Cloud security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

xAI's Grok Build coding CLI was uploading entire Git repositories, full commit history and all, to a Google Cloud Storage bucket run by xAI, not just the files a coding task needed. A researcher publishing as cereblab , testing version 0.2.93 , captured one of those uploads, cloned the git bundle out of the intercepted request, and pulled back a file the agent had been told in plain terms not to open. The upload rode a separate channel from the model itself, and the byte split is hard to argue with. On a 12 GB repo of files the model never read, model-turn traffic to /v1/responses came to about 192 KB while the storage channel to /v1/storage moved 5.10 GiB, a roughly 27,800x gap between what the model needed and what left the machine. That storage upload ran as 73 chunks of about 75 MB, every one returning HTTP 200, and across the researcher's size sweep the volume tracked total repo size. The destination bucket, grok-code-session-traces , is named in the binary and ...

Attackers whose methods line up with the data-extortion group  ShinyHunters  have spent the past year walking into corporate Salesforce environments without exploiting a single flaw in the platform. The way in has been the trust the organization had already extended, usually through the OAuth connections that tie Salesforce to the apps and third-party vendors around it. In  research published July 13 , Microsoft mapped the campaigns, which ran from mid-2025 into mid-2026, to three distinct techniques. It also worked with Salesforce to roll out new detection and governance tooling aimed at addressing the activity authentication logs miss. That is what makes this hard to catch. When the access comes from a real user who approved a connected app, or from an integration the company already trusts, the traffic reads as ordinary use, and sign-in and authentication monitoring barely registers it. What matters is what the app or account does once it is in, and that is ex...

Somewhere right now, a security tool is quietly finding bugs faster than any human can fix them. That's supposed to be the good news. The catch is that the attackers have the same tools, pointed the other way, and they don't file tickets. That's the shape of this week. Trusted code turns on the people who installed it. Old bugs from last year are still landing because the fix sat in a queue too long. Fake installers, poisoned packages, systems left facing the open internet, and helpful little AI assistants running instructions that were never yours. The gap between "patch exists" and "already exploited" keeps shrinking, and nobody's closing it. None of it is exotic. That's what wears you down. Same ordinary mistakes, just happening faster than we can keep up. Here's the full mess, top to bottom. ⚡ Threat of the Week Progress Tells ShareFile Customers to Shut Down Storage Zone Controllers — Progress urged customers to shut down Win...

A new phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) operation called Forg365 is using a combination of device code phishing , adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) tactics, antibot evasion, artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted lure creation, and post-compromise mailbox operations targeting Microsoft 365 accounts. Distributed via Telegram and costing $400 a month (or $3,800 per year), attack chains leverage phishing lures that make use of legitimate email delivery infrastructure, such as Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and Twilio SendGrid, to imitate a redirection chain that blends into regular email traffic before it ends in Forg365-controlled domains. "The panel exposes a mature operator workflow: accounts, links, invitations, OAuth app configuration, redirect links, SVG generation, campaign sending, SMTP profiles, SMTP rotation, AI email generation, token vaulting, account intelligence, keyword alerts, viewer links, and browser-extension support," ZeroBEC said . The email securi...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged an intrusion in which an unknown threat actor leveraged a vibe-coded PowerShell script for Active Directory (AD) enumeration. "The script looked for the Domain Controller (DC) and mapped users, computers, and domains, before creating a directory and exporting out a number of files, and finally creating AD_Report.html to measure the success of the enumeration attempt," Huntress researchers Jevon Ang and Dray Agha said . The attack chain involved the threat actor establishing Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) access onto a domain-joined Windows Server with a set of pre-compromised credentials, followed by staging the tools in the "C:\ProgramData\" folder. The incident took place in early June 2026. This included an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated payload to map the Active Directory environment. The assessment is based on various telltale signs, such as the prompt iteration title, placeholder strings, over-engineered cod...

