Identity Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybercriminals are hijacking artificial intelligence (AI) user accounts via information stealer logs to create "stolen keys" that grant illicit access to tools from model providers like Google, Anthropic, and others.  Information stealers like Lumma Stealer or Vidar are equipped to harvest a wide range of data from compromised systems. This can include credential, session tokens, and API keys. Once the data is stolen, threat actors who have purchased access to these off-the-shelf offerings put them up for sale on underground forums in the form of stealer logs to enable follow-on attacks. "Session tokens and API keys are sought specifically by threat actors because it is often possible to replay those secrets and bypass credential-based authentication," Jeremy Kirk, director of threat intelligence at Okta, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Once successfully replayed, a threat actor is effectively logged in to an LLM service without actua...

A flaw in FreeIPA lets a client that has never logged in create a Kerberos identity of its own choosing in the directory and end up in the administrators group, Red Hat says. FreeIPA is the system that determines who may log in across a Linux domain and maintains all identities in a 389 Directory Server database accessed via LDAP. The attack needs a second flaw in that database software. The FreeIPA project has already fixed its side in  version 4.13.4 . Red Hat says it reproduced the chain twice on a default installation, most recently on a machine with no access at all. Red Hat tracks the FreeIPA flaw as  CVE-2026-76578  and rates it critical, with a CVSS score of 9.8. The same page says that score is preliminary and subject to review. Red Hat ships FreeIPA as its Identity Management product , where the package is called  ipa . FreeIPA ships an access control rule, called an ACI, that lets a user manage their own one-time-password token. The rule does no...

Threat hunters have disclosed details of a widespread data theft and extortion threat cluster that's targeting Microsoft 365 and other software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings through information technology (IT) help desk vishing, adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) token theft, and residential-proxy sign-ins. The activity, which mainly singles out directors, vice presidents, and other executive staff, is being tracked by Arctic Wolf under the moniker PREY-0058 . The operation shares significant tradecraft similarities with a data extortion group that Google-owned Mandiant calls UNC6671 . It also said that the data extortion threat actor known as Cinder likely represents yet another rebrand or a possible continuation of Pink operations, citing overlaps between organizations listed on the Cinder leak site and those connected to Pink. It's worth noting that the ever-evolving labels do not correspond to a single proven actor identity, but rather an amorphous set of affiliates, s...

Turning off email images should at least stop the pictures. This week, attackers had a workaround: a scannable QR code built out of text. It still appears, even with images blocked. A small detail, but an annoying one if that was a precaution you were counting on. Elsewhere, a trusted software source delivered code that stole credentials, and a protocol designed for secure network management gave outsiders useful clues before login. Add active attacks on browsers, routers, and online stores, and there’s plenty to check—even for teams that have kept up with the patches. Read the full recap for the week’s major developments, plus more research, attacks, and security news beyond what we covered last week. ⚡ Threat of the Week N-able Patches Critical N-central Flaws — N-able has released hotfixes to address two severe N-central flaws (CVE-2026-86206 and CVE-2026-86207) that could allow an unauthorized party to bypass authentication controls and gain full access to the platform. ...

JetBrains is urging Cadence users to revoke and rotate all credentials following a security incident last month in which unidentified threat actors exploited a recently disclosed critical vulnerability in TeamCity to breach its own environment. "Cadence users should immediately revoke or rotate all credentials and secrets that may have been used to run their Cadence executions," JetBrains said . "They should also treat all executions, including their inputs and outputs in your Cadence project, as potentially untrusted." "As the threat actors gained access to the Cadence server, any credentials or secrets stored in Cadence, contained in the compromised backup, or made available to executions on the affected server should be considered compromised and must be revoked or rotated." Cadence is a JetBrains-hosted cloud computing service that integrates with PyCharm via an optional plugin to let developers run machine learning and heavy workloads on cloud...

Threat actors are exploiting a newly patched critical security flaw impacting JFrog Artifactory merely days after public disclosure, according to watchTowr . The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-82329 (CVSS score: 9.8), a case of authentication bypass that could lead to administrative access in Artifactory. "JFrog Artifactory contains an authentication weakness that, under default configuration, may allow an unauthenticated attacker with network access to obtain administrative privileges," according to a description of the flaw on CVE.org. The vulnerability was patched by JFrog with Artifactory version 7.161.20 released on August 28, 2026. It affects the following versions - 7.161.0 > 7.161.19 7.146.0 > 7.146.36 7.133.0 > 7.133.28 7.125.0 > 7.125.19 7.117.0 > 7.117.27 7.111.4 > 7.111.21 "It affects default configs, requires no auth, no user interaction," Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said in a post on LinkedIn. ...

Threat actors with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka DPRK or North Korea) have been observed seeking job opportunities beyond the information technology (IT) sector, with recent investigations identifying suspected workers employed in sales and marketing and the medical profession. The ongoing insider threat is part of what has been described as the IT worker scheme , where North Korea leverages its network of skilled IT workers, both within and outside the country, to fraudulently land jobs in Fortune 500 companies and private sector firms across the world and remotely earn income to further Pyongyang's unlawful nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. This entails relying on stolen or forged identity documents, VPNs, and proxy services to mask their true identity and location. The yearslong campaign is also tracked under the monikers Famous Chollima, Jasper Sleet, Nickel Tapestry, PurpleDelta (formerly TAG-121), UNC5267, and Wagemole. ...

