privilege escalation | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a security flaw that leverages indirect prompt injection targeting Google Gemini as a way to bypass authorization guardrails and use Google Calendar as a data extraction mechanism. The vulnerability, Miggo Security's Head of Research, Liad Eliyahu, said, made it possible to circumvent Google Calendar's privacy controls by hiding a dormant malicious payload within a standard calendar invite. "This bypass enabled unauthorized access to private meeting data and the creation of deceptive calendar events without any direct user interaction," Eliyahu said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The starting point of the attack chain is a new calendar event that's crafted by the threat actor and sent to a target. The invite's description embeds a natural language prompt that's designed to do their bidding, resulting in a prompt injection. The attack gets activated when a user asks Gemini a completely inno...

A maximum-severity security flaw in a WordPress plugin called Modular DS has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to Patchstack. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-23550 (CVSS score: 10.0), has been described as a case of unauthenticated privilege escalation impacting all versions of the plugin prior to and including 2.5.1. It has been patched in version 2.5.2 . The plugin has more than 40,000 active installs. "In versions 2.5.1 and below, the plugin is vulnerable to privilege escalation, due to a combination of factors including direct route selection, bypassing of authentication mechanisms, and auto-login as admin," Patchstack said . The problem is rooted in its routing mechanism, which is designed to put certain sensitive routes behind an authentication barrier. The plugin exposes its routes under the "/api/modular-connector/" prefix. However, it has been found that this security layer can be bypassed every time the "direct reques...

Not long ago, AI agents were harmless. They wrote snippets of code. They answered questions. They helped individuals move a little faster. Then organizations got ambitious. Instead of personal copilots, companies started deploying shared organizational AI agents - agents embedded into HR, IT, engineering, customer support, and operations. Agents that don't just suggest, but act. Agents that touch real systems, change real configurations, and move real data: An HR agent who provisions and deprovisions access across IAM, SaaS apps, VPNs, and cloud platforms. A change management agent that approves requests, updates production configs, logs actions in ServiceNow, and updates Confluence. A support agent that pulls customer data from CRM, checks billing status, triggers backend fixes, and updates tickets automatically. These agents warrant deliberate control and oversight. They're now part of our operational infrastructure. And to make them useful, we made them powerful ...

Fortinet has released updates to fix a critical security flaw impacting FortiSIEM that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to achieve code execution on susceptible instances. The operating system (OS) injection vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-64155 , is rated 9.4 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. "An improper neutralization of special elements used in an OS command ('OS command injection') vulnerability [CWE-78] in FortiSIEM may allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via crafted TCP requests," the company said in a Tuesday bulletin. Fortinet said the vulnerability affects only Super and Worker nodes, and that it has been addressed in the following versions - FortiSIEM 6.7.0 through 6.7.10 (Migrate to a fixed release) FortiSIEM 7.0.0 through 7.0.4 (Migrate to a fixed release) FortiSIEM 7.1.0 through 7.1.8 (Upgrade to 7.1.9 or above) FortiSIEM 7.2.0 through 7.2.6 (Upgrade to 7.2.7 or above) FortiSIEM 7.3.0 thr...

Microsoft on Tuesday rolled out its first security update for 2026 , addressing 114 security flaws, including one vulnerability that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 114 flaws, eight are rated Critical, and 106 are rated Important in severity. As many as 58 vulnerabilities have been classified as privilege escalation, followed by 22 information disclosure, 21 remote code execution, and five spoofing flaws. According to data collected by Fortra, the update marks the third-largest January Patch Tuesday after January 2025 and January 2022. These patches are in addition to two security flaws that Microsoft has addressed in its Edge browser since the release of the December 2025 Patch Tuesday update, including a spoofing flaw in its Android app ( CVE-2025-65046 , 3.1) and a case of insufficient policy enforcement in Chromium's WebView tag ( CVE-2026-0628 , CVSS score: 8.8). The vulnerability that has come under in-the-wild exploitation is CVE-2026-20805 (CV...

The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has disclosed details of an unpatched security flaw impacting TOTOLINK EX200 wireless range extender that could allow a remote authenticated attacker to gain full control of the device. The flaw, CVE-2025-65606 (CVSS score: N/A), has been characterized as a flaw in the firmware-upload error-handling logic, which could cause the device to inadvertently start an unauthenticated root-level telnet service. CERT/CC credited Leandro Kogan for discovering and reporting the issue.  "An authenticated attacker can trigger an error condition in the firmware-upload handler that causes the device to start an unauthenticated root telnet service, granting full system access," CERT/CC said . Successful exploitation of the flaw requires an attacker to be already authenticated to the web management interface to access the firmware-upload functionality. CERT/CC said the firmware-upload handler enters an "abnormal error state" when certain ...

