The Hacker News

"AI changed the exposure problem.  Validation needs to change with it."

Views expressed in this cybersecurity, cybercrime update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 14 September 2026, 1436 UTC.

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

AI Changed the Exposure Problem. Validation Needs to Change With It.

Sep 14, 2026Vulnerability / Penetration Testing

There's a lot of noise around AI and cybersecurity right now. What’s actually important is far simpler, if often lost in the hubbub. Vulnerability discovery is getting faster and happening at a much greater scale, while defenders still have to work out which findings actually deserve their action. In the first half of 2026, a whopping 35,853 CVEs were published, roughly 49% more than in the year before. Yet only 495 were catalogued as exploited in the wild during that same period, and 116 were already under attack on the day they became public. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s own disclosure data shows Mythos-class models surfacing 26,153 vulnerability candidates in open-source software, with only 421 of those getting patched upstream. That small exploited subset is a very important point. It tells defenders that treating every vulnerability with a High or Critical CVSS rating as an emergency is not only impossible, it’s actually the wrong model . The critical task security teams fa...

Malicious Twitch Browser Extension Leaks OAuth Tokens From Nearly 31,000 Users

Sep 14, 2026Malware / Browser Security

A malicious cross-store Twitch browser extension has leaked OAuth tokens associated with nearly 31,000 users to proxy servers operated by a Russian commercial bot service. The extension, named "Twitch Enhanced Viewer | JeetBot," lists HISHIMIRO/jeetbot.cc as its developer and has the following identifiers on the Google Chrome Web Store and Mozilla Firefox Add-Ons store - Chrome - pnhhdhhcadcjfckjhpmjneldiegbojfb - 30,000 users (Published on June 26, 2025) Firefox - twitchenhancedviewer@example.com - 604 users (Published on July 7, 2025) Both extensions are still available for download as of writing. The extension listing description states: "JeetBot is a modern tool for streamers and viewers who appreciate quality, convenience, and control," adding it "expands Twitch capabilities: 1080p stream for regions with constraints." "Current builds (v85.x) forward the token inline as an &auth= query parameter on a network-layer redirect ...

Attackers Use Passkey Phishing to Hijack Microsoft Cloud Accounts and Exfiltrate Data

Sep 13, 2026Cloud Security / Identity Security

Microsoft has disclosed details of two campaigns in which threat actors are abusing third-party email delivery infrastructure to blast financial fraud scam messages and using passkey-themed social engineering to breach cloud environments. The first campaign, per the tech giant, involved sending over a million scam emails between August 3 and 5, 2026, by masquerading as chief executive officers (CEOs) of various target companies, aiming to persuade accounts payable departments at those firms to initiate Automated Clearing House ( ACH ) transfers for a supposed ServiceNow annual subscription. Evidence indicates that the operators behind the campaign have leveraged generative artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate the creation of email templates and draft emails tailored to their recipients. The activity primarily singled out enterprise users in the U.S., spanning IT services, consumer goods, real estate, and discrete manufacturing sectors. "The campaign follows steps bef...

AI Security's Greatest Hits

WizAI Security / Cheat Sheet

Get 7 of the most widely used AI security resources in one pack. Each asset provides practical tools for securing AI apps, models, and agents.

CISA Adds 5 Actively Exploited Artifactory, ScreenConnect, and RouterOS Flaws to KEV

Sep 12, 2026Vulnerability / Enterprise Security

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added five security flaws impacting JFrog Artifactory, ConnectWise ScreenConnect , and MikroTik RouterOS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. Details of the vulnerabilities are as follows - CVE-2026-42016 (CVSS score: 8.1) - An incorrect authorization vulnerability in JFrog Artifactory that could lead to privilege escalation due to a validation check of the token signature/issuer and not the token's scope. CVE-2026-42018 (CVSS score: 7.5) - An improper authentication vulnerability in JFrog Artifactory that could return an internal anonymous-user token to an unauthenticated caller when anonymous access is disabled, potentially leaking sensitive resources. CVE-2026-84869 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper privilege management and missing authorization vulnerability in  ConnectWise ScreenConnect that could allow an attacker to fil...

When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Sep 12, 2026AI Agent / Security Operations

Over the past year, we watched a new class of alert appear in enterprise security operations centers and grow faster than anything else in the stream: alerts that were triggered by AI tools and agents. Not attacks against AI, but the ordinary, everyday footprint of an organization using it, from developers running coding agents and non-technical staff signing consumer AI tools into corporate accounts. We reviewed AI-related activity across numerous enterprise environments. Two numbers frame everything that follows. AI-related alerts still account for only 0.43% of all SOC alerts. And that share is climbing every single month, up 685% between February and June 2026. AI is a small slice of the alert stream today and the fastest-growing slice at the same time. What makes those alerts worth a security team’s attention is not their volume but their composition. We sort everything an AI agent triggers in a SOC into three buckets: real attacks, risks, and noise, with the split being 94....

