Application Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched bug impacting Open VSX's pre-publish scanning pipeline to cause the tool to allow a malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension to pass the vetting process and go live in the registry. "The pipeline had a single boolean return value that meant both 'no scanners are configured' and 'all scanners failed to run,'" Koi Security researcher Oran Simhony said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The caller couldn't tell the difference. So when scanners failed under load, Open VSX treated it as 'nothing to scan for' and waved the extension right through." Early last month, the Eclipse Foundation, which maintains Open VSX, announced plans to enforce pre-publish security checks before VS Code extensions are published to the repository in an attempt to tackle the growing problem of malicious extensions. With Open VSX also serving as the extension market...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed three security vulnerabilities impacting LangChain and LangGraph that, if successfully exploited, could expose filesystem data, environment secrets, and conversation history. Both LangChain and LangGraph are open-source frameworks that are used to build applications powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). LangGraph is built on the foundations of LangChain for more sophisticated and non-linear agentic workflows. According to statistics on the Python Package Index (PyPI), LangChain, LangChain-Core, and LangGraph have been downloaded more than 52 million , 23 million , and 9 million times last week alone. "Each vulnerability exposes a different class of enterprise data: filesystem files, environment secrets, and conversation history," Cyera security researcher Vladimir Tokarev said in a report published Thursday. The issues, in a nutshell, offer three independent paths that an attacker can leverage to drain sensitive data from any...

AWS Bedrock is Amazon's platform for building AI-powered applications. It gives developers access to foundation models and the tools to connect those models directly to enterprise data and systems. That connectivity is what makes it powerful – but it’s also what makes Bedrock a target. When an AI agent can query your Salesforce instance, trigger a Lambda function, or pull from a SharePoint knowledge base, it becomes a node in your infrastructure - with permissions, with reachability, and with paths that lead to critical assets. The XM Cyber threat research team mapped exactly how attackers could exploit that connectivity inside Bedrock environments. The result: eight validated attack vectors spanning log manipulation, knowledge base compromise, agent hijacking, flow injection, guardrail degradation, and prompt poisoning. In this article, we’ll walk through each vector - what it targets, how it works, and what an attacker can reach on the other side. The Eight Vectors The XM ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of two now-patched security flaws in the n8n workflow automation platform, including two critical bugs that could result in arbitrary command execution. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-27577 (CVSS score: 9.4) - Expression sandbox escape leading to remote code execution (RCE) CVE-2026-27493 (CVSS score: 9.5) - Unauthenticated expression evaluation via n8n's Form nodes "CVE-2026-27577 is a sandbox escape in the expression compiler: a missing case in the AST rewriter lets process slip through untransformed, giving any authenticated expression full RCE," Pillar Security researcher Eilon Cohen, who discovered and reported the issues, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity company described CVE-2026-27493 as a "double-evaluation bug" in n8n's Form nodes that could be abused for expression injection by taking advantage of the fact that the form endpoints are publi...

OpenAI on Friday began rolling out Codex Security , an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered security agent that's designed to find, validate, and propose fixes for vulnerabilities. The feature is available in a research preview to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, Business, and Edu customers via the Codex web with free usage for the next month. "It builds deep context about your project to identify complex vulnerabilities that other agentic tools miss, surfacing higher-confidence findings with fixes that meaningfully improve the security of your system while sparing you from the noise of insignificant bugs," the company said . Codex Security represents an evolution of Aardvark⁠ , which OpenAI unveiled in private beta in October 2025 as a way for developers and security teams to detect and fix security vulnerabilities at scale. Over the last 30 days, Codex Security has scanned more than 1.2 million commits across external repositories over the course of the beta, identifying ...

Anthropic on Friday said it discovered 22 new security vulnerabilities in the Firefox web browser as part of a security partnership with Mozilla. Of these, 14 have been classified as high, seven have been classified as moderate, and one has been rated low in severity. The issues were addressed in Firefox 148 , released late last month. The vulnerabilities were identified over a two-week period in January 2026. The artificial intelligence (AI) company said the number of high-severity bugs identified by its Claude Opus 4.6 large language model (LLM) represents "almost a fifth" of all high-severity vulnerabilities that were patched in Firefox in 2025. Anthropic said the LLM detected a use-after-free bug in the browser's JavaScript after "just" 20 minutes of exploration, which was then validated by a human researcher in a virtualized environment to rule out the possibility of a false positive. "By the end of this effort, we had scanned nearly 6,000 C++ ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged malicious Packagist PHP packages masquerading as Laravel utilities that act as a conduit for a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) that's functional on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. The names of the packages are listed below - nhattuanbl/lara-helper (37 Downloads) nhattuanbl/simple-queue (29 Downloads) nhattuanbl/lara-swagger (49 Downloads) According to Socket, the package "nhattuanbl/lara-swagger" does not directly embed malicious code, lists "nhattuanbl/lara-helper" as a Composer dependency , causing it to install the RAT. The packages are still available for download from the PHP package registry. Both lara-helper and simple-queue have been found to contain a PHP file named "src/helper.php," which employs a number of tricks to complicate static analysis by making use of techniques like control flow obfuscation, encoding domain names, command names, and file paths, and randomized identifie...

