Unit 42 explores modern OAuth threats and actionable steps organizations can take to protect their environments. The post The Current Landscape of OAuth Attacks appeared first on Unit 42.
Social media giant Meta was ordered to pay 25 billion in penalties by a New Mexico court on Wednesday as part of a data privacy lawsuit that sprang from the company's Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which came to light in 2018. According to multiple reports from the Associated Press, the New York Times, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal, state District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew called
Microsoft says IT admins can re-enable the retired Exchange Web Services (EWS) API in Exchange Online to fix EWS apps that have stopped working. EWS is an API for developing apps that can access Exchange mailbox items (e.g., email messages, meetings, and contacts) from Exchange Online and on-premises Exchange servers. This API is used by various apps, including but not limited to Outlook desktop add-ins, older versions of Outlook for Windows, the Apple Mail / Calendar on macOS, and various other apps. In February, the company announced it will start blocking the EWS API by default on October 1, 2026, but will let IT administrators temporarily maintain access via an app allowlist until the final shutdown on April 1, 2027. However, when EWS is disabled, the apps show errors ranging from alerts that the EWS protocol is unavailable to repeated prompts to enter the username or password.
AWS detected PHP2Shell exploit attempts four days before disclosure, highlighting the risk of attackers exploiting critical flaws before patches arrive. Attackers attempted to exploit two critical PHP vulnerabilities four days before the flaws became public, according to Amazon Threat Intelligence. “Amazon Threat Intelligence identified a PHP2Shell exploitation attempt dating to Oct. 17, 2026, in MadPot telemetry, four days before public disclosure of CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619.” reads the report published by Amazon team.”The exploit attempt originated from an IP address associated with a commercial anonymization network. While the vulnerability was under embargo, the targeting of a honeypot from an anonymized IP address suggests the activity was conducted by a threat actor, though it remains unclear how the actor acquired exploit information prior to disclosure.” The activity began on October 17, 2026, and appeared in telemetry from MadPot, AWS’s network of honeypots designed to attract and study malicious activity. The company said the first attempt targeted a honeypot from an IP address linked to a commercial anonymization network. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, were still under embargo at the time. AWS believes the use of anonymized infrastructure suggests a threat actor was behind the activity. However, the company hasn’t established how the attacker obtained information about the vulnerabilities before their public disclosure, nor has it confirmed that the early attempts would have succeeded against real-world systems. The first attempt wasn’t an isolated event. AWS detected multiple proof-of-concept exploits on October 21, with the earliest appearing at around 02:00 UTC, roughly 12 hours before the scheduled public release and patch at 14:00 UTC. Between 02:00 and 08:00 UTC that day, AWS observed further attempts against MadPot from additional anonymized infrastructure. The payloads and anonymization services varied, leading the company to suspect that multiple actors were involved. After the embargo ended and PHP released the fixes, more proof-of-concept exploits appeared within hours. AWS reported that attackers used them against its sensors almost immediately, describing PHP2Shell as being broadly exploited in the wild. The findings show why the date of a public security advisory can’t always serve as the starting point for an incident investigation. In this case, defenders had to account for activity that began before they could publicly identify the vulnerabilities. “The actual payloads and choices in anonymization infrastructure varied, suggesting these were multiple actors.” continues the report. “Technical analysis is ongoing, and it’s unclear if any of these attempts would have succeeded in real-world systems.” PHP2Shell refers to two critical flaws in the PHP runtime that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. An attacker may be able to send a specially crafted web request and run commands on a vulnerable server without first logging in. PHP published fixes on October 21. The corrected releases are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35, according to the official PHP security notice. The vulnerabilities affect PHP itself, rather than a specific website application. As a result, updating WordPress, Drupal or another application won’t fix the underlying problem if the server continues to run a vulnerable PHP runtime. AWS says there is no configuration-only workaround that fully addresses both flaws. Organizations should install the fixed PHP version as soon as possible and check whether their hosting provider, operating system vendor or container image has supplied the necessary update. For systems that can’t be patched immediately, AWS suggests considering whether blocking multipart file uploads is practical. Administrators should assess the impact on their applications before applying that restriction, and they shouldn’t treat it as a replacement for installing the fixes. AWS recommends reviewing web server logs for suspicious requests, particularly POST requests containing the PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS string in multipart form data. Security