network security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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...

PortSwigger says HTTP Terminator, an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted research system built by James Kettle , generated and proved new HTTP desynchronization techniques after exploring 30,000 candidate desync vectors. PortSwigger said a separate human-guided discovery cascade also exposed a zero-day in Apache Traffic Server. Kettle said HTTP Terminator tested 30,000 websites where scanning was authorized through bug bounty or vulnerability disclosure programs and found roughly 700 vulnerable targets before deeper validation and RQP research. Kettle said those findings involved banks, government infrastructure, security products, and an airport. The research produced new desync triggers, a dual-matching Content-Length pattern, and a "dangling-byte" technique designed to make response queue poisoning (RQP) more reliable. RQP can potentially make a front end lose track of which back-end response belongs to which user, potentially exposing another user's resp...

Cisco has rolled out updates to address multiple critical security vulnerabilities impacting Catalyst SD-WAN and IOS XE Software as part of a comprehensive internal security review. The security issues affect Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Software, regardless of device configuration, and Cisco IOS XE Software when it is running in autonomous or controller mode. "These vulnerabilities were found during internal security testing using existing testing processes as well as frontier AI models [...] and are not known to be actively exploited," Cisco said, urging customers to apply the necessary updates for optimal protection. The vulnerabilities impacting Catalyst SD-WAN Software are listed below - CVE-2026-20303 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper input validation vulnerability (which also covers path traversals) CVE-2026-20304 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper access control vulnerability  CVE-2026-20310 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper link resolution before file acc...

Forescout found 22 internet-facing Rockwell Automation programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in cities hit by recent cyberattacks on US water utilities. Nineteen used the same mobile carrier network. Its August 3 scan counted 4,407 exposed Rockwell controllers worldwide, including 2,844 in the United States, but Forescout could not confirm any were compromised. That figure counts exposed controllers, not water utilities or confirmed victims. Forescout said the publicly described effects could be achieved without a vulnerability exploit: attackers changed IP addresses and set passwords on controllers that were already reachable, causing operators to lose visibility and, in some cases, control of connected equipment. Neither the government alerts nor Forescout's analysis explains how the attackers found, selected, or initially accessed their targets. Water and wastewater utilities in at least seven states have reported incidents since July 27 , the FBI and EPA said in a July...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security issue with Apple's iCloud Private Relay tool that can expose a user's real IP address. Introduced with iOS 15, iCloud Private Relay employs a dual-hop architecture to ensure users' privacy by routing their Safari web traffic through two relays so that no single third-party, including Apple, can determine where the request is originating from and what sites are being visited. It's available as part of the iCloud+ subscription. Researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk, who found the issue, said the problem is rooted in three features in Apple's WebKit: DNS prefetching, WebAuthn Related Origin Requests, and WebTransport. WebKit is the default web browser engine used by Safari and all third-party browsers on iOS and iPadOS, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Brave, and others. The three features "bypass the configured proxy and send traffic directly from the device, which exposes t...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a "factory-shipped backdoor" implanted in at least 20 Chinese router models from Zbtlink. According to a new report from VulnCheck, the implant appears in all 21 firmware images currently available from Zbtlink that span more than 2 years. The backdoors are designed such that they start automatically and attempt to beacon to Chinese command-and-control (C2) infrastructure as often as every 35 seconds. They masquerade as a Linux kernel thread, but are actually userland processes running with root privileges while blending their true functionality with other legitimate kworker processes. The "phone home" implants have been codenamed ENDLESSDOORS . "ENDLESSDOORS, at its core, is a small tool called rctl (remote control linux)," Jacob Baines, VulnCheck Chief Technology Officer, said. "Uploaded to GitHub on January 14, 2015 and never touched again, this obscure repository implements a simple co...

A memory corruption flaw in the Linux kernel's Open vSwitch datapath gives ordinary local users a path to root on a broad set of default-configured distributions, and a public exploit ships with pre-built records for roughly 800 kernel builds. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-64531 (CVSS score: 7.8) and codenamed OVSwrap by its discoverer, was disclosed by security researcher Asim Manizada on July 28, 2026. The bug sits in the kernel datapath, not the userspace ovs-vswitchd daemon. In a technical write-up , Manizada said an attacker needs "no existing OVS bridge, no running ovs-vswitchd, no host-level CAP_NET_ADMIN." On affected systems where the OVS kernel datapath is available and unprivileged user namespaces are enabled, an ordinary user can create private user and network namespaces with unshare -Urn, gain CAP_NET_ADMIN inside that namespace, and reach the vulnerable flow-installation path. If the openvswitch module is installed but not loaded, resolvi...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), on August 5, 2026, added three flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2026-9198 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A code injection vulnerability in Langflow that allows unauthenticated attackers to achieve full remote code execution on default Langflow deployments. (Fixed in July 2026 with version 1.10.1) CVE-2026-34486 (CVS score: 7.5) - A missing encryption of sensitive data vulnerability in Apache Tomcat that allows a bypass of EncryptInterceptor, a cluster component that adds pre-shared key encryption to messages sent between cluster nodes. (Fixed in April 2026 with versions 11.0.21, 10.1.54, and 9.0.117) Also added to the KEV catalog is CVE-2026-18556 (CVSS score: 8.2), an authentication bypass vulnerability in N-able N-central. It's worth noting that an incomplete fix for this issue promp...

