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Two MikroTik RouterOS SSH vulnerabilities chained together let attackers take full administrative control of Internet-exposed routers without a password, SSH key, or completed authentication. The chain, which CERT Polska calls MikroTrick , combines an SSH state-machine flaw ( CVE-2026-67279 ) with an argument-injection bug in the RouterOS login process ( CVE-2026-86060 ). Attack logs date to at least September 2, one day before MikroTik shipped patches in RouterOS 6.49.21, 7.23.4, and 7.24.2. As  previously reported , CERT Polska warned on September 5 that attackers were using RouterOS flaws to take control of devices whose SSH service was reachable from public networks. That warning confirmed the exploitation and urged immediate patching but did not identify which two flaws formed the chain or explain how they combined. This latest analysis provides both. How the Chain Works SSH requires three steps in order: it establishes an encrypted connection, authentica...

A flaw in cPanel's  CalDAV and CardDAV service  lets anyone with a cPanel hosting account run code as root and take "full control of the server," the company said on September 22. A  second bug in the WP Toolkit plugin, used to install and manage WordPress sites, allows an account holder to change databases that belong to other accounts. cPanel has released fixed versions for both, along with a fix for a  third flaw  in the same service, which stores each account's calendars and contacts. That third flaw lets a local user on the server read other accounts' calendar events and contacts, but not change them or gain root access. cPanel lists no requirements for the root flaw other than having an account. On a shared server where a hosting provider sells accounts to the public, that means any customer could use it. So could anyone who gets hold of a customer's login. The three flaws and the versions that fix them:

Autonomous security agents are getting good at finding bugs. Nobody has a good way to measure how good. Point one at a realistic target and what comes back is a report the agent wrote about itself: confident prose, a list of findings, and no way to tell which of them happened. Someone with a security background then sits down and checks every claim against the target. Which findings are real, which are duplicates, which are inventions, and, the question nobody has time for, what did the agent never try? That is a day of expert work for one run. Multiply it by three models, four prompt variants and ten repetitions, and the review queue is longer than the experiment. XRanges for AI, built by CTF.ae, exists for that loop. It deploys realistic target applications with instrumentation baked into every service, records what an agent actually does inside them, and scores each run live on four independent signals. This walkthrough covers how it works, what a run looks like from deployment t...

A use-after-free in the Linux kernel's AF_UNIX socket subsystem can be used to escape a container and gain root on the host, security firm DepthFirst  said in research published September 22. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2026-80521  (CVSS score: 7.8), was fixed upstream on August 6, but Ubuntu has not shipped the patch for its 26.04, 24.04, or 22.04 LTS releases. DepthFirst  released exploit code  targeting Ubuntu 26.04. Ubuntu's security tracker  lists the Linux package on 26.04 as "vulnerable, work in progress." The 24.04 and 22.04 releases are also affected through newer kernel packages, including those for AWS, Azure, and GCP workloads. No fix has shipped on any affected release. The flaw is not in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and there are no confirmed reports of attacks using it. The vulnerability sits in the kernel's garbage collector for AF_UNIX sockets. That collector cleans up file descriptors passed between processes t...

Attackers are exploiting a critical flaw in F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) that lets them run code on a BIG-IP system without logging in, F5 says. The flaw,  CVE-2026-94127 , affects only systems in which APM serves as an OAuth authorization server, issuing access tokens to applications. F5 disclosed it in  an advisory  on September 22 and has released engineering hotfixes. APM is the BIG-IP module that controls how users reach an organization's applications and networks. The vulnerable setup has an APM access policy and an OAuth authorization server profile on the same virtual server, which hosts the BIG-IP address that receives the OAuth traffic. Specific malicious traffic sent to that virtual server can lead to remote code execution. The flaw is a heap-based buffer overflow. F5 rates it 9.8 out of 10 on CVSS v3.1 and 9.3 on CVSS v4.0. Because the malicious traffic goes to the virtual server itself, limiting access to the BIG-IP management interface does...

