Security & IT News

Microsoft has released emergency updates to fix a known issue causing some Dell PCs to shut down after installing the July 2026 Windows 11 security updates. [...]

7-Zip version 26.02 was released to fix a remote code execution vulnerability that could allow attackers to execute malicious code by convincing users to open specially crafted compressed files. [...]

Public exploits have been released for the critical "wp2shell" remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting WordPress Core, making it imperative that administrators patch their sites immediately. [...]

In this article Weston on the future of defense Our latest intelligence (and response) on npm supply chain attacks Follow the research in the Black Hat Briefings Go deeper in Microsoft sessions Visit booth #2144 for research, community, and hands-on defense Plan your week with Microsoft Security Skill up before and after Black Hat See you at hacker summer camp Microsoft Security booth #2144 experiences and schedule Across the threat landscape, in this moment, one pattern sits at the center of the story: threat actors are following trust. They are not only looking for vulnerable systems, but rather targeting the software, services, identities, tools, developer workflows, and AI systems that organizations already depend on. A package can become a distribution path. A build pipeline can become an access path. A trusted tool can become or expand an attack surface. An AI agent with the wrong access can become a new way to reach code, data, or infrastructure. While the surfaces may change, the goal for the majority of threat actors remains the same: find what is trusted, abuse it, and scale the impact. At Black Hat USA 2026 , Microsoft Security will walk through how we are seeing this shift unfold, how security teams can look for it earlier, and how threat intelligence, expert-led response, and security operations need to work together when campaigns move across software, identity, cloud, data, and AI systems. On Wednesday, August 5, 2026, the day begins with David Weston’s keynote, The End of Rare: Defending When Offense Is Cheap , which looks at what defense requires when offensive capability becomes easier to access, automate, and scale. Later that afternoon, Aarti Borkar and Tanmay Ganacharya will resume the main stage for Poisoned at the Source: Inside the Hunt for Supply Chain Attacks , which offers a closer look at how Microsoft Threat Intelligence is hunting attacks across software ecosystems, developer workflows, and trusted services. This includes details into the ongoing attacks on npm (Node package manager). Together, these sessions frame the challenge security teams are facing now: when offensive capability becomes easier to scale, security teams need to understand the trust paths threat actors can abuse before those paths become open doors for attacks. At our booth, we’ll also showcase Microsoft Defender Experts Threat Intelligence , a new expert-led service delivering continuous, curated intelligence tailored to your organization, and Microsoft Defender Experts MDR, now extended with third-party and multicloud coverage. From August 4 to 6, 2026, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, you’ll find Microsoft Security on the Business Hall floor at booth #2144 , and on Wednesday evening, join us at the Microsoft Security reception at Swingers at Mandalay Bay. Register for the Microsoft Security reception Weston on the future of defense At 9:15 AM PT on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, David Weston, CVP of Agentic Security, will examine what changes for secu

Some Amazon customers logged on Friday to a surprise bill estimate claiming that they owed the tech and cloud giant billions in fees.

US government agencies have until July 19 to patch two critical Fortinet vulnerabilities

ACR Stealer, an infostealer in circulation since 2024, is walking out of enterprise networks with saved browser passwords, live session tokens, PDFs, Microsoft 365 documents, and files from synced OneDrive and SharePoint folders. It gets in because someone pasted a command into a Run box and pressed Enter. Microsoft laid out two of the delivery chains on Thursday. Its Defender Experts team, the

In this article Campaign 1: WebDAV-based ClickFix with Python loaders and blockchain C2 Campaign 2: MSHTA-initiated PowerShell chain with steganographic payload delivery Mitigation and protection guidance References Learn more From late April 2026 to mid-June 2026, Microsoft Defender Experts observed increased ACR Stealer activity across customer environments. These campaigns are successfully using ClickFix lures to steal browser credentials, authentication tokens, and sensitive documents from enterprise environments. Successful compromise can expose browser credentials, session tokens, authentication artifacts, and sensitive enterprise data, potentially enabling account compromise, unauthorized access to cloud resources, and follow-on intrusion activity. Security teams should prioritize monitoring for ClickFix lures, suspicious WebDAV activity, obfuscated PowerShell execution, and attempts to access browser credential stores. ACR Stealer is an information-stealing malware family reportedly offered through a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model and associated with the rebranding of Amatera Stealer. During this period, two campaigns stand out, together appearing frequently in reviewed recent intrusions. Both begin the same way, with a ClickFix social engineering technique that tricks targets into running the threat actor’s command, but the intrusion chains that follow diverge in how they deliver payloads, establish execution, and evade detection. The first campaign relies on WebDAV-delivered payloads, staged PowerShell, Python-based loaders and persistence, and, in some intrusions, blockchain-backed dead-drop command-and-control (C2) resolution. The second campaign takes a more fileless route, using MSHTA, obfuscated PowerShell, and steganography-assisted in-memory execution. Despite these differences, both campaigns ultimately pursue the same goal: stealing browser-stored credentials and other sensitive data for exfiltration. These two campaigns represent some of the most prevalent ACR Stealer delivery campaigns observed by Defender Experts; however, they do not represent the full range of delivery methods used by this malware family. Attribution to ACR Stealer is based on the observed behavior and post-exploitation tradecraft, corroborated by open-source intelligence on the infrastructure associated with this malware family. Additional campaigns, infrastructure patterns, and execution chains are likely active, and organizations should treat the indicators and techniques described here as representative. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can help surface both campaigns through behavioral coverage for living-off-the-land execution, suspicious WebDAV and MSHTA activity, obfuscated PowerShell, scheduled-task persistence, in-memory payload execution, and browser credential theft. In this blog, we analyze both campaigns in detail, including their delivery mechanisms, post-exploitation tradecraft, indicators of compromise, hunting opportunities, and guidanc

