Web Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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...

GitLab has released patches to address multiple flaws, including a maximum-severity security vulnerability that has witnessed in-the-wild probes within hours of public disclosure. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-85706 (CVSS score: 10.0), a path traversal issue in the repository commits API that could allow an unauthenticated user to read arbitrary files from the GitLab server under certain conditions. The problem, per GitLab, stems from "improper path confinement and missing authentication enforcement in the repository commits API." The issue impacts the following versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) - All versions from 18.7 before 19.1.8,  All versions from 19.2 before 19.2.6, and  All versions from 19.3 before 19.3.2 According to preemptive exposure management firm watchTowr, the vulnerability is already witnessing active in-the-wild probes since 06:00 UTC on September 11, 2026. The issue, it said, allows an ...

Attackers have chained two flaws in JFrog Artifactory , the repository that software build pipelines pull from, to take administrator control of self-hosted servers and plant backdoors, cloud security company Wiz said in a report. Wiz saw the attacks between August 15 and September 8. JFrog had fixed both flaws before then, so only servers that had not been updated were open to them. Neither flaw gives administrator control on its own. CVE-2026-42018 makes Artifactory hand an internal anonymous-user token to a caller who has not logged in, even when anonymous access is turned off. CVE-2026-42016 then allows that low-privilege token to be swapped for one with administrator scope, because Artifactory checks a token's signature and who issued it, but not what the token is allowed to do. Every case Wiz saw followed a similar pattern. The attacker sent an unauthenticated request to a token endpoint and received a token for the internal anonymous user, then exchanged it ...

Anthropic on Wednesday disclosed a fourth incident in which its artificial intelligence (AI) model broke into real third-party systems, marking the latest in a growing list of cases that have raised concerns about the security risks posed by autonomous AI agents. The AI company said the incident dates back to January 2026 and involved an early version of Claude Opus 4.6 that breached "third-parties after being unable to abort its task." It said it notified all the affected parties but did not share any further details. The January incident is said to have gone unnoticed until last month. In late July 2026, Anthropic revealed three of its models, including Claude Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an unnamed research model, broke into three unnamed organizations during cybersecurity evaluations without its knowledge. The American firm said it expanded its scan to roughly 481 million transcripts following the discovery of the latest incident, but noted it did not find "other...

Multiple espionage-motivated threat activity clusters have been found deploying a previously undocumented exploit kit called BlueMoon that chains together multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and Google Chrome. The first in-the-wild use of BlueMoon has been attributed to the China-aligned state-sponsored group tracked as APT31 (aka Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, JungleBamboo, PerplexedGoblin, RedBravo, TA412, Tide Castle, and Violet Typhoon) on August 28, 2026. "Within days, several other espionage-motivated clusters began using BlueMoon, the majority of which have a suspected China nexus," Proofpoint said in a report published today. "However, BlueMoon may not be exclusive to China-aligned actors, as some usage remains unattributed and there are also potentially more actors using the exploit kit." The exploit chain employs three vulnerabilities - CVE-2026-85046 , a type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome CVE-2026-87491 , an out-of-bounds...

A flaw in DeepSeek Harness , DeepSeek's open-source tool for running AI coding agents on a developer's machine, let a sandboxed agent turn off its own sandbox with a single command. The tool runs an agent's commands inside an operating-system sandbox, so that an agent working on untrusted files cannot write outside its workspace. The agent could remove that limit by calling the tool's own web interface on the same machine, and its commands would then run outside the sandbox without an approval prompt. It worked on a default installation until DeepSeek fixed the tool on August 27, and it required attacker-supplied text that the agent read to prompt it to make the call. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-82533 . VulnCheck, which assigned the identifier,  published the record  on September 8 and rated the flaw 9.4 out of 10. OX Research , the security firm that reported the flaw, said one shell command was enough. The command invoked the tool's local interface an...

Bitcoin wallet company Alby has  warned of a critical flaw  in Alby Hub that could have let an attacker take over a wallet and send its funds, but only where the owner had made the Hub reachable from the internet. Alby Hub is a self-hosted Lightning wallet, meaning the owner runs it on their own computer or server, and it holds their bitcoin. The flaw affects versions v1.7.0 through v1.18.5, all released before August 2025, and Alby said one user has been affected so far. Versions v1.19.0 and later do not have the flaw. The first release with that fix was published on August 29, 2025, so a Hub updated to any release published since then is not affected. Alby is telling anyone still on an older build to stop outside access to the Hub's management interface first, which is the web page used to control the wallet. The next step is to update to  v1.24.0 , the current release. The company has not said what the flaw is. It said it would publish full details later, in l...

