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Most of this week’s threats didn’t rely on new tricks. They relied on familiar systems behaving exactly as designed, just in the wrong hands. Ordinary files, routine services, and trusted workflows were enough to open doors without forcing them. What stands out is how little friction attackers now need. Some activity focused on quiet reach and coverage, others on timing and reuse. The emphasis wasn’t speed or spectacle, but control gained through scale, patience, and misplaced trust. The stories below trace where that trust bent, not how it broke. Each item is a small signal of a larger shift, best seen when viewed together. Spear-phishing delivers custom backdoor Operation Nomad Leopard Targets Afghanistan Government entities in Afghanistan have been at the receiving end of a spear-phishing campaign dubbed Operation Nomad Leopard that employs bogus administrative documents as decoys to distribute a backdoor named FALSECUB by means o...

Security teams at agile, fast-growing companies often have the same mandate: secure the business without slowing it down. Most teams inherit a tech stack optimized for breakneck growth, not resilience. In these environments, the security team is the helpdesk, the compliance expert, and the incident response team all rolled into one. Securing the cloud office in this scenario is all about finding leverage: identifying the strategic control points that drive the most resilience without adding operational overhead. Google Workspace provides an excellent security foundation, but its native tooling has inherent limitations, and relying on the default configurations can cause headaches. To build a truly resilient program, there are some common-sense first steps teams can take to secure Workspace natively, before intelligently augmenting the platform where its capabilities fall short. Secure email, the primary attack vector and largest archive Email remains the most reliable target for ...

A new malicious package discovered in the Python Package Index (PyPI) has been found to impersonate a popular library for symbolic mathematics to deploy malicious payloads, including a cryptocurrency miner, on Linux hosts. The package, named sympy-dev , mimics SymPy , replicating the latter's project description verbatim in an attempt to deceive unsuspecting users into thinking that they are downloading a "development version" of the library. It has been downloaded over 1,100 times since it was first published on January 17, 2026. Although the download count is not a reliable yardstick for measuring the number of infections, the figure likely suggests some developers may have fallen victim to the malicious campaign. The package remains available for download as of writing. According to Socket , the original library has been modified to act as a downloader for an XMRig cryptocurrency miner on compromised systems. The malicious behavior is designed to trigger only when ...

A new security flaw in SmarterTools SmarterMail email software has come under active exploitation in the wild, two days after the release of a patch. The vulnerability, which currently does not have a CVE identifier, is tracked by watchTowr Labs as WT-2026-0001 . It was patched by SmarterTools on January 15, 2026, with Build 9511 , following responsible disclosure by the exposure management platform on January 8, 2026. Markus Wulftange of CODE WHITE GmbH, the finder has also been credited with reporting the same flaw. It has been described as an authentication bypass flaw that could allow any user to reset the SmarterMail system administrator password by means of a specially crafted HTTP request to the "/api/v1/auth/force-reset-password" endpoint. "The kicker of course being that said user is able to use RCE-as-a-feature functions to directly execute OS [operating system] commands," watchTowr Labs researchers Piotr Bazydlo and Sina Kheirkhah said. The problem ...

Cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf has warned of a "new cluster of automated malicious activity" that involves unauthorized firewall configuration changes on Fortinet FortiGate devices. The activity, it said, commenced on January 15, 2026, adding it shares similarities with a December 2025 campaign in which malicious SSO logins on FortiGate appliances were recorded against the admin account from different hosting providers by exploiting CVE-2025-59718 and CVE-2025-59719. Both vulnerabilities allow for unauthenticated bypass of SSO login authentication via crafted SAML messages when the FortiCloud single sign-on (SSO) feature is enabled on affected Devices. The shortcomings impact FortiOS, FortiWeb, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager. "This activity involved the creation of generic accounts intended for persistence, configuration changes granting VPN access to those accounts, as well as exfiltration of firewall configurations," Arctic Wolf said of the developin...

Cisco has released fresh patches to address what it described as a "critical" security vulnerability impacting multiple Unified Communications (CM) products and Webex Calling Dedicated Instance that it has been actively exploited as a zero-day in the wild. The vulnerability, CVE-2026-20045 (CVSS score: 8.2), could permit an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system of a susceptible device. "This vulnerability is due to improper validation of user-supplied input in HTTP requests," Cisco said in an advisory. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a sequence of crafted HTTP requests to the web-based management interface of an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to obtain user-level access to the underlying operating system and then elevate privileges to root." The critical rating for the flaw is due to the fact that its exploitation could allow for privil...

As many as 3,136 individual IP addresses linked to likely targets of the Contagious Interview activity have been identified, with the campaign claiming 20 potential victim organizations spanning artificial intelligence (AI), cryptocurrency, financial services, IT services, marketing, and software development sectors in Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, and Central America. The new findings come from Recorded Future's Insikt Group, which is tracking the North Korean threat activity cluster under the moniker PurpleBravo . First documented in late 2023, the campaign is also known as CL-STA-0240, DeceptiveDevelopment, DEV#POPPER, Famous Chollima, Gwisin Gang, Tenacious Pungsan, UNC5342, Void Dokkaebi, and WaterPlum. The 3,136 individual IP addresses, primarily concentrated around South Asia and North America, are assessed to have been targeted by the adversary from August 2024 to September 2025. The 20 victim companies are said to be based in Belgium, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, In...

Zoom and GitLab have released security updates to resolve a number of security vulnerabilities that could result in denial-of-service (DoS) and remote code execution. The most severe of the lot is a critical security flaw impacting Zoom Node Multimedia Routers (MMRs) that could permit a meeting participant to conduct remote code execution attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-22844 and discovered internally by its Offensive Security team, carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of 10.0. "A command injection vulnerability in Zoom Node Multimedia Routers (MMRs) before version 5.2.1716.0 may allow a meeting participant to conduct remote code execution of the MMR via network access," the company noted in a Tuesday alert. Zoom is recommending that customers using Zoom Node Meetings, Hybrid, or Meeting Connector deployments update to the latest available MMR version to safeguard against any potential threat. There is no evidence that the security flaw has been exploited ...