In this article Real-world scenarios Best Practices: Identity + RBAC + Scope + Safe Tool Binding Looking Ahead AI agents aren’t only smarter API callers. They plan, chain actions across systems, and invoke tools in sequences while no single human explicitly approves each step. The architectural reality may introduce identity and authorization challenges that organizations are still evolving to address. When an agent operates without a managed identity and least-privilege role-based access controls (RBAC), it can access or modify sensitive data beyond intended permissions if controls are not properly configured. Since agents can operate across multiple systems within a single workflow, a misconfigured permission may increase the potential impact compared to traditional service account scenarios, depending on how the system is configured and scoped. Organizations are deploying agentic capabilities (multi-step automation, delegated actions, tool use) faster than their identity and authorization models are evolving to safely constrain them. The resulting exposure can be significant and may include risks such as unauthorized data access, unintended writes or deletions, and potential privilege escalation arising from overly broad role assignments. In some cases, these conditions can also contribute to gaps in auditability, which may make cyberattack detection, incident response, and regulatory inquiries more complex than necessary. The right mental model is to treat every agent as a first-class principal: give it a lifecycle-managed identity, assign explicit roles, scope its permissions tightly, and scope tool usage to a preconfigured tools manifest or configuration. Real-world scenarios The risk can occur in real-world implementations. Consider a common pattern: a team provisions an agent with a broad “Reader” role because it’s quick and the initial use case seems read-only. Then the workflow expands to include fixing issues it finds, and suddenly the agent needs write access too. Rather than rethinking the role design, teams grant something broader than intended and move on. The scope creep is quiet, incremental, and rarely revisited. A related problem emerges when agents work across multiple tools. An agent with access to email, files, a ticketing system, and a code repository may look low-risk at each individual integration, but the combination lets it correlate data across systems and take actions no one explicitly authorized as a whole. Combined access across systems may result in broader effective permissions than evaluated individually. Underneath both scenarios is a question that teams consistently fail to answer cleanly: is the agent acting under its own identity, a delegated user scope, or some mix of both? That ambiguity matters because it determines who’s accountable when something goes wrong, and what approvals were actually required. When the answer isn’t documented and enforced upfront, it shows up la

CISA has ordered federal agencies to secure their systems by Saturday against ongoing attacks exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Oracle E-Business Suite financial application. [...]

Pull the certificate off the flash of a Shark RV2320EDUS robot vacuum, and you can run root commands on other people's Shark vacuums across the same AWS region: watch the camera, drive the robot, read the map of the house, and take the Wi-Fi password in plaintext. A researcher publishing under the handle tokay0 put the method online on Monday, having tested it only against vacuums he

