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Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a maximum-severity security flaw in Ruflo , an open-source agent meta-harness for Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-59726 (CVSS score: 10.0), impacts all versions of the project before version 3.16.3. It has been codenamed RufRoot by Noma Security's research team, Noma Labs. Originally launched as Claude Flow, Ruflo is an AI multi-agent orchestration platform and harness that allows users to deploy multi-player swarms, coordinate autonomous workflows, and build conversational AI systems. The project has more than 66,500 stars on GitHub. The crux of the vulnerability is that Ruflo exposed 233 tools, including shell command execution, database operations, agent management, and memory storage, through an unauthenticated Model Context Protocol (MCP) bridge that's open to the network by default. Specifically, the "docker-comp...

A coordinated cyberattack targeted operational technology at more than 30 Minnesota community water systems on July 26 and 27, triggering a statewide cybersecurity response. Braham, Plymouth, South St. Paul and Maple Plain have publicly described a plant outage, communications failures or affected automated controls. Braham 's water plant went offline, and the city asked residents to minimize water use until treatment resumed. Plymouth reported cellular communications problems at two water towers and multiple wastewater lift stations but continued operating manually. South St. Paul and Maple Plain maintained services after automated utility controls were affected, with Maple Plain declaring a local state of emergency to support its response. Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) said on July 28 that it was not aware of any active requests for residents to change their drinking-water use. Officials have not publicly identified the attacker, affected products, exploited vulnerabi...

AI is compressing exploit timelines. The real question isn't whether your vulnerability management playbook needs to change, it's which part of it you've been getting wrong all along. The conversation happening in security circles right now goes something like this: Mythos is here. Exploit timelines are collapsing. Does the vulnerability management playbook need to change? The honest answer is yes. But not the part most people are focused on. The discussion around Mythos, Anthropic's frontier model and its implications for offensive security, tends to center on discovery. AI accelerates reconnaissance. It helps attackers identify exposures faster, chain techniques more efficiently, and move at machine speed through environments that were previously protected, in part, by the attacker's own time constraints. That's real. And it matters. But here's the part getting less attention: most security teams weren't winning the prioritization battle bef...

Cybersecurity researchers have shared additional technical details about a recently patched critical security flaw impacting Check Point Security Management Server and Multi-Domain Security Management Server (MDS) that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-16232 (CVSS score: 9.3), is an authentication bypass in the SmartConsole login process that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to obtain an application login token and use it to authenticate with full administrative privileges. "By leveraging CVE-2026-16232, an unauthenticated attacker can obtain an application login token, use this token to log in through SmartConsole with full administrator privileges, and modify the security policy or security configuration," Rapid7 said . Successful exploitation requires an attacker to have network access to the Management Server and a configuration that does not restrict Trusted Clients. Check Point has disclosed that it...

A new Mirai-derived botnet called Tengu can use a compromised Linux device's hardware watchdog to trigger a reboot when defenders kill its main process. If that happens, Tengu's other persistence mechanisms get another chance to relaunch it. Nozomi Networks Labs observed the dropper reaching its honeypots through Telnet credential brute force. Tengu supports 25 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) methods. It can also run a SOCKS5 proxy, execute shell commands, and collect system and network data. The malware can update itself and retrieve additional Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) or Android package (APK) payloads. Nozomi listed architecture-specific samples for i386, amd64, MIPS, ARM, PowerPC, and m68k. The report identifies no specific vendor or device model. It also names no operator, infection count, or real-world DDoS victims. It shows what Tengu can do, not how far it has spread. Defenders should start by removing internet exposure for Telnet and other unne...

Cybersecurity researchers have sounded an alert after finding more than 36,000 Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) management interfaces exposing Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) protocol to the public internet. Of the 36,872 internet-exposed server-management interfaces running IPMI, 24,650 have been found to disclose password-derived authentication hashes before login due to a vulnerability with the IPMI v2.0 specification itself, according to a new report Lava shared with The Hacker News. IPMI v2.0 was introduced in February 2024. The issue in question is CVE-2013-4786 (CVSS score: 7.5), a high-severity information disclosure flaw that enables remote attackers to obtain password hashes for valid accounts and conduct offline password guessing attacks by obtaining the HMAC from an RMCP+ Authenticated Key-Exchange Protocol (RAKP) message response from a BMC. Per an advisory released by Dell, "this is an inherent problem with the specification for IPMI ...

JFrog has confirmed that OpenAI models exploited a zero-day in self-hosted Artifactory while trying to reach the open internet from a sealed evaluation environment. Artifactory is JFrog's software repository manager. OpenAI says the models then escalated privileges and moved laterally until they reached an internet-connected node. JFrog says it has since developed and released fixes for cloud and self-hosted customers. The Artifactory exploit occurred inside OpenAI's environment. OpenAI says a separate attack path later reached Hugging Face's systems. JFrog says its cloud customers are already protected. Self-hosted users should review the Artifactory release notes and move to the remediating build for their maintained branch. Several Artifactory CVE records were published on July 27 with affected-version ranges and fixed-version thresholds, but neither JFrog nor OpenAI has said whether any of those records correspond to the vulnerabilities used during the evaluati...

