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Threat actors have begun to exploit two newly disclosed security flaws in Fortinet FortiGate devices, less than a week after public disclosure. Cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf said it observed active intrusions involving malicious single sign-on (SSO) logins on FortiGate appliances on December 12, 2025. The attacks exploit two critical authentication bypasses (CVE-2025-59718 and CVE-2025-59719, CVSS scores: 9.8). Patches for the flaws were released by Fortinet last week for FortiOS, FortiWeb, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager. "These vulnerabilities allow unauthenticated bypass of SSO login authentication via crafted SAML messages, if the FortiCloud SSO feature is enabled on affected devices," Arctic Wolf Labs said in a new bulletin. It's worth noting that while FortiCloud SSO is disabled by default, it is automatically enabled during FortiCare registration unless administrators explicitly turn it off using the "Allow administrative login using FortiCloud SS...

The security vulnerability known as React2Shell is being exploited by threat actors to deliver malware families like KSwapDoor and ZnDoor, according to findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 and NTT Security. "KSwapDoor is a professionally engineered remote access tool designed with stealth in mind," Justin Moore, senior manager of threat intel research at Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, said in a statement. "It builds an internal mesh network, allowing compromised servers to talk to each other and evade security blocks. It uses military-grade encryption to hide its communications and, most alarmingly, features a 'sleeper' mode that lets attackers bypass firewalls by waking the malware up with a secret, invisible signal." Moore told The Hacker News that the backdoor has been identified in two distinct regions and industries, and that it's likely the work of Chinese nation-state actors, based on the malware's code structure and functional overlap w...

Google has announced that it's discontinuing its dark web report tool in February 2026, less than two years after it was launched as a way for users to monitor if their personal information is found on the dark web. To that end, scans for new dark web breaches will be stopped on January 15, 2026, and the feature will cease to exist effective February 16, 2026. "While the report offered general information, feedback showed that it didn't provide helpful next steps," Google said in a support document. "We're making this change to instead focus on tools that give you more clear, actionable steps to protect your information online." The tech giant said it will delete all data related to dark web report once the feature is retired in February, but noted that users have an option to delete their monitoring profile ahead of time by following the steps below - Go to the Dark Web report Under "Results with your info," click Edit monitoring prof...

A Google Chrome extension with a "Featured" badge and six million users has been observed silently gathering every prompt entered by users into artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots like OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Meta AI, and Perplexity. The extension in question is Urban VPN Proxy , which has a 4.7 rating on the Google Chrome Web Store. It's advertised as the "best secured Free VPN access to any website, and unblock content." Its developer is a Delaware-based company named Urban Cyber Security Inc . On the Microsoft Edge Add-ons marketplace, it has 1.3 million installations .  Despite claiming that it allows users to "protect your online identity, stay protected, and hide your IP," an update was pushed to users on July 9, 2025, when version 5.5.0 was released with the AI data harvesting enabled by default using hard-coded settings. Specifically, this is achieved by means of a t...

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the open-source private branch exchange (PBX) platform FreePBX, including a critical flaw that could result in an authentication bypass under certain configurations. The shortcomings, discovered by Horizon3.ai and reported to the project maintainers on September 15, 2025, are listed below - CVE-2025-61675 (CVSS score: 8.6) - Numerous authenticated SQL injection vulnerabilities impacting four unique endpoints (basestation, model, firmware, and custom extension) and 11 affected parameters that enable read and write access to the underlying SQL database CVE-2025-61678 (CVSS score: 8.6) - An authenticated arbitrary file upload vulnerability that allows an attacker to exploit the firmware upload endpoint to upload a PHP web shell after obtaining a valid PHPSESSID and run arbitrary commands to leak the contents of sensitive files (e.g., "/etc/passwd") CVE-2025-66039 (CVSS score: 9.3) - An authentication bypass vulne...