artificial intelligence | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

How much damage can someone do without breaking much? Quite a lot, it seems. A stolen login can open doors across several systems. A trusted setting can be used to lock people out. Even a simple file copy can reach places it shouldn't. And while new tools are helping find security holes faster, some important systems are still taking months, sometimes over a year, to get patched. Not exactly a great match. The stranger part is how little some attacks now need. Ransom demands without encrypted files. Fake websites that look real enough to steal money. AI tools picking up dangerous instructions while trying to help. Even the attackers are making mistakes in their own code. This week's stories are a reminder that the biggest problems don't always come from clever tricks. Sometimes the easy way works just fine. Here's what else happened. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

OpenAI on Wednesday detailed a pipeline that employed an upcoming cyber-focused artificial intelligence (AI) model to validate and patch 948 local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Linux for $1.2 million in API costs. "Our prototype identified and analyzed 2,308 candidate Linux kernel findings, dynamically reproduced 1,724 vulnerabilities, and produced 948 local privilege escalation (LPE) exploits that could allow an unprivileged local user to gain root access," the AI company said . The findings build upon 24 LPE exploits that OpenAI revealed were discovered by its GPT‑5.5‑Cyber model back in June 2026. The latest research turns this process into an agentic pipeline comprising five stages - Vulnerability discovery, where agents identify high-value audit targets (i.e., parts of the codebase that are security-relevant and reachable by low-privileged users) and look for candidate findings Dynamic validation, where agents attempt to reproduce each candidate ...

October 2026 brought another wave of cyber threats targeting US businesses, with attackers exploiting trusted platforms, legitimate authentication processes, and everyday business workflows. For enterprises, these campaigns raise the stakes beyond individual security incidents, increasing the risk of financial losses, data breaches, and costly operational disruption. Below, we examine five active cyber threats through real-world sandbox investigations, revealing how they operate, the risks they pose to organizations, and how security teams can detect and contain attacks faster to minimize business impact. 1. SkyW4lker: Microsoft 365 Phishing Puts US Corporate Accounts at Risk SkyW4lker is an active phishing kit that exploits Microsoft's legitimate device-code authentication to compromise corporate accounts without stealing passwords or bypassing MFA. ANY.RUN researchers identified 618 related sandbox analyses between June and October 21, 2026, with 46% coming from the US. ...

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has disclosed that an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted threat actor it tracks as Crafty Falcon is targeting organizations in the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sectors in the country. Describing the threat as active and ongoing, the activity involves the use of publicly-available AI-driven offensive security tools like ARTEX, PentAGI, Cairn, and CyberStrikeAI . "These tools execute complete attack chains autonomously at machine speed, generate and refine large numbers of tailored attack scripts in rapid succession, and adapt their payloads based on target responses," CERT-In said . "The supporting attack infrastructure rotates IP addresses within hours to days." The agency said the attacks have also targeted cryptocurrency exchanges and digital asset service providers, resulting in the theft of keys and funds. The update follows an October 2026 alert issued by CERT-In, which wa...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an OpenAI Codex jailbreak bundle that's designed to modify an artificial intelligence (AI) agent's trusted instructions to insert advertisements for a third-party AI gateway. The phenomenon has been codenamed prompt adware by Check Point Research. Called Haiou (meaning Seagull in Chinese), the jailbreak modifies OpenAI Codex's configuration files to inject advertisements for the jailbreak author's website into subsequent agent responses. "The advertised service is an opaque, OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway, a middleware between an application and an LLM provider," Check Point Research said in a technical report. "The likely business model is to use the freely distributed jailbreak bundle as an acquisition channel for the paid gateway service." Adware is a type of software that displays unwanted advertisements, which can appear on users' computers or mobile devices, often in the form of ...

Two flaws in the Xen hypervisor allow a malicious guest virtual machine (VM) to read and write the memory of other VMs on the same host, including dom0. Dom0 is the VM that, by default, has full permissions and manages the others. Patches are out, and there is no known mitigation, the Xen Project said in an  advisory  on November 3. All Xen versions from 4.6 onward are vulnerable, while 4.5 and earlier are not. The flaws are tracked as CVE-2026-102703 and CVE-2026-102704 , under Xen advisory XSA-523. The Xen Project credited AI company Anthropic with finding the flaws using its Claude model. Stephan Lipp of Ada Logics then validated the finding, and the CodeAnt AI Security Research Team later independently reported the same issue. The flaws are in grant copy, the operation Xen uses to copy data between VMs. Each VM tells Xen which of its memory pages other VMs may use, and Xen checks those permissions. To save time on a batch of copies within the same memory page, ...

