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

xAI's Grok Build coding CLI was uploading entire Git repositories, full commit history and all, to a Google Cloud Storage bucket run by xAI, not just the files a coding task needed. A researcher publishing as cereblab , testing version 0.2.93 , captured one of those uploads, cloned the git bundle out of the intercepted request, and pulled back a file the agent had been told in plain terms not to open. The upload rode a separate channel from the model itself, and the byte split is hard to argue with. On a 12 GB repo of files the model never read, model-turn traffic to /v1/responses came to about 192 KB while the storage channel to /v1/storage moved 5.10 GiB, a roughly 27,800x gap between what the model needed and what left the machine. That storage upload ran as 73 chunks of about 75 MB, every one returning HTTP 200, and across the researcher's size sweep the volume tracked total repo size. The destination bucket, grok-code-session-traces , is named in the binary and ...

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has designated two individuals and a VPN service provider for enabling ransomware actors' and other cybercriminals' malicious activities, including ransomware attacks against Americans. The VPN, named First VPN Service ( 1VPNS ), has been accused of offering its tools to ransomware groups, along with its 45-year-old Ukrainian administrator, Dmytro Rashevskyi. The department has also sanctioned Yegeniy Vladimirovich Silayev, a Belarusian national, for selling cryptors to help conceal ransomware and other malware as safe programs to avoid being detected by security tools. First VPN was dismantled in May 2026 as part of a joint law enforcement operation by European and North American authorities for assisting criminal actors to obscure the origins of ransomware attacks, data theft, scanning, and denial-of-service attacks. The service had been operational since 2014, advertising that it neither keeps...

A campaign of 148 npm packages disguised as student web proxies turned visitors' browsers into a distributed denial-of-service botnet for roughly two weeks in May, according to new research from JFrog. The packages did not go after the developers who might install them. The operators used the registry as free hosting for a booby-trapped proxy site and let the students who came to dodge school web filters supply the attack traffic. The packages shipped under names like charlie-kirk, ilovefemboys, and miguelphonk, each carrying a proxy app branded "Lucide" and dressed as a tutoring landing page called Riverbend Tutoring or Northstar Tutoring. On the surface, the proxy worked, letting students slip past content filters to reach games and blocked sites. Underneath, it loaded a remote code loader whose payload the operators could swap at will, plus a WebSocket flood generator built to speak the Wisp proxy protocol. Anyone who opened a page joined the swarm without ...

Attackers whose methods line up with the data-extortion group  ShinyHunters  have spent the past year walking into corporate Salesforce environments without exploiting a single flaw in the platform. The way in has been the trust the organization had already extended, usually through the OAuth connections that tie Salesforce to the apps and third-party vendors around it. In  research published July 13 , Microsoft mapped the campaigns, which ran from mid-2025 into mid-2026, to three distinct techniques. It also worked with Salesforce to roll out new detection and governance tooling aimed at addressing the activity authentication logs miss. That is what makes this hard to catch. When the access comes from a real user who approved a connected app, or from an integration the company already trusts, the traffic reads as ordinary use, and sign-in and authentication monitoring barely registers it. What matters is what the app or account does once it is in, and that is ex...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new macOS information stealer called CrashStealer that's capable of harvesting sensitive data from compromised systems. Unlike other information stealers that are built on AppleScript droppers or Objective-C-based wrappers, CrashStealer is implemented in native C++, according to Jamf Threat Labs. "It validates the victim's login password locally before harvesting, collects broadly across browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, password managers, and the keychain, encrypts what it collects with AES-GCM before exfiltrating over libcurl, and persists by copying and re-signing itself," security researcher Thijs Xhaflaire said in a report shared with The Hacker News. CrashStealer is said to be distributed by means of a signed and Apple-notarized dropper that's distributed as a disk image file named "Werkbit.app." Because both the disk image and binary are notarized and carry a valid developer ID ("Emil Grigorov...

