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Most of this week’s threats didn’t rely on new tricks. They relied on familiar systems behaving exactly as designed, just in the wrong hands. Ordinary files, routine services, and trusted workflows were enough to open doors without forcing them. What stands out is how little friction attackers now need. Some activity focused on quiet reach and coverage, others on timing and reuse. The emphasis wasn’t speed or spectacle, but control gained through scale, patience, and misplaced trust. The stories below trace where that trust bent, not how it broke. Each item is a small signal of a larger shift, best seen when viewed together. Spear-phishing delivers custom backdoor Operation Nomad Leopard Targets Afghanistan Government entities in Afghanistan have been at the receiving end of a spear-phishing campaign dubbed Operation Nomad Leopard that employs bogus administrative documents as decoys to distribute a backdoor named FALSECUB by means o...

Security teams at agile, fast-growing companies often have the same mandate: secure the business without slowing it down. Most teams inherit a tech stack optimized for breakneck growth, not resilience. In these environments, the security team is the helpdesk, the compliance expert, and the incident response team all rolled into one. Securing the cloud office in this scenario is all about finding leverage: identifying the strategic control points that drive the most resilience without adding operational overhead. Google Workspace provides an excellent security foundation, but its native tooling has inherent limitations, and relying on the default configurations can cause headaches. To build a truly resilient program, there are some common-sense first steps teams can take to secure Workspace natively, before intelligently augmenting the platform where its capabilities fall short. Secure email, the primary attack vector and largest archive Email remains the most reliable target for ...

A new malicious package discovered in the Python Package Index (PyPI) has been found to impersonate a popular library for symbolic mathematics to deploy malicious payloads, including a cryptocurrency miner, on Linux hosts. The package, named sympy-dev , mimics SymPy , replicating the latter's project description verbatim in an attempt to deceive unsuspecting users into thinking that they are downloading a "development version" of the library. It has been downloaded over 1,100 times since it was first published on January 17, 2026. Although the download count is not a reliable yardstick for measuring the number of infections, the figure likely suggests some developers may have fallen victim to the malicious campaign. The package remains available for download as of writing. According to Socket , the original library has been modified to act as a downloader for an XMRig cryptocurrency miner on compromised systems. The malicious behavior is designed to trigger only when ...

A new security flaw in SmarterTools SmarterMail email software has come under active exploitation in the wild, two days after the release of a patch. The vulnerability, which currently does not have a CVE identifier, is tracked by watchTowr Labs as WT-2026-0001 . It was patched by SmarterTools on January 15, 2026, with Build 9511 , following responsible disclosure by the exposure management platform on January 8, 2026. Markus Wulftange of CODE WHITE GmbH, the finder has also been credited with reporting the same flaw. It has been described as an authentication bypass flaw that could allow any user to reset the SmarterMail system administrator password by means of a specially crafted HTTP request to the "/api/v1/auth/force-reset-password" endpoint. "The kicker of course being that said user is able to use RCE-as-a-feature functions to directly execute OS [operating system] commands," watchTowr Labs researchers Piotr Bazydlo and Sina Kheirkhah said. The problem ...

Cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf has warned of a "new cluster of automated malicious activity" that involves unauthorized firewall configuration changes on Fortinet FortiGate devices. The activity, it said, commenced on January 15, 2026, adding it shares similarities with a December 2025 campaign in which malicious SSO logins on FortiGate appliances were recorded against the admin account from different hosting providers by exploiting CVE-2025-59718 and CVE-2025-59719. Both vulnerabilities allow for unauthenticated bypass of SSO login authentication via crafted SAML messages when the FortiCloud single sign-on (SSO) feature is enabled on affected Devices. The shortcomings impact FortiOS, FortiWeb, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager. "This activity involved the creation of generic accounts intended for persistence, configuration changes granting VPN access to those accounts, as well as exfiltration of firewall configurations," Arctic Wolf said of the developin...

Cisco has released fresh patches to address what it described as a "critical" security vulnerability impacting multiple Unified Communications (CM) products and Webex Calling Dedicated Instance that it has been actively exploited as a zero-day in the wild. The vulnerability, CVE-2026-20045 (CVSS score: 8.2), could permit an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system of a susceptible device. "This vulnerability is due to improper validation of user-supplied input in HTTP requests," Cisco said in an advisory. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a sequence of crafted HTTP requests to the web-based management interface of an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to obtain user-level access to the underlying operating system and then elevate privileges to root." The critical rating for the flaw is due to the fact that its exploitation could allow for privil...

