artificial intelligence | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The crooks have trust problems of their own. One ransomware affiliate decided to keep the profits for himself. Elsewhere, an attacker left a server exposed, complete with tools and traces of an intrusion. Apparently, keeping things secure is a problem on both sides of the fence. The rest of the week isn't much more reassuring. Malicious code turned up in developer packages and extensions that looked harmless. Familiar online services helped phishing emails appear legitimate. A basic file upload flaw gave attackers a way in, while weak session cookies made impersonation far too easy. Even AI assistants are getting their own instructions hidden inside phishing messages now. What's interesting is the gap between effort and results. Some attacks involve several stages, careful timing, and plenty of tricks. Others get surprisingly far because of a bad design choice or something nobody bothered to check. Both seem to be working well enough. Anyway, here's what else turned u...

The Russia-aligned threat actor known as UAC-0099 has been attributed to a previously undocumented .NET infostealer and remote access trojan (RAT) codenamed ASHVEIN . According to TrendAI, the malware has been put to use in attacks targeting Ukrainian government personnel. The cybersecurity company is tracking the cluster under the name Earth Sirrush (previously SHADOW-EARTH-065). ASHVEIN, which its developers internally refer to as "TelemetryBrowser," brings together credential theft, surveillance, and remote-control capabilities. Its functionality includes credential theft from Chrome and Firefox, GDI-based screenshot capture, file enumeration and retrieval, PowerShell remote shell execution, system fingerprinting, and encrypted command-and-control (C2) communications. "ASHVEIN also hides tasking inside invisible HTML elements," TrendAI said . "Some variants use a GitHub-based dead drop resolver as a fallback mechanism, while delivery methods inclu...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a targeted campaign aimed at South Korean financial organizations that used an artificial intelligence (AI) pen testing tool named ARTEX to carry out the attacks. The activity, per CrowdStrike Intelligence, was active from late September to early October 2026, and resulted in data exfiltration. "In this activity, the threat actor leveraged ARTEX, a recently released open-source agentic penetration testing (pentesting) tool developed in China, alongside large language models (LLMs)," the cybersecurity company said . CrowdStrike said it discovered the campaign after it identified a set of open directories hosted at a Hong Kong-based IP address, exposing Claude Code session histories, Claude memory files, and ARTEX configuration files. The campaign has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. But evidence points to a suspected Chinese-speaking operator driven by financial gain. ARTEX is a large lan...

The npm package known as " tensorlake ," a TypeScript software development kit (SDK) for Tensorlake applications, sandboxes, and cloud services, was compromised as part of a ChainDrop / Shai-Hulud supply chain attack. The malicious version 0.5.144 "contains obfuscated malware that harvests credentials, exfiltrates secrets, establishes persistence, and executes remotely supplied code," Socket said . Version 0.5.144 is no longer available for download from the npm package registry. An analysis of the compromised release shows that it contains a preinstall hook designed to launch a JavaScript file ("package/lib/setup.mjs"), an obfuscated loader that launches the main credential-stealing and self-propagating worm ("package/lib/Math_Symbol.js") using the Bun runtime. The stealer malware is designed to harvest credentials across local files, CI environments, Kubernetes, and Vault sources. It also drops the HackBrowserData binary, exfiltrate...

A critical vulnerability in LMCache , open-source software that speeds up large language model (LLM) servers such as vLLM, lets an attacker run code on the cache server without logging in, and no fixed version is available. The flaw is in LMCache's  multiprocess mode , where the cache runs as a standalone server that LLM workers reach over the ZeroMQ messaging library. A single network message to that server can run commands as the user the LMCache process runs as. The server can be reached from another machine only when an operator sets it to listen on a routable address, rather than the localhost it uses by default. JFrog disclosed the flaw  on October 7 and assigned it a severity score of 9.8 out of 10, in the critical range, the rating it gives a server bound to a routable address. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2026-105192 , affects LMCache from version 0.3.9, released in October 2025, through 0.5.5, the latest stable release, and is also present in the ...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new malware family that has been observed targeting exposed artificial intelligence (AI) and large language model (LLM) infrastructure with an aim to deploy cryptocurrency miners and further expand the scale of the botnet. The financially motivated campaign, dubbed Canto Incognito , has been found to install cryptocurrency miners, including XMRig and Iron, and connects victims to Kryptex, a Russian cryptocurrency mining service. "Compromised hosts are reused to expand the botnet," Lumen Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Infected servers are turned into scanners and exploit servers, allowing the actor to find and compromise additional vulnerable systems." The malware distributed as part of the campaign has been codenamed PoeLLM owing to what has been described as a "creative" technique that hides the command-and-control (C2) address within a poem the threat actors wr...