Google and Microsoft have pulled ModHeader , a popular header-editing extension with roughly 1.6 million installs across Chrome and Edge, after researchers found a hidden browsing-history collector built into its official store version. The collector was dormant. An empty allow-list kept it switched off, and no proof has emerged that it ever gathered or sent a single browsing domain. The analysis came from  Stripe OLT , a UK security firm, which checked the code against Google's own Web Store signature and confirmed the collector shipped inside the genuine extension, not a counterfeit. Its review covers the Chrome build and its roughly 900,000 users; third-party trackers put another 700,000 or so on Edge. Microsoft pulled the Edge listing on July 3, and Google removed the Chrome one a week later, on July 10. Version 7.0.18 (extension ID idgpnmonknjnojddfkpgkljpfnnfcklj) still edits HTTP headers as advertised. The same minified background code also contains a...

Somewhere right now, a security tool is quietly finding bugs faster than any human can fix them. That's supposed to be the good news. The catch is that the attackers have the same tools, pointed the other way, and they don't file tickets. That's the shape of this week. Trusted code turns on the people who installed it. Old bugs from last year are still landing because the fix sat in a queue too long. Fake installers, poisoned packages, systems left facing the open internet, and helpful little AI assistants running instructions that were never yours. The gap between "patch exists" and "already exploited" keeps shrinking, and nobody's closing it. None of it is exotic. That's what wears you down. Same ordinary mistakes, just happening faster than we can keep up. Here's the full mess, top to bottom. ⚡ Threat of the Week Progress Tells ShareFile Customers to Shut Down Storage Zone Controllers — Progress urged customers to shut down Win...

Give an AI assistant a memory and access to your inbox, and you hand an attacker a way to rewrite what it thinks it knows about you. A single email can trick that agent into saving a false "fact" about the user, hide the change, and quietly steer its answers in later sessions. When it works, the person reads an ordinary-looking reply and never learns their assistant was tampered with. The researchers named the attack  stealth memory injection  and built a tool that writes the emails automatically. The paper, "When Claws Remember but Do Not Tell,"  landed on arXiv on 6 July 2026 . First, what these assistants do A personal agent is an AI assistant that sticks around. Instead of forgetting everything when a chat ends, it keeps notes about you in files: your preferences, your contacts, and what you asked it to do. It reads those notes at the start of every new session, which is why it feels like it knows you. Many of these agents can also act for you, readin...

A new phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) operation called Forg365 is using a combination of device code phishing , adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) tactics, antibot evasion, artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted lure creation, and post-compromise mailbox operations targeting Microsoft 365 accounts. Distributed via Telegram and costing $400 a month (or $3,800 per year), attack chains leverage phishing lures that make use of legitimate email delivery infrastructure, such as Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and Twilio SendGrid, to imitate a redirection chain that blends into regular email traffic before it ends in Forg365-controlled domains. "The panel exposes a mature operator workflow: accounts, links, invitations, OAuth app configuration, redirect links, SVG generation, campaign sending, SMTP profiles, SMTP rotation, AI email generation, token vaulting, account intelligence, keyword alerts, viewer links, and browser-extension support," ZeroBEC said . The email securi...

Meta has filed a patent application for an AI that listens to your voice throughout the day, works out how it thinks you are feeling from the way you sound, and keeps a timestamped log of every read. Each read gets pinned to the moment it happened: the time, your location, what you were doing, even how you were using your phone. Some versions in the filing would listen all day; others would check in only at set times. None of these ships in a product today, and Meta has not announced one; a filing like this stakes a claim on an idea long before anyone commits to building it. The application,  US 2026/0182881 , was filed by Meta Platforms in December 2025 and published on July 2. It names a single inventor, Lachlan Dunn , and traces back to a provisional filing from December 2024. The patent-analysis site  Patentlyze  flagged the filing first. Its title pairs two ideas, emotional state analysis and real-time fitness coaching. The claims show the first is the ...

