Cloud application hosting platform Northflank is warning customers to rotate all credentials and secrets stored on its platform after a security breach led to unauthorized use of customers' AI API keys. Northflank is a cloud platform that allows developers to deploy and manage applications, containers, databases, and AI applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. The company disclosed a security incident on October 30, warning customers to immediately rotate their environment variables and API keys after receiving a threat alert from cloud security company Wiz. Soon after, Northflank told all customers to assume their environment variables had been decrypted and that the secrets stored within them were stolen. "Assume all environment variables have been decrypted. Disable/rotate all keys," Northflank warned in an October 30 update.
Reddit announced in a post by co-founder Steve Huffman that the site will gradually become a "logged-in service," offering limited access to visitors without accounts. For the past 20 years, the discussion platform has let users browse almost all its content without logging in, but according to Huffman, Reddit has now grown to a size where this is no longer sustainable. The two main points for this upcoming change are the need to offer users more personalization and to address the increasing problem of content scrapers. To tackle this, a new pilot test will begin in selected markets outside the United States in the coming months, requiring users to log in to access the site's full content. However, what content will be restricted, what countries will be impacted first, and rollout timelines have not been determined at this time.
Finding a real security flaw and getting paid for it is an appealing goal when you are learning cyber security. Bug bounties give you a chance to test your skills on real software and help its developers make it safer. Headlines about programs closing or pausing under a flood of AI reports can make that route feel less certain. Earlier this year, curl, the widely used data transfer tool and library, ended its paid bounty program after similar problems. As a beginner, these decisions raise a practical question about where to put your effort. A useful starting point is understanding what went wrong, then building the skills to produce findings that someone else can verify. A bug bounty program rewards eligible security findings under a defined set of rules. Developers must still review each submission, reproduce the issue and assess its impact.
American blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said it was the target of a cybersecurity incident in which an external actor accessed non-sensitive customer data. However, the company noted that the breach did not result in unauthorized access to its investigation content, authentication credentials, or session tokens. "This month, Chainalysis detected an external actor using offensive agentic
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added two security flaws impacting Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2026-111357 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A missing authentication for a critical function vulnerability that could allow a
A malicious ChatGPT share link could run an attacker's code in the logged-in session of anyone who opened it, allowing them to read their private conversations, researchers at the security firm Parameter showed. The researchers reported the flaw through OpenAI's bug bounty program on October 18, and OpenAI fixed it eight days later and rated it P1, its most serious category.
Threat actors are launching about 8,226 network-layer distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks per hour, Cloudflare revealed Thursday. The web infrastructure and security company said it autonomously mitigated 18.2 million network-layer (L3) DDoS attacks and 14.4 trillion HTTP DDoS requests in the third quarter of 2026. That amounts to 197,400 attacks per day, or one attack every 0.44
Yoba malware uses fake ChatGPT and Claude apps to sideload malware through signed installers and deploy a cryptocurrency miner. Check Point Research has spent two months tracking a campaign it calls Yoba, which uses the popularity of AI tools to spread a custom malware chain. The attackers build fake GitHub projects that pose as AI desktop applications such as GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus. The projects look convincing and run on real GitHub infrastructure, which helps them seem legitimate to potential victims. “These projects look convincing and use real GitHub infrastructure, which helps them appear legitimate to potential victims. The website exhibits search-targeted content and suspicious installer-delivery tactics consistent with an SEO-poisoning lure. Inside the installers, there is a malicious component we refer to as the YobaDropper. This dropper includes another component, the YobaLoader, which is responsible for contacting attacker-controlled infrastructure and fetching the final payload.” reads the report. “In this report, we describe how victims are lured to these fake projects, how the YobaDropper and YobaLoader work together, and how the attackers ultimately use this chain to run unwanted software on infected systems.” The lure is simple. Each project has a repository, a GitHub.io page describing the software, and a ZIP release with the malware. The repositories show no fake stars or forks, yet they still rank among the top Google results, most likely through SEO poisoning that optimizes titles, descriptions and hosting domains. The first repository appeared around July 2026, but the first malicious releases landed only on August 30 and 31, and a third followed about five days later on September 4. Each repository uses a different Outlook address, and commit times point to UTC+4, UTC-4 and UTC+3, which Check Point reads as a deliberate attempt to hide the actor’s real time zone. Here’s the trick that gives the report its title. Each ZIP holds a legitimate signed executable from OpenAI or Anthropic, named Setup.exe, next to a malicious winmm.dll. The signed program loads the DLL on its own, a technique known as DLL sideloading, which is often used to bypass security protections. The ZIP files were not even password-protected. Attackers often use passwords to prevent security tools from automatically unpacking and scanning files. However, these binaries already had very low detection rates because they used anti-sandbox and other techniques to avoid analysis. The DLL’s compilation date is another clue: it was built on the same day it was added to the archive, unlike the legitimate files around it. The dropper, called YobaDropper, checks the environment before running. It calculates a hash of the name of the program that launched it and continues only if the name is Setup.exe. This means that sandboxes that run the DLL on its own will fail this check. When that happens, the process does not exit. Instead, it sleeps 200,000 times for 5.5 seconds each, a total of about 12.73 days. The malware also avoids victims in CIS countries by checking the keyboard layout. It excludes Russian, Belarusian, Tajik, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Uzbek, and Tatar. Interestingly, Ukraine, which has often appeared in similar exclusion lists, is not included. Next, the malware requests administrator privileges. If the user does not have them, it displays the message “Please run this program as Administrator.” and exits. The victim must then restart it