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University of Toronto researchers have built and tested a proof-of-concept AI-driven computer worm that uses a locally hosted open-weight large language model to reason its way through a network, generate tailored attack strategies for each target it encounters, and replicate itself, all without human intervention and without touching a commercial AI service. The preprint, posted to arXiv on June 2 and currently under peer review, shows why single-CVE patching breaks down when malware can inspect exposed services, read fresh advisories, and generate a new attack path at runtime. In 15 isolated runs on a deliberately vulnerable 33-host network, the worm identified an average of 31.3 vulnerabilities and gained elevated access on 23.1 hosts, roughly three-quarters of the hosts it actively targeted. It then replicated autonomously to 20.4 of those hosts, or 62% of the full network, over seven days, with no prior knowledge of the network topology and no human input. Traditional worm...

Google has released security updates to address 74 vulnerabilities, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-11645 (CVSS score: 8.8), has been described as an out-of-bounds memory access in V8, Chrome's JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Out-of-bounds read and write in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 149.0.7827.103 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside a sandbox via a crafted HTML page," reads a description of the flaw in the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). A security researcher named "303f06e3" has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on April 27, 2026. The researcher has been awarded a bug bounty of $55,000 for responsible disclosure. As is customary in these cases, Google acknowledged that an "exploit for CVE-2026-11645 exists in the wild," but stopped short of sharing additional specifics to ensure that a m...

Organizations have more visibility than ever. Growing tech stacks provide greater coverage, and network security teams are increasingly adopting AI and automation to help with routine tasks and reduce manual effort. But the same challenges persist. Outages still last hours, causing significant financial losses, operational disruption, and reputational impact. Threat response and mean time to remediate (MTTR) remain slow. Misconfigurations and human error still create major incidents. And, despite the promises of AI, teams remain overwhelmed and burnt out. Detection isn't the issue. Neither is tooling. Today, the real problem is execution - that is, the work that happens between tools. The hidden operational layer most organizations overlook Every time an alert fires, network security teams must: Gather context across systems Validate ownership and severity Route tickets to the appropriate people Request approvals Implement changes manually Log evidence...

A malicious website can work out which sites you visit and which apps you open, using nothing but JavaScript and the timing of your SSD. The attack, called FROST , needs no native code, no extension, and no permission prompt. You open the page, leave the tab sitting there, and it watches the drive for contention in the background. Researchers at Graz University of Technology built it and described it in a new paper set to appear at DIMVA 2026. It abuses a storage feature present in every major desktop browser, and the underlying timing channel works on both macOS and Linux. SSD timing attacks are not new. Last year the same group published Secret Spilling Drive , which read user behavior off a drive by watching how reads slow down when something else is using it. The catch was that it needed native code on the machine, through a low-level interface like Linux's io_uring. FROST drops that requirement. It runs inside the browser sandbox, which turns a local attack into a remo...

The Miasma supply chain campaign has sparked a fresh attack wave called Hades , this time involving 37 malicious wheel artifacts across 19 packages in the Python Package Index (PyPI) registry, as the Mini Shai-Hulud-style attacks continue to be refined and splintered to target specific ecosystems. "The compromised releases shipped a *-setup.pth file that attempts to execute automatically during Python startup, download the Bun JavaScript runtime, and run an obfuscated JavaScript payload named _index.js," Socket said in a new analysis. The list of identified packages is below - bramin 0.0.2, 0.0.3, 0.0.4 cmd2func 0.2.2, 0.2.3 coolbox 0.4.1, 0.4.2 dynamo-release 1.5.4 executor-engine 0.3.4, 0.3.5 executor-http 0.1.3, 0.1.4 funcdesc 0.2.2, 0.2.3 magique 0.6.8, 0.6.9 magique-ai 0.4.4, 0.4.5 mrbios 0.1.1, 0.1.2 napari-ufish 0.0.2, 0.0.3 nucbox 0.1.2, 0.1.3 okite 0.0.7, 0.0.8 pantheon-agents 0.6.1, 0.6.2 pantheon-toolsets 0.5....

