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Cybersecurity researchers have flagged two new malware families called WordlistLoader and SynkLoader that's used to deliver next-stage payloads and likely sell access to ransomware groups. According to findings from Gen Digital, WordlistLoader is being used to deliver Amatera Stealer (aka ACR Stealer or AcridRain Stealer) via ClearFake campaigns, which employ the ClickFix (aka FakeCaptcha) technique to dupe victims into running malicious commands under the pretext of completing CAPTCHA verification checks. "Once the visitor clicks on the 'I'm not a robot' checkbox, they're walked through the well-known ClickFix flow, where a malicious command is copied into their clipboard and the victim is instructed to paste it into the Windows Run dialog and execute it, leading to the download of WordlistLoader that ultimately results in the execution of Amatera," security researcher Vojtěch Krejsa said . The ClickFix prompts are displayed on real websites th...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group dubbed UAT-10147 that's targeting Windows and Linux web servers globally across the education, media, technology, and gaming sectors. The vast majority of the targets are located in Brazil, Bolivia, China, Canada, and Vietnam. Details of the threat activity came to light following the discovery of an open directory hosted at "139.180.197[.]150," which was observed communicating with one of the compromised machines. "The actor leveraged publicly disclosed vulnerabilities to gain initial access at scale," Cisco Talos said in a two-part report published last week. The actor employed a mixture of open-source offensive frameworks, including Metasploit , ysoserial , PentestGPT , DeepAudit, and multiple privilege escalation exploits to automate intrusion operations and establish persistence." UAT-10147 has been described as a threat actor that conducts search engine op...

A newly disclosed security flaw in GitLab has come under active exploitation within days of public disclosure, according to watchTowr. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-19478 (CVSS score: 9.4), a case of code injection that allows an unauthenticated attacker to modify or delete publicly accessible GitLab projects and rewrite their data under certain conditions without requiring credentials, user interaction, or obscure configuration. The following versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) are affected by the flaw - 18.2 before 18.11.11 19.0 before 19.0.8 19.1 before 19.1.6 19.2 before 19.2.4 In an alert released earlier this week, GitLab said the issue could be exploited via a GraphQL directive. Fixes for the flaw were rolled out in GitLab CE and EE versions 19.2.4, 19.1.6, 19.0.8, and 18.11.11. Preemptive exposure management firm watchTowr told The Hacker News that it was able to reproduce the vulnerability within minutes of ...

Adversa AI has disclosed an attack technique that it says can cause xAI's Grok chatbot to send a user's name, approximate location, subscription tier, and the prompts from the ongoing conversation to an attacker-controlled server after the user asks it to summarize an ordinary web page. The AI security company, which has codenamed the technique "Cryptographic Context Injection ," said the transfer completed without a confirmation step and with no visible warning in its proof-of-concept demonstration. There is no patch, no CVE identifier, and no user-facing workaround, and the writeup does not report any exploitation in the wild. Asked which build was tested, Adversa told The Hacker News the target was the Grok web chat at grok.com running Grok 4.5 Fast, and that the attack was reproduced once on August 19, 2026. The writeup gives no success rate. The company said it has attempted the attack 20 times since June with a 40% success rate, and that the failures cam...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that exploit how major content delivery networks (CDNs) convert client-facing HTTP/3 traffic into HTTP/1.1 requests to the websites they front, amplifying a low-bandwidth request stream by up to 350x against the origin server. The attacks, collectively named " CDN Tsunami ," were evaluated against Alibaba, Baidu, Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, and Tencent. All six were found susceptible to the bandwidth variant and five to the connection variant, with Cloudflare unaffected by the latter because it buffers the complete request before opening a connection to the origin. The attack requires a website hosted on one of the six providers, with HTTP/3 serving at the edge, and no configuration changes on the website's part. The paper lists HTTP/3 as enabled by default at Cloudflare and CloudFront. However,  Cloudflare's documentation  describes HTTP/3 as available on all plans and pr...

Security researchers at Cycode have disclosed a chain of flaws in AIT-GUI, the browser-based operator console for NASA/JPL's open-source AMMOS Instrument Toolkit, that allow an unauthenticated attacker to issue arbitrary commands to the software's spacecraft and instrument command bus. The chain, tracked as GHSA-p9r8-2q67-fp86 and rated 9.4 on the CVSS v3.1 scoring system, impacts AIT-GUI versions 2.5.1 and earlier, with the advisory listing version 2.5.2 as the fixed release. The advisory, published August 13, 2026, states that no CVE has been assigned to it. The AMMOS Instrument Toolkit is a framework for building ground data systems, the software that sends commands to instruments and spacecraft and processes the telemetry coming back down. AIT-GUI is its operator console, and the endpoints in question relay operator commands to a command bus. "The blast radius of an unauthenticated POST is measured in issued instrument commands, not defaced pages," Cycode ...

