artificial intelligence | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

AI is compressing exploit timelines. The real question isn't whether your vulnerability management playbook needs to change, it's which part of it you've been getting wrong all along. The conversation happening in security circles right now goes something like this: Mythos is here. Exploit timelines are collapsing. Does the vulnerability management playbook need to change? The honest answer is yes. But not the part most people are focused on. The discussion around Mythos, Anthropic's frontier model and its implications for offensive security, tends to center on discovery. AI accelerates reconnaissance. It helps attackers identify exposures faster, chain techniques more efficiently, and move at machine speed through environments that were previously protected, in part, by the attacker's own time constraints. That's real. And it matters. But here's the part getting less attention: most security teams weren't winning the prioritization battle bef...

Most organizations have incident response plans, security tools, and technical teams in place. Yet new research suggests that many still lack the coordination, visibility, and executive alignment needed to withstand a serious cyberattack. According to The State of Incident Response Readiness 2026 , based on a survey of 600 senior IT security decision makers conducted by Vanson Bourne in January and February 2026, 73% of organizations admit they would not be "fully ready" if a significant cybersecurity attack occurred tomorrow. The findings point to a critical gap between having incident response capabilities and being able to execute them effectively under pressure. The report also found that cyberattacks are already a recurring business risk. More than three-quarters of organizations, 76%, experienced at least one cyberattack in the past 12 months, while 32% experienced more than one. Incident Response Readiness Remains a Weak Point Incident response has evolved f...

OpenAI on Tuesday revealed the rogue artificial intelligence (AI) agent that escaped its sealed evaluation environment and broke into Hugging Face's production environment also hacked multiple third-party accounts and services as part of the attack. The latest disclosure shows that the security incident, which stemmed from an internal security test, was more extensive in scope than previously thought. The AI company said its ongoing review of the incident revealed a "small number of cases" where the models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and an "even more capable pre-release model," identified and used exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly-available services. "This includes four accounts on four services as part of the Hugging Face incident (and a few accounts accessed as part of other evaluations)," it said. "One of these four accounts was used as an outbound relay and staging path, and another account was used for data st...

Anthropic says Claude Mythos Preview helped derive an end-to-end key-recovery attack against HAWK-256 and a 200- to 800-fold speedup for an attack on seven-round AES-128. The HAWK attack exploits a previously unused symmetry in the lattice behind the signature scheme. Anthropic's released implementation gives an expected end-to-end runtime of about three hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server. The AES result removes a 256-way guessing step from an existing meet-in-the-middle attack. Anthropic said neither result affects production systems. HAWK remains a candidate in a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) post-quantum standardization process, and the public recovery code only targets the smaller HAWK-256 parameter. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) result applies to seven of AES-128's ten rounds and still requires an impractical number of chosen plaintexts. The company said no production software needs to change as a result. Anthropic published...

JFrog has confirmed that OpenAI models exploited a zero-day in self-hosted Artifactory while trying to reach the open internet from a sealed evaluation environment. Artifactory is JFrog's software repository manager. OpenAI says the models then escalated privileges and moved laterally until they reached an internet-connected node. JFrog says it has since developed and released fixes for cloud and self-hosted customers. The Artifactory exploit occurred inside OpenAI's environment. OpenAI says a separate attack path later reached Hugging Face's systems. JFrog says its cloud customers are already protected. Self-hosted users should review the Artifactory release notes and move to the remediating build for their maintained branch. Several Artifactory CVE records were published on July 27 with affected-version ranges and fixed-version thresholds, but neither JFrog nor OpenAI has said whether any of those records correspond to the vulnerabilities used during the evaluati...

OpenWrt has shipped version 24.10.8 to close a critical DHCPv6 stack overflow and a wider set of remotely triggerable flaws in network services enabled by default. The critical issue, tracked as CVE-2026-53921 and rated 9.8 on CVSS 3.1 in OpenWrt's GitHub advisory, lets an unauthenticated attacker able to reach the DHCPv6 server overwrite a stack buffer in odhcpd through a crafted DHCPv6 REQUEST. odhcpd runs as root, and the advisory notes that embedded hardware commonly lacks stack canaries and address space layout randomization (ASLR), making code execution a realistic outcome on typical devices. The advisory includes public Python proof-of-concept code for both documented overflow paths. Users on the 24.10 branch should install 24.10.8, while users on 25.12 should install 25.12.5; firmware images are available through the OpenWrt Firmware Selector. As of July 28, the reviewed OpenWrt materials did not report exploitation in the wild. The flaw was also absent from CISA...

STAR Labs has published a Linux kernel exploit that turns an ordinary local user into root on the CentOS Stream 9 build it targeted. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-53264 (CVSS score: 7.8), is a use-after-free race in the kernel's network traffic-control subsystem. Researcher Lee Jia Jie said artificial intelligence (AI) helped him find the bug and speed up exploit development. This is local privilege escalation, not remote code execution, so an attacker needs a foothold on the machine before any of it applies. The demonstrated exploit also requires unprivileged user namespaces, the CONFIG_NET_ACT_GACT and CONFIG_NET_CLS_FLOWER kernel options, and a kernel-specific return-oriented programming (ROP) chain containing hardcoded offsets. Those conditions narrow the immediate exposure, but full exploit source code is now public. The upstream fix landed on June 1, 2026, and has since been backported to several stable kernel branches. The Linux CNA record lists vulnerable ranges begi...

