The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

The hardest part of cybersecurity isn't the technology, it’s the people. Every major breach you’ve read about lately usually starts the same way: one employee, one clever email, and one "Patient Zero" infection. In 2026, hackers are using AI to make these "first clicks" nearly impossible to spot. If a single laptop gets compromised on your watch, do you have a plan to stop it from taking down the whole company? Register for the Webinar: The Patient Zero Playbook What is "Patient Zero"? In medicine, Patient Zero is the first person to carry a disease into a population. In cybersecurity, it’s the first device an attacker hits. Once they are "in," they don't stay there—they move fast to find your data, your passwords, and your backups. What You Will Learn Thisisn't a boring lecture. It is a technical deep dive into how modern breaches start and how to kill them instantly. We are covering: The AI Phish: How attackers use gene...

A previously undocumented Linux implant codenamed Quasar Linux RAT (QLNX) is targeting developers' systems to establish a silent foothold as well as facilitate a broad range of post-compromise functionality, such as credential harvesting, keylogging, file manipulation, clipboard monitoring, and network tunneling. "QLNX targets developers and DevOps credentials across the software supply chain," Trend Micro researchers Aliakbar Zahravi and Ahmed Mohamed Ibrahim said in a technical analysis of the malware. "Its credential harvester extracts secrets from high-value files such as .npmrc (npm tokens), .pypirc (PyPI credentials), .git-credentials, .aws/credentials, .kube/config, .docker/config.json, .vault-token, Terraform credentials, GitHub CLI tokens, and .env files. The compromise of these assets could allow the operator to push malicious packages to NPM or PyPI registries, access cloud infrastructure, or pivot through CI/CD pipelines." The malware's ab...

The dark secret of enterprise security operations is that defenders have quietly institutionalized the practice of not looking. This is not just anecdotal, but rather backed by a recent report investigating more than 25 million security alerts, including informational and low-severity, across live enterprise environments.  The dataset behind these findings includes 10 million monitored endpoints and identities, 82,000 forensic endpoint investigations including live memory scans, 180 million files analyzed, and telemetry from 7 million IP addresses, 3 million domains and URLs, and over 550,000 phishing emails. The patterns that emerge from this data tell a consistent story. Threat actors are exploiting the predictable gaps created by constrained, severity-based security operations, and they are doing it systematically. Understanding where those gaps actually live requires looking at the full alert picture, starting with the category most teams have been conditioned to ignore. Th...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Linux backdoor named PamDOORa that's being advertised on the Rehub Russian cybercrime forum for $1,600 by a threat actor called "darkworm." The backdoor is designed as a Pluggable Authentication Module ( PAM )-based post-exploitation toolkit that enables persistent SSH access by means of a magic password and specific TCP port combination. It's also capable of harvesting credentials from all legitimate users who authenticate through the compromised system. "The tool, called PamDOORa, is a new PAM-based backdoor, designed to serve as a post-exploitation backdoor, enabling authentication to servers via OpenSSH," Flare.io researcher Assaf Morag said in a technical report. "Allegedly this would remain persistent on Linux systems (x86_64)." PamDOORa is the second Linux backdoor targeting the PAM stack after Plague . PAM is a security framework in Unix/Linux operating systems that grants syst...

Details have emerged about a new, unpatched local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability impacting the Linux kernel. Dubbed Dirty Frag , it has been described as a successor to Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431, CVSS score: 7.8), a recently disclosed LPE flaw impacting the Linux kernel that has since come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability was reported to Linux kernel maintainers on April 30, 2026. "Dirty Frag is a vulnerability (class) that achieves root privileges on most Linux distributions by chaining the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability," security researcher Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel) said in a write-up. "Dirty Frag is a case that extends the bug class to which Dirty Pipe and Copy Fail belong. Because it is a deterministic logic bug that does not depend on a timing window, no race condition is required, the kernel does not panic when the exploit fails, and the success rate is very high." T...

