cybersecurity | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The Russian state-sponsored hacking group known as Turla has transformed its custom backdoor Kazuar into a modular peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet that's engineered for stealth and persistent access to compromised hosts. Turla, per the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is assessed to be affiliated with Center 16 of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). It overlaps with activity traced by the broader cybersecurity community under the names ATG26, Blue Python, Iron Hunter, Pensive Ursa, Secret Blizzard (formerly Krypton), Snake, SUMMIT, Uroburos, Venomous Bear, Waterbug, and WRAITH. The hacking group is known for its attacks targeting government, diplomatic, and defense sectors in Europe and Central Asia, as well as endpoints previously breached by Aqua Blizzard (aka Actinium and Gamaredon) to support the Kremlin's strategic objectives. "This upgrade aligns with Secret Blizzard's broader objective of gaini...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a set of four security flaws in OpenClaw that could be chained to achieve data theft, privilege escalation, and persistence. The vulnerabilities, collectively dubbed Claw Chain by Cyera, can permit an attacker to establish a foothold, expose sensitive data, and plant backdoors. A brief description of the flaws is below - CVE-2026-44112 (CVSS score: 9.6/6.3) - A time-of-check/time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition vulnerability in the OpenShell managed sandbox backend that allows attackers to bypass sandbox restrictions and redirect writes outside the intended mount root.  CVE-2026-44113 (CVSS score: 7.7/6.3) - A TOCTOU race condition vulnerability in OpenShell that allows attackers to bypass sandbox restrictions and read files outside the intended mount root. CVE-2026-44115 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An incomplete list of disallowed inputs vuln...

In Your Biggest Security Risk Isn't Malware — It's What You Already Trust , we made a simple argument: the most dangerous activity inside most organizations no longer looks like an attack. It looks like administration. PowerShell, WMIC, netsh, Certutil, MSBuild — the same trusted utilities your IT team uses every day are also the preferred toolkit of modern threat actors. Bitdefender's analysis of 700,000 high-severity incidents found legitimate-tool abuse in 84% of them . The reaction we heard most was a fair one: We know. So what do we actually do about it? That's what Bitdefender's complimentary Internal Attack Surface Assessment   is built to answer. It's a 45-day, low-effort engagement available to organizations with 250 or more employees that turns the abstract problem of "living off the land" into a specific, prioritized list of users, endpoints, and tools you can safely take away from attackers without breaking the business. Why This, Why ...

OpenAI has disclosed that two of its employee devices in its corporate environment were impacted via the Mini Shai-Hulud supply chain attack on TanStack, but noted that no user data, production systems, or intellectual property were compromised or modified in an unauthorized manner. "Upon identification of the malicious activity, we worked quickly to investigate, contain, and take steps to protect our systems," OpenAI said . "We observed activity consistent with the malware's publicly described behavior, including unauthorized access and credential-focused exfiltration activity, in a limited subset of internal source code repositories to which the two impacted employees had access." The artificial intelligence (AI) upstart said only limited credential material was successfully transferred from these code repositories, adding no other information or code was impacted. Upon being alerted of the activity, OpenAI said it isolated impacted systems and identities...

Microsoft has disclosed a new security vulnerability impacting on-premise versions of Exchange Server that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42897 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been described as a spoofing bug stemming from a cross-site scripting flaw. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. "Improper neutralization of input during web page generation ('cross-site scripting') in Microsoft Exchange Server allows an unauthorized attacker to perform spoofing over a network," the tech giant said in a Thursday advisory. Microsoft, which tagged the vulnerability with an "Exploitation Detected" assessment, said an attacker could weaponize it by sending a crafted email to a user, which, when opened in Outlook Web Access and subject to other "certain interaction conditions," can allow arbitrary JavaScript code to be executed in the context of the web brow...

The U.S.Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a newly disclosed vulnerability impacting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to remediate the issue by May 17, 2026. The vulnerability is a critical authentication bypass tracked as CVE-2026-20182 . It's rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system, indicating maximum severity. "Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller and Manager contain an authentication bypass vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administrative privileges on an affected system," CISA said . In a separate advisory, Cisco attributed the active exploitation of CVE-2026-20182 with high confidence to UAT-8616 , the same cluster behind the weaponization of CVE-2026-20127 to gain unauthorized access to SD-WAN systems. "UAT-8616 performed similar post-compromise ...

Cisco has released updates to address a maximum-severity authentication bypass flaw in Catalyst SD-WAN Controller that it said has been exploited in limited attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20182 , carries a CVSS score of 10.0. "A vulnerability in the peering authentication in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller, formerly SD-WAN vSmart, and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly SD-WAN vManage, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administrative privileges on an affected system," Cisco said . The networking equipment major said the flaw stems from a malfunction of the peering authentication mechanism, which an attacker could exploit by sending crafted requests to the affected system. A successful exploit could permit the attacker to log in to the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller as an internal, high-privileged, non-root user account, and then weaponize it to access NETCONF and manipulate network configuration f...

