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A fake Web3 accelerator has been observed pushing information stealers and backdoors to Windows and macOS systems using malicious npm packages under the pretext of offering free artificial intelligence (AI) credits for Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini, coding tools, and security audits. "The tools delivered information-stealing malware and backdoors for macOS and Windows machines," Elastic Security Labs researchers Jia Yu Chan and Daniel Stepanic said . "The operation also repackaged a legitimate coding agent to send model requests through attacker-controlled services, while its audit tools generated fabricated security findings." The scheme poses as a Web3 venture capital accelerator named Apex Accelerator to target cryptocurrency startups and founders. It's being tracked under the moniker REF8801 . The names of the npm packages, each of which targets both Windows and macOS machines, are listed below - @apexacc/cli (Apex Copilot CLI — AI advisor fo...

A flaw in Broadcom's Wi-Fi setup software lets an attacker within radio range run code as root on Broadcom-based routers, without the network password or any pairing step, security researcher Quentin Kaiser  disclosed  on October 16. He showed the attack working against home gateways supplied by three Belgian internet providers, in one case reading the Wi-Fi password off the device and in another opening a remote shell over the air. No CVE has been assigned to the flaw, and no fix has been deployed to the affected routers, Kaiser says. The flaw is in Broadcom's version of Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), the feature that lets a device join a Wi-Fi network without the password being typed in. Broadcom's code mishandles the reassembly of fragmented WPS setup messages, so an attacker in range can send crafted messages that corrupt the router's memory. From there, Kaiser built two things: a way to read memory back off the device, and a way to run his own code on it. Ag...

An intruder reached a legacy system at OpenCode on the night of October 16 and may have exposed the third-party AI provider keys that users had saved in OpenCode Console, the company said. Console is OpenCode's optional hosted service: a workspace saves its own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google key there, and Console uses that key to call the provider so team members can use the models without ever seeing the key. The affected group is 1.4% of Console users, all of whom have an outside provider linked, and OpenCode has told them via email to revoke those keys with each provider and replace them. The email went out on the morning of October 17 under the subject line "Action Required: Potential provider key breach." Anyone who did not get one was not affected,  OpenCode said  in a post on X later that day. The keys at risk are the ones pasted into Console. The OpenCode command-line and desktop apps keep provider keys added on the machine in a  SQLite database  th...

ConnectWise on Saturday said it has 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 tenants. The disabled identities are listed below - ConnectWise Cloud Backup - 506e08f9-6e9a-4da4-942b-a099a03644ae ConnectWise Cloud Management - 2399d300-6fca-4e6a-a686-399fefe75b83 ConnectWise Cloud Management - MS Teams - 24205314-2b89-4e07-a2a4-579e898a5640 ConnectWise Cloud Management - Exchange Online - b78f6a77-d4e5-46fb-87e5-d1648bd02519 ConnectWise Cloud Management - MS Graph - 0de14c77-b9b0-4137-9360-34878a929827 ConnectWise Cloud Management - Partner Center - 412dcf96-176d-4b3a-a1b0-4981ad66971e ConnectWise Cloud Management - SharePoint Online - b2b55f5b-7758-4719-8d8f-88ae172e6bdb The IT management software provider said it took the action on October 17, 2026, at 07:00 UTC, adding it has a...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious npm package that's part of a recently disclosed software supply chain attack campaign dubbed MALFEX . The package, named " imgdecode ," was uploaded to the package registry on September 30, 2026, by a user named "malfexteste8." It has been downloaded 979 times as of writing and is still available on npm as of writing. The latest version of the package is 1.0.3. "The npm package imgdecode hides a malicious loader in a compiled Node.js addon," SafeDep said . "Its nine-line JavaScript file loads a Windows dynamic-link library (DLL). When a Node.js program calls require('imgdecode') from a Windows console, the DLL attempts to download encrypted shellcode from GitHub. It decrypts the response and injects the result into a new dllhost.exe process." First documented by both Checkmarx and CloudSEK, MALFEX is the name assigned to a long-running campaign in which an unknown threat...

