Search: “Searchlight Exposure”

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Searchlight Cyber combines exposure and threat intelligence in new PTEM platform

Searchlight Cyber launched its PTEM platform, merging exposure management from Assetnote with dark web threat intelligence to prioritize likely-exploited exposures.

Searchlight Cyber launched its Preemptive Threat Exposure Management (PTEM) platform, unifying Searchlight Exposure (formerly Assetnote) with Searchlight Threat, which consolidates the Cerberus investigations platform and DarkIQ dark web monitoring. The platform pairs continuous attack surface discovery and exploitability validation with attacker intelligence from the open, deep and dark web to help teams prioritize the exposures most likely to be exploited. The launch follows the 2025 Assetnote acquisition and a new corporate identity, and cites a Gartner forecast that preemptive security will reach 50% of IT security spending by 2030.

Help Net Security·Aug 13, 00:00 UTC · Aug 13, 2026Tools

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New infosec products of the month: August 2026

August 2026 roundup of security product releases from ServiceNow, Tanium, Snyk, F5, A10, Searchlight Cyber, Intezer, NETSCOUT, Tufin, and Abnormal AI.

Help Net Security's monthly product roundup covers roughly a dozen vendors. Highlights include Snyk's general availability of Evo Continuous Offensive Security with AI-powered pentesting and AI agent red teaming, Searchlight Cyber's PTEM platform combining exposure visibility with attacker intelligence, and A10 and F5 AI gateways to govern enterprise LLM and agent usage. Other updates include Abnormal AI email DLP and phishing training, NETSCOUT outbound DDoS mitigation for service providers, Intezer's native Workflows automation, and Tufin's AI-powered Segmentation Intelligence.

Help Net Security·Aug 28, 00:00 UTC · 19d agoTools

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Quantifying the Engagement Trap: Impact of Short-form Video Recommender Systems on Users with ADHD

A 302-participant study finds engagement-optimized short-form video recommenders cause disproportionate time blindness and distress for users with ADHD.

Researchers ran a stratified Prolific study with 302 participants comparing short-form video recommendation experiences with and without ADHD. Participants with ADHD reported significantly higher time blindness, post-usage regret, and emotional distress despite perceiving recommendations as similarly relevant. The paper proposes neurodiversity-aware, human-centered design interventions to mitigate these algorithmic harms.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:38 UTC · 8d agoAI research

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New infosec products of the week: August 14, 2026

Vendors A10 Networks, ScienceLogic, Searchlight Cyber, and DataGrout/SelectHub released new security and AI operations products this week.

A weekly product roundup covering four releases: ScienceLogic Skylar AI 2.5 with expanded secure deployment options, Searchlight Cyber's Preemptive Threat Exposure Management platform combining exposure visibility with threat intelligence, the general availability of the A10 AI Gateway for routing and governing enterprise AI traffic, and DataGrout's LLM inference optimization and AI governance platform.

Help Net Security·Aug 14, 00:00 UTC · Aug 14, 2026Tools

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Nightmare-Eclipse Strikes Again with 'ShieldCrash' Windows Exploit

A researcher known as Nightmare-Eclipse published another zero-day exploit, dubbed ShieldCrash, targeting Windows Defender.

Dark Reading reports that the disgruntled researcher tracked as Nightmare-Eclipse continued a vendetta against Microsoft by publishing a new zero-day exploit named ShieldCrash for Windows Defender. The brief report does not detail affected versions, exploitation prerequisites, or whether exploitation has been observed.

Dark Reading·Sep 10, 15:29 UTC · 5d agoExploit / PoC1

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wp2shell: incident response guide (CVE-2026-63030 + CVE-2026-60137)

Eye Security published forensic IR tooling for wp2shell (CVE-2026-63030/CVE-2026-60137), the unauthenticated WordPress core RCE chain, after WordPress.org forced auto-updates.

wp2shell chains a REST API batch-endpoint route-confusion bug (CVE-2026-63030) with an SQL injection in WP_Query's author__not_in parameter (CVE-2026-60137), giving unauthenticated attackers rogue admin and code execution on default installs. Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber discovered the flaw, a public PoC exists on GitHub, and WordPress.org forced automatic updates across an estimated 200M+ sites. Eye Security released a compromise-scanner WordPress plugin and browser extension and notes database artifacts (oEmbed cache rows, changesets) are the primary evidence since the attack is log-blind; fixed versions are 6.8.6, 6.9.5, and 7.0.2.

