CISA urges water utilities to find and secure internet-exposed PLCs after July attacks showed how easily exposed industrial systems can be compromised. Over 100 internet-exposed systems in the US water and wastewater sector got hit by cyberattacks in July 2026, and CISA’s response wasn’t just an incident report, it was a how-to guide for making sure it doesn’t happen to you next. The agency’s exposure reduction guidance, published August 21, walks through exactly how organizations can find their own internet-facing weak points before an attacker does. The pattern behind the July attacks was surprisingly simple. Most of the affected systems were programmable logic controllers (PLCs), small industrial computers that control pumps and valves. Many connected directly to cellular modems and had no firewall or gateway between them and the internet. CISA warns that this type of setup can expose PLCs to serious security risks. “Directly connecting PLCs to the internet through cellular modems can create significant security risks. However, internet exposure reduction does not mean disabling necessary remote access; organizations should remove remote access when it is unnecessary and secure it when it is necessary.” states CISA. Hackers remotely accessed exposed PLCs, changed device IP addresses and passwords, and in some cases disabled shutdown processes and alarms, creating what CISA called unsafe conditions without notifying the operators running the actual equipment. Iran is the suspected actor behind much of this activity, likely tied to the ongoing war involving the US and Israel, though officials have stopped short of a formal attribution. CISA presents reconnaissance as an ongoing process. Organizations need to know which systems they expose to the internet and can use tools such as Shodan, Censys, or CISA’s Cyber Hygiene Vulnerability Scanning service to check their own IP ranges from the outside. The review should also cover ports used by industrial systems. Besides SSH, RDP, and HTTP, CISA highlights protocols such as Modbus, EtherNet/IP, DNP3, BACnet, and OPC UA. Finding one of these ports open does not automatically mean the system has been compromised, but it does indicate an exposure that needs to be investigated and addressed quickly. Where remote access is genuinely necessary, CISA’s advice is to route everything through a secure, centrally managed gateway rather than connecting straight to a PLC, HMI, or remote terminal unit. Pair that with phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication, unique credentials instead of shared defaults, and active monitoring of traffic in and out, and you’ve closed most of the gap that let this particular wave of attacks succeed in the first place. None of this is exotic security engineering; it’s the same basic hygiene that’s been recommended for years, just finally getting attention because attackers are actually using the gap. This isn’t an isolated incident CISA is responding to reactively, either. The water sector attacks sit inside a much larger pattern of nation-state interest in US and allied critical infrastructure, from China’s Volt Typhoon reportedly pre-positioning malware inside American infrastructure as a potential wartime disruption tool, to Russian-linked campaigns testing water and energy systems across Europe as part of broader pressure on NATO. If a foreign government is willing to spend years quietly waiting inside a power grid, an exposed PLC with a factory-default password isn’t a minor oversight, it’s an open invitation. “CISA urges all critical infrastructure organizations to route all necessary remote access through a secure gateway, firewall, VPN, or other centrally managed access solution, rather than connecting directly to a PLC, human-machine interface (HMI), or remote terminal unit (RTU).” concludes CISA. “The July 2026 malicious cyber activity targeting WWS Sector entities demonstrates the consequences of directly exposing PLCs to the internet. Threat actors remotely accessed internet-exposed PLCs, changed device IP addresses and passwords, and caused loss of monitoring and control functionality and, in some cases, operational disruptions.” If you run anything with the letters PLC, SCADA, ICS, or HMI in its job description, this guidance isn’t optional reading for next quarter. Go run the scan today, because the alternative is finding out the hard way that someone else already ran it for you. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Water Utilities)
CISA red teams fully compromised two critical infrastructure orgs. One SOC isolated hosts in minutes; the other never detected the breach. CISA published an advisory (AA26-237A) documenting two simultaneous red team assessments at critical infrastructure organizations. Both organizations lost full domain control and had their cloud environments compromised. One of them didn’t know until CISA told them afterward. “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) conducted simultaneous red team assessments at two organizations and observed different defensive outcomes. In both environments, the red team achieved full domain compromise and accessed sensitive business systems (SBSs) and cloud resources.” states CISA. “Organization A failed to detect or contain the activity, but Organization B rapidly identified initial compromise attempts, isolated affected systems, and forced the red team into an assume breach model.” Organization A is a Government Services and Facilities Sector entity. Organization B operates in the Water and Wastewater Systems Sector. The red team used comparable techniques against both. The difference in outcome was entirely about detection and response, not the sophistication of the attack. At Organization A, the red team found a web application that still used default credentials. They used it to send phishing emails