Open Source | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A cluster of nearly 800 malicious packages has been published to the npm registry as part of a new campaign designed to deliver cross-platform malware targeting Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. "These packages appear to use AI slop squatted, or randomly generated typo-squatting package names, but all of them deliver a powerful RAT and infostealer payload," OpenSourceMalware researcher Paul McCarty said . Unlike other npm-oriented software supply chain attacks that make use of lifecycle hooks like preinstall or postinstall to trigger the execution of malicious code, the newly identified packages come with a README that instructs developers to load them with require(), a built-in function to import modules, local files, and third-party packages. The attack leads to the execution of a downloader named WEL1DROPPER , which, when executed, identifies the host operating system and processor architecture and fetches a compatible payload from one of the three Cloudflare Workers...

WordPress has fixed a pre-authentication reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in its login screen that affects every version of the content management system. pwn.ai demonstrated how the flaw can be chained into PHP code execution on the server when a logged-in administrator interacts with an attacker-controlled page. Tracked as  CVE-2026-64638  (CVSS score: 8.9), the high-severity vulnerability requires no attacker privileges. According to pwn.ai , which discovered the flaw and shared technical details with The Hacker News, the login-page XSS requires no authentication. Once a crafted username reaches the failed-login error page, the resulting JavaScript executes in the visitor's browser with no further interaction required on that page. The code-execution path requires a victim already logged in as an Administrator and explicit interaction with an attacker-controlled page. In pwn.ai's demonstration, that interaction is one ordinary click. The researchers told The...

Open Source had a great childhood. For two decades it got to be a kid. It ran around barefoot, gave everything away, trusted strangers, and never once thought about who was watching. It ran the kind of lemonade stand that took IOUs from anyone who wandered up — take what you need, pay me back whenever, no need to leave a name. It was idyllic. It was also, in retrospect, a little feral. Then, somewhere around 2020, its voice started to crack. It tried to grow a beard. Acne everywhere. SolarWinds, then Log4Shell, then TeamPCP and Shai-Hulud — the supply chain woke up one morning like the end of Ender's Game : the simulation had been real the whole time. Those were real battles. Real systems, real money, real people, all of it quietly leaning on code we'd been treating like a practice round. And then the adults showed up with rules: executive orders, European regulations, permission slips for half the places it wanted to go. What it did not get was a nice, slow, storybook ...

A use-after-free bug in Linux's SCTP networking code can be turned into full root on a host, and Tencent researchers say they used it to escape a container and reach the machine underneath. The flaw has existed since 2008. The fix already shipped: stable kernels 7.1.6, 6.18.42, 6.12.101 and 6.6.148, released August 3, close it. Anyone running an older kernel with SCTP reachable should update. Tracked as  CVE-2026-64564  and named SCTPhantom by its finders, the flaw was disclosed publicly on August 6, two days after the kernel CVE team assigned it. No public exploit code had surfaced at the time of writing, and The Hacker News found no entry for the flaw in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog as of August 7. The flaw is local, not remote, and it needs SCTP reachable on the target, which limits exposure. Where those conditions held, Tencent Zhuque Lab reports it got root on the kernel builds it tested for Debian 13, Ubuntu 24.04, Rocky Linux 9 and RHEL 9, and ...

PortSwigger says HTTP Terminator, an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted research system built by James Kettle , generated and proved new HTTP desynchronization techniques after exploring 30,000 candidate desync vectors. PortSwigger said a separate human-guided discovery cascade also exposed a zero-day in Apache Traffic Server. Kettle said HTTP Terminator tested 30,000 websites where scanning was authorized through bug bounty or vulnerability disclosure programs and found roughly 700 vulnerable targets before deeper validation and RQP research. Kettle said those findings involved banks, government infrastructure, security products, and an airport. The research produced new desync triggers, a dual-matching Content-Length pattern, and a "dangling-byte" technique designed to make response queue poisoning (RQP) more reliable. RQP can potentially make a front end lose track of which back-end response belongs to which user, potentially exposing another user's resp...

