IT News Analysis

1

Growing Up The Hard Way

Open Source had a great childhood. For two decades it got to be a kid. It ran around barefoot, gave everything away, trusted strangers, and never once thought about who was watching. It ran the kind of lemonade stand that took IOUs from anyone who wandered up — take what you need, pay me back whenever, no need to leave a name. It was idyllic. It was also, in retrospect, a little feral. Then, somewhere around 2020, its voice started to crack. It tried to grow a beard. Acne everywhere. SolarWinds, then Log4Shell, then TeamPCP and Shai-Hulud — the supply chain woke up one morning like the end of Ender's Game : the simulation had been real the whole time. Those were real battles. Real systems, real money, real people, all of it quietly leaning on code we'd been treating like a practice round. And then the adults showed up with rules: executive orders, European regulations, permission slips for half the places it wanted to go. What it did not get was a nice, slow, storybook ...

Aug 07, 2026

2

18-Year-Old Linux SCTP Flaw Could Let Local Users Gain Root and Escape Containers

A use-after-free bug in Linux's SCTP networking code can be turned into full root on a host, and Tencent researchers say they used it to escape a container and reach the machine underneath. The flaw has existed since 2008. The fix already shipped: stable kernels 7.1.6, 6.18.42, 6.12.101 and 6.6.148, released August 3, close it. Anyone running an older kernel with SCTP reachable should update. Tracked as  CVE-2026-64564  and named SCTPhantom by its finders, the flaw was disclosed publicly on August 6, two days after the kernel CVE team assigned it. No public exploit code had surfaced at the time of writing, and The Hacker News found no entry for the flaw in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog as of August 7. The flaw is local, not remote, and it needs SCTP reachable on the target, which limits exposure. Where those conditions held, Tencent Zhuque Lab reports it got root on the kernel builds it tested for Debian 13, Ubuntu 24.04, Rocky Linux 9 and RHEL 9, and ...

Aug 07, 2026

3

AI Threat Readiness 101

Learn the four pillars of AI threat readiness and how security teams can reduce risk faster with detection, validation, and remediation built for today's threat landscape.

4

New NatJack Attacks Hijack TCP Sessions and Spoof DNS by Manipulating NAT Tables

Security researcher Malcolm Stagg has disclosed a new attack class called  NatJack  that manipulates network address translation (NAT) connection state to hijack active TCP sessions, spoof DNS responses, expose mapped ports, and exhaust NAT tables. Presented at Black Hat USA 2026 , the research found affected behavior across independently developed implementations, including Windows and Linux. Two implementation-specific flaws have been assigned CVEs:  CVE-2026-56181  (CVSS score: 8.3) in Windows NAT used by Hyper-V, and  CVE-2026-63913  (CVSS score: 8.2) in Linux Netfilter conntrack. NatJack generally requires the attacker to have privileged access to a system behind the same NAT as the victim. The mitigation guidance therefore emphasizes separating untrusted workloads from trusted systems that share NAT infrastructure. There is no single patch for the broader attack class. Organizations should apply available Windows and Linux updates and encryp...

Aug 07, 2026

5

Microsoft 365 AitM Phishing Hijacks Accounts to Collect Payroll and Finance Emails

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to an active "widespread email-driven phishing campaign" that employs adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) techniques to take control of Microsoft 365 accounts with an aim to identify key personnel involved in financial workflows and gather related email. "The campaign uses residential proxies to disguise malicious sign-ins as ordinary consumer traffic," Arctic Wolf Labs said . "Automated activity maintains compromised sessions at approximately eight-hour intervals." The activity is assessed to impact organizations across healthcare, education, manufacturing, government, and professional services sectors located in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. It shares tactical overlaps with Payroll Pirate attacks tracked by Microsoft under the moniker Storm-2755 . Payroll Pirates is the designation assigned to a broader financially motivated threat cluster that involves hijacking the accounts of employees to reroute sal...

