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Smashing Security podcast #470: This AI security flaw might be impossible to fix

A website called “UK visa portal” has been quietly collecting passport scans, selfies, and personal data from thousands of travellers who thought they were applying through official channels. They weren’t. And when a journalist tried to warn the company, it was lawyers who responded. Meanwhile, a paper from Cornell suggests that prompt injection – the…

Welcoming the Philippine Government to Have I Been Pwned

Today, we welcome the 46th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: the Philippines. The Philippines’ National CERT, working with the Department of Information and Communications Technology, now has access to monitor official government domains against the data in HIBP. This gives their Cyber Threat Intel and Monitoring Section the ability to…

Two-year old Oracle WebLogic Server vulnerability is being exploited

US federal government departments have been given until Thursday to patch a two-year old high severity vulnerability in Oracle WebLogic Server that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to access critical data. The vulnerability, CVE-2024-21182, was added Monday to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, giving federal Oracle admins a…

Gamaredon Exploits WinRAR to Deliver GammaWorm and GammaSteel Against Ukraine

The Russian hacking group known as Gamaredon has been attributed to the continued exploitation of a WinRAR vulnerability to deliver multiple malware families aimed at data theft and propagation. Per Sekoia, the activity involves the weaponization of CVE-2025-8088, a path traversal flaw in WinRAR, to launch an HTML Application payload dubbed GammaPhish, which is then…

China-Aligned Groups Ramp Up Attacks: Dragon Weave Hits Czech Republic & Taiwan

A new cyber espionage campaign codenamed Operation Dragon Weave has been observed targeting officials and citizens in the Czech Republic and Taiwan to deliver an AdaptixC2 agent. According to Seqrite Labs, targets of the campaign include government, research, academic, technology, and financial services sectors. The activity entails distributing spear-phishing emails containing ZIP attachments

1,000 Data Breaches Later, the Disclosure Lag is Worse Than Ever

Today, I loaded the 1,000th data breach into Have I Been Pwned. Reflecting on that milestone number, I pondered how to mark the occasion in writing, and what immediately came to mind was a very simple question: why is it still needed? Especially considering the emergence of privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA in…

Attackers Use LLM Agent for Post-Exploitation After Marimo CVE-2026-39987 Exploit

An unknown threat actor has been observed using a large language model (LLM) agent to conduct post-compromise actions after obtaining initial access following the exploitation of a publicly-accessible Marimo network using a recently disclosed vulnerability. “The attacker compromised an internet-reachable Marimo notebook via CVE-2026-39987, extracted two cloud credentials from the compromised

New Russian-Linked GREYVIBE Targets Ukraine with AI-Powered Cyberattacks

A previously undocumented threat actor dubbed GREYVIBE has been attributed to ongoing and persistent attacks targeting Ukraine and Ukraine-related entities since at least August 2025. GREYVIBE, per WithSecure, is assessed to be a Russian-speaking group operating broadly in the Russian time zone, with the activities aligning with Kremlin state interests, specifically when it comes to

The Race to Build AI Data Centers — Before the People Can Protest

Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary has been making the media rounds defending the 40,000-acre data center project he’s backing in northern Utah. Dismissing residents’ concerns over the environmental impacts and water demands of the proposed project in the drought-stricken Great Salt Lake region, O’Leary has claimed protesters are “bused in,” “misinformed,” and alleged that China has…

AI Is Reshaping the Future of Cyber Resilience

Cyber resilience has been a core focus in cybersecurity for years.  During my recent conversation with Brandon Willitts, Director of Product Management for Cyber Resilience at Everpure, it became clear that artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing how organizations approach resilience strategies.  According to Willitts, AI is not creating entirely new security problems as much…

CVE-2026-35616: FortiClient EMS Flaw Actively Exploited in Malware Attacks

A critical FortiClient Endpoint Management Server (EMS) vulnerability patched in April has been exploited in fresh attacks to deploy information-stealing malware, Arctic Wolf reports. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-35616 (CVSS score of 9.1), can be exploited remotely via crafted requests for remote code execution (RCE) and does not require authentication. Threat actors are exploiting a critical FortiClient…

Microsoft’s Copilot trust test: Zero findings, more models, wider oversight

Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat (Copilot) have been recertified under ISO/IEC 42001:2023 by an independent auditor for the second consecutive year. Copilot first received ISO 42001 certification in March 2025. This year’s recertification recorded zero non-conformities and zero improvement observations, resulting in a second audit in a row. The certification evaluates the AI management…

Employees are unknowingly inviting tech support impersonators into firms, says FBI

