Over 8,300 Internet-exposed Gitea instances are still unpatched against a critical security flaw exploited in ongoing remote code execution attacks, according to cybersecurity watchdog Shadowserver. The code injection vulnerability (CVE-2026-60004) targeted in these attacks was reported by Salesforce security researcher Shai Rod, and it allows authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the Gitea service account by submitting malicious patches via the diffpatch API endpoint. While successful exploitation requires repository write access to repositories hosted on vulnerable servers, Gitea comes with self-registration enabled by default, allowing unauthenticated attackers to register an account, create a new repository, and trigger the vulnerability without prior credentials.
BlueDelta (APT28) uses webhook.site and Microsoft Edge to hide HOOKEDGE espionage traffic targeting European governments. Recorded Future’s Insikt Group documented a campaign by BlueDelta, the Russian GRU-linked group that overlaps with the group APT28, running an entire espionage operation against European government targets using webhook.site, a service built for developers to test HTTP requests, as its command-and-control backbone. The campaign ran from late September 2025 through early April 2026, targeting government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain, and Türkiye. “The campaigns delivered a lightweight Windows batch-script backdoor, dubbed “HOOKEDGE,” via macro-enabled Microsoft Word documents using diplomatic-themed lures, including material impersonating Spain’s Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes, created shortly after a September 2025 meeting between Spanish and Moldovan officials.” states the report by Insikt Group. “Insikt Group assesses with moderate confidence that this activity was conducted by BlueDelta (which overlaps with APT28, Fancy Bear, and Forest Blizzard), a Russian state-sponsored threat group attributed to the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU).” The attackers used a fairly old-school trick: macro-enabled Word documents. One of them looked like a real meeting agenda from Spain’s Ministry of the Presidency and appeared shortly after an actual meeting between Spanish and Moldovan officials. The timing was interesting because it came just before Moldova’s September 2025 parliamentary elections. The document looked credible enough to make the phishing attempt believable. The backdoor, called HOOKEDGE, is surprisingly simple. It uses a Windows batch script and relies on two webhooks. One receives commands, while the other sends the stolen data back to the attackers. Every 30 minutes, a scheduled task downloads a command file through Microsoft Edge, runs it and sends the results to another endpoint. The malware uses Edge to make the traffic look like normal web activity, making it harder for security tools to spot. That reliance on a real browser for both tasking and exfiltration is the cleverest part of the whole design. “A notable aspect of HOOKEDGE is its use of msedge.exe for both tasking and exfiltration. By generating network traffic through a legitimate web browser rather than a commonly abused LotL binary (LOLBin) or a custom binary, the malware blends its communications with normal enterprise browsing activity.” continues the report. Recorded Future explains, and that’s really the entire evasion strategy in one sentence: don’t build something exotic, just make your traffic look exactly like an employee checking a website. BlueDelta didn’t build HOOKEDGE from scratch either. It shares deep code and structural overlap with HEADLACE, a backdoor the same group used years earlier, right down to identical JavaScript variable names and the same base64 encoding scheme for automated downloads. “HOOKEDGE’s code and structural design have significant overlap with HEADLACE, a backdoor used by BlueDelta in previous campaigns.” states the report. Recorded Future assesses with moderate confidence that HOOKEDGE is a direct evolutionary successor, maintained by the same operators rather than a fresh tool built by a different team, which fits BlueDelta’s long-documented habit of refining working tradecraft instead of reinventing it. The operation also included a triage mechanism worth understanding on its own. Once a victim showed signs of being worth deeper attention, active communication with the initial webhook endpoints, BlueDelta deployed a second HOOKEDGE payload configured to check in every five minutes instead of thirty, giving operators much faster interactive control over higher-value targets. That two-tier setup also solved a practical infrastructure problem: webhook.site’s free tier caps out at 100 requests per endpoint, so spreading routine and high-priority tasking across separate endpoints kept any single one from getting exhausted mid-operation. BlueDelta kept tuning the operation continuously rather than treating it as a finished product. Beaconing intervals stretched from 30 minutes to 61, deliberately timed to slip past sandbox environments that typically only watch a sample’s behavior for an hour. The group added canary tracking pixels named things like mailopened.jpg and docopened.jpg to monitor exactly when a phishing email got opened versus when the document itself got opened versus when macros actually executed, essentially building analytics for their own phishing funnel. “The malicious document also contains a hidden image referencing a remote webhook URL: hxxp://webhook[.]site/62114596-33f5-47fb-9012-0223529e5a13/docopened[.]jpg. This serves as a document-open “canary,” alerting BlueDelta operators when a victim opens the lure. Later variants used the filename doc.jpg in place of docopened.jpg.” states Insik. “Insikt Group also identified webhooks using the filename mailopened.jpg, indicating that BlueDelta likely used a similar canary mechanism to monitor when recipients opened phishing emails, providing operators with visibility into campaign delivery success before any payload execution.” That kind of detailed tracking of what victims do would look very familiar to a marketing team. The difference is that here the targets are victims, not customers. For defenders, the useful indicators are quite clear. Block macros in documents downloaded from the internet, monitor scheduled tasks that launch scripts from user-writable folders, and flag Microsoft Edge running in headless mode or making automated connections to file-sharing and webhook services that the organization does not normally use. You don’t need sophisticated tools to spot these behaviors. Even a well-configured monitoring system should be able to detect them early. The worrying part is that a persistent, state-backed group can still rely on a small set of behaviors that defenders can identify and block. For defenders, the actionable pieces here are concrete rather than abstract. Block macro execution from documents that arrived over the internet, watch for scheduled tasks spawning script interpreters from user-writable folders, and specifically flag Microsoft Edge running in headless mode or making automated requests to file-hosting and webhook services your organization doesn’t actually use for anything legitimate. None of this requires exotic tooling to catch, which is oddly reassuring: a threat group this persistent and state-backed is still, at its core, relying on the same handful of detectable behaviors that a properly configured monitoring setup would catch on day one. “BlueDelta is likely to continue conducting initial access campaigns against European government and diplomatic organizations in support of Russian intelligence collection. Given the enduring strategic importance of European governance, NATO-related affairs, and diplomatic engagement with former Soviet republics, the intelligence requirements driving this activity are unlikely to diminish in the near term.” concludes the report. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, BlueDelta)
ServiceNow released security patches for three new maximum-severity AI Platform vulnerabilities that can be exploited in code injection, SQL injection, and privilege escalation attacks. The ServiceNow AI Platform (formerly known as the Now Platform) is an enterprise-grade Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that helps integrate AI into core enterprise workflows and powers more than 100,000 enterprise AI apps at 85% of all Fortune 500 companies. In a Thursday advisory, the company said it patched its cloud-based platform against the three critical security flaws (CVE-2026-18885, CVE-2026-18886, and CVE-2026-74820) and advised customers to secure their self-hosted instances. The first is a code injection vulnerability that can allow attackers to execute arbitrary code, the second stems from a code injection weakness that enables them to escalate privileges, and the third allows threat actors to access or modify instance data through SQL injection attacks.
Australian police charged two men linked to TeamPCP over malware hidden in open-source code that stole 500,000+ credentials from 1,000+ organizations. Australian police have charged two men from Western Australia over a global cybercrime operation that allegedly hid malicious code in open-source software and used it to steal data from thousands of organisations. “Two West Australian men have been charged following a joint investigation between the AFP and Western Australia Police Force (WAPF), working in parallel with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), into a sophisticated cybercrime syndicate that allegedly created malicious open-source software to rob thousands of global businesses.” states AFP. “The AFP charged the men yesterday (26 August, 2026) with a combined total of 14 offences after executing search warrants in Perth with WAPF, and the assistance of the FBI.” The Australian Federal Police, the Western Australia Police Force and the FBI executed search warrants in Perth on 26 August 2026 and arrested a 21-year-old from Cottesloe and a 23-year-old from Mandurah. They face a combined total of 14 charges covering unauthorised data modification, possession and supply of data for computer offences, and dealing with proceeds of crime. Police say the pair were principal participants in a syndicate known as TeamPCP, which allegedly inserted malicious code into software hosted on public repositories and then let other developers pull it in without knowing. Infected components ended up in systems across government, academia and the private sector, giving the group a way to steal credentials and other sensitive material at scale. “Parallel investigations started in April, 2026, after the AFP and FBI received information from multiple cyber threat assessment companies regarding a syndicate that allegedly inserted malicious code into software available on an open-source repository, which was then unwittingly used by other developers.” continues AFP. “Police will allege infected software was then distributed into computer systems at other organisations across