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Cloned voices and synthetic video calls now show up in payment fraud, help desk resets, and access requests. A structured drill shows security teams exactly where verification breaks down, while nothing is at stake. The call comes in at 4:40 on a Friday. It's the CFO, or it sounds exactly like her, asking the controller to push a supplier payment out before the weekend because a deal closes Monday. She's traveling, she's rushed, and she apologizes for the bad connection. Ten minutes later an email lands with the wire details. A couple of years ago that scenario was a conference talk. Now it shows up in incident reports. In a 2025 Gartner survey of 302 cybersecurity leaders , 62% said their organization had experienced at least one deepfake attack in the prior 12 months. In the same survey, 43% reported at least one deepfake audio call incident and 37% had run into deepfakes on video calls. And the wire is only the obvious ask. The same cloned voice can call the help ...

A team at security firm XBOW chained three then-unknown Google Chrome bugs into a single attack that runs code on a Windows computer when the user only loads a web page, the company said. Its researchers built the attack in six days by directing AI agents running OpenAI's publicly available GPT-5.6 Sol model. Google has since confirmed all three bugs,  fixed them , and paid XBOW its top $250,000 reward for a full Chrome exploit. The attack is a full chain: a set of bugs used together to break every layer of Chrome's protection, from a web page all the way to the computer. Chrome runs web page code inside two nested sandboxes, the barriers that stop a hacked page from reaching the rest of the machine. The chain crossed both. The result was code running outside Chrome on Windows, with no need for the user to click or download anything. All three bugs are now fixed, and XBOW says they were never used against Chrome users. The two that carry public identifiers were fixed ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Android banking trojan called Hirudo that works by replacing legitimate banking apps with purpose-built patched versions designed to bypass security checks from inside the app itself, marking a new escalation in financial fraud.  Dutch mobile security company ThreatFabric said it identified replacements for eight Indonesian banking apps, while credential targeting in the malware spans Indonesia, China, India, Mexico, Morocco and Thailand. "The operation combines credential theft, device takeover, screen and camera capture, and SMS theft, in combination with a fairly mature backend," Eward Driehuis, vice president of fraud engineering at ThreatFabric, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. Hirudo facilitates on-device credential theft and live remote control. The malware is delivered by shopping, adult video, and entertainment dropper apps that carry the trojan as a separate installation package, whic...

The bug was simple: the login let you choose where your sign-in code went. Proving it on a live website was the hard part. TL;DR During an authorized assessment, an AI pentesting agent found a critical authentication bypass on a major insurer's production website, on its own. One login request let the user choose where the one-time passcode went. The attack was the easy part. Proving it on a live site took web context built over a decade. The Login Worked. Then the Agent Stopped. Reflectiz's AI pentesting agent was mapping the login flow of a major insurer's production website, which has millions of users. The agent requested a login code and directed it to an email inbox it controlled. The code arrived. The login went through. Its guardrails halted the test after the login succeeded.  The agent had discovered a critical-severity authentication bypass on its own. Reflectiz reported it to the insurer. The Flaw: The Request Chose Where the Code Went ...

A flaw in Linux's vhost subsystem lets a local user read and write kernel memory at will and become root across nearly a decade of kernel versions. In one virtualization setup, it lets an untrusted virtual machine write to the host's memory and hijack the program that runs the virtual machine. The bug is tracked as  CVE-2026-74580  and named Vghost . Tencent Zhuque Lab, which found the flaw, released a fix on August 3 and published a full write-up on October 12 with working demos of both attacks. There is no public sign it has been exploited yet. vhost is the part of the Linux kernel that speeds up network and other input/output for virtual machines and containers. A local user reaches it by opening a device node, usually /dev/vhost-net or /dev/vhost-vsock. On the host, the flaw gives an unprivileged user a reliable way to read and write any kernel address, bypass KASLR, and escalate to root. The attack is deterministic: it needs no memory grooming and ...

Security researchers ran their own code inside a protected part of Windows that is meant to stay sealed off even when the rest of the computer is taken over. The protected area is a VBS enclave , an isolated slice of memory the operating system uses to guard secrets, and the one they broke into handles passwords for a Windows anti-phishing feature. The work was done in a lab as a proof of concept, has not been seen in real attacks, and Microsoft fixed the flaw in its September 8, 2026 update. The flaw is tracked as  CVE-2026-83498 . Microsoft rates it an elevation-of-privilege issue, Critical, with a CVSS score of 7.8, and says it has not been exploited and was not publicly known before the fix. Microsoft also says it found the same issue internally. The research, by the security firm  Doyensec , was published October 13, more than a month after the patch. A VBS enclave is a signed library that a normal Windows program loads but cannot read or change once it is runnin...