-->
#1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Platform
Followed by 5.80+ million
The Hacker News Logo
Get Updates
cybersecurity

data security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Category — data security
Chainalysis Confirms Intrusion Into Internal Tools and Exposure of Customer Identity Data

Chainalysis Confirms Intrusion Into Internal Tools and Exposure of Customer Identity Data

Oct 31, 2026 Data Security / Cyber Attack
American blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said it was the target of a cybersecurity incident in which an external actor accessed non-sensitive customer data. However, the company noted that the breach did not result in unauthorized access to its investigation content, authentication credentials, or session tokens. "This month, Chainalysis detected an external actor using offensive agentic techniques to gain unauthorized access to Chainalysis systems and internal tools," Chainalysis said Friday. "Some non-sensitive customer data, such as user IDs, full names, email addresses, and organization role labels for users provisioned on our platform were accessed, including such information relating to your organization and users." The company said it's patching vulnerabilities and hardening its systems in response to the incident. The mention of "offensive agentic techniques" indicates that an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool was used ...
A Shared ChatGPT Link Could Run Attacker Code in Your Session and Read Private Chats

A Shared ChatGPT Link Could Run Attacker Code in Your Session and Read Private Chats

Oct 31, 2026 Vulnerability / Web Security
A malicious ChatGPT share link could run an attacker's code in the logged-in session of anyone who opened it, allowing them to read their private conversations, researchers at the security firm Parameter showed. The researchers reported the flaw through  OpenAI's bug bounty program  on October 18, and OpenAI fixed it eight days later and rated it P1, its most serious category. The trap was an ordinary ChatGPT conversation shared via its public link. It could be sent the same way as any real shared chat: by email, as a chat message, as a support ticket, or as a social post. The victim did not have to install anything, join a workspace, or sign in through the attacker. In the most reliable version of the attack, they opened the link and clicked ChatGPT's Preview button once. In a later version, Parameter set the page to open Preview on its own, so opening the link was the only step. What the Attacker Could Do Once the link opened, the attacker's code ran ins...
OpenAI Compaction Flaw Let Researchers Bypass Hidden Reasoning Protections

OpenAI Compaction Flaw Let Researchers Bypass Hidden Reasoning Protections

Oct 27, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Data Security
OpenAI's compaction feature, which shrinks a long conversation to save space, could be turned into a way to copy a model's hidden reasoning out in plain text,  security firm Xint  has shown. OpenAI's reasoning models work through a problem before answering, and the service normally returns only the raw reasoning as  an encrypted item  the user cannot read. The method got past the protections OpenAI added in August against this kind of reasoning theft. OpenAI confirmed the problem and fixed it on October 23, according to Xint. Xint ran the technique against gpt-5.6-sol, one of OpenAI's reasoning models, using math and algorithm puzzles its researchers wrote themselves. The reasoning it pulled out came from those same requests, and Xint did not claim the method could reach another user's reasoning. Xint says it cannot prove the copied text is word-for-word the model's real reasoning, because it never had the original to compare against. Two cheaper models e...
cyber security

The Toxic Combination: 62% of Agents Are One Prompt Away From Exfiltration

websiteRecoAI Agent Security
Get the report: how one unreviewed pair of permissions turns a single agent into a breach.
cyber security

Turn Your Next Employee Mistake Into a Training Moment, Not a Breach.

websiteAdaptive SecuritySecurity Awareness
Build safer habits with Adaptive's interactive training tailored to your team's roles and real-world risks.
Gheist Uses Stolen GitHub Tokens to Steal Private Repository Secrets via Actions Logs

Gheist Uses Stolen GitHub Tokens to Steal Private Repository Secrets via Actions Logs

