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Researchers have disclosed a new hardware attack, called DDRop , that breaks the memory protection in Intel and AMD confidential computing by silently dropping writes to a server's memory, so the processor keeps reading old encrypted data as if it were current. The attack requires an attacker who already controls the server's software and can briefly access the machine to insert a small circuit board, called an interposer , between the processor and a memory module. The interposer costs under $200 to build. DDRop works against Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP, the hardware that cloud services use to keep customer data private while it is in use, even from the cloud provider. Confidential computing keeps a server's memory encrypted, so that even someone with physical access to the machine sees only scrambled data. To cover the large amount of memory that a cloud server uses, though, these designs omit a guarantee called freshness. The processor can confi...

An attacker was operating inside the network of 3BB , one of Thailand's largest broadband providers, and maintained remote control of internal machines using a legitimate management tool called MeshCentral, threat intelligence firm Hunt.io said. The company uncovered the intrusion by examining a server the attacker had left open on the internet, which held the attacker's own tools and a list of machines already under their control. The researchers captured the exposed server on June 3, 2026, while the operation was still live. The tools on it had been run from a computer inside 3BB's own network, and one recovered file showed the attacker gaining full administrative control, known as root, of an internal server. To maintain that access, the attacker installed MeshCentral , a free tool that IT teams typically use to manage computers remotely. The recovered settings show it was configured as a hidden backdoor, with the agents reporting to a control server that the atta...

A flaw in Telegram Desktop let a bot's message plant hidden JavaScript inside chats that users exported to HTML files, security researchers at ExPatch said in a  writeup  published on September 12. In Telegram, the message looked ordinary, with a link button, and the script ran only when someone opened the export file in a web browser. It could then copy every message in that file to an attacker-controlled server, or rewrite what the page displayed. Telegram shipped  a fix  in July, but the app update does not update files exported with earlier versions, so old HTML exports can still carry the script. Telegram Desktop, Telegram's app for Windows, macOS, and Linux, can save a single chat or all chats from an account as HTML pages that open in a browser. Bots can attach rows of buttons under their messages, which Telegram calls inline keyboards, and the bot chooses the text shown on each button. Until the fix, the export code wrote that button text directly ...

A suspected Chinese threat actor tracked as Red Heron has been attributed to the rapid exploitation of a recently disclosed security vulnerability in Gitea to compromise internet-facing instances as part of a multi-national campaign. "Red Heron scanned 1,386 Gitea instances across seven countries and maintained a separate dataset of 477 Taiwan-based systems," Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) said in an analysis. "The activity progressed from source-code theft to persistent access, credential collection, and lateral movement, including root-level access to a three-node Proxmox cluster." The activity is said to have resulted in confirmed compromises affected organizations in Canada (2), Argentina (1), Taiwan (4), the U.S. (4), Qatar (1), and Sri Lanka (1), with the threat actor using Simplified Chinese labels to classify targets spanning defense, election, energy, aerospace, telecommunications, government, public safety, and research sectors. The Singapore ...

WordPress has announced it's launching an automated security review for every release of a plugin before it's distributed through the WordPress.org update API so as to analyze it for potential security issues and ensure there are no risks involved. "New plugins are reviewed before they enter the directory, but updates ship continuously after that," David Perez, WordPress Official Plugin Repository Team Co-Lead, said . "A plugin can be secure today and introduce a vulnerability, or malicious code, in a future release." WordPress said the lack of a "consistent review step" between the commit of a release and the release of a plugin to downstream users meant that it could open the door for malicious attacks. The content management system (CMS) platform noted that its automated review detected a backdoor committed to a release of a plugin with about 20,000 active installations on July 28, 2026. Because the release was within a cooldown window, ...

AI keeps showing up in the wrong places. Attackers are using it to speed up exploits, test defenses, and automate more of the job. Some models are also crossing lines on their own. That is not a great combination. The rest of the week is more familiar: old bugs still working, fresh exploit chains, exposed systems, weak defaults, and simple paths that should have been harder to abuse. A few of these stories are clever. Most are just easy. Here’s what mattered this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenAI Agents Behind May 2026 Attack on RubyGems — The "major malicious attack" that targeted RubyGems in May 2026 was the work of a swarm of OpenAI agents, according to researchers. The event was driven by a cluster of OpenAI agents that engaged in en masse publication of thousands of packages to RubyGems in May and June 2026. "The swarm behaves extremely similarly to the German-wiki agents we previously found," researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von...

