endpoint security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Hidden text on a web page was enough to make Kiro , AWS's agentic coding IDE, rewrite its own configuration file and run an attacker's code on a developer's machine, with no approval step able to stop it. Intezer, in research with Kodem Security, found that a request as ordinary as asking Kiro to summarize a page could end in remote code execution. AWS has patched the issue, and no CVE has been assigned to it. Kiro's safety model rests on a human clicking "allow." The agent can run shell commands, fetch URLs, and edit files, and the design assumes a developer reviews anything risky before it happens. That approval step is the security boundary, and the flaw let an attacker slip past it without the developer ever being offered a choice. The weak point was the file that tells Kiro which external tools to load. Kiro reads its list of Model Context Protocol servers, and the exact command used to start each one, from ~/.kiro/settings/mcp.json. When that fi...

Threat actors have been observed exploiting a now-patched high-severity Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS vulnerability as an entry point to deploy Qilin (aka Agenda) ransomware on victim environments. Arctic Wolf Labs said it investigated multiple intrusions in June 2026 that began with the exploitation of CVE-2026-0257 (CVSS score: 7.8), an authentication bypass flaw affecting the portal and gateway components of PAN-OS software. Successful exploitation of the flaw allows unauthenticated remote attackers to sidestep authentication and establish VPN sessions without valid credentials when authentication override cookies are enabled with specific certificate configurations. "Post-exploitation tradecraft varied across intrusions, from rapid encryption-only operations to full double-extortion, possibly suggesting multiple affiliates operating under the Qilin ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) umbrella," the cybersecurity company said .

Attackers have begun to exploit two critical vulnerabilities in WordPress that, when combined together, enable unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) and complete compromise of vulnerable websites. The two security flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137 , have been codenamed wp2shell . "By the early hours of Saturday morning (UTC), successful exploitation was already well underway, initially using public exploit code to exfiltrate hashed credentials, with remote code execution following once additional details were made public," Jake Knott, principal security researcher at watchTowr, told The Hacker News in a statement. "From our vantage point across a global client base, we are seeing widespread impact of this vulnerability across organizations of every size and every vertical." Telemetry data captured by KEVIntel shows that 13 unique IP addresses from Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., Indonesia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Singapore h...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered nearly 7,600 malicious GitHub repositories, out of which more than 800 pose as artificial intelligence (AI) skills or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to deliver a malware family known as SmartLoader as part of an ongoing campaign codenamed FakeGit . "FakeGit uses copied projects, lookalike developer profiles, convincing READMEs, and malicious ZIP files to deliver SmartLoader malware," Oleg Zaytsev, lead security researcher at Island, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The end goal of these attacks is to leverage the access afforded by SmartLoader to establish persistence and push secondary payloads, such as StealC, an information stealer capable of harvesting a wide range of data from compromised systems. It's worth mentioning here that the use of trojanized MCP servers to distribute SmartLoader and StealC was flagged earlier this year by Straiker AI and subsequently by Derp.ca . But a concerning aspect ...

Opening a crafted XZ archive in 7-Zip could let an attacker run code on the machine. The flaw, CVE-2026-14266 , is a heap-based buffer overflow in how the archiver processes XZ chunked data, and Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) detailed it on July 15. A fix shipped on June 25 in 7-Zip 26.02 . The overflow lets an attacker "execute code in the context of the current process," per the advisory. The code runs with the token 7-Zip itself holds and gains no privileges of its own. On Windows, a normally launched 7-Zip runs under a filtered standard-user token even on an administrator account, so the attacker inherits those limited rights unless the program was started elevated. The bug came in from Landon Peng of Lunbun LLC, who reported it to 7-Zip on June 5. ZDI rates the flaw 7.0, or High, not the Critical several write-ups reached for. The full CVSS 3.0 vector is AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H . The AV:L makes it a local attack vector, not a network-re...

