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Anthropic on Tuesday confirmed that internal code for its popular artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistant, Claude Code, had been inadvertently released due to a human error. "No sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed," an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement shared with CNBC News. "This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. We’re rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again." The discovery came after the AI upstart released version 2.1.88 of the Claude Code npm package, with users spotting that it contained a source map file that could be used to access Claude Code's source code – comprising nearly 2,000 TypeScript files and more than 512,000 lines of code. The version is no longer available for download from npm. Security researcher Chaofan Shou was the first to publicly flag it on X, stating "Claude code source code has been leaked via a map file in their npm re...

Thursday. Another week, another batch of things that probably should've been caught sooner but weren't. This one's got some range — old vulnerabilities getting new life, a few "why was that even possible" moments, attackers leaning on platforms and tools you'd normally trust without thinking twice. Quiet escalations more than loud zero-days, but the kind that matter more in practice anyway. Mix of malware, infrastructure exposure, AI-adjacent weirdness, and some supply chain stuff that's... not great. Let's get into it. Resilient hybrid botnet surge Phorpiex Botnet Detailed A new variant of the botnet known as Phorpiex (aka Trik) has been observed, using a hybrid communication model that combines traditional C2 HTTP polling with a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol over both TCP and UDP to ensure operational continuity in the face of server takedowns. The malware acts as a conduit for encrypted payloads, ma...

As 2025 draws to a close, security professionals face a sobering realization: the traditional playbook for web security has become dangerously obsolete. AI-powered attacks, evolving injection techniques, and supply chain compromises affecting hundreds of thousands of websites forced a fundamental rethink of defensive strategies. Here are the five threats that reshaped web security this year, and why the lessons learned will define digital protection for years to come. 1. Vibe Coding Natural language coding, " vibe coding " , transformed from novelty to production reality in 2025, with nearly 25% of Y Combinator startups using AI to build core codebases. One developer launched a multiplayer flight simulator in under three hours, eventually scaling it to 89,000 players and generating thousands in monthly revenue. The Result Code that functions perfectly yet contains exploitable flaws, bypassing traditional security tools. AI generates what you ask for, not what you forget...

This week had real hits. The key software got tampered with. Active bugs showed up in the tools people use every day. Some attacks didn’t even need much effort because the path was already there. One weak spot now spreads wider than before. What starts small can reach a lot of systems fast. New bugs, faster use, less time to react. That’s this week. Read through it. ⚡ Threat of the Week Axios npm Package Compromised by N. Korean Hackers —Threat actors with ties to North Korea seized control of the npm account belonging to the lead maintainer of Axios, a popular npm package with nearly 100 million weekly downloads, to push malicious versions containing a cross-platform malware dubbed WAVESHAPER.V2. The activity has been attributed to a financially motivated threat actor known as UNC1069. The incident demonstrates how quickly the compromise of a popular npm package can have ripple effects through the ecosystem. T...

The supply chain campaign known as GlassWorm has once again reared its head, infiltrating both Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace and Open VSX with 24 extensions impersonating popular developer tools and frameworks like Flutter, React, Tailwind, Vim, and Vue. GlassWorm was first documented in October 2025, detailing its use of the Solana blockchain for command-and-control (C2) and harvest npm, Open VSX, GitHub, and Git credentials, drain cryptocurrency assets from dozens of wallets, and turn developer machines into attacker-controlled nodes for other criminal activities. The most crucial aspect of the campaign is the abuse of the stolen credentials to compromise additional packages and extensions, thereby spreading the malware like a worm. Despite continued efforts of Microsoft and Open VSX, the malware resurfaced a second time last month, and the attackers were observed targeting GitHub repositories. The latest wave of the GlassWorm campaign, spotted by Secure Annex's Jo...

