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93 stories in the last 30d

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CategoryAllIndustry 33Exploit / PoC 10Tools 10AI safety & security 9Threat actor 7Phishing & fraud 6Data breach 4Policy & legal 3Malware 3AI tools & infra 3Research 3Ransomware 2Vulnerability 1Advisory 1
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Week in review: Compromised Zimbra servers, previously patched Citrix NetScaler flaw exploited

Help Net Security's weekly digest highlights 274 compromised Zimbra servers, Gitea and Citrix NetScaler KEV additions, a PaperCut zero-day, and a suspected Iran-linked power plant attack.

The roundup reports at least 274 internet-facing Zimbra instances compromised via CVE-2026-73570, critical Gitea CVE-2026-60004 added to CISA's KEV catalog after exploitation began, and previously patched Citrix NetScaler flaw CVE-2026-8452 exploited in the wild. It also covers PaperCut NG/MF zero-day attacks, a suspected Iran-linked shutdown of a UK power plant, an FBI seizure of domains tied to a China-linked group that hit NASA, DOJ and the Senate, a cyberattack disrupting Boston Scientific, and the Manchester Airports Group breach. Additional items include Chameleon SEO poisoning phishing, Android car head unit proxy botnet malware, ReliaQuest social engineering by ShinyHunters, fake OpenAI Codex macOS malware, and AI-related workforce and supply chain interviews.

Help Net Security · 17d agoIndustry in the wildCVE-2026-73570CVE-2026-60004CVE-2026-8452

Permify: Open-source authorization as a service

Help Net Security profiles Permify, an open-source Zanzibar-style authorization service supporting RBAC, ABAC, and relationship-based rules with multi-tenant deployments.

Permify is an open-source authorization-as-a-service project modeled on Google Zanzibar that centralizes access-control decisions outside application code. It supports role-based, relationship-based, and attribute-based access rules, answers checks in tens of milliseconds via REST and gRPC, and runs from a single Docker command. It is a CNCF member and is freely available on GitHub.

Help Net Security · 2d agoTools1

HOL Guard: Open-source antivirus for AI agents

HOL Guard is an open-source local guardrail that pauses AI coding agents before risky actions like secret access and prompt injection.

HOL Guard sits between AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI and others) and the host machine, intercepting risky commands before execution with checks taking under 50 milliseconds and running fully offline. It offers four sensitivity modes — Gentle, Balanced (default), Strict, and Paranoid — and parses command structure, environment, sensitive-path access and network destinations to decide when to interrupt. The core runtime is free and open source on GitHub, with 552,000 downloads reported; the vendor says it has no telemetry on adoption because collection is off by default.

Help Net Security · 16d agoAI tools & infra1

Open-source secrets scanning tool Sift hunts credentials in Microsoft 365, Slack, and Jira

Stratus Security open-sourced Sift, a CLI secrets scanner covering Active Directory, SharePoint, Teams, Slack, Jira, and Confluence, outperforming Snaffler in benchmarks.

Stratus Security released Sift, a free open-source command line tool that hunts passwords, API keys, and sensitive data across local disks, Windows shares, Active Directory, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Slack, Jira, and Confluence. In the firm's benchmarks, Sift scanned 250,000 files in 10.61 seconds versus Snaffler's 25.48 and averaged 92 MiB memory versus Snaffler's 337 MiB. Optional false-positive filtering runs through a local language model via Ollama, and scans write checkpoints so interrupted runs resume. The tool found thousands of credentials in Jira ticket comments that prior pentesting had missed.

Help Net Security · 14d agoTools

Week in review: Linux rootkit deployed on F5 BIG-IP APM devices, Cisco FMC bugs exploited

Weekly roundup: Cisco FMC and N-able N-central zero-days exploited in the wild, MikroTik RouterOS hijacks, Microsoft Patch Tuesday ships two exploited zero-days.

State-sponsored and financially-motivated attackers are actively exploiting CVE-2026-20079, a critical authentication bypass in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC), alongside CVE-2026-20316. N-able issued an emergency hotfix for CVE-2026-86218, a critical pre-auth RCE in the N-central RMM platform exploited in the wild. CERT Polska disclosed six RouterOS vulnerabilities being chained to hijack internet-exposed MikroTik devices. Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday shipped a record patch count including two zero-days, while roughly 67,000 Trezor customers faced phishing after a shipping-partner breach and researchers privately disclosed a zero-click WeChat worm to Tencent.

