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A domain used as harmless placeholder text showed up in roughly 1,700 repositories. Then somebody registered it and started serving malicious lures. That is the kind of week this was: forgotten assumptions turning into live attack surface. Elsewhere, weak service accounts, old bugs, exposed systems, phishing kits, and strangely easy exploit paths kept doing useful work for attackers. Nothing exotic. Mostly things nobody expected to matter anymore. Here’s the full recap of what mattered this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week Citrix Warns of Actively Exploited NetScaler ADC and Gateway Flaws — Citrix released patches to address multiple vulnerabilities, including CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772, that have come under active exploitation. CVE-2026-88771 is an improper input validation vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands, while successful exploitation of CVE-2026-88772 could allow for remote code execution or denial-of-service. CISA...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new botnet malware called Carbonato that's targeting exposed Docker daemons to deploy an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) agent framework called Hermes Agent . "The implant installs the framework unchanged, then overwrites its SOUL.md persona file," ThreatDown said . "The 39-line prompt directs it to execute tasks received through Telegram, maintain persistence, and collect credentials." At a high level, the botnet breaks into Docker daemons exposed without authentication on port 2375 and scans neighboring networks every five minutes to propagate further. On each host, it installs Hermes Agent with instructions to follow operators' Telegram commands. The cybersecurity company said it found the operation through an unauthenticated Docker registry that's been publicly accessible since May 2026. The staged data has been found to include details of the botnet and a separate campaign that d...

The threat actor known as JADEPUFFER has been observed orchestrating destructive actions within a Microsoft Azure environment using compromised service principals. Microsoft, which is tracking the activity under the name Storm-3168 , has called it an evolution of the threat actor's tradecraft. The attack took place in early June 2026 over a period of about 18 hours. "The destructive operations were facilitated by compromising service principals and targeted Azure Storage Accounts, SQL databases, Key Vaults, Function Apps, recovery protection locks, Virtual Machines, and App Services," researchers Yossi Weizman and Tushar Mudi, along with the Microsoft Security Research team, said . JADEPUFFER was first documented by Sysdig, describing it as the first-ever ransomware operation run end-to-end with the help of a large language model (LLM). The agentic attack exploited a known security flaw in Langflow (CVE-2025-3248) to break in, harvested credentials, burrowed deepe...

The way we talk about AI agents is shifting, and the way we implement them requires an even more fundamental shift. While earlier discourse focused on how quickly organizations could stand up agents and how much productivity they could promise, a string of recent incidents, including a widely discussed intrusion at Hugging Face during an evaluation of OpenAI agents, has spurred organizations to examine whether speed has outpaced the ability to secure what gets deployed . Security teams are increasingly asking what an agent can reach once it's running, and whether anyone would notice before it mattered. However tempting it may be to jump directly into enforcement controls and detections, you need to look before you leap. Research from Veeam reveals that 70% of organizations admit that AI workflows are already in contact with sensitive corporate data without full oversight in place, and 67% report that IT cannot fully track the autonomous workflows that employees are building. Sh...

A flaw in Cloudflare Containers let a paying customer read data that other customers' containers had left behind on the same server, Cloudflare and the researchers who found it said on Thursday. The data came from disk space that earlier containers had used and given up, not from any live workload, and an attacker could not choose whose data they got,  according to Cloudflare . The company has fixed the flaw across its service and says customers need to do nothing. Cloudflare Containers runs customers' programs inside containers on servers shared by many accounts, and Cloudflare, not the customer, picks the server. Cloudflare Sandboxes, which runs on Containers and is sold as a safe place to run untrusted code, including code written by AI agents, was affected too. The flaw was reported on September 4 by Oren Yomtov of the security firm Accomplish , through Cloudflare's bug bounty program. The problem was in how the shared disks were set up. Each container gets a ...

This week, the dangerous stuff keeps arriving dressed as something boring. An update. A login box. A search answer. A coding tool. A link you have clicked a hundred times before. That is the thread running through the pile. Trusted paths get poisoned. Old bugs find new jobs. AI tools leak more than expected. Fake prompts look real enough. And some attacks barely need an exploit at all — just one weak setting or one person doing what the screen tells them. Nothing here looks especially dramatic. That is what makes it useful. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

