IT News Analysis

1

F5 BIG-IP APM Malware Injects a PHP Web Shell Into Memory, Evading Disk Scans

Malware linked to break-ins at F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager appliances hides a PHP web shell in memory instead of in a file on disk, Sophos said in an analysis published on September 7. When Apache loads any of the three appliances' own PHP scripts, the malware adds the web shell to the copy held in memory, so a check of the file on disk can come back clean. Those three scripts are the same ones F5 pointed customers to in March, when it said changes to them alone do not show a break-in. A web shell is usually a small script an attacker drops into a web server's folders to run commands through ordinary web requests. Because it sits on disk, defenders look for it by scanning files and comparing them against known-good copies. That approach does not work here. As the researchers put it, the web shell "does not need to exist in its final form on disk." The three scripts are apm_css.php3, full_wt.php3 and webtop_popup_css.php3, part of the BIG-IP APM webtop. ...

Sep 09, 2026

2

SANS 2026 Security Awareness & Culture Report Shows What's Next

11 years of practitioner data on what it takes to keep pace with a field that keeps shifting.

3

Researcher Drops New Microsoft Defender PoC Showing ShieldBreak Patch Can Be Bypassed

The security researcher known as Chaotic Eclipse has dropped a proof-of-concept (PoC) for yet another zero-day in Microsoft Defender. The vulnerability, codenamed ShieldCrash , is assessed to be a patch bypass for CVE-2026-69414 (CVSS score: 7.8), also called ShieldBreak , which the researcher reported last month. "Microsoft has failed to properly patch ShieldBreak CVE-2026-69414," Chaotic Eclipse said. "Under specific conditions it is still possible to trigger the exact same problem that was caused by ShieldBreak. While Microsoft fixed several things to prevent re-exploiting the issue, they missed a spot where ShieldBreak can still be exploited." The PoC demonstrates an arbitrary file read as SYSTEM with the latest version of Windows installed. All supported versions of the desktop operating system are said to be impacted. The development comes days after Redmond shipped an update to the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine to plug CVE-2026-69414. The issue...

Sep 09, 2026

4

SAP Patches CVSS 10.0 Kernel Flaw Enabling Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution

SAP has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities, including a maximum-severity flaw in SAP Extended Passport (EPP) Processing that could have a severe impact on the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the application The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-44756 (CVSS score: 10.0), has been described as a case of memory corruption. Discovered and reported by SAP security company Onapsis, it has been codenamed OVERPASS . The flaw, which resides in the SAP kernel's processing of the Extended Passport (EPP), is exploitable remotely and without authentication, and allows bad actors to run arbitrary operating system commands on the SAP host with SAP administrative privileges, leading to a total compromise of the underlying SAP business data and processes. CVE-2026-44756 stems from a missing boundary validation during the deserialization of EPP data, leading to a memory safety violation when processing externally supplied length fields. An unauthe...

Sep 09, 2026

5

Microsoft Patches Record 974 Flaws, Including Two Exploited Windows Zero-Days

Microsoft on Tuesday broke Patch Tuesday records by addressing an earth-shattering 974 vulnerabilities spanning its software portfolio, including two flaws that it said have been actively exploited in the wild. These include 723 flaws in Windows, 111 in Office and Office 2016, 62 in SQL, and 22 in Developer Tools. Of these, over 110 shortcomings have been assigned a critical severity rating. Three prominent vulnerability types, namely privilege escalation, remote code execution, and information disclosure, account for nearly 90% of the flaws patched this month. Along with Microsoft's fixes for 25 non-Microsoft CVEs, the update brings the total number of vulnerabilities resolved to 999. September's record-setting security updates come after Microsoft patched 457 vulnerabilities in August, 663 in July , 220 in June , and 161 in May . "At this scale, the challenge is not simply getting through the patch list but knowing what needs attention first," Jack Bicer...

Sep 09, 2026

6

N-able N-central Pre-Auth RCE Flaw Exploited in the Wild

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a maximum-severity security flaw impacting N-able N-central to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to apply the fixes by September 11, 2026. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-86218 (CVSS score: 10.0), which has been described as a case of static code injection. It has been patched in N-central 2026.3 Hotfix 4 , released on September 5, 2026. "N-able N-central contains a static code injection vulnerability that could allow for pre-authentication remote code execution," CISA said. The development came shortly after Huntress said it commenced an investigation following the compromise of a customer's fully patched N-central production environment on September 4, 2026. However, it remains unclear if the intrusion involved CVE-2026-86218 or two other vulnerabilities ( CVE-2026-86206 and CVE-2026-86207 )...

Sep 09, 2026

7

New Webinar: How AI Broke the Pyramid of Pain for Threat Detection

Attacker tools and infrastructure are now changing at machine speed. Learn what’s changed and how to adapt.

8

Slim Spider Steals Crypto Custody Secrets From Brazilian Financial Institution

A previously undocumented financially motivated threat actor has been linked to attacks targeting Brazilian financial institutions since at least March 2026. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is tracking the Brazil-based activity cluster under the name Slim Spider . "The adversary demonstrates deep operational knowledge of Brazilian financial infrastructure, including the instant payment service Pix, digital asset platforms, and financial entities' cloud environments," CrowdStrike said . Slim Spider has been observed orchestrating a multi-stage intrusion at a Brazil-based financial institution in late March 2026, setting its sights on the entity's cryptocurrency assets and instant payment accounts. As part of the attack, the e-crime group is said to have developed custom Bash scripts that query the cloud instance metadata to steal temporary cloud credentials over socket connections. Upon establishing access to the organization's cloud environment, the t...

Sep 08, 2026

9

Liquid Hackers Return 3,400 Bitcoin Taken via Elements Bug, Still Holding $47M in BTC

Whoever took nearly 4,000 bitcoin from the Liquid Network on Sunday, September 6,  returned 3,400 of it  the next day, Bitcoin's public record shows. About 598.5 bitcoin has not come back. Liquid is a Bitcoin sidechain that holds real bitcoin to back a token called L-BTC . The network is still paused, so holders cannot turn that token back into bitcoin. The 3,400 bitcoin was sent to a  Liquid Federation address  at 16:09 UTC on September 7, about 85% of what was taken. The federation is the group of operators that holds the bitcoin backing L-BTC. The remaining 598.5 bitcoin was not a separate payment. It is the change from that same transaction, sent back to the address the funds had come from. It was  still there on September 8 , according to the block explorer mempool.space. Neither Blockstream nor Liquid Network has said publicly whether that bitcoin is part of an agreement. In an  incident notice , Blockstream, which provides the technology f...

Sep 08, 2026

10

ChatGPT Flaw Let a Planted Prompt Send a Victim's Gmail Data to Another Account

Check Point Research said in a report published today that a single instruction planted in a ChatGPT conversation could cause ChatGPT to quietly work for an attacker while answering the user's question as usual. In the company's proof of concept, that hidden work read data from the user's connected Gmail account and passed it to a second ChatGPT account through a hidden channel between the two. The reply the user saw said nothing about it. Check Point said the same channel could also copy out the chat history and the files in that conversation. How much an attacker could take depended on what the session could already access, including its data, tools, other connected apps, and permissions. The instruction had to be in the conversation before any of this worked. Check Point named three ways to get it there: a prompt the user pastes in, a shared ChatGPT conversation the user opens, or a custom GPT that holds it in its builder instructions, which are not shown to th...

Sep 08, 2026