News · The Hacker News

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  The Hacker News Fri 23 Oct

  Critical x402 SDK Flaw Could Let Malicious APIs Drain AI Agents’ Token Balances

  AI agents paying for API calls with the x402 SDKs could sign a payment for their full balance of a supported token if a malicious API asked for it, security firm V12 said on October 22. The cause was the SDKs' default client, which set no spending limit until releases on August 18 added one. The risk was limited to agents who automatically signed payments and whose apps set
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  The Hacker News Fri 23 Oct

  Researchers Demonstrate Node2Shell RCE Exploit on Node.js Build Using Crafted Brotli Data

  Malicious Brotli data can make an application on an official build of Node.js run attacker-supplied code, security researchers at Imperva have demonstrated. Their "Node2Shell" proof of concept ran code on the official Node.js 24.22.0 image for Linux arm64, with no debugger or custom build, by feeding crafted data to the bundled Brotli decoder (CVE-2026-111497). Node.js disclosed the flaw

  CVE-2026-111497
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  The Hacker News Fri 23 Oct

  PHP2Shell Exploit Attempts Hit Millions as Attackers Try to Deploy Mirai Malware

  Threat actors have been observed unsuccessfully attempting to exploit the newly disclosed PHP2Shell vulnerabilities to rope infected systems into a Mirai botnet variant called Potassium, as it emerges that weaponizing the flaws may be harder than previously thought. The attacks aim to exploit CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (CVSS scores: 9.2), which can result in unauthenticated remote

  CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  Arista Warns of Critical VeloCloud SQL Injection Zero-Day Exploited in Attacks

  Attackers are exploiting a zero-day SQL injection flaw in Arista's VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO), the central management system for VeloCloud SD-WAN networks, the company said in an advisory on October 22. The flaw lets anyone who can log in to the orchestrator, even with a read-only customer account, gain operator privileges, the top level of control over it. For
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  eMudhra to Exit Global SSL/TLS Business After 8 Intermediate CA Keys Found Easily Guessable

  eMudhra, an Indian certificate authority (CA), will withdraw from its global SSL/TLS certificate business, its board decided on Thursday. The decision came five days after a researcher reported recovering the private keys of eight of its intermediate CA certificates. eMudhra said it will replace affected customers' certificates with free ones from partners, though its
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  ThreatsDay: AI Secrets Leak, PingCAP Source Theft, Signal Hang-Up Flaw, Laravel Auth Bypass + 21 More

  This week has already been rough for cybersecurity. Critical PHP and GitLab RCE flaws, serious Linux security bugs, compromised eMudhra certificates, a Node.js RCE flaw, a hacked LiteLLM release, and hundreds of hijacked Tor relays. That's a lot to deal with in just a few days. And the week isn't even over yet. But those big headlines are only half the story. Stolen passwords, exposed
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  Two CVSS 9.0 Linux KSMBD RCE Flaws Disclosed on Public Mailing Lists Before Kernel Fixes

  Linux servers running KSMBD, the kernel's built-in SMB server, are exposed to two publicly reported remote code execution flaws rated 9.0 by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, with no fix yet in the mainline kernel. One of them, ZDI-CAN-33774, can be triggered before any network authentication. The other, ZDI-CAN-33549, requires the SMB Direct transport and an RDMA-capable network
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion After Court Finds 43 Million Privacy Violations

  Social media giant Meta was ordered to pay 25 billion in penalties by a New Mexico court on Wednesday as part of a data privacy lawsuit that sprang from the company's Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which came to light in 2018. According to multiple reports from the Associated Press, the New York Times, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal, state District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew called
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  INTERPOL Arrests 1,462 Suspects, Disrupts 10,909 Cybercrime Networks in Global Crackdown

  INTERPOL on Thursday announced that a coordinated law enforcement action has disrupted 10,909 malicious networks and recovered more than $105 million in illicit funds. In tandem, the effort saw law enforcement agencies from 21 countries arrest 1,462 suspects. Codenamed Operation Serengeti III, the cybercrime crackdown took place between June 29 and August 31, 2026. "Authorities identified
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  The AI Agent Nobody Owns: Watch Expert Webinar On Your Newest Insider Threat

  Right now, there is probably an AI agent running on a laptop somewhere in your network. It stores API keys and database passwords, can access your internal systems, and works without anyone watching. Nobody reviewed its access. Nobody owns it. If an employee had that much reach with that little oversight, you would call it an insider risk. So why do we still call the agent a productivity tool?
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  Railway Says Intruder May Have Accessed Customer Secrets, Urges Credential Rotation

  Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Railway on Wednesday disclosed "anomalous activity" related to systems that store customer environment variables. Upon further investigation, the company found that an unauthorized third party may have gained access to encrypted environment variables, and, in some cases, obtained the decrypted contents. The impact, it said, is limited to a "subset of users,
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  OpenCode Flaw Lets Malicious MCP Servers Execute Code During Sign-In on Windows and WSL

  A flaw in the OpenCode AI coding agent allowed a malicious or hijacked MCP server to run code on a developer's Windows or WSL machine when the developer signed in. OpenCode connects to MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to add outside tools, and such code would run with the developer's own access. Anomaly, the company behind OpenCode, fixed the flaw in version 1.18.33 on September
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  LiteLLM Suspects GitHub Token Leak in AI Gateway Logs Behind Malicious Package Release

  LiteLLM on Wednesday disclosed that threat actors compromised "multiple independent security controls" to push a malicious version of the Python package containing a credential stealer and a backdoor. On October 21, 2026, LiteLLM's release pipeline was compromised to push 1.107.0 to the Docker Hub registry and the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository. The incident took place around 4:00 a.m.
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  Node.js Brotli Decoder Bug Could Allow Remote Code Execution in All Supported Versions

  Node.js released security updates on October 21 for its three supported release lines, 22.x, 24.x and 26.x, fixing 10 flaws. The most serious is a bug in the Brotli decompression code that Node.js bundles, which the project says can allow remote code execution, meaning an attacker could run code of their choosing on the affected system. Each supported line has one fixed version:
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  New QPACK Flaws Can Crash HTTP/3 Servers, Trigger Up to 4,000-Fold Memory Amplification

  A remote attacker who has not logged in can crash many HTTP/3 web servers with a single connection, security firm FoxIO disclosed, releasing working proof-of-concept code. By sending a small batch of compressed HTTP headers that expands in memory to a much larger set, the attacker can force the server to use thousands of times more memory than it received, enough to run a default server
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  Someone Tried to Exploit PHP2Shell 4 Days Before the Vulnerabilities Were Publicly Disclosed

  Amazon's Threat Intelligence team on Wednesday said it detected an attempt to exploit the newly disclosed PHP2Shell vulnerabilities dating back to October 17, 2026, against its MadPot honeypot service, as the flaws come under broad exploitation in the wild following the release of the patches. "The exploit attempt originated from an IP address associated with a commercial anonymization network,
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  The Hacker News Thu 22 Oct

  China-Linked Hackers Use ARTEX AI Agents in ConnectWise Supply Chain Attack

  Microsoft on Wednesday disclosed that a China state-aligned actor dubbed Storm-0940 was behind the recent supply chain compromise of the ConnectWise Cloud Backup application. During the incident, Storm-0940 used ARTEX, a Go-based agentic AI penetration testing framework that was made closed-source in the wake of its abuse in cyber attacks targeting South Korean financial institutions, to speed
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  Critical GitLab Flaw (CVSS 10.0) Could Allow Unauthenticated RCE Across 12 Years of Releases

  GitLab released fixes on October 21 for a flaw that lets an attacker run code on a self-managed server without logging in, and it affects every version of the software going back to 7.0, released in 2014. The fix matters even for administrators who patched nine days earlier: the October 12 update covered only versions 19.2 and later, and the new fixed versions sit one patch above it, so an
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  LiteLLM Compromised in Supply Chain Attack Delivering Credential Stealer and Backdoor

  The popular LiteLLM Python package has been compromised as part of a software supply chain attack that delivered a credential stealer and a backdoor, according to reports from SafeDep, Socket, StepSecurity, and Upwind. The compromise affects LiteLLM 1.107.0, distributed through PyPI wheels and Docker images. The Python package has since been quarantined on Python Package Index (PyPI), and the
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  OpenAI's GPT-6 Agent Removed Safety Monitoring, Then Falsely Denied Doing So

  OpenAI has revealed that two artificial intelligence (AI) agents powered by GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra weakened misalignment monitoring while making requested software changes during two internal coding tasks. The AI company said the incident took place on October 3 and 6, 2026, for Sol and Astra, respectively, as part of an internal deployment. "A GPT-6.1 Sol agent repairing an evaluation
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  PHP Issues Emergency Patches for Two Critical PHP2Shell RCE Flaws as Exploit Attempts Emerge

  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
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  Google Chrome Adds ClickFix Warnings to Stop Users From Running Malicious Commands

  Google on Tuesday said it's rolling out improved safeguards in its Chrome browser to secure users against ClickFix attacks when Enhanced Protection is enabled. ClickFix is a popular social engineering technique in which bad actors trick users into copying and pasting malicious code directly into their computer's operating system, thereby bypassing conventional security controls. As part of
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  China-Aligned Bronze Sandcastle Abuses Sandboxie DLL Sideloading to Deploy Backdoors

  Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously undocumented China-aligned threat cluster known as Bronze Sandcastle that has been observed targeting organizations in Asia and Africa since mid-2025. "The most distinctive technical marker for Bronze Sandcastle is its consistent use of Sandboxie DLL sideloading," Sophos security researcher Gabor Szappanos said in a post published
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  Generative AI Is Erasing Behavioral Tells, Weakening Behavior-Only Detection, Proofpoint Reports

  Generative AI has changed what a malicious email looks like. Messages that once gave themselves away through clumsy wording, generic pretexts, and reused templates now arrive fluent, personalized, and unique to each recipient, and the behavioral signals email filters have relied on for years are fading as a result. Proofpoint shared several examples of the shift at its Protect 2026 conference.
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  PHP2Shell: What Actually Protects You Before the 14:00 UTC PHP RCE Patch, and What Doesn't

  You cannot fully block the two critical PHP flaws called PHP2Shell before today's fix, and the one setting being passed around as a workaround is not enough on its own, the security firm that suggested it now says. PHP will release the fix at 14:00 UTC on October 21 for two flaws it rates 9.2 out of 10, and has given no workaround of its own. Until you can install it, what lowers your
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  The Harness Is the Hard Part of Agentic Pentesting

  An AppSec team can point an AI agent running on a general-purpose model at its own web apps with little setup. Sure, the model writes the attacks. But everything that makes those attacks safe to run against production and worth acting on afterward lives in the harness around the model. The harness is where the engineering in AI pentesting sits. The Hugging Face intrusion OpenAI disclosed in July
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  Attackers Hijacked Over 300 Tor Exit Relays to Intercept SSH Connections

  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
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  PHP2Shell: Two Unpatched Critical PHP RCE Flaws (CVSS 9.2) Trigger Emergency Security Alert

  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. ⚡
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  Attackers Abuse UpdraftCentral Keys to Plant Backdoors on WordPress Sites

  Unknown threat actors breached TeamUpdraft's website and potentially gained unauthorized access to customers' connection keys for UpdraftCentral, UpdraftVault, and UpdraftClone, using them to backdoor WordPress sites. TeamUpdraft is the developer behind UpdraftPlus, a popular WordPress backup plugin with over four million active installations. The vendor also offers UpdraftCentral, a remote
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  U.S. Orders DeepSeek Removed From Federal Civilian Systems, Bans New Purchases

  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
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  State Bank of India Confirms Data Leak After 3,897 Customer Records Found on Dark Web

  State Bank of India has identified 3,897 customer records containing personal information in a set of about 375,000 records available on the dark web, and it does not yet know where the data came from. The state-owned bank, India's largest, said in a stock-exchange filing dated October 21 that it "has experienced an incident involving the loss of certain data." The count is
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  CISA Orders Federal Agencies to Patch Exploited Plex2Shell, Siemens, and SiteGuard Flaws

  The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added four vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, including four vulnerabilities impacting Plex Media Server that's collectively called Plex2Shell. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-96652 (CVSS score: 5.3) - Plex Media Server Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)

  CVE-2026-96652
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  The Hacker News 21 Oct

  Hackers Hid Vasilek Backdoor in VMware Tools During 2-Year Russian Healthcare Intrusion

  A Belarus-aligned hacktivist group spent nearly two years within the network of a Russian healthcare organization. According to a report published by Russian cybersecurity firm Solar, the activity has been attributed to a threat cluster dubbed Partisan Zmiy, which is also known as the Cyber Partisans. Known to be active since at least 2020, the group has a track record of striking industrial
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  Eight eMudhra CA Keys Compromised, Triggering Emergency Fixes Across Browsers and Software

  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
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  Critical FortiSIEM Flaw Gets Public Exploit PoC for Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution

  Cybersecurity researchers have released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a recently patched critical security flaw impacting Fortinet FortiSIEM that could result in arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-106173 (CVSS score: 9.4), is a critical path traversal flaw that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via specially

  CVE-2026-106173
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  Qilin and INC Ransomware Groups Exploit Palo Alto Networks Flaw to Bypass MFA

  Palo Alto Networks has disclosed that it's continuing to observe exploitation of a now-patched security flaw impacting PAN-OS and Prisma Access by ransomware actors. The activity relates to CVE-2026-0257 (CVSS score: 7.8), an authentication bypass flaw that could be exploited by bad actors to set up unauthorized VPN connections. It was patched by Palo Alto Networks in May 2026 and was

  CVE-2026-0257
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  Hackers Use Autonomous AI Agents to Breach Company Websites, Target Over 1,200 Sites

  A Chinese-speaking criminal pointed autonomous AI agents at company websites and let them break in with almost no help, and a security researcher watched it happen because the operators left their control panels open on the internet. The agents tried more than 1,200 sites and reached websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including farm-equipment maker Deere, appliance company
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  Pegasus Spyware Infection Confirmed on Serbian University Rector's iPhone Days Before Election

