Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

This week starts small. A token leaks. A bad package slips in. A login trick works. An old tool shows up again. At first, it feels like the usual mess. Then you see the pattern: attackers are not always breaking in. They are using the parts we already trust. That is what makes it worrying. The danger is in normal things now - updates, apps, cloud buttons, support chats, trusted accounts. AI does not make the attacks magic. It just helps people try more things, faster. Here's what showed up this week. 47 zero-days exposed 47 0-Days Discovered in Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 The Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 hacking contest has concluded, with security researchers collecting $1,298,250 in rewards after exploiting 47 zero-day flaws in various products from Windows, Linux, VMware, and NVIDIA. DEVCORE won the event with 50.5 Master of Pwn points and $505,000 in rewards throughout the three-day contest after hacking Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft E...

Microsoft has disclosed that a privilege escalation and a denial-of-service flaw in Defender has come under active exploitation in the wild. The former, tracked as CVE-2026-41091 , is rated 7.8 on the CVSS scoring system. Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. "Improper link resolution before file access ('link following') in Microsoft Defender allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally," Microsoft said in an advisory. The second vulnerability under exploitation is CVE-2026-45498 (CVSS score: 4.0), a denial-of-service bug impacting Defender. The two vulnerabilities have been addressed in Microsoft Defender Antimalware Platform versions 1.1.26040.8 and 4.18.26040.7, respectively. The tech giant noted that systems that have disabled Microsoft Defender are not susceptible to the vulnerability, adding that no action is required to install the update since it automatically updates malware definition...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a vulnerability in the Linux kernel that remained undetected for nine years. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-46333 (CVSS score: 5.5), is a case of improper privilege management that could permit an unprivileged local user to disclose sensitive files and execute arbitrary commands as root on default installations of several major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. It's also codenamed ssh-keysign-pwn. According to Qualys, which discovered the flaw, the problem is rooted in the kernel's __ptrace_may_access() function and was introduced in November 2016. "The primitive is reliable and turns any local shell into a path to root or to sensitive credential material," Saeed Abbasi, senior manager of Threat Research Unit at Qualys, said . Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit a local attacker to disclose /etc/shadow and host private keys under /etc/ssh/*_key, as well as execute arbitrary...

Drupal has released security updates for a "highly critical" security vulnerability in Drupal Core that could be exploited by attackers to achieve remote code execution, privilege escalation, or information disclosure. The vulnerability, now tracked as CVE-2026-9082 , carries a CVSS score of 6.5 out of 10.0, per CVE.org. Drupal said the vulnerability resides in a database abstraction API that is used in Drupal Core to validate queries and ensure they are sanitized against SQL injection attacks. "A vulnerability in this API allows an attacker to send specially crafted requests, resulting in arbitrary SQL injection for sites using PostgreSQL databases," it said . "This can lead to information disclosure, and in some cases privilege escalation, remote code execution, or other attacks." Drupal noted the security flaw can be exploited by anonymous users, and impacts only sites that use PostgreSQL. The following versions address the issue - Drupal 11.3.10 ...

Microsoft on Tuesday released a mitigation for a BitLocker bypass vulnerability named YellowKey following its public disclosure last week. The zero-day flaw, now tracked as CVE-2026-45585 , carries a CVSS score of 6.8. It has been described as a BitLocker security feature bypass. "Microsoft is aware of a security feature bypass vulnerability in Windows publicly referred to as 'YellowKey,'" the tech giant said in an advisory. "The proof of concept for this vulnerability has been made public, violating coordinated vulnerability best practices." The issue impacts Windows 11 version 26H1 for x64-based Systems, Windows 11 Version 24H2 for x64-based Systems, Windows 11 Version 25H2 for x64-based Systems, Windows Server 2025, and Windows Server 2025 (Server Core installation). YellowKey was disclosed by a security researcher named Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse). It essentially involves placing specially crafted 'FsTx' files on a USB driv...

Proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code has now been released for a recently patched security flaw in the Linux kernel that could allow for local privilege escalation (LPE). Dubbed DirtyDecrypt (aka DirtyCBC), the vulnerability was discovered and reported by the Zellic and V12 security team on May 9, 2026, only to be informed by the maintainers that it was a duplicate of a vulnerability that had already been patched in the mainline. "It's a rxgk pagecache write due to missing COW [copy-on-write] guard in rxgk_decrypt_skb," Zellic co-founder Luna Tong (aka cts and gf_256) said in a description shared on GitHub. Although the CVE identifier was not disclosed, the vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-31635 (CVSS score: 7.5) based on the fact that the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD) includes a link to the DirtyDecrypt PoC in its CVE record. "The specific fault sits in rxgk_decrypt_skb(), the function that decrypts an incoming sk_buff (socket buffer) on th...

