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GitHub has announced that it's introducing a new package firewall as a preview to block installation of suspicious npm packages during installation time. "The firewall inspects both metadata requests and package downloads for signs of malicious activity, acting as an install-time policy gate," GitHub said . The feature, which currently supports only npm packages, is available in public preview for all GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers, including data-resident GitHub Enterprise Cloud. According to the Microsoft subsidiary, the firewall is placed between endpoints or internal registries and the upstream package repositories so as to deter malware attacks that compromise systems when packages are installed. This behavior can expose users to severe security risks, especially when artificial intelligence (AI) agents and CI runners automatically install dependencies to complete a task or build without their explicit permission. The idea is that endpoints like coding ...

Hackers exploited a critical Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN flaw, fixed in February, to plant custom malware inside the systems that control an organization's SD-WAN network. The malware, called KeyDrift , is designed to copy the keys that encrypt traffic between sites and store them for later use,  Cisco Talos said  on October 28. Talos calls the attacks historical but does not specify when they occurred or whether any keys were sent. The flaw is tracked as  CVE-2026-20127  and has a CVSS score of 10.0. It allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass authentication and gain administrative privileges on these control systems. On a Controller, the attacker can log in as a high-privileged internal account that is not root. When Cisco  disclosed the flaw in February , Talos tracked its exploitation as UAT-8616, a cluster of activity it said went back to at least 2023. In  Cisco's traditional key exchange , each SD-WAN router periodically generates an AE...

Third-party Android app stores can now apply to Google for permission to install apps with one tap, without Android's usual confirmation screens, and to update them in the background. To qualify, a store must pass identity checks and send Google  its full catalog , along with every new app and update, for ongoing malware scanning. Approved stores get the features from December 1, but only on devices running Android 17 QPR2 or later in  supported countries , which do not include the US. Today, a user installing apps from a third-party store must first enable the store to install apps, then confirm each install and each update. From December 1, a store in Google's  Registered App Stores program  gets that permission automatically once it is approved, and its updates run in the background under the user's own update settings. Google  announced the program in March , alongside changes it said resolved its disputes with Epic Games. Joining is optional, and sto...

Japan's GMO Internet Group is  offering up to $1 million in total  for tips that help catch the attackers who breached its Onamae.com Desktop Cloud service, after refusing to pay an extortion demand. The reward program opened on October 28 and pays only if a tip helps lead to an arrest or an international wanted notice. The service  hosts Windows desktops  used for FX trading, and a broker has linked unauthorized trades on some of its customers' accounts to logins leaked from the service. GMO says the attackers took customer information. It received a demand for about  $50 million (about ¥8 billion)  on October 21 from people it believes carried out the attack. They have also threatened its customers' trading accounts and data. On October 27, the attackers posted material on their website that they say is information about GMO and its customers. The site's domain, including its mirror sites,  was shut down  at about 4 a.m. Japan time on O...

The North Korea-linked Lazarus Group has been attributed to a cyber espionage campaign dubbed Operation FlashHole targeting at least three organizations in South Korea spanning the construction, software, and wire-communication equipment manufacturing sectors. According to Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky, the campaign has been active since at least July 2025. It's assessed to pick up from where Operation SyncHole left off. "The group targeted victims more selectively, sending spear‑phishing emails with links to fabricated but relevant sites, such as portfolio and résumé pages tailored to each target," Sojun Ryu, senior security researcher at Kaspersky GReAT, said in an exhaustive analysis. Operation SyncHole was first documented by Kaspersky in April 2025, detailing the state-sponsored adversary's targeting of South Korea's software, IT, financial, semiconductor manufacturing, and telecommunications industries since November 2024 to deliver malwa...

A criminal using the Amadey malware can no longer access or steal data from 180,000 infected computers around the world, including some in Australia, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) says. The agency's operators gained access to the criminal's operation's backend and cut it off from those computers. "The next steps that we took were to disconnect that Amadey controller from all those victims," Tauri Gregory, ASD's acting deputy director-general of intelligence,  told ABC News  in an interview published on October 27. ASD is Australia's foreign signals intelligence and cyber security agency. Its  offensive cyber operations  need explicit approval from the Australian government and can disrupt cybercriminals overseas by disabling their infrastructure. Amadey was sold to criminals as a service in 2018, according to  ESET's analysis of Amadey . Each buyer runs its own control panel on its own servers. Computers infected with Amadey check ...

