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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new vulnerability in OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas web browser that could allow malicious actors to inject nefarious instructions into the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant's memory and run arbitrary code. "This exploit can allow attackers to infect systems with malicious code, grant themselves access privileges, or deploy malware," LayerX Security Co-Founder and CEO, Or Eshed, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attack, at its core, leverages a cross-site request forgery ( CSRF ) flaw that could be exploited to inject malicious instructions into ChatGPT's persistent memory. The corrupted memory can then persist across devices and sessions, permitting an attacker to conduct various actions, including seizing control of a user's account, browser, or connected systems, when a logged-in user attempts to use ChatGPT for legitimate purposes. Memory, first introduced by OpenAI in February 2024, is...

Security, trust, and stability — once the pillars of our digital world — are now the tools attackers turn against us. From stolen accounts to fake job offers, cybercriminals keep finding new ways to exploit both system flaws and human behavior. Each new breach proves a harsh truth: in cybersecurity, feeling safe can be far more dangerous than being alert. Here's how that false sense of security was broken again this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week Newly Patched Critical Microsoft WSUS Flaw Comes Under Attack — Microsoft released out-of-band security updates to patch a critical-severity Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) vulnerability that has since come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-59287 (CVSS score: 9.8), a remote code execution flaw in WSUS that was originally fixed by the tech giant as part of its Patch Tuesday update published last week. According to Eye Security and Huntress, the security flaw is being weaponized to drop a .N...

The ransomware group known as Qilin (aka Agenda, Gold Feather, and Water Galura) has claimed more than 40 victims every month since the start of 2025, barring January, with the number of postings on its data leak site touching a high of 100 cases in June. The development comes as the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation has emerged as one of the most active ransomware groups , accounting for 84 victims each in the months of August and September 2025. The Russian-speaking threat group emerged around July 2022. According to data compiled by Cisco Talos, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, and Germany are some of the countries most impacted by Qilin. The attacks have primarily singled out manufacturing (23%), professional and scientific services (18%), and wholesale trade (10%) sectors. Attacks mounted by Qilin affiliates have likely leveraged leaked administrative credentials on the dark web for initial access using a VPN interface, followed by performing RDP connections to th...

The newly released OpenAI ChatGPT Atlas web browser has been found to be susceptible to a prompt injection attack where its omnibox can be jailbroken by disguising a malicious prompt as a seemingly harmless URL to visit. "The omnibox (combined address/search bar) interprets input either as a URL to navigate to, or as a natural-language command to the agent," NeuralTrust said in a report published Friday. "We've identified a prompt injection technique that disguises malicious instructions to look like a URL, but that Atlas treats as high-trust 'user intent' text, enabling harmful actions." Last week, OpenAI launched Atlas as a web browser with built-in ChatGPT capabilities to assist users with web page summarization, inline text editing, and agentic functions. In the attack outlined by the artificial intelligence (AI) security company, an attacker can take advantage of the browser's lack of strict boundaries between trusted user input and untru...

The threat actors behind a large-scale, ongoing smishing campaign have been attributed to more than 194,000 malicious domains since January 1, 2024, targeting a broad range of services across the world, according to new findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. "Although these domains are registered through a Hong Kong-based registrar and use Chinese nameservers, the attack infrastructure is primarily hosted on popular U.S. cloud services," security researchers Reethika Ramesh, Zhanhao Chen, Daiping Liu, Chi-Wei Liu, Shehroze Farooqi, and Moe Ghasemisharif said . The activity has been attributed to a China-linked group known as the Smishing Triad , which is known to flood mobile devices with fraudulent toll violation and package misdelivery notices to trick users into taking immediate action and providing sensitive information. These campaigns have proven to be lucrative, allowing the threat actors to make more than $1 billion over the last three years, according to a re...

Microsoft on Thursday released out-of-band security updates to patch a critical-severity Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) vulnerability with a proof-of-concept (Poc) exploit publicly available and has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-59287 (CVSS score: 9.8), a remote code execution flaw in WSUS that was originally fixed by the tech giant as part of its Patch Tuesday update published last week. Three security researchers, MEOW, f7d8c52bec79e42795cf15888b85cbad, and Markus Wulftange with CODE WHITE GmbH, have been acknowledged for discovering and reporting the bug. The shortcoming concerns a case of deserialization of untrusted data in WSUS that allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. It's worth noting that the vulnerability does not impact Windows servers that do not have the WSUS Server Role enabled. In a hypothetical attack scenario, a remote, unauthenticated attacker could send a crafted even...

