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The European Commission on Thursday ordered Google to give rival AI assistants the same reach into Android that Gemini already has: the camera, the microphone, whatever is on screen, a wake word that fires with the display off, and the ability to drive other apps in the background by imitating taps and typing. Google has to ship it in the next major release, Android 18, and by 1 August 2027 at the latest. That is one of two binding specification decisions adopted on 16 July under the Digital Markets Act, six months after the Commission opened proceedings on 27 January. The second makes Google hand anonymised Search query, click, and ranking data to rival search engines, and to AI chatbots that do search, for a cost-based fee. Neither is a fine. Specification proceedings only say what a gatekeeper has to build; the Commission's separate power to open a non-compliance case , fines included, is untouched. Android carries around 60% of European mobile users. Five features g...

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...

Pull the certificate off the flash of a Shark RV2320EDUS robot vacuum, and you can run root commands on other people's Shark vacuums across the same AWS region: watch the camera, drive the robot, read the map of the house, and take the Wi-Fi password in plaintext. A researcher publishing under the handle tokay0  put the method online  on Monday, having tested it only against vacuums he bought himself. The flaw was unpatched then. He says SharkNinja, the company behind the Shark and Ninja appliance brands, has had his report since March. The policy attached to that certificate was never scoped to the device holding it. Present it to Shark's cloud broker, and the broker accepts whatever you publish, addressed to any device it serves. No memory corruption, no privilege escalation, no password to guess. The command that runs is an ordinary field in the device shadow, the per-device state document AWS keeps in the cloud. Using the certificate from an RV2320EDUS, the rese...

A single approved marketing tag can quietly load fourth-party code your security team has never seen, granting full access to your forms, customer data, and checkout pages. This on-demand webinar reveals how this Approval Gap forms, and gives your team the blueprint to close it before an auditor, regulator, or attacker finds it first. The Reality of the Approval Gap It's a pattern every security and IT team recognizes: You ran the security review. You approved the vendor. You moved on.

Any other browser extension that can run a script on claude.ai can still trigger Claude for Chrome tasks aimed at your Gmail, your latest Google Doc and its comments, and your Calendar. Both this and ClaudeBleed need a rogue extension that can already run a script on claude.ai; the difference is scope. Anthropic restricted the arbitrary-prompt path in May as part of its response to the  ClaudeBleed  flaw, boxing external callers into a fixed set of tasks, but  Manifold Security  says the gap is still open in v1.0.80, the current release, eight versions later. If you run Claude for Chrome and any other extension that can touch claude.ai, you are in scope. In the default "ask before acting" mode, the forged task still hits an approval box you have to click. If you switched on "Act without asking," the hands-off automation mode, it runs with no prompt at all. The quickest guard is to turn "Act without asking" off and review any extension with permissio...

Researchers at KU Leuven tested 85 of the most popular crypto wallets that run as browser extensions and found that the wallets themselves leak enough to link and track the people using them. The way these wallets talk to websites and blockchain servers can tie a person's separate addresses together and let outsiders follow them from site to site. And on a site that already holds a name or email, the same leaks can put a real name to an "anonymous" crypto identity. This is not a hack. The wallets behave exactly as they were built to. The 85 extensions together have about 35 million users listed on the Chrome Web Store. The team, from the university's DistriNet security group,  posted the paper  this month and will present it at the PETS 2026 privacy conference in Calgary in late July. They ran real wallets against real Web3 sites and mapped out five privacy weaknesses in how wallets and websites interact. When they reported the most far-reaching one to the wa...

Google and Microsoft have pulled ModHeader , a popular header-editing extension with roughly 1.6 million installs across Chrome and Edge, after researchers found a hidden browsing-history collector built into its official store version. The collector was dormant. An empty allow-list kept it switched off, and no proof has emerged that it ever gathered or sent a single browsing domain. The analysis came from  Stripe OLT , a UK security firm, which checked the code against Google's own Web Store signature and confirmed the collector shipped inside the genuine extension, not a counterfeit. Its review covers the Chrome build and its roughly 900,000 users; third-party trackers put another 700,000 or so on Edge. Microsoft pulled the Edge listing on July 3, and Google removed the Chrome one a week later, on July 10. Version 7.0.18 (extension ID idgpnmonknjnojddfkpgkljpfnnfcklj) still edits HTTP headers as advertised. The same minified background code also contains a...

