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ZDI-26-648: (Pwn2Own) OpenAI Codex External Control of System or Configuration Setting Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

ZDI published a Pwn2Own advisory for CVE-2026-19590, enabling remote code execution in OpenAI's Codex agent via system or configuration control.

Zero Day Initiative advisory ZDI-26-648 documents an External Control of System or Configuration Setting vulnerability in OpenAI Codex, demonstrated at Pwn2Own. A remote attacker could achieve arbitrary code execution, with user interaction required such as opening malicious content. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-19590 with a CVSS rating of 7.8. No exploitation in the wild is reported.

NCSC Warns of Critical Check Point VPN Flaws as Large-Scale Exploitation Is Expected

Dutch NCSC warns of two critical CVSS 9.8 Check Point VPN flaws enabling unauthenticated remote code execution, urging immediate patching before mass exploitation.

The Dutch NCSC warned that CVE-2026-85102 and CVE-2026-85103, both rated 9.8 CVSS, allow unauthenticated remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on Check Point Quantum Security Gateway, Spark Firewall, and Security Management Server deployments when VPN is enabled. CVE-2026-85102 stems from improper certificate trust validation during VPN negotiation, while CVE-2026-85103 is a heap-based buffer overflow in ASN.1 certificate decoding. Check Point shipped emergency updates on September 9, 2026, including R82.10 Take 44, R82 Take 126, and R81.20 Take 166 or later, plus LivePatch for eligible systems. No public exploit code exists yet, but the NCSC rates exploitation likelihood high and recommends restricting UDP ports 500 and 4500 to known peers as a stopgap.

Cyber Security Newsupdated · 2d agofirst · 2d agoVulnerability 9 sourcesCVE-2026-85102CVE-2026-85103

Securing Claude Code: The New Compliance API, Local Visibility, and Identity Governance

Anthropic's new Compliance API endpoints expose Claude Code local session transcripts, highlighting governance gaps for endpoint AI agents.

Anthropic added local session transcript endpoints to its Compliance API on August 11, 2026, giving security teams visibility into prompts, bash commands, file operations, and MCP commands run by Claude Code harnesses on endpoints. The article argues local harnesses break the classic shared-responsibility model, citing Token Security data that 68.6% of discovered AI agents run on endpoints, and a Cloud Security Alliance survey of 418 IT and security professionals in which 82% found an unknown agent within the past year. It outlines three governance layers: Anthropic managed settings as a policy baseline, the Compliance API for cloud-visible transcripts, and endpoint telemetry to connect agent activity to identity, credentials, and permissions.

The Hacker News · 16d agoAI safety & security1

Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution (via the strip utility)

ArXiv paper shows the trusting-trust compiler backdoor technique can compromise an entire Linux distribution via the strip utility.

The paper (arXiv 2607.24888) demonstrates that Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack, long viewed as a compiler-specific threat, can backdoor an entire Linux distribution by targeting the strip utility. A compromised tool reproduces its backdoor in subsequent rebuilds of itself, generalizing the attack surface beyond compilers. The finding has supply-chain implications for build reproducibility and distribution trust, though it is a research result with no observed real-world exploitation.

Lobsters · security · 11d agoResearch

Putting models to the secure coding test: Plan vs default mode

Datadog Security Labs tested Sonnet 5, Composer 2.5, and GPT 5.5 to see if plan mode yields more secure code than default mode.

Datadog Security Labs evaluated whether plan mode produces measurably more secure code than default mode. The test covered three frontier coding models: Sonnet 5, Composer 2.5, and GPT 5.5. The results inform how engineering teams should configure AI coding assistants to reduce insecure code. This is an AI security evaluation, not an incident report.

Datadog Security Labs · 28d agoAI safety & security

Compiler Can Undo Your Security Checks

Chris Domas explains at Black Hat how legal compiler optimizations can strip security checks and memory-clearing operations, turning secure C source into vulnerable binaries.

David Bombal interviews researcher Chris Domas at Black Hat USA 2026 about how the C abstract machine permits compilers to legally transform code in ways that remove security protections, delete memory-clearing operations, and introduce time-of-check to time-of-use vulnerabilities. Factors like register pressure, structure layout, and data size affect vulnerability, with examples where 17 or 33 byte buffers are safe while nearby sizes produce vulnerable code. An AI-assisted analysis of 500 million lines of open-source code identified 300 potentially dangerous patterns. Recommended mitigations include enabling compiler warnings, using sanitizers, analyzing optimized builds, and testing the exact binary that ships.

