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A third SharePoint Server flaw patched by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday update for July 2026 has come under active exploitation, per watchTowr . The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-50522 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical deserialization of untrusted data in Microsoft Office SharePoint that could allow an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. Microsoft credited DEVCORE researcher "splitline" with discovering and reporting the flaw. "In a network-based attack, an attacker authenticated as at least a Site Owner, could write arbitrary code to inject and execute code remotely on the SharePoint Server," Redmond said in an advisory released last week. "The attack vector is Network (AV:N) because this vulnerability is remotely exploitable and can be exploited from the internet. The attack complexity is Low (AC:L) because an attacker does not require significant prior knowledge of the system and can achieve repeatable success with the ...

Attackers have begun to exploit two critical vulnerabilities in WordPress that, when combined together, enable unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) and complete compromise of vulnerable websites. The two security flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137 , have been codenamed wp2shell . "By the early hours of Saturday morning (UTC), successful exploitation was already well underway, initially using public exploit code to exfiltrate hashed credentials, with remote code execution following once additional details were made public," Jake Knott, principal security researcher at watchTowr, told The Hacker News in a statement. "From our vantage point across a global client base, we are seeing widespread impact of this vulnerability across organizations of every size and every vertical." Telemetry data captured by KEVIntel shows that 13 unique IP addresses from Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., Indonesia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Singapore h...

Researchers at Sysdig have linked a second attack on the same Langflow server to JADEPUFFER , the AI-agent-driven operator it first documented earlier this month. The same operator has now been spotted deploying ENCFORGE , a new compiled Go ransomware designed to encrypt model weights, vector indexes, training datasets, and other AI infrastructure files across the host filesystem. The entry point did not change. Langflow versions before 1.3.0 expose the /api/v1/validate/code endpoint without authentication, allowing any remote attacker to execute arbitrary Python on the server. The flaw, CVE-2025-3248 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and has been in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog since May 5, 2025. As The Hacker News reported earlier this month, the prior operation used throwaway Python code and MySQL's AES_ENCRYPT() function to encrypt and destroy data in Nacos (Alibaba's configuration server) and production databases. The new ENCFORGE payload re...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered nearly 7,600 malicious GitHub repositories, out of which more than 800 pose as artificial intelligence (AI) skills or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to deliver a malware family known as SmartLoader as part of an ongoing campaign codenamed FakeGit . "FakeGit uses copied projects, lookalike developer profiles, convincing READMEs, and malicious ZIP files to deliver SmartLoader malware," Oleg Zaytsev, lead security researcher at Island, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The end goal of these attacks is to leverage the access afforded by SmartLoader to establish persistence and push secondary payloads, such as StealC, an information stealer capable of harvesting a wide range of data from compromised systems. It's worth mentioning here that the use of trojanized MCP servers to distribute SmartLoader and StealC was flagged earlier this year by Straiker AI and subsequently by Derp.ca . But a concerning aspect ...

A malware operator left its delivery server wide open, and Rapid7 pulled down the whole toolkit: 1,048 files spanning lure templates, filename-spoofing tests, execution experiments, droppers, builder notes, and two campaign chains. One was already live against Windows users in Mexico, delivering an infostealer through a fake government ID-lookup site over WebDAV. What makes it more than a payload dump: it caught the operation mid-build. Testing notes, failed experiments, documentation, and live delivery logs sat in one place, the kind of complete development trail defenders rarely see. Rapid7 reads the artifacts, down to a hardcoded path pointing at an open-source AI coding tool, as an operator using generative AI to produce, test, and document phishing delivery at speed. The most developed test set focused on CVE-2025-33053 (CVSS 8.8, now in CISA's KEV catalog ), the WebDAV working-directory hijack Check Point documented last year in its Stealth Falcon reporting. The...

