privilege escalation | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Security researchers have published a detailed, working exploit for a Linux kernel use-after-free that lets an unprivileged local user escalate to root and break out of a container. The flaw, CVE-2026-23111, sits in the kernel's nf_tables packet-filtering code and was patched upstream on February 5, 2026. Exodus Intelligence released its full technical walkthrough on June 8, and it is not even the first public exploit: FuzzingLabs published an independent reproduction back in April. The flaw came down to a single stray character, an inverted check in nf_tables, and the upstream fix removed it in one line. Ubuntu rates the flaw CVSS 7.8 (high). If your distribution's kernel package does not yet include the fix, update and reboot. The reachable setup is common: nf_tables plus unprivileged user namespaces, a Linux feature that lets an ordinary account act as root inside a private sandbox and reach kernel code it otherwise could not. Both ship by default on most desktop...

Cisco has warned that a high-severity security flaw impacting Catalyst SD-WAN Manager has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20245 , carries a CVSS score of 7.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. It affects the following deployment types - On-Prem Deployment Cisco SD-WAN Cloud-Pro Cisco SD-WAN Cloud (Cisco Managed) Cisco SD-WAN for Government (FedRAMP) "A vulnerability in the CLI of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly SD-WAN vManage, could allow an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root by supplying a crafted file to the affected system," Cisco said in an advisory. The network security company said the vulnerability is the result of insufficient validation of user-supplied input, which an attacker could exploit by uploading a crafted file to the affected system. This, in turn, could permit the attacker to perform command injection attacks and elevate their privileges as the root user. "To...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously unreported threat cluster dubbed OP-512 (where "OP" stands for "opponent") that has been observed targeting Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) servers to deploy a bespoke web shell framework. ReliaQuest has assessed with moderate to high confidence that the espionage-focused activity is linked to China. "OP-512 was highly likely conducting espionage through a compromised Internet Information Services (IIS) web server on an organization whose sector and geography align with China-linked intelligence priorities," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Although no overlaps have been found between OP-512 and other known China-aligned adversaries, it's the fourth such threat group after CL-STA-0048 , DragonRank , and GhostRedirector to single out IIS web servers over the past 12 months. As recently as last month, Cisco Talos revealed that multiple Chinese-speaking...

Google on Monday released patches for 124 security vulnerabilities impacting its Android operating system for the month of June 2026, including one high-severity flaw in the Framework component that has come under active exploitation. Tracked as CVE-2025-48595 (CVSS score: 8.4), the security flaw has been described as a case of privilege escalation without requiring any user interaction. The vulnerability impacts devices running Android versions 14, 15, 16, and 16 QPR2 (Quarterly Platform Release 2). "In multiple locations, there is a possible way to achieve code execution due to an integer overflow," according to a description of the vulnerability on CVE.org. "This could lead to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed. User interaction is not needed for exploitation." Google has acknowledged there are indications that CVE-2025-48595 may be under "limited, targeted exploitation." As is typically the case, the t...

Threat actors are attempting to actively exploit a critical security flaw impacting WP Maps Pro , a WordPress plugin that has had over 15,000 sales on the Envato Market, to create malicious administrator accounts on susceptible sites. WP Maps Pro allows site owners to embed customizable Google Maps and OpenStreetMap with markers, listings, and advanced location features on WordPress sites. It is used as a store locator tool, making it easier for users to find nearby locations, view listing details, and get directions. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-8732 (CVSS score: 9.8), a privilege escalation bug that allows unauthenticated attackers to create a WordPress user with administrative permissions, effectively allowing them to take control of a site. The shortcoming impacts all versions of the plugin prior to and including 6.1.0. It has been addressed in version 6.1.1. Security researcher David Brown has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. At a high ...