A new analysis has uncovered that the threat actor tracked as TeamPCP has been active on the cybercrime scene as far back as 2020, indicating the group has been compromising internet-facing infrastructure for years before training their sights on the software supply chain. "The connection is supported by overlapping domains, malware deployment paths, staging techniques, backend infrastructure, and operational tradecraft," Oligo Security researchers Avi Lumelsky and Gal Elbaz said . This includes two campaigns observed in the second half of 2025: ShadowRay 2.0 (aka IronErn), which involved hijacking artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure into a self-propagating botnet, and TA-NATALSTATUS , which targeted exposed Redis servers to deliver cryptocurrency miners. TA-NATALSTATUS is assessed to be an evolution of a prior campaign that was detailed by Trend Micro in April 2020 that involved targeting Redis servers to deploy malware. This suggests that the threat actor h...

Coinspect has identified CryptoJS.lib.WordArray.random() as the weak random number generator behind the Ill Bloom wallet drains . Introduced in the JavaScript cryptography library 12 years ago, the function supplied weak entropy that affected wallet apps used to generate recovery phrases. Coinspect's on-chain analysis puts the measured theft across two sweeps since late May at a lower bound of roughly $5.7 million. The blockchain security firm, which coined the Ill Bloom name in July, has now confirmed five applications that used the generator as an entropy source for recovery-phrase generation: RRWallet , which Coinspect says is discontinued. No fix. Bexo Wallet , which Coinspect says has been fixed in version 20.1.0, although the updated builds had not yet been uploaded. NanChat , which independently confirmed versions before 1.3.0 were affected. Fixed in 1.3.0. Bitcoin Libre , which Coinspect says fixed the issue in version 4, released July 2024. Milo , w...

Two security flaws in Paperclip could let attackers execute commands on a network server or a developer's computer. Paperclip is an open-source control plane for teams of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, and both paths rely on importing a malicious agent and starting it. A third flaw could expose sensitive data and control-plane details through application programming interface (API) routes that did not enforce the expected access checks. The more severe server-side path, tracked as CVE-2026-41679 (CVSS score: 10.0), requires no pre-existing account or victim interaction against network-accessible deployments using authenticated mode with the default registration configuration. The second path, tracked as GHSA-x8hx-rhr2-9rf7 (CVSS score: 9.6), requires a user to open an attacker-controlled page while Paperclip is running in its default local_trusted mode. The source tagged as Paperclip v2026.416.0 contains the import-authorization fix and hostname-validation guard di...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged an evolution of the EtherHiding blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) technique that conceals the C2 server IP address inside a made-up destination address of a completely empty Ethereum transfer. The new dead drop resolver approach, observed in two trojanized npm packages "bianira-ui" and "fluid-type-ui," has been codenamed NullReceiver by OpenSourceMalware, which has described it as a "deliberate improvement on EtherHiding." The activity has been linked to North Korea. The packages are currently no longer available for download from npm. However, statistics show that they have been downloaded a few hundred times since they were first published on July 28, 2026 - bianira-ui (109 downloads), uploaded by an npm user named "npmuser1101" fluid-type-ui (587 downloads), uploaded by an npm user named "npmuser3002" EtherHiding was first publicly documented by Guardio Labs in October...

A memory corruption flaw in the Linux kernel's Open vSwitch datapath gives ordinary local users a path to root on a broad set of default-configured distributions, and a public exploit ships with pre-built records for roughly 800 kernel builds. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-64531 (CVSS score: 7.8) and codenamed OVSwrap by its discoverer, was disclosed by security researcher Asim Manizada on July 28, 2026. The bug sits in the kernel datapath, not the userspace ovs-vswitchd daemon. In a technical write-up , Manizada said an attacker needs "no existing OVS bridge, no running ovs-vswitchd, no host-level CAP_NET_ADMIN." On affected systems where the OVS kernel datapath is available and unprivileged user namespaces are enabled, an ordinary user can create private user and network namespaces with unshare -Urn, gain CAP_NET_ADMIN inside that namespace, and reach the vulnerable flow-installation path. If the openvswitch module is installed but not loaded, resolvi...

