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

PHP has rebuilt its official Windows packages for PHP 8.2 through 8.5 to fix CVE-2026-111497 , a flaw in the Brotli compression library that the packages include. The flaw can let an attacker corrupt memory and potentially run code. PHP says the flaw can be reached through the cURL extension when the extension decompresses HTTP responses automatically. cURL leaves that off by default, but applications and HTTP client libraries can turn it on. The rebuilt packages, numbered 8.5.12-1 , 8.4.27-1 , 8.3.36-1 and 8.2.35-1 , come five days after the October 21 releases that fixed the two PHP2Shell remote code execution flaws . They use the same PHP source, so those fixes stay in place, and they now include Brotli 1.2.1 , the fixed version. PHP publishes a software bill of materials , a list of the components inside, with each package. For last week's x64 Non Thread Safe builds of all four versions, those lists show Brotli 1.2.0, one of the affected versions. PHP advises Windows...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to what they say is a "recurring social engineering pattern" across hundreds of cases in which threat actors use Microsoft Teams' external chat creation feature to conduct impersonation scams or to deliver malware. "A consistent pattern of attacker behavior has emerged across these incidents: the use of the same throwaway tenants, the same 'IT Support (Internal)' display names, the same remote-access tools, and increasingly, the same payload domains," Arctic Wolf Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks consistently employ IT-themed display names or friendly-sounding first names to subvert external-user warnings in Teams. These messages originate from Teams identities established through newly created or acquired Microsoft 365 tenants. Nearly 30–40% of the cases investigated by the cybersecurity company involve the use of *.onmicrosoft[.]com , a permanent fallback domain auto...

This2Shell, That2Shell, Everything2Shell. That's pretty much how the last week went. Critical bugs that let attackers run code remotely are showing up everywhere. Hackers are scanning for targets, some flaws are already being used in attacks, and security teams have more urgent patches than they can keep up with. And that's not even the full story. A leaked key led to a software supply-chain attack. AI agents are being tricked into following harmful instructions. Old bugs are still being used to break into systems, and some attacks are so simple it's hard to believe they still work. Some websites even went offline to avoid taking chances. It's been a rough week for anyone trying to keep systems safe. Here's what happened. ⚡ Threat of the Week PHP2Shell Flaws Puts Organizations on Alert — The PHP Foundation released patches for two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution...

Two critical flaws in  Wasmtime , a WebAssembly runtime that can be built into other software, could allow a malicious WebAssembly module to escape the sandbox intended to contain it, the project's maintainers say. An attacker would first need a vulnerable Wasmtime build to compile a module they control, and one of the flaws affects only ARM64 systems. Fixed versions were released on October 19 and 20, and the maintainers have not reported any attacks. Wasmtime runs WebAssembly code outside web browsers. Both bugs are in Cranelift, the compiler it uses by default to turn WebAssembly into machine code. Wasmtime's maintainers at the Bytecode Alliance rated each flaw 9.9 out of 10 on the CVSS scale in advisories published on October 19. CVE-2026-115889  affects Wasmtime across all processor architectures. CVE-2026-115893  affects only ARM64, also called aarch64. The sandbox is meant to keep a module inside set limits. A module can only use its own memory and...

Every SOC struggles with a pile of alerts. Very few of those alerts explain how an attack started or how it progressed. Network data, like that from a network detection and response (NDR) platform, connects individual alerts into one timeline, and it feeds the defensive systems that can tie all events together into one coordinated view. SOC teams often first see the shape of an intrusion through a series of smaller alerts that are triggered (e.g., when a signature matches a known malware hash, a threshold flags an unusual spike in failed logins, or an endpoint agent detects suspicious activity). When viewed through the SIEM dashboard, an attack often begins as a series of distinct events with related or overlapping timestamps. Artificial intelligence has accelerated modern attacks, enabling attackers to automate reconnaissance, craft targeted payloads, and execute scripts in seconds. Yet, speed does not obfuscate the need for stealth. To evade detection, adversaries deliberately d...

