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)
Meta has reached a proposed settlement worth up to approximately $18 billion with a bipartisan coalition of 52 attorneys generals over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to encourage compulsive use by children and teenagers.
Attackers are now targeting a chain of two Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities that can allow them to execute arbitrary code on unpatched servers, according to threat intelligence company Defused. The first (tracked as CVE-2026-55040) is an authentication bypass flaw in the JWT token validation pipeline that attackers without privileges can exploit to perform operations as a SharePoint site user or administrator. The second (CVE-2026-63520) is a vulnerability in SharePoint's Business Connectivity Services (BCS) that unauthenticated attackers can chain after successfully exploiting CVE-2026-55040 for remote code execution (RCE) on a targeted SharePoint Server. Both flaws have publicly available proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits, released by Rapid7 security researcher Stephen Fewer on August 11 (for CVE-2026-55040, representing the first part of the exploit chain) and by VulnCheck vulnerability researcher Jonathan Peterson on August 24 (for CVE-2026-63520).
The FBI has disrupted infrastructure associated with a technical “quartermaster” that provided reconnaissance, proxy management, and operational routing capabilities for Chinese cyber espionage activities. Black Lotus Labs, the threat research arm of Lumen Technologies, has been tracking the infrastructure for the past year and discovered the components of the framework used in attacks against U.S. critical infrastructure. According to the researchers, the provider offers a reusable service consisting of four distinct operational elements: The infrastructure was used to profile and steal data from U.S. military and defense organizations, government networks, universities and research institutions, aerospace and bioinformatics organizations, healthcare orgs, financial firms, critical infrastructure and energy companies, and enterprise software vendors.
Snowflake is ending password authentication for legacy service accounts, forcing organizations to migrate them to passwordless methods. Token Security explains why the harder challenge is identifying what uses each account, who owns it, and how much access it still needs.
Ubiquiti has released security patches for three new maximum-severity vulnerabilities that threat actors can exploit remotely without privileges. The first (tracked as CVE-2026-77537) lets unauthenticated attackers compromise unpatched devices by exploiting an improper input validation weakness in the UniFi Protect Application video surveillance management platform. Ubiquiti also addressed a CRLF injection flaw (CVE-2026-77550) that remote attackers without privileges can exploit to bypass authentication on UniFi OS devices or instances. "A malicious actor with access to the network could exploit an Improper Neutralization of CRLF Sequences vulnerability found in certain devices running CRLF Injection to bypass authentication to such UniFi OS devices or instances," it explained. The third maximum severity vulnerability patched today is a command injection security flaw (CVE-2026-77554) stemming from improper input validation in the UniFi Talk Application Voice over IP (VoIP) phone system.
Microsoft has begun testing new privacy controls that will let Windows 11 users choose which desktop applications can access their camera, microphone, and precise location. This new feature is shipping to systems upgraded to Windows 11 Insider Experimental Preview Build 26340.9233, and the goal is to make privacy permissions easier to understand in Windows 11 and quicker to manage for each desktop app. "Windows Insiders can now manage camera, microphone, and location permissions for individual desktop apps. Previously, access for traditional desktop applications was managed through a single device-wide setting," Microsoft explained. "With this update, you can review and control access on an app-by-app basis, giving you greater visibility into which apps are requesting access to sensitive resources and more control over your privacy choices."
Attackers are actively exploiting a critical-severity vulnerability in the Gitea self-hosted Git service, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Like cloud-hosted GitHub or GitLab SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms, Gitea provides a full suite of DevOps tools, but it is designed to be used as a self-hosted software development platform. Tracked as CVE-2026-60004 and reported by Salesforce security researcher Shai Rod, this code injection security flaw allows an authenticated user with repository write access to repositories hosted on vulnerable servers to execute arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the Gitea service account by submitting malicious patches via the diffpatch API endpoint. However, default-configured Gitea instances have self-registration enabled, allowing unauthenticated attackers to register an account, create a new repository, and trigger the vulnerability without prior credentials.
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