TECHZONE™

Summer of Clearinghouses https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/summer-of-clearinghouses.html Everyone seems to have announced a clearinghouse over the past few weeks. We did too. Ours is called Athena, and the main thing that sets it apart is that it was already real and running when we announced it — built quietly months earlier, heads down, taking findings and shipping fixes, because customers kept asking us to. We only announced it now because everyone else started announcing theirs,

GodDamn Ransomware Uses PoisonX Driver to Disable Endpoint Defenses https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/goddamn-ransomware-uses-poisonx-driver.html Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new ransomware family called GodDamn that employs the PoisonX kernel driver to neutralize security software as part of its defense evasion strategy. According to a new report published by the Threat Hunter Team from Symantec, the ransomware was first publicly spotted in the wild on May 21, 2026. It's assessed to be a rebrand of the Beast ransomware,

Microsoft Patches RoguePlanet Defender Flaw That Can Grant SYSTEM Privileges https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/microsoft-patches-rogueplanet-defender.html Microsoft has released security updates for a Defender vulnerability known as RoguePlanet, nearly a month after details of the flaw became public. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score: 7.8), is a privilege escalation issue in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine ("mpengine.dll"), which provides scanning, detection, and cleaning capabilities for its antivirus and

Meta's New AI Image Tool Lets Others Use Your Public Instagram Photos in AI Images https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/metas-new-ai-image-tool-lets-others-use.html Meta has announced that its new artificial intelligence (AI) model Muse Image lets people use public Instagram posts and reels to generate AI content, and it's enabled by default. "You can also @-mention Instagram accounts in the Meta AI app to bring specific Instagram profiles right into your images," the social media giant said in a post. "Whether you want to design a custom event invitation

Top AI Agents Built to Catch Malicious Code Can Be Tricked Into Running It https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/friendly-fire-ai-agents-built-to-catch.html Ask an AI coding agent to scan open-source code for security holes, and it might run the attacker's code on your own machine instead. That is the finding in a proof-of-concept published Wednesday by the AI Now Institute, an attack it calls "Friendly Fire." It works against Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex when either is running in an autonomous mode that approves its own

GhostApproval Symlink Flaws Could Let Malicious Repos Run Code in AI Coding Agents https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/ghostapproval-symlink-flaws-could-let.html Researchers at Wiz found that a flaw in six popular AI coding assistants lets a booby-trapped code project quietly take control of a developer's computer. The assistant asks permission to edit one harmless-looking file, but the write lands on a sensitive one instead. The affected tools are Amazon Q Developer, Anthropic's Claude Code, Augment, Cursor, Google Antigravity, and Windsurf.

Fake 7-Zip Installers Turn Devices Into Residential Proxy Nodes https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/fake-7-zip-installers-turn-devices-into.html Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new threat actor dubbed Lurking Lizard that has been operating an end-to-end malicious residential proxy business using an infrastructure comprising more than 230 lookalike domains. The activity dates back to at least August 2022, according to DNS threat intelligence firm Infoblox. Once such campaign, observed earlier this year, involved the

ESET Threat Report H1 2026 https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/eset-research/eset-threat-report-h1-2026/ A view of the H1 2026 threat landscape as seen by ESET telemetry and from the perspective of ESET threat detection and research experts.

GitHub 'Verified' Commits Can Be Rewritten Into New Hashes Without Breaking Signatures https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/github-verified-commits-can-be.html New research shows that a signed Git commit's hash is not the one-of-a-kind name that much of the software world assumes it to be. Given any signed commit, someone without the signing key can mint a second commit with the same files, author, and date, and a valid signature, GitHub still stamps "Verified." Everything a reviewer would check matches. The commit's hash does not. That matters

The Verification Step Is the New ATO Battleground in 2026 https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/the-verification-step-is-new-ato.html For years, account takeover (ATO) followed a predictable script. Attackers bought stolen credentials in bulk, ran them through automated tools, and waited for matches. Credential stuffing was cheap, scalable, and for defenders, relatively well understood. That era is ending. Not because attackers gave up, but because the front door finally got harder to kick in. Passkeys are now mainstream.