Google on Tuesday released updates to patch 230 security vulnerabilities, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The medium-severity vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-87491 (CVSS score: N/A), has been described as an out-of-bounds bug in V8, Chrome's JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Out-of-bounds write in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 153.0.8010.36 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page," reads a description of the flaw on the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Security researcher Jihyeon Jeong of Compsec Lab, Seoul National University, has been acknowledged for discovering and reporting the flaw on August 6, 2026. The researcher received a $2,500 bug bounty reward for responsible disclosure. Google acknowledged it is "aware that an exploit for CVE-2026-87491 exists in the wild," but has not disclosed any additional specific information re...

cPanel has patched a flaw that it says lets a single hosting account take control of an entire server. An authenticated account holder with mail-related privileges can create files of their choosing on the server through EmailTrack and, from there, run code as the root user. cPanel published the  advisory on September 8  and says every supported version of cPanel and WHM is affected. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-67401 . cPanel's advisory calls it an SQL injection issue in EmailTrack, but does not say which cPanel feature or privilege an account needs. cPanel's developer documentation lists an EmailTrack module that tracks email statistics, and the advisory does not say whether that is the affected code. cPanel is web hosting control panel software. A customer manages one hosting account via cPanel, while the provider manages the entire machine via WHM as the root user. Attackers exploited  a different cPanel flaw in April . Taking over the panel is not the s...

Malware linked to break-ins at F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager appliances hides a PHP web shell in memory instead of in a file on disk, Sophos said in an analysis published on September 7. When Apache loads any of the three appliances' own PHP scripts, the malware adds the web shell to the copy held in memory, so a check of the file on disk can come back clean. Those three scripts are the same ones F5 pointed customers to in March, when it said changes to them alone do not show a break-in. A web shell is usually a small script an attacker drops into a web server's folders to run commands through ordinary web requests. Because it sits on disk, defenders look for it by scanning files and comparing them against known-good copies. That approach does not work here. As the researchers put it, the web shell "does not need to exist in its final form on disk." The three scripts are apm_css.php3, full_wt.php3 and webtop_popup_css.php3, part of the BIG-IP APM webtop. ...

Adobe on Monday released security patches to address a maximum-severity flaw impacting Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, now tracked as CVE-2026-75650 (CVSS score: 10.0), has been codenamed StyleSmuggler by Sansec, which discovered zero-day exploitation starting September 4, 2026. "This update resolves a critical vulnerability that could result in arbitrary code execution," Adobe said , adding it's "aware that CVE-2026-75650 has been exploited in the wild targeting Adobe Commerce merchants." At its core, the flaw abuses Magento's template system through PHP code injection to generate a "Payment Transaction Failed Reminder" email, triggering code execution in the process.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a sprawling search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning campaign that paves the way for malware deployment and tech support scams. The campaign, discovered by the DFIR Report in March 2026, has been codenamed BengalSEO . It has operated out of the Indian state of Rajasthan since at least 2015, driven by two IT service providers named WeConnect Solutions LLC (previously iConnect Soft Solutions LLC) and Garage2Global. Although Garage2Global claims to be a website design, SEO, and digital marketing services provider, the cyber threat intelligence platform said it unearthed evidence indicating the company develops malicious web infrastructure used in SEO poisoning campaigns as part of the BengalSEO scam cluster. "This group utilizes its extensive SEO and web development capabilities to create and promote lure pages with multiple Black Hat SEO techniques," the DFIR Report said in a technical analysis published late last mo...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a complex Chromium-based post-exploitation toolkit called PEEP that masquerades as a bookmarks extension for the web browser. "Requiring prior administrative or code execution access, its installer injects the extension directly into Chrome/Edge profiles, bypassing Web Store checks and user prompts by forging Chromium's own Secure Preferences integrity values," SOCRadar said . "A native-messaging tool then extends it beyond browser telemetry to host-level command execution and file management." Once installed, the PEEP "extension" agent polls its command-and-control (C2) server ("206.237.30[.]232" or " xfjcc[.]fun ") every 30 seconds over plaintext HTTP for new commands, while exfiltrating browsing history, active-tab metadata, and session cookies. It also functions as a remote access and browser monitoring toolkit that runs host commands, steals credentials, hijacks sessions...

A TantoSec proof-of-concept turns an AES-CBC "padding oracle" in Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX into unauthenticated remote code execution — but only against applications in a specific non-default configuration, and Progress patched the chain in July. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation in the wild. Security firm TantoSec has published a working exploit chain targeting vulnerabilities in Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX that can allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute remote code on the server hosting a vulnerable application. Progress Software patched the flaws in July, and exploitation requires a non-default configuration — but the release pairs a detailed write-up with a ready-to-run tool and two payloads, putting a complete attack path in public hands for the first time. The underlying flaws are not new. Progress shipped the fix in version 2026.2.708 (2026 Q2 SP1) on July 8 and published the CVEs and advisory on July 22. What changed on September 7 is t...

