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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...

Beta release versions of two npm packages in the @joyfill namespace have been compromised to deliver a remote access trojan (RAT) associated with the DEV#POPPER malware family. The list of affected packages is as follows - @joyfill/layouts@0.1.2-2773.beta.0 @joyfill/components@4.0.0-rc24-2773-beta.4 The two packages "contain an import-time JavaScript implant that resolves encrypted code through Tron, Aptos, and BNB Smart Chain transactions," Socket said in an analysis. Unlike other malicious packages that are triggered via an npm lifecycle hook, the implant delivered as part of the JavaScript libraries runs when Node.js loads the CommonJS package entry point. It's worth noting that the use of a multi-blockchain resolver structure comprising Tron, Aptos, and BNB Smart Chain (BSC) has been linked to a threat cluster tracked as PolinRider , which is assessed to be related to Contagious Interview . Earlier this month, Checkmarx and OpenSourceMalware highl...

STAR Labs has published a Linux kernel exploit that turns an ordinary local user into root on the CentOS Stream 9 build it targeted. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-53264 (CVSS score: 7.8), is a use-after-free race in the kernel's network traffic-control subsystem. Researcher Lee Jia Jie said artificial intelligence (AI) helped him find the bug and speed up exploit development. This is local privilege escalation, not remote code execution, so an attacker needs a foothold on the machine before any of it applies. The demonstrated exploit also requires unprivileged user namespaces, the CONFIG_NET_ACT_GACT and CONFIG_NET_CLS_FLOWER kernel options, and a kernel-specific return-oriented programming (ROP) chain containing hardcoded offsets. Those conditions narrow the immediate exposure, but full exploit source code is now public. The upstream fix landed on June 1, 2026, and has since been backported to several stable kernel branches. The Linux CNA record lists vulnerable ranges begi...

NVIDIA and 36 other organizations have formed the Open Secure AI Alliance to develop and share open technologies, techniques, and tools for securing software and artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The 37-member group spans cloud, security, enterprise software, and AI companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Hugging Face, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, and the Linux Foundation. Its stated scope covers the full agent stack, including identity, permissions, isolation, guardrails, logs, model formats, multi-model scanning, and secure coding workflows. The pitch is that cyber defenders need AI models they can read, change, and run on their own hardware, not only closed systems reached through a vendor's application programming interface (API). The launch also brings its first named technical contribution: NVIDIA-labs OO Agents (NOOA) , an Apache 2.0 research framework designed to make agent behavior easier to test, trace, audit, and govern. The laun...

GitHub has announced a new cooldown mechanism in Dependabot, allowing the tool to wait at least three days after a release is published before opening a pull request. "The cooldown configuration option in the dependabot.yml still controls the behavior, though, so you can choose a different cooldown parameter that fits your project," the Microsoft-owned subsidiary said . According to GitHub, the three-day cooldown default only applies to version updates, which are designed to keep software dependencies up-to-date. Security updates will continue to be pushed right away, permitting Dependabot to issue an alert and open a pull request to move the project to the patched version. With this update, the idea is to handle scenarios where a threat actor manages to push a poisoned version of a popular package, which then gets quickly pulled by downstream projects before that version is yanked from the registry. Although such trojanized packages are short-lived, the time period fo...

Eight security flaws in NodeBB went public on Wednesday, along with the code to exploit them. Aikido Security rates all eight as high severity and says its AI pentest agents found them in a six-hour review of the forum software's source code. Every version before 4.14.0 is affected. NodeBB has fixed them all, and administrators should be on 4.14.2. The simplest one takes a settings change. A regular forum member could point their homepage setting at the admin address, reload the page, and the admin dashboard opened for them. No password, no exploit code. The forum's own interface blocks that setting, but the block only ran in the browser and could be sidestepped. Most of what a member could then reach was read-only, including the error log and any user list an admin had exported, though they could also swap the site logo. Two more gave an attacker with no account at all access to things meant to be private. One let anyone claim to be any user and read private messages...

Redis shipped seven security releases on July 23 after researchers published authenticated RCE PoCs for stock Redis 6.2.22, 7.4.9, 8.6.4, and 8.8.0. All four chains require RESTORE. The Streams chains also need EVAL and XGROUP; the 8.8.0 chain needs EVAL and the bundled RedisBloom module. Redis says the underlying memory flaws may lead to remote code execution . Redis 6.2.23, 7.2.15, and 7.4.10 fix the Streams shared-NACK use-after-free; Redis 8.2.8, 8.4.5, and 8.6.5 fix both the Streams issue and the RedisBloom and TDigest out-of-bounds writes; Redis 8.8.1 fixes the RedisBloom and TDigest loaders, while the Streams guard was already present in Redis 8.8.0. Two PoC targets, Redis 6.2.22 and 7.4.9, were the May security updates Redis told users to install, but those releases did not include the shared-NACK ownership guard. Upgrade to the fixed release for the deployed branch. Until then, revoke RESTORE from accounts that do not strictly need it and block untrusted network acce...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability in snap-confine that an unprivileged user can trigger to obtain root access and gain complete control of a target environment. The high-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-8933 (CVSS score: 7.8), impacts default installations of Ubuntu Desktop 24.04, 25.10, and 26.04. The disclosure comes as 442 security flaws in Linux have been publicized over the past three days. "The issue stems from a security hardening change that inadvertently introduced a race condition during sandbox initialization," Saeed Abbasi, head of Threat Research Unit (TRU) and director of product at Qualys, said. Snap-confine is a program used internally by snapd to construct the execution environment for snap applications. Snapd is the background service or daemon that manages snap packages on Linux systems. Snaps are nothing but a software packaging format devised by Canonical that allows an app...