IT News Analysis

1

U.S. Agencies Accuse China AI Firms of Distilling Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok

U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have accused China-based artificial intelligence (AI) companies of conducting "systematic extraction" of proprietary functionalities and capabilities of American frontier models through distillation attacks. The activity has been described as occurring at an industrial-scale and one that forms the "core" of their AI development strategy, according to a bulletin released by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). "While 'distillation' is recognized as a legitimate and useful technique in AI research, China-based AI companies are engaging in aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale that extract restricted proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U.S. frontier AI models," the authoring agencies said . The joint advisory noted that Chinese AI firms l...

Sep 09, 2026

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SANS 2026 Security Awareness & Culture Report Shows What's Next

11 years of practitioner data on what it takes to keep pace with a field that keeps shifting.

3

Chrome V8 Zero-Day Exploited in the Wild Enables Code Execution Inside Sandbox

Google on Thursday released updates to patch 230 security vulnerabilities, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The medium-severity vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-87491 (CVSS score: N/A), has been described as an out-of-bounds bug in V8, Chrome's JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Out-of-bounds write in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 153.0.8010.36 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page," reads a description of the flaw on the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Security researcher Jihyeon Jeong of Compsec Lab, Seoul National University, has been acknowledged for discovering and reporting the flaw on August 6, 2026. The researcher received a $2,500 bug bounty reward for responsible disclosure. Google acknowledged it is "aware that an exploit for CVE-2026-87491 exists in the wild," but has not disclosed any additional specific information r...

Sep 09, 2026

4

New cPanel Flaw Lets a Hosting Account With Mail Privileges Run Code as Root

cPanel has patched a flaw that it says lets a single hosting account take control of an entire server. An authenticated account holder with mail-related privileges can create files of their choosing on the server through EmailTrack and, from there, run code as the root user. cPanel published the  advisory on September 8  and says every supported version of cPanel and WHM is affected. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-67401 . cPanel's advisory calls it an SQL injection issue in EmailTrack, but does not say which cPanel feature or privilege an account needs. cPanel's developer documentation lists an EmailTrack module that tracks email statistics, and the advisory does not say whether that is the affected code. cPanel is web hosting control panel software. A customer manages one hosting account via cPanel, while the provider manages the entire machine via WHM as the root user. Attackers exploited  a different cPanel flaw in April . Taking over the panel is not the s...

Sep 09, 2026

5

F5 BIG-IP APM Malware Injects a PHP Web Shell Into Memory, Evading Disk Scans

Malware linked to break-ins at F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager appliances hides a PHP web shell in memory instead of in a file on disk, Sophos said in an analysis published on September 7. When Apache loads any of the three appliances' own PHP scripts, the malware adds the web shell to the copy held in memory, so a check of the file on disk can come back clean. Those three scripts are the same ones F5 pointed customers to in March, when it said changes to them alone do not show a break-in. A web shell is usually a small script an attacker drops into a web server's folders to run commands through ordinary web requests. Because it sits on disk, defenders look for it by scanning files and comparing them against known-good copies. That approach does not work here. As the researchers put it, the web shell "does not need to exist in its final form on disk." The three scripts are apm_css.php3, full_wt.php3 and webtop_popup_css.php3, part of the BIG-IP APM webtop. ...

Sep 09, 2026

6

Researcher Drops New Microsoft Defender PoC Showing ShieldBreak Patch Can Be Bypassed

The security researcher known as Chaotic Eclipse has dropped a proof-of-concept (PoC) for yet another zero-day in Microsoft Defender. The vulnerability, codenamed ShieldCrash , is assessed to be a patch bypass for CVE-2026-69414 (CVSS score: 7.8), also called ShieldBreak , which the researcher reported last month. "Microsoft has failed to properly patch ShieldBreak CVE-2026-69414," Chaotic Eclipse said. "Under specific conditions it is still possible to trigger the exact same problem that was caused by ShieldBreak. While Microsoft fixed several things to prevent re-exploiting the issue, they missed a spot where ShieldBreak can still be exploited." The PoC demonstrates an arbitrary file read as SYSTEM with the latest version of Windows installed. All supported versions of the desktop operating system are said to be impacted. The development comes days after Redmond shipped an update to the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine to plug CVE-2026-69414. The issue...

Sep 09, 2026

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New Webinar: How AI Broke the Pyramid of Pain for Threat Detection

Attacker tools and infrastructure are now changing at machine speed. Learn what’s changed and how to adapt.

8

SAP Patches CVSS 10.0 Kernel Flaw Enabling Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution

SAP has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities, including a maximum-severity flaw in SAP Extended Passport (EPP) Processing that could have a severe impact on the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the application The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-44756 (CVSS score: 10.0), has been described as a case of memory corruption. Discovered and reported by SAP security company Onapsis, it has been codenamed OVERPASS . The flaw, which resides in the SAP kernel's processing of the Extended Passport (EPP), is exploitable remotely and without authentication, and allows bad actors to run arbitrary operating system commands on the SAP host with SAP administrative privileges, leading to a total compromise of the underlying SAP business data and processes. CVE-2026-44756 stems from a missing boundary validation during the deserialization of EPP data, leading to a memory safety violation when processing externally supplied length fields. An unauthe...

Sep 09, 2026

9

Microsoft Patches Record 974 Flaws, Including Two Exploited Windows Zero-Days

Microsoft on Tuesday broke Patch Tuesday records by addressing an earth-shattering 974 vulnerabilities spanning its software portfolio, including two flaws that it said have been actively exploited in the wild. These include 723 flaws in Windows, 111 in Office and Office 2016, 62 in SQL, and 22 in Developer Tools. Of these, over 110 shortcomings have been assigned a critical severity rating. Three prominent vulnerability types, namely privilege escalation, remote code execution, and information disclosure, account for nearly 90% of the flaws patched this month. Along with Microsoft's fixes for 25 non-Microsoft CVEs, the update brings the total number of vulnerabilities resolved to 999. September's record-setting security updates come after Microsoft patched 457 vulnerabilities in August, 663 in July , 220 in June , and 161 in May . "At this scale, the challenge is not simply getting through the patch list but knowing what needs attention first," Jack Bicer...

Sep 09, 2026

10

N-able N-central Pre-Auth RCE Flaw Exploited in the Wild

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a maximum-severity security flaw impacting N-able N-central to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to apply the fixes by September 11, 2026. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-86218 (CVSS score: 10.0), which has been described as a case of static code injection. It has been patched in N-central 2026.3 Hotfix 4 , released on September 5, 2026. "N-able N-central contains a static code injection vulnerability that could allow for pre-authentication remote code execution," CISA said. The development came shortly after Huntress said it commenced an investigation following the compromise of a customer's fully patched N-central production environment on September 4, 2026. However, it remains unclear if the intrusion involved CVE-2026-86218 or two other vulnerabilities ( CVE-2026-86206 and CVE-2026-86207 )...

Sep 09, 2026