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a high-severity flaw impacting BerriAI LiteLLM to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42271 (CVSS score: 8.7), is a command injection vulnerability that could allow any authenticated user to run arbitrary commands on the host. It affects the following version of the LiteLLM Python package - >= 1.74.2 < 1.83.7 "Two endpoints used to preview an MCP server before saving it - POST /mcp-rest/test/connection and POST /mcp-rest/test/tools/list - accepted a full server configuration in the request body, including the command, args, and env fields used by the stdio transport," according to a description of the flaw shared by BerriAI. "When called with a stdio configuration, the endpoints attempted to connect, which spawned the supplied command as a subprocess on the proxy host w...

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...

Meta on Monday said it detected and blocked spear-phishing attempts linked to Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group . In addition, the tech giant said it's filing a federal court contempt order against the company for violating a permanent injunction that barred it from targeting WhatsApp and its users. "They tried to trick people into clicking on malicious links to drive them to external websites outside of WhatsApp, similar to previously reported 1-click phishing campaigns linked to NSO," Meta said . The social media company also said it caught NSO Group creating test accounts and groups on WhatsApp. They have since been taken down by Meta. The list of malicious domains linked to the activity is listed below - fr24cast[.]com ghazacast[.]com ikhwancast[.]com Meta did not disclose any technical details about the campaign, including when the activity occurred, how many users were targeted, if any of those attacks were successful, and how the activity was t...

Check Point has warned of active exploitation of a critical vulnerability impacting Remote Access VPN and Mobile Access deployments that are configured to use the deprecated IKEv1 key exchange protocol. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-50751 (CVSS score: 9.3), is a case of a logic flow weakness in certificate validation that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass user authentication and establish a remote access VPN connection without a valid user password. "By exploiting a logic flaw in certificate validation, an attacker can establish a VPN session without possession of a valid password, effectively bypassing authentication requirements," Check Point said . "Additional post-authentication activity is required to access internal resources or escalate privileges." The shortcoming impacts the following products and versions -

Phishing has always been a numbers game. AI has turned it into a volume machine. Attackers can now create convincing emails, fake login pages, and tailored lures in minutes. Every polished message adds another case for Tier 1 to review, another link to inspect, and another alert that cannot be dismissed at a glance. As the queue grows, a credential theft attempt or malware delivery can easily get buried among routine checks. SOC leaders need to help their teams cut through the noise faster and catch the alerts that could turn into a serious incident. Where Tier 1 Teams Lose Time on AI Phishing AI helps attackers launch more convincing campaigns, vary the message, and rotate infrastructure faster. For Tier 1 teams, that means fewer alerts can be ruled out quickly. AI-driven change What Tier 1 has to deal with SOC impact More lure variations Similar campaigns no longer look identical. More alert...

Monday again. The weekend was meant to be quiet. It wasn't. Last week had poisoned packages, a broken AI helper, and a worm tearing through repos. The ugly part: basic tricks still worked. A chatbot got fooled. A bot token got leaked inside the malware. The same old mistakes showed up again. And while everyone chased the loud stuff, quieter attackers sat in inboxes for months, reading mail and stealing it bit by bit. Lots to cover. Grab coffee. Read up. ⚡ Threat of the Week Miasma Worm Hits 73 Microsoft GitHub Repositories in Supply Chain Attack - Microsoft's GitHub repositories became the latest to fall victim to the ongoing Miasma self-replicating supply chain attack campaign. The incident impacted 73 Microsoft repositories across four of its GitHub organizations, including Azure, Azure-Samples, Microsoft, and MicrosoftDocs. The development prompted GitHub to disable access to those repositories. Miasma is assessed to be a variant of the Mini Shai-Hulud worm that T...

Mythos is real. I know a big chunk of the industry thinks it's a marketing stunt, and I get why. I get it. But I've seen the findings, and they're bad. These aren't "whoops, this line right here is wrong, and that's RCE." They're novel combinations of a few dozen issues out of thousands of things every SAST scanner already finds, chained together into something much worse. It's real creativity, like Move 37. That's not a better scanner. That's a different category of threat. In some ways, it doesn't even matter. Even if this specific model were a hoax, the capability is coming regardless. Some days, I wish it were a hoax. We'd have more time. But you can believe me or not. The rest of this post is about what we do about it either way, and I'm getting started now. Washington has been tracking this for a while, but you can't regulate something most of the industry thinks is made up. Now that every boardroom is in preparat...