AI coding agents are changing how quickly developers can build and ship software as well as how quickly credentials can become exposed. According to GitGuardian’s 2026 State of Secrets Sprawl Report , commits identified as AI-assisted are leaking secrets at approximately twice the rate of human-written ones. Most of the fastest-growing categories of leaked credentials are now connected to AI services, meaning the tools meant to advance development are also accelerating the exposure of the keys development relies on. This isn’t a new vulnerability; what is new is AI changing the scale and pace at which those mistakes can happen. A coding agent can read an entire project, modify files, generate configurations and interact with external services in the time a developer might take to review a single pull request. The main issue isn’t that AI agents sometimes encounter secrets but that many of those secrets were never designed for an environment in which software can act autonomously. A...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active TeamFiltration campaign codenamed UNK_CondorFiltration that has targeted over 5,700 accounts across 28 Microsoft 365 tenants. According to Proofpoint, the activity has primarily focused on Chilean retail and financial institutions. It originated from 1,487 unique AWS EC2 source IP addresses. "The campaign compromised 7 accounts – all of which were unmanaged functional or service accounts rather than individual employee accounts – highlighting a critical exposure gap around forgotten, non-human identities carrying default or unrotated passwords and no MFA [multi-factor authentication]," the enterprise security company said in a statement. The Microsoft 365 brute-force campaign is said to have unfolded across three different waves from late July to August 2026, with an unnamed Chilean retailer facing the brunt of 78.3% of all observed authentication events - July 21-24, targeting approximately 100–120 ...

Unknown threat actors have managed to compromise two legitimate MemTensor packages across the npm and Python Package Index (PyPI) repositories to push a platform-specific Go-based implant dubbed sckit designed for Windows, Linux, and macOS. According to reports from Aikido , SafeDep , Socket , and StepSecurity , the libraries in question below - @memtensor/memos-cloud-openclaw-plugin versions 0.1.21, 0.1.23 and 0.1.25 (versions 0.1.22 and 0.1.24 are clean) MemoryOS version 2.0.34 (project currently quarantined on PyPI) The malicious npm package versions include a "hidden Go payload into a legitimate AI memory integration. Versions 0.1.21, 0.1.23, and 0.1.25 contain code that launches the payload when the agent gateway starts and whenever the plugin handles a memory-recall event," StepSecurity said. "The launcher passes the host process environment and, during recall, the user's prompt text directly to the malicious executable."

A use-after-free in the Linux kernel's AF_UNIX socket subsystem can be used to escape a container and gain root on the host, security firm DepthFirst  said in research published September 22. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2026-80521  (CVSS score: 7.8), was fixed upstream on August 6, but Ubuntu has not shipped the patch for its 26.04, 24.04, or 22.04 LTS releases. DepthFirst  released exploit code  targeting Ubuntu 26.04. Ubuntu's security tracker  lists the Linux package on 26.04 as "vulnerable, work in progress." The 24.04 and 22.04 releases are also affected through newer kernel packages, including those for AWS, Azure, and GCP workloads. No fix has shipped on any affected release. The flaw is not in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and there are no confirmed reports of attacks using it. The vulnerability sits in the kernel's garbage collector for AF_UNIX sockets. That collector cleans up file descriptors passed between processes t...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a malicious npm package named "tw-pkgprobe-7731" that masquerades as a security tool targeting developers integrating Twilio into their applications, while stealthily attempting to harvest sensitive data. The package, named "tw-pkgprobe-7731," was first uploaded to the npm registry in mid-August 2026 by an npm account named "twdepprobe7731." In total, 11 versions of the package were published in quick succession on the same day over an approximately 45-minute time period. The npm user account no longer exists as of writing. "The first version of tw-pkgprobe-7731 posed as an authorized security research probe," ReversingLabs researcher Lucija Valentić said in a report published today. "Comments inside the package describe it as an 'Authorized bug-bounty research probe (Twilio HackerOne program)' that 'runs only inside Twilio's serverless packager sandbox' and ...

Microsoft on Tuesday announced the takedown of the EvilTokens device code phishing service that it said used artificial intelligence (AI) "at every step of the attack chain." The action, carried out with authorization from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, involved the efforts of Health-ISAC, alongside Cloudflare, Coinbase, OpenAI, Railway, SpyCloud, The Shadowserver Foundation, and TRM Labs. Microsoft is tracking the threat actors behind the development and support of EvilTokens as Storm-2992 . In tandem, the Metropolitan Police Service arrested two men, aged 32 and 38, on September 11, 2026, in connection with the illicit commercial operation. The tech giant described EvilTokens as a "powerful cybercrime platform" that used AI to compromise email accounts and design roadmaps for financial fraud and scams. "While EvilTokens helped cybercriminals access email accounts, at the center of the service was an AI-style chatbot th...

Security teams have spent decades asking whether an identity has too much access. AI agents raise a harder question: how can we determine which paths an autonomous system can discover, given the access it already has? A person may try several ways to complete a task. A deterministic application follows the flow its developer wrote. But an AI agent is relentless in its pursuit of done. In May 2026, OpenAI announced that one of its models had disproved a 1946 Erdős conjecture in discrete geometry, largely by working through paths a mathematician would abandon as too tedious. The same principle applies to cybersecurity. An AI agent can test thousands of actions, abandon failed routes, discover credentials, switch tools, and keep going. That persistence is part of what makes agents useful, but it also changes how we need to think about lateral movement. AI agent risk has two dimensions: Access defines the possible blast radius Autonomy determines how much an agent can do with...