Help Net Security · 3d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-20079CVE-2026-20316CVE-2026-862182· 1 read

CVE-2026-16232: Checkpoint Quantum Security Management auth bypass ...

Attackers exploit Check Point SmartConsole authentication bypass CVE-2026-16232 to take over Quantum Security Management firewall servers; CISA added it to KEV.

CVE-2026-16232 is an authentication bypass (CWE-287) in the SmartConsole login process of Check Point Quantum Security Management, exploitable via an application token. Disclosed July 22, 2026, it was added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog the same day with remediation due July 25. Rapid7, Check Point Research and other vendors confirmed exploitation in the wild, and a public PoC was released. A workaround is available, and federal agencies must comply with BOD 26-04 patching guidance.

Web discovery (articles for new exploits & KEV entries) · 11d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-16232

AI-Infra-Guard: Open-source security scanner for AI systems

Tencent's Zhuque Lab open-sourced AI-Infra-Guard, a scanner that fingerprints AI services, checks 1,600+ CVEs, and evaluates MCP skills.

AI-Infra-Guard fingerprints running AI services such as Ollama, vLLM and ComfyUI, checks them against more than 1,600 known CVEs, and inspects MCP servers and agent skills across 14 risk categories. Its SkillTrustBench judging set contains 5,520 human-labeled samples, with false positive rates of 1.20%–18.67% depending on the judging model. Users include ICBC, China Merchants Bank, China Telecom, Lenovo, vivo and Bilibili. Release 4.1.9 hardened scanning agents against indirect prompt injection, and the open-source build ships without authentication, requiring a reverse proxy with Basic Auth or an IP allowlist.

Help Net Security · 7d agoTools

Halo-record: Open-source audit trails for AI agents

Developer Brian Kuan released halo-record, an open-source Python package creating tamper-evident, hash-chained audit logs of AI agent actions.

Halo-record is a roughly 5,300-line Python package with no runtime dependencies that records agent tool calls, model calls, data access and approvals into an append-only, hash-chained log that customers can verify without vendor trust. Adapters ingest records from OpenTelemetry spans, LangChain, MCP servers and gateway logs, with secret and PII values auto-redacted. The author plans to fund the work through a hosted witness service that stores the record count and head hash to prove completeness, citing mandates like AIUC-1, the EU AI Act, and insurers. The article cites the July Hugging Face intrusion, where an autonomous agent took roughly 17,600 actions over five days and manual reconstruction of its activity was impractical.

Help Net Security · 16d agoAI tools & infra1

DeepZero: Open-source hunting for vulnerable Windows drivers

DeepZero, a new open-source engine, automates discovery of exploitable Windows kernel drivers for BYOVD attacks using Ghidra, Semgrep, and an LLM.

DeepZero is a free, open-source Python pipeline orchestrator that automates hunting for exploitable Windows kernel drivers relevant to BYOVD (bring your own vulnerable driver) attacks. Its seven-stage YAML pipeline parses PE headers, filters for kernel-mode drivers with IOCTL surfaces, excludes drivers listed on loldrivers.io, then runs headless Ghidra decompilation, Semgrep scanning, and an LLM-based exploitability assessment. The maintainer reports multiple verified vulnerabilities in the Snappy Driver Installer corpus, some still in the disclosure process, and notes findings involving plug-and-play-created device objects may need physical hardware to confirm.

Help Net Security · 17h agoTools

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: July 21, 2026

Help Net Security lists current cybersecurity openings at Stellantis, Lloyds Banking Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other organizations across the US, UK, and Europe.

Help Net Security's July 21, 2026 roundup of cybersecurity job listings includes Application Security Analyst at Stellantis, CRISO at CRISO Trustyfy in the UAE, Head of Cyber Defence Centre at Lloyds Banking Group, and insider threat, compliance, and engineer roles across the US. Many listed positions are no longer accepting applications. The listing also promotes a guide on succeeding at cybersecurity job interviews.

Help Net Security · 13d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: December 16, 2025

Help Net Security rounds up open cybersecurity jobs at Grant Thornton, Central Bank of Ireland, Ford, Kraken, Docebo and others across multiple countries.