A solo Russian-speaking threat actor known as " bandcampro " outsourced a chunk of their operations to Google's open-source Gemini CLI artificial intelligence (AI) and commandeered a live botnet. The findings come from an analysis of 200 Gemini CLI session logs between March 19 and April 21, 2026, which found the threat actor using AI, among other things, to crack passwords, set up a residential proxy, compromise WordPress merchants, and plan a phone-based cryptocurrency fraud scheme aimed at elderly people in the U.S. and Canada. "The logs documented how the threat actor used an AI agent to migrate a command-and-control (C&C) server, and to control a small-scale botnet, among other hacking activities," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen, Philippe Lin, Lucas Silva, Vladimir Kropotov, and Fyodor Yarochkin said . "The entire C&C operation fits in three plaintext files totaling roughly 5 KB, making it highly replicable and effectively disposa...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a new modular malware called TELEPUZ that's been spreading via websites infected with ClickFix lures since late April 2026. "The malware is full-featured, lightweight, and modular," Elastic Security Labs researcher Cyril François said in a technical report. "While the number of C2 [command-and-control] domains is currently small, the daily volume of builds uploaded to VirusTotal and the rapid pace of updates indicate active development and likely further growth." The disclosure makes it the second new threat cluster after SCMBANKER to be propagated via ClickFix , a pervasive social engineering attack that tricks users into manually running malicious commands by disguising them as innocent fixes for fake browser errors, software updates, or CAPTCHA verifications. Underpinning the technique is an approach called clipboard hijacking. Because web pages using ClickFix inject malicious script or commands i...

ClickLock Stealer , a new macOS infostealer, answers a victim's refusal by killing their apps on a loop until they hand over the login password. It arrives as a command pasted into Terminal, asks for the password behind a fake system dialog, and when the victim cancels, installs two LaunchAgents and quietly exits. At the next login, Finder, the Dock, Spotlight, Terminal, Activity Monitor, and the major browsers start dying every 210 milliseconds, for up to 83 hours, leaving one password box on a dead desktop. Type it, and the machine gives up the Keychain, the browser credentials, and the crypto wallets. Group-IB's telemetry counts at least 100 targets across 33 countries since May, over half of them in Europe. Its analysts assume from the code structure that the malware is still under development. Uploaded to VirusTotal on June 9, the orchestrator script had  zero detections  there when Group-IB analyzed it. And the analysts never found the front door. They have the ...

More than 20 Brazilian government websites were hijacked and turned into malware delivery channels in an active PhantomEnigma campaign uncovered by ANY.RUN , a leading provider of interactive malware analysis and threat intelligence solutions. The investigation revealed previously undocumented backdoor behavior, hidden infrastructure relationships, and multiple attack arms behind a campaign putting banks and public agencies at risk. By connecting hundreds of seemingly unrelated sandbox sessions, ANY.RUN researchers exposed the operation’s broader scope and showed how trusted .gov.br links and authenticated emails helped the activity remain hidden. For the complete technical analysis, infrastructure details, indicators, and detection guidance, read the full PhantomEnigma investigation report Trusted Government Infrastructure Became the Lure The attack began with fake police-themed documents presented as official “Ofício Polícia Civil” or “Procuração Digital” notices. Some ...

Zoom has released security updates for a critical security flaw impacting Zoom Workplace for Windows that could facilitate account takeover. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-53412 (CVSS score: 9.8), affects Zoom Workplace for Windows before version 7.0.0 and Zoom Workplace VDI Client for Windows before version 7.0.10, 6.6.15, and 6.5.18 in their respective branches. "Improper Input Validation in Zoom Desktop Client for Windows and Zoom VDI Client for Windows may allow an unauthenticated user to conduct an account takeover via network access," Zoom said in an advisory released this week. The latest security fixes also address three high-severity flaws - CVE-2026-53411 (CVSS score: 7.8) - An improper input validation vulnerability in the Zoom Workplace VDI Plugin for Windows before version 6.6.14 that may allow an authenticated user to conduct an escalation of privilege via local access. CVE-2026-53410 (CVSS score: 7.0) - A time-of-check to time-of-use ...

