Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

An unknown threat actor has infected 953 online stores, most of them running Magento, as part of a long-running campaign active since July 2025. According to Dutch e-commerce security company Sansec, the activity is designed to add a small piece of code to the store's pages that, when visited by unsuspecting users, serves malicious JavaScript loader code through Magento CMS blocks. "When you visit, that code makes your browser ask the group's server what to do next," Sansec said . "The server first checks whether you are a real shopper or a security scanner, so scanners get nothing." No less than five distinct domains have been observed over time in connection with the campaign - manulfie[.]click, first seen in July 2025 neswnsssn[.]click, first seen in December 2025 lanhd6549tdhse[.]top, first seen in March 2026 additionalver[.]com, first seen in June 2026 deepveindrilling[.]com, first seen in October 2026 Sansec said it found deep...

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...

This2Shell, That2Shell, Everything2Shell. That's pretty much how the last week went. Critical bugs that let attackers run code remotely are showing up everywhere. Hackers are scanning for targets, some flaws are already being used in attacks, and security teams have more urgent patches than they can keep up with. And that's not even the full story. A leaked key led to a software supply-chain attack. AI agents are being tricked into following harmful instructions. Old bugs are still being used to break into systems, and some attacks are so simple it's hard to believe they still work. Some websites even went offline to avoid taking chances. It's been a rough week for anyone trying to keep systems safe. Here's what happened. ⚡ Threat of the Week PHP2Shell Flaws Puts Organizations on Alert — The PHP Foundation released patches for two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution...

Two critical flaws in  Wasmtime , a WebAssembly runtime that can be built into other software, could allow a malicious WebAssembly module to escape the sandbox intended to contain it, the project's maintainers say. An attacker would first need a vulnerable Wasmtime build to compile a module they control, and one of the flaws affects only ARM64 systems. Fixed versions were released on October 19 and 20, and the maintainers have not reported any attacks. Wasmtime runs WebAssembly code outside web browsers. Both bugs are in Cranelift, the compiler it uses by default to turn WebAssembly into machine code. Wasmtime's maintainers at the Bytecode Alliance rated each flaw 9.9 out of 10 on the CVSS scale in advisories published on October 19. CVE-2026-115889  affects Wasmtime across all processor architectures. CVE-2026-115893  affects only ARM64, also called aarch64. The sandbox is meant to keep a module inside set limits. A module can only use its own memory and...

A single hacked device on a Tailscale network can be used to gain root access to other servers it can reach, according to a security researcher who published the findings this week. The attack requires two things: Tailscale SSH set up to allow port forwarding, and an attacker who already controls one device that the network's access rules permit to connect to the target. The findings were published on October 25 in a report called  Tailworm  by Erica Windisch of Cyberdione Labs. Windisch tested Tailscale version 1.104.2 and headscale version 0.29.5, the self-hosted server some networks use to run Tailscale instead of the company's hosted service, over three days in a lab. The report describes tests on that software, not attacks against real networks. As of publication, Tailscale had issued no  security bulletin , no CVE identifier, and no fixed version. Tailscale has responded in public. Mike Shaver, the company's vice president of engineering,  wrote on Red...

In an update, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said it's retracting its earlier assessment that the post-compromise activity targeting the European government agency involved the exploitation of the PHP2Shell flaws. "What researchers saw was an attack against a European government agency executed in the context of a vulnerable PHP application," a spokesperson for the company told The Hacker News via email. "This led us to believe that it was exploitation of those vulnerabilities. We are unable to confirm that initial access is associated with the specific PHP2Shell CVEs." The original story follows. Threat actors have been observed using agentic artificial intelligence (AI) platforms for post-exploitation activity following the abuse of the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. "In one case, the attackers targeted a government entity in Europe and within two hours of the initial exploitation they had successfully acce...

OpenAI has announced plans to conduct frontier model training with no live internet access, as it resumes reinforcement learning (RL) training and internal inference of its most advanced AI models. "Based on the current state of alignment research, monitoring systems, and the security of internet infrastructure, we believe the responsible approach is to conduct frontier model training with no internet access," the artificial intelligence (AI) company said . "We've implemented this policy and will maintain it until advances in these safeguards justify broader internet access." OpenAI said models' growing capabilities can have the side effect of them getting much better at devising ways around environmental restrictions to escape containment and perform unintended actions. This can involve the model exploiting a software flaw or misconfiguration to reach the live internet, or finding unauthorized ways to communicate with agents in other sandboxes. Late ...

