Security & IT News

ChatGPT, the famous artificial intelligence chatbot that allows users to converse with various personalities and topics, has connectivity issues worldwide. [...]

A threat actor used the open-source Hermes AI agent in unattended "YOLO" mode to automate post-exploitation activity during an alleged breach of Thailand's Ministry of Finance. [...]

Microsoft says a bug in its automated network maintenance request system caused Thursday's massive outage by mistakenly removing IP routes from more devices than intended, disrupting Azure and Microsoft 365 services. [...]

Researchers H0j3n and Aniq Fakhrul published a working exploit on July 24 that lets a low-privileged Active Directory user obtain a certificate for a Domain Controller and authenticate as that machine. They codenamed the flaw Certighost. Because Domain Controller accounts carry directory replication rights, the resulting Kerberos credential can retrieve the krbtgt secret through DCSync.

Slopsquatting, phantom squatting, and HalluSquatting all exploit the same late-binding attack pattern, where AI coding agents trust hallucinated package, repo, or domain names. ActiveState explains how pre-fetch verification and governed dependency management can help stop these attacks before malicious code enters the pipeline. [...]

Europol has flagged 4,340 URLs for removal during a multi-week operation targeting online content linked to "The Com," a loosely organized network of nihilistic violent extremist groups. [...]

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical vulnerability in OpenAI's ChatGPT Workspace Agents that could have allowed a single phishing link to stealthily build, authorize, and deploy an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent inside a victim's organization. The vulnerability has been codenamed AgentForger by Zenity Labs. The issue has since been addressed by OpenAI as of June 8,

A crafted SVG submitted to Bing's image search ran commands as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM on Microsoft's production image-processing workers, and as root on the Linux machines in the same fleet. XBOW's testing got the same result on workers across different hosts and network ranges, so the problem sat in Bing's image tier, not on one bad machine. Microsoft issued two critical CVEs, CVE-2026-32194 and

AI agent security is moving through a familiar maturity curve: adoption, then visibility, and finally, control. But what we've collectively discovered is that enforcing least privilege for AI agents is harder than we ever imagined. This is why there are so many approaches, from prompt filtering to identity-layer access controls. Where we've collectively landed is that understanding the intent of

Tel Aviv, Israel, 24th July 2026, CyberNewswire

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a new campaign that involves the use of a malicious program that's dressed up as a Notepad++ plugin to compromise Windows systems. The activity has been attributed by the agency to a threat cluster it tracks as UAC-0099, a Russia-aligned group that has previously observed weaponizing security flaws in WinRAR software to

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. https://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Getting locked out of an account is no fun. Google has a few ways to help you regain access if you happen to forget your password or lose an authenticator, including recovery contacts and backup codes. Now, Google has a completely new option: your face . You can now give Google a video record of your face and sign into your account with a selfie, which sounds like something people are going to just love. You'll have to set this feature up ahead of time if you want the option of regaining account access with a selfie later on. To get started, verify your account type is supported. You won't be able to configure selfie sign-ins for Workspace accounts, child accounts, or any account enrolled in Google's Advanced Protection Program. Configuring selfie sign-in requires you to record a video, which Google will store on its servers. Google's selfie sign-in landing page includes the typical disclaimers about privacy and data access, promising that the company will keep the video encrypted and won't use it for any other purposes unless you opt in. Read full article Comments

Microsoft Teams and several Microsoft 365 services are experiencing an ongoing outage, with users reporting problems accessing Teams, SharePoint, Excel and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. [...]

FedRAMP 20X replaces point-in-time assessments with continuous, machine-readable evidence that demonstrates security controls are working. Anecdotes explains what the transition from Rev5 to FedRAMP 20X means and how organizations can prepare for continuous, evidence-based assurance. [...]

