DevSecOps | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered 36 malicious packages in the npm registry that are disguised as Strapi CMS plugins but come with different payloads to facilitate Redis and PostgreSQL exploitation, deploy reverse shells, harvest credentials, and drop a persistent implant. "Every package contains three files (package.json, index.js, postinstall.js), has no description, repository, or homepage, and uses version 3.6.8 to appear as a mature Strapi v3 community plugin," SafeDep said . All identified npm packages follow the same naming convention, starting with "strapi-plugin-" and then phrases like "cron," "database," or "server" to fool unsuspecting developers into downloading them. It's worth noting that the official Strapi plugins are scoped under "@strapi/." The packages, uploaded by four sock puppet accounts "umarbek1233," "kekylf12," "tikeqemif26," and "umar_bektembiev1...

In December 2025 , we shared the first-ever The State of Trusted Open Source report, featuring insights from our product data and customer base on open source consumption across our catalog of container image projects, versions, images, language libraries, and builds. These insights shed light on what teams pull, deploy, and maintain day to day, alongside the vulnerabilities and remediation realities these projects face. Fast forward a few months, and software development is accelerating at a pace that most didn’t see coming. AI is increasingly embedded across the development lifecycle, from code generation to infrastructure automation, as models become more advanced and better at meeting the demands of modern work. This shift is expanding what teams can build and how quickly they can ship. It is also reshaping the security landscape. Before diving into the numbers, it’s important to explain how we perform this analysis. We examined over 2,20...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched bug impacting Open VSX's pre-publish scanning pipeline to cause the tool to allow a malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension to pass the vetting process and go live in the registry. "The pipeline had a single boolean return value that meant both 'no scanners are configured' and 'all scanners failed to run,'" Koi Security researcher Oran Simhony said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The caller couldn't tell the difference. So when scanners failed under load, Open VSX treated it as 'nothing to scan for' and waved the extension right through." Early last month, the Eclipse Foundation, which maintains Open VSX, announced plans to enforce pre-publish security checks before VS Code extensions are published to the repository in an attempt to tackle the growing problem of malicious extensions. With Open VSX also serving as the extension market...

Two more GitHub Actions workflows have become the latest to be compromised by credential-stealing malware by a threat actor known as TeamPCP, the cloud-native cybercriminal operation also behind the Trivy supply chain attack . The workflows, both maintained by the supply chain security company Checkmarx, are listed below - checkmarx/ast-github-action checkmarx/kics-github-action Cloud security company Sysdig said it observed an identical credential stealer as the one used in TeamPCP's operations targeting Aqua Security's Trivy vulnerability scanner and its associated GitHub Actions, about four days after the breach on March 19, 2026. The Trivy supply chain compromise is being tracked under the CVE identifier CVE-2026-33634 (CVSS score: 9.4). "This suggests that the stolen credentials from the Trivy compromise were used to poison additional actions in affected repositories," Sysdig said . The stealer, referred to as "TeamPCP Cloud stealer," is desig...

Trivy, a popular open-source vulnerability scanner maintained by Aqua Security, was compromised a second time within the span of a month to deliver malware capable of stealing sensitive CI/CD secrets. The latest incident impacted GitHub Actions " aquasecurity/trivy-action " and " aquasecurity/setup-trivy ," which are used to scan Docker container images for vulnerabilities and set up GitHub Actions workflow with a specific version of the scanner, respectively. "We identified that an attacker force-pushed 75 out of 76 version tags in the aquasecurity/trivy-action repository, the official GitHub Action for running Trivy vulnerability scans in CI/CD pipelines," Socket security researcher Philipp Burckhardt said . "These tags were modified to serve a malicious payload, effectively turning trusted version references into a distribution mechanism for an infostealer." The payload executes within GitHub Actions runners and aims to extract valuable de...

Security teams have spent years building identity and access controls for human users and service accounts. But a new category of actor has quietly entered most enterprise environments, and it operates entirely outside those controls. Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent, is now running across engineering organizations at scale. It reads files, executes shell commands, calls external APIs, and connects to third-party integrations called MCP servers. It does all of this autonomously, with the full permissions of the developer who launched it, on the developer's local machine, before any network-layer security tool can see it. It leaves no audit trail that the existing security infrastructure was built to capture. This walkthrough covers Ceros, an AI Trust Layer built by Beyond Identity that sits directly on the developer's machine alongside Claude Code and provides real-time visibility, runtime policy enforcement, and a cryptographic audit trail of every action the a...

A threat actor known as UNC6426 leveraged keys stolen following the supply chain compromise of the nx npm package last year to completely breach a victim's cloud environment within a span of 72 hours. The attack started with the theft of a developer's GitHub token, which the threat actor then used to gain unauthorized access to the cloud and steal data. "The threat actor, UNC6426, then used this access to abuse the GitHub-to-AWS OpenID Connect (OIDC) trust and create a new administrator role in the cloud environment," Google said in its Cloud Threat Horizons Report for H1 2026. "They abused this role to exfiltrate files from the client's Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets and performed data destruction in their production cloud environments." The supply chain attack targeting the nx npm package took place in August 2025, when unknown threat actors exploited a vulnerable pull_request_target workflow – an attack type ...