The 2026 findings are not just a year-over-year shift. They mark the latest point in a five-year arc where resilience, AI governance, human risk, and board scrutiny are converging inside the systems where work actually happens. For years, the enterprise cybersecurity story has been told as a straight line of escalation: more attacks, more data loss, more pressure, and more urgency. That narrative is still familiar, but comparing the five most recent years of Voice of the CISO research suggests a more useful reading. The CISO role has not simply become harder because every metric is rising at once. It has become harder because the center of risk has shifted and moved closer to the way work now gets done. The latest 2026 findings show signs of progress. Fewer CISOs expect a material cyberattack in the next 12 months, and fewer report material loss of sensitive information than in 2025. But those improvements sit within a longer trend line that is much less settled. Over five years,...

If you’re evaluating an agentic pentesting solution right now, you’ve probably heard the same pitch more than once: point it at a target, and it discovers, validates, and exploits attack paths autonomously, the way a real attacker would. That promise is worth taking seriously. It’s also worth pressure testing, and three questions do the heavy lifting.  What can the assessment actually prove?   When is that proof produced? And,  How much of your environment does the proof cover?  Most evaluations stop at the first step. However, it’s at the second and third ones where validation programs are won or lost. One note on where we stand: Picus builds and sells autonomous pentesting . That is exactly why we can be precise about where it ends, because the limits belong to the method, not to any vendor's implementation, and no roadmap can remove them. The problem in four numbers Four numbers from this year explain why the second and third questions now c...

Anthropic on Tuesday said it's expanding a program that allows vetted cybersecurity professionals to test its advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models with reduced safeguards and blocking classifiers, as the company claimed its Project Glasswing initiative uncovered at least 129,000 verified software vulnerabilities between April and July 2026. The company said it also found an additional 5,500 verified software vulnerabilities between April and October 2026 through open-source scanning efforts. "Of these verified vulnerabilities, more than 33,000 have so far been rated as critical- or high-severity," Anthropic said . "This is likely an undercount, as it is based on survey data from only a subset of Glasswing partners. As such, we expect the true impact to be at least five times higher." The updated program, called the Cyber Verification Program (CVP), features three access tiers, allowing organizations and security teams to apply for one that best a...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a "human-operated phishing platform" that impersonates advertising products for artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Perplexity, Meta Muse, and Manus. The products, which claim to offer campaign optimization, spend audits, and business-account connections, are designed with one goal in mind: to capture credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes via spoofed login windows using the browser-in-the-browser ( BitB ) trick. "Each product was built around the same action: Connect," Island researchers Oleg Zaytsev and Ofek Ronen said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Clicking it opened a browser drawn inside the real browser. The fake address bar displayed trusted origins such as accounts.google.com or an Okta tenant, while the real browser remained on the phishing domain." "Behind the interface, the platform kept every passw...

The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, has confirmed that it has discovered activity by rogue OpenAI agents on its platforms, including unsuccessful efforts to compromise Etherpad, a public note-taking tool, and edit Wikipedia pages. "The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic," the Foundation said in a post. The investigation, it added, was prompted by recent public reports involving Hugging Face and DseWiki where OpenAI's agents turned Artifactory and the German wiki forum into an unsanctioned bulletin board to communicate with each other, while taking steps to chain together online services  to gain access to the internet and cover up evidence of their exploits. To that end, Wikimedia said it identified edits to Wikimedia wikis suspected to be from agents operated by OpenAI. The agents are said to have been testing edits in " sandbox ...

In 2024, MCP (Model Context Protocol) set out to become the USB-C of AI: one standard for connecting models, agents, and IDEs to tools and data. The protocol delivered. Thousands of developers built servers, and enterprises plugged them into agent workflows. The ecosystem around it fell short. Earlier this year, our team at OX Security ,  traced critical vulnerabilities in Anthropic's MCP source code, downloaded more than 150 million times. This time, we looked at what people actually install: community-published servers across the most popular MCP marketplaces. We found no guardrails and no review. Security is a recommendation, not a policy. A Marketplace With No Bouncer In 2012, Google ran Bouncer, an automated scanner that checked Android apps for malware before they reached users. It wasn't perfect: researchers slipped malware past it . But it existed. MCP marketplaces have no equivalent. Anyone can write a server, push it, and publish it. Even a review wouldn'...

A new type of ClickFix attack is using compromised websites to trick users into executing a malicious payload cached in a web browser's cache. "Instead of downloading and executing remote payloads like the typical attack pattern, in this attack, the websites pre-fetch a script payload into the browser cache disguised as a PNG file," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a post on X. Thus, when the victim is prompted to paste and execute a malicious command – as is the case with ClickFix attacks – it executes the cached website content that's already on the device.  What's notable about this browser cache smuggling approach is that it allows the attackers to conceal the payload script and bypass character limit restrictions imposed on Windows Run (aka the Run dialog). The Windows Run dialog, triggered by Win + R, truncates any input that exceeds approximately 260 characters. In the attack chain observed by Microsoft, the staged payload is a ...