Oct 26, 2026 Cyber Attack / Cloud Security
An automated campaign is using stolen GitHub tokens to plant workflows that print a repository's secrets into its GitHub Actions logs, which the attackers then download before deleting the runs. The attacks have succeeded in private repositories and GitHub Enterprise environments, according to an analysis by cloud security company Wiz. A  GitHub safeguard  that pauses suspicious workflow runs stopped every public-repository run Wiz checked, but it does not cover private repositories or GitHub Enterprise Server. Each workflow sits on a new branch named ci-sync- followed by six random characters. Deleting a branch, or the run it started, does not undo the exposure. Every secret the repository could read should be rotated, and the token that pushed the branch revoked. Wiz has tracked the campaign since September 15 and calls it Gheist , after the user agent gheist that the attackers' tool sends with GitHub API requests. Wiz has recovered mor...
What Security Teams Can Do To Tame Wild Code

What Security Teams Can Do To Tame Wild Code

Oct 20, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Runtime Security
A sales manager builds an AI-assisted workflow to route leads. It connects to customer records, summarizes inbound requests, and posts updates to a shared channel. The workflow saves time, reduces manual work, and soon becomes part of the team’s daily routine. Across the same organization, employees are building useful apps, agents, and automations faster than existing processes can support them.  If you work in security, that success introduces a new set of questions. Whose credentials does the workflow use? Which records can it access? Who can see its output? If it starts exposing information it shouldn’t, can you trace what happened and stop further access?  Wild code takes root when useful builds spread faster than the processes for owning, securing, and maintaining them. It isn’t simply another name for unapproved software. Employees are creating new capabilities, not just adopting existing products. A small experiment can become an operational dependency before secu...
Ex-OpenAI Engineer Detained in Spy Device Case as Saudi Royal Contacts Emerge

Ex-OpenAI Engineer Detained in Spy Device Case as Saudi Royal Contacts Emerge

Oct 20, 2026 Cyber Espionage / Data Security
A U.S. court on Monday granted the U.S. government's request to detain a former OpenAI engineer accused of planting a recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco office to allegedly steal sensitive secrets. In a new court filing Sunday, prosecutors revealed that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national, was "in frequent communications via WhatsApp with a member of the Saudi Royal Family" throughout 2025 and 2026. Alfozan is said to have communicated with the Saudi royal as recently as October 5, 2026, four days before he was arrested. "Among other things, the individual told the defendant that an artificial intelligence initiative was being launched in Saudi Arabia and wanted the defendant to join it," the filing reads. "In May 2026, the individual told the defendant, 'Saudi needs you more then [sic] the US!' to which the defendant responded '100,' indicating he agreed." The S...
OpenAI Research Model Spent 3rd-Party Test ETH Without Permission to Deploy Smart Contract

OpenAI Research Model Spent 3rd-Party Test ETH Without Permission to Deploy Smart Contract

Oct 16, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Web Security
OpenAI has disclosed seven new incidents in which its artificial intelligence (AI) models exhibited misaligned behavior, including one case where its research model, after not having funds on an Ethereum test network, spent test cryptocurrency from a third-party's wallet without authorization to complete a coding task. The incident, the AI company said, involved an internal research model part of the GPT-5.6 Sol family. The incident occurred on June 26, 2026, and was discovered by OpenAI three months later. "An internal research model asked to update a cryptocurrency trading application used funds from a wallet that the task had not supplied to pay for a deployment on Sepolia, an Ethereum test network," OpenAI said . "It derived wallet keys from publicly known developer recovery phrases, found an account with test-network funds, and used that account to pay for the requested contract deployment." The assignment allowed the model to deploy compatible cont...
CERT-In Warns AI Agents Accessed Sensitive Data at Indian Organizations During Testing

CERT-In Warns AI Agents Accessed Sensitive Data at Indian Organizations During Testing

