Identity Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Given that the browser is where business apps are accessed and used, it makes sense that attacks are happening there too. Most breaches today begin in a browser session. Often, they never leave it, with the entire attack chain from initial access to exfiltration playing out in the browser. Here are the six most dangerous techniques that should be on every security team's radar in 2026. 1. Phishing for credentials and sessions Modern phishing kits don't just steal passwords — they intercept live sessions. Reverse-proxy adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) kits like Tycoon2FA, Sneaky2FA, and Evilginx relay credentials and session tokens in real time, bypassing most forms of MFA. These kits are sold as turnkey Phishing-as-a-Service platforms with anti-bot protection, dynamic lure generation, and automated session replay — reducing the barrier to sophisticated phishing to effectively zero. At the same time, phishing delivery has moved well beyond email — attackers deliver link...

An attacker used stolen passwords of staff at France's tax administration to take tax data on hundreds of thousands of taxpayers and businesses in June and July. Neither the tax administration nor France's national cybersecurity agency saw the data leave. The attack was not sophisticated, the agency, ANSSI, says in a  report  (in French) published on Tuesday: it worked because of weak login protection, poorly separated networks and gaps in monitoring. The tax administration, known as the DGFIP, runs France's tax website, impots.gouv.fr. The data came from E-Contact, the tool taxpayers use to message the tax administration. The stolen data covers  a little over 350,000 individuals  and  a little over 250,000 businesses , the DGFIP says. Taxpayers' own online accounts and passwords were not compromised. For individuals, the data that may have been viewed or copied includes their tax ID, contact details, family situation, reference taxable income and tax...

A malicious MCP server could trick an application built on the official  MCP Python SDK  into handing over the OAuth credentials it uses to log in to a real service, the SDK's maintainers said in a security advisory. Affected versions sent the client secret, the authorization code, and the PKCE proof key to a token endpoint the attacker controlled. The fix is in versions 1.30.0 and 2.2.0. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI applications to outside tools and data, and this package is its official Python SDK for building MCP servers and clients. With the stolen credentials, the attacker can request a valid access token from the real login service. Cycode, the security firm that reported the flaw , demonstrated that full exchange in a test and says the resulting token carries whatever permissions the app was granted. The client secret is long-lived, so it keeps working until it is changed. The flaw is rated high (7.5) for the two prov...

What is IAM for AI agents? AI agents authenticate, invoke tools, and act across enterprise systems with delegated authority. IAM for AI Agents is the identity-control architecture that governs those actors. This guide covers the limits of conventional provisioning, the components that matter, how to evaluate framework choices, and what runtime evidence proves an agent behaved as intended. Identity and access management (IAM) for AI agents treats each agent as a non-human identity with a human owner, a defined purpose, scoped authorization, an expiration, and continuous monitoring. The complication is architectural. IAM platforms express intended access, while applications and infrastructure reveal what the agent actually executed. Between the two sits identity dark matter: the agents, credentials, application-local accounts, and authentication paths that central identity data never reports. A framework that cannot observe that surface produces policy intent, not assurance. Wh...

A domain used as harmless placeholder text showed up in roughly 1,700 repositories. Then somebody registered it and started serving malicious lures. That is the kind of week this was: forgotten assumptions turning into live attack surface. Elsewhere, weak service accounts, old bugs, exposed systems, phishing kits, and strangely easy exploit paths kept doing useful work for attackers. Nothing exotic. Mostly things nobody expected to matter anymore. Here’s the full recap of what mattered this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week Citrix Warns of Actively Exploited NetScaler ADC and Gateway Flaws — Citrix released patches to address multiple vulnerabilities, including CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772, that have come under active exploitation. CVE-2026-88771 is an improper input validation vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands, while successful exploitation of CVE-2026-88772 could allow for remote code execution or denial-of-service. CISA...

AI agents are moving into production faster than security teams can govern them. They are connecting to apps, handling data, calling APIs, and acting across business systems—often without the same controls applied to human users. According to Okta’s Global CISO Insights 2026 report, only 47% of CISOs are confident they can identify every AI agent in their environment. Even among those who feel confident about visibility, roughly 80% still worry that excessive access may be going unreviewed. That is the real problem: seeing an agent is not the same as controlling what it can do. Join Matt Immler , Regional CSO at Okta, for a practical session on how to bring AI agents under stronger identity governance before excessive access becomes harder to contain.

The threat actor known as JADEPUFFER has been observed orchestrating destructive actions within a Microsoft Azure environment using compromised service principals. Microsoft, which is tracking the activity under the name Storm-3168 , has called it an evolution of the threat actor's tradecraft. The attack took place in early June 2026 over a period of about 18 hours. "The destructive operations were facilitated by compromising service principals and targeted Azure Storage Accounts, SQL databases, Key Vaults, Function Apps, recovery protection locks, Virtual Machines, and App Services," researchers Yossi Weizman and Tushar Mudi, along with the Microsoft Security Research team, said . JADEPUFFER was first documented by Sysdig, describing it as the first-ever ransomware operation run end-to-end with the help of a large language model (LLM). The agentic attack exploited a known security flaw in Langflow (CVE-2025-3248) to break in, harvested credentials, burrowed deepe...