Cybersecurity researchers are sounding the alarm about what has been described as "malicious activity" in newly published versions of node-ipc. According to Socket and StepSecurity , three different versions of the npm package have been confirmed as malicious - node-ipc@9.1.6 node-ipc@9.2.3 node-ipc@12.0.1 "Early analysis indicates that node-ipc@9.1.6, node-ipc@9.2.3, and node-ipc@12.0.1 contain obfuscated stealer/backdoor behavior," Socket said. "The malware appears to fingerprint the host environment, enumerate and read local files, compress and chunk collected data, wrap the payload in a cryptographic envelope, and attempt exfiltration through a network endpoint selected via DNS/address logic." StepSecurity said the heavily obfuscated payload is triggered when the package is required at runtime, and attempts to exfiltrate a broad set of developer and cloud secrets to an external command-and-control (C2) server. This includes 90 categories ...

Everything is still on fire. This week feels dumb in the worst way — bad links, weak checks, fake help desks, shady forum posts, and people turning supply chain attacks into some cursed little game for clout and cash. Half of it feels new. Half of it feels like crap we should have fixed years ago. The mess keeps getting louder: users get tricked, boxes get popped, tools meant for normal work get used for bad stuff, and nobody seems shocked anymore. Great. Love that for us. Anyway. Let’s get into it. Exploited PAN-OS RCE Palo Alto Networks Releases Fixes for Exploited Flaw Palo Alto Networks has released the first round of fixes to address CVE-2026-0300 , a critical buffer overflow vulnerability in the User-ID Authentication Portal service of PAN-OS software that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges by sending specially crafted packets. The company said it has observed the flaw being...

The Belarus-aligned threat group known as Ghostwriter has been attributed to a fresh set of attacks targeting governmental organizations in Ukraine. Active since at least 2016, Ghostwriter has been linked to both cyber espionage and influence operations targeting neighboring countries, particularly Ukraine. It's also tracked under the monikers FrostyNeighbor, PUSHCHA, Storm-0257, TA445, UAC‑0057, Umbral Bison (formerly RepeatingUmbra), UNC1151, and White Lynx. "FrostyNeighbor has been running continual cyber operations, changing and updating its toolset regularly, updating its compromise chain and methods to evade detection – targeting victims located in Eastern Europe," ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Previous attacks mounted by the hacking crew have leveraged a malware family known as PicassoLoader , which then acts as a conduit for Cobalt Strike Beacon and njRAT. In late 2023, the threat actor was also observed weaponizing a vulnerability in W...

Threat actors have been observed attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security vulnerability in PraisonAI , an open-source multi-agent orchestration framework, within four hours of its public disclosure. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-44338 (CVSS score: 7.3), a case of missing authentication that exposes sensitive endpoints to anyone, potentially allowing an attacker to invoke the API server's protected functionality without a token.  " PraisonAI ships a legacy Flask API server with authentication disabled by default," according to an advisory released by the maintainers earlier this month. "When that server is used, any caller that can reach it can access /agents and trigger the configured agents.yaml workflow through /chat without providing a token." Specifically, the legacy Flask-based API server, src/praisonai/api_server.py, hard-codes AUTH_ENABLED = False and AUTH_TOKEN = None. According to PraisonAI, successful exploitation of the...

AI hallucinations are introducing serious security risks into critical infrastructure decision-making by exploiting human trust through highly confident yet incorrect outputs. When an AI model lacks certainty, it doesn’t have a mechanism to recognize that. Instead, it generates the most probable response based on patterns in its training data, even if that response is inaccurate. These outputs may appear authoritative, making them especially dangerous when driving real-world security decisions. Based on Artificial Analysis’s AA-Omniscience benchmark , a 2025 evaluation of 40 AI models found that all but four models tested were more likely to provide a confident, incorrect answer than a correct one on difficult questions. As AI takes on a larger role in cybersecurity operations, organizations must treat every AI-generated response as a potential vulnerability until a human has verified it. What are AI hallucinations? AI hallucinations are confidently presented, plausible-sounding out...

An anonymous cybersecurity researcher who disclosed three Microsoft Defender vulnerabilities has returned with two more zero-days involving a BitLocker bypass and a privilege escalation impacting Windows Collaborative Translation Framework (CTFMON). The security defects have been codenamed YellowKey and GreenPlasma , respectively, by the researcher, who goes by the online aliases Chaotic Eclipse and Nightmare-Eclipse. The researcher described YellowKey as "one of the most insane discoveries I ever found," likening the BitLocker bypass to functioning as a backdoor, as the bug is present only in the Windows Recovery Environment ( WinRE ), a built-in framework designed to troubleshoot and repair common unbootable operating system issues. YellowKey affects Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022/2025. At a high level, it involves copying specially crafted "FsTx" files on a USB drive or the EFI partition, plugging the USB drive into the target Windows computer with Bit...

