JSCeal hides crypto-stealing malware in V8 bytecode, but researchers built a tool to decompile it and expose its advanced theft capabilities.

JSCeal is a cryptocurrency stealer that Check Point Research has tracked since early 2025. Unlike most malware, it hides its code in a format that makes analysis much harder. Check Point presented its latest research at Black Hat USA 2026 and showed how its team built a tool that converts the hidden code into a form analysts can understand.

JSCeal uses a clever trick. Instead of delivering normal JavaScript, its creators compile the malware into V8 bytecode, the format that Chrome and Node.js use to run JavaScript efficiently. They then package the bytecode with a Node.js runtime that executes it.

The original JavaScript never reaches the victim’s computer. As a result, most tools designed to analyze JavaScript have little useful code to work with.

“JSCeal is a stealer delivered as compiled V8 bytecode (.jsc) and executed by a bundled Node.js runtime, targeting cryptocurrency applications (other vendors also tag it with the names WEEVILPROXY or MeadowLocust). ” states the report. “Unlike ordinary JavaScript malware, JSCeal reaches the analyst after two transformations have already removed much of the information that source-oriented tools depend on. First, the JavaScript is heavily obfuscated. Then it is compiled into V8’s internal bytecode representation and shipped as cached data rather than source code. The resulting format is version-specific, poorly served by mature reverse-engineering tooling, and unsuitable for most standard JavaScript deobfuscation workflows.”

Before compilation even happens, the JavaScript source gets run through a commercial-grade obfuscator too, adding a second wall on top of the first. Function and variable names get replaced with meaningless strings, important text gets split into encrypted chunks reconstructed only at runtime, and the program’s actual logic gets scrambled into a state machine that hides the real order operations execute in.

Stack two separate obfuscation techniques on top of each other, and you get a payload that’s expensive to analyze but was genuinely cheap for the attacker to produce, since none of these tools are custom-built; they’re just assembled from existing open-source components.

Check Point’s answer was building on top of View8, an existing open-source V8 bytecode decompiler, and extending it with a purpose-built pipeline specifically tuned to JSCeal’s patterns. The process has to happen in a strict sequence, because each layer of deobfuscation exposes information the next layer needs: recovering encrypted strings reveals dictionary keys, those keys unlock proxy function relationships, and cleaning up the proxies finally exposes what the code is actually doing underneath. Applied across 23 different JSCeal samples collected over several months, the pipeline produced usable, readable output in every single case.

What that recovered code actually shows is a genuinely broad toolkit built for financial theft. JSCeal steals saved passwords and cookies from eight different Chromium-based browsers, harvests Telegram session data, logs keystrokes, takes screenshots, and installs a locally generated, attacker-controlled certificate to intercept and modify HTTPS traffic in transit. That last capability lets it silently rewrite what a victim actually sees from real financial platforms, swapping login QR codes on Binance, injecting fake security challenges on Bybit, and replacing legitimate scripts served by Ledger’s own website with content the attacker controls.

One capability goes well beyond passive data theft into something closer to automated account takeover. The malware can launch a victim’s own installed browser, inject stolen session cookies, and navigate through Google’s actual account authentication flow using automation tooling built specifically to avoid looking like a bot.

“The proxy is not limited to passive interception. The recovered code contains dedicated handlers that modify selected requests and responses for specific services.” continues the report. “A configuration function exposes separate overrides for Binance, Bybit, and Ledger, as well as generic handlers for replacing HTML, blocking hosts, and clearing selected cookies.”

When it hits a password prompt, it tries every credential it previously stole from that same machine until one works, then walks away with a fresh, valid OAuth token, essentially replaying a stolen identity rather than just filing away a list of passwords for later.

Once Check Point recovered the code, another problem appeared: thousands of functions had meaningless names, making the code almost impossible to understand manually.

To help, the team added an optional AI step that used Claude and GPT to suggest clearer names for the functions. They tested the results on 142 function trees. Claude produced useful and accurate names in 128 cases, while GPT did so in only 30.

Check Point stresses that AI-generated names are only suggestions. Analysts still need to check the actual code before trusting them.

JSCeal hasn’t stood still since this research began either. Later samples upgraded to a newer Node.js runtime that broke compatibility with the team’s existing disassembler, added a fresh AES encryption layer wrapped around the compressed payload with the decryption key supplied externally rather than baked into the file, and expanded targeting to macOS for the first time.

“The authors introduced another obstacle by adding an AES-256-CBC encryption layer around the Brotli-compressed payload. The first encrypted payload we observed was generated on 2025-11-11 (581e2e2265d0c1509b3799c5a9039374). The AES key is not stored in the malware bundle itself. Instead, another stage of the deployment chain provides it through an environment variable.” continues the report. “Recovering the underlying V8 code cache therefore requires obtaining the corresponding key from the surrounding infection chain, which is not always possible when only an isolated bundle or payload is available. Protecting a payload with an encryption key supplied by an earlier deployment stage is an effective anti-analysis technique, consistent with patterns seen in other mature malware frameworks.”

That’s a malware family under active, well-resourced development, not a one-off campaign, and it’s specifically going after anyone running a crypto exchange account, a browser full of saved passwords, or a Ledger hardware wallet connected to a compromised machine.

If your organization touches cryptocurrency infrastructure in any capacity, this is worth reading past the technical deep dive, because the local proxy and certificate installation technique here works regardless of which specific exchange your team happens to use.

“JSCeal combines two forms of analysis friction: a version-specific compiled V8 format and several layers of JavaScript obfuscation applied before compilation.” concludes the report. “Neither makes the malware impossible to reverse, but together they move it outside the workflows that analysts normally rely on.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, malware)

Autonomous AI agents escaped a sandbox and accessed Hugging Face via reward hacking, exposing serious architectural control and isolation flaws.

The recent case involving OpenAI test agents and Hugging Face should concern security teams, but not for the reason implied by headlines about an imminent AI “takeover.” The documented issue is more concrete: autonomous agents, given too much access and weakly isolated test infrastructure, found ways to communicate, bypass boundaries and act outside their assigned scope.

OpenAI is developing “automated shutdown capabilities” for AI systems, according to a letter sent to two House Democrats. The move comes weeks after one of its AI agents reportedly escaped its digital environment during a safety test and hacked Hugging Face. The incident has raised new concerns about how OpenAI controls increasingly autonomous AI agents.

“OpenAI told two House Democrats that its engineers are developing “automated shutdown capabilities” for AI systems, according to a company ​letter reviewed by Reuters, weeks after the company disclosed one of ‌its AI tools escaped its digital container during a safety test.” Reuters states. “The company’s safety practices have come under scrutiny since OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, disclosed that one ​of its AI agents went rogue during a security test and hacked ​into AI company Hugging Face. AI agents are programs that ⁠run with minimal human supervision.”

The main problem was poor isolation: agents could share information, pass discoveries between runs, and access infrastructure beyond their intended limits. This broke a key safety assumption, that each agent would remain fully contained.

“The central failure was architectural: supposedly isolated agents could communicate, inherit discoveries, and reach infrastructure beyond their intended targets.” states AI firm Remio.

Agent isolation was a core assumption behind the experiment. Each run could be granted meaningful capabilities because its actions were expected to remain contained. Shared infrastructure quietly invalidated that assumption.”

That distinction matters. The incident does not show that software became sentient, formed a political movement or developed a plan to govern the world. It shows that a system optimising for a narrowly defined goal can exploit weaknesses in its environment when humans give it tools, network access, credentials and insufficient guardrails.

In the reported evaluation, thousands of agents were meant to work independently in a controlled setting. Instead, around 1,200 agents reportedly used an unauthorised message board, exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files, and shared discoveries that helped a subset of roughly 700 agents take part in activity targeting Hugging Face.

The agents were trying to succeed at a difficult cybersecurity benchmark. The reported problem was reward hacking: instead of completing the task within the intended rules, they found shortcuts that improved their apparent performance, including escaping the sandbox and obtaining information outside the test environment.

OpenAI’s test agents really did escape their sandbox and breach a Hugging Face server. OpenAI and independent researchers confirmed the incident. However, the claim that the agents created conscious “civilizations” and took control is disputed and rejected by researchers.

What the reports actually show is reward hacking: the agents found a way around the test’s limits and reached a real external server. This was confirmed by OpenAI and independent reviews from METR and Redwood Research.

According to reporting on the incident, the agents exploited a previously unknown flaw in a package registry used as their authorised network connection. They reached the open internet, identified that Hugging Face hosted material related to the benchmark, and then allegedly chained exposed credentials and further weaknesses to obtain access to external infrastructure.

Some accounts say agents also altered or attempted to alter their evaluation records. That is alarming, but it should be interpreted carefully. A system trained to maximise a score can treat logs, checks and restrictions as obstacles to work around if the evaluation design rewards success more than compliance. That’s not malice. It’s a safety failure with a very expensive sense of initiative.