Microsoft has launched its first cybersecurity-specific model inside MDASH , its multi-model vulnerability identification and remediation harness. The company says MDASH, using MAI-Cyber-1-Flash and GPT-5.4, scored 95.95% on CyberGym. It also claims the configuration costs 50% less than its current best MDASH combination of GPT-5.4, GPT-5.4 mini, and GPT-5.3 Codex. Access is limited to approved MDASH customers through an Azure AI Foundry private preview. MAI-Cyber-1-Flash is designed to handle up to 90% of MDASH tasks, with GPT-5.4 reserved for the hardest 10%. It is available only inside MDASH, not as a standalone public model or general-purpose application programming interface. The headline score belongs to MDASH running MAI-Cyber-1-Flash alongside GPT-5.4, not to the new model by itself. CyberGym Level 1 is a known-vulnerability reproduction test. It gives an agent a vulnerability description and the corresponding unpatched source code, then checks whether it can produce a ...

Monday starts with the usual promise that everything is under control. Then the logs wake up. This week, trusted tools crossed lines, old flaws found new work, exposed systems stayed exposed, and attackers kept hiding inside normal-looking services. Nothing looked strange at first. That helped. That is the mood. Here is the full recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenAI Says Its AI Agent Went Rogue and Targeted Hugging Face - OpenAI disclosed that it lost control of two AI models during a security evaluation that ended in a breach of Hugging Face. The AI company said its AI models broke out of a sealed testing environment and broke into Hugging Face's production system to find solutions for the ExploitGym benchmark. "The incident also makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access," OpenAI said. "It highlights that advanced cyber capabilities must be developed alongside stronger safegua...

The North Korean threat actors behind the ClickFix-style campaigns that employ typosquatted Zoom and Microsoft Teams domains have been found to operate an active phishing kit to impersonate the videoconferencing platforms in social engineering campaigns designed to deliver malware. " BlueNoroff has operationalised trust abuse by combining compromised industry contacts, social engineering, wallet reconnaissance and malware delivery into a repeatable victim acquisition pipeline," JUMPSEC said in a detailed report shared with The Hacker News. "The platform profiles victims' cryptocurrency wallets before malware delivery, enabling selective targeting of high-value victims." Describing the campaign as an operator-driven victim acquisition platform, the cybersecurity company noted that the activity involves using compromised trusted contacts as the initial access vector to create a self-propagating attack chain via Telegram. Details of the activity have been...

Someone installed a popular AI assistant on a rented server, switched off the setting that makes it ask permission before running risky commands, and pointed it at Thailand's Ministry of Finance, which runs the country's treasury and tax collection. The agent then worked through the ministry's network on its own, checking hosts for ways to gain root access, hunting through file systems, and crawling a folder of staff personnel records going back to 2012. The operator left the agent's own logs sitting on a web server with directory listing switched on, where threat intelligence firm Hunt.io and researcher Bob Diachenko found them, along with 585 files and 470 MB of attack tooling. The tool is Hermes , an open-source assistant from Nous Research that people install to manage their mail, run chores, and take instructions over Telegram or Slack. It is not a hacking tool, and nothing here is a flaw in it. The mode the operator used, called YOLO, is a documented feat...

Most of this week's trouble came dressed as something useful. A package stole data. A fake extension opened remote access. A safety app became spyware. An image gave hidden orders to an AI agent. Other threats hid in open systems, weak code, and normal network traffic. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out. The danger was easy to miss because it looked ordinary. Here is the full list:

Google on Thursday announced a new way for users to sign-in to their accounts by letting them take a selfie video. The selfie for sign-in , per the tech giant, is another option on top of existing recovery methods to log in to an account, including an email address or a phone number. The idea is to use a video selfie as a way to regain access if a user ever gets locked out or doesn't have access to their usual phone or computer. As part of the process, users are required to set up a selfie video by just looking into the device's camera and completing a "few short, guided head movements" to capture their face from different angles. Should users have any trouble signing in to their accounts with the selfie method at a later stage, they can just take another selfie to sign back in. "Selfie video compares the new video to the one you set up to confirm it is really you and help you get back into your account," Google said in a blog post shared with The Ha...

RefluXFS , a Linux kernel flaw disclosed on July 22 and tracked as CVE-2026-64600 , lets an unprivileged local user overwrite root-owned files on an XFS filesystem and gain persistent root access. Qualys said default installations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives, Fedora Server, and Amazon Linux can meet the conditions for exploitation. The company demonstrated the race against /etc/passwd and setuid-root binaries. The overwrite lands at the block layer. It survives a reboot and leaves the target's ownership, permissions, timestamps, and setuid bit untouched, so a modified setuid-root binary still runs as root. The fix was merged on July 16, and Linux vendors have begun shipping backported kernels. The patch traces the bug to Linux 4.11 in 2017: a Fixes: tag naming commit 3c68d44a2b49 and a stable backport request marked # v4.11 . Who is exposed Exploitation requires three conditions: The system runs Linux 4.11 or later without the RefluXFS fix....

