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Think your Wi-Fi is safe? Your coding tools? Or even your favorite financial apps? This week proves again how hackers, companies, and governments are all locked in a nonstop race to outsmart each other. Here's a quick rundown of the latest cyber stories that show how fast the game keeps changing. DeFi exploit drains funds Critical yETH Exploit Used to Steal $9M A critical exploit targeting Yearn Finance's yETH pool on Ethereum has been exploited by unknown threat actors, resulting in the theft of approximately $9 million from the protocol. The attack is said to have abused a flaw in how the protocol manages its internal accounting, stemming from the fact that a cache containing calculated values to save on gas fees was never cleared when the pool was completely emptied. "The attacker achieved this by minting an astronomical number of tokens – 235 septillion yETH (a 41-digit number) – while depositing only 16 wei, worth approxim...

As 2025 draws to a close, security professionals face a sobering realization: the traditional playbook for web security has become dangerously obsolete. AI-powered attacks, evolving injection techniques, and supply chain compromises affecting hundreds of thousands of websites forced a fundamental rethink of defensive strategies. Here are the five threats that reshaped web security this year, and why the lessons learned will define digital protection for years to come. 1. Vibe Coding Natural language coding, " vibe coding " , transformed from novelty to production reality in 2025, with nearly 25% of Y Combinator startups using AI to build core codebases. One developer launched a multiplayer flight simulator in under three hours, eventually scaling it to 89,000 players and generating thousands in monthly revenue. The Result Code that functions perfectly yet contains exploitable flaws, bypassing traditional security tools. AI generates what you ask for, not what you forget...

Cybercriminals associated with a financially motivated group known as GoldFactory have been observed staging a fresh round of attacks targeting mobile users in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam by impersonating government services. The activity , observed since October 2024, involves distributing modified banking applications that act as a conduit for Android malware, Group-IB said in a technical report published Wednesday. Assessed to be active as far back as June 2023, GoldFactory first gained attention early last year, when the Singapore-headquartered cybersecurity company detailed the threat actor's use of custom malware families like GoldPickaxe, GoldDigger, and GoldDiggerPlus targeting both Android and iOS devices. Evidence points to GoldFactory being a well-organized Chinese-speaking cybercrime group with close connections to Gigabud , another Android malware that was spotted in mid-2023. Despite major disparities in their codebases, both GoldDigger and Gigabud have bee...

Cloudflare on Wednesday said it detected and mitigated the largest ever distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that measured at 29.7 terabits per second (Tbps). The activity, the web infrastructure and security company said, originated from a DDoS botnet-for-hire known as AISURU , which has been linked to a number of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks over the past year. The attack lasted for 69 seconds. It did not disclose the target of the attack. The botnet has prominently targeted telecommunication providers, gaming companies, hosting providers, and financial services. Also tackled by Cloudflare was a 14.1 Bpps DDoS attack from the same botnet. AISURU is believed to be powered by a massive network comprising an estimated 1-4 million infected hosts worldwide. "The 29.7 Tbps was a UDP carpet-bombing attack bombarding an average of 15,000 destination ports per second," Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco said . "The distributed attack randomized various packet attrib...

A maximum-severity security flaw has been disclosed in React Server Components (RSC) that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-55182, carries a CVSS score of 10.0. The vulnerability has been codenamed React2shell . It allows "unauthenticated remote code execution by exploiting a flaw in how React decodes payloads sent to React Server Function endpoints," the React Team said in an alert issued today. "Even if your app does not implement any React Server Function endpoints, it may still be vulnerable if your app supports React Server Components." According to cloud security firm Wiz , the issue is a case of logical deserialization that stems from processing RSC payloads in an unsafe manner. As a result, an unauthenticated attacker could craft a malicious HTTP request to any Server Function endpoint that, when deserialized by React, achieves execution of arbitrary JavaScript code on the server. ...

Remember when phishing emails were easy to spot? Bad grammar, weird formatting, and requests from a "Prince" in a distant country? Those days are over. Today, a 16-year-old with zero coding skills and a $200 allowance can launch a campaign that rivals state-sponsored hackers. They don't need to be smart; they just need to subscribe to the right AI tool. We are witnessing the industrialization of cybercrime. The barrier to entry has collapsed, and your current email filters are looking for threats that no longer exist. Watch the Live Breakdown of AI Phishing Tools ➜ The New "Big Three" of Cybercrime Security leaders don't need another lecture on what phishing is. You need to see exactly what you are up against. This isn't science fiction—these tools are being sold on the dark web right now. In this webinar , we are going inside the "AI Phishing Factory" to deconstruct the three tools rewriting the threat landscape: WormGPT: Think of...