The way we talk about AI agents is shifting, and the way we implement them requires an even more fundamental shift. While earlier discourse focused on how quickly organizations could stand up agents and how much productivity they could promise, a string of recent incidents, including a widely discussed intrusion at Hugging Face during an evaluation of OpenAI agents, has spurred organizations to examine whether speed has outpaced the ability to secure what gets deployed . Security teams are increasingly asking what an agent can reach once it's running, and whether anyone would notice before it mattered. However tempting it may be to jump directly into enforcement controls and detections, you need to look before you leap. Research from Veeam reveals that 70% of organizations admit that AI workflows are already in contact with sensitive corporate data without full oversight in place, and 67% report that IT cannot fully track the autonomous workflows that employees are building. Sh...

AI coding agents are changing how quickly developers can build and ship software as well as how quickly credentials can become exposed. According to GitGuardian’s 2026 State of Secrets Sprawl Report , commits identified as AI-assisted are leaking secrets at approximately twice the rate of human-written ones. Most of the fastest-growing categories of leaked credentials are now connected to AI services, meaning the tools meant to advance development are also accelerating the exposure of the keys development relies on. This isn’t a new vulnerability; what is new is AI changing the scale and pace at which those mistakes can happen. A coding agent can read an entire project, modify files, generate configurations and interact with external services in the time a developer might take to review a single pull request. The main issue isn’t that AI agents sometimes encounter secrets but that many of those secrets were never designed for an environment in which software can act autonomously. A...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active TeamFiltration campaign codenamed UNK_CondorFiltration that has targeted over 5,700 accounts across 28 Microsoft 365 tenants. According to Proofpoint, the activity has primarily focused on Chilean retail and financial institutions. It originated from 1,487 unique AWS EC2 source IP addresses. "The campaign compromised 7 accounts – all of which were unmanaged functional or service accounts rather than individual employee accounts – highlighting a critical exposure gap around forgotten, non-human identities carrying default or unrotated passwords and no MFA [multi-factor authentication]," the enterprise security company said in a statement. The Microsoft 365 brute-force campaign is said to have unfolded across three different waves from late July to August 2026, with an unnamed Chilean retailer facing the brunt of 78.3% of all observed authentication events - July 21-24, targeting approximately 100–120 ...

The private email address GitLab gives you for filing issues by email is a credential. Anyone who gets it can email a patch that GitLab commits in your name, to any branch you can push to, including main, and can start CI/CD jobs that run as you. GitLab shows each user this address behind a button labeled "Email work item to this project." Mail sent to it opens an issue in that project, authored by you. The string in the middle of the address is a token tied to your account, and GitLab's documentation says it does not expire. The address looks like it belongs to one project. It does not.  Aikido Security , which reported the behavior, found that the addresses GitLab creates for a user's different projects all share the same token, and that the token applies to every project the account can open, public or private. GitLab does not check who sent the email. Any mailbox can write to the address, and GitLab acts on the message as if it came from you. Whoever holds...

Attackers are exploiting a critical flaw in F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) that lets them run code on a BIG-IP system without logging in, F5 says. The flaw,  CVE-2026-94127 , affects only systems in which APM serves as an OAuth authorization server, issuing access tokens to applications. F5 disclosed it in  an advisory  on September 22 and has released engineering hotfixes. APM is the BIG-IP module that controls how users reach an organization's applications and networks. The vulnerable setup has an APM access policy and an OAuth authorization server profile on the same virtual server, which hosts the BIG-IP address that receives the OAuth traffic. Specific malicious traffic sent to that virtual server can lead to remote code execution. The flaw is a heap-based buffer overflow. F5 rates it 9.8 out of 10 on CVSS v3.1 and 9.3 on CVSS v4.0. Because the malicious traffic goes to the virtual server itself, limiting access to the BIG-IP management interface does...

Microsoft on Tuesday announced the takedown of the EvilTokens device code phishing service that it said used artificial intelligence (AI) "at every step of the attack chain." The action, carried out with authorization from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, involved the efforts of Health-ISAC, alongside Cloudflare, Coinbase, OpenAI, Railway, SpyCloud, The Shadowserver Foundation, and TRM Labs. Microsoft is tracking the threat actors behind the development and support of EvilTokens as Storm-2992 . In tandem, the Metropolitan Police Service arrested two men, aged 32 and 38, on September 11, 2026, in connection with the illicit commercial operation. The tech giant described EvilTokens as a "powerful cybercrime platform" that used AI to compromise email accounts and design roadmaps for financial fraud and scams. "While EvilTokens helped cybercriminals access email accounts, at the center of the service was an AI-style chatbot th...