Ivanti is warning that a new security flaw impacting Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) has been explored in limited attacks in the wild. The high-severity vulnerability, CVE-2026-6973 (CVSS score: 7.2), is a case of improper input validation affecting EPMM before versions 12.6.1.1, 12.7.0.1, and 12.8.0.1. It allows "a remotely authenticated user with administrative access to achieve remote code execution," Ivanti said in an advisory released today. "We are aware of a very limited number of customers exploited with CVE-2026-6973. Successful exploitation requires Admin authentication. If customers followed Ivanti's recommendation in January to rotate credentials if you were exploited with CVE-2026-1281 and CVE-2026-1340 , then your risk of exploitation from CVE-2026-6973 is significantly reduced." It's currently not known who is behind the exploitation efforts, if any of those attacks were successful, and what the end goals of the attacks were. The devel...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new credential theft framework dubbed PCPJack that targets exposed cloud infrastructure and ousts any artifacts linked to TeamPCP from the environments. "The toolset harvests credentials from cloud, container, developer, productivity, and financial services, then exfiltrates the data through attacker-controlled infrastructure while attempting to spread to additional hosts," SentinelOne security researcher Alex Delamotte said in a report published today. PCPJack is specifically designed to target cloud services like Docker, Kubernetes, Redis, MongoDB, RayML, and vulnerable web applications, allowing the operators to spread in a worm-like fashion, aswell as move laterally within the compromised networks. It's assessed that the end goal of the cloud attack campaign is to generate illicit revenue for the threat actors through credential theft, fraud, spam, extortion, or resale of stolen access. The  What makes thi...

Palo Alto Networks has disclosed that threat actors may have attempted to unsuccessfully exploit a recently disclosed critical security flaw as early as April 9, 2026. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-0300 (CVSS score: 9.3/8.7), a buffer overflow vulnerability in the User-ID Authentication Portal service of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges by sending specially crafted packets. While fixes are expected to be released starting May 13, 2026, customers are advised to secure access to the PAN-OS User-ID Authentication Portal by restricting access to trusted zones, or by disabling it entirely if it's not used. As additional mitigation, the company is recommending that organizations disable Response Pages in the Interface Management Profile for any L3 interface where untrusted or internet traffic can ingress. Customers with Advanced Threat Prevention can also block exploitation a...

Bad week. Turns out the easiest way to get hacked in 2026 is still the same old garbage: shady packages, fake apps, forgotten DNS junk, scam ads, and stolen logins getting dumped into Discord channels like it’s normal. Some of these attack chains don’t even feel sophisticated anymore. More like some tired guy with a Telegram account and too much free time. The worst part is how often this stuff still works. Meanwhile, AI tools are speeding up exploit hunting, browsers are keeping passwords sitting in memory for “performance reasons,” and even ransomware crews are pushing broken builds into the wild. Everybody’s scrambling to patch faster because attackers are automating faster. Anyway. ThreatsDay’s rough this week. Let’s get into it. Credential theft campaign New MicroStealer Spotted A new stealer called MicroStealer has been observed targeting education and telecom sectors to steal sensitive data. It was first observed in the wild in...

Having an incident response retainer, or even a pre-approved external incident response firm, is not the same as being ready for an incident. A retainer means someone will answer the phone. Operational readiness determines whether that team can do meaningful work the moment they do.  That distinction matters far more than many organizations realize. In the first hours of a security incident, attackers are not waiting for your identity team to provision emergency accounts, for legal to decide whether an outside firm can access sensitive systems, or for someone to figure out who owns the EDR console. Every delay gives the attacker more uninterrupted time in your environment. Every hour lost to logistics increases the likelihood of deeper compromise, broader impact, and more expensive recovery.  The same is true internally. An organization may have an incident response plan, a capable security team, and a list of escalation contacts, yet still be unprepared to respond under p...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered three packages on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that are designed to stealthily deliver a previously unknown malware family called  ZiChatBot on Windows and Linux systems. "While these wheel packages do implement the features described on their PyPI web pages, their true purpose is to covertly deliver malicious files," Kaspersky  said . "Unlike traditional malware, ZiChatBot does not communicate with a dedicated command-and-control (C2) server, but instead uses a series of REST APIs from the public team chat app Zulip as its C2 infrastructure." The activity has been described as a "carefully planned and executed PyPI supply chain attack" by the Russian cybersecurity company. The names of the packages, which have since been taken down, are listed below - uuid32-utils (1,479 downloads) colorinal (614 downloads) termncolor (387 downloads) All three packages were uploaded to PyPI during a short wi...

A dozen critical security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the vm2 Node.js library that could be exploited by bad actors to break out of the sandbox and execute arbitrary code on susceptible systems. vm2 is an open-source library used to run untrusted JavaScript code inside a secure sandbox by intercepting and proxying JavaScript objects to prevent sandboxed code from accessing the host environment. The security flaws are listed below - CVE-2026-24118 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A vulnerability that allows sandbox escape via "__lookupGetter__" and permits an attacker to run arbitrary code on the underlying host. (Affects versions <= 3.10.4, patches in 3.11.0) CVE-2026-24120 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A patch bypass for CVE-2023-37466 (CVSS score: 9.8) that could allow attackers to escape the sandbox through the species property of promise objects and execute arbitrary commands on the underlying host. (Affects versions <= 3.10.3, patched in 3.10.5) CVE-2026-24781 (CVSS ...