A malware framework called OkoBot has been running on Windows machines since April 2025, and one of its modules is built to con hardware wallet owners out of their recovery phrase. On an infected PC, the request comes from inside the wallet's own desktop software. Sometimes it waits until you plug the device in first. The page is malicious. The app around it is the real one you installed, and the phrase is the wallet. Kaspersky's GReAT team  published the teardown  on Wednesday, counting hundreds of victims in its telemetry across more than 25 countries. The largest share of attacked users is in Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and Türkiye. How many of them typed a phrase in, the report does not say. OkoBot carries more than 20 payloads and implants and was still active as of the July 15 report. SeedHunter Waits for the Device SeedHunter is the OkoBot module that steals the phrase. Once the framework lands, it watches for Trezor Suite, Ledger Wallet, and Ledger Live...

For years, routing traffic through cloud proxies was good enough. Then work moved to the browser, AI entered the workflow, and the inspection model stopped keeping up. Enterprise workflows now live across SaaS applications, browsers, and an expanding ecosystem of generative AI tools, unsanctioned browser extensions, and autonomous agents. Employees routinely paste intellectual property into public LLMs for code optimization, while automated agents query internal documentation and move data across systems at machine speed. The challenge is not that SASE failed, but that data interactions have shifted to the presentation layer, an area network-centric architectures were never designed to see. This structural paradigm shift is explored in detail within The Guide to Modern SASE Architecture . Why Traditional Enforcement Struggles Traditional SASE relies on backhauling traffic to cloud proxies for decryption, inspection, and policy enforcement. However, modern internet protocols, spe...

Open a repository in Cursor on Windows and, if a file named git.exe is sitting in the project root, Cursor runs it. No click, no approval dialog, no warning that anything in the folder is about to execute. Whatever that binary does, it does as you, with your source, your SSH keys and your cloud tokens. Cursor keeps re-running it for as long as the project stays open. No prompt injection, no agent, no model in the loop, and no prior access to the machine: opening the folder is the entire exploit, and the result is arbitrary code execution as the logged-in user. AI security firm Mindgard reported the flaw to Cursor on December 15, 2025 and  published full technical details  on Tuesday, seven months later. There is still no patch, and Cursor has published no advisory for the issue. The mechanism takes about a sentence. Cursor checks several locations for a Git binary when a project loads, and one of them is the workspace itself. Process Monitor output in t...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a previously undocumented Rust-based remote access trojan (RAT) codenamed LabubaRAT that masquerades as NVIDIA software to blend into target environments. "LabubaRAT creates a reusable foothold for hands-on activity," Blackpoint Cyber researchers Sam Decker and Nevan Beal said in an analysis published today. "Once deployed, it can profile the host, identify security tools, receive operator commands, move files, capture screenshots, and proxy traffic through the affected system." The implant also supports multiple communication methods, including HTTPS, WebView2, and DNS tunneling, allowing attackers to maintain access to compromised hosts even if one pathway is detected and closed off. There are some signs that LabubuRAT is being offered under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. The starting point of the attack chain is an executable named "nvidia-sysruntime.exe," which impersonates NVIDIA's container ru...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered 11 old, Microsoft-signed, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) applications that could be abused to bypass Secure Boot on most systems using the modern firmware standard. "An attacker exploiting one of these vulnerable applications can execute untrusted code during system boot, enabling deployment of malicious UEFI bootkits or other malware," ESET researcher Martin Smolár said in a report published today. The UEFI shim bootloaders expose any UEFI-based machine that trusts Microsoft's " Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011 " third-party UEFI certificate authority (CA) certificate, irrespective of the installed operating system. The certificate is used to sign third-party boot components intended to run under Secure Boot. It expired as of June 27, 2026, and has been replaced by Microsoft UEFI CA 2023 and Microsoft Option ROM UEFI CA 2023. The shim is a lightweight, open-source UEFI bootloader that acts as an ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new macOS information stealer called CrashStealer that's capable of harvesting sensitive data from compromised systems. Unlike other information stealers that are built on AppleScript droppers or Objective-C-based wrappers, CrashStealer is implemented in native C++, according to Jamf Threat Labs. "It validates the victim's login password locally before harvesting, collects broadly across browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, password managers, and the keychain, encrypts what it collects with AES-GCM before exfiltrating over libcurl, and persists by copying and re-signing itself," security researcher Thijs Xhaflaire said in a report shared with The Hacker News. CrashStealer is said to be distributed by means of a signed and Apple-notarized dropper that's distributed as a disk image file named "Werkbit.app." Because both the disk image and binary are notarized and carry a valid developer ID ("Emil Grigorov...