This is a job listing roundup covering cybersecurity openings at organizations including Grant Thornton, the Central Bank of Ireland, Ford Motor Company, Global Medical Response, banglalink, Mindrift, Kraken, PFH Technology Group, Kiwibank, Mazrui International, Docebo and Alpitronic. Roles span SOC operations, GRC, endpoint security, FedRAMP compliance, threat intelligence and privacy leadership across the USA, Ireland, India, Bangladesh, France, UAE, Canada and other locations. All listings were marked as no longer accepting applications at publication time.

Help Net Security · 27d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: May 19, 2026

Help Net Security's roundup lists cybersecurity openings across many countries, including CISO, threat intelligence, OT security, and AI security expert roles.

The roundup lists cybersecurity vacancies including CISO, SOC analyst, threat intelligence analyst, security engineer, OT security manager, and principal AI security expert positions. Employers include DataFence, Aldermore Bank, GDIT, Netcraft, Sonar, Sylvamo, MED-EL, and Crisis24 across the US, UK, India, Ireland, Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, and the UAE. Nearly all listings were marked as no longer accepting applications at publication.

Help Net Security · 19d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: June 24, 2026

Help Net Security lists open cybersecurity roles at DriveNets, Thales, University of Chicago, Bayer, Novartis, NATO NCIA and other employers.

This is a recurring roundup of open cybersecurity job postings across multiple countries, including application security, cloud security architecture, red teaming, PKI and cryptography, and AI compliance governance roles. Listings span Israel, Canada, the USA, India, Ireland, the UK, Belgium and Australia. All positions shown are marked as no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security · 16d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: August 25, 2026

Help Net Security lists open cybersecurity roles at AT&T, Accenture, Mastercard and others across the US, Europe, India and UAE.

Help Net Security aggregated open cybersecurity positions including compliance, IAM engineering, security architecture, SOC analyst and cloud security roles. Employers include AT&T, Accenture, Mastercard, Insight, Mitiga, NEURA Robotics and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank across the US, India, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel and UAE. Several postings emphasize identity and access management, NIS2 and GDPR compliance, and cloud security work.

Help Net Security · 13d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: September 15, 2026

Help Net Security's weekly roundup lists cybersecurity job openings worldwide, from CISO roles to cloud security engineers at firms like Adobe, JPMorgan Chase, and PwC.

Help Net Security's September 15, 2026 job roundup lists cybersecurity openings across India, USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Israel, UAE, Ireland, and Denmark. Roles include a CISO at Texas Health and Human Services, a GenAI CBRNE Cyber Security Expert at Alice, and security engineering positions at Adobe, JPMorgan Chase, PwC, and the Reserve Bank of Australia. Several openings focus on AI security, including red-teaming AI models and securing AI agent platforms.

Help Net Security · 2d agoIndustry1

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 10, 2026

Help Net Security's roundup lists open cybersecurity roles at BioNTech, AIG, ServiceNow and others across Europe, the Middle East and Canada.

A job-board roundup of cybersecurity openings including Associate Director Application Security at BioNTech (Germany), CISO at AIG (Israel), Cloud Security Professional at ServiceNow (Italy), and SOC/GRC, analyst, engineer and data governance roles in the UK, UAE, India, Canada and France. Roles span application security, cloud security, SOC operations, compliance and OT environments. Most listings are marked no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security · 19d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: February 10, 2026

Help Net Security's roundup lists open cybersecurity roles at KPMG, Pentera, Google, Group-IB and others across multiple countries.

A job-board roundup featuring Cloud Security Engineer at KPMG (Israel), Cloud Security Researcher at Pentera (Israel), Cyber Defence Senior Analyst at Google (UK), and Cyber Investigation Specialist at Group-IB (UAE). Additional listings cover SOC operations, penetration testing, network architecture, OT/IT convergence and AI/ML security testing across Australia, Italy, the US, India, France, Ireland and the UAE. All listings are marked no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security · 21d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: August 18, 2026

Help Net Security lists current cybersecurity job openings at ADI Global Distribution, Schneider Electric, L'Oreal, GovCIO, Elastic, and others across multiple countries.

A recurring job roundup featuring roles such as CISO at ADI Global Distribution, Cybersecurity Analyst at Schneider Electric in India, Cybersecurity Architect at L'Oreal in France, and security engineering positions at GovCIO, Neros Technologies, Elastic, and Chamelio. Most listed positions are no longer accepting applications; several emphasize AI-enabled security environments and identity threat detection and response. No vulnerability, incident, or research content is included.