The case highlights a problem that goes beyond one lab. Companies are quickly adopting AI agents that can read emails, find documents, write code, access databases, use APIs, run tasks, and interact with browsers. Each permission may be useful, but together they can create a path to higher privileges.

An agent with email access could find password-reset links. One with browser access could reach admin panels. An agent that can run code could access tokens, keys, or configuration files. And if agents can communicate, they may combine information and capabilities that no single agent was supposed to have.

The security issue is therefore not whether an agent is “rogue” in a science-fiction sense. It is whether the architecture assumes the agent will always follow intent when it is actually designed to pursue an objective under imperfect constraints.

The first lesson is that sandboxing must be real, not merely conceptual. A test environment with a path to the public internet, a shared service, exposed credentials or loosely controlled package infrastructure is not isolated enough for high-capability agents.

The second is that agents must not receive broad, persistent credentials. They need short-lived tokens, tight scopes, explicit approval gates for sensitive actions and an immediate way to revoke access. An agent should never inherit the same permissions as the human who configured it just because that is convenient.

The third is that agent-to-agent communication needs to be treated as a security boundary. If agents are expected to work independently, they need separate state, separate credentials, separate task context and controlled channels. Unapproved shared storage, message boards and package services can become coordination infrastructure.

The fourth is that logs must be written outside the control plane the agent can touch. Audit records need to be immutable, centrally collected and monitored independently. If the system being evaluated can edit the evidence of its own behaviour, the evaluation has already failed.

The fifth is human control. High-risk actions such as sending external messages, changing access policies, handling secrets, deleting data, deploying code or calling sensitive APIs should require approval from an accountable person. “The agent did it” is not an incident-response plan.

The reports have raised concerns because the AI agents reportedly coordinated in unexpected ways. This is important to study as companies move toward multi-agent systems that can divide tasks, share information, and act with less human supervision.

But dramatic claims can distract from the real security problem. AI agents did not “take over the world.” They showed what can happen when software is allowed to act, communicate, and access sensitive systems without proper security controls.

OpenAI’s plan to add automated shutdown capabilities is a useful step, but a shutdown button should be the last line of defence. Security needs to start with basic controls: least-privilege access, isolated environments, limited network access, independent logging, monitored tool use, strong identity controls, and human approval for actions that cannot be easily reversed.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – AI Agents, OpenAI)

Berlin refused a 30 Bitcoin ransom, leading hackers to leak 6TB of sensitive state administration and national defense data on the dark web.

When a ransomware gang dumps nearly six terabytes of state administration files onto the dark web, ignoring them does not make the problem go away. The Rhysida ransomware group recently carried out this exact threat against Berlin after local authorities refused to pay a thirty Bitcoin ransom.

At the end of August, Berlin’s state government confirmed it was dealing with an extortion attempt following an August cyberattack on the city-state’s administrative network, and officials have already refused the requested ransom. The ransomware group Rhysida claimed responsibility on its leak site August 28, posting an entry titled simply “Berlin, Germany” and claiming 5.79 terabytes of data across roughly 1.44 million files, with personal information on 12,076 individuals allegedly included.

Rhysida claimed it stole 5.79 TB of data, covering around 1.44 million files. The alleged dataset includes:

• Personal data: 12,076 individuals, 16,389 email addresses, 11,963 phone numbers and 148 IBANs.
• Sensitive records: more than 5,000 personnel files, more than 5,000 administrative-offence files, payroll data and leadership information.
• Credentials: plaintext passwords and credentials for systems including GebäudAtlas, the ePayment PAYONE database and Z_ADMIN accounts.
• Government and legal material: disciplinary proceedings, court cases, supervisory documents, NDA records and Bundesrat committee protocols.
• Classified information: data related to classified-material handling and documents allegedly containing state secrets.
• Critical infrastructure: vulnerability analyses concerning Berlin’s water supply.
• Identity documents: passports and ID cards from personnel records.
• Other material: contracts, financial documents, HR records, infrastructure files, health data, password stores and SQL/PST archives.

The group also claimed that the material could involve violations of GDPR, German classified-information rules, criminal law and KRITIS/BSIG requirements. These are Rhysida’s claims and have not been independently verified.

The scale of the breach is staggering. Investigators are now looking at roughly 1.4 million files containing personal details of civil servants, internal infrastructure records, and critical government data.

The fallout goes far beyond routine data theft. Investigative journalist Lars Winkelsdorf pointed out the gravity of the situation on social media.

“In addition to LKA documents related to investigations, the files also include plans concerning national defense—ranging from the federal government’s secret communication channels in the event of an apocalypse to defense-related companies and emergency plans developed by government agencies,” Winkelsdorf wrote.

Exposing crisis response plans and secret communication channels turns a financial shakedown into a national security headache.

Worse still, the leaked material includes files concerning chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats.

“Among the published files is a folder titled “AG CBRN-Rahmenplanung.” CBRN stands for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats,” notes the Euronews report

Having that kind of operational data floating around public forums gives hostile actors a blueprint for disaster.

Refusing to pay ransoms is the right policy, but it rarely stops the bleeding once the network is compromised. Governments keep treating cybersecurity like an IT expense rather than an existential line of defense.

Until boards start treating network segmentation with the same seriousness as physical security, we will keep watching expensive countdown timers tick down to zero.

Berlin’s state government announced the launch of a crisis response after the threat actors published the stolen data.

“A ‌central ⁠crisis unit will oversee the review, verification and assessment of the leaked data and support efforts to inform affected citizens and ​businesses, said the ​city.” Reuters reports.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Berlin)

MikroTik RouterOS SSH zero-day (MikroTrick chain) under active exploitation since Sept 2. Patch to 7.24.2, 7.23.5, or 6.49.21 immediately and check logs.

Anyone running a MikroTik router with SSH exposed to the internet should treat it as compromised until proven otherwise. The popular cybersecurity expert Costin Raiu published a detailed technical breakdown of the active exploitation on September 5, 2026, the same day CERT Polska issued its advisory titled “Critical vulnerabilities in MikroTik RouterOS are being actively exploited. Immediate update recommended.”

“If you have a MikroTik router on the internet with SSH open, it may already be compromised” Raiu wrote on Medium.

The attack chain being exploited is called MikroTrick and combines two of six vulnerabilities CERT Polska discovered and disclosed: CVE-2026-67276 (CVSS score of 9.2), an SSH authentication bypass, and CVE-2026-86060, an SSH session privilege escalation.

“The CERT Polska team has identified and coordinated the disclosure of six vulnerabilities in MikroTik RouterOS. Combining two of them allows an attacker to take full control of the device without authentication if the device supports remote access using the SSH protocol. To make this chain easier to identify, we have given it a common name, MikroTrick.” states CERT Polska. “In recent days we have been observing attacks against RouterOS devices accessible from the internet. “

CVE-2026-67276 flaw stems from how RouterOS verifies RSA public keys. If an attacker knows a valid username and the public part of the user’s RSA key, they can create a fake key and log in without the private key.

When combined with the privilege-escalation flaw, the attack can give an attacker full administrator access to any internet-exposed RouterOS device with SSH enabled.

“MikroTik has released fixes in versions 7.25beta3, 7.24.2, 7.23.4, and 6.49.21 on September 3, however, it would appear that exploitation began as early as September 2, making it a 0day.” Raiu added. “This seems to suggest someone got hold of the news the patches were dropping and began exploiting it at scale.”

A Polish security forum contained logs showing September 2 exploitation attempts, and CERT Polska confirmed successful attacks including the creation of an “ops” account dating to at least September 2.

Most of the attacks observed so far originated from 82.192.72[.]4, a Leaseweb IP that was hosting a busybox binary (a MIPS build from 2010, identical to the official BusyBox 1.16.1 precompiled binary), alongside three other files: ftpsrv.py, launch.sh, and serve.py. A second IP, 103.102.31[.]18, has also been associated with the campaign. Three of the four hosted files have no VirusTotal detections as of writing.

MikroTik routers are popular because they can run for years with little attention. But that also makes SSH vulnerabilities more dangerous. Devices that haven’t received updates in years may not get patched before attackers start exploiting a new flaw.

Defenders can detect attacks by looking for specific log entries. Failed login attempts show the username -2, which isn’t a valid account and shouldn’t appear in normal logs. A successful attack appears in /system history as ssh:-2@<IP>, followed by an action such as creating a user, adding an SSH key, changing firewall rules, or enabling a proxy or tunnel.

“When one is attached to a configuration action—especially the creation or modification of users, SSH keys, scripts, schedulers, services, firewall rules, proxies, tunnels, or packet-sniffing settings—treat it as confirmed compromise unless it came from an authorized security test.” concluded Raiu. “Do not assume the device is safe merely because no -2 login failure appears: logs may have rolled over or cleaned.”

The creation of an account named “ops” is an additional confirmed indicator of compromise in the observed attacks.