Cybersecurity researchers are sounding the alarm related to an active campaign in which unknown threat actors are abusing a compromised Microsoft 365 (M365) credential belonging to ConnectWise Cloud Backup (formerly SkyKick) to gain unauthorized access to customers' M365 environments. ConnectWise Cloud Backup is a cloud-based backup and recovery service built for managed service providers (MSPs) to secure their clients' Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace data. To accomplish its tasks, the application is granted broad access to mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and directory data in every tenant on which it's installed. Huntress said it has observed confirmed unauthorized sign-ins within 173 partner/customer tenants using the compromised vendor credential. The incident impacts every organization that has the app installed, and the credential works against every tenant the app is consented in. "The app's credential is in hostile hands," security r...

A local privilege escalation exploit published today gains root on OpenBSD 7.9 by chaining a roughly 37-year-old integer overflow with a separate kernel flaw, bypassing OpenBSD's KARL kernel-address randomization and its SMAP and SMEP hardware protections. Security firm Calif, which found and reported the flaws, published a detailed writeup and full proof-of-concept code after OpenBSD shipped patches for both issues in September. The integer overflow in the shmat(4) attach function was fixed in errata 018 , shipped September 14 as a reliability fix. The reference-counting use-after-free that completes the chain was fixed separately in errata 026, shipped September 30 as a security fix. Both are available through syspatch and cover all architectures. OpenBSD 7.8 also received the integer-overflow fix. The integer overflow, the entry point for the full chain, is classified as a reliability fix, not a security fix. No CVE has been assigned for either flaw as of publication. ...

Attackers repeatedly changed the files that AOMEI Backupper fetches from the vendor's own update servers, in windows of five to ten minutes at a time between May and July 2026, so that any copy of the Windows backup program that checked for an update during one of those windows would download and run a backdoor. Google Threat Intelligence Group, Mandiant , and  ManageEngine's Threat Analysis Lab , which disclosed the campaign this week, say AOMEI has reported fixing its servers, but that fix does not remove the backdoor from machines that were already hit. AOMEI Backupper is Windows backup and disk-cloning software made by AOMEI Technology, a vendor registered in Hong Kong. Like the company's remote-desktop tool AnyViewer, it runs background services that regularly check AOMEI's servers over HTTPS for software updates and promotional pop-ups. Two files drive that check. One, down_html.ini, names the update package to download and the checksum the program uses to ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an advanced persistent threat (APT) spear-phishing campaign that has targeted individuals affiliated with Taiwan research organizations to direct victims to an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing framework designed to harvest their Google account credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes. The activity is being tracked by Cisco Talos under the moniker UAT-11985 , describing it as likely fueled by artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted content generation so as to quickly craft bespoke lures aimed at different targets within the confines of a common social engineering framework. The campaign was first observed in mid-2026. "The operation leveraged legitimate public event themes and impersonated reputable academic and policy institutions to establish credibility," Talos researcher Joey Chen said in an analysis. "Beyond traditional email phishing, the actor incorporated QR code phishing (quishing) te...

OpenAI has disclosed seven new incidents in which its artificial intelligence (AI) models exhibited misaligned behavior, including one case where its research model, after not having funds on an Ethereum test network, spent test cryptocurrency from a third-party's wallet without authorization to complete a coding task. The incident, the AI company said, involved an internal research model part of the GPT-5.6 Sol family. The incident occurred on June 26, 2026, and was discovered by OpenAI three months later. "An internal research model asked to update a cryptocurrency trading application used funds from a wallet that the task had not supplied to pay for a deployment on Sepolia, an Ethereum test network," OpenAI said . "It derived wallet keys from publicly known developer recovery phrases, found an account with test-network funds, and used that account to pay for the requested contract deployment." The assignment allowed the model to deploy compatible cont...