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. ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has begun to roll out a new security feature for Claude Code that can scan a user's software codebase for vulnerabilities and suggest patches. The capability, called Claude Code Security , is currently available in a limited research preview to Enterprise and Team customers. "It scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review, allowing teams to find and fix security issues that traditional methods often miss," the company said in a Friday announcement. Anthropic said the feature aims to leverage AI as a tool to help find and resolve vulnerabilities to counter attacks where threat actors weaponize the same tools to automate vulnerability discovery.  With AI agents increasingly capable of detecting security vulnerabilities that have otherwise escaped human notice, the tech upstart said the same capabilities could be used by adversaries to uncover exploitable weakness...

Notepad++ has released a security fix to plug gaps that were exploited by an advanced threat actor from China to hijack the software update mechanism to selectively deliver malware to targets of interest. The version 8.9.2 update incorporates what maintainer Don Ho calls a "double lock" design that aims to make the update process "robust and effectively unexploitable." This includes verification of the signed installer downloaded from GitHub (implemented in version 8.8.9 and later), as well as the newly added verification of the signed XML returned by the update server at notepad-plus-plus[.]org. In addition to these enhancements, security-focused changes have been introduced to WinGUp, the auto-updater component - Removal of libcurl.dll to eliminate DLL side-loading risk Removal of two unsecured cURL SSL options: CURLSSLOPT_ALLOW_BEAST and CURLSSLOPT_NO_REVOKE Restriction of plugin management execution to programs signed with the same certificate as WinGUp...

January 5, 2026, Seattle, USA — ZAST.AI announced the completion of a $6 million Pre-A funding round. This investment came from the well-known investment firm Hillhouse Capital, bringing ZAST.AI's total funding close to $10 million. This marks a recognition from leading capital markets of a new solution: ending the era of high false positive rates in security tools and making every alert genuinely actionable. In 2025, ZAST.AI discovered hundreds of zero-day vulnerabilities across dozens of popular open-source projects. These findings were submitted through authoritative vulnerability platforms like VulDB, successfully resulting in 119 CVE assignments . These are not laboratory targets, but production-grade code supporting global businesses. Affected well-known projects include widely used components and frameworks such as Microsoft Azure SDK, Apache Struts XWork, Alibaba Nacos, Langfuse, Koa, node-formidable, and others. It was precisely within these widely adopted open-source p...

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic revealed that its latest large language model (LLM), Claude Opus 4.6, has found more than 500 previously unknown high-severity security flaws in open-source libraries, including Ghostscript , OpenSC , and CGIF . Claude Opus 4.6, which was launched Thursday, comes with improved coding skills, including code review and debugging capabilities, along with enhancements to tasks like financial analyses, research, and document creation. Stating that the model is "notably better" at discovering high-severity vulnerabilities without requiring any task-specific tooling, custom scaffolding, or specialized prompting, Anthropic said it is putting it to use to find and help fix vulnerabilities in open-source software. "Opus 4.6 reads and reasons about code the way a human researcher would—looking at past fixes to find similar bugs that weren't addressed, spotting patterns that tend to cause problems, or understanding a piece of...

A new, critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the n8n workflow automation platform that, if successfully exploited, could result in the execution of arbitrary system commands. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-25049 (CVSS score: 9.4), is the result of inadequate sanitization that bypasses safeguards put in place to address CVE-2025-68613 (CVSS score: 9.9), another critical defect that was patched by n8n in December 2025. "Additional exploits in the expression evaluation of n8n have been identified and patched following CVE-2025-68613," n8n's maintainers said in an advisory released Wednesday. "An authenticated user with permission to create or modify workflows could abuse crafted expressions in workflow parameters to trigger unintended system command execution on the host running n8n." The issue affects the following versions - <1.123.17 (Fixed in 1.123.17) <2.5.2 (Fixed in 2.5.2)

An innovative approach to discovering, analyzing, and governing identity usage beyond traditional IAM controls. The Challenge: Identity Lives Outside the Identity Stack Identity and access management tools were built to govern users and directories. Modern enterprises run on applications. Over time, identity logic has moved into application code, APIs, service accounts, and custom authentication layers. Credentials are embedded. Authorization is enforced locally. Usage patterns change without review. These identity paths often operate outside the visibility of IAM, PAM, and IGA. For security and identity teams, this creates a blind spot - what we call Identity Dark Matter. This dark matter is responsible for the identity risk that cannot be directly observed. Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short Most identity tools rely on configuration data and policy models. That works for managed users.

