Supply Chain Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The China-linked cybercrime group known as Silver Fox has been attributed to a new Rust-based remote access trojan (RAR) called MODBEACON . Chinese cybersecurity company QiAnXin said that while the threat cluster may appear like a low-sophistication, high-activity operation that propagates malware via counterfeit installers using SEO poisoning techniques, it belies their true organizational structure , which compromises multiple distributors. "These distributors conduct activities across Asia using counterfeit software installers distributed through SEO campaigns, leveraging variants of Gh0st RAT and WinOS (ValleyRAT) trojan families," QiAnXin said . One such campaign observed in mid-June 2026 involved a distributor delivering a previously undocumented modular RAT targeting technology, education, and state-owned enterprises in the country. MODBEACON's requested command-and-control (C2) infrastructure is hosted on Amazon and Cloudflare's Content Delivery Networ...

Datadog Security Labs is warning of "several overlapping campaigns" that are systematically enumerating corporate GitHub organizations, repositories, and user accounts through the GitHub API. "Operators rely on automated scraping tooling with custom or legitimate-sounding user agents, leveraging GitHub 'ghost' accounts that are often years old, or compromised OAuth tokens and personal access tokens (PATs) from legitimate users," Julie Agnes Sparks, senior security engineer at Datadog, said . While the activity in most cases involves targeting public data, select instances have gone beyond public information enumeration to successfully clone private repositories. The campaign employs a mix of automated scanner tools, over 50 dormant accounts, and dozens of legitimate accounts that have had their personal access tokens (PATs) exposed unintentionally or compromised through some other method to facilitate the enumeration. What's notable about the ...

GitHub has officially announced the release of npm version 12 with install scripts disabled by default, along with deprecating granular access tokens (GATs) designed to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA). The Microsoft-owned subsidiary noted that the following npm install behaviors that used to run automatically before have been made opt-in - allowScripts defaults to off, meaning dependency lifecycle scripts (i.e., preinstall, install, postinstall) and implicit node-gyp builds no longer run unless explicitly allowed. --allow-git defaults to none, meaning --allow-git defaults to none: Git dependencies (direct or transitive) are no longer resolved unless explicitly allowed. --allow-remote defaults to none, meaning dependencies from remote URLs (e.g., https tarballs) are no longer resolved unless explicitly allowed. To review and approve trusted scripts, users are now required to run: "npm approve-scripts --allow-scripts-pending," then commit the resulting a...

Ask an AI coding agent to scan open-source code for security holes, and it might run the attacker's code on your own machine instead. That is the finding in a  proof-of-concept published Wednesday by the AI Now Institute, an attack it calls " Friendly Fire. " It works against Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex when either is running in an autonomous mode that approves its own commands. It hijacks the exact job these tools are sold for: checking untrusted third-party code for problems. Instead of catching the threat, the agent becomes the way in. Researchers Boyan Milanov and Heidy Khlaaf tested two setups, each a stock install with the autonomous mode switched on: Claude Code (CLI 2.1.116, 2.1.196, 2.1.198, 2.1.199) on Claude Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 5, or Opus 4.8 OpenAI Codex (CLI 0.142.4) on GPT-5.5 Claude Code's "auto-mode" and Codex's "auto-review" use a classifier to run commands the agent judges safe, pausing ...

Researchers at  Wiz  found that a flaw in six popular AI coding assistants lets a booby-trapped code project quietly take control of a developer's computer. The assistant asks permission to edit one harmless-looking file, but the write lands on a sensitive one instead. The affected tools are Amazon Q Developer, Anthropic's Claude Code, Augment, Cursor, Google Antigravity, and Windsurf. Wiz calls the pattern GhostApproval and published it on July 8. Three of the six have shipped fixes, two have not, and Anthropic disputes that it is a bug. The most exposed are the tools that change files before you can weigh in. How the attack works The attack abuses an old Unix feature called a symbolic link , or symlink , that the assistants fail to check. A symlink quietly points to another file elsewhere on disk, so writing to it actually writes to the target. Wiz built a malicious repository with a symlink named project_settings.json that really points to the victim's ...

