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Security researchers at Forever Security have shown that one ordinary browser extension could take control of the AI assistants built into five Chromium-based products: Gemini Live in Chrome, Perplexity Comet, Microsoft Edge, Opera Neon and the Claude in Chrome extension. Once the extension was installed, it could access each product's built-in AI with a single click. On Comet, Edge, Opera Neon, and Claude in Chrome, it could drive the AI agent to act on behalf of the attacker; on Chrome and Comet, it could read files from the user's computer, and on Chrome, it could also switch on the camera and microphone. The findings are researcher demonstrations, not attacks seen in the wild, and each requires the attacker's extension to be already running in the victim's browser. These products all work the same way. The AI has a "body" inside the browser that can see the screen, open files, use the camera, and take actions, and a "brain" that runs on th...

Parallels Desktop for Mac has a flaw that lets an ordinary local account run code as root, the highest level of access on a Mac, software company JFrog said this week. The attack needs code already running on the machine as a normal user, so it does not work over the network. JFrog says the fix is in Parallels Desktop 27, a version that Intel Macs cannot install. Yuval Moravchick, who leads JFrog's vulnerability research team,  published the finding  on Tuesday and calls it ParaShells. The flaw is tracked as  CVE-2026-90894 , an identifier JFrog assigned itself, and JFrog rates it 7.8 out of 10. Parallels Desktop runs Windows and Linux inside virtual machines on a Mac. It installs a background service called prl_disp_service that runs as root, because its work includes setting up host networking and unpacking virtual machine packages. The flaw is on the Mac side of the product, so the machine at risk is the Mac itself rather than the virtual machines on...

Google has disclosed that a high-severity security flaw in its Pixel Cellular Modem has come under exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-58704 (CVSS score: 8.0), is a privilege escalation flaw. "In Cellular Modem, there is a possible permission bypass due to a logic error in the code," according to a description of the bug in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). "This could lead to remote (proximal/adjacent) escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed. User interaction is not needed for exploitation." In an advisory issued Tuesday, Google acknowledged that it has found indications that "CVE-2026-58704 may be under limited, targeted exploitation" but stopped short of sharing any further details surrounding the nature of the attacks exploiting it, as well as the identity of the threat actor behind them. Besides CVE-2026-58704, Google has addressed 109 other security flaws as part of...

Acronis has warned that a high-severity security flaw in its Backup plugin for cPanel and Web Host Manager (WHM) deployments has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-87886 (CVSS score: 7.8), is described as a case of local privilege escalation due to insecure file permissions. It affects the following versions - Acronis Backup plugin for cPanel & WHM (Linux) before build 1.9.3.1021 - Fixed in 1.9.3 HF3 Acronis Backup extension for Plesk (Linux) before build 1.8.11.638 Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker with low privileges to escalate their permissions on a susceptible Linux version, potentially enabling them to perform unauthorized actions or run arbitrary code that could impact the confidentiality and integrity of the application. "This update contains fixes for 1 high-severity security vulnerability and should be installed immediately by all users," Acronis noted in a separate advisory for 1.9.3 HF3...

Threat actors are exploiting a critical security flaw in WooCommerce Wholesale Lead Capture, a premium WordPress plugin that has more than 6,000 active installs. "This vulnerability can be leveraged by unauthenticated attackers to upload arbitrary files, including PHP backdoors, and achieve remote code execution," Wordfence said . The WordPress security company said it has blocked over 100,000 exploit attempts targeting the vulnerability since June 2026, with 99 of those attack attempts recorded over the past 24 hours. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-27540 (CVSS score: 9.8). The issue is a case of arbitrary file uploads due to missing file type validation in an AJAX action named "wwlc_file_upload_handler" that impacts all versions of the plugin up to, and including, 2.0.3.1. This opens the door for an unauthenticated attacker to upload arbitrary files on the affected site's server, paving the way for remote code execution. In the attack obse...

A critical security flaw in WSO2 API Manager has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to findings from watchTowr. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-5430 (CVSS score: 9.8/10.0), is a case of improper verification of a cryptographic signature that could result in account takeover. Hacktron Team has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. "JWT authentication can be bypassed when a token is signed using an unsupported algorithm, allowing unauthorized access," according to an advisory released by WSO2 in May 2026. "Successful exploitation of the vulnerability may lead to unauthorized access, including potential compromise of administrative accounts and full account takeover." The shortcoming affects the following products - WSO2 API Control Plane: 4.6.0, 4.5.0 WSO2 API Manager: 4.6.0, 4.5.0, 4.4.0, 4.3.0, 4.2.0, 4.1.0 WSO2 Traffic Manager: 4.6.0, 4.5.0 WSO2 Universal Gateway: 4.6.0, 4.5.0 Fixes are available...

