Web Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a WordPress compromise in which threat actors deployed multiple persistence mechanisms to ensure that the final payload kept returning without having to infect the site again. The backdoor has been codenamed SC after the "SC_" markers present in the injected content. Sucuri has described the malware as a "self-healing mesh" that's blockchain-controlled. "The payload lives in at least eight places at once, spread across files, the database, and shared memory, and every one of those places can rebuild all the others," security researcher Gabriel Barbosa said . "Delete the plugin and a drop-in rewrites it. Delete the drop-in and the theme rewrites it. Clean every file on disk, and the next page load restores the whole set from the database or from a shared-memory segment. The result is a circular system with no single point you can remove to stop it." According to Sucuri, the malware does no...

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget on Wednesday confirmed that attackers who stole $387.5 million last week exploited a zero-day flaw in third-party security products, citing ongoing investigation findings from SlowMist. "Their investigation identified malicious activity involving third-party security products, including a zero-day vulnerability, and recovered a customized tool used by the attacker to initiate unauthorized withdrawals," Bitget said in a post on X. On September 24, 2026, the cryptocurrency exchange disclosed that threat actors stole $387.5 million from its hot and warm wallets through a series of unauthorized transfers, prompting it to halt all withdrawals temporarily. Close to $1.1 million in cryptocurrency assets have been frozen by Circle, Tether, and NEAR Intents. In a subsequent analysis , Bitget said the attackers exploited the flaw to obtain high-level internal credentials and use them to issue fraudulent withdrawal commands to the wallet system ...

Threat actors have been observed exploiting a critical pre-authentication command injection vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway to drop web shells and attempt theft of configuration data. LevelBlue's Threat Hunt Operations & Research (THOR) team, which analyzed the exploitation activity across multiple customer environments, said it identified malicious NetScaler authentication events containing attacker-controlled usernames designed to weaponize CVE-2026-88771. CVE-2026-88771 (CVSS score: 9.5) is an improper input validation vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands.  The security flaw, along with CVE-2026-88772, was disclosed last week after reports that the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL) reportedly sent a pre-notification to organizations in the Netherlands that urged organizations to shut their appliances down, citing active exploitation. As of writing, there are currently no d...

Given that the browser is where business apps are accessed and used, it makes sense that attacks are happening there too. Most breaches today begin in a browser session. Often, they never leave it, with the entire attack chain from initial access to exfiltration playing out in the browser. Here are the six most dangerous techniques that should be on every security team's radar in 2026. 1. Phishing for credentials and sessions Modern phishing kits don't just steal passwords — they intercept live sessions. Reverse-proxy adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) kits like Tycoon2FA, Sneaky2FA, and Evilginx relay credentials and session tokens in real time, bypassing most forms of MFA. These kits are sold as turnkey Phishing-as-a-Service platforms with anti-bot protection, dynamic lure generation, and automated session replay — reducing the barrier to sophisticated phishing to effectively zero. At the same time, phishing delivery has moved well beyond email — attackers deliver link...

Unknown threat actors have been observed exploiting a newly patched security flaw in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances to target organizations in North America and Europe. The activity, observed by Mandiant Consulting and Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) in September 2026, has targeted government, financial services, technology, education, and legal and professional services sectors. In a post shared on LinkedIn, Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting, said the targeted intrusions have impacted dozens of organizations, warning of "broad and opportunistic exploitation of CVE-2026-88772 and CVE-2026-88771 by a variety of threat actors in the near term." "Exploitation of CVE-2026-88772 bypasses authentication and triggers an unhandled termination of the NetScaler Packet Processing Engine (NSPPE) to establish initial root-level access," the tech giant said . The attacks have been observed weaponizing the f...

A group of academics from VUSec and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna have disclosed details of a new Spectre CPU vulnerability variant that affects Just-In-Time ( JIT ) engines present in web browsers, language runtimes, and the operating system kernel, across multiple CPU vendors. The new Spectre v2 variant has been codenamed Branch Target Reuse (BTR) . "The key insight is that, while modern CPUs restore architectural code coherence after self-modification, they do not necessarily invalidate stale indirect branch prediction entries (i.e., branch targets)," researchers Sander Wiebing, Yuhui Zhu, Alessandro Biondi, and Cristiano Giuffrida said in an accompanying paper. "In JIT engines, these stale targets can outlive the original code and later be reused when the code cache is repopulated, yielding a transient execute-after-free primitive. This allows attackers to hijack transient control flow to newly generated code at obsolete offsets, bypassing software hardening...

