DevSecOps | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

GitHub has announced a new cooldown mechanism in Dependabot, allowing the tool to wait at least three days after a release is published before opening a pull request. "The cooldown configuration option in the dependabot.yml still controls the behavior, though, so you can choose a different cooldown parameter that fits your project," the Microsoft-owned subsidiary said . According to GitHub, the three-day cooldown default only applies to version updates, which are designed to keep software dependencies up-to-date. Security updates will continue to be pushed right away, permitting Dependabot to issue an alert and open a pull request to move the project to the patched version. With this update, the idea is to handle scenarios where a threat actor manages to push a poisoned version of a popular package, which then gets quickly pulled by downstream projects before that version is yanked from the registry. Although such trojanized packages are short-lived, the time period fo...

Security researchers at  depthfirst published working exploit code on July 24 for a GitLab flaw that GitLab patched six weeks earlier, on June 10. It runs commands as git on any self-managed 18.11.3 server that has not taken the update. Any authenticated user who can push to a project can run it. The attacker commits a crafted Jupyter notebook and opens its commit diff, which leaks a heap pointer. Enough of those and an automated probe can locate the libraries in memory. Two more notebooks then fire the payload. No administrator rights, no CI or runner access, no victim interaction, no access to anyone else's project. GitLab did not file the fix as a security fix. A review by The Hacker News found the Oj 3.17.3 bump listed under bug fixes in the June 10 patch release , not in the security-fix table. There is no CVE, no CVSS score, and no mention of the notebook-diff chain. Operators who triaged that release against the security table had no reason to treat it as urgent. ...

AI agent security is moving through a familiar maturity curve: adoption, then visibility, and finally, control. But what we've collectively discovered is that enforcing least privilege for AI agents is harder than we ever imagined. This is why there are so many approaches, from prompt filtering to identity-layer access controls. Where we've collectively landed is that understanding the intent of AI agents is essential to securing them. It's not easy, but it's the only path forward. Organizations approach this challenge with different levels of sophistication. For many, the current goal is simply to find the AI agents already operating across the business. That is a necessary first step. AI agents are appearing in SaaS platforms, developer environments, cloud workflows, customer support systems, productivity tools, and internal applications. Some are sanctioned, and others are not. But discovery alone isn't useful. AI agents are not passive; they reason, plan, c...

Beginning July 27, 2026, GitHub will cut public bug bounty payouts by at least half at every severity level. Critical findings will drop from $20,000-$30,000+ to a fixed $10,000, while its permanent invite-only VIP tier will pay $30,000 or more. Reports filed before that date, including those already in GitHub's growing triage queue, will retain the previous payout terms. GitHub said the changes are intended to reduce noise while giving established researchers faster responses, higher rewards, and closer access to its security engineering team. "You don't earn more by submitting more," the company said. "You earn more by submitting better." The public program is moving from flexible ranges to fixed payments: Low: $250, down from $617-$2,000 Medium: $2,000, down from $4,000-$10,000 High: $5,000, down from $10,000-$20,000 Critical: $10,000, down from $20,000-$30,000+ The Hacker News calculated that the new public rates are 50% lower f...

A single invisible comment in an Azure DevOps pull request can turn a reviewer's own AI coding agent against them, driving it into projects the attacker has no rights to reach and quietly leaking what it finds. The flaw is in Microsoft's official Azure DevOps MCP server , and it works because one of its tools returns pull request descriptions without a prompt-injection guardrail the company had already applied to others. Agentic Runtime Security firm Manifold Security detailed the confused-deputy bug this week. Microsoft ships the server so AI agents can read and operate Azure DevOps for a user, across pull requests, pipelines, wikis, and work items, all with the user's own permissions. That is the whole problem: content other people wrote can become instructions the agent acts on. Azure DevOps PR descriptions accept Markdown, which allows HTML comments. In the web UI, an HTML comment (<!-- ... -->) renders as nothing, so a reviewer scrolling the description s...

The jscrambler npm package was compromised, and simply installing its 8.14.0 release runs an infostealer on your machine. Published on July 11, 2026, the malicious version carries a preinstall hook that drops and executes a native binary, one build each for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Socket flagged the release  six minutes after it was published . If you or one of your build systems pulled it in that window, the payload has already run with whatever access your install process had. None of this is in the prior release, 8.13.0.  The package diff  shows two new files under dist/: setup.js, a small loader, and intro.js. Despite the name, intro.js is not JavaScript but a roughly 7.8MB container packing three gzip-compressed native binaries, one each for Linux, Windows, and macOS. On install, setup.js picks the binary for the host operating system, writes it under a random name in the system temp directory...

