U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Atlassian flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added an Atlassian flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-21589 (CVSS score of 9.3), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. In early October, threat actors started exploiting CVE-2026-21589, a critical arbitrary file access flaw in Atlassian Data Center products. The vulnerability could allow attackers to access sensitive files under certain conditions. Affected products include Bitbucket, Confluence, Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Bamboo, Crowd, Crucible, and Fisheye. “This Arbitrary File Access vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to access specific files within the web application root directory in affected versions. Exploitation requires prior knowledge of the target file’s exact name and path; this vulnerability does not allow attackers to enumerate or list directory contents.” reads the advisory. “In some configurations, there may be some sensitive files that make this highly severe.” Previdian telemetry has detected 15 exploitation attempts from three IP addresses in Japan and the U.S.. “Exploitation has now started to hit our honeypot network” Previdian Founder Ryan Dewhurst wrote on LinkedIn. On October 6, watchTowr Labs published a technical analysis of CVE-2026-21589 after comparing vulnerable and patched Atlassian packages. Researchers found a path traversal flaw where double-colon (::) sequences can be treated as path separators, allowing attackers to read files from the application web root. “While semicolons (;) are very common in path traversal within Java applications, along with the everyday dots (.) and slashes (/), one item stood out: the matching of double colons (::).” reads the analysis. “This is uncommon syntax for this type of vulnerability, but grepping through the codebase we came across an all too familiar sight.” In one Crowd deployment with Jira, researchers were able to read crowd.properties, which exposed application credentials. They then used those credentials to create a user and add it to the jira-administrators group. Crowd IP allowlisting can block this attack path. Exploitation attempts against its honeypot network reportedly began two hours after watchTowr published additional technical details about the vulnerability. According to watchTowr, the problem is in Atlassian’s web-resource handling. It can turn a string such as ..::..::..::..::WEB-INF::web.xml into ../../../../WEB-INF/web.xml, allowing attackers to move through directories and access files they should not be able to read. Atlassian says all versions before the listed fixed versions are affected: ProductFixed versionsBitbucket Data Center9.4.26, 10.2.8, 10.5.1Confluence Data Center9.2.26, 10.2.19Jira Service Management Data Center5.12.40, 10.3.26, 11.3.12Jira Software Data Center9.12.40, 10.3.26, 11.3.12Bamboo Data Center10.2.24, 12.1.12Crowd Data Center6.3.7, 7.0.3, 7.1.7, 7.2.4Crucible4.9.15Fisheye4.9.15 watchTowr has released a free tool on GitHub to help check if a server is vulnerable. 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 October 18, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
PEERSTITCH malware exploited FortiManager to expose 500+ firewalls, evade detection inside FortiOS memory, and maintain stealthy access. PEERSTITCH, a stealthy implant deployed during a prolonged intrusion, helped attackers maintain access to a telecom managed service provider after compromising its FortiManager appliance. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 documented the operation, which began in September 2024 and exposed credentials and configurations for more than 500 downstream firewalls. “Unit 42 investigated a multi-stage network intrusion against a telecommunications organization that occurred in September 2024, which we are tracking as cluster CL-STA-0954 (aka UNC5820). The attackers behind CL-STA-0954 achieved an initial compromise by exploiting CVE-2024-47575 against a centralized FortiManager appliance.” reads the report published by Palo Alto Networks. “From that single appliance, our observations are that the attackers exfiltrated an archive containing running configurations, cryptographic material and database files containing information about more than 500 managed FortiGate firewalls. Those firewalls protected the target’s own infrastructure and the networks of its clients.” The initial access relied on CVE-2024-47575, known as FortiJump, which allowed an unauthenticated attacker to register a rogue virtual device with the central management platform over TCP port 541. Within minutes, the attackers extracted a configuration archive containing serial numbers, public IP addresses, routing tables, VPN credentials, and cryptographic trust material for every managed firewall. One compromised management system had effectively handed them the keys to hundreds of networks. The targeted 500 devices didn’t all belong to the same organization. They protected the managed service provider’s infrastructure and its clients’ networks. The attackers got running configurations and private keys for firewalls belonging to organizations that had no idea any of this was happening. Unit 42 was clear about the scope: the investigation covered only the provider’s own environment, not the downstream clients. Armed with decrypted credentials from the stolen configuration files, which stored passwords as reversible ciphertext, the attackers then established unauthorized SSL/VPN sessions into internal network management segments from external staging addresses. That’s the moment reconnaissance turned into active access. In the second stage, attackers exploited CVE-2025-61624, a path traversal flaw in the FortiOS auto-script engine, to deploy a new implant called PEERSTITCH. The implant is a 64-bit ARM64 binary written in C, but what it does is unusual. Unit 42’s researchers put it plainly: “PEERSTITCH leaves no persistent binary on disk, opens no listening ports and initiates no outbound network connections. Instead, it communicates through traffic generated by legitimate processes on the infected host, which makes the malware resistant to conventional endpoint and network detection.” the report continues. “The attackers also impersonated the FortiManager platform to pull from managed firewalls of other hosts in the targeted network.” Instead, it injects itself into two legitimate FortiOS daemons, the logging process and the VPN service, and creates a covert communication bridge between them using memory that’s already allocated to those running processes. When traffic passing through the logging daemon matches two specific markers, a port number embedded in data and a link-local IP address, it extracts a session token and writes it directly into