Web discovery (articles for new exploits & KEV entries)·Sep 8, 16:27 UTC · 7d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-63030CVE-2026-601371

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Can We Stop The Ads? Taxonomy and Characterization of Smartphone Splash Ads and Existing Countermeasures

Study of 108 ad-defense implementations finds only one tool blocked splash-ad navigation across ten popular apps, and it required Accessibility permission.

The paper taxonomizes smartphone splash ads — full-screen ads at app launch that trick users into trigger mechanisms such as moving the phone — and analyzes 108 documented advertising defenses for deployment barriers. Many defenses require device rooting, jailbreaking, runtime code injection, or application modification; others need extra permissions, rule maintenance, compilation, or payment. In evaluating 13 configurations of 11 tools across 10 popular apps, only one prevented ad-triggered navigation across all ten apps, requiring Accessibility permission and leaving ads visible roughly one second before dismissal. Documented harms include delayed emergency response, driver distraction, and degraded accessibility for vision-impaired users.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 15:24 UTC · 22h agoResearch

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Patch Tuesday to Pentest Wednesday: How an Equipment Rental Company Is Turning Continuous Testing Into Continuous Exposure Management

An equipment rental company uses Horizon3 NodeZero for continuous exposure management, surfacing an SSH key exposure in eight hours versus annual pentesting.

The company moved from periodic penetration testing to continuous exposure management using the NodeZero Proactive Security Platform, feeding telemetry into a Splunk-based CTEM pipeline via Horizon3 APIs. NodeZero exposed SSH RSA key pairs from a PHP web server change about eight hours after introduction and found more findings in 12 hours than a third-party engagement found in roughly 30 days. An Active Directory password audit of 15,000 passwords found about 300 identical or similar compromised passwords, driving a banned-password list, 12-character minimums, service desk changes, and self-service reset rollout; users with similar passwords later dropped from 880 to 209. NodeZero also validated a suspected Cisco vulnerability as exploitable.

Horizon3.ai·Sep 9, 15:58 UTC · 6d agoIndustry

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Wiz Penetration Test Findings is now GA

Wiz announces general availability of Penetration Test Findings, unifying pen-test results with real-time cloud context for continuous exposure management.

Wiz has made its Penetration Test Findings capability generally available on its cloud security platform. The feature integrates point-in-time penetration test findings with real-time cloud context, aiming to turn static pen-test reports into continuous exposure management. This gives security teams a unified view for prioritizing cloud findings alongside offensive testing results.

Wiz Blog·Aug 19, 15:36 UTC · 27d agoTools

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Trends in Web Threats: Attackers Were More Active During Holiday Season

Unit 42 tracked 533,000 malicious landing URL incidents from October-December 2021, showing web threats peaked during the holiday shopping season.

Unit 42 detected 533,452 malicious landing URL incidents (120,753 unique) and 2,906,875 malicious host URL incidents (165,255 unique) from October through December 2021. Threat activity peaked in November, likely tied to Black Friday in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Most malicious domains appeared to originate in the United States, followed by Russia and Germany. Personal sites, blogs, business sites, and shopping sites were the most common apparently benign entry points for attacks.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 13:06 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Research

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When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online·Sep 9, 10:00 UTC · 7d agoAI safety & security1

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Google Search Makes It Harder to See Where a Link Really Goes Before You Click

Google now routes some Search results through opaque google.com/goto redirects, weakening hover-to-verify anti-phishing checks.

Google has begun serving some organic search results as opaque google.com/goto?url= redirects whose destinations can only be resolved server-side by Google, likely to raise scraping costs for rank trackers and archival services. The change removes the pre-click hover preview of the true destination URL, undermining a long-standing anti-phishing habit for spotting lookalike, typosquatted, or search-optimized phishing domains. Security teams are advised to rely on layered defenses such as domain reputation, DNS and web filtering, browser isolation, and user training rather than hover text.

GBHackers·Sep 15, 13:42 UTC · 1d agoIndustry

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Microsoft named a Leader in the Frost Radar™: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, 2026

Microsoft was named a leader in the 2026 Frost Radar for Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, cited for Defender for Cloud runtime security.

