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A new analysis of The Gentlemen operation has revealed that the financially motivated threat group initially operated as an affiliate responsible for conducting double extortion attacks, while leveraging resources from various ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) schemes like LockBit (aka Tenacious Mantis), Qilin (aka Pestilent Mantis), and Medusa (aka Venomous Mantis). According to a detailed report published by PRODAFT, the group, which it tracks as Phantom Mantis, is led by a Russian-speaking cybercriminal tracked as LARVA-368, who goes by the monikers hastalamuerte, ArmCorp, zeta88, nobody0, and santamuerte. The Gentlemen is known to be active since March 2025, claiming a total of 478 victims to date, per data from Ransomware.Live. "In July 2025, Phantom Mantis transitioned into The Gentlemen, an independent partnership program no longer dependent on other RaaS groups," the Swiss cybersecurity company said. "Additionally, LARVA-368 relies heavily on artificial in...

Most good security work is invisible by design. Today is the exception. The 2026 Cybersecurity Stars Awards winners are announced across 95 subcategories in four main award categories. The reason is simple. Cybersecurity is full of work that deserves recognition and rarely gets it. Products that quietly close real gaps. Teams that stop incidents nobody reads about. Companies that raise the baseline for everyone else. The Cybersecurity Stars Awards put names on that work, once a year, through independent judging. Every nomination was reviewed by an independent panel of judges and scored against three criteria: innovation, impact, and technical excellence. Entries were not ranked by popularity, brand size, or campaign reach. They were judged on the work itself. Some subcategories have more than one winner. The awards recognize every entry that meets the standard, not just one per category. By design, the winners span four main categories and 97 subcategories, including agentic...

It's been one of those weeks. You expect the usual noise: recycled malware, sloppy attacks, another easy target getting hit. Instead, there's a supply chain attack kit in a public repo, a $5,000-a-month RAT that clones browsers, and research showing AI agents can be tricked into leaking real credentials. The bigger problem is how polished this all looks now. Mule networks run like SaaS. Deepfake KYC bypass is sold as a feature. Endpoint tools can be quietly weakened using built-in OS settings, with no exploit needed. Here's the full list of threats, tools, flaws, and updates worth knowing.

For thirty years, vulnerability management ran on a buffer: the months between when a vulnerability was found and when someone could figure out how to weaponize it. The solution was straightforward enough; triage by severity, schedule the fix, validate, and move on. The buffer was what made that work. Today, that buffer is gone. AI didn't make your team slower. It changed the other side of the equation, compressing discovery-to-exploit from months to hours . And the sad truth for defenders is that a process built for breathing room can't survive without it. AI Turned Vulnerability Discovery Into a Volume Game In its May 2026 update, Anthropic reported that it and approximately 50 partners used Claude Mythos Preview to find more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in systemically important software in a single month. Earlier figures were just as stark. Pointed at Firefox, the gated Mythos model wrote 181 working exploits , against just 2 from t...

The Vietnam-aligned threat actor known as OceanLotus has been attributed to two distinct campaigns that targeted domestic entities and stock investors with a backdoor known as SPECTRALVIPER. The campaigns involve a prolonged cyber espionage operation aimed at a Vietnamese infrastructure and transport construction corporation between mid-2024 and February 2026, as well as a supply chain attack leveraging FireAnt Metakit, a popular software platform used by stock investors in Vietnam. The second activity cluster took place from October 2025 to March 2026. The two sets of attacks represent a shift in operational focus, per ESET, with the threat actor placing an increasing emphasis on domestic espionage rather than external targets. The group, active since 2012, also has a history of targeting China . "Whether the shift represents a temporary adjustment or a long-term strategic change remains unclear; however, this 15-year-old APT group continues to demonstrate aggressive tact...

GitHub has announced what it said are "breaking changes" coming to npm version 12, one of which turns off install scripts by default to combat software supply chain threats. The changes aim to combat attack techniques that abuse the "npm install" command to trigger the execution of malicious code using npm lifecycle hooks. "Npm install" is used to download and install all the necessary dependencies for a Node.js project. Version 12 is scheduled for release next month. Describing install-time lifecycle scripts as the "single largest code-execution surface in the npm ecosystem," GitHub said the "npm install" command runs scripts from every transitive dependency, as a result of which a single compromised package anywhere in the dependency tree can run arbitrary code on a developer machine or CI runner. By blocking such behaviours, the idea is to require explicit user approval before code execution is initiated automatically durin...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a "resurgence and expansion" of JDY , a covert network associated with China-nexus state-sponsored threat actors. "The JDY botnet comprises over 1,500 SOHO [small office and home office] and IoT devices and operates as a centrally controlled, high-performance scanner used to discover, fingerprint, and continuously map exposed services at scale," Lumen's Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. JDY was first flagged as a cluster within another botnet codenamed KV-botnet in mid-December 2023. Primarily used for broader scanning against internet targets, the stealthy network comprising compromised SOHO routers, firewalls, and IoT devices has been put to use by Chinese hacking groups like Volt Typhoon. Following KV-botnet's takedown by the U.S. government in early 2024, the botnet operators began making behavioral changes to the network, with the second KV cluster largely going offline. It...