Meta has filed a patent application for an AI that listens to your voice throughout the day, works out how it thinks you are feeling from the way you sound, and keeps a timestamped log of every read. Each read gets pinned to the moment it happened: the time, your location, what you were doing, even how you were using your phone. Some versions in the filing would listen all day; others would check in only at set times. None of these ships in a product today, and Meta has not announced one; a filing like this stakes a claim on an idea long before anyone commits to building it. The application,  US 2026/0182881 , was filed by Meta Platforms in December 2025 and published on July 2. It names a single inventor, Lachlan Dunn , and traces back to a provisional filing from December 2024. The patent-analysis site  Patentlyze  flagged the filing first. Its title pairs two ideas, emotional state analysis and real-time fitness coaching. The claims show the first is the ...

Researchers ran 281 of the most popular free VPN apps on the Google Play Store through a new testing system and found that many fail at the basics people install a VPN for, i.e., keeping their traffic private and secure. The apps flagged with at least one problem have been installed more than 2.4 billion times. The problems are basic, not sophisticated. 29 apps let user traffic leak outside the encrypted tunnel, including the DNS lookups that reveal which websites you visit. 61 apps send some data in plain text that anyone watching the traffic on that network can read. Five of those send the app's configuration file in the clear, which lets an attacker on the network redirect the connection to a server they control. The system, called MVPNalyzer , was presented at the NDSS security conference in February 2026 by researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of New Mexico, and IIT Delhi. It is a mobile counterpart to the same lab's earlier VPNalyzer study ...

Most security mess starts as admin work. A link gets clicked. A tool gets trusted. A bucket name gets reused. A setting stays loose because nobody wants to touch it. This week is full of that kind of damage. Not loud. Not clever. Just small gaps doing big jobs. The worst part is how normal it all looks until the bill arrives. The full ThreatsDay list is below. Global fraud bust Global Operation Leads to ~6K Arrests A global anti-fraud operation involving 97 countries and territories has resulted in the arrest of 5,811 individuals and the interception of $293 million in illicit assets as part of an operation codenamed First Light 2026 that took place between January 15 and April 30, 2026, to tackle social engineering scams and associated money laundering activities. "Over 142,000 victims globally were identified during Operation First Light 2026, highlighting the extent to which social engineering scams and fraud have escalated ...

Meta has announced that its new artificial intelligence (AI) model Muse Image lets people use public Instagram posts and reels to generate AI content, and it's enabled by default. "You can also @-mention Instagram accounts in the Meta AI app to bring specific Instagram profiles right into your images," the social media giant said in a post. "Whether you want to design a custom event invitation, mock up a collaborative creative concept, or generate a personalized graphic, tagging a username lets Meta AI use public photos to build a visual that's ready to post" Muse Image is Meta's inaugural image-focused AI model from its Superintelligence Labs, which the company said uses advanced reasoning to better understand complex prompts and blend multiple photos into high-quality creations for sharing across its platforms and elsewhere. It's also being embedded into WhatsApp and Instagram to facilitate AI-powered effects for Instagram Stories and ima...

Researchers found a flaw in  Opera GX , the gaming-focused version of the Opera browser, that let a malicious website silently install a browser add-on and use it to lift specific data from the pages a victim visits. In a proof of concept, they reconstructed a signed-in user's full Gmail address from a single visit, with no click. Opera has patched the flaw and says it found no evidence that it was ever used in the wild. The fix shipped in Opera GX version 130.0.5847.89, so anyone on a current build is already covered; you can confirm yours at opera://about. There is no CVE. Because the attack needed no clicks or approvals, there was no workaround short of the patch. Opera's bug bounty team rated the issue P1, its top severity, and paid the maximum $5,000 award for a critical bug. How the attack works GX Mods let you reskin Opera GX with custom sounds, themes, wallpapers, and CSS that restyles the sites you visit. They ship as .crx files, like browser...

This week’s security news is mostly about weak spots. Browsers, bots, sandboxes, AI systems, and email flows all show the same problem in different ways. Everything looks normal until someone tests a small gap and finds a way through. This is not one big break. It is small permissions, weak checks, open systems, and normal tools doing things they were allowed to do. That same pattern runs through the stories below.

