IT News Analysis

1

AI Agents Are Rewriting the Rules of Lateral Movement

Security teams have spent decades asking whether an identity has too much access. AI agents raise a harder question: how can we determine which paths an autonomous system can discover, given the access it already has? A person may try several ways to complete a task. A deterministic application follows the flow its developer wrote. But an AI agent is relentless in its pursuit of done. In May 2026, OpenAI announced that one of its models had disproved a 1946 Erdős conjecture in discrete geometry, largely by working through paths a mathematician would abandon as too tedious. The same principle applies to cybersecurity. An AI agent can test thousands of actions, abandon failed routes, discover credentials, switch tools, and keep going. That persistence is part of what makes agents useful, but it also changes how we need to think about lateral movement. AI agent risk has two dimensions: Access defines the possible blast radius Autonomy determines how much an agent can do with...

Sep 22, 2026

2

Do You Need to Protect AI, Use AI, or Govern AI? SANS has Mapped All Three.

Free frameworks, guidelines, and role-based AI security training, gathered in one place.

3

New CVSS 10.0 VeloCloud Orchestrator Flaw Actively Exploited in Certificate-Based Setups

Attackers are exploiting a new flaw in on-premises VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO), the server that manages the Edge devices in a VeloCloud SD-WAN, Arista said on September 22. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-93952 , may allow a remote attacker with no login access to privilege internal functions and affect the VCO host. Only orchestrators set up to authenticate their Edges with certificates are exposed. As of September 22,  fixed releases  are out for the 5.2 and 6.4 release trains, but not yet for the 6.1 and 7.0 trains. Arista has already patched the Hosted and Dedicated versions of VCO. The affected releases include those that fixed a different VCO flaw, which Arista reported as  exploited in July . Arista gave the flaw a CVSS 3.1 score of 10.0. A successful attack may compromise the orchestrator and the data it manages. A compromised VCO may also give attackers access to the Edge devices it manages. Arista said the flaw "was discovered externally and is known t...

Sep 22, 2026

4

DORA Year Two: Can Your SOC Actually See the Attack?

When the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) became enforceable across the European Union in January 2025, it triggered an administrative sprint. Financial entities spent the first year establishing risk governance, assessing third-party service providers, updating contract clauses, and documenting incident escalation workflows. Now in its second year, the harder part of DORA is demonstrating how well frameworks work in practice. EU regulators are increasing their focus on DORA implementation, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) incident analysis, and the effectiveness of ICT risk supervision. For security teams, that raises an important question: does the SOC have enough visibility to detect, investigate, and scope an active intrusion across critical systems? While DORA doesn’t prescribe a particular security stack, several of its requirements rely on continuous visibility in the ICT environment to identify behavior that may indicate an emerging risk. Continuou...

Sep 22, 2026

5

New Linux Kernel Flaw Gives ARM64 KVM Guests Read-Write Access to Host Memory

A new flaw in the Linux kernel's KVM virtualization code for ARM64 processors can leave a freed piece of host memory exposed to a guest virtual machine on hosts with nested virtualization enabled. The bug, tracked as  CVE-2026-89775 , allows a guest to read and write host kernel memory, and the researcher who found it says it can be used to escape the guest and run code on the host machine. The affected code is part of the mainline Linux kernel for ARM64, and it is fixed in Linux 6.18.51, 7.2.5, and 7.3-rc1. Nested virtualization allows a guest to run its own hypervisor, enabling it to host virtual machines. On ARM64, it is off by default. It is  an experimental boot-time mode  that needs Armv8.4 hardware with a feature called FEAT_NV2, so a plain ARM64 KVM host that never turns it on is outside the reported attack path. The flaw sits in the part of KVM that handles nested virtualization on ARM64. When a guest arranges its memory in a certain way, a size calculat...

Sep 22, 2026

6

SharePoint Flaw Initially Listed as Spoofing by Microsoft Enables Authenticated RCE

A SharePoint Server vulnerability that Microsoft initially classified as a spoofing flaw with a CVSS score of 6.5 actually enables authenticated remote code execution, according to full technical details published today by Viettel Cyber Security researcher Dinh Ho Anh Khoa. The flaw, CVE-2026-65660 , affects SharePoint Server 2016, 2019, and Subscription Edition. Patches have been available since the  August 11 security updates , and the National Vulnerability Database scores it 8.8. Microsoft's advisory  describes CVE-2026-65660 as allowing an authorized attacker to perform spoofing and assigns no impact to integrity or availability. The CVE record that Microsoft publishes separately, updated on September 11, titles the same flaw a remote code execution vulnerability and says it allows an authorized attacker to execute code. Both records assign CWE-94, a code-injection weakness. Defenders who triaged CVE-2026-65660 based on the advisory saw a moderate spoofi...

Sep 22, 2026

7

Mikko Hyppönen and Enterprise CISOs on What AI-Speed Attacks Actually Change

Join the summit where leading security teams lay out how they prepare for attackers with AI on their side.

8

Malicious npm Package indexed-btree Hid Its Loader in Runtime Code Before Removal

A malicious npm package named "indexed-btree" has been observed hiding its malicious behavior within application code rather than using lifecycle scripts, indicating that threat actors are likely shifting tactics in response to recent security controls . "Indexed-btree is a malicious npm package mimicking the legit sorted-btree package, an ordinary B-tree/indexing utility," Checkmarx said . "Unlike the common attacks we've seen in the supply chain space, this package does not rely on preinstall / postinstall at all. Instead, it runs entirely from application code at runtime." The package and the associated GitHub repository are no longer available for download from npm. However, statistics show the package was first uploaded to the registry on June 18, 2026, by an npm user named " charlessadler25 ," amassing millions of downloads in a short span of time . To make matters worse, the campaign may have generated illicit profits for the...

Sep 22, 2026

9

SideCopy Broadens India Targeting to Academia With ReverseRAT Spear-Phishing

The threat actor known as SideCopy has been observed using spear-phishing lures to target academic institutions in India, expanding their strategic focus beyond government entities. "SideCopy campaign operations typically initiate through spear-phishing campaigns that leverage the abuse of mshta.exe to execute malicious scripts and circumvent standard security protocols," Trellix researchers Boggavarapu R S S Srinivas Gupta and Ravishankar N C said in a technical report. "This delivery mechanism facilitates the deployment of a remote access trojan (RAT), which serves as the central pillar of their offensive infrastructure." Active since at least 2019, SideCopy (aka TAG-140) is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that originates from Pakistan, and shares overlaps with the Transparent Tribe cluster. Historically, the threat actor has primarily targeted Indian defense forces and government officials. In a report published in June 2026, Seqrite Labs a...

Sep 22, 2026

10

One Hidden Meta Muse Setting Could Let Attackers Turn the AI Assistant Into a Backdoor

Malware already running on a Mac can quietly take over Meta's Muse assistant and use the broad access its owner granted the app, security researcher Patrick Wardle has shown in a  proof-of-concept  released on September 21. It works by changing a hidden setting so that when the user taps the microphone and dictates a prompt, the words go to the attacker instead of Meta. The flaw is in the Mac version of Muse, and it only works if an attacker can already run code as the logged-in user. It cannot break into a Mac on its own. But Wardle told The Hacker News that a remote attacker could hijack Muse and steal its token through a ClickFix trick, which fools the user into running a single command with nothing to download or install. Muse is the personal AI agent Meta  launched this month  in the United States. Once a user turns it on, it can work across their files, email, messages, calendar, shopping and smart-home apps, using whatever access the person chooses to g...

Sep 22, 2026