IT News Analysis

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GitLab CVE-2026-19478 Comes Under Active Exploitation Within Days of Disclosure

A newly disclosed security flaw in GitLab has come under active exploitation within days of public disclosure, according to watchTowr. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-19478 (CVSS score: 9.4), a case of code injection that allows an unauthenticated attacker to modify or delete publicly accessible GitLab projects and rewrite their data under certain conditions without requiring credentials, user interaction, or obscure configuration. The following versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) are affected by the flaw - 18.2 before 18.11.11 19.0 before 19.0.8 19.1 before 19.1.6 19.2 before 19.2.4 In an alert released earlier this week, GitLab said the issue could be exploited via a GraphQL directive. Fixes for the flaw were rolled out in GitLab CE and EE versions 19.2.4, 19.1.6, 19.0.8, and 18.11.11. Preemptive exposure management firm watchTowr told The Hacker News that it was able to reproduce the vulnerability within minutes of ...

Aug 21, 2026

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Microsoft Entra ID Flaw (CVSS 10.0) Exploited in Wild, Allows Remote Code Execution

Microsoft on Thursday warned of a maximum-severity security flaw in Entra ID that it said has been exploited in the wild, but noted that no customer action is required. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-69836 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a case of remote code execution impacting the tech giant's cloud-based identity and access management service. It was previously called Azure Active Directory or Azure AD. "Deserialization of untrusted data in Microsoft Entra ID allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network," Microsoft said in an alert released Thursday. Flaws of this kind occur when an application converts user-controlled data back into an active object or code structure without proper validation. This can lead to code execution, denial-of-service, or access control bypass that can permit an attacker to perform unauthorized actions. The company credited Principal Security Engineer Robert Fitzaptrick for discovering and reporting the issue. ...

Aug 21, 2026

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AI changed the job for 68% of practitioners, SANS finds

Up 14 points in a year. Training requirements shifted for 73% of teams too. Read the data.

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Rust Supply Chain Attack Puts Build-Time Malware in Crates with 245 Million Downloads

The Rust Project has deleted malicious versions of three widely used Rust crates from crates.io after a compromised maintainer account published releases that added a typosquatted dependency whose build script downloaded and executed a remote payload during compilation. The affected releases are arrayref 0.3.10, internment 0.8.7, and append-only-vec 0.1.9, all published from the same owner account on August 20, 2026, and all removed within 86 to 107 minutes. Because the malicious code sat in the build script of the injected dependency, building a project that resolved it was sufficient to run the payload, and nothing from the crates themselves had to be called. Developers are advised to search ~/.cargo/registry/cache for the deleted crate files and to pin arrayref at 0.3.9 or earlier, after the Rust Security Response Team unyanked the maliciously-yanked versions during the response. There is no patched version, no CVE identifier has been assigned, and the RustSec advisories...

Aug 20, 2026

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Suspected Russian Hackers Abuse Google OAuth and WhatsApp Linking to Hijack Accounts

Three distinct suspected Russian cyber espionage threat clusters have been observed leveraging legitimate authentication flows to single out individuals working in academia, aerospace and defense, governments, and think tanks across Europe, as well as academia and think tanks within the U.S. These clusters include UNC6293 , UNC7005 , and UNC5976 . "These clusters engage in persistent, adaptive phishing campaigns, using sophisticated social engineering tactics to compromise personal accounts across multiple platforms," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) researchers Gabby Roncone and Wesley Shields said in a report published today. UNC6293, first detailed by the tech giant and the Citizen Lab in June 2025, is assessed to be a sub-cluster of Ice Relic (formerly APT29), which is also tracked under the monikers Cozy Bear and Midnight Blizzard. The hacking crew was previously attributed to a campaign that abused a Google account feature called application specific pas...

Aug 20, 2026

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ThreatsDay: Gogs 10.0 RCE, n8n Workflow-to-RCE, $10M Reward, GLM-5.3 AI Exploit, and More

A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something trusted doing exactly what it was allowed to do. Signed drivers get turned against defenses. Legitimate apps help malware blend in. A weak header check opens a path to code execution. Elsewhere, exposed systems, old bugs, odd hiding tricks, and AI-assisted exploit research keep lowering the effort needed to cause damage. Nothing here needs much decoration. The small gaps are doing enough work already. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Aug 20, 2026

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11 Real Stories: How Identity Exposure Unlocks Active Attack Paths

Map cross-domain privilege escalation to sever breach routes at key choke points.

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AI-Generated Exploit Scripts Target Siemens S7 PLCs in U.S. Critical Infrastructure

The U.S. government on Wednesday warned of an "active threat" targeting critical infrastructure organizations in the country using artificial intelligence (AI)-generated exploit scripts. The activity is targeting Siemens S7 SeriesProgrammable Logic Controllers (PLCs) to conduct reconnaissance and capability development using AI-generated scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. That said, the ongoing PLC targeting activity is assessed to be broader in scope than Siemens PLCs. "The actors leverage internet scanning services like Censys and ZoomEye to identify internet-exposed PLCs running outdated software or that are otherwise poorly protected," according to the advisory published by the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Energy (DOE), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Targets of the activity include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Wa...

Aug 20, 2026

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New Cryptographic Context Injection Attack Could Let Web Pages Steal Grok Chat Data

Adversa AI has disclosed an attack technique that it says can cause xAI's Grok chatbot to send a user's name, approximate location, subscription tier, and the prompts from the ongoing conversation to an attacker-controlled server after the user asks it to summarize an ordinary web page. The AI security company, which has codenamed the technique "Cryptographic Context Injection ," said the transfer completed without a confirmation step and with no visible warning in its proof-of-concept demonstration. There is no patch, no CVE identifier, and no user-facing workaround, and the writeup does not report any exploitation in the wild. Asked which build was tested, Adversa told The Hacker News the target was the Grok web chat at grok.com running Grok 4.5 Fast, and that the attack was reproduced once on August 19, 2026. The writeup gives no success rate. The company said it has attempted the attack 20 times since June with a 40% success rate, and that the failures cam...

Aug 20, 2026

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Isolated-vm Flaw Lets Sandboxed JavaScript Escape to Host for Potential RCE

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw in isolated-vm , a popular open-source sandbox with more than 2,900 stars and 190 forks on GitHub, that could allow attackers to escape the confines of the isolated environment. The vulnerability (" GHSA-864f-rcv7-6rh4 "), which has yet to be assigned a CVE identifier, impacts all versions of the library before and including 7.0.0. It has been patched in versions 6.2.0 and 7.0.1 released earlier this month. Isolated-vm is a Node.js library for running untrusted JavaScript inside a V8 Isolate , an independent instance of the Google V8 JavaScript engine, allowing multiple sandboxed JavaScript environments to run concurrently without sharing data or interfering with each other. The npm package has witnessed nearly 1 million downloads over the past week. Because each V8 Isolate has a separate state and maintains its own heap, it is not possible to directly pass JavaScript objects from the main Node.js threa...

Aug 20, 2026