the VPN daemon’s memory using Linux’s /proc filesystem. When the VPN daemon processes a subsequent session carrying that same tag, it takes an alternate execution path, bypassing FortiOS security checks entirely. PEERSTITCH is hard to detect because it leaves no persistent file on disk, opens no listening ports, and initiates no outbound network connections. The only way to detect it is by inspecting live process memory for anomalous read-write-execute (RWX) regions in the two targeted daemons or identifying NOP patches at specific offsets in their code. Fortinet’s Integrity Checker Tool cannot detect the implant because it scans files on disk, which remain untouched. The attackers also established a secondary command channel by abusing Apache’s built-in certificate management module on the firewalls. They embedded shell commands in the domain name field of certificate validation requests and configured Apache to retry them continuously, creating a persistent outbound reverse shell through a legitimate system process. Before running their malicious auto-scripts, the attackers killed the logging and syslog daemons to suppress any trace of what was about to happen. Crash logs were wiped. Rogue administrator accounts and script objects were automatically deleted shortly after execution. The malicious ACME configuration file was overwritten with innocent-looking text. The PEERSTITCH injector unlinked its own binary from disk after completing execution. “The cryptographic trust material governing the platform’s relationship with every managed device leaves with the attacker and remains valid until it is rotated. Defenders must treat edge management interfaces with the highest level of zero trust isolation.” Palo Alto Networks states. “They must also treat the credentials and certificates those interfaces hold as compromised the moment the platform is.” Patching FortiManager doesn’t reverse the data theft. The stolen cryptographic keys remain valid until the trust material on every managed device is individually rotated. A firmware update alone won’t invalidate them. The broader lesson goes beyond Fortinet: management platforms are high-value targets because compromising one can expose an entire network. As Unit 42 noted, “the management platform is the highest-value target on the network.” When that platform belongs to a managed service provider, a single breach can affect hundreds of downstream customers, turning a local compromise into a supply-chain security incident. “For organizations that manage infrastructure on behalf of others, the management platform is the highest-value target on the network. Compromising the management platform is not contained by the boundary of the organization that owns it.” the report concludes. “That compromise also does not end when the platform is patched.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, PEERSTITCH malware)
The regulated utility company CenterPoint Energy says a data breach exposed the personal information of more than 1 million people in Texas. CenterPoint Energy is a regulated utility company used to deliver natural gas and electricity infrastructure, maintain power grids and pipelines, and restore service across parts of Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and Minnesota. The organization disclosed a data breach affecting more than 1 million people in Texas. This week, CenterPoint Energy told the Texas Attorney General’s Office that the breach affected 1,062,060 Texas residents. The company does not appear to have notified the affected individuals by letter. “More than one million Texans were affected by a CenterPoint Energy data breach that compromised sensitive personal information, according to newly published information from the Texas Attorney General’s Office.” reported the broadcast Click2Huston. “The state’s data breach database lists 1,062,060 Texans as being affected. The information involved includes customers’ names, addresses, Social Security information and driver’s-license numbers.” Days before the first disclosure, on September 12, a threat actor using the alias “4d722e4d656f77” claimed on a cybercrime forum to have extracted roughly 7.49 million customer records from CenterPoint Energy. “In September 2026, CenterPoint Energy, Inc. (the “Company”) became aware of an online post by a third party claiming to have obtained a data set containing certain of the Company’s customer information.” reads the FORM 8-K report filed with SEC.”While the investigation remains ongoing, the Company has determined that an unauthorized third party obtained personal information relating to a portion of the Company’s customers through one of the Company’s external facing systems (the “Incident”).” The hacker claimed the theft of names, phone numbers, service and billing addresses, account numbers, billing amounts, payment status, and partial Social Security numbers. He offered a 2.5 GB archive for download. The attacker warned that “next time we won’t simply pull data, we’ll start attacking the main infrastructure,” a line that reads well on a forum but should still be taken seriously by any critical infrastructure operator. The attackers claimed they stole over the records through an API they say lacked proper WAF protection, rate limiting, and authentication. They also claimed the company tried to stop the data dump only after millions of records had been extracted. “CenterPoint Energy continues to actively investigate the cybersecurity incident disclosed last month. Upon learning of the issue, CenterPoint activated our incident response procedures and engaged external cybersecurity, forensic, and legal advisors to assist with the investigation.” a spokesperson for CenterPoint said on Wednesday. “We continue to work with third-party experts to assess the scope of affected customer data to identify which customers will be provided notifications in accordance with applicable legal requirements.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, data breach)
Threat actors are exploiting a critical command execution flaw, now tracked as CVE-2026-110447, in the Collabora Online - Built-in CODE Server app (richdocumentscode) for Nextcloud. Multiple administrator reports indicate that attacks began in mid-September, roughly a month before the formal security bulletin, the GitHub advisory, and CVE publication. CVE-2026-110447 impacts richdocumentscode versions before 26.4.303 and resides in the Nextcloud app’s mechanism for starting the bundled Collabora server. The flaw affects only the optional built-in CODE server app. Standalone Collabora Online servers, Docker and RPM/DEB installations, and Nextcloud All-in-One deployments remain unaffected, according to Collabora. The attacks involve sending a malicious request to the app’s proxy.php endpoint, triggering OS command injection.