In yet another software supply chain attack, the open-source, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cline CLI was updated to stealthily install OpenClaw , a self-hosted autonomous AI agent that has become exceedingly popular in the past few months. "On February 17, 2026, at 3:26 AM PT, an unauthorized party used a compromised npm publish token to publish an update to Cline CLI on the NPM registry: cline@2.3.0," the maintainers of the Cline package said in an advisory. "The published package contains a modified package.json with an added postinstall script: 'postinstall": "npm install -g openclaw@latest.'" As a result, this causes OpenClaw to be installed on the developer's machine when Cline version 2.3.0 is installed. Cline said no additional modifications were introduced to the package and there was no malicious behavior observed. However, it noted that the installation of OpenClaw was not authorized or intended. The s...

Three different ClickFix campaigns have been found to act as a delivery vector for the deployment of a macOS information stealer called MacSync . "Unlike traditional exploit-based attacks, this method relies entirely on user interaction – usually in the form of copying and executing commands – making it particularly effective against users who may not appreciate the implications of running unknown and obfuscated terminal commands," Sophos researchers Jagadeesh Chandraiah, Tonmoy Jitu, Dmitry Samosseiko, and Matt Wixey said . It's currently not known if the campaigns are the work of the same threat actor. The use of ClickFix lures to distribute the malware was also flagged by Jamf Threat Labs in December 2025. The details of the three campaigns are as follows - November 2025: A campaign that used OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas web browser as bait, delivered via sponsored search results on Google, to direct users to a fake Google Sites URL with a download button that, whe...

Cybersecurity researchers from  SafeDep and Veracode detailed a number of malware-laced npm packages that are designed to execute remote code and download additional payloads. The packages in question are listed below - eslint-config-airbnb-compat (676 Downloads) ts-runtime-compat-check (1,588 Downloads) solders (983 Downloads) @mediawave/lib (386 Downloads) All the identified npm packages have since been taken down from npm, but not before they were downloaded hundreds of times from the package registry.  SafeDep's analysis of eslint-config-airbnb-compat found that the JavaScript library has ts-runtime-compat-check listed as a dependency, which, in turn, contacts an external server defined in the former package ("proxy.eslint-proxy[.]site") to retrieve and execute a Base64-encoded string. The exact nature of the payload is unknown. "It implements a multi-stage remote code execution attack using a transitive dependency to hide the malicious code,"...

Threat actors are continuing to upload malicious packages to the npm registry so as to tamper with already-installed local versions of legitimate libraries and execute malicious code in what's seen as a sneakier attempt to stage a software supply chain attack. The newly discovered package, named pdf-to-office , masquerades as a utility for converting PDF files to Microsoft Word documents. But, in reality, it harbors features to inject malicious code into cryptocurrency wallet software associated with Atomic Wallet and Exodus. "Effectively, a victim who tried to send crypto funds to another crypto wallet would have the intended wallet destination address swapped out for one belonging to the malicious actor," ReversingLabs researcher Lucija Valentić said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The npm package in question was first published on March 24, 2025, and has received three updates since then but not before the previous versions were likely removed by the a...

Cybersecurity company ESET has disclosed that it discovered an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered ransomware variant codenamed PromptLock . Written in Golang, the newly identified strain uses the gpt-oss:20b model from OpenAI locally via the Ollama API to generate malicious Lua scripts in real-time. The open-weight language model was released by OpenAI earlier this month. "PromptLock leverages Lua scripts generated from hard-coded prompts to enumerate the local filesystem, inspect target files, exfiltrate selected data, and perform encryption," ESET said . "These Lua scripts are cross-platform compatible, functioning on Windows, Linux, and macOS." The ransomware code also embeds instructions to craft a custom note based on the "files affected," and the infected machine is a personal computer, company server, or a power distribution controller. It's currently not known who is behind the malware, but ESET told The Hacker News that PromptLoc arti...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two malicious packages uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that impersonated popular artificial intelligence (AI) models like OpenAI ChatGPT and Anthropic Claude to deliver an information stealer called JarkaStealer. The packages, named gptplus and claudeai-eng , were uploaded by a user named " Xeroline " in November 2023, attracting 1,748 and 1,826 downloads, respectively. Both libraries are no longer available for download from PyPI. "The malicious packages were uploaded to the repository by one author and, in fact, differed from each other only in name and description," Kaspersky said in a post. The packages purported to offer a way to access GPT-4 Turbo API and Claude AI API, but harbored malicious code that initiated the deployment of the malware upon installation. Specifically, the "__init__.py" file in these packages contained Base64-encoded data that incorporated code to download ...