With artificial intelligence (AI) shrinking the window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation and lowering the barrier to entry for bad actors, new findings from Sysdig show that skilled human operators can move just as swiftly after gaining initial access. In one instance highlighted by the cloud security company, the threat actor pivoted from a vulnerable Marimo notebook to an SSH bastion host in eight seconds using a custom Python toolkit they "wrote and debugged by hand" without any AI agent in the loop. "Eight seconds is the kind of speed we expect to see in AI-assisted attacks," the Sysdig Threat Research Team said . "This operator got there on skill alone, and along the way walked straight past a trap that every agentic threat actor (ATA) we've profiled against this same CVE fell into. Not only can skilled human attackers move at machine speed, but they can also often better evade defenders' detections." The attack chain ha...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a mass-scanning campaign that has targeted Vite deployments siphon sensitive data. The first is an automated effort aimed at internet-exposed Vite development servers that's designed to steal cloud credentials, configurations from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure instances, and infrastructure state files, per F5 Labs . The credential harvesting activity, observed in August 2026, has been found to leverage an exploit for CVE-2026-39364 (CVSS score: 8.2), a high-severity security flaw in Vite that could permit an unauthenticated attacker to bypass security restrictions via query parameter manipulation and leak sensitive data, including files specified by server.fs.deny. "On the Vite dev server, files that should be blocked by server.fs.deny (e.g., .env, *.crt) can be retrieved with HTTP 200 responses when query parameters such as ?raw, ?import&raw, or ?import&url&inline are appended," Vite s...

A critical vulnerability in LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise could let a low-privilege website user gain root access on a shared-hosting server, cPanel warned in an  advisory published on September 14 . On such servers, many customers' sites run on a single machine, and an attacker with one of those hosting accounts could exploit the flaw to access or alter other sites and the server itself, according to the advisory. cPanel said it had received notice of the flaw, which affects versions before 6.3.7, and urged administrators to update to that release, which LiteSpeed  published on September 11 . The flaw can bypass the controls that keep hosting accounts apart, including  CageFS , cPanel said. CageFS is a CloudLinux tool that gives each hosting account a restricted view of the file system, so it cannot see other accounts or the server's configuration files. Neither cPanel's advisory nor LiteSpeed's release notes describe how the flaw works. LiteSpeed's an...

Cisco has warned that a new critical vulnerability impacting AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76461 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been described as a case of insufficient validation in the email parsing logic that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to run arbitrary commands with root privileges on the underlying operating system. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted email message that contains malicious SQL statements through an affected device," Cisco said in a Monday advisory. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary SQL statements, leading to command execution with root privileges on the underlying operating system." The shortcoming affects Cisco Secure Email Gateway, both physical and virtual, regardless of device configuration. However, the networkin...

A Chinese threat actor has been attributed to a spear-phishing campaign that exploits recently patched security flaws in Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows to deliver a malicious JavaScript backdoor called GRIMWEDGE . Volexity, which is tracking the threat cluster under the moniker UTA0560 , said the activity targeted multiple non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on September 1, 2026. "The emails contained a message encouraging the users to click a link that led to the website of a U.S.-based university," researchers Ankur Saini, Conor Quigley, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, and Tom Lancaster said . "These links abused a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on the website, redirecting recipients to threat-actor-controlled infrastructure hosting a multi-stage exploit chain." The exploit chain, as previously highlighted by Proofpoint, involves three separate flaws – two in Chrome and one in Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC). It first ab...

Researchers have disclosed a new hardware attack, called DDRop , that breaks the memory protection in Intel and AMD confidential computing by silently dropping writes to a server's memory, so the processor keeps reading old encrypted data as if it were current. The attack requires an attacker who already controls the server's software and can briefly access the machine to insert a small circuit board, called an interposer , between the processor and a memory module. The interposer costs under $200 to build. DDRop works against Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP, the hardware that cloud services use to keep customer data private while it is in use, even from the cloud provider. Confidential computing keeps a server's memory encrypted, so that even someone with physical access to the machine sees only scrambled data. To cover the large amount of memory that a cloud server uses, though, these designs omit a guarantee called freshness. The processor can confi...

An attacker was operating inside the network of 3BB , one of Thailand's largest broadband providers, and maintained remote control of internal machines using a legitimate management tool called MeshCentral, threat intelligence firm Hunt.io said. The company uncovered the intrusion by examining a server the attacker had left open on the internet, which held the attacker's own tools and a list of machines already under their control. The researchers captured the exposed server on June 3, 2026, while the operation was still live. The tools on it had been run from a computer inside 3BB's own network, and one recovered file showed the attacker gaining full administrative control, known as root, of an internal server. To maintain that access, the attacker installed MeshCentral , a free tool that IT teams typically use to manage computers remotely. The recovered settings show it was configured as a hidden backdoor, with the agents reporting to a control server that the atta...