In this article Attack chain overview How the attack started: GitHub Actions pwn request Mitigation and protection guidance Learn more On July 14, 2026, Microsoft Threat Intelligence identified a coordinated supply chain compromise of the @asyncapi npm organization, a widely used set of packages for the AsyncAPI specification and code generation. Five package versions across four package names were republished within roughly ninety minutes, each carrying the same maliciously injected loader: @asyncapi/specs (in both the 6.11.2-alpha.1 prerelease and 6.11.2 stable release), @asyncapi/[email protected], @asyncapi/[email protected], and @asyncapi/[email protected]. Because @asyncapi/specs is a transitive dependency of numerous AsyncAPI tooling packages, this attack affected developer workstations, CI/CD pipelines, container builds, or production services that resolved and imported the affected versions during the exposure window. Unlike the more common postinstall-hook supply-chain pattern, this campaign executes at module-load (import/require) time. When any consuming build or application imports a poisoned package, the injected block runs immediately. Because the trigger is an import rather than an install script, the common npm install –ignore-scripts mitigation does not neutralize it. The second stage decrypts and evaluates a Miasma modular runtime with active command and control (C2), persistence, and decentralized fallback channels. Although disabled in this instance, credential-harvesting, propagation, and additional high-risk modules could be enabled through persistence. Microsoft Defender Antivirus detects and blocks malicious artifacts as Trojan:JS/MiasmStealer.SC and Trojan:Script/Supychain.A . Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides behavioral coverage for the suspicious detached Node.js process spawn, IPFS retrieval, and persistence activity. Organizations should immediately remove all five affected versions, purge npm and Yarn caches, hunt for sync.js under the NodeJS masquerade directories, block outbound connections to 85.137.53[.]71 on ports 8080, 8081, and 8091, and rotate all credentials accessible from any environment that imported the compromised packages. Detailed hunting queries, indicators of compromise, and mitigation guidance are provided in the succeeding sections. Attack chain overview Figure 1. End-to-end attack chain from CI/CD pipeline compromise through import-time execution to IPFS second-stage fetch, with C2 infrastructure and affected packages. The compromise originated from a pwn request against asyncapi/generator. A misconfigured GitHub Actions workflow ( pull_request_target ) executed attacker-controlled pull-request (PR) code, exposed the asyncapi-bot personal access token (PAT), and enabled unauthorized pushes to auto-publish branches. The legitimate GitHub Actions OpenID Connect (OIDC) release workflows then published the poisoned packages under the automated identity npm-oidc-no-reply@git

The vulnerability in the decades-old game could have allowed hackers to take over victims’ computers with a malicious game invite.

Microsoft's monthly release of security fixes, dubbed Patch Tuesday, resolved a record 570 security vulnerabilities across the company's product line, thanks to discoveries with AI.

In this article Upstream: See the campaign before it reaches you Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence Now Integrated into Defender In your environment: Follow the threat everywhere it moves See it live at Black Hat USA Security teams have never had more visibility, yet rarely have they felt more uncertain. Signal pours in from endpoints, identities, cloud workloads, and a sprawling mix of third-party tools. Dashboards are full, alerts keep coming, but the hardest question of the day remains unanswered: of everything happening right now, what actually matters to us , and what do we do about i t? That space between knowing a threat exists and acting on it is the intelligence-to-action gap, and it’s where most breaches are won or lost. It doesn’t close with another feed or another dashboard. It closes with expertise: seasoned defenders who know your environment, interpret what global signal means for your risk, and stay with you from the first indicator to the final response. Today we’re announcing a new service, Microsoft Defender Experts Threat Intelligence , and we are expanding Microsoft Defender Experts MDR to include new third-party and multi-cloud coverage. Together, these human-led offerings are designed to close the intelligence-to-action gap at the two moments that decide the outcome: before a campaign reaches you, and as it moves through your environment. Upstream: See the campaign before it reaches you The earlier you see a campaign forming, the more options you have, and the cheaper every decision becomes. Yet most threat intelligence still arrives as raw feeds or static reports: high in volume, low in context, and disconnected from what’s exposed in your estate. Teams end up with more to read and no more clarity on what to do about it. Microsoft Defender Experts Threat Intelligence is a new, expert-delivered service that closes that distance. Built on Microsoft’s visibility across endpoints, identity, cloud, and evolving attacker activity, it gives your team periodic, curated insight into the threats most likely to target you. Designated Microsoft experts interpret the global landscape through the lens of your industry, geography, and environment, then translate it into clear, prioritized guidance your team can act on. As campaigns evolve, experts continuously refine that guidance with newly observed infrastructure, tactics, and targeting patterns, helping your team adjust hunting, hardening, and response activities. The insight is tailored for both leadership and defenders, providing executive-ready context alongside technical recommendations so the entire organization can act from a shared understanding of the threat landscape. The goal is simple: help you reduce risk before an attack reaches your environment, not explain what happened after the fact. In practice, your team receives: Early-warning alerts on emerging campaigns relevant to you Campaign-evolution updates as activity unfolds Contextualized

Mozilla has released updates to address two critical flaws in Firefox for which it warned that exploit code has been published. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-15718, an invalid pointer in the JavaScript: WebAssembly component CVE-2026-15719, a site isolation in the DOM: Navigation component "We are aware that exploit code for this is public, however we are not aware of

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned Tuesday that attackers are actively exploiting three vulnerabilities to hack Internet-exposed on-premises SharePoint Server instances. [...]

Microsoft released fixes for a record 570 CVEs in its July Patch Tuesday update, as experts warn AI is dramatically accelerating vulnerability discovery and increasing patch volumes

The UK government is warning of the potential impact of catastrophic cyber-attacks

Microsoft is blocking this month's Windows 11 security updates on some Dell devices because they are causing shutdowns and performance issues. [...]