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Microsoft has disclosed that a privilege escalation and a denial-of-service flaw in Defender has come under active exploitation in the wild. The former, tracked as CVE-2026-41091 , is rated 7.8 on the CVSS scoring system. Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. "Improper link resolution before file access ('link following') in Microsoft Defender allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally," Microsoft said in an advisory. The second vulnerability under exploitation is CVE-2026-45498 (CVSS score: 4.0), a denial-of-service bug impacting Defender. The two vulnerabilities have been addressed in Microsoft Defender Antimalware Platform versions 1.1.26040.8 and 4.18.26040.7, respectively. The tech giant noted that systems that have disabled Microsoft Defender are not susceptible to the vulnerability, adding that no action is required to install the update since it automatically updates malware definition...

Consider a cached access key on a single Windows machine. It got there the way most cached credentials do - a user logged in, and the key stored itself automatically. Standard AWS behavior. No one misconfigured anything or violated a policy. Yet that single key, which was easily accessible to a minor-league attacker, could have opened a path to some 98% of entities in the company's cloud environment - nearly every critical workload the business depended on.  This real-world exposure was caught before an attacker could use it. But the takeaway is clear: identity itself, and every permission it carries, has become the attack path. Your environment runs on identity. Active Directory, cloud identity providers, service accounts, machine identities, and AI agents - all of these carry permissions that span systems and trust boundaries. A single stolen credential hands the attacker a legitimate identity - along with every permission attached to it.  Despite this, most security pro...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a vulnerability in the Linux kernel that remained undetected for nine years. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-46333 (CVSS score: 5.5), is a case of improper privilege management that could permit an unprivileged local user to disclose sensitive files and execute arbitrary commands as root on default installations of several major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. It's also codenamed ssh-keysign-pwn. According to Qualys, which discovered the flaw, the problem is rooted in the kernel's __ptrace_may_access() function and was introduced in November 2016. "The primitive is reliable and turns any local shell into a path to root or to sensitive credential material," Saeed Abbasi, senior manager of Threat Research Unit at Qualys, said . Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit a local attacker to disclose /etc/shadow and host private keys under /etc/ssh/*_key, as well as execute arbitrary...

GitHub on Wednesday officially confirmed that the breach of its internal repositories was the result of a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned version of the Nx Console Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension.  The development comes as the Nx team revealed that the extension, nrwl.angular-console , was breached after one of its developers' systems was hacked in the wake of the recent TanStack supply chain attack. Other companies that were impacted by the TanStack compromise include OpenAI, Mistral AI , and Grafana Labs . "We have no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub's internal repositories, such as our customer's own enterprises, organizations, and repositories," Alexis Wales, Chief Information Security Officer of GitHub, said in a statement. "Some of GitHub's internal repositories contain information from customers, for example, excerpts of support interactions. If any impact is discov...

Drupal has released security updates for a "highly critical" security vulnerability in Drupal Core that could be exploited by attackers to achieve remote code execution, privilege escalation, or information disclosure. The vulnerability, now tracked as CVE-2026-9082 , carries a CVSS score of 6.5 out of 10.0, per CVE.org. Drupal said the vulnerability resides in a database abstraction API that is used in Drupal Core to validate queries and ensure they are sanitized against SQL injection attacks. "A vulnerability in this API allows an attacker to send specially crafted requests, resulting in arbitrary SQL injection for sites using PostgreSQL databases," it said . "This can lead to information disclosure, and in some cases privilege escalation, remote code execution, or other attacks." Drupal noted the security flaw can be exploited by anonymous users, and impacts only sites that use PostgreSQL. The following versions address the issue - Drupal 11.3.10 ...

Microsoft has unveiled two new open-source tools called RAMPART and Clarity to assist developers in better testing the security of artificial intelligence (AI) agents. RAMPART , short for Risk Assessment and Measurement Platform for Agentic Red Teaming, functions as a Pytest-native safety and security testing framework for writing and running safety and security tests for AI agents, covering both adversarial and benign issues, as well as various harm categories. Users can write test cases to attack or probe an AI agent to explore possible safety violations like cross-prompt injections, where untrusted data reaches an AI system indirectly via a data source (e.g., email, file, or a web page) processed by it, or unintended behavioral regressions and data exfiltration. RAMPART then evaluates the outcome of those tests and reports the results. All it needs is an adapter that connects an agent to the test suite. The tool builds on PyRIT (short for Python Risk Identification Tool), ...