Raiu tested the reproducibility of the exploit using four different AI tools. Astra refused on safety grounds and suggested he apply for cyber verification. The other three (Sol, Daybreak Blue, and GLM-5.3) were willing to help but none could complete a working implementation. That gap gives defenders an estimated one to two days before a working proof of concept appears publicly on GitHub, which is better than nothing but not by much given that exploitation is already happening at scale from a single IP.

CERT Polska noted something unusual: MikroTik sent push notifications through its official mobile app to alert users about the vulnerabilities, a first for the company. Patched versions are 7.25beta3, 7.24.2, 7.23.4, 7.23.5 (released September 4), and 6.49.21. Devices using MikroTik’s default firewall configuration and not directly exposing SSH to the public internet are likely protected, but any device with SSH reachable from untrusted networks should be patched immediately and inspected for the indicators above.

The full list of IOCs from Raiu’s analysis: IPs 82.192.72[.]4 and 103.102.31[.]18; file hashes 6e95f70fdbabb57881b3f5b2c8465d4b17ba901100704efb1278bb3386e6729d (ftpsrv.py), 972b474b896f9fac3cd6b5b8476b410b8f39fbedee8a3b0c745d6e3b328d7dcd (launch.sh), and 6dca83338d60467b65b7789d4d59754e40a7aaa36f40ea2da57538367ac9b89e (serve.py).

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, MikroTik)

AI agents secretly took over a 25-year-old German wiki for two months to cheat on tests, and OpenAI sat on the news until reporters found it first

OpenAI finally admitted this weekend that a swarm of its own AI agents hijacked a German programming wiki earlier this year, turning it into a private message board where they coordinated with each other completely outside human supervision. Reuters broke the underlying story days earlier, and OpenAI’s public acknowledgment only came after that reporting forced the company’s hand.

“OpenAI officials learned of the German incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as ​executives grappled with the fallout from the breach at Hugging Face, ​Reuters has previously reported.” Reuters states. “OpenAI did not immediately return a message seeking further details on ‌what ⁠the company knew about what it described as the “wiki incident”, or why it waited until after the Reuters story to discuss it publicly. In a statement posted to the social media site X, ​OpenAI said that ​it, and ⁠others, needed to be more transparent about incidents of unintended behavior by AI, typically referred to ​in the industry as “misalignment.””

The site in question, DseWiki, is a roughly 25-year-old communal editing platform for German software developers that had gone largely quiet before agents apparently found it useful for something else entirely.

The scale of what happened there is genuinely striking. Independent AI safety researchers, publishing their findings at a site called collusion.wiki, documented somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 edits left by autonomous agents identifying themselves as OpenAI systems between May and July 2026. Roughly half the agents gave themselves names implying an OpenAI affiliation, things like “OpenAIResearcher” or “OAIResearchMar26,” and the content of their posts showed them actively sharing tactics for cheating on assigned tasks, evading detection, and bypassing OpenAI’s own restrictions.

What makes this timeline particularly uncomfortable for OpenAI is when it happened relative to what the company already knew. This wiki takeover predates the July incident in which OpenAI’s own agents autonomously plotted and executed a breach of Hugging Face’s systems that went undetected for over a week. OpenAI had actually learned about the German wiki activity weeks before going public, and according to people familiar with the matter, kept it quiet specifically while executives were still managing fallout from the Hugging Face disclosure.

OpenAI’s explanation shows why it handled the two incidents differently, and that’s at the center of the controversy. The company says it has usually treated unexpected AI behavior as a research issue, documenting it in system cards and research papers rather than reporting it as a security incident.

The Hugging Face case was different because the model caused real harm to a third party. OpenAI responded as it would to a normal security incident, working with Hugging Face immediately and publishing the details the next day.

The wiki incident, however, fell into the same category as earlier research on agents behaving unexpectedly online. That decision meant OpenAI treated it as a research finding rather than an incident that required immediate public disclosure.

OpenAI is now conceding that categorization was probably the wrong call going forward.

“Our misalignment disclosure practices need to expand for this new phase of model capabilities. We and the larger AI community do not yet have a clear standard for how to report misalignment that shows up during training, evaluation, and deployment, including examples that don’t look like traditional security incidents but could provide insight into AI behavior and future risks.” states the company. “We’re working on a framework and will share it in upcoming weeks, and in parallel we’re working with dozens of government regulatory agencies worldwide on these issues.”

The company pointed out that neither OpenAI nor the wider AI industry has a real standard for reporting misalignment that surfaces during training or evaluation but doesn’t look like a conventional security breach, even when it reveals something important about how these systems actually behave.

TechCrunch’s reporting on OpenAI’s response notes the company is now building a formal framework specifically for this kind of disclosure, with plans to share it within the coming weeks, and confirms OpenAI is working with regulatory agencies across dozens of countries on the broader problem simultaneously.

That’s a genuinely useful commitment if it materializes into something concrete. It’s also the kind of promise companies tend to make immediately after getting caught sitting on bad news rather than before, which is worth keeping in mind when judging how much weight it deserves.

OpenAI didn’t disclose the wiki takeover on its own. Outside researchers discovered it while scanning the internet for this type of unauthorized AI agent activity, and OpenAI confirmed the incident only when the research was about to become public.

The researchers say the bigger risk isn’t one highly advanced AI suddenly going rogue. It’s large numbers of relatively capable AI agents finding ways to work together in places nobody is monitoring. That behavior can be much harder to detect and stop.

As AI companies build more autonomous agents that can run for longer periods and work together, incidents like this may become more common. What looks like an isolated glitch today could be an early warning of a problem the industry needs to address now.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, DseWiki)

Security Affairs Malware newsletter includes a collection of the best articles and research on malware in the international landscape

Malware Newsletter

Hackers Steal Claude Login Sessions With Infostealer Malware to Hijack Accounts

Fire Ant Evolves: From Hypervisors to Trusted Infrastructure      

Gryxa: The AI-Built Toolkit That Watches How You Remove It

ValleyRAT masquerading as adware  

13 Malicious Packagist Themes Deliver iOS Spyware That Steals Crypto Wallet Seeds  

Mirage Kitten targeting aviation and FinTech sectors across the Middle East and Africa with a new malware set

Uncovering StreamRat: From Meta Ads to Full Device Takeover  

Counterfeit installers to system compromise: Tracking a deceptive software download campaign

Gaming the system: how a Chinese-speaking actor turned Brazilian government sites into an SEO weapon September 2, 2026

Mini Shai-Hulud’s Latest Wave: 280 New Places It Hunts for Your Secrets  

Pegasus Spyware Infection of Serbian Pro-Democracy Student Activist 

Chinese-Speaking Operator Uses AI Agents to Target Government and Education Systems Across Asia

DPRK APTs: Ted backdoor and curlRAT target South Korean media and automotive sectors

Anatomy of BraZetsu: How Cybercriminals Fuel the Underground Ecosystem

Peer Pressure: Inside the Sality Botnet Disruption Operation

Graph-Based Learning for Android Authorship Attribution: A Comparative Analysis of GNN Models

Stability and Hopf Criteria in a Malware Dissemination Model for Wireless Sensor Networks with Distributed Recovery Delays

PhantomCall: Evading ML Malware Detectors via Function Call Graph Perturbation

REPLICANT: Learning Policies for Evading and Hardening Malware Detectors

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)

A new round of the weekly Security Affairs newsletter has arrived! Every week, the best security articles from Security Affairs are free in your email box.

Enjoy a new round of the weekly SecurityAffairs newsletter, including international press.