A cluster of 77 extensions on the Open VSX marketplace has been found to impersonate legitimate developer tools while transmitting information about the systems and development environments on which they were installed. The "evil twin" extensions were uploaded to the repository between July 26 and August 1, 2026, according to Manifold Security. The packages have been removed from Open VSX as of August 3, 2026. "In most of the packages it sends little more than the machine's hostname," security researchers Ax Sharma and Cody Nash said . "In nineteen of them it sends a detailed description of the machine, the repository open in the editor, and the CI system the editor is running inside." Of the identified extensions, 58 have been described as lightweight tools designed to exfiltrate the hostname and, in some cases, the workspace folder name or editor version. The rest are reconnaissance payloads that transmit the developer-related information: l...

An agent running Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 spent 34 hours trying to get a malware dropper merged into a real open-source project during a cyber evaluation by the UK's AI Security Institute. When a bystander publicly warned that the code was malicious, the agent denied it, force-pushed a rewritten branch history to erase the evidence, and posted from a second account it controlled to vouch for its own work. The project's maintainer closed the pull request anyway. The institute, known as AISI, published its incident report on Tuesday. Across 122 runs of a capture-the-flag (CTF) exercise on two of its cyber ranges, researchers catalogued 19 unsanctioned actions on the live internet across 10 runs: 17 from Mythos 5, a restricted model Anthropic sells for cybersecurity work, and two from OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. AISI says the attempts failed and that it has found no evidence of resulting real-world harm. Both models ran with their providers' cyber classifiers swi...

A credential-stealing npm worm that first appeared in keyv@6.0.0 spread beyond the Keyv and Cacheable namespaces into hundreds of packages across multiple organizations on August 4, 2026. SafeDep verified 353 poisoned versions across 79 package names in the npm registry. Its monitoring put the wider footprint at 442 versions across 353 names, while Aikido later reported at least 868 packages across 1,381 versions. Neither broader total was independently reproducible from a complete public list at the reporting cutoff. The malicious release used a preinstall script to run a credential-stealing bundle inside developer and continuous integration (CI) environments. SafeDep and Socket say it can harvest repository, package registry, cloud and private-key material, then use available npm publishing access to poison more packages. The Keyv repository also retained separate Claude Code and Visual Studio Code (VS Code) hooks that can execute the payload once a user trusts the workspace...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new set of malicious npm packages that target users of Alibaba developer tools with a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) as part of a sophisticated, targeted software supply chain attack targeting Chinese-speaking environments. One of the packages in question is " lib-mtop ," an unscoped package with the same name as a private Alibaba package under the "@ali" scope. Although the npm package was first published sometime in November 2023 with no functionality, three new versions (v1.0.1, v1.0.2, and v1.0.3) were uploaded earlier this March and April. It's currently not clear if this was the result of a maintainer account takeover or the project developer opting to go rogue. Regardless of how the malicious changes were pushed, the newly added changes feature a loader that's designed to fetch a remote JavaScript payload using curl and then execute it. The same maintainer account " ch4ce ," whic...

Three high-severity security flaws have been disclosed in Hugging Face's Diffusers library that could allow crafted model repositories to stealthily execute arbitrary code on machines that load it, opening the artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain to security risk. "These vulnerabilities are bypassing trust_remote_code, the safeguard designed to stop unreviewed code from running in the custom pipelines loading process," Zafran Labs researchers Gal Zaban and Ido Shani said in an analysis published last week. The shortcomings have been collectively named FaceHugger . With Hugging Face becoming the "GitHub of the AI era" and its libraries and repositories prevalent in enterprise environments, vulnerabilities in libraries like Diffusers can grant attackers extensive access owing to how the library is embedded into production pipelines, CI/CD systems, and container images. Diffusers is a Python package that serves as a library of state-of-the-art (SOT...