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...

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...

A critical flaw in Google's Dialogflow CX could have let an attacker with edit rights on one Code Block-enabled agent compromise other Code Block-enabled agents in the same Google Cloud project. From there, they could read live conversations, steal the data users shared, and make the bots send attacker-written messages, including requests to re-enter a password. Security firm Varonis found it and named it Rogue Agent. The flaw affected only organizations that built agents with Dialogflow's Playbooks and custom Code Blocks, which let developers add their own Python. And it was not a remote, unauthenticated attack. Pulling it off needed the dialogflow.playbooks.update permission on one such agent, which limits the realistic attacker to a malicious insider or a compromised developer account, not a stranger on the internet. From that one foothold, though, the reach extended to every agent in the project. Google has fixed it, and both Varonis and Google say there is no sig...

A public issue can trick GitHub Agentic Workflows into leaking the contents of an organization's private repositories, researchers at Noma Security have shown. The attacker needs only to open a normal-looking issue on a public repository, with no stolen credentials and no access to the organization. If that organization has given the agent read access across its repositories, private ones included, the issue can steer it into pulling private contents into a public comment. Noma calls the technique GitLost . The target is GitHub Agentic Workflows , a feature now in public preview that GitHub launched in February. Instead of writing automation scripts, you write instructions to an AI agent in plain English in a Markdown file. The agent reads issues and pull requests, runs tools, and replies on its own. It can be powered by GitHub Copilot, Anthropic's Claude, Google Gemini, or OpenAI Codex. Workflows are read-only by default, but an organization can hand one a token with...

Software supply chain security was hard enough. Then AI joined the build pipeline. For five years, "software supply chain security" meant one question: what's in your code? Which open-source packages, which versions, which transitive dependencies three layers deep that nobody chose on purpose? SolarWinds, Log4Shell, and XZ Utils all taught the same lesson: the risk lives less in the code a team writes and more in everything that produces it. Shai-Hulud, the self-propagating malicious package campaign that spread through developer toolchains this year, taught the next one: knowing what's in your code is still necessary, but it's no longer sufficient. In the roughly 20 months since the Model Context Protocol launched, AI tools, models, and the infrastructure around them have become load-bearing parts of how software gets built, deployed, and run. Code is written by agents. Packages are pulled in by autonomous tools that decide they are needed. Prompts have...

GitHub has rolled out new controls for npm to improve the security of the software supply chain, giving maintainers the ability to explicitly approve a release prior to the packages becoming publicly available for installation. Called staged publishing, the feature is now generally available on npm. It mandates that a human maintainer pass a two-factor authentication (2FA) challenge to approve a package before it is pushed to the npmjs[.]com. "Instead of a direct publish that immediately makes a package version available to consumers, the prebuilt tarball is uploaded to a stage queue where a maintainer must explicitly approve it before it becomes installable," GitHub said . The Microsoft-owned subsidiary said the change ensures "proof of presence" for every publish, including those that come from non-interactive CI/CD workflows and trusted publishing with OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication. Before using staged publishing , package maintainers have to meet...

A new "coordinated" supply chain attack campaign has impacted eight packages on Packagist including malicious code designed to run a Linux binary retrieved from a GitHub Releases URL. "Although the affected packages were all Composer packages, the malicious code was not added to composer.json," Socket said . "Instead, it was inserted into package.json, targeting projects that ship JavaScript build tooling alongside PHP code." This "cross-ecosystem placement" makes the activity stand out because developers and security teams scanning PHP dependencies may only focus on Composer-related metadata, while skipping package.json lifecycle hooks that are bundled within the package. The malicious versions have since been removed from Packagist. An analysis of the packages has uncovered that their upstream repositories have been modified to include a postinstall script that attempts to download a Linux binary from a GitHub Releases URL ("github[...

TL;DR: Stop chasing thousands of "toast" alerts. Join experts from Wiz to learn how hackers connect tiny flaws to build a "Lethal Chain" to your data—and how to break it. Register for the Strategic Briefing Here . Most security tools work like a smoke alarm that goes off every time you burn a piece of toast. You get so many alerts that you eventually start to ignore them. The real danger? While your team is busy fixing 100 "toast" alerts, a sophisticated attacker is quietly building a Lethal Chain through your system. Hackers rarely look for one big "open door" anymore. Instead, they find a series of tiny, low-risk "cracks" that don't look scary on their own. By connecting these cracks—moving from a small coding bug to a cloud misconfiguration—they create a direct path to your most sensitive data. If your tools only look at code or cloud in isolation, you aren’t seeing the big picture. You’re flying blind. The Briefing: Sto...