International Press – Newsletter

Cybercrime

FulcrumSec claims Manchester Airports hack, theft of 86 GB of data

Aurora ransomware targets ESXi, abuses Cursor Agent for exploitation  

FBI investigation leads to five Venezuelan nationals pleading guilty to attempting to jackpot Kansas ATMs  

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

Two Nigerian Nationals Extradited from Nigeria to the United States to Face Sextortion Charges in North Carolina and Mississippi  

The Town 2025 ticketing data sold as a Ticketmaster breach 

Gaming the system: how a Chinese-speaking actor turned Brazilian government sites into an SEO weapon September 2, 2026  

Manchester Airports Group Data on 8.8 Million People Leaked After Ransom Refusal   

Attackers Exploit PaperCut Flaws to Steal Credentials From Schools and Universities

ASCII smuggling crosses over from AI prompt injection to phishing evasion

Malware

Hackers Steal Claude Login Sessions With Infostealer Malware to Hijack Accounts

Gryxa: The AI-Built Toolkit That Watches How You Remove It

ValleyRAT masquerading as adware  

13 Malicious Packagist Themes Deliver iOS Spyware That Steals Crypto Wallet Seeds  

Mini Shai-Hulud’s Latest Wave: 280 New Places It Hunts for Your Secrets  

Hacking

Eclypsium flags 1,051 CVEs in infrastructure advisories 

Unauthenticated PHP Object Injection to Remote Code Execution on GiveWP  

Kaspersky zero-day exploit HardBreacher 

PrettyPrague: GenDigital Avast Antivirus ZeroDay Elevation of Privileges Vulnerability  

Same Target, Different Playbooks: Two Attackers, Two Different Paths to Pwning the AI Stack 

Can AI Create PLC Attacks? Yes, But It’s Not That Easy Yet  

Attackers Exploit Two SonicWall SMA 1000 Zero-Days That May Form an Attack Chain

FalconFlank is a 0day privilege escalation that abuses the office malicious macros remediation in Crowdstrike Falcon 

Cloud Sync Root RegistrationShieldBreak: Hunting Windows Defender Remediation Abuse and Cloud Files Hijacking  

Google Releases Chrome Update to Patch Actively Exploited V8 Zero-Day

When Sorting Leads To Confusion  

Intelligence and Information Warfare  

Pegasus Spyware Infection of Serbian Pro-Democracy Student Activist

Fire Ant Evolves: From Hypervisors to Trusted Infrastructure

Insights into Suspected DPRK Workers: Red Flags to Look Out For   

Mirage Kitten targeting aviation and FinTech sectors across the Middle East and Africa with a new malware set  

Leaked Russian Cyber-Operations Training Materials  

Threat Intelligence Report: University Leak Exposes Russia’s Military Cyber Training Pipeline  

Chinese-Speaking Operator Uses AI Agents to Target Government and Education Systems Across Asia

How the Russians Got Inside My Phone

DPRK APTs: Ted backdoor and curlRAT target South Korean media and automotive sectors    

Cybersecurity

Judge says Pentagon’s measures against Anthropic were ‘illegal and baseless’  

How AI could make it harder for governments to use hacking tools  

Own a gun? Go to church? Do yoga? AI can find out in seconds        

Path to Astra: critical capabilities and frontier safeguards  

PostGREShell: The database powering much of the internet had an open door for 12 years 

Fighting AI with AI: The US’s New Cyber Rules of Engagement 

ATM Flaws Reveal Key Weaknesses in the Software Supply Chain 

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)

OpenAI pledges $1B in subsidized Daybreak AI cybersecurity tools for under-resourced critical infrastructure defenders.

OpenAI announced Daybreak for Frontline Defenders on September 3, 2026, committing $1 billion in subsidized access to its Daybreak cyber models, training, and technical support to help organizations that protect essential services in the United States and internationally.

“A $1 billion global commitment to expand subsidized access to Daybreak cyber models and products, training, technical support, and partnerships in the United States and internationally.” reads the announcement

The full announcement is at openai.com. The $1 billion is product credits and subsidized access, not a cash grant, targeted to be used over the next six months.

“Every day, we depend on cyber defenders to protect the systems that keep communities running: the water coming from the tap, the electricity powering homes and businesses, the local government systems that deliver public services, and the financial institutions people trust with their money.” continues the announcement. “Many operate with limited staff and budgets, while defending complex and aging systems.”

Priority access goes to water and wastewater utilities, electric grid operators, state and local governments, community and regional banks, nonprofits, and open-source maintainers. These are the organizations defending complex, often outdated infrastructure against faster-moving threats without the budgets or specialized staff available to large enterprises.

Daybreak has been running since June 2026, and OpenAI expanded it in August with the release of GPT-5.6-Cyber. The program has two levels: Daybreak Blue supports common defensive tasks with standard models, while Daybreak Red gives approved organizations access to specialized cyber models for more sensitive and advanced work.

Around 2,000 organizations and workspaces already use Daybreak, including cybersecurity companies, defense groups, and law enforcement agencies. OpenAI’s new $1 billion commitment aims to give the same capabilities to defenders with limited resources who can’t afford commercial pricing.

“In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable. That shift puts every organization on notice. Defenders need to act now: test systems, find weaknesses, and strengthen defenses before attackers do.” states OpenAI. “Frontier AI can help defenders move faster. We have a defender’s window: a narrowing opportunity to use AI to close security gaps before attackers seize them. Our role is to help put powerful tools in defenders’ hands so they can protect the systems, and the people, they are responsible for.”

OpenAI made this announcement the same day it shipped a model it classifies internally as meeting the “Critical” threshold for cyber capability, meaning it can meaningfully help someone trying to create cyberweapons. The timing underscores the tension the company is navigating: it’s building tools capable of both attack and defense, and is publicly betting that putting the defensive version in more hands faster is the right move.

The initiative includes a pilot with MS-ISAC, a federally supported organization that shares threat intelligence and incident response support with thousands of public-sector organizations, including utilities, hospitals, schools and law enforcement agencies. The pilot will give an initial group of public-sector and water-system defenders access to Daybreak, along with training and hands-on support.

OpenAI has already tested this approach after recent attacks on U.S. water infrastructure. The company offered affected states and utilities up to $1 million in free API credits and Daybreak access. Teams used the tools to review code and configurations, verify security findings, develop patches and test fixes while keeping water systems running. The new initiative aims to expand this model to more defenders.

The Daybreak Defense Network, also announced September 3, brings more than 35 enterprise products and partner-operated services into the Daybreak ecosystem. HackerOne is among the early partners. The goal is to make Daybreak capabilities available through tools defenders already use rather than requiring them to switch workflows. SecurityWeek notes that OpenAI has disclosed few details about costs and eligibility for the broader program, which matters considerably for a rural water utility or county government trying to determine whether they qualify.

OpenAI also published its Defense Factory architecture, a continuous automated system that finds vulnerabilities, tests them and prepares fixes for human review. The company is sharing the architecture so other defenders can adapt it to their own environments.

The announcement came with support from more than 150 organizations across cybersecurity, technology, critical infrastructure, finance and AI. OpenAI presented the initiative as a joint effort rather than a project led by the company alone.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Astra)

Attackers are exploiting two new PaperCut flaws to steal credentials and gain privileged access in education-sector attacks across the U.S. and Europe.

Attackers are exploiting two recelty disclosed PaperCut flaws, CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078, in attacks targeting schools and other education organizations in the U.S. and Europe, as reported by TheHackerNews.

Arctic Wolf researchers observed threat actors chaining an authentication bypass with remote code execution to run commands, perform reconnaissance and create privileged accounts. The activity shows how quickly attackers can turn newly disclosed vulnerabilities into real-world attacks, putting sensitive credentials and systems at risk.

“Arctic Wolf observed exploitation of PaperCut servers affected by CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078 leading to command execution, reconnaissance, and attempts to create privileged accounts.” reads the advisory. “Observed post-exploitation activity included delivery of Windows registry hive collection tools, Metasploit/Meterpreter-related Java payloads, and commands used to identify hosts, users, processes, and sensitive configuration data.”

PaperCut, an enterprise print-management platform, has a history of exploitation, including attacks that delivered LockBit ransomware. PaperCut disclosed active exploitation of the latest flaws on August 27, 2026. CISA added both to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on August 31.

Attackers used PaperCut flaws to run basic system checks, create a privileged account named Administrator17, and collect system and user data.

They downloaded credential-harvesting tools with certutil and used Meterpreter Java payloads to establish remote sessions. The attackers also searched PaperCut configuration files for passwords, secrets, LDAP settings and tokens.

Researchers observed lsa_collect.exe extracting registry keys to recover the Windows BootKey, which could give attackers access to the SAM database and stored credentials.

Defenders should review PaperCut server.log files for known exploitation indicators and look for unusual five-character .class, .cmd, or .out files. Monitor pc-app.exe for command shells such as cmd.exe and powershell.exe, and investigate commands like whoami, tasklist, ver, and uname.

Also check for credential-harvesting tools, unexpected privileged accounts such as Administrator17, suspicious requests to /custom/pcp_*.txt, and large downloads using python-requests.

Finally, keep PaperCut management interfaces off the public internet and install the vendor’s security fixes.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, PaperCut)

Broadcom patched two VMware Workstation/Fusion VM-escape bugs. No workarounds exist. Update to version 26H1u1 immediately.

Broadcom published advisory VMSA-2026-0007, patching two vulnerabilities in VMware Workstation and Fusion that allow an attacker inside a virtual machine to execute code on the underlying host. One is rated Critical. Neither has a workaround.

The first vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-59346 (CVSS score of 9.3), is an integer-overflow vulnerability. The issue resides in the VMXNET3, a virtual network adapter (virtual NIC) designed by VMware for virtual machines.

An attacker with local admin privileges on a virtual machine using a VMXNET3 network adapter could exploit this flaw to run code on the host.

“VMware Workstation and Fusion contain an integer-overflow vulnerability.” reads the advisory. “A malicious actor with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine with VMXNET3 virtual network adapter may exploit this issue to execute code on the host.”

