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Hackers tied to a Chinese cybersecurity company stole email from government organizations, law enforcement agencies, healthcare systems, and religious institutions in Southeast Asia, the FBI and agencies in 6 other countries said on October 8. The company, Integrity Technology Group , has been sanctioned by the U.S. and the UK. The hackers scanned websites for flaws using a tool containing more than 1,300 scripts, guessed passwords for Microsoft 365 and Exchange accounts, and copied mailboxes using tools designed to collect mail. The hackers have been breaking into networks since at least mid-January 2021, according to the agencies'  joint advisory . It describes the hacking in the present tense but provides no date for any theft and does not specify how many organizations were breached. The same hackers targeted U.S. government services, critical manufacturing, healthcare, and IT organizations, along with U.S. law enforcement, education, and religious groups. Organizations ...

Attackers behind a string of personal data leaks at Japanese organizations have abused APIs for mobile apps and targeted known software flaws, the JPCERT Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) said. The Tokyo-based center, which takes incident reports, based its  October 8, 2026 alert  on those reports and other information. The alert names no attacker and no affected organization. JPCERT/CC called what it knows "limited and fragmentary" in the alert, translated here from Japanese. It said its account does not mean the same method was used in every incident. Besides consumer apps, the systems hit include business intelligence (BI) tools and employee-facing management systems that their operators did not expect the public to reach. Data stored in them leaked in some cases. For defenders, the alert includes eight source IP addresses, five User-Agent strings, and a list of API controls, including access controls on every endpoint, public or not. The only product it names a...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a targeted campaign aimed at South Korean financial organizations that used an artificial intelligence (AI) pen testing tool named ARTEX to carry out the attacks. The activity, per CrowdStrike Intelligence, was active from late September to early October 2026, and resulted in data exfiltration. "In this activity, the threat actor leveraged ARTEX, a recently released open-source agentic penetration testing (pentesting) tool developed in China, alongside large language models (LLMs)," the cybersecurity company said . CrowdStrike said it discovered the campaign after it identified a set of open directories hosted at a Hong Kong-based IP address, exposing Claude Code session histories, Claude memory files, and ARTEX configuration files. The campaign has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. But evidence points to a suspected Chinese-speaking operator driven by financial gain. ARTEX is a large lan...

Phishing kits are no longer limited to copying a familiar login page and waiting for a victim to enter credentials. Attackers are increasingly building filtering, session management, and traffic controls into the infrastructure that delivers the phishing page itself. ANY.RUN has identified Wazza, a new phishkit targeting banking, manufacturing, and government organizations across the US, Europe, and Australia. The campaign uses a multi-stage routing chain to screen visitors and automated traffic before delivering an Adobe-themed Device Code phishing page. For security teams, that makes Wazza more than another malicious URL. The campaign shows how attackers can control the path to the final lure, making the initial link less informative and potentially complicating automated detection. MSSPs face an added challenge, as they investigate alerts across multiple customer environments while keeping response times under control. That uncertainty can translate directly into longer in...

Attackers compromised three country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and obtained unauthorized HTTPS certificates for several Google domains, Google  said on October 6 . Google's own systems were not breached, but any domain ending in .gh (Ghana), .sl (Sierra Leone) or .as (American Samoa) was put at risk. With such a certificate, an attacker could pose as the real site over an encrypted connection and read the private data sent to it. Chrome blocked the unauthorized certificates for Google's domains through  CRLSets , its way of quickly blocking certificates in emergencies, Google said. The company also worked with the certificate authorities (CAs) that issued the certificates to have them revoked, a step meant to protect people using other browsers and apps. Google did not name the domains.  Certificate Transparency  (CT) logs are the public record of certificates issued by CAs. They show at least 12 certificates issued between September 22 and 27 for Google...

SonicWall has released hotfixes for four flaws in its SMA1000 appliances, the gateways that give remote workers access to a company's network and applications. The most serious could allow an attacker without a login to send requests through the appliance and reach internal functions. SonicWall rates it 10.0 on the CVSS scale and says it has no evidence that any of the four flaws is being used in attacks. The most serious flaw, tracked as  CVE-2026-102255 , is a server-side request forgery (SSRF) bug in WorkPlace, the portal that SMA1000 users log in to. It exists due to an unintended access path through SonicWall and can be reached before authentication. An attacker who abuses that path could "reach internal functionality and perform unauthorized operations," SonicWall said in its  security advisory , dated October 6, without saying which functions. All four flaws affect SMA1000 models 6210, 7210 and 8200v on these platform-hotfix versions:

Threat actors have begun to exploit a newly disclosed critical security flaw impacting Atlassian Data Center products that could allow access to sensitive files under certain conditions. The arbitrary file access flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-21589 (CVSS score: 9.3) affects multiple products, including Bitbucket Data Center, Confluence Data Center, Jira Service Management Data Center, Jira Software Data Center, Bamboo Data Center, Crowd Data Center, Crucible, and Fisheye. "This arbitrary file access vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to access specific files within the web application root directory in affected versions," the Australian company said. "Exploitation requires prior knowledge of the target file's exact name and path; this vulnerability does not allow attackers to enumerate or list directory contents. In some configurations, there may be sensitive files present that increase your risk." Atlassian said impacted Atlassian Cloud pro...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has identified more than 100 compromised websites that have been injected with malicious JavaScript to serve an information-stealing malware called LunexStealer (aka Psychedelic Stealer). The activity, which was observed by the agency in September 2026, has been attributed to a threat cluster dubbed UAC-0277. It did not disclose who the victims of the campaign were or if any systems were successfully compromised as a result of these attacks. "When visiting such a site, users were shown a forged Cloudflare verification page that, under the pretext of confirming the visitor is human, prompted them to execute a command," CERT-UA said in an advisory. "Executing the command caused a malicious MSI package to be downloaded and installed from a remote server (the ClickFix technique)." The attacks also make use of the EtherHiding technique to retrieve the domain name of the resource from which the fake verif...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a "human-operated phishing platform" that impersonates advertising products for artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Perplexity, Meta Muse, and Manus. The products, which claim to offer campaign optimization, spend audits, and business-account connections, are designed with one goal in mind: to capture credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes via spoofed login windows using the browser-in-the-browser ( BitB ) trick. "Each product was built around the same action: Connect," Island researchers Oleg Zaytsev and Ofek Ronen said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Clicking it opened a browser drawn inside the real browser. The fake address bar displayed trusted origins such as accounts.google.com or an Okta tenant, while the real browser remained on the phishing domain." "Behind the interface, the platform kept every passw...