A flaw in Telegram Desktop let a bot's message plant hidden JavaScript inside chats that users exported to HTML files, security researchers at ExPatch said in a  writeup  published on September 12. In Telegram, the message looked ordinary, with a link button, and the script ran only when someone opened the export file in a web browser. It could then copy every message in that file to an attacker-controlled server, or rewrite what the page displayed. Telegram shipped  a fix  in July, but the app update does not update files exported with earlier versions, so old HTML exports can still carry the script. Telegram Desktop, Telegram's app for Windows, macOS, and Linux, can save a single chat or all chats from an account as HTML pages that open in a browser. Bots can attach rows of buttons under their messages, which Telegram calls inline keyboards, and the bot chooses the text shown on each button. Until the fix, the export code wrote that button text directly ...

A suspected Chinese threat actor tracked as Red Heron has been attributed to the rapid exploitation of a recently disclosed security vulnerability in Gitea to compromise internet-facing instances as part of a multi-national campaign. "Red Heron scanned 1,386 Gitea instances across seven countries and maintained a separate dataset of 477 Taiwan-based systems," Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) said in an analysis. "The activity progressed from source-code theft to persistent access, credential collection, and lateral movement, including root-level access to a three-node Proxmox cluster." The activity is said to have resulted in confirmed compromises affected organizations in Canada (2), Argentina (1), Taiwan (4), the U.S. (4), Qatar (1), and Sri Lanka (1), with the threat actor using Simplified Chinese labels to classify targets spanning defense, election, energy, aerospace, telecommunications, government, public safety, and research sectors. The Singapore ...

WordPress has announced it's launching an automated security review for every release of a plugin before it's distributed through the WordPress.org update API so as to analyze it for potential security issues and ensure there are no risks involved. "New plugins are reviewed before they enter the directory, but updates ship continuously after that," David Perez, WordPress Official Plugin Repository Team Co-Lead, said . "A plugin can be secure today and introduce a vulnerability, or malicious code, in a future release." WordPress said the lack of a "consistent review step" between the commit of a release and the release of a plugin to downstream users meant that it could open the door for malicious attacks. The content management system (CMS) platform noted that its automated review detected a backdoor committed to a release of a plugin with about 20,000 active installations on July 28, 2026. Because the release was within a cooldown window, ...

AI keeps showing up in the wrong places. Attackers are using it to speed up exploits, test defenses, and automate more of the job. Some models are also crossing lines on their own. That is not a great combination. The rest of the week is more familiar: old bugs still working, fresh exploit chains, exposed systems, weak defaults, and simple paths that should have been harder to abuse. A few of these stories are clever. Most are just easy. Here’s what mattered this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenAI Agents Behind May 2026 Attack on RubyGems — The "major malicious attack" that targeted RubyGems in May 2026 was the work of a swarm of OpenAI agents, according to researchers. The event was driven by a cluster of OpenAI agents that engaged in en masse publication of thousands of packages to RubyGems in May and June 2026. "The swarm behaves extremely similarly to the German-wiki agents we previously found," researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von...

There's a lot of noise around AI and cybersecurity right now. What’s actually important is far simpler, if often lost in the hubbub. Vulnerability discovery is getting faster and happening at a much greater scale, while defenders still have to work out which findings actually deserve their action. In the first half of 2026, a whopping 35,853 CVEs were published, roughly 49% more than in the year before. Yet only 495 were catalogued as exploited in the wild during that same period, and 116 were already under attack on the day they became public. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s own disclosure data shows Mythos-class models surfacing 26,153 vulnerability candidates in open-source software, with only 421 of those getting patched upstream. That small exploited subset is a very important point. It tells defenders that treating every vulnerability with a High or Critical CVSS rating as an emergency is not only impossible, it’s actually the wrong model . The critical task security teams fa...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added five security flaws impacting JFrog Artifactory, ConnectWise ScreenConnect , and MikroTik RouterOS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. Details of the vulnerabilities are as follows - CVE-2026-42016 (CVSS score: 8.1) - An incorrect authorization vulnerability in JFrog Artifactory that could lead to privilege escalation due to a validation check of the token signature/issuer and not the token's scope. CVE-2026-42018 (CVSS score: 7.5) - An improper authentication vulnerability in JFrog Artifactory that could return an internal anonymous-user token to an unauthenticated caller when anonymous access is disabled, potentially leaking sensitive resources. CVE-2026-84869 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper privilege management and missing authorization vulnerability in  ConnectWise ScreenConnect that could allow an attacker to fil...

The "major malicious attack" that targeted RubyGems in May 2026 was the work of a swarm of OpenAI agents, according to a new report published by researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx. On May 12, Maciej Mensfeld, senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io, disclosed details of a coordinated cyber attack that targeted the package manager for the Ruby programming language with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days. In a follow-up analysis, Socket highlighted a campaign dubbed GemStuffer that involved a cluster of more than 150 gems that used the package registry as a data exfiltration channel and staged public data scraped from U.K. local government democratic services portals. At that time, the software supply chain security company noted the activity shares the "same abuse pattern" as the broader RubyGems spam-publishing incident. "It's not...