DevOps | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

AI is changing everything — from how we code, to how we sell, to how we secure. But while most conversations focus on what AI can do, this one focuses on what AI can break — if you're not paying attention. Behind every AI agent, chatbot, or automation script lies a growing number of non-human identities — API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens — silently operating in the background. And here's the problem: 🔐 They're invisible 🧠 They're powerful 🚨 They're unsecured In traditional identity security, we protect users. With AI, we've quietly handed over control to software that impersonates users — often with more access, fewer guardrails, and no oversight. This isn't theoretical. Attackers are already exploiting these identities to: Move laterally through cloud infrastructure Deploy malware via automation pipelines Exfiltrate data — without triggering a single alert Once compromised, these identities can silently unlock critical systems. You don't get a second cha...

Human identities management and control is pretty well done with its set of dedicated tools, frameworks, and best practices. This is a very different world when it comes to Non-human identities also referred to as machine identities. GitGuardian's end-to-end NHI security platform is here to close the gap. Enterprises are Losing Track of Their Machine Identities Machine identities–service accounts, API keys, bots, automation, and workload identities–that now outnumber humans by up to 100:1 are in fact a massive blind spot in companies' security landscape: Without robust governance, NHIs become a prime target for attackers. Orphaned credentials, over-privileged accounts, and "zombie" secrets are proliferating—especially as organizations accelerate cloud adoption, integrate AI-powered agents, and automate their infrastructure . Secrets Sprawl: The New Attack Surface GitGuardian's research shows that 70% of valid secrets detected in public repositories in 2022 remained active in ...

Modern enterprise networks are highly complex environments that rely on hundreds of apps and infrastructure services. These systems need to interact securely and efficiently without constant human oversight, which is where non-human identities (NHIs) come in. NHIs — including application secrets, API keys, service accounts, and OAuth tokens — have exploded in recent years, thanks to an ever-expanding array of apps and services that must work together and identify one another on the fly. In some enterprises, NHIs now outnumber human identities by as much as 50-to-1 .  However, NHIs introduce unique risks and management challenges that have security leaders on high alert. Forty-six percent of organizations have experienced compromises of NHI accounts or credentials over the past year, and another 26% suspect they have, according to a recent report from Enterprise Strategy Group .  It's no wonder NHIs — and the difficulties they present with oversight, risk reduction, and gove...

Security teams face growing demands with more tools, more data, and higher expectations than ever. Boards approve large security budgets, yet still ask the same question: what is the business getting in return? CISOs respond with reports on controls and vulnerability counts – but executives want to understand risk in terms of financial exposure, operational impact, and avoiding loss. The disconnect has become difficult to ignore. The average cost of a breach has reached $4.88 million, according to recent IBM data . That figure reflects not just incident response but also downtime, lost productivity, customer attrition, and the extended effort required to restore operations and trust. The fallout is rarely confined to security. Security leaders need a model that brings those consequences into view before they surface. A Business Value Assessment (BVA) offers that model. It links exposures to cost, prioritization to return, and prevention to tangible value. This article will explain ...

An Iran-aligned hacking group has been attributed to a new set of cyber attacks targeting Kurdish and Iraqi government officials in early 2024. The activity is tied to a threat group ESET tracks as BladedFeline , which is assessed with medium confidence to be a sub-cluster within OilRig , a known Iranian nation-state cyber actor. It's said to be active since September 2017, when it targeted officials associated with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). "This group develops malware for maintaining and expanding access within organizations in Iraq and the KRG," the Slovak cybersecurity company said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "BladedFeline has worked consistently to maintain illicit access to Kurdish diplomatic officials, while simultaneously exploiting a regional telecommunications provider in Uzbekistan, and developing and maintaining access to officials in the government of Iraq." BladedFeline was first documented by ESET in Ma...

Threat hunters are calling attention to a new variant of a remote access trojan (RAT) called Chaos RAT that has been used in recent attacks targeting Windows and Linux systems. According to findings from Acronis, the malware artifact may have been distributed by tricking victims into downloading a network troubleshooting utility for Linux environments. "Chaos RAT is an open-source RAT written in Golang, offering cross-platform support for both Windows and Linux systems," security researchers Santiago Pontiroli, Gabor Molnar, and Kirill Antonenko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Inspired by popular frameworks such as Cobalt Strike and Sliver, Chaos RAT provides an administrative panel where users can build payloads, establish sessions, and control compromised machines." While work on the "remote administration tool" started way back in 2017, it did not attract attention until December 2022 , when it was put to use in a malicious campaig...

