The Hacker News

"Weekly Recap:  Double-Tap Skimmers, PromptSpy AI, 30 Tbps DDoS, and Docker Malware."

Views expressed in this cybersecurity, cyber crime update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 23 February 2026, 1535 UTC.

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⚡ Weekly Recap: Double-Tap Skimmers, PromptSpy AI, 30Tbps DDoS, Docker Malware & More

Feb 23, 2026Cybersecurity / Hacking

Security news rarely moves in a straight line. This week, it feels more like a series of sharp turns, some happening quietly in the background, others playing out in public view. The details are different, but the pressure points are familiar. Across devices, cloud services, research labs, and even everyday apps, the line between normal behavior and hidden risk keeps getting thinner. Tools meant to protect, update, or improve systems are also becoming pathways when something goes wrong. This recap gathers the signals in one place. Quick reads, real impact, and developments that deserve a closer look before they become next week’s bigger problem. ⚡ Threat of the Week Dell RecoverPoint for VMs Zero-Day Exploited — A maximum severity security vulnerability in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines has been exploited as a zero-day by a suspected China-nexus threat cluster dubbed UNC6201 since mid-2024. The activity involves the exploitation of CVE-2026-22769 (CVSS score: 10.0), a ca...

Eliminate Shadow AI Blind Spots

Nudge SecuritySaaS Security / Shadow AI

Shadow AI is quietly accessing sensitive data across your SaaS environment. Learn how to close AI blind spots and get ahead of data exposure risks.

How Exposed Endpoints Increase Risk Across LLM Infrastructure

Feb 23, 2026Artificial Intelligence / Zero Trust

As more organizations run their own Large Language Models (LLMs), they are also deploying more internal services and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to support those models. Modern security risks are being introduced less from the models themselves and more from the infrastructure that serves, connects and automates the model. Each new LLM endpoint expands the attack surface, often in ways that are easy to overlook during rapid deployment, especially when endpoints are trusted implicitly. When LLM endpoints accumulate excessive permissions and long-lived credentials are exposed, they can provide far more access than intended. Organizations must prioritize endpoint privilege management because exposed endpoints have become an increasingly common attack vector for cybercriminals to access the systems, identities and secrets that power LLM workloads. What is an endpoint in modern LLM infrastructure? In modern LLM infrastructure, an endpoint is any interface where something —...

Malicious npm Packages Harvest Crypto Keys, CI Secrets, and API Tokens

Feb 23, 2026AI Security / DevOps

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is an active "Shai-Hulud-like" supply chain worm campaign that has leveraged a cluster of at least 19 malicious npm packages to enable credential harvesting and cryptocurrency key theft. The campaign has been codenamed SANDWORM_MODE by supply chain security company Socket. As with prior Shai-Hulud attack waves , the malicious code embedded into the packages comes with capabilities to siphon system information, access tokens, environment secrets, and API keys from developer environments and automatically propagate by abusing stolen npm and GitHub identities to extend its reach. "The sample retains Shai-Hulud hallmarks and adds GitHub API exfiltration with DNS fallback, hook-based persistence, SSH propagation fallback, MCP server injection with embedded prompt injection targeting AI coding assistants, and LLM API Key harvesting," the company said . The packages, published to npm by two npm publisher aliases,...

MuddyWater Targets MENA Organizations with GhostFetch, CHAR, and HTTP_VIP

Feb 23, 2026Threat Intelligence / Artificial Intelligence

The Iranian hacking group known as MuddyWater (aka Earth Vetala, Mango Sandstorm, and MUDDYCOAST) has targeted several organizations and individuals mainly located across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as part of a new campaign codenamed Operation Olalampo . The activity, first observed on January 26, 2026, has resulted in the deployment of new malware families that share overlapping samples previously identified as used by the threat actor, according to a report published by Group-IB. These include downloaders like GhostFetch and HTTP_VIP, along with a Rust backdoor called CHAR and an advanced implant codenamed GhostBackDoor that's dropped by GhostFetch. "These attacks follow similar patterns and align with the killchains previously observed in MuddyWater attacks; starting with a phishing email with a Microsoft Office document attached to it that contains malicious macro code that decodes the embedded payload and drops it on the system and executes it, pro...

AI-Assisted Threat Actor Compromises 600+ FortiGate Devices in 55 Countries

Feb 21, 2026Threat Intelligence / Artificial Intelligence

A Russian-speaking, financially motivated threat actor has been observed taking advantage of commercial generative artificial intelligence (AI) services to compromise over 600 FortiGate devices located in 55 countries. That's according to new findings from Amazon Threat Intelligence, which said it observed the activity between January 11 and February 18, 2026. "No exploitation of FortiGate vulnerabilities was observed—instead, this campaign succeeded by exploiting exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication, fundamental security gaps that AI helped an unsophisticated actor exploit at scale," CJ Moses, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Amazon Integrated Security, said in a report. The tech giant described the threat actor as having limited technical capabilities, a constraint they overcame by relying on multiple commercial generative AI tools to implement various phases of the attack cycle, such as tool development, attac...

OpenClaw: RCE, Leaked Tokens, and 21K Exposed Instances in 2 Weeks

Reco AIAttack Surface / AI Agents

The viral AI agent connects to Slack, Gmail, and Drive—and most security teams have zero visibility into it.

Anthropic Launches Claude Code Security for AI-Powered Vulnerability Scanning

Feb 21, 2026Artificial Intelligence / DevSecOps

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has begun to roll out a new security feature for Claude Code that can scan a user's software codebase for vulnerabilities and suggest patches. The capability, called Claude Code Security , is currently available in a limited research preview to Enterprise and Team customers. "It scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review, allowing teams to find and fix security issues that traditional methods often miss," the company said in a Friday announcement. Anthropic said the feature aims to leverage AI as a tool to help find and resolve vulnerabilities to counter attacks where threat actors weaponize the same tools to automate vulnerability discovery.  With AI agents increasingly capable of detecting security vulnerabilities that have otherwise escaped human notice, the tech upstart said the same capabilities could be used by adversaries to uncover exploitable weakness...