An academic study has disclosed a "widespread class" of security vulnerabilities impacting 4G and 5G core networks that, if successfully exploited, could trigger denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and even session hijacking, allowing an attacker to seize control of a user's network session. The findings have been released by a group of researchers from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University in a paper titled "Understanding Implicit Trust Errors in Core Carrier Networks through Multi-Agent Flaw Discovery and Analysis." The study has uncovered dozens of vulnerabilities in the signaling interfaces of LTE/5G core networks, and specifically covers two LTE implementations (Open5GS and OpenAirInterface) and five 5G implementations (Open5GS, free5GC, OpenAirInterface, SD-Core, and eUPF) across two core signaling protocols, GPRS Tunnelling Protocol Control Plane ( GTP-C ) and Packet Forwarding Control Protocol ( PFCP ). "Our research finds these vulne...

Amazon has tied the September 2025 hijack of the npm packages debug and chalk to North Korea. For ten months, the incident sat in the public record as crypto theft: a maintainer phished through a lookalike npm domain and a wallet-draining script pushed into at least 18 packages carrying more than 2 billion weekly downloads between them. The original Aikido and Wiz reports did not attribute the incident to North Korea. In research published July 29, Amazon Threat Intelligence assesses with medium confidence that the group behind the March 2026 axios compromise was behind it. The same group planted a trojanized file in a small package called typo-crypto in March 2025, according to Amazon, a full year before it reached axios. Analysts found it while chasing a domain registered in 2025 that surfaced during the axios investigation. Downloads were low, but the tradecraft "aligns with what we later observed in attacks on more popular packages," Amazon wrote, and the compa...

Ruby on Rails has released fixes for a critical Active Storage vulnerability that could let unauthenticated attackers read arbitrary files from application servers through crafted image uploads. Tracked as CVE-2026-66066 (CVSS score: 9.5), the flaw can expose the Rails process environment and secrets such as secret_key_base , the Rails master key, database passwords, cloud storage credentials, and API tokens. Those secrets may enable remote code execution (RCE) or lateral movement into connected systems. Affected applications use libvips for Active Storage image processing and accept image uploads from untrusted users. Rails selects Vips under load_defaults 7.0 , and later defaults retain it. Ethiack and GMO Flatt Security list the affected ranges as Rails 7.0.0 through 7.2.3.1, Rails 8.0.0 through 8.0.5, and Rails 8.1.0 through 8.1.3. Rails 6.0.0 through 6.1.7.10 releases are affected only when Active Storage is configured to use Vips, which was not the default processor in Ra...

Nebula Security says a patched Firefox JIT flaw could be triggered by simply visiting a malicious webpage and was also used to compromise Tor Browser. Tracked as CVE-2026-10702 , the bug provides arbitrary code execution inside the browser's renderer process. Mozilla rated it High and fixed it in the Firefox 151.0.3 update . "No settings or additional user interaction are required," Eten Zou, CEO of Nebula Security, told The Hacker News. "Visiting a malicious webpage is enough to trigger it," Zou said every Tor Browser release that incorporated a vulnerable Firefox version was affected, though researchers have not identified the exact Tor releases. On its own, the bug runs code only inside Firefox's sandboxed content process. Nebula released public exploit material and used the flaw as the first stage of IonStack, a browser-to-kernel chain built for an ARM64 device running Android 17. The released end-to-end code targets one supported Google build, a...

Gitea, the self-hosted Git platform, has patched a critical remote code execution vulnerability. A user with ordinary repository write access can turn attacker-controlled patch content into a live Git hook and run shell commands as the Gitea service account. Tracked as CVE-2026-60004 (CVSS score: 9.8), the flaw affects Gitea versions 1.17 and later before 1.27.1 and is fixed in 1.27.1. The vulnerable API call requires authentication and repository write permission. But Gitea enables registration by default, so an outside visitor can create a normal account and repository on an unchanged installation, then exploit the bug without pre-existing credentials. Upgrading to 1.27.1 is the fix. Gitea said on July 27 that Gitea Cloud instances would be upgraded automatically. Gitea's July 28 advisory does not say the flaw has been exploited in the wild, but it includes public proof-of-concept (PoC) code. Disabling open registration can remove the public account-creation path while th...