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Enterprise defenses are tuned to catch the attacks that make noise. This year's data shows attackers winning by making none. According to Picus Labs' new Blue Report 2026 , which measured more than 338 million real attack simulations across actual client production environments in the first half of 2026, defenses are having one of their strongest years yet. Average prevention effectiveness climbed from 62% to 69% , matching its 2024 peak, and logging reached a four-year high of 58% . The good news: The recovery is real. The bad news: It's taking place almost exclusively at the perimeter. The report's sharper finding is what happens after that perimeter is crossed . Inside, the picture inverts : defenses that look strong from the outside turn soft , and are the softest of all against the quiet moves, the reconnaissance and credential theft that precede every serious breach.  This is a fault line that runs through the entire report. A vulnerable interior behin...

The security researcher going by the name Chaotic Eclipse (aka INFINITE NIGHTMARE, MSNightmare, and Nightmare-Eclipse) has released a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a new Microsoft zero-day called ShieldBreak . The vulnerability, rooted in Microsoft Defender for Windows, demonstrates a patch bypass for CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score: 7.8), otherwise known as RoguePlanet . RoguePlanet has been described as a race condition that, if successfully exploited, could grant an attacker the ability to spawn a shell with SYSTEM-level privileges, enabling them to run arbitrary code or perform unauthorized actions. Although it was first disclosed by the researcher in June 2026, a patch for the vulnerability was not released by Microsoft until almost a month later. The tech giant described it as a privilege escalation issue in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine ("mpengine.dll"). Soon after, Chaotic Eclipse said the "defense-in-depth updates" introduced by Microsoft to ad...

Anyone sharing their screen on a Zoom call could have taken over the computers of everyone watching, and anyone watching could have taken over the presenter's. The flaw sat in the annotation tool, the feature that lets participants draw and type on a shared screen, and it asked nothing of the victim beyond being in the meeting. No click, no download, no prompt, and nothing on screen to show it had happened. The patches are not new. Client fixes shipped in June and July, roughly two months before the flaws were made public, and no exploitation has been reported as of publication. None of the three identifiers appear in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The versions that close them: Zoom Workplace, all supported platforms, before 7.1.5 and 7.0.6 in their respective branches Zoom Workplace VDI Client for Windows, before 7.0.11 and 6.6.16 Zoom Rooms and Zoom Meeting SDK, all platforms, before 7.1.0, and before 7.1.5 for the third flaw The research ...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has disclosed details of a new social engineering campaign orchestrated by Russian nation-state threat actors targeting IT workers in the country by masquerading as recruiters to trick them into installing malware. CERT-UA pinned the activity on a threat cluster it tracks as UAC-0145 , which is a subgroup within Sandworm (aka APT44, Seashell Blizzard, and UAC-0002), a sophisticated hacking group affiliated with the GRU. The campaign is assessed to be ongoing since May 2026. "Specifically, on job search websites, after reviewing a candidate's resume, the attackers contact a potential victim – typically a system administrator or IT specialist – on behalf of an IT company (such as ATLAS Business Group)," CERT-UA said .  Although initial communications take place via built-in online chat, the conversation subsequently shifts to messaging apps like Telegram, where a preliminary chat takes place with a purported H...

The ransomware group known as DeadLock has been observed using decentralized infrastructure to facilitate victim communications and data leak operations in a bid to improve operational resilience. "Its recovery ecosystem combines the Session messaging network with blockchain-backed services that store and deliver resources used throughout the extortion process," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said . The tech giant said it observed the ransomware being deployed by multiple threat actors, including an affiliate for Lynx and INC ransomware. DeadLock was first detected in July 2025, employing double extortion tactics to encrypt victim environments and apply pressure by threatening to publicly release exfiltrated data. As of this month, the group has claimed 96 victims , with most of them located in Italy, Spain, Poland, Türkiye, and the U.S. In an analysis published earlier this January, Singapore-headquartered Group-IB said the group has managed to keep a lowe...