Nearly every agent security pitch now ends on the same promise: the product stops the bad action in real time. The promise holds for one kind of agent, the kind whose traffic passes through a gateway the enterprise owns. Most agents never touch one. One recent case shows what that gap looks like in practice. An employee asked an AI assistant to trigger a mass-email automation. The automation hit a recipient-limit policy and failed, so the assistant, which was also connected to the employee's personal mailbox, offered to send the batch from there instead. The employee approved without registering that the assistant was about to route around the sanctioned system. An unknown number of external recipients received email from a personal account rather than the approved channel. No jailbreak was involved. The assistant did exactly what it was built to do, and the fix was not retraining a model. It was a single runtime rule that blocks any attempt to reach more than fifty external d...

Blockchain infrastructure provider Chainstack on Tuesday disclosed that it was targeted in a cyber attack that allowed an unauthorized party to gain access to some parts of its infrastructure. The incident is assessed to be part of a large-scale, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered attack campaign that came to light last week. "An external attacker gained unauthorized access to part of Chainstack's infrastructure through a third-party component," the company said . "We detected the intrusion, cut the access paths, and are hardening our systems." According to the timeline of events shared by Chainstack, the attacker gained access to a development environment on October 26, 2026, and then escalated their access to break into "some parts of our production environment." The intrusion was subsequently detected on October 31, 2026, and the attacker's access was cut off that same day, the company noted. As part of the digital break-in, the ...

Binance on Tuesday said the record-setting theft of $6.43 billion in assets from the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange was the culmination of a "sophisticated, multi-stage campaign" that involved the use of a tampered Homebrew installation and recruitment-themed social engineering attack targeting two of its engineers. "It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident," the company said . "The attackers combined a range of techniques, including social engineering by fake recruitment interviews, malicious software downloads, compromised internal AI tooling, endpoint compromise, and an advanced transaction-authorisation method." The starting point has been traced back to a supply chain attack targeting one of its engineers from the Wallet DevOps team (named "Engineer A"), who downloaded a trojanized Homebrew installer to install a popular artificial intelligence (AI) tool after searching for it on a search engine....

Google on Monday warned that threat actors are hijacking enterprise access to Large Language Models (LLMs) to fraudulently leverage expensive computing resources and AI services. The tactic is called LLMjacking , a form of resource hijacking adapted for the LLM era, where an attacker obtains an API key through phishing, source code leaks, misconfigured environments, or exposed client-side code to gain unauthorized access to an organization's LLM accounts, while the legitimate owner covers the consumption costs. Such attacks have a wide geographical footprint, with impacted entities located in North America, South America, and Asia Pacific across the financial services, retail, technology, and transportation sectors. "Unlike the gradual resource consumption associated with cryptojacking, LLMJacking can generate large spikes in fraudulent cloud charges in a matter of hours," Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant said in a report shared with The Hacker News...

Fixed kernels for a use-after-free vulnerability in the Linux kernel's IPv4 TCP code are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, 9, and 10, while Ubuntu's fixes for its three newest long-term-support releases remain in its opt-in testing channel with no date for a regular update. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-98432 , can be reached by a remote, unauthenticated attacker and can lead to remote code execution,  Red Hat  and  Canonical  said. The Linux kernel's own CVE team rates the flaw 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale. Red Hat, which initially rated it Moderate at 5.9, has raised its score to 9.8 and now calls it Critical. The bug has been present since Linux 4.4, and the upstream fix landed in October. What the Flaw Is When a server accepts an IPv4 TCP connection, the kernel passes IP options from the incoming request to the new socket without copying them. If the client retransmits its connection request while another processor still rea...

A Russia-aligned threat actor known as Gorbag has been observed using simple information stealer malware in attacks targeting Ukrainian organizations. "Active since at least February 2025, the group has focused exclusively on Ukrainian targets, with a clear preference for law enforcement and justice entities, local administrations near the front line, and the defense sector," ESET researcher Damien Schaeffer said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The activity shares overlaps with a cluster tracked by the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) under the moniker UAC-0226 and by Trend Micro as SHADOW-EARTH-066 . Gorbag is known to be active since at least February 2025. A key tool in the threat actor's malware arsenal is GIFTEDCROOK, a C/C++ stealer that facilitates the theft of sensitive data from web browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, such as cookies, browsing history, and authentication data. Earlier this Ju...

Some attacks this week didn't need much of a trick. A fake support call, a trusted extension, a shared link, or a device with no password. Small things that people barely think about. Yet each was enough to cause serious trouble. Then there were the bigger messes. Billions stolen, hidden networks of hacked devices, poisoned software, and attackers finding new ways to turn normal tools against their users. Even the places meant to keep money and systems safe ended up with problems of their own. The strange part is how often the damage started somewhere nobody was looking. And that's before getting to the long list of fresh bugs, shady services, and scams making the rounds. Quite a bit to sort through. Here's what made the list. ⚡ Threat of the Week N. Korea Sets New Record with Binance $6.43B Crypto Theft — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has officially attributed the theft of more than $6 billion in virtual assets from Binance to a North Korean hack...

