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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a high-severity security flaw impacting Broadcom VMware Tools and VMware Aria Operations to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-41244 (CVSS score: 7.8), which could be exploited by an attacker to attain root level privileges on a susceptible system. "Broadcom VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools contain a privilege defined with unsafe actions vulnerability," CISA said in an alert. "A malicious local actor with non-administrative privileges having access to a VM with VMware Tools installed and managed by Aria Operations with SDMP enabled may exploit this vulnerability to escalate privileges to root on the same VM." The vulnerability was addressed by Broadcom-owned VMware last month, but not before it was exploited as a zero-day by unknown threat actors since mid-Oct...

A design firm is editing a new campaign video on a MacBook Pro. The creative director opens a collaboration app that quietly requests microphone and camera permissions. MacOS is supposed to flag that, but in this case, the checks are loose. The app gets access anyway. On another Mac in the same office, file sharing is enabled through an old protocol called SMB version one. It's fast and convenient—but outdated and vulnerable. Attackers can exploit it in minutes if the endpoint is exposed to the internet. These are the kinds of configuration oversights that happen every day, even in organizations that take security seriously. They're not failures of hardware or antivirus software. They're configuration gaps that open doors to attackers, and they often go unnoticed because nobody is looking for them. That's where Defense Against Configurations (DAC) comes in. Misconfigurations are a gift to attackers: default settings left open, remote access that should be off (like outdated netwo...

Google on Thursday revealed that the scam defenses built into Android safeguard users around the world from more than 10 billion suspected malicious calls and messages every month. The tech giant also said it has blocked over 100 million suspicious numbers from using Rich Communication Services (RCS), an evolution of the SMS protocol, thereby preventing scams before they could even be sent. In recent years, the company has adopted various safeguards to combat phone call scams and automatically filter known spam using on-device artificial intelligence and move them automatically to the "spam & blocked" folder in the Google Messages app for Android. Earlier this month, Google also globally rolled out safer links in Google Messages, warning users when they attempt to click on any URLs in a message flagged as spam and step them visiting the potentially harmful website, unless the message is marked as "not spam." Google said its analysis of user-submitted rep...

The open-source command-and-control (C2) framework known as AdaptixC2 is being used by a growing number of threat actors, some of whom are related to Russian ransomware gangs. AdaptixC2 is an emerging extensible post-exploitation and adversarial emulation framework designed for penetration testing. While the server component is written in Golang, the GUI Client is written in C++ QT for cross-platform compatibility. It comes with a wide range of features, including fully encrypted communications, command execution, credential and screenshot managers, and a remote terminal, among others. An early iteration was publicly released by a GitHub user named " RalfHacker " ( @HackerRalf on X) in August 2024, who describes themselves as a penetration tester, red team operator, and "MalDev" (short for malware developer). In recent months, AdaptixC2 has been adopted by various hacking groups, including threat actors tied to the Fog and Akira ransomware operations, as ...

A severe vulnerability disclosed in Chromium's Blink rendering engine can be exploited to crash many Chromium-based browsers within a few seconds. Security researcher Jose Pino, who disclosed details of the flaw, has codenamed it Brash . "It allows any Chromium browser to collapse in 15-60 seconds by exploiting an architectural flaw in how certain DOM operations are managed," Pino said in a technical breakdown of the shortcoming. At its core, Brash stems from the lack of rate limiting on " document.title " API updates, which, in turn, allows for bombarding millions of [document object model] mutations per second, causing the web browser to crash, as well as degrade system performance as a result of devoting CPU resources to this process. The attack plays out in three steps - Hash generation or preparation phase, where the attacker preloads into memory 100 unique hexadecimal strings of 512 characters that act as a seed for the browser tab title changes ...

Security doesn't fail at the point of breach. It fails at the point of impact.  That line set the tone for this year's Picus Breach and Simulation (BAS) Summit , where researchers, practitioners, and CISOs all echoed the same theme: cyber defense is no longer about prediction. It's about proof. When a new exploit drops, scanners scour the internet in minutes. Once attackers gain a foothold, lateral movement often follows just as fast. If your controls haven't been tested against the exact techniques in play, you're not defending, you're hoping things don't go seriously pear-shaped. That's why pressure builds long before an incident report is written. The same hour an exploit hits Twitter, a boardroom wants answers. As one speaker put it, "You can't tell the board, 'I'll have an answer next week.' We have hours, not days." BAS has outgrown its compliance roots and become the daily voltage test of cybersecurity, the current you run through your stack to see what actuall...

