The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News

Beginning July 27, 2026, GitHub will cut public bug bounty payouts by at least half at every severity level. Critical findings will drop from $20,000-$30,000+ to a fixed $10,000, while its permanent invite-only VIP tier will pay $30,000 or more. Reports filed before that date, including those already in GitHub's growing triage queue, will retain the previous payout terms. GitHub said the changes are intended to reduce noise while giving established researchers faster responses, higher rewards, and closer access to its security engineering team. "You don't earn more by submitting more," the company said. "You earn more by submitting better." The public program is moving from flexible ranges to fixed payments: Low: $250, down from $617-$2,000 Medium: $2,000, down from $4,000-$10,000 High: $5,000, down from $10,000-$20,000 Critical: $10,000, down from $20,000-$30,000+ The Hacker News calculated that the new public rates are 50% lower f...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability in snap-confine that an unprivileged user can trigger to obtain root access and gain complete control of a target environment. The high-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-8933 (CVSS score: 7.8), impacts default installations of Ubuntu Desktop 24.04, 25.10, and 26.04. The disclosure comes as 442 security flaws in Linux have been publicized over the past three days. "The issue stems from a security hardening change that inadvertently introduced a race condition during sandbox initialization," Saeed Abbasi, head of Threat Research Unit (TRU) and director of product at Qualys, said. Snap-confine is a program used internally by snapd to construct the execution environment for snap applications. Snapd is the background service or daemon that manages snap packages on Linux systems. Snaps are nothing but a software packaging format devised by Canonical that allows an appl...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched vulnerability chain in the Adobe Acrobat Chrome extension that has over 314 million users, which, if exploited, could facilitate a silent hijack of a user's WhatsApp data. The shortcoming has been codenamed HermeticReader by Guardio Labs. It's officially tracked as CVE-2026-48294 (CVSS score: 7.4), with the vulnerability described as a case of universal cross-site scripting (UXSS)-class cross-origin data disclosure vulnerability. It affects all versions of the extension (ID: efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj ) prior to and including 26.5.2.2. Successful exploitation of the flaw can bypass the browser's same-origin policy and access data linked to the victim's session across origins. The only prerequisite is that it requires user interaction. A victim must be convinced into visiting a maliciously crafted URL or interact with a compromised web page that triggers the extension's vulnerable code ...

A high-severity security flaw impacting open-source developer platform Windmill has come under active exploitation in the wild, per VulnCheck. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-29059 (CVSS score: 7.5), a case of unauthenticated path traversal impacting Windmill's "get_log_file" endpoint ("/api/w/{workspace}/jobs_u/get_log_file/{filename}"). "The filename parameter is concatenated into a file path without sanitization, allowing an attacker to read arbitrary files on the server using ../ sequences," according to an advisory published by Windmill in March 2026. "The primary sensitive value exposed by this vulnerability is the SUPERADMIN_SECRET environment variable, readable via /proc/1/environ. When set, this secret can be used as a Bearer token to authenticate as a superadmin and execute arbitrary code through the job preview API." However, it's worth noting that SUPERADMIN_SECRET is not set by default, and for standalon...

Security leaders who build fast, visible paths to AI adoption are becoming the most valued partners in their organizations. AI governance done right gives security teams the visibility they need, employees the tools they want, and CISOs the strategic influence they have earned. According to McKinsey's State of AI report, 76 percent of employees now use AI in some capacity at work, up from 55 percent the year before. Writing assistants, coding copilots, meeting summarizers, AI-powered research tools: they are woven into daily work. Most were never reviewed by security. The conventional response is restriction. An application appears, the security team blocks it, employees find a workaround within days, and the cycle repeats. It comes down to speed: the approval path moves slower than the pace of AI releases. When the official route takes six weeks, and a workaround takes six minutes, most employees will choose the workaround. Technology gets adopted because people find it use...

OpenAI on Tuesday said a combination of its artificial intelligence (AI) models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and an "even more capable pre-release model," was behind the security incident that targeted Hugging Face's production infrastructure last week. The AI company said the models were operating with "reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes" that might otherwise limit their ability to conduct cyber attacks, adding it expects such incidents to "become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models." Describing it as an "unprecedented cyber incident" and one involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, OpenAI said it intends to conduct a thorough investigation in partnership with Hugging Face to get to the bottom of the matter. As part of an internal evaluation, the models are said to have identified and chained vulnerabilities across OpenAI's research environment and Hugging Face's producti...

The cycle is over. For years, cybersecurity followed a familiar pattern: defenses improved, attackers adapted, and the back-and-forth continued. Today, AI-equipped attackers are simply outpacing defenses. Most intrusions now bypass endpoint and malware-based detection entirely. The CrowdStrike Global Threat Report estimates around 79% of attacks are malware-free, as threat actors rely on credential theft and DLL side-load techniques to bypass host-level monitoring. Perimeter vulnerabilities compound this exposure; firewalls and VPN gateway breaches climbed 19% according to the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report . Once an adversary gains access, breakout often occurs in seconds. Claude Mythos and similar models have further escalated operational pressure. These can rapidly discover and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities, virtually closing the window from initial discovery to full compromise. Security practices must adapt to prioritize rapid containment and ...