SonicWall has rolled out fixes to address a security flaw in Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series appliances that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-40602 (CVSS score: 6.6), concerns a case of local privilege escalation that arises as a result of insufficient authorization in the appliance management console (AMC). It affects the following versions - 12.4.3-03093 (platform-hotfix) and earlier versions - Fixed in 12.4.3-03245 (platform-hotfix) 12.5.0-02002 (platform-hotfix) and earlier versions - Fixed in 12.5.0-02283 (platform-hotfix) "This vulnerability was reported to be leveraged in combination with CVE-2025-23006 (CVSS score 9.8) to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges," SonicWall said. It's worth noting that CVE-2025-23006 was patched by the company in late January 2025 in version 12.4.3-02854 (platform-hotfix). Clément Lecigne and Zander Work of Google Threat Intelligen...

Microsoft closed out 2025 with patches for 56 security flaws in various products across the Windows platform, including one vulnerability that has been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 56 flaws, three are rated Critical, and 53 are rated Important in severity. Two other defects are listed as publicly known at the time of the release. These include 29 privilege escalation, 18 remote code execution, four information disclosure, three denial-of-service, and two spoofing vulnerabilities. In total, Microsoft has addressed a total of 1,275 CVEs in 2025, according to data compiled by Fortra. Tenable's Satnam Narang said 2025 also marks the second consecutive year where the Windows maker has patched over 1,000 CVEs. It's the third time it has done so since Patch Tuesday's inception. The update is in addition to 17 shortcomings the tech giant patched in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of the November 2025 Patch Tuesday update . This also consists of a s...

A critical security flaw impacting a WordPress plugin known as King Addons for Elementor has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, CVE-2025-8489 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a case of privilege escalation that allows unauthenticated attackers to grant themselves administrative privileges by simply specifying the administrator user role during registration. It affects versions from 24.12.92 through 51.1.14. It was patched by the maintainers in version 51.1.35 released on September 25, 2025. Security researcher Peter Thaleikis has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. The plugin has over 10,000 active installs. "This is due to the plugin not properly restricting the roles that users can register with," Wordfence said in an alert. "This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to register with administrator-level user accounts." Specifically, the issue is rooted in the "handle_register_ajax()" function that...

Malicious actors can exploit default configurations in ServiceNow's Now Assist generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform and leverage its agentic capabilities to conduct prompt injection attacks. The second-order prompt injection, according to AppOmni, makes use of Now Assist's agent-to-agent discovery to execute unauthorized actions, enabling attackers to copy and exfiltrate sensitive corporate data, modify records, and escalate privileges. "This discovery is alarming because it isn't a bug in the AI; it's expected behavior as defined by certain default configuration options," said Aaron Costello, chief of SaaS Security Research at AppOmni. "When agents can discover and recruit each other, a harmless request can quietly turn into an attack, with criminals stealing sensitive data or gaining more access to internal company systems. These settings are easy to overlook." The attack is made possible because of agent discovery and agent-to-a...

Microsoft on Tuesday released patches for 63 new security vulnerabilities identified in its software, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 63 flaws, four are rated Critical and 59 are rated Important in severity. Twenty-nine of these vulnerabilities are related to privilege escalation, followed by 16 remote code execution, 11 information disclosure, three denial-of-service (DoS), two security feature bypass, and two spoofing bugs. The patches are in addition to the 27 vulnerabilities the Windows maker addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of October 2025's Patch Tuesday update. The zero-day vulnerability that has been listed as exploited in Tuesday's update is CVE-2025-62215 (CVSS score: 7.0), a privilege escalation flaw in Windows Kernel. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) and Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) have been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. "Concurre...

Google's Mandiant Threat Defense on Monday said it discovered n-day exploitation of a now-patched security flaw in Gladinet's Triofox file-sharing and remote access platform. The critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-12480 (CVSS score: 9.1), allows an attacker to bypass authentication and access the configuration pages, resulting in the upload and execution of arbitrary payloads.  The tech giant said it observed a threat cluster tracked as UNC6485 weaponizing the flaw as far back as August 24, 2025, nearly a month after Gladinet released patches for the flaw in version 16.7.10368.56560 . It's worth noting that CVE-2025-12480 is the third flaw in Triofox that has come under active exploitation this year alone, after CVE-2025-30406 and CVE-2025-11371 . "Added protection for the initial configuration pages," according to release notes for the software. "These pages can no longer be accessed after Triofox has been set up." Mandiant said the th...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a high-severity security flaw impacting Broadcom VMware Tools and VMware Aria Operations to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-41244 (CVSS score: 7.8), which could be exploited by an attacker to attain root level privileges on a susceptible system. "Broadcom VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools contain a privilege defined with unsafe actions vulnerability," CISA said in an alert. "A malicious local actor with non-administrative privileges having access to a VM with VMware Tools installed and managed by Aria Operations with SDMP enabled may exploit this vulnerability to escalate privileges to root on the same VM." The vulnerability was addressed by Broadcom-owned VMware last month, but not before it was exploited as a zero-day by unknown threat actors since mid-Oct...

A severe security flaw has been disclosed in the Red Hat OpenShift AI service that could allow attackers to escalate privileges and take control of the complete infrastructure under certain conditions. OpenShift AI is a platform for managing the lifecycle of predictive and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models at scale and across hybrid cloud environments. It also facilitates data acquisition and preparation, model training and fine-tuning, model serving and model monitoring, and hardware acceleration. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-10725 , carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been classified by Red Hat as "Important" and not "Critical" in severity owing to the need for a remote attacker to be authenticated in order to compromise the environment. "A low-privileged attacker with access to an authenticated account, for example, as a data scientist using a standard Jupyter notebook, can escalate their privileges to ...

