Gemini | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google on Friday said it's pursuing legal action against a Chinese cybercrime network, accusing it of using its Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) agent to send phishing text messages targeting Americans. The network is said to be behind the development and management of a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) software kit called Outsider, per the tech giant. "The operation weaponized Gemini to help generate fraudulent phishing pages and deploy massive SMS phishing ('smishing') attacks, often through text messages impersonating legitimate brands, alerting recipients of 'brokerage account issues' or insisting they are eligible for 'rewards through their mobile phone carrier,'" Google said . "The texts prompt users to click a link leading to a fraudulent website that mimics trusted institutions to steal personal and financial information." Google said it's filing the lawsuit to dismantle the network's infrastructure, and that it...

Two security teams have shown, in separate research published this week, that OpenClaw , the popular self-hosted AI agent, can be driven to run attacker-controlled code or hand over sensitive data through ordinary-looking inputs. Imperva buried instructions inside shared contacts, vCards, and location pins that the agent executed without the victim ever seeing them. Varonis built a test agent on the platform, gave it a mailbox full of synthetic business data, and watched a single plain email talk it into forwarding mock AWS keys and a fake customer export to an outside address. The flaw Imperva found is patched in OpenClaw 2026.4.23, so update if you run it. The phishing weakness Varonis found is not something a patch fixes; it comes down to limiting what the agent can do on its own. Different doors into the same room: the agent trusts what reaches it, and its access becomes the attacker's. Hidden commands in a shared contact Imperva researcher Yohann Sillam looked at ...

A single poisoned notification from WhatsApp, Slack, SMS, Signal, Instagram, or Messenger could have hijacked Google Gemini's voice assistant on Android and made it open a victim's connected windows, fake a message from their boss, push the phone into a Zoom call, or quietly poison its long-term memory. No malicious app on the phone is required. The assistant just had to treat a hostile notification as useful context. The research, published by SafeBreach's Or Yair, follows the team's earlier " Invitation Is All You Need " work, which pulled off similar tricks through malicious Google Calendar invites. After that, Google hardened Gemini against indirect prompt injection. Yair found a way around the new defenses. Google has since patched it, SafeBreach lists no CVE for the issue, and there is no evidence that the technique was ever used in the wild. On Android, Gemini's Utilities feature can read and reply to your notifications, including ones ...

Google on Monday disclosed that it identified an unknown threat actor using a zero-day exploit that it said was likely developed with an artificial intelligence (AI) system, marking the first time the technology has been put to use in the wild in a malicious context for vulnerability discovery and exploit generation. The activity is said to be the work of cybercrime threat actors who appear to have collaborated together to plan what the tech giant described as a "mass vulnerability exploitation operation." "Our analysis of exploits associated with this campaign identified a zero-day vulnerability implemented in a Python script that enables the user to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) on a popular open-source, web-based system administration tool," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The tech giant said it worked with the impacted vendor to responsibly disclose the flaw and get it fixed in order to proactiv...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched security flaw in Google Chrome that could have permitted attackers to escalate privileges and gain access to local files on the system. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-0628 (CVSS score: 8.8), has been described as a case of insufficient policy enforcement in the WebView tag. It was patched by Google in early January 2026 in version 143.0.7499.192/.193 for Windows/Mac and 143.0.7499.192 for Linux. "Insufficient policy enforcement in WebView tag in Google Chrome prior to 143.0.7499.192 allowed an attacker who convinced a user to install a malicious extension to inject scripts or HTML into a privileged page via a crafted Chrome extension," according to a description on the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Gal Weizman, who discovered and reported the flaw on November 23, 2025, said the issue could have permitted malicious extensions with basic permissi...

New research has found that Google Cloud API keys, typically designated as project identifiers for billing purposes, could be abused to authenticate to sensitive Gemini endpoints and access private data. The findings come from Truffle Security, which discovered nearly 3,000 Google API keys (identified by the prefix "AIza") embedded in client-side code to provide Google-related services like embedded maps on websites. "With a valid key, an attacker can access uploaded files, cached data, and charge LLM-usage to your account," security researcher Joe Leon said , adding the keys "now also authenticate to Gemini even though they were never intended for it." The problem occurs when users enable the Gemini API on a Google Cloud project (i.e., Generative Language API), causing the existing API keys in that project, including those accessible via the website JavaScript code, to gain surreptitious access to Gemini endpoints without any warning or notice. Th...