An unknown threat actor has infected 953 online stores, most of them running Magento, as part of a long-running campaign active since July 2025. According to Dutch e-commerce security company Sansec, the activity is designed to add a small piece of code to the store's pages that, when visited by unsuspecting users, serves malicious JavaScript loader code through Magento CMS blocks. "When you visit, that code makes your browser ask the group's server what to do next," Sansec said . "The server first checks whether you are a real shopper or a security scanner, so scanners get nothing." No less than five distinct domains have been observed over time in connection with the campaign - manulfie[.]click, first seen in July 2025 neswnsssn[.]click, first seen in December 2025 lanhd6549tdhse[.]top, first seen in March 2026 additionalver[.]com, first seen in June 2026 deepveindrilling[.]com, first seen in October 2026 Sansec said it found deep...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to what they say is a "recurring social engineering pattern" across hundreds of cases in which threat actors use Microsoft Teams' external chat creation feature to conduct impersonation scams or to deliver malware. "A consistent pattern of attacker behavior has emerged across these incidents: the use of the same throwaway tenants, the same 'IT Support (Internal)' display names, the same remote-access tools, and increasingly, the same payload domains," Arctic Wolf Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks consistently employ IT-themed display names or friendly-sounding first names to subvert external-user warnings in Teams. These messages originate from Teams identities established through newly created or acquired Microsoft 365 tenants. Nearly 30–40% of the cases investigated by the cybersecurity company involve the use of *.onmicrosoft[.]com , a permanent fallback domain auto...

This2Shell, That2Shell, Everything2Shell. That's pretty much how the last week went. Critical bugs that let attackers run code remotely are showing up everywhere. Hackers are scanning for targets, some flaws are already being used in attacks, and security teams have more urgent patches than they can keep up with. And that's not even the full story. A leaked key led to a software supply-chain attack. AI agents are being tricked into following harmful instructions. Old bugs are still being used to break into systems, and some attacks are so simple it's hard to believe they still work. Some websites even went offline to avoid taking chances. It's been a rough week for anyone trying to keep systems safe. Here's what happened. ⚡ Threat of the Week PHP2Shell Flaws Puts Organizations on Alert — The PHP Foundation released patches for two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution...

A rentable Android spyware kit called uCreator takes over Telegram and WeChat accounts by hiding its code inside working copies of the two apps, researcher Ovi found . It only reaches people who install one of these tampered copies, spread outside the official app stores, or who run WeChat inside the kit makers' own container app. The kit's Telegram part matches Baohuo , a backdoor that Doctor Web reported in October 2025 . Doctor Web found Baohuo in tampered copies of Telegram X, an Android app from Telegram. At the time, the company estimated that more than 58,000 devices were infected. The Hacker News compared the two reports. Doctor Web's technical description of Baohuo lists the same code namespace, com.ucreator.tgjar , the same command-and-control (C2) server, and matching command names as Ovi's analysis. Ovi's analysis, published October 21, 2026, does not mention Doctor Web's findings, and Doctor Web did not name the kit. It is not clear whether...

A malicious instruction file sitting in a developer's Downloads folder tried to make their AI coding agent install a known-malicious npm package, security firm Forever Security said in a report published last week. The company caught the attempt on a real customer's machine and stopped the agent before any code ran. It could not determine how the file got into the folder. The file was  AGENTS.md, a plain-text instructions file that a coding agent, such as OpenAI's Codex, reads when it starts in a folder and follows as directions. It was dressed up as ordinary engineering notes. One section told the agent to add a server to its own configuration and install a package called function-color from npm. That package is part of a malware campaign that other researchers have  documented separately : function-color pulls in a downloader called function-flag, which fetches and runs a Windows payload. Researchers at CloudSEK and Checkmarx, who ...

LiteLLM on Friday revealed that an Agent Platform master key accidentally published to a public GitHub repository in late May 2026 ultimately allowed the threat actor to push a malicious version of the popular Python package. "On May 27, 2026, a configuration file was committed to the public LiteLLM-Labs/lite-harness repository which inadvertently contained the master key to a deployment of the LiteLLM Agent Platform, an open source tool we use for orchestrating agents," LiteLLM's Oliver Jensen and Mateo Wang said . "The error was quickly identified, the commit force-pushed over, and we identified the exposed keys as requiring revocation. However, key revocation did not occur for the master key." LiteLLM said the unknown attacker (operating from "69.48.229[.]143") used this unrevoked key on October 10, 2026, to gain access to the Agent Platform and extracted a GitHub CLI OAuth token the service was configured with to allow self-hosted cloud a...

Diplomatic organizations in Central Asia have been targeted by a sophisticated new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) bootkit called BlackX . The activity, which singled out diplomatic entities in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan in early 2026, is suspected to be orchestrated by a China-linked state-sponsored hacking group known as APT41 , Kaspersky said in a technical report published this week. The primary objective behind deploying the malware is to undermine Microsoft Windows startup defenses, along with third-party security solutions, while maintaining long-term, covert access to compromised devices. Notably, BlackX is assessed to be an updated version of BlackLotus , a notorious bootkit that was first observed being advertised on cybercrime forums in late 2022, before its existence was officially confirmed by ESET in March 2023. BlackLotus is designed to exploit a now-patched Secure Boot bypass vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-21894 (CVSS score: 4.4...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven intrusion ecosystem run by affiliates of the INC and The Gentlemen ransomware groups. Central to the operation is an "Autonomous Red Team Kill Chain Framework" referred to as Phantom. The threat actor is assessed to be Russian-speaking and functions both as an intrusion and data-extortion operator, as well as an infrastructure provider supporting different partners across the ransomware ecosystem. "The operators exploited edge and remote-access systems at scale, including FortiClient EMS, SimpleHelp, cPanel, and VPN gateways," SOCRadar said . "They used AI-managed knowledge bases to track victims, stolen credentials, and campaign progress." A notable aspect that defines the campaign is its "AI-executed, human-approved operating structure" in which a human operator provides a victim-specific prompt and reviews every step, while the intrusions themselves are e...

