Security teams have spent years trying to detect threats faster. AI is changing the harder part: how much time defenders have left to act. Advanced AI models can now help attackers discover vulnerabilities, generate exploit code, and move through weaknesses faster than traditional security processes were built to handle. The challenge is no longer just finding another vulnerability or
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has charged two Western Australian men with a combined total of 14 offences over their alleged role in TeamPCP, the cybercrime group behind the March 2026 compromise of the open-source security scanners Trivy and Checkmarx KICS and the AI gateway LiteLLM. Louis Michael Gaebler, 23, and Ruben Ian Thomson, 21, appeared in Perth Magistrates Court on August 27,
AI is officially mainstream in security operations. According to Prophet Security's State of AI in Security Operations 2026 report (produced from ViB’s survey of 250+ cybersecurity pros), 40% of security teams now use AI daily. Another 56% are currently testing it out, and only 4% have no plans to adopt it. For the teams already using AI, what is actually changing? Here are the ten biggest
Individuals and organizations in Cambodia have emerged as the target of a new campaign that delivers an open-source remote access trojan (RAT) called Spark RAT. "The samples employ diverse lure themes, suggesting an effort to appeal to a broad range of potential victims. These include government notices, public health materials, real estate-related content, and other topics," Acronis Threat
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
Academic researchers have disclosed a Rowhammer attack impacting NVIDIA workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory that defeats error correction codes (ECC), the mitigation NVIDIA recommends against GPU Rowhammer, and enables denial-of-service (DoS) and privilege escalation to a root shell. Dubbed GPUThor, the attack was developed by researchers at the University of Toronto, who hammered four DRAM
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added six flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, including a high-severity security vulnerability impacting Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2019-1068 - A remote code execution vulnerability in
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.
A newly disclosed Rowhammer attack called GPUThor can bypass error-correcting code (ECC) protections on NVIDIA GPUs, enabling denial-of-service (DoS) and root-level privilege escalation. In a paper published by the University of Toronto, researchers say that GPUThor achieves far more practical bit-flip rates than past concepts like their own GPUHammer or GPUBreach, which became irrelevant after ECC was introduced. The attack was demonstrated against Ampere-class NVIDIA workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory, including the RTX A4000, RTX A4500, RTX A5000, and RTX A6000, all widely used in AI and cloud infrastructure. Rowhammer is the name for a class of attacks where memory rows are repeatedly accessed (“hammered”) in a way that increases the likelihood of bits in neighboring memory regions to flip, changing their state from one to zero or vice versa.
FBI seizes QScan and QTRouter, China-linked platforms used to hide intrusions and target U.S. critical infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI have seized two platforms, QScan and QTRouter, used by a China-linked group to hide cyberattacks and target critical infrastructure. The operation matters because it shows how state-backed actors no longer need to build every part of an attack from scratch: they can rely on shared scanning tools, compromised devices, commercial proxy services, and rented servers. U.S. authorities attribute the activity to a group known as QTFY, which they say operated through the China-based company Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company. According to the Justice Department, the group offered hacking services to paying clients that included China’s Ministry of State Security and the People’s Liberation Army. “The Justice Department and FBI announced court-authorized domain seizures today to deny malicious cyber actors access to two complementary hacking platforms known as “QScan” and “QTRouter,” used to target U.S. critical infrastructure and other sensitive networks. As described in court documents unsealed in the Southern District of California, a People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored group known as “QTFY,” employed by China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company (南京鑫玖维网络科技有限公司), created and operated QScan and QTRouter.” reads the press release published by DoJ. According to the Justice Department, QTFY targeted NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Departments of Energy, Justice, and Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Senate. Those are not random targets caught in a broad scan. QScan and QTRouter had different jobs. QScan searched the internet for vulnerable devices and automatically infected thousands of exposed Internet of Things devices. Those compromised