A memory-corruption flaw in Google's Brotli decoder sits in many programs that unpack Brotli-compressed data, among them Bun, Microsoft's .NET, the Python Brotli and brotlicffi packages, and Envoy proxies set up to decompress Brotli. Tracked as  CVE-2026-111497 , the flaw allows crafted compressed data to overwrite past the end of a buffer and corrupt a program's memory, potentially causing a crash, a memory leak, or the execution of attacker-controlled code. Imperva researchers have shown that code can run on one unpatched Node.js build . The same has not been demonstrated on the other software, and no real-world attacks have been reported. The flaw was  first disclosed on October 21 , when Node.js and Google shipped fixes, and more have followed product by product since. Because the bug is in Google's decoder and each program ships its own copy of it, every one has to update that copy on its own. Brotli is a compression format from Google, used ...

Between November 2025 and March 2026, the Dutch security firm Eye Security pushed more than 2 million updates to computers it did not own to switch off a background updater that it said could have allowed an outsider to take over the machine. The updater belongs to Time4Popcorn , an abandoned copy of Popcorn Time, a free app that streamed pirated films and TV over BitTorrent. Popcorn Time was popular about a decade ago, and the original shut down in 2014, but several copies kept running under the same name. A separate, legal project that took the Popcorn Time name in early 2025 is unrelated to it. Eye Security, which monitors client networks for threats, found the updater during a routine threat hunt: a program called Updater.exe on one client's laptop kept trying to reach a web address that was no longer registered. The firm registered the address itself to see what would connect, and about 50 requests a second poured in. It later laid out the operation, which it named O...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added two vulnerabilities impacting Collabora Online Built-in CODE Server and Arista VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ), citing reports of active exploitation in the wild. The critical-severity vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-110447 (CVSS score: 9.2) - An operating system command injection vulnerability in Collabora Online – Built-in CODE Server (aka richdocumentscode) when used within the NextCloud platform that could allow remote code execution via "proxy.php" when the CODE local document server isn't running. (Fixed in September 2026 in version 26.4.303) CVE-2026-114625 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An SQL injection vulnerability in on-premise versions of Arista VeloCloud Orchestrator that could allow a remote attacker to access privileged internal functionality. (Fixed in October 2026  in versions 5.2.3.18, 6.1.3.10, and 6.4.2.12) As r...

Diplomatic organizations in Central Asia have been targeted by a sophisticated new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) bootkit called BlackX . The activity, which singled out diplomatic entities in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan in early 2026, is suspected to be orchestrated by a China-linked state-sponsored hacking group known as APT41 , Kaspersky said in a technical report published this week. The primary objective behind deploying the malware is to undermine Microsoft Windows startup defenses, along with third-party security solutions, while maintaining long-term, covert access to compromised devices. Notably, BlackX is assessed to be an updated version of BlackLotus , a notorious bootkit that was first observed being advertised on cybercrime forums in late 2022, before its existence was officially confirmed by ESET in March 2023. BlackLotus is designed to exploit a now-patched Secure Boot bypass vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-21894 (CVSS score: 4.4...

Ruby has released versions 4.0.9, 3.4.12, and 3.3.13 to fix three bugs in Onigmo, the regular expression engine built into the language. The bugs lie behind four critical security flaws that GitLab patched over the past month. GitLab found that a specially crafted pattern could corrupt memory while Ruby compiles it, potentially leading to code execution on its own servers. Ruby says any application that builds a regular expression from text an attacker controls is affected, not just GitLab. Which Applications Are Affected In  its advisory , Ruby said an application is affected only if it compiles a regular expression from a string an attacker controls. That happens when a program passes such a string to Regexp.new, Regexp.union or Regexp.compile, or places it inside a pattern through interpolation, as in /#{input}/. Applications that only use regular expressions written by their own developers are not affected. Ruby fixed the bugs in 4.0.9, 3.4.12, and 3.3.13. The...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven intrusion ecosystem run by affiliates of the INC and The Gentlemen ransomware groups. Central to the operation is an "Autonomous Red Team Kill Chain Framework" referred to as Phantom. The threat actor is assessed to be Russian-speaking and functions both as an intrusion and data-extortion operator, as well as an infrastructure provider supporting different partners across the ransomware ecosystem. "The operators exploited edge and remote-access systems at scale, including FortiClient EMS, SimpleHelp, cPanel, and VPN gateways," SOCRadar said . "They used AI-managed knowledge bases to track victims, stolen credentials, and campaign progress." A notable aspect that defines the campaign is its "AI-executed, human-approved operating structure" in which a human operator provides a victim-specific prompt and reviews every step, while the intrusions themselves are e...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a large-scale campaign that has targeted exposed network edge devices such as Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect firewalls. "Artifacts from this investigation also indicate that operators in this campaign have obtained access to numerous organizations worldwide, and have attempted to further compromise some victims, resulting in persistent remote access and data exfiltration," according to a joint investigation published by Group-IB and NyxLab. The widespread exploitation activity has been attributed to a threat actor known as k0t, who also goes by the aliases CryptoFeel, Member19, and QazWsxShop. The cybercriminal actor was first seen in the wild on October 22, 2025. The threat actor is assessed to share connections with ransomware groups such as Qilin and The Gentlemen, likely operating as an initial access broker or an affiliate. Analysis of the threat actor's dark web activity reveals a k...

