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Large language models keep inventing web addresses that do not exist. Attackers have started buying those made-up domains before anyone else can, then hosting phishing pages on them to catch traffic that AI tools point their way. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 calls the trick phantom squatting , and its new research shows it is already happening in the wild. The reason it matters is trust. Developers and AI assistants increasingly treat the links a model hands back as real. When a model invents a domain that does not exist yet, whoever registers it first inherits all of that misplaced trust, with no phishing email and no malicious ad required. To measure the problem, Unit 42 asked two AI models 685,339 questions about 913 well-known brands across technology, finance, healthcare, government, gambling, and other sectors. The models produced 2.1 million links. Threat intelligence already flagged 13,229 of them as outright malicious, meaning the AI was handing out known-ba...

ClickFix , the trick that fools people into running malware by hand, has quietly grown a back office. New research shows the malicious commands behind its fake "prove you're human" pages are now handed out by API-driven servers that give each visitor the same malware in a different disguise. The same research also turned up a new delivery method built to slip past Windows' script scanning. Security researcher Bert-Jan Pals took apart several ClickFix platforms and analyzed roughly 3,000 payloads from live campaigns. He presented the findings at  OrangeCon  in early June and  published the details  on June 30. ClickFix is simple by design. A booby-trapped page shows a fake CAPTCHA or error, hidden JavaScript drops a command into your clipboard, and the page tells you to press a key combo, paste, and hit Enter. You run the malware yourself. There's usually no exploit at the first step and often no file for traditional antivirus to flag, so conventional emai...

Researchers tested 444 AI chatbot apps for iPhone and found that 282 of them, nearly two-thirds, exposed paid AI access through their network traffic. In many cases, the path in was visible just by watching what the app sent: a plaintext API key, a reusable token, or a backend server that accepted requests with no key at all. Whoever grabs it can send model requests on the developer's account, and the developer pays the bill. Three months after the researchers warned the developers, only 28% had fixed it. The work, from researchers at Wake Forest University, is the  first in-depth study of the problem on iOS . It is striking partly because of how little effort the snooping took. The team used a tool they built, LLMKeyLens , that watches an app's traffic and pulls out the credentials as they go by. No jailbreaking, no cracking the app open. The key is the secret that lets the app call a service like OpenAI or Google Gemini. Embed it in the app, and it is exposed with ev...

A critical security flaw impacting Oracle E-Business Suite has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to Defused Cyber. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-46817 (CVSS score: 9.8), refers to an improper privilege management and authentication flaw in Oracle Payments that could be abused to take over susceptible instances. "Easily exploitable vulnerability allows unauthenticated attacker with network access via HTTP to compromise Oracle Payments," according to a description of the flaw in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). "Successful attacks of this vulnerability can result in the takeover of Oracle Payments." The shortcoming impacts versions from 12.2.3 through 12.2.15. Patches for the flaw were shipped by Oracle as part of its Critical Security Patch Update last month. CVE-2026-46817 has since come under active exploitation, with Defused Cyber noting on Monday that "over the weekend, we observed an actor exploiting t...

The China-aligned espionage group  Mustang Panda  is running two campaigns against the Indian government and hydropower targets, deploying new malware and turning a legitimate cloud service into its command channel. Acronis Threat Research Unit  found active compromises inside Indian government networks, including machines used by senior administrative staff, and worked with  CERT-In  on notification and cleanup. The malware abuses  Zoho WorkDrive , a cloud storage platform common in India's government sector, to pass commands and exfiltrate data. That is the whole idea: the traffic looks like ordinary cloud activity, so it hides inside the network it is stealing from. Acronis names three new tools. SHARDLOADER is a loader that runs by sideloading a malicious DLL through a legitimately signed binary, a Solid PDF Creator executable in one campaign, and a Citrix Receiver binary in the other. It deploys one of two implants. MINIRECON is a rewor...

An unknown threat actor exploited a recently disclosed high-severity security flaw impacting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN as a zero-day at least two months before it was publicly disclosed, according to new findings from Google-owned Mandiant. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20245 (CVSS score: 7.8), allows an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands with elevated privileges by supplying a crafted file to the affected system by taking advantage of the device's insufficient validation of user-supplied input. Earlier this month, Cisco acknowledged that it became aware of exploitation of this vulnerability, adding that a malicious actor must have netadmin privileges on an affected system to pull off a successful attack. "Throughout the intrusion, to maintain operational security and avoid detection, the threat actor consistently employed anti-forensic techniques, selectively deleting and restoring system configuration files that were modified during the...