CISA Adds Two Actively Exploited Roundcube Flaws to KEV Catalog

Feb 21, 2026Vulnerability / Patch Management

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added two security flaws impacting Roundcube webmail software to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2025-49113 (CVSS score: 9.9) - A deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability that allows remote code execution by authenticated users because the _from parameter in a URL is not validated in program/actions/settings/upload.php. (Fixed in June 2025 ) CVE-2025-68461 (CVSS score: 7.2) - A cross-site scripting vulnerability via the animate tag in an SVG document. (Fixed in December 2025 ) Dubai-based cybersecurity company FearsOff, whose founder and CEO, Kirill Firsov, was credited with discovering and reporting CVE-2025-49113, said attackers have already " diffed and weaponized the vulnerability " within 48 hours of public disclosure of the flaw. An exploit for the vulnerability wa...

EC-Council Expands AI Certification Portfolio to Strengthen U.S. AI Workforce Readiness and Security

Feb 21, 2026Artificial Intelligence / Training

With $5.5 trillion in global AI risk exposure and 700,000 U.S. workers needing reskilling, four new AI certifications and Certified CISO v4 help close the gap between AI adoption and workforce readiness . EC-Council , creator of the world-renowned Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) credential and a global leader in applied cybersecurity education, today launched its Enterprise AI Credential Suite, with four new role-based AI certifications debuting alongside Certified CISO v4 , an overhauled executive cyber leadership program. The dual launch is the largest single expansion of EC-Council’s portfolio in its 25-year history. It addresses a structural gap that no single tool, platform, or policy can solve alone: AI is scaling faster than the workforce trained to run, secure, and govern it. The launch aligns with U.S. priorities on workforce development and applied AI education outlined in Executive Order 14179, the July 2025 AI Action Plan’s workforce development pillar, and Executive Or...

BeyondTrust Flaw Used for Web Shells, Backdoors, and Data Exfiltration

Feb 20, 2026Vulnerability / Cyber Attack

Threat actors have been observed exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting BeyondTrust Remote Support (RS) and Privileged Remote Access (PRA) products to conduct a wide range of malicious actions, including deploying VShell and  The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-1731 (CVSS score: 9.9), allows attackers to execute operating system commands in the context of the site user. In a report published Thursday, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said it detected the security flaw being actively exploited in the wild for network reconnaissance, web shell deployment, command-and-control (C2), backdoor and remote management tool installs, lateral movement, and data theft. The campaign has targeted financial services, legal services, high technology, higher education, wholesale and retail, and healthcare sectors across the U.S., France, Germany, Australia, and Canada. The cybersecurity company described the vulnerability as a case of sanitization failure that enab...

Cline CLI 2.3.0 Supply Chain Attack Installed OpenClaw on Developer Systems

Feb 20, 2026Software Security / Artificial Intelligence

In yet another software supply chain attack, the open-source, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cline CLI was updated to stealthily install OpenClaw , a self-hosted autonomous AI agent that has become exceedingly popular in the past few months. "On February 17, 2026, at 3:26 AM PT, an unauthorized party used a compromised npm publish token to publish an update to Cline CLI on the NPM registry: cline@2.3.0," the maintainers of the Cline package said in an advisory. "The published package contains a modified package.json with an added postinstall script: 'postinstall": "npm install -g openclaw@latest.'" As a result, this causes OpenClaw to be installed on the developer's machine when Cline version 2.3.0 is installed. Cline said no additional modifications were introduced to the package and there was no malicious behavior observed. However, it noted that the installation of OpenClaw was not authorized or intended. The s...

ClickFix Campaign Abuses Compromised Sites to Deploy MIMICRAT Malware

Feb 20, 2026Malware / Threat Intelligence

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new ClickFix campaign that abuses compromised legitimate sites to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called MIMICRAT (aka AstarionRAT). "The campaign demonstrates a high level of operational sophistication: compromised sites spanning multiple industries and geographies serve as delivery infrastructure, a multi-stage PowerShell chain performs ETW and AMSI bypass before dropping a Lua-scripted shellcode loader, and the final implant communicates over HTTPS on port 443 using HTTP profiles that resemble legitimate web analytics traffic," Elastic Security Labs said in a Friday report. According to the enterprise search and cybersecurity company, MIMICRAT is a custom C++ RAT with support for Windows token impersonation, SOCKS5 tunneling, and a set of 22 commands for comprehensive post-exploitation capabilities. The campaign was discovered earlier this month. It's also assessed to share tactic...

Identity Cyber Scores: The New Metric Shaping Cyber Insurance in 2026

Feb 20, 2026Cyber Insurance / Password Security

With one in three cyber-attacks now involving compromised employee accounts, insurers and regulators are placing far greater emphasis on identity posture when assessing cyber risk.  For many organizations, however, these assessments remain largely opaque. Elements such as password hygiene, privileged access management, and the extent of multi-factor authentication (MFA) coverage are increasingly influential in how cyber risk and insurance costs are evaluated. Understanding the identity-centric factors behind these assessments is critical for organizations seeking to demonstrate lower risk exposure and secure more favorable insurance terms. Why identity posture now drives underwriting With the global average cost of a data breach reaching $4.4 million in 2025, more organizations are turning to cyber insurance to manage financial exposure. In the UK, coverage has increased from 37% in 2023 to 45% in 2025, but rising claims volumes are prompting insurers to tighten underwrit...