The Hacker News

"Maladvertising sends malware in pieces, then makes the browser build the executable."

Views expressed in this cybersecurity, cyber crime update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 26 July 2026, 2306 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://www.hawaiicybersecurityjournal.net).

Maladvertising Sends Malware in Pieces, Then Makes the Browser Build the Executable

Jul 25, 2026Browser Security / Malvertising

A malvertising operation dubbed SourTrade is making victims' browsers build the final Windows executable themselves, using a legitimate Bun runtime as its base instead of serving one complete malicious file from a fixed URL. Confiant, which detailed the campaign on July 23, 2026, said it has operated since late 2024 and impersonated TradingView, Solana, and Luno to target retail traders and cryptocurrency investors across 12 countries in 25 languages. Its landing pages fingerprint visitors, showing suspected researchers and bots an empty page while selected targets receive a convincing copy of the impersonated service. The defense against that is the ordinary one: install trading and wallet software from the vendor's own site, not from an ad. The documented chain does not rely on a browser vulnerability or remove Mark of the Web (MotW). Confiant's analysis documents the delivery, not execution of the file inside the browser, and does not establish whether the fina...

Fastjson 1.x RCE Vulnerability Targeted in Attacks With No Patched Available

Jul 25, 2026Vulnerability / Application Security

Security firms ThreatBook and Imperva say attackers are targeting a critical flaw in Fastjson, Alibaba's JSON library for Java. In affected Spring Boot applications, a malicious JSON request can execute code without authentication, with the privileges of the Java process. Tracked as CVE-2026-16723 , the vulnerability carries an Alibaba-assigned CVSS score of 9.0. The confirmed chain requires Fastjson 1.2.68 through 1.2.83, a Spring Boot executable fat-JAR, a network-reachable path that sends attacker-controlled JSON to an affected parser, and SafeMode left at its disabled default. AutoType can remain disabled, and no classpath gadget is required. As of July 25, Alibaba had not released a fixed Fastjson 1.x version. Organizations that cannot migrate immediately should enable SafeMode with -Dfastjson.parser.safeMode=true or use com.alibaba:fastjson:1.2.83_noneautotype . Alibaba lists migration to Fastjson2 as the long-term fix. Alibaba published its advisory on July 21 follo...

SANS SEC401: The Security Foundation Every Specialization Needs

SANSCyber Defense / Training

Foster Nethercott explains how, then SANS SEC535 teaches the tradecraft. GOAA cert path.

Researcher Publishes GitLab RCE PoC Letting Authenticated Users Run Commands as Git

Jul 25, 2026Vulnerability / Application Security

Security researchers at  depthfirst published working exploit code on July 24 for a GitLab flaw that GitLab patched six weeks earlier, on June 10. It runs commands as git on any self-managed 18.11.3 server that has not taken the update. Any authenticated user who can push to a project can run it. The attacker commits a crafted Jupyter notebook and opens its commit diff, which leaks a heap pointer. Enough of those and an automated probe can locate the libraries in memory. Two more notebooks then fire the payload. No administrator rights, no CI or runner access, no victim interaction, no access to anyone else's project. GitLab did not file the fix as a security fix. A review by The Hacker News found the Oj 3.17.3 bump listed under bug fixes in the June 10 patch release , not in the security-fix table. There is no CVE, no CVSS score, and no mention of the notebook-diff chain. Operators who triaged that release against the security table had no reason to treat it as urgent. ...

CTM360 Research Reveals How Insurance Phishing Has Evolved Into Real-Time Account Hijacking

Jul 25, 2026Phishing / Cybercrime

For years, phishing campaigns targeting financial institutions followed the same playbook. Victims were tricked into entering usernames and passwords, attackers collected the credentials, and accounts were compromised later when an opportunity arose. That model is changing. Recent investigations into insurance-focused phishing operations reveal a more immediate approach. Instead of harvesting credentials for later use, attackers now synchronize their activity with victims in real time, authenticating against legitimate insurance portals as victims unknowingly complete the login process. The entire attack can unfold within a single browsing session. This shift highlights a broader trend across the cybersecurity landscape. As phishing campaigns become more sophisticated, simply identifying malicious websites and impersonation domains is no longer enough. Organizations increasingly need to understand the infrastructure, techniques, and operational workflows behind these attacks. ...

