linux | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added three security flaws impacting the Linux kernel to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2025-39682 (CVSS score: 9.8) - An improper check for unusual or exceptional conditions vulnerability in the TLS receive path that could allow local authenticated users to trigger memory disclosure or denial-of-service (DoS). CVE-2026-53266 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the ebtables Source Network Address Translation (SNAT) Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) rewrite path that could allow a local attacker to trigger unintended system behavior, DoS, or local privilege escalation. CVE-2025-39964 (CVSS score: 7.8) - A race condition vulnerability that could allow concurrent writes to the same AF_ALG socket, allowing a local attacker to crash the system or corrupt cryptographic ope...

A security researcher has released working exploit code for four Linux kernel flaws that each let a local user gain root, the highest level of access on a machine. Kernel maintainers have fixed all four over the past few weeks, so a system running an up-to-date kernel is not affected. But the exploit code is now public, and any machine still running an older kernel should be updated. The flaws are called DirtyAH6 , TUNderflow , PPPoEject , and DiagSpill . Researcher Asim Manizada found them and reported them to the Linux kernel security team in mid-July. He published a technical  write-up  with working exploits on September 18, after a coordinated hold with Linux distributions so the fixes could be released first. So far, there are no reports of the four being used in real-world attacks. The exploits are Manizada's own, are tuned to specific kernel builds, and can crash a machine, so they are meant for isolated test systems. Still, public exploit code raises the ris...

The Pakistan-aligned threat group tracked as Transparent Tribe (aka APT36 and Earth Karkaddan) has been attributed to a fresh set of cyber attacks targeting government and defense entities in India and Afghanistan. The attacks, per Zscaler ThreatLabz, involve the use of previously undocumented tools called RUSTYSHADE, RUSTYMOVE, PSNATCH, and BASHNATCH. The activity has been codenamed Operation RapidRust . "APT36 has maintained a high operational tempo and updated their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in continued attacks targeting government and defense organizations in India and Afghanistan," Sudeep Singh , senior manager of APT Research at Zscaler ThreatLabz, said in a technical report published this week. The discovery comes a little over a month after  Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) tied the long-running persistent threat group to another campaign aimed at Afghan telecom providers and South Asian critical infrastructure organizations using a backdo...

Enterprises in Russia have emerged as the target of three threat activity clusters tracked as NightEagle , Hacking Cat , and Toy Ghouls , according to multiple reports from Kaspersky. The cybersecurity vendor said it has identified attacks mounted by NightEagle (aka APT-Q-95), a threat actor known to be active since at least 2023, that involve new techniques for persistence and lateral movement. "In most incidents, the attackers used compromised valid credentials to gain access to corporate VPNs," Kaspersky said in an analysis published today. "VPN connections originated from IP addresses in the Russian segment linked to Cloudflare WARP tunnels, as well as from IP addresses associated with European virtual infrastructure providers." The attacks, as highlighted in July 2025, involve the deployment of GhostContainer , a known modular backdoor that grants the operators complete access to a victim's Microsoft Exchange Server, as well as run arbitrary code, ...

Acronis has warned that a high-severity security flaw in its Backup plugin for cPanel and Web Host Manager (WHM) deployments has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-87886 (CVSS score: 7.8), is described as a case of local privilege escalation due to insecure file permissions. It affects the following versions - Acronis Backup plugin for cPanel & WHM (Linux) before build 1.9.3.1021 - Fixed in 1.9.3 HF3 Acronis Backup extension for Plesk (Linux) before build 1.8.11.638 Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker with low privileges to escalate their permissions on a susceptible Linux version, potentially enabling them to perform unauthorized actions or run arbitrary code that could impact the confidentiality and integrity of the application. "This update contains fixes for 1 high-severity security vulnerability and should be installed immediately by all users," Acronis noted in a separate advisory for 1.9.3 HF3...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a multi-platform campaign that uses the Message Queueing Telemetry Transport ( MQTT ) protocol as a communication channel to control Windows and Linux systems. The emerging malware family, codenamed BambooToken , is assessed to be active since at least February 2023 and put to use in attacks targeting organizations across Asia and South America. Activity linked to the malware has been detected as recently as July 2026. Lumen Black Lotus Labs said it discovered the previously undocumented malware on VirusTotal in early 2026, with evidence pointing to a skilled threat actor that has managed to stay undetected until now. The initial access vector used to deliver BambooToken remains undetermined. "The actor used Tendyron's 'OnKey' software to sideload agents into targeted machines," Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Tendyron creates hardware-based tokens employed in high-se...

A suspected Chinese threat actor tracked as Red Heron has been attributed to the rapid exploitation of a recently disclosed security vulnerability in Gitea to compromise internet-facing instances as part of a multi-national campaign. "Red Heron scanned 1,386 Gitea instances across seven countries and maintained a separate dataset of 477 Taiwan-based systems," Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) said in an analysis. "The activity progressed from source-code theft to persistent access, credential collection, and lateral movement, including root-level access to a three-node Proxmox cluster." The activity is said to have resulted in confirmed compromises affected organizations in Canada (2), Argentina (1), Taiwan (4), the U.S. (4), Qatar (1), and Sri Lanka (1), with the threat actor using Simplified Chinese labels to classify targets spanning defense, election, energy, aerospace, telecommunications, government, public safety, and research sectors. The Singapore ...

