cybersecurity | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented data wiper that has been used in attacks targeting Venezuela at the end of last year and the start of 2026. Dubbed Lotus Wiper , the novel file wiper has been used in a destructive campaign targeting the energy and utilities sector in Venezuela, per findings from Kaspersky. "Two batch scripts are responsible for initiating the destructive phase of the attack and preparing the environment for executing the final wiper payload," the Russian cybersecurity vendor said . "These scripts coordinate the start of the operation across the network, weaken system defenses, and disrupt normal operations before retrieving, deobfuscating, and executing a previously unknown wiper." Once deployed, the wiper erases recovery mechanisms, overwrites the content of physical drives, and systematically deletes files across affected volumes, effectively leaving the system in an inoperable state. No extortion or paymen...

On January 31, 2026, researchers disclosed that Moltbook, a social network built for AI agents, had left its database wide open, exposing 35,000 email addresses and 1.5 million agent API tokens across 770,000 active agents. The more worrying part sat inside the private messages. Some of those conversations held plaintext third-party credentials, including OpenAI API keys shared between agents, stored in the same unencrypted table as the tokens needed to hijack the agent itself. This is the shape of a toxic combination: a permission breakdown between two or more applications, bridged by an AI agent, integration, or OAuth grant, that no single application owner ever authorized as its own risk surface. Moltbook's agents sat at that bridge, carrying credentials for their host platform and for the outside services their users had wired them into, in a place that neither platform owner had line of sight into. Most SaaS access reviews still examine one application at a time, which is...

Microsoft has released out-of-band updates to address a security vulnerability in ASP.NET Core that could allow an attacker to escalate privileges. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-40372 , carries a CVSS score of 9.1 out of 10.0. It's rated Important in severity. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. "Improper verification of cryptographic signature in ASP.NET Core allows an unauthorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network," Microsoft said in a Tuesday advisory. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges." The tech giant said an attacker could abuse the vulnerability to disclose files and modify data, but emphasized that successful exploitation hinges on three prerequisites - The application uses Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection 10.0.6 from NuGet (either directly or through a package that depends on it, such as Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection.S...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new variant of a known malware called LOTUSLITE that's distributed via a theme related to India's banking sector. "The backdoor communicates with a dynamic DNS-based command-and-control server over HTTPS and supports remote shell access, file operations, and session management, indicating a continued espionage-focused capability set rather than financially motivated objectives," Acronis researchers Subhajeet Singha and Santiago Pontiroli said in an analysis. The use of LOTUSLITE was previously observed in spear-phishing attacks targeting U.S. government and policy entities using decoys associated with the geopolitical developments between the U.S. and Venezuela. The activity was attributed with medium confidence to a Chinese nation-state group tracked as Mustang Panda. The latest activity flagged by Acronis involves deploying an evolved version of LOTUSLITE that demonstrates "incremental improvements" over ...

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in a Python-based sandbox called Terrarium that could result in arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-5752 , is rated 9.3 on the CVSS scoring system. "Sandbox escape vulnerability in Terrarium allows arbitrary code execution with root privileges on a host process via JavaScript prototype chain traversal," according to a description of the flaw in CVE.org. Developed by Cohere AI as an open-source project, Terrarium is a Python sandbox that's used as a Docker-deployed container for running untrusted code written by users or generated with assistance from a large language model (LLM). Notably, Terrarium runs on Pyodide, a Python distribution for the browser and Node.js, enabling it to support standard Python packages.  The project has been forked 56 times and starred 312 times. According to the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC), the root cause relates to a JavaScript prototype chain t...

Threat actors associated with The Gentlemen ransomware‑as‑a‑service (RaaS) operation have been observed attempting to deploy a known proxy malware called SystemBC . According to new research published by Check Point, the command-and-control (C2 or C&C) server linked to SystemBC has led to the discovery of a botnet of more than 1,570 victims. "SystemBC establishes SOCKS5 network tunnels within the victim’s environment and connects to its C&C server using a custom RC4‑encrypted protocol," Check Point said. "It can also download and execute additional malware, with payloads either written to disk or injected directly into memory." Since its emergence in July 2025, The Gentlemen has quickly established itself as one of the most prolific ransomware groups, claiming more than 320 victims on its data leak site. Operating under a classic double-extortion model, the group is versatile as it's sophisticated, exhibiting capabilities to target Windows, Linux, N...

Cybersecurity researchers have identified 22 new vulnerabilities in popular models of serial-to-IP converters from Lantronix and Silex that could be exploited to hijack susceptible devices and tamper with data exchanged by them. The vulnerabilities have been collectively codenamed BRIDGE:BREAK by Forescout Research Vedere Labs, which identified nearly 20,000 Serial-to-Ethernet converters exposed online globally. "Some of these vulnerabilities allow attackers to take full control of mission-critical devices connected via serial links," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Serial-to-IP converters are hardware devices that enable users to remotely access, control, and manage any serial device over an IP network or the internet by "bridging" legacy applications and industrial control systems (ICS) that operate over TCP/IP. At a high level, as many as eight security flaws have been discovered in Lantronix products (EDS3000PS Seri...