Cl0p Affiliates Target Internet-Exposed PTC Windchill and FlexPLM with Unauthenticated RCE

Jul 25, 2026Vulnerability / Ransomware

Threat actors linked to the Cl0p (aka Chubby Scorpius, FIN11, Graceful Spider, and Lace Tempest) ransomware campaign are exploiting flaws in internet-exposed PTC Windmill and FlexPLM deployments as part of a new data extortion campaign. "Attackers chain a pre-authentication information disclosure in the FlexPLM WSDL endpoint with a server-side flaw in the Windchill login servlet, enabling unauthenticated remote code execution and deployment of hex-named JSP web shells under /Windchill/login/," according to a new coordinated advisory released by Ransom-ISAC along with eCrime.ch and DEFUSED. Upon gaining an initial foothold, the attackers have been found to conduct file system enumeration, stage engineering/design data, and ultimately carry out double extortion data theft. Targets of the campaign include manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, and retail sectors. It's suspected that threat actors are exploiting CVE-2026-12569 (CVSS score: 9.3), a critical security fl...

Webinar: The State of Shadow AI in 2026 (And How Attackers Are Taking Advantage)

Push SecurityShadow AI / SaaS Security

Network defense, hardening, and IR across Windows, Linux, and macOS. 20 labs, GSEC.

DevMan RaaS Portal Centralizes Payload Builds, Victim Management, and Affiliate Payouts

Jul 25, 2026Ransomware / Cybercrime

The operators of the DevMan ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) scheme are maintaining a dedicated web platform that offers affiliates the ability to build payloads, oversee earnings, and manage various aspects related to victims. Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT is tracking the centrally administered RaaS operation under the name Funky Mantis . "The portal combined build generation, finance, victim chat, support, victim records, teams, and payout functions," the company said in an extensive report shared with The Hacker News. "The service integrated access brokerage or access distribution with ransomware deployment. Administrators offered country-specific 'networks,' asked whether an affiliate would use personal or program-supplied access, and imposed two-to-three-day completion windows." Various analyses show that DevMan first emerged on the scene in April 2025 as an affiliate for Qilin, DragonForce, Apos, and RansomHub, before shifting to their o...

BlueNoroff Zoom Phishing Kit Profiles Crypto Wallets Before Malware Delivery

Jul 24, 2026Malware / Artificial Intelligence

The North Korean threat actors behind the ClickFix-style campaigns that employ typosquatted Zoom and Microsoft Teams domains have been found to operate an active phishing kit to impersonate the videoconferencing platforms in social engineering campaigns designed to deliver malware. " BlueNoroff has operationalised trust abuse by combining compromised industry contacts, social engineering, wallet reconnaissance and malware delivery into a repeatable victim acquisition pipeline," JUMPSEC said in a detailed report shared with The Hacker News. "The platform profiles victims' cryptocurrency wallets before malware delivery, enabling selective targeting of high-value victims." Describing the campaign as an operator-driven victim acquisition platform, the cybersecurity company noted that the activity involves using compromised trusted contacts as the initial access vector to create a self-propagating attack chain via Telegram. Details of the activity have been...

Certighost Exploit Lets Low-Privileged Active Directory Users Impersonate a Domain Controller

Jul 24, 2026Vulnerability / Enterprise Security

Researchers H0j3n and Aniq Fakhrul published a working exploit on July 24 that lets a low-privileged Active Directory user obtain a certificate for a Domain Controller and authenticate as that machine. They codenamed the flaw Certighost . Because Domain Controller accounts carry directory replication rights, the resulting Kerberos credential can retrieve the krbtgt secret through DCSync . Microsoft patched the Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) issue ten days earlier as CVE-2026-54121 . Microsoft classed the flaw as improper authorization and assigned it a CVSS score of 8.8. Exploitation requires network access and a domain account, but no administrator rights or user interaction. In the researchers' test, a normal Domain Users account could create a computer account under the default ms-DS-MachineAccountQuota value of 10 or reuse one it already controlled. The chain also required an Enterprise CA that followed the vulnerable chain path, enrollment through t...

ChatGPT AgentForger Flaw Could Deploy Rogue Workspace Agents via a Phishing Link

Jul 24, 2026Vulnerability / Enterprise Security

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical vulnerability in OpenAI's ChatGPT Workspace Agents that could have allowed a single phishing link to stealthily build, authorize, and deploy an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent inside a victim's organization. The vulnerability has been codenamed AgentForger by Zenity Labs. The issue has since been addressed by OpenAI as of June 8, 2026, following responsible disclosure. "A single link could hijack OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent Builder to stand up an attacker-controlled AI agent with a real employee's access and its approvals switched off," the AI security company said in a two-part report shared with The Hacker News. The attack occurs when an unsuspecting employee clicks open a benign-looking ChatGPT link, causing it to spawn a new AI agent within the company's trust boundary that does the attacker's bidding. The issue is a case of cross-site request forgery (CSRF) that forges an attack...