government, academia and the private sector. The software allegedly enabled the syndicate to infiltrate those organisations to steal or harvest sensitive data, including user credentials and authentication materials.” The numbers are not small. Investigators estimate the malicious code potentially compromised more than 1,000 organisations worldwide, enabling the theft of over 500,000 credentials and the exfiltration of at least 300 gigabytes of data. Remediation costs so far run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. TeamPCP is behind multiple supply chain attacks, in the past, they targeted PyPI packages and NPM repositories, and most recently the “Mini Shai-Hulud” campaign also caught two OpenAI employees. The pattern is consistent: go after the tools developers trust, poison the supply chain, and let the downstream damage multiply. The confirmed list of modified tools includes Trivy, a widely used container vulnerability scanner; KICS, a static analysis tool for infrastructure-as-code; LiteLLM, a popular library for routing requests across AI model APIs; and the Telnyx Python SDK. These aren’t niche utilities. They’re commonly integrated into enterprise CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure workflows, and security scanning processes. Hitting them means hitting a large number of organizations simultaneously through a single poisoned update. The group also deployed four distinct malware families. CanisterWorm harvested cloud access tokens, credentials, and API keys for AWS, GCP, and Azure. SANDCLOCK extracted AWS credentials, Kubernetes ServiceAccount tokens, local environment variables, and cryptocurrency wallet data. Mini Shai-Hulud was a self-replicating worm designed to spread across both npm and PyPI registries. Miasma was a variant of Mini Shai-Hulud that propagated across those same open-source registries while harvesting credentials and poisoning configuration files. The worm component is the part that deserves particular attention. Mini Shai-Hulud and its Miasma variant didn’t just infect the initial target and stop. They spread across open-source package registries autonomously, harvesting credentials and poisoning configuration files as they went. The FBI confirmed two GitHub repository names used for exfiltration: tpcp-docs and docs-tpcp. If either of those repository names appears in your GitHub organization, the worm created it using stolen credentials. TeamPCP’s method was straightforward and effective: inject malicious code into legitimate software packages, push the trojanized versions through normal distribution channels, and wait for CI/CD pipelines to pull them in automatically. The modified tools installed credential-stealing malware and persistent backdoors without any visible sign that anything had changed. “These men are allegedly members of the cybercriminal group TeamPCP, whose malicious code potentially compromised more than a thousand organizations worldwide,” Assistant Director Leatherman said. “We are proud to work with the Australian Federal Police and the Western Australia Police Force to impose cost on criminal actors and combat the growing threat of software supply-chain attacks.” The charges show how serious the alleged operation was. The 21-year-old faces several charges, including changing data without authorization, possessing and supplying data for computer crimes, failing to comply with a production order, and handling at least A$100,000 in criminal proceeds. The 23-year-old faces similar hacking charges, with maximum penalties ranging from three to 20 years. Police seized electronic devices and other items from properties in Cottesloe, Hamilton Hill and Mandurah. Investigators are now examining a large amount of data and have not ruled out further arrests or charges. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
Australian authorities have arrested and charged two young men accused of being part of the TeamPCP hacking group linked to a string of far-reaching developer supply chain attacks. TeamPCP is a hacking group known for widespread supply-chain attacks over the past year that targeted open-source software and developer platforms to steal credentials, authentication secrets, and source code. High-profile attacks attributed to TeamPCP have impacted Trivy, LiteLLM, Telnyx, SAP, and TanStack packages, while the group has also breached the European Commission, Mistral AI, OpenAI, and GitHub. To carry out their attacks, the threat actors injected malicious code into software hosted on open-source repositories, which developers then unknowingly incorporated into their own applications on systems used by government, academic, and private-sector organizations.
Google Workspace breaches can begin with social engineering or forgotten third-party integrations rather than sophisticated exploits. This webinar examines real-world breaches, what happens during the critical first hours, and the security controls that can make the greatest difference.
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)
Threat actors linked by Arctic Wolf to Dark Caracal with medium confidence deployed a previously undocumented Go-based malware framework, GoCaracal, during a June 2026 intrusion at an unnamed communications organization in Venezuela. GoCaracal provides operators with remote shell access and payload execution, while the extended profile adds browser data theft, keylogging, remote desktop control
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.
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