security research | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

An unprivileged Linux program can time a hardware interrupt to land in the gap between a processor sanitizing its branch predictor and the kernel using it, re-poisoning the predictor after the defense has run. MIT CSAIL researchers Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan named the technique INTERRUPT INJECTION . On an AMD Zen 2 machine running Linux 6.14 with every default Spectre v2 mitigation on, their exploit leaked arbitrary kernel memory at 5.47 bytes per second with 91.97% accuracy, enough to locate and read /etc/shadow, which stores the system's password hashes, in five of ten attempts. It needs no privileges, only local code execution, so the risk sits on shared systems running an affected processor. The pair disclosed to AMD and Intel on February 5. AMD told them it plans a kernel patch; MIT says one has since shipped and arrives in a normal operating system update. A fix is in the Linux kernel. The commit, "x86/bugs: Make Safe-RET robust against interrupt injec...

A new class of prompt injection is spreading across commercial websites. It requires no malware, no stolen credentials, and no zero-day exploit. It abuses a standard feature built into almost every major AI assistant: pre-filled deep links. We observed production websites embedding hidden prompt injection payloads inside "Ask AI" buttons on marketing and competitor comparison pages. When a user logged into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok clicks one, a pre-formed query executes immediately in their session, with no confirmation and no warning. Most of these links are benign. The dangerous ones instruct the AI to permanently save the vendor's domain as a "trusted source," quietly biasing every future answer in that vendor's favor. In February 2026, Microsoft Security catalogued the behavior as AI Recommendation Poisoning , identifying 31 companies across 14 industries deploying it, with more than 50 distinct prompts observed in a single data source over ...

Beginning July 27, 2026, GitHub will cut public bug bounty payouts by at least half at every severity level. Critical findings will drop from $20,000-$30,000+ to a fixed $10,000, while its permanent invite-only VIP tier will pay $30,000 or more. Reports filed before that date, including those already in GitHub's growing triage queue, will retain the previous payout terms. GitHub said the changes are intended to reduce noise while giving established researchers faster responses, higher rewards, and closer access to its security engineering team. "You don't earn more by submitting more," the company said. "You earn more by submitting better." The public program is moving from flexible ranges to fixed payments: Low: $250, down from $617-$2,000 Medium: $2,000, down from $4,000-$10,000 High: $5,000, down from $10,000-$20,000 Critical: $10,000, down from $20,000-$30,000+ The Hacker News calculated that the new public rates are 50% lower f...

An Android app that can draw over other windows and write to shared storage can slip instructions to the AI agent driving that phone, in text no human eye will ever see. Two more steps, and the same app is running commands on the PC driving the agent. Researchers demonstrated that chain, plus six other attacks, against five open-source mobile agent frameworks: AppAgent, AppAgentX, Mobile-Agent-v3, Open-AutoGLM, and MobA. Everyone fell to at least six of the seven. The paper went up on arXiv on July 1 and was revised on July 14. The authors are at Simon Fraser University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shandong University, and the Xingtu Lab at Chinese security firm QAX. Nothing here has a CVE, and first author Zidong Zhang told The Hacker News the team has no evidence of the techniques being used outside a controlled setting. The Hacker News checked all five frameworks and found the screenshot paths, the shell call, and the broadcast fallback that the paper describes st...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing offensive security, but it has not changed the standard that matters most: a finding has to be proven before it becomes useful. AI-assisted tools can read code quickly, generate payloads, summarize attack surfaces, explain unfamiliar APIs, and run repetitive testing workflows at impressive speed. That is a real advantage for security teams. It also creates a new kind of pressure, because the industry can now produce more vulnerability-looking output than ever before. The problem is that output is not the same as evidence. A generated report can sound polished, include a severity rating, and even contain a proof-of-concept that looks reasonable at first glance. None of that proves the bug exists in the deployed environment. None of it proves exploitability, impact, or risk. In offensive testing, the hard part has never been writing something that sounds like a vulnerability report. The hard part is demonstrating what is actually true. That d...

