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)
Binance links a $6.3 billion crypto theft to a compromised DevOps laptop, with North Korean hackers blamed by blockchain analysts. Binance was investigating suspicious transfers that early estimates put at up to $5.8 billion. A day later, multiple media outlets reported that the largest cryptocurrency exchange had linked the theft of about $6.3 billion to a DevOps engineer’s compromised laptop. Billions had moved out of wallets linked to the exchange. According to The Block, blockchain analyst Spreek identified approximately $3.55 billion in incoming transfers to an initially unidentified wallet. “Onchain data flagged by analyst Spreek shows about $3.55 billion in incoming transfers to the unlabeled wallet, with nearly $900 million subsequently moved across other wallets.” The Block reports. “Conor Grogan, a senior director and product leader at Coinbase, says the amount is up to $5.8 billion.” Coinbase executive Conor Grogan initially estimated that the total value of the movements could reach $5.8 billion. Those figures came from blockchain tracking and differing estimates, so they didn’t necessarily show the amount stolen. Binance pointed out that customer funds were safe, while co-founder Changpeng Zhao, widely known as CZ, said the activity appeared to be a hack. Zhao no longer manages Binance’s platform, but said he expected customers’ funds to be fully covered. The company said its user funds were “completely safe.” “Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating. User funds are completely safe. Our security teams are reviewing all relevant information with urgency, and we will provide updates through official Binance channels as soon as we have verified information.” the company states. “Users should remain cautious of scams and should not trust unofficial links, messages, or requests for account information.” That assurance is important, but it doesn’t replace a technical explanation of how the transfers occurred or independent confirmation of the final impact. “Our initial investigation suggests this security incident may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop. That gave an attacker access to a service container, where they submitted unauthorized withdrawal transactions.” Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng explained. “To be clear: the attacker did not simply use one engineer’s permissions, and this was not a single “one-click” action. It involved a more complex attack process. Our investigation has not attributed responsibility to any individual.” I want to speak to you directly about what happened. Bottom line – your money is safe, and we're covering every loss. Our initial investigation suggests this security incident may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop. That gave an attacker access to a… — Richard Teng (@_RichardTeng) October 30, 2026 Attackers used access from an engineer’s laptop to reach a service container and send unauthorized withdrawal requests. Binance says it has found no evidence that attackers stole any wallet private keys. Binance also said it had found “additional points of breach” and was still investigating. Co-CEO Richard Teng said the investigation had not identified anyone responsible. After the attack, Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals to carry out security checks, cancelled the permissions linked to the affected address, and began working with blockchain analysis firms and law enforcement to track the stolen funds. Binance says it will cover all losses using its SAFU fund and its own money, and that customer funds are safe. The company also plans to publish an updated Proof of Reserves once it has completed the recovery work. This commitment does not replace a detailed technical explanation or independent confirmation of the full impact of the attack. Binance hasn’t named a culprit, but the blockchain analysis firm TRM has. It attributes the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-backed unit also tracked as Lazarus Group and APT38, and Chainalysis says it’s highly confident in that finding. Our investigators observed funds stolen by DPRK in last month's Bitget exploit commingling with funds stolen from Binance. We have a high degree of confidence that DPRK is responsible for the $6.4 billion hack of Binance. https://t.co/xj9dQYcbKr — Chainalysis (@chainalysis) October 30, 2026 TRM says the attacker moved about $6.36 billion out of Binance wallets on ten blockchains on October 29, most of it in roughly 20 minutes starting at 20:05 UTC. That makes it the largest crypto theft on record, about four times the $1.5 billion Bybit hack of February 2025. “On October 29, 2026, an attacker moved approximately USD 6.36 billion out of Binance wallets on ten blockchains, most of it in about 20 minutes starting at 20:05 UTC. That makes this the largest crypto theft on record, about four times the USD 1.5 billion Bybit hack of February 2025. Binance has confirmed a security incident and suspended withdrawals on several networks.” TRM said. “TRM attributes the attack to TraderTraitor, North Korea’s elite hacking unit, based on robust on and off-chain intelligence. We make this judgment with high confidence. TRM is tracking the funds and alerting partners through the Beacon Network.” Freezing the money only went partway. Tether, Circle, Ripple and World Liberty Financial froze about $2.67 billion in stablecoins, and Arbitrum’s Security Council froze 8,426 ETH and 74.6 million ARB, for roughly $2.7 billion in all. But the attacker raced the freezes by selling USDT to market makers and borrowing ETH against USDT on Aave. It now holds more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC, about $2.4 billion beyond any issuer’s reach. The early freeze numbers were messy too, Tether and Circle froze approximately $1.79 billion in stablecoins associated with the suspicious transfers in the initial reports. Those amounts describe different moments, and you shouldn’t add them without checking whether they cover distinct assets. A freeze works on tokens that have an issuer to call, and Ether and Bitcoin don’t. Hot wallets help explain how this type of theft can happen. They store cryptocurrency in systems connected to the internet, allowing exchanges to process withdrawals quickly. But this also makes strong security controls essential. Investigators still need to determine who initiated the transfers, whether they were authorized, whether attackers gained control of the wallets, and whose funds were stolen. Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, who no longer runs the company, said the activity looked like a hack and expected customers to be fully compensated. Large transfers alone do not prove a cyberattack, but the findings that emerged later provided strong evidence of a breach. Customers also need to be careful. Attackers often exploit the confusion after a major incident by spreading fake announcements, pretending to be support staff, and directing users to fraudulent websites. Use only Binance’s official channels, avoid unexpected links, and never share passwords, authentication codes, or wallet recovery phrases in response to unsolicited messages. Security teams should also watch for phishing emails that use the incident to pressure employees into verifying their accounts. The lesson goes beyond Binance. A public blockchain records every transaction, but it cannot show who authorized it or how attackers gained access. Blockchain transparency does not guarantee operational security. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Binance)
Hardware wallet device maker Trezor has received credible reports about a suspected hardware crypto-theft implant in a Trezor Safe 5 sold by its reseller CryptoBilis in Southeast Asia. Although the company has not yet received the device to examine it and confirm whether there is a malicious implant, it has warned potentially affected users to move their private keys and digital assets to known safe wallets. Trezor wallets are physical devices that store cryptocurrency private keys and authorize transactions. Safe 5 is one of its latest models and is currently available for purchase from the official store. According to Trezor, the concerns arose after it received a report from an Indonesian user who purchased a Safe 5 device from CryptoBilis through Tokopedia in August 2026. The user opened it and found an extra circuit board between the wallet's main board and screen, equipped with a cellular module and antenna.
A malicious version of Anthropic's Claude Code VS Code extension was distributed through Cursor's extension marketplace for approximately 11 hours on October 29, exposing up to 5,000 developers to malware designed to install persistent SSH backdoors.
Attackers have started exploiting a maximum-severity GitLab vulnerability patched earlier this month, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Tracked as CVE-2026-97229, this critical security flaw was discovered by a security researcher using the 'joaxcar' handle in the CI/CD Regular Expression Compiler, which parses, compiles, and evaluates regular expressions in pipeline configuration files. CVE-2026-97229 stems from an integer overflow weakness and could let remote attackers run arbitrary code on targeted instances via a maliciously crafted regular expression in a CI/CD configuration, due to insufficient expression validation. "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," it said.
A practical pentest workflow combines CVSS, EPSS and business impact to validate findings, prioritize fixes and document remediation decisions. Remediation prioritization after a pentest is the process of ranking and ordering security findings based on their risk, exploitability, and business impact. A penetration test can produce any number of findings, ranging from the very low (zero) to the very high (hundreds). The security of the tested organization depends on the findings management processes addressing the most important results first. CVSS alone misranks risk. Accurate prioritization relies on combining CVSS, EPSS, and business context. 68.4% of practitioners say a 500+ candidate finding set would strain the team or be unmanageable, so it’s important to validate first. 81.7% of practitioners see AI-generated findings that need significant manual validation, so validation with concrete proof remains essential. Document every deprioritization, because that record counts as audit evidence. Why aren’t CVSS scores alone enough to inform remediation? When prioritizing pentest results, some practitioners rely solely on frameworks like the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). The logic is sound: the higher a vulnerability’s CVSS score is, the more risk it poses, and the sooner you should fix it, right? Unfortunately, the reality is much more complicated. Boiling down a complex ecosystem of risk into a one-dimensional number means ignoring the wider business context. In the end, that means you fix vulnerabilities that pose serious theoretical risk first, while genuine exposures get pushed to the back of the queue. Lets use two hypothetical vulnerabilities as an example. Vulnerability A is an RCE flaw, CVSS 9.8, on an isolated intranet site. Vulnerability B is a BOLA flaw, CVSS 6.5, on a public facing production payment API. Now think about which one you would fix first. Would you prioritize the“critical” flaw on an intranet site, containing no sensitive data that attackers could only reach if they’d already compromised your internal network? Or would you prioritize the “medium” flaw on an API that processes live credit card transactions, and that any script kiddie could manipulate? Across an entire organization, or