A newly discovered espionage implant has been using a hijacked Microsoft 365 calendar as its command channel, planting operator instructions and smuggling out stolen files as attachments on calendar events dated to the year 2050. Group-IB , which named the malware HollowGraph , says the approach moves tasking and stolen data through legitimate Microsoft Graph API traffic, so the activity looks like ordinary Microsoft 365 chatter and network controls keyed to attacker-owned destinations have nothing to flag. The implant is a .NET DLL that supports just two commands, get and send , and it never reaches out to an attacker-owned server for payloads. Instead, it treats the compromised mailbox's calendar as a two-way dead drop. To pull tasking, it queries the calendar for an event the operator has planted, buried at 2050-05-13 , so the mailbox owner is unlikely to ever scroll to it, and reads its instructions from an attached file. To exfiltrate, it does the reverse: encrypts th...

A single request should not be able to do this much. But this week, small inputs led to code execution, memory loss, stolen keys, and disabled security tools. The paths were often simple: exposed systems, weak checks, old drivers, fake prompts, and public code used for malware delivery. Some bugs were new. Others were already being used before defenders had time to patch. Here is the full recap of what broke, what was exploited, and what needs attention now. ⚡ Threat of the Week New wp2shell WordPress Core Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Run Code - Searchlight Cyber disclosed a pre-authenticated remote code execution vulnerability in WordPress Core that can be exploited anonymously on a standard WordPress installation, without requiring any plugins or other special conditions. It is a combination of CVE-2026-63030 (REST API batch-route confusion) and CVE-2026-60137 (SQL injection in WordPress core) that can be chained to turn an anonymous request into code execution. wa...

A solo Russian-speaking threat actor known as " bandcampro " outsourced a chunk of their operations to Google's open-source Gemini CLI artificial intelligence (AI) and commandeered a live botnet. The findings come from an analysis of 200 Gemini CLI session logs between March 19 and April 21, 2026, which found the threat actor using AI, among other things, to crack passwords, set up a residential proxy, compromise WordPress merchants, and plan a phone-based cryptocurrency fraud scheme aimed at elderly people in the U.S. and Canada. "The logs documented how the threat actor used an AI agent to migrate a command-and-control (C&C) server, and to control a small-scale botnet, among other hacking activities," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen, Philippe Lin, Lucas Silva, Vladimir Kropotov, and Fyodor Yarochkin said . "The entire C&C operation fits in three plaintext files totaling roughly 5 KB, making it highly replicable and effectively disposa...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new software supply chain attack codenamed SleeperGem targeting the Ruby ecosystem after three malicious gems were published to RubyGems with the end goal of serving additional payloads. The rogue gems are listed below - git_credential_manager (versions 2.8.0, 2.8.1, 2.8.2, 2.8.3) - Published on July 18, 2026 Dendreo (versions 1.1.3, 1.1.4) - Published on October 14, 2017 fastlane-plugin-run_tests_firebase_testlab (version 0.3.2) - Published on February 06, 2018 "Each malicious release is a loader," StepSecurity said in an analysis. "It fetches a second stage from an attacker controlled Forgejo host, checks whether it is running in a build system and skips if it is, and on a developer machine it drops a native daemon and installs persistence." One aspect of the attack that immediately stands out is that "git_credential_manager" impersonates the official Microsoft Git Credential Manager, while t...

Russian state-sponsored threat actors have been observed leveraging the infamous ClickFix strategy to trick Ukrainian targets into infecting their own machines with data-stealing malware. According to the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA), the activity has been attributed to UAC-0145 , a sub-cluster within Sandworm , an advanced hacking unit affiliated with GRU, Russia's primary foreign military intelligence agency. In these attacks, threat actors have been found to leverage fake CAPTCHA checks on compromised websites that instruct prospective targets to execute a PowerShell command in the terminal. "The mentioned command, as an example, could be intended for downloading and saving a VBS file in the Startup autorun directory; one of the variants of such a program was called GHETTOVIBE," CERT-UA said in an alert. The attacks also involve the use of SCOUTCURL, a PowerShell script that performs basic reconnaissance by harvesting details about t...