Dutch law enforcement authorities, along with counterparts from Canada , Germany, and the U.S., have disrupted malicious infrastructure associated with SocGholish and cleaned up nearly 15,000 infected WordPress websites. "With these actions we deprive cybercriminals of access to infected computer systems," Maikel Rollman of the Netherlands National High Tech Crime Unit said . "This prevents further damage to the digital systems of citizens, businesses and organizations worldwide and limits the spread of malware. It also reduces the risk that these systems are used for cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and other essential societal processes. This marks the beginning of further action against SocGholish." The takedown is part of Operation Endgame , an ongoing international law enforcement initiative to combat botnets and associated criminal infrastructures. It was launched in 2024. As part of the effort, 106 servers linked to SocGholish have been t...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday urged Fortinet customers with FortiGate appliances to take steps to secure against ongoing malicious activity aimed at thousands of internet-accessible devices. The sweeping campaign, believed to be the work of Russian-speaking threat actors, has been codenamed FortiBleed . The number of compromised devices stands at 86,644 as of June 19, 2026. According to data from SOCRadar, generic admin accounts (35%) and built-in Fortinet system accounts (28.3%) together make up the majority of compromised credentials. Organization-specific accounts account for 36.7% of the remaining breached credentials. "This points directly to a widespread failure to rename default accounts or rotate factory credentials, giving the attacker a highly reliable target list before any brute force was even needed," SOCRadar said. "Org-specific accounts topping the list is significant. It means the attacker is not ju...

Introduction The average enterprise security team has 40 or more security tools, giving a lot of visibility into internal telemetry and asset data. But often, these tools are working in siloes, generating (overlapping) alerts and data. And yet, breach dwell times remain stubbornly long (~43 days), response windows keep closing before teams can act, and analysts burn out triaging noise instead of stopping threats. The problem isn't effort. It's architecture. Security programs were built for a world where threats moved slowly enough for humans to coordinate responses manually. That world no longer exists. With the way AI capabilities are getting developed and used, especially with frontier AI tools, a much more proactive stance to security is needed as well as machine speed response to combat fast moving adversaries. Gartner's Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework helps this shift from reactive, point-in-time assessments to a continuous, iterative cycl...

Security teams have never had more IP data at their disposal. Every day, analysts ingest enrichment feeds, geolocation data, reputation scores, telemetry, and threat intelligence from a growing ecosystem of vendors and platforms. Yet despite this abundance of information, many organizations continue to face a fundamental challenge: sifting through the noise to understand who is behind an IP and what action should follow . Case in point: a recent industry study of more than 200 security practitioners conducted by Spur Intelligence found that anonymizing infrastructure - including VPNs and residential proxy networks - now appears in nearly every security incident. At the same time, the study showed that many organizations admit they lack the visibility, context, and operational workflows needed to make effective decisions based on that IP data. The findings support a broader industry trend: a reactive approach to managing IP-based risks. The Rise of Anonymized Infrastructure...

Bad actors are exploiting multiple security vulnerabilities in Fortinet FortiSandbox, according to threat intelligence firm Defused Cyber. In a post shared on X, the company said it has observed exploitation of CVE-2026-39813, CVE-2026-39808 , and CVE-2026-25089 over the past 24 hours. CVE-2026-39813 (CVSS score: 9.1) refers to a path traversal vulnerability in FortiSandbox JRPC API that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to bypass authentication via specially crafted HTTP requests. The second flaw, CVE-2026-39808 (CVSS score: 9.1), is a case of operating system command injection that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via crafted HTTP requests. Both vulnerabilities were patched by Fortinet in April 2026. CVE-2026-25089 (CVSS score: 9.1), on the other hand, was fixed last week, with Fortinet describing it as an operating system command injection impacting FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud, and FortiSandbox PaaS WEB UI that co...

Cybersecurity researchers have described what they say is a new class of attack that can trick artificial intelligence (AI) coding agents into running arbitrary code on developer machines. Called Agentjacking by Tenet Security, the attack can be triggered by means of a fake error report crafted using Sentry, an open-source error-tracking and performance-monitoring platform. "The attack exploits a critical architectural flaw at the intersection of Sentry's event ingestion (which accepts arbitrary payloads from anyone with the DSN) and the Sentry MCP server (which returns this data to AI agents as trusted system output)," security researchers Ron Bobrov, Barak Sternberg, and Nevo Poran said . The idea is to inject crafted input into Sentry error events, which are then interpreted by coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor as legitimate diagnostic resolution steps and run attacker-controlled code. A successful attack of this kind can expose sensitive data, includ...

