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

The Iran-linked "hacktivist" persona known as Handala Hack has been attributed to a Telegram-based surveillance backdoor called HEAVYGRAM and a Delphi-based utility known as CRUDEEXCLUDE . "HEAVYGRAM offers builtin commands supporting remote command execution, system, network and process information discovery, data and Telegram session files exfiltration, screenshot capture, DLL sideloading, file cleanup, and persistence via Windows autorun registry keys," Group-IB said . On the other hand, CRUDEEXCLUDE is a Delphi-based Windows utility employed to prepare environments for the deployment of subsequent stages such as HEAVYGRAM. First observed in late July 2024, the malware is often disguised as a legitimate application with a graphical user interface (GUI), and configures Microsoft Defender exclusion paths for defense evasion. The findings build upon an alert the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) first issued in March 2026 and again earlier this wee...

Every release of the Unbound DNS resolver before 1.26.1 has a critical heap overflow in its DNSSEC validator, maintainer NLnet Labs said in an  advisory  on Wednesday. An attacker who controls a malicious zone and queries a vulnerable resolver can trigger it, enabling remote code execution. Unbound 1.26.1, released the same day, fixes the bug, tracked as  CVE-2026-81642 , along with eight other flaws. One of the eight,  CVE-2026-82717 , is a heap corruption bug in CNAME synthesis reported by Ben Morris of Anthropic. It could also lead to remote code execution "under certain systems and compilation options," NLnet Labs said. NLnet Labs has not reported exploitation of either bug, and CISA's entry for CVE-2026-81642 marked exploitation as "none" on Wednesday. NLnet Labs rates the DNSKEY flaw Critical, with a CVSS score of 4.0 (9.1), and its scoring lists a network attack vector requiring no privileges or user interaction. NVD listed the CVE as "Await...

A new CVE drops. Your scanner finds it. The severity score looks ugly. But that still does not answer the question that matters: Can it actually be exploited in your environment? Mythos-class AI is compressing the time between disclosure and working exploitation, while many security programs still validate risk on weekly or quarterly cycles. The dangerous gap is no longer just technical. It is measured in time. 📅 Save Your Spot Today: How to Prove You're Ready for Mythos-Class Attacks . Can’t join live? Register anyway. We’ll send the webinar recording after the session, so you can watch it later, whenever it fits your schedule, and still see the full, fresh CVE-to-validation workflow. Stop prioritizing on severity alone A high score tells you a vulnerability could be serious. It does not prove that an attacker can use it against you. Security teams need faster answers: Is the affected asset exposed? What attack techniques does exploitation require? Do ...

Attackers now weaponize new vulnerabilities in about five days (Mandiant, part of Google Cloud). The median organization takes 43 days to patch one (Verizon DBIR 2026). A new free guide explains how autonomous AI agents are closing that gap, and what security leaders must demand before pointing one at production. TL;DR Exploitation is now the front door. It starts 31% of breaches (Verizon DBIR 2026), the #1 initial-access vector, while annual pentesting leaves an estimated 90% of the estate untested. The capability is proven, not projected. An autonomous system topped HackerOne's US leaderboard in 2025 (XBOW), and peer-reviewed agents exploited 87% of one-day flaws unaided (Fang et al., 2024). Continuous beats periodic, measurably. Programmatic testing makes teams 4.5x more likely to fix criticals within three days (Cobalt, 2026). It's an AI agent in your production. Hold it to a bar. Provable coverage, an independent validator, blast-radius guardrails, and a...

The China-aligned state-sponsored threat actor known as FamousSparrow has been observed deploying a previously unreported backdoor called SparroWocky in attacks targeting multiple countries in Latin America since at least August 2025. "SparroWocky is a modular, C++ backdoor," ESET security researchers Alexandre Côté Cyr and Romain Dumont said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. "Its architecture and the techniques used by its authors indicate strong knowledge of anti-analysis tricks and Windows internals." SparroWocky is so named for the fact that early iterations of the malware have been found to contain the first stanza of Jabberwocky , a famous nonsense poem written by the English author, poet, and mathematician Lewis Carroll in around 1855. The latest findings from ESET indicate that the cyber espionage group , which shares some level of overlap with Earth Estries and Salt Typhoon, has replaced SparrowDoor with Spar...