Free Assessment: Identify Hidden Internal Risk

BitdefenderAttack Surface / Threat Detection

Discover unnecessary user access to risky tools, shadow IT, based on real user behavior.

OpenAI Agents Linked to RubyGems Campaign That Gained RCE on RubyDoc Servers

Sep 12, 2026Vulnerability / Web Security

The "major malicious attack" that targeted RubyGems in May 2026 was the work of a swarm of OpenAI agents, according to a new report published by researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx. On May 12, Maciej Mensfeld, senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io, disclosed details of a coordinated cyber attack that targeted the package manager for the Ruby programming language with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days. In a follow-up analysis, Socket highlighted a campaign dubbed GemStuffer that involved a cluster of more than 150 gems that used the package registry as a data exfiltration channel and staged public data scraped from U.K. local government democratic services portals. At that time, the software supply chain security company noted the activity shares the "same abuse pattern" as the broader RubyGems spam-publishing incident. "It's not...

GitLab CVSS 10 File-Read Flaw Draws In-the-Wild Probes After Disclosure

Sep 11, 2026Vulnerability / Web Security

GitLab has released patches to address multiple flaws, including a maximum-severity security vulnerability that has witnessed in-the-wild probes within hours of public disclosure. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-85706 (CVSS score: 10.0), a path traversal issue in the repository commits API that could allow an unauthenticated user to read arbitrary files from the GitLab server under certain conditions. The problem, per GitLab, stems from "improper path confinement and missing authentication enforcement in the repository commits API." The issue impacts the following versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) - All versions from 18.7 before 19.1.8,  All versions from 19.2 before 19.2.6, and  All versions from 19.3 before 19.3.2 According to preemptive exposure management firm watchTowr, the vulnerability is already witnessing active in-the-wild probes since 06:00 UTC on September 11, 2026. The issue, it said, allows an ...

Anthropic Says Seven China-Based AI Labs Ran Industrial-Scale Claude Distillation Attacks

Sep 11, 2026Artificial Intelligence / Cybercrime

Anthropic on Thursday said it identified and disrupted industrial-scale illicit distillation attacks against Claude from seven labs based in China, including Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek, Z.ai (aka Zhipu), and MiniMax. Knowledge distillation by itself is a legitimate training method . It refers to a machine learning technique where a large, powerful AI model assumes the role of a "teacher" to train a smaller, less-capable or faster "student" model to copy its capabilities. Illicit distillation, on the other hand, is an industrial-scale campaign that covertly extracts a model's capabilities and replicates them in another model without authorization, typically by making use of networks of fake accounts created with stolen credit cards, login credentials, and API keys. Frontier AI labs in the West, including Google and OpenAI , have repeatedly called out distillation attacks aimed at their models. Anthropic said it has observed unauthorized labs employing ...

Claude Used to Automate Exploitation and Data Theft Across Multiple Victims

Sep 11, 2026Artificial Intelligence / Cyber Operations

Anthropic has warned that cybercriminals and state-sponsored hackers alike are using its Claude models for cyber attacks, weapons design, propaganda, and mass surveillance between December 2025 and August 2026. The threat actors, which the artificial intelligence (AI) company has branded Generative Threat Groups (GTGs), span state-sponsored groups, financially motivated criminals, commercial spyware vendors, state propaganda institutions, and politically motivated individuals. "The cybersecurity skills of AI models means that AI has collapsed the labor and tooling gap that used to separate well-resourced, state-sponsored operations from individual operators," Anthropic said . "The use of AI went beyond simple questions and responses from a chatbot but rather involved the use of multi-agent frameworks executing reconnaissance, exploitation, and data exfiltration." Among the notable cases highlighted by Anthropic is the development of an AI-assisted workflow by...

Russian State-Sponsored Hackers Use Claude to Rebuild Malware After Detection

Sep 11, 2026Cyber Espionage / Malware

Anthropic on Thursday revealed it disrupted a campaign mounted by a Russian state-sponsored threat actor that abused Claude for developing an AI-assisted workflow to get ahead of the detection curve. The operation has been attributed to a cyber espionage group it calls GTG-20006 (where "GTG" stands for Generative Threat Group), which aligns with broader reporting linking the cluster to Midnight Blizzard (aka APT29 and Cozy Bear). This actor is said to have developed an AI-driven process to automatically rebuild and re-deploy their toolkit if it was detected by security products, thereby undermining defenders' ability to block the artifacts via static detections. Attacks mounted by GTG-20006 have targeted military intelligence targets in Ukrainian and European governments, along with diplomatic and defense organizations and individuals connected to U.S. foreign policy. The toolkit includes a number of programs - Two Windows-based implants A mobile explo...