AI coding assistants have a habit of making things up. Ask one to fetch a popular tool, and it will sometimes hand back a real-sounding name for a project that does not exist. New research, which its authors call  HalluSquatting , turns that habit into an attack: work out the fake names an AI reliably invents, register them first, and wait for the assistant to fetch your trap on a user's behalf. Anyone whose AI assistant can fetch an outside resource and then run commands with little human review is exposed. In tests, that path led the assistant to run attacker-supplied code on the machine. Repeat it with a popular enough resource, and one planted name can reach many machines, which is why the researchers frame it as a way to assemble a botnet. How it works The attack chains two AI quirks. The first is a  hallucination : an AI making something up and presenting it as real. The second is a  prompt injection : a booby-trapped instruction that hijacks the AI, so i...

Scanners meant to catch malicious add-on "skills" for AI coding agents can be fooled by a few simple changes that leave the malware working, according to a  new study  from researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Their strongest trick slipped past every scanner tested more than 90% of the time, and the same team built a runtime checker that catches most of the disguised skills the scanners miss. Skills are small packages, usually a Markdown instruction file plus a few scripts, that agents such as Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and OpenClaw load to pick up a new capability. Because a skill is just a bundle of files, the same one can run across different agents. And it runs with the agent's own access: your files, your terminal, your saved passwords. A bad one can steal credentials, copy source code, or install a backdoor. Most of what a public marketplace lists is uploaded by strangers with little vetting. The main defense so far has been th...

New Microsoft research shows how attackers can hijack AI agents that act on a user's behalf, using nothing more than a poisoned tool description to make the agent quietly hand over company data to an outsider. The trick is that the agent never breaks a rule. Every step looks routine, so in a default setup no alarm may fire. The work comes from Microsoft Incident Response and its Defender security research team, and it lands as companies start letting AI do more than read and summarize. What changes when an agent can act Until recently, the workplace AI risk was mostly framed around what a model read and wrote. A poisoned document could skew an answer, and that was mostly where it ended. Agents are different. Microsoft 365 Copilot can send email, create files, and change calendars. Custom agents built in Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry can reach into business systems and run multi-step jobs on their own. The same injection trick that biases a summary now trigger...

A high-severity flaw in Amazon Q Developer let a malicious repository run commands and steal a developer's cloud credentials. The path was short: a developer opens the repo, trusts the workspace, and Amazon Q does the rest. Amazon has patched it. Tracked as  CVE-2026-12957  (CVSS 8.5), the bug sat in how Amazon's AI coding assistant handled Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Wiz Research, which found and reported it, showed that a single config file dropped in a repo was enough to go from git clone to cloud compromise. How the attack worked Amazon Q read an MCP configuration file, .amazonq/mcp.json, from the open workspace and launched the servers it defined. MCP servers are local processes that an AI assistant can spawn to reach databases, APIs, or build tools, so starting one means running commands on the machine. Those processes inherited the developer's full environment. That usually means AWS keys, cloud CLI tokens, API secrets, and SSH agent sockets. ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new class of CI/CD workflow weakness that allows attackers to hijack workflows and compromise open-source supply chains. The "critical exploitable pattern" has been codenamed Cordyceps by Novee Security. The issue can allow full attacker control of repositories at dozens of the largest organizations worldwide, including Microsoft, Google, Apache, and Cloudflare. "The flaw is exploitable by any unauthenticated user," Elad Meged, founding engineer and security researcher at Novee Security, said . "No org membership or special privileges; a free account is enough to forge approvals, push code, or steal credentials." The penetration-testing company's scan of about 30,000 high-impact repositories has revealed more than 300 to be fully exploitable, enabling attacker-controlled code execution, credential theft, and supply chain compromise, which can have severe downstream impacts. The core of the problem tri...