Checkmarx has confirmed that a modified version of the Jenkins AST plugin was published to the Jenkins Marketplace. "If you are using Checkmarx Jenkins AST plugin, you need to ensure that you are using the version 2.0.13-829.vc72453fa_1c16 that was published on December 17, 2025 or previously," the cybersecurity company said in a statement over the weekend. As of writing, Checkmarx has released 2.0.13-848.v76e89de8a_053 on both GitHub and the Jenkins Marketplace. A spokesperson for the company said the new version addresses the concerns associated with the incident. It's assessed that the malicious code was published after obtaining credentials from a previous supply chain attack that took place in March 2026. The development is the latest attack orchestrated by TeamPCP targeting Checkmarx. It arrives a couple of weeks after the notorious cybercrime group was attributed to the compromise of its KICS Docker image, two VS Code extensions, and a GitHub Actions workflo...

Two high-severity security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Composer, a package manager for PHP, that, if successfully exploited, could result in arbitrary command execution. The vulnerabilities have been described as command injection flaws affecting the Perforce VCS (version control software) driver. Details of the two flaws are below - CVE-2026-40176 (CVSS score: 7.8) - An improper input validation vulnerability that could allow an attacker controlling a repository configuration in a malicious composer.json declaring a Perforce VCS repository to inject arbitrary commands, resulting in command execution in the context of the user running Composer. CVE-2026-40261 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An improper input validation vulnerability stemming from inadequate escaping that could allow an attacker to inject arbitrary commands through a crafted source reference containing shell metacharacters. In both cases, Composer would execute these injected ...

OX Security recently analyzed 216 million security findings across 250 organizations over a 90-day period. The primary takeaway: while raw alert volume grew by 52% year-over-year, prioritized critical risk grew by nearly 400%. The surge in AI-assisted development is creating a "velocity gap" where the density of high-impact vulnerabilities is scaling faster than remediation workflows. The ratio of critical findings to raw alerts nearly tripled, moving from 0.035% to 0.092%. Key Findings from the 2026 Analysis: CVSS vs. Business Context: Technical severity scores are no longer the primary driver of risk. The most common elevation factors were High Business Priority (27.76%) and PII Processing (22.08%) . In modern environments, where a vulnerability lives is now more important than what the vulnerability is. The AI Fingerprint: We observed a direct correlation between the adoption of AI coding tools and the quadrupling of critical f...

OpenAI revealed a GitHub Actions workflow used to sign its macOS apps led to the download of the malicious Axios library on March 31, but noted that no user data or internal system was compromised. "Out of an abundance of caution, we are taking steps to protect the process that certifies our macOS applications are legitimate OpenAI apps," OpenAI said in a post last week. "We found no evidence that OpenAI user data was accessed, that our systems or intellectual property were compromised, or that our software was altered." The disclosure comes a little over a week after Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) attributed the supply chain compromise of the popular npm package to a North Korean hacking group it tracks as UNC1069 . The attack enabled the threat actors to hijack the package maintainer's npm account to push two poisoned versions 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 that came embedded with a malicious dependency named "plain-crypto-js," which depl...

A high-severity security vulnerability has been disclosed in Docker Engine that could permit an attacker to bypass authorization plugins ( AuthZ ) under specific circumstances. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-34040 (CVSS score: 8.8), stems from an incomplete fix for CVE-2024-41110 , a maximum-severity vulnerability in the same component that came to light in July 2024. "Using a specially-crafted API request, an attacker could make the Docker daemon forward the request to an authorization plugin without the body," Docker Engine maintainers said in an advisory released late last month. "The authorization plugin may allow a request which it would have otherwise denied if the body had been forwarded to it." "Anyone who depends on authorization plugins that introspect the request body to make access control decisions is potentially impacted." Multiple security vulnerabilities, including Asim Viladi Oglu Manizada, Cody, Oleh Konko, and Vladimir...

The most active piece of enterprise infrastructure in the company is the developer workstation. That laptop is where credentials are created, tested, cached, copied, and reused across services, bots, build tools, and now local AI agents. In March 2026, the TeamPCP threat actor proved just how valuable developer machines are. Their supply chain attack on LiteLLM, a popular AI development library downloaded millions of times daily, turned developer endpoints into systematic credential harvesting operations. The malware only needed access to the plaintext secrets already sitting on disk. The LiteLLM Attack: A Case Study in Developer Endpoint Compromise The attack was straightforward in execution but devastating in scope. TeamPCP compromised LiteLLM packages versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI, injecting infostealer malware that activated when developers installed or updated the package. The malware systematically harv...