network security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Every single day, hackers are finding new ways to crash websites and steal data. But right now, something has changed. Hackers are no longer working alone. They are now using powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to make their attacks faster, stronger, and much harder to stop. According to recent updates from The Hacker News , bad actors are using AI to find weak spots in systems and launch massive "DDoS attacks" that can take your business offline in seconds. If your website goes down, you lose money, you lose customer trust, and you spend days trying to fix the mess. 👉 Save Your Free Webinar Seat The Old Way of Protection Doesn't Work Anymore In the past, you could set up a simple firewall, update your software, and feel safe. Not anymore. AI-assisted attacks can think and adapt. They don't just hit your front door; they look for hidden entry points, smart APIs, and tiny mistakes in your cloud setup. They do in minutes what used to take human h...

Microsoft has rolled out updates to fix a remote code execution vulnerability impacting SharePoint that could be exploited by bad actors in attacks without requiring any specialized conditions to be met. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-45659 , carries a CVSS score of 8.8. It has been assigned an important severity. "Deserialization of untrusted data in Microsoft Office SharePoint allows an authorized attacker to execute code over a network," Microsoft said in an advisory released last week. Microsoft noted that the vulnerability could be triggered by any authenticated attacker, and that it does not require administrator or other elevated privileges. "In a network-based attack, an authenticated attacker, who has a minimum of Site Member permissions (PR:L), could execute code remotely on the SharePoint Server," the Windows maker added. Microsoft credited a researcher named MEOW for discovering and reporting the flaw. Updates have been released for th...

Monday recap. Same mess, new week. A sketchy dev tool got people pwned, old bugs came back from the dead, and security products somehow needed protecting from themselves. A bunch of companies spent the week checking old boxes and forgotten servers they should've patched years ago. Good times. Phishing crews are getting smarter too - less obvious scam junk, more targeted stuff that actually looks real. Meanwhile, botnets are grabbing anything exposed to the internet like it's free candy. The Internet's still a dumpster fire. Let’s get into it. ⚡ Threat of the Week GitHub Breached via Nx Console VS Code Extension —GitHub officially confirmed that the breach of its internal repositories was the result of a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned version of the Nx Console Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension. The attack is said to have allowed the threat actor, a cybercriminal group known as TeamPCP, to exfiltrate about 3,800 repositories. G...

Anthropic on Friday disclosed that Project Glasswing has helped uncover more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities across some of the most "systemically" important software across the world since the cybersecurity initiative went live last month. Project Glasswing is a defensive effort launched by the artificial intelligence (AI) company to secure critical global software infrastructure. It grants a small set of about 50 partners exclusive, early access to Claude Mythos Preview, a frontier model with capabilities to autonomously identify vulnerabilities in widely-used software before bad actors can exploit them. Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects. Subsequent analysis of these vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives. As many as 1,094 flaws are assessed to be either high- or critical-severity. One of the identified w...

Monday opens with a trust problem. A mail server flaw is under active use. A network control system was targeted. Trusted packages were poisoned. A fake model page pushed a stealer. Then came the familiar ransom claim: the data was returned and deleted. The pattern is clear. One weak dependency can leak keys. One leaked key can open cloud access. One cloud foothold can become a production incident. AI is speeding up vulnerability discovery, attackers are moving quickly, and old exposure still keeps paying off. Patch the quiet risks first. Let’s get into it. ⚡ Threat of the Week On-Prem Microsoft Exchange Server Exploited in the Wild —Microsoft disclosed a security vulnerability impacting on-premise versions of Exchange Server, which has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42897 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been described as a spoofing bug stemming from a cross-site scripting flaw. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering ...

Cisco has released updates to address a maximum-severity authentication bypass flaw in Catalyst SD-WAN Controller that it said has been exploited in limited attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20182 , carries a CVSS score of 10.0. "A vulnerability in the peering authentication in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller, formerly SD-WAN vSmart, and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly SD-WAN vManage, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administrative privileges on an affected system," Cisco said . The networking equipment major said the flaw stems from a malfunction of the peering authentication mechanism, which an attacker could exploit by sending crafted requests to the affected system. A successful exploit could permit the attacker to log in to the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller as an internal, high-privileged, non-root user account, and then weaponize it to access NETCONF and manipulate network configuration f...

American educational technology company Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said it reached an "agreement" with a decentralized cybercrime extortion group after it breached its network and threatened to leak stolen information from thousands of schools and universities. In an update shared on Monday, the Utah-based firm said it "reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident," citing "concerns about the potential publication of data." In taking the controversial decision to pay a ransom to avoid a leak, the company said the agreement covers all its impacted customers and that the pilfered data was returned to it, along with digital confirmation of data destruction. It also said it has been informed that none of the company's customers will be separately extorted as a result of the hack. "While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cyber criminals, we believe it was important to take every step...