Threat actors are continuing to exploit a critical, now-patched security flaw impacting FortiClient Endpoint Management Server (EMS) deployments to deliver a credential-stealing malware family dubbed EKZ Infostealer. "The campaign abused trusted endpoint management infrastructure to deliver malware across managed endpoints," Arctic Wolf said . "Threat actors disguised the credential stealer payload as a Fortinet endpoint update, silently executing the malicious executable through PowerShell." The activity, observed by the cybersecurity company in May 2026, involves the exploitation of CVE-2026-35616 (CVSS score: 9.1), a critical pre-authentication API access bypass leading to privilege escalation. The issue was addressed by Fortinet in FortiClient EMS 7.4.7 and later. A successful compromise is followed by the threat actor taking steps to modify configurations to defer firmware upgrade reminders, as well as modifying a Remote Access Profile configuration and...

A maximum-severity security vulnerability impacting LiteSpeed User-End cPanel Plugin has come under active exploitation in the wild. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-48172 (CVSS score: 10.0), relates to an instance of incorrect privilege assignment that an attacker could abuse to run arbitrary scripts with elevated permissions. "Any cPanel user (including an attacker or a compromised account) may exploit the lsws.redisAble function to execute arbitrary scripts as root," LiteSpeed said . The vulnerability impacts all versions of the plugin between 2.3 and 2.4.4. LiteSpeed's WHM plugin is not impacted. The issue has been addressed in version 2.4.5. Security researcher David Strydom has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. LiteSpeed noted that the "vulnerability is being actively exploited," but refrained from sharing additional details. It has provided the following indicator of compromise - grep -rE "cpanel_jsonapi_func=redisAble...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a recently patched critical security flaw impacting Drupal Core to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-9082 (CVSS score: 6.5), an SQL injection vulnerability affecting all supported versions of Drupal Core. "Drupal Core contains a SQL injection vulnerability that could allow for privilege escalation and remote code execution via specially crafted requests sent with the database abstraction API," CISA said. News of exploitation arrives less than two days after Drupal released fixes for the flaw. Patches are available for the following versions - Drupal 11.3.10 Drupal 11.2.12 Drupal 11.1.10 Drupal 10.6.9 Drupal 10.5.10 Drupal 10.4.10 Drupal 9.5 (Manual patching required) Drupal 8.9 (Manual patching required) In an update to its advisory on May 22, 2026, Drupal acknowl...

Microsoft has disclosed that a privilege escalation and a denial-of-service flaw in Defender has come under active exploitation in the wild. The former, tracked as CVE-2026-41091 , is rated 7.8 on the CVSS scoring system. Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. "Improper link resolution before file access ('link following') in Microsoft Defender allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally," Microsoft said in an advisory. The second vulnerability under exploitation is CVE-2026-45498 (CVSS score: 4.0), a denial-of-service bug impacting Defender. The two vulnerabilities have been addressed in Microsoft Defender Antimalware Platform versions 1.1.26040.8 and 4.18.26040.7, respectively. Although Microsoft has not formally confirmed, the vulnerability descriptions for CVE-2026-41091 and CVE-2026-45498 overlap with that of RedSun and UnDefend , two Defender zero-days that were disclosed by Chaotic Eclips...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a vulnerability in the Linux kernel that remained undetected for nine years. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-46333 (CVSS score: 5.5), is a case of improper privilege management that could permit an unprivileged local user to disclose sensitive files and execute arbitrary commands as root on default installations of several major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. It's also codenamed ssh-keysign-pwn. According to Qualys, which discovered the flaw, the problem is rooted in the kernel's __ptrace_may_access() function and was introduced in November 2016. "The primitive is reliable and turns any local shell into a path to root or to sensitive credential material," Saeed Abbasi, senior manager of Threat Research Unit at Qualys, said . Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit a local attacker to disclose /etc/shadow and host private keys under /etc/ssh/*_key, as well as execute arbitrary...