A China-nexus cyber espionage group has been observed deploying a BSD variant of a known backdoor called BRICKSTORM, as well as two other malware families codenamed PLENET (aka GRIMBOLT ) and AGENTPSD to target Linux systems. The activity has been attributed by Volexity to a threat cluster it tracks as VerdantBamboo , which it said overlaps with hacking groups known as Clay Typhoon (Microsoft), UNC5221 (Google), and Warp Panda (CrowdStrike). The cybersecurity company said it discovered the intrusion during an incident response engagement in September 2025, when it emerged that the adversary had compromised an unnamed victim's Egnyte Storage Sync system by exploiting a local privilege escalation flaw to deploy BRICKSTORM. The issue was addressed in Storage Sync version 13.13 , released in March 2026.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a financially motivated data theft extortion campaign that has targeted dozens of organizations across professional, legal, and financial services in the U.S. between January and May 2026. The activity has been attributed by Google Mandiant and Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) to a threat actor dubbed UNC3753 , which is also known as Chatty Spider, Luna Moth, and Silent Ransom Group (SRG). "UNC3753 leverages voice phishing (vishing) and social engineering deception techniques to achieve remote access into corporate environments," researchers Chad Reams, Tufail Ahmed, Keith Knapp, Ashley Frazer, and Tyler McLellan said . "Using pretexts such as data migration or invoice-related emails, the threat actors initiate phone conversations posing as IT support and convince targets to host screen-sharing sessions and download remote monitoring and management (RMM) utilities." Upon gaining access, the threat a...

Microsoft has announced that Visual Studio Code (VS Code) will apply a two-hour delay before extensions for the integrated development environment (IDE) are updated automatically to a newer version in an attempt to tackle software supply chain threats. "When automatic updates are enabled, new versions are auto-updated two hours after they are published, adding an extra layer of protection against problematic or potentially compromised releases," Microsoft said . The new feature is available starting in VS Code 1.123. The tech giant noted that users still have the option to update any extension immediately at any point in time by using the "Update" button. When extensions have pending updates, a reason for why they haven't been updated yet will be available in the details view, along with when the automatic update will take place. That said, this two-hour delay does not apply to extensions from trusted publishers such as Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI, it...

OpenAI has begun rolling out a new Lockdown Mode to ChatGPT for eligible personal accounts to reduce the risk of data exfiltration arising from prompt injection attacks . The feature is primarily designed for people and organizations that handle sensitive data and require stricter protection guarantees. Lockdown Mode is available to logged-in users across Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, and self-serve ChatGPT Business plans. "Lockdown Mode is an optional advanced security setting that limits many tools and capabilities in OpenAI products that can connect to the web or external services," OpenAI said . "It is designed to reduce the risk of data exfiltration from prompt injection attacks by limiting outbound network requests, at the expense of disabling or limiting some useful features." The safeguards are aimed at hardening the attack surface against prompt injections, which continues to be a "frontier" problem impacting all large language models (LLMs...

A researcher has reverse-engineered the iOS SDK that Bright Data embeds in consumer apps and documented how, with the user's consent, it can turn devices, including always-on smart TVs, into exit nodes that relay web-scraping traffic for a data business Bright Data markets heavily to the AI industry. The company, the successor to Luminati, operates what it calls the largest residential proxy network in the world, advertised at more than 400 million residential IPs. Part of that supply comes from this SDK, shipped inside free apps behind an opt-in screen and described by Bright Data as a consent-sourced pool of 150 million-plus IPs. The findings, published June 5 by  Include Security  and independent researcher Buchodi, matter because the scraping comes from the user's home IP, not the customer's. The immediate risk is not a hacked account or stolen data; it is that a home connection and its bandwidth get used as someone else's scraping infrastructure. A connec...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a high-severity security flaw impacting SolarWinds Serv-U multi-protocol file server software to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-28318 (CVSS score: 7.5), is a denial-of-service (DoS) bug that causes the service to crash under certain conditions. CISA described it as an uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability that results in a DoS condition. "SolarWinds Serv-U is susceptible to specially crafted POST requests that crash the Serv-U service without authentication using Content-Encoding: deflate," SolarWinds said in an advisory released earlier this week. The issue has been addressed in SolarWinds Serv-U version 15.5.4 HF1. As mitigations, it's advised to limit access to known addresses and block any request containing "content-encoding" since the vulnerable service does not r...