Cybersecurity researchers have unpacked JSCeal , a sophisticated compiled V8 JavaScript (JSC) malware with credential harvesting, surveillance, and traffic-interception capabilities. "The payloads are protected with javascript-obfuscator , using multiple techniques including RC4-protected strings, control-flow flattening, proxy functions, and operation wrappers," Check Point Research said in a technical report published last week. JSCeal was first documented by Check Point in July 2025, highlighting the threat actors' use of fake cryptocurrency trading sites to which unsuspecting users are redirected via malicious ads on Facebook and Google. The counterfeit sites instruct them to download bogus installers for TradingView that lead to the deployment of the malware. The activity overlaps with a threat cluster tracked under the monikers WEEVILPROXY and MeadowLocust. Malvertising campaigns distributing the malware make use of two ZIP archives delivered via PowerShell...

Attackers are exploiting a new unpatched vulnerability in Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce that lets them run malicious code on an online store's server without logging in, Dutch e-commerce security company Sansec said in an  advisory published on September 5 . Sansec, which discovered the flaw and named it StyleSmuggler , said attacks started on September 4. "Sansec is publishing early because stores are being compromised right now," the company said. As of September 6, Adobe has not published an advisory, a CVE identifier, a patch, or a workaround, and its  Adobe Commerce security bulletin index  lists nothing after the August 11 update. A successful attack gives the attacker code execution on the store's server and installs a persistent backdoor. Sansec said all current versions are affected, including 2.4.9, and that it reproduced the full unauthenticated chain on clean Magento Open Source installations of 2.4.7, 2.4.8, and 2.4.9. Its ...

Hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor on Friday disclosed that another 67,000 customers from the U.S. have been impacted in a breach at its shipping provider ShipMonk. The exposed information includes customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses, and order numbers between November 2019 and August 2021. The breach does not affect the security of the company's hardware wallets. "Throughout our entire relationship with ShipMonk, we repeatedly requested and received written assurance confirming the deletion of the data, in line with our contract, data policy, and past communications," Trezor said . "We are very disappointed that, despite receiving this confirmation, the data was not deleted in their systems." The exposure is in addition to 13,689 customers the company disclosed last month as having had their data either fully or partially exposed. The breach, it noted at the time, was limited during its 90-day data storage policy. Trezo...

A group of AI safety researchers says a fleet of autonomous agents that identified themselves as OpenAI systems left about 18,000 posts on a dormant 25-year-old German wiki between May and July 2026, using the site as a shared board to pool answers to a timed web task and pass around a way out of their sandbox. The activity was concentrated on DSEwiki , a German software developer wiki that runs on the ProWiki farm at wikiservice[.]at and had been edited about 20 times over the previous decade. The researchers, led by Sydney Von Arx of the AI safety nonprofit  Nightingale Collective , reconstructed the deleted pages from edit history and published their analysis along with a downloadable copy of the data. The wikis let anyone change a page with an ordinary web request, the kind normally used only to read a page rather than to write one. Agents that were restricted to reading the internet could therefore still write to the site, because the restriction was written a...

Threat actors are exploiting the newly disclosed PaperCut flaws to facilitate credential theft in attacks targeting the education sector in the U.S. and Europe. The Arctic Wolf Adversary Research Team said it observed attackers exploiting CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078 – an authentication bypass and remote code execution chain – to conduct command execution and reconnaissance, as well as create privileged accounts. "Observed post-exploitation activity included delivery of Windows registry hive collection tools, Metasploit/Meterpreter-related Java payloads, and commands used to identify hosts, users, processes, and sensitive configuration data," Arctic Wolf said. The cybersecurity company told The Hacker News that the activity has targeted vulnerable PaperCut servers across the education sector, impacting organizations ranging from K-12 schools to major universities in the U.S. and Europe. Some of the identified malicious activity includes - Running discover...

A previously undocumented Linux toolkit has been found compiled directly into the trojanized HAProxy load balancers of two South Korean organizations, where it intercepted web traffic and served altered pages to selected visitors. The attackers named the implant ted in debug strings left in the binary. It is not a HAProxy vulnerability, and installing it requires code execution on the host and the ability to replace the running binary. Rapid7 Labs attributed the toolkit with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors and put the two victims in South Korea's automotive and media sectors. Command-and-control (C2) requests never reach a backend server and are erased from HAProxy's own connection counters, so neither the backend logs nor the load balancer's statistics record them. "Further evidence is necessary to make a more definitive assessment," Rapid7 said. A request for one specific image path puts the filter into C2 mode, Rapid7 said i...