Ransomware operators including Spikey Scorpius (aka Qilin) and Tarnished Scorpius (aka Inc) are exploiting PAN-OS vulnerability CVE-2026-0257. The post Threat Brief: Active Exploitation of PAN-OS CVE-2026-0257 (Updated October 19) appeared first on Unit 42.
Nikkei Inc. disclosed a new data breach, the third in about a month, that exposed 1.83 million personal information records. The Japanese giant says subsets of the data contained personally identifiable information and other sensitive details, but most records contained no identifying info. The company said that 150,000 records contained at least one of the following data types: full names, email addresses, physical addresses, telephone numbers, and dates of birth. Email addresses appeared in 120,000 records. The remaining 1.68 million records contain no identifiers, the company said, and no credit card information was exposed. Nikkei Inc. is a major Japanese business news and financial information group, owner of Financial Times, the country’s largest business-focused media company. The company employs over 10,100 people and has an annual revenue of $2.5 billion (¥393.8 billion).
Some downloads of the Rank Math PRO WordPress plugin from the vendor’s official website carried malware that planted hidden backdoors in a supply-chain attack last week. According to the vendor, a limited number of users who downloaded version 3.0.123 of the plugin between October 15 at 20:02 UTC and October 16 at 07:12 UTC received compromised versions that could compromise their websites upon activation. “The affected plugin files contained malware that could compromise your website if the plugin was activated,” Rank Math warned. “We immediately removed the affected files and released a clean version, Rank Math PRO v3.0.124.” Users who installed and activated the trojanized version during this 11-hour window should treat their websites as compromised and follow the clean-up procedures in the advisory from the vendor.
Hackers reportedly compromised AOMEI's servers to distribute malware through a built-in promotional feature in its backup software, briefly tampering with configuration files before restoring them to their original state to hide the attacks. The supply chain attacks took place between April and July 2026 and targeted the update and notification systems used by AOMEI Backupper, a Windows application for backing up data, cloning disks, and restoring systems. Researchers at ManageEngine's Threat Analysis Lab (METAL), working with Google's Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant, uncovered the campaign and investigated the attacks. In reports published by Google and ManageEngine, the activity is attributed to a threat actor tracked as UNC7017, who used the compromised infrastructure to distribute a previously unknown malware downloader called CROSSROAD and a backdoor named SHINYROAD.
Staffing software company Bullhorn has disabled access to its platform to contain a cyberattack that caused a system-wide outage. The company says it has isolated the issue and eradicated the immediate threat. Currently, its team is working to restore services following thorough security reviews conducted with help from CrowdStrike specialists. Bullhorn is an American software company specializing in cloud-based staffing and recruitment solutions. Its platform helps staffing firms manage the recruitment lifecycle, including candidate tracking, onboarding, and payroll. The company says it serves more than 10,000 customers worldwide. According to a status page on the incident, customers started to experience issues with job posting in the Bullhorn application on Friday. The next day, the company said it was "experiencing a system-wide outage affecting the Bullhorn platform," and later confirmed that the issues were caused by a cyberattack.
Attackers exploit Plex2Shell flaws to install crypto miners and proxy software. Admins should update their Plex Media Server. Plex Media Server is designed to make movies, music, and other media available across devices. But when a server is exposed to the internet and runs vulnerable software, it can become an entry point for attackers who have little interest in your film collection. On October 16, 2026, security researcher Zach Main published technical details and proof-of-concept (PoC) code for a vulnerability chain dubbed Plex2Shell. Within a day, researchers had observed attackers using the exploit against an internet-facing honeypot, deploying cryptocurrency-mining malware and proxy software. The incident is a reminder of how quickly a public exploit can be weaponized by threat actors. The chain combines four vulnerabilities in Plex Media Server: CVE-2026-96652, CVE-2026-96654, CVE-2026-96655, and CVE-2026-96656. Together, they can allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable servers without valid credentials, provided the required conditions are met. The code runs with the privileges of the Plex service, giving attackers an opportunity to install additional software and abuse the host. The technical details are available in Main’s original analysis, Plex2Shell. Plex had been notified of the vulnerabilities on July 27 and acknowledged the report on August 4, awarding a bug bounty. The company released fixes in September, before the exploit code became public. The loader does not check the library’s name, executable permissions, digital signature, or symbols. As a result, the library’s ELF constructor can run with the same privileges as the Plex service. “It doesn’t check for a lib prefix, doesn’t require the execute bit, doesn’t verify any signature, and doesn’t look for any specific symbol.” reads the report published by zmain.com. “When dlopen loads a shared object, it runs the ELF’s DT_INIT_ARRAY (constructor functions) before doing any symbol resolution. A .so that only has a constructor and no exported symbols will still execute its code on load. We then trigger a second transcode. The codec directory gets re-enumerated, the .so we wrote in Stage 4 gets loaded, and the constructor runs as uid=1000(plex).” That detail matters because the final stage can exploit how