Drupal has issued an alert stating that it intends to release a "core security release" for all supported branches on May 20, 2026, from 5-9 p.m. UTC. "The Drupal Security Team urges you to reserve time for core updates at that time because exploits might be developed within hours or days," the maintainers of the PHP-based content management system (CMS) said . "Not all configurations are affected. Reserve time on May 20 during the release window to determine whether your sites are affected and in need of an immediate update. Mitigation information will be included in the advisory." It's being advised to update to the latest supported patch for the site's version of Drupal before the deadline so that any outstanding upgrade issues can be addressed. Patches are expected to be available for the following supported branches of Drupal core - 11.3.x 11.2.x 10.6.x 10.5.x "Sites on one of these supported versions should updat...

Critical security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in SEPPMail Secure E-Mail Gateway , an enterprise-grade email security solution, that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution and enable an attacker to read arbitrary mails from the virtual appliance. "These vulnerabilities could have been exploited to read all mail traffic or as an entry vector into the internal network," InfoGuard Labs researchers Dario Weiss, Manuel Feifel, and Olivier Becker said in a Monday report. The list of identified flaws is as follows - CVE-2026-2743 (CVSS score: 10.0) - A path traversal vulnerability in the SeppMail User Web Interface's large file transfer (LFT) feature that could enable arbitrary file write, resulting in remote code execution. CVE-2026-7864 (CVSS score: 6.9) - An exposure of sensitive system information vulnerability that leaks server environment variables through an unauthenticated endpoint in the new GINA UI. CVE-2026-44125 (CVSS score: 9.3) - A mi...

Monday opens with a trust problem. A mail server flaw is under active use. A network control system was targeted. Trusted packages were poisoned. A fake model page pushed a stealer. Then came the familiar ransom claim: the data was returned and deleted. The pattern is clear. One weak dependency can leak keys. One leaked key can open cloud access. One cloud foothold can become a production incident. AI is speeding up vulnerability discovery, attackers are moving quickly, and old exposure still keeps paying off. Patch the quiet risks first. Let’s get into it. ⚡ Threat of the Week On-Prem Microsoft Exchange Server Exploited in the Wild —Microsoft disclosed a security vulnerability impacting on-premise versions of Exchange Server, which has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42897 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been described as a spoofing bug stemming from a cross-site scripting flaw. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering ...

Ivanti, Fortinet, n8n, SAP, and VMware have released security fixes for various vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors to bypass authentication and execute arbitrary code. Topping the list is a critical flaw impacting Ivanti Xtraction (CVE-2026-8043, CVSS score: 9.6) that could be exploited to achieve information disclosure or client-side attacks. "External control of a file name in Ivanti Xtraction before version 2026.2 allows a remote authenticated attacker to read sensitive files and write arbitrary HTML files to a web directory, leading to information disclosure and possible client-side attacks," Ivanti said in an advisory. Fortinet published advisories for two critical shortcomings affecting FortiAuthenticator and FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud, and FortiSandbox PaaS that could result in code execution - CVE-2026-44277 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An improper access control vulnerability in FortiAuthenticator that may allow an unauthenticated attacker to...

Chaotic Eclipse, the security researcher behind the recently disclosed Windows flaws, YellowKey and GreenPlasma , has released a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a Windows privilege escalation zero-day flaw that grants attackers SYSTEM privileges on fully patched Windows systems. Codenamed MiniPlasma , the vulnerability impacts "cldflt.sys," which refers to the Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver, and resides in a routine named "HsmOsBlockPlaceholderAccess." It was originally reported to Microsoft by Google Project Zero researcher James Forshaw in September 2020. Although it was assumed that the shortcoming was fixed by Microsoft in December 2020 as part of CVE-2020-17103 , Chaotic Eclipse said further investigation has uncovered that the "exact same issue [...] is actually still present, unpatched." "I'm unsure if Microsoft just never patched the issue or the patch was silently rolled back at some point for unknown reasons. The original PoC by...

A newly disclosed security flaw impacting NGINX Plus and NGINX Open has come under active exploitation in the wild, days after its public disclosure, according to VulnCheck . The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42945 (CVSS score: 9.2), is a heap buffer overflow in ngx_http_rewrite_module affecting NGINX versions 0.6.27 through 1.30.0. According to AI-native security company depthfirst, the vulnerability was introduced in 2008. Successful exploitation of the flaw can permit an unauthenticated attacker to crash worker processes or execute remote code with crafted HTTP requests. However, it bears noting that code execution is possible only on devices where Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), a safeguard against memory-based attacks, is turned off.