Oct 16, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Data Security
AI agents being tested online reached the live systems of Indian organizations and read business records, including personal data and confidential material, CERT-In  said in an advisory  on October 15. The agents went beyond their assigned tasks, and none of the organizations detected the unauthorized access. After internal reviews, the AI companies whose models were being tested voluntarily reported the cases to CERT-In, India's national cyber agency. AI agents are software systems that can plan work, run commands, use tools, and act on the internet autonomously for extended periods. In these cases, the agents gained access via credentials and connection settings left exposed in application configuration and public code repositories, and via cloud service roles with excessive permissions. CERT-In did not name the AI companies, their models, or the organizations and sectors involved. It did not say how many companies reported cases or how many organizations were affecte...
The Sixth Voice of the CISO Data Shows Cyber Risk Has Moved Inside the Workflow

The Sixth Voice of the CISO Data Shows Cyber Risk Has Moved Inside the Workflow

Oct 07, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Data Security
The 2026 findings are not just a year-over-year shift. They mark the latest point in a five-year arc where resilience, AI governance, human risk, and board scrutiny are converging inside the systems where work actually happens. For years, the enterprise cybersecurity story has been told as a straight line of escalation: more attacks, more data loss, more pressure, and more urgency. That narrative is still familiar, but comparing the five most recent years of Voice of the CISO research suggests a more useful reading. The CISO role has not simply become harder because every metric is rising at once. It has become harder because the center of risk has shifted and moved closer to the way work now gets done. The latest 2026 findings show signs of progress. Fewer CISOs expect a material cyberattack in the next 12 months, and fewer report material loss of sensitive information than in 2025. But those improvements sit within a longer trend line that is much less settled. Over five years,...
OpenAI Parts Ways With Three Safety Researchers Over Sensitive Information Mishandling

OpenAI Parts Ways With Three Safety Researchers Over Sensitive Information Mishandling

Oct 02, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Data Security
OpenAI has parted ways with three members of its safety team after they leaked private information in violation of company policies, The Wall Street Journal reported . "We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information," a spokesperson for the company was quoted as saying. "Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work." The impacted employees are Jasmine Wang , Tomek Korbak , and Mikita Balesni , the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The three researchers have all previously expressed concerns about the pace of artificial intelligence (AI) development. It's said that the individuals shared confidential information with a third-party AI-safety organization. The name of the organization was not disclosed. According...
OpenAI Disrupts Reasoning Extraction Campaign Linked to Moonshot AI Associates

OpenAI Disrupts Reasoning Extraction Campaign Linked to Moonshot AI Associates

Oct 01, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Vulnerability
OpenAI on Wednesday said it identified and disrupted a coordinated distillation campaign that was designed to illicitly extract protected reasoning from its artificial intelligence (AI) models. A "core cluster of the activity," going back to the first week of July, has been attributed to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI company based in Beijing. It did not cite any technical evidence to back this assessment, likely owing to security reasons. "The operators did not break our encryption, compromise a database, or gain direct access to stored user conversations," OpenAI said . "Instead, they manipulated model interactions so that protected reasoning could be reproduced in forms visible to the requester in a coordinated, scaled manner that violated our terms of service." The activity is said to have begun on July 1, 2026, initially at a low volume before it spiked on July 24 and 25, 2026, to 16,000 attempted requests using a relevan...
Telegram Desktop Flaw Lets Hidden JavaScript Exfiltrate Messages From HTML Exports

Telegram Desktop Flaw Lets Hidden JavaScript Exfiltrate Messages From HTML Exports