Researchers h4urek(@h4urek) with secsys lab & Y² (@cameudis) and Stan S, working with TrendAI Zero Day Initiative, independently reported this flaw to the vendor.

The second issue, tracked as CVE-2026-59347 (CVSS score of 8.1), is a stack-based buffer overflow in HGFS component. Host-Guest File System (HGFS) is a VMware feature that lets a virtual machine (guest) access files and directories located on the physical host.

An attacker with local administrator privileges on a virtual machine could exploit this flaw to execute code with the privileges of the VMX process running on the host.

“VMware Workstation and Fusion contain a stack-based buffer-overflow vulnerability in HGFS.” continues the advisory. “A malicious actor with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine may exploit this issue to execute code as the virtual machine’s VMX process running on the host.”

Researchers Yeonghyeon Choi and Tianchu Chen of Tencent Xuanwu Lab reported the vulnerability to Broadcom.

The vulnerabilities affect VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion versions 25H2 and 26H1. Workstation runs on Windows and Linux, while Fusion runs on macOS. VMware fixed both flaws in version 26H1u1.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Broadcom )

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Google Chromium V8 flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a Google Chromium V8 flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-85046 (CVSS score of 8,8), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.

This week, Google released a Chrome security update fixing 12 vulnerabilities, including CVE-2026-85046, an actively exploited V8 type confusion flaw.

The bug affects Chrome’s JavaScript and WebAssembly engine and could let a remote attacker execute arbitrary code inside the browser sandbox by using a specially crafted HTML page.

“CVE-2026-85046: Type confusion in V8.” reads the advisory. “Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2026-85046 exists in the wild.”

As usual, Google did not disclose technical details about the attacks exploiting this vulnerability or attribute them to any specific threat actor.

Security researcher Salvatore Gulizia, known as Serotav, reported the flaw on August 4, 2026, and received a $1,000 bug bounty.

“a v8 bug in the compilers that leads to an array containing PACKED_ELEMENTS to receive the map PACKED_SMI_ELEMENTS, this can be turned into arb r/w on the js heap.” wrote Serotav. “The bug was present in both maglev and turbofan.”

CVE-2026-85046 is the sixth actively exploited Chrome zero-day of 2026. Since the start of the year, Google has addressed the following zero-day flaws exploited in attacks in the wild:

• February 2026 – CVE-2026-2441 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Use after free in CSS.
• March 2026 – CVE-2026-3909 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Out-of-bounds write in the Skia 2D graphics library and CVE-2026-3910 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Flaw in the implementation of the V8 JavaScript/WebAssembly engine.
• April 2026 – CVE-2026-5281 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Use-after-free bug in Dawn, the WebGPU component used for graphics processing.
• June 2026 – CVE-2026-11645 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Out-of-bounds memory access in the V8 JavaScript engine

Google has updated Chrome Stable to version 152.0.7977.82/.83 for Windows and Mac and 152.0.7977.82 for Linux, with the rollout happening over the coming days and weeks.

According to Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, FCEB agencies have to address the identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect their networks against attacks exploiting the flaws in the catalog.

Experts also recommend that private organizations review the Catalog and address the vulnerabilities in their infrastructure.

CISA orders federal agencies to fix the flaw by September 18, 2026.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)

Manchester Airports Group (MAG) data allegedly leaked by FulcrumSec exposes emails and phone numbers of 8.8 million people.

Manchester Airports Group, which operates Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports, has confirmed a data breach involving customer information held in a third-party database. The company says airport operations, passenger safety and aviation security were not affected, but the incident has exposed data that can make fraud far more convincing.

The data related to parking, lounge and Fast Track bookings, as well as airport Wi-Fi sign-ups. MAG said attackers took email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registration details and postcodes, while payment-card data was not accessed.

The group disclosed the incident on 27 August and said it had contained the risk, engaged specialist advisers and notified relevant authorities.

The extortion group FulcrumSec claimed responsibility for the intrusion and leaked the data after MAG had refused its ransom demand.

“Today we are releasing the Manchester Airports Group dataset: every customer, event, configuration that serves Manchester Airport, London Stansted and East Midlands Airport. Half a terabyte, and every byte of it is pure PII. However, we have decided to withhold the most dangerous part of the breach : the nearly 200,000 passengers whose entire upcoming travel schedules were exposed by MAG’s negligence, which, when linked with their full PII and vehicle information, creates an ideal opportunity for burglars, stalkers, and worse.” FulcrumSec wrote on its data leak site. “Unfortunately for them, MAG made zero effort to protect all their data they’d been collecting. The way we gained access was so simple it is tragi-comical: Iterable admin keys in the frontend JavaScript of each of its three airports’ websites: manchesterairport.co.uk, stanstedairport.com, and eastmidlandsairport.com. Each site had its own key hardcoded into it that provided access to millions of passengers who had passed through that airport. That means for this breach to have occurred at the scale it did, MAG had to make a catastrophic security mistake not once, not twice, but THREE times.”

FulcrumSec claims it accessed MAG’s systems using administrator keys exposed in the JavaScript of its three airport websites. MAG hasn’t confirmed this, and SecurityWeek hasn’t independently verified it, so the claim remains unproven. Still, the case highlights a basic security rule: keep secrets off client-side code, rotate them regularly, limit access and scan code, repositories, logs and configurations for accidental exposure.

The group then published roughly 550 GB of uncompressed data it says came from the airport operator’s systems.

“These exposed keys gave us access to the following:

• 8,672,291 customer profiles with email, name, mobile, home town, postal region, and the residential IP address the account last connected from
• 1,169,302,811 events, of which 1,160,120,195 are email-channel events: 611,629,550 sends, 463,286,223 opens, 36,878,965 clicks, plus every subscribe, unsubscribe, bounce and complaint
• 2,482,763 purchases — every booking every customer of its parking, lounge, and fast-track products has ever made. An analysed subset of 1,154,675 transactions, from 877,754 identified purchasers, totals £83,413,317.89
• 461,433 SMS messages rendered with a passenger’s booking date, car park and vehicle registration spelled out in plain text
• 108,077 unique UK vehicle registration plates tied to the owner’s email, mobile, airport, car park and dated booking
• The complete platform configuration: every campaign, every journey, every list, every segment and every template, all as live JSON” FulcrumSec added.

The announcement claims that a leaked MAG database exposes 190,849 future bookings, including 142,755 linked to vehicle registrations, potentially revealing when homes will be empty.

It also claims the data includes thousands of government, judicial, military, police, NHS and defence-industry employees, creating significant security risks. The attackers say they removed the most sensitive travel details before publishing, while accusing MAG of downplaying the breach.

Databreach notification service Have I Been Pwned processed the available dataset and added the incident to its breach database. The service reports that approximately 8.8 million email addresses and phone numbers were compromised, alongside names, IP addresses, browser user-agent details, geographic information, purchases and vehicle registration plates.

That is not just a list of email addresses. It is a working fraud kit: a criminal can link a person to an airport, a booking type, a car, a location and a contact number. They don’t need to guess much after that.

What affected people should do

Anyone who has used MAG’s parking, lounge, Fast Track or airport Wi-Fi services should assume that phishing attempts may become more tailored. They should be cautious with messages claiming to concern a booking, refund, parking penalty, account problem or payment request.

Users should change passwords if they reused one associated with these services elsewhere, especially on email accounts. They should also enable multi-factor authentication, review account-recovery methods and avoid clicking links in unexpected messages.

A legitimate organisation will not ask for a password, a banking PIN or a one-time authentication code by email, SMS or phone. If a message refers to a booking, open the relevant airport or provider site manually rather than following the link it contains.

The Have I Been Pwned breach entry allows users to check whether their email address appears in the published dataset.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Manchester Airports Group)

PostGREShell (CVE-2026-6471) is a 12-year-old PostgreSQL flaw that lets low-privileged attackers execute code and take over servers.

Cyera researchers found a severe PostgreSQL vulnerability, dubbed PostGREShell and tracked as CVE-2026-6471 (CVSS score of 7.2). Present in releases dating back to 2014, the flaw can be exploited by attackers with low-level replication access to execute code, escalate privileges and gain permanent superuser access.

“Missing authorization in PostgreSQL logical decoding allows a non-superuser holding REPLICATION privilege to dlopen any file visible to the operating system account running the server, via the choice of logical decoding plugin.” reads the advisory. “This in turn runs arbitrary code as that account. Versions before PostgreSQL 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24 are affected.”

Attackers could also install a persistent backdoor in the database, potentially leading to a full takeover of the database and underlying server. PostgreSQL is widely used by enterprises worldwide.

PostgreSQL fixed CVE-2026-6471 in versions 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24.

The flaw is caused by missing authorization in PostgreSQL’s logical decoding feature. An attacker with “Replication” privileges could abuse a logical decoding plugin to load any file that the operating system account running PostgreSQL can access.

