Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of three cyber attacks targeting organizations in Japan in which artificial intelligence (AI) was a key element, either in the driving seat or to assist a human operator. TrendAI, which analyzed three exposed server environments used by threat actors to conduct the malicious cyber operations, described them as distinct from previously published attacks that have leveraged ARTEX , an autonomous AI penetration testing framework, to single out entities in South Korea and Japan. "These environments held reconnaissance and attack tools, scripts, target lists, results, logs, and command histories," security researchers Bakuei Matsukawa and Joseph C Chen said. "They ranged from workspaces used largely by hand by skilled operators to AI-agent platforms that automated the entire workflow, including command and control." The first of the three attacks has been found to abuse CyberStrikeAI , another open-source penetra...

The GoAhead embedded web server loaded a certificate revocation list into its default TLS backend but never turned revocation checking on, so a revoked client certificate could still pass login on affected setups. The flaw is in builds that use the OpenSSL backend with mutual-TLS, where the server checks a client certificate and vice versa, and a revocation list is configured to block revoked certificates. That is a setup an operator turns on deliberately; a default build does not.  GoAhead 6.1.1 , released to device makers on August 2, 2026, and publicly published on October 12, fixes it. GoAhead is a small web server that device makers build into firmware to run management pages on routers, printers, gateways and industrial controllers. Its maker, EmbedThis, says it runs in hundreds of millions of devices. The flaw was found by Sébastien Féry of FoxIO, who described it and two other TLS problems in a  write-up  on October 26. On an affected build, the server...

Apple on Monday backported fixes for a high-severity security flaw that was exploited in real-world cyber attacks to older devices. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-86950 (CVSS score: 8.8), is an out-of-bounds write affecting CoreGraphics that could result in arbitrary code execution when processing a maliciously crafted file. Patches for the flaw were released last month by Apple in versions iOS 26.7.1, iPadOS 26.7.1, macOS Tahoe 26.7.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.8.1, acknowledging that it may have been exploited in sophisticated attacks against specific individuals using devices running iOS before iOS 27. The fixes have now been expanded to include iOS 18.7.11 and iPadOS 18.7.11, which support iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad 7th generation, iPad Air 4th generation and later, iPad 9th generation and later, and iPad mini 6th generation and later. "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against ...

Microsoft has fixed a flaw in its Authenticator app for Android that let a malicious app with no permissions pose as a trusted Microsoft app, such as Teams, and collect sign-in tokens for a victim's work account. Microsoft tracks the flaw as  CVE-2026-80097  and fixed it in Authenticator for Android version 6.2606.4246, so anyone using the app should update. In the researchers' tests, the tokens gave full access to the account's email, files, and calendar. Microsoft says exploitation also needs the victim to complete a sign-in step in Authenticator, and that the flaw has not been used in attacks. The research comes from Ofek Levin, working through a fellowship program at the security firm  Enclave , which published the technical details on October 23, 2026. Microsoft assigned the CVE on September 8 and rated it 8.6 on the CVSS scale, which it labels "Important." On Android, Authenticator does more than show six-digit codes. It also acts as a broker: when ...

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...

The North Korea-linked Lazarus Group has been attributed to a cyber espionage campaign dubbed Operation FlashHole targeting at least three organizations in South Korea spanning the construction, software, and wire-communication equipment manufacturing sectors. According to Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky, the campaign has been active since at least July 2025. It's assessed to pick up from where Operation SyncHole left off. "The group targeted victims more selectively, sending spear‑phishing emails with links to fabricated but relevant sites, such as portfolio and résumé pages tailored to each target," Sojun Ryu, senior security researcher at Kaspersky GReAT, said in an exhaustive analysis. Operation SyncHole was first documented by Kaspersky in April 2025, detailing the state-sponsored adversary's targeting of South Korea's software, IT, financial, semiconductor manufacturing, and telecommunications industries since November 2024 to deliver malwa...

OpenAI's compaction feature, which shrinks a long conversation to save space, could be turned into a way to copy a model's hidden reasoning out in plain text,  security firm Xint  has shown. OpenAI's reasoning models work through a problem before answering, and the service normally returns only the raw reasoning as  an encrypted item  the user cannot read. The method got past the protections OpenAI added in August against this kind of reasoning theft. OpenAI confirmed the problem and fixed it on October 23, according to Xint. Xint ran the technique against gpt-5.6-sol, one of OpenAI's reasoning models, using math and algorithm puzzles its researchers wrote themselves. The reasoning it pulled out came from those same requests, and Xint did not claim the method could reach another user's reasoning. Xint says it cannot prove the copied text is word-for-word the model's real reasoning, because it never had the original to compare against. Two cheaper models e...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has issued an alert warning of unauthorized remote access to video surveillance systems manufactured by Dahua. "Cases of compromising IP cameras and DVRs with access to the video stream, changing the device configuration and creating third-party accounts have been recorded," the State Special Communications Service of Ukraine (SSSCIP) said in an alert issued last week. The primary initial access vector used in the attacks is via Easy4IP , a peer-to-peer (P2P) platform that allows users to remotely monitor homes or small businesses by connecting their Dahua IP cameras, NVRs, and DVRs via a smartphone app or web browser by scanning a QR code or entering the hardware Serial Number (SN). The agency has warned that the serial numbers have a predictable structure containing a 10-character model prefix that's identical for all units of the same device family and a five-character hexadecimal counter that's i...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday confirmed active exploitation of the recently patched PHP2Shell flaws by adding them to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog. The PHP vulnerabilities, both rated 9.2 on the CVSS scoring system, facilitate unauthenticated remote code execution on affected deployments - CVE-2026-109618 - An out-of-memory corruption vulnerability that allows for unauthenticated remote code execution. CVE-2026-109619 - A stale internal request-state vulnerability that allows for unauthenticated remote code execution. The addition of the two flaws to the KEV catalog comes after Adel Karimi, detection and response lead at Perplexity, confirmed successful instances of remote code execution against honeypot systems on October 24, 2026. "This is now confirmed RCE with usable memory disclosure, not just a crash followed by a suspicious process," Karimi said . "The response delivered an 800 ...

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. When the report was published, Tailscale had issued no  security bulletin , no CVE identifier, and no fixed version. The company has since said a patched client is close, as detailed in the update below. Tailscale ha...

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...