Two things landed within days of each other this week. A security startup reported 21 previously unknown vulnerabilities in FFmpeg, the media library inside almost everything that touches video, all of them found by an autonomous AI agent. The same week, Google shipped Chrome 149 with patches for 429 security bugs, the most ever in a single release. Only the FFmpeg bugs were found by AI. Chrome's record landed after Google overhauled its bounty program to cope with a flood of AI-generated reports. The mechanisms differ, but the pressure is the same: AI is putting more vulnerabilities in front of the people who have to deal with them, and faster than before. The FFmpeg findings come from depthfirst , whose autonomous security agent scanned the project's roughly 1.5 million lines of C and produced 21 confirmed zero-days, each with a reproducible proof-of-concept input. The company puts the cost of the run at around $1,000. Several of the bugs had been latent for 15 to 2...

Microsoft's GitHub repositories have become the latest to fall victim to the ongoing Miasma self-replicating supply chain attack campaign. The incident impacted 73 Microsoft repositories across four of its GitHub organizations, including Azure, Azure-Samples, Microsoft, and MicrosoftDocs, per OpenSourceMalware . The development has prompted GitHub to disable access to those repositories. "Access to this repository has been disabled by GitHub Staff due to a violation of GitHub's terms of service," reads the message when attempting to access the " Azure/azure-functions-host " repository. "If you are the owner of the repository, you may reach out to GitHub Support for more information." According to OpenSourceMalware, some of the repositories impacted by the incident are listed below - azure-search-openai-demo-purviewdatasecurity Connectors-NET-LSP Connectors-NET-SDK durabletask durabletask-dotnet durabletask-go durablet...

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...

Multiple software supply chain attacks have hit the npm ecosystem, with threat actors using both malicious and poisoned versions of over 50 legitimate packages to distribute a Rust-based information stealer and a self-spreading worm, respectively. According to JFrog , the information stealer "scrapes every secret it can find on a developer's machine, hides behind an eBPF kernel rootkit, and answers to its operator over Tor." The stealer also uses the stolen credentials as a propagation mechanism, drawing similarities to the infamous Shai-Hulud worm. The new malware has been codenamed IronWorm by the software supply chain security company. By publishing itself to the npm registry in the form of trojanized packages, the approach results in a self-replicating attack. The malicious activity has been traced back to a compromised npm account named " asteroiddao ," which has been found to publish package versions containing the Rust ELF binary that's exec...

Arabic-speaking users have emerged as the target of a new Android spyware codenamed Asin , according to findings from ESET. The Slovakian cybersecurity company said it first detected the malware spread via multiple campaigns in early 2025, with each attack wave making use of distinct websites mimicking utilities, war-related updates, and a government news source: govlens[.]net, which impersonates a government news source (registered on May 27, 2025) pdf-reader[.]help, which impersonates a secure PDF editor (registered on May 29, 2025) live-war-map[.]com, which claims to offer updates on military incidents (registered on January 20, 2025) Two of these websites - govlens[.]net and live-war-map[.]com - were also marketed via dedicated accounts on social media platforms like Facebook and Telegram - www.facebook[.]com/GovLens t[.]me/liveuamap_ar "Each of these websites distributes a malicious app that combines legitimate functionality with stealthy spyware ca...

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...

Eighteen months ago, the AI SOC was a marketing line. Today it's a budget item. The category has crossed over from interesting to inevitable, with billions of dollars now flowing into AI-powered security operations platforms, agentic SOC tools, and AI co-pilots built into every layer of the security stack. The data shows SOCs are buying, deploying, and standing up AI capabilities at the fastest pace the industry has ever seen. And yet, the same SOCs reporting record AI adoption are reporting underwhelming outcomes. The first objective benchmark on the value of AI in the SOC was published in the SOC-CMM 2026 Maturity Report in May, drawing on survey data collected from roughly 200 SOCs across regions, sectors, and delivery models between late January and mid-March 2026. Only about 10% of respondents said AI has delivered excellent value to their SOC. About 19% reported good value. The remaining 71% landed at some value or none at all. Eighteen months into AI deployment, that...

