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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched security flaw in Google Chrome that could have permitted attackers to escalate privileges and gain access to local files on the system. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-0628 (CVSS score: 8.8), has been described as a case of insufficient policy enforcement in the WebView tag. It was patched by Google in early January 2026 in version 143.0.7499.192/.193 for Windows/Mac and 143.0.7499.192 for Linux. "Insufficient policy enforcement in WebView tag in Google Chrome prior to 143.0.7499.192 allowed an attacker who convinced a user to install a malicious extension to inject scripts or HTML into a privileged page via a crafted Chrome extension," according to a description on the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Gal Weizman, who discovered and reported the flaw on November 23, 2025, said the issue could have permitted malicious extensions with basic permissi...

Google has announced a new program in its Chrome browser to ensure that HTTPS certificates are secure against the future risk posed by quantum computers . "To ensure the scalability and efficiency of the ecosystem, Chrome has no immediate plan to add traditional X.509 certificates containing post-quantum cryptography to the Chrome Root Store ," the Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team said . "Instead, Chrome, in collaboration with other partners, is developing an evolution of HTTPS certificates based on Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs), currently in development in the PLANTS working group." As Cloudflare explains, MTC is a proposal for the next generation of the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to secure the internet that aims to reduce the number of public keys and signatures in the TLS handshake to the bare minimum required. Under this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single 'Tree Head' representing potentially millions of certi...

This week is not about one big event. It shows where things are moving. Network systems, cloud setups, AI tools, and common apps are all being pushed in different ways. Small gaps in access control, exposed keys, and normal features are being used as entry points. The pattern becomes clear only when you see everything together. Faster scans, smarter misuse of trusted services, and steady targeting of high-value sectors. Each story adds context. Reading them all gives a fuller picture of how today’s threat landscape is evolving. ⚡ Threat of the Week Cisco SD-WAN Zero-Day Exploited — A newly disclosed maximum-severity security flaw in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller (formerly vSmart) and Catalyst SD-WAN Manager (formerly vManage) has come under active exploitation in the wild as part of malicious activity that dates back to 2023. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20127 (CVSS score: 10.0), allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administr...

Most SaaS teams remember the day their user traffic started growing fast. Few notice the day bots started targeting them. On paper, everything looks great: more sign-ups, more sessions, more API calls. But in reality, something feels off: Sign-ups increase, but users aren’t activating. Server costs rise faster than revenue. Logs are filled with repeated requests from strange user agents. If this sounds familiar, it’s not just a sign of popularity. Your app is under constant automated attack, even if no ransom emails have arrived. Your load balancer sees traffic. Your product team sees “growth”. Your database sees pain. This is where a WAF like SafeLine fits in. SafeLine is a self-hosted web application firewall (WAF) that sits in front of your app and inspects every HTTP request before it reaches your code.  It does not just look for broken packets or known bad IPs. It watches how traffic behaves: what it sends, how fast, in what patterns, and against which endpoints. ...

A recently disclosed security flaw patched by Microsoft may have been exploited by the Russia-linked state-sponsored threat actor known as APT28 , according to new findings from Akamai. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-21513 (CVSS score: 8.8), a high-severity security feature bypass affecting the MSHTML Framework. "Protection mechanism failure in MSHTML Framework allows an unauthorized attacker to bypass a security feature over a network," Microsoft noted in its advisory for the flaw. It was fixed by the Windows maker as part of its February 2026 Patch Tuesday update. However, the tech giant also noted that the vulnerability had been exploited as a zero-day in real-world attacks, crediting the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), and Office Product Group Security Team, along with Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), for reporting it. In a hypothetical attack scenario, a threat actor could weaponize th...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new iteration of the ongoing Contagious Interview campaign, where the North Korean threat actors have published a set of 26 malicious packages to the npm registry. The packages masquerade as developer tools, but contain functionality to extract the actual command-and-control (C2) by using seemingly harmless Pastebin content as a dead drop resolver and ultimately drop a developer-targeted credential stealer and remote access trojan. The C2 infrastructure is hosted on Vercel across 31 deployments. The campaign , tracked by Socket and kmsec.uk's Kieran Miyamoto is being tracked under the moniker StegaBin . It's attributed to a North Korean threat activity cluster known as Famous Chollima. "The loader extracts C2 URLs steganographically encoded within three Pastebin pastes, innocuous computer science essays in which characters at evenly-spaced positions have been replaced to spell out hidden infrastructure addresses," Socket...

OpenClaw has fixed a high-severity security issue that, if successfully exploited, could have allowed a malicious website to connect to a locally running artificial intelligence (AI) agent and take over control. "Our vulnerability lives in the core system itself – no plugins, no marketplace, no user-installed extensions – just the bare OpenClaw gateway, running exactly as documented," Oasis Security said in a report published this week. The flaw has been codenamed ClawJacked by the cybersecurity company. The attack assumes the following threat model: A developer has OpenClaw set up and running on their laptop, with its gateway , a local WebSocket server, bound to localhost and protected by a password. The attack kicks in when the developer lands on an attacker-controlled website through social engineering or some other means. The infection sequence then follows the steps below - Malicious JavaScript on the web page opens a WebSocket connection to localhost on the ...

