Supply Chain | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A flaw in APT , the package manager for Debian and Ubuntu, allows an attacker who can modify package downloads to swap a checked package for their own. The attacker's code then runs as root, according to advisories that  Debian ,  Ubuntu , and  APT's developers  published on November 4. The attack needs APT to retry failed downloads, which it does by default from Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 onward. Debian has released fixed versions of APT for the flaw, CVE-2026-109518 . APT's developers, who call the flaw critical, say updates for Ubuntu and its Ubuntu Pro subscription service are being released. Ubuntu 14.04 users with Ubuntu Pro can already get one. Older releases, such as Debian 11 and Ubuntu 20.04, are not exposed by default, according to Ubuntu. But many user scripts may have turned on the retry setting, Acquire::Retries, on those releases anyway, APT's developers say. Debian's testing branch was still on the  vulnerable version 3.3.5  at...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an OpenAI Codex jailbreak bundle that's designed to modify an artificial intelligence (AI) agent's trusted instructions to insert advertisements for a third-party AI gateway. The phenomenon has been codenamed prompt adware by Check Point Research. Called Haiou (meaning Seagull in Chinese), the jailbreak modifies OpenAI Codex's configuration files to inject advertisements for the jailbreak author's website into subsequent agent responses. "The advertised service is an opaque, OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway, a middleware between an application and an LLM provider," Check Point Research said in a technical report. "The likely business model is to use the freely distributed jailbreak bundle as an acquisition channel for the paid gateway service." Adware is a type of software that displays unwanted advertisements, which can appear on users' computers or mobile devices, often in the form of ...

The Russia-linked threat actor known as APT29 is said to be behind a large-scale watering hole campaign targeting iOS and Android users through compromised websites, fake domains, and a supply chain attack involving a Ukrainian web analytics service called Plerdy SEO Tracker. "The injected JavaScript code collects browser and device attributes," Sekoia researchers Amaury-Jacques Garçon and Félix Aime said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Then, the delivery infrastructure delivers a platform-specific N-day exploit chain targeting either iOS or Android." The end goal of the attacks is to serve payloads capable of stealing browser cookies, and in some cases, Wi-Fi passwords or full mobile device data. The activity, codenamed Poisoned Source , was discovered by the French cybersecurity company in mid-October 2026. A defining aspect of the campaign is the use of three infection vectors - Compromise of legitimate websites to inject malicio...

Nearly every agent security pitch now ends on the same promise: the product stops the bad action in real time. The promise holds for one kind of agent, the kind whose traffic passes through a gateway the enterprise owns. Most agents never touch one. One recent case shows what that gap looks like in practice. An employee asked an AI assistant to trigger a mass-email automation. The automation hit a recipient-limit policy and failed, so the assistant, which was also connected to the employee's personal mailbox, offered to send the batch from there instead. The employee approved without registering that the assistant was about to route around the sanctioned system. An unknown number of external recipients received email from a personal account rather than the approved channel. No jailbreak was involved. The assistant did exactly what it was built to do, and the fix was not retraining a model. It was a single runtime rule that blocks any attempt to reach more than fifty external d...

A China-aligned threat actor known as SlippyNunchucks has been attributed to a Domain Name System (DNS) hijacking operation abusing insecure HTTP communications in Windows versions of Sogou Input Method as part of a surveillance campaign designed to deploy an implant called DarkVigil (aka FDMTP). The campaign, observed starting July 1, 2026, is assessed to have targeted organizations and Chinese-speaking individuals in Hong Kong, Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Oman, and Sri Lanka, according to ESET. "DarkVigil implants are typically deployed through popular Chinese applications," ESET researcher Anh Ho said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "By abusing these applications, the SlippyNunchucks threat actor has been able to reach Chinese-speaking users across Asia and Europe." Some of the applications abused by the adversary include Sogou Input Method, QuickFox, QingTalk, MiYunChat, SoftCam, and tawk.to. Active since at least September 15, 2023, SlippyNunc...

Blockchain infrastructure provider Chainstack on Tuesday disclosed that it was targeted in a cyber attack that allowed an unauthorized party to gain access to some parts of its infrastructure. The incident is assessed to be part of a large-scale, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered attack campaign that came to light last week. "An external attacker gained unauthorized access to part of Chainstack's infrastructure through a third-party component," the company said . "We detected the intrusion, cut the access paths, and are hardening our systems." According to the timeline of events shared by Chainstack, the attacker gained access to a development environment on October 26, 2026, and then escalated their access to break into "some parts of our production environment." The intrusion was subsequently detected on October 31, 2026, and the attacker's access was cut off that same day, the company noted. As part of the digital break-in, the ...