A new flaw in the Linux kernel's KVM virtualization code for ARM64 processors can leave a freed piece of host memory exposed to a guest virtual machine on hosts with nested virtualization enabled. The bug, tracked as  CVE-2026-89775 , allows a guest to read and write host kernel memory, and the researcher who found it says it can be used to escape the guest and run code on the host machine. The affected code is part of the mainline Linux kernel for ARM64, and it is fixed in Linux 6.18.51, 7.2.5, and 7.3-rc1. Nested virtualization allows a guest to run its own hypervisor, enabling it to host virtual machines. On ARM64, it is off by default. It is  an experimental boot-time mode  that needs Armv8.4 hardware with a feature called FEAT_NV2, so a plain ARM64 KVM host that never turns it on is outside the reported attack path. The flaw sits in the part of KVM that handles nested virtualization on ARM64. When a guest arranges its memory in a certain way, a size calculat...

A browser. A plugin. A package. A login screen. Normal stuff. That is basically the problem this week. The trouble keeps showing up inside things people already trust: code that takes a bad turn, old payloads coming back, exposed systems, weak checks, fake fixes, and attack paths that look almost too easy. Even the research side is getting messy, with more findings, more automation, and not always more clarity. Nothing here needs much drama. Just a lot of small doors left open. Here’s what happened. ⚡ Threat of the Week Cisco Warns of Actively Exploited ISE Auth Bypass — Cisco warned of a fresh maximum-severity security flaw impacting Identity Services Engine (ISE) that has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76460 (CVSS score: 10.0), could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication. "This vulnerability is due to insufficient authentication control on an API endpoint," Cisco said. "An attacker could exp...

Identity visibility is a starting point for modern identity security, because stolen and misused credentials are among the most frequently reported initial access vectors in breach research, including Verizon's annual Data Breach Investigations Report . This article explains what identity visibility means in IAM, why cloud and multicloud environments complicate it, which capabilities matter in identity visibility tools , and how to build a practical program. What is identity visibility? Identity visibility is the ability to see every identity in an environment, what it can access, and how that access is actually used at runtime. It combines inventory, entitlement mapping, and behavioral telemetry into one continuous picture instead of a periodic snapshot. The important distinction is between intent and execution. Identity and access management (IAM) platforms express policy intent: who should have access, under what conditions, and for how long. Applications and infrastructu...

An attacker copied about 170 of CrowdSec's private GitHub repositories on May 22 using the account of an employee who had just left, CrowdSec said on September 18. The French security company had kept his GitHub access open. CrowdSec says his laptop was compromised in May's  supply chain attack on TanStack , in which malicious versions of TanStack's npm packages stole credentials from developers' machines. The code appeared on an online forum on September 16. Along with the source code, it contained the email addresses of 83 CrowdSec users and the names, email addresses, and investment context of 51 potential investors from 2020, the company said. CrowdSec says the account was used only to copy code, that its infrastructure and databases were not accessed, and that no code was changed. How the Code Was Taken On May 11, 84 malicious versions of 42 TanStack npm packages were published. The compromise is tracked as CVE-2026-45321 . Installing one of those versi...

Microsoft has released fixes for a maximum-severity security flaw in Azure AI Foundry that could be exploited to achieve privilege escalation. No customer action is required. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-85889 , carries a CVSS score of 10.0. "Missing authentication for critical function in Azure AI Foundry allows an unauthorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network," Microsoft said in a Thursday advisory. Azure AI Foundry, also called Microsoft Foundry, is an enterprise platform designed to build, deploy, and manage generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications and agents. The Windows maker credited security researcher Rémy Marot (@R_Marot) for discovering and reporting the flaw. There is no evidence that the issue has been exploited in the wild. Also patched by Microsoft in recent days are a number of other critical flaws -

Attackers keep finding new keys. The funny part is that defenders keep inventing where to store them. This week, those keys sit in AI tools, exposed services, old bugs, weak logins, and software sold like a monthly subscription. Some attacks use new tricks. Others just reuse what was already lying around. Both work often enough. So the threat landscape is not getting cleaner. It is just getting more places to make the same mistake. Here’s what showed up this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

OpenAI on Wednesday disclosed six new instances of "unexpected or concerning model behavior" that took place over the past six months, while sharing a new framework for reporting, tracking, investigating, and disclosing model misalignment in a bid to improve transparency. "As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research," OpenAI said. "We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer." "Decisions about how AI development should proceed in the months and years to come need to draw on evidence that people outside the companies building frontier models can examine for themselves." The six incidents are outside of the recently disclosed misaligned activity targeting Hugging Face , DseWiki , and RubyGems . Details of the inc...