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The Iranian state-backed hacking group tracked as Nimbus Manticore (aka GalaxyGato, Mirage Kitten, Smoke Sandstorm, Subtle Snail, and UNC1549) has been attributed to a fresh set of attacks targeting entities across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. The intrusions involve the use of a previously undocumented Windows backdoor called NightLedger and two custom WebSocket tunnelers, BridgeHead and ArcBridge, with an aim to maintain covert access. Targets of the campaign include Egypt, SMB and government environments in Jordan and Tanzania, aviation organizations in Pakistan, telecommunication companies in Ethiopia, and financial-sector entities in Burkina Faso, per Kaspersky. "The toolset includes NightLedger, a new Windows backdoor for reconnaissance, command execution, file operations, process discovery, and screenshot capture; and two custom WebSocket-based tunnelers, ArcBridge and BridgeHead, for covert network access and operator-controlled tunneling," Kasper...

JetBrains is urging customers of on-premise versions of TeamCity to update to the latest version following the discovery of a critical security issue that could result in arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability, assigned CVE-2026-63077 (CVSS score: 9.8), affects all TeamCity On-Premises versions. It has been addressed in versions 2025.11.7 and 2026.1.3. TeamCity Cloud instances have already been updated. JetBrains has credited Antoni Tremblay with discovering and reporting the flaw on July 10, 2026. "If exploited, this flaw may enable an unauthenticated attacker with HTTP(S) access to a TeamCity server to bypass authentication checks and execute arbitrary operating system commands with the privileges of the TeamCity server process," JetBrains said. The flaw allows unauthenticated remote code execution via the agent polling protocol to sidestep authentication checks and achieve command execution. Depending on the privileges granted to the TeamCity server process, ...

STAR Labs has published a Linux kernel exploit that turns an ordinary local user into root on the CentOS Stream 9 build it targeted. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-53264 (CVSS score: 7.8), is a use-after-free race in the kernel's network traffic-control subsystem. Researcher Lee Jia Jie said artificial intelligence (AI) helped him find the bug and speed up exploit development. This is local privilege escalation, not remote code execution, so an attacker needs a foothold on the machine before any of it applies. The demonstrated exploit also requires unprivileged user namespaces, the CONFIG_NET_ACT_GACT and CONFIG_NET_CLS_FLOWER kernel options, and a kernel-specific return-oriented programming (ROP) chain containing hardcoded offsets. Those conditions narrow the immediate exposure, but full exploit source code is now public. The upstream fix landed on June 1, 2026, and has since been backported to several stable kernel branches. The Linux CNA record lists vulnerable ranges begi...

Microsoft has launched its first cybersecurity-specific model inside MDASH , its multi-model vulnerability identification and remediation harness. The company says MDASH, using MAI-Cyber-1-Flash and GPT-5.4, scored 95.95% on CyberGym. It also claims the configuration costs 50% less than its current best MDASH combination of GPT-5.4, GPT-5.4 mini, and GPT-5.3 Codex. Access is limited to approved MDASH customers through an Azure AI Foundry private preview. MAI-Cyber-1-Flash is designed to handle up to 90% of MDASH tasks, with GPT-5.4 reserved for the hardest 10%. It is available only inside MDASH, not as a standalone public model or general-purpose application programming interface. The headline score belongs to MDASH running MAI-Cyber-1-Flash alongside GPT-5.4, not to the new model by itself. CyberGym Level 1 is a known-vulnerability reproduction test. It gives an agent a vulnerability description and the corresponding unpatched source code, then checks whether it can produce a ...

A maximum-severity security flaw impacting on-premises versions of Arista VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-16812 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a case of operating system command injection that could pave the way for arbitrary code execution. "VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) on-prem has a security issue where this issue may allow a remote attacker to access privileged internal functionality and impact the VCO host," Arista said in a Monday advisory. "Successful exploitation may compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the orchestrator and data managed by the orchestrator. This functionality was intended to be for internal use only and is not intended to be remotely accessible." The American network equipment company said the issue has already been addressed in hosted and dedicated versions of VCO in advance. The following versions are affected - VCO 5.2.x r...

NVIDIA and 36 other organizations have formed the Open Secure AI Alliance to develop and share open technologies, techniques, and tools for securing software and artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The 37-member group spans cloud, security, enterprise software, and AI companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Hugging Face, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, and the Linux Foundation. Its stated scope covers the full agent stack, including identity, permissions, isolation, guardrails, logs, model formats, multi-model scanning, and secure coding workflows. The pitch is that cyber defenders need AI models they can read, change, and run on their own hardware, not only closed systems reached through a vendor's application programming interface (API). The launch also brings its first named technical contribution: NVIDIA-labs OO Agents (NOOA) , an Apache 2.0 research framework designed to make agent behavior easier to test, trace, audit, and govern. The laun...

Dysphoria , an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet line tracked by CNCERT and XLab, has adopted blockchain-based name services and infected-device relays after a March law-enforcement operation against JackSkid infrastructure. The researchers say the design makes the botnet harder to disrupt. CNCERT, China's national computer emergency response team, and XLab, the threat-intelligence lab of Chinese firm Qi'anxin, put its population above 200,000 bots. Their telemetry logged 4,401 confirmed active devices inside China between July 14 and 20 and a single-day peak of 239,000 bots abroad. None of the counts has been independently reproduced. The researchers published no counting or de-duplication methodology, so the numbers should not be read as a precise device census. Defenders should patch exposed IoT gear, replace devices that can no longer be updated, eliminate default and weak credentials, and disable remote management and UPnP where they are not needed. The lineage runs...

