Search results for October 21 2026 | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The worst problems don't always come with a warning. Sometimes they arrive through a service everyone trusts, a device someone bought, or a system nobody thought to check. By the time something looks wrong, the damage may already be done. This week had plenty of that. Trusted connections became a problem. Hardware wasn't as safe as it looked. Old bugs found new victims, and some systems were left so exposed that breaking in barely required any effort. Even AI agents crossed lines they weren't supposed to. Some attacks were clever. Others were painfully simple. The full recap shows just how much can go wrong, and how little it sometimes takes. ⚡ Threat of the Week ConnectWise Suspends Cloud Backup Following Unauthorized Access — ConnectWise disabled seven ConnectWise application identities as it continues its investigation into an incident in which unknown threat actors obtained unauthorized access to the application identities and compromised Microsoft 365 tenant...

PHP has released emergency updates that fix two critical flaws in the language itself, letting an attacker without an account run code on a web server. The fixes are in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35, and the PHP team says only updating fully protects a server. The flaws, together called PHP2Shell , sit in the PHP runtime, not in any application, so a site is exposed even when its own code is secure. The risk is highest on servers using Apache's mod_php, where a working exploit triggers the attack before any application code runs. Both flaws are rated 9.2 on the CVSS v4.0 scale and carry the identifiers  CVE-2026-109618  and  CVE-2026-109619 . PHP published them around the scheduled release time of 14:00 UTC on October 21, a day after details leaked ahead of a planned October 22 disclosure. Researchers at Wiz, Calif, and OpenAI found and reported the flaws, which affect nearly every PHP version back to PHP 5.4. Who Is Affected Every PHP installatio...

The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate certificate authority (CA) certificates are compromised,  Mozilla  and  Google's Chrome Root Program  confirms on October 20. An intermediate CA signs the certificates that websites present, so anyone holding one of these keys could issue a certificate for any website that a browser would accept. A researcher reported the compromise to the root programs on the evening of October 17, and Chrome and Firefox blocked the eight certificates within hours, after Chrome verified the findings. No TLS certificate chaining to the six intermediates used for websites had been logged to  Certificate Transparency  (CT) before Chrome's block, so none could have been trusted by default in Chrome or any other browser that requires CT logging, the Chrome Root Program said. The keys did not have to be stolen. They were generated with too little randomness, so anyone can compute them from the public certificates,  Goo...

This story is developing and was written before PHP's scheduled 14:00 UTC release on October 21. Once the release is out, the affected and fixed versions below are confirmed by the official advisory. PHP will ship an out-of-cycle security release at 14:00 UTC today, October 21, for two critical vulnerabilities that its security team has rated 9.2 on the CVSS v4.0 scale but has not described. ⚡ UPDATE — PHP Issues Emergency Patches for Two Critical PHP2Shell RCE Flaws as Exploit Attempts Emerge Security researchers at watchTowr say the two flaws allow remote code execution. Only the four supported PHP branches, 8.2 through 8.5, can receive the fix, and no exploitation has been reported so far. The  advance notice  followed a leak. On October 20, a  post on HN  said two PHP remote code execution flaws, rated CVSS 10.0 and affecting versions from PHP 5 onward, would be disclosed on Thursday, October 22. The poster said they had "no evidence beyond 'source: trus...

Two of 31 newly disclosed flaws in Progress Software's  MarkLogic Server  database could let an account given only some management privileges take administrator control of the server, the company says. Progress published all 31 on October 12 and scored five of them critical. Fixes have been available since September 10, in  MarkLogic 11.3.7  and  MarkLogic 12.1.0 . Affected releases, and the release that fixes each: MarkLogic 11.x before 11.3.7: upgrade to 11.3.7 MarkLogic 12.x before 12.1.0: upgrade to 12.1.0 MarkLogic 11.3 is the long-term support (LTS) line. The 12 line, which Progress calls an innovation release, has no patched 12.0 release. Its fix is 12.1.0, which also adds new features. Installing the fixes for the 10 MarkLogic flaws Progress disclosed in August is not enough. Those fixes arrived in 11.3.6 and 12.0.3, and both releases are affected by the new flaws. Progress's CVE records and its upgrade notes for the two releases do n...

