IT News Analysis

1

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

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

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

4

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

5

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

6

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

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

Autonomous AI Agents Compromise Thousands of Credentials in Under Six Hours

Threat actors are continuing to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline their operations , with one financially motivated hacking group employing an autonomous, multi-agent attack framework to carry out a large-scale credential harvesting campaign within six hours. Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said it has observed attackers with diverse motivations targeting proprietary AI models across healthcare, government, and media sectors, exfiltrating API credentials, and co-opting victim cloud environments to sustain unauthorized AI workloads. This highlights growing attacker focus on enterprise AI assets for espionage, extortion, and resource theft. "At this point, we can assume that all threat actors are using AI in some capacity and their operations have benefited," John Hultquist, chief analyst at GTIG, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "Like everyone else, we're concerned about the vulnerability problem, but AI is being applie...

Sep 08, 2026

9

WeChat Zero-Click Worm Took Over Accounts on iPhone and Android via Incoming Calls

Researchers at the security firm Calif have built a worm that takes over a WeChat account via an incoming call and  demonstrated it spreading  among three test phones. The person being called does not have to answer or touch their phone for it to work, but the caller must already be one of their WeChat contacts. Calif reported the flaw to Tencent in July and says the company has since blocked the exploit for all users. No attacks using the flaw have been reported, and Calif does not say there were any. Attacks that require no action from the target, known as zero-click attacks, are not new. Last year, WhatsApp  patched a flaw  it said may have been used in targeted attacks. Answering the call does not stop the attack. Calif said a person who picks up hears nothing and the exploit still works. Declining the call ends that attempt, but the attacker can call again later, for example while the target is asleep. The caller has to be on the target's WeChat contac...

Sep 08, 2026

10

What It Took to Reach 1 Billion Build Manifests

In the last six months, Chainguard doubled its output from 500 million to more than 1 billion container build manifests. We also surpassed 3,000 unique container images and 675,000 image versions in our catalog. Those are the headline numbers, but I want to share what's actually behind them. The number itself is less interesting than the system that produced it, and why we had to fundamentally rethink that system to get here. What a build manifest actually represents Let’s be precise about what we're counting. How do we define a “build manifest”? Think of it as every time the Chainguard Factory produces a new, verifiable artifact: a fresh image for go:1.26.5 , a rebuild of nginx triggered by a libc patch, a new architecture variant, a regenerated SBOM after a dependency change - all these events cause a new build and therefore new artifacts. At our scale, a single project like Python might have dozens of supported versions, each with multiple architecture builds, each r...

Sep 08, 2026