Windows Plug and Play can be abused to fetch signed vendor software for an emulated USB device and execute privileged installation components that researchers chained to SYSTEM access on a fully updated Windows 11 machine. The same PnP path can be triggered over Remote Desktop without physical hardware when supported Plug and Play or low-level USB redirection is enabled; Microsoft says that redirection is not allowed by default. Security researchers Alejandro Hernando and Borja Martinez described the technique in " Plug And Pwn: Weaponizing Windows PnP Auto-Install ," research prepared for DEF CON 34. They built tooling to emulate arbitrary USB devices and said that, under the required conditions, an unprivileged user can turn the PnP installation path into SYSTEM code execution. Microsoft's own driver documentation describes the underlying selection step: Windows receives hardware and compatible IDs for a device and uses them to find a matching driver package. A...

North Korea's state hackers are no longer content to type prompts into public chatbots. One of the country's main espionage groups has begun running artificial intelligence (AI) offline on its own servers, connecting document-search tools to files in its possession, and collecting the software parts needed to build AI into its malware. South Korean security firm Genians says it uncovered the setup after months of tracking and log analysis on infrastructure tied to Kimsuky, a hacking unit under North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau. Genians found no evidence that the group had trained an AI model of its own, and the firm does not offer that as reassurance. It describes an actor in a "research and knowledge acquisition" stage, assembling and testing existing tools rather than making new models, with the apparent aim of folding AI through the operation, from writing malware to analyzing data. For an intelligence unit that has spent years phishing governm...

Three separate research efforts last week demonstrated ways to defeat passkey protections without breaking the cryptography they rest on. Passkeys are designed to replace reusable passwords and resist phishing. The attacks instead reused signed authentication material that Windows had exposed, abused a cloud-synced passkey system from malware already on the victim's machine, and used a  Windows Hello for Business  key from a compromised user session without a fresh PIN or biometric check. None cracked the math. The impact is not the same in all three cases. SpecterOps showed a Windows and Microsoft Entra ID chain that could impersonate privileged users while satisfying phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA); that chain reused signed authentication material rather than stealing the authenticator's private key. Unit 42 showed attacks against  Google Password Manager in Chrome , including a path that recovers the private keys for a victim's synced p...

N-able has released a fresh round of hotfixes for N‑central as part of its investigation into ongoing exploitation of a recently disclosed security flaw in the Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) product. "We are proactively expanding protections in response to ongoing monitoring of threat actors as they evolve their attack techniques," the company said. "This is not a duplicate of our previous communication. Hotfix 2 is required, even if you already applied the earlier hotfix. Hotfix 2 supersedes Hotfix 1 with additional hardening measures to further protect you and your customers." The disclosure comes as N-able acknowledged that it detected unusual activity within a customer's environment on July 31, 2026, leading to the discovery of unknown threat actors exploiting a then-zero-day flaw in the N‑central server (CVE-2026-18577, CVSS score: 8.2). It impacts all versions prior to 2026.3.1.7. It's worth noting that CVE-2026-18577 relates to an i...

ClickFix-style attacks are being used to deliver a Go-based malware capable of stealing cryptocurrency assets, as well as browser-stored passwords, Apple iCloud Keychain data, and cached credentials. The macOS-focused infection chain is designed to deliver a shell script that profiles the host and then fetches a macOS malware payload that's compatible with the computer's CPU architecture. "While the malware payload is capable of stealing passwords, its most interesting function is its capability to slowly deplete cryptocurrency accounts, siphoning their contents into accounts under the threat actor's control," Huntress security researcher Andrew Brandt said . The attack chain begins with pasting a ClickFix command into the Terminal app, triggering the execution of a Bash profiler/loader that collects extensive system details and then retrieves a Mach-O payload that matches the victim's processor architecture. The payload is a Go-based stealer that can ...