A flaw in FreeIPA lets a client that has never logged in create a Kerberos identity of its own choosing in the directory and end up in the administrators group, Red Hat says. FreeIPA is the system that determines who may log in across a Linux domain and maintains all identities in a 389 Directory Server database accessed via LDAP. The attack needs a second flaw in that database software. The FreeIPA project has already fixed its side in  version 4.13.4 . Red Hat says it reproduced the chain twice on a default installation, most recently on a machine with no access at all. Red Hat tracks the FreeIPA flaw as  CVE-2026-76578  and rates it critical, with a CVSS score of 9.8. The same page says that score is preliminary and subject to review. Red Hat ships FreeIPA as its Identity Management product , where the package is called  ipa . FreeIPA ships an access control rule, called an ACI, that lets a user manage their own one-time-password token. The rule does no...

Adobe on Monday released security patches to address a maximum-severity flaw impacting Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, now tracked as CVE-2026-75650 (CVSS score: 10.0), has been codenamed StyleSmuggler by Sansec, which discovered zero-day exploitation starting September 4, 2026. "This update resolves a critical vulnerability that could result in arbitrary code execution," Adobe said , adding it's "aware that CVE-2026-75650 has been exploited in the wild targeting Adobe Commerce merchants." At its core, the flaw abuses Magento's template system through PHP code injection to generate a "Payment Transaction Failed Reminder" email, triggering code execution in the process.

A previously undocumented Linux toolkit has been found compiled directly into the trojanized HAProxy load balancers of two South Korean organizations, where it intercepted web traffic and served altered pages to selected visitors. The attackers named the implant ted in debug strings left in the binary. It is not a HAProxy vulnerability, and installing it requires code execution on the host and the ability to replace the running binary. Rapid7 Labs attributed the toolkit with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors and put the two victims in South Korea's automotive and media sectors. Command-and-control (C2) requests never reach a backend server and are erased from HAProxy's own connection counters, so neither the backend logs nor the load balancer's statistics record them. "Further evidence is necessary to make a more definitive assessment," Rapid7 said. A request for one specific image path puts the filter into C2 mode, Rapid7 said i...

A Chinese-speaking cybercrime cluster known as Gambling Goblin has been observed installing malicious Apache modules on compromised web servers run by Brazilian government and educational institutions, and using them to divert visitors to attacker-controlled pages promoting online gambling and sports betting. Check Point Research said it has tracked the campaign since mid-2025. The modules reverse-proxy visitors to a set of phishing pages while the traffic still appears to originate from the legitimate domain. The site's own security headers are stripped, allowing the injected content to run freely. Those pages pose as trusted app stores including Google Play, Microsoft Store, and Amazon, and push online gambling and sports betting behind that facade. Check Point said the likely goal is search engine optimization (SEO) manipulation at scale, with compromised high-reputation domains, many of them Brazilian government sites, chained together to inflate search rankings. AN...

Virtualizor said hackers used a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijack to divert Softaculous traffic. The hackers then used the diverted update traffic to deliver a malicious Virtualizor package to some installations. A hosting-provider account separately said 5 of its 34 checked Virtualizor hypervisors sustained root-level compromise. The incident window ran from approximately August 28 at 20:57 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to August 30 at 06:10 UTC. Virtualizor said every operator should check its servers because the company has no affected-version range or definitive list of installations that received the package. Virtualizor released Patch 9 with a Security Analyzer on September 1, but the vendor said cryptographic package signing remained future work. Operators should run the official scanner, rotate and restrict application programming interface (API) credentials, and audit each server for persistence and unauthorized access. "This affected a handful of servers rat...

The Iranian Nimbus Manticore hacking group has been attributed to two previously undocumented malware families that highlight the continued evolution of its toolset and likely expand its targeting footprint to infect Linux and Apple macOS systems using cross-platform remote access trojans (RATs) developed using Node.js and JavaScript. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky is tracking the malware strains under the names NodeRabbit and PollCat. The first sample of NodeRabbit was discovered on a system in Afghanistan, with subsequent sightings on two distinct machines located in Egypt and Ethiopia. "Its operators deliver [NodeRabbit] through spear-phishing messages on LinkedIn and other job search platforms that contain trojanized coding challenge archives," Kaspersky security researcher Omar Amin said . "Like NodeRabbit, PollCat is a cross-platform RAT, but it is written in obfuscated JavaScript also distributed through trojanized coding challenge archives."...

