IT News Analysis

1

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

2

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

3

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.

4

INTERPOL Operation Jackal IV Arrests 58, Identifies 263 in Global Cyber Fraud Crackdown

An eight-month INTERPOL operation targeting West African organized crime groups has led to arrests of 58 people and the identification of 263 suspects. "The operation, which brought together 22 countries from six continents, is a response to the escalating global threat posed by West African criminal networks – such as the Black Axe and other similar groups," INTERPOL said . "These groups are responsible for a significant share of the world's cyber-enabled financial fraud, typically through romance scams, cryptocurrency and investment scams or business email compromise fraud, as well as other serious and violent crimes." Countries that participated in the effort include Austria, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Côte d'Ivoire, France, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.A.E., the U.K., and the U.S. INTERPOL said the investigation identified 196 individu...

Aug 26, 2026

5

Newly SLEEPWALKER Backdoor Waits for One Crafted Packet, Then Runs Its Own Bytecode

An independent malware researcher has documented a previously unreported Windows backdoor, dubbed SLEEPWALKER , that stays inert in memory until a specifically crafted network packet reaches the machine and then runs commands written in a 23-instruction language of its own design. The sample is an unsigned 64-bit Windows dynamic-link library (DLL) of 59,904 bytes, built to be side-loaded into ERAAgent.exe, the Windows executable for ESET Management Agent. It impersonates Microsoft's dpapi.dll, exporting the same seven data protection functions as the genuine system library, and carries a version resource copied from ESET Management Agent. There are no domains, IP addresses or URLs built into the file, and it makes no outbound connection of its own, so an infected host can look clean to tooling that watches for connections to known-bad infrastructure. Commands arrive as bytecode rather than readable text, so recovering the encryption key yields opcodes in a format that...

Aug 26, 2026

6

Critical Gitea RCE Actively Exploited as Reported Attack Drops Miner-Like Payload

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday warned of active exploitation efforts targeting a recently patched critical security flaw impacting Gitea. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-60004 (CVSS score: 9.8), a case of remote code execution that allows an attacker with ordinary write access to a repository to execute arbitrary shell commands as the Gitea OS user. "Gitea's diffpatch endpoint can be abused to install and execute a Git hook from repository-controlled content," according to an advisory released by Gitea last month. "With default open registration, an unauthenticated visitor can obtain the required write access by registering an account and creating a repository." Security researcher Shai rod (aka NightRang3r) has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. The issue affects all versions of Gitea from version 1.17 and has been patched in version 1.27.1. As The Hacker News reported pre...

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

Fake Apple Support AI Calls Target Stolen-Device Owners for Passcodes and 2FA Codes

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform built to strip Apple's Activation Lock from stolen devices, using rented AI voice agents that call theft victims posing as Apple Support and ask for their device passcode. SOCRadar Threat Research Unit (STRU) said the platform, which it tracks as AnonyMousKIT , is credit-metered and drives lures across five channels from a single victim record, comprising email at 1.50 credits, SMS priced per sender ID, WhatsApp, a recorded voice call at 1 credit, and an AI voice agent at 2 credits. The targets are owners of Apple devices that were recently lost or stolen, and the pages and calls ask each of them for the 4- or 6-digit device passcode, then the Apple ID credentials, and finally a live two-factor authentication (2FA) code. Apple's own guidance states that the company never asks for a password, device passcode, or 2FA code to provide support. "AnonyMousKIT is best understood no...

Aug 26, 2026

9

U.S. Sanctions Iran-Linked Hackers Behind Critical Infrastructure Breaches

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced fresh sanctions on Iranian cyber actors as part of what it called an "unprecedented, whole-of-government, economic campaign" against the nation and its enablers. "We are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone," said Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. The action, codenamed Operation Economic Outcast, aims to cut the Iranian regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the financial "lifelines" that support the "leading state sponsor of terror." To that end, the sanctions designate nearly 60 Iran-linked entities, individuals, and vessels across nuclear, missile, oil, and cyber networks, including the digital assets sector. Specifically, the sanctions take aim at a malicious cyber group affiliated with Iran...

Aug 25, 2026

10

A Malicious Webpage Could Poison Your Local AI Model Behind NVIDIA NemoClaw

Oasis Security has disclosed a weakness in NVIDIA NemoClaw that could let an attacker-controlled webpage take unauthenticated control of the local Ollama instance serving an AI agent and plant hidden instructions inside the model itself. The findings were shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication, and the report says Oasis Security reported them to NVIDIA's Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) beforehand. The research carries no CVE identifier. No exploitation has been reported as of August 25, 2026. Oasis Security's head of research, Elad Luz, told The Hacker News that NemoClaw v0.0.35 fixed the issue on macOS and Linux. There is no fix on the Windows and WSL path, according to Luz, where v0.0.34 added a Windows installation that carries a warning instead. NemoClaw is NVIDIA's open source reference stack for running agents such as OpenClaw inside its OpenShell sandboxes, and Ollama is one of its supported local inference backends. The report des...

Aug 25, 2026