OpenAI on Wednesday disclosed six new instances of "unexpected or concerning model behavior" that took place over the past six months, while sharing a new framework for reporting, tracking, investigating, and disclosing model misalignment in a bid to improve transparency. "As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research," OpenAI said. "We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer." "Decisions about how AI development should proceed in the months and years to come need to draw on evidence that people outside the companies building frontier models can examine for themselves." The six incidents are outside of the recently disclosed misaligned activity targeting Hugging Face , DseWiki , and RubyGems . Details of the inc...

The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has released  BIND 9.20.29 and 9.21.26  to fix fourteen security flaws it  disclosed  on 16 September in BIND 9, its open-source DNS server software. One of them affects any BIND server that answers DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH). A sender with no credentials can crash the server process, named, with a single request that carries an invalid SIG(0) signature, if the sender closes the connection before named finishes checking the signature. ISC said in its advisories that it is not aware of any of the fourteen being exploited. Which Release Fixes What The fixed releases, described in ISC's  release notes , are: BIND 9.20.29, on the current stable branch: fixes all fourteen BIND 9.21.26, on the development branch: fixes thirteen, because CVE-2026-19662 does not affect 9.21 BIND 9.20.29-S1, the Supported Preview Edition for support customers: fixes all fourteen ISC lists no workarounds for any of the...

A security breach at Gyazo , Helpfeel's image-sharing service, exposed about 23.62 million user records, including email addresses and password hashes, the Kyoto-based company said in a  notice  published Wednesday. It also exposed about 490 million image metadata records, mostly for images from January 2019 or earlier, including the IDs that make up Gyazo image links. Helpfeel said those IDs could be used to view the images without permission, and that it has temporarily disabled viewing of some of them. Helpfeel asked every Gyazo user to change their password and to change it on any other service that uses the same or a similar one. It also asked users to watch for suspicious emails or messages related to the incident. The attacker gained access through a vulnerability in Gyazo's image upload server, ran arbitrary commands on Helpfeel's systems, and accessed Gyazo's database, the company said. It has not said what kind of flaw it was. Helpfeel said no pay...

Cisco has warned of a fresh maximum-severity security flaw impacting Identity Services Engine (ISE) that has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76460 (CVSS score: 10.0), could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication. "This vulnerability is due to insufficient authentication control on an API endpoint," Cisco said. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to an affected API endpoint. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to gain unauthorized access to the affected device by bypassing the web-based management interface." The issue affects Cisco ISE and Cisco ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC), regardless of device configuration. It has been addressed in the following versions -

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday announced the court-authorized seizure of internet domains associated with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)-for-hire service known as NightmareStresser. The domains in question are: nightmare-stresser[.]com and nightmarestresser[.]org. Visitors to the site are now greeted by a seizure banner that states - "This domain has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in accordance with a seizure warrant pursuant to 18 U.S.C. §§ 981(a)(1)(A) and (b), 982(b)(1), and 1030(i) (1)(A); and 21 U.S.C. § 853 issued by the United States District Court for the District of Alaska as part of a joint international law enforcement operation and action by: United States Attorney's Office for the District of Alaska, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Anchorage Field Office, [and] Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)." These so-called booter services are usually advertised as stress testing utilities but have been used to...

A critical security flaw in Issabel Framework , a web-based framework for the open-source unified communications PBX software, has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-89026 (CVSS v3.1 score: 9.8/CVSS v4.0 score: 9.3), which can allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary operating system (OS) commands by taking advantage of a hard-coded JSON Web Token (JWT) signing key. The Issabel Framework "contains a hard-coded HS256 JWT signing key in the pbxapi index.php file that is identical across every installation, allowing unauthenticated remote attackers to forge valid bearer tokens," VulnCheck said in an alert. "Attackers can use the forged token to call the manager '/pbxapi/manager/originate' endpoint with the System application parameter, causing Asterisk to execute arbitrary OS commands as the Asterisk user." A patch for the vulnerability was pushed on August 1, 2026, and plugs the flaw by r...