For thirty years, vulnerability management ran on a buffer: the months between when a vulnerability was found and when someone could figure out how to weaponize it. The solution was straightforward enough; triage by severity, schedule the fix, validate, and move on. The buffer was what made that work. Today, that buffer is gone. AI didn't make your team slower. It changed the other side of the equation, compressing discovery-to-exploit from months to hours . And the sad truth for defenders is that a process built for breathing room can't survive without it. AI Turned Vulnerability Discovery Into a Volume Game In its May 2026 update, Anthropic reported that it and approximately 50 partners used Claude Mythos Preview to find more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in systemically important software in a single month. Earlier figures were just as stark. Pointed at Firefox, the gated Mythos model wrote 181 working exploits , against just 2 from t...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a "resurgence and expansion" of JDY , a covert network associated with China-nexus state-sponsored threat actors. "The JDY botnet comprises over 1,500 SOHO [small office and home office] and IoT devices and operates as a centrally controlled, high-performance scanner used to discover, fingerprint, and continuously map exposed services at scale," Lumen's Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. JDY was first flagged as a cluster within another botnet codenamed KV-botnet in mid-December 2023. Primarily used for broader scanning against internet targets, the stealthy network comprising compromised SOHO routers, firewalls, and IoT devices has been put to use by Chinese hacking groups like Volt Typhoon. Following KV-botnet's takedown by the U.S. government in early 2024, the botnet operators began making behavioral changes to the network, with the second KV cluster largely going offline. It...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added three new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2026-20245 (CVSS score: 7.8) - An improper encoding or escaping of output vulnerability in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager that could allow an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root by supplying a crafted file to the affected system. CVE-2026-11645 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An out-of-bounds read and write vulnerability in Google Chrome V8 that could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside a sandbox via a crafted HTML page. CVE-2026-7473 (CVSS score: 6.9) - An incomplete comparison with missing factors vulnerability in Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS) that could be exploited to process non-configured tunnel traffic. No Patch Planned for Exploited Arista EOS Flaw "On...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously unreported threat cluster dubbed OP-512 (where "OP" stands for "opponent") that has been observed targeting Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) servers to deploy a bespoke web shell framework. ReliaQuest has assessed with moderate to high confidence that the espionage-focused activity is linked to China. "OP-512 was highly likely conducting espionage through a compromised Internet Information Services (IIS) web server on an organization whose sector and geography align with China-linked intelligence priorities," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Although no overlaps have been found between OP-512 and other known China-aligned adversaries, it's the fourth such threat group after CL-STA-0048 , DragonRank , and GhostRedirector to single out IIS web servers over the past 12 months. As recently as last month, Cisco Talos revealed that multiple Chinese-speaking...

Eighteen months ago, the AI SOC was a marketing line. Today it's a budget item. The category has crossed over from interesting to inevitable, with billions of dollars now flowing into AI-powered security operations platforms, agentic SOC tools, and AI co-pilots built into every layer of the security stack. The data shows SOCs are buying, deploying, and standing up AI capabilities at the fastest pace the industry has ever seen. And yet, the same SOCs reporting record AI adoption are reporting underwhelming outcomes. The first objective benchmark on the value of AI in the SOC was published in the SOC-CMM 2026 Maturity Report in May, drawing on survey data collected from roughly 200 SOCs across regions, sectors, and delivery models between late January and mid-March 2026. Only about 10% of respondents said AI has delivered excellent value to their SOC. About 19% reported good value. The remaining 71% landed at some value or none at all. Eighteen months into AI deployment, that...

The threat actor known as PCPJack has hijacked cloud servers associated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to create a covert SMTP email relay network. "Compromised business servers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia were quietly converted into SMTP proxies, verified for mail relay capability, and synced to a downstream consumer every five minutes," Hunt.io said in a statement. "The infrastructure was still running when we found it." The threat intelligence company said it found source code, compiled binaries, deployment state logs, internet scanners, exploitation tooling, and a live Sliver configuration after the threat actor behind the operation left two open directories on a command-and-control (C2) server ("213.136.80[.]73") without any authentication. PCPJack was first discovered by SentinelOne in April 2026 after it identified a credential theft framework that specifically targets cloud services, while taking s...

Google on Monday released patches for 124 security vulnerabilities impacting its Android operating system for the month of June 2026, including one high-severity flaw in the Framework component that has come under active exploitation. Tracked as CVE-2025-48595 (CVSS score: 8.4), the security flaw has been described as a case of privilege escalation without requiring any user interaction. The vulnerability impacts devices running Android versions 14, 15, 16, and 16 QPR2 (Quarterly Platform Release 2). "In multiple locations, there is a possible way to achieve code execution due to an integer overflow," according to a description of the vulnerability on CVE.org. "This could lead to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed. User interaction is not needed for exploitation." Google has acknowledged there are indications that CVE-2025-48595 may be under "limited, targeted exploitation." As is typically the case, the t...

The Russian hacking group known as Gamaredon has been attributed to the continued exploitation of a WinRAR vulnerability to deliver multiple malware families aimed at data theft and propagation. Per Sekoia, the activity involves the weaponization of CVE-2025-8088 , a path traversal flaw in WinRAR, to launch an HTML Application payload dubbed GammaPhish, which is then used to retrieve an intermediate Visual Basic Script (VBScript) downloaders codenamed GammaLoad. The infection chain was observed by the French cybersecurity company in January 2026. "Their primary objectives are to fingerprint the host system, update the network configuration in the registry using dead drop resolvers (DDRs), fetch and execute arbitrary VBScript payloads from the C2 servers," Sekoia said . One of the payloads is a VBScript worm known as GammaWorm that establishes persistence via scheduled tasks and is designed to hide legitimate directories in network shares and USB drives and replace wit...