A third individual who was employed as a ransomware negotiator has pleaded guilty to conducting ransomware attacks against U.S. companies in 2023. Angelo Martino , 41, of Land O'Lakes, Florida, teamed up with the operators of the BlackCat ransomware starting in April 2023 to assist the e-crime gang in extracting higher amounts as ransoms. "Working as a negotiator on behalf of five different ransomware victims, Martino provided BlackCat attackers with confidential information about the negotiating position and strategy of his company's clients without the clients' or his employer’s knowledge or permission," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a Monday announcement. The information, which included the victims' insurance policy limits and internal negotiation positions, maximized the ransoms they were required to pay. Martino was financially compensated in exchange for providing the details. Martino, who was charged last month, also admitted to co...

Security teams often present MTTR as an internal KPI. Leadership sees it differently: every hour a threat dwells inside the environment is an hour of potential data exfiltration, service disruption, regulatory exposure, and brand damage.  The root cause of slow MTTR is almost never "not enough analysts." It is almost always the same structural problem: threat intelligence that exists outside the workflow. Feeds that require manual lookup. Reports that live in a shared drive. Enrichment that happens in a separate tab. Every handoff costs minutes; over the course of a workday, those minutes become hours. Mature SOCs have collapsed those handoffs. Their intelligence is embedded in the workflow itself at the exact moment a decision needs to be made. Below are the five places where separation matters most. 1. Detection: Catching Threats Before They Become Incidents In many SOCs, detection begins only when an alert fires. By that point, the attacker may already have a foothol...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new iteration of an Android malware family called  NGate  that has been found to abuse a legitimate application called  HandyPay instead of NFCGate. "The threat actors took the app, which is used to relay NFC data, and patched it with malicious code that appears to have been AI-generated," ESET security researcher Lukáš Štefanko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "As with previous iterations of NGate, the malicious code allows the attackers to transfer NFC data from the victim's payment card to their own device and use it for contactless ATM cash-outs and unauthorized payments." In addition, the malicious payload is capable of capturing the victim's payment card PIN and exfiltrating it to the threat actor's command-and-control (C2) server. NGate, also known as NFSkate, was first publicly documented by the Slovakian cybersecurity vendor in August 2024, detailing its ability to carry out relay ...

The cybersecurity industry has spent the last several years chasing sophisticated threats like zero-days, supply chain compromises, and AI-generated exploits. However, the most reliable entry point for attackers still hasn't changed: stolen credentials. Identity-based attacks remain a dominant initial access vector in breaches today. Attackers obtain valid credentials through credential stuffing from prior breach databases, password spraying against exposed services, or phishing campaigns — and use them to walk through the front door. No exploits needed. Just a valid username and password. What makes this difficult to defend against is how unremarkable the initial access looks. A successful login from a legitimate credential doesn't trigger the same alarms as a port scan or a malware callback. The attacker looks like an employee. Once inside, they dump and crack additional passwords, reuse those credentials to move laterally, and expand their foothold across the environment....

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a vulnerability in Google's agentic integrated development environment (IDE), Antigravity, that could be exploited to achieve code execution. The flaw, since patched, combines Antigravity's permitted file-creation capabilities with an insufficient input sanitization in Antigravity's native file-searching tool, find_by_name, to bypass the program's Strict Mode , a restrictive security configuration that limits network access, prevents out-of-workspace writes, and ensures all commands are being run within a sandbox context . "By injecting the -X (exec-batch) flag through the Pattern parameter [in the find_by_name tool], an attacker can force fd to execute arbitrary binaries against workspace files," Pillar Security researcher Dan Lisichkin said in an analysis. "Combined with Antigravity's ability to create files as a permitted action, this enables a full attack chain: stage a malicious script, then trigger ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added eight new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, including three flaws impacting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, citing evidence of active exploitation. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2023-27351 (CVSS score: 8.2) - An improper authentication vulnerability in PaperCut NG/MF that could allow an attacker to bypass authentication on affected installations via the SecurityRequestFilter class. CVE-2024-27199 (CVSS score: 7.3) - A relative path traversal vulnerability in JetBrains TeamCity that could allow an attacker to perform limited admin actions. CVE-2025-2749 (CVSS score: 7.2) - A path traversal vulnerability in Kentico Xperience that could allow an authenticated user's Staging Sync Server to upload arbitrary data to path relative locations. CVE-2025-32975 (CVSS score: 10.0) - An improper authentication vulnerability in Quest KACE Systems Ma...