A rentable Android spyware kit called uCreator takes over Telegram and WeChat accounts by hiding its code inside working copies of the two apps, researcher Ovi found . It only reaches people who install one of these tampered copies, spread outside the official app stores, or who run WeChat inside the kit makers' own container app. The kit's Telegram part matches Baohuo , a backdoor that Doctor Web reported in October 2025 . Doctor Web found Baohuo in tampered copies of Telegram X, an Android app from Telegram. At the time, the company estimated that more than 58,000 devices were infected. The Hacker News compared the two reports. Doctor Web's technical description of Baohuo lists the same code namespace, com.ucreator.tgjar , the same command-and-control (C2) server, and matching command names as Ovi's analysis. Ovi's analysis, published October 21, 2026, does not mention Doctor Web's findings, and Doctor Web did not name the kit. It is not clear whether...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a Microsoft 365 campaign that has been observed leveraging an adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) relay to capture sign-in sessions and then replay the stolen tokens to break into email accounts at 79 organizations. Huntress, which observed the activity between July 14 and September 22, 2026, said it detected 497 successful Microsoft 365 sign-in events across the victim organizations from over 200,000 login attempts, with the attackers ultimately compromising 97 accounts and registering 48 rogue Entra devices. "Rather than guessing passwords, the attacker replayed sign-in tokens stolen from victims, and we've traced more than 200,000 failed login attempts from the campaign window back to the 193.26.115[.]0/24 IP range," Huntress researchers Andrea Hatcher, Susannah Matt, Matt Poto, and Andrew Schwartz said. The attack has been found to employ an AitM login page, which sits between the victims and legitimate Microsoft infrastru...

An automated campaign is using stolen GitHub tokens to plant workflows that print a repository's secrets into its GitHub Actions logs, which the attackers then download before deleting the runs. The attacks have succeeded in private repositories and GitHub Enterprise environments, according to an analysis by cloud security company Wiz. A  GitHub safeguard  that pauses suspicious workflow runs stopped every public-repository run Wiz checked, but it does not cover private repositories or GitHub Enterprise Server. Each workflow sits on a new branch named ci-sync- followed by six random characters. Deleting a branch, or the run it started, does not undo the exposure. Every secret the repository could read should be rotated, and the token that pushed the branch revoked. Wiz has tracked the campaign since September 15 and calls it Gheist , after the user agent gheist that the attackers' tool sends with GitHub API requests. Wiz has recovered mor...

A malicious instruction file sitting in a developer's Downloads folder tried to make their AI coding agent install a known-malicious npm package, security firm Forever Security said in a report published last week. The company caught the attempt on a real customer's machine and stopped the agent before any code ran. It could not determine how the file got into the folder. The file was  AGENTS.md, a plain-text instructions file that a coding agent, such as OpenAI's Codex, reads when it starts in a folder and follows as directions. It was dressed up as ordinary engineering notes. One section told the agent to add a server to its own configuration and install a package called function-color from npm. That package is part of a malware campaign that other researchers have  documented separately : function-color pulls in a downloader called function-flag, which fetches and runs a Windows payload. Researchers at CloudSEK and Checkmarx, who ...

A single hacked device on a Tailscale network can be used to gain root access to other servers it can reach, according to a security researcher who published the findings this week. The attack requires two things: Tailscale SSH set up to allow port forwarding, and an attacker who already controls one device that the network's access rules permit to connect to the target. The findings were published on October 25 in a report called  Tailworm  by Erica Windisch of Cyberdione Labs. Windisch tested Tailscale version 1.104.2 and headscale version 0.29.5, the self-hosted server some networks use to run Tailscale instead of the company's hosted service, over three days in a lab. The report describes tests on that software, not attacks against real networks. As of publication, Tailscale had issued no  security bulletin , no CVE identifier, and no fixed version. Tailscale has responded in public. Mike Shaver, the company's vice president of engineering,  wrote on Red...