A set of 40 Mozilla Firefox extensions has been found to engage in cryptocurrency wallet theft by masquerading as OKX, Rabby Wallet, TronLink, and other Web3 products. According to the Socket Threat Research team, the extensions are part of a broader set of 77 browser add-ons that share source code and infrastructure overlaps. The campaign, dubbed Offside Wallet Theft Factory , is believed to have been active since March 2026. The activity has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. "Extension-level analysis confirms 40 as malicious," security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . "Another 37 form a coordinated multi-sport score-shell operation. Their analyzed builds contain no confirmed credential- or wallet-stealing payloads, but their deceptive functionality, shared publishing artifacts, and version histories indicate malicious intent." Among those 40 extensions, seven use threat actor-controlled Supabase projects as remote switches to server ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a critical flaw in the Elementor Pro WordPress plugin that, if successfully exploited, could lead to remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-32475 , carries a CVSS score of 9.0 out of 10.0. It has been described as a case of unrestricted upload of a file with a dangerous type. "The flaw lives in the Forms module's File Upload field, where the extension check and the file-move step run in two separate loops with different handling of empty file entries," Patchstack said . "By submitting two file parts for the same field, an unauthenticated attacker skips the extension blocklist entirely and writes a PHP file into a public directory." This discrepancy in how it validates the file's extension and moves the uploaded file to a public directory when empty file entries are processed turns a restricted file-upload field into an unauthenticated remote code execution primitive. Succes...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a  remote Spectre attack  against Cloudflare Workers that leaked a JSON Web Token (JWT) from a co-located Worker in the production environment at up to 12 bits per second, 360 times the rate of an earlier attack demonstrated in 2021. The end-to-end experiment used an attacker Worker and a victim Worker controlled by the researchers, with the JWT intentionally placed in the victim's memory. The research paper stated that no customer data was accessed. Cloudflare said the attack has already been mitigated in production after it improved Dynamic Process Isolation (DyPrIs), integrated the  V8 Sandbox , and deployed Memory Protection Keys (MPK)-based in-process isolation, adding that it found no indicators of active exploitation over the last three years. "We demonstrate that the production implementation of DyPrIs was insufficient," the researchers said in  the paper . Cloudflare Workers runs code from multiple...

Varonis Threat Labs has disclosed three vulnerabilities in Microsoft Copilot Personal that it said could allow a single click on a crafted link to silently pull data from connected apps and other information available to the victim's Copilot session. The flaws, which the researchers collectively named CoSnitch , turn in part on an undocumented URL parameter that the assistant itself surfaced during testing. The company said it reported the issue to Microsoft in December 2025 and that patches shipped on August 18, 2026. CoSnitch is tracked as  CVE-2026-24301  in Microsoft's Security Update Guide. The research names Copilot Personal, the consumer assistant hosted at copilot.microsoft.com, and does not state that the same behavior affected Microsoft 365 Copilot. The researchers said they found no evidence that CoSnitch was exploited in the wild. They reached the parameter by repeatedly asking Copilot why a prompt could not be made to run without user interaction, an ap...

Two critical vulnerabilities impacting MLflow, an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform, and FUXA, an open-source, web-based SCADA / HMI software built for operational technology (OT) and industrial automation, are witnessing malicious scanning and exploitation efforts. According to independent reports from watchTowr and VulnCheck, the vulnerabilities in question are as follows - CVE-2026-64849 (CVSS score: 9.3) - An unauthenticated Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in MLflow that can allow an attacker who can reach the Tracking Server (mlflow server) to issue HTTP requests to arbitrary internal cloud metadata endpoints and extract sensitive data. (Affects versions < 3.15.0) CVE-2026-25895 (CVSS score: 9.5) - A missing authentication for a critical function and path traversal vulnerability in FUXA that can allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to write arbitrary files to the server file system and achieve remote code execution. (Affects ve...

A single piece of infrastructure has been pulling records out of Salesforce and ServiceNow customer portals across multiple industries for more than a year, according to research published this week by agent security platform Reco. The activity, which Reco has named the City Forum campaign after a domain tied to the attacker's IP address, traces back to one server: 158.220.87.79, hosted on a commodity VPS through the German provider Contabo. Every request from that server carries the same fingerprint, the default user agent of Go's net/http library, which tells researchers the tool behind it is a compiled, purpose built program rather than anything run from a browser. Passive DNS shows the same domain pointed at that IP as far back as March 2025, and the server has not moved since. Targets identified so far span telecoms, banks and other financial services firms, enterprise software vendors including security and data privacy companies, and public sector portals, though Reco...

SafePal has disclosed that an authorization flaw in an order-tracking plug-in exposed the names, email addresses, shipping addresses, phone numbers, and purchase details of approximately 39,798 customers. The hardware wallet maker said all affected customers were notified individually by email on August 16 from security@safepal.com, with the subject line "[Important] Your SafePal Order Information Has Been Affected." The exposed records did not include wallet credentials or financial information, according to SafePal, which said it has found no evidence that the incident itself compromised access to SafePal wallets or funds. "This incident did not involve your seed phrase, private keys, wallet password, or other wallet credentials, bank account information, payment card numbers, or government-issued identification numbers," SafePal said . Under certain conditions, the flaw allowed unauthorized access to another customer's order information, the company ...