An attacker running a live Microsoft 365 phishing operation left a Python web server listening on a public port with directory listing switched on. The command that did it:  python3 -m http.server 8080 , was still sitting in the readable  .bash_history . From that one lapse, French security firm  Lexfo  lifted the operator's entire toolkit and pivoted through it to two more phishing operators, three campaigns in all. Each ran a custom fork of the open-source Evilginx proxy , cloned from public GitHub. The largest of the three had been running for more than a year, its victims overwhelmingly corporate mailboxes. The three got past MFA in two mechanically different ways, one by proxying the live login , one by abusing a legitimate Microsoft sign-in flow. The two need different defenses, which is the part that matters most if you run Microsoft 365. Directory listing on a working attack server is close to a full confession. The listing exposed phishing conf...

Progress Software has told ShareFile customers to shut down the Windows servers running their Storage Zone Controllers, confirming to The Hacker News that it is responding to a "credible external security threat." The company has temporarily disabled access to the affected accounts, a step it says it took "out of an abundance of caution" while it works with internal and external security experts. It says it has no indication of unauthorized access to any ShareFile accounts or data, and that it notified customers after learning of the threat. What Progress has not said is what the threat is or who is behind it. The order became public when a customer posted the company's email to Reddit's  r/sysadmin  on July 10. Progress  confirmed the disruption on its status page, listing Storage Zone Controller customers as "not operational" and the incident as under investigation as of a 12:12 p.m. EDT update. Only the Storage Zone Controller is af...

The China-linked cybercrime group known as Silver Fox has been attributed to a new Rust-based remote access trojan (RAR) called MODBEACON . Chinese cybersecurity company QiAnXin said that while the threat cluster may appear like a low-sophistication, high-activity operation that propagates malware via counterfeit installers using SEO poisoning techniques, it belies their true organizational structure , which compromises multiple distributors. "These distributors conduct activities across Asia using counterfeit software installers distributed through SEO campaigns, leveraging variants of Gh0st RAT and WinOS (ValleyRAT) trojan families," QiAnXin said . One such campaign observed in mid-June 2026 involved a distributor delivering a previously undocumented modular RAT targeting technology, education, and state-owned enterprises in the country. MODBEACON's requested command-and-control (C2) infrastructure is hosted on Amazon and Cloudflare's Content Delivery Networ...

A single wrong variable on one line in XQUIC, Alibaba's QUIC and HTTP/3 library, lets any remote client crash the server with a short burst of completely legal traffic. There is no patch. FoxIO researcher Sébastien Féry  disclosed the flaw on July 8  and nicknamed it XRING. He says it needs no login and no malformed packets: about 260 bytes of ordinary QPACK traffic takes the server process down. XQUIC is open-source, so the risk is not Alibaba's alone: any server that embeds it and serves HTTP/3 with the default QPACK settings is exposed. That includes Tengine, Alibaba's Nginx-based web server, which FoxIO says fronts the company's cloud and CDN on sites including Taobao and Alipay. Every release through v1.9.4, the latest, is affected. There is no fixed release and no CVE as of July 10. Until a fix ships, operators can set SETTINGS_QPACK_MAX_TABLE_CAPACITY to 0, which turns off QPACK's dynamic table, or drop HTTP/3 support entirely. The bug lives in how H...

A cybercrime crew left one of its own servers wide open on the internet for three weeks, and it exposed the operation's inner workings: the hacking tools, the activity logs, and target lists naming more than 1.4 million websites. Far fewer were actually broken into, but the exposed files showed researchers how a mass site-hacking operation runs from the inside. The operation, now tracked as WP-SHELLSTORM , is what  SOCRadar  calls a webshell access brokerage: a crew that breaks into sites at scale, plants a hidden backdoor (a "webshell") on each, and packages that access for resale. The strongest activity hit WordPress sites running out-of-date plugins. If you run WordPress or Joomla, the two flaws that mattered most were in the Breeze caching plugin and Joomla's JCE editor; skip to the checklist below if that's you. A forgotten server Two teams dug into the same exposed folder. SOCRadar's threat intelligence team spotted it on June 11, 2026, on a U...

