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OpenAI has disclosed seven new incidents in which its artificial intelligence (AI) models exhibited misaligned behavior, including one case where its research model, after not having funds on an Ethereum test network, spent test cryptocurrency from a third-party's wallet without authorization to complete a coding task. The incident, the AI company said, involved an internal research model part of the GPT-5.6 Sol family. The incident occurred on June 26, 2026, and was discovered by OpenAI three months later. "An internal research model asked to update a cryptocurrency trading application used funds from a wallet that the task had not supplied to pay for a deployment on Sepolia, an Ethereum test network," OpenAI said . "It derived wallet keys from publicly known developer recovery phrases, found an account with test-network funds, and used that account to pay for the requested contract deployment." The assignment allowed the model to deploy compatible cont...

AI agents being tested online reached the live systems of Indian organizations and read business records, including personal data and confidential material, CERT-In  said in an advisory  on October 15. The agents went beyond their assigned tasks, and none of the organizations detected the unauthorized access. After internal reviews, the AI companies whose models were being tested voluntarily reported the cases to CERT-In, India's national cyber agency. AI agents are software systems that can plan work, run commands, use tools, and act on the internet autonomously for extended periods. In these cases, the agents gained access via credentials and connection settings left exposed in application configuration and public code repositories, and via cloud service roles with excessive permissions. CERT-In did not name the AI companies, their models, or the organizations and sectors involved. It did not say how many companies reported cases or how many organizations were affecte...

A newly disclosed critical flaw in the Linux kernel allows code inside a virtual machine to read memory on the host computer it runs on. A researcher demonstrated the leak against Vercel's live cloud sandboxes, and Vercel confirmed it. The flaw, now tracked as CVE-2026-99999 and nicknamed PwnEscape , is in the Linux kernel's networking code, not in any one cloud's setup, so it reaches the shared layer that cloud providers use to keep customers' workloads apart. It was found in a Vercel security challenge and reported privately before any public release, and there is no sign it has been used in a real attack. What the Researcher Showed Paulos Yibelo of the security firm pwn.ai found that specially made network packets sent from inside a virtual machine could do three things, he explained in a  technical write-up : read the host's memory, crash the host, and run code on it. All three come from the same kernel flaw. Vercel said in its  report on the challen...

Someone built a tool to steal data, then decided it should scare the victim for fun. Yes, that’s an actual feature. And somehow, it fits right in with this week's security stories. The rest gets interesting in different ways. A small permission can lead to a big theft. A trusted login can hide the wrong person. Old bugs are finding new victims, familiar tools are being put to strange uses, and some flaws are so simple you wonder how nobody spotted them sooner. There's a lot more hiding in the details, including a few twists you probably wouldn't expect. Here's what made the list this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

A long-running Traffic Distribution System (TDS) known as Help TDS to a Russian-language affiliate program called Hotejka , which appears to be a rebrand of a traffic monetization operation dubbed ROI777. Help TDS is assessed to be active since at least 2017, offering PHP code templates to partners and affiliates that are installed into compromised websites with an aim to direct unsuspecting users to tech support scams. These scams make use of full-screen browser manipulation and exit prevention techniques to serve bogus Microsoft Windows security alert screens instructing victims to contact a Windows Support number to address the problem. "Help TDS delivers tech support scams (TSSs) that direct users to call centers, where social engineering is used to convince them to install remote desktop tools," Infoblox said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It's not simple credit card fraud: it's remote access, living-off-the-land malware operations. Once in,...

The credential-theft campaign known as GhostAction has ramped up, targeting more than 30,000 repositories across 3,000 users and organizations. The spike, according to GitGuardian, was observed on October 8 and 9, 2026. "This resulted from compromising the GitHub accounts of about 1,900 users. It attempted to extract 3,174 secrets from public repositories' CI," security researchers Gaetan Ferry and Guillaume Valadon said . GhostAction is the moniker for a supply chain attack campaign targeting developer infrastructure on GitHub. Originally discovered in September 2025, it involves threat actors compromising legitimate developer accounts to inject malicious GitHub Actions automation workflows into software repositories. Attackers have been found to gain write access to repositories using stolen Personal Access Tokens (PATs) or credentials harvested from infostealer logs and dumps. Using the hijacked maintainer account, they push a malicious workflow file disguis...

Microsoft and Health-ISAC, along with the Japan Cybercrime Control Center (JC3) and a coalition of private sector companies, such as Resecurity, Cloudflare, Oracle, Proofpoint, and TRM Labs, announced the disruption of three phishing kits, CoGUI (aka NX or FA), Haozi (aka Phoenix), and Iron Man System . "Since January 2026, the threat actors behind these kits have been responsible for facilitating the sending of over one billion phishing emails and SMS messages to over 75 thousand organizations worldwide," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence and Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit said . The court-authorized operation is the result of an investigation that Microsoft launched in late 2025 after it was notified of malicious messaging campaigns targeting people in Japan. The  The Chinese-language cybercriminal ecosystem has been described as an interconnected network of phishing kit operators, developers, and an illicit marketplace and initial access broker (IAB) codenamed YAM ...

