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A malicious SIM card can order the device it sits in to run commands of the attacker's choosing. On the cellular modules built into electric-vehicle chargers, industrial routers, and car telematics units, that is enough to take the whole device over. Researchers at the University of Birmingham and the security firm Fuzzware tested 26 phones and cellular modules for the capability, found it switched on in 9 of them, and used it to run their own code on a commercial EV charger. Six of the eight cellular modules they tested accepted the command. Only 3 of 18 phones did: the OPPO Find X5, the OPPO Reno 14 F 5G, and the ASUS Zenfone 9. No iPhone or Pixel was among them. The exposure is in machine-to-machine hardware. Five of the six were Quectel parts, three of them pulled from an EV charger, an industrial router, and a car's telematics control unit. Knowing the victim's number is not enough: every attack starts with a hostile card already in the slot, swapped by hand,...

Mozilla has scrapped the cryptographic key behind Firefox and Thunderbird downloads for Linux after an unencrypted copy of it was committed by mistake to one of the company's own private code repositories. That key is how a user, or a Linux distribution packaging the browser, confirms a downloaded Firefox tarball came from Mozilla and was not tampered with. That decision carries a cost for anyone who checks what they download: files signed with the old key stop verifying once a user imports the revocation. That covers older Firefox and Thunderbird downloads, not just future ones. Nothing so far points to anyone outside the company getting hold of the key. The repository was private, the browser maker says a review of available audit records turned up no sign of unauthorized access, and everyone who could see it already had legitimate access anyway. Mozilla revoked it regardless. Most Firefox and Thunderbird users need to do nothing. Two groups do. Anyone who checks signatu...

Security researchers invented a cryptocurrency startup, advertised developer jobs, and hired three people they believe were North Korean operatives. Every virtual machine the company issued was recording. The onboarding paperwork is the part hiring teams can use. The first hire claimed to live in Pasadena, Texas, then sent a California driver's license and a New York bank account. The researchers said the image metadata showed it had been processed with Google Gemini. They also reported a SynthID watermark, the invisible marker Google embeds in images its AI tools create or edit. The second supplied a Texas license, a valid Social Security number, and a bank account in Kansas City. The third sent a New York license belonging to someone else, a genuine iPhone 15 photograph with the GPS coordinates stripped. A successful placement gives the operative a real employee account and real access to source code and internal systems. The July 31 joint alert says North Korean IT work...

Windows Plug and Play can be abused to fetch signed vendor software for an emulated USB device and execute privileged installation components that researchers chained to SYSTEM access on a fully updated Windows 11 machine. The same PnP path can be triggered over Remote Desktop without physical hardware when supported Plug and Play or low-level USB redirection is enabled; Microsoft says that redirection is not allowed by default. Security researchers Alejandro Hernando and Borja Martinez described the technique in " Plug And Pwn: Weaponizing Windows PnP Auto-Install ," research prepared for DEF CON 34. They built tooling to emulate arbitrary USB devices and said that, under the required conditions, an unprivileged user can turn the PnP installation path into SYSTEM code execution. Microsoft's own driver documentation describes the underlying selection step: Windows receives hardware and compatible IDs for a device and uses them to find a matching driver package. A...

A malicious tool server connected to an AI coding assistant can quietly walk off with SSH keys, environment secrets, source code, and customer data without ever sending one obviously harmful instruction. The trick can work even after a blunt version of the same theft is refused: split the request into fragments that each look routine, place them in channels the assistant already uses, and let the agent stitch them together and send the data back. The attack targets coding tools that connect to outside servers over the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard that lets AI assistants call external tools. A malicious MCP server can put one fragment in a tool description and another in a tool result; some setups also support server-initiated sampling. MCP does preserve structured tool and result boundaries. But ASSET Research Group's tests show agents can still combine instructions across them in the same working context, so no single fragment has to contain the whole mal...

Cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from South Korea and the U.S. warned of Gunra ransomware attacks targeting critical infrastructure sectors and organizations across the world. Targets of these attacks include healthcare and public health, financial services, government services and facilities, and professional and nonprofit services. "Gunra is another variant in the ongoing trend of ransomware attacks causing disruption and harm to U.S. and international organizations," CISA Acting Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity, Chris Butera, said. Attacks deploying the ransomware have leveraged security flaws in internet-facing Schneider Electric PowerLogic P5 ( CVE-2024-5559 ) and Fortinet FortiOS and FortiProxy ( CVE-2025-24472 ) appliances to obtain initial access, and then deploy the Gunra ransomware as part of a double extortion model that combines data exfiltration and data encryption for maximum impact. Victims who refuse to pay up within five to sev...

Attackers shut down a steam turbine and the process-water treatment system at a Polish combined heat and power plant by coming in over the private cellular network the local grid operator uses to reach remote equipment. The plant supplies heat to roughly 50,000 residents. Recovery began at about 7:30 a.m. while the intruders were still active inside the network, and customers lost neither heat nor electricity. CERT Polska  disclosed the December 2025 incident on August 8 after an investigation lasting more than three months. Poland's prime minister had said in January that two CHP plants were hit. This is the second. The route ran through a private APN, or access point name: a dedicated cellular data network managed by the distribution system operator. A configuration that allowed arbitrary devices on that APN to communicate with one another let the attacker pivot from a compromised wind-farm network to a controller at the CHP plant. CERT says reaching an industrial contro...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a supply chain compromise impacting WordPress plugin vendor BdThemes, prompting the content management systems (CMS) platform's plugins team to temporarily disable their downloads. "Unlike traditional software supply chain attacks, zero source code files were modified within the official WordPress.org repository," Wordfence researcher Paolo Tresso said . "Instead, threat actors poisoned a static remote JSON data stream fetched by an administrative promotional banner component." The list of affected plugins is below - Element Pack Addons for Elementor – Elementor Widgets, Elementor Templates, Elementor Addons [bdthemes-element-pack-lite] - 100,000+ active installs Live Copy Paste for Elementor – Cross Domain Copy Paste & Page Duplicator [live-copy-paste] - 6,000+ active installs Pixel Gallery Addons for Elementor – Easy Grid, Creative Gallery, Drag and Drop Grid, Custom Grid Layout, Portfolio Gallery [p...

AI is helping development teams produce far more code, far faster. But security teams still have to review vulnerabilities, manage dependencies, prioritize fixes, and control risk at human speed. When software output jumps 10 to 50 times, the problem is no longer just finding vulnerabilities. It is keeping security from becoming the bottleneck, or worse, losing control of what gets shipped. In our latest webinar with Chainguard experts, “ The True Cost of Building at Machine Speed ,” you can now watch how security teams can keep AI-driven development fast without letting risk scale with it. For years, application security followed a familiar cycle: developers wrote code, scanners found problems, security teams prioritized them, and engineers fixed what mattered most. AI puts that model under pressure. If teams can suddenly create many times more code, security can also end up with many more components, dependencies, findings, and fixes to manage. More scanning alone does no...

Microsoft has disclosed that Storm-1175 , a financially motivated threat actor linked to China, has deployed a previously undocumented ransomware strain called StormEncryptor . The use of StormEncryptor marks a shift from the adversary's previous use of Medusa ransomware, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Team said. "StormEncryptor is written in C++ and appends the file name extension .encrypted to files it encrypts," Microsoft noted in a series of posts on Bluesky. "It then drops a ransom note named !!!README_FIRST!!!.txt to every scanned directory." Although the exact vulnerability exploited by the threat actor as part of this campaign is unclear, the tech giant said it likely involves the exploitation of CVE-2026-18577 , a newly disclosed security flaw in N-able N‑central, to obtain initial access. The vulnerability is assessed to be a patch bypass for CVE-2026-18556, both of which allow authentication bypass and account takeover in susceptible vers...