Several malicious packages have been uncovered across the npm, Python, and Ruby package repositories that drain funds from cryptocurrency wallets, erase entire codebases after installation, and exfiltrate Telegram API tokens, once again demonstrating the variety of supply chain threats lurking in open-source ecosystems. The findings come from multiple reports published by Checkmarx, ReversingLabs, Safety, and Socket in recent weeks. The list of identified packages across these platforms are listed below - Socket noted that the two malicious gems were published by a threat actor under the aliases Bùi nam, buidanhnam, and si_mobile merely days after Vietnam ordered a nationwide ban on the Telegram messaging app late last month for allegedly not cooperating with the government to tackle illicit activities related to fraud, drug trafficking, and terrorism. "These gems silently exfiltrate all data sent to the Telegram API by redirecting traffic through a command-and-control (C2...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has released security updates to address as many as eight vulnerabilities in its StoreOnce data backup and deduplication solution that could result in an authentication bypass and remote code execution. "These vulnerabilities could be remotely exploited to allow remote code execution, disclosure of information, server-side request forgery, authentication bypass, arbitrary file deletion, and directory traversal information disclosure vulnerabilities," HPE said in an advisory. This includes a fix for a critical security flaw tracked as CVE-2025-37093, which is rated 9.8 on the CVSS scoring system. It has been described as an authentication bypass bug affecting all versions of the software prior to 4.3.11. The vulnerability, along with the rest, was reported to the vendor on October 31, 2024. According to the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), which credited an anonymous researcher for discovering and reporting the shortcoming, said the problem is...

Threat hunters are alerting to a new campaign that employs deceptive websites to trick unsuspecting users into executing malicious PowerShell scripts on their machines and infect them with the NetSupport RAT malware. The DomainTools Investigations (DTI) team said it identified "malicious multi-stage downloader Powershell scripts" hosted on lure websites that masquerade as Gitcode and Docusign. "These sites attempt to deceive users into copying and running an initial PowerShell script on their Windows Run command," the company said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Upon doing so, the powershell script downloads another downloader script and executes on the system, which in turn retrieves additional payloads and executes them eventually installing NetSupport RAT on the infected machines." It's believed that these counterfeit sites may be propagated via social engineering attempts over email and/or social media platforms. The Po...

In the wake of high-profile attacks on UK retailers Marks & Spencer and Co-op, Scattered Spider has been all over the media, with coverage spilling over into the mainstream news due to the severity of the disruption caused — currently looking like hundreds of millions in lost profits for M&S alone.  This coverage is extremely valuable for the cybersecurity community as it raises awareness of the battles that security teams are fighting every day. But it's also created a lot of noise that can make it tricky to understand the big picture.  The headline story from the recent campaign against UK retailers is the use of help desk scams. This typically involves the attacker calling up a company's help desk with some level of information — at minimum, PII that allows them to impersonate their victim, and sometimes a password, leaning heavily on their native English-speaking abilities to trick the help desk operator into giving them access to a user account.  Help Des...

Google has revealed that it will no longer trust digital certificates issued by Chunghwa Telecom and Netlock citing "patterns of concerning behavior observed over the past year." The changes are expected to be introduced in Chrome 139, which is scheduled for public release in early August 2025. The current major version is 137.  The update will affect all Transport Layer Security (TLS) server authentication certificates issued by the two Certificate Authorities (CAs) after July 31, 2025, 11:59:59 p.m. UTC. Certificates issued before that date will not be impacted. Chunghwa Telecom is Taiwan's largest integrated telecom service provider and Netlock is a Hungarian company that offers digital identity, electronic signature, time stamping, and authentication solutions. "Over the past several months and years, we have observed a pattern of compliance failures, unmet improvement commitments, and the absence of tangible, measurable progress in response to publicly di...

Microsoft and CrowdStrike have announced that they are teaming up to align their individual threat actor taxonomies by publishing a new joint threat actor mapping. "By mapping where our knowledge of these actors align, we will provide security professionals with the ability to connect insights faster and make decisions with greater confidence," Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president at Microsoft Security, said . The initiative is seen as a way to untangle the menagerie of nicknames that private cybersecurity vendors assign to various hacking groups that are broadly categorized as a nation-state, financially motivated, influence operations, private sector offensive actors, and emerging clusters. For example, the Russian state-sponsored threat actor tracked by Microsoft as Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium) is also known as APT29, BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, and The Dukes. Likewise, Forest Blizzard (previously Strontium) goes by other monikers such...

Google on Monday released out-of-band fixes to address three security issues in its Chrome browser, including one that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. The high-severity flaw is being tracked as CVE-2025-5419 (CVSS score: 8.8), and has been flagged as an out-of-bounds read and write vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Out-of-bounds read and write in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 137.0.7151.68 allowed a remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page," reads the description of the bug on the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Google credited Clement Lecigne and Benoît Sevens of Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) with discovering and reporting the flaw on May 27, 2025. It also noted that the issue was addressed the next day by pushing out a configuration change to the Stable version of the browser across all platforms. As is customary, the advisory is light on details regarding t...