-->
#1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Platform
Followed by 5.70+ million
The Hacker News Logo
Get the Latest News
cybersecurity

API Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Category — API Security
Hackers Exploit Gravity SMTP WordPress Plugin Bug to Expose API Keys

Hackers Exploit Gravity SMTP WordPress Plugin Bug to Expose API Keys

Jun 20, 2026 Vulnerability / Web Security
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 ...
Forget Data Leakage: Shadow AI's Real Threat Is Access Control

Forget Data Leakage: Shadow AI's Real Threat Is Access Control

Jun 19, 2026 Agentic AI / SaaS Security
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...
Orphaned AI Agents: How to Find Hidden Access Risks Inside Your Network

Orphaned AI Agents: How to Find Hidden Access Risks Inside Your Network

Jun 18, 2026 AI Security / Data Security
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...
cyber security

Moses Frost Trains You to Think Like an AI-Armed Attacker - Online in Aug

websiteSANS InstituteNetwork Security / Ethical Hacking
SANS SEC535 (GOAA): offensive AI recon, social engineering, evasion—hands-on with the tools adversaries use.
cyber security

Inside Device Code Phishing: Live Demos, Real Kits, and What's Next

websitePush SecurityPhishing / Webinar
Device code attacks are up 37x this year, with 18+ kits in the wild. Join the research webinar on June 30th.
The Top 10 Attack Surface Exposures in 2026

The Top 10 Attack Surface Exposures in 2026

Jun 17, 2026 Attack Surface Management
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? ...
LiteLLM Vulnerability Chain Lets Low-Privilege Users Take Over AI Gateway Servers

LiteLLM Vulnerability Chain Lets Low-Privilege Users Take Over AI Gateway Servers

Jun 15, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Vulnerability
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...
LiteLLM Flaw CVE-2026-42271 Exploited in the Wild, Chains to Unauthenticated RCE

LiteLLM Flaw CVE-2026-42271 Exploited in the Wild, Chains to Unauthenticated RCE

Jun 09, 2026 Vulnerability / Artificial Intelligence
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...
OpenAI Codex Authentication Tokens Stolen in codexui-android npm Supply Chain Attack

OpenAI Codex Authentication Tokens Stolen in codexui-android npm Supply Chain Attack

Jun 01, 2026 API Security / Cloud Security
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 ...
[THN Webinar] New AI DDoS Attacks Are Smarter. Learn How to Fight Back

[THN Webinar] New AI DDoS Attacks Are Smarter. Learn How to Fight Back

May 26, 2026 Web Security / Artificial Intelligence
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...
PraisonAI CVE-2026-44338 Auth Bypass Targeted Within Hours of Disclosure

PraisonAI CVE-2026-44338 Auth Bypass Targeted Within Hours of Disclosure

May 14, 2026 Vulnerability / API Security
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...
The Back Door Attackers Know About — and Most Security Teams Still Haven’t Closed

The Back Door Attackers Know About — and Most Security Teams Still Haven’t Closed

May 05, 2026 SaaS Security / Enterprise Security
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...
We Scanned 1 Million Exposed AI Services. Here's How Bad the Security Actually Is

We Scanned 1 Million Exposed AI Services. Here's How Bad the Security Actually Is

May 05, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / API Security
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...
Toxic Combinations: When Cross-App Permissions Stack into Risk

Toxic Combinations: When Cross-App Permissions Stack into Risk

Apr 22, 2026 SaaS Security / AI Agents
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...
[Webinar] Eliminate Ghost Identities Before They Expose Your Enterprise Data

[Webinar] Eliminate Ghost Identities Before They Expose Your Enterprise Data

Apr 18, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Enterprise Security
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 Patches Actively Exploited CVE-2026-35616 in FortiClient EMS

Fortinet Patches Actively Exploited CVE-2026-35616 in FortiClient EMS

Apr 05, 2026 Vulnerability / API Security
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...
Magento PolyShell Flaw Enables Unauthenticated Uploads, RCE and Account Takeover

Magento PolyShell Flaw Enables Unauthenticated Uploads, RCE and Account Takeover

Mar 20, 2026 Web Security / Vulnerability
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 ...
Threat Actors Mass-Scan Salesforce Experience Cloud via Modified AuraInspector Tool

Threat Actors Mass-Scan Salesforce Experience Cloud via Modified AuraInspector Tool

Mar 10, 2026 Cloud Security / API Security
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...
AI Agents: The Next Wave Identity Dark Matter - Powerful, Invisible, and Unmanaged

AI Agents: The Next Wave Identity Dark Matter - Powerful, Invisible, and Unmanaged

Mar 03, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Enterprise Security
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...
How to Protect Your SaaS from Bot Attacks with SafeLine WAF

How to Protect Your SaaS from Bot Attacks with SafeLine WAF

Mar 02, 2026 Application Security / DevOps
Most SaaS teams remember the day their user traffic started growing fast. Few notice the day bots started targeting them. On paper, everything looks great: more sign-ups, more sessions, more API calls. But in reality, something feels off: Sign-ups increase, but users aren’t activating. Server costs rise faster than revenue. Logs are filled with repeated requests from strange user agents. If this sounds familiar, it’s not just a sign of popularity. Your app is under constant automated attack, even if no ransom emails have arrived. Your load balancer sees traffic. Your product team sees “growth”. Your database sees pain. This is where a WAF like SafeLine fits in. SafeLine is a self-hosted web application firewall (WAF) that sits in front of your app and inspects every HTTP request before it reaches your code.  It does not just look for broken packets or known bad IPs. It watches how traffic behaves: what it sends, how fast, in what patterns, and against which endpoints. ...
Thousands of Public Google Cloud API Keys Exposed with Gemini Access After API Enablement

Thousands of Public Google Cloud API Keys Exposed with Gemini Access After API Enablement

Feb 28, 2026 Generative AI / API Security
New research has found that Google Cloud API keys, typically designated as project identifiers for billing purposes, could be abused to authenticate to sensitive Gemini endpoints and access private data. The findings come from Truffle Security, which discovered nearly 3,000 Google API keys (identified by the prefix "AIza") embedded in client-side code to provide Google-related services like embedded maps on websites. "With a valid key, an attacker can access uploaded files, cached data, and charge LLM-usage to your account," security researcher Joe Leon said , adding the keys "now also authenticate to Gemini even though they were never intended for it." The problem occurs when users enable the Gemini API on a Google Cloud project (i.e., Generative Language API), causing the existing API keys in that project, including those accessible via the website JavaScript code, to gain surreptitious access to Gemini endpoints without any warning or notice. Th...
Claude Code Flaws Allow Remote Code Execution and API Key Exfiltration

Claude Code Flaws Allow Remote Code Execution and API Key Exfiltration

Feb 25, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Vulnerability
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple security vulnerabilities in Anthropic's Claude Code, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant, that could result in remote code execution and theft of API credentials. "The vulnerabilities exploit various configuration mechanisms, including Hooks, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and environment variables – executing arbitrary shell commands and exfiltrating Anthropic API keys when users clone and open untrusted repositories," Check Point researchers Aviv Donenfeld and Oded Vanunu said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The identified shortcomings fall under three broad categories - No CVE (CVSS score: 8.7) - A code injection vulnerability stemming from a user consent bypass when starting Claude Code in a new directory that could result in arbitrary code execution without additional confirmation via untrusted project hooks defined in .claude/settings.json. (Fixed in version 1.0.87 in Sep...
Expert Insights Articles Videos
Cybersecurity Resources