IT News Analysis

1

CISO's Expert Guide to Agentic Pentesting for Websites

Attackers now weaponize new vulnerabilities in about five days (Mandiant, part of Google Cloud). The median organization takes 43 days to patch one (Verizon DBIR 2026). A new free guide explains how autonomous AI agents are closing that gap, and what security leaders must demand before pointing one at production. TL;DR Exploitation is now the front door. It starts 31% of breaches (Verizon DBIR 2026), the #1 initial-access vector, while annual pentesting leaves an estimated 90% of the estate untested. The capability is proven, not projected. An autonomous system topped HackerOne's US leaderboard in 2025 (XBOW), and peer-reviewed agents exploited 87% of one-day flaws unaided (Fang et al., 2024). Continuous beats periodic, measurably. Programmatic testing makes teams 4.5x more likely to fix criticals within three days (Cobalt, 2026). It's an AI agent in your production. Hold it to a bar. Provable coverage, an independent validator, blast-radius guardrails, and a...

Sep 17, 2026

2

China-Aligned FamousSparrow Deploys SparroWocky Backdoor Across Latin America

The China-aligned state-sponsored threat actor known as FamousSparrow has been observed deploying a previously unreported backdoor called SparroWocky in attacks targeting multiple countries in Latin America since at least August 2025. "SparroWocky is a modular, C++ backdoor," ESET security researchers Alexandre Côté Cyr and Romain Dumont said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. "Its architecture and the techniques used by its authors indicate strong knowledge of anti-analysis tricks and Windows internals." SparroWocky is so named for the fact that early iterations of the malware have been found to contain the first stanza of Jabberwocky , a famous nonsense poem written by the English author, poet, and mathematician Lewis Carroll in around 1855. The latest findings from ESET indicate that the cyber espionage group , which shares some level of overlap with Earth Estries and Salt Typhoon, has replaced SparrowDoor with Spar...

Sep 17, 2026

3

OpenAI Reveals Six Model Incidents Involving Hidden Failures and Unauthorized Uploads

OpenAI on Wednesday disclosed six new instances of "unexpected or concerning model behavior" that took place over the past six months, while sharing a new framework for reporting, tracking, investigating, and disclosing model misalignment in a bid to improve transparency. "As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research," OpenAI said. "We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer." "Decisions about how AI development should proceed in the months and years to come need to draw on evidence that people outside the companies building frontier models can examine for themselves." The six incidents are outside of the recently disclosed misaligned activity targeting Hugging Face , DseWiki , and RubyGems . Details of the inc...

Sep 17, 2026

4

AI Security's Greatest Hits

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.

5

BIND 9 Update Fixes 14 Flaws, Including an Unauthenticated Crash Over DNS-over-HTTPS

The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has released  BIND 9.20.29 and 9.21.26  to fix fourteen security flaws it  disclosed  on 16 September in BIND 9, its open-source DNS server software. One of them affects any BIND server that answers DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH). A sender with no credentials can crash the server process, named, with a single request that carries an invalid SIG(0) signature, if the sender closes the connection before named finishes checking the signature. ISC said in its advisories that it is not aware of any of the fourteen being exploited. Which Release Fixes What The fixed releases, described in ISC's  release notes , are: BIND 9.20.29, on the current stable branch: fixes all fourteen BIND 9.21.26, on the development branch: fixes thirteen, because CVE-2026-19662 does not affect 9.21 BIND 9.20.29-S1, the Supported Preview Edition for support customers: fixes all fourteen ISC lists no workarounds for any of the...

Sep 17, 2026

6

Gyazo Breach Exposes 23.62 Million User Records and 490 Million Image Metadata Records

A security breach at Gyazo , Helpfeel's image-sharing service, exposed about 23.62 million user records, including email addresses and password hashes, the Kyoto-based company said in a  notice  published Wednesday. It also exposed about 490 million image metadata records, mostly for images from January 2019 or earlier, including the IDs that make up Gyazo image links. Helpfeel said those IDs could be used to view the images without permission, and that it has temporarily disabled viewing of some of them. Helpfeel asked every Gyazo user to change their password and to change it on any other service that uses the same or a similar one. It also asked users to watch for suspicious emails or messages related to the incident. The attacker gained access through a vulnerability in Gyazo's image upload server, ran arbitrary commands on Helpfeel's systems, and accessed Gyazo's database, the company said. It has not said what kind of flaw it was. Helpfeel said no pay...

Sep 17, 2026

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Free Assessment: Identify Hidden Internal Risk

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

8

Cisco Warns of New Zero-Day ISE Auth Bypass (CVSS 10.0) Exploited in Active Attacks

Cisco has warned of a fresh maximum-severity security flaw impacting Identity Services Engine (ISE) that has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76460 (CVSS score: 10.0), could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication. "This vulnerability is due to insufficient authentication control on an API endpoint," Cisco said. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to an affected API endpoint. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to gain unauthorized access to the affected device by bypassing the web-based management interface." The issue affects Cisco ISE and Cisco ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC), regardless of device configuration. It has been addressed in the following versions -

Sep 17, 2026

9

U.S. Seizes NightmareStresser Domains Linked to Hundreds of Thousands of DDoS Attacks

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday announced the court-authorized seizure of internet domains associated with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)-for-hire service known as NightmareStresser. The domains in question are: nightmare-stresser[.]com and nightmarestresser[.]org. Visitors to the site are now greeted by a seizure banner that states - "This domain has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in accordance with a seizure warrant pursuant to 18 U.S.C. §§ 981(a)(1)(A) and (b), 982(b)(1), and 1030(i) (1)(A); and 21 U.S.C. § 853 issued by the United States District Court for the District of Alaska as part of a joint international law enforcement operation and action by: United States Attorney's Office for the District of Alaska, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Anchorage Field Office, [and] Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)." These so-called booter services are usually advertised as stress testing utilities but have been used to...

Sep 17, 2026

10

Attackers Exploit Issabel Framework Flaw Enabling Unauthenticated OS Command Execution

A critical security flaw in Issabel Framework , a web-based framework for the open-source unified communications PBX software, has come under active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-89026 (CVSS v3.1 score: 9.8/CVSS v4.0 score: 9.3), which can allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary operating system (OS) commands by taking advantage of a hard-coded JSON Web Token (JWT) signing key. The Issabel Framework "contains a hard-coded HS256 JWT signing key in the pbxapi index.php file that is identical across every installation, allowing unauthenticated remote attackers to forge valid bearer tokens," VulnCheck said in an alert. "Attackers can use the forged token to call the manager '/pbxapi/manager/originate' endpoint with the System application parameter, causing Asterisk to execute arbitrary OS commands as the Asterisk user." A patch for the vulnerability was pushed on August 1, 2026, and plugs the flaw by r...

Sep 16, 2026