Plex loads shared libraries. The chain uses a setting related to transcoding to influence execution, allowing a specially crafted library to run when Plex loads it. The result can be code execution under the service account, without requiring the attacker to obtain an interactive login first. The first confirmed activity appeared on October 17, when a researcher monitoring a vulnerable Plex honeypot reported seeing exploitation in the wild. “My honeypot mostly saw scanning and generic exploitation attempts. As of this morning (Oct 17th), I finally saw in the wild exploitation.” reports the researcher on BoredHackerBlog. “So by default, I don’t allow outbound traffic from my honeypots but due to how this vuln works, I had to go modify my settings later on so sadly I didn’t get payloads for all the attacks. It’s possible that I have partial data. I haven’t gone through pcaps and I had to modify settings for tcpdump anyway. The attacker could be using slightly modified code & technique too.” The attackers used the publicly available exploit to deploy an XMRig-based cryptocurrency miner. Later that day, the researcher found a second payload named myawesomeproxy, which turns the compromised system into a proxy node and may allow others to use its internet connection. Cryptomining consumes computing resources and electricity, while proxy software creates a different risk. Attackers can route traffic through compromised residential or business connections, potentially using their reputation and IP addresses to reach services or networks that might otherwise block suspicious infrastructure. A Plex server can therefore become more than a source of unwanted costs: it can provide an attacker with a foothold for further activity. Plex released patched versions in September, and administrators should ensure they’re running Plex Media Server 1.43.3.10861 or later. This includes installations running on NAS devices, virtual machines, and Docker containers. Updating the application is the immediate priority, particularly for servers exposed directly to the internet. Administrators should also investigate unexpected child processes launched by Plex, unexplained CPU usage, unfamiliar files in the Plex Codecs directory, and outbound connections to unrecognized IP addresses. The appearance of cryptocurrency miners or proxy processes deserves particular attention. Because attackers can change filenames, infrastructure, and payloads, detection shouldn’t depend on a fixed list of indicators alone. The honeypot findings provide evidence of exploitation, but they don’t establish how many real-world systems have been compromised or identify the operators with certainty. Organizations should treat the activity as a warning to check exposure and patch promptly, rather than assume that every vulnerable server has already been attacked. “I wouldn’t be surprised if threat actors deploy more sophisticated things. Plex may be hosted on residential IP and I think threat actors would love to have residential IP proxy to access corporate VPNs and emails. (edit: see update at the bottom. i do see proxy being deployed now)” the researchers adds. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Plex2Shell )
The open-source AI coding project OpenCode has notified some users that stored API keys they used with external providers were exposed in a security breach. Multiple users reported that the incident led to unauthorized API charges and suspended projects in Google Cloud. According to the project maintainer, the breach affected 1.4% of OpenCode Console users, with some reporting more than $1,700 in unauthorized charges overnight. OpenCode is a model-agnostic AI coding agent that helps users understand code, write features, and fix bugs using natural-language instructions, through a terminal, desktop app, or code editor. Users can connect AI models from multiple AI providers to the OpenCode console to streamline and automate the development process. On Saturday, OpenCode announced that it suffered a large distillation attack that impacted only developers who linked external providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
Microsoft has fixed a known issue that caused games and Windows 11 apps using AC-3 (Dolby Digital) audio decoding to crash after installing the September 2026 preview update (KB5124010). While KB5124010 is an optional update that requires clicking a "Download and install" link (reducing the number of potentially affected Windows users), it installs automatically on devices where the "Get the latest updates as soon as they're available" option is toggled on. "In some cases the application can fail to launch, or close without warning. In other cases the application will work normally until certain features are used, such as playing music," Microsoft said when it acknowledged this issue two weeks ago. "Affected applications may vary and can include games, media players, and certain productivity applications."
Cybercriminals are selling forged identity documents, deepfake videos, and live verification services to help buyers bypass Know Your Client (KYC) checks. Flare examines how these underground services operate and the techniques used to create and maintain fraudulent verified accounts.
F5 has released out-of-band security patches to address multiple NGINX web server flaws, including three critical-severity vulnerabilities that can let attackers execute code on vulnerable systems. The three critical vulnerabilities were found in the ngx_http_v3_module (CVE-2026-15176 and CVE-2026-97205) and the NGINX map directive (CVE-2026-93479). Remote attackers without privileges can exploit them to launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or gain code execution on NGINX systems with non-default configurations. Successful exploitation causes a heap-based buffer overflow or use-after-free in the NGINX worker process, leading to crashes or a restart. However, attackers may also be able to "execute code on systems with Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) disabled or when the attacker can bypass ASLR."
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