There's a lot of noise around AI and cybersecurity right now. What’s actually important is far simpler, if often lost in the hubbub. Vulnerability discovery is getting faster and happening at a much greater scale, while defenders still have to work out which findings actually deserve their action. In the first half of 2026, a whopping 35,853 CVEs were published, roughly 49% more than in the year before. Yet only 495 were catalogued as exploited in the wild during that same period, and 116 were already under attack on the day they became public. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s own disclosure data shows Mythos-class models surfacing 26,153 vulnerability candidates in open-source software, with only 421 of those getting patched upstream. That small exploited subset is a very important point. It tells defenders that treating every vulnerability with a High or Critical CVSS rating as an emergency is not only impossible, it’s actually the wrong model . The critical task security teams fa...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added five security flaws impacting JFrog Artifactory, ConnectWise ScreenConnect , and MikroTik RouterOS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. Details of the vulnerabilities are as follows - CVE-2026-42016 (CVSS score: 8.1) - An incorrect authorization vulnerability in JFrog Artifactory that could lead to privilege escalation due to a validation check of the token signature/issuer and not the token's scope. CVE-2026-42018 (CVSS score: 7.5) - An improper authentication vulnerability in JFrog Artifactory that could return an internal anonymous-user token to an unauthenticated caller when anonymous access is disabled, potentially leaking sensitive resources. CVE-2026-84869 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper privilege management and missing authorization vulnerability in  ConnectWise ScreenConnect that could allow an attacker to fil...

The "major malicious attack" that targeted RubyGems in May 2026 was the work of a swarm of OpenAI agents, according to a new report published by researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx. On May 12, Maciej Mensfeld, senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io, disclosed details of a coordinated cyber attack that targeted the package manager for the Ruby programming language with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days. In a follow-up analysis, Socket highlighted a campaign dubbed GemStuffer that involved a cluster of more than 150 gems that used the package registry as a data exfiltration channel and staged public data scraped from U.K. local government democratic services portals. At that time, the software supply chain security company noted the activity shares the "same abuse pattern" as the broader RubyGems spam-publishing incident. "It's not...

GitLab has released patches to address multiple flaws, including a maximum-severity security vulnerability that has witnessed in-the-wild probes within hours of public disclosure. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-85706 (CVSS score: 10.0), a path traversal issue in the repository commits API that could allow an unauthenticated user to read arbitrary files from the GitLab server under certain conditions. The problem, per GitLab, stems from "improper path confinement and missing authentication enforcement in the repository commits API." The issue impacts the following versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) - All versions from 18.7 before 19.1.8,  All versions from 19.2 before 19.2.6, and  All versions from 19.3 before 19.3.2 According to preemptive exposure management firm watchTowr, the vulnerability is already witnessing active in-the-wild probes since 06:00 UTC on September 11, 2026. The issue, it said, allows an ...

Security teams have become exceptionally talented at finding vulnerabilities. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to optimizing the process for determining which of those vulnerabilities actually create a path to compromise. A critical vulnerability may look alarming on a scanner report, but if it sits behind strong segmentation, identity controls, and other defenses that prevent an attacker from reaching anything important, then it doesn’t necessarily need immediate attention.  On the other hand, a medium-severity vulnerability may appear less important, but if it can be used to provide a foothold that can be chained with other weaknesses to reach sensitive data or privileged systems, then fixing that gap becomes a priority. How Autonomous Penetration Testing Reveals What Attackers Can Actually Exploit Severity scores tell you what vulnerabilities could mean in isolation. Autonomous penetration testing tells you what an attacker can actually do with the vulnerabilities....

Attackers have chained two flaws in JFrog Artifactory , the repository that software build pipelines pull from, to take administrator control of self-hosted servers and plant backdoors, cloud security company Wiz said in a report. Wiz saw the attacks between August 15 and September 8. JFrog had fixed both flaws before then, so only servers that had not been updated were open to them. Neither flaw gives administrator control on its own. CVE-2026-42018 makes Artifactory hand an internal anonymous-user token to a caller who has not logged in, even when anonymous access is turned off. CVE-2026-42016 then allows that low-privilege token to be swapped for one with administrator scope, because Artifactory checks a token's signature and who issued it, but not what the token is allowed to do. Every case Wiz saw followed a similar pattern. The attacker sent an unauthenticated request to a token endpoint and received a token for the internal anonymous user, then exchanged it ...

A China-linked hacking group exploited a flaw in Sogou Input Method , one of the most widely used tools for typing Chinese characters on Windows, to install a backdoor on victims' computers, security company Gen Digital said in  research published Thursday . The attack started with a crafted link and ended with the attacker able to do anything the logged-in user could do. Tencent, which owns and develops Sogou, fixed the flaw in April 2026. Gen found the flaw while investigating a live intrusion by UNC3569 , a group that  Google Threat Intelligence ties to China  and places in the country's hacker-for-hire scene. Google has tracked the group since 2021 and says it has targeted government, education, technology, and finance sectors, mostly in East and Southeast Asia. The backdoor it installed is GRAYRABBIT , a small program the group has used for years and that Google describes as its first step onto a machine. It gives an attacker a remote command shell, allows fil...

