IT News Analysis

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Public Exploits Released for Four Linux Kernel Flaws That Enable Local Root

A security researcher has released working exploit code for four Linux kernel flaws that each let a local user gain root, the highest level of access on a machine. Kernel maintainers have fixed all four over the past few weeks, so a system running an up-to-date kernel is not affected. But the exploit code is now public, and any machine still running an older kernel should be updated. The flaws are called DirtyAH6 , TUNderflow , PPPoEject , and DiagSpill . Researcher Asim Manizada found them and reported them to the Linux kernel security team in mid-July. He published a technical  write-up  with working exploits on September 18, after a coordinated hold with Linux distributions so the fixes could be released first. So far, there are no reports of the four being used in real-world attacks. The exploits are Manizada's own, are tuned to specific kernel builds, and can crash a machine, so they are meant for isolated test systems. Still, public exploit code raises the ris...

Sep 18, 2026

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New WordPress Click2Shell Flaw Forces Theme Installs, Can Chain to Code Execution

WordPress today released patches to fix a new set of vulnerabilities in its core software, one of which could allow a crafted web link, opened by a logged-in administrator, to install a theme from the official WordPress.org directory without anyone clicking Install. The security firm pwn.ai , whose researchers reported the flaw, calls the attack chain Click2Shell . On its own the flaw only installs a real theme that the attacker picks, but the security research team showed it could be combined with a separate weakness in a theme to run the attacker's own code on the server.  The fix shipped on September 17 in WordPress 7.1.1 . Because this is a security release, WordPress advises updating right away. There is no sign the flaw has been used in real attacks. The installed theme stays switched off, so the site's own appearance does not change and nothing looks wrong. Reaching code execution needed a second, separate flaw in the theme that was installed. As pwn.ai wrote of t...

Sep 18, 2026

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Transparent Tribe Deploys New Rust Backdoor Using Private GitHub Repositories for C2

The Pakistan-aligned threat group tracked as Transparent Tribe (aka APT36 and Earth Karkaddan) has been attributed to a fresh set of cyber attacks targeting government and defense entities in India and Afghanistan. The attacks, per Zscaler ThreatLabz, involve the use of previously undocumented tools called RUSTYSHADE, RUSTYMOVE, PSNATCH, and BASHNATCH. The activity has been codenamed Operation RapidRust . "APT36 has maintained a high operational tempo and updated their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in continued attacks targeting government and defense organizations in India and Afghanistan," Sudeep Singh , senior manager of APT Research at Zscaler ThreatLabz, said in a technical report published this week. The discovery comes a little over a month after  Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) tied the long-running persistent threat group to another campaign aimed at Afghan telecom providers and South Asian critical infrastructure organizations using a backdo...

Sep 18, 2026

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5

Microsoft Patches CVSS 10.0 Azure AI Foundry Flaw Enabling Unauthorized Privilege Escalation

Microsoft has released fixes for a maximum-severity security flaw in Azure AI Foundry that could be exploited to achieve privilege escalation. No customer action is required. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-85889 , carries a CVSS score of 10.0. "Missing authentication for critical function in Azure AI Foundry allows an unauthorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network," Microsoft said in a Thursday advisory. Azure AI Foundry, also called Microsoft Foundry, is an enterprise platform designed to build, deploy, and manage generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications and agents. The Windows maker credited security researcher Rémy Marot (@R_Marot) for discovering and reporting the flaw. There is no evidence that the issue has been exploited in the wild. Also patched by Microsoft in recent days are a number of other critical flaws -

Sep 18, 2026

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An Abandoned CDN Domain Was Re-Registered. Thousands of Sites Still Call It.

In July 2025, someone registered a domain that used to belong to a content delivery network.  The CDN had been wound down years earlier, and the domain it served assets from was allowed to expire. What it had not lost were its callers. Thousands of websites, code repositories, and documentation pages still carry hard-coded references to hostnames beneath it.  The new owner holds wildcard DNS across the entire domain, and any hostname under it now resolves to infrastructure that person controls. Today the apex serves an ad-heavy media downloader page, which is unremarkable. The remarkable part is that the decision about what those thousands of pages load next belongs to a stranger, and nobody involved has been notified, because from the outside nothing broke.  This pattern is not hypothetical, and it's not unheard of either. In June 2024, the polyfill.io domain (a JavaScript shim embedded in more than 110,000 sites) changed ownership and began serving conditional redi...

Sep 18, 2026

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Plugin4Shell Lets Repository Owners Swap Pinned Plugin Code Across Four AI Coding Agents

A flaw in four widely used AI coding agents lets someone who controls a plugin's code repository swap the plugin an agent installs for a malicious one, even when the agent locked that plugin to a specific reviewed version, security firm  Air Security said on Thursday . The firm said Anthropic has patched the flaw in Claude Code 2.1.179 and OpenAI in Codex 0.146.0, that GitHub Copilot has no fix, and that Google will not patch the Gemini CLI, which it is retiring. The agents install add-ons called plugins from online marketplaces. To stay safe, a marketplace locks each plugin to a single reviewed version by its commit hash, a long string that identifies an exact snapshot of the code. Air found that the agents fetch that snapshot but never check that the code they end up with actually matches it. A branch is a named line of code in a repository. On a code host that lets someone create a branch whose name is made to look like the commit hash, the owner of a plugin's reposit...

Sep 18, 2026

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WeaselBiscuit Stealer Spreads via 13 npm Packages to Harvest Chrome Extension Storage

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of 13 npm packages that have been found to deliver a previously undocumented JavaScript stealer codenamed WeaselBiscuit . The new malware family, per OpenSourceMalware , exhibits functional overlaps with two malware strains associated with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK) Contagious Interview campaign: BeaverTail and OtterCookie . "It's smaller, lighter, and stripped down, with many of the heavier functions removed entirely," security researcher Paul McCarty (aka 6mile) said. The names of the packages are below - @biz44/id10-client @biz44/id12-client @biz44/id44-client @biz44/id79-client @biz44/id95-client @biz44/id99-client @biz44/process-runtime-utils @biz44/runtime-utils engin1 id79-client process-lhpm process-mite process-tailwind "It's a stripped down stealer that borrows several functions from DPRK's BeaverTail and OtterCookie,...

Sep 18, 2026

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Claimed Bug Bounty Hunter Likely Used LLM to Build PhantomRaven npm Stealer

A financially motivated threat actor has been linked to the development and distribution of a JavaScript (JS)-based information stealer known as PhantomRaven via the npm package registry. "The developer likely wrote the malware using a large language model (LLM), an assessment made with high confidence based on verbose comments, placeholder code, and statistical token-analysis patterns," CrowdStrike's Counter Adversary Operations said in an analysis published this week. PhantomRaven was first flagged by Koi Security and DCODX in late October 2025, calling attention to a slopsquatting and typosquatted campaign in which more than 100 malicious packages were uploaded to npm to steal authentication tokens, CI/CD secrets, and GitHub credentials from developers' machines. The software supply chain attack used these packages as a cover to retrieve a remote dynamic dependency (RDD) from an external server so that the libraries themselves are not flagged by security ...

Sep 18, 2026