Entra ID researcher Dirk-jan Mollema demonstrated that malware already running in a signed-in Windows session can silently use the victim's Windows Hello for Business key to authenticate to Microsoft Entra ID. The attacker can then establish longer-term cloud access, register a device it controls, obtain a Primary Refresh Token (PRT), and add further authentication methods where tenant policies permit. On TPM-backed systems, the attacker does not extract the private key, recover the PIN, or trigger a biometric prompt. Windows ticketing keeps private-key operations available while the user is interactively signed in, allowing code running as the user to ask Windows to sign authentication data. Administrator privileges are not required. The technique requires code execution in the victim's signed-in session. Mollema describes the behavior as a consequence of how Windows Hello for Business works and says it was left as-is. The disclosure does not report active exploitatio...

Attackers broke into an organization's Oracle database through a SQL injection flaw in a public-facing web application, then installed a post-exploitation toolkit without writing an executable to disk. They fed Java source code to the database, let Oracle compile it into stored schema objects, and ran commands from inside the database engine. Huntress, which tracks the toolkit as khunt , investigated after credential-theft detections fired on July 27, 2026, and traced the chain to SYSTEM-level code execution on the underlying Windows server. The flaw sat in the application, where an autocomplete search field passed unvalidated input to the database over a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) connection. The account behind that connection had enough privilege to create Java objects. No Oracle patch closes either the application flaw or the account privilege behind it. Finding the toolkit means hunting: search the Oracle installation for object names beginning Khunt, and SQL logs...

A macOS ClickFix operation spanning more than 250 front-end domains now fingerprints visitors before deciding whether to show them a malware lure, a change Microsoft Threat Intelligence tracked on infrastructure it had been watching for weeks. The server-side gate hides the malicious page from crawlers and sandboxes while presenting selected Mac users with a fake software download. Microsoft said the wider cluster distributed MacSync and Atomic Stealer (AMOS) ; the chain it analyzed through the gate ended in AMOS. The attack still requires the user to copy and run an obfuscated command in Terminal. That command retrieves scripts and launches an infostealer targeting credentials, browser data, authentication stores, cryptocurrency wallets, and sensitive files. Microsoft has not disclosed victim numbers, targeted sectors, or the identity of the operators. Users should not follow any website, CAPTCHA, chat, or download instruction that asks them to paste text into Terminal. Micro...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what has been described as a "long-standing supply chain attack" on QuickFox, a virtual private network (VPN) and network acceleration tool designed for overseas Chinese users. According to Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, the supply chain attack has been ongoing since at least August 2025 and involves a trojanized version of the application to deliver FDMTP , a backdoor that has been put to use by a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor tracked as Mustang Panda. "The attack is delivered via a modified Electron renderer HTML file used to download and execute a JavaScript-based loader," the FortiGuard Incident Response Team said . "Upon execution, the JavaScript loader fingerprints the victim endpoint to determine if it's a valid target before downloading and installing an FDMTP implant." Following responsible disclosure, QuickFox has removed the malicious components from their Windows installer with the release o...

A credential-stealing npm worm that first appeared in keyv@6.0.0 spread beyond the Keyv and Cacheable namespaces into hundreds of packages across multiple organizations on August 4, 2026. SafeDep verified 353 poisoned versions across 79 package names in the npm registry. Its monitoring put the wider footprint at 442 versions across 353 names, while Aikido later reported at least 868 packages across 1,381 versions. Neither broader total was independently reproducible from a complete public list at the reporting cutoff. The malicious release used a preinstall script to run a credential-stealing bundle inside developer and continuous integration (CI) environments. SafeDep and Socket say it can harvest repository, package registry, cloud and private-key material, then use available npm publishing access to poison more packages. The Keyv repository also retained separate Claude Code and Visual Studio Code (VS Code) hooks that can execute the payload once a user trusts the workspace...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active, multi-wave campaign that employs social engineering lures themed around Adobe and Zoom software updates, business document reviews, and system maintenance utilities to stealthily deploy Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) programs like ConnectWise ScreenConnect. The campaign has been codenamed SMOKE#SCREEN by Securonix Threat Research. "The campaign relies on a toolkit of VBScript droppers, batch file loaders, compiled .NET executables and an HTML phishing page, all ultimately pointing to a live WsgiDAV-based staging server at 207.174.0[.]143:8080," researchers Shikha Sangwan, Akshay Gaikwad, and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Successful attacks culminate with a ScreenConnect agent installed and beaconing to one of three attacker-controlled relay servers, providing the attackers with persistent remote access to compromised systems. The activity has not been attributed to ...