multiple organizations if you’re a consultant or MSP, those critical flaws can really pile up. In one AI pentesting survey of 158 base practitioners by Pentest-Tools.com, conducted in June 2026, 68.4% of respondents said a 500+ candidate finding set would strain the team or be unmanageable. Approaching risk prioritization by trying to fix every “Critical” finding is going to exhaust you and your team. That’s when people make mistakes, and you end up with a major incident on your hands. What separates a validated finding from a candidate? That same distinction, in part, separates a candidate finding from a validated one. For example, vulnerability with a high CVSS score but near-zero exploitability should remain a candidate. To graduate a vulnerability from a candidate to a legally and technically validated finding, it must pass through a strict filter that involves three processes. The first step is to eliminate as much administrative noise as possible. That means deduplicating findings and removing any that are obviously non-exploitable. Then, you need to confirm exploitability. That typically means executing a safe, controlled attack path against the target environment to prove that a state change, data exposure, or privilege escalation can actually occur. Finally, you need concrete evidence. A validated finding cannot rely on a generic tool’s “confidence score.” It must include comprehensive proof that a developer or auditor can immediately follow: Technical proof tends to include HTTP request/response traces or specific error payloads. Proof of impact includes things like screenshots or server-side telemetry demonstrating unauthorized data access. Now, many vendors are going to claim that AI-generated findings ease the strain of exploit validation. In many cases, they’re telling the truth. But as with any AI technology, a healthy level of skepticism is important. According to the same study, 81.7% of respondents encounter AI-generated findings that need significant manual exploit validation at least sometimes. How do CVSS, EPSS and business context combine into a ranking? Together, CVSS, Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) scores, and business context create a single risk ranking that reflects real-world danger to the tested organization. CVSS, as mentioned earlier, measures theoretical severity. It tells you how bad a flaw is in a vacuum, but is entirely blind to context. EPSS measures probability. It tells you how likely an attacker is to exploit a flaw in the wild over the next 30 days, but doesn’t measure the potential impact of an exploitation. Business context measures operational impact. It tells you the value of the affected asset, how easily an attacker can reach a flaw, and what they can steal. It tells you nothing, however, about the threat itself. Ultimately, business context is expressed as residual risk, the danger left over after you factor in your existing defenses. Calculating it relies on measuring four factors: Exposure: Whether a server is open to the public internet. User count: How many people use a system. Data sensitivity: Whether the system holds sensitive information. Compensating controls: Whether you have firewalls or antivirus tools actively blocking the attack path. By checking these boxes, you won’t waste time fixing a “Critical” bug locked in an empty, disconnected server. Instead, you’ll prioritize the “Medium” bug on your public checkout page that hackers are actively trying to breach. What goes first when dev time is limited? Sometimes, you’re not going to have much time for remediation. That’s natural. In those situations, prioritize validated findings with high threat activity (EPSS score) and critical business exposure. They’re the findings that pose the most threat to your organization. Prioritization done well is itself evidence. A ranked, validated list, with a written reason for what was deprioritized, is what a team can defend later. You’ll need to record the owner (the specific individual accepting the risk), the date of the decision, the technical operational basis for deprioritization (such as an active compensating control), and a hard review date for re-evaluation. Why does the ranked list count as audit evidence? A prioritized ranking list counts as valid audit evidence because it proves compliance alignment with several major security frameworks. For example: ISO 27001 A.8.8 demands that organizations evaluate real-world exposure, take targeted corrective actions, and retain objective evidence that the remediation loop has successfully closed. PCI DSS 11.4 mandates that penetration testing actively validates and exploits findings, with formal retesting conducted after significant organizational changes. SOC 2 CC7.1 relies on this documentation to confirm that an organization maintains systemic operational consistency and rigorous vulnerability triage over time. A ranked, validated list also gives MSPs and MSSPs a clear, auditable record of truth that clients can either accept or challenge with their own evidence. This transparency ensures both sides agree on which real-world risks need to be addressed first. What does a defensible ranking record contain? A defensible ranking record contains the validated asset identification, its technical CVSS severity, its real-world EPSS probability, the active compensating controls defining its residual list, the formal sign-off from the risk owner, and the targeted review schedule. About the Author: Josh Breaker-Rolfe is a Content writer at Bora. He graduated with a degree in Journalism in 2021 and has a background in cybersecurity PR. He’s written on a wide range of topics, from AI to Zero Trust, and is particularly interested in the impacts of cybersecurity on the wider economy. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, pentest)
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