A Chinese threat actor codenamed UTA0565 has been observed exploiting the recently disclosed Google Chrome-Microsoft Windows exploit chain as zero-days through fake websites. The attacks, detected on September 3 and 4, 2026, involved the chaining of two vulnerabilities in Chrome (CVE-2026-85046, CVE-2026-87491) and one impacting Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call (CVE-2026-85880) to break out of the browser's sandbox and achieve remote code execution. "UTA0565 masqueraded as various entities including media organizations and a non-governmental organization (NGO)," Volexity researchers Damien Cash and Tom Lancaster said in an analysis published this week. "Notably, this threat actor's campaigns differed from previously documented attacks by using multiple fake websites to deceive victims." One such campaign targeted Asian government entities with Chinese- and English-language phishing emails that urged recipients to support Hong Kong activist Cho...

A new security vulnerability in Next.js could allow attackers to run code on a server via  ImageResponse , the feature that generates Open Graph and other social preview images, Vercel said. The risk applies when an app puts values an attacker controls, such as text read from the request URL, into the image. Vercel, which develops Next.js,  fixed the flaw  on September 22 in version 16.3.6. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-94545 , affects Next.js 16.2.0 through 16.3.5 when ImageResponse runs on the Node.js runtime, which Next.js  uses by default . Vercel's  advisory  rates it critical, with a CVSS score of 9.5. The Edge version of ImageResponse is not affected, and neither is Next.js 15. ImageResponse uses  Satori , a Vercel library, to convert the image layout into SVG code before the final PNG is generated. Affected apps are those that "pass attacker-controlled values into SVG content, attributes, or styles during image generation", according to ...

The cyber extortion group known as ShinyHunters on Tuesday claimed it had breached the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and stolen data belonging to current and former employees at the agency. "We have compromised the FBI. We hold very sensitive data on almost ALL FBI Agents and individuals who filed an application with the FBI for a job," the group said in a statement posted on their dark web site. "Whether it be a Special Agent or any other role within your agency. The following FBI services were compromised: Criminal Justice (CJ), HR, Medlink, and more." The development was first reported by 404 Media. ShinyHunters said the FBI was targeted in response to a May 2026 public service announcement (PSA) that detailed the threat actor's targeting of Canvas , an online Learning Management System (LMS), while urging victims not to pay. The attackers, in their own counter PSA, described them as "substantial false allegations," adding, "w...

Attackers exploited a previously unknown flaw in Check Point's Security Management Server in a handful of targeted attacks on July 23,  the company said . The flaw, CVE-2026-93616 , allows an attacker who can access the server's web service to run scripts on it without logging in. Check Point released a fix on September 22 for the server that controls firewall policies for the Check Point gateways it manages. Separately,  Check Point said  attackers have been trying since September 12 to exploit a VPN flaw it  fixed on September 9 . The attempts, against a flaw tracked as CVE-2026-85102, have targeted customers of Spark, Check Point's firewall line for small businesses. When the fix came out, Check Point had no evidence the flaw was being exploited. CVE-2026-93616 is a path traversal bug in the management server's web service. The service does not properly limit which files and folders a request can reach. An attacker can use it to upload scripts to the s...

WordPress has fixed a critical flaw in its core software that lets an attacker with no account make a site load a PHP file from outside its theme folders. On some servers, that can go further, allowing the attacker to run their own code. The fix shipped on September 22 in WordPress 7.1.2, with fixes for every branch the project still supports, back to 4.7, and WordPress is telling site owners to  update now . WordPress rates the flaw as critical, assigns it a CVSS score of 9.2, and assigns it  CVE-2026-87902 . Reaching it requires no account and no action from a logged-in user. Every version from 4.7.0 through 7.1.1 is affected. That includes 7.1.1, from WordPress's  September 17 security release , so a site updated less than a week ago still needs this one. It is a separate flaw from the ones that the release fixed.