Keys to the Kingdom: Erlang/OTP SSH Vulnerability Analysis and Exploits Observed in the Wild

Attackers actively exploit CVE-2025-32433, a CVSS 10.0 unauthenticated RCE in Erlang/OTP SSH, heavily targeting OT and critical infrastructure networks.

CVE-2025-32433 enables unauthenticated RCE in Erlang/OTP's SSH daemon via SSH connection protocol messages (codes >= 80) processed before authentication, affecting versions before OTP-27.3.3, OTP-26.2.5.11 and OTP-25.3.2.20. Unit 42 recorded a spike in exploitation between May 1-9, 2025, with 70% of detections on firewalls protecting OT networks, disproportionately affecting healthcare, agriculture, media and high technology. Observed payloads bind TCP-connected shells or launch Bash reverse shells to hosts like 146.103.40.203:6667, with randomized DNS lookups under dns.outbound.watchtowr.com indicating OAST-driven blind RCE validation.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2025-32433

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

CISA added CVE-2026-86218 (CVSS 10.0), a pre-auth RCE in N-able N-central, to KEV after N-able confirmed in-the-wild exploitation; patch by September 11.

CISA added CVE-2026-86218, a maximum-severity static code injection flaw enabling pre-authentication remote code execution in N-able N-central, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog with a September 11, 2026 deadline for federal agencies. The flaw is fixed in N-central 2026.3 Hotfix 4 (released September 5), and N-able told customers it has been observed being exploited in the wild. Separately, Huntress is investigating the compromise of a fully patched customer N-central environment on September 4 and cannot yet confirm which flaw was used, while Rapid7-disclosed CVE-2026-86206 and CVE-2026-86207 can be chained by an unauthenticated attacker to create a rogue System Administrator account.

Cisco confirms CVE-2026-20079 Secure FMC flaw exploited in attacks

Cisco confirmed active exploitation of CVE-2026-20079, a CVSS 10.0 authentication bypass enabling unauthenticated root command execution in Secure FMC; CISA added it to KEV.

Cisco confirmed in August 2026 that CVE-2026-20079 (CVSS 10.0), an unauthenticated authentication bypass in Secure Firewall Management Center, is being actively exploited, allowing remote attackers to execute scripts and commands as root via crafted HTTP requests to the web interface. CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, ordering federal civilian agencies to patch by September 12, 2026. Shared IOCs, identical hot fixes, and a July 23 log entry suggest CVE-2026-20079 was used alongside the separately exploited static-credential flaw CVE-2026-20316 in the same attacks. Cisco released patches and cloud fixes, warns hot fixes do not remediate already-compromised devices, and says there are no workarounds.

BleepingComputerupdated · 2d agofirst · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 13 sourcesCVE-2026-20079CVE-2026-20316

USN-8736-1: Perl vulnerabilities

Ubuntu issued USN-8736-1 fixing two Perl regex flaws that could cause denial of service, code execution, or security-restriction bypass.

Ubuntu released a security notice addressing two Perl vulnerabilities in regular expression handling. CVE-2026-15534 involves mishandling of large inputs during regex matching, enabling out-of-bounds heap reads or writes that could lead to denial of service or arbitrary code execution. CVE-2026-19487 involves incorrect matching for regexes with alternative branches, allowing security restrictions to be bypassed. Users are advised to apply the updated packages.

An Empirical Security Analysis of Open-Source Software Used in Onboard Satellite Systems

Study of 126 onboard satellite OSS repositories finds 2,827 security findings, 72% medium severity or higher, dominated by memory safety and code quality weaknesses.

Researchers performed an empirical security analysis of 126 public repositories of open-source software used in onboard satellite systems using SBOM generation, software composition analysis, static application security testing, infrastructure-as-code analysis, and secret scanning. After cleaning and deduplication the pipeline produced 2,827 findings, with medium-severity findings accounting for 49% and 72% classified medium or higher. A CWE-based taxonomy mapped all findings to eight weakness families, with Memory Safety and Code Quality dominating, followed by Input Validation and Injection. Project-developed code accounted for 81.4% of findings, though external dependency code remained relevant; findings do not establish mission-specific exploitability.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

New AI Attack Hides Malicious Instructions in Normal-Looking Text to Evade Safety Filters

Check Point researchers show crafted prose hides policy-violating instructions that bypass all tested LLM gatekeepers, including GPT-4o mini and Llama Guard 3.