Hackers aren’t kicking down the door anymore. They just use the same tools we use every day — code packages, cloud accounts, email, chat, phones, and “trusted” partners — and turn them against us. One bad download can leak your keys. One weak vendor can expose many customers at once. One guest invite, one link on a phone, one bug in a common tool, and suddenly your mail, chats, repos, and servers are in play. Every story below is a reminder that your “safe” tools might be the real weak spot. ⚡ Threat of the Week Shai-Hulud Returns with More Aggression — The npm registry was targeted a second time by a self-replicating worm that went by the moniker "Sha1-Hulud: The Second Coming," affecting over 800 packages and 27,000 GitHub repositories. Like in the previous iteration, the main objective was to steal sensitive data like API keys, cloud credentials, and npm and GitHub authentication information, and facilitate deeper supply chain compromise in a worm-like fashion. Th...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a malicious npm package that was generated using artificial intelligence (AI) and concealed a cryptocurrency wallet drainer. The package, @kodane/patch-manager, claims to offer "advanced license validation and registry optimization utilities for high-performance Node.js applications." It was uploaded to npm by a user named "Kodane" on July 28, 2025. The package is no longer available for download from the registry, but not before it attracted over 1,500 downloads. Software supply chain security company Safety, which discovered the library, said the malicious features are advertised directly in the source code, calling it an "enhanced stealth wallet drainer." Specifically, the behavior is triggered as part of a postinstall script that drops its payload within hidden directories across Windows, Linux, and macOS systems, and then proceeds to connect to a command-and-control (C2) server at "sweeper-monitor-produ...

Cyber threats last week showed how attackers no longer need big hacks to cause big damage. They’re going after the everyday tools we trust most — firewalls, browser add-ons, and even smart TVs — turning small cracks into serious breaches. The real danger now isn’t just one major attack, but hundreds of quiet ones using the software and devices already inside our networks. Each trusted system can become an entry point if it’s left unpatched or overlooked. Here’s a clear look at the week’s biggest risks, from exploited network flaws to new global campaigns and fast-moving vulnerabilities. ⚡ Threat of the Week Flaws in Multiple Network Security Products Come Under Attack — Over the past week, Fortinet , SonicWall , Cisco , and WatchGuard said vulnerabilities in their products have been exploited by threat actors in real-world attacks. Cisco said attacks exploiting CVE-2025-20393, a critical flaw in AsyncOS, have been abused by a China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actor cod...

Microsoft has disclosed details of a new version of the ClickFix social engineering tactic in which the attackers trick unsuspecting users into running commands that carry out a Domain Name System (DNS) lookup to retrieve the next-stage payload. Specifically, the attack relies on using the " nslookup " (short for nameserver lookup ) command to execute a custom DNS lookup triggered via the Windows Run dialog. ClickFix is an increasingly popular technique that's traditionally delivered via phishing, malvertising, or drive-by download schemes, often redirecting targets to bogus landing pages that host fake CAPTCHA verification or instructions to address a non-existent problem on their computers by running a command either through the Windows Run dialog or the macOS Terminal app. The attack method has become widespread over the past two years since it hinges on the victims infecting their own machines with malware, thereby allowing the threat actors to bypass security c...