OpenWrt has shipped version 24.10.8 to close a critical DHCPv6 stack overflow and a wider set of remotely triggerable flaws in network services enabled by default. The critical issue, tracked as CVE-2026-53921 and rated 9.8 on CVSS 3.1 in OpenWrt's GitHub advisory, lets an unauthenticated attacker able to reach the DHCPv6 server overwrite a stack buffer in odhcpd through a crafted DHCPv6 REQUEST. odhcpd runs as root, and the advisory notes that embedded hardware commonly lacks stack canaries and address space layout randomization (ASLR), making code execution a realistic outcome on typical devices. The advisory includes public Python proof-of-concept code for both documented overflow paths. Users on the 24.10 branch should install 24.10.8, while users on 25.12 should install 25.12.5; firmware images are available through the OpenWrt Firmware Selector. As of July 28, the reviewed OpenWrt materials did not report exploitation in the wild. The flaw was also absent from CISA...

The Iranian state-backed hacking group tracked as Nimbus Manticore (aka GalaxyGato, Mirage Kitten, Smoke Sandstorm, Subtle Snail, and UNC1549) has been attributed to a fresh set of attacks targeting entities across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. The intrusions involve the use of a previously undocumented Windows backdoor called NightLedger and two custom WebSocket tunnelers, BridgeHead and ArcBridge, with an aim to maintain covert access. Targets of the campaign include Egypt, SMB and government environments in Jordan and Tanzania, aviation organizations in Pakistan, telecommunication companies in Ethiopia, and financial-sector entities in Burkina Faso, per Kaspersky. "The toolset includes NightLedger, a new Windows backdoor for reconnaissance, command execution, file operations, process discovery, and screenshot capture; and two custom WebSocket-based tunnelers, ArcBridge and BridgeHead, for covert network access and operator-controlled tunneling," Kasper...

A maximum-severity security flaw impacting on-premises versions of Arista VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-16812 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a case of operating system command injection that could pave the way for arbitrary code execution. "VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) on-prem has a security issue where this issue may allow a remote attacker to access privileged internal functionality and impact the VCO host," Arista said in a Monday advisory. "Successful exploitation may compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the orchestrator and data managed by the orchestrator. This functionality was intended to be for internal use only and is not intended to be remotely accessible." The American network equipment company said the issue has already been addressed in hosted and dedicated versions of VCO in advance. The following versions are affected - VCO 5.2.x r...

Dysphoria , an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet line tracked by CNCERT and XLab, has adopted blockchain-based name services and infected-device relays after a March law-enforcement operation against JackSkid infrastructure. The researchers say the design makes the botnet harder to disrupt. CNCERT, China's national computer emergency response team, and XLab, the threat-intelligence lab of Chinese firm Qi'anxin, put its population above 200,000 bots. Their telemetry logged 4,401 confirmed active devices inside China between July 14 and 20 and a single-day peak of 239,000 bots abroad. None of the counts has been independently reproduced. The researchers published no counting or de-duplication methodology, so the numbers should not be read as a precise device census. Defenders should patch exposed IoT gear, replace devices that can no longer be updated, eliminate default and weak credentials, and disable remote management and UPnP where they are not needed. The lineage runs...

Monday starts with the usual promise that everything is under control. Then the logs wake up. This week, trusted tools crossed lines, old flaws found new work, exposed systems stayed exposed, and attackers kept hiding inside normal-looking services. Nothing looked strange at first. That helped. That is the mood. Here is the full recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenAI Says Its AI Agent Went Rogue and Targeted Hugging Face - OpenAI disclosed that it lost control of two AI models during a security evaluation that ended in a breach of Hugging Face. The AI company said its AI models broke out of a sealed testing environment and broke into Hugging Face's production system to find solutions for the ExploitGym benchmark. "The incident also makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access," OpenAI said. "It highlights that advanced cyber capabilities must be developed alongside stronger safegua...

A Russian state-supported espionage group spent months reading Western mailboxes through a then-unknown flaw in Zimbra's webmail client. The payload goes after the last 90 days of email, the organization's entire email directory, the password saved in the browser and the codes kept for two-factor recovery. Opening the message was enough to start it. The NSA , CISA and partner agencies published a joint advisory on the campaign Thursday, alongside research from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 and Proofpoint. The advisory calls the technique "a view-based exploit that only requires a user to view a malicious email" in a vulnerable client. It says the actors have been targeting and compromising Western government and commercial organizations through Zimbra since at least July 2025. The flaw, CVE-2025-66376 , is a stored cross-site scripting vulnerability in Zimbra's Classic UI. A crafted HTML email abuses CSS @import handling to execute JavaScript inside a...