A lot of security problems still begin with someone doing a completely normal thing. Cloning a repo. Answering a call. Leaving a box exposed. Trusting the default. That pretty much covers the mood this week. Old bugs are back, supply chains are getting stranger, and some exploit paths are so short you wonder what was supposed to stop them in the first place. That’s only part of it. Here’s everything else that made the Monday recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week Anthropic's Model Attempts to Poison Open-Source Project — A new evaluation conducted by the U.K. AI Security Institute (AISI) found that AI models with access to the internet reached out into the real world to target individuals and organizations autonomously across 10 of the total of 122 runs. Of 19 such actions recorded, 17 originated from Anthropic's Mythos 5 and the remaining two involved OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol with cyber classifiers. In the most serious case, Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 spent 34 hours trying...

North Korea's state hackers are no longer content to type prompts into public chatbots. One of the country's main espionage groups has begun running artificial intelligence (AI) offline on its own servers, connecting document-search tools to files in its possession, and collecting the software parts needed to build AI into its malware. South Korean security firm Genians says it uncovered the setup after months of tracking and log analysis on infrastructure tied to Kimsuky, a hacking unit under North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau. Genians found no evidence that the group had trained an AI model of its own, and the firm does not offer that as reassurance. It describes an actor in a "research and knowledge acquisition" stage, assembling and testing existing tools rather than making new models, with the apparent aim of folding AI through the operation, from writing malware to analyzing data. For an intelligence unit that has spent years phishing governm...

Three separate research efforts last week demonstrated ways to defeat passkey protections without breaking the cryptography they rest on. Passkeys are designed to replace reusable passwords and resist phishing. The attacks instead reused signed authentication material that Windows had exposed, abused a cloud-synced passkey system from malware already on the victim's machine, and used a  Windows Hello for Business  key from a compromised user session without a fresh PIN or biometric check. None cracked the math. The impact is not the same in all three cases. SpecterOps showed a Windows and Microsoft Entra ID chain that could impersonate privileged users while satisfying phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA); that chain reused signed authentication material rather than stealing the authenticator's private key. Unit 42 showed attacks against  Google Password Manager in Chrome , including a path that recovers the private keys for a victim's synced p...

The threat actor known as Head Mare has been observed weaponizing security flaws in unpatched TrueConf servers once again in attacks targeting Russian companies spanning instrumentation, electronics, transport, energy, IT, and software development sectors. Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said it detected the attacks in July 2026. The activity involves exploiting a vulnerability chain in the TrueConf videoconferencing server to replace the original TrueConf client installers with poisoned versions that deliver the PhantomCore backdoor and remote access trojan (RAT) into susceptible systems. The vulnerabilities, tracked as KLCERT-26-057 and KLCERT-26-058, enable arbitrary code execution with elevated privileges. The attack impacts TrueConf server versions 5.3.x up to 5.3.9, 5.4.x up to 5.4.9, 5.5.x up to 5.5.5, and earlier. The attack chain is as follows - Attackers connect to the TrueConf server on TCP port 4307, which is open by default. Upon successful conn...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension named Solidity Pro ("solidity-pro") that has been observed delivering a browser wallet and credential stealer. The names of the extensions are below - helper-beeps.solidity-pro web3devtoolsx.solidity-pro Although neither of the extensions is now available on Open VSX, the GitHub repository for " web3devtoolsx/solidity-pro " continues to remain accessible as of writing. According to Yeeth Security , early iterations of the extensions – from 1.0.0 through v2.4.x – were found to beacon to Cloudflare Workers endpoints to retrieve an encrypted Python payload and execute it. Subsequent versions starting with v3.0.0, on the other hand, have shifted to a full-blown information stealer that can collect browser profiles, crypto wallets, source-control tokens, API keys, SSH keys, and Telegram bot tokens. The captured data is then exfiltrated via a Telegram bot u...