cyber espionage | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Hackers exploited a critical Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN flaw, fixed in February, to plant custom malware inside the systems that control an organization's SD-WAN network. The malware, called KeyDrift , is designed to copy the keys that encrypt traffic between sites and store them for later use,  Cisco Talos said  on October 28. Talos calls the attacks historical but does not specify when they occurred or whether any keys were sent. The flaw is tracked as  CVE-2026-20127  and has a CVSS score of 10.0. It allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass authentication and gain administrative privileges on these control systems. On a Controller, the attacker can log in as a high-privileged internal account that is not root. When Cisco  disclosed the flaw in February , Talos tracked its exploitation as UAT-8616, a cluster of activity it said went back to at least 2023. In  Cisco's traditional key exchange , each SD-WAN router periodically generates an AE...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a security flaw impacting Broadcom VMware ESX to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, after CrowdStrike revealed that it had been weaponized by a China-nexus threat actor known as Warp Panda in attacks targeting the U.S. legal sector. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-41709 (CVSS score: 2.7), an a case of insufficient logging that could permit permit a malicious actor with admin access to perform certain operations without being logged. In an advisory released in July 2026, Broadcom revealed that the issue was addressed in the following versions - VMware Cloud Foundation SXi-9.1.0.0-25370933 and ESXi-9.0.2.0100-25595025 VMware vSphere Foundation SXi-9.1.0.0-25370933 and ESXi-9.0.2.0100-25595025 VMware ESX ESXi80U3j-25429389 VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2.4 VMware Telco Cloud Platform ESXi80U3j-25429389 The development comes in response to CrowdStrike...

The China-nexus cyber espionage group known as Volt Typhoon has been attributed to a now-disrupted covert access network dubbed Silent Train that has been put to use for zero-day exploitation and strategic access. "First identified in late 2023, Silent Train uses rotating chains of compromised SOHO, IoT, and enterprise infrastructure," Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It employs anti-forensic techniques, compartmentalized operations, and post-operation cleanup to minimize detection and attribution." Its main purpose is to facilitate critical attack phases like vulnerability exploitation, credential access, data exfiltration, and to maintain continued access to victim environments. The activity stands out for two main reasons - It singled out entities that could provide scalable access to downstream customers, sensitive networks, or strategic programs. It targeted endpoint management platforms, network...

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 , ...

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...