A new prompt-crafting technique embeds malicious payloads inside grammatical, natural-looking text without Base64, invisible Unicode, or obvious encodings, defeating lightweight pre-screening gatekeepers. In testing, all four evaluated gatekeeper models—gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18, gpt-oss-safeguard:20b, claude-3-haiku-20240307, and llama-guard3:8b—classified the crafted wrappers as safe at a 100% bypass rate across 23 obfuscated prompts. GPT-5 Thinking in high-reasoning mode recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (~94.4%), often spending over a minute and multiple Python executions. Researchers recommend paraphrasing untrusted input, hardening gatekeeper policies, and applying defense-in-depth controls for agentic deployments.

GBHackers · 5d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

Attackers exploit critical SharePoint flaw after PoC goes public (CVE-2026-55040)

Attackers use Rapid7's public PoC to exploit CVE-2026-55040, a critical SharePoint authentication bypass patched in July 2026.

Rapid7 researcher Stephen Fewer published technical analysis and PoC exploit code for CVE-2026-55040, an authentication bypass in SharePoint caused by flaws in the JWT token validation pipeline. Threat intelligence firm Defused observed attackers using the PoC against SharePoint honeypots, though Microsoft has not yet confirmed in-the-wild exploitation. Chained with CVE-2026-63520, the flaw can yield unauthenticated remote code execution, per NHS England Digital. CISA is urging administrators to harden SharePoint deployments by limiting direct internet exposure and using Layer 7 reverse proxies.

Help Net Security · Aug 13, 2026Exploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-55040CVE-2026-63520

VU#456290: Hugging Face Transformers library writes remote code to disk prior to consent check

CVE-2026-80047: Hugging Face Transformers 4.49.0 through 5.8.1 writes attacker-controlled Python files to disk before the trust_remote_code consent check.

CERT/CC vulnerability note VU#456290 describes CVE-2026-80047 in the Hugging Face Transformers library, affecting versions 4.49.0 through 5.8.1. The library performs a remote module fetch and writes attacker-controlled Python files to the local disk before evaluating the trust_remote_code consent prompt, without user authorization. This violates the security contract enforced across other dynamic module-loading paths in the library. Transformers is a primary framework for training and inference across NLP, vision, audio, video, and multimodal machine learning systems.

Understanding the Security Boundary of Obfuscation-based On-Device LLM Protection

Researchers formalize obfuscation primitives for TEE-protected on-device LLMs and show a Collapse attack breaks ArrowCloak, TSQP, and LoRO, then extend the boundary.

The paper formalizes obfuscation primitives for TEE-Shielded LLM Partition (TSLP) schemes that offload computationally intensive layers from a Trusted Execution Environment to external GPUs. A novel primitive-guided attack, Collapse, demonstrates a shared vulnerability in prominent published methods including ArrowCloak (Security'25), TSQP (S&P'25), and LoRO (NeurIPS'25). The authors then introduce two new obfuscation primitives and integrate them with existing constructs to formulate an extended security boundary (O_ext).

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoAI safety & security

USN-8764-1: SRT vulnerabilities

Ubuntu fixes two SRT flaws allowing encrypted connection downgrade with content injection and remote crash.

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-8764-1 patches two vulnerabilities in the SRT streaming protocol. CVE-2026-55868 stems from unauthenticated encryption control messages, letting a remote attacker downgrade an encrypted connection to inject content or interrupt media streams. CVE-2026-55869 involves improper validation of control packets during connection setup and key refresh, enabling a remote denial of service.

An Empirical Analysis of CodeQL False Positives and Query Refinements for Java Vulnerabilities

Study of 167 Java CVE instances finds CodeQL false positives follow recurring patterns; query refinements remove 81.8% of reviewed ones.