with administrator rights. Once it has the required privileges, the malware creates a folder called WMProcess under ProgramData. It copies the legitimate WMPDMC.exe file from System32 into this folder and places the second-stage payload there under the name wmpdui.dll. The malicious code achieves persistence by using a scheduled task dressed up as Microsoft. The author is set to Microsoft Corporation, the description says it collects device metadata for Windows Media Player, and it starts three minutes after boot as Local System. The task launches the legitimate program, which sideloads the malicious DLL. The second stage, YobaLoader, shares code with the dropper, which points to the same developer. It only runs under WMPDMC.exe and uses a different seed for its hashing than the dropper does, which separates the stages and weakens hash-based detection. Its job is to find its payload without a classic command server. It goes to a Telegram channel, t[.]me/yoba_fanclub, and downloads the channel’s profile picture. The last 50 bytes of the image seed a domain generator that builds names from word lists in the form adjective-noun-verb-number on dedyn[.]io. Change the picture and the operator gets a new domain. Then it asks Google’s DNS-over-HTTPS service for a TXT record on that domain. The reply is signed, and the loader checks the signature before decrypting it, which gives a link to a payload on Catbox. Check Point says this reliance on DoH and common hosting aims to bypass passive DNS monitoring and some gateway protections, and the campaign avoids dedicated command-and-control infrastructure, using Telegram, Tor, Catbox and DoH instead. The operator can choose how the payload runs. It can inject it into svchost.exe, save it as an executable after removing the Zone.Identifier mark, or run it as a hidden PowerShell script while bypassing execution policies. “Finally, the injected payload into svchost.exe is an XMRig 6.26.0 miner with a hidden command line targeting a TLS-enabled onion mining endpoint through a local Tor SOCKS5 proxy. It can unpack and start Tor 0.4.9.12 plus lyrebird 0.8.1, monitor user-input activity to pause mining, and conditionally load the WinRing0 driver service for MSR-based mining optimization.” continnues the report. The miner uses Tor to connect to an encrypted mining server. It can start its own Tor components, use about 85% of CPU threads, and pause mining when the user is active. It resumes after 240 seconds of inactivity and can load the WinRing0 driver to optimize mining performance. However, YobaLoader is not limited to cryptocurrency mining. Its DNS tasking system allows operators to deliver any PE executable or PowerShell payload, meaning future attacks could distribute other malware families. Earlier versions appeared in June 2026. They used Cursor.exe for sideloading, a startup shortcut for persistence, and excluded only Russia. They also used .aber[.]ir instead of dedyn[.]io and included anti-debugging and anti-VM checks that later versions dropped. Check Point believes the attackers may have Russian origins and mainly operate in the UTC-4 time zone, but this is an assessment, not a confirmed attribution. Defenders should look for suspicious WMPDMC.exe copies under ProgramData, fake Microsoft scheduled tasks, Telegram-related traffic, DNS lookups for dedyn[.]io through dns.google, and unexplained high CPU usage. “The Yoba campaign shows how attackers can use trusted platforms and the current interest in AI tools to distribute malware in a way that looks believable and harmless at first glance. By packaging their code together with well-known software names and hosting it on GitHub, they lower the chances that users or basic security checks will immediately flag the files as suspicious.” concludes the report. “Organizations should be cautious about installing “AI helpers” or similar tools from unverified repositories and should enforce policies that restrict running software from unknown sources. Combining user awareness with basic technical controls.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Yoba malware)
Security researchers at Anthropic have developed an exploit for a critical Linux kernel vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to remotely execute commands as root on servers running Multipath TCP (MPTCP) listeners. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-98432, also affects ordinary TCP connections, although remote code execution has not been publicly demonstrated on servers without an MPTCP listener. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a TCP feature that lets a single connection use multiple network paths at the same time to improve performance and reliability. It is commonly used in environments where devices have multiple network connections, such as Wi-Fi and cellular networks. CVE-2026-98432 is a use-after-free vulnerability in the kernel's IPv4 TCP networking code that received a severity score of 9.8 out of 10 from the Linux kernel CVE team.
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds GitLab and Cisco flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added GitLab and Cisco vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog: Below are the flaws added to the catalog: CVE-2026-97229 (CVSS score of 10.0) GitLab Community Edition and Enterprise Edition Integer Overflow or Wraparound vulnerability CVE-2026-76418 (CVSS score of 8.6) Cisco Secure Firewall ASA Software and Cisco Secure FTD Software Unchecked Return Value to NULL Pointer Dereference Vulnerability CVE-2026-97229 is a critical security flaw that could let attackers run code on its servers without logging in. The flaw affects Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), it is an integer overflow bug caused by weak validation of regular expressions in CI/CD configurations. The issue affects GitLab versions 19.2 before 19.2.8, 19.3 before 19.3.5, and 19.4 before 19.4.2. Users should upgrade to a patched version to protect their systems. GitLab advisory “GitLab has remediated an issue that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server via a specially crafted regular expression in a CI/CD configuration, due to insufficient regular expression validation.” reads the advisory. The researchers joaxcar reported this vulnerability through the company’s HackerOne bug bounty program. Alpine Linux recently reported that an unknown attacker tried to exploit the vulnerability against Alpine Linux on October 20 and 21, 2026, but the attempts failed. CVE-2026-76418 is a NULL pointer dereference vulnerability affecting Cisco Secure Firewall ASA and FTD Software. It could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to force a device to reload, causing a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. Cisco said it became aware of active exploitation earlier this month. The company has not disclosed who is behind the attacks, how many organizations have been targeted, or what attackers may have done after gaining access. According to Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, FCEB agencies have to address the identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect their networks against attacks exploiting the flaws in the catalog. Experts also recommend that private organizations review the Catalog and address the vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. CISA orders federal agencies to fix the two vulnerabilities by November 1st, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
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