from a trusted internal address and gained access to four workstations. From there, they exploited a misconfigured Active Directory Certificate Services template with the ESC1 flaw. This allowed a low-privileged user to request certificates for other users, including administrators. They then reached all the targeted sensitive business systems without anyone noticing. After moving into the cloud, they even read SOC staff emails to see if the attack had been detected. It hadn’t. “Without well-defined baselines and alert filtering, false positives and routine alerts overwhelm defenders, obscuring real threats.” CISA continues. “Organizations that tune alerts to highlight anomalies and filter out normal business activity enable defenders to focus on genuine incidents and respond rapidly.” Organization A’s SOC was receiving thousands of false positive alerts, many at higher severity than the actual intrusion alerts the red team was generating. Staff eventually reviewed SCCM-related alerts from real red team activity, couldn’t identify the system’s owner or function, and marked it a false positive. The red team confirmed the miss by reading SOC email. Then they used keyloggers and screenshot capture on SOC workstations to make sure nothing was coming. Nothing was. The organization had multiple separate SOCs with different EDR solutions and no cross-team visibility, which meant that even if one team noticed something, there was no mechanism to act on it across the relevant systems. “Detection tools are only as effective as the people, processes, and procedures supporting them. SOC staff should not operate in silos and should have clear authority unhindered by bureaucracy to effectively contain and resolve incidents.” add CISA. At Organization A, SOC analysts were managing systems they didn’t fully understand and had no written escalation procedures, so their default response to ambiguity was to wait. At Organization B, staff triaged, investigated, coordinated with engineering, and reimaged machines before handing them back to users. At Organization B, the red team still found important security gaps. They discovered a password stored in plain text inside an XML file on an SCCM distribution point. They used the related service account to gain powerful rights over a domain controller and then performed a DCSync attack, obtaining the krbtgt hash. This allowed them to create Golden Tickets and impersonate users across the domain. They also found a path into the OT network through RDP files pointing to a bastion host. Using FTP credentials found on a jump server, they connected to the bastion through SSH. The bastion had no outbound internet access, so their payload could not run, and the SOC quarantined the host. Still, the access path was there. Both organizations also had the same cloud security problem: neither had enabled Conditional Access for workload identities. This Microsoft feature applies access controls to applications and service accounts, not just human users. Without it, applications with broad Microsoft Graph permissions can bypass normal Conditional Access rules. CISA’s red team used this gap in both organizations to access emails across the companies. In Organization A, the team also found AWS IAM credentials stored in users’ home directories with no expiration date. Those credentials could remain valid indefinitely, creating another long-term risk. In Organization B’s cloud environment, the red team abused Seamless SSO by using Kerberos tickets obtained via DCSync to authenticate to Azure without needing any user’s cleartext password. They found a disabled AD-synced account that owned an application with permission to read, write, and send emails for every user in the tenant. They re-enabled the account, DCSynced its credentials, added a client secret to the application, and could then access the full mailbox of every employee from the public internet. Organization B’s detections flagged the AzureHound tool by user agent and caught anomalous Microsoft Graph API request volumes, but those controls arrived after the initial cloud access was already established. CISA recommends several practical steps to improve security. These include hardening ADCS by disabling CT_FLAG_ENROLLEE_SUPPLIES_SUBJECT on templates and limiting who can enroll, setting the Machine Account Quota to zero when there is no operational need, and removing cleartext credentials from workstations and network shares. Organizations should also enable Conditional Access for workload identities, create procedures to revoke tokens, and treat SCCM and similar endpoint management platforms as Tier 0 assets, giving them the same level of protection as domain controllers. The full advisory also maps each red team technique to its MITRE ATT&CK identifier and compares how well the two organizations detected the different stages of the attacks. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
A critical vulnerability chain in the popular Avada theme for WordPress can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary PHP code on the server. The exploit chains six security issues into a zero-click attack. The flaws are collectively tracked as CVE-2026-18431 and received a 9.8 critical severity score. The attack comprises exploits for authorization, input-validation, trust-boundary, and file-handling weaknesses, which must be executed in a specific order to enable arbitrary PHP code execution on a target server. Hackers who successfully exploit these vulnerabilities could fully compromise websites for malicious activities ranging from planting malware and accessing databases to redirecting visitors to malicious sites or adding rogue admin accounts. CVE-2026-18431 affects Avada versions up to 7.16 and Fusion Builder plugin versions up to 3.16, researchers at Defiant's Wordfence team say in a report on Tuesday.
