The day's cybersecurity headlines from public sources, in one place. Search them, filter by theme or CVE, or show only vulnerabilities CISA has confirmed are being exploited. Every headline links to the original.
For my own read on what the news means for your business, see Insights.
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AI-generated intelligence report falsely flagged nuclear components on a Chinese ship, nearly triggering a boarding
CNN reported, citing four sources, that an intelligence report circulated across the US military this spring claiming a Chinese vessel in the Middle East carried nuclear weapons program components. Armed boarding teams were preparing to move and military aircraft were airborne before someone…
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Researchers escape the OpenAI Codex sandbox two ways, one from its most restricted mode
Oren Yomtov of Accomplish AI reported two sandbox escapes to OpenAI on August 12, both fixed within eight days. The more serious, called Heapjack, turns opening someone else's repository in Codex and asking a question about the code into unsandboxed command execution on the developer's machine…
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Malicious npm package hides its loader in runtime code to slip past npm's new install-script controls
Checkmarx found a package called indexed-btree impersonating the legitimate sorted-btree library, with roughly 2 million weekly downloads. Instead of using a preinstall or postinstall script, which GitHub's June 2026 npm hardening now blocks unless explicitly approved, the malware hides its loader…
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TigerByte Cyber leaves stealth with $3M seed and more than $7M in government contracts
Seed round led by Hale Capital Partners with Tenon VC. Contracts in place with DARPA, the US Space Force, and the US Navy.
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CrowdSec says the TanStack npm attack led to 170 private GitHub repositories being copied
An attacker copied roughly 170 private CrowdSec repositories on May 22 using the GitHub account of an employee who had already left. The company had not revoked his access. His laptop was compromised in May's TanStack npm supply chain attack, tracked as CVE-2026-45321, in which 84 malicious…
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Google confirms Gemini reached three real companies' systems during a security evaluation
The incidents happened in May 2026 during testing run by Israeli firm Irregular, the same evaluation partner involved in similar disclosures from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. A domain mix-up put live systems inside the test scope.
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BragJack lets a malicious browser extension hijack built-in AI assistants across five browsers
Timestamp note: this converts to Sep 18, 23:05 EDT, so it sits just before the strict window opens. Included because it is the most substantive new technique of the weekend and has not appeared in a prior roundup.
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SolarWinds patches a hard-coded key flaw in Access Rights Manager enabling unauthenticated RCE
CVE-2026-28326, CVSS 8.8, affects all versions of Access Rights Manager 2026.2 and earlier. The root cause is a hard-coded static key. Fixed in ARM 2026.2.1.
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ShinyHunters hacks the Clop leak site and threatens to extort the ransomware gang
ShinyHunters breached Clop's Tor data leak site, defaced it, and claims to have taken server data plus the private keys for the onion service. The stated entry point was an unauthenticated file upload flaw in Grav CMS.
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Most WordPress professionals still have no breach recovery plan
A survey of WordPress professionals found the majority lack a documented plan for recovering from a compromise.
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Android apps can now check security patch status down to individual device components
Google released AndroidX security state libraries that let apps query patch status at the component level rather than relying on a single device-wide patch date.
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Microsoft fixes the bug behind false "Defender Antivirus is turned off" alerts
Microsoft resolved a known issue that produced incorrect alerts claiming Defender Antivirus had been disabled after recent updates.
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Microsoft Teams will let admins block custom file extensions
Microsoft is adding the ability for administrators to modify the list of file extensions Teams treats as risky, so organizations can match their own requirements rather than the default list.
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Transparent Tribe deploys new Rust backdoors using private GitHub repositories for command and control
Zscaler ThreatLabz attributes a campaign it calls Operation RapidRust to the Pakistan-aligned group APT36 (also Transparent Tribe, Earth Karkaddan), targeting government and defense entities in India and Afghanistan with previously undocumented tools named RUSTYSHADE, RUSTYMOVE, PSNATCH, and…
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AI-built exploit and a sign-in flaw opened a path to internal OpenAI code
Hacktron researchers earned a bug bounty after demonstrating access to OpenAI employee accounts, chaining an AI-generated exploit with an authentication weakness to reach internal code.
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98 percent of fraudulent hires already hold company credentials by the time they are caught
HYPR reported that in the overwhelming majority of fraudulent-hire cases, the fake employee has already been issued working company credentials before detection. The finding sits against the backdrop of the ongoing North Korean IT worker placement problem.
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Abandoned IoT apps keep sending sensitive data to broken servers
Research found that IoT companion apps whose vendors have gone away or stopped maintaining them continue transmitting sensitive data to servers that no longer respond correctly, or to domains that may change hands.
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Hardcoded MCP credentials found sitting in public GitHub files
Hush Security reported finding hardcoded Model Context Protocol credentials in public GitHub repositories. MCP configuration files carry the tokens that let AI agents reach live systems, and they are being committed to public repos the same way API keys always have been.
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An abandoned CDN domain was re-registered and thousands of sites still call it
A domain formerly belonging to a wound-down content delivery network expired and was re-registered by a stranger in July 2025. Thousands of websites, code repositories, and documentation pages still carry hard-coded references to hostnames under it. The new owner holds wildcard DNS across the…
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PhantomRaven npm stealer was likely written with an LLM
CrowdStrike's Counter Adversary Operations assesses with high confidence that the developer of the PhantomRaven JavaScript stealer used a large language model to write it, based on verbose comments, leftover placeholder code, and statistical token-analysis patterns. PhantomRaven surfaced in late…
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WeaselBiscuit stealer spreads through 13 npm packages, borrows from DPRK tooling
OpenSourceMalware identified 13 npm packages delivering a previously undocumented JavaScript stealer called WeaselBiscuit that targets Chrome extension storage. Researcher Paul McCarty describes it as a stripped-down build sharing functions with BeaverTail and OtterCookie, both tied to North…
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Fake LastPass Authenticator GitHub repositories push the new Rapuncel infostealer
An ongoing campaign uses SEO-optimized GitHub repositories impersonating well-known software vendors to distribute a previously undocumented infostealer called Rapuncel. The repositories rank in search results, which is how victims arrive.
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WordPress Click2Shell flaw forces theme installs from a crafted link
A crafted link opened by a logged-in WordPress administrator can install a theme from the official WordPress.org directory without anyone clicking Install. Security firm pwn.ai named the chain Click2Shell. On its own the flaw only installs a legitimate theme of the attacker's choosing and leaves…
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Critical Orkes Conductor flaw under active exploitation, roughly 1,300 attempts blocked in two days
CVE-2026-58138 is an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw (CVSS 9.8) in Orkes Conductor, the open source workflow and microservice orchestration framework. An attacker submits a malicious workflow definition with JavaScript or Python expressions to the workflow API, and because the GraalVM…
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FBI and Coast Guard boarded two hacked oil tankers headed toward the US coast
Federal teams boarded two foreign-flagged tankers in the Gulf of Mexico on August 21 and August 24 after indications that attackers had reached shipboard networks. One was the VL Prosperity, a Liberian-flagged supertanker carrying roughly 2.3 million barrels. Rear Adm. Amy Grable of Coast Guard…