API Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting Progress Kemp LoadMaster is seeing active exploitation attempts, according to an advisory from eSentire's Threat Response Unit (TRU). The Canadian cybersecurity company said it identified exploitation attempts targeting CVE-2026-8037 (CVSS score: 9.6), an operating system (OS) command injection flaw that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution on susceptible devices. The exploitation activity commenced on June 29, 2026. "OS Command Injection Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in API in Progress LoadMaster allows an unauthenticated attacker with permissions to execute arbitrary commands on the LoadMaster appliance by exploiting unsanitized input," Progress said in an advisory for the vulnerability released early last month. In an analysis published this week, watchTowr Labs described the flaw as rooted in a function named "escape_quotes()" within the load balancer application and tha...

Researchers tested 444 AI chatbot apps for iPhone and found that 282 of them, nearly two-thirds, exposed paid AI access through their network traffic. In many cases, the path in was visible just by watching what the app sent: a plaintext API key, a reusable token, or a backend server that accepted requests with no key at all. Whoever grabs it can send model requests on the developer's account, and the developer pays the bill. Three months after the researchers warned the developers, only 28% had fixed it. The work, from researchers at Wake Forest University, is the  first in-depth study of the problem on iOS . It is striking partly because of how little effort the snooping took. The team used a tool they built, LLMKeyLens , that watches an app's traffic and pulls out the credentials as they go by. No jailbreaking, no cracking the app open. The key is the secret that lets the app call a service like OpenAI or Google Gemini. Embed it in the app, and it is exposed with ev...

A critical vulnerability in Progress Kemp LoadMaster can let an unauthenticated attacker execute arbitrary commands as root on the appliance by sending a crafted request to its API. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2026-8037 , carries a CVSS score of  9.8 according to ZDI . A patch is available. If you run LoadMaster with the API enabled, update now. Progress  published its advisory on June 4  and says it has not received any reports of exploitation. On June 29, researchers at watchTowr Labs published a detailed technical write-up that walks through the full exploit chain. What the Flaw Does LoadMaster is an application delivery controller and load balancer used by enterprises to manage traffic across servers. It sits at the network edge, which makes any pre-auth flaw in it especially dangerous. The vulnerability lives in a function called  escape_quotes() , which is supposed to sanitize user input before it gets passed into a shell command. The f...

Threat actors are exploiting a recently patched security flaw impacting Gravity SMTP, a WordPress plugin that's installed on about 100,000 sites. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-4020 (CVSS score: 5.3), is a medium-severity information disclosure flaw that can allow unauthenticated attackers to extract sensitive data, such as configuration data, API keys, secrets, and OAuth tokens configured for the plugin's email integrations. "This is due to a REST API endpoint registered at /wp-json/gravitysmtp/v1/tests/mock-data with a permission_callback that unconditionally returns true, allowing any unauthenticated visitor to access it," Wordfence said . "When the ?page=gravitysmtp-settings query parameter is appended, the plugin's register_connector_data() method populates internal connector data, causing the endpoint to return approximately 365 KB of JSON containing the full System Report." As a result, an unauthenticated attacker can weaponize ...

The first wave of enterprise AI concern was straightforward. It was simply employees pasting sensitive data into public AI tools. Security teams responded with usage policies, domain blocks, and data loss prevention rules. That response made sense at the time. It doesn't fit the problem anymore. Shadow AI has shifted from a data leakage concern to an access control problem. The threat isn't about what employees type into AI tools. It's about which AI agents are running inside the organization, what enterprise systems they're connected to, and what actions they're authorized,or not, to take. From passive tools to active actors Employees and business units are building AI agents at a pace most security teams can't keep track of. Custom assistants, coding agents, workflow automations, and agentic applications are being created across departments with some in sanctioned platforms, but many through browser extensions, SaaS-native features, developer tools, M...

If an autonomous AI agent interacts with your company's core intellectual property today, can your security team instantly name the person who authorized it? For most enterprises, the answer is a simple no . The rush to adopt internal AI tools has left a massive trail of administrative debt: orphaned agents (AI tools left running after their creator leaves the company) and standing privileges (AI that retains permanent, unrestricted access it no longer needs). When an employee moves on, the automated tools they built stay active—often keeping unmonitored access to sensitive databases and source code long after the human’s credentials are revoked. To help security teams bridge this line of accountability, The Hacker News is hosting a technical briefing. Secure your spot today for the live webinar: Orphaned Agents & Standing Privileges: The Hidden Access Risks of Internal AI . Why Existing Security Tools Miss the Signal Traditional access tools treat AI like stand...

Breaches don't always start with a zero-day. An exposed admin panel can get brute-forced, or credentials reused from a previous attack. But when a vulnerability does drop — like MongoBleed earlier this year, which let attackers pull credentials and session tokens from server memory without authentication — anything internet-facing is immediately at risk. With time-to-exploit now down to a single day, the question isn't just how fast you can patch. It's why the service was exposed in the first place. The team at Intruder analyzed 3,000 attack surfaces to find out how much of a typical organization's attack surface consists of services that have no reason to be there. We grouped what we found into four categories — HTTP panels, risky ports and services, databases, and publicly accessible files and information. The full findings, including breakdowns by company size and industry, are in our 2026 Attack Surface Management Index . How widespread is the problem? ...