The 2026 Frost Radar for Cloud Workload Protection Platforms placed Microsoft in its leadership tier, calling the company a visionary leader. Microsoft attributes the recognition to unified runtime security delivered through Microsoft Defender for Cloud. The post is vendor marketing with no incident, vulnerability, or technical detail.

Microsoft Security Blog·Aug 19, 17:30 UTC · 27d agoIndustry2

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Bitsight connects threat intelligence and exposure monitoring across the supply chain

Bitsight made Beacon generally available, combining supply-chain exposure monitoring with MCP support to feed threat intelligence into AI workflows.

Bitsight announced general availability of Beacon, which continuously monitors critical vendors for exposure, vulnerabilities, malicious activity, intrusion, stolen credentials and compromise. New Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agentic capabilities push Bitsight intelligence into AI-enabled workflows, with over 400 customers signing up for early access in one month. The company cites data that third parties now account for almost half of enterprise breaches, up over 60% year over year.

Help Net Security·Sep 14, 13:42 UTC · 2d agoTools

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CTEM Is Not About the Stages. It’s About the Outcome.

Horizon3 argues CTEM programs should measure continuously reduced exposure rather than mapping technologies to Gartner's five stages.

Horizon3 contends that Continuous Threat Exposure Management should be judged by one outcome: continuously reducing attacker-reachable exposure, not by mapping a technology to each of Gartner's five stages. The post argues validation and verification, not visibility or closed tickets, provide evidence that attack paths are actually broken. It describes a Discover, Validate, Prioritize, Remediate, Verify, Repeat motion as its operationalization of CTEM.

Horizon3.ai·Sep 2, 13:11 UTC · 14d agoIndustry

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Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted

Researchers show Grok can be made to exfiltrate user data via Cryptographic Context Injection, a newly documented technique that bypasses LLM safety guardrails.

According to Ars Technica, Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted, a technique called Cryptographic Context Injection. The method is described as the latest documented way to break LLM safety guardrails, showing that encrypted content can carry hidden instructions past safeguards. The finding underscores gaps in how large language models validate and execute context from external sources.

Ars Technica · Security·Aug 20, 13:00 UTC · 27d agoAI safety & security1

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You Can't Prefer Emotions You Don't Sample: Intensity Undershoot in DPO-Tuned LLMs

Study quantifies DPO-tuned LLMs undershooting requested emotional intensity, tracing the gap to candidate-pool extremity rather than conditioning format.

Conditioning an instruction-tuned LLM on continuous valence-arousal targets yields gain of only 0.26 for valence and 0.13 for arousal on Llama-3.1-8B, far below faithful control of 1.0. The authors attribute undershoot to neutral-heavy preference corpora like EmoBank and candidate pools lacking extreme affect, leaving DPO without extreme exemplars. Uniform target coverage with a hotter candidate pool raises valence gain to 0.40 on Llama-3.1-8B and 0.44 on Qwen3-8B, with modest in-distribution cost; arousal gains remain unstable across seeds.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:47 UTC · 8d agoAI research

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Chrome adopts what may be the best protection yet against account takeovers

Chrome adopts device-bound session credentials that tie login sessions to a specific device, defending against cookie-theft account takeover attacks.

Chrome is adopting device-bound session credentials, which bind authenticated sessions to the physical device rather than to transferable cookies. The mechanism targets a common account takeover technique in which attackers steal session cookies and replay them on other machines. Ars Technica characterizes it as possibly the strongest protection yet against this class of takeover, which has become increasingly common.

Ars Technica · Security·Aug 11, 20:59 UTC · Aug 11, 2026Tools

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The State of Cloud Risk 2026: Most Security Findings Aren’t Real Attacker Opportunities

Wiz Research's 2026 cloud risk report finds most high-severity findings lack a viable path to compromise, urging exposure-based prioritization.

Wiz Research telemetry underpins a State of Cloud Risk 2026 report arguing that the majority of high-severity security findings are not real attacker opportunities because they lack a path to compromise. The report pushes defenders to prioritize findings by exposure and exploitability rather than raw severity scores. No specific CVEs, victims, or incident counts are provided in the available text.