A Pakistan-nexus threat actor has been observed targeting Indian government entities as part of spear-phishing attacks designed to deliver a Golang-based malware known as DeskRAT . The activity, observed in August and September 2025 by Sekoia, has been attributed to Transparent Tribe (aka APT36), a state-sponsored hacking group known to be active since at least 2013. It also builds upon a prior campaign disclosed by CYFIRMA in August 2025. The attack chains involve sending phishing emails containing a ZIP file attachment, or in some cases, a link pointing to an archive hosted on legitimate cloud services like Google Drive. Present within the ZIP file is a malicious Desktop file embedding commands to display a decoy PDF ("CDS_Directive_Armed_Forces.pdf") using Mozilla Firefox while simultaneously executing the main payload. Both the artifacts are pulled from an external server "modgovindia[.]com" and executed. Like before, the campaign is designed to target BO...

Does your organization suffer from a cybersecurity perception gap? Findings from the  Bitdefender 2025 Cybersecurity Assessment suggest the answer is probably "yes" — and many leaders may not even realize it. This disconnect matters. Small differences in perception today can evolve into major blind spots tomorrow. After all, perception influences what organizations prioritize, where they allocate resources, and how they respond in critical moments. Confidence at the Top, Caution on the Ground Bitdefender's latest assessment surveyed  1,200 cybersecurity and IT professionals , and at first glance, the results suggest optimism. An impressive  93% say they are "somewhat" or "very confident" in their ability to manage cyber risk as the attack surface expands. But dig deeper, and the optimism begins to split. Nearly half ( 45% ) of C-level respondents — including CISOs and CIOs — describe themselves as "very confident" in their organization's readiness. Yet among mid-l...

A malicious network of YouTube accounts has been observed publishing and promoting videos that lead to malware downloads, essentially abusing the popularity and trust associated with the video hosting platform for propagating malicious payloads. Active since 2021, the network has published more than 3,000 malicious videos to date, with the volume of such videos tripling since the start of the year. It has been codenamed the YouTube Ghost Network by Check Point. Google has since stepped in to remove a majority of these videos. The campaign leverages hacked accounts and replaces their content with "malicious" videos that are centred around pirated software and Roblox game cheats to infect unsuspecting users searching for them with stealer malware. Some of these videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views, ranging from 147,000 to 293,000. "This operation took advantage of trust signals, including views, likes, and comments, to make malicious content seem safe,...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a self-propagating worm that spreads via Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions on the Open VSX Registry and the Microsoft Extension Marketplace, underscoring how developers have become a prime target for attacks. The sophisticated threat, codenamed GlassWorm by Koi Security, is the second such supply chain attack to hit the DevOps space within a span of a month after the Shai-Hulud worm that targeted the npm ecosystem in mid-September 2025. What makes the attack stand out is the use of the Solana blockchain for command-and-control (C2), making the infrastructure resilient to takedown efforts. It also uses Google Calendar as a C2 fallback mechanism. Another novel aspect is that the GlassWorm campaign relies on "invisible Unicode characters that make malicious code literally disappear from code editors," Idan Dardikman said in a technical report. "The attacker used Unicode variation selectors – special characters that are...

Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been attributed to a new wave of attacks targeting European companies active in the defense industry as part of a long-running campaign known as Operation Dream Job . "Some of these [companies] are heavily involved in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sector, suggesting that the operation may be linked to North Korea's current efforts to scale up its drone program," ESET security researchers Peter Kálnai and Alexis Rapin said in a report shared with The Hacker News. It's assessed that the end goal of the campaign is to plunder proprietary information and manufacturing know-how using malware families such as ScoringMathTea and MISTPEN. The Slovak cybersecurity company said it observed the campaign starting in late March 2025. Some of the targeted entities include a metal engineering company in Southeastern Europe, a manufacturer of aircraft components in Central Europe, and a defense company in Central Europe. While Sc...

AI is everywhere—and your company wants in. Faster products, smarter systems, fewer bottlenecks. But if you're in security, that excitement often comes with a sinking feeling. Because while everyone else is racing ahead, you're left trying to manage a growing web of AI agents you didn't create, can't fully see, and weren't designed to control. Join our upcoming webinar and learn how to make AI security work with you, not against you . The Quiet Crisis No One Talks About Did you know most companies now have 100 AI agents for every one human employee? Even more shocking? 99% of those AI identities are completely unmanaged. No oversight. No lifecycle controls. And every one of them could be a backdoor waiting to happen. It's not your fault. Traditional tools weren't built for this new AI world. But the risks are real—and growing. Let's Change That. Together. In our free webinar, " Turning Controls into Accelerators of AI Adoption ," we'll help you flip the script. Th...