IT News Analysis

1

Iranian Hackers Use Telegram-Controlled Malware to Spy on Dissidents and Journalists

Cybersecurity agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have detailed a Windows malware that they say Iran's intelligence service uses to spy on dissidents, journalists, and activists around the world. The malware is controlled via the Telegram messaging app and can copy a target's emails and chat messages, take screenshots, and activate the microphone to record audio. The FBI calls it HEAVYGRAM , and the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) calls it CHOSEN BRICK . The  joint advisory  was published on September 15 by the NCSC , the FBI, and the Netherlands' intelligence service, the AIVD. The FBI also released an  updated analysis  of the malware that expands on a  March 2026 alert , the first to describe the campaign, with more technical detail and new indicators of compromise. The FBI attributes the malware to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), the country's main intelligence agency, and dates th...

Sep 15, 2026

2

BambooToken Malware Uses MQTT to Control Windows and Linux Systems

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a multi-platform campaign that uses the Message Queueing Telemetry Transport ( MQTT ) protocol as a communication channel to control Windows and Linux systems. The emerging malware family, codenamed BambooToken , is assessed to be active since at least February 2023 and put to use in attacks targeting organizations across Asia and South America. Activity linked to the malware has been detected as recently as July 2026. Lumen Black Lotus Labs said it discovered the previously undocumented malware on VirusTotal in early 2026, with evidence pointing to a skilled threat actor that has managed to stay undetected until now. The initial access vector used to deliver BambooToken remains undetermined. "The actor used Tendyron's 'OnKey' software to sideload agents into targeted machines," Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Tendyron creates hardware-based tokens employed in high-se...

Sep 15, 2026

3

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4

Human Attacker Exploits Marimo RCE, Reaches SSH Bastion in Eight Seconds

With artificial intelligence (AI) shrinking the window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation and lowering the barrier to entry for bad actors, new findings from Sysdig show that skilled human operators can move just as swiftly after gaining initial access. In one instance highlighted by the cloud security company, the threat actor pivoted from a vulnerable Marimo notebook to an SSH bastion host in eight seconds using a custom Python toolkit they "wrote and debugged by hand" without any AI agent in the loop. "Eight seconds is the kind of speed we expect to see in AI-assisted attacks," the Sysdig Threat Research Team said . "This operator got there on skill alone, and along the way walked straight past a trap that every agentic threat actor (ATA) we've profiled against this same CVE fell into. Not only can skilled human attackers move at machine speed, but they can also often better evade defenders' detections." The attack chain ha...

Sep 15, 2026

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Attack Chains, Not Just Attack Surfaces: Why Testing Individual Techniques Misses the Point

Introduction Security teams have gotten pretty good at testing against what can hurt them. Can this EDR agent catch this payload? Will my organization fail the phishing simulation? Does this SIEM rule fire on this particular technique? And, in more mature organizations, this testing happens continuously rather than as a one-off exercise. But no matter how much you validate against these exposures, it doesn't fix the main problem the industry is facing: these are isolated, disconnected testing.  And real attackers, increasingly AI Powered ones, don't test techniques one at a time. They chain them. A phishing email leads to a credential harvest. That harvest leads to an initial foothold. The foothold leads to privilege escalation, then lateral movement, then data staging, then exfiltration… until the damage is irreversibly done.  Any one of those individual steps might be something a security control is theoretically capable of catching - but there's just too many po...

Sep 15, 2026

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Mass-Scanning Campaign Exploits Vite Flaw to Extract Cloud Credentials From Exposed Dev Servers

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a mass-scanning campaign that has targeted Vite deployments siphon sensitive data. The first is an automated effort aimed at internet-exposed Vite development servers that's designed to steal cloud credentials, configurations from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure instances, and infrastructure state files, per F5 Labs . The credential harvesting activity, observed in August 2026, has been found to leverage an exploit for CVE-2026-39364 (CVSS score: 8.2), a high-severity security flaw in Vite that could permit an unauthenticated attacker to bypass security restrictions via query parameter manipulation and leak sensitive data, including files specified by server.fs.deny. "On the Vite dev server, files that should be blocked by server.fs.deny (e.g., .env, *.crt) can be retrieved with HTTP 200 responses when query parameters such as ?raw, ?import&raw, or ?import&url&inline are appended," Vite s...

Sep 15, 2026

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8

LiteSpeed Enterprise Flaw Could Let One Hosting Account Gain Root Access on a Shared Server

A critical vulnerability in LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise could let a low-privilege website user gain root access on a shared-hosting server, cPanel warned in an  advisory published on September 14 . On such servers, many customers' sites run on a single machine, and an attacker with one of those hosting accounts could exploit the flaw to access or alter other sites and the server itself, according to the advisory. cPanel said it had received notice of the flaw, which affects versions before 6.3.7, and urged administrators to update to that release, which LiteSpeed  published on September 11 . The flaw can bypass the controls that keep hosting accounts apart, including  CageFS , cPanel said. CageFS is a CloudLinux tool that gives each hosting account a restricted view of the file system, so it cannot see other accounts or the server's configuration files. Neither cPanel's advisory nor LiteSpeed's release notes describe how the flaw works. LiteSpeed's an...

Sep 15, 2026

9

Cisco Secure Email Gateway Flaw Exploited in the Wild, Enables Root Command Execution

Cisco has warned that a new critical vulnerability impacting AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76461 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been described as a case of insufficient validation in the email parsing logic that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to run arbitrary commands with root privileges on the underlying operating system. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted email message that contains malicious SQL statements through an affected device," Cisco said in a Monday advisory. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary SQL statements, leading to command execution with root privileges on the underlying operating system." The shortcoming affects Cisco Secure Email Gateway, both physical and virtual, regardless of device configuration. However, the networkin...

Sep 15, 2026

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China-Linked Hackers Exploit Chrome-Windows Zero-Day Chain to Deploy GRIMWEDGE

A Chinese threat actor has been attributed to a spear-phishing campaign that exploits recently patched security flaws in Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows to deliver a malicious JavaScript backdoor called GRIMWEDGE . Volexity, which is tracking the threat cluster under the moniker UTA0560 , said the activity targeted multiple non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on September 1, 2026. "The emails contained a message encouraging the users to click a link that led to the website of a U.S.-based university," researchers Ankur Saini, Conor Quigley, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, and Tom Lancaster said . "These links abused a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on the website, redirecting recipients to threat-actor-controlled infrastructure hosting a multi-stage exploit chain." The exploit chain, as previously highlighted by Proofpoint, involves three separate flaws – two in Chrome and one in Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC). It first ab...

Sep 15, 2026