Wiz Blog·Aug 26, 15:01 UTC · 20d agoResearch

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What Matters, When? Diagnosing and Improving Conditional Visual Grounding in Visuomotor Imitation Policies

Researchers diagnose conditional visual grounding failures in visuomotor imitation policies and show targeted interventions substantially improve distractor robustness.

The paper studies why ACT-based visuomotor imitation policies fail when visually similar distractor objects or receptacles are introduced, finding sensitivity depends on both distractor type and manipulation stage. Interventions including distractor augmentation, phase-dependent attention regularization, and appearance-based visual prompting improve target selection while preserving spatial control information, with gains in simulation and on a physical UR3e. The same failure pattern is confirmed in a pretrained vision-language-action policy on a state-conditioned medical instrument-handling task.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:27 UTC · 11d agoAI research

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Webinar: Learn How to Answer “Are We Exposed?” Faster After a New CVE

Tines will host a September 2026 webinar showing security teams how to combine SBOM, endpoint, cloud, and vulnerability data into one exposure assessment workflow.

The Hacker News published a contributed webinar announcement from Tines titled "Outpacing AI-Era Attacks Starts With Faster Time to Answer." Tines Co-founder Thomas Kinsella and Senior Security Operations Engineer Andrew Katz will demonstrate connecting SBOM data, endpoint application data, cloud inventory, and vulnerability feeds into a single interactive exposure view. The session also covers pairing AI-assisted analysis with deterministic, reviewed automation to reduce time from CVE disclosure to exposure determination.

The Hacker News·Sep 9, 11:57 UTC · 7d agoIndustry

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Mythos Vulnerability Firehose Hits a Human Bottleneck

Analysis of Project Glasswing findings shows only a fraction of discovered vulnerabilities have reached disclosure and even fewer are fixed.

Dark Reading reports that an analysis of Project Glasswing findings shows only a fraction of the vulnerabilities discovered by the program have reached disclosure, and an even smaller number have been fixed. The article examines how the volume of findings from the discovery program is bottlenecked by limited human triage and remediation capacity. The piece highlights growing tension between high-volume vulnerability discovery and the industry's ability to process, disclose and patch reports.

Dark Reading·Sep 9, 21:19 UTC · 6d agoResearch

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Show HN: LLM Attention Visualization

A developer released a browser-based tool that visualizes which past tokens influence each LLM output token using aggregated, value-weighted attention scores.

A Show HN project presents a React application built on Transformers.js that renders per-token attention influence by aggregating attention weights scaled by value-vector magnitudes across all attention heads and layers. To expose internal tensors, the author instrumented the ONNX computation graph, hosted a modified model on Hugging Face, and pre-generated prompts to avoid long model downloads in the browser. Demos with a 600-million-parameter model show how verbatim copying draws heavily on source tokens and how single outputs blend information from multiple phrases.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 8, 16:59 UTC · 7d agoAI tools & infraHN 41↑ · 9 comments

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Trends in Web Threats in CY Q2 2022: Malicious JavaScript Downloaders Are Evolving

Unit 42 detected 751,000 landing URL incidents in Q2 2022 and documented malicious JavaScript downloaders evolving to evade detection.

Unit 42 detected 751,331 landing URL incidents (253,644 unique) and 1,744,629 malicious host URL incidents (256,844 unique) from April through June 2022. Total landing URL incidents rose compared with Q1 2022, and unique host URL incidents grew 42%, indicating attackers deploying more variants. The report includes a case study of a JavaScript downloader campaign demonstrating new evasion techniques. Personal sites, blogs, and business sites were the top apparently benign entry points.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 13:05 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Research

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ModaLens: Measuring Image Sensitivity in Report-Conditioned Medical VLMs

ModaLens image-swap audit shows report availability cuts MedGemma-27B image sensitivity on MIMIC-CXR from 20.94% to 4.26% answer changes.