OpenAI on Friday began rolling out Codex Security , an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered security agent that's designed to find, validate, and propose fixes for vulnerabilities. The feature is available in a research preview to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, Business, and Edu customers via the Codex web with free usage for the next month. "It builds deep context about your project to identify complex vulnerabilities that other agentic tools miss, surfacing higher-confidence findings with fixes that meaningfully improve the security of your system while sparing you from the noise of insignificant bugs," the company said . Codex Security represents an evolution of Aardvark⁠ , which OpenAI unveiled in private beta in October 2025 as a way for developers and security teams to detect and fix security vulnerabilities at scale. Over the last 30 days, Codex Security has scanned more than 1.2 million commits across external repositories over the course of the beta, identifying ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has begun to roll out a new security feature for Claude Code that can scan a user's software codebase for vulnerabilities and suggest patches. The capability, called Claude Code Security , is currently available in a limited research preview to Enterprise and Team customers. "It scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review, allowing teams to find and fix security issues that traditional methods often miss," the company said in a Friday announcement. Anthropic said the feature aims to leverage AI as a tool to help find and resolve vulnerabilities to counter attacks where threat actors weaponize the same tools to automate vulnerability discovery.  With AI agents increasingly capable of detecting security vulnerabilities that have otherwise escaped human notice, the tech upstart said the same capabilities could be used by adversaries to uncover exploitable weakness...

We’ve all seen this before: a developer deploys a new cloud workload and grants overly broad permissions just to keep the sprint moving. An engineer generates a "temporary" API key for testing and forgets to revoke it. In the past, these were minor operational risks, debts you’d eventually pay down during a slower cycle. In 2026, “Eventually” is Now But today, within minutes, AI-powered adversarial systems can find that over-permissioned workload, map its identity relationships, and calculate a viable route to your critical assets. Before your security team has even finished their morning coffee, AI agents have simulated thousands of attack sequences and moved toward execution. AI compresses reconnaissance, simulation, and prioritization into a single automated sequence. The exposure you created this morning can be modeled, validated, and positioned inside a viable attack path before your team has lunch. The Collapse of the Exploitation Window Historically, the exploita...

In December 2025, in response to the Sha1-Hulud incident, npm completed a major authentication overhaul intended to reduce supply-chain attacks. While the overhaul is a solid step forward, the changes don’t make npm projects immune from supply-chain attacks. npm is still susceptible to malware attacks – here’s what you need to know for a safer Node community. Let’s start with the original problem Historically, npm relied on classic tokens: long-lived, broadly scoped credentials that could persist indefinitely. If stolen, attackers could directly publish malicious versions to the author’s packages (no publicly verifiable source code needed). This made npm a prime vector for supply-chain attacks. Over time, numerous real-world incidents demonstrated this point. Shai-Hulud, Sha1-Hulud, and chalk/debug are examples of recent, notable attacks. npm’s solution To address this, npm made the following changes: npm revoked all classic tokens and defaulted to session-based tokens instead...

January 5, 2026, Seattle, USA — ZAST.AI announced the completion of a $6 million Pre-A funding round. This investment came from the well-known investment firm Hillhouse Capital, bringing ZAST.AI's total funding close to $10 million. This marks a recognition from leading capital markets of a new solution: ending the era of high false positive rates in security tools and making every alert genuinely actionable. In 2025, ZAST.AI discovered hundreds of zero-day vulnerabilities across dozens of popular open-source projects. These findings were submitted through authoritative vulnerability platforms like VulDB, successfully resulting in 119 CVE assignments . These are not laboratory targets, but production-grade code supporting global businesses. Affected well-known projects include widely used components and frameworks such as Microsoft Azure SDK, Apache Struts XWork, Alibaba Nacos, Langfuse, Koa, node-formidable, and others. It was precisely within these widely adopted open-source p...

A new, critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the n8n workflow automation platform that, if successfully exploited, could result in the execution of arbitrary system commands. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-25049 (CVSS score: 9.4), is the result of inadequate sanitization that bypasses safeguards put in place to address CVE-2025-68613 (CVSS score: 9.9), another critical defect that was patched by n8n in December 2025. "Additional exploits in the expression evaluation of n8n have been identified and patched following CVE-2025-68613," n8n's maintainers said in an advisory released Wednesday. "An authenticated user with permission to create or modify workflows could abuse crafted expressions in workflow parameters to trigger unintended system command execution on the host running n8n." The issue affects the following versions - <1.123.17 (Fixed in 1.123.17) <2.5.2 (Fixed in 2.5.2)

Leaked API keys are no longer unusual, nor are the breaches that follow. So why are sensitive tokens still being so easily exposed? To find out, Intruder’s research team looked at what traditional vulnerability scanners actually cover and built a new secrets detection method to address gaps in existing approaches.  Applying this at scale by scanning 5 million applications revealed over 42,000 exposed tokens across 334 secret types, exposing a major class of leaked secrets that is not being handled well by existing tooling, particularly in single-page applications (SPAs). In this article, we break down existing secrets detection methods and reveal what we found when we scanned millions of applications for secrets hidden in JavaScript bundles. Established secrets detection methods (and their limitations) Traditional secrets detection The traditional, fully automated approach to detecting application secrets is to search a set of known paths and apply regular expressions to ma...