OpenAI has disclosed details of GPT-Red , an internal automated red-teaming model that scales prompt injection vulnerability discovery with an aim to fix issues before the tools are deployed widely. "GPT‑Red is a strong red-teamer, and our previous models are highly vulnerable to its prompt injection attacks," the artificial intelligence (AI) company said . "We use GPT‑Red to adversarially train GPT‑5.6 , making it much more robust to prompt injections." The model works just like a human red-teamer. It sends a prompt, monitors how a GPT model responds, and iterates its way towards a malicious goal, such as uploading sensitive data to an external server. The development comes as adversarial prompt injections continue to be a persistent thorn in the flesh of large language models, which can be tricked into executing a carefully crafted instruction⁠ that can produce undesirable consequences. As agentic systems continue to be hooked to third-party data sources ...

Open a repository in Cursor on Windows and, if a file named git.exe is sitting in the project root, Cursor runs it. No click, no approval dialog, no warning that anything in the folder is about to execute. Whatever that binary does, it does as you, with your source, your SSH keys and your cloud tokens. Cursor keeps re-running it for as long as the project stays open. No prompt injection, no agent, no model in the loop, and no prior access to the machine: opening the folder is the entire exploit, and the result is arbitrary code execution as the logged-in user. AI security firm Mindgard reported the flaw to Cursor on December 15, 2025 and  published full technical details  on Tuesday, seven months later. There is still no patch, and Cursor has published no advisory for the issue. The mechanism takes about a sentence. Cursor checks several locations for a Git binary when a project loads, and one of them is the workspace itself. Process Monitor output in t...

Researchers at KU Leuven tested 85 of the most popular crypto wallets that run as browser extensions and found that the wallets themselves leak enough to link and track the people using them. The way these wallets talk to websites and blockchain servers can tie a person's separate addresses together and let outsiders follow them from site to site. And on a site that already holds a name or email, the same leaks can put a real name to an "anonymous" crypto identity. This is not a hack. The wallets behave exactly as they were built to. The 85 extensions together have about 35 million users listed on the Chrome Web Store. The team, from the university's DistriNet security group,  posted the paper  this month and will present it at the PETS 2026 privacy conference in Calgary in late July. They ran real wallets against real Web3 sites and mapped out five privacy weaknesses in how wallets and websites interact. When they reported the most far-reaching one to the wa...

Give an AI assistant a memory and access to your inbox, and you hand an attacker a way to rewrite what it thinks it knows about you. A single email can trick that agent into saving a false "fact" about the user, hide the change, and quietly steer its answers in later sessions. When it works, the person reads an ordinary-looking reply and never learns their assistant was tampered with. The researchers named the attack  stealth memory injection  and built a tool that writes the emails automatically. The paper, "When Claws Remember but Do Not Tell,"  landed on arXiv on 6 July 2026 . First, what these assistants do A personal agent is an AI assistant that sticks around. Instead of forgetting everything when a chat ends, it keeps notes about you in files: your preferences, your contacts, and what you asked it to do. It reads those notes at the start of every new session, which is why it feels like it knows you. Many of these agents can also act for you, readin...

A heart defibrillator remotely controlled by a villainous hacker to trigger a fatal heart attack? Yes now its possible, The Government Accountability Office has released a report warning that medical devices are vulnerable to hacking and calling for greater FDA oversight of such devices. The investigation into electronic medical-device safety was initiated after computer-security researchers found dangerous vulnerabilities in insulin pumps. The FDA in 2009 issued guidance urging hospitals and medical device manufacturers to work together to eliminate security risks. But in September, the Government Accountability Office issued a report warning that implantable medical devices could be vulnerable to hacking, posing a safety threat, and asked the FDA to address the issue. “ Even the human body is vulnerable to attack from computer hackers ,” Representative Anna Eshoo, a Democrat from California, said in a statement on her website . Preventing potential hacking it might s...