New research has found that Google Cloud API keys, typically designated as project identifiers for billing purposes, could be abused to authenticate to sensitive Gemini endpoints and access private data. The findings come from Truffle Security, which discovered nearly 3,000 Google API keys (identified by the prefix "AIza") embedded in client-side code to provide Google-related services like embedded maps on websites. "With a valid key, an attacker can access uploaded files, cached data, and charge LLM-usage to your account," security researcher Joe Leon said , adding the keys "now also authenticate to Gemini even though they were never intended for it." The problem occurs when users enable the Gemini API on a Google Cloud project (i.e., Generative Language API), causing the existing API keys in that project, including those accessible via the website JavaScript code, to gain surreptitious access to Gemini endpoints without any warning or notice. Th...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) this week announced the seizure of $61 million worth of Tether that were allegedly associated with bogus cryptocurrency schemes known as pig butchering . The confiscated funds were traced to cryptocurrency addresses used for the laundering of criminally derived proceeds stolen from victims of cryptocurrency investment scams, the department added. "Criminal actors and professional money launderers use cyber-enabled fraud schemes to swindle their victims and conceal their ill-gotten gains," said HSI Charlotte Acting Special Agent in Charge Kyle D. Burns. "HSI special agents work diligently to trace the illicit proceeds of crime across the globe to disrupt and dismantle the transnational criminal organizations that seek to defraud hardworking Americans." As is the norm in such cybercrime operations, threat actors are known to target individuals by cultivating romantic relationships after approaching them on dating and social m...

The Shadowserver Foundation has revealed that over 900 Sangoma FreePBX instances still remain infected with web shells as part of attacks that exploited a command injection vulnerability starting in December 2025. Of these, 401 instances are located in the U.S., followed by 51 in Brazil, 43 in Canada, 40 in Germany, and 36 in France. The non-profit entity said the compromises are likely accomplished via the exploitation of CVE-2025-64328 (CVSS score: 8.6), a high-severity security flaw that could enable post-authentication command injection. "The impact is that any user with access to the FreePBX Administration panel could leverage this vulnerability to execute arbitrary shell commands on the underlying host," FreePBX said in an advisory for the flaw in November 2025. "An attacker could leverage this to obtain remote access to the system as the asterisk user." The vulnerability affects FreePBX versions higher than and including 17.0.2.36. It was resolved in...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a malicious Go module that's designed to harvest passwords, create persistent access via SSH, and deliver a Linux backdoor named Rekoobe. The Go module, github[.]com/xinfeisoft/crypto, impersonates the legitimate "golang.org/x/crypto" codebase, but injects malicious code that's responsible for exfiltrating secrets entered via terminal password prompts to a remote endpoint, fetches a shell script in response, and executes it. "This activity fits namespace confusion and impersonation of the legitimate golang.org/x/crypto subrepository (and its GitHub mirror github.com/golang/crypto)," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . "The legitimate project identifies go.googlesource.com/crypto as canonical and treats GitHub as a mirror, a distinction the threat actor abuses to make github.com/xinfeisoft/crypto look routine in dependency graphs." Specifically, the backdoor has been placed with...

The North Korean threat actor known as ScarCruft has been attributed to a fresh set of tools, including a backdoor that uses Zoho WorkDrive for command-and-control (C2) communications to fetch more payloads and an implant that uses removable media to relay commands and breach air-gapped networks. The campaign, codenamed Ruby Jumper by Zscaler ThreatLabz, involves the deployment of malware families, such as RESTLEAF, SNAKEDROPPER, THUMBSBD, VIRUSTASK, FOOTWINE, and BLUELIGHT to facilitate surveillance on a victim's system. It was discovered by the cybersecurity company in December 2025. "In the Ruby Jumper campaign, when a victim opens a malicious LNK file, it launches a PowerShell command and scans the current directory to locate itself based on file size," security researcher Seongsu Park said . "Then, the PowerShell script launched by the LNK file carves multiple embedded payloads from fixed offsets within that LNK, including a decoy document, an executable pa...

Threat actors are luring unsuspecting users into running trojanized gaming utilities that are distributed via browsers and chat platforms to distribute a remote access trojan (RAT). "A malicious downloader staged a portable Java runtime and executed a malicious Java archive (JAR) file named jd-gui.jar," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a post on X. "This downloader used PowerShell and living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBins) like cmstp.exe for stealthy execution." The attack chain is also designed to evade detection by deleting the initial downloader and by configuring Microsoft Defender exclusions for the RAT components. Persistence is achieved by means of a scheduled task and Windows startup script named "world.vbs," before the final payload is deployed on the compromised host. The malware, per Microsoft, is a "multi-purpose malware" that acts as a loader, runner, downloader, and RAT. Once launched, it connects to an external ...

