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American educational technology company Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said it reached an "agreement" with a decentralized cybercrime extortion group after it breached its network and threatened to leak stolen information from thousands of schools and universities. In an update shared on Monday, the Utah-based firm said it "reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident," citing "concerns about the potential publication of data." In taking the controversial decision to pay a ransom to avoid a leak, the company said the agreement covers all its impacted customers and that the pilfered data was returned to it, along with digital confirmation of data destruction. It also said it has been informed that none of the company's customers will be separately extorted as a result of the hack. "While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cyber criminals, we believe it was important to take every step...

OpenAI has launched Daybreak , a new cybersecurity initiative that brings together frontier artificial intelligence (AI) model capabilities and Codex Security to help organizations identify and patch vulnerabilities before attackers find a way in using the same issues. "Daybreak combines the intelligence of OpenAI models, the extensibility of Codex as an agentic harness, and our partners across the security flywheel to help make the world safer for everyone," the AI upstart said . "Defenders can bring secure code review, threat modeling, patch validation, dependency risk analysis, detection, and remediation guidance into the everyday development loop so software becomes more resilient from the start." Like Anthropic's Mythos , the idea is to leverage AI to tilt the balance in favor of defenders and help detect and address security issues before they are found by bad actors. Access to the tooling remains tightly controlled for now, with OpenAI urging interest...

Apple on Monday officially released iOS 26.5 with support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to Rich Communication Services (RCS) in beta as part of a "cross-industry effort" to replace traditional SMS with a more secure alternative. To that end, E2EE RCS messaging is rolling out to iPhone users running iOS 26.5 with supported carriers and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. The feature is enabled by default for both new and existing conversations in both platforms. RCS is a modern, internet-based messaging protocol that allows Android and iPhone users to send high-resolution photos and videos, see typing indicators, and receive read receipts, features all typically present in instant messaging apps. It is built on an industry specification called the RCS Universal Profile . "When RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they can't be read while they're sent between devices," Apple said in a statement. "Users will know that a conv...

Checkmarx has confirmed that a modified version of the Jenkins AST plugin was published to the Jenkins Marketplace. "If you are using Checkmarx Jenkins AST plugin, you need to ensure that you are using the version 2.0.13-829.vc72453fa_1c16 that was published on December 17, 2025 or previously," the cybersecurity company said in a statement over the weekend. As of writing, Checkmarx has released 2.0.13-848.v76e89de8a_053 on both GitHub and the Jenkins Marketplace, although its incident update still notes that it's "in the process of publishing a new version of this plugin." It did not disclose how the malicious plugin version was published. The development is the latest attack orchestrated by TeamPCP targeting Checkmarx. It arrives a couple of weeks after the notorious cybercrime group was attributed to the compromise of its KICS Docker image, two VS Code extensions, and a GitHub Actions workflow to push credential-stealing malware. The breach, in turn, r...

A threat actor named Mr_Rot13 has been attributed to the exploitation of a recently disclosed critical cPanel flaw to deploy a backdoor codenamed Filemanager on compromised environments. The attack exploits CVE-2026-41940 , a vulnerability impacting cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) that could result in an authentication bypass and allow remote attackers to gain elevated control of the control panel. According to a new report from QiAnXin XLab, the security defect has been exploited by a number of threat actors shortly after its public disclosure late last month, resulting in malicious behaviors like cryptocurrency mining, ransomware, botnet propagation, and backdoor implantation. "Monitoring data shows that more than 2,000 attacker source IPs worldwide are currently involved in automated attacks and cybercrime activities targeting this vulnerability," XLab researchers said. "These IPs are distributed across multiple regions globally, primarily originating from Germ...

Google on Monday disclosed that it identified an unknown threat actor using a zero-day exploit that it said was likely developed with an artificial intelligence (AI) system, marking the first time the technology has been put to use in the wild in a malicious context for vulnerability discovery and exploit generation. The activity is said to be the work of cybercrime threat actors who appear to have collaborated together to plan what the tech giant described as a "mass vulnerability exploitation operation." "Our analysis of exploits associated with this campaign identified a zero-day vulnerability implemented in a Python script that enables the user to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) on a popular open-source, web-based system administration tool," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The tech giant said it worked with the impacted vendor to responsibly disclose the flaw and get it fixed in order to proactiv...