The Russian state-sponsored hacking group Sandworm teamed up with another threat actor to carry out a destructive wiping attack targeting a Ukrainian logistics company last year. According to ESET , the attack involved UAC-0099 (aka Earth Sirrush) obtaining initial access to the target on July 16, 2025, via a spear-phishing email bearing a malware-laced attachment that led to the deployment of the MATCHWOK backdoor through a downloader called MATCHBOIL. The activity ultimately concluded with the threat actor handing off access to Sandworm, which then conducted a data-wiping attack on September 17, 2025, more than two months after it obtained a foothold. What makes the attack stand out is UAC-0099's use of a previously undocumented backdoor called MythicRatatoskr that communicates with a command-and-control (C2) server hosted inside the Yggdrasil mesh network. The backdoor was deployed a day after MATCHWOK was executed. There are indications that development on the back...

Threat actors have been observed unsuccessfully attempting to exploit the newly disclosed PHP2Shell vulnerabilities to rope infected systems into a Mirai botnet variant called Potassium , as it emerges that weaponizing the flaws may be harder than previously thought. The attacks aim to exploit CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (CVSS scores: 9.2), which can result in unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) via specially crafted HTTP requests. The vulnerabilities have been patched in PHP versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35. "However, analysis of the sample revealed that it is an updated and significantly expanded version of the Mirai-derived botnet variant identified in early 2026," Sophos said . "The sample displays downloader and network disruption functionality." ⚡ WARNING — PHP Warns of Another Unpatched RCE Flaw CVE-2026-115560 Specifically, it resolves a hard-coded, encrypted command-and-control (C2) address, establishes a TCP connec...

This week has already been rough for cybersecurity. Critical PHP and GitLab RCE flaws, serious Linux security bugs , compromised eMudhra certificates , a Node.js RCE flaw , a hacked LiteLLM release, and hundreds of hijacked Tor relays . That's a lot to deal with in just a few days. And the week isn't even over yet. But those big headlines are only half the story. Stolen passwords, exposed databases, broken login checks, and trusted tools being turned against their users are causing trouble too. Some attacks are clever. Others work because someone left a simple security gap open. This ThreatsDay, we're digging into the stories that didn't make as much noise but still deserve attention. Some are strange, some are serious, and a few might surprise you. Here's everything else you shouldn't miss this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

LiteLLM on Wednesday disclosed that threat actors compromised "multiple independent security controls" to push a malicious version of the Python package containing a credential stealer and a backdoor. On October 21, 2026, LiteLLM's release pipeline was compromised to push 1.107.0 to the Docker Hub registry and the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository. The incident took place around 4:00 a.m. PST. The following compromised versions were published - LiteLLM v1.107.0 (PyPI) v1.107.0, latest, main-latest, and main-stable (Docker) v1.107.0, latest, main-latest, and main-stable (GHCR) Users who downloaded an unpinned version of LiteLLM between 11:39 a.m. and 1:23 p.m. UTC via pip or used the Docker image v1.107.0, latest, main-latest, or main-stable between 11:46 a.m. and 2:20 p.m. UTC are impacted. The poisoned version incorporated code to harvest credentials and keys, and run arbitrary code from a remote server every hour, turning it into a remote acce...

The popular LiteLLM Python package has been compromised as part of a software supply chain attack that delivered a credential stealer and a backdoor, according to reports from SafeDep , Socket , StepSecurity , and Upwind . The compromise affects LiteLLM 1.107.0, distributed through PyPI wheels and Docker images. The Python package has since been quarantined on Python Package Index (PyPI), and the malicious Docker images have been removed. Oliver Jensen, director of security at LiteLLM, said an investigation into the incident is ongoing, and that it's still working to trace the original attack vector by which the threat actor published the malicious release. "We have identified that the malicious actions were taken through three engineers' GitHub accounts, appearing to be by way of stolen GitHub CLI OAuth tokens," Jensen said . "The threat actor used one user's account to trigger the project-releaser run, and another user's account to approve it. A...

Google on Tuesday said it's rolling out improved safeguards in its Chrome browser to secure users against ClickFix attacks when Enhanced Protection is enabled. ClickFix is a popular social engineering technique in which bad actors trick users into copying and pasting malicious code directly into their computer's operating system, thereby bypassing conventional security controls. As part of these attacks, unsuspecting users who land on legitimate-but-compromised sites or click on malicious ads are redirected to phishing landing pages that display fake Cloudflare or Google reCAPTCHA verification or other non-existent errors and instruct users to copy and paste a command on the Windows Run dialog (or the Mac Terminal app) to address it. The moment a user presses the Enter key after pasting the command, it triggers a multi-stage infection chain that leads to the deployment of malware, such as information stealers or remote access trojans. In an attempt to blend in with re...