Public exploit details released on July 27 show how an unauthenticated request can reach PHP's eval() function inside vBulletin and execute code on an unpatched forum server. The attack requires no account, administrative access, or interaction from another user. SSD Secure Disclosure lists vBulletin 6.2.1 and earlier, and 6.1.6 and earlier, as affected, but does not give a lower version boundary. vBulletin issued security patches for 6.2.1, 6.2.0, and 6.1.6 at the end of June and released the fixed version 6.2.2 on July 1, nearly four weeks before the exploit went public Administrators running self-hosted installations should apply the patch for their branch or upgrade to 6.2.2. vBulletin says its Cloud sites have already been patched against the flaw. SSD did not report active exploitation. As of July 27, 2026, no source had confirmed in-the-wild attacks, and CVE-2026-61511 was not listed in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The company published an int...

Monday starts with the usual promise that everything is under control. Then the logs wake up. This week, trusted tools crossed lines, old flaws found new work, exposed systems stayed exposed, and attackers kept hiding inside normal-looking services. Nothing looked strange at first. That helped. That is the mood. Here is the full recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenAI Says Its AI Agent Went Rogue and Targeted Hugging Face - OpenAI disclosed that it lost control of two AI models during a security evaluation that ended in a breach of Hugging Face. The AI company said its AI models broke out of a sealed testing environment and broke into Hugging Face's production system to find solutions for the ExploitGym benchmark. "The incident also makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access," OpenAI said. "It highlights that advanced cyber capabilities must be developed alongside stronger safegua...

n8n has patched a high-severity expression-sandbox escape that could let an authenticated workflow editor execute operating-system commands on the server running the automation platform. Security Joes found the flaw while probing n8n's February fix for CVE-2026-27577 for another bypass. The affected ranges are <2.31.5 and >=2.32.0,<2.32.1 . n8n fixed the flaw in versions 2.31.5 and 2.32.1 . It tracks the issue as GHSA-gv7g-jm28-cr3m , rates it High with a CVSS 4.0 score of 8.7, and no CVE had been assigned as of July 27, 2026. Administrators should update rather than rely on n8n's interim guidance to restrict instance access and workflow editing to fully trusted users. The advisory describes those controls as incomplete, short-term mitigations. It lists no patched 1.x release and does not say whether n8n Cloud was affected. Exploitation requires a valid account with permission to create or modify workflows. It does not require action from another user. A succ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a Microsoft Teams-themed phishing campaign that employs "secure document" lures to deliver legitimate remote monitoring and management ( RMM ) tools. "The victim was directed through compromised web infrastructure to a counterfeit Microsoft Store page claiming that Microsoft Teams had to be updated before the shared document could be opened," ZeroBEC said in a report published last week. The bogus Teams page in question is "teamvem[.]com." The active download is used to deliver "supportdev.exe," an Inno Setup-based loader that launches PowerShell in a hidden window, fetches an official Level RMM installer, and registers the endpoint using an attacker-controlled enrollment secret ("LEVEL_API_KEY=GxSCHE8EZwfyYN3iPQHPai8D"). The same PowerShell command has been found to download and deploy ConnectWise ScreenConnect in parallel, indicating an attempt to drop multiple RMM tools with an intent to...

The China-linked cybercrime group behind the use of income tax-related phishing lures targeting Indian taxpayers, tax professionals, and corporate finance teams has been observed using a sophisticated crypter service called Cruciferra . According to a new analysis by Proofpoint, Cruciferra has been utilized by various unrelated cybercriminal threat clusters to deliver a wide array of remote access trojans (RATs) and information stealer malware. "Cruciferra is written in Mono and features numerous techniques designed to evade detection, analysis, and incident response efforts," the enterprise security company said in an analysis published last week. "These include using indirect system calls, API and Import Address Table (IAT) unhooking, bring-your-own-vulnerable-driver ( BYOVD )-based EDR tampering, privilege escalation, persistence mechanisms, and a customized implementation of Process Ghosting used to execute payloads while minimizing forensic artifacts."...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged fresh malicious cyber activity by a threat actor with ties to East Asia targeting government entities in the Middle East. The intrusions have resulted in the deployment of previously unreported malware families dubbed TELESHIM, MIXEDKEY, and BINDCLOAK, according to Zscaler ThreatLabz. The cybersecurity firm said it detected the campaign earlier this month. "The campaign used a multi-stage attack chain to establish and maintain access on infected systems, with TELESHIM abusing the Telegram API for command-and-control (C2) communication to blend in with legitimate internet traffic," Sudeep Singh, senior manager of APT research at Zscaler ThreatLabz, said in a technical write-up published last week. The attack chain starts with an ISO file containing a legitimate executable ("RegSchdTask.exe") that's used to sideload a rogue DLL ("AsTaskSched.dll"), a 32-bit Windows backdoor called TELESHIM that then leverage...

GitHub has announced a new cooldown mechanism in Dependabot, allowing the tool to wait at least three days after a release is published before opening a pull request. "The cooldown configuration option in the dependabot.yml still controls the behavior, though, so you can choose a different cooldown parameter that fits your project," the Microsoft-owned subsidiary said . According to GitHub, the three-day cooldown default only applies to version updates, which are designed to keep software dependencies up-to-date. Security updates will continue to be pushed right away, permitting Dependabot to issue an alert and open a pull request to move the project to the patched version. With this update, the idea is to handle scenarios where a threat actor manages to push a poisoned version of a popular package, which then gets quickly pulled by downstream projects before that version is yanked from the registry. Although such trojanized packages are short-lived, the time period fo...