Security News

When the "Autonomous Attacker" Is Your Own AI Model, (Thu, Jul 23rd)

Two disclosures, five days apart, described the same intrusion from opposite ends —

Claude Cowork Flaw Could Let AI Agent Escape Its VM and Access Mac Files

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a sandbox escape vulnerability in Anthropic's Claude Cowork that makes it possible to break out of the confines of a Linux virtual machine (VM) within which the agent runs to read or write files anywhere on the Mac. Accomplish AI, which shared details of the vulnerability with The Hacker News ahead of publication, said about 500,000 macOS users running

Chaos Ransomware Uses msaRAT to Route C2 Traffic Through Headless Chrome and Edge

The Chaos ransomware group ran its command-and-control through the victim's own browser. Cisco Talos on Thursday detailed msaRAT, the Rust implant behind it, found on a compromised Windows machine ahead of the encryptor. The implant never opens an outbound connection of its own. Its process talks to 127.0.0.1 and nothing else. It starts Chrome or Edge in headless mode and drives the browser

China-Nexus JadeProx Uses New TriBack Loader in Government and Healthcare Attacks

An exposed Alibaba Cloud server has revealed a China-nexus operation that Group-IB tracks as JadeProx. The cluster has targeted government, healthcare, and education organizations across Asia and Latin America with a previously undocumented Windows loader called TriBack Loader. Group-IB found the server in mid-April 2026 in Alibaba Cloud's Singapore region; it was offline by the time the report

How Synthetic Identity Fraud is Coming for Machine Identities

Most people understand identity theft as an attacker stealing a real person's sensitive information and impersonating them. Synthetic identity fraud is much harder to catch. Instead of stealing a real identity, the attacker manufactures a new one, frankensteining together several real data points with fabricated ones to create a person who doesn't exist. Since no real victim monitors misuse, a

Attackers Weaponize GitHub Actions Runners to Target cPanel and WHM Servers

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a large-scale campaign that has turned compromised GitHub repositories into distributed attack infrastructure designed to target cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) instances. The activity involves malicious Packagist development versions spanning 10 packages associated with a legitimate PHP and DevOps developer, dinushchathurya, between July 12 and 13,

Agentic AI Challenges Progress in Confidential Computing

Core issues that slowed down adoption of secure data vaults are being resolved by technology, but artificial intelligence poses new ones. Experts have some answers.

Google Adds Selfie Video Recovery for Users Locked Out of Their Accounts

Google on Thursday announced a new way for users to sign-in to their accounts by letting them take a selfie video. The selfie for sign-in, per the tech giant, is another option on top of existing recovery methods to log in to an account, including an email address or a phone number. The idea is to use a video selfie as a way to regain access if a user ever gets locked out or doesn't have access

Nine-Year-Old RefluXFS Linux Flaw Gives Local Users Root on Default RHEL Installs

RefluXFS, a new Linux kernel flaw disclosed on July 22 and tracked as CVE-2026-64600, lets an unprivileged local user overwrite root-owned files on an XFS filesystem and gain persistent root access. Qualys said default installations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives, Fedora Server, and Amazon Linux can meet the conditions for exploitation. The company demonstrated the race

Brazilian Banking Trojan Actively Spreading in Portugal

Portuguese businesses operate in the same native language as Brazilian hackers, making those businesses easy targets.

Check Point Patches Exploited SmartConsole Flaw Allowing Full Admin Access

Check Point has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities impacting Security Management and Multi-Domain Management (MDSM) products, including a critical flaw that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The security flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-16232 (CVSS score: 9.3), is an authentication bypass affecting the Check Point SmartConsole login process that allows an

ISC Stormcast For Thursday, July 23rd, 2026 https://isc.sans.edu/podcastdetail/10020, (Thu, Jul 23rd)

Ransomware Attack Puts a Chill On Japanese Frozen-Food Chain

A cyberattack on a food and logistics firm disrupts the supply of frozen food to thousands of clients, including major franchises like Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Flaws in Passkey Implementation Show Old Attacks Still Work

Ahead of Black Hat USA, researchers find exploitable flaws in how Microsoft handles passkeys that could allow attackers to impersonate privileged users.

Attackers Are Learning to Live Off the AI Toolchain

Sandworm_Mode is an early example of malware that exploits trusted AI tools and workflows to make malicious activity virtually indistinguishable from normal activity.

Fake Bahrain Alert App Deploys Android Surveillance Malware

A malicious application delivers four-stage Android spyware via phony Google Play sites, exploiting civilian fear during Iranian missile strikes.

GitHub Cuts Public Bug Bounty Payouts, Moves Top Rewards to VIP Tier

Beginning July 27, 2026, GitHub will cut public bug bounty payouts by at least half at every severity level. Critical findings will drop from $20,000-$30,000+ to a fixed $10,000, while its permanent invite-only VIP tier will pay $30,000 or more. Reports filed before that date, including those already in GitHub's growing triage queue, will retain the previous payout terms. GitHub said the

Ubuntu snap-confine Flaw Could Give Local Users Root on Default Desktop Installs

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability in snap-confine that an unprivileged user can trigger to obtain root access and gain complete control of a target environment. The high-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-8933 (CVSS score: 7.8), impacts default installations of Ubuntu Desktop 24.04, 25.10, and 26.04. The disclosure comes as

Rondo Meets Geoserver, (Wed, Jul 22nd)

This isn&&#x23&#x3b;x26&#x3b;&#x23&#x3b;39&#x3b;t a new attack, but something I saw "pop-up" in our logs this week:

When AI Attacks: OpenAI Models Autonomously Hack Hugging Face

Advanced LLMs escaped their sandboxes while attempting to achieve a non-malicious benchmark test objective.