As many as 3,136 individual IP addresses linked to likely targets of the Contagious Interview activity have been identified, with the campaign claiming 20 potential victim organizations spanning artificial intelligence (AI), cryptocurrency, financial services, IT services, marketing, and software development sectors in Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, and Central America. The new findings come from Recorded Future's Insikt Group, which is tracking the North Korean threat activity cluster under the moniker PurpleBravo . First documented in late 2023, the campaign is also known as CL-STA-0240, DeceptiveDevelopment, DEV#POPPER, Famous Chollima, Gwisin Gang, Tenacious Pungsan, UNC5342, Void Dokkaebi, and WaterPlum. The 3,136 individual IP addresses, primarily concentrated around South Asia and North America, are assessed to have been targeted by the adversary from August 2024 to September 2025. The 20 victim companies are said to be based in Belgium, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, In...

Zoom and GitLab have released security updates to resolve a number of security vulnerabilities that could result in denial-of-service (DoS) and remote code execution. The most severe of the lot is a critical security flaw impacting Zoom Node Multimedia Routers (MMRs) that could permit a meeting participant to conduct remote code execution attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-22844 and discovered internally by its Offensive Security team, carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of 10.0. "A command injection vulnerability in Zoom Node Multimedia Routers (MMRs) before version 5.2.1716.0 may allow a meeting participant to conduct remote code execution of the MMR via network access," the company noted in a Tuesday alert. Zoom is recommending that customers using Zoom Node Meetings, Hybrid, or Meeting Connector deployments update to the latest available MMR version to safeguard against any potential threat. There is no evidence that the security flaw has been exploited ...

Every managed security provider is chasing the same problem in 2026 — too many alerts, too few analysts, and clients demanding “CISO-level protection” at SMB budgets. The truth? Most MSSPs are running harder, not smarter. And it’s breaking their margins. That’s where the quiet revolution is happening: AI isn’t just writing reports or surfacing risks — it’s rebuilding how security services are delivered . The Shift Until now, MSSPs scaled by adding people. Each new client meant another analyst, another spreadsheet, another late-night ticket queue. AI automation flips that model. It handles assessments, benchmarking, and reporting in minutes — freeing your team to focus on strategy, not data entry. Early adopters are already seeing double-digit margin gains and faster onboarding cycles — without increasing headcount. Real Proof — Not Theory When Chad Robinson , CISO at Secure Cyber Defense, applied Cynomi’s AI platform, his team stopped drowning in manual checklists. He didn’t ju...

Gartner® doesn’t create new categories lightly. Generally speaking, a new acronym only emerges when the industry's collective "to-do list" has become mathematically impossible to complete. And so it seems that the introduction of the Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP) category is a formal admission that traditional Vulnerability Management (VM) is no longer a viable way to secure a modern enterprise. The shift from the traditional Market Guide for Vulnerability Assessment to the new Magic Quadrant for EAPs represents a move away from the "vulnerability hose", i.e., the endless stream of CVEs, and toward a model of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) . To us, this is more than just a change in terminology; it is an attempt to solve the "Dead End" paradox that has plagued security teams for a decade. In the inaugural Magic Quadrant report of this category, Gartner evaluated 20 vendors for their ability to support continuous discovery, ris...

Security vulnerabilities were uncovered in the popular open-source artificial intelligence (AI) framework Chainlit that could allow attackers to steal sensitive data, which may allow for lateral movement within a susceptible organization. Zafran Security said the high-severity flaws, collectively dubbed ChainLeak , could be abused to leak cloud environment API keys and steal sensitive files, or perform server-side request forgery (SSRF) attacks against servers hosting AI applications. Chainlit is a framework for creating conversational chatbots. According to statistics shared by the Python Software Foundation, the package has been downloaded over 220,000 times over the past week. It has attracted a total of 7.3 million downloads to date. Details of the two vulnerabilities are as follows - CVE-2026-22218 (CVSS score: 7.1) - An arbitrary file read vulnerability in the "/project/element" update flow that allows an authenticated attacker to access the contents of any ...

