WhatsApp has started rolling out several new account security features, including support for multiple passkeys and stronger two-step verification. While the instant messaging service already allowed users to add passkeys for secure logins via fingerprint, Face ID, or screen lock code, it now lets them create separate ones for each platform. "More than a billion people have already set one up, and you can now add more than one passkey to your account if you use both Android and iOS devices. To get started, go to Settings > Account > Passkeys," it said. WhatsApp has also updated its two-step verification security feature to allow alphanumeric passwords instead of six-digit PINs. "Until now it was a six-digit PIN, we've now upgraded it to a full password: longer, alphanumeric, and even with special ch@racters to make it harder to guess. If you've been using '123456,' this is your sign to upgrade," WhatsApp added.
Law enforcement agencies from 22 countries helped identify 263 suspects and arrested 58 individuals linked to cybercrime networks coordinated by African crime groups. The "Operation Jackal IV" international joint action targeted West African criminal networks between November 2025 and June 2026. The operation also focused on disrupting the Black Axe cybercrime syndicate, known for its involvement in global-scale cyber-enabled financial fraud. Most commonly, Black Axe and similar criminal rings are targeting victims in romance scams, cryptocurrency and investment scams, or business email compromise fraud, but they've often also been linked to violent crimes. During Operation Jackal IV, Argentinian law officers made 17 arrests, and they linked 196 suspects to a major Crime-as-a-Service network that provided West African organized crime groups with web domains and money-laundering support.
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.
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Oracle 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-2026-21962 (CVSS score of 10,0), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. CVE-2026-21962 is a critical, unauthenticated vulnerability affecting the Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in for Apache HTTP Server and IIS. An attacker does not need an account or valid credentials. With network access, they can exploit the flaw remotely through HTTP and potentially compromise the affected server. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to access, modify or delete critical data, potentially gaining broad access to information available through the affected components. “Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in contain an improper access control vulnerability that can result in unauthorized creation, deletion, or modification access to critical data as well as unauthorized access to critical data or complete access to all Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in accessible data,” CISA reports. The vulnerability also has a scope-change impact, meaning an attacker who exploits it could potentially affect other systems or applications connected to the vulnerable Oracle components. The flaw affects versions: 12.2.1.4.0, 14.1.1.0.0 and 14.1.2.0.0. In practical terms, this is dangerous because an internet-accessible Oracle WebLogic proxy component could provide an attacker with a path into critical backend systems without requiring authentication. In March 2026, CloudSEK researchers detected attacks targeting several known flaws in Oracle WebLogic against its honeypot network. Attackers also targeted CVE-2026-21962 along with older WebLogic RCE vulnerabilities, including CVE-2020-14882/14883, CVE-2020-2551 and CVE-2017-10271. “This report analyzes attack data collected from a high-interaction honeypot simulating a vulnerable Oracle WebLogic Server (v14.1.1.0.0) over a 12-day period (Jan 22 – Feb 3, 2026). The primary focus is the immediate and widespread exploitation of the newly disclosed, critical unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability, CVE-2026-21962 (CVSS: 10.0).” ” reads the report published CloudSEK. “In addition to CVE-2026-21962, the honeypot captured attacks targeting other persistent, critical WebLogic RCE flaws, including CVE-2020-14882/14883 (Console RCE), CVE-2020-2551 (IIOP RCE), and CVE-2017-10271 (WLS-WSAT RCE). This confirms that threat actors continue to rely on a small set of highly-effective, simple-to-exploit vulnerabilities to compromise WebLogic environments.” 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 27, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
WeedHack Minecraft Malware Survives C2 Takedown: Fake Client Sites Still Active, SEO Poisoning Puts Malicious Downloads at the Top of Google McAfee Labs published a follow-up report on the WeedHack Malware-as-a-Service campaign this week, documenting ten active malicious sites and multiple file-hosting accounts that are still spreading the infostealer despite a disruption to its command-and-control infrastructure. Over the past month alone, McAfee WebAdvisor blocked more than 6,300 user attempts to reach these sites. WeedHack was first spotted in early June 2026 when McAfee researcher Aayush Tyagi documented a Malware-as-a-Service operation that had been running since January and had logged 116,464 infected systems, adding between 2,000 and 3,000 new victims every day. The operation offered a free tier that anyone with a Discord account could access, a premium tier with webcam surveillance capability for $5 a month, and a dashboard letting operators view stolen credentials, configure custom payloads, and monitor victims in real time. It spread through fake Minecraft client websites, YouTube videos linking to malicious downloads, and SEO poisoning that pushed those fake sites to the top of search results for popular Minecraft tool names. The malware stole session cookies, passwords, browser data, and cryptocurrency wallet contents, and used EtherHiding, a technique that fetches the attacker’s active server address from