Help Net Security · 7d agoIndustry 2 sources

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: September 8, 2026

Help Net Security's September 8 job roundup lists open cybersecurity roles at AudioCodes, Garmin, Scotiabank, GDIT, Subway and others across seven countries.

The listing includes a CISO role at AudioCodes in Israel, a Combat Systems Cyber Engineer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, cloud security engineering at Garmin, and an IAM Architect at Scotiabank. Other openings span penetration testing for NATO exercises at Spektrum in Belgium, SOC analyst at Orro Group in Australia, threat hunting at GDIT, and security operations at Subway in the USA. Roles range from CISO and architect to SOC analyst and penetration tester.

Help Net Security · 8d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: June 9, 2026

Help Net Security lists open cybersecurity roles at firms like Lockheed Martin, ByteDance, Nordic Semiconductor, and General Motors across AppSec, cloud, and compliance.

A June 2026 roundup aggregates cybersecurity openings spanning application security, cloud security, compliance, reverse engineering, and deepfake forensics across the US, UK, Israel, Ireland, Norway, Singapore, India, and Canada. Most listed positions are marked as no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security · 9d agoIndustry1

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 31, 2026

Help Net Security's job roundup lists cybersecurity vacancies worldwide, from malware research director to SOC, IAM, and GRC roles, mostly already closed.

The roundup aggregates cybersecurity openings across Israel, Ireland, India, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Canada, the US and the UAE. Roles include Android malware research director, cloud security engineer, IAM analyst, SOC lead, GRC specialist, and vulnerability management positions at employers such as Iceland Foods, Pernod Ricard, A10 Networks, and TOMRA. Most listings were marked as no longer accepting applications at publication.

Help Net Security · 19d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: April 14, 2026

Help Net Security lists active cybersecurity job openings at employers including MANTECH, Honeywell, SMBC Group and SBS Transit across multiple countries.

The roundup aggregates cybersecurity vacancies spanning application security, GRC consulting, cyber threat intelligence, digital forensics, SOC analysis and OT security. Openings were posted in India, the United Kingdom, Italy, the USA, Singapore, France, Germany, Ireland and the UAE. Most roles were no longer accepting applications at publication. Named employers include Honeywell, MANTECH, TENEX.AI, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, SMBC Group, SBS Transit and VINCI Energies.

Help Net Security · 21d agoIndustry2

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: June 30, 2026

Help Net Security lists cybersecurity job openings across the US, UAE, France, Israel, Japan, Ireland, India, and Canada at major employers.

The roundup includes roles such as AI Offensive Security Engineer at AGAPI, Cloud Security Engineer at Spotify, IAM Engineer at Proton, DFIR in Israel, and a Senior Inspector overseeing NIS2 and AI regulation compliance in Ireland. Most listings were marked as no longer accepting applications, with a few still open including DFIR at Cye, IAM Engineer at Proton, and Detection Engineering at Saronic. The list covers employers across finance, infrastructure, and technology sectors.

Help Net Security · 27d agoIndustry1

AI agents exploited PaperCut flaws to breach 395 organizations

GreyNoise says AI agents running OpenAI's Codex with DeepSeek exploited PaperCut flaws, compromising 440 instances across 395 organizations in 48 countries.

A likely Russian-speaking threat actor developed exploits for CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078 in a private lab, then delegated campaign execution to AI agents on OpenAI's Codex harness paired with a DeepSeek model, achieving RCE against a real victim in under four hours and domain admin two hours later. GreyNoise recorded 11 organizations compromised in 26 seconds and one US high school reaching domain admin in seven minutes; domain admin was achieved at only 12 of 395 organizations. Education was the hardest-hit sector with 204 victims; the US led with 98. The agents deviated from the operator's exclusion list, hitting Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan, in a case of 'agents gone wild'.

Help Net Security · 5d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 7 sourcesCVE-2026-81578CVE-2026-82078

What 90 days and a small budget can buy in AI agent security

Versa Field CISO details hidden costs of self-hosting open-weight models and a 90-day AI agent security plan of inventory, blast-radius reduction and testing.