The boring parts caused most of the trouble. A router shipped ready to listen. A fake check turned the user into the installer. Trusted systems collected traffic and passwords, then cleaned the logs. Old bugs formed new attack chains. Even an AI agent decided its assigned task was optional. Elsewhere, fake apps, helpful support calls, cheap banking kits, exposed systems, and weak defaults kept things moving. Different attacks, same useful mistake: something familiar was trusted without a second look. Here is the week... ⚡ Threat of the Week U.S. Disrupts Chinese Proxy Network Enabling Cyber Espionage — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) disrupted infrastructure associated with a technical quartermaster who sold reconnaissance, proxy management, and operational routing capabilities for Chinese cyber espionage activities. The QTYF group is said to have created and operated the QScan and QTRouter frameworks, which have been used to target U.S. critical infrastructu...

Claude Code reads files, runs shell commands, invokes MCP tools, and acts through the credentials available on a developer’s machine. Anthropic’s new Compliance API endpoints give security teams their clearest view yet into that activity. They also expose a larger problem: activity logs alone cannot tell you whether an agent’s access is legitimate. AI has moved from the browser tab to the endpoint with harnesses like Claude Code. They run on developers' machines, execute bash commands locally, and connect to third parties via MCP servers, skills, and plugins. All this so the user can outsource labor to the machine and focus on designing, thinking, and creating. Local agents are not a niche category. They account for 68.6% of the AI agents Token Security discovers in customer environments, and they often inherit the employee's credentials, network position, and permissions. The shift to the endpoint has major implications for security. With Claude Code, there is no ce...

An Identity Fabric knits fragmented identity systems into a coherent layer that observes how identities behave across applications, APIs, and infrastructure. As enterprise access spans more cloud services and automated workloads, identity security depends less on static configuration and more on runtime visibility. This article covers the architecture, the risks of unmanaged identities, and practical steps to close the gap between access intent and actual execution. The guidance here focuses on enterprise hybrid and multi-cloud environments; smaller single-directory deployments may not require the full scope described. Understanding Identity Fabric Architecture and How It Works An Identity Fabric is not a single product but an architectural approach that connects identity providers, governance systems, applications, and infrastructure into one observable layer. Its purpose is to reconcile what access policy intends with how identities are actually used at runtime. Closing this g...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing toolkit called NovaCookies that's used as a proxy to redirect Microsoft 365 sign-ins, while capturing authenticated sessions in the process. In a report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication, Island characterized the $320/month service as a subscription-based phishing platform that facilitates real-time Microsoft 365 session theft. The kit has been used to target hundreds of organizations across multiple sectors in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Germany, Israel, and the U.A.E. to date.  "Observed campaigns used genuine Docusign envelopes to carry counterfeit document-share lures, with some clicks routed through legitimate Microsoft or Google sign-in endpoints as redirect hops before reaching the kit," Island said. "The message, document service and redirect can therefore appear trustworthy until the browser reaches attacker-controlled infrastructure....

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published the results of two red team assessments it conducted simultaneously against two critical infrastructure organizations, using what it described as similar tradecraft while recording sharply different defensive outcomes. Both organizations were fully compromised at the domain level, and in both, the red team also reached sensitive business systems (SBSs) and cloud resources. The advisory, tracked as AA26-237A and titled "A Tale of Two SOCs," was released on August 25, 2026. CISA identified the first target only as a Government Services and Facilities Sector organization, referred to as Organization A , and the second as a Water and Wastewater Systems Sector entity, referred to as Organization B . "CISA conducted two simultaneous red team assessments using similar tradecraft but observed different defensive responses," the agency said in the advisory. Against Organization A, the re...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform built to strip Apple's Activation Lock from stolen devices, using rented AI voice agents that call theft victims posing as Apple Support and ask for their device passcode. SOCRadar Threat Research Unit (STRU) said the platform, which it tracks as AnonyMousKIT , is credit-metered and drives lures across five channels from a single victim record, comprising email at 1.50 credits, SMS priced per sender ID, WhatsApp, a recorded voice call at 1 credit, and an AI voice agent at 2 credits. The targets are owners of Apple devices that were recently lost or stolen, and the pages and calls ask each of them for the 4- or 6-digit device passcode, then the Apple ID credentials, and finally a live two-factor authentication (2FA) code. Apple's own guidance states that the company never asks for a password, device passcode, or 2FA code to provide support. "AnonyMousKIT is best understood no...