Details have emerged about a new variant of the recent Dirty Frag Linux local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability that allows local attackers to gain root access, making it the third such bug to be identified in the kernel within a span of two weeks. Codenamed Fragnesia , the security vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-46300 (CVSS score: 7.8) and is rooted in the Linux kernel's XFRM ESP-in-TCP subsystem. It was discovered by researcher William Bowling of Zellic and the V12 security team. "The vulnerability allows unprivileged local attackers to modify read-only file contents in the kernel page cache and achieve root privileges through a deterministic page-cache corruption primitive," Google-owned Wiz said . Advisories have been released by multiple Linux distributions - AlmaLinux Amazon Linux CloudLinux Debian Gentoo Red Hat Enterprise Linux SUSE Ubuntu "This is a separate bug in the ESP/XFRM from Dirty Frag which has received its own patch,...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple security vulnerabilities impacting NGINX Plus and NGINX Open, including a critical flaw that remained undetected for 18 years. The vulnerability, discovered by depthfirst , is a heap buffer overflow issue impacting ngx_http_rewrite_module (CVE-2026-42945, CVSS v4 score: 9.2) that could allow an attacker to achieve remote code execution or cause a denial-of-service (DoS) with crafted requests. It has been codenamed NGINX Rift . "NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source have a vulnerability in the ngx_http_rewrite_module module," F5 said in an advisory released Wednesday. "This vulnerability exists when the rewrite directive is followed by a rewrite, if, or set directive and an unnamed Perl-Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) capture (for example, $1, $2) with a replacement string that includes a question mark (?)." "An unauthenticated attacker, along with conditions beyond its control, can exploit this vulnerabili...

Microsoft has unveiled a new multi-model artificial intelligence (AI)-driven system called MDASH to facilitate vulnerability discovery and remediation at scale, adding that it's being tested by some customers as part of a limited private preview. MDASH, short for m ulti-mo d el a gentic s canning h arness, is designed as a model-agnostic system that uses bespoke AI agents for different vulnerability classes to autonomously discover, validate, and prove exploitable defects in complex codebases like Windows. "Unlike single-model approaches, the harness orchestrates more than 100 specialized AI agents across an ensemble of frontier and distilled models to discover, debate, and prove exploitable bugs end-to-end," Taesoo Kim, vice president of agentic security at Microsoft, said . MDASH is envisioned as a "structured pipeline" that ingests a codebase and produces validated, proven findings through a series of actions. It starts with analyzing the source code t...

A threat actor with affiliations to China has been linked to a "multi-wave intrusion" targeting an unnamed Azerbaijani oil and gas company between late December 2025 and late February 2026, marking an expansion of its targeting. The activity has been attributed by Bitdefender with moderate-to-high confidence to a hacking group known as FamousSparrow (aka UAT-9244), which shares some level of tactical overlap with clusters tracked under the monikers Earth Estries and Salt Typhoon. The attack paves the way for the deployment of two distinct backdoors across three separate waves: Deed RAT (aka Snappybee), a successor of ShadowPad that's used by multiple China-nexus espionage groups, and TernDoor , which was recently discovered in attacks targeting telecommunications infrastructure in South America since 2024. What's notable about the campaign is that it repeatedly leveraged the same vulnerable Microsoft Exchange Server entry point despite several remediation att...

Security teams have never had better visibility into their environments and never been worse at confirming what they fix stays fixed. Mandiant's M-Trends 2026 report puts the mean time to exploit at an estimated negative seven days. The Verizon 2025 DBIR puts median time to remediate edge device vulnerabilities at 32 days. These numbers have understandably driven the industry toward a clear response: prioritize better, patch faster. That advice is necessary. It is also incomplete. Because the question that still doesn't get enough attention is this: when you do patch, how do you know it worked? Mythos Didn't Change the Problem. It Changed the Speed and Ease of Exploitation. The discussions around the impact of AI have focused on speed: exploit development is getting cheaper, faster, and less dependent on elite human skill.  For remediation, this changes the stakes. Plenty of fixes get marked 'remediated' when what really happened was a vendor patch that turned...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign dubbed GemStuffer that has targeted the RubyGems repository with more than 150 gems that use the registry as a data exfiltration channel rather than for malware distribution. "The packages do not appear designed for mass developer compromise," Socket said . "Many have little or no download activity, and the payloads are repetitive, noisy, and unusually self-contained." "Instead, the scripts fetch pages from U.K. local government democratic services portals, package the collected responses into valid .gem archives, and publish those gems back to RubyGems using hardcoded API keys." The development comes as RubyGems temporarily disabled new account registration following what has been described as a major malicious attack. While it's not clear if the two sets of activities are related, the application security company said GemStuffer fits the "same abuse pattern," which invo...

Google on Tuesday unveiled a new opt-in Android feature called Intrusion Logging for storing forensic logs to better analyze sophisticated spyware attacks. Intrusion Logging, available as part of Advanced Protection Mode , enables "persistent and privacy-preserving forensics logging to allow for investigation of devices in the event of a suspected compromise," the company said. The feature, it added, was developed in partnership with Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders. According to a help document shared by Google, it logs device and network activities on a daily basis, including information about device behavior and the various applications that run on it. The kinds of activities recorded are listed below - App activity (e.g., when an app process starts) App installations, updates, and uninstalls Network connections like starting and stopping Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, DNS lookups, and IP addresses File transfers to or from the device over USB Changes to...