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WordPress has announced it's launching an automated security review for every release of a plugin before it's distributed through the WordPress.org update API so as to analyze it for potential security issues and ensure there are no risks involved. "New plugins are reviewed before they enter the directory, but updates ship continuously after that," David Perez, WordPress Official Plugin Repository Team Co-Lead, said . "A plugin can be secure today and introduce a vulnerability, or malicious code, in a future release." WordPress said the lack of a "consistent review step" between the commit of a release and the release of a plugin to downstream users meant that it could open the door for malicious attacks. The content management system (CMS) platform noted that its automated review detected a backdoor committed to a release of a plugin with about 20,000 active installations on July 28, 2026. Because the release was within a cooldown window, ...

AI keeps showing up in the wrong places. Attackers are using it to speed up exploits, test defenses, and automate more of the job. Some models are also crossing lines on their own. That is not a great combination. The rest of the week is more familiar: old bugs still working, fresh exploit chains, exposed systems, weak defaults, and simple paths that should have been harder to abuse. A few of these stories are clever. Most are just easy. Here’s what mattered this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenAI Agents Behind May 2026 Attack on RubyGems — The "major malicious attack" that targeted RubyGems in May 2026 was the work of a swarm of OpenAI agents, according to researchers. The event was driven by a cluster of OpenAI agents that engaged in en masse publication of thousands of packages to RubyGems in May and June 2026. "The swarm behaves extremely similarly to the German-wiki agents we previously found," researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von...

There's a lot of noise around AI and cybersecurity right now. What’s actually important is far simpler, if often lost in the hubbub. Vulnerability discovery is getting faster and happening at a much greater scale, while defenders still have to work out which findings actually deserve their action. In the first half of 2026, a whopping 35,853 CVEs were published, roughly 49% more than in the year before. Yet only 495 were catalogued as exploited in the wild during that same period, and 116 were already under attack on the day they became public. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s own disclosure data shows Mythos-class models surfacing 26,153 vulnerability candidates in open-source software, with only 421 of those getting patched upstream. That small exploited subset is a very important point. It tells defenders that treating every vulnerability with a High or Critical CVSS rating as an emergency is not only impossible, it’s actually the wrong model . The critical task security teams fa...

A malicious cross-store Twitch browser extension has leaked OAuth tokens associated with nearly 31,000 users to proxy servers operated by a Russian commercial bot service. The extension, named "Twitch Enhanced Viewer | JeetBot," lists HISHIMIRO/jeetbot.cc as its developer and has the following identifiers on the Google Chrome Web Store and Mozilla Firefox Add-Ons store - Chrome - pnhhdhhcadcjfckjhpmjneldiegbojfb - 30,000 users (Published on June 26, 2025) Firefox - twitchenhancedviewer@example.com - 604 users (Published on July 7, 2025) Both extensions are still available for download as of writing. The extension listing description states: "JeetBot is a modern tool for streamers and viewers who appreciate quality, convenience, and control," adding it "expands Twitch capabilities: 1080p stream for regions with constraints." "Current builds (v85.x) forward the token inline as an &auth= query parameter on a network-layer redirect ...

Microsoft has disclosed details of two campaigns in which threat actors are abusing third-party email delivery infrastructure to blast financial fraud scam messages and using passkey-themed social engineering to breach cloud environments. The first campaign, per the tech giant, involved sending over a million scam emails between August 3 and 5, 2026, by masquerading as chief executive officers (CEOs) of various target companies, aiming to persuade accounts payable departments at those firms to initiate Automated Clearing House ( ACH ) transfers for a supposed ServiceNow annual subscription. Evidence indicates that the operators behind the campaign have leveraged generative artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate the creation of email templates and draft emails tailored to their recipients. The activity primarily singled out enterprise users in the U.S., spanning IT services, consumer goods, real estate, and discrete manufacturing sectors. "The campaign follows steps bef...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added five security flaws impacting JFrog Artifactory, ConnectWise ScreenConnect , and MikroTik RouterOS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. Details of the vulnerabilities are as follows - CVE-2026-42016 (CVSS score: 8.1) - An incorrect authorization vulnerability in JFrog Artifactory that could lead to privilege escalation due to a validation check of the token signature/issuer and not the token's scope. CVE-2026-42018 (CVSS score: 7.5) - An improper authentication vulnerability in JFrog Artifactory that could return an internal anonymous-user token to an unauthenticated caller when anonymous access is disabled, potentially leaking sensitive resources. CVE-2026-84869 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper privilege management and missing authorization vulnerability in  ConnectWise ScreenConnect that could allow an attacker to fil...