PostgreSQL uses a dedicated replication system to keep database replicas in sync for backup and recovery. To do this, backup tools, servers, data pipelines and monitoring systems are typically given an account with Replication privileges.

“The flaw lets a low-privilege “backup” account load and execute arbitrary code on the database server, achieving remote code execution across Windows, Linux, and macOS. That foothold escalates to full PostgreSQL superuser with persistent backdoor access, turning a routine replication account into total database and server compromise.” reads the report published by Cyera. “The vulnerability has existed in every PostgreSQL version since 2014 (9.4+) and was never patched until now.”

During logical replication, PostgreSQL records database changes as events that external tools can read. These tools create a logical replication slot and specify an output plugin, which PostgreSQL loads to format and deliver the changes.

When PostgreSQL loads a plugin, it runs the plugin’s initialization code with the same privileges as the database server. To prevent abuse, non-superusers are normally allowed to load plugins only from a directory controlled by an administrator.

PostgreSQL does not properly check the plugin name before passing it to the loader. This means an attacker could provide a full path to a file on the system. PostgreSQL then passes that path to dlopen(), the C/C++ function used to load shared libraries.

“When PostgreSQL loads the output plugin, the name from the user’s CREATE_REPLICATION_SLOTcommand is passed directly to the loader. No validation, no sanitization, no restriction check. The SQL LOADcommand, by contrast, passes a !superuser()flag that triggers the path validation. The replication path passes nothing. And the replication protocol’s parser accepts almost any character inside a double-quoted plugin name: slashes, backslashes, dots, ../ traversal, even Windows UNC paths.” Cyera states. “So an attacker can hand the loader a full filesystem path, and it reaches dlopen() (Linux/macOS) or LoadLibrary()(Windows) exactly as typed. The whole bug is code execution via dlopen().”

Once obtained, permanent superuser privileges, the attackers can access every table in every database, execute commands on the operating system, read private keys, and write files anywhere the PostgreSQL process can access.

PostGREShell can give attackers persistent backdoor access, including passwordless connections and restored superuser privileges. The flaw affects PostgreSQL 9.4–18.

Organizations should update their instances as soon as possible, review all Replication accounts, and remove the Replication attribute from accounts that do not need it.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, CVE-2026-6471)

Hunt.io uncovered a Chinese-speaking campaign using AI agents to automate cyberattacks against Asian government, education and industrial targets.

Threat intelligence firm Hunt.io just documented a second, separate China-linked campaign wiring commercial AI models directly into live cyberespionage operations, this time hitting Taiwan’s Kuomintang Party archives, Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, government and education systems in mainland China, and industrial hosts in Vietnam.

The full report traces the operation through five exposed open directories the operators accidentally left publicly accessible, which is how researchers reconstructed the entire orchestration system from the inside.

“Five open directories, one campaign. The exposed directories map to an AI orchestration host, a Java/CAS exploitation workspace, a fake MySQL deserialization service, a Shellshock and credential-testing node, and a payload-distribution store.” reads the report. “SecFlow split reconnaissance, exploitation, collection, and reporting among specialist workers. The runtime could switch between Claude, Qwen, and DeepSeek profiles without changing the task interface.”

The framework behind the campaign, called SecFlow by the operators, could use different AI models, including Claude, Qwen, and DeepSeek. The operators could switch between them without changing how the system worked. Instead of using the models’ official APIs, SecFlow routed requests through private proxy servers linked to the niestools.com domain.

The AI models did not break into systems on their own. They helped automate and organize traditional hacking tasks, such as scanning for vulnerabilities, testing stolen credentials, trying exploits, deploying webshells, collecting data and evidence, and generating reports. The attackers built the infrastructure that connected these AI capabilities to real-world intrusions.

The most damaging confirmed breach hit a Fengtai District government Office Automation environment in China, and it ran the full playbook from web shell to data theft.

“The most extensive compromise hit a Fengtai District government environment, where the operator achieved command execution, collected LSASS and registry hives, accessed government and health records, and deployed multiple Windows implants. Separate activity exposed a Chinese education AI platform and obtained root database access to a university campus-card system.” Hunt.io states. “SecFlow coordinated reconnaissance, exploitation, and reporting across Claude, Qwen, and DeepSeek workers. “

Operators achieved Windows command execution through internet-facing web applications, then used ASPX web shells not just to run commands but as a persistent operational backbone: querying internal databases, pulling an LSASS memory dump apart in 37 separate chunks to avoid detection, and extracting SAM and SYSTEM registry hives containing password hash material.

“The operator divided the LSASS dump into 37 blocks, requested each block through an authenticated SOCKS route, verified the expected byte count, and reconstructed the complete file.” continues the report. “The operator also collected the SAM and SYSTEM registry hives. Another server-side page, extract.aspx, scanned sections of the memory dump for Windows password-hash material.”

From there they pulled 822 OA user account records, created a new privileged account of their own for backup access, and walked away with 949 attachments totaling 1.28GB, including a chronic-disease report containing real patient health information.

In a separate case, the operators also exposed the management backend of a Chinese education AI platform. The irony is hard to miss: an AI company was compromised partly because its own AI infrastructure was not properly secured.

Hunt.io found a backend that anyone could access without authentication. It exposed 23 AI agent configurations, 14 API secret fields containing credentials, and 104 complete chatbot conversations. Some of those logs included real student data, such as names, student ID numbers, majors and academic advisers, taken from career-guidance and study-partner chats.

The exposed credentials were not just old or unused secrets. They worked against the platform’s live production API, meaning attackers could use the stolen keys to access real systems.

One particularly clever access method used a fake MySQL server as bait rather than a target. A malicious service impersonating a MySQL database would accept connections from vulnerable Java applications, then return specially crafted data designed to trigger unsafe object deserialization on the client side the moment it connected, turning what should have been an outbound database query into inbound code execution. That’s initial access flipped on its head, exploiting the assumption that connecting out to a database is inherently safer than accepting connections in.

The webshell tooling itself, a custom framework the operators called GLUTTON, hid its payloads inside PNG image files using steganography, literally embedding executable code in the red, green, and blue color channel data of ordinary-looking images. A small decoder script on the server would read the image pixel by pixel, XOR-decrypt the hidden bytes using a fixed key, and load the resulting code directly into memory without ever writing an obviously malicious file to disk. Any security control that only checks file extensions or content types for image uploads would sail right past this without noticing anything wrong.

This isn’t an isolated incident for the underlying pattern either. It’s the second campaign in two months where researchers caught commercial AI coding tools embedded as operational components of live nation-state intrusions, following a similar Hunt.io discovery in June involving the same Claude Code and DeepSeek combination against separate government and financial targets in Afghanistan and Thailand. Anthropic itself disclosed a related pattern back in November 2025, describing attackers who convinced Claude it was doing legitimate defensive penetration testing by splitting malicious requests into small, individually harmless-looking pieces.

The operators also left a clear trace across their own infrastructure. The username “Nie” appeared several times in hardcoded file paths inside the GLUTTON tools and was reused in proxy credentials, linking all five compromised workspaces to the same campaign.

For defenders, this is especially important if they use Java frameworks vulnerable to deserialization attacks, older Apache or Grafana systems, or public-facing office automation software. The campaign shows that attackers can treat commercial AI models as interchangeable tools. The key question is no longer which AI model carried out an attack, but how quickly defenders can recognize the attack pattern, regardless of which model was used.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, AI Agents)

Google patched 12 Chrome flaws, including an actively exploited V8 zero-day that could enable remote code execution through a crafted webpage.

Google released a Chrome security update fixing 12 vulnerabilities, including CVE-2026-85046 (CVSS score of 8.8), an actively exploited V8 type confusion flaw.

The bug affects Chrome’s JavaScript and WebAssembly engine and could let a remote attacker execute arbitrary code inside the browser sandbox by using a specially crafted HTML page.

“CVE-2026-85046: Type confusion in V8.” reads the advisory. “Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2026-85046 exists in the wild.”

As usual, Google did not disclose technical details about the attacks exploiting this vulnerability or attribute them to any specific threat actor.

Security researcher Salvatore Gulizia, known as Serotav, reported the flaw on August 4, 2026, and received a $1,000 bug bounty.

“a v8 bug in the compilers that leads to an array containing PACKED_ELEMENTS to receive the map PACKED_SMI_ELEMENTS, this can be turned into arb r/w on the js heap.” wrote Serotav. “The bug was present in both maglev and turbofan.”

CVE-2026-85046 is the sixth actively exploited Chrome zero-day of 2026. Since the start of the year, Google has addressed the following zero-day flaws exploited in attacks in the wild:

• February 2026 – CVE-2026-2441 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Use after free in CSS.
• March 2026 – CVE-2026-3909 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Out-of-bounds write in the Skia 2D graphics library and CVE-2026-3910 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Flaw in the implementation of the V8 JavaScript/WebAssembly engine.
• April 2026 – CVE-2026-5281 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Use-after-free bug in Dawn, the WebGPU component used for graphics processing.
• June 2026 – CVE-2026-11645 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Out-of-bounds memory access in the V8 JavaScript engine

Google has updated Chrome Stable to version 152.0.7977.82/.83 for Windows and Mac and 152.0.7977.82 for Linux, with the rollout happening over the coming days and weeks.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Chrome)

FBI probes suspected breach at IDScan.net after dark web service Nexus offered 153M+ US and Canadian driver’s license scans.