Rough Monday. Somebody poisoned a trusted download again, somebody else turned cloud servers into public housing, and a few crews are still getting into boxes with bugs that should’ve died years ago — the same old holes, same lazy access paths, same “how the hell is this still open” feeling. One report this week basically reads like a guy tripped over root access by accident and decided to stay there. The weird part is how normal this all sounds now. Fake updates. Quiet backdoors. Remote tools are used like skeleton keys. Forum rats swapping stolen access while defenders burn another weekend chasing logs and praying the weird traffic is just monitoring noise. The Internet’s held together with duct tape and bad sleep. Anyway, Monday recap time. Same fire. New smoke. ⚡ Threat of the Week Ivanti EPMM and Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS Flaws Under Attack —Ivanti warned customers that attackers have successfully weaponized CVE-2026-6973, an improper input validation defect in Endpoint Man...

The hardest part of cybersecurity isn't the technology, it’s the people. Every major breach you’ve read about lately usually starts the same way: one employee, one clever email, and one "Patient Zero" infection. In 2026, hackers are using AI to make these "first clicks" nearly impossible to spot. If a single laptop gets compromised on your watch, do you have a plan to stop it from taking down the whole company? Register for the Webinar: The Patient Zero Playbook What is "Patient Zero"? In medicine, Patient Zero is the first person to carry a disease into a population. In cybersecurity, it’s the first device an attacker hits. Once they are "in," they don't stay there—they move fast to find your data, your passwords, and your backups. What You Will Learn Thisisn't a boring lecture. It is a technical deep dive into how modern breaches start and how to kill them instantly. We are covering: The AI Phish: How attackers use gene...

Ivanti is warning that a new security flaw impacting Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) has been explored in limited attacks in the wild. The high-severity vulnerability, CVE-2026-6973 (CVSS score: 7.2), is a case of improper input validation affecting EPMM before versions 12.6.1.1, 12.7.0.1, and 12.8.0.1. It allows "a remotely authenticated user with administrative access to achieve remote code execution," Ivanti said in an advisory released today. "We are aware of a very limited number of customers exploited with CVE-2026-6973. Successful exploitation requires Admin authentication. If customers followed Ivanti's recommendation in January to rotate credentials if you were exploited with CVE-2026-1281 and CVE-2026-1340 , then your risk of exploitation from CVE-2026-6973 is significantly reduced." It's currently not known who is behind the exploitation efforts, if any of those attacks were successful, and what the end goals of the attacks were. The devel...

Palo Alto Networks has disclosed that threat actors may have attempted to unsuccessfully exploit a recently disclosed critical security flaw as early as April 9, 2026. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-0300 (CVSS score: 9.3/8.7), a buffer overflow vulnerability in the User-ID Authentication Portal service of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges by sending specially crafted packets. While fixes are expected to be released starting May 13, 2026, customers are advised to secure access to the PAN-OS User-ID Authentication Portal by restricting access to trusted zones, or by disabling it entirely if it's not used. As additional mitigation, the company is recommending that organizations disable Response Pages in the Interface Management Profile for any L3 interface where untrusted or internet traffic can ingress. Customers with Advanced Threat Prevention can also block exploitation a...

Having an incident response retainer, or even a pre-approved external incident response firm, is not the same as being ready for an incident. A retainer means someone will answer the phone. Operational readiness determines whether that team can do meaningful work the moment they do.  That distinction matters far more than many organizations realize. In the first hours of a security incident, attackers are not waiting for your identity team to provision emergency accounts, for legal to decide whether an outside firm can access sensitive systems, or for someone to figure out who owns the EDR console. Every delay gives the attacker more uninterrupted time in your environment. Every hour lost to logistics increases the likelihood of deeper compromise, broader impact, and more expensive recovery.  The same is true internally. An organization may have an incident response plan, a capable security team, and a list of escalation contacts, yet still be unprepared to respond under p...

Cybersecurity researchers have exposed a new Mirai -derived botnet that self-identifies as xlabs_v1 and targets internet-exposed devices running Android Debug Bridge ( ADB ) to enlist them in a network capable of carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Hunt.io, which detailed the malware, said it made the discovery after identifying an exposed directory on a Netherlands-hosted server at the IP address "176.65.139[.]44" without requiring any authentication. The malware supports "21 flood variants across TCP, UDP, and raw protocols, including RakNet and OpenVPN-shaped UDP, capable of bypassing consumer-grade DDoS protection," Hunt.io said, adding it's offered as a DDoS-for-hire service designed for targeting game servers and Minecraft hosts. What makes xlabs_v1 notable is that it seeks out Android devices running an exposed ADB service on TCP port 5555, meaning any gear that comes with the tool enabled by default, such as Android TV boxes,...

Palo Alto Networks has released an advisory warning that a critical buffer overflow vulnerability in its PAN-OS software has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-0300 , has been described as a case of unauthenticated remote code execution. It carries a CVSS score of 9.3 if the User-ID Authentication Portal is configured to enable access from the internet or any untrusted network. The severity comes down to 8.7 if access to the portal is restricted to only trusted internal IP addresses. "A buffer overflow vulnerability in the User-ID Authentication Portal (aka Captive Portal) service of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the PA-Series and VM-Series firewalls by sending specially crafted packets," the company said . According to Palo Alto Networks, the vulnerability has come under "limited exploitation," specifically targeting instances where the Use...

