data privacy | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Think your Wi-Fi is safe? Your coding tools? Or even your favorite financial apps? This week proves again how hackers, companies, and governments are all locked in a nonstop race to outsmart each other. Here's a quick rundown of the latest cyber stories that show how fast the game keeps changing. DeFi exploit drains funds Critical yETH Exploit Used to Steal $9M A critical exploit targeting Yearn Finance's yETH pool on Ethereum has been exploited by unknown threat actors, resulting in the theft of approximately $9 million from the protocol. The attack is said to have abused a flaw in how the protocol manages its internal accounting, stemming from the fact that a cache containing calculated values to save on gas fees was never cleared when the pool was completely emptied. "The attacker achieved this by minting an astronomical number of tokens – 235 septillion yETH (a 41-digit number) – while depositing only 16 wei, worth approxim...

As 2025 draws to a close, security professionals face a sobering realization: the traditional playbook for web security has become dangerously obsolete. AI-powered attacks, evolving injection techniques, and supply chain compromises affecting hundreds of thousands of websites forced a fundamental rethink of defensive strategies. Here are the five threats that reshaped web security this year, and why the lessons learned will define digital protection for years to come. 1. Vibe Coding Natural language coding, " vibe coding " , transformed from novelty to production reality in 2025, with nearly 25% of Y Combinator startups using AI to build core codebases. One developer launched a multiplayer flight simulator in under three hours, eventually scaling it to 89,000 players and generating thousands in monthly revenue. The Result Code that functions perfectly yet contains exploitable flaws, bypassing traditional security tools. AI generates what you ask for, not what you forget...

A threat actor known as ShadyPanda has been linked to a seven-year-long browser extension campaign that has amassed over 4.3 million installations over time. Five of these extensions started off as legitimate programs before malicious changes were introduced in mid-2024, according to a report from Koi Security, attracting 300,000 installs. These extensions have since been taken down. "These extensions now run hourly remote code execution – downloading and executing arbitrary JavaScript with full browser access," security researcher Tuval Admoni said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "They monitor every website visit, exfiltrate encrypted browsing history, and collect complete browser fingerprints." To make matters worse, one of the extensions, Clean Master, was featured and verified by Google at one point. This trust-building exercise allowed the attackers to expand their user base and silently issue malicious updates years later without attracting any...

Hackers have been busy again this week. From fake voice calls and AI-powered malware to huge money-laundering busts and new scams, there's a lot happening in the cyber world. Criminals are getting creative — using smart tricks to steal data, sound real, and hide in plain sight. But they're not the only ones moving fast. Governments and security teams are fighting back, shutting down fake networks, banning risky projects, and tightening digital defenses. Here's a quick look at what's making waves this week — the biggest hacks, the new threats, and the wins worth knowing about. Mirai-based malware resurfaces with new IoT campaign ShadowV2 Botnet Continues to Target IoT Devices The threat actors behind the Mirai-based ShadowV2 botnet have been observed infecting IoT devices across industries and continents. The campaign is said to have been active only during the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in late October 2025. It's assessed ...

Meta on Tuesday said it has made available a tool called WhatsApp Research Proxy to some of its long-time bug bounty researchers to help improve the program and more effectively research the messaging platform's network protocol. The idea is to make it easier to delve into WhatsApp-specific technologies as the application continues to be a lucrative attack surface for state-sponsored actors and commercial spyware vendors. The company also noted that it's setting up a pilot initiative where it's inviting research teams to focus on platform abuse with support for internal engineering and tooling. "Our goal is to lower the barrier of entry for academics and other researchers who might not be as familiar with bug bounties to join our program," it added . The development comes as the social media giant said it has awarded more than $25 million in bug bounties to over 1,400 researchers from 88 countries in the last 15 years, out of which more than $4 million were...