Beginning July 27, 2026, GitHub will cut public bug bounty payouts by at least half at every severity level. Critical findings will drop from $20,000-$30,000+ to a fixed $10,000, while its permanent invite-only VIP tier will pay $30,000 or more. Reports filed before that date, including those already in GitHub's growing triage queue, will retain the previous payout terms. GitHub said the changes are intended to reduce noise while giving established researchers faster responses, higher rewards, and closer access to its security engineering team. "You don't earn more by submitting more," the company said. "You earn more by submitting better." The public program is moving from flexible ranges to fixed payments: Low: $250, down from $617-$2,000 Medium: $2,000, down from $4,000-$10,000 High: $5,000, down from $10,000-$20,000 Critical: $10,000, down from $20,000-$30,000+ The Hacker News calculated that the new public rates are 50% lower f...

Security leaders who build fast, visible paths to AI adoption are becoming the most valued partners in their organizations. AI governance done right gives security teams the visibility they need, employees the tools they want, and CISOs the strategic influence they have earned. According to McKinsey's State of AI report, 76 percent of employees now use AI in some capacity at work, up from 55 percent the year before. Writing assistants, coding copilots, meeting summarizers, AI-powered research tools: they are woven into daily work. Most were never reviewed by security. The conventional response is restriction. An application appears, the security team blocks it, employees find a workaround within days, and the cycle repeats. It comes down to speed: the approval path moves slower than the pace of AI releases. When the official route takes six weeks, and a workaround takes six minutes, most employees will choose the workaround. Technology gets adopted because people find it use...

The cycle is over. For years, cybersecurity followed a familiar pattern: defenses improved, attackers adapted, and the back-and-forth continued. Today, AI-equipped attackers are simply outpacing defenses. Most intrusions now bypass endpoint and malware-based detection entirely. The CrowdStrike Global Threat Report estimates around 79% of attacks are malware-free, as threat actors rely on credential theft and DLL side-load techniques to bypass host-level monitoring. Perimeter vulnerabilities compound this exposure; firewalls and VPN gateway breaches climbed 19% according to the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report . Once an adversary gains access, breakout often occurs in seconds. Claude Mythos and similar models have further escalated operational pressure. These can rapidly discover and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities, virtually closing the window from initial discovery to full compromise. Security practices must adapt to prioritize rapid containment and ...

Google's DeepMind on Tuesday announced the release of Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber , a specialized artificial intelligence (AI) model built atop 3.5 Flash that's designed to discover, validate, and patch vulnerabilities quickly and efficiently. According to the tech giant, the model will be exclusively available to governments and trusted partners via CodeMender as part of a limited-access pilot program. CodeMender is an AI-powered agent for vulnerability discovery and patching that was unveiled by the company in October 2025. A Google DeepMind spokesperson told The Hacker News that there are plans to extend the model's capabilities to include red-teaming features and end-to-end enterprise defense. The lightweight model, per DeepMind, is both cost-efficient and highly capable alternative to large, costly cybersecurity-focused models. CodeMender can call upon 3.5 Flash Cyber "multiple times at high speed and low cost," allowing the AI agent to scan more code path...

Every patch is a confession. The moment a vendor ships a security fix, the diff between the old code and the new code tells anyone watching exactly what was broken and where. Turn that diff back into a working exploit, and you can hit every system that hasn't updated yet. This is N-day exploitation, and it's always been a race: the vendor patches, the clock starts, and defenders try to deploy before an attacker finishes reverse-engineering the fix. For the last thirty-odd years, defenders usually won that race. Reverse-engineering a patch into a reliable exploit was slow, specialized work - usually requiring weeks of expert-level effort. Historically, the gap between a patch and a working public exploit spanned weeks, often months. The traditional playbook assumed you had at least a few weeks. You don't anymore. Not even close. Reverse-engineering a patch used to take weeks. Mythos does it in an hour. Anthropic's red team measured exactly that. Given not...

Researchers at Sysdig have linked a second attack on the same Langflow server to JADEPUFFER , the AI-agent-driven operator it first documented earlier this month. The same operator has now been spotted deploying ENCFORGE , a new compiled Go ransomware designed to encrypt model weights, vector indexes, training datasets, and other AI infrastructure files across the host filesystem. The entry point did not change. Langflow versions before 1.3.0 expose the /api/v1/validate/code endpoint without authentication, allowing any remote attacker to execute arbitrary Python on the server. The flaw, CVE-2025-3248 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and has been in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog since May 5, 2025. As The Hacker News reported earlier this month, the prior operation used throwaway Python code and MySQL's AES_ENCRYPT() function to encrypt and destroy data in Nacos (Alibaba's configuration server) and production databases. The new ENCFORGE payload re...