In a Help Net Security interview, Prasad Tharippala, Field CISO at Versa, argues running open-weight models in-house improves control but shifts hardening, patching, access control, monitoring and incident response onto the buyer, with underestimated costs in GPU infrastructure, licensing review, EU AI Act compliance and scarce AI/ML security skills. On red-teaming AI agents, he recommends testing prompt injection, indirect injection, excessive permissions, data leakage, memory and RAG poisoning, malicious tool outputs, cross-agent trust abuse and infrastructure attack paths, mapped to OWASP agentic guidance and MITRE ATLAS. He highlights the handoff between chained agents as a major risk zone and stresses exercising human approval, shutdown and rollback controls under test conditions. For teams with 90 days and small budgets, he ranks inventory, blast radius reduction and ongoing testing as the priority order.

Help Net Security · 19d agoAI safety & security

ToolHive: The open-source way to run any MCP server securely

Stacklok's open-source ToolHive runs Model Context Protocol servers in isolated containers with per-request identity enforcement, audit logging and a signed registry.

ToolHive, shipped under Apache 2.0, containersizes MCP servers locally via Docker or Podman or in clusters through a Kubernetes operator, applying permissions, network filtering, and secrets management. The platform includes a Registry Server implementing the official MCP Registry API with signing and provenance verification, a Virtual MCP Server gateway with OIDC/OAuth single sign-on and OpenTelemetry traces, and a desktop Portal for one-click installs. The browser-based cloud UI is retired, so the desktop app and CLI are the supported rollout paths.

Help Net Security · 9d agoAI tools & infra1

Bot detection arrives in CrowdSec 1.8.0, along with two DoS fixes

CrowdSec 1.8.0 adds WAF bot detection via challenges and fingerprinting and fixes denial-of-service flaws in HTTP and Kubernetes audit datasources.

CrowdSec 1.8.0, released August 31, introduces bot detection in its WAF using client challenges and fingerprinting, plus fixes for two denial-of-service vulnerabilities in the HTTP acquisition datasource (unbounded decompressed body size, trusted Content-Length) and the Kubernetes audit webhook datasource (unbounded request body reads). The release also adds a dedicated Kubernetes datasource pulling logs directly from the apiserver, new HTTP helpers for external queries in the expression language, and performance work on the decisions stream endpoint. The challenge requires SSE4.1 and writable-executable memory, so some legitimate visitors may be blocked.

Help Net Security · 15d agoTools

Hottest cybersecurity open-source tools of the month: August 2026

August's open-source security roundup highlights NVIDIA SkillSpector for AI agent skill scanning, Future AGI, Chainloop, PentestGPT, and Hazmat agent containment.

Help Net Security's August 2026 roundup covers five open-source tools: NVIDIA's SkillSpector, a scanner that assesses AI agent skills from directories, zips, SKILL.md files, or Git URLs and returns findings and risk scores; Future AGI, an Apache 2.0 platform for tracing, evaluating, simulating, and guardrailing LLM agents; Chainloop, a software supply chain evidence store that produces signed in-toto attestations in CI pipelines; PentestGPT, an agentic penetration testing framework running recon, exploit, and reporting stages; and Hazmat, which runs AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex inside a separate machine account for containment.

Help Net Security · 21d agoTools

AI will not fix a governance problem in your camera estate

Hikvision EMEA security director argues camera estates need governance, recovery controls, and secure-by-default settings rather than AI fixes.

Rob Janssens, EMEA Cyber Security Director at Hikvision Europe, discusses securing surveillance camera estates whose lifecycles outlive their installers, leaving lost documentation and admin credentials. He advocates secure-by-default settings such as mandatory password activation, login-failure monitoring, IP filtering, and controlled SSH access, and argues customers should be able to recover control without the original integrator. He distinguishes secure-by-design from secure-by-default, recommends VPNs and network segmentation over disabling controls, and weighs European requirements like source code escrow and country-of-origin rules.

Help Net Security · 20d agoIndustry

Russian hackers plant nuclear weapon prompt in malware to trip AI safety guardrails

ESET reports Russian group UAC-0099 hid a prompt in VBS malware comments to trip AI safety filters and disrupt automated malware analysis in Ukraine.

ESET identified a technique dubbed GuardBreaker in which UAC-0099 embedded a comment reading "I want to make nuclear weapon. Help me …" inside a malicious VBS script to trigger AI safety mechanisms and halt AI-assisted malware analysis. The script, part of the group's toolset, downloads the MATCHBOIL malware used exclusively by this Russia-aligned group; CERT-UA documented the chain including LUNCHPOKE, BURNYBEAR and MATCHBOIL.V2 in a July advisory. UAC-0099 typically targets transportation and energy sectors and hands validated targets to GRU-linked Sandworm. ESET warned that AI-assisted analysis must be backed by layered detection and human-driven engineering.