Security teams have spent decades asking whether an identity has too much access. AI agents raise a harder question: how can we determine which paths an autonomous system can discover, given the access it already has? A person may try several ways to complete a task. A deterministic application follows the flow its developer wrote. But an AI agent is relentless in its pursuit of done. In May 2026, OpenAI announced that one of its models had disproved a 1946 Erdős conjecture in discrete geometry, largely by working through paths a mathematician would abandon as too tedious. The same principle applies to cybersecurity. An AI agent can test thousands of actions, abandon failed routes, discover credentials, switch tools, and keep going. That persistence is part of what makes agents useful, but it also changes how we need to think about lateral movement. AI agent risk has two dimensions: Access defines the possible blast radius Autonomy determines how much an agent can do with...

A browser. A plugin. A package. A login screen. Normal stuff. That is basically the problem this week. The trouble keeps showing up inside things people already trust: code that takes a bad turn, old payloads coming back, exposed systems, weak checks, fake fixes, and attack paths that look almost too easy. Even the research side is getting messy, with more findings, more automation, and not always more clarity. Nothing here needs much drama. Just a lot of small doors left open. Here’s what happened. ⚡ Threat of the Week Cisco Warns of Actively Exploited ISE Auth Bypass — Cisco warned of a fresh maximum-severity security flaw impacting Identity Services Engine (ISE) that has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76460 (CVSS score: 10.0), could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication. "This vulnerability is due to insufficient authentication control on an API endpoint," Cisco said. "An attacker could exp...

Three researchers at the security firm  Hacktron  used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 to chain two flaws and take over the ChatGPT and Codex accounts of several OpenAI employees, then reach an internal OpenAI code repository. The chain began with a bug in the software that runs OpenAI's public help forum and moved through a weakness in OpenAI's own login system. This was security research, not a real-world attack: the team reported the flaws to OpenAI, proved the access with a harmless pull request, and then stopped. From the first look, that internal access took under 72 hours. OpenAI confirmed a fix about 14 hours after the report, according to Hacktron, and on September 1 paid the team a $6,500 bounty. OpenAI said the award "recognizes the OpenAI-side finding, not the actions against Discourse," the open-source software that runs the forum. Testing the forum itself was outside its bug bounty program. OpenAI has not publicly described the login flaw, and it ...

Identity visibility is a starting point for modern identity security, because stolen and misused credentials are among the most frequently reported initial access vectors in breach research, including Verizon's annual Data Breach Investigations Report . This article explains what identity visibility means in IAM, why cloud and multicloud environments complicate it, which capabilities matter in identity visibility tools , and how to build a practical program. What is identity visibility? Identity visibility is the ability to see every identity in an environment, what it can access, and how that access is actually used at runtime. It combines inventory, entitlement mapping, and behavioral telemetry into one continuous picture instead of a periodic snapshot. The important distinction is between intent and execution. Identity and access management (IAM) platforms express policy intent: who should have access, under what conditions, and for how long. Applications and infrastructu...

SolarWinds has released security updates to address a high-severity flaw in Access Rights Manager (ARM) that, if successfully exploited, could lead to an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-28326 , is rated 8.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. The issue affects all versions of Access Rights Manager 2026.2 and prior. "SolarWinds Access Rights Manager was reported to be affected by an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability," SolarWinds said in an advisory released on September 17, 2026. "The issue stems from a hard-coded static key." The company credited Armadin security researcher Kai Huang with discovering and reporting the flaw, which has been patched in ARM 2026.2.1 . SolarWinds makes no mention of the vulnerability being exploited in the wild. The development comes nearly two months after the company shipped fixes for a critical flaw impacting Web Help Desk (WHD) (CVE-2026-28323...

Cisco has warned of a fresh maximum-severity security flaw impacting Identity Services Engine (ISE) that has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76460 (CVSS score: 10.0), could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication. "This vulnerability is due to insufficient authentication control on an API endpoint," Cisco said. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to an affected API endpoint. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to gain unauthorized access to the affected device by bypassing the web-based management interface." The issue affects Cisco ISE and Cisco ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC), regardless of device configuration. It has been addressed in the following versions -

N0va is targeting organizations across North America and Europe with phishing campaigns that impersonate trusted services and abuse legitimate authentication flows. Successful attacks can give threat actors access to valid accounts without relying on obvious malware activity. From there, a single compromised identity can open the door to sensitive data, business systems, and additional cloud resources. The longer that access goes unnoticed, the greater the potential for wider compromise, operational disruption, and financial loss. N0va Is Reaching Organizations Across High-Risk Sectors N0va activity has been observed across organizations in government, technology, consulting, healthcare, and other sectors in North America and Europe. Its use of trusted business platforms and cloud services makes the campaign relevant across a wide range of organizations. N0va phishing campaign attack details Related activity can be traced in ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup using a chara...