ThreatsDay: AI-Powered Hacking, 370 Chrome Flaws, SonicWall Attacks, DNS Hijacking + 22 More Stories
⚡ Weekly Recap: Chrome 0-Day, Router Hijacks, Coder Supply Chain Attack and More
Weekly recap: actively exploited Chrome V8 zero-day, MikroTik RouterOS zero-day chain, Magento StyleSmuggler backdoor, and critical N-able N-central flaws.
Google patched an actively exploited Chrome V8 type confusion zero-day, CVE-2026-85046 (CVSS 8.8), the sixth exploited Chrome zero-day of 2026. CERT Polska warned of the MikroTrick exploit chain (CVE-2026-67276 and CVE-2026-86060, CVSS 9.2) giving unauthenticated full control of MikroTik RouterOS devices via SSH, observed since September 2. Sansec disclosed the StyleSmuggler Magento/Adobe Commerce zero-day used since September 4 to inject a Rust backdoor into online stores, while N-able patched three critical N-central flaws (CVE-2026-86206, CVE-2026-86207, and CVE-2026-86218, CVSS 10.0) with Huntress observing likely exploitation. Elastic and Morphisec also detailed RevStealer, an information stealer spread via game cheats and a fake Claude Desktop app.
Weekly Cybersecurity Newsletter Bulletin – Microsoft 0-day, FortiOS, PAN-OS Flaw, Revolut Data Breach, and 20+ Stories
Weekly roundup: Microsoft patches 973 flaws including two actively exploited zero-days; FortiOS CAPWAP flaw deploys PivotC2 RAT; PAN-OS root RCE disclosed.
Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday fixed 973 vulnerabilities, including two zero-days under active exploitation: CVE-2026-85880 (Windows ALPC) and CVE-2026-81963 (Windows Update Stack), both elevation-of-privilege bugs. SOCRadar reported active exploitation of CVE-2025-25249 (CVSS 9.8) in FortiOS CAPWAP, deploying a Node.js RAT called PivotC2 that exfiltrates Exchange mailboxes to Wasabi cloud storage; 178 devices were compromised out of 30,000 scanned IPs, attributed to a Russian-speaking financially motivated group. Palo Alto disclosed CVE-2026-0310, a 9.2-rated buffer overflow enabling root code execution on PA-Series firewalls, and Fortinet disclosed CVE-2026-84393, a ZTNA certificate validation MITM flaw. Cyera also revealed CVE-2026-6471 ('PostGREShell'), a 12-year-old PostgreSQL logical-decoding flaw allowing code execution via REPLICATION-privileged accounts.
Agents Gone Wild: An AI-Orchestrated Global Campaign Against PaperCut NG/MF
AI-orchestrated campaign exploited PaperCut NG/MF RCE (CVE-2026-81578/82078), compromising 440+ instances at 395 organizations in 48 countries.
GreyNoise tracked a likely Russian-speaking actor using AI (OpenAI Codex harness plus a DeepSeek model) to develop, test, and deploy exploits for PaperCut NG/MF (CVE-2026-81578, CVE-2026-82078) starting 31 August 2026. The actor compromised at least 440 PaperCut instances across 395 organizations in 48 countries, achieving domain admin at 12 victims — fastest time to domain admin was five minutes and a US high school was fully compromised in seven minutes. Attack paths involved LSASS memory and registry secret harvesting, pass-the-hash to domain controllers, noPac attacks, account additions to Domain Admins, and DCSync to exfiltrate full NTDS.DIT credential dumps. Impact scope suggests access development potentially for handoff, with prior PaperCut intrusions historically leading to extortion.
14 Trojanized npm Packages Drop RedC2 4.0 Linux Backdoor With AI
Trend Micro found 14 trojanized npm calendar utilities delivering RedC2 4.0, an AI-powered cross-platform backdoor sold for $99.99.
Trend Micro's TrendAI identified 14 functional but trojanized npm packages (streak-*, kit-map-vim, map-streak-kit) that load a bundled Linux implant, the RedShell beacon of RedC2 4.0, without requiring install hooks. RedC2 4.0, sold by Red Offsec for $99.99 and advertised on Hack Forums by actor MarlboroMan in June 2026, offers shell access, credential theft, SOCKS5 proxying, in-memory execution, and an LLM-driven component called Red Agent for natural-language post-exploitation. The framework has evolved from version 2.0 in August 2025 through 4.0, with the Linux beacon introduced in the latest release.