A previously undocumented threat actor has been attributed to the exploitation of recently disclosed SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series VPN appliances as zero-days prior their public disclosure since June 22, 2026. Cybersecurity company Volexity is tracking the activity under the moniker UTA0533 . The discovery was made following an incident response investigation earlier this month. The impacted organization has not been identified. "This threat actor was observed using multiple zero-day exploits, malware designed specifically for SonicWall SMA VPN appliances, as well as other attacker tradecraft," security researchers Sean Koessel and Steven Adair said in an analysis. The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-15409 (CVSS score: 10.0) and CVE-2026-15410 (CVSS score: 7.2), both of which could be chained to facilitate arbitrary command execution and take over susceptible devices. Patches for both the vulnerabilities were released by SonicWall this wee...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of seven malicious npm packages targeting the Vite frontend tooling ecosystem as part of a software supply chain attack. The malicious package campaign, codenamed ViteVenom by Checkmarx, marks an expansion of ChainVeil , which was observed using an "unprecedented" four-tier blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) infrastructure spanning Tron, Aptos, and Binance Smart Chain to deliver a remote access trojan (RAT) capable reverse shell, credential harvesting, file exfiltration, and persistent backdoor injection. "This tactic makes disabling or destroying the C2 infrastructure extremely difficult," Checkmarx researcher Pavan Gudimalla said in an analysis published last month. The activity has been attributed to a threat actor named SuccessKey, with evidence of malicious activity detected as far back as February 27, 2026, when cryptocurrency wallets linked to ViteVenom were activated. While the typosquats pub...

A Go botnet called NadMesh turned up in early July hunting exposed AI services, and the operator's own dashboard claims 3,811 unique AWS keys. A Shodan harvester keeps the scan queue stocked with ComfyUI, Ollama , n8n , Open WebUI , Langflow , and Gradio: the image generators, local model runners, and workflow builders that teams stand up fast and firewall late. The intel feed behind that counter shows 47 credential hauls and 41 model inventories in its last 100 records. Those inventories carry DeepSeek, GLM, and Kimi identifiers tagged :cloud, which suggests that what the bots catalogue reaches past the box itself. QiAnXin's XLab published a report on Friday, named the malware after the "n4d mesh controller" string in its source, and screenshotted the panel. The figures on it are the operator's own, captured July 10, and they do not agree with each other. A counter reading 17,700 total deploys sits above a funnel claiming 95,700 in the past 24 hours. On...

Cybersecurity researchers have attributed the April 2026 DigiCert security incident to a threat activity cluster dubbed CylindricalCanine . Expel, which shared technical details of the event, described the threat actor as a sub-group of GoldenEyeDog (aka APT-Q-27, Dragon Breath, and Miuuti Group), a Chinese cybercrime group known for its targeting of the gambling and gaming sectors using counterfeit websites to push malware-laced software. It's known to be active since at least 2015. "In April 2026, GoldenEyeDog used their malware to access a support member's device at DigiCert, a code-signing certificate provider, and leveraged their access to steal certificates intended for DigiCert customers," Expel security researcher Aaron Walton said in an analysis. "This attack highlighted the capability of the malware and operators." Central to the threat actor's operations is a modified version of Gh0st RAT (aka Farfli), a remote access trojan (RAT) w...

North Korean threat actors linked to the Contagious Interview campaign have been observed employing steganography in SVG image files to conceal malicious payloads as part of a campaign using fake job postings and coding challenges. "Any user who ran the project ended up with a four-stage payload aligned with OtterCookie: a browser credential and crypto wallet stealer, a file stealer, a Socket.IO-based remote access trojan (RAT), and a clipboard stealer," Elastic Security Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The findings once again highlight the continued targeting of software developers by state-sponsored hackers aligned with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) with an aim to steal sensitive data and plunder cryptocurrency wallets. The activity is being tracked under the moniker REF9403. The cybersecurity arm of the Dutch enterprise search and observability platform said it discovered the campaign after the threat actors targeted membe...