A default low-privilege account on a LiteLLM proxy can climb to full admin and run code on the server by chaining three vulnerabilities, researchers at Obsidian Security disclosed LiteLLM is a widely deployed open-source AI gateway that brokers calls to more than 100 model providers behind one OpenAI-compatible interface. A server takeover exposes every provider key it holds, the secrets that decrypt its stored credentials, and every prompt and response passing through it. Obsidian rates the full chain CVSS 9.9, in the Critical range. BerriAI , the maintainer, included the complete fix set in LiteLLM v1.83.14-stable, which GitHub lists as released May 2. Upgrade to that release or later to close the three-CVE chain. The three bugs The first link is CVE-2026-47101 , an authorization bypass. When a regular user (an internal_user) generates a virtual API key, LiteLLM stores the caller-supplied allowed_routes field without checking it against the user's role. The field is...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a high-severity flaw impacting BerriAI LiteLLM to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42271 (CVSS score: 8.7), is a command injection vulnerability that could allow any authenticated user to run arbitrary commands on the host. It affects the following version of the LiteLLM Python package - >= 1.74.2 < 1.83.7 "Two endpoints used to preview an MCP server before saving it - POST /mcp-rest/test/connection and POST /mcp-rest/test/tools/list - accepted a full server configuration in the request body, including the command, args, and env fields used by the stdio transport," according to a description of the flaw shared by BerriAI. "When called with a stdio configuration, the endpoints attempted to connect, which spawned the supplied command as a subprocess on the proxy host w...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new malicious supply chain campaign that's targeting developers using OpenAI Codex through a legitimate-looking remote web UI. The tool, named codexui-android , is advertised on GitHub and npm as a remote web UI for OpenAI Codex, attracting over 29,000 weekly downloads. The package is still available for download from the repository. What makes this activity noteworthy is that it's not a traditional attack that uses a typosquat or throwaway package to trick developers. Rather, the malicious code is embedded into a functional npm package that has undergone active development. The associated GitHub repository remains clean. "And for the past month, every single invocation has been quietly exfiltrating your Codex authentication tokens to an attacker-controlled server," Aikido Security researcher Charlie Eriksen said . The nefarious changes are said to have been introduced about a month after the package was ...

Every single day, hackers are finding new ways to crash websites and steal data. But right now, something has changed. Hackers are no longer working alone. They are now using powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to make their attacks faster, stronger, and much harder to stop. According to recent updates from The Hacker News , bad actors are using AI to find weak spots in systems and launch massive "DDoS attacks" that can take your business offline in seconds. If your website goes down, you lose money, you lose customer trust, and you spend days trying to fix the mess. 👉 Save Your Free Webinar Seat The Old Way of Protection Doesn't Work Anymore In the past, you could set up a simple firewall, update your software, and feel safe. Not anymore. AI-assisted attacks can think and adapt. They don't just hit your front door; they look for hidden entry points, smart APIs, and tiny mistakes in your cloud setup. They do in minutes what used to take human h...

Threat actors have been observed attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security vulnerability in PraisonAI , an open-source multi-agent orchestration framework, within four hours of its public disclosure. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-44338 (CVSS score: 7.3), a case of missing authentication that exposes sensitive endpoints to anyone, potentially allowing an attacker to invoke the API server's protected functionality without a token.  " PraisonAI ships a legacy Flask API server with authentication disabled by default," according to an advisory released by the maintainers earlier this month. "When that server is used, any caller that can reach it can access /agents and trigger the configured agents.yaml workflow through /chat without providing a token." Specifically, the legacy Flask-based API server, src/praisonai/api_server.py, hard-codes AUTH_ENABLED = False and AUTH_TOKEN = None. According to PraisonAI, successful exploitation of the...

Every AI tool, workflow automation, and productivity app your employees connected to Google or Microsoft this year left something behind: a persistent OAuth token with no expiration date, no automatic cleanup, and in most organizations, no one watching it. Your perimeter controls don't see it. Your MFA doesn't stop it. And when an attacker gets hold of one, they don't need a password. OAuth grants don't expire when employees leave. They don't reset when passwords change. And in most organizations, nobody is watching them. The model made sense when a handful of IT-approved apps needed calendar access. It doesn't hold up when every employee is independently wiring AI tools, workflow automations, and productivity apps directly into their Google or Microsoft environment — each one receiving a persistent, scoped token with no automatic expiration and no centralized visibility. That's not a misconfiguration. It's how OAuth is designed to work. The gap is t...