A U.S. court on Monday granted the U.S. government's request to detain a former OpenAI engineer accused of planting a recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco office to allegedly steal sensitive secrets. In a new court filing Sunday, prosecutors revealed that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national, was "in frequent communications via WhatsApp with a member of the Saudi Royal Family" throughout 2025 and 2026. Alfozan is said to have communicated with the Saudi royal as recently as October 5, 2026, four days before he was arrested. "Among other things, the individual told the defendant that an artificial intelligence initiative was being launched in Saudi Arabia and wanted the defendant to join it," the filing reads. "In May 2026, the individual told the defendant, 'Saudi needs you more then [sic] the US!' to which the defendant responded '100,' indicating he agreed." The S...

Attackers took control of more than 300 Tor exit relays in early October and used them to redirect SSH connections to servers that stole login passwords, a researcher found. Exit relays are the last hop in a Tor circuit, where traffic leaves the network for its destination. Only a password login to an SSH server made through Tor between October 1 and 5, after accepting the interception server's host key, could have been captured. The Tor Project began flagging relays on October 4, and by October 5, none remained in the consensus, the list of relays that Tor clients use. At the peak on October 4, the relays carrying the attacker's exit policy made up 7.46% of Tor's exit capacity, measured by consensus weight, according to an  analysis of public Tor directory data  posted to the tor-relays mailing list. The researcher, who publishes as kaba,  scanned  all of Tor's roughly 3,000 exits on October 2 and found 333 redirecting SSH to the same 12 interception servers...

Threat actors have been observed exploiting a critical pre-authentication command injection vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway to drop web shells and attempt theft of configuration data. LevelBlue's Threat Hunt Operations & Research (THOR) team, which analyzed the exploitation activity across multiple customer environments, said it identified malicious NetScaler authentication events containing attacker-controlled usernames designed to weaponize CVE-2026-88771. CVE-2026-88771 (CVSS score: 9.5) is an improper input validation vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands.  The security flaw, along with CVE-2026-88772, was disclosed last week after reports that the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL) reportedly sent a pre-notification to organizations in the Netherlands that urged organizations to shut their appliances down, citing active exploitation. As of writing, there are currently no d...

Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to address a record 169 security flaws across its product portfolio, including one vulnerability that has been actively exploited in the wild. Of these 169 vulnerabilities, 157 are rated Important, eight are rated Critical, three are rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. Ninety-three of the flaws are classified as privilege escalation, followed by 21 information disclosure, 21 remote code execution, 14 security feature bypass, 10 spoofing, and nine denial-of-service vulnerabilities. Also included among the 169 flaws are four non-Microsoft issued CVEs impacting AMD (CVE-2023-20585), Node.js (CVE-2026-21637), Windows Secure Boot (CVE-2026-25250), and Git for Windows (CVE-2026-32631). The updates are in addition to 78 vulnerabilities that have been addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the update that was released last month . T...

