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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...

Threat actors are now exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting ServiceNow AI Platform, according to Defused Cyber . In a post shared on X, the threat intelligence firm said it's observing in-the-wild exploitation of CVE-2026-6875 (CVSS score: 9.5), a sandbox escape vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated user to run arbitrary code. Patches for the flaw were released by ServiceNow throughout June in the following versions - Brazil EA and Brazil GA Australia Patch 2 Zurich Patch 7b and Zurich Patch 9 Yokohama Patch 12 Hot Fix 1b and Yokohama Patch 13 Searchlight Cyber, which disclosed additional technical specifics, said it reported the issue on April 1, 2026, adding it allows a complete compromise of the ServiceNow instance as well as all connected proxy servers. Besides rolling out a fix, ServiceNow is "enhancing instance security by severely restricting the type of code that can run in sandbox contexts," securit...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered nearly 7,600 malicious GitHub repositories, out of which more than 800 pose as artificial intelligence (AI) skills or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to deliver a malware family known as SmartLoader as part of an ongoing campaign codenamed FakeGit . "FakeGit uses copied projects, lookalike developer profiles, convincing READMEs, and malicious ZIP files to deliver SmartLoader malware," Oleg Zaytsev, lead security researcher at Island, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The end goal of these attacks is to leverage the access afforded by SmartLoader to establish persistence and push secondary payloads, such as StealC, an information stealer capable of harvesting a wide range of data from compromised systems. It's worth mentioning here that the use of trojanized MCP servers to distribute SmartLoader and StealC was flagged earlier this year by Straiker AI and subsequently by Derp.ca . But a concerning aspect ...

A malware operator left its delivery server wide open, and Rapid7 pulled down the whole toolkit: 1,048 files spanning lure templates, filename-spoofing tests, execution experiments, droppers, builder notes, and two campaign chains. One was already live against Windows users in Mexico, delivering an infostealer through a fake government ID-lookup site over WebDAV. What makes it more than a payload dump: it caught the operation mid-build. Testing notes, failed experiments, documentation, and live delivery logs sat in one place, the kind of complete development trail defenders rarely see. Rapid7 reads the artifacts, down to a hardcoded path pointing at an open-source AI coding tool, as an operator using generative AI to produce, test, and document phishing delivery at speed. The most developed test set focused on CVE-2025-33053 (CVSS 8.8, now in CISA's KEV catalog ), the WebDAV working-directory hijack Check Point documented last year in its Stealth Falcon reporting. The...

A single request should not be able to do this much. But this week, small inputs led to code execution, memory loss, stolen keys, and disabled security tools. The paths were often simple: exposed systems, weak checks, old drivers, fake prompts, and public code used for malware delivery. Some bugs were new. Others were already being used before defenders had time to patch. Here is the full recap of what broke, what was exploited, and what needs attention now. ⚡ Threat of the Week New wp2shell WordPress Core Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Run Code - Searchlight Cyber disclosed a pre-authenticated remote code execution vulnerability in WordPress Core that can be exploited anonymously on a standard WordPress installation, without requiring any plugins or other special conditions. It is a combination of CVE-2026-63030 (REST API batch-route confusion) and CVE-2026-60137 (SQL injection in WordPress core) that can be chained to turn an anonymous request into code execution. wa...

The industry spent the initial months after Anthropic's April 7 Mythos reveal focused on volume . How many new CVEs would Mythos add to an already overloaded pipeline? How quickly would the flood of AI-driven discovery overwhelm triage capabilities? How long would it take adversaries to weaponize Mythos findings at scale? Those questions were and remain valid. Yet they all stop short of addressing the single metric that determines whether any of those vulnerabilities actually lead to a breach: the exposure window. The exposure window - the gap between the moment a vulnerability becomes exploitable and the moment your team fixes it - is the time an attacker has to do actual damage. That window is currently open far too wide. In 2025, the average eCrime breakout time dropped to 29 minutes . Even PCI DSS - the strictest compliance framework in the industry - allows 30 days to remediate a critical vulnerability. That's a 1,000-to-1 gap between how fast attackers move and how f...

A solo Russian-speaking threat actor known as " bandcampro " outsourced a chunk of their operations to Google's open-source Gemini CLI artificial intelligence (AI) and commandeered a live botnet. The findings come from an analysis of 200 Gemini CLI session logs between March 19 and April 21, 2026, which found the threat actor using AI, among other things, to crack passwords, set up a residential proxy, compromise WordPress merchants, and plan a phone-based cryptocurrency fraud scheme aimed at elderly people in the U.S. and Canada. "The logs documented how the threat actor used an AI agent to migrate a command-and-control (C&C) server, and to control a small-scale botnet, among other hacking activities," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen, Philippe Lin, Lucas Silva, Vladimir Kropotov, and Fyodor Yarochkin said . "The entire C&C operation fits in three plaintext files totaling roughly 5 KB, making it highly replicable and effectively disposa...

The European Commission on Thursday ordered Google to give rival AI assistants the same reach into Android that Gemini already has: the camera, the microphone, whatever is on screen, a wake word that fires with the display off, and the ability to drive other apps in the background by imitating taps and typing. Google has to ship it in the next major release, Android 18, and by 1 August 2027 at the latest. That is one of two binding specification decisions adopted on 16 July under the Digital Markets Act, six months after the Commission opened proceedings on 27 January. The second makes Google hand anonymised Search query, click, and ranking data to rival search engines, and to AI chatbots that do search, for a cost-based fee. Neither is a fine. Specification proceedings only say what a gatekeeper has to build; the Commission's separate power to open a non-compliance case , fines included, is untouched. Android carries around 60% of European mobile users. Five features g...

Military forces are under increasing pressure to field autonomous capabilities faster than ever before. Across the U.S., UK, and NATO, new investment, evolving defense strategies, and accelerated acquisition pathways are transforming how capability is delivered, rewarding programs that can move from concept to operational deployment at commercial speed. Now the focus shifts to the trusted information infrastructure that allows them to operate together at mission speed. As autonomous aircraft, uncrewed maritime vessels, ground systems, satellites and AI-enabled mission applications become increasingly connected, so too does the information that powers them. Telemetry, ISR, command data, AI outputs, sensor-to-shooter workflows and coalition intelligence all need to move seamlessly across platforms, domains, and partners. The future force won't be defined by autonomous systems alone, it will be defined by the trusted information infrastructure that connects them. Defense Has ...

A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something that looks close enough. A familiar repo. A useful installer. A harmless sync setting. Then the handoff goes bad, the box starts talking to someone else, and the damage moves faster than the explanation. Old bugs are back, weak defaults are earning their keep, and some attack paths are so plain they barely feel like research. Here’s the mess. Game cheats drop spyware 11 Malicious NuGet Tools Masquerade as Game Cheats to Drop Windows Surveillance Payload Cybersecurity researchers 11 malicious NuGet packages published as .NET command-line tools that present themselves as game utilities, bots, and "panels," each of which act as a first-stage downloader responsible for fetching and executing a second-stage Python payload named "pepesoft.exe" from GitHub Releases and Hugging Face paths under the username "pepegit666," along with a dormant BitTorrent fallback...