Researchers ran CodeQL's Java security query suite on 167 CVE instances from 110 projects, manually reviewing 500 sampled false-positive paths and building a five-category taxonomy led by Missed Path Constraint or Sanitization (36.6%), Benign Execution Context (29.4%), and Missing Trust Boundary Modeling (27.6%). Guided by the taxonomy, query-level refinements removed 81.8% of reviewed false positives and 15.8% of reported paths across the selected queries while retaining 7 of 8 true positives. To address generalization, agentic coding tools given the refinement patterns as templates adapted them to new projects successfully in 56% and 62% of tasks, versus 28% without guidance.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch1

[webapps] Metabase 0.61.0 - Authenticated Remote Code Execution

Exploit-DB published an authenticated remote code execution exploit targeting Metabase version 0.61.0.

A new Exploit-DB entry (ID 52680) describes an authenticated remote code execution vulnerability in Metabase 0.61.0. The listing provides minimal detail, but authenticated RCE in a widely deployed BI tool is notable for defenders running exposed instances. No CVE id or in-the-wild exploitation is mentioned in the listing.

Exploit-DB · 13d agoExploit / PoC1

Access Control as Verified Parse Constraints

Researchers verify a class of EverParse validators that correctly enforce access-control policies, deploying a machine-checked enforcement gate on seL4.

The paper targets enforcement-code bugs in commercial security gateways by proving that forward-only, backtrack-free EverParse validators are verified recognizers for a bounded finite-state class that includes access-control decision functions with fixed-offset fields and bounded disjunction. Encoding a bounded policy language into a fixed-size byte buffer allows an SMT solver to verify the enforcement code once, covering all byte values, policies, requests, and sessions. Editing rule content over a fixed endpoint set requires no new proof, while adding endpoints reruns the toolchain. A deployment on the seL4 microkernel ensures every request passes through the gate and unverified components cannot corrupt the enforcement chain.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

Closing the Blind Spot: Securing Personal Repositories in the Software Supply Chain

Wiz highlights personal developer repositories as a supply chain blind spot leaking corporate secrets, offering correlation-based risk validation and remediation.

Wiz argues that developers' personal code repositories are a blind spot in software supply chain security where corporate secrets quietly escape. The company describes an approach that correlates personal repositories to specific developers, validates the actual risk, and drives remediation. No specific incident or vulnerability is disclosed in the announcement.

Wiz Blog · Aug 13, 2026Tools2

[webapps] FreePBX 17.0.2 - Remote Code Execution (RCE)

Exploit-DB published a remote code execution exploit targeting FreePBX version 17.0.2.

Exploit-DB entry 52681 documents a remote code execution vulnerability in FreePBX 17.0.2, a widely used open-source PBX platform. The listing contains no CVE id, authentication requirement, or evidence of in-the-wild exploitation. FreePBX is commonly internet-facing, so unauthenticated RCE would be significant for exposed deployments.

Exploit-DB · 13d agoExploit / PoC2

Signal's new security feature checks if your encrypted chats were tampered with

Signal adds automatic key verification, a key-transparency system audited by Cloudflare and Trail of Bits that detects key-directory tampering in E2EE chats.

Signal launched automatic key verification, a key-transparency system that confirms a phone number or username remains bound to a consistent encryption key across Signal's key directory. Cloudflare and Trail of Bits independently audit the system, with cryptographic protection preventing auditors from seeing users' identifiers in plaintext. The feature mitigates key substitution by a compromised directory or privileged insider, though it currently requires the contact's phone number and users can fall back to manual Safety Number verification.

Help Net Security · Aug 12, 2026Tools

CONTINUITY: Security-Context Contracts for Composable LLM Agent Controls

Researchers introduce CONTINUITY, a framework of assume-guarantee contracts that preserves LLM agent security context across components, verified across 2,560 attack instances.

The paper identifies security-context discontinuity, where individually sound controls drop, widen, or reinterpret security context as actions cross component boundaries, and proposes CONTINUITY, a framework of assume-guarantee contracts using signed root grants, provenance commitments, role-bound transition receipts, and effect-bound execution permits. It formalizes end-to-end consequence integrity, requiring every external effect to be backed by a valid authorization witness linking principal, task, provenance, and policy state. A reference verifier and cross-layer fault-injection suite covering 32 fault classes showed the full configuration committed no harmful external effect across 2,560 parameterized attack instances while completing all 700 benign tasks and escalating all 200 ambiguous cases.

arXiv cs.CR · 11d agoAI safety & security