Security firm AIR built a fake AI agent skill, pushed it through a popular skill marketplace and an Instagram ad, and says it reached roughly 26,000 agents, including some on corporate accounts. Every skill security scanner the firm tested it against marked it safe. The payload was harmless by design: it collected the user's email address and did nothing else. The point was to show that none of the signals people lean on to trust a skill caught it: not the scanners, not the GitHub stars, not the open-source reputation. A skill is a bundle of instructions an agent loads into its own context and follows with roughly the authority of a user prompt. That trust is the whole problem, and it is the reason skill-scanning tools exist in the first place. The skill, named  brand-landingpage , claimed to build a landing page using Google's Stitch design tool, aimed squarely at non-technical users. To make it look credible, AIR went after two trust signals: GitHub stars an...

An independent PCI assessor tested Reflectiz against the new PCI DSS rules. Here is the verdict: See the full QSA assessment here → When a customer types their card number into your checkout, their browser is running far more than your code. Analytics tags, a tag manager, a support widget, a payment iframe: a modern checkout loads dozens of third-party scripts, and any one of them can be turned into a skimmer. This is how Magecart works. Sansec has counted more than 100,000 sites hit by web skimming and supply-chain attacks. The 2018 British Airways breach alone exposed 380,000 transactions and a fine that started at £183 million. The dangerous part: the malicious code usually arrives through a script you already approved. Attackers compromise a third-party vendor, and the payload rides in on a script you have run for months. Nothing looks new. What changed is the script's behavior, not its presence on the page. PCI DSS v4.0.1 closes that gap with two requirements, now...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a "coordinated malware campaign" on the JetBrains Marketplace that has published no less than 15 malicious plugins capable of exfiltrating artificial intelligence (AI) provider keys. "Every plugin poses as an AI coding assistant built on DeepSeek and other large language models, offering chat, commit messages, code review, bug finding, and unit tests," Aikido Security researcher Ilyas Makari said . "They function exactly as advertised. However, the AI provider API key you enter gets exfiltrated to a server controlled by the attacker." The activity is said to have been ongoing since the end of October 2025, with new plugins released as recently as June 10, 2026. Two of the plugins, CodeGPT AI Assistant and DeepSeek AI Assist, have more than 25,000 downloads each, although it's not clear if the counts are authentic or if they have been inflated to fake their popularity. The complete list of plugins is below -...

Most good security work is invisible by design. Today is the exception. The 2026 Cybersecurity Stars Awards winners are announced across 95 subcategories in four main award categories. The reason is simple. Cybersecurity is full of work that deserves recognition and rarely gets it. Products that quietly close real gaps. Teams that stop incidents nobody reads about. Companies that raise the baseline for everyone else. The Cybersecurity Stars Awards put names on that work, once a year, through independent judging. Every nomination was reviewed by an independent panel of judges and scored against three criteria: innovation, impact, and technical excellence. Entries were not ranked by popularity, brand size, or campaign reach. They were judged on the work itself. Some subcategories have more than one winner. The awards recognize every entry that meets the standard, not just one per category. By design, the winners span four main categories and 97 subcategories, including agentic...

Why do the Riskiest SOC Alerts Go Unanswered? Security operations teams are drowning in alerts. But the real problem isn't always alert volume; it's the blind spots. The most dangerous alerts are the ones no one is investigating. A recent report from The Hacker News examined why certain high-risk alert categories - WAF, DLP, OT/IoT, dark web intelligence, and supply chain signals- consistently go uninvestigated across enterprise SOCs. The findings point to a structural gap in how security coverage is delivered today: not a lack of tooling, but a ceiling built into every existing model. Your SOC Model Has a Coverage Ceiling In-house SOC teams are the first to feel the gap. Overloaded with high-volume, routine alerts, analysts rarely have the capacity, or the specialized expertise, to investigate WAF events, DLP anomalies, or signals from operational technology environments. These alert types require deep, domain-specific knowledge that most SOC teams simply don't have...