Hackers have used a malware family called NeedyMantis to maintain long-term access to networks they had already breached, Microsoft said in a technical analysis. The malware has been seen in a small number of targeted intrusions at telecommunications organizations, universities, medical nonprofits, intergovernmental organizations, and government contractors. Its use goes back to at least October 2025. Microsoft found NeedyMantis while following up on indicators from Kaspersky's investigation into the  supply chain attack on DAEMON Tools . In that attack, official, signed installers for the DAEMON Tools Lite disk image program carried malicious code from April 8, 2026. The developer replaced them with a clean version on May 5. Microsoft tracks the activity tied to that attack as Storm-3069. It says Storm-3069 is one group that uses NeedyMantis, though it has not seen the malware itself spread through a supply chain attack. Defenders can check their networks using the fi...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an ongoing credential-theft campaign that has compromised two high-profile open-source maintainer accounts to push a malicious workflow into over 340 repositories. "Using the account of Takashi Kitao, author of the 18,400-star game engine pyxel, the attacker pushed a malicious workflow to 27 repositories starting at 13:20 UTC," StepSecurity said . "Eight hours later, the account of Henry Wu (henrywoo), the original author of Uber's athenadriver, was used to push the same workflow to 318 repositories in a 16-minute window, 21:10–21:26 UTC." As of October 9, 2026, Socket said it has identified more than 500 GitHub accounts that committed the malicious workflow to tens of thousands of repositories since October 7, 2026. The activity has been attributed to GhostAction , a massive supply chain attack campaign that first came to light in September 2025. The activity impacted 817 repositories across 327 GitHu...

Microsoft on Tuesday rolled out its first security update for 2026 , addressing 114 security flaws, including one vulnerability that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 114 flaws, eight are rated Critical, and 106 are rated Important in severity. As many as 58 vulnerabilities have been classified as privilege escalation, followed by 22 information disclosure, 21 remote code execution, and five spoofing flaws. According to data collected by Fortra, the update marks the third-largest January Patch Tuesday after January 2025 and January 2022. These patches are in addition to two security flaws that Microsoft has addressed in its Edge browser since the release of the December 2025 Patch Tuesday update, including a spoofing flaw in its Android app ( CVE-2025-65046 , 3.1) and a case of insufficient policy enforcement in Chromium's WebView tag ( CVE-2026-0628 , CVSS score: 8.8). The vulnerability that has come under in-the-wild exploitation is CVE-2026-20805 (CV...

U.S. federal civilian agencies must remove DeepSeek products from their information technology systems, along with any third-party products or services "developed using DeepSeek implementations," under a Department of Homeland Security order. They may also no longer buy information technology products or services from the Chinese AI developer or its affiliates Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin issued the order, dated July 24, 2026, under the  Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 , and the department published it in the  Federal Register  on October 20. The notice does not define " DeepSeek implementations. " The order names Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd., the developer of the R1 and V3 models, and covers its affiliates as defined in federal acquisition rules. The company's  privacy policy  says it collects, processes and stores users' personal data in the People's Republic of China. Under the 2018...

Attackers behind a string of personal data leaks at Japanese organizations have abused APIs for mobile apps and targeted known software flaws, the JPCERT Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) said. The Tokyo-based center, which takes incident reports, based its  October 8, 2026 alert  on those reports and other information. The alert names no attacker and no affected organization. JPCERT/CC called what it knows "limited and fragmentary" in the alert, translated here from Japanese. It said its account does not mean the same method was used in every incident. Besides consumer apps, the systems hit include business intelligence (BI) tools and employee-facing management systems that their operators did not expect the public to reach. Data stored in them leaked in some cases. For defenders, the alert includes eight source IP addresses, five User-Agent strings, and a list of API controls, including access controls on every endpoint, public or not. The only product it names a...

WhatsApp's help pages carried hidden instructions for its support chatbot that told it not to recommend a data protection authority or regulator to users who could no longer delete their accounts, even though WhatsApp's own privacy policy for Europe tells users they can complain to one. The text sat in the pages' code, never shown on screen, until it was removed by October 18. Whether the chatbot ever followed the instructions is not known:  Redact , the data-deletion software company that found the text, read the instructions, not the chatbot's answers. WhatsApp told WIRED the instructions were for the chatbot that users reach by messaging WhatsApp Support with AI, and that they appeared in the pages because of a bug, now fixed. A second block of hidden text on the page about reporting and blocking told the chatbot that once a user mentioned a lawyer, a lawsuit, or a court, it should not cite privacy laws such as the GDPR, even when the user raised them. A W...