GitHub Copilot Refuses Harmful Requests in Chat, Then Writes Them in Code https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/github-copilot-refuses-harmful-requests.html An AI coding assistant that refuses to answer a dangerous request in its chat box can answer it anyway if the same request is broken into small, ordinary-looking steps inside a code editor. That is the finding of a new study of GitHub Copilot by researchers Abhishek Kumar and Carsten Maple. The models they tested through Copilot, Claude from Anthropic, and Gemini from Google, refused

China-Linked UAT-7810 Expands ORB Network With New LONGLEASH Malware https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/china-linked-uat-7810-expands-orb.html A Chinese threat actor tracked as UAT-7810 is actively refining its bespoke malware to expand its Operational Relay Box (ORB) network by breaking into internet-facing networking devices. According to findings from Cisco Talos, UAT-7810 is an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor that's responsible for maintaining and proliferating LapDogs, an ORB network that first came to light in June 2025.

15-Year-Old GhostLock Flaw Enables Root and Container Escape on Most Linux Distros https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/15-year-old-ghostlock-flaw-enables-root.html Researchers at Nebula Security have disclosed GhostLock (CVE-2026-43499), a 15-year-old Linux kernel flaw that lets any logged-in user take full root control of a machine that has not been patched. The vulnerable code has shipped by default in essentially every mainstream distribution since 2011. The flaw needs no special permission, no unusual settings, and no network

CISA Adds 4 Actively Exploited Adobe, Joomla, and Langflow Flaws to KEV https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/cisa-adds-4-actively-exploited-adobe.html The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added four security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-48282 (CVSS score: 10.0) - A path traversal vulnerability in Adobe ColdFusion that could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the

RedWing MaaS Packages Android Bank Fraud as a Telegram Rental Service https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/redwing-maas-packages-android-bank.html A new Android malware operation called RedWing is being rented out on Telegram as a ready-made bank-fraud service. It lets even low-skill criminals take over a victim's phone, steal their banking logins, and capture the one-time codes that protect their accounts. Zimperium's zLabs, which found the operation, says it looks like a new variant of Oblivion, a $300-a-month rent-a-malware tool

Rogue Agent Flaw Could Have Let Attackers Hijack Google Dialogflow CX Chatbots https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/rogue-agent-flaw-could-have-let.html A critical flaw in Google's Dialogflow CX could have let an attacker with edit rights on one Code Block-enabled agent compromise other Code Block-enabled agents in the same Google Cloud project. From there, they could read live conversations, steal the data users shared, and make the bots send attacker-written messages, including requests to re-enter a password. Security firm Varonis found it

DEBULL Tooling Abuses Microsoft Device-Code Flow to Target M365 Accounts https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/debull-tooling-abuses-microsoft-device.html A Microsoft 365 device code phishing campaign has been observed leveraging collaboration-themed lures to take control of victim accounts between the last week of June 2026 and into early July, per findings from ZeroBEC. "The campaign did not depend on a fake Microsoft password page. It used a malicious collaboration-style lure to push users into the legitimate Microsoft device login experience,

Public GitHub Issue Could Trick GitHub Agentic Workflows Into Leaking Private Repo Data https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/public-github-issue-could-trick-github.html A public issue can trick GitHub Agentic Workflows into leaking the contents of an organization's private repositories, researchers at Noma Security have shown. The attacker needs only to open a normal-looking issue on a public repository, with no stolen credentials and no access to the organization. If that organization has given the agent read access across its repositories, private ones

Court Filing Reveals Windows Device ID Helped FBI Trace Alleged Scattered Spider Hacker https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/court-filing-reveals-windows-device-id.html U.S. prosecutors linked an alleged Scattered Spider hacker to a break-in at a luxury jewelry retailer using a persistent Windows device ID, according to a newly unsealed federal complaint. Microsoft records tied that ID first to the account the attackers used to keep access during the May 2025 intrusion, then to online accounts prosecutors say belong to 19-year-old Peter Stokes. Stokes is

Writer AI Flaw Could Let Agent Previews Leak Session Tokens Across Tenants https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/writer-ai-flaw-could-let-agent-previews.html Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched critical session isolation vulnerability in Writer, an enterprise generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform, that could result in cross-tenant compromise. The one-click vulnerability has been codenamed WriteOut by the Sand Security Research team. "An outsider could go from having no access to taking over any Writer AI