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...

cPanel has patched a flaw that let an authenticated hosting customer execute SQL in the database's root context, crossing the privilege boundary between a cPanel account and the server's administrative database identity. It shipped in a targeted security release that closes two other routes past account boundaries. The database bug is tracked as CVE-2026-58048 (CVSS 4.0 score: 9.4) and affects all supported versions of cPanel & WHM, along with WP Squared. Reaching it requires a valid cPanel account and access to the MySQL/MariaDB feature. From there, the vendor says the account holder could execute arbitrary database commands with full administrative privileges. Depending on the operating system and database engine configuration, “this may extend to operating-system-level compromise.” cPanel patched CVE-2026-58048 in these builds: 11.110.0.137 11.118.0.71 11.126.0.78 11.134.0.48 11.136.0.32 138.1.6 for WP Squared Servers that cannot update immediately can ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a high-severity security flaw impacting N-able N-central to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog following reports of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-18577 (CVSS score: 8.2), is a case of incomplete patching for CVE-2026-18556 (CVSS score: 8.2) that allows authentication bypass and account takeover in susceptible versions of the software. The issue has been addressed in version 2026.3 HF1. "N-able N-central contains an authentication bypass using an alternate path or channel [that] allows for authentication bypass and account takeover in N-central," CISA said. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability can permit remote attackers to gain administrative access to vulnerable N-central servers and then abuse the built-in Take Control feature to pivot into managed endpoints and deploy persistence mechanisms. N-able has shared the fol...

The INC Ransomware operation has emerged as the "dominant threat actor" exploiting the recently disclosed security flaws in SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series VPN appliances. In a report published over the weekend, Resecurity said it observed the INC Ransomware accelerating its activity since the beginning of August 2026, listing multiple victims on its data leak site. Per statistics listed on Ransomware.Live, the group has claimed 885 victims to date, with the most recent victim listed on August 2, 2026. The attacks are suspected to involve the exploitation of CVE-2026-15409 and CVE-2026-15410 , which could be chained to facilitate arbitrary command execution and take over susceptible devices. Fixes for the vulnerability pair were released by SonicWall in mid-July 2026. The two shortcomings are assessed to have been weaponized as zero-days, with Rapid7 noting that the attacks leveraged the foothold to extract high-value credentials, active session dat...

This week kept coming back to permission. A model crossed a boundary. A wallet trusted bad randomness. Webmail kept an intruder around. Public systems, package feeds, hotel networks, and login flows all gave away more than intended. Some of it was clever. Most of it was just access left lying around: old bugs, exposed gear, poisoned dependencies, weak defaults, and tooling that moved from forum chatter to real targets. The full weekly recap report follows. ⚡ Threat of the Week Anthropic Disclosed its Models Targeted 3 Organizations - Anthropic revealed that three of its models, including Claude Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an unnamed research model, breached three unnamed organizations during cybersecurity testing without its knowledge. The AI firm said the earliest incidents date back to April 2026, adding it made the discoveries after launching a "large-scale retrospective review" in response to the recent Hugging Face incident. "After reviewing 141,006 evaluatio...

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 fake browser update served over hijacked hotel Wi-Fi has been used to deliver CornFlake , a remote access trojan (RAT) that can capture webcam images, microphone audio, and keystrokes, Microsoft said in its latest report. Researchers track the operation as CaptiveCrunch and attribute it to Storm-2945 . It assesses Storm-2945 to be an operational sub-cluster of Midnight Blizzard , also known as APT29 and Cozy Bear. The U.S. and U.K. governments attribute the broader actor to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). On the compromised networks ReliaQuest investigated, the captive portal gateway also served as the DNS resolver assigned to connected devices. Administrative control of that gateway let the attackers forge Domain Name System (DNS) answers and redirect the resulting traffic. They could then redirect a laptop's automatic connectivity check to a fake browser or operating system update. Some pages use ClickFix instructions that tell victims to open a termina...

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...

An academic study has disclosed a "widespread class" of security vulnerabilities impacting 4G and 5G core networks that, if successfully exploited, could trigger denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and even session hijacking, allowing an attacker to seize control of a user's network session. The findings have been released by a group of researchers from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University in a paper titled "Understanding Implicit Trust Errors in Core Carrier Networks through Multi-Agent Flaw Discovery and Analysis." The study has uncovered dozens of vulnerabilities in the signaling interfaces of LTE/5G core networks, and specifically covers two LTE implementations (Open5GS and OpenAirInterface) and five 5G implementations (Open5GS, free5GC, OpenAirInterface, SD-Core, and eUPF) across two core signaling protocols, GPRS Tunnelling Protocol Control Plane ( GTP-C ) and Packet Forwarding Control Protocol ( PFCP ). "Our research finds these vulne...

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 says a Chinese-speaking threat actor used DeepSeek through the open-source Hermes Agent framework to launch attacks autonomously. After an initial Telegram instruction, the agent found internet-facing systems and selected public exploits. The researchers recovered no further operator input in the session. The operator, tracked through the aliases knaithe and KnYuan , launched exploitation attempts against more than 460 targets using autonomous and conventional workflows. Unit 42 described seven exploit tracks. They span eight Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifiers because the n8n chain combines two vulnerabilities. The DeepSeek-led attacks against Langflow and n8n failed because the exposed systems did not meet the exploits' configuration requirements. In separate manual operations, Unit 42 reported data exfiltration from three organizations through the NetScaler memory-overread flaw CVE-2026-3055 and command execution on 11...

Network firewalls are the workhorses of modern cybersecurity. They are trusted to protect the network, blocking malicious traffic and preventing intrusions and breaches. And for decades, network security teams have built controls around a relatively stable model: users connect to applications, applications exchange data, and security tools inspect packets, protocols, and destinations. Firewalls became exceptionally good at understanding where traffic was going and whether it should be allowed. But just as AI is reshaping every aspect of the business world, it's also had a monumental impact on how security teams view network traffic and the firewall. AI is driving new network dynamics that traditional security policies were never designed to govern. Employees, applications, and agents send prompts, call models, connect to services, and trigger actions across the environment, all activity most firewalls can't see, let alone understand. AI agents interact with external servic...