A few days ago, I was sitting with the CISO of a Fortune 50 company, walking through how his security team was thinking about AI agents in the SOC. Smart team. Serious program. They had already connected Claude to a few detection tools and were seeing real value in specific investigations. But as we mapped out the broader architecture, something kept nagging at me. The design they were building was going to work beautifully for a tiny percentage of alerts that genuinely needed deep human judgment. It was going to completely ignore the rest. On the flight home, I picked up a book I had not touched in a few years. Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman is one of the rare people who genuinely changed how we understand human decision-making. He spent his career as a psychologist studying how people actually think, as opposed to how economists assumed they did. In 2002, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, which tells you something about how far his work traveled beyond ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged an intrusion in which an unknown threat actor leveraged a vibe-coded PowerShell script for Active Directory (AD) enumeration. "The script looked for the Domain Controller (DC) and mapped users, computers, and domains, before creating a directory and exporting out a number of files, and finally creating AD_Report.html to measure the success of the enumeration attempt," Huntress researchers Jevon Ang and Dray Agha said . The attack chain involved the threat actor establishing Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) access onto a domain-joined Windows Server with a set of pre-compromised credentials, followed by staging the tools in the "C:\ProgramData\" folder. The incident took place in early June 2026. This included an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated payload to map the Active Directory environment. The assessment is based on various telltale signs, such as the prompt iteration title, placeholder strings, over-engineered cod...

An attacker running a live Microsoft 365 phishing operation left a Python web server listening on a public port with directory listing switched on. The command that did it:  python3 -m http.server 8080 , was still sitting in the readable  .bash_history . From that one lapse, French security firm  Lexfo  lifted the operator's entire toolkit and pivoted through it to two more phishing operators, three campaigns in all. Each ran a custom fork of the open-source Evilginx proxy , cloned from public GitHub. The largest of the three had been running for more than a year, its victims overwhelmingly corporate mailboxes. The three got past MFA in two mechanically different ways, one by proxying the live login , one by abusing a legitimate Microsoft sign-in flow. The two need different defenses, which is the part that matters most if you run Microsoft 365. Directory listing on a working attack server is close to a full confession. The listing exposed phishing conf...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added two maximum-severity security flaws impacting iCagenda and Balbooa extensions for Joomla to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of zero-day exploitation in the wild. The vulnerabilities, both rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system, are below - CVE-2026-48939 - A vulnerability in the iCagenda extension for Joomla that allows the upload of arbitrary files via the file attachment feature, leading to PHP code upload and execution. CVE-2026-56291 - A vulnerability in the Balbooa Forms extension for Joomla that allows the upload of arbitrary files, leading to remote code execution. According to mySites.guru, a cloud-based dashboard service for managing WordPress and Joomla websites, CVE-2026-48939 is said to have been exploited as a zero-day since June 15, 2026, in automated attacks aimed at Joomla sites on which iCagenda is installed. It resides in the "Submit an...

The jscrambler npm package was compromised, and simply installing its 8.14.0 release runs an infostealer on your machine. Published on July 11, 2026, the malicious version carries a preinstall hook that drops and executes a native binary, one build each for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Socket flagged the release  six minutes after it was published . If you or one of your build systems pulled it in that window, the payload has already run with whatever access your install process had. None of this is in the prior release, 8.13.0.  The package diff  shows two new files under dist/: setup.js, a small loader, and intro.js. Despite the name, intro.js is not JavaScript but a roughly 7.8MB container packing three gzip-compressed native binaries, one each for Linux, Windows, and macOS. On install, setup.js picks the binary for the host operating system, writes it under a random name in the system temp directory...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of sustained cyber espionage activity against several Pakistani law enforcement organizations undertaken by suspected China- and India-aligned threat actors between February 2024 and April 2026. "At Balochistan Police, the compromised assets included servers hosting web applications that manage police and citizen data, such as criminal and biometric records," Aleksandar Milenkoski, principal threat researcher at SentinelOne SentinelLABS, said in a report published this week. The activity targeted network appliances and servers hosting web applications that manage biometric records, hotel and tenant registrations linked to national identity records, criminal case files, and personnel records. The China-nexus threat actor is also said to have compromised one of these web applications to deploy a custom implant masquerading as a portal update. The application in question, named Complaint Management System (CMS), serves pol...