Attackers are actively exploiting a critical-severity vulnerability in the Gitea self-hosted Git service, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Like cloud-hosted GitHub or GitLab SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms, Gitea provides a full suite of DevOps tools, but it is designed to be used as a self-hosted software development platform. Tracked as CVE-2026-60004 and reported by Salesforce security researcher Shai Rod, this code injection security flaw allows an authenticated user with repository write access to repositories hosted on vulnerable servers to execute arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the Gitea service account by submitting malicious patches via the diffpatch API endpoint. However, default-configured Gitea instances have self-registration enabled, allowing unauthenticated attackers to register an account, create a new repository, and trigger the vulnerability without prior credentials.
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Gitea flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added an Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle Weblogic Server Proxy Plug-in flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-60004 (CVSS score of 9,8), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. Gitea is an open-source platform for hosting and managing Git repositories. Think of it as a self-hosted alternative to GitHub or GitLab. CVE-2026-60004 is a critical remote code execution flaw that allows an attacker with write access to a repository to execute arbitrary shell commands as the Gitea service user. The flaw affects Gitea versions from 1.17 and was fixed in 1.27.1. The vulnerable diffpatch API can be abused to plant and execute a malicious Git hook. Because Gitea enables open registration by default, an unauthenticated attacker can create an account, create a repository, and exploit the flaw without existing credentials. A reported attack used the vulnerability to deploy a cryptocurrency-miner-like payload after an exposed Gitea instance allowed open registration and anonymous access to its web interface. 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 flaw by August 28, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has disclosed two unpatched vulnerabilities in Kaltura's HTML5 video player library that allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to read arbitrary files from a server and execute code on it. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-19913 and CVE-2026-19912, both stem from the same unsafe deserialization in the mwEmbedLoader.php endpoint of the mwEmbed player
A newly uncovered phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform called AnonyMousKIT automates the retrieval of codes used to unlock stolen Apple devices and disable the Activation Lock feature. The illegal service has been active since early 2024 and is powering a structured ecosystem that sells stolen iPhones, harvests Apple IDs, accesses iCloud backups, and Keychain credentials. Researchers at threat intelligence platform SOCRadar took advantage of the platform operator's use of bare relative paths to gather information on how the service works, its operators, and infrastructure. SOCRadar found that AnonyMousKIT is connected to 506 domains and is fueling a sprawling business with 168 storefront brands acting as resellers. The researchers recovered records of 200 calls made to victims between August 2025 and May 2026, using 55 distinct interaction transcripts handled by a voice AI agent operating under five personas.
Microsoft updated its Windows PowerToys toolset with a new utility dubbed "Window Hopper" that lets users switch between an app's windows more quickly. The Window Hopper added in this release works like the standard ALT + TAB Windows feature, but it only works for the currently focused app, helping users switch back and forth between its windows. "Once the utility is enabled, press the configurable Alt + backtick shortcut to cycle through that app's windows without stepping through everything else on your desktop," Microsoft explains. "It is especially useful when you're juggling multiple browser windows, terminals, File Explorer windows, or editor instances." Those who want to customize the default activation keyboard shortcut can also do so in PowerToys settings to switch to the next and previous app window.
Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock (LockA locked padlock) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Staying Secure at Eventsno-cost Cyber ServicesCybersecurity Awareness MonthKnown Exploited Vulnerabilities CatalogReport A Cyber Issue WASHINGTON – Today, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published an advisory about lessons learned from red team assessments performed at the request of two critical infrastructure organizations to help organizations strengthen detection, response and protections in information technology (IT), cloud, and operational technology (OT) environments.
Explore Unit 42 research on AI-enabled malware. Learn how existing behavioral detection and endpoint analytics stop AI-authored code before execution. The post The State of AI-Enabled Malware August 2026: From Brand Abuse to Agentic Execution appeared first on Unit 42.
Confirm this action.
Leaving now will discard your changes.