Google and Microsoft have pulled ModHeader , a popular header-editing extension with roughly 1.6 million installs across Chrome and Edge, after researchers found a hidden browsing-history collector built into its official store version. The collector was dormant. An empty allow-list kept it switched off, and no proof has emerged that it ever gathered or sent a single browsing domain. The analysis came from  Stripe OLT , a UK security firm, which checked the code against Google's own Web Store signature and confirmed the collector shipped inside the genuine extension, not a counterfeit. Its review covers the Chrome build and its roughly 900,000 users; third-party trackers put another 700,000 or so on Edge. Microsoft pulled the Edge listing on July 3, and Google removed the Chrome one a week later, on July 10. Version 7.0.18 (extension ID idgpnmonknjnojddfkpgkljpfnnfcklj) still edits HTTP headers as advertised. The same minified background code also contains a...

Microsoft has taken apart a destructive Windows backdoor it calls GigaWiper . What stands out is how it is built: not one tool but three older destructive programs bolted into one, offered as commands the operator can choose from. Each is a different way to break a machine: wipe the whole disk, overwrite the Windows drive, or run fake "ransomware" that scrambles files with a key it never saves. Because this is malware and not a single flaw, there is no patch to chase; GigaWiper is what an attacker runs after they are already inside, which makes early detection and clean, offline backups the real defense. The same malicious files show up in a second report under another name: BLUERABBIT , a backdoor Binary Defense flagged last month . Microsoft lists four hashes for the GigaWiper backdoor ; Binary Defense lists the same four for BLUERABBIT , and both command servers match. Binary Defense, citing Google's Threat Intelligence Group, ties the malware to a likely Ir...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new ransomware family called GodDamn that employs the PoisonX kernel driver to neutralize security software as part of its defense evasion strategy. According to a new report published by the Threat Hunter Team from Symantec, the ransomware was first publicly spotted in the wild on May 21, 2026. It's assessed to be a rebrand of the Beast ransomware, which, in turn, was an enhanced version of Monster , a Delphi-based ransomware that surfaced in March 2022. Broadcom's cybersecurity arm is tracing the developer behind these ransomware families under the moniker Hyadina. In one attack orchestrated by the ransomware operation in early June 2026, the threat actors are said to have leveraged AnyDesk for remote access and used a NirSoft-based credential harvesting toolkit before deploying the ransomware. The exact initial access vector is unknown. The credential harvester is designed to extract sensitive data from common web browsers, W...

Microsoft has released security updates for a Defender vulnerability known as RoguePlanet, nearly a month after details of the flaw became public. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score: 7.8), is a privilege escalation issue in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine ("mpengine.dll"), which provides scanning, detection, and cleaning capabilities for its antivirus and antispyware software. The issue has been remediated in Microsoft Malware Protection Engine version 1.1.26060.3008, along with defense-in-depth updates to harden unspecified security-related features.  RoguePlanet was first disclosed by a security researcher named Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse), describing it as a race condition that could be abused to spawn a shell with SYSTEM-level privileges. This, in turn, grants the attacker the ability to run arbitrary code or perform unauthorized actions. The exploit has been found to work on systems running up-to-date versions of Wind...