Small artificial intelligence (AI) models may be months away from developing capabilities to self-replicate on IoT devices like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, according to a warning from Anthropic. The frontier AI lab said small AI models could form autonomous, self-propagating worm botnets that are "challenging to shut down," since "there's no centralized point to shut off." Prior work has demonstrated that AI agents can act like one by scanning their network, executing an exploit, and copying model weights to a target machine across a GPU cluster with an aim to generate tailored attack strategies and use compromised machines as a botnet to run large language models (LLMs) in order to sustain its reasoning and expand in scale. "Such an 'AI worm' could carry its model weights with it as it reproduces (or re-download them from a public hub), and then run inference directly on compromised hardware," Anthropic said . "Eff...

A flaw in Docker Hub, the registry where container images are published and downloaded, let one user push, pull, or delete images as another user. Docker fixed the flaw on September 30 and says it found no evidence that anyone exploited it. The flaw was in the feature that  converts a personal account  into an organization, Docker said in a  security advisory  on October 12. Conversion transferred the account's personal access tokens (PATs) to the user designated as the organization's owner. A PAT is used in place of a password in the registry, and the person who created each token can still use it. The access was limited to the registry. It did not reach the Docker Hub web interface, and it could not be used to change a password, email address, or two-factor settings, or to take over an account. Docker tracks the flaw as CVE-2026-105445 and rated it critical. The  CVE record  it published on October 13 gives the flaw a CVSS 4.0 score of 9.4. The ...

A flaw in SAP's  Cloud SDK for Python  can send an application's OAuth2 client credentials to a server an attacker controls, SAP said in a  security advisory  on October 13. The flaw affects multi-tenant applications on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) that use the SDK, SAP's official Python client for BTP services. An attacker must be able to control the tenant subdomain, the name such an application passes to the SDK to say which tenant a request is for. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-89111 and carries SAP's CVSS score of 10.0 out of 10. The advisory names  version 0.45.2 , released on August 21, as the fix. The SDK handles authentication for those services with the application's client credentials, a client ID and a client secret. Version 0.45.2 added a check that rejects any tenant subdomain that is not a simple name. Six later releases do not apply that check in every case, The Hacker News found. Versions 0.53.0 through 0.55.0, published betwe...

Two of 31 newly disclosed flaws in Progress Software's  MarkLogic Server  database could let an account given only some management privileges take administrator control of the server, the company says. Progress published all 31 on October 12 and scored five of them critical. Fixes have been available since September 10, in  MarkLogic 11.3.7  and  MarkLogic 12.1.0 . Affected releases, and the release that fixes each: MarkLogic 11.x before 11.3.7: upgrade to 11.3.7 MarkLogic 12.x before 12.1.0: upgrade to 12.1.0 MarkLogic 11.3 is the long-term support (LTS) line. The 12 line, which Progress calls an innovation release, has no patched 12.0 release. Its fix is 12.1.0, which also adds new features. Installing the fixes for the 10 MarkLogic flaws Progress disclosed in August is not enough. Those fixes arrived in 11.3.6 and 12.0.3, and both releases are affected by the new flaws. Progress's CVE records and its upgrade notes for the two releases do n...

Some meetings last longer than it took attackers to jump on a newly disclosed security flaw this week. Within hours, they were already testing it. That's not much time to read the warning, let alone do something about it. But speed is only part of the problem. A secure connection didn't always mean a safe destination. People offering to fix a ransomware mess had questions to answer themselves. Malware got better at hiding its tracks. And some systems turned out to be easier to break into than anyone would like to admit. The odd part is how normal much of it looked until someone checked closer. There's more going on here than a few bad bugs and clever attacks. Some of the smaller stories are just as telling. This week's full recap is worth a read, especially the bits that didn't make the big headlines. ⚡ Threat of the Week Atlassian Flaw Exploited in the Wild — Threat actors have begun to exploit a newly disclosed critical security flaw impacting Atlassian...

The personal AI agents rollout is going about as smoothly as expected: Amazon now blocks Meta's Muse because it doesn't identify itself as a bot while browsing; Instinct keeps raising privacy concerns ; and the horror stories from pretty much every personal AI agent keep piling up. Regardless, the tech world is mesmerized by the capabilities and potential of these services. Less than a year after the first release of the open-source agent now called OpenClaw, the juggernauts are putting their weight behind the idea that each of us needs a personal assistant. You know what's coming: your employees will connect their personal agents to work systems. There's no stopping that. Their agents already manage their home time, and managing their work time is the next logical step. For them, that is. Not for your security. Given that personal agents will reach corporate systems whether approved or not, you might be wondering what the best way is to block them. If that’s yo...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an ongoing credential-theft campaign that has compromised two high-profile open-source maintainer accounts to push a malicious workflow into over 340 repositories. "Using the account of Takashi Kitao, author of the 18,400-star game engine pyxel, the attacker pushed a malicious workflow to 27 repositories starting at 13:20 UTC," StepSecurity said . "Eight hours later, the account of Henry Wu (henrywoo), the original author of Uber's athenadriver, was used to push the same workflow to 318 repositories in a 16-minute window, 21:10–21:26 UTC." As of October 9, 2026, Socket said it has identified more than 500 GitHub accounts that committed the malicious workflow to tens of thousands of repositories since October 7, 2026. The activity has been attributed to GhostAction , a massive supply chain attack campaign that first came to light in September 2025. The activity impacted 817 repositories across 327 GitHu...