Online or telephone IT support scams have been tricking employees into downloading or clicking on malware for years. But according to the FBI, one group that targets US-based law firms has recently found success in person, by convincing firms to allow a supposed IT support person into the building, where they insert a storage device…

Welcoming the AWS Customer Incident Response Team

May 26, 2026: This post was originally published in July 2022. It has been updated to reflect current engagement options, new threat intelligence resources such as the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS (TTC), additional open-source tools, and the distinction between AWS CIRT support and the AWS Security Incident Response managed service. Welcome back, or welcome…

Well-architected best practices for software supply chain security

There have been multiple notable supply chain attacks using the npm Registry since September: Shai-Hulud, Chalk/Debug, one abusing tea.xyz tokens, and recently axios. Thanks to community efforts involving the Amazon Inspector team, the Open Source Security Foundation, and others, the affected packages were quickly flagged, which reduced the impact of these incidents. Supply chain attacks…

MuddyWater Uses DLL Side-Loading in Espionage Campaign Targeting 9 Countries

The Iranian hacking group known as MuddyWater has been linked to a new campaign affecting at least nine organizations across nine countries on four continents in the first quarter of 2026. The activity targeted industrial and electronics manufacturing, education and public-sector bodies, financial services, and professional services, per the Threat Hunter Team from Symantec and…

Welcoming the Bhutanese Government to Have I Been Pwned

Today, we welcome the 45th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Bhutan. The Bhutan Computer Incident Response Team, BtCIRT, now has access to monitor Bhutanese government domains against the data in HIBP. As Bhutan’s national CIRT, BtCIRT is responsible for consuming threat intelligence and sharing relevant insights with its constituents, helping…

AntV data visualization tool the latest to be hit by ongoing npm supply chain attacks

The world’s largest open-source registry, node package manager (npm), has been hit by another fast-moving malware attack, this time targeting the widely-used AntV enterprise data visualization tool. Unlike last week’s high-profile npm attack on TanStack, which exploited a complex GitHub Actions cache poisoning weakness, the latest incident early on May 19 took the more conventional…

SEPPMail Secure E-Mail Gateway Vulnerabilities Enable RCE and Mail Traffic Access

Critical security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in SEPPMail Secure E-Mail Gateway, an enterprise-grade email security solution, that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution and enable an attacker to read arbitrary mails from the virtual appliance. “These vulnerabilities could have been exploited to read all mail traffic or as an entry vector into the…

Expired domain leads to supply chain attack on node-ipc npm package

A popular npm package called node-ipc has been compromised, with hackers publishing malicious versions that bundle credential stealing malware. The root cause of the compromise was an expired domain name that attackers managed to register in order to hijack a maintainer’s account. The node-ipc package has had malware added to its code in the past.…

Stealer Backdoor Found in 3 Node-IPC Versions Targeting Developer Secrets

Cybersecurity researchers are sounding the alarm about what has been described as “malicious activity” in newly published versions of node-ipc. According to Socket and StepSecurity, three different versions of the npm package have been confirmed as malicious – node-ipc@9.1.6 node-ipc@9.2.3 node-ipc@12.0.1 “Early analysis indicates that node-ipc@9.1.6, node-ipc@9.2.3, and node-ipc@12.0.1

Ghostwriter Targets Ukrainian Government With Geofenced PDF Phishing, Cobalt Strike

The Belarus-aligned threat group known as Ghostwriter has been attributed to a fresh set of attacks targeting governmental organizations in Ukraine. Active since at least 2016, Ghostwriter has been linked to both cyber espionage and influence operations targeting neighboring countries, particularly Ukraine. It’s also tracked under the monikers FrostyNeighbor, PUSHCHA, Storm-0257, TA445, UAC‑0057

PraisonAI CVE-2026-44338 Auth Bypass Targeted Within Hours of Disclosure

Threat actors have been observed attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security vulnerability in PraisonAI, an open-source multi-agent orchestration framework, within four hours of public disclosure. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-44338 (CVSS score: 7.3), a case of missing authentication that exposes sensitive endpoints to anyone, potentially allowing an attacker to invoke the

Welcoming the Bahamian Government to Have I Been Pwned

Today, we welcome the 44th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: The Bahamas. The National Computer Incident Response Team of The Bahamas, CIRT-BS, now has access to monitor government domains against the data in HIBP. As the national CIRT, CIRT-BS is responsible for coordinating and supporting cybersecurity-related matters across the country,…

Azerbaijani Energy Firm Hit by Repeated Microsoft Exchange Exploitation

A threat actor with affiliations to China has been linked to a “multi-wave intrusion” targeting an unnamed Azerbaijani oil and gas company between late December 2025 and late February 2026, marking an expansion of its targeting. The activity has been attributed by Bitdefender with moderate-to-high confidence to a hacking group known as FamousSparrow (aka UAT-9244),…