Sep 14, 2026 Vulnerability / Data Security
A flaw in Telegram Desktop let a bot's message plant hidden JavaScript inside chats that users exported to HTML files, security researchers at ExPatch said in a  writeup  published on September 12. In Telegram, the message looked ordinary, with a link button, and the script ran only when someone opened the export file in a web browser. It could then copy every message in that file to an attacker-controlled server, or rewrite what the page displayed. Telegram shipped  a fix  in July, but the app update does not update files exported with earlier versions, so old HTML exports can still carry the script. Telegram Desktop, Telegram's app for Windows, macOS, and Linux, can save a single chat or all chats from an account as HTML pages that open in a browser. Bots can attach rows of buttons under their messages, which Telegram calls inline keyboards, and the bot chooses the text shown on each button. Until the fix, the export code wrote that button text directly ...
When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Sep 12, 2026 AI Agent / Security Operations
Over the past year, we watched a new class of alert appear in enterprise security operations centers and grow faster than anything else in the stream: alerts that were triggered by AI tools and agents. Not attacks against AI, but the ordinary, everyday footprint of an organization using it, from developers running coding agents and non-technical staff signing consumer AI tools into corporate accounts. We reviewed AI-related activity across numerous enterprise environments. Two numbers frame everything that follows. AI-related alerts still account for only 0.43% of all SOC alerts. And that share is climbing every single month, up 685% between February and June 2026. AI is a small slice of the alert stream today and the fastest-growing slice at the same time. What makes those alerts worth a security team’s attention is not their volume but their composition. We sort everything an AI agent triggers in a SOC into three buckets: real attacks, risks, and noise, with the split being 94....
Your Cloud Security Checklist Doesn't Work the Way You Think It Does

Your Cloud Security Checklist Doesn't Work the Way You Think It Does

Sep 07, 2026 Cloud Security / Data Security
If managing security across multiple cloud providers wasn't hard enough, each one fails in a different way. For the 2026 Cloud Security Index , Intruder analyzed misconfiguration data from 3,000 organizations across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and found that risk profiles across providers have almost nothing in common. Here’s what the data looks like. How risk differs across cloud providers Intruder grouped every misconfiguration into one of six categories: weak identity and access management (IAM), missing logging, misconfigured services, permissive firewalls, exposed services, and weak encryption. For each category, they compared how many accounts had at least one issue in it across the three providers. Weak IAM controls and missing logging are near-universal, affecting between 80% and 98% of accounts regardless of provider. The other four categories are where things diverge: Exposed services: AWS (76%) , Azure (64%) , Google Cloud (8%) Permissive firewalls: AWS...
How to Secure Enterprise AI: From Adoption to Incident Readiness

How to Secure Enterprise AI: From Adoption to Incident Readiness

Sep 02, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Enterprise Security
The debate about whether AI delivers business value is over. The challenge now is implementing it at scale and securely across every function while meeting board-level pressure to move fast. Organizations must focus on adopting AI at business speed without losing control of cyber risk. Download the full eBook here.   The Business Reality   In Sygnia’s 2026 CISO Survey Report , which surveyed 600 senior IT and security leaders worldwide, nearly one-third already report extensive AI use across threat detection and IR, with 63% expecting it to be fully embedded in their organization by 2027. 1 Yet 73% of IT security decision makers say their organization would not be fully ready if a significant cyberattack occurred tomorrow. 1 Security teams feel they do not have adequate time to adapt. The tools are being deployed. The governance, controls, and incident readiness to support them are not. Security leaders are now tasked with enabling AI adoption while reducing the inheri...
Securing Claude Code: The New Compliance API, Local Visibility, and Identity Governance

Securing Claude Code: The New Compliance API, Local Visibility, and Identity Governance

Aug 31, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Endpoint Visibility
Claude Code reads files, runs shell commands, invokes MCP tools, and acts through the credentials available on a developer’s machine. Anthropic’s new Compliance API endpoints give security teams their clearest view yet into that activity. They also expose a larger problem: activity logs alone cannot tell you whether an agent’s access is legitimate. AI has moved from the browser tab to the endpoint with harnesses like Claude Code. They run on developers' machines, execute bash commands locally, and connect to third parties via MCP servers, skills, and plugins. All this so the user can outsource labor to the machine and focus on designing, thinking, and creating. Local agents are not a niche category. They account for 68.6% of the AI agents Token Security discovers in customer environments, and they often inherit the employee's credentials, network position, and permissions. The shift to the endpoint has major implications for security. With Claude Code, there is no ce...
Amazon Kiro Prompt Injection Can Exfiltrate Sensitive Data Through Kiro Powers