Fortinet, Ivanti, and SAP have released security updates to address multiple critical security vulnerabilities that could result in arbitrary code execution and information disclosure. The security flaw patched by Fortinet relates to a command injection vulnerability in FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud, and FortiSandbox PaaS WEB UI. It's tracked as CVE-2026-25089 (CVSS score: 9.1). "An improper neutralization of special elements used in an OS command vulnerability [CWE-78] in FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud and FortiSandbox PaaS WEB UI may allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized commands via specifically crafted HTTP requests," Fortinet said . The issue impacts the following products and versions - FortiSandbox 5.0.0 through 5.0.5 (Upgrade to 5.0.6 or above) FortiSandbox 4.4.0 through 4.4.8 (Upgrade to 4.4.9 or above) FortiSandbox Cloud 5.0.4 through 5.0.5 (Upgrade to 5.0.6 or above) FortiSandbox PaaS 5.0.4 through 5.0.5 (Upgrade t...

A high-severity unpatched security flaw in Langflow, an open-source low-code platform to build artificial intelligence (AI) applications, has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to findings from VulnCheck. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-5027 (CVSS score: 8.8), a case of path traversal that could allow an attacker to write files to arbitrary locations. "The 'POST /api/v2/files' endpoint does not sanitize the 'filename' parameter from the multipart form data, allowing an attacker to write files to arbitrary locations on the filesystem using path traversal sequences ('../')," Tenable, which discovered the flaw, said in an alert released in late March 2026. The cybersecurity company said it attempted to contact the project maintainers three times in January and February 2026, before disclosing details of the issue on March 27. Caitlin Condon, vice president of security research at VulnCheck, said in a LinkedIn post ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added three new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2026-20245 (CVSS score: 7.8) - An improper encoding or escaping of output vulnerability in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager that could allow an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root by supplying a crafted file to the affected system. CVE-2026-11645 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An out-of-bounds read and write vulnerability in Google Chrome V8 that could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside a sandbox via a crafted HTML page. CVE-2026-7473 (CVSS score: 6.9) - An incomplete comparison with missing factors vulnerability in Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS) that could be exploited to process non-configured tunnel traffic. No Patch Planned for Exploited Arista EOS Flaw "On...

Your pentest report looks clean. That might be the problem. Run automated pentesting long enough, and the new findings start to dry up. By the third or fourth run, fewer issues appear. The report looks stable. Leadership reads "stable" as "secure." It usually isn't. The work slows down. The risk does not. That gap is what a The Hacker News webinar with Picus Security sets out to close. Autumn Stambaugh and Can Yüceel, with host James Azar, show what your tool validates, where it stops, and how to close what it leaves open. Register for the webinar. Start with the core problem. A flat report can mean the obvious holes were fixed. It can also mean the tool has reached the edge of what it can see. Automated pentesting is often treated as full security validation. It is not. Picus frames validation as six surfaces and puts automated pentesting on one of them, the attack path: whether an attacker can move through an environment. That leaves the other five ...

Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for a record 206 security vulnerabilities impacting its software portfolio, including three flaws that have been publicly disclosed at the time of release. Of the 206 flaws, 39 are rated Critical, and 167 are rated Important in severity. This includes 63 privilege escalation, 56 remote code execution, 30 information disclosure, 27 spoofing, 20 security feature bypass, seven denial-of-service, and three tampering vulnerabilities. The patches also include two non-Microsoft CVEs, a privilege escalation vulnerability impacting Windows Kernel ( CVE-2025-10263 ) and a UEFI Secure Boot security feature bypass ( CVE-2026-8863 ). They are in addition to more than 350 security flaws that Google has addressed in Chromium, which is used in Microsoft's Edge browser. Topping the list of fixes is CVE-2026-45657 (CVSS score: 9.8), a use-after-free flaw affecting Windows Kernel that could result in remote code execution. "An attacker could exploi...