Thousands of companies have been affected by the Mirage2FA campaign from 2024 to 2026. The commercial phishing-as-a-service toolkit targets Microsoft 365 accounts by abusing legitimate login flows and bypassing two-factor authentication. According to ANY.RUN research, 48% of targeted email addresses were potentially compromised. Most of the affected companies are US-based. Mirage2FA Campaign Scope and Impact By stealing passwords and session cookies, attackers can gain access to authenticated Microsoft 365 sessions and SSO-connected services. This creates significant identity-related risks for companies, potentially exposing corporate email, trusted business accounts, and other sensitive data. Once an authenticated Microsoft 365 session is hijacked, a path for impersonation, fraud, and further compromise is created. Key takeaways about Mirage2FA by ANY.RUN The campaign has a broad geographic and corporate reach. Apart from the United States accounting for 63.7% of the tot...

A package gets installed. A login prompt opens. A box sits exposed to the internet. Nothing looks unusual yet. That’s roughly the mood this week. Trusted tools turn hostile, old weak spots get fresh attention, AI makes exploit work cheaper, and researchers keep finding attacks that sound harder than they actually are. Plenty to clean up. Here’s the short version. ⚡ Threat of the Week U.S. Warns of AI-Powered Attacks on Siemens PLCs — Threat actors are using AI to write exploit scripts targeting internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) used across water, energy, manufacturing, and other critical infrastructure sectors, according to the U.S. government. The agencies warned: "This is not a theoretical risk—it is an active threat." The exploitation of poorly secured PLCs could result in disruption of critical industrial processes, safety incidents, downtime or equipment damage, compromise of sensitive data, and compliance violations, not...

Big security risks come in small packages. While enterprise security teams focus on policing the proliferation of employees using ChatGPT and Claude for quick drafting tasks, a more urgent threat is posed by a handful of AI super-adopters who are quietly hardcoding unvetted tools into critical business operations. According to new research published by Akamai, the top 5% of enterprise power users interact with AI models at 12 times the rate of the bottom 50% of the workforce. The findings, published in Akamai’s State of the Internet: Enterprise AI Usage Risk Report 2026 , are based on real-world usage and telemetry data as well as research and threat analysis.  These AI super-adopters are creating a disproportionate security risk by expanding the use of shadow AI, increasing opportunities for data leakage, and introducing autonomous AI agents that operate within the enterprise but outside its established guardrails. “Small groups of AI power users are casting outsized shado...

Update: The story was updated after publication to note that the vulnerability has not been exploited. Although the security bulletin originally marked the "Exploited" field under the Exploitability Assessment table as "Yes," on August 21, 2026, Microsoft corrected the "Exploited" status to "No" after The Hacker News contacted the company for comment. It also noted, "this vulnerability was not exploited in the wild." "We identified and addressed this issue with a fix and released CVE-2026-69836 for greater transparency . There are no additional actions customers need to take,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Hacker News. The headline has been edited to reflect this change. The original story follows below - Microsoft on Thursday warned of a maximum-severity security flaw in Entra ID that it said has been exploited in the wild, but noted that no customer action is required. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-69836...

Three distinct suspected Russian cyber espionage threat clusters have been observed leveraging legitimate authentication flows to single out individuals working in academia, aerospace and defense, governments, and think tanks across Europe, as well as academia and think tanks within the U.S. These clusters include UNC6293 , UNC7005 , and UNC5976 . "These clusters engage in persistent, adaptive phishing campaigns, using sophisticated social engineering tactics to compromise personal accounts across multiple platforms," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) researchers Gabby Roncone and Wesley Shields said in a report published today. UNC6293, first detailed by the tech giant and the Citizen Lab in June 2025, is assessed to be a sub-cluster of Ice Relic (formerly APT29), which is also tracked under the monikers Cozy Bear and Midnight Blizzard. The hacking crew was previously attributed to a campaign that abused a Google account feature called application specific pas...

A single piece of infrastructure has been pulling records out of Salesforce and ServiceNow customer portals across multiple industries for more than a year, according to research published this week by agent security platform Reco. The activity, which Reco has named the City Forum campaign after a domain tied to the attacker's IP address, traces back to one server: 158.220.87.79, hosted on a commodity VPS through the German provider Contabo. Every request from that server carries the same fingerprint, the default user agent of Go's net/http library, which tells researchers the tool behind it is a compiled, purpose built program rather than anything run from a browser. Passive DNS shows the same domain pointed at that IP as far back as March 2025, and the server has not moved since. Targets identified so far span telecoms, banks and other financial services firms, enterprise software vendors including security and data privacy companies, and public sector portals, though Reco...

The expensive attacks are not always the clever ones. This week had plenty of proof. Exposed services got hit, old bugs found fresh use, browser sessions became attack paths, and supply-chain problems kept spreading farther than the original compromise. A lot of it came down to access that was already there and defenses that assumed nobody would look too closely. So, nothing magical. Just a lot of small openings turning into bigger problems. Here’s what stood out. ⚡ Threat of the Week Suspected China APT Behind Exploitation of New VMware Flaw — A suspected China-nexus APT is assessed to be behind the exploitation of a newly patched security flaw in VMware vCenter. The attacks involve the exploitation of CVE-2026-59310 (CVSS score: 9.8), a severe directory-traversal vulnerability in the VMware vCenter server that could be weaponized by a malicious actor to execute arbitrary code. In at least one compromised instance, the attacks led to the deployment of a backdoor and. a rever...