Zimbra is urging customers to apply updates to address a critical security vulnerability impacting the Classic Web Client that could result in arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability has been described as a case of stored cross-site scripting (XSS) that could allow specially crafted emails to execute malicious scripts in a user's session. It has yet to be assigned a CVE identifier. "The update fixes a security issue in the Classic Web Client where a specially crafted email could run malicious code when the email is opened," Zimbra said . "If exploited, it could allow access to mailbox information, session data, or account settings." XSS vulnerabilities occur when an application includes untrusted data in a web page without proper validation or escaping. This allows attackers to inject and execute malicious JavaScript in victims' browsers, which can result in session hijacking, credential theft, and account compromise. Stored XSS, or persistent ...

Progress Software has told ShareFile customers to shut down the Windows servers running their Storage Zone Controllers, confirming to The Hacker News that it is responding to a "credible external security threat." The company has temporarily disabled access to the affected accounts, a step it says it took "out of an abundance of caution" while it works with internal and external security experts. It says it has no indication of unauthorized access to any ShareFile accounts or data, and that it notified customers after learning of the threat. What Progress has not said is what the threat is or who is behind it. The order became public when a customer posted the company's email to Reddit's  r/sysadmin  on July 10. Progress  confirmed the disruption on its status page, listing Storage Zone Controller customers as "not operational" and the incident as under investigation as of a 12:12 p.m. EDT update. Only the Storage Zone Controller is af...

Unknown threat actors compromised the Injective Labs SDK project's GitHub repository and leveraged it to publish a malicious package on the npm registry to steal cryptocurrency wallet private keys and mnemonic seed phrases. The compromised version, @injectivelabs/sdk-ts@1.20.21 , came embedded with fake telemetry functionality that exfiltrated data from cryptocurrency wallets. The version was released on July 8, 2026, but has since been deprecated on the registry. That said, the release artifacts belonging to the compromised version are still available for download from GitHub as of writing. "The malicious functionality was introduced to the project's official GitHub repository through commits submitted by a GitHub account belonging to a developer with an established history of contributions to the repository," Socket said . The software supply chain security firm said the threat actor behind the attack also published version 1.20.21 across 17 additional @inj...

Researchers at firmware security firm Binarly have found six new flaws in U-Boot, the small program that starts up hardware as varied as home routers, smart cameras, and the management chips inside data-center servers. Four of the bugs can crash a device. The other two could let an attacker who slips a malicious image in front of the bootloader run their own code, before the device has confirmed that the software is genuine. That last part is the point. A bootloader runs before the operating system, so a flaw here can undermine everything that loads after it. All six bugs are reached while U-Boot is still reading an untrusted image, before it has checked the signature. What Binarly found U-Boot can bundle a kernel, device tree, ramdisk, and other boot components into one package, a FIT (Flattened Image Tree), and it checks that package's digital signature before handing over control. Binarly went looking for weak spots in that check and found six. Most of the vulner...

Researchers at Ledger's Donjon security team  have shown that a precisely timed laser pulse, aimed at the chip inside a Tangem crypto wallet card, can reset the card's password to anything the attacker picks. No old password. No backup card. Once it is reset, whoever did it controls the wallet and can move the coins out. This is not an emergency for most owners. The attack needs the physical card in hand and a lab that Donjon puts at around $250,000. It also means cutting the card open, which leaves damage no one can miss. It cannot be done over the internet, and there is no fix coming: Tangem cards cannot take software updates, so every card already sold carries the flaw. The one group that should act now is anyone whose card is lost or stolen and holds serious value. How the card is meant to protect you A Tangem wallet looks like a plain bank card. Tap it to your phone, and a companion app talks to a Samsung S3D232A chip inside. That chip is a ...