The comfort zone in cybersecurity is gone. Attackers are scaling down, focusing tighter, and squeezing more value from fewer, high-impact targets. At the same time, defenders face growing blind spots — from spoofed messages to large-scale social engineering. This week's findings show how that shrinking margin of safety is redrawing the threat landscape. Here's what's making headlines. Hijack Loader expands its reach in Latin America LATAM Targeted by PureHVNC Phishing emails containing SVG file attachments targeting Colombian, Spanish-speaking individuals with themes relating to the Attorney General's office of Colombia have been used to deliver PureHVNC RAT . "The emails entice the user to download an 'official document' from the judicial information system, which starts the infection chain of executing a Hijack Loader executable that leads to the PureHVNC Remote Access Trojan (RAT)," IBM X-Force said . The activity ...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered yet another active software supply chain attack campaign targeting the npm registry with over 100 malicious packages that can steal authentication tokens, CI/CD secrets, and GitHub credentials from developers' machines. The campaign has been codenamed PhantomRaven by Koi Security. The activity is assessed to have begun in August 2025, when the first packages were uploaded to the repository. It has since ballooned to a total of 126 npm libraries, attracting more than 86,000 installs. Some of the packages have also been flagged by the DevSecOps company DCODX -  op-cli-installer (486 Downloads) unused-imports (1,350 Downloads) badgekit-api-client (483 Downloads) polyfill-corejs3 (475 Downloads) eslint-comments (936 Downloads) What makes the attack stand out is the attacker's pattern of hiding the malicious code in dependencies by pointing to a custom HTTP URL, causing npm to fetch them from an untrusted website (in this case,...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a spike in automated attacks targeting PHP servers, IoT devices, and cloud gateways by various botnets such as Mirai , Gafgyt , and Mozi . "These automated campaigns exploit known CVE vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations to gain control over exposed systems and expand botnet networks," the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity company said PHP servers have emerged as the most prominent targets of these attacks owing to the widespread use of content management systems like WordPress and Craft CMS . This, in turn, creates a large attack surface as many PHP deployments can suffer from misconfigurations, outdated plugins and themes, and insecure file storage. Some of the prominent weaknesses in PHP frameworks that have been exploited by threat actors are listed below - CVE-2017-9841 - A Remote code execution vulnerability in PHPUnit CVE-2021-3129 - A Re...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new security issue in agentic web browsers like OpenAI ChatGPT Atlas that exposes underlying artificial intelligence (AI) models to context poisoning attacks. In the attack devised by AI security company SPLX, a bad actor can set up websites that serve different content to browsers and AI crawlers run by ChatGPT and Perplexity. The technique has been codenamed AI-targeted cloaking . The approach is a variation of search engine cloaking, which refers to the practice of presenting one version of a web page to users and a different version to search engine crawlers with the end goal of manipulating search rankings. The only difference in this case is that attackers optimize for AI crawlers from various providers by means of a trivial user agent check that leads to content delivery manipulation. "Because these systems rely on direct retrieval, whatever content is served to them becomes ground truth in AI Overviews, summaries, or autonom...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) . It's no longer a future concept—it's here, and it's already reshaping how teams operate. AI's capabilities are profound: it's speeding up audits, flagging critical risks faster, and drastically cutting down on time-consuming manual work. This leads to greater efficiency, higher accuracy, and a more proactive GRC function. However, this powerful shift introduces significant new challenges. AI brings its own set of risks, including potential bias, dangerous blind spots, and regulatory gaps that are only beginning to be addressed by governing bodies. Staying ahead of this curve—not just struggling to keep up—requires clear, practical knowledge. Don't Just Stay Afloat—Master the Change To help you navigate this complex landscape, we invite you to our free, high-impact webinar, " The Future of AI in GRC: Opportunities, Risks, and Practical Insights . " This se...

BeyondTrust's annual cybersecurity predictions point to a year where old defenses will fail quietly, and new attack vectors will surge. Introduction The next major breach won't be a phished password. It will be the result of a massive, unmanaged identity debt. This debt takes many forms: it's the "ghost" identity from a 2015 breach lurking in your IAM, the privilege sprawl from thousands of new AI agents bloating your attack surface , or the automated account poisoning that exploits weak identity verification in financial systems. All of these vectors—physical, digital, new, and old—are converging on one single point of failure: identity .  Based on analysis from BeyondTrust's cybersecurity experts, here are three critical identity-based threats that will define the coming year:  1. Agentic AI Emerges as the Ultimate Attack Vector By 2026, agentic AI will be connected to nearly every technology we operate, effectively becoming the new middleware for most organizations. ...