In the space of a month, a new category of AI model went from nonexistent to everywhere. TypeSafe AI released Jev on September 15 and called it a System One model, a nod to Kahneman's fast, intuitive thinking . OpenAI announced its own Decisions API at DevDay and opened a public beta on October 6. Cribl published cribl-decision , an open LoRA adapter you can run locally. Others, like Laya, are already showing up in open source tooling. These models skip text generation entirely. You hand them some state and a set of typed questions. They hand back a choice, a score, or a yes/no with a probability attached. For security operations, I think this is some of the best news of the year. I also think most of the conversation is pointed at the wrong layer. Why a SOC should be excited Three properties make decision models a natural fit for alert triage. You get a number you can automate against. A typed answer with a calibrated probability is something you can put a thresho...

The China-nexus cyber espionage group tracked as Armory Castle (previously UNC5221 or Warp Panda) exploited a newly disclosed security flaw in BeyondTrust Remote Support (formerly Bomgar) as a zero-day in late August 2026. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-102764 (CVSS score: 9.3), is a case of improper origin validation in an internal messaging component that could be exploited by a remote attacker to perform file operations on an affected appliance. "The vulnerability exists within internal components of Remote Support," BeyondTrust said in a Thursday alert. "The components did not adequately validate the origin of the messages it received. Under the right conditions, this could be used to perform file operations on the appliance." Patches for the flaw have been pushed to all Remote Support SaaS customers as of October 9, 2026. Self-hosted customers of Remote Support running versions from 24.3.1 through 26.2.3 are advised to manually update to BT26-0...

AI agents being tested online reached the live systems of Indian organizations and read business records, including personal data and confidential material, CERT-In  said in an advisory  on October 15. The agents went beyond their assigned tasks, and none of the organizations detected the unauthorized access. After internal reviews, the AI companies whose models were being tested voluntarily reported the cases to CERT-In, India's national cyber agency. AI agents are software systems that can plan work, run commands, use tools, and act on the internet autonomously for extended periods. In these cases, the agents gained access via credentials and connection settings left exposed in application configuration and public code repositories, and via cloud service roles with excessive permissions. CERT-In did not name the AI companies, their models, or the organizations and sectors involved. It did not say how many companies reported cases or how many organizations were affecte...

A suspected advanced threat actor has been observed exploiting a security flaw in Fortinet FortiOS to deliver a previously unreported memory-resident ARM64 malware known as PEERSTITCH . The attack involves the exploitation of CVE-2025-61624 (CVSS score: 5.4), a path traversal flaw in the command line interpreter of FortiOS, FortiPAM, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager that could allow a privileged attacker to achieve arbitrary write or delete files via specifically crafted arguments to existing commands. It was patched by Fortinet in April 2026. "PEERSTITCH leaves no persistent binary on disk, opens no listening ports and initiates no outbound network connections," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Daniel Gott and Shawn Westfall said . "Instead, it communicates through traffic generated by legitimate processes on the infected host, which makes the malware resistant to conventional endpoint and network detection." The cybersecurity company said it discov...

A newly disclosed critical flaw in the Linux kernel allows code inside a virtual machine to read memory on the host computer it runs on. A researcher demonstrated the leak against Vercel's live cloud sandboxes, and Vercel confirmed it. The flaw, now tracked as CVE-2026-99999 and nicknamed PwnEscape , is in the Linux kernel's networking code, not in any one cloud's setup, so it reaches the shared layer that cloud providers use to keep customers' workloads apart. It was found in a Vercel security challenge and reported privately before any public release, and there is no sign it has been used in a real attack. What the Researcher Showed Paulos Yibelo of the security firm pwn.ai found that specially made network packets sent from inside a virtual machine could do three things, he explained in a  technical write-up : read the host's memory, crash the host, and run code on it. All three come from the same kernel flaw. Vercel said in its  report on the challen...

Someone built a tool to steal data, then decided it should scare the victim for fun. Yes, that’s an actual feature. And somehow, it fits right in with this week's security stories. The rest gets interesting in different ways. A small permission can lead to a big theft. A trusted login can hide the wrong person. Old bugs are finding new victims, familiar tools are being put to strange uses, and some flaws are so simple you wonder how nobody spotted them sooner. There's a lot more hiding in the details, including a few twists you probably wouldn't expect. Here's what made the list this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.