teams should also look for unexpected processes launched by PHP and unexplained changes to files on web application servers. These checks matter because an attack may leave evidence beyond the original HTTP request. Unexpected command interpreters, newly created files or unusual process activity can help investigators determine whether an attacker progressed beyond probing a vulnerable endpoint. AWS also published six IP addresses associated with observed activity: 103.216.220.92, observed on October 17 31.223.184.166, observed on October 21 37.19.200.5, observed on October 21 134.209.159.64, observed on October 21 103.114.163.188, observed on October 21 95.217.98.37, observed on October 21 These addresses require careful handling. AWS warns that some belong to shared anonymization infrastructure and aren’t exclusive to PHP2Shell activity, so organizations should investigate matching events rather than automatically blocking every address. The Cloudflare analysis of PHP2Shell provides additional context. Cloudflare said it had deployed web application firewall protections before public disclosure and had already observed attack traffic targeting its customers, including attempts to change payloads to evade those protections. A web application firewall can help reduce exposure, but it doesn’t replace patching. Defenders should combine updated software with log analysis, process monitoring and checks for suspicious file changes. AWS draws a broader lesson from the incident: organizations shouldn’t assume that exploitation begins only after a vulnerability becomes public. The October 17 activity shows that attackers may obtain or develop exploit information while a flaw is still under coordinated disclosure. Attackers are using AI to develop exploits faster, sometimes within hours of a patch being released. Security teams need to patch critical systems quickly and investigate attacks from the earliest known date. For PHP2Shell, AWS recommends checking logs and activity from October 17 onward, including suspicious behavior that detection tools may not yet recognize. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, PHP)
Attackers can steal credentials and begin exfiltrating data within minutes, often before security teams can respond. Exaforce examines real-world attacks involving stolen GitHub tokens, malicious AI installers, and MFA phishing, explaining why faster detection and automated containment are critical.
INTERPOL on Thursday announced that a coordinated law enforcement action has disrupted 10,909 malicious networks and recovered more than $105 million in illicit funds. In tandem, the effort saw law enforcement agencies from 21 countries arrest 1,462 suspects. Codenamed Operation Serengeti III, the cybercrime crackdown took place between June 29 and August 31, 2026. "Authorities identified
Security researchers at Amazon Threat Intelligence say attackers began targeting the PHP2Shell flaws four days before security patches were released on Wednesday. Tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, the two critical vulnerabilities let attackers gain remote code execution (RCE) on vulnerable systems. The PHP security team patched them on October 21 after urging admins one day earlier to prepare to install the updates as soon as they became available. PHP core developer Gina Peter Banyard warned before disclosure that applying the official security patches is the only permanent defense, while the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) asked UK organizations to immediately update PHP servers or take them offline until they can be patched. The PHP team says that everything went according to plan until two days before the coordinated disclosure, when it had to speed up the targeted release date starting October 20 after some details on the PHP2Shell security flaws (including the two CVE IDs and mitigation advice provided to some critical infrastructure providers) leaked online.
GitLab has released security patches for a maximum-severity Regular Expression Compiler flaw that can let remote attackers run arbitrary code on vulnerable servers. This security issue is tracked as CVE-2026-110264 and was reported by a security researcher using the 'joaxcar' handle through GitLab's HackerOne bug bounty program. CVE-2026-110264 stems from an integer overflow weakness in GitLab's Regular Expression Compiler, a background engine that parses and validates regular expressions in configuration files. GitLab has fixed the vulnerability in GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) versions 19.5.1, 19.4.3, 19.3.6, 19.2.9, 19.1.9, 19.0.10, and 18.11.13, and warned users to patch their instances immediately. "GitLab has remediated an issue that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server due to integer overflow when compiling a specially crafted regular expression," the company said.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Railway on Wednesday disclosed "anomalous activity" related to systems that store customer environment variables. Upon further investigation, the company found that an unauthorized third party may have gained access to encrypted environment variables, and, in some cases, obtained the decrypted contents. The impact, it said, is limited to a "subset of users,
A flaw in the OpenCode AI coding agent allowed a malicious or hijacked MCP server to run code on a developer's Windows or WSL machine when the developer signed in. OpenCode connects to MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to add outside tools, and such code would run with the developer's own access. Anomaly, the company behind OpenCode, fixed the flaw in version 1.18.33 on September
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