IT News Analysis

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Iran-Linked Handala Hack Tied to HEAVYGRAM Telegram Backdoor That Can Steal Passwords

The Iran-linked "hacktivist" persona known as Handala Hack has been attributed to a Telegram-based surveillance backdoor called HEAVYGRAM and a Delphi-based utility known as CRUDEEXCLUDE . "HEAVYGRAM offers builtin commands supporting remote command execution, system, network and process information discovery, data and Telegram session files exfiltration, screenshot capture, DLL sideloading, file cleanup, and persistence via Windows autorun registry keys," Group-IB said . On the other hand, CRUDEEXCLUDE is a Delphi-based Windows utility employed to prepare environments for the deployment of subsequent stages such as HEAVYGRAM. First observed in late July 2024, the malware is often disguised as a legitimate application with a graphical user interface (GUI), and configures Microsoft Defender exclusion paths for defense evasion. The findings build upon an alert the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) first issued in March 2026 and again earlier this wee...

Sep 17, 2026

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Critical Unbound DNSSEC Validator Flaw Could Allow RCE via a Malicious DNS Zone

Every release of the Unbound DNS resolver before 1.26.1 has a critical heap overflow in its DNSSEC validator, maintainer NLnet Labs said in an  advisory  on Wednesday. An attacker who controls a malicious zone and queries a vulnerable resolver can trigger it, enabling remote code execution. Unbound 1.26.1, released the same day, fixes the bug, tracked as  CVE-2026-81642 , along with eight other flaws. One of the eight,  CVE-2026-82717 , is a heap corruption bug in CNAME synthesis reported by Ben Morris of Anthropic. It could also lead to remote code execution "under certain systems and compilation options," NLnet Labs said. NLnet Labs has not reported exploitation of either bug, and CISA's entry for CVE-2026-81642 marked exploitation as "none" on Wednesday. NLnet Labs rates the DNSKEY flaw Critical, with a CVSS score of 4.0 (9.1), and its scoring lists a network attack vector requiring no privileges or user interaction. NVD listed the CVE as "Await...

Sep 17, 2026

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Can You Prove a New CVE Is Exploitable Before Attackers Do? Learn How in This Webinar

A new CVE drops. Your scanner finds it. The severity score looks ugly. But that still does not answer the question that matters: Can it actually be exploited in your environment? Mythos-class AI is compressing the time between disclosure and working exploitation, while many security programs still validate risk on weekly or quarterly cycles. The dangerous gap is no longer just technical. It is measured in time. 📅 Save Your Spot Today: How to Prove You're Ready for Mythos-Class Attacks . Can’t join live? Register anyway. We’ll send the webinar recording after the session, so you can watch it later, whenever it fits your schedule, and still see the full, fresh CVE-to-validation workflow. Stop prioritizing on severity alone A high score tells you a vulnerability could be serious. It does not prove that an attacker can use it against you. Security teams need faster answers: Is the affected asset exposed? What attack techniques does exploitation require? Do ...

Sep 17, 2026

5

CISO's Expert Guide to Agentic Pentesting for Websites

Attackers now weaponize new vulnerabilities in about five days (Mandiant, part of Google Cloud). The median organization takes 43 days to patch one (Verizon DBIR 2026). A new free guide explains how autonomous AI agents are closing that gap, and what security leaders must demand before pointing one at production. TL;DR Exploitation is now the front door. It starts 31% of breaches (Verizon DBIR 2026), the #1 initial-access vector, while annual pentesting leaves an estimated 90% of the estate untested. The capability is proven, not projected. An autonomous system topped HackerOne's US leaderboard in 2025 (XBOW), and peer-reviewed agents exploited 87% of one-day flaws unaided (Fang et al., 2024). Continuous beats periodic, measurably. Programmatic testing makes teams 4.5x more likely to fix criticals within three days (Cobalt, 2026). It's an AI agent in your production. Hold it to a bar. Provable coverage, an independent validator, blast-radius guardrails, and a...

Sep 17, 2026

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China-Aligned FamousSparrow Deploys SparroWocky Backdoor Across Latin America

The China-aligned state-sponsored threat actor known as FamousSparrow has been observed deploying a previously unreported backdoor called SparroWocky in attacks targeting multiple countries in Latin America since at least August 2025. "SparroWocky is a modular, C++ backdoor," ESET security researchers Alexandre Côté Cyr and Romain Dumont said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. "Its architecture and the techniques used by its authors indicate strong knowledge of anti-analysis tricks and Windows internals." SparroWocky is so named for the fact that early iterations of the malware have been found to contain the first stanza of Jabberwocky , a famous nonsense poem written by the English author, poet, and mathematician Lewis Carroll in around 1855. The latest findings from ESET indicate that the cyber espionage group , which shares some level of overlap with Earth Estries and Salt Typhoon, has replaced SparrowDoor with Spar...

Sep 17, 2026

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OpenAI Reveals Six Model Incidents Involving Hidden Failures and Unauthorized Uploads

OpenAI on Wednesday disclosed six new instances of "unexpected or concerning model behavior" that took place over the past six months, while sharing a new framework for reporting, tracking, investigating, and disclosing model misalignment in a bid to improve transparency. "As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research," OpenAI said. "We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer." "Decisions about how AI development should proceed in the months and years to come need to draw on evidence that people outside the companies building frontier models can examine for themselves." The six incidents are outside of the recently disclosed misaligned activity targeting Hugging Face , DseWiki , and RubyGems . Details of the inc...

Sep 17, 2026

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BIND 9 Update Fixes 14 Flaws, Including an Unauthenticated Crash Over DNS-over-HTTPS

The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has released  BIND 9.20.29 and 9.21.26  to fix fourteen security flaws it  disclosed  on 16 September in BIND 9, its open-source DNS server software. One of them affects any BIND server that answers DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH). A sender with no credentials can crash the server process, named, with a single request that carries an invalid SIG(0) signature, if the sender closes the connection before named finishes checking the signature. ISC said in its advisories that it is not aware of any of the fourteen being exploited. Which Release Fixes What The fixed releases, described in ISC's  release notes , are: BIND 9.20.29, on the current stable branch: fixes all fourteen BIND 9.21.26, on the development branch: fixes thirteen, because CVE-2026-19662 does not affect 9.21 BIND 9.20.29-S1, the Supported Preview Edition for support customers: fixes all fourteen ISC lists no workarounds for any of the...

Sep 17, 2026

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Gyazo Breach Exposes 23.62 Million User Records and 490 Million Image Metadata Records

A security breach at Gyazo , Helpfeel's image-sharing service, exposed about 23.62 million user records, including email addresses and password hashes, the Kyoto-based company said in a  notice  published Wednesday. It also exposed about 490 million image metadata records, mostly for images from January 2019 or earlier, including the IDs that make up Gyazo image links. Helpfeel said those IDs could be used to view the images without permission, and that it has temporarily disabled viewing of some of them. Helpfeel asked every Gyazo user to change their password and to change it on any other service that uses the same or a similar one. It also asked users to watch for suspicious emails or messages related to the incident. The attacker gained access through a vulnerability in Gyazo's image upload server, ran arbitrary commands on Helpfeel's systems, and accessed Gyazo's database, the company said. It has not said what kind of flaw it was. Helpfeel said no pay...

Sep 17, 2026