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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an artificial intelligence (AI) powered platform called AkiraBot that's used to spam website chats, comment sections, and contact forms to promote dubious search engine optimization (SEO) services such as Akira and ServicewrapGO. "AkiraBot has targeted more than 400,000 websites and successfully spammed at least 80,000 websites since September 2024," SentinelOne researchers Alex Delamotte and Jim Walter said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The bot uses OpenAI to generate custom outreach messages based on the purpose of the website." Targets of the activity include contact forms and chat widgets present in small to medium-sized business websites, with the framework sharing spam content generated using OpenAI's large language models (LLMs). What makes the "sprawling" Python-based tool stand apart is its ability to craft content such that it can bypass spam filters. It's believe...

Lovable , a generative artificial intelligence (AI) powered platform that allows for creating full-stack web applications using text-based prompts, has been found to be the most susceptible to jailbreak attacks, allowing novice and aspiring cybercrooks to set up lookalike credential harvesting pages. "As a purpose-built tool for creating and deploying web apps, its capabilities line up perfectly with every scammer's wishlist," Guardio Labs' Nati Tal said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "From pixel-perfect scam pages to live hosting, evasion techniques, and even admin dashboards to track stolen data – Lovable didn't just participate, it performed. No guardrails, no hesitation." The technique has been codenamed VibeScamming – a play on the term vibe coding, which refers to an AI-dependent programming technique to produce software by describing the problem statement in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for codin...

A Chinese-affiliated threat actor known for its cyber-attacks in Asia has been observed exploiting a security flaw in security software from ESET to deliver a previously undocumented malware codenamed TCESB . "Previously unseen in ToddyCat attacks, [TCESB] is designed to stealthily execute payloads in circumvention of protection and monitoring tools installed on the device," Kaspersky said in an analysis published this week. ToddyCat is the name given to a threat activity cluster that has targeted several entities in Asia, with attacks dating all the way back to at least December 2020. Last year, the Russian cybersecurity vendor detailed the hacking group's use of various tools to maintain persistent access to compromised environments and harvest data on an "industrial scale" from organizations located in the Asia-Pacific region. Kaspersky said its investigation into ToddyCat-related incidents in early 2024 unearthed a suspicious DLL file ("version...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl report for 2025 reveals the alarming scale of secrets exposure in modern software environments. Driving this is the rapid growth of non-human identities (NHIs), which have been outnumbering human users for years. We need to get ahead of it and prepare security measures and governance for these machine identities as they continue to be deployed, creating an unprecedented level of security risk. This report reveals an astounding 23.77 million new secrets were leaked on GitHub in 2024 alone. This is a 25% surge from the previous year. This dramatic increase highlights how the proliferation of non-human identities (NHIs), such as service accounts, microservices, and AI agents, are rapidly expanding the attack surface for threat actors. The Non-Human Identity Crisis NHI secrets, including API keys, service accounts, and Kubernetes workers, now outnumber human identities by at least 45-to-1 in DevOps environments. These machine-based credentials...

Microsoft has revealed that a now-patched security flaw impacting the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) was exploited as a zero-day in ransomware attacks aimed at a small number of targets. "The targets include organizations in the information technology (IT) and real estate sectors of the United States, the financial sector in Venezuela, a Spanish software company, and the retail sector in Saudi Arabia," the tech giant said . The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-29824, a privilege escalation bug in CLFS that could be exploited to achieve SYSTEM privileges. It was fixed by Redmond as part of its Patch Tuesday update for April 2025. Microsoft is tracking the activity and the post-compromise exploitation of CVE-2025-29824 under the moniker Storm-2460, with the threat actors also leveraging a malware named PipeMagic to deliver the exploit as well as ransomware payloads. The exact initial access vector used in the attacks is currently not known. However, the threa...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a critical security flaw impacting Gladinet CentreStack to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-30406 (CVSS score: 9.0), concerns a case of a hard-coded cryptographic key that could be abused to achieve remote code execution. It has been addressed in version 16.4.10315.56368 released on April 3, 2025. "Gladinet CentreStack contains a use of hard-coded cryptographic key vulnerability in the way that the application manages keys used for ViewState integrity verification," CISA said. "Successful exploitation allows an attacker to forge ViewState payloads for server-side deserialization, allowing for remote code execution." Specifically, the shortcoming is rooted in the use of a hard-code "machineKey" in the IIS web.config file, which enables threat actors with knowl...