The recently discovered sophisticated Linux malware framework known as VoidLink is assessed to have been developed by a single person with assistance from an artificial intelligence (AI) model. That's according to new findings from Check Point Research, which identified operational security blunders by malware's author that provided clues to its developmental origins. The latest insight makes VoidLink one of the first instances of an advanced malware largely generated using AI. "These materials provide clear evidence that the malware was produced predominantly through AI-driven development, reaching a first functional implant in under a week," the cybersecurity company said, adding it reached more than 88,000 lines of code by early December 2025. VoidLink, first publicly documented last week, is a feature-rich malware framework written in Zig that's specifically designed for long-term, stealthy access to Linux-based cloud environments. The malware is said...

LastPass is alerting users to a new active phishing campaign that's impersonating the password management service, which aims to trick users into giving up their master passwords. The campaign, which began on or around January 19, 2026, involves sending phishing emails claiming upcoming maintenance and urging them to create a local backup of their password vaults in the next 24 hours. The messages, LastPass said, come with the following subject lines - LastPass Infrastructure Update: Secure Your Vault Now Your Data, Your Protection: Create a Backup Before Maintenance Don't Miss Out: Backup Your Vault Before Maintenance Important: LastPass Maintenance & Your Vault Security Protect Your Passwords: Backup Your Vault (24-Hour Window) The emails are designed to steer unsuspecting users to a phishing site ("group-content-gen2.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws[.]com/5yaVgx51ZzGf") that then redirects to the domain " mail-lastpass[.]com ." The company emphasiz...

A security vulnerability has been disclosed in the popular binary-parser npm library that, if successfully exploited, could result in the execution of arbitrary JavaScript. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-1245 (CVSS score: 6.5), affects all versions of the module prior to version 2.3.0 , which addresses the issue. Patches for the flaw were released on November 26, 2025. Binary-parser is a widely used parser builder for JavaScript that allows developers to parse binary data. It supports a wide range of common data types, including integers, floating-point values, strings, and arrays. The package attracts approximately 13,000 downloads on a weekly basis. According to an advisory released by the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC), the vulnerability has to do with a lack of sanitization of user-supplied values, such as parser field names and encoding parameters, when the JavaScript parser code is dynamically generated at runtime using the "Function" constructor. ...

The North Korean threat actors associated with the long-running Contagious Interview campaign have been observed using malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) projects as lures to deliver a backdoor on compromised endpoints. The latest finding demonstrates continued evolution of the new tactic that was first discovered in December 2025, Jamf Threat Labs said. "This activity involved the deployment of a backdoor implant that provides remote code execution capabilities on the victim system," security researcher Thijs Xhaflaire said in a report shared with The Hacker News. First disclosed by OpenSourceMalware last month, the attack essentially involves instructing prospective targets to clone a repository on GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, and launch the project in VS Code as part of a supposed job assessment. The end goal of these efforts is to abuse VS Code task configuration files to execute malicious payloads staged on Vercel domains, depending on the oper...

A set of three security vulnerabilities has been disclosed in mcp-server-git , the official Git Model Context Protocol ( MCP ) server maintained by Anthropic, that could be exploited to read or delete arbitrary files and execute code under certain conditions. "These flaws can be exploited through prompt injection, meaning an attacker who can influence what an AI assistant reads (a malicious README, a poisoned issue description, a compromised webpage) can weaponize these vulnerabilities without any direct access to the victim's system," Cyata researcher Yarden Porat said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Mcp-server-git is a Python package and an MCP server that provides a set of built-in tools to read, search, and manipulate Git repositories programmatically via large language models (LLMs). The security issues, which have been addressed in versions 2025.9.25 and 2025.12.18 following responsible disclosure in June 2025, are listed below - CVE-2025-68143 (CV...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new phishing campaign that exploits social media private messages to propagate malicious payloads, likely with the intent to deploy a remote access trojan (RAT). The activity delivers "weaponized files via Dynamic Link Library (DLL) sideloading, combined with a legitimate, open-source Python pen-testing script," ReliaQuest said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attack involves approaching high-value individuals through messages sent on LinkedIn, establishing trust, and deceiving them into downloading a malicious WinRAR self-extracting archive (SFX). Once launched, the archive extracts four different components - A legitimate open-source PDF reader application A malicious DLL that's sideloaded by the PDF reader A portable executable (PE) of the Python interpreter A RAR file that likely serves as a decoy The infection chain gets activated when the PDF reader application is run, causing the rogue DLL to be sid...