In an update, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said it's retracting its earlier assessment that the post-compromise activity targeting the European government agency involved the exploitation of the PHP2Shell flaws. "What researchers saw was an attack against a European government agency executed in the context of a vulnerable PHP application," a spokesperson for the company told The Hacker News via email. "This led us to believe that it was exploitation of those vulnerabilities. We are unable to confirm that initial access is associated with the specific PHP2Shell CVEs." The original story follows. Threat actors have been observed using agentic artificial intelligence (AI) platforms for post-exploitation activity following the abuse of the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. "In one case, the attackers targeted a government entity in Europe and within two hours of the initial exploitation they had successfully acce...

OpenAI has announced plans to conduct frontier model training with no live internet access, as it resumes reinforcement learning (RL) training and internal inference of its most advanced AI models. "Based on the current state of alignment research, monitoring systems, and the security of internet infrastructure, we believe the responsible approach is to conduct frontier model training with no internet access," the artificial intelligence (AI) company said . "We've implemented this policy and will maintain it until advances in these safeguards justify broader internet access." OpenAI said models' growing capabilities can have the side effect of them getting much better at devising ways around environmental restrictions to escape containment and perform unintended actions. This can involve the model exploiting a software flaw or misconfiguration to reach the live internet, or finding unauthorized ways to communicate with agents in other sandboxes. Late ...

A memory-corruption flaw in Google's Brotli decoder sits in many programs that unpack Brotli-compressed data, among them Bun, Microsoft's .NET, the Python Brotli and brotlicffi packages, and Envoy proxies set up to decompress Brotli. Tracked as  CVE-2026-111497 , the flaw allows crafted compressed data to overwrite past the end of a buffer and corrupt a program's memory, potentially causing a crash, a memory leak, or the execution of attacker-controlled code. Imperva researchers have shown that code can run on one unpatched Node.js build . The same has not been demonstrated on the other software, and no real-world attacks have been reported. The flaw was  first disclosed on October 21 , when Node.js and Google shipped fixes, and more have followed product by product since. Because the bug is in Google's decoder and each program ships its own copy of it, every one has to update that copy on its own. Brotli is a compression format from Google, used ...

LiteLLM on Friday revealed that an Agent Platform master key accidentally published to a public GitHub repository in late May 2026 ultimately allowed the threat actor to push a malicious version of the popular Python package. "On May 27, 2026, a configuration file was committed to the public LiteLLM-Labs/lite-harness repository which inadvertently contained the master key to a deployment of the LiteLLM Agent Platform, an open source tool we use for orchestrating agents," LiteLLM's Oliver Jensen and Mateo Wang said . "The error was quickly identified, the commit force-pushed over, and we identified the exposed keys as requiring revocation. However, key revocation did not occur for the master key." LiteLLM said the unknown attacker (operating from "69.48.229[.]143") used this unrevoked key on October 10, 2026, to gain access to the Agent Platform and extracted a GitHub CLI OAuth token the service was configured with to allow self-hosted cloud a...

Google has updated its privacy policy to spell out that using personalized artificial intelligence (AI) features in Search or Gemini could allow the company to serve targeted ads to users based on their activity on other connected Google services. "You may choose to allow certain Google services, including services like Search or Gemini Apps, to access data from other Google services you use, such as Google Photos and Workspace apps like Gmail and Drive, in order to provide you with a more personalized experience, subject to the policies and settings of the accessing service," reads a policy update effective October 16, 2026. "For example, Search may process some of the data that you allow Search to access to personalize content, including ads." Google also notes in its revised policy that "We don't show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos, unless you choose to make data from these services available to ...

Between November 2025 and March 2026, the Dutch security firm Eye Security pushed more than 2 million updates to computers it did not own to switch off a background updater that it said could have allowed an outsider to take over the machine. The updater belongs to Time4Popcorn , an abandoned copy of Popcorn Time, a free app that streamed pirated films and TV over BitTorrent. Popcorn Time was popular about a decade ago, and the original shut down in 2014, but several copies kept running under the same name. A separate, legal project that took the Popcorn Time name in early 2025 is unrelated to it. Eye Security, which monitors client networks for threats, found the updater during a routine threat hunt: a program called Updater.exe on one client's laptop kept trying to reach a web address that was no longer registered. The firm registered the address itself to see what would connect, and about 50 requests a second poured in. It later laid out the operation, which it named O...