routers, cameras, appliances, and other connected systems were then added to QTRouter, a proxy network used to route malicious traffic through systems located outside China. That approach makes attribution and blocking harder. A victim may see an attack coming from what appears to be a local router, a legitimate commercial proxy, or a virtual private server rented in another country. Blocking traffic by country or IP address becomes far less useful when the attacker is borrowing the identity and location of other people’s devices. “QScan scans and automatically infects thousands of “internet-of-things” (IoT) devices worldwide, which are then added to the QTRouter network of QTFY-controlled devices. QTRouter consists of these compromised IoT devices, as well as commercial proxy service devices and leased virtual private servers.” continues DoJ. “QTRouter then serves as an “obfuscation network” – meaning it allows QTFY and other malicious cyber actors to conceal the PRC-origin of their computer intrusion activities because the malicious communications appear to originate from computers (such as those compromised by QScan) that are outside of the PRC and may even be local to the targeted networks.” The government did not merely take down a website. The seized domains were hard-coded into QScan and QTRouter and used for core functions such as authentication and command-and-control communication. By taking control of those domains through a court order, the FBI made the malware platforms unable to operate as intended. This is a useful example of technical disruption rather than simple attribution. Publicly naming a group matters, but it does not stop an operator who already has access to vulnerable devices and a working relay network. Taking away the infrastructure they need to manage that network is more disruptive, at least until they rebuild it. “Because the seized domains were hard-coded into both the QScan and QTRouter malware and used for essential tasks such as communication and authentication, the court-authorized seizures made QScan and QTRouter inoperable.” DoJ states. The broader operation looks like an industrial service model. QTFY allegedly used QScan to map targets, identify weaknesses, and compromise devices; it then used QTRouter and other proxy layers to hide where the activity actually came from. Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs described the group as a “digital quartermaster,” meaning it supplied infrastructure and services that could support multiple operations at the same time. “To support its primary objectives, the quartermaster runs a secondary, completely decoupled target profiling utility called “QScan.” While the core proxy network focuses on managing stateful session paths, the QScan framework operates as the front-end scout.” reads a report published by Lumen. “The operations of this quartermaster demonstrate the high degree of industrialization occurring within China-nexus cyber operations. By shifting away from fragmented, ad hoc setups and toward shared multi-tenant utility networks, state-sponsored actors can execute complex campaigns with a high degree of anonymity and speed, and at a global scale.” The group reportedly exploited both old and newly disclosed vulnerabilities in widely deployed products, including Fortinet SSL-VPN, Citrix ADC, Microsoft Exchange, F5 BIG-IP, Apache Log4j, Atlassian Confluence, Check Point gateways, CrushFTP, Ivanti appliances, and BeyondTrust Remote Support. This is not a reminder that organisations need magic detection. It is a reminder that old vulnerabilities remain useful because somebody, somewhere, will still leave them unpatched. The attack chain also included web shells, remote-access trojans, stolen or legitimate credentials, and compromised IoT devices used as nearby relay points. That combination allows an attacker to blend into normal-looking traffic and avoids the obvious infrastructure that defenders have learned to block. A hostile connection that looks like a local consumer router is still hostile; it just has better camouflage. This seizure follows earlier FBI actions against China-linked botnets. In 2025, the FBI removed PlugX malware from more than 4,000 infected U.S. computers linked to Mustang Panda. In 2024, it disrupted a botnet of hundreds of thousands of IoT devices associated with Flax Typhoon, while in 2023 it acted against a Volt Typhoon botnet used to conceal activity targeting U.S. and foreign critical infrastructure. “For defenders, the operational lesson is straightforward. Inventory internet-facing assets, patch known vulnerabilities quickly, remove unsupported devices, monitor unusual outbound proxy traffic, and do not assume that an IP address tells you who is behind an attack. The same applies to IoT equipment: a router, camera, network appliance, or smart device left exposed and unmanaged can become part of someone else’s attack platform. “This disruption announced today is among a series of court-authorized technical operations against indiscriminate hacking activities by the PRC.” concludes DoJ. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, QTRouter)
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