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Three distinct suspected Russian cyber espionage threat clusters have been observed leveraging legitimate authentication flows to single out individuals working in academia, aerospace and defense, governments, and think tanks across Europe, as well as academia and think tanks within the U.S. These clusters include UNC6293 , UNC7005 , and UNC5976 . "These clusters engage in persistent, adaptive phishing campaigns, using sophisticated social engineering tactics to compromise personal accounts across multiple platforms," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) researchers Gabby Roncone and Wesley Shields said in a report published today. UNC6293, first detailed by the tech giant and the Citizen Lab in June 2025, is assessed to be a sub-cluster of Ice Relic (formerly APT29), which is also tracked under the monikers Cozy Bear and Midnight Blizzard. The hacking crew was previously attributed to a campaign that abused a Google account feature called application specific pas...

A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something trusted doing exactly what it was allowed to do. Signed drivers get turned against defenses. Legitimate apps help malware blend in. A weak header check opens a path to code execution. Elsewhere, exposed systems, old bugs, odd hiding tricks, and AI-assisted exploit research keep lowering the effort needed to cause damage. Nothing here needs much decoration. The small gaps are doing enough work already. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

The U.S. government on Wednesday warned of an "active threat" targeting critical infrastructure organizations in the country using artificial intelligence (AI)-generated exploit scripts. The activity is targeting Siemens S7 SeriesProgrammable Logic Controllers (PLCs) to conduct reconnaissance and capability development using AI-generated scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. That said, the ongoing PLC targeting activity is assessed to be broader in scope than Siemens PLCs. "The actors leverage internet scanning services like Censys and ZoomEye to identify internet-exposed PLCs running outdated software or that are otherwise poorly protected," according to the advisory published by the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Energy (DOE), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Targets of the activity include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Wa...

Adversa AI has disclosed an attack technique that it says can cause xAI's Grok chatbot to send a user's name, approximate location, subscription tier, and the prompts from the ongoing conversation to an attacker-controlled server after the user asks it to summarize an ordinary web page. The AI security company, which has codenamed the technique "Cryptographic Context Injection ," said the transfer completed without a confirmation step and with no visible warning in its proof-of-concept demonstration. There is no patch, no CVE identifier, and no user-facing workaround, and the writeup does not report any exploitation in the wild. Asked which build was tested, Adversa told The Hacker News the target was the Grok web chat at grok.com running Grok 4.5 Fast, and that the attack was reproduced once on August 19, 2026. The writeup gives no success rate. The company said it has attempted the attack 20 times since June with a 40% success rate, and that the failures cam...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw in isolated-vm , a popular open-source sandbox with more than 2,900 stars and 190 forks on GitHub, that could allow attackers to escape the confines of the isolated environment. The vulnerability (" GHSA-864f-rcv7-6rh4 "), which has yet to be assigned a CVE identifier, impacts all versions of the library before and including 7.0.0. It has been patched in versions 6.2.0 and 7.0.1 released earlier this month. Isolated-vm is a Node.js library for running untrusted JavaScript inside a V8 Isolate , an independent instance of the Google V8 JavaScript engine, allowing multiple sandboxed JavaScript environments to run concurrently without sharing data or interfering with each other. The npm package has witnessed nearly 1 million downloads over the past week. Because each V8 Isolate has a separate state and maintains its own heap, it is not possible to directly pass JavaScript objects from the main Node.js threa...

Citrix has released updates to address two security flaws impacting NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway deployments, including a critical-severity authentication bypass vulnerability. According to the cloud computing and virtualization technology company, the issues affect customer-managed NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, including certain FIPS and NDcPP builds, as well as SecurAccess ZTNA Hybrid deployments that use customer-managed NetScaler instances. It bears noting that the vulnerabilities do not apply to Citrix-managed cloud services or Citrix-managed Adaptive Authentication, as the necessary updates have already been applied. The list of impacted NetScaler versions is below - NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway 14.1 BEFORE 14.1-73.32  NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway 13.1 BEFORE 13.1-63.21  NetScaler ADC FIPS BEFORE 14.1-73.32 FIPS  NetScaler ADC FIPS and NDcPP BEFORE 13.1-37.277  The first of the two vulnerabilities is CVE-2026...

A now-patched security flaw impacting Zimbra Collaboration (ZCS) has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to the Polish Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT Polska). The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-73570 (CVSS score: 8.9), which refers to a case of command injection that can lead to remote code execution. "A remote code execution vulnerability exists in Zimbra Collaboration (ZCS) before 10.1.20 when the optional zimbra-snmp package is installed, and SNMP notifications are enabled," according to a description of the flaw in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). "Due to improper sanitization of untrusted input during SNMP notification processing, an unauthenticated attacker can send specially crafted SMTP requests that may result in execution of arbitrary operating system commands as the Zimbra user." The security issue was patched by Zimbra last month with the release of version 10.1.20. In a bulletin issued earlie...

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated an attack that revives expired Visa contactless credit cards for real in-store purchases by rewriting the expiration date a point-of-sale (POS) terminal reads over near-field communication (NFC), without breaking any of the card's cryptography. The attack, which the researchers named " Zombie Card ," requires physical possession of the expired card or sustained NFC proximity to it, plus a man-in-the-middle (MitM) relay positioned between the card and the terminal. It also requires that the account remain open under the same primary account number (PAN), which is standard practice when an issuer sends a replacement card, and that the issuing bank not independently re-check the expiry during authorization. The paper's preliminary study spans five major US banks and tests general tampering with Europay, Mastercard, and Visa (EMV) transactions. Raja Hasnain Anwar, the lead author, told The Hac...