A blank field. A public repo. One reply to an email. A box left exposed. None of this sounds dramatic, which is partly the problem. This week’s threats keep finding leverage in small things that were easy to overlook. There are actively exploited bugs in the mix, cleaner intrusion paths, smarter automation, and a long patch list waiting behind them. Some attacks are getting more capable. Others are still getting in because the basics gave way first. Here’s what mattered this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week Citrix Warns of Newly Exploited NetScaler ADC and Gateway Flaw — Citrix released security updates for a high-severity security flaw in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway that has been exploited as part of targeted zero-day attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-88779, carries a CVSS score of 8.7 out of 10.0. "CVE-2026-88779 is a memory overflow vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Citrix NetScaler Gateway that can lead to denial-of-service under specific depl...

Every modern enterprise depends on credentials. This is how humans, systems, and now AI, all connect to data, services, and each other securely. GitGuardian helps secure that credential layer through three connected capabilities: Detect, Remediate, and Prevent. The journey starts with detection, because organizations first need to understand what credentials exist, where they live, and what they can access. This is the first of three articles we are releasing that explain the reason behind our mission.  — Software production is accelerating beyond the growth assumptions that shaped many of today's security controls. GitHub COO Kyle Daigle said the platform had gone from roughly 1 billion commits during all of 2025 to 2.9 billion commits in August 2026, an annualized pace of over 14 billion for the 2026 reporting year. GitHub's own engineering team has gone further in its capacity planning, saying it moved from preparing for 10x scale to designing for a future that require...

Apple has announced that it's taking steps to tighten controls around a macOS setting called Full Disk Access (FDA) due to security risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) agents. "Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history – without users' full knowledge and understanding," Apple said in a post. "For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with." Full Disk Access , accessed via Privacy & Security in the Settings app, was introduced by Apple in macOS Mojave (version 10.14). It offers users greater control over which applications can access their entire system and data from apps like Mail, Messages, Safari, and Time Machine backups. Once the setting is enabled for an application, it allows that program to bypass certain security restrictions and read and w...

A critical security flaw impacting Rejetto HTTP File Server (HFS) is witnessing active exploitation attempts, according to VulnCheck. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-61500 (CVSS score: 9.3), a case of session forgery stemming from the use of a weak pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that can lead to a predictable key, which an attacker can then use to gain unauthorized access and seize control of affected systems. "Rejetto HFS 3.0.0 through 3.2.0 derives its session-cookie signing key from the non-cryptographic Math.random() generator and discloses outputs of the same generator to unauthenticated clients during login," according to an advisory for the flaw. "A remote attacker can collect a small number of login responses, reconstruct the generator's state, recover the signing key, and forge a valid administrator session cookie, leading to full administrative access and remote code execution via the server_code configuration feature." Hori...

A new China-nexus cyber espionage group known as TA419 has been attributed to multiple credential phishing campaigns targeting artificial intelligence (AI) experts working for U.S. think tanks, universities, and legal sector organizations. The campaigns have impersonated prominent economists and AI policymakers, as well as a prominent Anthropic employee, to single out an AI policy expert at a U.S. think tank in February 2026. The phishing email carried the subject line "Request for Feedback on Military Integration of Claude." "This activity likely supports wider Chinese intelligence objectives to better understand ongoing developments within the U.S. AI policy and regulatory landscape and occurs amid intense strategic competition, accusations of model distillation, and export controls involving the U.S. and China," Proofpoint said in an analysis published this week. The enterprise security company has described TA419 as a China-aligned and espionage-motivat...

The U.K.'s domestic intelligence and security agency has warned that more than 100 academics have helped China boost its intelligence gathering efforts on behalf of Beijing's state security service. In a "Security Service Espionage Alert" issued on September 30, 2026, MI5 said the "primary purpose of the China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI) 中国通用技术研究院 is to fund research that directly improves Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) technical capability for espionage." CGTRI, also known as the China Academy of General Technology (CAGT), is assessed to be a front company for MSS. The body, per MI5, funds academic research in China on topics including artificial intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, covert communications systems, and steganography. More than 100 U.K.-linked academics have contributed to research projects funded by MSS via CGTRI, the alert read. In some cases, the individuals may not be aware that CGTRI is providing monetary ...

Featuring: Cybersecurity is being reshaped by the expansion of cloud infrastructure, AI, distributed systems, and increasingly complex digital environments. As organizations manage more identities, devices, data, and internet-facing infrastructure, security is shifting toward continuous visibility, control, and the ability to respond to risk at scale. This report examines how core areas of cybersecurity are evolving in response to that shift. Across identity security, telemetry management, human security, endpoint management, human risk intelligence, exposure management, email and domain security, connected device security, AI-native security operations, and cloud security, it explores how organizations are adapting to threats that increasingly move across systems, identities, and infrastructure rather than targeting a single point of failure. Read the full report here:  https://report.papryon.com/thehackernews