering a browser wallet and credential stealer. The names of the extensions are below - helper-beeps.solidity-pro web3devtoolsx.solidity-pro Although neither of the extensions is now available on Open VSX, the GitHub repository for " web3devtoolsx/solidity-pro " continues to remain accessible as of writing. According to Yeeth Security , early iterations of the extensions – from 1.0.0 through v2.4.x – were found to beacon to Cloudflare Workers endpoints to retrieve an encrypted Python payload and execute it. Subsequent versions starting with v3.0.0, on the other hand, have shifted to a full-blown information stealer that can collect browser profiles, crypto wallets, source-control tokens, API keys, SSH keys, and Telegram bot tokens. The captured data is then exfiltrated via a Telegram bot u...

OpenAI has announced that it's pausing some "internal activities" involving its upcoming artificial intelligence (AI) model Astra after an internal evaluation found it had made significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity. In response to the discovery, the AI upstart said it's implementing security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities, such as isolated testing environments, restricted network and tool access, enhanced model weight protections and encryption, additional monitoring and detection capabilities, and sandboxed execution. "We are pausing internal activities involving Astra that do not yet meet these strengthened security control requirements," it said in a statement. "We have implemented universal monitoring for risky actions and misalignment across all agentic applications of Astra, including training and evaluation. Monitors evaluate the model's Chain of Thought and trigger a security re...

Attacker-controlled instructions can make Atlassian's Rovo assistant collect Jira or Confluence data that a signed-in user can access, then send it to an outside server. Two security firms found that behavior independently, by different routes. Only one of those routes is confirmed closed. PromptArmor , an AI security firm, hid the instructions in content Rovo reads. It said an uploaded file was enough to make the assistant gather internal data and send it out through a URL request, with no separate approval step. The firm published on August 5, 2026 and said the chain still worked with Rovo's web-search option switched off. That bypass is single-sourced, and the report establishes the finding's status only on that date; a later remediation is not confirmed here. Varonis Threat Labs put the instructions in a link instead. It found that the rovoChatPrompt URL parameter would preload attacker instructions into Rovo Chat, so one click from an authenticated user was enou...

New research shows content inside an email can escape its message boundary and interfere with the webmail interface. Across attack chains spanning Outlook, Gmail, Fastmail, Proton Mail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail, the techniques can capture passwords, take over third-party accounts, leak tokens, hijack trusted UI actions, and manipulate AI tools that read email. PortSwigger researcher Gareth Heyes presented the work at Black Hat USA 2026. One Outlook/Firefox chain spoofs a Microsoft sign-in screen and captures the password a recipient types. A Yahoo/AOL paste race can expose a Medium email-login token and let an attacker sign in as the victim. A Gmail/Cowork chain can exfiltrate a Slack token after prompt injection and user interaction. The paper presents proof-of-concept research and does not report malicious exploitation. Public PoCs remain available as of August 8. The researcher said Fastmail fixed two CSS mutation bugs and a Proton Mail proxy bypass stopped working when he re...

Metabase has warned that a maximum-severity security flaw impacting its business intelligence and data visualization software package has been exploited in the wild as a zero-day. The vulnerability (CVSS score: 10.0), which does not carry a CVE identifier, allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to inject arbitrary SQL into the Metabase application database, enabling them to gain administrator access to the instance. Armed with the elevated access, the attacker can change the application configuration, steal stored credentials for the connected databases, read any data accessible through those connections, and export data. "We recently identified that Metabase Cloud was attacked by someone utilizing an unknown ('0-day') security vulnerability in versions 1.58 and above," Metabase said in an advisory. Metabase Cloud instances have already been updated to the latest version. Users running self-hosted versions are advised to apply security patches released b...

N-able has released a fresh round of hotfixes for N‑central as part of its investigation into ongoing exploitation of a recently disclosed security flaw in the Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) product. "We are proactively expanding protections in response to ongoing monitoring of threat actors as they evolve their attack techniques," the company said. "This is not a duplicate of our previous communication. Hotfix 2 is required, even if you already applied the earlier hotfix. Hotfix 2 supersedes Hotfix 1 with additional hardening measures to further protect you and your customers." The disclosure comes as N-able acknowledged that it detected unusual activity within a customer's environment on July 31, 2026, leading to the discovery of unknown threat actors exploiting a then-zero-day flaw in the N‑central server (CVE-2026-18577, CVSS score: 8.2). It impacts all versions prior to 2026.3.1.7. It's worth noting that CVE-2026-18577 relates to an i...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added a critical-severity security flaw impacting Progress Kemp LoadMaster to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-8037 (CVSS score: 9.6), is a command injection flaw that could be weaponized to achieve arbitrary code execution on susceptible devices. "Progress LoadMaster contains a command injection vulnerability that allows an un-authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the LoadMaster appliance by exploiting unsanitized input in multiple command endpoints," CISA said . In an analysis published in June 2026, watchTowr Labs described the issue as present in a function named "escape_quotes()" within the load balancer application and that it stemmed from improper handling of user-supplied input, ultimately enabling command injection. Successful exploitation of the...

