IT News Analysis

1

6 Reasons Why Device Code Phishing is the Fastest-Growing Threat of 2026

Device code phishing - the abuse of the OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant to steal access tokens - has evolved from a niche red-team technique to an industrial-scale threat in under six months. Designed for input-constrained devices like smart TVs, printers, and so on, the device authorization login flow has been adopted by a wide range of apps and use-cases that it wasn't originally intended for - most commonly CLI logins. Researchers first described the attack vector in 2020, but it took until 2024 before nation-state actors like Storm-2372 started using it in the wild. By 2025, ShinyHunters was using device code phishing against Salesforce tenants at scale, then in February 2026, the EvilTokens kit arrived and criminal adoption skyrocketed. By April, Microsoft was reporting 10 to 15 entirely new campaigns every 24 hours . Barracuda counted 7 million attacks in four weeks . The FBI issued a standalone advisory on Kali365 , the first US federal agency PSA about a specif...

Jul 31, 2026

2

How AI Is Rewriting the Cloud Security Playbook

Explore AI agents, Zero Trust, machine identities, and cloud security with Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and SANS. Explore the Agenda.

3

Chinese Hacker Commands DeepSeek via Telegram to Launch Autonomous Attacks

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 says a Chinese-speaking threat actor used DeepSeek through the open-source Hermes Agent framework to launch attacks autonomously. After an initial Telegram instruction, the agent found internet-facing systems and selected public exploits. The researchers recovered no further operator input in the session. The operator, tracked through the aliases knaithe and KnYuan , launched exploitation attempts against more than 460 targets using autonomous and conventional workflows. Unit 42 described seven exploit tracks. They span eight Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifiers because the n8n chain combines two vulnerabilities. The DeepSeek-led attacks against Langflow and n8n failed because the exposed systems did not meet the exploits' configuration requirements. In separate manual operations, Unit 42 reported data exfiltration from three organizations through the NetScaler memory-overread flaw CVE-2026-3055 and command execution on 11...

Jul 31, 2026

4

Anthropic Says Claude Mistook the Open Internet for a CTF and Breached Three Organizations

Anthropic on Thursday became the latest artificial intelligence (AI) company to reveal that three of its models, including Claude Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an unnamed research model, had breached three unnamed organizations during cybersecurity testing without its knowledge. The AI firm said the earliest incidents date back to April 2026, adding it made the discoveries after launching a "large-scale retrospective review" in response to a recent disclosure from OpenAI that a combination of its models escaped the sandboxed environment by exploiting a previously unreported zero-day in Artifactory to obtain internet access and break into Hugging Face's production systems with an end goal to cheat on an evaluation. "After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-...

Jul 31, 2026

5

DPRK-Linked macOS Malvertising Uses Fake Updates to Deliver Crypto-Stealing Malware

Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been attributed to a sophisticated macOS malvertising campaign that involves redirecting users to fake web pages displaying a full-screen non-existent update sequence to deliver malware as part of a new iteration of the long-running Contagious Interview campaign. The defining aspect of the attack is that bogus macOS software update screen stealthily copies an attack command to the clipboard and then prompts the victim to execute it via the Terminal app, a known technique referred to as ClickFix . "The experience is designed to induce panic," AllSecure said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The computer appears frozen or rebooting, so a user who believes the OS has failed follows instructions they would otherwise find suspicious." The campaign is also noteworthy for its use of blockchain-hosted command-and-control (C2), with the malware extracting the live server address from an Ethereum smart contract. Thi...

Jul 30, 2026

6

ThreatsDay: AI-Powered Hacking, 370 Chrome Flaws, SonicWall Attacks, DNS Hijacking + 22 More Stories

A lot of security still comes down to trusting the wrong screen. This week, that screen might be a login page, an install guide, a recruiter call, or a familiar service behaving slightly wrong. Behind it: reused credentials, exposed systems, quiet loaders, abused trust, and exploit paths that should have been harder. Some defenses improved. The loose parts still got found first. Anyway, here's the mess. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Jul 30, 2026

7

Five things successful IT teams get right about SaaS management

1Password blog: how IT teams can automate access reviews, reduce license spend, and surface shadow AI and IT.

8

Azure Cosmos DB Flaw Exposed Platform-Wide Key That Could Access Any Database

A now-patched vulnerability in Azure Cosmos DB could have let an attacker escape the service's Gremlin query sandbox and obtain full read and write access to databases across customer tenants, according to Wiz. Wiz , which codenamed the chain CosmosEscape , said the exploit chain began with a crafted query against a Gremlin database controlled by the attacker. From there, code execution on a multi-tenant gateway exposed a platform-wide signing secret and a regional account directory, allowing the researchers to locate a target and retrieve its primary account key. Microsoft blocked the vulnerable Gremlin entry point within 48 hours of the November 2025 report. Wiz said Microsoft completed the longer-term fix across all regions in July 2026 and eliminated the platform-wide key. "We appreciate Wiz's work in identifying and reporting this issue through coordinated vulnerability disclosure," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Hacker News. "We have fully addres...

Jul 30, 2026

9

Microsoft Copilot for Word Can Copy Hidden Prompts Into New Documents

Hidden instructions in a Word document can make Microsoft 365 Copilot rewrite figures in a report, then copy the same instructions into the finished file. Håkon Måløy disclosed the technique on July 28, 144 days after reporting it to Microsoft. In his proof of concept, the internally generated file triggered the same behavior when it was used in a second Copilot drafting session. Måløy's timeline says Microsoft confirmed the reported behavior on March 31 and deployed two mitigations. The first blocked the original prompt wording; the second upgraded the underlying model to GPT-5.5. He said the full chain worked with modified instructions on GPT-5.6 the next day, and the attack class still reproduced on July 28. "The vulnerability class therefore remains exploitable at the time of publication," Måløy said. The attack is not zero-click and does not execute conventional malware. It requires a Copilot drafting or editing operation, and the malicious document must en...

Jul 30, 2026

10

The Network Has Become the Control Plane for AI Security

Network firewalls are the workhorses of modern cybersecurity. They are trusted to protect the network, blocking malicious traffic and preventing intrusions and breaches. And for decades, network security teams have built controls around a relatively stable model: users connect to applications, applications exchange data, and security tools inspect packets, protocols, and destinations. Firewalls became exceptionally good at understanding where traffic was going and whether it should be allowed. But just as AI is reshaping every aspect of the business world, it's also had a monumental impact on how security teams view network traffic and the firewall. AI is driving new network dynamics that traditional security policies were never designed to govern. Employees, applications, and agents send prompts, call models, connect to services, and trigger actions across the environment, all activity most firewalls can't see, let alone understand. AI agents interact with external servic...

Jul 30, 2026