A critical vulnerability in  Bifrost , an open-source AI gateway that routes requests to more than 20 LLM providers, allows an unauthenticated attacker to run arbitrary commands on the gateway server with a single HTTP request. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2026-90898  (CVSS score: 9.8), affects all versions of the Bifrost HTTP transport before 2.1.0 when management authentication is disabled, which is the default configuration. A fix is available in transports/v2.1.0. Yuval Moravchick of  JFrog Security Research , who discovered the flaw, said an attacker can register a stdio-type MCP client through a single unauthenticated POST to the management API endpoint /api/mcp/client. Bifrost starts the specified command immediately, before any MCP handshake, as the gateway process user. On the official Docker image, that user is appuser. Because the gateway stores API keys for every connected provider, executing commands on the gateway process grants the attack...

A zero-day proof-of-concept tool that stops Microsoft Defender from installing platform and signature updates by filling all available disk space was  published on GitHub  on September 19. The tool, called BigDiskBuster , has no patch, no CVE, and no Microsoft advisory. Its author, Abdelhamid Naceri, is a former Microsoft security researcher whose earlier Defender exploits were used in attacks. When updates are blocked, Defender keeps running, but its detection content grows stale. The researcher's screenshot shows Defender returning a generic Windows error when trying to update, but whether the failure raises an automatic alert is not clear from the proof-of-concept alone. Naceri said he was dismissed from Microsoft's Security Response Center in 2024 and has been releasing exploits without coordinating with the company since April. His first three Defender tools — BlueHammer, RedSun, and UnDefend — were all  exploited in live intrusions  before Microsoft...

Attackers are exploiting a new flaw in on-premises VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO), the server that manages the Edge devices in a VeloCloud SD-WAN, Arista said on September 22. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-93952 , may allow a remote attacker with no login access to privilege internal functions and affect the VCO host. Only orchestrators set up to authenticate their Edges with certificates are exposed. As of September 22,  fixed releases  are out for the 5.2 and 6.4 release trains, but not yet for the 6.1 and 7.0 trains. Arista has already patched the Hosted and Dedicated versions of VCO. The affected releases include those that fixed a different VCO flaw, which Arista reported as  exploited in July . Arista gave the flaw a CVSS 3.1 score of 10.0. A successful attack may compromise the orchestrator and the data it manages. A compromised VCO may also give attackers access to the Edge devices it manages. Arista said the flaw "was discovered externally and is known t...

A new flaw in the Linux kernel's KVM virtualization code for ARM64 processors can leave a freed piece of host memory exposed to a guest virtual machine on hosts with nested virtualization enabled. The bug, tracked as  CVE-2026-89775 , allows a guest to read and write host kernel memory, and the researcher who found it says it can be used to escape the guest and run code on the host machine. The affected code is part of the mainline Linux kernel for ARM64, and it is fixed in Linux 6.18.51, 7.2.5, and 7.3-rc1. Nested virtualization allows a guest to run its own hypervisor, enabling it to host virtual machines. On ARM64, it is off by default. It is  an experimental boot-time mode  that needs Armv8.4 hardware with a feature called FEAT_NV2, so a plain ARM64 KVM host that never turns it on is outside the reported attack path. The flaw sits in the part of KVM that handles nested virtualization on ARM64. When a guest arranges its memory in a certain way, a size calculat...

A SharePoint Server vulnerability that Microsoft initially classified as a spoofing flaw with a CVSS score of 6.5 actually enables authenticated remote code execution, according to full technical details published today by Viettel Cyber Security researcher Dinh Ho Anh Khoa. The flaw, CVE-2026-65660 , affects SharePoint Server 2016, 2019, and Subscription Edition. Patches have been available since the  August 11 security updates , and the National Vulnerability Database scores it 8.8. Microsoft's advisory  describes CVE-2026-65660 as allowing an authorized attacker to perform spoofing and assigns no impact to integrity or availability. The CVE record that Microsoft publishes separately, updated on September 11, titles the same flaw a remote code execution vulnerability and says it allows an authorized attacker to execute code. Both records assign CWE-94, a code-injection weakness. Defenders who triaged CVE-2026-65660 based on the advisory saw a moderate spoofi...