Enterprises in Russia have emerged as the target of three threat activity clusters tracked as NightEagle , Hacking Cat , and Toy Ghouls , according to multiple reports from Kaspersky. The cybersecurity vendor said it has identified attacks mounted by NightEagle (aka APT-Q-95), a threat actor known to be active since at least 2023, that involve new techniques for persistence and lateral movement. "In most incidents, the attackers used compromised valid credentials to gain access to corporate VPNs," Kaspersky said in an analysis published today. "VPN connections originated from IP addresses in the Russian segment linked to Cloudflare WARP tunnels, as well as from IP addresses associated with European virtual infrastructure providers." The attacks, as highlighted in July 2025, involve the deployment of GhostContainer , a known modular backdoor that grants the operators complete access to a victim's Microsoft Exchange Server, as well as run arbitrary code, ...

Security researchers at Forever Security have shown that one ordinary browser extension could take control of the AI assistants built into five Chromium-based products: Gemini Live in Chrome, Perplexity Comet, Microsoft Edge, Opera Neon and the Claude in Chrome extension. Once the extension was installed, it could access each product's built-in AI with a single click. On Comet, Edge, Opera Neon, and Claude in Chrome, it could drive the AI agent to act on behalf of the attacker; on Chrome and Comet, it could read files from the user's computer, and on Chrome, it could also switch on the camera and microphone. The findings are researcher demonstrations, not attacks seen in the wild, and each requires the attacker's extension to be already running in the victim's browser. These products all work the same way. The AI has a "body" inside the browser that can see the screen, open files, use the camera, and take actions, and a "brain" that runs on th...

Mandiant says an attacker hijacked an active AI coding-assistant session at an unnamed software-as-a-service provider and later spread  Shai-Hulud  across about 100 internal code repositories. Before the repository spread, the assistant recommended software that the attacker had poisoned, and the recommendation was accepted. The worm stole repository secrets and source code for the company's products. The case appears in  Mandiant's September 2026 report . The public case study does not say when the intrusion happened or how the attacker took over the active coding-assistant session. How the Attack Unfolded After the recommendation was accepted, the attacker used the developer's active session to install an infostealer through a poisoned PyPI package. The attacker also stole GitHub OAuth tokens. The attacker then deployed the self-spreading Shai-Hulud worm across approximately 100 internal code repositories. The attacker also poisoned a package in the company...

Parallels Desktop for Mac has a flaw that lets an ordinary local account run code as root, the highest level of access on a Mac, software company JFrog said this week. The attack needs code already running on the machine as a normal user, so it does not work over the network. JFrog says the fix is in Parallels Desktop 27, a version that Intel Macs cannot install. Yuval Moravchick, who leads JFrog's vulnerability research team,  published the finding  on Tuesday and calls it ParaShells. The flaw is tracked as  CVE-2026-90894 , an identifier JFrog assigned itself, and JFrog rates it 7.8 out of 10. Parallels Desktop runs Windows and Linux inside virtual machines on a Mac. It installs a background service called prl_disp_service that runs as root, because its work includes setting up host networking and unpacking virtual machine packages. The flaw is on the Mac side of the product, so the machine at risk is the Mac itself rather than the virtual machines on...

N0va is targeting organizations across North America and Europe with phishing campaigns that impersonate trusted services and abuse legitimate authentication flows. Successful attacks can give threat actors access to valid accounts without relying on obvious malware activity. From there, a single compromised identity can open the door to sensitive data, business systems, and additional cloud resources. The longer that access goes unnoticed, the greater the potential for wider compromise, operational disruption, and financial loss. N0va Is Reaching Organizations Across High-Risk Sectors N0va activity has been observed across organizations in government, technology, consulting, healthcare, and other sectors in North America and Europe. Its use of trusted business platforms and cloud services makes the campaign relevant across a wide range of organizations. N0va phishing campaign attack details Related activity can be traced in ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup using a chara...