Two Google Chrome extensions have turned malicious after what appears to be a case of ownership transfer , offering attackers a way to push malware to downstream customers, inject arbitrary code, and harvest sensitive data. The extensions in question, both originally associated with a developer named "akshayanuonline@gmail.com" (BuildMelon), are listed below - QuickLens - Search Screen with Google Lens (ID: kdenlnncndfnhkognokgfpabgkgehodd) - 7,000 users ShotBird - Scrolling Screenshots, Tweet Images & Editor (ID: gengfhhkjekmlejbhmmopegofnoifnjp) - 800 users While QuickLens is no longer available for download from the Chrome Web Store, ShotBird remains accessible as of writing. ShotBird was originally launched in November 2024, with its developer, Akshay Anu S (@AkshayAnuOnline), claiming on X that the extension is suitable for "creating professional, studio-like visuals," and that all processing happens locally. According to research published by mo...

This week showed just how fast things can go wrong when no one’s watching. Some attacks were silent and sneaky. Others used tools we trust every day — like AI, VPNs, or app stores — to cause damage without setting off alarms. It’s not just about hacking anymore. Criminals are building systems to make money, spy, or spread malware like it’s a business. And in some cases, they’re using the same apps and services that businesses rely on — flipping the script without anyone noticing at first. The scary part? Some threats weren’t even bugs — just clever use of features we all take for granted. And by the time people figured it out, the damage was done. Let’s look at what really happened, why it matters, and what we should all be thinking about now. ⚡ Threat of the Week Silently Patched Fortinet Flaw Comes Under Attack — A vulnerability that was patched by Fortinet in FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) has been exploited in the wild since early October 2025 by threat actors to c...

Details have emerged about a now-patched security flaw in the DeepSeek artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that, if successfully exploited, could permit a bad actor to take control of a victim's account by means of a prompt injection attack . Security researcher Johann Rehberger, who has chronicled many a prompt injection attack targeting various AI tools, found that providing the input "Print the xss cheat sheet in a bullet list. just payloads" in the DeepSeek chat triggered the execution of JavaScript code as part of the generated response – a classic case of cross-site scripting (XSS). XSS attacks can have serious consequences as they lead to the execution of unauthorized code in the context of the victim's web browser. An attacker could take advantage of such flaws to hijack a user's session and gain access to cookies and other data associated with the chat.deepseek[.]com domain, thereby leading to an account takeover. "After some experimenting,...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two new malicious extensions on the Chrome Web Store that are designed to exfiltrate OpenAI ChatGPT and DeepSeek conversations alongside browsing data to servers under the attackers' control. The names of the extensions, which collectively have over 900,000 users, are below - Chat GPT for Chrome with GPT-5, Claude Sonnet & DeepSeek AI (ID: fnmihdojmnkclgjpcoonokmkhjpjechg, 600,000 users) AI Sidebar with Deepseek, ChatGPT, Claude, and more. (ID: inhcgfpbfdjbjogdfjbclgolkmhnooop, 300,000 users) The findings come weeks after Urban VPN Proxy , another extension with millions of installations on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, was caught spying on users' chats with artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. This tactic of using browser extensions to stealthily capture AI conversations has been codenamed Prompt Poaching by Secure Annex. The two newly identified extensions "were found exfiltrating user conversations and all ...

The year opened without a reset. The same pressure carried over, and in some places it tightened. Systems people assume are boring or stable are showing up in the wrong places. Attacks moved quietly, reused familiar paths, and kept working longer than anyone wants to admit. This week’s stories share one pattern. Nothing flashy. No single moment. Just steady abuse of trust — updates, extensions, logins, messages — the things people click without thinking. That’s where damage starts now. This recap pulls those signals together. Not to overwhelm, but to show where attention slipped and why it matters early in the year. ⚡ Threat of the Week RondoDox Botnet Exploits React2Shell Flaw — A persistent nine-month-long campaign has targeted Internet of Things (IoT) devices and web applications to enroll them into a botnet known as RondoDox. As of December 2025, the activity has been observed leveraging the recently disclosed React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182, CVSS score: 10.0) flaw as an initial...