Details have emerged about three now-patched security flaws in the OpenClaw personal artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that, if successfully exploited, could enable credential theft, privilege escalation, and arbitrary code execution on the host. A brief description of the high-severity vulnerabilities is as follows - GHSA-hjr6-g723-hmfm (CVSS score: 8.8) - An operating system command injection and an incomplete list of disallowed inputs vulnerability impacting the host execution environment filtering mechanism that could allow for executing or persist actions beyond the caller's intended authorization. GHSA-9969-8g9h-rxwm (CVSS score: 8.8) - An operating system command injection and an incomplete list of disallowed inputs vulnerability impacting the host execution environment filtering mechanism that could allow for executing or persist actions beyond the caller's intended authorization. GHSA-575v-8hfq-m3mc (CVSS score: 8.4) - A path traversal and link f...

The China-linked cybercrime group known as Silver Fox has been attributed to a new Rust-based remote access trojan (RAR) called MODBEACON . Chinese cybersecurity company QiAnXin said that while the threat cluster may appear like a low-sophistication, high-activity operation that propagates malware via counterfeit installers using SEO poisoning techniques, it belies their true organizational structure , which compromises multiple distributors. "These distributors conduct activities across Asia using counterfeit software installers distributed through SEO campaigns, leveraging variants of Gh0st RAT and WinOS (ValleyRAT) trojan families," QiAnXin said . One such campaign observed in mid-June 2026 involved a distributor delivering a previously undocumented modular RAT targeting technology, education, and state-owned enterprises in the country. MODBEACON's requested command-and-control (C2) infrastructure is hosted on Amazon and Cloudflare's Content Delivery Networ...

A single wrong variable on one line in XQUIC, Alibaba's QUIC and HTTP/3 library, lets any remote client crash the server with a short burst of completely legal traffic. There is no patch. FoxIO researcher Sébastien Féry  disclosed the flaw on July 8  and nicknamed it XRING. He says it needs no login and no malformed packets: about 260 bytes of ordinary QPACK traffic takes the server process down. XQUIC is open-source, so the risk is not Alibaba's alone: any server that embeds it and serves HTTP/3 with the default QPACK settings is exposed. That includes Tengine, Alibaba's Nginx-based web server, which FoxIO says fronts the company's cloud and CDN on sites including Taobao and Alipay. Every release through v1.9.4, the latest, is affected. There is no fixed release and no CVE as of July 10. Until a fix ships, operators can set SETTINGS_QPACK_MAX_TABLE_CAPACITY to 0, which turns off QPACK's dynamic table, or drop HTTP/3 support entirely. The bug lives in how H...

A cybercrime crew left one of its own servers wide open on the internet for three weeks, and it exposed the operation's inner workings: the hacking tools, the activity logs, and target lists naming more than 1.4 million websites. Far fewer were actually broken into, but the exposed files showed researchers how a mass site-hacking operation runs from the inside. The operation, now tracked as WP-SHELLSTORM , is what  SOCRadar  calls a webshell access brokerage: a crew that breaks into sites at scale, plants a hidden backdoor (a "webshell") on each, and packages that access for resale. The strongest activity hit WordPress sites running out-of-date plugins. If you run WordPress or Joomla, the two flaws that mattered most were in the Breeze caching plugin and Joomla's JCE editor; skip to the checklist below if that's you. A forgotten server Two teams dug into the same exposed folder. SOCRadar's threat intelligence team spotted it on June 11, 2026, on a U...

Researchers ran 281 of the most popular free VPN apps on the Google Play Store through a new testing system and found that many fail at the basics people install a VPN for, i.e., keeping their traffic private and secure. The apps flagged with at least one problem have been installed more than 2.4 billion times. The problems are basic, not sophisticated. 29 apps let user traffic leak outside the encrypted tunnel, including the DNS lookups that reveal which websites you visit. 61 apps send some data in plain text that anyone watching the traffic on that network can read. Five of those send the app's configuration file in the clear, which lets an attacker on the network redirect the connection to a server they control. The system, called MVPNalyzer , was presented at the NDSS security conference in February 2026 by researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of New Mexico, and IIT Delhi. It is a mobile counterpart to the same lab's earlier VPNalyzer study ...

