artificial intelligence | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Some attacks take real skill. Others just need someone to leave a door open. This week has both. Exposed passwords, old bugs still getting exploited, and trusted software doing things it shouldn't. There's a strange mix of clever tricks and careless mistakes. Hackers are borrowing trust from familiar apps, websites, and AI tools. Some are using AI to speed things up. Others are leaving their own attack files exposed. Not exactly careful work. Different stories, familiar weak spots. Here's what showed up this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

A flaw in the Linux kernel's TCP code, tracked as  CVE-2026-98432 , affects Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and other Linux distributions. The kernel's own CVE team rates it 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale. Anthropic said  on October 27 that its AI model wrote an exploit that uses the flaw to let a remote attacker with no credentials run commands as root on Linux servers with a multipath TCP listener. As of October 29, Ubuntu and RHEL have not released a fixed kernel. Red Hat, Amazon, Oracle, and SUSE score the flaw between 5.9 and 8.1, lower than the kernel team's 9.8. The flaw is a race condition in the code that sets up new IPv4 TCP connections. It can make the kernel read memory it has already freed, a bug type known as a use-after-free. The kernel fix  credits Anthropic researcher Xinyang Ge with reporting the bug. Neither the CVE record nor the fix mentions multipath TCP (MPTCP). The link between that feature and this bug comes from Anthropic'...

Threat actors are delivering malicious loaders and cryptocurrency miners under the guise of artificial intelligence (AI) desktop applications for Anthropic Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT as part of a campaign dubbed Yoba . The activity involves creating fake GitHub projects that claim to be desktop applications like GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, and Claude Opus, only to deliver a malware family called YobaLoader. "The malware is placed next to legitimate, signed executables from OpenAI and Anthropic so it can be loaded indirectly, a technique commonly known as DLL sideloading, which is often used to bypass security protections," Check Point Research said in an analysis. To add to the project's credibility, the attackers set up GitHub.io pages to describe the capabilities of the software. Although the GitHub projects' popularity is not manipulated using techniques like ghost networks , signs point to the use of SEO poisoning tactics to ensure that links to them are sur...

Google on Wednesday took the wraps off Gemini 4 Carbon , its latest frontier model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities. "It shows significant gains across coding and agentic tasks as well as across key capabilities critical for cybersecurity defense, landing a firm lead in SEC-bench Pro (88.2%) for finding vulnerabilities, ExploitGym (54.8%) for exploitation, and CWE-bench (71.0%) for patching," Koray Kavukcuoglu, senior vice president of Google DeepMind and chief AI architect at Google, said . On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index benchmark, Carbon leads with a score of 59, surpassing Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 (58), OpenAI GPT-6 Astra (57), GPT-6.1 Sol (55). One of the core focus areas is cybersecurity, where the latest iteration reportedly delivers significant performance improvements across the board, including vulnerability detection, validation, and remediation. Carbon is also twice as likely to generate secure code ver...

Security teams have spent years trying to detect threats faster. AI is changing the harder part: how much time defenders have left to act. Advanced AI models can now help attackers discover vulnerabilities, generate exploit code, and move through weaknesses faster than traditional security processes were built to handle. The challenge is no longer just finding another vulnerability or generating another alert. It is knowing which exposures matter, what an attacker can reach, and which issues need to be fixed first. That is the focus of next week's webinar, How to Build AI Threat Readiness Across Your Security Operations , featuring an expert from Wiz. The session will show how security teams can improve visibility, prioritize real risk, and shorten the path from detection to remediation. Most security teams already have plenty of data. They have vulnerability findings, cloud alerts, identity signals, application telemetry, and threat detections. The harder problem is conne...

A flaw in Telegram for Android could be chained with two other bugs to take full control of a victim's phone through a voice call, once the victim answered, according to security startup NebuSec. The attacker needed only an ordinary Telegram account. Telegram fixed the flaw in version 12.10.4 of the app, released in late September, and NebuSec  disclosed it on October 29 . Combined with an information-leak bug, the flaw gives the attacker an escape from the Telegram app to Android, NebuSec co-founder and chief executive Eten Zou told The Hacker News. Adding an Android root exploit then gives full control of the phone, including its messages, microphone and camera. The flaw can be triggered in every version from 8.6.2 through 12.10.3, Zou said. Those versions came out between March 2022 and September 2026. The company confirmed it in private voice calls on ARM64-based phones and has no evidence so far that it directly affects Telegram's iOS and desktop apps or group ca...

AI is beginning to take over much of the work that has traditionally defined the security analyst's job. Investigating alerts, collecting evidence, correlating activity across tools, and executing response actions are becoming tasks that AI systems can perform on their own. As these capabilities mature, security operations centers (SOCs) will see major changes in how work is organized, how decisions are made, and what is expected of the people responsible for defending organizations. For security professionals, this is a chance to take on a much broader role. As AI assumes more of the operational workload, analysts can move beyond individual alerts and investigations to direct the defense across the entire security lifecycle. We call this emerging role the Threat Operator: an AI-native security professional who translates business risk into defensive priorities, directs AI-driven operations, and exercises judgment over the decisions and actions taken by those systems. The impa...

