Identity Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Monday again. The weekend was meant to be quiet. It wasn't. Last week had poisoned packages, a broken AI helper, and a worm tearing through repos. The ugly part: basic tricks still worked. A chatbot got fooled. A bot token got leaked inside the malware. The same old mistakes showed up again. And while everyone chased the loud stuff, quieter attackers sat in inboxes for months, reading mail and stealing it bit by bit. Lots to cover. Grab coffee. Read up. ⚡ Threat of the Week Miasma Worm Hits 73 Microsoft GitHub Repositories in Supply Chain Attack - Microsoft's GitHub repositories became the latest to fall victim to the ongoing Miasma self-replicating supply chain attack campaign. The incident impacted 73 Microsoft repositories across four of its GitHub organizations, including Azure, Azure-Samples, Microsoft, and MicrosoftDocs. The development prompted GitHub to disable access to those repositories. Miasma is assessed to be a variant of the Mini Shai-Hulud worm that T...

Password manager Dashlane has disclosed that "fewer than" 20 users on the personal subscription plan had their encrypted vaults downloaded following a brute-force attack launched by an unknown party. On May 31, 2026, the company said an "external" threat actor launched a brute-force attack against certain Dashlane user accounts with the aim of breaking two-factor authentication (2FA) protections and allowing them to register new devices on existing user accounts. Exactly how many users were targeted remains unknown, but Dashlane said the high volume of attempts on those accounts triggered temporary account suspensions and authentication issues due to its built-in security controls. Although access to the accounts has since been restored, the company has now revealed that the attackers were successful in a handful of cases, enabling them to download a copy of the encrypted vaults belonging to less than 20 personal plan users. "We have directly notif...

Monday hit like a cron job with anger issues. A busted auth path here, a repo-side faceplant there, some "patched-ish" thing already getting chewed on in the wild, and then the usual bonus round: poisoned dev tools, sketchy forum chatter, phishing kits pretending to be productivity, and AI lowering the bar for people who already thought 'curl | sh' had a personality. The vibe is simple: old bugs, new wrappers, faster abuse. Patch the obvious crap first. Then read the rest. ⚡ Threat of the Week PAN-OS GlobalProtect Authentication Bypass Under Exploitation - Palo Alto Networks warned that a recently disclosed medium-severity security flaw impacting PAN-OS and Prisma Access has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-0257 (CVSS score: 7.8), refers to a case of authentication bypass that could be exploited by bad actors to set up VPN connections. The issue specifically affects firewalls with GlobalProtect portal or gate...

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) was supposed to close a critical gap in identity security. It meant that, even if an attacker possessed the account credentials, they couldn't log in without the second factor. While that logic was sound, attackers have now figured out that they don't need to steal the second factor: they just need the user to hand it over. If your workforce authenticates with push-based MFA, this attack is a live threat to your organization today. Tools like Specops Secure Access are built specifically to close that gap, but before getting into the fix, it's worth understanding how this technique works. How MFA prompt bombing works The attack requires three key elements to work: Valid account credentials, usually sourced from breached password dumps on the dark web A login portal that uses push-based MFA (such as a VPN, Microsoft 365, Okta, or Duo) A victim who is alerted every time the attacker tries the login Attackers repeatedly tri...

Monday recap. Same mess, new week. A sketchy dev tool got people pwned, old bugs came back from the dead, and security products somehow needed protecting from themselves. A bunch of companies spent the week checking old boxes and forgotten servers they should've patched years ago. Good times. Phishing crews are getting smarter too - less obvious scam junk, more targeted stuff that actually looks real. Meanwhile, botnets are grabbing anything exposed to the internet like it's free candy. The Internet's still a dumpster fire. Let’s get into it. ⚡ Threat of the Week GitHub Breached via Nx Console VS Code Extension —GitHub officially confirmed that the breach of its internal repositories was the result of a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned version of the Nx Console Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension. The attack is said to have allowed the threat actor, a cybercriminal group known as TeamPCP, to exfiltrate about 3,800 repositories. G...

Consider a cached access key on a single Windows machine. It got there the way most cached credentials do - a user logged in, and the key stored itself automatically. Standard AWS behavior. No one misconfigured anything or violated a policy. Yet that single key, which was easily accessible to a minor-league attacker, could have opened a path to some 98% of entities in the company's cloud environment - nearly every critical workload the business depended on.  This real-world exposure was caught before an attacker could use it. But the takeaway is clear: identity itself, and every permission it carries, has become the attack path. Your environment runs on identity. Active Directory, cloud identity providers, service accounts, machine identities, and AI agents - all of these carry permissions that span systems and trust boundaries. A single stolen credential hands the attacker a legitimate identity - along with every permission attached to it.  Despite this, most security pro...

New Industry Data Just Released Suggests Not. On May 19th, 2026, Orchid Security released the results of our Identity Gap: Snapshot 2026. Among the findings, "identity dark matter" (the unseen, unmanaged elements of identity) now overshadows the visible elements 57% vs. 43%. And it couldn't have occurred at a worse time, with enterprises embracing Agent AI with both arms (and unfortunately, as Orchid co-founder Robert Wiseman explains, more than one eye closed). 