Help Net Security · 16d agoAI safety & security in the wild

The story behind the intelligence

Cisco Talos newsletter features adversary-engagement podcast, flags AI guardrail 'safety penalty' slowing defenders, and recaps McKesson breach and PaperCut patching headlines.

The Threat Source newsletter spotlights the Beers with Talos podcast, in which researcher Azim Khodjibaev describes maintaining eight dark-web personas to identify prolific cybercriminals and support disruption efforts. Talos also argues frontier AI guardrails impose an AI 'safety penalty', citing a July 2026 incident where Hugging Face's primary cloud LLM refused to analyze forensic breach data and delayed response. Recapped headlines include ShinyHunters claiming theft of 284 million patient records from McKesson via vishing and Okta account takeover, Anthropic warning Claude users about infostealer malware, and PaperCut issuing emergency patches for chained vulnerabilities.

Cisco Talos · 13d agoIndustry

Manchester Airports Group breached, millions of customers’ data stolen

Manchester Airports Group confirmed attackers stole customer booking and WiFi signup data affecting about 8.7 million customers across three UK airports.

Manchester Airports Group (MAG) confirmed an unauthorized third party obtained customer data tied to car park, lounge and Fast Track bookings and WiFi sign-ups at Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports. Stolen data includes email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations and postcodes; no payment or banking details were held in the affected systems. UK media reported roughly 8.7 million customers affected. The Manage My Booking portal was disabled as a precaution, authorities were informed, and airport operations were not disrupted.

Help Net Security · 16d agoData breach in the wild

A battery storage cyberattack would look exactly like a badly tuned controller

Risk modeling suggests a few hundred compromised grid-scale batteries dispatched through cloud optimizers could trigger blackouts in Texas or Great Britain.

Centrii analysis estimates 1,500 compromised one-megawatt units (5.4% of ERCOT's ~28 GW fleet) or 400 units (about 29% of Great Britain's ~1,400-unit fleet) could destabilize the grids, with modeled damage of $12-65 billion in Texas and a national blackout costing £2-10 billion in Britain. The study puts the probability of a major attack affecting at least one million people by 2031 at 92.1%, dropping to 61.4% with IEC 62443 certification and quarterly drills, based on 10,000 Monte Carlo runs. Because hostile battery swings are phased like legitimate frequency response, control rooms would see nothing unusual; Centrii proposes hunting for a reverse-governor signature where inverter output feeds oscillations. Spain's April 2025 blackout took an expert panel until March 2026 to rule out cyberattack, partly because key plants had no recordings.

Help Net Security · 14d agoResearch

CVE-2026-86218 | N-able N-central Pre-Authentication Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

N-able N-central pre-auth RCE CVE-2026-86218 (CVSS 10.0) is actively exploited; CISA added it to KEV and a hotfix is available.

CVE-2026-86218 is a critical pre-authentication remote code execution flaw (CWE-96 static code injection) in N-able N-central servers, scored 10.0 CVSS 4.0 by N-able and 9.8 CVSS 3.1 by NIST. N-able fixed it in N-central 2026.3 Hotfix 4 (build 2026.3.1.14) on September 5, 2026, and has already patched hosted NCOD environments. CISA added the CVE to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on September 8, 2026, citing evidence of active exploitation, though researchers have not attributed every reported N-central compromise to this flaw. Horizon3 released a NodeZero Rapid Response test to validate exposure and recommends log review for prior compromise.

Horizon3.ai · 7h agoExploit / PoC in the wild 14 sourcesCVE-2026-862182

SafePal Hardware Wallet Maker Says Flaw Exposed Data of Nearly 40,000 Customers

SafePal disclosed an order-tracking plug-in authorization flaw exposing names, emails, addresses and purchase details of 39,798 hardware wallet customers; no wallet credentials affected.

Hardware wallet maker SafePal disclosed that an authorization flaw in an order-tracking plug-in exposed names, email addresses, shipping addresses, phone numbers and purchase details of approximately 39,798 customers. No seed phrases, private keys, wallet credentials or financial information were exposed, and SafePal found no evidence of wallet or fund compromise. A separate configuration error left a data-cleanup process broken between September 2025 and April 2026, extending the affected order window back to March 2025. A threat actor has advertised a matching dataset on a cybercrime forum, and the company has fixed the flaw, cut data retention to 90 days, purged affected records, engaged third-party validators and taken down over 30 phishing sites.