Meta on Thursday said it's taking legal action to tackle scams on its platforms by filing lawsuits against what it calls deceptive advertisers based in Brazil, China, and Vietnam. As part of the effort, the advertisers' methods of payment have been suspended, related accounts have been disabled, and the website domain names used to pull off the scams have been blocked. Concurrently, the social media giant said it has also issued cease and desist letters to eight marketing consultants who advertised the ability to bypass its ad policy enforcement systems. This included fake "un-ban" or account restoration services and renting access to trusted accounts so as to help clients bypass its controls. At least three advertisers, two from Brazil and one from China, were found to engage in celeb-bait scams, which often involve misusing the image of well-known figures to trick people into clicking on bogus ads that lead to scam sites. These websites are designed to harvest ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new botnet loader called Aeternum C2 that uses a blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) infrastructure to make it resilient to takedown efforts. "Instead of relying on traditional servers or domains for command-and-control, Aeternum stores its instructions on the public Polygon blockchain," Qrator Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This network is widely used by decentralized applications, including Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market. This approach makes Aeternum's C2 infrastructure effectively permanent and resistant to traditional takedown methods." This is not the first time botnets have been found relying on blockchain for C2. In 2021, Google said it took steps to disrupt a botnet known as Glupteba that uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a backup C2 mechanism to fetch the actual C2 server address. Details of Aeternum C2 first emerged in December 2025, when Outpos...

A previously undocumented threat activity cluster has been attributed to an ongoing malicious campaign targeting education and healthcare sectors in the U.S. since at least December 2025. The campaign is being tracked by Cisco Talos under the moniker UAT-10027 . The end goal of the attacks is to deliver a never-before-seen backdoor codenamed Dohdoor. "Dohdoor utilizes the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) technique for command-and-control (C2) communications and has the ability to download and execute other payload binaries reflectively," security researchers Alex Karkins and Chetan Raghuprasad said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. Although the initial access vector used in the campaign is currently not known, it's suspected to involve the use of social engineering phishing techniques, leading to the execution of a PowerShell script. The script then proceeds to download and run a Windows batch script from a remote staging server, which, for its part, facilitat...

Nothing here looks dramatic at first glance. That’s the point. Many of this week’s threats begin with something ordinary, like an ad, a meeting invite, or a software update. Behind the scenes, the tactics are sharper. Access happens faster. Control is established sooner. Cleanup becomes harder. Here is a quick look at the signals worth paying attention to. AI-powered command execution Kali Linux Integrates Claude AI Assistant via MCP Kali Linux, an advanced penetration testing Linux distribution used for ethical hacking and network security assessments, has added an integration with Anthropic's Claude large language model through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to issue commands in natural language and translate them into technical commands. Belarus-linked Android spyware ResidentBat Infrastructure Analyzed ResidentBat is an Android spyware implant used by Belarusian autho...

Introduction: Steal It Today, Break It in a Decade Digital evolution is unstoppable, and though the pace may vary, things tend to fall into place sooner rather than later. That, of course, applies to adversaries as well. The rise of ransomware and cyber extortion generated funding for a complex and highly professional criminal ecosystem. The era of the cloud brought general availability of almost infinite amounts of storage. So there is literally nothing that stops criminals from stealing and trafficking heaps of data, be it encrypted or not.  Patient adversaries are employing a "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" (HNDL) strategy. They are quietly accumulating encrypted data with the intention of decrypting it later using quantum computers. Any data requiring long-term security, such as trade secrets or classified designs, is vulnerable because its lifespan will inevitably outlive its current encryption. Therefore, it is crucial that organizations begin planning their PQC migrati...

A "coordinated developer-targeting campaign" is using malicious repositories disguised as legitimate Next.js projects and technical assessments to trick victims into executing them and establish persistent access to compromised machines. "The activity aligns with a broader cluster of threats that use job-themed lures to blend into routine developer workflows and increase the likelihood of code execution," the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said in a report published this week. The tech giant said the campaign is characterized by the use of multiple entry points that lead to the same outcome, where attacker-controlled JavaScript is retrieved at runtime and executed to facilitate command-and-control (C2). The attacks rely on the threat actors setting up fake repositories on trusted developer platforms like Bitbucket, using names like "Cryptan-Platform-MVP1" to trick developers looking for jobs into running them as part of an assessment proces...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new malicious package discovered on the NuGet Gallery, impersonating a library from financial services firm Stripe in an attempt to target the financial sector. The package, codenamed StripeApi.Net, attempts to masquerade as Stripe.net , a legitimate library from Stripe that has over 75 million downloads. It was uploaded by a user named StripePayments on February 16, 2026. The package is no longer available. "The NuGet page for the malicious package is set up to resemble the official Stripe.net package as closely as possible," ReversingLabs Petar Kirhmajer said . "It uses the same icon as the legitimate package and contains a nearly identical readme, only swapping the 'Stripe.net' references to read 'Stripe-net.'" In a further effort to lend credibility to the typosquatted package, the threat actor behind the campaign is said to have artificially inflated the download count to more than 180,00...