Your Critical Vulnerabilities Might Not Be Your Biggest Risk

Sep 11, 2026Penetration Testing / Artificial Intelligence

Security teams have become exceptionally talented at finding vulnerabilities. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to optimizing the process for determining which of those vulnerabilities actually create a path to compromise. A critical vulnerability may look alarming on a scanner report, but if it sits behind strong segmentation, identity controls, and other defenses that prevent an attacker from reaching anything important, then it doesn’t necessarily need immediate attention.  On the other hand, a medium-severity vulnerability may appear less important, but if it can be used to provide a foothold that can be chained with other weaknesses to reach sensitive data or privileged systems, then fixing that gap becomes a priority. How Autonomous Penetration Testing Reveals What Attackers Can Actually Exploit Severity scores tell you what vulnerabilities could mean in isolation. Autonomous penetration testing tells you what an attacker can actually do with the vulnerabilities....

Attackers Chain JFrog Artifactory Flaws to Gain Admin Control and Plant Backdoors

Sep 11, 2026Vulnerability / DevOps

Attackers have chained two flaws in JFrog Artifactory , the repository that software build pipelines pull from, to take administrator control of self-hosted servers and plant backdoors, cloud security company Wiz said in a report. Wiz saw the attacks between August 15 and September 8. JFrog had fixed both flaws before then, so only servers that had not been updated were open to them. Neither flaw gives administrator control on its own. CVE-2026-42018 makes Artifactory hand an internal anonymous-user token to a caller who has not logged in, even when anonymous access is turned off. CVE-2026-42016 then allows that low-privilege token to be swapped for one with administrator scope, because Artifactory checks a token's signature and who issued it, but not what the token is allowed to do. Every case Wiz saw followed a similar pattern. The attacker sent an unauthenticated request to a token endpoint and received a token for the internal anonymous user, then exchanged it ...

China-Linked UNC3569 Exploited Sogou Input Method Flaw to Deploy GRAYRABBIT Backdoor

Sep 11, 2026Vulnerability / Browser Security

A China-linked hacking group exploited a flaw in Sogou Input Method , one of the most widely used tools for typing Chinese characters on Windows, to install a backdoor on victims' computers, security company Gen Digital said in  research published Thursday . The attack started with a crafted link and ended with the attacker able to do anything the logged-in user could do. Tencent, which owns and develops Sogou, fixed the flaw in April 2026. Gen found the flaw while investigating a live intrusion by UNC3569 , a group that  Google Threat Intelligence ties to China  and places in the country's hacker-for-hire scene. Google has tracked the group since 2021 and says it has targeted government, education, technology, and finance sectors, mostly in East and Southeast Asia. The backdoor it installed is GRAYRABBIT , a small program the group has used for years and that Google describes as its first step onto a machine. It gives an attacker a remote command shell, allows fil...

PaperCut Replaces Emergency Patches With Fixes for Two Actively Exploited Flaws

Sep 11, 2026Vulnerability / Cyber Attack

PaperCut on Thursday released a new security maintenance release that replaces all previously published emergency patches that were pushed to address two security flaws that have come under active exploitation. The software development company said PaperCut NG/MF versions 26.0.5, 25.0.13 and 24.1.10 are now available for customers to download. "These are Regular Maintenance Releases (MR) that have gone through complete QA testing," it said. "They contain all of the security fixes issued in Emergency Patch Releases 1, 2 and 3, plus additional security hardening, and they have been through our standard release testing process." It's worth noting that the release supersedes the emergency patches that were shipped to address two security flaws as well as two regressions, along with various hardening and mitigation against potential attack chains. The vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078 , have come under active exploitation in the wild to byp...

Cisco FMC Flaws Exploited to Steal Credentials and Deploy Qilin Ransomware

Sep 11, 2026Vulnerability / Malware

Cisco has revealed that three distinct threat clusters linked to ransomware and state-sponsored attacks have been exploiting two recently patched Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) vulnerabilities. The attacks leverage CVE-2026-20079 (CVSS score: 10.0), an authentication bypass vulnerability in the web interface of FMC software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and execute script files on an affected device to obtain root access to the underlying operating system. The second flaw under exploitation is CVE-2026-20316 (CVSS score: 5.3), which could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to log in to an affected device using a low-privilege account to access sensitive data within susceptible systems. It can be paired with other Cisco Secure FMC vulnerabilities to elevate privileges. Cisco Talos said it identified three clusters of post-compromise activity of FMC instances associated with state-sponsored and crimeware threat act...

ThreatsDay: 200 Android Flaws, Browser-Built Phishing, 119K Scam Shops + 23 More Stories

Sep 10, 2026Hacking News / Cybersecurity News

A lot of this week’s security news has the same awkward answer to one question: “Why was that allowed to work?” An extension asks for access and takes too much. A trusted service becomes part of a phishing chain. An old bug still gets results. An exposed system stays exposed. A package looks useful right up until it isn’t. Different stories, same basic problem: the path in was often already there. Nothing here needed magic. Mostly access, trust, weak edges, and someone willing to keep poking. That’s the week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.