  The iPhone of Vladan Đokić, rector of the University of Belgrade and a prominent supporter of Serbia's student protest movement, was infected with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware in 2026, the Citizen Lab said on October 19. The finding came six days before Serbia's October 25 snap parliamentary election. The infection used a zero-click exploit, meaning Đokić did not have to tap a link or
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  WhatsApp Hid Instructions in Help Pages Telling Its AI Chatbot Not to Recommend Privacy Regulators

  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
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  What Security Teams Can Do To Tame Wild Code

  A sales manager builds an AI-assisted workflow to route leads. It connects to customer records, summarizes inbound requests, and posts updates to a shared channel. The workflow saves time, reduces manual work, and soon becomes part of the team’s daily routine. Across the same organization, employees are building useful apps, agents, and automations faster than existing processes can support them
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  Go Issues Emergency Update Blocking Eight CA Keys Over Undisclosed Security Concerns

  Go 1.27.3 and Go 1.26.10, released on October 20, make Go's certificate verifier reject any certificate chain that passes through one of eight intermediate certificate authority keys. Programs built on the new release will refuse connections to sites and services whose certificates were issued under those keys. The Go team says the keys belong to one certificate authority it has not
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  Russian APT28 Breaches NATO Naval Shipbuilder in NATO Country, Deploys New Reflective Loader

  The Russia-linked state-sponsored threat actor tracked as APT28 (aka BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, and Forest Blizzard) has been attributed to attacks targeting two member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Symantec Threat Hunter Team, which is tracking the activity cluster under the moniker Swallowtail, involved the use of a backdoor called HOOKEDGE and a previously
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  ConnectWise Resets Credentials as Cloud Backup Remains Offline After Security Incident

  ConnectWise on Monday said it has taken remediation measures, including strengthening administrative-access protections and resetting accounts and replacing application credentials, as it continues to respond to a security incident that led to unauthorized access to application identities associated with Cloud Backup. The company said it has completed the following actions since it began
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  Hackers Hijack Five OVHcloud CLI Releases to Distribute Secret-Stealing Malware

  An attacker used a contributor's GitHub account to replace the download archives on five existing releases of OVHcloud's command-line tool on Monday, October 19. The account had been hijacked, and the new files were a build designed to steal secrets stored on the disk of any machine that runs it, the cloud provider says. They were live on GitHub for up to 94 minutes, from 12:47 to 14:21 UTC,
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  ClickFix Attackers Exploit Siemens Software Center Flaw to Deploy Remote Access Trojan

  Siemens has addressed a DLL sideloading vulnerability impacting Siemens Software Center that it said has been exploited in ClickFix attacks. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-110936 (CVSS v4 score: 8.4), could allow an attacker to place a specially-crafted DLL in a directory the application searches, resulting in execution of malicious code with the same privileges as the

  CVE-2026-110936
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  Ex-OpenAI Engineer Detained in Spy Device Case as Saudi Royal Contacts Emerge

  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
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  The Hacker News 20 Oct

  Hackers Use New ROMULUS ClickFix Platform to Deliver LegionLoader and Other Malware

  Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a ClickFix delivery platform called ROMULUS that's being used to distribute malware such as Legion Loader. According to Forescout Research - Vedere Labs, ROMULUS is akin to a malware delivery service that employs ClickFix-style lures on bogus landing pages to trick unsuspecting users into running malicious commands and infecting their own
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  The Hacker News 19 Oct

  Hackers Exploit Plex2Shell Flaws to Install Crypto Miners and Linux Proxy Backdoor

  Threat actors have begun to exploit a chain of vulnerabilities in Plex Media Server to deploy cryptocurrency miners and reverse proxy software, a day after a proof-of-concept (PoC) went public. According to a researcher who goes by the online alias boredhackerblog, the exploitation activity involves chaining four different vulnerabilities, collectively called Plex2Shell. The vulnerabilities
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  The Hacker News 19 Oct

  Popular WordPress SEO Plugin Rank Math PRO Hijacked to Deliver Self-Restoring Backdoor

  Copies of Rank Math PRO, the paid version of the Rank Math SEO plugin for WordPress, that were downloaded from rankmath.com or delivered as updates between 20:02 UTC on October 15 and 07:12 UTC on October 16 contained malware, Rank Math said in a security notice published on October 16. Any site that installed and activated one of those copies should be treated as compromised, and the
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  The Hacker News 19 Oct

  ⚡ Weekly Recap: 98 Zero-Days, Rogue AI Agents, $100M Crypto Theft, 700 Supermarkets Hit and More

  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

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