Dutch authorities have confirmed that they arrested a 24-year-old man from Amsterdam in connection with the ShinyHunters group. "It is true that this month a 24-year-old man from Amsterdam was arrested in an investigation into the hacker group ShinyHunters," the Politie Landelijke Opsporing en Interventies said in an X post Monday. Police said the individual is expected to appear before the Rotterdam District Court on September 29, 2026. Although law enforcement officials did not disclose any additional details, independent security journalist Brian Krebs and DataBreaches.Net identified the arrested man as Pepijn van der Stap (aka Umbreon), who was previously apprehended in 2023 for his role in a series of data thefts and extortions. Per DataBreaches.Net, van der Stap was arrested on September 15, 2026. In 2023, it emerged that the individual worked at cybersecurity company Hadrian and volunteered at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD). ...

OpenAI said it has made the decision to pause training of its most powerful models after one of its agents during reinforcement learning (RL) training contacted an external chatbot by exploiting a loophole in its internet-access restrictions. "An agent attempting to complete a search-based training task queried a public chatbot service through a gap in our internet-access restrictions: insufficient DNS filtering in its training sandbox," OpenAI said . "Before this, the agent issued queries via our search tool and unsuccessfully tried to access search engines directly. Note that all internet access apart from the DNS resolver in this report hit our offline webcache and therefore did not access the live internet." OpenAI said it has since added blocking controls at two independent layers to prevent this access in the first place. It also said its misalignment monitoring system detected the behavior within 15 minutes and it was acknowledged by a human reviewer...

Google is warning of renewed mass exploitation of a known security vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft as part of a campaign targeting multiple sectors globally. The ShinyHunters-linked activity involves the weaponization of CVE-2026-35273 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical security flaw that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution. The vulnerability was first exploited as a zero-day in attacks against academic institutions to conduct reconnaissance, deploy remote access software like MeshCentral agent for persistence, move laterally over SSH, run a shell script to connect via SSH to other internal PeopleSoft machines using known username/password combinations, and steal data. At that time, Google-owned Mandiant said it initiated notifications to over 100 global organizations whose IP addresses matched vulnerable endpoints, most of them located in the U.S. "This new wave of activity stems from UNC6240 modifying its exploit to bypass web application firewall (WAF...

Details have emerged about a high-severity security flaw in the Elementor Website Builder WordPress plugin that could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to create rogue administrator accounts and take control of a site. The cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability, which has yet to be assigned a CVE identifier, carries a CVSS score of 8.8 out of 10.0. It only affects versions 4.3.0 and 4.3.1 of the plugin, which is active on over 10 million WordPress sites. Statistics from WordPress.org show that the two impacted versions alone have been installed on more than 2 million sites. "One link, opened by a logged-in WordPress user, makes that user carry out any REST API action their account is permitted to perform," Patchstack said . "On a stock installation, an administrator clicking the link creates a second administrator account for the attacker." The WordPress security company said the attack does not hinge on any prerequisite, such as JavaScrip...

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security has warned that a now-patched Roundcube Webmail vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-48842 (CVSS score: 8.1), a pre-authentication SQL injection in the virtuser_query plugin of Roundcube Webmail versions 1.6.x before 1.6.16 and 1.7.x before 1.7.1. The issue stems from a preg_replace() backslash escape bypass that allows attackers to inject arbitrary SQL statements without authentication. "Unauthenticated attackers can inject SQL into Roundcube's database backend through the virtuser_query plugin, potentially exposing mail account credentials and stored messages," SentinelOne said . Patches for the vulnerability were released by Roundcube in May 2026 as part of 1.6.16 and 1.7.1. In an update shared this week, the Cyber Centre said the security flaw is being actively exploited in the wild, citing open-source reporting. No additional details of the exploitation ac...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), on Thursday, added two critical security flaws impacting WSO2 and Adobe Commerce and Magento to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-5430 (CVS score: 9.8) - A path traversal vulnerability in  WSO2 API Control Plane, API Manager, Traffic Manager and Universal Gateway that could allow unrestricted file upload and lead to remote code execution. CVE-2026-71362 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An incorrect authorization vulnerability in  Adobe Commerce and Magento that could allow an attacker to leverage this vulnerability to gain elevated access to sensitive resources without any user interaction. The addition of CVE-2026-5430 to the KEV comes a little over a week after watchTowr said it's seeing in-the-wild exploitation efforts against its honeypots since at least September 13, 2026. "We captured forged JW...