The Problem: The Identities Left Behind As organizations grow and evolve, employees, contractors, services, and systems come and go - but their accounts often remain. These abandoned or “orphan” accounts sit dormant across applications, platforms, assets, and cloud consoles. The reason they persist isn’t negligence - it’s fragmentation.  Traditional IAM and IGA systems are designed primarily for human users and depend on manual onboarding and integration for each application - connectors, schema mapping, entitlement catalogs, and role modeling. Many applications never make it that far. Meanwhile, non-human identities (NHIs): service accounts, bots, APIs, and agent-AI processes are natively ungoverned, operating outside standard IAM frameworks and often without ownership, visibility, or lifecycle controls. The result? A shadow layer of untracked identities forming part of the broader identity dark matter - accounts invisible to governance but still active in infrastructure. Wh...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a malware campaign that's targeting software developers with a new information stealer called Evelyn Stealer by weaponizing the Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension ecosystem. "The malware is designed to exfiltrate sensitive information, including developer credentials and cryptocurrency-related data. Compromised developer environments can also be abused as access points into broader organizational systems," Trend Micro said in an analysis published Monday. The activity is designed to single out organizations with software development teams that rely on VS Code and third-party extensions, along with those with access to production systems, cloud resources, or digital assets, it added. It's worth noting that details of the campaign were first documented by Koi Security last month, when details emerged of three VS Code extensions – BigBlack.bitcoin-black, BigBlack.codo-ai, and BigBlack.mrbigblacktheme...

Cloudflare has addressed a security vulnerability impacting its Automatic Certificate Management Environment ( ACME ) validation logic that made it possible to bypass security controls and access origin servers .  "The vulnerability was rooted in how our edge network processed requests destined for the ACME HTTP-01 challenge path (/.well-known/acme-challenge/*)," the web infrastructure company's Hrushikesh Deshpande, Andrew Mitchell, and Leland Garofalo said. The web infrastructure company said it found no evidence that the vulnerability was ever exploited in a malicious context. ACME is a communications protocol ( RFC 8555 ) that facilitates automatic issuance, renewal, and revocation of SSL/TLS certificates. Every certificate provisioned to a website by a certificate authority (CA) is validated using challenges to prove domain ownership. This process is typically achieved using an ACME client like Certbot that proves domain ownership via an HTTP-01 (or DNS-01) ...

Leaked API keys are no longer unusual, nor are the breaches that follow. So why are sensitive tokens still being so easily exposed? To find out, Intruder’s research team looked at what traditional vulnerability scanners actually cover and built a new secrets detection method to address gaps in existing approaches.  Applying this at scale by scanning 5 million applications revealed over 42,000 exposed tokens across 334 secret types, exposing a major class of leaked secrets that is not being handled well by existing tooling, particularly in single-page applications (SPAs). In this article, we break down existing secrets detection methods and reveal what we found when we scanned millions of applications for secrets hidden in JavaScript bundles. Established secrets detection methods (and their limitations) Traditional secrets detection The traditional, fully automated approach to detecting application secrets is to search a set of known paths and apply regular expressions to ma...

A Telegram-based guarantee marketplace known for advertising a broad range of illicit services appears to be winding down its operations, according to new findings from Elliptic. The blockchain intelligence company said Tudou Guarantee has effectively ceased transactions through its public Telegram groups following a period of significant growth. The marketplace is estimated to have processed over $12 billion in transactions, making it the third-largest illicit marketplace of all time. "Other parts of Tudou Guarantee, such as its gambling operations, continue to function, so it remains to be seen whether this represents the first stages of a full shutdown or a pivot away from fraud-related activity," the company said . Tudou Guarantee is just one of the many Telegram-based marketplaces serving cyber fraudsters, the others being HuiOne Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee , which collectively engaged in over $35 billion in USDT transactions. Thousands of channels associated with...

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...

In cybersecurity, the line between a normal update and a serious incident keeps getting thinner. Systems that once felt reliable are now under pressure from constant change. New AI tools, connected devices, and automated systems quietly create more ways in, often faster than security teams can react. This week’s stories show how easily a small mistake or hidden service can turn into a real break-in. Behind the headlines, the pattern is clear. Automation is being used against the people who built it. Attackers reuse existing systems instead of building new ones. They move faster than most organizations can patch or respond. From quiet code flaws to malware that changes while it runs, attacks are focusing less on speed and more on staying hidden and in control. If you’re protecting anything connected—developer tools, cloud systems, or internal networks—this edition shows where attacks are going next, not where they used to be. ⚡ Threat of the Week Critical Fortinet Flaw Comes Under...