IT News Analysis

1

World's Largest AI Model Repository Hugging Face Breached by Autonomous AI Agent

In an ironic twist, open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform Hugging Face revealed that it was the victim of a hack perpetrated by an autonomous AI agent system. The company said it detected and responded to the incident targeting its production infrastructure earlier last week. "We identified unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials used by our services," the company said in a statement. While an investigation into the intrusion remains ongoing, Hugging Face said it has found no evidence that the AI agent tampered with public, user-facing models, datasets, or Spaces, and its own software supply chain. The starting point of the attack was the data processing pipeline itself, with a malicious dataset abusing two code execution paths, viz., in its remote code dataset loader and a template injection in a dataset configuration, to run code on a processing worker.

Jul 20, 2026

2

SleeperGem Uses Three Malicious RubyGems Packages to Target Developer Machines

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new software supply chain attack codenamed SleeperGem targeting the Ruby ecosystem after three malicious gems were published to RubyGems with the end goal of serving additional payloads. The rogue gems are listed below - git_credential_manager (versions 2.8.0, 2.8.1, 2.8.2, 2.8.3) - Published on July 18, 2026 Dendreo (versions 1.1.3, 1.1.4) - Published on October 14, 2017 fastlane-plugin-run_tests_firebase_testlab (version 0.3.2) - Published on February 06, 2018 "Each malicious release is a loader," StepSecurity said in an analysis. "It fetches a second stage from an attacker controlled Forgejo host, checks whether it is running in a build system and skips if it is, and on a developer machine it drops a native daemon and installs persistence." One aspect of the attack that immediately stands out is that "git_credential_manager" impersonates the official Microsoft Git Credential Manager, while t...

Jul 20, 2026

3

Critical NGINX Vulnerability Can Crash Workers and May Allow Remote Code Execution

F5 has shipped fixes for a critical nginx flaw that lets a remote, unauthenticated attacker trigger a heap buffer overflow in the worker process with crafted HTTP requests. CVE-2026-42533 was patched on July 15 in nginx 1.30.4 (stable) and 1.31.3 (mainline) , and in NGINX Plus 37.0.3.1; anyone on an earlier build should upgrade. Triggering it can crash or restart the worker, causing a denial of service; where ASLR is disabled or can be bypassed, F5 says it may also allow remote code execution. The overflow lives in nginx's script engine, the code that assembles strings from directives at request time. It only surfaces under a specific configuration: a regex-based map whose output variable is referenced in a string expression after a capture from an earlier regex match. Under that pattern the engine's two-pass evaluation comes apart. The first pass measures how many bytes the result needs and allocates a buffer to fit; the second pass writes the bytes in. Both read the ...

Jul 19, 2026

4

Agentic AI Runs Recon, Phishing, and Malware Without a Human

Foster Nethercott explains how, then SANS SEC535 teaches the tradecraft. GOAA cert path.

5

UAC-0145 Uses ClickFix CAPTCHAs to Infect Ukrainian Devices wih Malware

Russian state-sponsored threat actors have been observed leveraging the infamous ClickFix strategy to trick Ukrainian targets into infecting their own machines with data-stealing malware. According to the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA), the activity has been attributed to UAC-0145 , a sub-cluster within Sandworm , an advanced hacking unit affiliated with GRU, Russia's primary foreign military intelligence agency. In these attacks, threat actors have been found to leverage fake CAPTCHA checks on compromised websites that instruct prospective targets to execute a PowerShell command in the terminal. "The mentioned command, as an example, could be intended for downloading and saving a VBS file in the Startup autorun directory; one of the variants of such a program was called GHETTOVIBE," CERT-UA said in an alert. The attacks also involve the use of SCOUTCURL, a PowerShell script that performs basic reconnaissance by harvesting details about t...

Jul 19, 2026

6

SonicWall SMA Zero-Days Exploited Before Disclosure to Gain Root Access

A previously undocumented threat actor has been attributed to the exploitation of recently disclosed SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series VPN appliances as zero-days prior their public disclosure since June 22, 2026. Cybersecurity company Volexity is tracking the activity under the moniker UTA0533 . The discovery was made following an incident response investigation earlier this month. The impacted organization has not been identified. "This threat actor was observed using multiple zero-day exploits, malware designed specifically for SonicWall SMA VPN appliances, as well as other attacker tradecraft," security researchers Sean Koessel and Steven Adair said in an analysis. The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-15409 (CVSS score: 10.0) and CVE-2026-15410 (CVSS score: 7.2), both of which could be chained to facilitate arbitrary command execution and take over susceptible devices. Patches for both the vulnerabilities were released by SonicWall this wee...

Jul 19, 2026

7

Webinar: 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

New wp2shell WordPress Core Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Run Code

Updated July 18, 2026: the two flaws now carry CVE IDs, the full mechanism has been published, a persistent-object-cache condition has surfaced, and a working proof-of-concept is public. The story below reflects all of it. An anonymous HTTP request can run code on a WordPress site. The bug is in core, so a bare install with zero plugins is exploitable. Every 6.9 and 7.0 site was in range until Friday, when WordPress shipped 6.9.5 and 7.0.2 and enabled what it calls forced updates through its auto-update system. wp2shell is two bugs, not one, and both now carry CVE IDs. CVE-2026-63030 is the REST API batch-route confusion; CVE-2026-60137 is a SQL injection in WordPress core. Chained, they take an anonymous request all the way to code execution. Since Friday, the full mechanism has been published, and a working proof-of-concept has gone up on GitHub. Adam Kues at Assetnote, Searchlight Cyber's attack surface management arm, found the batch-route bug and reported it throug...

Jul 17, 2026

9

OpenSSL HollowByte Flaw Could Freeze Server Memory with 11-Byte TLS Requests

Eleven bytes will make an unpatched OpenSSL server set aside up to 131 KB of memory for a message that never arrives. On the glibc systems Okta tested, that memory is gone until the process restarts. OpenSSL shipped the HollowByte fix in June with no CVE, no advisory, and no changelog entry pointing at it. Okta's Red Team, which reported the denial-of-service bug and named it, published the details on Thursday. The fixed releases are OpenSSL 4.0.1, 3.6.3, 3.5.7, 3.4.6, and 3.0.21 , all dated June 9. Every release on those branches before the fixed ones has it. Nothing in a normal patch pipeline will point you at them: there is no identifier for a scanner to match and no advisory to read. The flaw is that OpenSSL took the attacker's word for it. Every TLS handshake message carries a 4-byte header, three bytes of which declare how long the body will be. Older versions grew the receive buffer to that declared size the moment the header landed, before a single byte of the bo...

Jul 17, 2026

10

Seven Malicious Vite npm Packages Use Blockchain C2 to Deliver a RAT

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of seven malicious npm packages targeting the Vite frontend tooling ecosystem as part of a software supply chain attack. The malicious package campaign, codenamed ViteVenom by Checkmarx, marks an expansion of ChainVeil , which was observed using an "unprecedented" four-tier blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) infrastructure spanning Tron, Aptos, and Binance Smart Chain to deliver a remote access trojan (RAT) capable reverse shell, credential harvesting, file exfiltration, and persistent backdoor injection. "This tactic makes disabling or destroying the C2 infrastructure extremely difficult," Checkmarx researcher Pavan Gudimalla said in an analysis published last month. The activity has been attributed to a threat actor named SuccessKey, with evidence of malicious activity detected as far back as February 27, 2026, when cryptocurrency wallets linked to ViteVenom were activated. While the typosquats pub...

Jul 17, 2026