Threat actors associated with Aurora (aka Aur0ra) ransomware have been observed using SpaceX's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cursor to break into target networks, according to findings from CloudSEK and Gambit Security . The two independent analyses are based on exposed infrastructure associated with the Russian-speaking cybercrime group, leading to the discovery of its toolkit, shell history, and encryptor. CloudSEK said the exposed open directory leaked "months of activity" that was active against more than 20 organizations across nine countries between April and July 2026. Four of those victims have since been listed on its data leak site. "The operator used Cursor, an agentic coding assistant, to plan attacks in Russian, while excluding CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] ranges and CIS-country domains, without exception," CloudSEK noted. Details about Aurora first emerged in late May 2026, with CYFIRMA highlighting atta...

A China-nexus cyber espionage actor tracked as Fire Ant has expanded a long-running campaign beyond VMware hypervisors to compromise Cisco IOS XR routers, Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System (TACACS) servers, and Linux management hosts used to route, authenticate, and manage high-value networks. Sygnia, the incident response firm that investigated the intrusion, said the actor turned the compromised routers into collection platforms, capturing network traffic, harvesting credentials, and suppressing the logging and telemetry that defenders rely on to reconstruct an attack. The firm assessed that the hacker group used its foothold to explore paths to connected high-value environments, including critical infrastructure. However, activity against those networks was limited to scanning and connection attempts rather than confirmed compromise. Controlling the routers gave the actor a vantage point over traffic moving through trusted network paths, Sygnia said. "...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added six flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, including a high-severity security vulnerability impacting Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2019-1068 - A remote code execution vulnerability in  Microsoft SQL Server that could allow an attacker to execute code in the context of the SQL Server Database Engine service account. CVE-2026-8452 - An improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway that could lead to denial-of-service. CVE-2022-0995 - An out-of-bounds memory write vulnerability in  Linux Kernel that could allow a local user to gain privileged access or cause a denial of service on the system. CVE-2015-5287 - A privilege escalation vulnerability in  Red Hat Automatic B...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of trojanized npm packages that masquerade as working calendar and streak utilities but are engineered to stealthily deliver an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Linux implant dubbed RedC2 4.0. "When the module loads, it locates the bundled binary, marks it executable, and launches it as a detached background process," TrendAI, Trend Micro's enterprise cybersecurity business, said in a report published Thursday. "No install hook function call is needed; a single import anywhere in the dependency graph, even a transitive one, is enough to execute the payload." The list of identified packages is below - streak-metrics-math@1.0.0,1.0.1 kit-map-vim@1.0.0 streak-map-cache@1.0.0 streak-map-kit@1.0.0 map-streak-kit@1.0.0 streak-cache-map@1.0.0 streak-calc-metrics@1.0.0 streak-calc-math@1.0.0 streak-math-abz@1.0.0 streak-metricsaz@1.0.0 streak-math-metrics@1.0.0 streak-metrica...

A cluster of nearly 800 malicious packages has been published to the npm registry as part of a new campaign designed to deliver cross-platform malware targeting Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. "These packages appear to use AI slop squatted, or randomly generated typo-squatting package names, but all of them deliver a powerful RAT and infostealer payload," OpenSourceMalware researcher Paul McCarty said . Unlike other npm-oriented software supply chain attacks that make use of lifecycle hooks like preinstall or postinstall to trigger the execution of malicious code, the newly identified packages come with a README that instructs developers to load them with require(), a built-in function to import modules, local files, and third-party packages. The attack leads to the execution of a downloader named WEL1DROPPER , which, when executed, identifies the host operating system and processor architecture and fetches a compatible payload from one of the three Cloudflare Workers...

A use-after-free bug in Linux's SCTP networking code can be turned into full root on a host, and Tencent researchers say they used it to escape a container and reach the machine underneath. The flaw has existed since 2008. The fix already shipped: stable kernels 7.1.6, 6.18.42, 6.12.101 and 6.6.148, released August 3, close it. Anyone running an older kernel with SCTP reachable should update. Tracked as  CVE-2026-64564  and named SCTPhantom by its finders, the flaw was disclosed publicly on August 6, two days after the kernel CVE team assigned it. No public exploit code had surfaced at the time of writing, and The Hacker News found no entry for the flaw in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog as of August 7. The flaw is local, not remote, and it needs SCTP reachable on the target, which limits exposure. Where those conditions held, Tencent Zhuque Lab reports it got root on the kernel builds it tested for Debian 13, Ubuntu 24.04, Rocky Linux 9 and RHEL 9, and ...

Security researcher Malcolm Stagg has disclosed a new attack class called  NatJack  that manipulates network address translation (NAT) connection state to hijack active TCP sessions, spoof DNS responses, expose mapped ports, and exhaust NAT tables. Presented at Black Hat USA 2026 , the research found affected behavior across independently developed implementations, including Windows and Linux. Two implementation-specific flaws have been assigned CVEs:  CVE-2026-56181  (CVSS score: 8.3) in Windows NAT used by Hyper-V, and  CVE-2026-63913  (CVSS score: 8.2) in Linux Netfilter conntrack. NatJack generally requires the attacker to have privileged access to a system behind the same NAT as the victim. The mitigation guidance therefore emphasizes separating untrusted workloads from trusted systems that share NAT infrastructure. There is no single patch for the broader attack class. Organizations should apply available Windows and Linux updates and encryp...