The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are here
Anthropic exposed a network of roughly 28 AI-driven dating apps using autonomous personas and gig workers to defraud paying users.
Anthropic threat intelligence uncovered a fraud network of around 28 dating apps after a prepaid account sent over 100,000 Claude API requests daily, with most chats run by autonomous AI personas and no human agent. Researchers Matthew Gore-Kormanik and Anthropic's Chris Cronbaugh documented apps including Dora, Romi, and Doni, which monetize conversations via coins; gig workers were hired only to pass liveness checks and select pregenerated replies. An operations manual written in Chinese was found inside the Doni app, and Anthropic published findings in its September 2026 AI misuse report.
Week in review: AiTM phishing kit used to hijack AWS accounts, year-long malware campaign targets HR
H1 2026 Malware Vulnerability Trends
Recorded Future's H1 2026 report finds 215 actively exploited CVEs, RAT dominance, NFC payment fraud, and AI-augmented but not autonomous tradecraft.
Recorded Future's Insikt Group identified 215 actively exploited CVEs in H1 2026, up 34% from 161 in H1 2025, with the most impactful flaws combining network reachability, no authentication, and code execution. AsyncRAT was the top malware family, with AsyncRAT, Cobalt Strike, XWorm, Stealc, and REMCOS remaining top-ten staples; Android NFC malware like NFCShare and NGate enabled payment card theft and ATM cash-outs. AI-enabled attacks remained additive to established tradecraft, concentrated in Levels 1-3 of Recorded Future's AIM3 maturity model, with AI-assisted vulnerability research (e.g., Claude Mythos fixing 271 Firefox bugs in Firefox 150) inflating NVD disclosure volumes 43% above the prior six-month average. The report urges defenders to prioritize remotely exploitable RCE flaws, behavioral detection, developer credential security, and third-party oversight.
ThreatsDay: CEO Phishing Kits, 5K Dropbox Account Hacks, OAuth Traps + 17 More Stories
Microsoft warns of Teams IT-impersonation intrusions deploying Node.js implants; Spring Ring vishing hit 150+ employees across 10 companies; The Gentlemen ransomware claims 683 victims.
Microsoft warned of a human-operated campaign abusing Teams external collaboration to impersonate IT help desk staff, deploy malicious MSI packages staging Node.js runtimes and obfuscated JavaScript implants, then pivot to domain controllers over WinRM. Unit 42 documented the Spring Ring vishing operation targeting over 150 employees across at least 10 companies using 26 attacker identities, including an NTLM relay variant against domain controllers. Sophos reported The Gentlemen ransomware (Gold Sherwood) reached 683 total victims by end of July 2026, adding 169 in July, with a playbook using BYOVD-based EDR killers and backup tampering. Group-IB found the Outsider phishing-as-a-service platform created 700+ new phishing pages within a month despite law enforcement takedowns.
Risky Bulletin: Russia tells data centers to deploy drone defenses
Russia ordered data center operators to deploy drone strike defenses under a Putin decree allowing temporary state takeover of unprotected critical infrastructure.
The Russian government instructed data center operators to deploy protections against drone strikes under a presidential decree signed by Putin that allows temporary state administration of critical infrastructure operators failing to defend against Ukrainian hacks and drone strikes. Although data centers are not formally critical infrastructure in Russia, the decree applies to them because other sectors depend heavily on cloud services; Russia has more than 180 data centers, over 80% in the European region within range of Ukrainian strikes. The digest also reports a Dropbox breach affecting nearly 5,000 accounts via the Lenovo ID integration, spyware attacks on at least 14 Serbians using NoviSpy or Pegasus, and a password recovery attack targeting hundreds of thousands of X accounts tied to the new X Money service. Other items include a 14-hour compromise of Coder's Cloudflare infrastructure delivering malicious Terraform modules, donor data breaches at Davayte and You Are Not Alone via the Stripe/WooCommerce integration, a $2.5M Aquifer crypto heist, and a TVING breach exposing data of almost 40 million accounts.