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in SGLang that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution on susceptible systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-5760 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10.0. It has been described as a case of command injection leading to the execution of arbitrary code. SGLang is a high-performance, open-source serving framework for large language models and multimodal models. The official GitHub project has been forked over 5,500 times and starred 26,100 times.  According to the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC), the vulnerability impacts the reranking endpoint "/v1/rerank," allowing an attacker to achieve arbitrary code execution in the context of the SGLang service by means of a specially crafted GPT-Generated Unified Format ( GGUF ) model file. "An attacker exploits this vulnerability by creating a malicious GPT Generated Unified Format (GGUF) model file with a crafted tokenizer.chat_temp...

Monday’s recap shows the same pattern in different places. A third-party tool becomes a way in, then leads to internal access. A trusted download path is briefly swapped to deliver malware. Browser extensions act normally while pulling data and running code. Even update channels are used to push payloads. It’s not breaking systems—it’s bending trust. There’s also a shift in how attacks run. Slower check-ins, multi-stage payloads, andmore code kept in memory. Attackers lean on real tools and normal workflows instead of custom builds. Some cases hint at supply-chain spread, where one weak link reaches further than expected. Go through the whole recap. The pattern across access, execution, and control only shows up when you see it all together. ⚡ Threat of the Week Vercel Discloses Data Breach —Web infrastructure provider Vercel has disclosed a security breach that allows bad actors to gain unauthorized access to "certain" internal Vercel systems. The incident originated f...

The fastest way to fall in love with an AI tool is to watch the demo. Everything moves quickly. Prompts land cleanly. The system produces impressive outputs in seconds. It feels like the beginning of a new era for your team. But most AI initiatives don't fail because of bad technology. They stall because what worked in the demo doesn't survive contact with real operations. The gap between a controlled demonstration and day-to-day reality is where teams run into trouble. Most AI product demos are built to highlight potential, not friction. They use clean data, predictable inputs, carefully crafted prompts, and well-understood use cases. Production environments don't look like that. In real operations, data is messy, inputs are inconsistent, systems are fragmented, and context is incomplete. Latency matters. Edge cases quickly outnumber ideal ones. This is why teams often see an initial burst of enthusiasm followed by a slowdown once they try to deploy AI more broadly. W...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a critical "by design" weakness in the Model Context Protocol's ( MCP ) architecture that could pave the way for remote code execution and have a cascading effect on the artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain. "This flaw enables Arbitrary Command Execution (RCE) on any system running a vulnerable MCP implementation, granting attackers direct access to sensitive user data, internal databases, API keys, and chat histories," OX Security researchers Moshe Siman Tov Bustan, Mustafa Naamnih, Nir Zadok, and Roni Bar said in an analysis published last week. The cybersecurity company said the systemic vulnerability is baked into Anthropic's official MCP software development kit (SDK) across any supported language, including Python, TypeScript, Java, and Rust. In all, it affects more than 7,000 publicly accessible servers and software packages totaling more than 150 million downloads. At issue are unsafe defaults in...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malware called ZionSiphon that appears to be specifically designed to target Israeli water treatment and desalination systems. The malware has been codenamed ZionSiphon by Darktrace, highlighting its ability to set up persistence, tamper with local configuration files, and scan for operational technology (OT)-relevant services on the local subnet. According to details on VirusTotal, the sample was first detected in the wild on June 29, 2025, right after the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel that took place between June 13 and 24. "The malware combines privilege escalation, persistence, USB propagation, and ICS scanning with sabotage capabilities aimed at chlorine and pressure controls, highlighting growing experimentation with politically motivated critical infrastructure attacks against industrial operational technologies globally," the company said . ZionSiphon, currently in an unfinished state, is characterized by it...

Web infrastructure provider Vercel has disclosed a security breach that allows bad actors to gain unauthorized access to "certain" internal Vercel systems. The incident stemmed from the compromise of Context.ai, a third-party artificial intelligence (AI) tool, that was used by an employee at the company. "The attacker used that access to take over the employee's Vercel Google Workspace account, which enabled them to gain access to some Vercel environments and environment variables that were not marked as 'sensitive,'" the company said in a bulletin. Vercel said environment variables marked as "sensitive" are stored in an encrypted manner that prevents them from being read, and that there is currently no evidence suggesting that those values were accessed by the attacker. It described the threat actor behind the incident as "sophisticated" based on their "operational velocity and detailed understanding of Vercel's syste...

In 2024, compromised service accounts and forgotten API keys were behind 68% of cloud breaches. Not phishing. Not weak passwords. Unmanaged non-human identities that nobody was watching. For every employee in your org, there are 40 to 50 automated credentials: service accounts, API tokens, AI agent connections, and OAuth grants. When projects end or employees leave, most of these stay active. Fully privileged. Completely unmonitored. Attackers don't need to break in. They just pick up the keys you left out. Join our upcoming webinar where we’ll show you how to find and eliminate these "Ghost Identities" before they become a back door for hackers. AI agents and automated workflows are multiplying these credentials at a pace security teams can't manually track. Many carry admin-level access they never needed. One compromised token can give an attacker lateral movement across your entire environment, and the average dwell time fo...