IT News Analysis

1

BlueNoroff Zoom Phishing Kit Profiles Crypto Wallets Before Malware Delivery

The North Korean threat actors behind the ClickFix-style campaigns that employ typosquatted Zoom and Microsoft Teams domains have been found to operate an active phishing kit to impersonate the videoconferencing platforms in social engineering campaigns designed to deliver malware. " BlueNoroff has operationalised trust abuse by combining compromised industry contacts, social engineering, wallet reconnaissance and malware delivery into a repeatable victim acquisition pipeline," JUMPSEC said in a detailed report shared with The Hacker News. "The platform profiles victims' cryptocurrency wallets before malware delivery, enabling selective targeting of high-value victims." Describing the campaign as an operator-driven victim acquisition platform, the cybersecurity company noted that the activity involves using compromised trusted contacts as the initial access vector to create a self-propagating attack chain via Telegram. Details of the activity have been...

Jul 24, 2026

2

SANS SEC401: The Security Foundation Every Specialization Needs

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

3

Certighost Exploit Lets Low-Privileged Active Directory Users Impersonate a Domain Controller

Researchers H0j3n and Aniq Fakhrul published a working exploit on July 24 that lets a low-privileged Active Directory user obtain a certificate for a Domain Controller and authenticate as that machine. They codenamed the flaw Certighost . Because Domain Controller accounts carry directory replication rights, the resulting Kerberos credential can retrieve the krbtgt secret through DCSync . Microsoft patched the Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) issue ten days earlier as CVE-2026-54121 . Microsoft classed the flaw as improper authorization and assigned it a CVSS score of 8.8. Exploitation requires network access and a domain account, but no administrator rights or user interaction. In the researchers' test, a normal Domain Users account could create a computer account under the default ms-DS-MachineAccountQuota value of 10 or reuse one it already controlled. The chain also required an Enterprise CA that followed the vulnerable chain path, enrollment through t...

Jul 24, 2026

4

ChatGPT AgentForger Flaw Could Deploy Rogue Workspace Agents via a Phishing Link

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical vulnerability in OpenAI's ChatGPT Workspace Agents that could have allowed a single phishing link to stealthily build, authorize, and deploy an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent inside a victim's organization. The vulnerability has been codenamed AgentForger by Zenity Labs. The issue has since been addressed by OpenAI as of June 8, 2026, following responsible disclosure. "A single link could hijack OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent Builder to stand up an attacker-controlled AI agent with a real employee's access and its approvals switched off," the AI security company said in a two-part report shared with The Hacker News. The attack occurs when an unsuspecting employee clicks open a benign-looking ChatGPT link, causing it to spawn a new AI agent within the company's trust boundary that does the attacker's bidding. The issue is a case of cross-site request forgery (CSRF) that forges an attack...

Jul 24, 2026

5

Bing Images Flaws Let Crafted SVGs Run Commands as SYSTEM on Microsoft's Servers

A crafted SVG submitted to Bing's image search ran commands as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM on Microsoft's production image-processing workers, and as root on the Linux machines in the same fleet. XBOW's testing got the same result on workers across different hosts and network ranges, so the problem sat in Bing's image tier, not on one bad machine. Microsoft issued two critical CVEs, CVE-2026-32194 and CVE-2026-32191, and rated both 9.8 on the CVSS scale. XBOW, the autonomous offensive security startup, found both and reported them privately. Bing users have no patch or mitigation to apply: Microsoft fixed both server-side before the advisories went out in March, and the records state there is "no customer action to resolve." Neither advisory recorded exploitation or public disclosure when they went up on March 19. XBOW published the exploit mechanics on July 23, after holding them back at Microsoft's request until the remediation had landed. What outlive...

Jul 24, 2026

6

Seeing AI Agents Is Not Enough. Security Teams Must Enforce What They Can Do

AI agent security is moving through a familiar maturity curve: adoption, then visibility, and finally, control. But what we've collectively discovered is that enforcing least privilege for AI agents is harder than we ever imagined. This is why there are so many approaches, from prompt filtering to identity-layer access controls. Where we've collectively landed is that understanding the intent of AI agents is essential to securing them. It's not easy, but it's the only path forward. Organizations approach this challenge with different levels of sophistication. For many, the current goal is simply to find the AI agents already operating across the business. That is a necessary first step. AI agents are appearing in SaaS platforms, developer environments, cloud workflows, customer support systems, productivity tools, and internal applications. Some are sanctioned, and others are not. But discovery alone isn't useful. AI agents are not passive; they reason, plan, c...

Jul 24, 2026

7

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

Network defense, hardening, and IR across Windows, Linux, and macOS. 20 labs, GSEC.

8

Hacker Runs Hermes AI Agent Unattended for Post-Exploitation at Thai Finance Ministry

Someone installed a popular AI assistant on a rented server, switched off the setting that makes it ask permission before running risky commands, and pointed it at Thailand's Ministry of Finance, which runs the country's treasury and tax collection. The agent then worked through the ministry's network on its own, checking hosts for ways to gain root access, hunting through file systems, and crawling a folder of staff personnel records going back to 2012. The operator left the agent's own logs sitting on a web server with directory listing switched on, where threat intelligence firm Hunt.io and researcher Bob Diachenko found them, along with 585 files and 470 MB of attack tooling. The tool is Hermes , an open-source assistant from Nous Research that people install to manage their mail, run chores, and take instructions over Telegram or Slack. It is not a hacking tool, and nothing here is a flaw in it. The mode the operator used, called YOLO, is a documented feat...

Jul 24, 2026

9

Golden Chickens Resurfaces With Four New Malware Families and Modular Implants

The threat actors behind the Golden Chickens malware-as-a-service (MaaS) ecosystem have resurfaced with four new malware families, indicating that the operators are showing no signs of stopping despite extensive public disclosures into their inner workings. The malware families in question are: TinyEgg, ChonkyChicken, a modularized variant of ChonkyChicken, and a modified web browser credential theft utility codenamed ChromEggscalator. Recorded Future's Insikt Group is tracking the group under the moniker TAG-195. TAG-195 is a financially motivated malware-as-a-service (MaaS) developer whose tooling has been previously linked to TAG-127 as an operator and customer. The threat intelligence company said it has also observed TAG-127 deploying TinyEgg via ClickFix-style social engineering campaigns that trick unsuspecting users into manually executing malicious commands. "The four new families indicate an architectural transition and evolution in the TAG-195 MaaS ecosys...

Jul 24, 2026

10

NodeBB Patches Eight AI-Found Flaws Exposing Admin Access and Private Chats

Eight security flaws in NodeBB went public on Wednesday, along with the code to exploit them. Aikido Security rates all eight as high severity and says its AI pentest agents found them in a six-hour review of the forum software's source code. Every version before 4.14.0 is affected. NodeBB has fixed them all, and administrators should be on 4.14.2. The simplest one takes a settings change. A regular forum member could point their homepage setting at the admin address, reload the page, and the admin dashboard opened for them. No password, no exploit code. The forum's own interface blocks that setting, but the block only ran in the browser and could be sidestepped. Most of what a member could then reach was read-only, including the error log and any user list an admin had exported, though they could also swap the site logo. Two more gave an attacker with no account at all access to things meant to be private. One let anyone claim to be any user and read private messages...

Jul 24, 2026