AI agents are no longer just writing code. They are executing it. Tools like Copilot, Claude Code, and Codex can now build, test, and deploy software end-to-end in minutes. That speed is reshaping engineering—but it’s also creating a security gap most teams don’t see until something breaks. Behind every agentic workflow sits a layer few organizations are actively securing: Machine Control Protocols (MCPs) . These systems quietly decide what an AI agent can run, which tools it can call, which APIs it can access, and what infrastructure it can touch. Once that control plane is compromised or misconfigured, the agent doesn’t just make mistakes—it acts with authority. Ask the teams impacted by CVE-2025-6514 . One flaw turned a trusted OAuth proxy used by more than 500,000 developers into a remote code execution path. No exotic exploit chain. No noisy breach. Just automation doing exactly what it was allowed to do—at scale. That incident made one thing clear: if an AI agent can execute...

Chainguard, the trusted source for open source, has a unique view into how modern organizations actually consume open source software and where they run into risk and operational burdens. Across a growing customer base and an extensive catalog of over 1800 container image projects, 148,000 versions, 290,000 images, and 100,000 language libraries, and almost half a billion builds, they can see what teams pull, deploy, and maintain day-to-day, along with the vulnerabilities and remediation realities that come hand in hand.  That’s why they created The State of Trusted Open Source , a quarterly pulse on the open source software supply chain. As they analyzed anonymized product usage and CVE data, the Chainguard team noticed common themes around what open source engineering teams are actually building with and the risks associated.  Here’s what they found:  AI is reshaping the baseline stack: Python led the way as the most popular open source image among Chainguard’s glo...

Security teams are still catching malware. The problem is what they're not catching. More attacks today don't arrive as files. They don't drop binaries. They don't trigger classic alerts. Instead, they run quietly through tools that already exist inside the environment — scripts, remote access, browsers, and developer workflows. That shift is creating a blind spot. Join us for a deep-dive technical session with the Zscaler Internet Access team. They will reveal how to unmask "hidden-in-plain-sight" tactics, why traditional defenses fall short, and exactly what needs to change. Secure your spot for the live session ➜ In this session, experts will cover: "Living off the Land" Attacks: These use trusted system tools like PowerShell, WMI, or remote desktop. File-based detection often sees nothing wrong because, technically, nothing new was installed. Fileless "Last Mile" Reassembly Attacks: Obfuscated HTML and JavaScript can e...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in LangChain Core that could be exploited by an attacker to steal sensitive secrets and even influence large language model (LLM) responses through prompt injection. LangChain Core (i.e., langchain-core ) is a core Python package that's part of the LangChain ecosystem, providing the core interfaces and model-agnostic abstractions for building applications powered by LLMs. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-68664, carries a CVSS score of 9.3 out of 10.0. Security researcher Yarden Porat has been credited with reporting the vulnerability on December 4, 2025. It has been codenamed LangGrinch . "A serialization injection vulnerability exists in LangChain's dumps() and dumpd() functions," the project maintainers said in an advisory. "The functions do not escape dictionaries with 'lc' keys when serializing free-form dictionaries." "The 'lc' key is used internally by LangChain to mark ser...

OpenAI has announced the launch of an "agentic security researcher" that's powered by its GPT-5 large language model (LLM) and is programmed to emulate a human expert capable of scanning, understanding, and patching code. Called Aardvark , the artificial intelligence (AI) company said the autonomous agent is designed to help developers and security teams flag and fix security vulnerabilities at scale. It's currently available in private beta. "Aardvark continuously analyzes source code repositories to identify vulnerabilities, assess exploitability, prioritize severity, and propose targeted patches," OpenAI noted . It works by embedding itself into the software development pipeline, monitoring commits and changes to codebases, detecting security issues and how they might be exploited, and proposing fixes to address them using LLM-based reasoning and tool-use. Powering the agent is GPT‑5 , which OpenAI introduced in August 2025. The company describes it...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered yet another active software supply chain attack campaign targeting the npm registry with over 100 malicious packages that can steal authentication tokens, CI/CD secrets, and GitHub credentials from developers' machines. The campaign has been codenamed PhantomRaven by Koi Security. The activity is assessed to have begun in August 2025, when the first packages were uploaded to the repository. It has since ballooned to a total of 126 npm libraries, attracting more than 86,000 installs. Some of the packages have also been flagged by the DevSecOps company DCODX -  op-cli-installer (486 Downloads) unused-imports (1,350 Downloads) badgekit-api-client (483 Downloads) polyfill-corejs3 (475 Downloads) eslint-comments (936 Downloads) What makes the attack stand out is the attacker's pattern of hiding the malicious code in dependencies by pointing to a custom HTTP URL, causing npm to fetch them from an untrusted website (in this case,...