Microsoft announced that it removed the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool from Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, as well as from Windows 11 beta builds released this week. WMIC is a legacy built-in Windows command-line utility that helps interact with the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) system using text commands. This move is part of a process announced in September, when the company said that WMIC will be removed after upgrading to Windows 11 25H2 and later. Microsoft deprecated WMIC in Windows Server 2012 (in 2016) and Windows 10 21H1 (in 2021), and it converted it into a Feature on Demand (FoD) starting with Windows 11 22H2 (in 2022), and announced in January 2024 that it would be removed altogether after first disabling it by default. "Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) has been removed in this release. This change is part of the ongoing deprecation and removal of WMIC from Windows," Microsoft noted on Monday.
Security researchers at Anthropic and Switzerland's EPFL have demonstrated that self-propagating payloads can spread from one artificial intelligence (AI) agent to the next through the editable system prompt files that autonomous agent harnesses use to carry state between sessions. The work, released as a preprint on August 10, 2026, tests the technique in a simulated six-agent coding
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously undocumented Python implant framework dubbed TWINLOOT. "TWINLOOT is a modular, PyArmor-hardened Python implant designed to operate its entire command-and-control infrastructure inside trusted Microsoft services," Ontinue said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Tasking flows through SharePoint Online file
SafePal has disclosed that an authorization flaw in an order-tracking plug-in exposed the names, email addresses, shipping addresses, phone numbers, and purchase details of approximately 39,798 customers. The hardware wallet maker said all affected customers were notified individually by email on August 16 from security@safepal.com, with the subject line "[Important] Your SafePal Order
Pokémon Center is notifying customers in the United Kingdom and Germany that it suffered a third-party data breach after hackers stole customer personal and order information from third-party logistics provider CEVA Logistics. While CEVA's systems were compromised in the cyberattack, the exposed records belonged to Pokémon Center customers who submitted orders on the site. The company then shared this information with the logistics provider to fulfill and ship PokemonCenter.com orders. CEVA Logistics is a subsidiary of the CMA CGM Group, the world's third-largest shipping company. The logistics provider operates 1,000 warehouses, handled 15 million shipments last year, and reported $18.3 billion in revenue in 2025. The company recently suffered a cyberattack in which attackers breached its servers between July 29 and August 1, affecting multiple retailers in Europe.
The French Ministry of the Economy and Finance has disclosed a data breach after an attacker accessed the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) systems and stole data belonging to 678,000 individuals. This incident was discovered after a threat actor using the "ZeroBytes" handle claimed the attack and listed a stolen database for sale on August 12 on the PwnForums hacking forum. "The in-depth investigations conducted since August 12, 2026, have established that, prior to their interruption, these access points had been used to consult and extract data concerning a total of 678,000 individuals and professionals, including tax data such as reference tax income, family quotient, and withholding tax rate, and, for businesses, data such as their company name and SIREN number," the French Finance Ministry said.
On Friday, Microsoft confirmed it has begun working on a security patch for a Defender zero-day vulnerability named "ShieldBreak." A security researcher who uses the "Nightmare Eclipse" handle disclosed this privilege escalation vulnerability after Microsoft released the August 2026 Patch Tuesday security updates. "Microsoft is aware of the reported vulnerability and is actively investigating the validity and potential applicability of these claims," a Microsoft spokesperson told BleepingComputer when asked for a statement regarding the new ShieldBreak zero-day. "Microsoft is committed to investigating security issues and updating impacted products to protect customers as soon as possible." Nightmare Eclipse described ShieldBreak as a bypass for RoguePlanet, another Defender privilege escalation flaw disclosed in June, and shared a ShieldBreak proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that local attackers with limited permissions can use to gain SYSTEM privileges on fully patched Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server systems.
GitLab has released security updates to address a critical vulnerability impacting its Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that, under certain conditions, could allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely modify or delete public projects and user data. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-19478, has been rated Critical by GitLab and assigned a CVSS score of 9.4. Released on
Cybersecurity researchers at Wiz have disclosed a new GitHub Actions workflow injection vulnerability in Snowflake's public snowflakedb/snowflake-connector-net repository that it said could be exploited through a crafted GitHub issue to execute commands in a workflow containing internal Jira credentials. The issue was present in .github/workflows/jira_issue.yml, which ran when a
The expensive attacks are not always the clever ones. This week had plenty of proof. Exposed services got hit, old bugs found fresh use, browser sessions became attack paths, and supply-chain problems kept spreading farther than the original compromise. A lot of it came down to access that was already there and defenses that assumed nobody would look too closely. So, nothing magical. Just a
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