Malware already running on a Mac can quietly take over Meta's Muse assistant and use the broad access its owner granted the app, security researcher Patrick Wardle has shown in a  proof-of-concept  released on September 21. It works by changing a hidden setting so that when the user taps the microphone and dictates a prompt, the words go to the attacker instead of Meta. The flaw is in the Mac version of Muse, and it only works if an attacker can already run code as the logged-in user. It cannot break into a Mac on its own. But Wardle told The Hacker News that a remote attacker could hijack Muse and steal its token through a ClickFix trick, which fools the user into running a single command with nothing to download or install. Muse is the personal AI agent Meta  launched this month  in the United States. Once a user turns it on, it can work across their files, email, messages, calendar, shopping and smart-home apps, using whatever access the person chooses to g...

A new flaw in WordPress core let an anonymous visitor leave a comment that planted a hidden script on the page. If a logged-in administrator later opened that page, the script could run code on the site's server. WordPress fixed the flaw, tracked as  CVE-2026-93485  and called " Comment2Shell ," on September 17 in  version 7.1.1  and told site owners to update right away. There is no sign it has been used in attacks, and it is not on the U.S. government's list of actively exploited software flaws. Patchstack, the company that assigned that identifier, rated the flaw 7.1 out of 10 on the CVSS scale. WordPress checks a comment for dangerous HTML when it is saved, then reformats it when the page is shown, and the flaw sat in the gap between those two steps. Rafie Muhammad, the security researcher who reported the bug, laid out the full chain in  a write-up  on September 21. The trick was a line break placed inside the attribute of an allowed HTML tag ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a now-patched security flaw impacting Zyxel GS1900 series switches to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-7273 (CVSS score: 8.8), is a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability that could result in arbitrary operating system (OS) command execution. "A stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in the CGI program of the Zyxel GS1900 series switch firmware could allow a LAN-based, unauthenticated attacker to exploit the flaw and potentially execute OS commands via a crafted HTTP request," Zyxel said in an advisory released in June 2026.  The issue has been addressed in the following versions -

A browser. A plugin. A package. A login screen. Normal stuff. That is basically the problem this week. The trouble keeps showing up inside things people already trust: code that takes a bad turn, old payloads coming back, exposed systems, weak checks, fake fixes, and attack paths that look almost too easy. Even the research side is getting messy, with more findings, more automation, and not always more clarity. Nothing here needs much drama. Just a lot of small doors left open. Here’s what happened. ⚡ Threat of the Week Cisco Warns of Actively Exploited ISE Auth Bypass — Cisco warned of a fresh maximum-severity security flaw impacting Identity Services Engine (ISE) that has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76460 (CVSS score: 10.0), could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication. "This vulnerability is due to insufficient authentication control on an API endpoint," Cisco said. "An attacker could exp...

Three researchers at the security firm  Hacktron  used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 to chain two flaws and take over the ChatGPT and Codex accounts of several OpenAI employees, then reach an internal OpenAI code repository. The chain began with a bug in the software that runs OpenAI's public help forum and moved through a weakness in OpenAI's own login system. This was security research, not a real-world attack: the team reported the flaws to OpenAI, proved the access with a harmless pull request, and then stopped. From the first look, that internal access took under 72 hours. OpenAI confirmed a fix about 14 hours after the report, according to Hacktron, and on September 1 paid the team a $6,500 bounty. OpenAI said the award "recognizes the OpenAI-side finding, not the actions against Discourse," the open-source software that runs the forum. Testing the forum itself was outside its bug bounty program. OpenAI has not publicly described the login flaw, and it ...