26,400 credentials that developers left in public code on Gitee , a Chinese code-hosting service, still worked when a researcher tested them. Anyone who copied one from that code could have used it. Independent researcher Ben Zimmermann found them by scanning 7.25 million public Gitee repositories and  reported the results  on October 28. Most were keys for cloud and AI services, led by 9,473 Alibaba Cloud AccessKey pairs. Zimmermann sent the vendors with the most exposed keys a list of their credentials, but he did not contact the developers who leaked them. When he published, he had not confirmed that any of the reported credentials had been revoked. So anyone who has pushed a key to a public Gitee repository cannot assume it has been revoked. The scan ran for about a month, but Zimmermann did not provide the dates, so it is unclear how long ago the credentials were tested. He also did not say whether anyone else had used them. He ran two secret scanners,  Truf...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of what appears to be an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted attack orchestrated by a suspected China-nexus threat actor that has leveraged the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities to breach exposed systems. The activity, which was observed on October 25, 2026, involved an attacker combining PHP2Shell with a kernel privilege escalation exploit to root 25 servers, including three systems in a U.S. government-affiliated environment. "The affected devices run specific versions of a large vendor's firewall software," cybersecurity firm Dream said . "The attacker then launched attacks against Active Directory. The recovered artifacts confirm credential extraction and directory enumeration." The name of the affected vendor was not disclosed, but the Israeli company said it notified the entity. The attack chain essentially brings together two sets of vulnerabilities impacting PHP and the Linux kernel - PHP2Shell , ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of this decade's defining technologies. From healthcare and finance to manufacturing and education, organizations increasingly rely on AI to automate repetitive tasks, uncover patterns hidden within large datasets, and support faster decision-making. Cybersecurity has experienced a similar transformation. While attackers employ AI to automate cyberattacks and accelerate vulnerability discovery, defenders are adopting AI to improve threat detection and enhance incident response. Security Operations Centers (SOCs) receive a high volume of alerts from endpoints, cloud workloads, network devices, identity providers, and business applications. Although SIEM and XDR platforms provide visibility into these environments, analysts often spend considerable time correlating alerts, searching documentation, and determining the next investigative steps. AI offers a practical way to augment analysts by providing contextual explanations, summarizing ...

An unreleased Anthropic AI model found security flaws in Chrome, Safari, Android, Windows, and Linux and chained them into working proof-of-concept exploits, the company said in its latest report. The exploits were built in the lab after the model was prompted, not seen in any real attack, and Anthropic reported every flaw to the vendor first, so all of them are already patched. One proof of concept opened the Calculator app on a stock Mac running Chrome within seconds of a page loading, with no further clicks. Anthropic's Frontier Red Team described five chains in a research post. The strongest claim is not any single bug, but that one model found several separate flaws and combined them into a working exploit, something the company says has until now been the work of a few specialist teams. That capability claim rests on Anthropic's own account. The patches and the fact that Apple and Google credit Anthropic and its Claude model for specific fixes can be verified with...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of three cyber attacks targeting organizations in Japan in which artificial intelligence (AI) was a key element, either in the driving seat or to assist a human operator. TrendAI, which analyzed three exposed server environments used by threat actors to conduct the malicious cyber operations, described them as distinct from previously published attacks that have leveraged ARTEX , an autonomous AI penetration testing framework, to single out entities in South Korea and Japan. "These environments held reconnaissance and attack tools, scripts, target lists, results, logs, and command histories," security researchers Bakuei Matsukawa and Joseph C Chen said. "They ranged from workspaces used largely by hand by skilled operators to AI-agent platforms that automated the entire workflow, including command and control." The first of the three attacks has been found to abuse CyberStrikeAI , another open-source penetra...

Fake login pages are nothing new, but generative AI is making them easier to build and more convincing. Attackers can recreate familiar login screens, impersonate trusted brands and tailor phishing attempts to specific employees or organizations.  Some fake login pages go beyond stealing passwords. They can also capture MFA codes or hijack authenticated sessions, allowing attackers to gain access to corporate accounts even when additional security measures are in place. How AI is making fake login pages more convincing Attackers have long used fake login pages to steal credentials, but generative AI makes it easier to create convincing replicas of legitimate authentication portals. From company logos and page layouts to login prompts, these fraudulent pages can closely resemble the websites employees regularly access. AI also makes it easier to tailor phishing campaigns to specific organizations or employees. For example, attackers can create personalized IT notifications ...