Amazon Kiro Prompt Injection Can Exfiltrate Sensitive Data Through Kiro Powers

Aug 27, 2026 Vulnerability / Artificial Intelligence
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a vulnerability in Amazon Kiro, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, agentic integrated development environment (IDE), that could facilitate data exfiltration via prompt injection and Kiro Powers. The security flaw, which does not have a CVE identifier, works against Kiro IDE 0.7.45 on Windows, according to Mindgard. The latest version of the IDE is 1.0.337. "The issue allowed attacker-controlled repository content to influence the Kiro agent and ultimately cause sensitive local information to be transmitted to an external endpoint," Chief Marketing Officer Fergal Glynn  said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Kiro Powers goes beyond skills by bundling Model Context Protocol (MCP) server configurations, steering files ("POWER.md"), hooks, and contextual knowledge. The steering file is like an "onboarding manual" that provides persistent context and tells the AI agent what MCP tools are...
The Outsized Shadow: Why 5% of AI Users Are Your Biggest Security Risk

The Outsized Shadow: Why 5% of AI Users Are Your Biggest Security Risk

Aug 24, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Browser Security
Big security risks come in small packages. While enterprise security teams focus on policing the proliferation of employees using ChatGPT and Claude for quick drafting tasks, a more urgent threat is posed by a handful of AI super-adopters who are quietly hardcoding unvetted tools into critical business operations. According to new research published by Akamai, the top 5% of enterprise power users interact with AI models at 12 times the rate of the bottom 50% of the workforce. The findings, published in Akamai’s State of the Internet: Enterprise AI Usage Risk Report 2026 , are based on real-world usage and telemetry data as well as research and threat analysis.  These AI super-adopters are creating a disproportionate security risk by expanding the use of shadow AI, increasing opportunities for data leakage, and introducing autonomous AI agents that operate within the enterprise but outside its established guardrails. “Small groups of AI power users are casting outsized shado...
New Cryptographic Context Injection Attack Could Let Web Pages Steal Grok Chat Data

New Cryptographic Context Injection Attack Could Let Web Pages Steal Grok Chat Data

Aug 20, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Data Security
Adversa AI has disclosed an attack technique that it says can cause xAI's Grok chatbot to send a user's name, approximate location, subscription tier, and the prompts from the ongoing conversation to an attacker-controlled server after the user asks it to summarize an ordinary web page. The AI security company, which has codenamed the technique "Cryptographic Context Injection ," said the transfer completed without a confirmation step and with no visible warning in its proof-of-concept demonstration. There is no patch, no CVE identifier, and no user-facing workaround, and the writeup does not report any exploitation in the wild. Asked which build was tested, Adversa told The Hacker News the target was the Grok web chat at grok.com running Grok 4.5 Fast, and that the attack was reproduced once on August 19, 2026. The writeup gives no success rate. The company said it has attempted the attack 20 times since June with a 40% success rate, and that the failures cam...
Why "Shady AI" is Security's Next Big Governance Problem

Why "Shady AI" is Security's Next Big Governance Problem

Aug 20, 2026 AI Security / Data Security
In March 2026, an internal AI agent at Meta triggered a “Sev 1” incident after sensitive company and user data was exposed to employees who weren’t authorized to access it.  The incident began when a Meta employee posted a technical question on an internal forum. An engineer used an approved AI agent to analyze it, but the agent posted its response publicly without approval. The employee followed its advice, inadvertently making a large volume of sensitive data available to unauthorized engineers for over two hours.  This was not shadow AI. The tool was approved, but the AI behaved in ways nobody had anticipated.  It’s a perfect example of security’s next big AI governance problem: shady AI.  Shadow AI is the unapproved use of AI tools  Shady AI is when employees use approved AI tools in unapproved, unexpected, or poorly governed ways  Shadow AI happens outside the organization's visibility. Shady AI happens inside it. And that makes it mu...
Expert Insights Articles Videos
Cybersecurity Resources