Bing Images Flaws Let Crafted SVGs Run Commands as SYSTEM on Microsoft's Servers

Jul 24, 2026Vulnerability / Web Security

A crafted SVG submitted to Bing's image search ran commands as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM on Microsoft's production image-processing workers, and as root on the Linux machines in the same fleet. XBOW's testing got the same result on workers across different hosts and network ranges, so the problem sat in Bing's image tier, not on one bad machine. Microsoft issued two critical CVEs, CVE-2026-32194 and CVE-2026-32191, and rated both 9.8 on the CVSS scale. XBOW, the autonomous offensive security startup, found both and reported them privately. Bing users have no patch or mitigation to apply: Microsoft fixed both server-side before the advisories went out in March, and the records state there is "no customer action to resolve." Neither advisory recorded exploitation or public disclosure when they went up on March 19. XBOW published the exploit mechanics on July 23, after holding them back at Microsoft's request until the remediation had landed. What outlive...

Seeing AI Agents Is Not Enough. Security Teams Must Enforce What They Can Do

Jul 24, 2026Enterprise Security / AI Security

AI agent security is moving through a familiar maturity curve: adoption, then visibility, and finally, control. But what we've collectively discovered is that enforcing least privilege for AI agents is harder than we ever imagined. This is why there are so many approaches, from prompt filtering to identity-layer access controls. Where we've collectively landed is that understanding the intent of AI agents is essential to securing them. It's not easy, but it's the only path forward. Organizations approach this challenge with different levels of sophistication. For many, the current goal is simply to find the AI agents already operating across the business. That is a necessary first step. AI agents are appearing in SaaS platforms, developer environments, cloud workflows, customer support systems, productivity tools, and internal applications. Some are sanctioned, and others are not. But discovery alone isn't useful. AI agents are not passive; they reason, plan, c...

Hacker Runs Hermes AI Agent Unattended for Post-Exploitation at Thai Finance Ministry

Jul 24, 2026Artificial Intelligence / Threat Intelligence

Someone installed a popular AI assistant on a rented server, switched off the setting that makes it ask permission before running risky commands, and pointed it at Thailand's Ministry of Finance, which runs the country's treasury and tax collection. The agent then worked through the ministry's network on its own, checking hosts for ways to gain root access, hunting through file systems, and crawling a folder of staff personnel records going back to 2012. The operator left the agent's own logs sitting on a web server with directory listing switched on, where threat intelligence firm Hunt.io and researcher Bob Diachenko found them, along with 585 files and 470 MB of attack tooling. The tool is Hermes , an open-source assistant from Nous Research that people install to manage their mail, run chores, and take instructions over Telegram or Slack. It is not a hacking tool, and nothing here is a flaw in it. The mode the operator used, called YOLO, is a documented feat...

Golden Chickens Resurfaces With Four New Malware Families and Modular Implants

Jul 24, 2026Threat Intelligence / Browser Security

The threat actors behind the Golden Chickens malware-as-a-service (MaaS) ecosystem have resurfaced with four new malware families, indicating that the operators are showing no signs of stopping despite extensive public disclosures into their inner workings. The malware families in question are: TinyEgg, ChonkyChicken, a modularized variant of ChonkyChicken, and a modified web browser credential theft utility codenamed ChromEggscalator. Recorded Future's Insikt Group is tracking the group under the moniker TAG-195. TAG-195 is a financially motivated malware-as-a-service (MaaS) developer whose tooling has been previously linked to TAG-127 as an operator and customer. The threat intelligence company said it has also observed TAG-127 deploying TinyEgg via ClickFix-style social engineering campaigns that trick unsuspecting users into manually executing malicious commands. "The four new families indicate an architectural transition and evolution in the TAG-195 MaaS ecosys...

NodeBB Patches Eight AI-Found Flaws Exposing Admin Access and Private Chats

Jul 24, 2026Web Security / Vulnerability

Eight security flaws in NodeBB went public on Wednesday, along with the code to exploit them. Aikido Security rates all eight as high severity and says its AI pentest agents found them in a six-hour review of the forum software's source code. Every version before 4.14.0 is affected. NodeBB has fixed them all, and administrators should be on 4.14.2. The simplest one takes a settings change. A regular forum member could point their homepage setting at the admin address, reload the page, and the admin dashboard opened for them. No password, no exploit code. The forum's own interface blocks that setting, but the block only ran in the browser and could be sidestepped. Most of what a member could then reach was read-only, including the error log and any user list an admin had exported, though they could also swap the site logo. Two more gave an attacker with no account at all access to things meant to be private. One let anyone claim to be any user and read private messages...