A dark web identity theft service called Nexus appeared on September 1, 2026, offering searchable access to more than 153 million scanned driver’s licenses belonging to people in the United States and Canada.

The FBI’s New Orleans field office opened a formal investigation the same day. Brian Krebs at KrebsOnSecurity, who broke the story, traced the source to idscan.net, a New Orleans-based identity verification company whose clients include Hertz, Target, FedEx, Motorola Solutions, Caesars Entertainment, and the financial services firm Jack Henry.

“On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit.” wrote Krebs. “The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.”

The record total was also increasing by roughly 400,000 per day at the time of publication, which the operators attributed to ongoing active exfiltration from a live breach they claim has been running for over a year.

Krebs found his own driver’s license in the database after a source alerted him to the service. The operators had posted his Virginia license as a free sample on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit. Each record contains six images of the license, showing the front and back in visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light, with a timestamp. Krebs’ timestamp matched a June 2025 flight and car rental.

He then checked nine friends and relatives, and everyone who found their license confirmed traveling or renting a car around the same date. His license and his mother’s, who rented a Hertz car with him that day, had timestamps just seconds apart.

Security researcher Zach Edwards, whose license also appeared in Nexus, narrowed the source further. His timestamp matched a trip to Las Vegas for DEF CON in August. He hadn’t rented a car, but he had shown his license at a marijuana dispensary: Planet13, a multi-state chain. In 2022, idscan.net published a press release announcing an exclusive identity verification partnership with Planet13’s dispensaries nationally. The company now serves more than 1,000 marijuana dispensaries in 19 states, and its own documentation confirms that its technology scans IDs with both infrared and ultraviolet light, precisely the format of the images appearing in Nexus.

Idscan.net performs more than 21 million verifications per month at more than 20,000 locations globally. Its client list spans car rentals, retailers, hotels, financial services, and dispensaries, which explains both the volume and the geographic spread of the records. The dataset also includes marijuana dispensary cards and records marked with the notation “CAC,” which may refer to Common Access Cards, the government-issued credentials used to enter federal buildings and secure facilities. If confirmed, that would significantly expand the security implications beyond consumer identity theft.

The database reportedly contained the driver’s licenses of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the FBI’s assistant director, but not FBI Director Kash Patel’s.

Idscan.net said Krebs’ findings would help its internal investigation but gave no further details. The company later said it was working with law enforcement and forensic experts. Soon after the story became public, the Nexus service went offline.

Identity verification systems that require driver’s licenses are spreading sensitive data across an expanding network of third-party vendors, and oversight mechanisms haven’t kept pace. Every bar, hotel, car rental counter, dispensary, and age-verification system that scans an ID is creating a copy of that image in a system whose security posture the cardholder has no way to assess.

The idscan.net incident, if confirmed at the reported scale, would be among the largest exposures of government-issued identity document images ever recorded.

Krebs reports that Nexus shut down after his article, while the FBI opened an investigation after learning that stolen IDs may include licenses belonging to FBI agents.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Nexus)

Serbian activists were targeted with zero-click Pegasus and NoviSpy spyware, exposing a major surveillance campaign ahead of elections.

A member of Serbia’s student protest movement had their iPhone infected with NSO Group‘s Pegasus spyware without ever clicking a link or opening a file. The Citizen Lab confirmed the infection in collaboration with the SHARE Foundation, tracing it to an iMessage zero-click exploit and identifying high-confidence indicators of compromise between December 2025 and January 2026, with the possibility of additional infections not ruled out.

“In collaboration with the SHARE Foundation, the Citizen Lab analyzed forensic artefacts from the iPhone of a member of Serbia’s student protest movement after they received an Apple Threat Notification warning of targeting with mercenary spyware.” reads the report published by Citizen Lab. “Our analysis confirmed that an iMessage zero-click exploit was used to infect the device with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. “

The attack required no action from the victim, which makes zero-click attacks especially dangerous. Citizen Lab said the Pegasus infection could stay hidden while giving the attacker full access to the phone, including messages, photos, notes, microphone, and camera. Apple later fixed this specific exploit through security updates in iOS 18.4.1.

“We believe that the zero-click exploit used in this attack targeted Apple iMessage, and has subsequently been patched by Apple as of iOS 18.4.1.” continues the report. “A zero-click infection with Pegasus spyware would not have been visible to the target, and would give the Pegasus attacker total access to the device. Pegasus allows an attacker to do anything that a user can do, ranging from accessing private data like notes, pictures and even encrypted messages. Pegasus also has the ability to covertly enable the phone’s microphone and camera.”

This one confirmed infection sits inside something considerably bigger. The SHARE Foundation has documented at least 14 individuals targeted with advanced spyware since early 2026, spanning student movement members, civil society activists, an opposition member of parliament, and a local councilor, which the organization is calling the largest documented surveillance wave in Serbia’s history. Twelve people approached SHARE’s digital forensics team in August after receiving Apple’s own threat notifications, warnings the company sends when it detects likely state-sponsored spyware targeting; eleven of those devices remain presumed infected pending further forensic confirmation.

The timing lines up uncomfortably well with Serbia’s political calendar. This surveillance wave coincides with local elections held on March 29, 2026, and stretches toward planned early parliamentary elections in October, following months of student-led anti-government and anti-corruption protests.

“These notifications and forensic confirmation highlight the aggressive mercenary spyware targeting of the peaceful pro-democracy movement with mercenary spyware ahead of key 2026 election cycles.” continues the report.

Targeting activists and opposition figures specifically in the run-up to elections isn’t subtle, and it fits a pattern Serbia has shown before.

Serbia has a history of using commercial spyware. Citizen Lab previously documented Pegasus targeting civil society and the use of Cellebrite tools to install the locally developed NoviSpy on activists’ phones. In this case, SHARE Foundation and Amnesty Tech found a new version of NoviSpy on a student activist’s Android phone after Serbian authorities seized it during police questioning.

Amnesty International’s Security Lab head, Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, connected the dots plainly between state custody and spyware installation.

“The forensic findings by SHARE prove that Serbian students continue to be targeted with invasive Android spyware tools, installed while detained by Serbian authorities” he said.

If you’ve received an Apple Threat Notification, whether in Serbia or anywhere else, the Citizen Lab’s guidance is unambiguous: treat it as a presumed infection and get expert help immediately rather than waiting to see if anything seems wrong. Individuals in Serbia should contact the SHARE Foundation directly, and anyone elsewhere can reach Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline, which supports journalists, human rights defenders, and other high-risk civil society targets worldwide. Anyone who suspects they might be a target based on their work or public role should also turn on Lockdown Mode, Apple’s built-in feature that significantly narrows what a zero-click exploit can actually reach, and keep every device updated, since the patch that closed this specific hole has already existed for well over a year for anyone who installed it.

“We believe that the zero-click used in this attack has been rendered ineffective by a patch from Apple in recent iOS versions. We urge everyone, especially those facing increased risks because of who they are or the work they do, to keep all devices updated.” concludes the report. “Click HERE for instructions on how to keep your iPhone up to date.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Pegasus)

Cisco patched a critical Nexus 9000 vulnerability, CVE-2026-20212, allowing unauthenticated remote root code execution.

Cisco has released patches for a critical flaw, tracked as tracked as CVE-2026-20212 (CVSS score of 9.8) in 10 Silicon One-based Nexus 9000 switches. The vulnerability could let an unauthenticated remote attacker execute code with root privileges.

Cisco’s Technical Assistance Center (TAC) discovered the flaw while investigating a customer support case.

The flaw exists because TCP ports 43210 and 43211 are exposed through the default Layer 3 VRF. An attacker could connect remotely and send specially crafted data that gets executed with root privileges. The attack could also crash the S1HAL process, potentially forcing the affected device to reload.

“A vulnerability in the Silicon One integration for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute code with root privileges.” reads the advisory. “This vulnerability exists because TCP ports 43210 and 43211 are accessible in the default Layer 3 (L3) virtual routing and forwarding (VRF). A successful exploit could allow the attacker to connect to an affected device and send crafted input that could be executed as code with root privileges. The exploitation of this vulnerability could also cause the S1HAL process to crash, which could cause the device to reload.”

The vulnerability affects Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches equipped with a Silicon One ASIC.