The Chaos ransomware group ran its command-and-control through the victim's own browser. Cisco Talos on Thursday detailed msaRAT , the Rust implant behind it, found on a compromised Windows machine ahead of the encryptor. The implant never opens an outbound connection of its own. Its process talks to 127.0.0.1 and nothing else. It starts Chrome or Edge in headless mode and drives the browser over the Chrome DevTools Protocol, the browser's own debugging API. Every C2 message travels out from there through a WebRTC data channel relayed by Twilio's TURN service, so what a defender sees on the wire is a browser calling Cloudflare and Twilio. The attacker's own server address never appears at all. Chrome Does the Talking msaRAT looks for Chrome or Edge through environment variables first, then falls back to the registry for Chrome. If no matching browser is found, the CDP path is skipped. When it finds one, it starts the browser without a visible window using -...

Check Point has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities impacting Security Management and Multi-Domain Management (MDSM) products, including a critical flaw that has come under active exploitation in the wild . The security flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-16232 (CVSS score: 9.3), is an authentication bypass affecting the Check Point SmartConsole login process that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to obtain an application login token and use it to authenticate with full administrative privileges. "Successful exploitation allows the attacker to modify security policies and security configurations," according to a description of the flaw in CVE.org. "Remote exploitation requires internet access to the Management Server IP address and a configuration that does not restrict Trusted Clients." Lotem Finkelstein, vice president of research at Check Point, said the company is aware of a handful of customers being targeted by this flaw, and t...

The cycle is over. For years, cybersecurity followed a familiar pattern: defenses improved, attackers adapted, and the back-and-forth continued. Today, AI-equipped attackers are simply outpacing defenses. Most intrusions now bypass endpoint and malware-based detection entirely. The CrowdStrike Global Threat Report estimates around 79% of attacks are malware-free, as threat actors rely on credential theft and DLL side-load techniques to bypass host-level monitoring. Perimeter vulnerabilities compound this exposure; firewalls and VPN gateway breaches climbed 19% according to the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report . Once an adversary gains access, breakout often occurs in seconds. Claude Mythos and similar models have further escalated operational pressure. These can rapidly discover and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities, virtually closing the window from initial discovery to full compromise. Security practices must adapt to prioritize rapid containment and ...

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 .

Zimbra has rolled out fixes to address multiple critical security issues, including a command injection flaw in the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) monitoring component. As many as nine security vulnerabilities have been patched in Zimbra 10.1.20 . Topping the list is a command injection vulnerability in the SNMP monitoring component when SNMP notifications are enabled. Also patched are four cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws in the Classic Web Client - A stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could allow malicious attachment filenames to execute script under specific conditions. An XSS vulnerability where crafted fields could execute a malicious script under specific conditions. An XSS vulnerability where a crafted field could execute a malicious script when rendered. An XSS vulnerability where crafted attachments could execute a malicious script when rendered. Separately, fixes have been released for a mail forwarding restriction bypass (CV...

A single request should not be able to do this much. But this week, small inputs led to code execution, memory loss, stolen keys, and disabled security tools. The paths were often simple: exposed systems, weak checks, old drivers, fake prompts, and public code used for malware delivery. Some bugs were new. Others were already being used before defenders had time to patch. Here is the full recap of what broke, what was exploited, and what needs attention now. ⚡ Threat of the Week New wp2shell WordPress Core Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Run Code - Searchlight Cyber disclosed a pre-authenticated remote code execution vulnerability in WordPress Core that can be exploited anonymously on a standard WordPress installation, without requiring any plugins or other special conditions. It is a combination of CVE-2026-63030 (REST API batch-route confusion) and CVE-2026-60137 (SQL injection in WordPress core) that can be chained to turn an anonymous request into code execution. wa...

At least one Russian intelligence service is systematically hijacking internet-connected security cameras across Europe and Ukraine, using the feeds to watch military transport routes, weapons shipments bound for Kyiv , and the locations of Ukrainian troops. That is the finding of a cybersecurity advisory published July 10 by the AIVD and MIVD, the Netherlands' civilian and military intelligence services, which describe the operation as ongoing. In Ukraine, the surveillance has not stayed passive. Camera access there has been "used in attempts to neutralise Ukrainian military personnel" and destroy their equipment, the services say, turning an exposed roadside or business camera into a targeting aid. Across EU and NATO states, the services add, the same camera access is also collecting military intelligence that has nothing to do with the war. Getting in is rarely the hard part. The operators scan the internet for exposed devices, fingerprint IP cameras by bran...