IT News Analysis

1

Installing the Fix for an Exploited WordPress Flaw Can Expose Some Sites One Last Time

Some WordPress sites can still be attacked while they install the fix for an actively exploited flaw, according to Umut Bayram, the Picus Security researcher who found it. The update that installs the fix still unpacks its files using the site's old, unpatched code, so an attacker who strikes at the right moment can run code on the server. The researcher advises blocking web access to the site's wp-content/upgrade folder before updating. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-119977 , affects WordPress 4.7 through 7.1.3. During a core update that uses a complete package, WordPress unpacks a copy of the new version into a temporary folder inside wp-content/upgrade. That copy includes the WordPress installer, and the web server can usually reach it. An attacker with no account who can determine the folder's name and access the installer before WordPress deletes the copy can end up running code on the server. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) ad...

Nov 06, 2026

2

OAuth review checklist: 4 steps to assess risk [Free Guide

Uncover risky OAuth grants and MCP server connections to protect your org from supply-chain attacks.

3

Hackers Target OpenSSH SSHole Flaw Within Hours of Disclosure, Gain Root on Honeypot

Threat actors are attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security flaw impacting OpenSSH that can enable sign-ins to accounts that have no password set, according to Previdian . The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-123158 (CVSS score: 8.1) and codenamed SSHole (or *sshole), impacts Linux systems that run OpenSSH on the musl C library with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) disabled, including Alpine Linux's default OpenSSH server configuration. An unauthenticated attacker can supply an oversized password to access accounts that are deliberately configured without usable passwords, without having to steal credentials or SSH keys. The issue, discovered by security researcher Ozgun Kultekin, has been addressed in OpenSSH 10.6p2 . The underlying issue dates back to a patch introduced in 2016 to fix a username enumeration vulnerability tracked as CVE-2016-6210 . Under specific conditions, the password-handling behavior in OpenSSH mistakenly interprets a failed pas...

Nov 06, 2026

4

OpenAI Launches GPT-6 Cyber After AI Helps Find 81 Firefox Flaws, 948 Linux Exploits

OpenAI on Thursday unveiled GPT‑6 Cyber , which it described as a major step forward in security research that brings together stronger cybersecurity capabilities with a step-change improvement in model alignment. The new model is "more capable at finding and fixing vulnerabilities, and far more reliable staying within the boundaries researchers set," OpenAI said . It has classified the model as Critical in cybersecurity under its Preparedness Framework. The artificial intelligence (AI) company said GPT‑6 Cyber is also better than its predecessors like GPT‑5.6 Cyber and GPT‑6 Astra when it comes to following task boundaries and avoiding exploiting out-of-scope services in 99.93% of cases, up from 94.49% for GPT-5.6 Cyber. It also scores 48.5% on ExploitGym, a cybersecurity benchmark that evaluates the capabilities of AI agents to autonomously turn known software vulnerabilities into functioning, real-world exploits. In comparison, GPT-5.6 Cyber scored 32.1%. OpenAI ...

Nov 06, 2026

5

Microsoft Paint RCE Fix Now Available, but Windows Update Won't Deliver It

A fix for CVE-2026-83844 , a remote code execution flaw in Windows Paint, is now in the Microsoft Store. Paint gets this fix only through a Store update, not through Windows updates. The fixed build, 11.2609.401.0, was the newest Paint build in all ten countries The Hacker News checked today. The flaw is an out-of-bounds read that could let an attacker run code over a network. Microsoft rates it as Important, with a CVSS score of 8.1, and says that a successful attack requires a deep understanding of the target system. The flaw was not known to be exploited or publicly disclosed when the company published it on October 13. Brian Vitko of RFF, a device-management software maker, checked which Paint builds the Store offered in six countries earlier this week. He found that the newest in each was 11.2605.81.0, a build without the fix. His test virtual machine has since moved to the fixed build on its own, through Store auto-update. That is one machine, and how quickly other PCs w...

Nov 06, 2026

6

Malicious Browser Extensions Could Use Claude Dispatch to Run Code on Users' Computers

A browser extension that can run scripts on claude.ai could make Claude Desktop run code on a person's computer, researchers at Forever Security, an endpoint security company, showed in a test. The attack needs Dispatch , a Claude feature that lets people send tasks from their phone to Claude Desktop. The flaw that makes this possible can still be exploited, the researchers said earlier this week. Claude Desktop is an AI agent that can run commands on the computer where it is installed. The researchers found that Dispatch also accepted an ordinary signed-in session on claude.ai, the Claude website, even though the site showed no link to it. That let an extension running on the site send Claude Desktop instructions as if the user had sent them. The researchers say Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, told them on October 13 that Dispatch would be retired, with the end of October as the target. The Dispatch help page, last updated late last week, does not mention a retire...

Nov 06, 2026

7

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8

The Flood is Coming And The Pipes Were Already Full

An update on Athena, and some unsolicited predictions on what's coming next On Saturday, Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier . I agree with him. Go read it if you haven't. I've spent the summer looking at what these models find, and the gap he describes between what they can do and what the rest of us are ready for is the one I've been staring at since May. The hardest piece of his plan is the one that asks governments to coordinate. They're in a difficult spot: regulate too little and a US company accidentally builds the weapon, regulate too much and it gets built somewhere else, and open source isn't governable either way. Where governments can act is on consumption: not what the models can do, but what happens to what they find. Who gets a vulnerability first, how fast a fix reaches the people running the code, whether the operators who can't move on an attacker's timeline get a head start. That's what Gold Eagle is. It matters...

Nov 06, 2026

9

Chainalysis Breach Exposes All Users' Credentials, Forces Shutdown of Key Services

Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis has revealed that its ongoing investigation into the agentic cyber attack targeting its systems also exposed names, usernames, password hashes and live tokens for all users. "While we investigated, we removed access to Reactor and Data Solutions," the company said. "At this time we continue to have no evidence that any investigations data has been accessed or Chainalysis attribution data has been manipulated." Chainalysis said it has implemented additional proactive monitoring systems to detect unusual activity, adding it took the Know Your Transaction (KYT) user interface and API offline, alongside other address screening products and the login page. Previously, Chainalysis said it was probing what it described as an "ongoing multi-front cyber attack," leading to the discovery of an "on-path attack" that exposed a subset of customer passwords. The company said the attack vector has since been addres...

Nov 06, 2026

10

Hackers Hide Linux Backdoor in Control Web Panel Server to Execute Commands Without Logs

A backdoor has been found hiding in the web server that runs Control Web Panel (CWP), a free panel for managing Linux hosting servers, researchers at QiAnXin's XLab said this week. The backdoored web server executes commands that attackers send via web requests, and those requests never appear in its access logs. Installing it takes root access, so the attackers must already control the server. The researchers, who named the backdoor cwpdoor , captured its installer, a shell script posing as a version update, on June 29. The installer handles only two versions of that web server, cwpsrv 1.15.10 and 1.24.0. The researchers do not yet know how attackers get the root access the installer needs. On September 30, an archive holding a copy of the backdoor was uploaded to VirusTotal from Brazil. The researchers say this indicates that "real victims already exist in the wild." They give no count of infected servers. The backdoor is cwpsrv itself, rebuilt with extra code...

Nov 06, 2026