KDE gets over €1 million investment to strengthen security and core infrastructure

European governments and public institutions have been shifting away from proprietary software for years, and the financial infrastructure supporting open-source alternatives is growing to match. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund announced today that it is investing more than €1 million in KDE, the open-source project behind the Plasma desktop environment and a broad range of Linux…

Why patching SLAs should be the floor, not the strategy

I’ve been a CISO for two separate companies, know several CISOs personally, and interact with many others through various cybersecurity forums. We all have one thing in common. We can tell you our patching SLA numbers off the top of our heads. Ninety-five percent of criticals closed in 14 days. Eighty-something on highs. The board…

Mini Shai-Hulud Worm Compromises TanStack, Mistral AI, Guardrails AI & More Packages

TeamPCP, the threat actor behind the recent supply chain attack spree, has been linked to the compromise of the npm and PyPI packages from TanStack, UiPath, Mistral AI, OpenSearch, and Guardrails AI as part of a fresh Mini Shai-Hulud campaign. The affected npm packages have been modified to include an obfuscated JavaScript file (“router_init.js”) that’s designed…

cPanel CVE-2026-41940 Under Active Exploitation to Deploy Filemanager Backdoor

A threat actor named Mr_Rot13 has been attributed to the exploitation of a recently disclosed critical cPanel flaw to deploy a backdoor codenamed Filemanager on compromised environments. The attack exploits CVE-2026-41940, a vulnerability impacting cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) that could result in an authentication bypass and allow remote attackers to gain elevated control of…

SAS Execs: AI Adoption is a Human and Organizational Challenge

AI adoption is more than a technical transformation, and organizations have been underestimating the human side of AI implementation, including employee fears, organizational culture, communication breakdowns, and trust. The human angle of AI adoption for organizations was a major talking point during SAS Innovate 2026. At the conference, Channel Insider sat down with both Kristi…

Rustinel: Open-source endpoint detection for Windows and Linux

Open-source endpoint detection has long been split between Windows-focused tools built around Sysmon and Linux tools built around eBPF or auditd. Defenders running mixed environments have had to stitch together separate pipelines, separate rule sets, and separate maintenance burdens. Rustinel, a Rust-based endpoint agent, is an attempt to collapse that work into a single codebase.…

Welcoming the Costa Rican Government to Have I Been Pwned

Today, we welcome the 42nd government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Costa Rica. The CSIRT of the Government of Costa Rica now has access to monitor government domains against the data in HIBP. This enables their national cybersecurity incident response team to identify exposure of government email addresses in data breach,…

Palo Alto Networks firewall flaw has been exploited for several weeks

Palo Alto Networks warns that a critical zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in the PAN-OS firewall system. The vulnerability has already been exploited by suspected state-sponsored hackers for nearly a month, reports Bleeping Computer. The vulnerability, CVE-2026-0300, is located in the User-ID Authentication Portal (also known as the Captive Portal) and allows attackers to execute…

13 new critical holes in JavaScript sandbox allow execution of arbitrary code

Thirteen critical vulnerabilities have been found in the vm2 JavaScript sandbox package that could allow an attacker’s code to escape the container and do nasty things to IT environments. As a result, developers using this library in their applications are urged to update the software to the latest version, which is currently 3.11.2. The warnings…

One House Democrat is pressing Commerce on the government’s spyware use

A House Democrat who’s been at the forefront of congressional efforts to scrutinize the federal government’s use of commercial spyware wants the Commerce Department to brief Capitol Hill amid apprehension that the Trump administration might further embrace the technology. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., sent a letter to the department Thursday seeking a briefing on several…

China-Linked UAT-8302 Targets Governments Using Shared APT Malware Across Regions

A sophisticated China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been attributed to attacks targeting government entities in South America since at least late 2024 and government agencies in southeastern Europe in 2025. The activity is being tracked by Cisco Talos under the moniker UAT-8302, with post-exploitation involving the deployment of custom-made malware families that have…

Microsoft: Phishing campaign used fake compliance notices to compromise employee accounts

Phishers have been using fake workplace compliance notices to try to trick Microsoft account owners into signing in via a fake sign-in page, says the company’s Defender Research team. The email campaign targeted more than 35,000 users across 13,000 organizations in 26 countries, but concentrated primarily on targets in the United States. Microsoft didn’t say…

Phishing Campaign Hits 80+ Orgs Using SimpleHelp and ScreenConnect RMM Tools

An active phishing campaign has been observed targeting multiple vectors since at least April 2025, with legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software as a way to establish persistent remote access to compromised hosts. The activity, codenamed VENOMOUS#HELPER, has impacted over 80 organizations, most of which are in the U.S., according to Securonix. It shares…

