Candiru spyware was delivered to devices at Al Jazeera Media Network via targeted online advertisements in a zero-click attack that required only rendering the malicious ads on the victim's device. Researchers at Citizen Labs investigating the attacks referred to this technique as AdFection, noting that their report is the first public technical confirmation of mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads. A similar method was documented in late 2025 by Amnesty International, involving ads that infected targets with Predator spyware without them clicking anything. That infection mechanism was called Aladdin and surfaced due to a collection of marketing files and documents leaked from the Intellexa surveillance company that researchers studied and corroborated with technical details from forensic investigations.
Employees using personal ChatGPT accounts at work can expose sensitive company data, even when their organization provides an approved Enterprise workspace. NordLayer explains how IT teams can investigate unauthorized AI use and block sensitive information before it reaches personal accounts.
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)
Microsoft says some users may have trouble turning on Smart App Control after installing this month's KB5127648 Windows 11 security update. Smart App Control is a Windows 11 security feature that uses Microsoft's app intelligence services and code integrity features and works alongside Microsoft Defender and SmartScreen to block potentially harmful apps or binaries. According to the company, on affected devices running Windows 11, version 24H2 and later, the Smart App Control option is grayed out and cannot be toggled. "After installing this update, some devices might be unable to turn on Smart App Control in the Windows Security app if it has been turned off. On affected devices, the option to turn on Smart App Control might be grayed out," Microsoft said in an update to the KB5127648 advisory.
The Administrative Office of the US Courts says a cyberattack on government contractor BAE Systems has taken down the notice system used by federal bankruptcy courts. In a Thursday press release, the Administrative Office of the US Courts said the BAE Systems cyberattack also halted the production and distribution of bankruptcy notices. "The Administrative Office of the US Courts has been in communication with the impacted courts and is also coordinating with BAE Systems. BAE is actively investigating this incident and working to restore operations," it said. "As a result of the incident, all access to the BNC systems and websites that BAE operates on behalf of the Judiciary and the related bankruptcy noticing process are unavailable at this time, including bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov, and the National Creditor Registration Service."
BeyondTrust warned customers on Thursday to patch a critical flaw in its Remote Support (RS) that has been exploited in zero-day attacks since late August. Remote Support is the company's enterprise-grade support solution that helps IT service desks, help desks, and customer support teams troubleshoot issues remotely. Tracked as CVE-2026-102764, this actively exploited authentication bypass vulnerability lets unprivileged remote attackers perform file operations on unpatched appliances and affects RS 26.2.3 or earlier. BeyondTrust patched the security issue for all Remote Support and Privileged Remote Access SaaS customers on October 8, but self-hosted installations must be patched manually if automatic updates are not enabled. While the company shared limited details about the vulnerability, it said the zero-day was abused in the wild by a suspected China-nexus espionage actor tracked by Mandiant and Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) security researchers as "Armory Castle" (formerly UNC5221) and by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike as "Warp Panda."
A local privilege escalation exploit published today gains root on OpenBSD 7.9 by chaining a roughly 37-year-old integer overflow with a separate kernel flaw, bypassing OpenBSD's KARL kernel-address randomization and its SMAP and SMEP hardware protections. Security firm Calif, which found and reported the flaws, published a detailed writeup and full proof-of-concept code after OpenBSD shipped
Attackers repeatedly changed the files that AOMEI Backupper fetches from the vendor's own update servers, in windows of five to ten minutes at a time between May and July 2026, so that any copy of the Windows backup program that checked for an update during one of those windows would download and run a backdoor. Google Threat Intelligence Group, Mandiant, and ManageEngine's Threat Analysis
OpenAI has disclosed seven new incidents in which its artificial intelligence (AI) models exhibited misaligned behavior, including one case where its research model, after not having funds on an Ethereum test network, spent test cryptocurrency from a third-party's wallet without authorization to complete a coding task. The incident, the AI company said, involved an internal research model part
The China-nexus cyber espionage group tracked as Armory Castle (previously UNC5221 or Warp Panda) exploited a newly disclosed security flaw in BeyondTrust Remote Support (formerly Bomgar) as a zero-day in late August 2026. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-102764 (CVSS score: 9.3), is a case of improper origin validation in an internal messaging component that could be exploited by a
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