Rough Monday. Somebody poisoned a trusted download again, somebody else turned cloud servers into public housing, and a few crews are still getting into boxes with bugs that should’ve died years ago — the same old holes, same lazy access paths, same “how the hell is this still open” feeling. One report this week basically reads like a guy tripped over root access by accident and decided to stay there. The weird part is how normal this all sounds now. Fake updates. Quiet backdoors. Remote tools are used like skeleton keys. Forum rats swapping stolen access while defenders burn another weekend chasing logs and praying the weird traffic is just monitoring noise. The Internet’s held together with duct tape and bad sleep. Anyway, Monday recap time. Same fire. New smoke. ⚡ Threat of the Week Ivanti EPMM and Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS Flaws Under Attack —Ivanti warned customers that attackers have successfully weaponized CVE-2026-6973, an improper input validation defect in Endpoint Man...

Defending a network at 2 am looks a lot like this: an analyst copy-pasting a hash from a PDF into a SIEM query. A red team script is being rewritten by hand so the blue team can use it. A patch waiting on a change-approval window that's longer than the exploitation window itself. Nobody in that chain is incompetent . Every human is doing their job correctly. The problem is the system, its workflows, and its messy handoffs. In contrast, the attacker's clock has nearly disappeared.  In 2024, the mean time from a CVE being published to a working exploit was 56 days. By 2025, it had shrunk to 23 days. So far in 2026, it’s sitting at roughly 10 hours across 3,532 CVE-exploit pairs from CISA KEV, VulnCheck KEV, and ExploitDB. Figure 1. Today’s Vulnerability to Exploitation Windows is now 10 Hours The minor piece of good news is that the defender's clock has accelerated to run in hours . The really bad news is that the attacker's clock has leapfrogged past it and now run...

A malicious Hugging Face repository managed to take a spot in the platform's trending list by impersonating OpenAI's Privacy Filter open-weight model to deliver a Rust-based information stealer to Windows users. The project, named Open-OSS/privacy-filter , masqueraded as its legitimate counterpart released by OpenAI late last month ( openai/privacy-filter ), including copying the entire description verbatim to trick unsuspecting users into downloading it. Access to the malicious model has since been disabled by Hugging Face. Privacy Filter was unveiled in April 2026 by the artificial intelligence (AI) company as a way to detect and redact personally identifiable information (PII) in unstructured text with an aim to incorporate strong privacy and security protections into applications. "The repository had typosquatted OpenAI's legitimate Privacy Filter release, copied its model card nearly verbatim, and shipped a loader.py file that fetches and executes infostealer...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security vulnerability in Ollama that, if successfully exploited, could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to leak its entire process memory. The out-of-bounds read flaw, which likely impacts over 300,000 servers globally, is tracked as CVE-2026-7482 (CVSS score: 9.1). It has been codenamed   Bleeding Llama by Cyera. Ollama is a popular open-source framework that allows large language models (LLMs) to be run locally instead of on the cloud. On GitHub, the project has more than 171,000 stars and has been forked over 16,100 times. "Ollama before 0.17.1 contains a heap out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the GGUF model loader," according to a description of the flaw in CVE.org. "The /api/create endpoint accepts an attacker-supplied GGUF file in which the declared tensor offset and size exceed the file's actual length; during quantization in fs/ggml/gguf.go and server/quantization.go (WriteTo()), the ser...

cPanel has released updates to address three vulnerabilities in cPanel and Web Host Manager (WHM) that could be exploited to achieve privilege escalation, code execution, and denial-of-service. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2026-29201 (CVSS score: 4.3) - An insufficient input validation of the feature file name in the "feature::LOADFEATUREFILE" adminbin call that could result in an arbitrary file read. CVE-2026-29202 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An insufficient input validation of the "plugin" parameter in the "create_user API" call that could result in arbitrary Perl code execution on behalf of the already authenticated account's system user. CVE-2026-29203 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An unsafe symlink handling vulnerability that allows a user to modify access permissions of an arbitrary file using chmod, resulting in denial-of-service or possible privilege escalation. The shortcomings have been patched in the following versions - cPane...

Threat hunters have flagged a previously undocumented Brazilian banking trojan dubbed TCLBANKER that's capable of targeting 59 banking, fintech, and cryptocurrency platforms. The activity is being tracked by Elastic Security Labs under the moniker REF3076 . The malware family is assessed to be a major update of the Maverick  family, which is known to leverage a worm called SORVEPOTEL to spread via WhatsApp Web to a victim's contacts. The Maverick campaign is attributed to a threat cluster that Trend Micro calls Water Saci. At the core of the attack chain is a loader with robust anti-analysis capabilities that deploys two embedded modules: a full-featured banking trojan and a worm component that uses WhatsApp and Microsoft Outlook for propagation. "The observed infection chain bundles a malicious MSI installer inside a ZIP file," security researchers Jia Yu Chan, Daniel Stepanic, Seth Goodwin, and Terrance DeJesus said . "These MSI installer packages are abus...