IT News Analysis

1

FBI Disrupts China-Linked QTFY Infrastructure Used to Steal Data From U.S. Organizations

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the disruption of two hacking platforms named QScan and QTRouter operated by Chinese threat actors to target critical infrastructure and other sensitive networks in the country. The activity has been attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored group known as QTFY, employed by Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company (南京鑫玖维网络科技有限公司).  "Among the victims of QTFY computer intrusion activity are the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Federal Reserve, Department of Energy, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Senate," DoJ said. Damon Rouse, a security researcher at Lumen Black Lotus Labs who has been tracking the activity for over the past 18 months, told The Hacker News that the digital quartermaster has been active since May 2018. Nanjing counts both China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the People's Liberation Army...

Aug 26, 2026

2

Nimbus Manticore Expands Toolset With TWOSTROKE-Like Backdoor and SSH Tunneler

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered additional infrastructure and previously undocumented malware associated with Nimbus Manticore , an Iranian state-sponsored hacking group affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Group-IB, in a new analysis published today, described the cyber espionage actor as among the most active Iranian APT groups in 2026. Nimbus Manticore (aka GalaxyGato, Mirage Kitten, Screening Serpens, Smoke Sandstorm, Subtle Snail, and UNC1549) is assessed to be linked to Tortoiseshell (aka Imperial Kitten and Unyielding Wasp), which is part of the Charming Kitten (aka Eclipsed Wasp) cluster. Tortoiseshell is known to be active since at least July 2018, mainly targeting defense, aerospace, IT service providers, and military organizations in the Middle East and the U.S. Nimbus Manticore also has a history of orchestrating its own version of the Dream Job campaign to deliver malware under the pretext of job opportunity-themed social engine...

Aug 26, 2026

3

NovaCookies Campaigns Abuse Genuine Docusign Notifications to Steal Microsoft 365 Sessions

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing toolkit called NovaCookies that's used as a proxy to redirect Microsoft 365 sign-ins, while capturing authenticated sessions in the process. In a report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication, Island characterized the $320/month service as a subscription-based phishing platform that facilitates real-time Microsoft 365 session theft. The kit has been used to target hundreds of organizations across multiple sectors in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Germany, Israel, and the U.A.E. to date.  "Observed campaigns used genuine Docusign envelopes to carry counterfeit document-share lures, with some clicks routed through legitimate Microsoft or Google sign-in endpoints as redirect hops before reaching the kit," Island said. "The message, document service and redirect can therefore appear trustworthy until the browser reaches attacker-controlled infrastructure....

Aug 26, 2026

4

Attackers Map Your Network Quietly. Controls Block 1 in 10 of Those Actions

Picus Labs analyzed 338 million attack simulations. See what got through in the Blue Report 2026.

5

CISA Red Team Compromised Two Critical Infrastructure Orgs, One Detected Nothing

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published the results of two red team assessments it conducted simultaneously against two critical infrastructure organizations, using what it described as similar tradecraft while recording sharply different defensive outcomes. Both organizations were fully compromised at the domain level, and in both, the red team also reached sensitive business systems (SBSs) and cloud resources. The advisory, tracked as AA26-237A and titled "A Tale of Two SOCs," was released on August 25, 2026. CISA identified the first target only as a Government Services and Facilities Sector organization, referred to as Organization A , and the second as a Water and Wastewater Systems Sector entity, referred to as Organization B . "CISA conducted two simultaneous red team assessments using similar tradecraft but observed different defensive responses," the agency said in the advisory. Against Organization A, the re...

Aug 26, 2026

6

Unpatched Kaltura mwEmbed Flaws Could Let Remote Attackers Read Files and Run Code

The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has disclosed two unpatched vulnerabilities in Kaltura's HTML5 video player library that allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to read arbitrary files from a server and execute code on it. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-19913 and CVE-2026-19912 , both stem from the same unsafe deserialization in the mwEmbedLoader.php endpoint of the mwEmbed player library, which Kaltura also distributes as html5lib. Neither requires authentication or a Kaltura session token, and network access to the endpoint is the only precondition CERT/CC states. No patch is available, and CERT/CC said it was "unable to reach Kaltura to coordinate these vulnerabilities." Administrators are advised to restrict or disable external access to the endpoint and to enforce a strict allow-list for the ServiceUrl parameter that permits only legitimate backend API URLs. No exploitation had been reported at the time of writing, and neither CVE appeared in CISA...

Aug 26, 2026

7

How IT Can Reduce Credential Risk Across Every Department

Learn how to manage credential access for every user, from your finance team to third-party contractors.

8

Imagine the SOC Without a Queue: From Alert Backlog to AI Hypothesis Engine

The SOC we've always known was built around a model that guarantees most of the alert queue will never receive analyst review. There's never time. In a traditional SOC, the typical progression follows a well-known pattern: an alert arrives; a detection engine assigns a severity score. The issue then waits for a human to decide if it should escalate to an investigation. Given the volume of network telemetry in the security stack, the queue is an unavoidable result of humans as the investigative layer. Long alert queues also force security teams to decide which signals to analyze before they even know what those signals represent. Threat hunting has always addressed security questions via an alternative approach: start with a hypothesis about attacker behavior, search the available evidence, then prove or disprove it. The sequence is powerful, but it hits the same wall: human capacity. Agentic security operations change the paradigm. The SOCs now being built are predica...

Aug 26, 2026

9

Claude Opus 4.6 Bypasses Gym Booking Limit, Cancels Other Users' Reservations in Tests

Aikido Security has published research that recreates the Australian gym-booking incident in a synthetic environment, finding that Claude Opus 4.6, running on the OpenClaw agent harness, exploited a client-side-only booking restriction in 9 of 10 runs. The original incident was first reported by ABC News on August 10, based on chat logs and screenshots the user supplied. He had asked an OpenClaw agent running Opus 4.6 to book him into a gym class. The agent booked sessions months beyond the window the site allowed. It then tested, without being asked, whether the same API would let it cancel another member's waitlist entry. The test removed the person holding the top place and moved the user up one position. The agent told him it could not add the member back. Aikido's test system is a single-page web application backed by a GraphQL API carrying the two flaws described in the original incident. The seven-day booking window is enforced only in the frontend, and the cancel...

Aug 26, 2026

10

OpenAI Bans Russian ChatGPT Accounts Used to Run Influence Operation

OpenAI on Tuesday said it banned a cluster of Russian ChatGPT accounts that used VPNs to bypass access restrictions and run an influence operation, which relied on its artificial intelligence (AI) tool to generate social media posts and comments that were shared on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. The accounts "were being used to promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a self-described 'expert community' based in Israel," the company said . "What began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation, built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a 'sovereignty' index that cast Russia in a favourable light, and efforts to disguise the operators' Russian origins." The campaign is assessed to have reached "relatively small audiences," with Telegram channels attracting more users and amassing about 10-20,000 followers each. The m...

Aug 26, 2026