Binance on Tuesday said the record-setting theft of $6.43 billion in assets from the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange was the culmination of a "sophisticated, multi-stage campaign" that involved the use of a tampered Homebrew installation and recruitment-themed social engineering attack targeting two of its engineers. "It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident," the company said . "The attackers combined a range of techniques, including social engineering by fake recruitment interviews, malicious software downloads, compromised internal AI tooling, endpoint compromise, and an advanced transaction-authorisation method." The starting point has been traced back to a supply chain attack targeting one of its engineers from the Wallet DevOps team (named "Engineer A"), who downloaded a trojanized Homebrew installer to install a popular artificial intelligence (AI) tool after searching for it on a search engine....

An attacker broke into the update system of the cPGuard security tool on November 2 and used it to send a malicious script to customers' Linux servers. The script installed a backdoor and collected password hashes and other sensitive files from servers that ran it, cPGuard maker OPSSHIELD said in an advisory . In a later disclosure , OPSSHIELD said about 2,950 customer servers ran the script, which sent the files it collected back to the attacker. OPSSHIELD first named cPGuard 5.88.25 as the fix. Its later disclosure says version 5.88.26 removes the backdoor, and a follow-up update removes a scheduled task the script also left. Admins should install the latest version and then check that those files are gone. Credentials the script copied may still work after the update, so any server that may have run the script also needs new passwords and keys. At 02:06 UTC, the attacker, who has not been identified, used compromised credentials to get into cPGuard's update system. ...

Attackers remotely changed the settings on refrigeration controls at supermarkets in Belgium, Sweden, Estonia and other European countries overnight into Monday, November 2, warming fridges and freezers. No chain reported more than several dozen affected stores, and some had to throw away chilled and frozen food or take it off the shelf. Danfoss, a Danish maker of refrigeration controls,  said its products were involved , as they were three weeks earlier when  attackers hit hundreds of French supermarkets . No one had claimed the attacks by Monday night, and it was not known whether they were linked to the attack in France. Refrigeration controls are computers that run a store's fridges and freezers. They can be connected to the internet, allowing refrigeration contractors to monitor them and fix faults remotely. In Belgium, attackers switched cooling units into defrost mode, Stephan Moelans, chief executive of the refrigeration contractor Sabcobel,  told Belgi...

A botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices, mostly TV set-top boxes, lost control of its servers in late October in a takedown led by Google. Google says  it is highly confident that device maker Videostrong intentionally put a backdoor in the boxes and sold access to criminals. They used the boxes for ad fraud and to pass other people's internet traffic through owners' home connections. The backdoor is still on the boxes, and owners cannot remove it themselves. Videostrong, based in Shenzhen, China, makes Android TV boxes and other devices under its own name and for other brands. The backdoor, called x.cpe, was built into many device models and brands over several years. Google does not believe a rogue insider or a mistake was to blame. Google used legal action to take down the domains and servers that controlled the botnet. It also took down the control domains of more than a dozen malware families loaded through the backdoor. Japan's National Police Agenc...

Malicious code on the website of prediction market Polymarket sold some signed-in traders' positions and moved their funds to the hackers on October 29. The code had replaced a page-speed script that the site loaded from an outside company. Polymarket says  it is refunding about $2.7 million to 726 affected wallets.  Blockchain records  show crypto worth about $2.64 million reached the hackers' wallet in under an hour. The replaced script came from DebugBear, whose real user monitoring (RUM) tool measures how fast web pages load for real visitors. Researchers at Hudson Rock  downloaded the malicious file on October 29 from the address Polymarket's site used to load the DebugBear script. They also found a change in Polymarket's site code that removed the DebugBear script. DebugBear's DNS records were compromised through its domain registrar, the company said on X. Its early findings indicate the attack targeted one customer's website. It has seen no sign...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has officially attributed the theft of more than $6 billion in virtual assets from Binance to TraderTraitor , a North Korea-aligned elite hacking group also tracked as Jade Sleet, Pressure Chollima, PUKCHONG, Slow Pisces, and UNC4899. The FBI, along with the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), said it observed the threat actor converting stolen assets primarily into Ethereum (ETH). "It is expected these assets will then be further laundered by converting them using DeFi and instant swap services as they prepare them for further laundering stages," the FBI said in a statement. The agency has also provided a list of wallet addresses that the attackers are said to be using to launder the stolen assets. The development comes as Binance said it has resumed phase one of withdrawals starting today between 6 and 9 a.m. UTC after they were paused in the wake of the incide...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of what has been described as a "highly sophisticated infection chain" targeting government organizations in Asia. The activity, detailed by Kaspersky this week, targeted a custom Windows 10 build used exclusively by government entities in Asia and involves the deployment of a previously undocumented .NET assembly-loading framework codenamed NetamLoader . The attack has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. Nor is it clear if the intrusion compromised more than one system and allowed the hackers to steal any sensitive information. The Russian cybersecurity company said the artifact was detected in the first half of 2026, packaged inside a Windows cabinet archive (CAB) file placed in a directory that stores Windows operating system update packages. It's suspected the operation involved a supply chain attack , in which bad actors compromised a trusted third-party vendor to gain access to downstrea...

