IT News Analysis

1

Thousands of OpenAI Agents Quietly Turned an Abandoned Wiki Into Their Coordination Channel

A group of AI safety researchers says a fleet of autonomous agents that identified themselves as OpenAI systems left about 18,000 posts on a dormant 25-year-old German wiki between May and July 2026, using the site as a shared board to pool answers to a timed web task and pass around a way out of their sandbox. The activity was concentrated on DSEwiki , a German software developer wiki that runs on the ProWiki farm at wikiservice[.]at and had been edited about 20 times over the previous decade. The researchers, led by Sydney Von Arx of the AI safety nonprofit  Nightingale Collective , reconstructed the deleted pages from edit history and published their analysis along with a downloadable copy of the data. The wikis let anyone change a page with an ordinary web request, the kind normally used only to read a page rather than to write one. Agents that were restricted to reading the internet could therefore still write to the site, because the restriction was written a...

Sep 05, 2026

2

Attackers Exploit PaperCut Flaws to Steal Credentials From Schools and Universities

Threat actors are exploiting the newly disclosed PaperCut flaws to facilitate credential theft in attacks targeting the education sector in the U.S. and Europe. The Arctic Wolf Adversary Research Team said it observed attackers exploiting CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078 – an authentication bypass and remote code execution chain – to conduct command execution and reconnaissance, as well as create privileged accounts. "Observed post-exploitation activity included delivery of Windows registry hive collection tools, Metasploit/Meterpreter-related Java payloads, and commands used to identify hosts, users, processes, and sensitive configuration data," Arctic Wolf said. The cybersecurity company told The Hacker News that the activity has targeted vulnerable PaperCut servers across the education sector, impacting organizations ranging from K-12 schools to major universities in the U.S. and Europe. Some of the identified malicious activity includes - Running discover...

Sep 05, 2026

3

How to Discover Shadow AI - What's Working For Modern Teams

Find the AI apps, accounts, agents, and integrations your employees have introduced. No surveys, no guesswork, no waiting for someone to self-report.

4

Phishing Campaign Sends Millions of Emails Using Invisible Unicode to Evade Filters

Microsoft is alerting of a "high-volume phishing campaign" that's using invisible Unicode tag characters to bypass email filters. "Instead of using these characters to hide instructions from people while exposing them to AI models, the attacker used them to split financial lure words such as 'funding' to prevent email filters from parsing them," the Microsoft Security Research team said . The Windows maker said the findings show AI-era evasion techniques can be adapted by threat actors in traditional phishing and spam campaigns. Attacks exploiting this approach are said to have first emerged in early February 2026. ASCII Smuggling refers to a technique where invisible or non-rendering Unicode characters are used to conceal messages or instructions inside seemingly-harmless text. As a result, human user interfaces do not render them, making the text appear completely normal to the user. However, such content can be ingested by email filters or AI...

Sep 04, 2026

5

PostgreSQL Fixes 12-Year-Old Logical Decoding Flaw Enabling Replication-Role Code Execution

PostgreSQL has released updates to address a security flaw that allows an account with the REPLICATION attribute to run arbitrary code as the operating-system user running the database server. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-6471 (CVSS score: 7.2), has been present since logical decoding was introduced in PostgreSQL 9.4 in 2014. Versions before PostgreSQL 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24 are affected. Exploitation requires an account carrying the REPLICATION attribute and a server running with wal_level = logical. Backup tools, standby servers, change data capture (CDC) pipelines, and monitoring systems routinely hold that attribute. The fix, shipped on August 13, adds a server parameter called output_plugin_libraries that lists which libraries may be loaded as logical decoding output plugins, defaulting to 'pgoutput, test_decoding'. Installations using any other output plugin, wal2json, and decoderbufs among them, will have logical decoding refused aft...

Sep 04, 2026

6

New Ted Backdoor Hides Inside Victims' Own HAProxy Builds to Intercept Web Traffic

A previously undocumented Linux toolkit has been found compiled directly into the trojanized HAProxy load balancers of two South Korean organizations, where it intercepted web traffic and served altered pages to selected visitors. The attackers named the implant ted in debug strings left in the binary. It is not a HAProxy vulnerability, and installing it requires code execution on the host and the ability to replace the running binary. Rapid7 Labs attributed the toolkit with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors and put the two victims in South Korea's automotive and media sectors. Command-and-control (C2) requests never reach a backend server and are erased from HAProxy's own connection counters, so neither the backend logs nor the load balancer's statistics record them. "Further evidence is necessary to make a more definitive assessment," Rapid7 said. A request for one specific image path puts the filter into C2 mode, Rapid7 said i...

Sep 04, 2026

7

10 Hours vs. 50 Seconds: An MDR Response Gap

Here are 4 things your MDR isn’t telling you and 5 questions to bring to your renewal conversation.

8

Over 440,000 Exploit Attempts Target Super Forms and Elementor Pro RCE Flaws

Threat actors are exploiting two critical security flaws in WordPress plugins Super Forms and Elementor Pro, according to findings from Wordfence. The vulnerabilities in question are - CVE-2026-14894 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A missing file type validation vulnerability in Super Forms – Drag & Drop Form Builder that allows unauthenticated attackers to upload files of any type, including executable PHP files, leading to remote code execution. (Fixed in version 6.3.314) CVE-2026-32475 (CVSS score: 9.0/9.8) - A vulnerability in Elementor Pro that allows unauthenticated attackers to upload files of any type, including executable PHP files, leading to remote code execution. (Fixed in version 4.2.2) As with arbitrary file upload vulnerabilities of this kind, an attacker can leverage them to write a PHP web shell to the site and execute arbitrary code, which can then be abused to create administrator accounts, exfiltrate data, or seize control of the entire WordPress site. It...

Sep 04, 2026

9

Plex Urges Immediate Updates After Patching Multiple Undisclosed Security Flaws

Plex is urging users to update their instances to the latest version following the release of an update that patches multiple security flaws. The fixes are available in Plex Media Server 1.43.3 and Plex Desktop 1.115.0. The streaming media service did not elaborate on what those issues are, but said CVE identifiers have been requested for them. "We recommend all server owners and Desktop users update to the latest version as soon as possible," Plex said in an announcement this week. "If you're running Plex Media Server on a NAS device, the updated version may not be available in their package manager yet, but you can install the package manually." In August 2025, Plex addressed a high-severity security flaw ( CVE-2025-34158 , CVSS score: 8.5), an authentication bug that stemmed from the "/myplex/account" endpoint incorrectly exposing the server owner's account details, including their administrative access token, even when accessed by any...

Sep 04, 2026

10

Google Releases Chrome Update to Patch Actively Exploited V8 Zero-Day

Google on Thursday released security updates to patch 12 vulnerabilities, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-85046 (CVSS score: 8.8), has been described as a type confusion bug in V8, Chrome's JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 152.0.7977.82 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page," reads a description of the flaw in CVE.org. Security researcher Salvatore Gulizia (aka Serotav) has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on August 4, 2026. The researcher has been awarded a bug bounty of $1,000 for responsible disclosure. In a separate blog post detailing the issue, Gulizia  described it as a "V8 bug in the compilers that leads to an array containing PACKED_ELEMENTS to receive the map PACKED_SMI_ELEMENTS, this can be turned into arbitrary read/write on the J...

Sep 04, 2026