Leaked API keys are no longer unusual, nor are the breaches that follow. So why are sensitive tokens still being so easily exposed? To find out, Intruder’s research team looked at what traditional vulnerability scanners actually cover and built a new secrets detection method to address gaps in existing approaches.  Applying this at scale by scanning 5 million applications revealed over 42,000 exposed tokens across 334 secret types, exposing a major class of leaked secrets that is not being handled well by existing tooling, particularly in single-page applications (SPAs). In this article, we break down existing secrets detection methods and reveal what we found when we scanned millions of applications for secrets hidden in JavaScript bundles. Established secrets detection methods (and their limitations) Traditional secrets detection The traditional, fully automated approach to detecting application secrets is to search a set of known paths and apply regular expressions to ma...

Node.js has released updates to fix what it described as a critical security issue impacting "virtually every production Node.js app" that, if successfully exploited, could trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. "Node.js/V8 makes a best-effort attempt to recover from stack space exhaustion with a catchable error, which frameworks have come to rely on for service availability," Node.js's Matteo Collina and Joyee Cheung said in a Tuesday bulletin. "A bug that only reproduces when async_hooks are used would break this attempt, causing Node.js to exit with 7 directly without throwing a catchable error when recursions in user code exhaust the stack space. This makes applications whose recursion depth is controlled by unsanitized input vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks." At its core, the shortcoming stems from the fact that Node.js exits with code 7 (denoting an Internal Exception Handler Run-Time Failure ) instead of gracefully handling the...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in LangChain Core that could be exploited by an attacker to steal sensitive secrets and even influence large language model (LLM) responses through prompt injection. LangChain Core (i.e., langchain-core ) is a core Python package that's part of the LangChain ecosystem, providing the core interfaces and model-agnostic abstractions for building applications powered by LLMs. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-68664, carries a CVSS score of 9.3 out of 10.0. Security researcher Yarden Porat has been credited with reporting the vulnerability on December 4, 2025. It has been codenamed LangGrinch . "A serialization injection vulnerability exists in LangChain's dumps() and dumpd() functions," the project maintainers said in an advisory. "The functions do not escape dictionaries with 'lc' keys when serializing free-form dictionaries." "The 'lc' key is used internally by LangChain to mark ser...

AI-assisted coding and AI app generation platforms have created an unprecedented surge in software development. Companies are now facing rapid growth in both the number of applications and the pace of change within those applications. Security and privacy teams are under significant pressure as the surface area they must cover is expanding quickly while their staffing levels remain largely unchanged. Existing data security and privacy solutions are too reactive for this new era. Many begin with data already collected in production, which is often too late. These solutions frequently miss hidden data flows to third party and AI integrations, and for the data sinks they do cover, they help detect risks but do not prevent them. The question is whether many of these issues can instead be prevented early. The answer is yes. Prevention is possible by embedding detection and governance controls directly into development. HoundDog.ai provides a privacy code scanner built for exactly this p...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in Apache Tika that could result in an XML external entity ( XXE ) injection attack. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-66516 , is rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring scale, indicating maximum severity. "Critical XXE in Apache Tika tika-core (1.13-3.2.1), tika-pdf-module (2.0.0-3.2.1) and tika-parsers (1.13-1.28.5) modules on all platforms allows an attacker to carry out XML External Entity injection via a crafted XFA file inside of a PDF," according to an advisory for the vulnerability. It affects the following Maven packages - org.apache.tika:tika-core >= 1.13, <= 3.2.1 (Patched in version 3.2.2) org.apache.tika:tika-parser-pdf-module >= 2.0.0, <= 3.2.1 (Patched in version 3.2.2) org.apache.tika:tika-parsers >= 1.13, < 2.0.0 (Patched in version 2.0.0) XXE injection refers to a web security vulnerability that allows an attacker to interfere with an application's processing of XML data. This, in tur...

The challenge facing security leaders is monumental: Securing environments where failure is not an option. Reliance on traditional security postures, such as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) to chase threats after they have already entered the network, is fundamentally risky and contributes significantly to the half-trillion-dollar annual cost of cybercrime. Zero Trust fundamentally shifts this approach, transitioning from reacting to symptoms to proactively solving the underlying problem. Application Control, the ability to rigorously define what software is allowed to execute, is the foundation of this strategy. However, even once an application is trusted, it can be misused. This is where ThreatLocker Ringfencing™, or granular application containment , becomes indispensable, enforcing the ultimate standard of least privilege on all authorized applications. Defining Ringfencing: Security Beyond Allowlisting Ringfencing is an advanced containment strategy applied to applicat...