ModaLens is a paired image-swap audit measuring how report availability affects image sensitivity in report-conditioned medical VLMs. On MedGemma-27B across 3,199 paired MIMIC-CXR cases from 293 patients (14 questions per case), generated answers changed on 4.26% of image-swap trials with the report versus 20.94% without it, a 16.7-point paired difference (95% CI 15.6-17.7). The original prompt with a lowercase first-token readout gave 4.70% versus 17.07%, and the direction replicated in two further model lineages. Labels derived from reports limit conclusions about visual correctness; code, prompts, and run records are publicly released.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 2d agoAI research

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New Microsoft Defender 'ShieldCrash' zero-day grants SYSTEM access

Researcher Nightmare Eclipse released 'ShieldCrash', a zero-day exploit for Microsoft Defender that grants attackers SYSTEM-level access.

An anonymous researcher known as Nightmare Eclipse published a zero-day exploit for Microsoft Defender, dubbed 'ShieldCrash', that yields SYSTEM-level access. The release came immediately after Microsoft rolled out its September 2026 Patch Tuesday security updates. No CVE identifier has been assigned publicly and no in-the-wild exploitation has been reported yet. Microsoft Defender ships by default on Windows, so potential exposure is broad until Microsoft patches the flaw.

BleepingComputer·Sep 9, 07:30 UTC · 7d agoExploit / PoC

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LastPass enhancements improve visibility, governance, and control

LastPass releases SaaS monitoring enhancements, Mobile Smart Scanner, and auto-enrolled dark web monitoring across its password management products.

LastPass announced enhancements to SaaS Monitoring and SaaS Protect in its Business Max offering, including Persistent Monitoring that keeps visibility active through the browser extension even when users are signed out, fully released as of July. It launched Mobile Smart Scanner to convert printed, handwritten, or screenshot passwords into vault credentials, and began phasing in automatic enrollment of all consumer accounts in dark web monitoring. The company also completed its transition to a Unified Admin Console, added company-wide onboarding links, and passed SOC 2 and ISO 27001/27701 audits with zero findings for the second consecutive year.

Help Net Security·Sep 1, 00:00 UTC · 15d agoTools

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The Year in Web Threats: Web Skimmers Take Advantage of Cloud Hosting and More

Unit 42 analyzed 2.24 million web threat incidents, finding web skimmers increasingly hosted on cloud infrastructure to steal payment card data.

Palo Alto Unit 42 analyzed 2,241,354 web threat incidents and 831,550 unique URLs detected via Advanced URL Filtering between October 2020 and September 2021. Threat activity peaked from October 2020 to January 2021, coinciding with the holiday shopping season, with most malicious domains geolocated to the United States, Russia, and Germany. Web skimmers ranked third among the top five threat classes and showed the most code diversity, making detection harder. Researchers observed more web skimmer families being hosted on cloud platforms to steal payment data and PII.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 13:06 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Research

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Google’s New Search Redirects Make It Harder to Check Where Links Lead Before Clicking

Malwarebytes reports Google's new encoded google.com/goto?url= redirects break hover-preview link checking, weakening a common phishing defense.

Google now routes some search results through opaque google.com/goto?url= redirects using custom encoding, so browser link previews no longer reveal the true destination, only the claimed label above the result. Malwarebytes found the final destination is visible only in the redirect response's Location header, complicating hover-based safety checks as well as scraping, archiving, and audit tools. The change arrives amid malvertising, search-result poisoning, and fake installer campaigns like the recent Node.js infostealer lure. Google says it deploys measures against evolving abuse but did not explain the change.

Cyber Security News·Sep 15, 12:21 UTC · 1d agoResearch

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Two critical Chrome flaws put users at risk on malicious websites

Google patched 26 Chrome flaws, including two critical use-after-frees and an actively exploited V8 sandbox escape (CVE-2026-85046); update to 152.0.7977.82/.83.

Chrome's desktop update fixes 26 security issues, including critical use-after-free flaws CVE-2026-84353 in Shared Tab Groups and CVE-2026-84352 in WebGL, both allowing code execution outside the browser sandbox via crafted HTML pages. Google subsequently patched CVE-2026-85046, a high-severity V8 JavaScript engine flaw with exploits already in the wild that enables arbitrary code execution inside the Chrome sandbox; HKCERT rates the overall risk as extremely high. Fixed versions are 152.0.7977.82/.83 on Windows and Mac and 152.0.7977.82 on Linux.

Malwarebytes Labs·Sep 2, 11:15 UTC · 14d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-84352CVE-2026-84353CVE-2026-850461

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