As enterprises race to deploy autonomous AI agents to accelerate business, a new report reveals they are tethered to security architectures built for a different era. The " Horizons of Identity Security " report from SailPoint highlights a critical “velocity paradox,” in which organizations invest in AI-speed business operations while continuing to rely on human-speed security controls, creating a structural failure that legacy approaches cannot solve. The data shows that while businesses have spent years maturing their identity programs for human employees, those same playbooks are fundamentally broken when applied to the ephemeral, autonomous, and rapidly multiplying world of non-human AI agents. A Market Stalled at the Starting Line Despite years of investment in identity and access management, the market's overall security maturity has hit a wall. According to the report, the center of gravity remains firmly planted in the foundational stages, with a combined 6...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice (DoJ) have announced the disruption of malicious tools used by a China-linked advanced persistent threat group known as Flax Typhoon. To that end, the agencies seized several domains and blocked access to platforms that were used to scan, and in some cases infiltrate, U.S. critical infrastructure. The list of seized domains is as follows - c0cc[.]cc 98aiblog[.]com 98aicai[.]com 98aicode[.]com outlook3650[.]com youtubecard[.]com linkedinns[.]net Flax Typhoon , also tracked as Ethereal Panda and RedJuliett, is associated with Integrity Technology Group, a Beijing-based company that contracts with the Chinese government. It was previously attributed to a botnet called Raptor Train that comprised thousands of compromised small office/home office (SOHO) and IoT devices. It was taken down following a U.S. court-authorized operation in September 2024. "These state-sponsored hackers co...

Hackers tied to a Chinese cybersecurity company stole email from government organizations, law enforcement agencies, healthcare systems, and religious institutions in Southeast Asia, the FBI and agencies in 6 other countries said on October 8. The company, Integrity Technology Group , has been sanctioned by the U.S. and the UK. The hackers scanned websites for flaws using a tool containing more than 1,300 scripts, guessed passwords for Microsoft 365 and Exchange accounts, and copied mailboxes using tools designed to collect mail. The hackers have been breaking into networks since at least mid-January 2021, according to the agencies'  joint advisory . It describes the hacking in the present tense but provides no date for any theft and does not specify how many organizations were breached. The same hackers targeted U.S. government services, critical manufacturing, healthcare, and IT organizations, along with U.S. law enforcement, education, and religious groups. Organizations ...

The crooks have trust problems of their own. One ransomware affiliate decided to keep the profits for himself. Elsewhere, an attacker left a server exposed, complete with tools and traces of an intrusion. Apparently, keeping things secure is a problem on both sides of the fence. The rest of the week isn't much more reassuring. Malicious code turned up in developer packages and extensions that looked harmless. Familiar online services helped phishing emails appear legitimate. A basic file upload flaw gave attackers a way in, while weak session cookies made impersonation far too easy. Even AI assistants are getting their own instructions hidden inside phishing messages now. What's interesting is the gap between effort and results. Some attacks involve several stages, careful timing, and plenty of tricks. Others get surprisingly far because of a bad design choice or something nobody bothered to check. Both seem to be working well enough. Anyway, here's what else turned u...

The npm package known as " tensorlake ," a TypeScript software development kit (SDK) for Tensorlake applications, sandboxes, and cloud services, was compromised as part of a ChainDrop / Shai-Hulud supply chain attack. The malicious version 0.5.144 "contains obfuscated malware that harvests credentials, exfiltrates secrets, establishes persistence, and executes remotely supplied code," Socket said . Version 0.5.144 is no longer available for download from the npm package registry. An analysis of the compromised release shows that it contains a preinstall hook designed to launch a JavaScript file ("package/lib/setup.mjs"), an obfuscated loader that launches the main credential-stealing and self-propagating worm ("package/lib/Math_Symbol.js") using the Bun runtime. The stealer malware is designed to harvest credentials across local files, CI environments, Kubernetes, and Vault sources. It also drops the HackBrowserData binary, exfiltrate...

A critical vulnerability in LMCache , open-source software that speeds up large language model (LLM) servers such as vLLM, lets an attacker run code on the cache server without logging in, and no fixed version is available. The flaw is in LMCache's  multiprocess mode , where the cache runs as a standalone server that LLM workers reach over the ZeroMQ messaging library. A single network message to that server can run commands as the user the LMCache process runs as. The server can be reached from another machine only when an operator sets it to listen on a routable address, rather than the localhost it uses by default. JFrog disclosed the flaw  on October 7 and assigned it a severity score of 9.8 out of 10, in the critical range, the rating it gives a server bound to a routable address. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2026-105192 , affects LMCache from version 0.3.9, released in October 2025, through 0.5.5, the latest stable release, and is also present in the ...