German and US law enforcement have taken down the core infrastructure of Kratos , described by German investigators as one of the world's most widely used criminal phishing kits, and Indonesian authorities arrested the man they say developed and ran it. In a joint announcement on Monday, the Frankfurt public prosecutor's cybercrime unit (ZIT) and Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) said they pulled more than 200 servers offline. Investigators estimate roughly 1,800 paying customers used Kratos to run about 15,000 phishing campaigns a month. Kratos harvested more than passwords. The kit was designed to steal the session cookie along with the login, and that cookie is enough to walk past two-factor authentication into the account as the user, the BKA said. ANY.RUN, which reverse-engineered the kit , found operators could pick one of two modes: a plain PHP page that only harvests credentials, or a Node.js reverse proxy designed to relay the login to Micros...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a NuGet typosquat that's unlike the typical information-stealing malware distributed via package registries: usual info-stealers: it's designed to rig live game results on Digitain. The package, named " Newtonsoftt.Json.Net ," masquerades as the Newtonsoft.Json library and is a trojanized fork. Seven versions of the package have been published to the NuGet repository: 11.0.4, 11.0.5, 11.0.7, 11.0.8, 11.0.9, 11.0.10, and 11.0.11. The package has been downloaded about 1,200 times to date. The package has been unlisted by its owner MagicalPuff96, meaning it will not be surfaced via a search on NuGet. However, the artifacts are still available for download from the registry. "The trojan rigs Digitain, an online betting platform, and in later generations, exfiltrates rigged round results to an attacker-controlled server, utilizing the header X-Seq-ApiKey: theperfectheist2025," according to JFrog . What's not...

A single invisible comment in an Azure DevOps pull request can turn a reviewer's own AI coding agent against them, driving it into projects the attacker has no rights to reach and quietly leaking what it finds. The flaw is in Microsoft's official Azure DevOps MCP server , and it works because one of its tools returns pull request descriptions without a prompt-injection guardrail the company had already applied to others. Agentic Runtime Security firm Manifold Security detailed the confused-deputy bug this week. Microsoft ships the server so AI agents can read and operate Azure DevOps for a user, across pull requests, pipelines, wikis, and work items, all with the user's own permissions. That is the whole problem: content other people wrote can become instructions the agent acts on. Azure DevOps PR descriptions accept Markdown, which allows HTML comments. In the web UI, an HTML comment (<!-- ... -->) renders as nothing, so a reviewer scrolling the description s...

Apple has moved to address a security flaw in its Hide My Email service that enabled users' real email addresses to be unmasked, effectively undermining the feature's privacy guarantees. 404 Media reported Tuesday that a fix for the issue was deployed by Apple on July 3, 2026, after more than a year, when it was disclosed to the company by Tyler Murphy, co-founder of EasyOptOuts. Hide My Email generates unique, random email addresses that forward messages to a user's personal email inbox automatically. By creating disposable email addresses, the idea is to safeguard user privacy and tackle unwanted spam. The feature requires a paid subscription to iCloud+ and was announced by Apple in June 2021. However, at the start of the month, details emerged of a flaw that made it possible to unmask a user's real email address hidden behind a Hide My Email address. The issue was first reported to Apple on June 13, 2025, with Cupertino unsuccessfully attempting to patch ...

Hidden text on a web page was enough to make Kiro , AWS's agentic coding IDE, rewrite its own configuration file and run an attacker's code on a developer's machine, with no approval step able to stop it. Intezer, in research with Kodem Security, found that a request as ordinary as asking Kiro to summarize a page could end in remote code execution. AWS has patched the issue, and no CVE has been assigned to it. Kiro's safety model rests on a human clicking "allow." The agent can run shell commands, fetch URLs, and edit files, and the design assumes a developer reviews anything risky before it happens. That approval step is the security boundary, and the flaw let an attacker slip past it without the developer ever being offered a choice. The weak point was the file that tells Kiro which external tools to load. Kiro reads its list of Model Context Protocol servers, and the exact command used to start each one, from ~/.kiro/settings/mcp.json. When that fi...

Google's DeepMind on Tuesday announced the release of Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber , a specialized artificial intelligence (AI) model built atop 3.5 Flash that's designed to discover, validate, and patch vulnerabilities quickly and efficiently. According to the tech giant, the model will be exclusively available to governments and trusted partners via CodeMender as part of a limited-access pilot program. CodeMender is an AI-powered agent for vulnerability discovery and patching that was unveiled by the company in October 2025. A Google DeepMind spokesperson told The Hacker News that there are plans to extend the model's capabilities to include red-teaming features and end-to-end enterprise defense. The lightweight model, per DeepMind, is both cost-efficient and highly capable alternative to large, costly cybersecurity-focused models. CodeMender can call upon 3.5 Flash Cyber "multiple times at high speed and low cost," allowing the AI agent to scan more code path...

A third SharePoint Server flaw patched by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday update for July 2026 has come under active exploitation, per watchTowr . The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-50522 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical deserialization of untrusted data in Microsoft Office SharePoint that could allow an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. Microsoft credited DEVCORE researcher "splitline" with discovering and reporting the flaw. "In a network-based attack, an attacker authenticated as at least a Site Owner, could write arbitrary code to inject and execute code remotely on the SharePoint Server," Redmond said in an advisory released last week. "The attack vector is Network (AV:N) because this vulnerability is remotely exploitable and can be exploited from the internet. The attack complexity is Low (AC:L) because an attacker does not require significant prior knowledge of the system and can achieve repeatable success with the ...