Threat actors are actively exploiting a critical security flaw in Everest Forms Pro, a WordPress plugin with about 4,000 active installations, to execute arbitrary code, leading to a complete site compromise. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-3300 (CVSS score: 9.8), a remote code execution bug impacting all versions of the plugin up to, and including, 1.9.12. A patch for the flaw was released on March 18, 2026, with version 1.9.13. "This is due to the Calculation Addon's process_filter() function concatenating user-submitted form field values into a PHP code string without proper escaping before passing it to eval()," Wordfence said . "The sanitize_text_field() function applied to input does not escape single quotes or other PHP code context characters. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject and execute arbitrary PHP code on the server by submitting a crafted value in any string-type form field (text, email, URL, select, radio) ...

Security researchers and the FBI are warning that a wave of FIFA-themed fraud is already hitting World Cup 2026 fans, days before the June 11 kickoff. Recent reports describe thousands of lookalike FIFA domains, banking malware hidden inside pirate streaming apps, and at least one operation that copies FIFA's login page well enough to take over real accounts. It is an obvious target. More than six million fans are expected across 16 cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and FIFA said it received more than 150 million ticket requests in the first 15 days, leaving the tournament around 30 times oversubscribed. Tickets are scarce, fans are anxious, and money is moving fast, which is exactly what fraud needs. One Operator, 300 Cloned FIFA Sites The most detailed findings come from Group-IB , which tracked more than 4,300 fraudulent FIFA domains registered since August 2025. At the center is a group it calls GHOST STADIUM , a Chinese-speaking, money-driven operation...

The threat actor known as PCPJack has hijacked cloud servers associated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to create a covert SMTP email relay network. "Compromised business servers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia were quietly converted into SMTP proxies, verified for mail relay capability, and synced to a downstream consumer every five minutes," Hunt.io said in a statement. "The infrastructure was still running when we found it." The threat intelligence company said it found source code, compiled binaries, deployment state logs, internet scanners, exploitation tooling, and a live Sliver configuration after the threat actor behind the operation left two open directories on a command-and-control (C2) server ("213.136.80[.]73") without any authentication. PCPJack was first discovered by SentinelOne in April 2026 after it identified a credential theft framework that specifically targets cloud services, while taking s...

Cisco has patched a bug in Unified Communications Manager that lets an unauthenticated attacker on the network write files to the box and, from there, climb to root. It is tracked as CVE-2026-20230 , and proof-of-concept exploit code is already public. Cisco's PSIRT says it has not seen the flaw used in attacks yet. The PoC shortens that runway. The flaw is a server-side request forgery. Unified CM and its Session Management Edition fail to validate certain HTTP requests properly, so a crafted request can push the server into writing arbitrary files onto the underlying OS. Those files are the foothold. Cisco says they can be used later to escalate to root, the top privilege on the system. That two-step is why the score and the rating disagree. The CVSS base is 8.6: it scores the file write (an integrity-only impact, no confidentiality or availability loss) but not the root escalation that follows. Cisco rated the advisory Critical anyway, since the end state is full root. ...

A security researcher found a flaw in Anthropic's Claude Code GitHub Action that let an attacker take over vulnerable public repositories running it, with nothing more than a single opened GitHub issue. Because Anthropic's own action repo used the same workflow, a working attack could have pushed malicious code into the action itself and onto the projects downstream that pull it. RyotaK of GMO Flatt Security reported the core bypass to Anthropic in January, and Anthropic fixed it within four days , with further hardening through the spring; the fixes are in claude-code-action v1.0.94. Anthropic rated the issues 7.8 under CVSS v4.0 and paid a bug bounty. Claude Code GitHub Actions drops Claude into CI/CD pipelines to triage issues, slap on labels, review pull requests, or run slash commands. By default, the workflow gets read and write access to a repo's code, issues, pull requests, discussions, and workflow files. Because those permissions are broad, the action is su...

Over the past several weeks, the cybersecurity community has been reminded how quickly frontier and agentic AI in defense networks can challenge our assumptions. When Anthropic's Claude Mythos model was made available to a limited set of organizations as a technical preview, it was reported that an unauthorized group claimed that it had gained access within hours. The incident, if true, was more than a possible breach. It was a warning. The potential impact of advanced AI on U.S. defense and intelligence networks is significant. As the U.S. government moves to deploy AI capabilities on classified networks, the opportunity is clear: advanced AI can help accelerate decision superiority for American forces . But the risks are expanding just as quickly, particularly as agentic AI begins to operate across sensitive networks, data environments, and mission workflows. AI adoption is not simply about deploying powerful models. It requires the right security, governance, and resilient...