OpenAI's compaction feature, which shrinks a long conversation to save space, could be turned into a way to copy a model's hidden reasoning out in plain text,  security firm Xint  has shown. OpenAI's reasoning models work through a problem before answering, and the service normally returns only the raw reasoning as  an encrypted item  the user cannot read. The method got past the protections OpenAI added in August against this kind of reasoning theft. OpenAI confirmed the problem and fixed it on October 23, according to Xint. Xint ran the technique against gpt-5.6-sol, one of OpenAI's reasoning models, using math and algorithm puzzles its researchers wrote themselves. The reasoning it pulled out came from those same requests, and Xint did not claim the method could reach another user's reasoning. Xint says it cannot prove the copied text is word-for-word the model's real reasoning, because it never had the original to compare against. Two cheaper models e...

This2Shell, That2Shell, Everything2Shell. That's pretty much how the last week went. Critical bugs that let attackers run code remotely are showing up everywhere. Hackers are scanning for targets, some flaws are already being used in attacks, and security teams have more urgent patches than they can keep up with. And that's not even the full story. A leaked key led to a software supply-chain attack. AI agents are being tricked into following harmful instructions. Old bugs are still being used to break into systems, and some attacks are so simple it's hard to believe they still work. Some websites even went offline to avoid taking chances. It's been a rough week for anyone trying to keep systems safe. Here's what happened. ⚡ Threat of the Week PHP2Shell Flaws Puts Organizations on Alert — The PHP Foundation released patches for two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution...

Every SOC struggles with a pile of alerts. Very few of those alerts explain how an attack started or how it progressed. Network data, like that from a network detection and response (NDR) platform, connects individual alerts into one timeline, and it feeds the defensive systems that can tie all events together into one coordinated view. SOC teams often first see the shape of an intrusion through a series of smaller alerts that are triggered (e.g., when a signature matches a known malware hash, a threshold flags an unusual spike in failed logins, or an endpoint agent detects suspicious activity). When viewed through the SIEM dashboard, an attack often begins as a series of distinct events with related or overlapping timestamps. Artificial intelligence has accelerated modern attacks, enabling attackers to automate reconnaissance, craft targeted payloads, and execute scripts in seconds. Yet, speed does not obfuscate the need for stealth. To evade detection, adversaries deliberately d...

A malicious instruction file sitting in a developer's Downloads folder tried to make their AI coding agent install a known-malicious npm package, security firm Forever Security said in a report published last week. The company caught the attempt on a real customer's machine and stopped the agent before any code ran. It could not determine how the file got into the folder. The file was  AGENTS.md, a plain-text instructions file that a coding agent, such as OpenAI's Codex, reads when it starts in a folder and follows as directions. It was dressed up as ordinary engineering notes. One section told the agent to add a server to its own configuration and install a package called function-color from npm. That package is part of a malware campaign that other researchers have  documented separately : function-color pulls in a downloader called function-flag, which fetches and runs a Windows payload. Researchers at CloudSEK and Checkmarx, who ...

In an update, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said it's retracting its earlier assessment that the post-compromise activity targeting the European government agency involved the exploitation of the PHP2Shell flaws. "What researchers saw was an attack against a European government agency executed in the context of a vulnerable PHP application," a spokesperson for the company told The Hacker News via email. "This led us to believe that it was exploitation of those vulnerabilities. We are unable to confirm that initial access is associated with the specific PHP2Shell CVEs." The original story follows. Threat actors have been observed using agentic artificial intelligence (AI) platforms for post-exploitation activity following the abuse of the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. "In one case, the attackers targeted a government entity in Europe and within two hours of the initial exploitation they had successfully acce...

OpenAI has announced plans to conduct frontier model training with no live internet access, as it resumes reinforcement learning (RL) training and internal inference of its most advanced AI models. "Based on the current state of alignment research, monitoring systems, and the security of internet infrastructure, we believe the responsible approach is to conduct frontier model training with no internet access," the artificial intelligence (AI) company said . "We've implemented this policy and will maintain it until advances in these safeguards justify broader internet access." OpenAI said models' growing capabilities can have the side effect of them getting much better at devising ways around environmental restrictions to escape containment and perform unintended actions. This can involve the model exploiting a software flaw or misconfiguration to reach the live internet, or finding unauthorized ways to communicate with agents in other sandboxes. Late ...

LiteLLM on Friday revealed that an Agent Platform master key accidentally published to a public GitHub repository in late May 2026 ultimately allowed the threat actor to push a malicious version of the popular Python package. "On May 27, 2026, a configuration file was committed to the public LiteLLM-Labs/lite-harness repository which inadvertently contained the master key to a deployment of the LiteLLM Agent Platform, an open source tool we use for orchestrating agents," LiteLLM's Oliver Jensen and Mateo Wang said . "The error was quickly identified, the commit force-pushed over, and we identified the exposed keys as requiring revocation. However, key revocation did not occur for the master key." LiteLLM said the unknown attacker (operating from "69.48.229[.]143") used this unrevoked key on October 10, 2026, to gain access to the Agent Platform and extracted a GitHub CLI OAuth token the service was configured with to allow self-hosted cloud a...