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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously unreported threat cluster dubbed OP-512 (where "OP" stands for "opponent") that has been observed targeting Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) servers to deploy a bespoke web shell framework. ReliaQuest has assessed with moderate to high confidence that the espionage-focused activity is linked to China. "OP-512 was highly likely conducting espionage through a compromised Internet Information Services (IIS) web server on an organization whose sector and geography align with China-linked intelligence priorities," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Although no overlaps have been found between OP-512 and other known China-aligned adversaries, it's the fourth such threat group after CL-STA-0048 , DragonRank , and GhostRedirector to single out IIS web servers over the past 12 months. As recently as last month, Cisco Talos revealed that multiple Chinese-speaking...

Eighteen months ago, the AI SOC was a marketing line. Today it's a budget item. The category has crossed over from interesting to inevitable, with billions of dollars now flowing into AI-powered security operations platforms, agentic SOC tools, and AI co-pilots built into every layer of the security stack. The data shows SOCs are buying, deploying, and standing up AI capabilities at the fastest pace the industry has ever seen. And yet, the same SOCs reporting record AI adoption are reporting underwhelming outcomes. The first objective benchmark on the value of AI in the SOC was published in the SOC-CMM 2026 Maturity Report in May, drawing on survey data collected from roughly 200 SOCs across regions, sectors, and delivery models between late January and mid-March 2026. Only about 10% of respondents said AI has delivered excellent value to their SOC. About 19% reported good value. The remaining 71% landed at some value or none at all. Eighteen months into AI deployment, that...

Threat actors are actively exploiting a critical security flaw in Everest Forms Pro, a WordPress plugin with about 4,000 active installations, to execute arbitrary code, leading to a complete site compromise. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-3300 (CVSS score: 9.8), a remote code execution bug impacting all versions of the plugin up to, and including, 1.9.12. A patch for the flaw was released on March 18, 2026, with version 1.9.13. "This is due to the Calculation Addon's process_filter() function concatenating user-submitted form field values into a PHP code string without proper escaping before passing it to eval()," Wordfence said . "The sanitize_text_field() function applied to input does not escape single quotes or other PHP code context characters. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject and execute arbitrary PHP code on the server by submitting a crafted value in any string-type form field (text, email, URL, select, radio) ...

Security researchers and the FBI are warning that a wave of FIFA-themed fraud is already hitting World Cup 2026 fans, days before the June 11 kickoff. Recent reports describe thousands of lookalike FIFA domains, banking malware hidden inside pirate streaming apps, and at least one operation that copies FIFA's login page well enough to take over real accounts. It is an obvious target. More than six million fans are expected across 16 cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and FIFA said it received more than 150 million ticket requests in the first 15 days, leaving the tournament around 30 times oversubscribed. Tickets are scarce, fans are anxious, and money is moving fast, which is exactly what fraud needs. One Operator, 300 Cloned FIFA Sites The most detailed findings come from Group-IB , which tracked more than 4,300 fraudulent FIFA domains registered since August 2025. At the center is a group it calls GHOST STADIUM , a Chinese-speaking, money-driven operation...

The threat actor known as PCPJack has hijacked cloud servers associated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to create a covert SMTP email relay network. "Compromised business servers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia were quietly converted into SMTP proxies, verified for mail relay capability, and synced to a downstream consumer every five minutes," Hunt.io said in a statement. "The infrastructure was still running when we found it." The threat intelligence company said it found source code, compiled binaries, deployment state logs, internet scanners, exploitation tooling, and a live Sliver configuration after the threat actor behind the operation left two open directories on a command-and-control (C2) server ("213.136.80[.]73") without any authentication. PCPJack was first discovered by SentinelOne in April 2026 after it identified a credential theft framework that specifically targets cloud services, while taking s...

Cisco has patched a bug in Unified Communications Manager that lets an unauthenticated attacker on the network write files to the box and, from there, climb to root. It is tracked as CVE-2026-20230 , and proof-of-concept exploit code is already public. Cisco's PSIRT says it has not seen the flaw used in attacks yet. The PoC shortens that runway. The flaw is a server-side request forgery. Unified CM and its Session Management Edition fail to validate certain HTTP requests properly, so a crafted request can push the server into writing arbitrary files onto the underlying OS. Those files are the foothold. Cisco says they can be used later to escalate to root, the top privilege on the system. That two-step is why the score and the rating disagree. The CVSS base is 8.6: it scores the file write (an integrity-only impact, no confidentiality or availability loss) but not the root escalation that follows. Cisco rated the advisory Critical anyway, since the end state is full root. ...

A security researcher found a flaw in Anthropic's Claude Code GitHub Action that let an attacker take over vulnerable public repositories running it, with nothing more than a single opened GitHub issue. Because Anthropic's own action repo used the same workflow, a working attack could have pushed malicious code into the action itself and onto the projects downstream that pull it. RyotaK of GMO Flatt Security reported the core bypass to Anthropic in January, and Anthropic fixed it within four days , with further hardening through the spring; the fixes are in claude-code-action v1.0.94. Anthropic rated the issues 7.8 under CVSS v4.0 and paid a bug bounty. Claude Code GitHub Actions drops Claude into CI/CD pipelines to triage issues, slap on labels, review pull requests, or run slash commands. By default, the workflow gets read and write access to a repo's code, issues, pull requests, discussions, and workflow files. Because those permissions are broad, the action is su...