GitLab has released security updates to address a critical vulnerability impacting its Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that, under certain conditions, could allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely modify or delete public projects and user data. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-19478 , has been rated Critical by GitLab and assigned a CVSS score of 9.4. Released on August 17, 2026, the critical patch release arrived outside the company's usual schedule of twice-monthly updates on the second and fourth Wednesdays, five days after a routine patch release that carried no critical-rated issues. Only self-managed installations need to act. The fixes are available in GitLab 19.2.4, 19.1.6, 19.0.8, and 18.11.11 . "GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated are already running the patched version. GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated customers do not need to take action," the company said. The following versions are affected - All versions from 18.2 ...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in Forminator Forms, a WordPress plugin with more than 600,000 active installations, that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution on susceptible sites. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-15748 , is rated 9.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It was discovered and reported by a security researcher who goes by the online alias "daroo." "This vulnerability makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to upload arbitrary files, including executable PHP files, to a vulnerable site, which can lead to remote code execution and complete site compromise," Wordfence said in a report published today. That said, a key prerequisite for successful exploitation is that the sites must have a form containing both a File Upload field and a Select field. The vulnerability impacts all versions of the plugin before and including 1.56.1. It has been addressed in version 1.56.2 released on July 31, 2026. Pe...

Threat actors are acquiring expired domains to inherit website traffic and reputation to redirect victims to scams and malware on a large scale. DNS threat intelligence firm Infoblox has given the name dropcatch domains to those that get a second chance, where an expired domain becomes available for registration and is then snapped up by another party. During the first half of 2026, 50,400 dropcatch domains were re-registered each day in the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) like ".com" alone, a figure that jumps to around 65,000 when country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) are taken into consideration. These account for nearly 20% of all daily gTLD and ccTLD registrations, meaning one out of five newly registered domains is a dropcatch domain. "These domains can be particularly interesting, even dangerous, because they inherit reputation and sometimes connections from their previous life," Infoblox said in an exhaustive three-part report shared with The Ha...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a post-exploitation technique that enables the  Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP)  inside a running Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge process on Windows, allowing an operator to access cookies, saved data, and authenticated browser sessions. The technique assumes that an operator already has code execution on the Windows host and does not involve exploiting a Chrome or Edge security vulnerability. The requirement for prior code execution and sufficient access to manipulate the target process places the technique in a narrower post-compromise scenario than a remotely exploitable browser flaw. SpecterOps said defenders can look for signs of process injection targeting chrome.exe and msedge.exe using Sysmon Event IDs 8 and 10. "Since App-Bound Encryption was enabled, we've seen an increase in attackers using Chrome Remote Debugging to extract cookies," Google said in a  March 2025 post . Google  changed C...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a large-scale, global recruitment-themed phishing campaign that uses fake interview scheduling pages and Browser-in-the-Browser (BitB) windows to steal Google and Facebook credentials and, in more advanced cases, relay multi-factor authentication (MFA) prompts in real time. CTM360, which detailed the activity in a new report titled RecruitTrap , said it identified more than 3,000+ phishing URLs over two months. The campaign impersonated real recruiters and recruitment processes associated with more than 50 organizations across 14 sectors . Marketing professionals accounted for the majority of observed targets. The focus on marketing roles appears deliberate. Compromised marketing accounts can provide access to advertising platforms, corporate social media profiles, customer data, email, and other business-critical services. Read the full report here: https://www.ctm360.com/reports/recruittrap-browser-in-the-browser-bitb-recruitment-scam...

Threat actors have begun to exploit a newly disclosed Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability following the release of a proof-of-concept (PoC) code. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-55040 (CVSS score: 9.1), which refers to a critical security feature bypass that stems from weak authentication. It was patched by Microsoft as part of its July 2026 Patch Tuesday updates. "The authentication feature could be bypassed as this vulnerability allows impersonation," Microsoft said in an advisory for the flaw last month. "Exploiting this vulnerability could allow an attacker to disclose files and modify data, but the attacker cannot impact the availability of the system." According to Defused Cyber , threat actors are leveraging a PoC exploit released by Rapid7 earlier this week, once again indicating fresh flaws are being rapidly abused in real-world attacks. It's worth mentioning that CVE-2026-55040 is the fifth SharePoint vulnerability to be exploited t...

A massive set of 737 free VPN and proxy extensions have been found to mainly target Russian-speaking users seeking access to blocked services with an aim to intercept browser traffic and route them through a proxy infrastructure. The extensions, published across at least 40 Chrome Web Store developer accounts, racked up 75,486 installs. Of those identified, 274 have been found to impersonate 66 established VPN and privacy brands, including Proton VPN, NordVPN, Surfshark, AdGuard VPN, Browsec, ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Windscribe, TunnelBear, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, and Google's Outline, per Socket. The censorship circumvention extensions "route the user's entire browser session through SOCKS5 proxies operated by a single provider," security researcher Kush Pandya said . "520 of the 522 in the bulk corpus route browser traffic through the same SOCKS5 infrastructure." The vast majority of the extensions have been found to route users' entire browser...