Google on Tuesday unveiled a new privacy-enhancing technology called Private AI Compute to process artificial intelligence (AI) queries in a secure platform in the cloud. The company said it has built Private AI Compute to "unlock the full speed and power of Gemini cloud models for AI experiences, while ensuring your personal data stays private to you and is not accessible to anyone else, not even Google." Private AI Compute has been described as a "secure, fortified space" for processing sensitive user data in a manner that's analogous to on-device processing but with extended AI capabilities. It's powered by Trillium Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Titanium Intelligence Enclaves (TIE), allowing the company to use its frontier models without sacrificing on security and privacy. In other words, the privacy infrastructure is designed to take advantage of the computational speed and power of the cloud while retaining the security and privacy assuran...

Microsoft has disclosed details of a novel side-channel attack targeting remote language models that could enable a passive adversary with capabilities to observe network traffic to glean details about model conversation topics despite encryption protections under certain circumstances. This leakage of data exchanged between humans and streaming-mode language models could pose serious risks to the privacy of user and enterprise communications, the company noted. The attack has been codenamed Whisper Leak . "Cyber attackers in a position to observe the encrypted traffic (for example, a nation-state actor at the internet service provider layer, someone on the local network, or someone connected to the same Wi-Fi router) could use this cyber attack to infer if the user's prompt is on a specific topic," security researchers Jonathan Bar Or and Geoff McDonald, along with the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team, said . Put differently, the attack allows an attacker t...

A now-patched security flaw in Samsung Galaxy Android devices was exploited as a zero-day to deliver a "commercial-grade" Android spyware dubbed LANDFALL in targeted attacks in the Middle East. The activity involved the exploitation of CVE-2025-21042 (CVSS score: 8.8), an out-of-bounds write flaw in the "libimagecodec.quram.so" component that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code, according to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. The issue was addressed by Samsung in April 2025. "This vulnerability was actively exploited in the wild before Samsung patched it in April 2025, following reports of in-the-wild attacks," Unit 42 said . Potential targets of the activity, tracked as CL-UNK-1054, are located in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Morocco based on VirusTotal submission data. The development comes as Samsung disclosed in September 2025 that another flaw in the same library (CVE-2025-21043, CVSS score: 8.8) had also been exploited in the wild as a...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new set of vulnerabilities impacting OpenAI's ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that could be exploited by an attacker to steal personal information from users' memories and chat histories without their knowledge. The seven vulnerabilities and attack techniques, according to Tenable, were found in OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-5 models. OpenAI has since addressed some of them .  These issues expose the AI system to indirect prompt injection attacks , allowing an attacker to manipulate the expected behavior of a large language model (LLM) and trick it into performing unintended or malicious actions, security researchers Moshe Bernstein and Liv Matan said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The identified shortcomings are listed below - Indirect prompt injection vulnerability via trusted sites in Browsing Context, which involves asking ChatGPT to summarize the contents of web pages with malicious instructions added...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) . It's no longer a future concept—it's here, and it's already reshaping how teams operate. AI's capabilities are profound: it's speeding up audits, flagging critical risks faster, and drastically cutting down on time-consuming manual work. This leads to greater efficiency, higher accuracy, and a more proactive GRC function. However, this powerful shift introduces significant new challenges. AI brings its own set of risks, including potential bias, dangerous blind spots, and regulatory gaps that are only beginning to be addressed by governing bodies. Staying ahead of this curve—not just struggling to keep up—requires clear, practical knowledge. Don't Just Stay Afloat—Master the Change To help you navigate this complex landscape, we invite you to our free, high-impact webinar, " The Future of AI in GRC: Opportunities, Risks, and Practical Insights . " This se...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a coordinated campaign that leveraged 131 rebranded clones of a WhatsApp Web automation extension for Google Chrome to spam Brazilian users at scale. The 131 spamware extensions share the same codebase, design patterns, and infrastructure, according to supply chain security company Socket. The browser add-ons collectively have about 20,905 active users. "They are not classic malware, but they function as high-risk spam automation that abuses platform rules," security researcher Kirill Boychenko said. "The code injects directly into the WhatsApp Web page, running alongside WhatsApp's own scripts, automates bulk outreach and scheduling in ways that aim to bypass WhatsApp's anti-spam enforcement." The end goal of the campaign is to blast outbound messaging via WhatsApp in a manner that bypasses the messaging platform's rate limits and anti-spam controls. The activity is assessed to have been ongoing for at lea...