Microsoft on Tuesday said it disrupted a malware-signing-as-a-service (MSaaS) operation that weaponized the company's Artifact Signing system to deliver malicious code and conduct ransomware and other attacks, compromising thousands of machines and networks across the world. The tech giant attributed the activity to a threat actor it calls Fox Tempest , which it said offered the MSaaS scheme to allow cybercriminals to disguise malware as legitimate software. The threat actor has been active since May 2025. The seizure effort has been codenamed OpFauxSign . "To disrupt the service, we seized Fox Tempest's website signspace[.]cloud, took offline hundreds of the virtual machines running the operation, and blocked access to a site hosting the underlying code," Steven Masada, assistant general counsel at Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, said . Microsoft noted that the operation enabled the deployment of Rhysida ransomware by threat actors such as Vanilla Tempe...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged fresh activity from a China-aligned threat actor known as Webworm in 2025, deploying custom backdoors that employ Discord and Microsoft Graph API for command-and-control (C2 or C&C) communications. Webworm, first publicly documented by Broadcom-owned Symantec in September 2022, is assessed to be active since at least 2022, targeting government agencies and enterprises spanning IT services, aerospace, and electric power sectors in Russia, Georgia, Mongolia, and several other Asian nations. Attacks mounted by the group have leveraged remote access trojans (RATs) like Trochilus RAT, Gh0st RAT, and 9002 RAT (aka Hydraq and McRat). The threat actor is said to overlap with China-nexus clusters tracked as FishMonger (aka Aquatic Panda), SixLittleMonkeys , and Space Pirates . SixLittleMonkeys is best known for deploying Gh0st RAT and a RAT called Mikroceen targeting entities in Central Asia, Russia, Belarus, and Mongolia. "In recent ye...

New Industry Data Just Released Suggests Not. On May 19th, 2026, Orchid Security released the results of our Identity Gap: Snapshot 2026. Among the findings, "identity dark matter" (the unseen, unmanaged elements of identity) now overshadows the visible elements 57% vs. 43%. And it couldn't have occurred at a worse time, with enterprises embracing Agent AI with both arms (and unfortunately, as Orchid co-founder Robert Wiseman explains, more than one eye closed). 

GitHub on Tuesday said it's investigating unauthorized access to its internal repositories after the notorious threat actor known as TeamPCP listed the platform's source code and internal organizations for sale on a cybercrime forum. "While we currently have no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub's internal repositories (such as our customers' enterprises, organizations, and repositories), we are closely monitoring our infrastructure for follow-on activity," the Microsoft-owned subsidiary said . The company also noted that it will notify customers via established incident response and notification channels if any impact is discovered. The development comes after TeamPCP, a threat actor behind a string of software supply chain attacks targeting open-source packages, listed GitHub's source code for sale for an asking price of no less than $50,000. The alleged data dump is said to include about 4,000 repositories. ...

AI-generated lookalike domains are now embedded inside the third-party scripts running on your web properties. Here's why your current stack can't see them, and what detection actually requires. Download the CISO Expert Guide to Typosquatting in the AI Era → TL;DR  Typosquatting is no longer a user problem. Attackers now embed lookalike domains inside legitimate third-party scripts. No mistyped URL required, no server breach needed. AI broke the economics of defense. LLMs generate thousands of convincing domain variants in minutes; full campaign deployment takes under ten. Malicious package uploads jumped 156% last year. Manual vetting is dead. Your security stack can't see this. Firewalls, WAFs, EDR, and CSP have no visibility into what approved scripts do once they execute in the browser. The Trust Wallet attack proved it. $8.5M stolen in 48 hours through a trojanized Chrome extension. No alert fired, not because something failed, but because nothing...

Microsoft on Tuesday released a mitigation for a BitLocker bypass vulnerability named YellowKey following its public disclosure last week. The zero-day flaw, now tracked as CVE-2026-45585 , carries a CVSS score of 6.8. It has been described as a BitLocker security feature bypass. "Microsoft is aware of a security feature bypass vulnerability in Windows publicly referred to as 'YellowKey,'" the tech giant said in an advisory. "The proof of concept for this vulnerability has been made public, violating coordinated vulnerability best practices." The issue impacts Windows 11 version 26H1 for x64-based Systems, Windows 11 Version 24H2 for x64-based Systems, Windows 11 Version 25H2 for x64-based Systems, Windows Server 2025, and Windows Server 2025 (Server Core installation). YellowKey was disclosed by a security researcher named Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse). It essentially involves placing specially crafted 'FsTx' files on a USB driv...