WhatsApp on Monday officially announced the start of global reservations of usernames with an aim to protect the privacy of more than three billion users on the messaging platform. The optional feature is designed to help users connect with someone on the service through usernames, as opposed to directly sharing their phone numbers. Username reservations will start rolling out starting today, enabling users to create and reserve a username before the feature becomes generally available later this year. "You choose your own, and it doesn't have to match your handle on any other app," the Meta-owned messaging app said in a statement shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. "At its core, it's a privacy feature, not a social media handle – there's no directory to browse and no suggestions, so people need to know your exact username to contact you for the first time." As it goes without saying, choosing a username should be unique and can b...

It’s dumb out there again. This week has the usual smell of prod on fire and nobody wanting to admit who left the door open — old creds still working, trusted apps doing sketchy crap, browser tricks jumping the fence, and “normal” workflows turning into phishing pipes because apparently email was not enough hell already. The worst part is how cheap some of it feels. Not elite. Not cinematic. Just stale secrets, fake updates, lazy trust, and random boxes quietly becoming someone else’s infrastructure. Same internet, fresh headache. Let’s get into it.

The internet did not break this week. It got used exactly as designed, which is worse. Searches were siphoned through shady browser add-ons. AI chat links turned into malware delivery paths. macOS attacks ran in memory and left almost nothing behind. Cloud agents looked like helpers until attackers treated them like open shells. Add exposed edge gear, poisoned packages, cash courier scams, stealers, loaders, and phishing that barely bothers pretending anymore. Here’s the full mess.

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a network of 152 Google Chrome extensions that act as new tab live wallpaper add-ons to distribute a potentially unwanted program (PUP) family. The cluster spans 38 separate Chrome Web Store publisher accounts and three brand backends: tabplugins[.]com, yowgames[.]com, and chromewallpaper[.]com. They have been collectively installed 105,000 times. The names of some of the extensions are listed below - Neymar - Football Live Wallpaper (laafpeklcnlfmjaofbndehkjpnccbhek) Satoru Gojo Manga Live Wallpaper (mnpacdigbockiilmilhbedciadenfdnb) Porsche 911 - Sports Car Live Wallpaper (dead service worker) (iedplnnolciaofkakkjmcojnmklpfikg) Satoru Gojo Live Wallpaper (ipiabbhciknabpoihaakdahgghllelpj) Hello Kitty Wallpapers HD New Tab (hijpkhinofkdobfagfbobnnoihmopgkk) Pusheen Cat Wallpapers HD New Tab (famchdjojcnakamhkddkpaglnkonkfnl) Peach & Goma Wallpapers HD New Tab (nomekamioepglinefhenifnbegjhfiai) Spider-Man Miles ...

It's been one of those weeks. You expect the usual noise: recycled malware, sloppy attacks, another easy target getting hit. Instead, there's a supply chain attack kit in a public repo, a $5,000-a-month RAT that clones browsers, and research showing AI agents can be tricked into leaking real credentials. The bigger problem is how polished this all looks now. Mule networks run like SaaS. Deepfake KYC bypass is sold as a feature. Endpoint tools can be quietly weakened using built-in OS settings, with no exploit needed. Here's the full list of threats, tools, flaws, and updates worth knowing.

Meta on Tuesday announced that it will use information shared by other businesses to personalize users' feed and responses from its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, expanding its scope beyond targeted ads. "Businesses often share information about people's activity on their sites with us to make ads more relevant," Meta said in a statement. "We already use this data - like games you play or purchases you make on other websites - to make the ads you see more relevant. In the future, we'll use this information to personalize other parts of your experience, including the content you see in your Feed and AI responses." The social media giant emphasized that it's not collecting any new data as part of the update, adding users are in the driver's seat and that they get to decide how this information is used for personalization. To that end, Meta is streaming its controls by expanding the "Activity from other businesses" setting...

A malicious website can work out which sites you visit and which apps you open, using nothing but JavaScript and the timing of your SSD. The attack, called FROST , needs no native code, no extension, and no permission prompt. You open the page, leave the tab sitting there, and it watches the drive for contention in the background. Researchers at Graz University of Technology built it and described it in a new paper set to appear at DIMVA 2026. It abuses a storage feature present in every major desktop browser, and the underlying timing channel works on both macOS and Linux. SSD timing attacks are not new. Last year the same group published Secret Spilling Drive , which read user behavior off a drive by watching how reads slow down when something else is using it. The catch was that it needed native code on the machine, through a low-level interface like Linux's io_uring. FROST drops that requirement. It runs inside the browser sandbox, which turns a local attack into a remo...