A newly patched security flaw impacting Broadcom VMware Tools and VMware Aria Operations has been exploited in the wild as a zero-day since mid-October 2024 by a threat actor called UNC5174, according to NVISO Labs . The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-41244 (CVSS score: 7.8), a local privilege escalation bug affecting the following versions - VMware Cloud Foundation 4.x and 5.x VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x.x.x VMware Cloud Foundation 13.x.x.x (Windows, Linux) VMware vSphere Foundation 9.x.x.x VMware vSphere Foundation 13.x.x.x (Windows, Linux) VMware Aria Operations 8.x VMware Tools 11.x.x, 12.x.x, and 13.x.x (Windows, Linux) VMware Telco Cloud Platform 4.x and 5.x VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure 2.x and 3.x "A malicious local actor with non-administrative privileges having access to a VM with VMware Tools installed and managed by Aria Operations with SDMP enabled may exploit this vulnerability to escalate privileges to root on the same VM," VMware sai...

We hear this a lot: "We've got hundreds of service accounts and AI agents running in the background. We didn't create most of them. We don't know who owns them. How are we supposed to secure them?" Every enterprise today runs on more than users. Behind the scenes, thousands of non-human identities, from service accounts to API tokens to AI agents, access systems, move data, and execute tasks around the clock. They're not new. But they're multiplying fast. And most weren't built with security in mind. Traditional identity tools assume intent, context, and ownership. Non-human identities have none of those. They don't log in and out. They don't get offboarded. And with the rise of autonomous agents, they're beginning to make their own decisions, often with broad permissions and little oversight. It's already creating new blind spots. But we're only at the beginning. In this post, we'll look at how non-human identity risk is evolving, where most organizations are still exposed, and...

A critical token validation failure in Microsoft Entra ID (previously Azure Active Directory) could have allowed attackers to impersonate any user, including Global Administrators, across any tenant. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-55241 , has been assigned the maximum CVSS score of 10.0. It has been described by Microsoft as a privilege escalation flaw in Azure Entra. There is no indication that the issue was exploited in the wild. It has been addressed by the Windows maker as of July 17, 2025, requiring no customer action. The CVE was formally issued on September 4. Security researcher Dirk-jan Mollema, who discovered and reported the shortcoming on July 14, said the shortcoming made it possible to compromise every Entra ID tenant in the world, with the likely exception of national cloud deployments . The problem stems from a combination of two components: the use of service-to-service (S2S) actor tokens issued by the Access Control Service (ACS) and a fatal flaw in th...

A team of academics from ETH Zürich and Google has discovered a new variant of a RowHammer attack targeting Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) memory chips from South Korean semiconductor vendor SK Hynix. The RowHammer attack variant, codenamed Phoenix ( CVE-2025-6202 , CVSS score: 7.1), is capable of bypassing sophisticated protection mechanisms put in place to resist the attack. "We have proven that reliably triggering RowHammer bit flips on DDR5 devices from SK Hynix is possible on a larger scale," the Computer Security Group (COMSEC) at ETH Zürich said. "We also proved that on-die ECC does not stop RowHammer, and RowHammer end-to-end attacks are still possible with DDR5." RowHammer refers to a hardware vulnerability where repeated access of a row of memory in a DRAM chip can trigger bit flips in adjacent rows, resulting in data corruption. This can be subsequently weaponized by bad actors to gain unauthorized access to data, escalate privileges, or even cause a...

Microsoft on Tuesday addressed a set of 80 security flaws in its software, including one vulnerability that has been disclosed as publicly known at the time of release. Of the 80 vulnerabilities, eight are rated Critical and 72 are rated Important in severity. None of the shortcomings has been exploited in the wild as a zero-day. Like last month , 38 of the disclosed flaws are related to privilege escalation, followed by remote code execution (22), information disclosure (14), and denial-of-service (3). "For the third time this year, Microsoft patched more elevation of privilege vulnerabilities than remote code execution flaws," Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said. "Nearly 50% (47.5%) of all bugs this month are privilege escalation vulnerabilities." The patches are in addition to 12 vulnerabilities addressed in Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of August 2025's Patch Tuesday update, including a securit...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added three security flaws impacting Citrix Session Recording and Git to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2024-8068 (CVSS score: 5.1) - An improper privilege management vulnerability in Citrix Session Recording that could allow for privilege escalation to NetworkService Account access when an attacker is an authenticated user in the same Windows Active Directory domain as the session recording server domain CVE-2024-8069 (CVSS score: 5.1) - A deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability in Citrix Session Recording that allows limited remote code execution with the privileges of a NetworkService Account access when an attacker is an authenticated user on the same intranet as the session recording server CVE-2025-48384 (CVSS score: 8.1) - A link following vulnerability in Git that arises as a ...