In March 2026, an internal AI agent at Meta triggered a “Sev 1” incident after sensitive company and user data was exposed to employees who weren’t authorized to access it.  The incident began when a Meta employee posted a technical question on an internal forum. An engineer used an approved AI agent to analyze it, but the agent posted its response publicly without approval. The employee followed its advice, inadvertently making a large volume of sensitive data available to unauthorized engineers for over two hours.  This was not shadow AI. The tool was approved, but the AI behaved in ways nobody had anticipated.  It’s a perfect example of security’s next big AI governance problem: shady AI.  Shadow AI is the unapproved use of AI tools  Shady AI is when employees use approved AI tools in unapproved, unexpected, or poorly governed ways  Shadow AI happens outside the organization's visibility. Shady AI happens inside it. And that makes it muc...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that exploit how major content delivery networks (CDNs) convert client-facing HTTP/3 traffic into HTTP/1.1 requests to the websites they front, amplifying a low-bandwidth request stream by up to 350x against the origin server. The attacks, collectively named " CDN Tsunami ," were evaluated against Alibaba, Baidu, Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, and Tencent. All six were found susceptible to the bandwidth variant and five to the connection variant, with Cloudflare unaffected by the latter because it buffers the complete request before opening a connection to the origin. The attack requires a website hosted on one of the six providers, with HTTP/3 serving at the edge, and no configuration changes on the website's part. The paper lists HTTP/3 as enabled by default at Cloudflare and CloudFront. However,  Cloudflare's documentation  describes HTTP/3 as available on all plans and pr...

A new Android threat codenamed Manic has been observed actively targeting Ukrainian banks, government and identity services, and messaging applications, as well as Russian and European financial institutions, global fintech and cryptocurrency services, and military-focused communications. "Manic sits at the intersection of Android banking malware and mobile spyware, combining financial-fraud capabilities with broader surveillance and device-control features," ThreatFabric said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The malware, besides targeting sensitive applications and enabling extensive device takeover, introduces a novel Wi‑Fi mesh technique that makes it possible for the infected devices to relay data through nearby compromised devices with internet access. It's distributed via phishing sites and dropper apps impersonating utilities. The Dutch security company said the malware family's activity dates back to February 2026, when the first dom...

Security researchers at Cycode have disclosed a chain of flaws in AIT-GUI, the browser-based operator console for NASA/JPL's open-source AMMOS Instrument Toolkit, that allow an unauthenticated attacker to issue arbitrary commands to the software's spacecraft and instrument command bus. The chain, tracked as GHSA-p9r8-2q67-fp86 and rated 9.4 on the CVSS v3.1 scoring system, impacts AIT-GUI versions 2.5.1 and earlier, with the advisory listing version 2.5.2 as the fixed release. The advisory, published August 13, 2026, states that no CVE has been assigned to it. The AMMOS Instrument Toolkit is a framework for building ground data systems, the software that sends commands to instruments and spacecraft and processes the telemetry coming back down. AIT-GUI is its operator console, and the endpoints in question relay operator commands to a command bus. "The blast radius of an unauthenticated POST is measured in issued instrument commands, not defaced pages," Cycode ...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on an updated version of ToxicPanda (aka TgToxic) that comes with "significant enhancements," including a set of 167 remote commands and expands its targeting footprint globally. Zimperium zLabs, in a Wednesday report , said the Android malware also features a PIN harvesting workflow targeting more than 140 banking and cryptocurrency applications. ToxicPanda is known to be active in the wild since at least July 2022. "By abusing the Android accessibility service, threat actors can steal every UI element on the screen, alongside an overlay-based credential theft mechanism targeting 349 financial institutions [across 16 countries], compared to the previous version, which targeted only 16 banking applications, the latest iteration demonstrates a significant expansion in targeting scope and capabilities," security researcher Vishnu Pratapagiri said. The new version also fleshes out some of the previously unimplemented co...

A set of 40 Mozilla Firefox extensions has been found to engage in cryptocurrency wallet theft by masquerading as OKX, Rabby Wallet, TronLink, and other Web3 products. According to the Socket Threat Research team, the extensions are part of a broader set of 77 browser add-ons that share source code and infrastructure overlaps. The campaign, dubbed Offside Wallet Theft Factory , is believed to have been active since March 2026. The activity has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. "Extension-level analysis confirms 40 as malicious," security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . "Another 37 form a coordinated multi-sport score-shell operation. Their analyzed builds contain no confirmed credential- or wallet-stealing payloads, but their deceptive functionality, shared publishing artifacts, and version histories indicate malicious intent." Among those 40 extensions, seven use threat actor-controlled Supabase projects as remote switches to server ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a critical flaw in the Elementor Pro WordPress plugin that, if successfully exploited, could lead to remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-32475 , carries a CVSS score of 9.0 out of 10.0. It has been described as a case of unrestricted upload of a file with a dangerous type. "The flaw lives in the Forms module's File Upload field, where the extension check and the file-move step run in two separate loops with different handling of empty file entries," Patchstack said . "By submitting two file parts for the same field, an unauthenticated attacker skips the extension blocklist entirely and writes a PHP file into a public directory." This discrepancy in how it validates the file's extension and moves the uploaded file to a public directory when empty file entries are processed turns a restricted file-upload field into an unauthenticated remote code execution primitive. Succes...