the Ethereum blockchain, to maintain contact with its infrastructure even when individual servers were shut down. “During our investigation of this campaign, we observed that most of these websites appear legitimate, as they are well-crafted and often mimic legitimate websites. We observed a series of dedicated brand-impersonation attacks targeting several popular Minecraft clients.” reads the report published by McAfee. “We published the original article in the first week of July, and, as a result, we’ve seen a disruption in WeedHack’s campaign: its C2 server is no longer active. Consequently, we have observed a shift in tactics by these attackers. “ The dashboard is gone. The distribution sites are not. Each fake website copies the real tool’s features, FAQs, installation steps, developer information and even links to legitimate GitHub repositories. The sites look detailed and convincing, so most users have little reason to suspect anything. The attackers also use search rankings to reach victims. Researchers found that the first two Google results for “Xenon Client,” a popular Minecraft client, led to fake sites distributing WeedHack. The sites offered installation guides, free and paid downloads, and links to the real Xenon Client GitHub repository. A player searching for the tool, clicking the first result and downloading the file could easily end up installing malware. The campaigns exploit a structural weakness in the Minecraft modding community: many popular tools don’t have official websites, only GitHub pages and Discord servers. Nova-client.com is a fake website for a client that has no real website; the attackers built one and ranked it above the genuine GitHub repository. 22qq-client.com does the same for a Crystal PVP mod. For nova-client.com, the researchers specifically noted that the credits section lists generic team names instead of anyone who actually worked on the project, which is one of the cleaner ways to spot an impersonation if you know who the real developers are. One site in the campaign was built using lovable.app, an AI-powered web application builder that accepts natural language instructions and produces working sites. The platform is legitimate; the use here is not. The ready availability of tools like this means the cost and technical skill required to launch a new convincing fake gaming site is now close to zero. McAfee found that most malicious links came through Discord (49.6%), followed by MediaFire (23.4%), GitHub (8.2%) and Dropbox (4.6%). One Discord channel promoting fake DonutSMP clients had more than 1,900 members, while another site offered eight different mods that all delivered the same malware. The campaign also spread through trusted Minecraft communities such as Planet Minecraft and EndMods, making the scams harder to spot because users already trusted these platforms. McAfee recommends downloading mods and clients only from official developer repositories or trusted platforms such as Modrinth and CurseForge. If a tool asks you to disable antivirus protection, treat it as malware. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, malware)
Bad actors are attempting to exploit two severe unauthenticated authentication bypasses in the Xecurify miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On plugin that make it possible for an attacker to sign in as any WordPress user, including administrators. The vulnerabilities, as disclosed by Patchstack, are listed below - CVE-2026-61979 (CVSS score: 8.1) - An unauthenticated privilege escalation
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a maximum-severity security flaw impacting Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-21962 (CVSS score: 10.0), allows an unauthenticated attacker with network access via HTTP to
An unpatched vulnerability in Calix GS7 XGS (GS5239XG) residential routers used by multiple U.S. broadband providers allows remote, unauthenticated attackers to create port-forwarding rules that can expose local network devices to the public internet.
Hackers are attempting to exploit two critical authentication bypass vulnerabilities in the miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On plugin for WordPress that can be used to forge SAML responses and log in as administrators. The miniOrange SAML SSO plugin turns a WordPress site into a SAML service provider, letting users log in through corporate identity platforms such as Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace, or OneLogin instead of separate WordPress credentials. Created by Xecurify, miniOrange is a family of seven plugins, with a free version that has 10,000 downloads and 30,000 customers for the other six. The two vulnerabilities observed in exploitation attempts are tracked as CVE-2026-61979 and CVE-2026-15981 and can be chained together to bypass authentication. Because the miniOrange SAML SSO plugin accepts the signature algorithm from incoming SAML responses instead of enforcing the configured one, an attacker can leverage CVE-2026-61979 to select HMAC-SHA1. This causes the plugin to treat the RSA public key from the identity provider (IdP) as the shared secret.
Cybersecurity company ReliaQuest has confirmed that one of its employees was targeted in a social engineering attack after hackers impersonated a member of the security team. In a statement over the weekend, ReliaQuest said that an attacker called multiple employees and tried to trick them into accessing "a fake ReliaQuest single sign-on (SSO) page behind a content delivery network." Last week, ReliaQuest's Threat Research team shared in a now-deleted post, that the ShinyHunters extortion gang was registering .claims domains to impersonate company's help desks and IT teams. "ReliaQuest is tracking a widespread ShinyHunters campaign using domains that follow the company[.]claims pattern. These domains incorporate the targeted organization’s name or abbreviation under the .claims TLD," read the company's post on X.
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