A cluster of nearly 800 malicious packages has been published to the npm registry as part of a new campaign designed to deliver cross-platform malware targeting Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. "These packages appear to use AI slop squatted, or randomly generated typo-squatting package names, but all of them deliver a powerful RAT and infostealer payload," OpenSourceMalware researcher Paul McCarty said . Unlike other npm-oriented software supply chain attacks that make use of lifecycle hooks like preinstall or postinstall to trigger the execution of malicious code, the newly identified packages come with a README that instructs developers to load them with require(), a built-in function to import modules, local files, and third-party packages. The attack leads to the execution of a downloader named WEL1DROPPER , which, when executed, identifies the host operating system and processor architecture and fetches a compatible payload from one of the three Cloudflare Workers...

ClickFix-style attacks are being used to deliver a Go-based malware capable of stealing cryptocurrency assets, as well as browser-stored passwords, Apple iCloud Keychain data, and cached credentials. The macOS-focused infection chain is designed to deliver a shell script that profiles the host and then fetches a macOS malware payload that's compatible with the computer's CPU architecture. "While the malware payload is capable of stealing passwords, its most interesting function is its capability to slowly deplete cryptocurrency accounts, siphoning their contents into accounts under the threat actor's control," Huntress security researcher Andrew Brandt said . The attack chain begins with pasting a ClickFix command into the Terminal app, triggering the execution of a Bash profiler/loader that collects extensive system details and then retrieves a Mach-O payload that matches the victim's processor architecture. The payload is a Go-based stealer that can ...

A recent wave of cyber attacks targeting financial services, private equity, and professional services has been attributed to a data extortion group known as UNC6671 . "UNC6671 continues to rely on voice phishing (vishing) to target enterprise employees, posing as IT help desk staff facilitating mandatory, urgent security migrations. Significantly, the threat actor often contacts employees via their personal mobile devices," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant said in a report. These calls are designed to trick victims into spoofed login portals where adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) infrastructure intercepts credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) tokens. The threat actors then leverage the captured data to establish session persistence and deploy automated Python and PowerShell scripts for data exfiltration from enterprise cloud environments and SaaS applications, including Microsoft 365 and Okta. According to the tech giant, UNC6671 has d...

WordPress has fixed a pre-authentication reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in its login screen that affects every version of the content management system. pwn.ai demonstrated how the flaw can be chained into PHP code execution on the server when a logged-in administrator interacts with an attacker-controlled page. Tracked as  CVE-2026-64638  (CVSS score: 8.9), the high-severity vulnerability requires no attacker privileges. According to pwn.ai , which discovered the flaw and shared technical details with The Hacker News, the login-page XSS requires no authentication. Once a crafted username reaches the failed-login error page, the resulting JavaScript executes in the visitor's browser with no further interaction required on that page. The code-execution path requires a victim already logged in as an Administrator and explicit interaction with an attacker-controlled page. In pwn.ai's demonstration, that interaction is one ordinary click. The researchers told The...

Open Source had a great childhood. For two decades it got to be a kid. It ran around barefoot, gave everything away, trusted strangers, and never once thought about who was watching. It ran the kind of lemonade stand that took IOUs from anyone who wandered up — take what you need, pay me back whenever, no need to leave a name. It was idyllic. It was also, in retrospect, a little feral. Then, somewhere around 2020, its voice started to crack. It tried to grow a beard. Acne everywhere. SolarWinds, then Log4Shell, then TeamPCP and Shai-Hulud — the supply chain woke up one morning like the end of Ender's Game : the simulation had been real the whole time. Those were real battles. Real systems, real money, real people, all of it quietly leaning on code we'd been treating like a practice round. And then the adults showed up with rules: executive orders, European regulations, permission slips for half the places it wanted to go. What it did not get was a nice, slow, storybook ...

A use-after-free bug in Linux's SCTP networking code can be turned into full root on a host, and Tencent researchers say they used it to escape a container and reach the machine underneath. The flaw has existed since 2008. The fix already shipped: stable kernels 7.1.6, 6.18.42, 6.12.101 and 6.6.148, released August 3, close it. Anyone running an older kernel with SCTP reachable should update. Tracked as  CVE-2026-64564  and named SCTPhantom by its finders, the flaw was disclosed publicly on August 6, two days after the kernel CVE team assigned it. No public exploit code had surfaced at the time of writing, and The Hacker News found no entry for the flaw in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog as of August 7. The flaw is local, not remote, and it needs SCTP reachable on the target, which limits exposure. Where those conditions held, Tencent Zhuque Lab reports it got root on the kernel builds it tested for Debian 13, Ubuntu 24.04, Rocky Linux 9 and RHEL 9, and ...

Security researcher Malcolm Stagg has disclosed a new attack class called  NatJack  that manipulates network address translation (NAT) connection state to hijack active TCP sessions, spoof DNS responses, expose mapped ports, and exhaust NAT tables. Presented at Black Hat USA 2026 , the research found affected behavior across independently developed implementations, including Windows and Linux. Two implementation-specific flaws have been assigned CVEs:  CVE-2026-56181  (CVSS score: 8.3) in Windows NAT used by Hyper-V, and  CVE-2026-63913  (CVSS score: 8.2) in Linux Netfilter conntrack. NatJack generally requires the attacker to have privileged access to a system behind the same NAT as the victim. The mitigation guidance therefore emphasizes separating untrusted workloads from trusted systems that share NAT infrastructure. There is no single patch for the broader attack class. Organizations should apply available Windows and Linux updates and encryp...