In February 2026, a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform called EvilTokens went live. Within five weeks, it had compromised more than 340 Microsoft 365 organizations across five countries.  The targets of the platform received a message asking them to enter a short code at microsoft.com/devicelogin and complete their normal MFA challenge, then walked away believing they had verified a routine sign-in. They had actually handed the operator a valid refresh token scoped to their mailbox, drive, calendar, and contacts, with the lifespan of a tenant policy rather than a session. The operator never needed a password, never tripped an MFA prompt, and never produced a sign-in event that looked like an intrusion. The attack succeeded because the OAuth consent screen has become an instinctive click, and the controls built to stop credential phishing do not look at the consent layer. Security researchers call the resulting condition consent phishing or OAuth grant abuse. The phishin...

Monday opens with a trust problem. A mail server flaw is under active use. A network control system was targeted. Trusted packages were poisoned. A fake model page pushed a stealer. Then came the familiar ransom claim: the data was returned and deleted. The pattern is clear. One weak dependency can leak keys. One leaked key can open cloud access. One cloud foothold can become a production incident. AI is speeding up vulnerability discovery, attackers are moving quickly, and old exposure still keeps paying off. Patch the quiet risks first. Let’s get into it. ⚡ Threat of the Week On-Prem Microsoft Exchange Server Exploited in the Wild —Microsoft disclosed a security vulnerability impacting on-premise versions of Exchange Server, which has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42897 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been described as a spoofing bug stemming from a cross-site scripting flaw. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering ...

AI hallucinations are introducing serious security risks into critical infrastructure decision-making by exploiting human trust through highly confident yet incorrect outputs. When an AI model lacks certainty, it doesn’t have a mechanism to recognize that. Instead, it generates the most probable response based on patterns in its training data, even if that response is inaccurate. These outputs may appear authoritative, making them especially dangerous when driving real-world security decisions. Based on Artificial Analysis’s AA-Omniscience benchmark , a 2025 evaluation of 40 AI models found that all but four models tested were more likely to provide a confident, incorrect answer than a correct one on difficult questions. As AI takes on a larger role in cybersecurity operations, organizations must treat every AI-generated response as a potential vulnerability until a human has verified it. What are AI hallucinations? AI hallucinations are confidently presented, plausible-sounding out...

Rough Monday. Somebody poisoned a trusted download again, somebody else turned cloud servers into public housing, and a few crews are still getting into boxes with bugs that should’ve died years ago — the same old holes, same lazy access paths, same “how the hell is this still open” feeling. One report this week basically reads like a guy tripped over root access by accident and decided to stay there. The weird part is how normal this all sounds now. Fake updates. Quiet backdoors. Remote tools are used like skeleton keys. Forum rats swapping stolen access while defenders burn another weekend chasing logs and praying the weird traffic is just monitoring noise. The Internet’s held together with duct tape and bad sleep. Anyway, Monday recap time. Same fire. New smoke. ⚡ Threat of the Week Ivanti EPMM and Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS Flaws Under Attack —Ivanti warned customers that attackers have successfully weaponized CVE-2026-6973, an improper input validation defect in Endpoint Man...

This week, the shadows moved faster than the patches. While most teams were still triaging last month’s alerts, attackers had already turned control panels into kill switches, kernels into open doors, and open-source pipelines into silent delivery systems. The game has shifted from breach to occupation. They’re living inside SaaS sessions, pushing code with trusted commits, and scaling operations like legitimate businesses — except their product is chaos. And the underground is getting uncomfortably professional. Here’s the full weekly cybersecurity recap: ⚡ Threat of the Week cPanel Flaw Comes Under Attack —A critical flaw in cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, could result in an authentication bypass and allow remote attackers to gain elevated control of the control panel. In some cases , the attacks have led to a complete wipe of entire websites and backups. Other attacks have deployed ...

Every security team has a version of the same story. The quarter ends with hundreds of vulnerabilities closed. The dashboards are bursting with green. Then someone in a leadership meeting asks: "So, are we actually safer now?" Crickets. The room goes quiet because an honest answer requires context – which is something that patch counts and CVSS scores were never designed to provide. Exposure management was created to provide this context - to bridge the gap between remediation efforts and actual risk reduction. The market has responded with a flood of platforms claiming to deliver it.  Yet the question security leaders are asking is: which exposure management platform actually does provide it? In this article, I’ll break down the four dominant approaches to exposure management, explain what each one can and can't deliver, and lay out five evaluation criteria that help you separate platforms built to reduce risk to your unique business and environment from platforms ...