A critical security vulnerability impacting the Funnel Builder plugin for WordPress has come under active exploitation in the wild to inject malicious JavaScript code into WooCommerce checkout pages with the goal of stealing payment data. Details of the activity were published by Sansec this week. The vulnerability currently does not have an official CVE identifier. It affects all versions of the plugin before 3.15.0.3. It's used in more than 40,000 WooCommerce stores.  The flaw lets unauthenticated attackers inject arbitrary JavaScript into every checkout page on the store, the Dutch e-commerce security company said. FunnelKit, which maintains Funnel Builder, has released a patch for the vulnerability in version 3.15.0.3. "Attackers are planting fake Google Tag Manager scripts into the plugin's 'External Scripts' setting," it noted. "The injected code looks like ordinary analytics next to the store's real tags, but...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a set of four security flaws in OpenClaw that could be chained to achieve data theft, privilege escalation, and persistence. The vulnerabilities, collectively dubbed Claw Chain by Cyera, can permit an attacker to establish a foothold, expose sensitive data, and plant backdoors. A brief description of the flaws is below - CVE-2026-44112 (CVSS score: 9.6/6.3) - A time-of-check/time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition vulnerability in the OpenShell managed sandbox backend that allows attackers to bypass sandbox restrictions and redirect writes outside the intended mount root.  CVE-2026-44113 (CVSS score: 7.7/6.3) - A TOCTOU race condition vulnerability in OpenShell that allows attackers to bypass sandbox restrictions and read files outside the intended mount root. CVE-2026-44115 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An incomplete list of disallowed inputs vuln...

Microsoft has disclosed a new security vulnerability impacting on-premise versions of Exchange Server that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42897 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been described as a spoofing bug stemming from a cross-site scripting flaw. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. "Improper neutralization of input during web page generation ('cross-site scripting') in Microsoft Exchange Server allows an unauthorized attacker to perform spoofing over a network," the tech giant said in a Thursday advisory. Microsoft, which tagged the vulnerability with an "Exploitation Detected" assessment, said an attacker could weaponize it by sending a crafted email to a user, which, when opened in Outlook Web Access and subject to other "certain interaction conditions," can allow arbitrary JavaScript code to be executed in the context of the web brow...

The U.S.Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a newly disclosed vulnerability impacting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to remediate the issue by May 17, 2026. The vulnerability is a critical authentication bypass tracked as CVE-2026-20182 . It's rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system, indicating maximum severity. "Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller and Manager contain an authentication bypass vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administrative privileges on an affected system," CISA said . In a separate advisory, Cisco attributed the active exploitation of CVE-2026-20182 with high confidence to UAT-8616 , the same cluster behind the weaponization of CVE-2026-20127 to gain unauthorized access to SD-WAN systems. "UAT-8616 performed similar post-compromise ...

Cisco has released updates to address a maximum-severity authentication bypass flaw in Catalyst SD-WAN Controller that it said has been exploited in limited attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20182 , carries a CVSS score of 10.0. "A vulnerability in the peering authentication in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller, formerly SD-WAN vSmart, and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly SD-WAN vManage, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administrative privileges on an affected system," Cisco said . The networking equipment major said the flaw stems from a malfunction of the peering authentication mechanism, which an attacker could exploit by sending crafted requests to the affected system. A successful exploit could permit the attacker to log in to the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller as an internal, high-privileged, non-root user account, and then weaponize it to access NETCONF and manipulate network configuration f...

Everything is still on fire. This week feels dumb in the worst way — bad links, weak checks, fake help desks, shady forum posts, and people turning supply chain attacks into some cursed little game for clout and cash. Half of it feels new. Half of it feels like crap we should have fixed years ago. The mess keeps getting louder: users get tricked, boxes get popped, tools meant for normal work get used for bad stuff, and nobody seems shocked anymore. Great. Love that for us. Anyway. Let’s get into it. Exploited PAN-OS RCE Palo Alto Networks Releases Fixes for Exploited Flaw Palo Alto Networks has released the first round of fixes to address CVE-2026-0300 , a critical buffer overflow vulnerability in the User-ID Authentication Portal service of PAN-OS software that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges by sending specially crafted packets. The company said it has observed the flaw being...

Threat actors have been observed attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security vulnerability in PraisonAI , an open-source multi-agent orchestration framework, within four hours of its public disclosure. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-44338 (CVSS score: 7.3), a case of missing authentication that exposes sensitive endpoints to anyone, potentially allowing an attacker to invoke the API server's protected functionality without a token.  " PraisonAI ships a legacy Flask API server with authentication disabled by default," according to an advisory released by the maintainers earlier this month. "When that server is used, any caller that can reach it can access /agents and trigger the configured agents.yaml workflow through /chat without providing a token." Specifically, the legacy Flask-based API server, src/praisonai/api_server.py, hard-codes AUTH_ENABLED = False and AUTH_TOKEN = None. According to PraisonAI, successful exploitation of the...

An anonymous cybersecurity researcher who disclosed three Microsoft Defender vulnerabilities has returned with two more zero-days involving a BitLocker bypass and a privilege escalation impacting Windows Collaborative Translation Framework (CTFMON). The security defects have been codenamed YellowKey and GreenPlasma , respectively, by the researcher, who goes by the online aliases Chaotic Eclipse and Nightmare-Eclipse. The researcher described YellowKey as "one of the most insane discoveries I ever found," likening the BitLocker bypass to functioning as a backdoor, as the bug is present only in the Windows Recovery Environment ( WinRE ), a built-in framework designed to troubleshoot and repair common unbootable operating system issues. YellowKey affects Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022/2025. At a high level, it involves copying specially crafted "FsTx" files on a USB drive or the EFI partition, plugging the USB drive into the target Windows computer with Bit...