Aug 07, 2026

6

AI-Assisted HTTP Terminator Finds Novel HTTP Desync Techniques and Apache Zero-Day

PortSwigger says HTTP Terminator, an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted research system built by James Kettle , generated and proved new HTTP desynchronization techniques after exploring 30,000 candidate desync vectors. PortSwigger said a separate human-guided discovery cascade also exposed a zero-day in Apache Traffic Server. Kettle said HTTP Terminator tested 30,000 websites where scanning was authorized through bug bounty or vulnerability disclosure programs and found roughly 700 vulnerable targets before deeper validation and RQP research. Kettle said those findings involved banks, government infrastructure, security products, and an airport. The research produced new desync triggers, a dual-matching Content-Length pattern, and a "dangling-byte" technique designed to make response queue poisoning (RQP) more reliable. RQP can potentially make a front end lose track of which back-end response belongs to which user, potentially exposing another user's resp...

Aug 07, 2026

7

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

AI adoption has exploded, but every new app, integration and extension introduces new threats and risks.

8

Malware Can Abuse Windows Hello for Business Keys for Persistent Entra ID Access

Entra ID researcher Dirk-jan Mollema demonstrated that malware already running in a signed-in Windows session can silently use the victim's Windows Hello for Business key to authenticate to Microsoft Entra ID. The attacker can then establish longer-term cloud access, register a device it controls, obtain a Primary Refresh Token (PRT), and add further authentication methods where tenant policies permit. On TPM-backed systems, the attacker does not extract the private key, recover the PIN, or trigger a biometric prompt. Windows ticketing keeps private-key operations available while the user is interactively signed in, allowing code running as the user to ask Windows to sign authentication data. Administrator privileges are not required. The technique requires code execution in the victim's signed-in session. Mollema describes the behavior as a consequence of how Windows Hello for Business works and says it was left as-is. The disclosure does not report active exploitatio...

Aug 07, 2026

9

Claude Code and Gemini CLI Flaws Let a GitHub Issue Reach CI Workflow Secrets

A GitHub issue opened by an account with no repository privileges was enough to execute code on the CI runners behind Anthropic's and Google's own coding-agent repositories. On OpenAI's, it was enough to hijack the next agent run. Novee Security ran the attack against each vendor's agent in the configuration that the vendor ships by default, and presented the work at Black Hat USA on August 5. Two CVEs came out of it. Both are patched. Gemini CLI carries the worst of the two. CVE-2026-12537 (CVSS 4 score: 10.0) is an OS command injection in the container launcher, reached through a crafted .gemini/.env file, which lets an unprivileged attacker run code on the host of a headless CI platform before the sandbox starts. It is fixed in Gemini CLI 0.39.1 and run-gemini-cli 0.1.22. In Claude Code, CVE-2026-54316 turned Hugging Face's public download counter into an exfiltration channel that leaked an API key one character at a time, and is fixed in 2.1.163. Every ...

Aug 07, 2026

10

TeamPCP Linked To Redis Attacks Dating Back To 2020 And Later Supply Chain Campaign

A new analysis has uncovered that the threat actor tracked as TeamPCP has been active on the cybercrime scene as far back as 2020, indicating the group has been compromising internet-facing infrastructure for years before training their sights on the software supply chain. "The connection is supported by overlapping domains, malware deployment paths, staging techniques, backend infrastructure, and operational tradecraft," Oligo Security researchers Avi Lumelsky and Gal Elbaz said . This includes two campaigns observed in the second half of 2025: ShadowRay 2.0 (aka IronErn), which involved hijacking artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure into a self-propagating botnet, and TA-NATALSTATUS , which targeted exposed Redis servers to deliver cryptocurrency miners. TA-NATALSTATUS is assessed to be an evolution of a prior campaign that was detailed by Trend Micro in April 2020 that involved targeting Redis servers to deploy malware. This suggests that the threat actor h...

Aug 07, 2026