On December 4, 2025, a 17-year-old was arrested in Osaka under Japan’s Unauthorized Access Prohibition Act. The young man had run malicious code to extract the personal data of over 7 million users of Kaikatsu Club , Japan's largest internet cafe chain. When asked, the young man shared his motivation for the hack: he wanted to buy Pokémon cards. In a sense, this is a fairly conventional story. Since the 1990s, we’ve read about computing wunderkinds such as Kevin Mitnick, whose technical ability exceeded their judgment and who were drawn into high-profile cybercrimes in pursuit of status, profit, or excitement. But something is different in this story: the young man in question wasn’t technical. The rise of AI-assisted attacks In 2025, LLM-backed chat and agent systems crossed a threshold, going from useful but error-prone coding assistants to end-to-end coding powerhouses. Throughout the year, several measures of cybercrime frequency and severity approximately doubled. Instanc...

Google has addressed a maximum severity security flaw in Gemini CLI -- the "@google/gemini-cli" npm package and the "google-github-actions/run-gemini-cli" GitHub Actions workflow -- that could have allowed attackers to execute arbitrary commands on host systems. "The vulnerability allowed an unprivileged external attacker to force their own malicious content to load as Gemini configuration," Novee Security said in a Wednesday report. "This triggered command execution directly on the host system, bypassing security before the agent’s sandbox even initialized." The shortcoming, which does not have a CVE identifier, carries a CVSS score of 10.0. It affects the following versions - @google/gemini-cli < 0.39.1 @google/gemini-cli < 0.40.0-preview.3 google-github-actions/run-gemini-cli < 0.1.22 In its advisory published last week, Google said the impact is limited to workflows using Gemini CLI in headless mode, adding that any use of...

Checkmarx has disclosed that its ongoing investigation tied to the supply chain security incident has revealed that a cybercriminal group published data related to the company on the dark web. "Based on current evidence, we believe this data originated from Checkmarx's GitHub repository, and that access to that repository was facilitated through the initial supply chain attack of March 23, 2026," the Israeli security company said . It also emphasized that the GitHub repository is maintained separately from its customer production environment, adding that no customer data is stored in the repository. Checkmarx said its forensic probe into the incident is ongoing and that it's actively working to verify the nature and scope of the posted data. Furthermore, the company said it has locked down access to the affected GitHub repository as part of its incident response efforts. "If we determine that customer information was involved in this incident, we will notify...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a critical "by design" weakness in the Model Context Protocol's ( MCP ) architecture that could pave the way for remote code execution and have a cascading effect on the artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain. "This flaw enables Arbitrary Command Execution (RCE) on any system running a vulnerable MCP implementation, granting attackers direct access to sensitive user data, internal databases, API keys, and chat histories," OX Security researchers Moshe Siman Tov Bustan, Mustafa Naamnih, Nir Zadok, and Roni Bar said in an analysis published last week. The cybersecurity company said the systemic vulnerability is baked into Anthropic's official MCP software development kit (SDK) across any supported language, including Python, TypeScript, Java, and Rust. In all, it affects more than 7,000 publicly accessible servers and software packages totaling more than 150 million downloads. At issue are unsafe defaults in...

Web infrastructure provider Vercel has disclosed a security breach that allows bad actors to gain unauthorized access to "certain" internal Vercel systems. The incident stemmed from the compromise of Context.ai, a third-party artificial intelligence (AI) tool, that was used by an employee at the company. "The attacker used that access to take over the employee's Vercel Google Workspace account, which enabled them to gain access to some Vercel environments and environment variables that were not marked as 'sensitive,'" the company said in a bulletin. Vercel said environment variables marked as "sensitive" are stored in an encrypted manner that prevents them from being read, and that there is currently no evidence suggesting that those values were accessed by the attacker. It described the threat actor behind the incident as "sophisticated" based on their "operational velocity and detailed understanding of Vercel's syste...