A threat actor has been targeting organizations spanning multiple sectors with voice-based fake security requests that prompt Microsoft 365 users to enroll a new Entra passkey with an aim to carry out data extortion attacks. The threat actor, tracked by Okta under the moniker O-UNC-066 , has deployed a panel-controlled phishing kit that's capable of targeting the passkey enrollment process . The activity has singled out food and beverage, technology, healthcare, automotive, construction, and aviation industries. "The threat actor registers domains that incorporate the word passkey as part of a voice-enabled phishing ('vishing') scheme," Okta researcher Houssem Eddine Bordjiba said . "The threat actor then calls targeted users on the phone in an attempt to persuade them that they need to register a new passkey." Users are then directed to a phishing kit that's identical to the Microsoft passkey enrollment process, giving the impression that th...

Datadog Security Labs is warning of "several overlapping campaigns" that are systematically enumerating corporate GitHub organizations, repositories, and user accounts through the GitHub API. "Operators rely on automated scraping tooling with custom or legitimate-sounding user agents, leveraging GitHub 'ghost' accounts that are often years old, or compromised OAuth tokens and personal access tokens (PATs) from legitimate users," Julie Agnes Sparks, senior security engineer at Datadog, said . While the activity in most cases involves targeting public data, select instances have gone beyond public information enumeration to successfully clone private repositories. The campaign employs a mix of automated scanner tools, over 50 dormant accounts, and dozens of legitimate accounts that have had their personal access tokens (PATs) exposed unintentionally or compromised through some other method to facilitate the enumeration. What's notable about the ...

GitHub has officially announced the release of npm version 12 with install scripts disabled by default, along with deprecating granular access tokens (GATs) designed to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA). The Microsoft-owned subsidiary noted that the following npm install behaviors that used to run automatically before have been made opt-in - allowScripts defaults to off, meaning dependency lifecycle scripts (i.e., preinstall, install, postinstall) and implicit node-gyp builds no longer run unless explicitly allowed. --allow-git defaults to none, meaning --allow-git defaults to none: Git dependencies (direct or transitive) are no longer resolved unless explicitly allowed. --allow-remote defaults to none, meaning dependencies from remote URLs (e.g., https tarballs) are no longer resolved unless explicitly allowed. To review and approve trusted scripts, users are now required to run: "npm approve-scripts --allow-scripts-pending," then commit the resulting a...

Most security mess starts as admin work. A link gets clicked. A tool gets trusted. A bucket name gets reused. A setting stays loose because nobody wants to touch it. This week is full of that kind of damage. Not loud. Not clever. Just small gaps doing big jobs. The worst part is how normal it all looks until the bill arrives. The full ThreatsDay list is below. Global fraud bust Global Operation Leads to ~6K Arrests A global anti-fraud operation involving 97 countries and territories has resulted in the arrest of 5,811 individuals and the interception of $293 million in illicit assets as part of an operation codenamed First Light 2026 that took place between January 15 and April 30, 2026, to tackle social engineering scams and associated money laundering activities. "Over 142,000 victims globally were identified during Operation First Light 2026, highlighting the extent to which social engineering scams and fraud have escalated ...

Everyone seems to have announced a clearinghouse over the past few weeks. We did too. Ours is called Athena , and the main thing that sets it apart is that it was already real and running when we announced it — built quietly months earlier, heads down, taking findings and shipping fixes, because customers kept asking us to. We only announced it now because everyone else started announcing theirs, and staying quiet started to look like something it wasn't. The others arrived louder and, as far as anyone outside the press releases could tell, didn't exist yet. Here's the part none of those announcements will tell you: the clearinghouse is the least important thing to build. When a project we'd deliberately kept private, a  five-billion-dollar press release , and  the White House all reach for the same word inside a few weeks, that's not a trend. Trends are optional. This is the shape of a problem changing under everyone at once. So let me explain why these thin...