Drupal has released security updates for a "highly critical" security vulnerability in Drupal Core that could be exploited by attackers to achieve remote code execution, privilege escalation, or information disclosure. The vulnerability, now tracked as CVE-2026-9082 , carries a CVSS score of 6.5 out of 10.0, per CVE.org. Drupal said the vulnerability resides in a database abstraction API that is used in Drupal Core to validate queries and ensure they are sanitized against SQL injection attacks. "A vulnerability in this API allows an attacker to send specially crafted requests, resulting in arbitrary SQL injection for sites using PostgreSQL databases," it said . "This can lead to information disclosure, and in some cases privilege escalation, remote code execution, or other attacks." Drupal noted the security flaw can be exploited by anonymous users, and impacts only sites that use PostgreSQL. The following versions address the issue - Drupal 11.3.10 ...

Proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code has now been released for a recently patched security flaw in the Linux kernel that could allow for local privilege escalation (LPE). Dubbed DirtyDecrypt (aka DirtyCBC), the vulnerability was discovered and reported by the Zellic and V12 security team on May 9, 2026, only to be informed by the maintainers that it was a duplicate of a vulnerability that had already been patched in the mainline. "It's a rxgk pagecache write due to missing COW [copy-on-write] guard in rxgk_decrypt_skb," Zellic co-founder Luna Tong (aka cts and gf_256) said in a description shared on GitHub. Although the CVE identifier was not disclosed, the vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-31635 (CVSS score: 7.5) based on the fact that the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD) includes a link to the DirtyDecrypt PoC in its CVE record. "The specific fault sits in rxgk_decrypt_skb(), the function that decrypts an incoming sk_buff (socket buffer) on th...

Ivanti, Fortinet, n8n, SAP, and VMware have released security fixes for various vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors to bypass authentication and execute arbitrary code. Topping the list is a critical flaw impacting Ivanti Xtraction (CVE-2026-8043, CVSS score: 9.6) that could be exploited to achieve information disclosure or client-side attacks. "External control of a file name in Ivanti Xtraction before version 2026.2 allows a remote authenticated attacker to read sensitive files and write arbitrary HTML files to a web directory, leading to information disclosure and possible client-side attacks," Ivanti said in an advisory. Fortinet published advisories for two critical shortcomings affecting FortiAuthenticator and FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud, and FortiSandbox PaaS that could result in code execution - CVE-2026-44277 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An improper access control vulnerability in FortiAuthenticator that may allow an unauthenticated attacker to...

Chaotic Eclipse, the security researcher behind the recently disclosed Windows flaws, YellowKey and GreenPlasma , has released a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a Windows privilege escalation zero-day flaw that grants attackers SYSTEM privileges on fully patched Windows systems. Codenamed MiniPlasma , the vulnerability impacts "cldflt.sys," which refers to the Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver, and resides in a routine named "HsmOsBlockPlaceholderAccess." It was originally reported to Microsoft by Google Project Zero researcher James Forshaw in September 2020. Although it was assumed that the shortcoming was fixed by Microsoft in December 2020 as part of CVE-2020-17103 , Chaotic Eclipse said further investigation has uncovered that the "exact same issue [...] is actually still present, unpatched." "I'm unsure if Microsoft just never patched the issue or the patch was silently rolled back at some point for unknown reasons. The original PoC by...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a set of four security flaws in OpenClaw that could be chained to achieve data theft, privilege escalation, and persistence. The vulnerabilities, collectively dubbed Claw Chain by Cyera, can permit an attacker to establish a foothold, expose sensitive data, and plant backdoors. A brief description of the flaws is below - CVE-2026-44112 (CVSS score: 9.6/6.3) - A time-of-check/time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition vulnerability in the OpenShell managed sandbox backend that allows attackers to bypass sandbox restrictions and redirect writes outside the intended mount root.  CVE-2026-44113 (CVSS score: 7.7/6.3) - A TOCTOU race condition vulnerability in OpenShell that allows attackers to bypass sandbox restrictions and read files outside the intended mount root. CVE-2026-44115 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An incomplete list of disallowed inputs vuln...