PaperCut on Thursday released a new security maintenance release that replaces all previously published emergency patches that were pushed to address two security flaws that have come under active exploitation. The software development company said PaperCut NG/MF versions 26.0.5, 25.0.13 and 24.1.10 are now available for customers to download. "These are Regular Maintenance Releases (MR) that have gone through complete QA testing," it said. "They contain all of the security fixes issued in Emergency Patch Releases 1, 2 and 3, plus additional security hardening, and they have been through our standard release testing process." It's worth noting that the release supersedes the emergency patches that were shipped to address two security flaws as well as two regressions, along with various hardening and mitigation against potential attack chains. The vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078 , have come under active exploitation in the wild to byp...

Cisco has revealed that three distinct threat clusters linked to ransomware and state-sponsored attacks have been exploiting two recently patched Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) vulnerabilities. The attacks leverage CVE-2026-20079 (CVSS score: 10.0), an authentication bypass vulnerability in the web interface of FMC software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and execute script files on an affected device to obtain root access to the underlying operating system. The second flaw under exploitation is CVE-2026-20316 (CVSS score: 5.3), which could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to log in to an affected device using a low-privilege account to access sensitive data within susceptible systems. It can be paired with other Cisco Secure FMC vulnerabilities to elevate privileges. Cisco Talos said it identified three clusters of post-compromise activity of FMC instances associated with state-sponsored and crimeware threat act...

A lot of this week’s security news has the same awkward answer to one question: “Why was that allowed to work?” An extension asks for access and takes too much. A trusted service becomes part of a phishing chain. An old bug still gets results. An exposed system stays exposed. A package looks useful right up until it isn’t. Different stories, same basic problem: the path in was often already there. Nothing here needed magic. Mostly access, trust, weak edges, and someone willing to keep poking. That’s the week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Check Point has patched two critical vulnerabilities in the way its firewall and management products handle VPN certificates. The company says both could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to run code, but only "under specific conditions" that it has not described. One flaw affects Check Point's Security Gateways, its firewall appliances. The other affects those gateways and the Security Management Server, the console used to configure them. Check Point disclosed the flaws on September 9 in a  notice to its customer community , and began delivering fixes the same day. The company says it found both itself and has no indication that either has been used in an attack. The first flaw,  CVE-2026-85102 , is a failure to properly validate certificate trust during VPN negotiation. Its CVE record says an unauthenticated remote attacker may be able to run code on the Security Gateway. The second,  CVE-2026-85103 , is a heap-based buffer overflow that happens while t...

A suspected Russian-speaking cyber actor has been attributed to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to devise exploits targeting a recently disclosed pair of security flaws in PaperCut NG/MF and break into hundreds of instances. According to independent reports from Blackpoint Cyber and GreyNoise , the activity originates from " 45.142.193[.]132 ," an IP address that has been linked to unauthorized port scanning and brute-force attack attempts in recent weeks. It's worth noting the same IP address was also flagged by Arctic Wolf in connection with the exploitation activity last week. "At this time, we cannot confirm the exact end goal of this campaign," Nevan Beal, principal MDR analyst at Blackpoint, told The Hacker News. "The threat actor's methodology is consistent with initial-access activity, but we do not yet have sufficient evidence to confirm whether they are operating as an initial access broker." At its core, the opportunist...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added three flaws, each impacting Cisco, Citrix, and Fortinet, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to apply the patches by September 12, 2026. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-20079 (CVSS score: 10.0) - An authentication bypass vulnerability in the web interface of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) Software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and execute script files on an affected device to obtain root access to the underlying operating system. CVE-2026-19490 (CVSS score: 9.3) - An authentication bypass vulnerability in  Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway when the appliance is configured as an AAA virtual server or as a Gateway (SSL VPN, ICA Proxy, CVPN, or RDP Proxy). CVE-2025-25249 (CVSS score: 7.3) - A heap-based buffer overflow ...

Nearly one in ten of the internet-facing LiteLLM servers that  Wiz Research  scanned in February accepted  sk-1234 , the example admin key in LiteLLM's own setup guide. LiteLLM is an open-source AI gateway, the software a company puts between its applications and the model providers it pays for. That key is the gateway's administrator credential. Anyone who holds it can read every model provider's API key stored on the server. In Wiz's tests, it also reached the cloud IAM credentials of the machine the gateway runs on. Changing the key needs no upgrade, and it closes every path in Wiz's report that depends on holding it. Where the Number Comes From Wiz ran one scan. It found 3,074 LiteLLM gateways on Shodan in February, and 294 of them accepted the key. In 191 of those 294, no key was set at all, so they would have accepted anything. The rest had the setup guide's value left in place. A second scan in August found more than 85,000 instances, but W...