Microsoft has silently plugged a security flaw that has been exploited by several threat actors since 2017 as part of the company's November 2025 Patch Tuesday updates , according to ACROS Security's 0patch . The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-9491 (CVSS score: 7.8/7.0), which has been described as a Windows Shortcut (LNK) file UI misinterpretation vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution. "The specific flaw exists within the handling of .LNK files," according to a description in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). "Crafted data in an .LNK file can cause hazardous content in the file to be invisible to a user who inspects the file via the Windows-provided user interface. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current user." In other words, these shortcut files are crafted such that viewing their properties in Windows conceals the malicious commands executed by them out of the u...

A critical security flaw impacting a WordPress plugin known as King Addons for Elementor has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, CVE-2025-8489 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a case of privilege escalation that allows unauthenticated attackers to grant themselves administrative privileges by simply specifying the administrator user role during registration. It affects versions from 24.12.92 through 51.1.14. It was patched by the maintainers in version 51.1.35 released on September 25, 2025. Security researcher Peter Thaleikis has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. The plugin has over 10,000 active installs. "This is due to the plugin not properly restricting the roles that users can register with," Wordfence said in an alert. "This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to register with administrator-level user accounts." Specifically, the issue is rooted in the "handle_register_ajax()" function that...

The threat actor known as Water Saci is actively evolving its tactics, switching to a sophisticated, highly layered infection chain that uses HTML Application (HTA) files and PDFs to propagate via WhatsApp a worm that deploys a banking trojan in attacks targeting users in Brazil. The latest wave is characterized by the attackers shifting from PowerShell to a Python-based variant that spreads the malware in a worm-like manner over WhatsApp Web. "Their new multi-format attack chain and possible use of artificial intelligence (AI) to convert propagation scripts from PowerShell to Python exemplifies a layered approach that has enabled Water Saci to bypass conventional security controls, exploit user trust across multiple channels, and ramp up their infection rates," Trend Micro researchers Jeffrey Francis Bonaobra, Sarah Pearl Camiling, Joe Soares, Byron Gelera, Ian Kenefick, and Emmanuel Panopio said . In these attacks, users receive messages from trusted contacts on WhatsA...

Most people know the story of Paul Bunyan. A giant lumberjack, a trusted axe, and a challenge from a machine that promised to outpace him. Paul doubled down on his old way of working, swung harder, and still lost by a quarter inch. His mistake was not losing the contest. His mistake was assuming that effort alone could outmatch a new kind of tool. Security professionals are facing a similar moment. AI is our modern steam-powered saw. It is faster in some areas, unfamiliar in others, and it challenges a lot of long-standing habits. The instinct is to protect what we know instead of learning what the new tool can actually do. But if we follow Paul's approach, we'll find ourselves on the wrong side of a shift that is already underway. The right move is to learn the tool, understand its capabilities, and leverage it for outcomes that make your job easier.  AI's Role in Daily Cybersecurity Work AI is now embedded in almost every security product we touch. Endpoint protection platfor...

Three critical security flaws have been disclosed in an open-source utility called Picklescan that could allow malicious actors to execute arbitrary code by loading untrusted PyTorch models, effectively bypassing the tool's protections. Picklescan , developed and maintained by Matthieu Maitre (@mmaitre314), is a security scanner that's designed to parse Python pickle files and detect suspicious imports or function calls, before they are executed. Pickle is a widely used serialization format in machine learning, including PyTorch , which uses the format to save and load models. But pickle files can also be a huge security risk , as they can be used to automatically trigger the execution of arbitrary Python code when they are loaded. This necessitates that users and organizations load trusted models, or load model weights from TensorFlow and Flax. The issues discovered by JFrog essentially make it possible to bypass the scanner, present the scanned model files as safe, and e...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious Rust package that's capable of targeting Windows, macOS, and Linux systems, and features malicious functionality to stealthily execute on developer machines by masquerading as an Ethereum Virtual Machine ( EVM ) unit helper tool. The Rust crate, named " evm-units ," was uploaded to crates.io in mid-April 2025 by a user named " ablerust ," attracting more than 7,000 downloads over the past eight months. Another package created by the same author, " uniswap-utils ," listed "evm-units" as a dependency. It was downloaded over 7,400 times. The packages have since been removed from the package repository. "Based on the victim's operating system and whether Qihoo 360 antivirus is running, the package downloads a payload, writes it to the system temp directory, and silently executes it," Socket security researcher Olivia Brown said in a report. "The package appears to retur...

India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has issued directions to app-based communication service providers to ensure that the platforms cannot be used without an active SIM card linked to the user's mobile number. To that end, messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, Arattai, Sharechat, Josh, JioChat, and Signal that use an Indian mobile number for uniquely identifying their users, in other words, a telecommunication identifier user entity (TIUE), to comply with the directive within 90 days. The amendment to the Telecommunications (Telecom Cyber Security) Rules, 2024, is seen as an attempt to combat the misuse of telecommunication identifiers for phishing, scams, and cyber fraud, and ensure telecom cybersecurity. The DoT said the SIM‑binding directions are crucial to close a security gap that bad actors are exploiting to conduct cross‑border fraud. "Accounts on instant messaging and calling apps continue to work even after the associated SIM is remov...