Microsoft has released security fixes to address a massive set of 125 flaws affecting its software products, including one vulnerability that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 125 vulnerabilities, 11 are rated Critical, 112 are rated Important, and two are rated Low in severity. Forty-nine of these vulnerabilities are classified as privilege escalation, 34 as remote code execution, 16 as information disclosure, and 14 as denial-of-service (DoS) bugs. The updates are aside from the 22 flaws the company patched in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The vulnerability that has been flagged as under active attack is an elevation of privilege (EoP) flaw impacting the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver ( CVE-2025-29824 , CVSS score: 7.8) that stems from a use-after-free scenario, allowing an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally. CVE-2025-29824 is the sixth EoP vulnerability to be di...

Adobe has released security updates to fix a fresh set of security flaws, including multiple critical-severity bugs in ColdFusion versions 2025, 2023 and 2021 that could result in arbitrary file read and code execution. Of the 30 flaws in the product, 11 are rated Critical in severity - CVE-2025-24446 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An improper input validation vulnerability that could result in an arbitrary file system read CVE-2025-24447 (CVSS score: 9.1) - A deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability that could result in arbitrary code execution CVE-2025-30281 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An improper access control vulnerability that could result in an arbitrary file system read CVE-2025-30282 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An improper authentication vulnerability that could result in arbitrary code execution CVE-2025-30284 (CVSS score: 8.0) - A deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability that could result in arbitrary code execution CVE-2025-30285 (CVSS score: 8.0) - A deserialization of ...

Fortinet has released security updates to address a critical security flaw impacting FortiSwitch that could permit an attacker to make unauthorized password changes. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-48887 , carries a CVSS score of 9.3 out of a maximum of 10.0. "An unverified password change vulnerability [CWE-620] in FortiSwitch GUI may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to modify admin passwords via a specially crafted request," Fortinet said in an advisory released today. The shortcoming impacts the following versions - FortiSwitch 7.6.0 (Upgrade to 7.6.1 or above) FortiSwitch 7.4.0 through 7.4.4 (Upgrade to 7.4.5 or above) FortiSwitch 7.2.0 through 7.2.8 (Upgrade to 7.2.9 or above) FortiSwitch 7.0.0 through 7.0.10 (Upgrade to 7.0.11 or above), and FortiSwitch 6.4.0 through 6.4.14 (Upgrade to 6.4.15 or above) The network security company said the security hole was internally discovered and reported by Daniel Rozeboom of the FortiSwitch web UI develo...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched security flaw in the Amazon EC2 Simple Systems Manager (SSM) Agent that, if successfully exploited, could permit an attacker to achieve privilege escalation and code execution. The vulnerability could permit an attacker to create directories in unintended locations on the filesystem, execute arbitrary scripts with root privileges, and likely escalate privileges or perform malicious activities by writing files to sensitive areas of the system, Cymulate said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Amazon SSM Agent is a component of Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables administrators to remotely manage, configure, and execute commands on EC2 instances and on-premises servers.  The software processes commands and tasks defined in SSM Documents , which can include one or more plugins, each of which is responsible for carrying out specific tasks, such as running shell scripts or automating deployment or configura...

Threat actors have been observed distributing malicious payloads such as cryptocurrency miner and clipper malware via SourceForge , a popular software hosting service, under the guise of cracked versions of legitimate applications like Microsoft Office. "One such project, officepackage, on the main website sourceforge.net, appears harmless enough, containing Microsoft Office add-ins copied from a legitimate GitHub project," Kaspersky said in a report published today. "The description and contents of officepackage provided below were also taken from GitHub." While every project created on sourceforge.net gets assigned a "<project>.sourceforge.io" domain name, the Russian cybersecurity company found that the domain for officepackage, "officepackage.sourceforge[.]io," displays a long list of Microsoft Office applications and corresponding links to download them in Russian. On top of that, hovering over the download button reveals a seemi...