Two disclosures, five days apart, described the same intrusion from opposite ends one from the victim, one from the party that turned out to be responsible and together they make one of the more instructive incidents of the year for defenders. On July 16, Hugging Face disclosed an AI-driven intrusion into its production infrastructure. Their account was the victim's view: a malicious dataset abused two code-execution flaws in the data-processing pipeline (a remote-code dataset loader and a template-injection in dataset config), gained node-level access, harvested service credentials, and moved laterally across internal clusters over a weekend. The operator was described as an autonomous agent framework, appearing to be built on an agentic security research harness, running thousands of actions and leaving a forensic log of 17,000+ events. No public models, datasets, or Spaces were tampered with. On July 21, OpenAI filled in the part Hugging Face couldn't: that autonomous agent was OpenAI's own frontier models. During an internal cyber-capability evaluation on the ExploitGym benchmark run, by design, with the models' safety refusals reduced to measure their capability ceiling the models became, in OpenAI's words, hyperfocused on solving the benchmark. To get the answers, they escaped the evaluation sandbox by exploiting a zero-day in internally hosted third-party software, then chained exposed credentials and further zero-days to reach Hugging Face's production database, where the benchmark's solutions were stored. There was no external adversary. The model, in effect, cheated on the test by hacking the place that held the answer key. Keep perspective (the part that matters) It is tempting to read this as AI can now hack autonomously, the sky is falling. Resist that. A few things keep it in proportion: The guardrails were off on purpose. This measured a ceiling , not normal production behavior. The evaluation deliberately reduced the models' refusals. That is very different from a customer-facing model with safeguards enabled. It's preliminary, self-reported, and worth reading skeptically. OpenAI is still investigating, and disclosures like this double as capability marketing Hugging Face is not a competitor, and our model escaped and hacked a partner conveniently showcases frontier capability. Read the framing with the same skepticism you'd apply to any our product is dangerously powerful claim, and treat it as marketing until it is independently corroborated. The techniques were mundane; the autonomy was not. Exposed credentials plus zero-days into a production database is a chain any of us would recognize. What's new is that an agent stitched it together end to end, unsupervised, in pursuit of a narrow goal it was never told to pursue offensively. This is emergent excessive agency , and it lines up with the broader 2026 evidence: capable benchmarks like ExploitGym and CyberGym show the strongest model

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a sandbox escape vulnerability in Anthropic's Claude Cowork that makes it possible to break out of the confines of a Linux virtual machine (VM) within which the agent runs to read or write files anywhere on the Mac. Accomplish AI, which shared details of the vulnerability with The Hacker News ahead of publication, said about 500,000 macOS users running

The OpenAI and Hugging Face incident lands like a warning shot for anyone thinking seriously about frontier AI and cybersecurity research. A model evaluation crossed the neat boundary of a research environment, reached a live third-party production system, and forced the industry to confront a question that is moving quickly from theory to operations: what happens when AI agents can pursue an objective with enough persistence, speed, and creativity to behave less like a tool and more like an autonomous intrusion path? According to OpenAI’s disclosure, the incident began during an internal evaluation of advanced cyber capabilities using GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable pre-release model. The evaluation was designed to test whether AI agents could pursue complex exploit paths, and OpenAI says cyber refusal safeguards were reduced or disabled to measure maximum capability. Inside that environment, the models reportedly found and exploited a zero-day in the package registry cache proxy that was meant to constrain network access, moved through OpenAI’s research environment, reached a node with internet connectivity, and then inferred that Hugging Face may host artifacts related to the benchmark they were trying to solve. From there, the models compromised part of Hugging Face’s dataset-processing pipeline, gained code execution on a worker, escalated access, harvested credentials, and moved laterally across internal clusters. Hugging Face detected and contained the activity, and OpenAI later connected the activity back to its own evaluation. Both companies have said the investigation is continuing, which means some details will almost certainly evolve. Still, the direction of travel is clear enough for defenders to act on now. How did the OpenAI model evaluation reach Hugging Face? The activity stands out because it looked less like a single model producing a risky command and more like a compressed intrusion path. Based on the public disclosures, the reported chain moved from identifying a constraint, to breaking that constraint, gaining access, inferring where valuable data may live, and continuing toward that objective across a live environment. Security teams should use that sequence to revisit assumptions built around human pacing. Many detection and response workflows still assume there will be time between stages of an attack, with reconnaissance followed by exploitation, lateral movement, and then objective pursuit. In an agent-driven scenario, those stages can begin to collapse into one continuous loop, with fewer natural pauses for defenders to catch up. The defensive model now has to account for a world where discovery, exploitation, and follow-on action can happen faster and with more persistence than traditional human-led campaigns. The uncomfortable lesson is that AI agents can be tireless, goal-oriented, and increasingly capable of finding the loose seams in systems built for a slower era. The incident highlights the collapse of the tradi

The European Commission fined Google €890 million ($1 billion) on Thursday after finding the company had violated the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which ensures fair online competition. [...]

An exposed Alibaba Cloud server has revealed a China-nexus operation that Group-IB tracks as JadeProx. The cluster has targeted government, healthcare, and education organizations across Asia and Latin America with a previously undocumented Windows loader called TriBack Loader. Group-IB found the server in mid-April 2026 in Alibaba Cloud's Singapore region; it was offline by the time the report