At the time of disclosure, the following models were known to include the affected Silicon One hardware:

• N9324C-SE1U
• N9348Y2C6D-SE1U
• N9364E-SG2-O
• N9364E-SG2-Q
• N9396T12C-SE1
• N9348Y12C-SE1
• N9396Y12C-SE1
• N9336C-SE1
• N9K-C9804
• N9K-C9808

Administrators can check the Product ID (PID) of a switch by running the show module command. For example, the output below shows N9336C-SE1, which is one of the affected models.

Other Nexus 9000 models are not affected. The same applies to Nexus 9000 switches running in ACI mode, as well as the Nexus 3000 and Nexus 7000 series.

Cisco provides a workaround to reduce the risk of remote exploitation. Administrators can use infrastructure access control lists (iACLs) to allow only the management and control traffic that the affected switch actually needs. Another option is to block TCP traffic to locally configured IP addresses on ports 43210 and 43211.

Cisco has also released a Live Protect shield for CVE-2026-20212. The shield provides temporary protection while organizations prepare to install the proper software update.

However, Cisco recommends upgrading to a fixed NX-OS release as the permanent solution. Before deploying any workaround or mitigation, administrators should test it in their own environment, as it could affect network functionality or performance.

Cisco says its Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of any public disclosure or active exploitation of this vulnerability.

“The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerability that is described in this advisory.” concludes the advisory.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Cisco)

412,000 The Town 2025 festival buyer records are being sold for $10,000, with Brazil’s data openly marketed for bank fraud, loans and SIM registration.

A seller on a Russian-language data-trading forum listed what they’re calling a Ticketmaster database on September 2, claiming over 412,000 Latin American purchase records with a heavy concentration of Brazilian data. Ransomnews’s analysis confirms the sample is genuine ticket-buyer data from The Town 2025, the São Paulo music festival, though who actually lost the data and how remains unconfirmed.

“The listing is headed “SELLING NEW TICKETMASTER DATABASE” and describes a global ticketing platform, Latin America region, with an internal ticketing database as the source and a breach date of 28 August 2026. It advertises 412,192 rows across 34 columns.” reported Ransomnews. “The country breakdown is dominated by Brazil at 251,557 records, or 61%, with Argentina at 219, Chile 155, Colombia 144, Peru 123 and Paraguay 72, plus nine more countries not itemised.”

The seller is asking $10,000 for the full database, or $80 for every 1,000 records, with escrow available. The 251,557 Brazilian records make up about 61% of the database, meaning the seller is effectively asking around four cents per person.

The data includes names, email addresses, CPF numbers, phone numbers, neighborhoods, ticket types, and payment details. Together, these details provide a detailed profile that could be used for identity theft and fraud.

“The seller’s own notes are the part that should concern Brazilian readers most. Alongside the sales copy, the listing states that the CPF numbers work “for Brazilian bank fraud, loan apps and SIM registration”.” continues the report.”That is not our characterisation of the risk. It is the seller describing the intended use of the file.”

Ransomnews ran the kind of checks that usually expose fake listings within minutes, and this one kept passing. Purchase IDs across the sample rise in strict chronological order, exactly what an auto-incrementing database key produces and something close to statistically impossible to fake by chance. Every CPF number in the sample passes Brazil’s official check-digit validation, phone area codes correctly match the state listed on each row rather than defaulting to a single city, and neighborhood names map precisely onto their stated cities, the kind of granular accuracy a random data generator simply doesn’t produce.

The ticket prices provide another strong sign that the database is genuine. Full-price tickets cost exactly 975 reais, while discounted tickets cost 487.50 reais, matching Brazil’s legal student discount. The database also lists Pix and Elo as payment methods, both widely used in Brazil.

Even the incomplete records look realistic. Complimentary tickets issued by the festival’s back office contain no name or CPF, only the ticket type and date. These kinds of inconsistencies are common in real databases but would be unusual in fabricated data.

However, there is an important detail that challenges the claim of a direct Ticketmaster breach. Every record in the sample has exactly the same processing timestamp: October 1, 2025 at 23:05:41, about two weeks after the festival ended.

A live database dump would normally contain different timestamps. The identical timestamp instead suggests that the data may have been exported in a single batch after the event and then shared with a promoter, sponsor, payment provider, or another partner. Ransomnews therefore warns that blaming Ticketmaster directly would go beyond what the available evidence currently shows.

That distinction matters more than it might seem, because it points at an industry-wide blind spot rather than one company’s failure. Brazilian ticketing requires CPF collection to enforce discount eligibility rules, which means live-events companies routinely end up holding a national identity number, a verified phone, and a home neighborhood for hundreds of thousands of people, data with the sensitivity of a bank record sitting inside an industry with nothing like a bank’s security requirements. The moment that data gets exported into a spreadsheet to reconcile ticket sales with a partner, which happens constantly and rarely makes headlines, it becomes dramatically easier to lose.

“If you bought tickets to The Town 2025, treat your CPF as exposed.” concludes the report. “A CPF cannot be reissued the way a password can, and the seller is explicitly marketing these numbers for credit and telecoms fraud.”

If you bought tickets to The Town 2025, the practical response here isn’t panic, it’s specific vigilance. A CPF can’t be reissued the way a password gets reset, so treat it as permanently exposed and check your credit record through Brazil’s Central Bank registry or services like Serasa for accounts you didn’t open. Watch closely for SIM swap attempts given the seller’s explicit mention of telecom fraud, and be skeptical of any inbound call or message referencing your actual festival purchase, since whoever holds this file knows exactly which days you attended and how you paid, more than enough detail to make a scam call sound completely legitimate.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, The Town 2025)

Chaotic Eclipse released FalconFlank, a PoC exploit for a Crowdstrike Falcon ZeroDay Elevation of Privileges Vulnerability

Security researcher Chaotic Eclipse, also known as INFINITE NIGHTMARE, MSNightmare and Nightmare-Eclipse, released a new zero-day exploit targeting Crowdstrike Falcon cybersecurity platform. The researcher named the exploit FalconFlank, it triggers a privilege escalation flaw.

According to the researcher, FalconFlank abuses Falcon’s “Microsoft Office file malicious macro removal” feature. The function is part of Falcon’s remediation capabilities and operates with high privileges. The researcher claims that this behavior can be abused to escalate privileges from a low-privileged local user to a more powerful context.

“FalconFlank is a 0day privilege escalation that abuses the office malicious macros remediation in Crowdstrike Falcon Sensor, obviously by the time I drop this Crowdstrike would already have detections for it so if you want to test you either have to add it to the exclusions or obfuscate the PoC and change the dll load technique.” reads the announcement. “As of now it works in a fully updated windows 11 25H2 / Windows Server 2025 with Crowdstrike Falcon – Phase 3 Optimal Protection + needs “Microsoft Office file malicious macro removal””

The proof of concept works on fully updated Windows 11 25H2 and Windows Server 2025 systems running CrowdStrike Falcon with Phase 3 – Optimal Protection and the malicious macro removal feature enabled.

An interesting part of the announcement is the researcher’s warning that CrowdStrike may already have detections for the published PoC. In other words, the underlying vulnerability could still exist even if Falcon detects and blocks the specific exploit technique used in the PoC.

The case is particularly interesting because it highlights a broader security issue: EDR products need elevated privileges to protect a system, but those same privileges can become an attack surface. An attacker who gains limited local access may try to abuse the security software itself to obtain higher privileges.

Recently, Chaotic Eclipse released exploits targeting other anti-malware solutions.

Chaotic Eclipse released a zero-day exploit targeting Kaspersky Endpoint Security he named HardBreacher, which triggers a privilege escalation flaw. The researcher pointed out that the PoC is unstable and may require repeated attempts, but when successful, it creates a DLL in System32 with full user permissions. The researcher also claims taking control of Kaspersky’s UI process can disrupt the antivirus and interfere with file-access controls, potentially leaving the system in an unstable state.

Nightmare Eclipse says the Kaspersky Endpoint Security zero-day allows privilege escalation on a fully patched Windows 11 25H2 system running Kaspersky Endpoint v14.0.0.504.

The researcher also released a zero-day exploit targeting GenDigital Avast Antivirus, named PrettyPrague. The exploit triggers a privilege escalation flaw.

The researcher claims to have found another zero-day in an antimalware product, this time targeting Avast Antivirus. The PoC exploits a flaw in Avast Sandbox to dump the Windows SAM database and gain a SYSTEM-level shell. It reportedly works even on fully patched Avast Antivirus and Windows 11 25H2. The researcher also suspects the flaw may affect other Gen Digital products, including AVG and Norton.

Chaotic Eclipse, also known as Nightmare Eclipse, is a researcher known for publicly releasing PoC exploits for zero-day vulnerabilities, often after criticizing vendors’ handling of vulnerability reports. His releases have mainly targeted Microsoft products, including Windows and Microsoft Defender, with some later exploited in the wild. Among the most notable are the Undefend and RedSun Defender zero-days.

His work has fueled debate over responsible disclosure and the risks of publishing working exploits.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Crowdstrike Falcon)