The "third-party[.]com" domain, commonly used as a documentation placeholder, has been observed serving a ClickFix lure to Windows browsers while displaying a harmless decoy to other users. "third-party[.]com has been a generic documentation placeholder for years, the same role example.com plays," Manifold Security's Head of Research, Ax Sharma, said . "Unlike 'example[.]com,' third-party[.]com is not IANA-reserved . Anyone could register it, and someone did. Every doc, test, and skill that hard-coded it now points readers at attacker infrastructure." As of writing, the domain has been marked as malicious and unsafe on both VirusTotal and Google's Safe Browsing list . ClickFix is a social engineering attack technique in which either malicious or legitimate-but-compromised websites display error messages, browser alerts, or CAPTCHA verification prompts, tricking users into copying and executing hidden commands via the Windows Run d...

An active ClickFix campaign has been observed compromising legitimate Ukrainian business websites to inject bogus Cloudflare verification pages and trick victims into downloading a previously undocumented information stealer called Psychedelic . "When a visitor interacts with the page, the lure copies a Windows Installer command to the clipboard and instructs the visitor to paste it into the Windows Run dialog," Arctic Wolf Labs said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The ClickFix chain uses an "msiexec.exe" command to fetch a Windows MSI installer that's used to deliver the stealer malware. The malicious tool is designed to harvest browser passwords, account tokens, and cryptocurrency-wallet data, set up scheduled-task persistence, and contact a command-and-control (C2) server for additional tasking. Some of the compromised websites include a hair-treatment clinic, a scale-model manufacturer, a specialist bookseller and publisher, a psy...

ClickFix has become the most common way attackers get into enterprise networks, and it does it without an exploit, an attachment, or a file on disk. Our new global threat report traces the technique from a novelty in late 2023 to a subscription product with on-chain infrastructure and a state-sponsored user base, and explains why blocking malicious domains is no longer a useful defense. Read the full report here:   https://www.ctm360.com/reports/clickfix-beyond A particular kind of security problem no patch will close. ClickFix is one of them. The attack begins with a page that presents a problem the user believes is theirs to solve. A human verification check that will not complete. A browser that cannot render the page. A document that will not open. A Mac that is running low on storage. The page offers a remedy in the form of instructions, quietly writes the "fix" to the clipboard, and asks the user to open a system interface they already trust, paste, and press Ent...

An AI agent on an internal OpenAI research task bypassed access controls on an Australian government Medicare statistics portal in June, Prime Minister  Anthony Albanese said . The portal publishes aggregate figures, such as spending, and is separate from the systems that handle Medicare claims and personal records. The agent reached files on it that were not public, but no personal information is believed to have been accessed so far. OpenAI first told the government on September 10, in an email to a public mailbox at Services Australia, which runs the portal. OpenAI says it found the activity in August. Albanese said the company took far too long to inform the government and that the manner in which it did so was unacceptable. On June 18, the portal repeatedly refused the agent's data requests, but the agent found a workaround and gained unauthorized access. The government has not said how the agent got past them. Services Australia has told the government that the age...

Threat actors have begun to actively exploit a critical security flaw in WordPress within hours of public disclosure. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-87902 (CVSS score: 9.2), which could allow an unauthenticated attacker to obtain remote code execution (RCE). "An unauthenticated attacker can make get_page_template() page-template resolution include a chosen readable local .php file outside the active theme directories," WordPress said in an advisory released two days ago. "If relevant preconditions for both the server environment and the active theme are met, this can lead to RCE." Successful exploitation hinges on meeting the two pre-requisites - The active child or parent theme contains a top-level directory whose name starts with page- (e.g., page-templates). A chosen local .php target file exists on the server and is readable by the web server account. (e.g., pearcmd.php). In a statement shared with The Hacker News, Previdian said it...

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:

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...