A newly identified supply chain attack targeting DAEMON Tools software has compromised its installers to serve a malicious payload, according to findings from Kaspersky. "These installers are distributed from the legitimate website of DAEMON Tools and are signed with digital certificates belonging to DAEMON Tools developers," Kaspersky researchers  Igor Kuznetsov, Georgy Kucherin, Leonid Bezvershenko, and Anton Kargin said . The installers have been trojanized since April 8, 2026, with versions ranging from 12.5.0.2421 to 12.5.0.2434 identified as compromised as part of the incident. While DAEMON Tools is also available for Mac, Kaspersky told The Hacker News that only the Windows version was compromised. The supply chain attack is active as of writing. AVB Disc Soft, the developer of the software, has been notified of the breach. Specifically, three different components of DAEMON Tools have been tampered with - DTHelper.exe DiscSoftBusServiceLite.exe DTShellHlp.exe ...

A sophisticated China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been attributed to attacks targeting government entities in South America since at least late 2024 and government agencies in southeastern Europe in 2025. The activity is being tracked by Cisco Talos under the moniker UAT-8302 , with post-exploitation involving the deployment of custom-made malware families that have been put to use by other China-aligned hacking groups. Notable among the malware families is a .NET-based backdoor dubbed NetDraft (aka NosyDoor), a C# variant of FINALDRAFT (aka Squidoor) that has been previously linked to threat clusters known as Ink Dragon , CL-STA-0049, Earth Alux , Jewelbug , and REF7707 . ESET is tracking the use of NosyDoor to a group it calls LongNosedGoblin . Interestingly, the same malware has also been deployed against Russian IT organizations by a threat actor referred to as Erudite Mogwai (aka Space Pirates and Webworm), per Russian cybersecurity company Solar, which...

Threat actors are actively exploiting a critical security flaw impacting an open-source content management system (CMS) known as MetInfo, according to new findings from VulnCheck. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-29014 (CVSS score: 9.8), a code injection flaw that could result in arbitrary code execution. "MetInfo CMS versions 7.9, 8.0, and 8.1 contain an unauthenticated PHP code injection vulnerability that allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code by sending crafted requests with malicious PHP code," the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD) states . "Attackers can exploit insufficient input neutralization in the execution path to achieve remote code execution and gain full control over the affected server." Per security researcher Egidio Romano, who discovered the vulnerability, the problem is rooted in the "/app/system/weixin/include/class/weixinreply.class.php" script, and stems from a lack of adequate sanitization of user...

A critical security vulnerability in Weaver (Fanwei) E-cology , an enterprise office automation (OA) and collaboration platform, has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability ( CVE-2026-22679 , CVSS score: 9.8) relates to a case of unauthenticated remote code execution affecting Weaver E-cology 10.0 versions prior to 20260312. The issue resides in the "/papi/esearch/data/devops/dubboApi/debug/method" endpoint that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary commands by invoking exposed debug functionality. "Attackers can craft POST requests with attacker-controlled interfaceName and methodName parameters to reach command-execution helpers and achieve arbitrary command execution on the system," according to a description of the flaw in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The advisory also noted that the Shadowserver Foundation observed the first signs of active exploitation on March 31, 2026. A similar alert published by QiAnXin on M...

An active phishing campaign has been observed targeting multiple vectors since at least April 2025 with legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software as a way to establish persistent remote access to compromised hosts. The activity, codenamed VENOMOUS#HELPER , has impacted over 80 organizations, most of which are in the U.S., according to Securonix. It shares overlaps with clusters previously tracked by Red Canary and Sophos, the latter of which has given it the moniker STAC6405 . While it's not clear who is behind the campaign, the cybersecurity company said it aligns with a financially motivated Initial Access Broker (IAB) or a ransomware precursor operation. "In this case, a customized SimpleHelp and ScreenConnect RMMs are used to bypass defenses as they are legitimately installed by the unsuspecting victim," researchers Akshay Gaikwad, Shikha Sangwan, and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Setting aside the fact that the ...

Progress Software has released updates to address two security flaws in MOVEit Automation, including a critical bug that could result in an authentication bypass. MOVEit Automation (formerly Central) is a secure, server-based managed file transfer (MFT) solution used to schedule and automate file movement workflows in enterprise environments without requiring any custom scripts.  The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-4670 (CVSS score: 9.8), an authentication bypass vulnerability, and CVE-2026-5174 (CVSS score: 7.7), an improper input validation vulnerability that could allow privilege escalation. "Critical and high vulnerabilities in MOVEit Automation may allow authentication bypass and privilege escalation through the service backend command port interfaces," Progress Software said in an advisory. "Exploitation may lead to unauthorized access, administrative control, and data exposure." The shortcomings affect the following versions - MOVEit Autom...