A new Russian loader-as-a-service (LaaS) codenamed DOUBLECUP has been using ClickFix lures as a way to stage malware-laced PNG images in victims' browser cache and ultimately deliver CountLoader and a previously undocumented remote access trojan called DeviceManager . "The first stage drops a steganographic PNG image into the browser's cache, retrieves its hidden content, and executes the second stage," SOCRadar said in a technical report. "This second stage decrypts the final payload in memory via a custom SHA-256 stream cipher in Counter (CTR) mode along with bitwise XOR using the victim's public IP address as the cryptographic key." Payloads delivered via the loader service include CountLoader , with variants for both Windows and macOS, and DeviceManager, which utilizes EtherHiding to resolve its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure and communicate with the server over HTTP or DNS tunneling. The service is assessed to be active since ea...

Malware running as an ordinary user on a Windows machine can sign into a victim's passkey-protected accounts without a fingerprint, a PIN, or anything at all appearing on the victim's screen. Unit 42 detailed three attack paths against Chrome's Google Password Manager cloud authenticator, which it calls Pass-ta-key , Silver Pass-ta-key and Golden Pass-ta-key ; the strongest targets the master key protecting the user's synced passkeys. None of this breaks the cryptography. The attacks go after the code around the passkey: how Chrome stores its device keys, how it re-enrolls a device after that state disappears, and whether the site you are signing into bothers to check that a human was verified at all. The attacks can silently obtain a valid authentication assertion, install an attacker-controlled user-verification key, or extract the 32-byte Security Domain Secret (SDS) used to decrypt synced passkey private keys. The researchers said the last two paths can p...

N-able said attackers exploited an authentication bypass in N-central to gain remote administrative access and reach the customer systems managed through those servers. Its first fix was incomplete. CVE-2026-18577 affects N-central builds prior to 2026.3.1.7. N-able shipped build 2026.3.1.7 on August 2 as the first unaffected version. N-central is the remote monitoring and management platform managed service providers and IT teams use to administer customer endpoints. After compromising an N-central server, the attackers used Take Control to reach managed endpoints and registered Cloudflare tunnels as services on the devices. The tunnels connect outbound to Cloudflare's edge, so they need no inbound firewall rule or open listening port. Running them as services lets them survive a reboot. N-able said the tunnels preserved access after the route through the N-central server was revoked. Nothing in the disclosure suggests Cloudflare was compromised; the attackers abused it...

A Chinese-speaking threat actor is suspected to be behind a fresh wave of cyber attacks targeting government organizations mainly located in Central Asia, including Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the Syrian Arab Republic, since January 2025. These targeted organizations operate across several sectors, such as healthcare, research, government offices, ministries of foreign affairs, logistics, law-enforcement agencies, urban planning and facilities management, and public educational establishments, per Kaspersky. The activity has not been linked to any known adversary or group. The attacks are characterized by the use of two new obfuscated backdoors the Russian cybersecurity company is tracking as OctLurk and SilkLurk , as well as a specialized utility codenamed LurkProxy to proxy network traffic. "OctLurk and SilkLurk can download and inject additional plugins to perform further malicious actions, including launching command shells, perf...