Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

WordPress has fixed a pre-authentication reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in its login screen that affects every version of the content management system. pwn.ai demonstrated how the flaw can be chained into PHP code execution on the server when a logged-in administrator interacts with an attacker-controlled page. Tracked as  CVE-2026-64638  (CVSS score: 8.9), the high-severity vulnerability requires no attacker privileges. According to pwn.ai , which discovered the flaw and shared technical details with The Hacker News, the login-page XSS requires no authentication. Once a crafted username reaches the failed-login error page, the resulting JavaScript executes in the visitor's browser with no further interaction required on that page. The code-execution path requires a victim already logged in as an Administrator and explicit interaction with an attacker-controlled page. In pwn.ai's demonstration, that interaction is one ordinary click. The researchers told Th...

A use-after-free bug in Linux's SCTP networking code can be turned into full root on a host, and Tencent researchers say they used it to escape a container and reach the machine underneath. The flaw has existed since 2008. The fix already shipped: stable kernels 7.1.6, 6.18.42, 6.12.101 and 6.6.148, released August 3, close it. Anyone running an older kernel with SCTP reachable should update. Tracked as  CVE-2026-64564  and named SCTPhantom by its finders, the flaw was disclosed publicly on August 6, two days after the kernel CVE team assigned it. No public exploit code had surfaced at the time of writing, and The Hacker News found no entry for the flaw in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog as of August 7. The flaw is local, not remote, and it needs SCTP reachable on the target, which limits exposure. Where those conditions held, Tencent Zhuque Lab reports it got root on the kernel builds it tested for Debian 13, Ubuntu 24.04, Rocky Linux 9 and RHEL 9, and ...

Security researcher Malcolm Stagg has disclosed a new attack class called  NatJack  that manipulates network address translation (NAT) connection state to hijack active TCP sessions, spoof DNS responses, expose mapped ports, and exhaust NAT tables. Presented at Black Hat USA 2026 , the research found affected behavior across independently developed implementations, including Windows and Linux. Two implementation-specific flaws have been assigned CVEs:  CVE-2026-56181  (CVSS score: 8.3) in Windows NAT used by Hyper-V, and  CVE-2026-63913  (CVSS score: 8.2) in Linux Netfilter conntrack. NatJack generally requires the attacker to have privileged access to a system behind the same NAT as the victim. The mitigation guidance therefore emphasizes separating untrusted workloads from trusted systems that share NAT infrastructure. There is no single patch for the broader attack class. Organizations should apply available Windows and Linux updates and encryp...

PortSwigger says HTTP Terminator, an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted research system built by James Kettle , generated and proved new HTTP desynchronization techniques after exploring 30,000 candidate desync vectors. PortSwigger said a separate human-guided discovery cascade also exposed a zero-day in Apache Traffic Server. Kettle said HTTP Terminator tested 30,000 websites where scanning was authorized through bug bounty or vulnerability disclosure programs and found roughly 700 vulnerable targets before deeper validation and RQP research. Kettle said those findings involved banks, government infrastructure, security products, and an airport. The research produced new desync triggers, a dual-matching Content-Length pattern, and a "dangling-byte" technique designed to make response queue poisoning (RQP) more reliable. RQP can potentially make a front end lose track of which back-end response belongs to which user, potentially exposing another user's resp...

Entra ID researcher Dirk-jan Mollema demonstrated that malware already running in a signed-in Windows session can silently use the victim's Windows Hello for Business key to authenticate to Microsoft Entra ID. The attacker can then establish longer-term cloud access, register a device it controls, obtain a Primary Refresh Token (PRT), and add further authentication methods where tenant policies permit. On TPM-backed systems, the attacker does not extract the private key, recover the PIN, or trigger a biometric prompt. Windows ticketing keeps private-key operations available while the user is interactively signed in, allowing code running as the user to ask Windows to sign authentication data. Administrator privileges are not required. The technique requires code execution in the victim's signed-in session. Mollema describes the behavior as a consequence of how Windows Hello for Business works and says it was left as-is. The disclosure does not report active exploitatio...