A threat actor has been targeting organizations spanning multiple sectors with voice-based fake security requests that prompt Microsoft 365 users to enroll a new Entra passkey with an aim to carry out data extortion attacks. The threat actor, tracked by Okta under the moniker O-UNC-066 , has deployed a panel-controlled phishing kit that's capable of targeting the passkey enrollment process . The activity has singled out food and beverage, technology, healthcare, automotive, construction, and aviation industries. "The threat actor registers domains that incorporate the word passkey as part of a voice-enabled phishing ('vishing') scheme," Okta researcher Houssem Eddine Bordjiba said . "The threat actor then calls targeted users on the phone in an attempt to persuade them that they need to register a new passkey." Users are then directed to a phishing kit that's identical to the Microsoft passkey enrollment process, giving the impression that th...

Security firm  Coinspect  has disclosed a crypto wallet flaw it calls  Ill Bloom , and attackers are already using it. The flaw is in how some wallet software generated its recovery phrase, the words that control the money. When that phrase is made with weak randomness, an attacker can work it out and take everything it controls. The firm has confirmed one coordinated sweep on May 27 that drained about $3.1 million from 431 wallets, and it told The Hacker News that a further $2.1 million in USDT was stolen from an exposed wallet afterward, pushing confirmed losses past $5 million. As the firm puts it, "if funds recently moved without your permission, this vulnerability may be why." Most people are probably fine. Coinspect says wallets created on hardware devices are not affected, and most mainstream software wallets are not either. The real risk sits with older or lesser-known wallets, both mobile apps and browser extensions, some dating back to 2018. It has not...

A 41-year-old former ransomware negotiator has been sentenced to nearly six years (i.e., 70 months) in prison in the U.S. for their role in conspiring with the now-defunct BlackCat ransomware operators to extort multiple victims and working with two other cybersecurity professionals to target additional victims in 2023. In a sentencing memorandum , federal prosecutors described Martino as a "double agent working to maximize the harm to his clients and the financial gain to cybercriminals who paid him a part of the ransom." Angelo Martino, 41, of Land O'Lakes, Florida, pleaded guilty to one-count information charging him with conspiring to interfere with interstate commerce through extortion back in April. The defendant worked as a negotiator on behalf of five different ransomware victims, while providing BlackCat attackers with confidential information regarding their negotiating position and strategy without their knowledge or permission. This information incl...

Datadog Security Labs is warning of "several overlapping campaigns" that are systematically enumerating corporate GitHub organizations, repositories, and user accounts through the GitHub API. "Operators rely on automated scraping tooling with custom or legitimate-sounding user agents, leveraging GitHub 'ghost' accounts that are often years old, or compromised OAuth tokens and personal access tokens (PATs) from legitimate users," Julie Agnes Sparks, senior security engineer at Datadog, said . While the activity in most cases involves targeting public data, select instances have gone beyond public information enumeration to successfully clone private repositories. The campaign employs a mix of automated scanner tools, over 50 dormant accounts, and dozens of legitimate accounts that have had their personal access tokens (PATs) exposed unintentionally or compromised through some other method to facilitate the enumeration. What's notable about the ...

Microsoft has taken apart a destructive Windows backdoor it calls GigaWiper . What stands out is how it is built: not one tool but three older destructive programs bolted into one, offered as commands the operator can choose from. Each is a different way to break a machine: wipe the whole disk, overwrite the Windows drive, or run fake "ransomware" that scrambles files with a key it never saves. Because this is malware and not a single flaw, there is no patch to chase; GigaWiper is what an attacker runs after they are already inside, which makes early detection and clean, offline backups the real defense. The same malicious files show up in a second report under another name: BLUERABBIT , a backdoor Binary Defense flagged last month . Microsoft lists four hashes for the GigaWiper backdoor ; Binary Defense lists the same four for BLUERABBIT , and both command servers match. Binary Defense, citing Google's Threat Intelligence Group, ties the malware to a likely Ir...