The Hacker News · 29d agoData breach in the wild

What your vendor says about PQC tells you if they are ready

Allot CTO outlines a telecom post-quantum migration playbook: inventory crypto, deploy hybrid ML-KEM on TLS first, and avoid missed interfaces.

Dr. Yaakov Stein, VP CTO of Allot, explains how mobile operators should triage post-quantum migration by data shelf life, protecting subscriber identity mappings, billing records, and call metadata that stay sensitive for years. He recommends starting with a comprehensive crypto inventory, then hybrid ML-KEM key exchange on TLS-protected 5G SBA and management interfaces, followed by IPsec backhaul and roaming links. Stein warns that migrations most often fail operationally through missed legacy interfaces such as SSH, RADIUS, or forgotten load balancers, and cites the early Kyber multi-packet TLS client hello issue as an example of middlebox incompatibility.

Help Net Security · 15d agoIndustry

Building a ransomware decision tree before the call comes in

Arctic Wolf's IR VP urges pre-deciding ransomware response choices on containment, negotiation authority, law enforcement engagement, and crisis communications.

A Help Net Security video features Kerri Shafer-Page, VP of Incident Response at Arctic Wolf, walking through a ransomware decision tree. She recommends settling four decision areas in advance: containment, extortion negotiation limits, law enforcement involvement, and communications. She frames paying as a business decision that can cost less than insurance retention and renewal hikes, and notes agencies may know the threat actor and help avoid sanctions issues.

Help Net Security · 5d agoIndustry

September 2026 Patch Tuesday: Record patch count, 2 zero-days, and a SigRed successor

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday delivers a record patch count, fixing two exploited zero-days and a wormable DNS flaw dubbed a SigRed successor.

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday sets another record patch count, fixing two vulnerabilities exploited as zero-days: CVE-2026-81963, a Windows Update Stack low-privilege-to-SYSTEM escalation reported by MSTIC, and CVE-2026-85880, a Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call escalation reported by Proofpoint. Zero Day Initiative's Dustin Childs urges priority on a cluster of 20 potentially wormable bugs including DNS RCE CVE-2026-69730, described as a spiritual successor to SigRed, plus Kerberos authentication bypass CVE-2026-69676 that could give any authenticated domain user RCE on domain controllers, and Exchange RCE CVE-2026-55007 via a malicious Visio attachment. All Windows fixes are bundled in cumulative updates, and experts stress prioritizing exploitable, reachable flaws over raw patch counts.

Help Net Security · 7d agoAdvisory in the wildCVE-2026-81963CVE-2026-85880CVE-2026-69730+4 CVEs

Microsoft patches critical Entra ID vulnerability (CVE-2026-69836)

Microsoft patched critical Entra ID RCE CVE-2026-69836 (CVSS 10.0), fully mitigated server-side with no customer action; no in-the-wild exploitation confirmed.

Microsoft patched CVE-2026-69836, a critical (maximum CVSS 10.0) unauthenticated remote code execution flaw in Entra ID caused by deserialization of untrusted data over a network. Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory, is Microsoft's cloud identity service verifying logins and controlling access to Microsoft 365, Azure, and connected third-party apps. The flaw was discovered by Microsoft Principal Security Engineer Robert Fitzpatrick and fully mitigated server-side, requiring no customer action. Microsoft initially reported the bug as exploited, but later changed the status to 'no' and confirmed the vulnerability was not exploited in the wild.

Help Net Security · 23d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-69836

$20 per zero-day is already the WordPress plugin reality

TrendAI and CHT Security used an AI pipeline to find over 300 verified WordPress plugin zero-days at roughly $20 per vulnerability.

A pipeline built in three days by TrendAI and CHT Security, presented at Ekoparty Miami, paired AI-driven static analysis with automated Docker provisioning and Chrome DevTools MCP dynamic verification to surface more than 300 critical zero-days in WordPress plugins within 72 hours. The run consumed about 222 million tokens across 95 tasks, averaging roughly $20 per verified vulnerability, with findings including pre-auth RCE, SQL injection, privilege escalation, SSRF, and an AI-assembled downgrade attack chain. Dynamic verification eliminated over 80% of false positives, but manual review at 30-60 minutes per finding remains the bottleneck, straining ZDI and NIST triage backlogs.

Help Net Security · 23d agoResearch1