Researchers at  Wiz  found that a flaw in six popular AI coding assistants lets a booby-trapped code project quietly take control of a developer's computer. The assistant asks permission to edit one harmless-looking file, but the write lands on a sensitive one instead. The affected tools are Amazon Q Developer, Anthropic's Claude Code, Augment, Cursor, Google Antigravity, and Windsurf. Wiz calls the pattern GhostApproval and published it on July 8. Three of the six have shipped fixes, two have not, and Anthropic disputes that it is a bug. The most exposed are the tools that change files before you can weigh in. How the attack works The attack abuses an old Unix feature called a symbolic link , or symlink , that the assistants fail to check. A symlink quietly points to another file elsewhere on disk, so writing to it actually writes to the target. Wiz built a malicious repository with a symlink named project_settings.json that really points to the victim's ...

A recent EvilTokens campaign targeting businesses across the US and Europe is exposing a new email security blind spot. This “ghost phishing” technique keeps the malicious page hidden until it decrypts and comes to life inside the victim’s browser. For security leaders, the risk is clear: traditional URL checks may miss the attack while Microsoft 365 access, sensitive data, and response time are already at stake. The Email Looks Safe. The Browser Tells a Different Story A recent EvilTokens attack shows how a phishing link can appear harmless during initial inspection while still leading to Microsoft 365 account takeover. The kit uses Microsoft Device Code Phishing to convince victims to complete a legitimate Microsoft login flow and unknowingly authorize access to their accounts. It does not need to steal the password directly. The real attack remains hidden until the page opens in the browser. Its HTML is encrypted with AES-GCM and becomes visible only after the browser dec...

New research shows that a signed Git commit's hash is not the one-of-a-kind name that much of the software world assumes it to be. Given any signed commit, someone without the signing key can mint a second commit with the same files, author, and date, and a valid signature, GitHub still stamps "Verified." Everything a reviewer would check matches. The commit's hash does not. That matters because so many systems treat a verified commit hash as a permanent, unique name for its contents. Here is the concrete failure: block a bad commit by its hash, and an attacker can re-push the same content under a fresh, still-"Verified" hash your blocklist has never seen. Deduplication, provenance logs, and reproducible-build records that key on the hash inherit the same soft spot. A compromised or hostile mirror can hand cloners validly signed commits whose hashes differ from those on the canonical forge. What this is not is a way to slip different code past a sig...

Researchers at  Nebula Security  have disclosed GhostLock ( CVE-2026-43499 ), a 15-year-old Linux kernel flaw that lets any logged-in user take full root control of a machine that has not been patched. The vulnerable code has shipped by default in essentially every mainstream distribution since 2011. The flaw needs no special permission, no unusual settings, and no network access; ordinary threading calls from any local program are enough. Nebula turned it into a working root exploit that is 97% reliable in its testing and also escapes containers, and says Google awarded the team $92,337 through its  kernelCTF  bug-bounty program. No one is known to be exploiting it in the wild, but Nebula has published  working exploit code , so anyone can now run it. Patching is the priority. How the bug works The kernel has a system for keeping an urgent task from getting stuck behind a trivial one. Part of it is a cleanup step that tidies up after a task...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added four security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-48282 (CVSS score: 10.0) - A path traversal vulnerability in Adobe ColdFusion that could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. CVE-2026-56290 (CVSS score: 10.0) - An improper access control vulnerability in Joomlack Page Builder that could allow for remote code execution via unauthenticated arbitrary file upload. CVE-2026-55255 (CVSS score: 6.1) - An authorization bypass through a user-controlled key vulnerability in Langflow that could allow an authenticated attacker to execute any flow belonging to another user by specifying the victim's flow ID in the request. CVE-2026-48908 (CVSS score: 10.0) - An unrestricted upload of a file with a dangerous type vulnerability in JoomShaper SP P...