Everything is dumb again. This week feels broken in a very familiar way. Old tricks are back. New tools are doing shady crap. Supply chains got hit. Fake help desks worked. Weird research showed how easy some attacks still are. Most of it feels like stuff we should have fixed years ago. Bad extensions. Stolen creds. Remote tools are getting abused. Malware hides in places people trust. Same mess, cleaner packaging. Coffee is cold. The vuln list is ugly. Let’s get into it. ⚡ Threat of the Week New fast16 Malware Was Developed Years Before Stuxnet —A new Lua-based malware called fast16, created years before the notorious Stuxnet worm, is designed to primarily target high-precision calculation software to tamper with results. The framework dates back to 2005. Analysis suggests that fast16 was active at least five years before the emergence of Stuxnet. Widely regarded as a joint U.S.-Israeli project, Stuxnet marked a turning point in cyber warfare as the first disruptive digital weap...

The cybersecurity industry has spent the last several years chasing sophisticated threats like zero-days, supply chain compromises, and AI-generated exploits. However, the most reliable entry point for attackers still hasn't changed: stolen credentials. Identity-based attacks remain a dominant initial access vector in breaches today. Attackers obtain valid credentials through credential stuffing from prior breach databases, password spraying against exposed services, or phishing campaigns — and use them to walk through the front door. No exploits needed. Just a valid username and password. What makes this difficult to defend against is how unremarkable the initial access looks. A successful login from a legitimate credential doesn't trigger the same alarms as a port scan or a malware callback. The attacker looks like an employee. Once inside, they dump and crack additional passwords, reuse those credentials to move laterally, and expand their foothold across the environment....

Monday’s recap shows the same pattern in different places. A third-party tool becomes a way in, then leads to internal access. A trusted download path is briefly swapped to deliver malware. Browser extensions act normally while pulling data and running code. Even update channels are used to push payloads. It’s not breaking systems—it’s bending trust. There’s also a shift in how attacks run. Slower check-ins, multi-stage payloads, andmore code kept in memory. Attackers lean on real tools and normal workflows instead of custom builds. Some cases hint at supply-chain spread, where one weak link reaches further than expected. Go through the whole recap. The pattern across access, execution, and control only shows up when you see it all together. ⚡ Threat of the Week Vercel Discloses Data Breach —Web infrastructure provider Vercel has disclosed a security breach that allows bad actors to gain unauthorized access to "certain" internal Vercel systems. The incident originated f...

Monday is back, and the weekend’s backlog of chaos is officially hitting the fan. We are tracking a critical zero-day that has been quietly living in your PDFs for months, plus some aggressive state-sponsored meddling in infrastructure that is finally coming to light. It is one of those mornings where the gap between a quiet shift and a full-blown incident response is basically non-existent. The variety this week is particularly nasty. We have AI models being turned into autonomous exploit engines, North Korean groups playing the long game with social engineering, and fileless malware hitting enterprise workflows. There is also a major botnet takedown and new research proving that even fiber optic cables can be used to eavesdrop on your private conversations. Skim this before your next meeting. Let’s get into it. ⚡ Threat of the Week Adobe Acrobat Reader 0-Day Under Attack   — Adobe released emergency updates to fix a critical...

Anthropic restricted its Mythos Preview model last week after it autonomously found and exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. Palo Alto Networks' Wendi Whitmore warned that similar capabilities are weeks or months from proliferation. CrowdStrike's 2026 Global Threat Report puts average eCrime breakout time at 29 minutes. Mandiant's M-Trends 2026 shows adversary hand-off times have collapsed to 22 seconds.  Offense is getting faster. The question is where exactly defenders are slow — because it's not where most SOC dashboards suggest. Detection tooling has gotten materially better. EDR, cloud security, email security, identity, and SIEM platforms ship with built-in detection logic that pushes MTTD close to zero for known techniques. That's real progress, and it's the result of years of investment in detection engineering across the industry.  But when adversaries are operating on timelines measured in s...

While much of the discussion on AI security centers around protecting ‘shadow’ AI and GenAI consumption, there's a wide-open window nobody's guarding: AI browser extensions.  A  new report from LayerX exposes just how deep this blind spot goes, and why AI extensions may be the most dangerous AI threat surface in your network that isn't on anyone's radar. AI browser extensions don't trigger your DLP and don't show up in your SaaS logs. They live inside the browser itself, with direct access to everything your employees see, type, and stay logged into. AI extensions are 60% more likely to have a vulnerability than extensions on average, are 3 times more likely to have access to cookies, 2.5 times more likely to be able to execute remote scripts in the browser, and 6 times more likely to have increased their permissions in the past year. These extensions install in seconds and can remain...

When talking about credential security, the focus usually lands on breach prevention. This makes sense when IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report puts the average cost of a breach at $4.4 million. Avoiding even one major incident is enough to justify most security investments, but that headline figure obscures the more persistent problems caused by recurring credential incidents. Account lockouts and compromised credentials don’t make the news. They show up as repeated helpdesk tickets, interrupted workflows, and time pulled away from higher-value work. Individually, each incident seems minor, but collectively they place a constant burden on IT teams and the wider business. The real cost doesn’t just sit in the breach you might prevent, but in the day-to-day disruption you’re already dealing with. Repeated incidents equal repeated costs If an organization finds itself suffering from credential-based attacks or repeated account c...