A flaw in SAP's  Cloud SDK for Python  can send an application's OAuth2 client credentials to a server an attacker controls, SAP said in a  security advisory  on October 13. The flaw affects multi-tenant applications on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) that use the SDK, SAP's official Python client for BTP services. An attacker must be able to control the tenant subdomain, the name such an application passes to the SDK to say which tenant a request is for. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-89111 and carries SAP's CVSS score of 10.0 out of 10. The advisory names  version 0.45.2 , released on August 21, as the fix. The SDK handles authentication for those services with the application's client credentials, a client ID and a client secret. Version 0.45.2 added a check that rejects any tenant subdomain that is not a simple name. Six later releases do not apply that check in every case, The Hacker News found. Versions 0.53.0 through 0.55.0, published betwe...

A China-linked hacking group exploited a flaw in Sogou Input Method , one of the most widely used tools for typing Chinese characters on Windows, to install a backdoor on victims' computers, security company Gen Digital said in  research published Thursday . The attack started with a crafted link and ended with the attacker able to do anything the logged-in user could do. Tencent, which owns and develops Sogou, fixed the flaw in April 2026. Gen found the flaw while investigating a live intrusion by UNC3569 , a group that  Google Threat Intelligence ties to China  and places in the country's hacker-for-hire scene. Google has tracked the group since 2021 and says it has targeted government, education, technology, and finance sectors, mostly in East and Southeast Asia. The backdoor it installed is GRAYRABBIT , a small program the group has used for years and that Google describes as its first step onto a machine. It gives an attacker a remote command shell, allows fil...

The Rust Project has deleted malicious versions of three widely used Rust crates from crates.io after a compromised maintainer account published releases that added a typosquatted dependency whose build script downloaded and executed a remote payload during compilation. The affected releases are arrayref 0.3.10, internment 0.8.7, and append-only-vec 0.1.9, all published from the same owner account on August 20, 2026, and all removed within 86 to 107 minutes. Because the malicious code sat in the build script of the injected dependency, building a project that resolved it was sufficient to run the payload, and nothing from the crates themselves had to be called. Developers are advised to search ~/.cargo/registry/cache for the deleted crate files and to pin arrayref at 0.3.9 or earlier, after the Rust Security Response Team unyanked the maliciously-yanked versions during the response. There is no patched version, no CVE identifier has been assigned, and the RustSec advisories ...

A new report from the Citizen Lab has revealed that former Member of the European Parliament Stelios Kouloglou had his mobile device repeatedly hacked with the notorious Pegasus spyware while serving on a committee that was tasked with investigating the abuse of such commercial surveillance tools in the bloc. "Through forensic analysis of his device, we found that the attackers could have had access to confidential documents and committee deliberations," the Citizen Lab researchers John Scott-Railton, Bill Marczak, Bahr Abdul Razzak, Kate Pundyk, Siena Anstis, and Ron Deibert said . The infections have not been attributed to a particular government at this time, and there is no evidence that the Greek government is behind the activity. However, the Canadian interdisciplinary research laboratory noted that it identified an overlap between the first infection and a previous campaign targeting Russian and Belarusian-speaking exiled journalists and activists in Europe. ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two malicious packages in the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that masquerade as spellcheckers but contain functionality to deliver a remote access trojan (RAT). The packages, named spellcheckerpy and spellcheckpy , are no longer available on PyPI, but not before they were collectively downloaded a little over 1,000 times. "Hidden inside the Basque language dictionary file was a base64-encoded payload that downloads a full-featured Python RAT," Aikido researcher Charlie Eriksen said . "The attacker published three 'dormant' versions first, payload present, trigger absent, then flipped the switch with spellcheckpy v1.2.0, adding an obfuscated execution trigger that fires the moment you import SpellChecker." Unlike other packages that conceal the malicious functionality within "__init__.py" scripts, the threat actor behind the campaign has been found to add the payload inside a file named "re...