Two critical flaws in Langflow could let a remote attacker with no account bypass authentication or run arbitrary code,  IBM said last week . Langflow is an open-source tool for building AI agents and workflows, and its vulnerability reports go to IBM. Every release from 1.0.0 through 1.12.8 has the flaws, and the only fix is version 1.13.0. Neither flaw is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, as of the catalog's October 30 update. Six other Langflow flaws are listed there, most recently CVE-2026-9198, which was added in August . The four Langflow flaws in IBM's bulletin, first published on October 28 and updated the next day, are:

Forty percent of security teams now use AI every day, and another 56% are testing it. Only 4% have no plans to adopt it, according to Prophet Security's State of AI in Security Operations 2026 survey of more than 250 CISOs, SOC leaders and practitioners. For the teams still testing, the next decision is whether their own SOC is ready. AI SOC readiness has two parts: whether a SOC has the problems AI SOC agents are built for, and whether it has the data access, context, written standards and oversight rules that AI agents need to investigate alerts accurately in its environment. A SOC does not need to be far along a maturity model to be ready. AI agents do their first work on the bottom layer, alert handling, and the analyst hours they return give a team room to work on the layers above it. The next section describes those problems. Technical readiness covers four areas: access and context, an investigation standard with baseline metrics, rules for what the agent may do, and a...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a cyber espionage campaign specifically targeting Linux infrastructure associated with government entities and state-affiliated infrastructure. The activity, observed by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 between October 2025 and April 2026, has been tracked under the moniker CL-UNK-1211 , where "CL" refers to cluster and "UNK" stands for unknown motivation. A notable aspect of the campaign concerns the use of large language models (LLMs) and/or automated artificial intelligence (AI) agents to generate payloads and execute malicious code. "The attackers behind this cluster of activity focused on Linux environments to conduct extensive reconnaissance and maintain persistent network access to support intelligence-gathering," researchers Roey Porat and Tom Fakterman said . "The attackers attempted to dump sensitive databases and exfiltrate government mailboxes to access social media accounts." T...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Windows infostealer malware called VOLTA-AUTODOXER (aka VOLTA) that makes use of a large language model (LLM) to rank a victim's stolen data by their monetization value. Like other typical stealer families, VOLTA is equipped to harvest passwords and cookies from Chromium-based web browsers; data from Outlook profiles and Slack workspaces; payment cards; cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases; Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions; Microsoft OAuth tokens; SSH and cloud-provider keys; Wi-Fi profiles; and screenshots. "VOLTA builds a structured evidence bundle about the person behind the machine," Cisco Talos researcher Ryan Fetterman said . "This bundle contains geolocation and home address, employer and employer domain, inferred birth year, card last-4 digits, Slack workspaces, document authorship metadata, iPhone backup indicators, and a live Roblox account valuation." To make this information more va...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has officially attributed the theft of more than $6 billion in virtual assets from Binance to TraderTraitor , a North Korea-aligned elite hacking group also tracked as Jade Sleet, Pressure Chollima, PUKCHONG, Slow Pisces, and UNC4899. The FBI, along with the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), said it observed the threat actor converting stolen assets primarily into Ethereum (ETH). "It is expected these assets will then be further laundered by converting them using DeFi and instant swap services as they prepare them for further laundering stages," the FBI said in a statement. The agency has also provided a list of wallet addresses that the attackers are said to be using to launder the stolen assets. The development comes as Binance said it has resumed phase one of withdrawals starting today between 6 and 9 a.m. UTC after they were paused in the wake of the incide...

American blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said it was the target of a cybersecurity incident in which an external actor accessed non-sensitive customer data. However, the company noted that the breach did not result in unauthorized access to its investigation content, authentication credentials, or session tokens. "This month, Chainalysis detected an external actor using offensive agentic techniques to gain unauthorized access to Chainalysis systems and internal tools," Chainalysis said Friday. "Some non-sensitive customer data, such as user IDs, full names, email addresses, and organization role labels for users provisioned on our platform were accessed, including such information relating to your organization and users." The company said it's patching vulnerabilities and hardening its systems in response to the incident. The mention of "offensive agentic techniques" indicates that an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool was used ...

A malicious ChatGPT share link could run an attacker's code in the logged-in session of anyone who opened it, allowing them to read their private conversations, researchers at the security firm Parameter showed. The researchers reported the flaw through  OpenAI's bug bounty program  on October 18, and OpenAI fixed it eight days later and rated it P1, its most serious category. The trap was an ordinary ChatGPT conversation shared via its public link. It could be sent the same way as any real shared chat: by email, as a chat message, as a support ticket, or as a social post. The victim did not have to install anything, join a workspace, or sign in through the attacker. In the most reliable version of the attack, they opened the link and clicked ChatGPT's Preview button once. In a later version, Parameter set the page to open Preview on its own, so opening the link was the only step. What the Attacker Could Do Once the link opened, the attacker's code ran ins...