PHP has warned of another way an attacker could run code on a web server, two days after it shipped emergency fixes for the critical PHP2Shell flaws. The new issue, assigned CVE-2026-115560 , affects only web applications configured in an unusual way, and PHP considers it an unlikely risk. The project is not issuing an emergency fix for it. Instead, it recommends turning off a feature called session upload progress until a fix is available in the next routine release. The warning came in a short  informational advisory  published on October 23. It follows the October 21  emergency release  that fixed two critical PHP2Shell flaws, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 , which let an attacker without an account run code on a server. Those were patched in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35. The new issue is separate and is not fixed by those releases. Only a narrow setup is at risk. PHP says the problem can occur when a web application does all of the followi...

Pillow , the most widely used image library for Python, can be made to run operating system commands on a server by specifying the name of a file it is told to open. The flaw,  CVE-2026-112900 , is in the way Pillow handles EPS images, which it opens by passing the file's name to Ghostscript , a separate program it runs to turn the image into pixels, without checking the name first. Ghostscript can read a name chosen by an attacker as instructions rather than as a file, and point it to a second file that carries commands to run. Pillow's maintainers fixed it in  version 13.0.0 , released on October 16. Pillow turns up almost everywhere Python handles images: web upload forms, avatar and thumbnail tools, document and PDF pipelines, and most machine-learning projects pull it in. OX Security, the firm whose report drew attention to the flaws, estimates the library is downloaded  about 436 million times a month . Version 13.0.0 is a large security release, with fixes...

Malicious Brotli data can make an application on an official build of Node.js run attacker-supplied code, security researchers at Imperva have demonstrated. Their " Node2Shell " proof of concept ran code on the official Node.js 24.22.0 image for Linux arm64, with no debugger or custom build, by feeding crafted data to the bundled Brotli decoder ( CVE-2026-111497 ). Node.js disclosed the flaw and  released fixes on October 21 , and applications that decode untrusted Brotli data should update. Imperva's test did not succeed on every attempt, and code execution took several tries in its Linux arm64 setup. The result covers that one build and application setup, with other architectures and the 22.x and 26.x lines not tested. On the fixed release, 24.22.1, the same data was rejected, and no code ran. The demonstration goes beyond the  first public proof of concept , which achieved code execution only on a deliberately weakened test build. On a standard build, that proo...

AI agents paying for API calls with the  x402 SDKs  could sign a payment for their full balance of a supported token if a malicious API asked for it,  security firm V12 said  on October 22. The cause was the SDKs' default client, which set no spending limit until releases on August 18 added one. The risk was limited to agents who automatically signed payments and whose apps set no limits. The missing limit is one of 25 flaws V12 found in the x402 code, and one of three it rated critical and described in detail. The x402 Foundation, which maintains the SDKs, had already fixed all three critical flaws in the August 18 releases. One of the other two let a facilitator, the service that checks x402 payments, accept a Solana transaction that moved no tokens as a valid payment. Among the x402 SDKs, only the TypeScript one had this flaw. The other let a malicious server get an agent to sign a login message for a different website. V12 found the flaws by reviewing t...

Threat actors have been observed unsuccessfully attempting to exploit the newly disclosed PHP2Shell vulnerabilities to rope infected systems into a Mirai botnet variant called Potassium , as it emerges that weaponizing the flaws may be harder than previously thought. The attacks aim to exploit CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (CVSS scores: 9.2), which can result in unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) via specially crafted HTTP requests. The vulnerabilities have been patched in PHP versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35. "However, analysis of the sample revealed that it is an updated and significantly expanded version of the Mirai-derived botnet variant identified in early 2026," Sophos said . "The sample displays downloader and network disruption functionality." ⚡ WARNING — PHP Warns of Another Unpatched RCE Flaw CVE-2026-115560 Specifically, it resolves a hard-coded, encrypted command-and-control (C2) address, establishes a TCP connec...

Attackers are exploiting a zero-day SQL injection flaw in Arista's VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO), the  central management system  for VeloCloud SD-WAN networks, the company said in an  advisory  on October 22. The flaw lets anyone who can log in to the orchestrator, even with a read-only customer account, gain operator privileges, the top level of control over it. For on-premises orchestrators, the fix is in VCO 5.2.3.18, 6.1.3.10, and 6.4.2.12, while Hosted and Dedicated orchestrators have already been patched. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-114625 and rated 9.9 on the CVSS scale. Orchestrators running the releases that fixed the VCO flaws exploited in July and September are still affected, because those releases are older than the new fixes. Arista bought the VeloCloud SD-WAN product line from Broadcom, announcing the deal in July 2025. The products were earlier known as VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud. To exploit the flaw, an attacker needs network acc...