An anonymous cybersecurity researcher who disclosed three Microsoft Defender vulnerabilities has returned with two more zero-days involving a BitLocker bypass and a privilege escalation impacting Windows Collaborative Translation Framework (CTFMON). The security defects have been codenamed YellowKey and GreenPlasma , respectively, by the researcher, who goes by the online aliases Chaotic Eclipse and Nightmare-Eclipse. The researcher described YellowKey as "one of the most insane discoveries I ever found," likening the BitLocker bypass to functioning as a backdoor, as the bug is present only in the Windows Recovery Environment ( WinRE ), a built-in framework designed to troubleshoot and repair common unbootable operating system issues. YellowKey affects Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022/2025. At a high level, it involves copying specially crafted "FsTx" files on a USB drive or the EFI partition, plugging the USB drive into the target Windows computer with Bit...

Details have emerged about a new variant of the recent Dirty Frag Linux local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability that allows local attackers to gain root access, making it the third such bug to be identified in the kernel within a span of two weeks. Codenamed Fragnesia , the security vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-46300 (CVSS score: 7.8) and is rooted in the Linux kernel's XFRM ESP-in-TCP subsystem. It was discovered by researcher William Bowling of Zellic and the V12 security team. "The vulnerability allows unprivileged local attackers to modify read-only file contents in the kernel page cache and achieve root privileges through a deterministic page-cache corruption primitive," Google-owned Wiz said . Advisories have been released by multiple Linux distributions - AlmaLinux Amazon Linux CloudLinux Debian Gentoo Red Hat Enterprise Linux SUSE Ubuntu "This is a separate bug in the ESP/XFRM from Dirty Frag which has received its own patch,...

Microsoft on Tuesday released patches for 138 security vulnerabilities spanning its product portfolio, although none of them have been listed as publicly known or under active attack. Of the 138 flaws, 30 are rated Critical, 104 are rated Important, three are rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. As many as 61 vulnerabilities are classified as privilege escalation bugs, followed by 32 remote code execution, 15 information disclosure, 14 spoofing, eight denial-of-service, six security feature bypass, and two tampering flaws. The update list also includes a vulnerability that was patched by AMD ( CVE-2025-54518 , CVSS score: 7.3) this month. It relates to a case of improper isolation of shared resources within the CPU operation cache on Zen 2-based products that could allow an attacker to corrupt instructions executed at a different privilege level, potentially resulting in privilege escalation. The patches are also in addition to 127 security flaws that Google has add...

cPanel has released updates to address three vulnerabilities in cPanel and Web Host Manager (WHM) that could be exploited to achieve privilege escalation, code execution, and denial-of-service. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2026-29201 (CVSS score: 4.3) - An insufficient input validation of the feature file name in the "feature::LOADFEATUREFILE" adminbin call that could result in an arbitrary file read. CVE-2026-29202 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An insufficient input validation of the "plugin" parameter in the "create_user API" call that could result in arbitrary Perl code execution on behalf of the already authenticated account's system user. CVE-2026-29203 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An unsafe symlink handling vulnerability that allows a user to modify access permissions of an arbitrary file using chmod, resulting in denial-of-service or possible privilege escalation. The shortcomings have been patched in the following versions - cPane...

Details have emerged about a new, unpatched local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability impacting the Linux kernel. Dubbed Dirty Frag , it has been described as a successor to Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431, CVSS score: 7.8), a recently disclosed LPE flaw impacting the Linux kernel that has since come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability was reported to Linux kernel maintainers on April 30, 2026. "Dirty Frag is a vulnerability (class) that achieves root privileges on most Linux distributions by chaining the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability," security researcher Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel) said in a write-up. "Dirty Frag is a case that extends the bug class to which Dirty Pipe and Copy Fail belong. Because it is a deterministic logic bug that does not depend on a timing window, no race condition is required, the kernel does not panic when the exploit fails, and the success rate is very high." T...