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS, Ahsay AhsayCBS, and Cisco Secure Email Gateway flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the following vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog: CVE-2026-0322 Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS Code Injection Vulnerability CVE-2026-76519 Cisco Secure Email Gateway Relative Path Traversal Vulnerability CVE-2026-105133 Ahsay AhsayCBS Improper Authentication Vulnerability CVE-2026-105134 Ahsay AhsayCBS Command Injection Vulnerability Cisco confirmed this week that threat actors are exploiting a critical vulnerability in Cisco Secure Email Gateway, tracked as CVE-2026-76519 (CVSS score of 9.8). An attacker can exploit the flaw by sending a crafted email attachment through the gateway and, if it lands right, writing arbitrary files to the underlying operating system. The flaw CVE-2026-0322 (CVSS score: 8.6) is a high-severity code injection vulnerability in the management interface of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS. It could allow an authenticated attacker with network access and high-level privileges to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on an affected firewall. The vulnerability affects PA-Series and VM-Series firewalls and Panorama appliances. Palo Alto Networks confirmed that limited exploitation has been observed targeting the management interface. The company recommends restricting access to trusted internal IP addresses and installing the relevant security updates. The flaw CVE-2026-105133 (CVSS score: 5.5) is an improper authentication vulnerability in AhsayCBS, a backup management platform. The flaw affects the checkSysPwd function in the product’s API and could allow a remote attacker to bypass authentication by manipulating the random parameter. Starting on October 7, 2026, attackers used it to bypass authentication before exploiting a second vulnerability, CVE-2026-105134, to execute commands on affected servers. Huntress reported that at least five organizations had been targeted by October 8. The flaw CVE-2026-105134 (CVSS score: 9.3) is a critical operating system command injection vulnerability in the Replication Receiver component of AhsayCBS. The flaw affects the /rps/api/json/UpdateReceivers.do endpoint and could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying system. The vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild. Attackers have chained it with CVE-2026-105133 to gain remote code execution with NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM privileges, deploy JSP web shells and install XMRig cryptocurrency miners disguised as Microsoft Edge processes. Huntress observed attacks against at least five organizations by October 8, 2026. 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 flaws by October 17, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
A proxyjacking campaign has impacted devices in 34 countries, monetizing victims’ internet connections through a commercial residential proxy network. The operator installed Pawns.app, a legitimate bandwidth-sharing application that lets users earn money by sharing their internet connections, on devices without the owners’ consent. Pawns.app account holders are rewarded for allowing traffic from other users to flow through their network, provided it runs on trusted, non-blocking IP addresses. By installing the app on multiple systems, the attacker likely accumulated larger payouts. Threat intelligence company GreyNoise discovered the campaign while investigating suspicious activity at an unnamed organization, and identified at least 143 compromised devices worldwide. According to the researchers, the attacker leveraged several vulnerabilities to breach edge devices and install the Pawns.app software:
Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2022 has reached the end of mainstream support and will remain in extended support until October 2031. Microsoft unveiled Windows Server 2022 in March 2021 and made it generally available in September 2021 as a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release with 10 years of support. "As of October 13, 2026, Windows Server 2022 has reached end of mainstream support and transitioned to extended support. The October 2026 security update is the last mainstream support update available for this version," it said. "Extended support includes security updates at no additional cost, and Windows Server 2022 will continue to receive monthly security updates through October 14, 2031." Microsoft has also extended Windows Server 2022 hotpatching until October 2027, one year after the mainstream end date of October 2026, for systems running the Datacenter: Azure Edition.
A long-running Traffic Distribution System (TDS) known as Help TDS to a Russian-language affiliate program called Hotejka, which appears to be a rebrand of a traffic monetization operation dubbed ROI777. Help TDS is assessed to be active since at least 2017, offering PHP code templates to partners and affiliates that are installed into compromised websites with an aim to direct unsuspecting
NGINX released versions 1.30.6 and 1.31.7 on October 14 to fix five vulnerabilities, one of them present in every release since May 2005. There are three memory bugs that F5, the company behind NGINX, says could crash a worker process or possibly let an attacker run code, and each requires a specific configuration to exploit. A fourth lets an attacker forge a TLS session that could
Attackers are impersonating popular AI products to distribute malware, steal browser sessions, and compromise business accounts. ANY.RUN linked 1,258 public sandbox analyses to fake AI campaigns between April and October of 2026. The campaigns also increase operational pressure on MSSPs serving US businesses, which accounted for 16% of country-attributed targets. Similar attacks
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