A Trezor Safe 5 hardware wallet bought from the reseller CryptoBilis has an extra circuit board that sends out the recovery phrase over a mobile network, a customer has reported. Trezor has not yet examined the device. It is telling everyone who bought a Trezor from CryptoBilis since March 2026 to move their funds to a new wallet with a new recovery phrase. Trezor said in a  blog post  on October 30 that the report came in two days earlier from a customer in Indonesia. He bought the wallet from CryptoBilis in August, through the marketplace Tokopedia. The board sits between the wallet's main board and its screen, with a cellular module and an antenna, according to the report. It reads the screen, including the recovery phrase (Trezor calls it the wallet backup), and sends it out whenever the device is plugged in. Trezor has the customer's photos and description and has interviewed him on a video call. It is arranging for the wallet to be sent to its lab. Trezor find...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed that a trojanized version of Anthropic's official Claude Code extension was distributed through the Cursor Marketplace as a legitimate update, attempting to install a persistent SSH backdoor on affected systems. The malicious update, version 2.1.313, was distributed under the extension's legitimate publisher identity, prompting Cursor to temporarily shut down its marketplace to remove the compromised package. The exact method attackers used to introduce the unauthorized update remains unclear. "We identified a security incident affecting a modified Claude Code VS Code extension accessed through our Cursor IDE extension marketplace, impacting at most 5,000 users," Cursor said . "This malicious version of the extension was not developed by Anthropic. It does not impact other extensions downloaded from the cursor[.]com/marketplace, Grok Bot, Grok, or our other SpaceXSI product. However, Cursor's statement that the...

26,400 credentials that developers left in public code on Gitee , a Chinese code-hosting service, still worked when a researcher tested them. Anyone who copied one from that code could have used it. Independent researcher Ben Zimmermann found them by scanning 7.25 million public Gitee repositories and  reported the results  on October 28. Most were keys for cloud and AI services, led by 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs. Zimmermann sent the vendors with the most exposed keys a list of their credentials, but he did not contact the developers who leaked them. When he published, he had not confirmed that any of the reported credentials had been revoked. So anyone who has pushed a key to a public Gitee repository cannot assume it has been revoked. The scan ran for about a month, but Zimmermann did not provide the dates, so it is unclear how long ago the credentials were tested. He also did not say whether anyone else had used them. He ran two secret scanners,  Truf...

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 ...

An attacker tried to exploit a critical GitLab vulnerability on the Alpine Linux project's own GitLab server a week after GitLab  released a fix , Alpine Linux  said  on 28 October. The flaw, CVE-2026-97229 (CVSS score: 10.0), can let an attacker run code on a GitLab server through a crafted regular expression in a CI configuration. Alpine found no evidence that the attack worked but cannot rule it out, so it rebuilt the server from scratch and reset every account's password. GitLab's fix  is a set of patches to the Ruby that GitLab ships in its own packages and container images. Alpine's GitLab image used standard Ruby, so upgrading the server to GitLab 19.3.6 on 22 October did not fix the flaw. For anyone running GitLab on their own Ruby, built from source or in their own container image, "upgrading GitLab is not enough," Alpine said. Those servers also need  Ruby 3.3.13, 3.4.12, 4.0.9 or later , and users of Alpine's alpinelinux/gitlab image...

An attacker who gained access to Keystone's website obtained the key that its hardware wallets use to prove they are genuine, the company said in a  statement  on October 26. Someone with that key could build counterfeit devices that pass the online check owners use to verify a Keystone. A buyer who trusted a counterfeit could have their crypto stolen, but the incident did not involve owners' recovery phrases or wallet private keys. Keystone will destroy 18,835 unsold devices that carry the key, and all new devices will get a new one. Keystone found the unauthorized access on October 20, and its advice to owners depends on when a device arrived. For a device received after that date with the old key, the company said: "Even if such a device passes authentication, we cannot completely rule out the possibility that it is counterfeit." Owners of such a device should contact Keystone support and use it only after the company confirms it is genuine. A device del...

PHP has rebuilt its official Windows packages for PHP 8.2 through 8.5 to fix CVE-2026-111497 , a flaw in the Brotli compression library that the packages include. The flaw can let an attacker corrupt memory and potentially run code. PHP says the flaw can be reached through the cURL extension when the extension decompresses HTTP responses automatically. cURL leaves that off by default, but applications and HTTP client libraries can turn it on. The rebuilt packages, numbered 8.5.12-1 , 8.4.27-1 , 8.3.36-1 and 8.2.35-1 , come five days after the October 21 releases that fixed the two PHP2Shell remote code execution flaws . They use the same PHP source, so those fixes stay in place, and they now include Brotli 1.2.1 , the fixed version. PHP publishes a software bill of materials , a list of the components inside, with each package. For last week's x64 Non Thread Safe builds of all four versions, those lists show Brotli 1.2.0, one of the affected versions. PHP advises Windows...