The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, has confirmed that it has discovered activity by rogue OpenAI agents on its platforms, including unsuccessful efforts to compromise Etherpad, a public note-taking tool, and edit Wikipedia pages. "The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic," the Foundation said in a post. The investigation, it added, was prompted by recent public reports involving Hugging Face and DseWiki where OpenAI's agents turned Artifactory and the German wiki forum into an unsanctioned bulletin board to communicate with each other, while taking steps to chain together online services  to gain access to the internet and cover up evidence of their exploits. To that end, Wikimedia said it identified edits to Wikimedia wikis suspected to be from agents operated by OpenAI. The agents are said to have been testing edits in " sandbox ...

A critical flaw in 8 Atlassian Data Center products, which customers host themselves, allows an attacker with no login access to read specific files in each product's web application root directory. The attacker must already know a file's exact name and path and cannot list what the directory holds. Atlassian  disclosed the flaw , CVE-2026-21589 , on October 5, rated it 9.3 out of 10, and listed a fixed version for each product. The web application root directory is the folder on the server that holds the web application itself. In some configurations, it may contain sensitive files, which raises the risk, according to Atlassian. Atlassian's cloud products affected by the flaw have already been patched, and cloud customers do not need to take any action. Atlassian advises customers who cannot upgrade all at once to take the instance offline if possible. Any instance reachable from the public internet, including one that requires a login, should be restricted from ...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has removed an Accenture contractor for their alleged role in a ShinyHunters-breach that led to the theft of personal details of thousands of bureau employees. That's according to a report from Reuters, citing two sources familiar with the matter. "To date, our review has determined that the incident occurred as the result of a security failure ​of a platform managed by a third-party organization — after a contractor failed to implement a security patch explicitly issued to secure the ​platform," Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, was quoted as saying to Reuters. "As such, the FBI has removed the contractor and taken all necessary steps to both mitigate any further risk and protect our workforce." Although the name of the third-party organization was not disclosed by the FBI, Reuters reported that it's Oracle PeopleSoft, which the ShinyHunters group said it exploited...

A new type of ClickFix attack is using compromised websites to trick users into executing a malicious payload cached in a web browser's cache. "Instead of downloading and executing remote payloads like the typical attack pattern, in this attack, the websites pre-fetch a script payload into the browser cache disguised as a PNG file," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a post on X. Thus, when the victim is prompted to paste and execute a malicious command – as is the case with ClickFix attacks – it executes the cached website content that's already on the device.  What's notable about this browser cache smuggling approach is that it allows the attackers to conceal the payload script and bypass character limit restrictions imposed on Windows Run (aka the Run dialog). The Windows Run dialog, triggered by Win + R, truncates any input that exceeds approximately 260 characters. In the attack chain observed by Microsoft, the staged payload is a ...

A critical security flaw impacting Rejetto HTTP File Server (HFS) is witnessing active exploitation attempts, according to VulnCheck. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-61500 (CVSS score: 9.3), a case of session forgery stemming from the use of a weak pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that can lead to a predictable key, which an attacker can then use to gain unauthorized access and seize control of affected systems. "Rejetto HFS 3.0.0 through 3.2.0 derives its session-cookie signing key from the non-cryptographic Math.random() generator and discloses outputs of the same generator to unauthenticated clients during login," according to an advisory for the flaw. "A remote attacker can collect a small number of login responses, reconstruct the generator's state, recover the signing key, and forge a valid administrator session cookie, leading to full administrative access and remote code execution via the server_code configuration feature." Hori...

The suspected China-linked threat actor known as Warlock is still continuing to weaponize Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities, likely both old and new , in attacks targeting organizations in Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries. The activity, observed by the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team, has hit critical infrastructure, government, and education organizations. "In the past two months, Longlegs has attacked at least four organizations, including two critical infrastructure operators (a water utility and a telecommunications provider), a regional government body, and a university," the Broadcom-owned cybersecurity unit said . "Victims were in Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries, spanning Europe, Africa, and Latin America."  Warlock, also tracked as Gold Salem, Longlegs, and Storm-2603, gained prominence in mid-2025 in connection with the zero-day exploitation of the "ToolShell" SharePoint flaws to deploy ransomware on ...

Featuring: Cybersecurity is being reshaped by the expansion of cloud infrastructure, AI, distributed systems, and increasingly complex digital environments. As organizations manage more identities, devices, data, and internet-facing infrastructure, security is shifting toward continuous visibility, control, and the ability to respond to risk at scale. This report examines how core areas of cybersecurity are evolving in response to that shift. Across identity security, telemetry management, human security, endpoint management, human risk intelligence, exposure management, email and domain security, connected device security, AI-native security operations, and cloud security, it explores how organizations are adapting to threats that increasingly move across systems, identities, and infrastructure rather than targeting a single point of failure. Read the full report here:  https://report.papryon.com/thehackernews

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...