Silver Fox Deploys ABCDoor Malware via Tax-Themed Phishing in India and Russia

The China-based cybercrime group known as Silver Fox has been linked to a new campaign targeting organizations in Russia and India with a new malware called ABCDoor. The activity involved using phishing emails that mimic correspondence from the Income Tax Department of India in December 2025, followed by a similar campaign aimed at Russian entities.…

Critical cPanel Vulnerability Weaponized to Target Government and MSP Networks

A previously unknown threat actor has been observed targeting government and military entities in Southeast Asia, alongside a smaller cluster of managed service providers (MSPs) and hosting providers in the Philippines, Laos, Canada, South Africa, and the U.S., by exploiting the recently disclosed vulnerability in cPanel. The activity, detected by Ctrl-Alt-Intel on May 2, 2026,…

The fake IT worker problem CISOs can’t ignore

Hiring fake IT workers has been a growing problem in recent years — but it’s often a problem very few want to admit to. From Fortune 500 companies down to smaller organizations, remote hiring practices have been exploited to grant trusted access to individuals who are not who they claim to be creating an insider…

Security posture improvement in the AI era

It’s only been a few weeks since Anthropic announced the Claude Mythos Preview model and launched Project Glasswing with AWS and other leading organizations. This has generated a lot of discussion about the future of cybersecurity and what the ever-increasing capabilities of foundation models mean to organizations. As AWS CISO Amy Herzog pointed out in…

Poisoned Ruby Gems and Go Modules Exploit CI Pipelines for Credential Theft

A new software supply chain attack campaign has been observed using sleeper packages as a conduit to subsequently push malicious payloads that enabled credential theft, GitHub Actions tampering, and SSH persistence. The activity has been attributed to the GitHub account “BufferZoneCorp,” which has published a set of repositories that are associated with malicious Ruby gems…

AWS, Microsoft, & Google Cloud Converge Around AI-Led Growth

The “big three” hyperscalers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google Cloud, have been especially active over the past 12 months, operating both as suppliers of in-demand data center capacity for AI model developers and as builders of their own models, services, and tools. While each has historically leaned into distinct strengths and target markets,…

A New Chapter in Alzheimer’s Care Begins in Australia, But Access Remains the Real Test

*]:pointer-events-auto [content-visibility:auto] supports-[content-visibility:auto]:[contain-intrinsic-size:auto_100lvh] R6Vx5W_threadScrollVars scroll-mb-[calc(var(–scroll-root-safe-area-inset-bottom,0px)+var(–thread-response-height))] scroll-mt-[calc(var(–header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]” dir=”auto” data-turn-id=”request-WEB:d157b42f-f595-4291-a196-6b04707088a5-6″ data-testid=”conversation-turn-8″ data-scroll-anchor=”false” data-turn=”assistant”>   This month, it has been announced that Australia is beginning to see the real world impact of its first disease modifying Alzheimer’s therapies, marking a pivotal moment in a field that for decades has struggled to move beyond symptom management.

Margin vs. Madness: Fixing MSSP Top 5 Operational Nightmares

Leading a managed security services provider has never been a comfortable job. And it isn’t now, though the demand for MSSPs has never been higher. The global threat landscape is expanding faster than most enterprise security teams can keep pace with, and organizations across every sector are turning to managed providers to fill the gap.   For MSSP leaders, this…

Chinese Silk Typhoon Hacker Extradited to U.S. Over COVID Research Cyberattacks

A Chinese national accused of being a member of the Silk Typhoon hacking group has been extradited to the U.S. from Italy.  Xu Zewei, 34, was arrested in July 2025 by Italian authorities for his alleged links to the Chinese state-sponsored threat group and for orchestrating cyber attacks against American organizations and government agencies between…

PhantomCore Exploits TrueConf Vulnerabilities to Breach Russian Networks

A pro-Ukrainian hacktivist group called PhantomCore has been attributed to attacks actively targeting servers running TrueConf video conferencing software in Russia since September 2025. That’s according to a report published by Positive Technologies, which found the threat actors to be leveraging an exploit chain comprising three vulnerabilities to execute commands remotely on susceptible

UNC6692 Impersonates IT Helpdesk via Microsoft Teams to Deploy SNOW Malware

A previously undocumented threat activity cluster known as UNC6692 has been observed leveraging social engineering tactics via Microsoft Teams to deploy a custom malware suite on compromised hosts. “As with many other intrusions in recent years, UNC6692 relied heavily on impersonating IT helpdesk employees, convincing their victim to accept a Microsoft Teams chat invitation from…