Armenia has held a Russian tourist named Aleksandr Ermakov in a detention center since June 28, on a U.S. extradition request for a REvil ransomware suspect named Aleksandr Ermakov. His wife, Maria Yurova, told REN TV that border officers pulled him out of the departure hall at Yerevan's Zvartnots airport, held up a phone with a photo of him off his VKontakte page, and walked him into a side room. His lawyers say Washington has the wrong man. The Ermakov the U.S. wants is Aleksandr Gennadievich Ermakov , sanctioned by Australia, the US, and the UK in January 2024 for stealing 9.7 million records from Medibank Private , one of Australia's largest private health insurers, and dumping some on the dark web. He is also serving a two-year Russian sentence that bars him from leaving the country, according to TASS and to case files two Russian outlets say they have read. The man in the Armenian cell, his lawyers say, is Aleksandr Yuryevich Ermakov , from Omsk, a former priso...

ACR Stealer , an infostealer in circulation since 2024, is walking out of enterprise networks with saved browser passwords, live session tokens, PDFs, Microsoft 365 documents, and files from synced OneDrive and SharePoint folders. It gets in because someone pasted a command into a Run box and pressed Enter. Microsoft laid out two of the delivery chains on Thursday. Its Defender Experts team, the company's managed detection arm, had watched ACR Stealer activity climb across customer environments from late April to mid-June, and says the campaigns are "successfully using ClickFix lures to steal browser credentials, authentication tokens, and sensitive documents." Both chains open with the same prompt, then split: one leaves traces on disk, the other runs almost entirely in memory. Microsoft's remediation guidance tells victims to revoke tokens, not just rotate passwords. A payload in the pixels The prompt likely arrives through malvertising or SEO-manipulated...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented malware called GoSerpent that has been put to use in cyber attacks targeting entities in Southeast Asia since late 2025 with a focus on long-term access and intelligence gathering. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky, which uncovered the activity in February 2026, said it was aimed at government and diplomatic entities in the region. GoSerpent is designed to contact an external server and deploy secondary payloads on sensitive data collection and credential dumping on the system. "Monitoring the activities of this threat actor revealed that in May 2026 they came back with an evolved set of malicious tools: new Stowaway RAT and proxy tool which resembled the initial malware as well as an additional stealthy tool to exfiltrate sensitive data collected for the previous few months through network share," security researcher Noushin Shabab said . The end goal of these efforts is to harvest sensitive fi...

A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something that looks close enough. A familiar repo. A useful installer. A harmless sync setting. Then the handoff goes bad, the box starts talking to someone else, and the damage moves faster than the explanation. Old bugs are back, weak defaults are earning their keep, and some attack paths are so plain they barely feel like research. Here’s the mess. Game cheats drop spyware 11 Malicious NuGet Tools Masquerade as Game Cheats to Drop Windows Surveillance Payload Cybersecurity researchers 11 malicious NuGet packages published as .NET command-line tools that present themselves as game utilities, bots, and "panels," each of which act as a first-stage downloader responsible for fetching and executing a second-stage Python payload named "pepesoft.exe" from GitHub Releases and Hugging Face paths under the username "pepegit666," along with a dormant BitTorrent fallback...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a new modular malware called TELEPUZ that's been spreading via websites infected with ClickFix lures since late April 2026. "The malware is full-featured, lightweight, and modular," Elastic Security Labs researcher Cyril François said in a technical report. "While the number of C2 [command-and-control] domains is currently small, the daily volume of builds uploaded to VirusTotal and the rapid pace of updates indicate active development and likely further growth." The disclosure makes it the second new threat cluster after SCMBANKER to be propagated via ClickFix , a pervasive social engineering attack that tricks users into manually running malicious commands by disguising them as innocent fixes for fake browser errors, software updates, or CAPTCHA verifications. Underpinning the technique is an approach called clipboard hijacking. Because web pages using ClickFix inject malicious script or commands i...