While the software industry has made genuine strides over the past few decades to deliver products securely, the furious pace of AI adoption is putting that progress at risk. Businesses are moving fast to self-host LLM infrastructure, drawn by the promise of AI as a force multiplier and the pressure to deliver more value faster. But speed is coming at the expense of security. In the wake of the ClawdBot fiasco — the viral self-hosted AI assistant that’s averaging an eye-watering 2.6 CVEs per day — the Intruder team wanted to investigate how bad the security of AI infrastructure actually is. To scope the attack surface, we used certificate transparency logs to pull just over 2 million hosts with 1 million exposed services. What we found wasn’t pretty. In fact, the AI infrastructure we scanned was more vulnerable, exposed, and misconfigured than any other software we've ever investigated. No authentication by default It didn’t take long to spot an alarming pattern: a signific...

On January 31, 2026, researchers disclosed that Moltbook, a social network built for AI agents, had left its database wide open, exposing 35,000 email addresses and 1.5 million agent API tokens across 770,000 active agents. The more worrying part sat inside the private messages. Some of those conversations held plaintext third-party credentials, including OpenAI API keys shared between agents, stored in the same unencrypted table as the tokens needed to hijack the agent itself. This is the shape of a toxic combination: a permission breakdown between two or more applications, bridged by an AI agent, integration, or OAuth grant, that no single application owner ever authorized as its own risk surface. Moltbook's agents sat at that bridge, carrying credentials for their host platform and for the outside services their users had wired them into, in a place that neither platform owner had line of sight into. Most SaaS access reviews still examine one application at a time, which is...

In 2024, compromised service accounts and forgotten API keys were behind 68% of cloud breaches. Not phishing. Not weak passwords. Unmanaged non-human identities that nobody was watching. For every employee in your org, there are 40 to 50 automated credentials: service accounts, API tokens, AI agent connections, and OAuth grants. When projects end or employees leave, most of these stay active. Fully privileged. Completely unmonitored. Attackers don't need to break in. They just pick up the keys you left out. Join our upcoming webinar where we’ll show you how to find and eliminate these "Ghost Identities" before they become a back door for hackers. AI agents and automated workflows are multiplying these credentials at a pace security teams can't manually track. Many carry admin-level access they never needed. One compromised token can give an attacker lateral movement across your entire environment, and the average dwell time fo...

Fortinet has released out-of-band patches for a critical security flaw impacting FortiClient EMS that it said has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-35616 (CVSS score: 9.1), has been described as a pre-authentication API access bypass leading to privilege escalation. "An improper access control vulnerability [CWE-284] in FortiClient EMS may allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via crafted requests," Fortinet said in a Saturday advisory. The issue affects FortiClient EMS versions 7.4.5 through 7.4.6. It's expected to be fully patched in the upcoming version 7.4.7, although the company has released a hotfix to address it.  Simo Kohonen from Defused Cyber and Nguyen Duc Anh have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. In a post on X, Defused Cyber said it observed zero-day exploitation of CVE-2026-35616 earlier this week. Accor...

Sansec is warning of a critical security flaw in Magento's REST API that could allow unauthenticated attackers to upload arbitrary executables and achieve code execution and account takeover. The vulnerability has been codenamed PolyShell by Sansec owing to the fact that the attack hinges on disguising malicious code as an image. There is no evidence that the shortcoming has been exploited in the wild. The unrestricted file upload flaw affects all Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce versions up to 2.4.9-alpha2. The Dutch security firm said the problem stems from the fact that Magento's REST API accepts file uploads as part of the custom options for the cart item. "When a product option has type 'file,' Magento processes an embedded file_info object containing base64-encoded file data, a MIME type, and a filename," it said . "The file is written to pub/media/custom_options/quote/ on the server." Depending on the web server configuration, the ...

Salesforce has warned of an increase in threat actor activity that's aimed at exploiting misconfigurations in publicly accessible Experience Cloud sites by making use of a customized version of an open-source tool called AuraInspector. The activity, per the company, involves the exploitation of customers' overly permissive Experience Cloud guest user configurations to obtain access to sensitive data. "Evidence indicates the threat actor is leveraging a modified version of the open-source tool AuraInspector [...] to perform mass scanning of public-facing Experience Cloud sites," Salesforce said . "While the original AuraInspector is limited to identifying vulnerable objects by probing API endpoints that these sites expose (specifically the /s/sfsites/aura endpoint), the actor has developed a custom version of the tool capable of going beyond identification to actually extract data — exploiting overly permissive guest user settings." AuraInspector ref...

The Rise of MCPs in the Enterprise The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a practical way to push LLMs from “chat” into real work. By providing structured access to applications, APIs, and data, MCP enables prompt-driven AI agents that can retrieve information, take action, and automate end-to-end business workflows across the enterprise. This is already showing up in production through horizontal assistants and custom vertical agents. like Microsoft Copilot, ServiceNow, Zendesk bots, and Salesforce Agentforce, with custom and vertical agents moving fast behind them. This echoes the recent Gartner “Market Guide for Guardian Agents” report , where analysts note that the rapid enterprise adoption of these AI agents is significantly outpacing the maturity of the governance and policy controls required to manage them. We believe the primary disconnect is that these AI “colleagues” don’t look like humans. They don’t join or leave through HR They don’t submit access re...