A critical heap buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2026-39919) in the Ghostscript interpreter and rendering engine could allow remote code execution through specially crafted PDF files. The flaw was discovered on August 23 by researchers at Defiant's platform Wordfence using their Argus AI-powered system. Ghostscript is a PostScript and PDF interpreter that can render PDFs as images, generate thumbnails for previews, and optimize PDF files by compressing embedded images and removing unnecessary font data. When generating a PDF thumbnail, WordPress can use the PHP Imagick extension to call ImageMagick, which launches Ghostscript. A specially crafted PDF file containing a JPEG 2000 image can trigger incorrect handling of low-bit-depth samples and mismatched component resolutions. Using Argus, the researchers developed two exploits for CVE-2026-39919 that force Ghostscript to write 1,024 bytes into a 256-byte buffer, corrupting nearby memory and leading to unauthenticated remote code execution in a WordPress deployment.
Small artificial intelligence (AI) models may be months away from developing capabilities to self-replicate on IoT devices like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, according to a warning from Anthropic. The frontier AI lab said small AI models could form autonomous, self-propagating worm botnets that are "challenging to shut down," since "there's no centralized point to shut off."
The U.K. Housing Ombudsman Service is investigating a third-party IT security incident that impacted its case management system on Tuesday. Established under the Housing Act 1996, the Housing Ombudsman is an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government. The watchdog settles disputes between social housing residents and social landlords in England, including housing associations, landlords, managers, and letting agents. On Tuesday, the service added an alert to its official website, warning that it's working with the affected service provider to assess the incident's impact and said social housing residents cannot file new complaints until systems are back online. Those who must raise new complaints are advised to call the Housing Ombudsman's phone line or email the watchdog at info@housing-ombudsman.org.uk.
Attackers continue exploiting gaps in MFA coverage, using stolen credentials to access VPNs, RDP, and Windows systems that still rely on passwords alone. Specops explains why protecting cloud applications isn't enough and how organizations can close these authentication gaps.
GitLab fixed a critical vulnerability with a maximum CVSS score of 10.0 that could let unauthenticated attackers run code on its servers. GitLab has addressed a critical security flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-97229 (CVSS score of 10.0), that could let attackers run code on its servers without logging in. The flaw affects Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), it is an integer overflow bug caused by weak validation of regular expressions in CI/CD configurations. The issue affects GitLab versions 19.2 before 19.2.8, 19.3 before 19.3.5, and 19.4 before 19.4.2. Users should upgrade to a patched version to protect their systems. GitLab advisory “GitLab has remediated an issue that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server via a specially crafted regular expression in a CI/CD configuration, due to insufficient regular expression validation.” reads the advisory. The researchers joaxcar reported this vulnerability through the company’s HackerOne bug bounty program. The company also addressed these flaws: CVE-2026-92883 (CVSS score: 8.7) – A security flaw where an attacker can trick another user’s web browser into running malicious JavaScript code through a specially designed repository. CVE-2026-16301 (CVSS score: 8.5) – An authorization flaw that lets a user with a Developer role bypass security permissions and run automated testing/deployment (CI/CD) pipelines on protected code branches. CVE-2026-14814 (CVSS score: 8.2) – A pattern-matching flaw that allows an attacker to manipulate cached files, causing target users’ automated pipelines to run malicious code and potentially leak sensitive environment variables. In early October, GitLab released patches for a critical vulnerability in its AI Gateway, tracked as CVE-2026-90970 (CVSS score of 9.9), that could allow an authenticated user with access to the Duo Agent Platform to execute arbitrary commands on the gateway. GitLab disclosed the flaw on October 2 and fixed it with the release of AI Gateway versions 19.2.4, 19.3.2 and 19.4.1. The issue affects the way the AI Gateway handles custom flow prompt templates. According to GitLab, a user with Duo Agent Platform access could use a specially crafted flow configuration to escape the prompt template sandbox and execute commands on the AI Gateway host. “GitLab has remediated an issue in the GitLab AI Gateway that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an authenticated user with Duo Agent Platform access to escape the prompt template sandbox via a specially crafted flow configuration, leading to arbitrary command execution on the AI Gateway.” reads the advisory. The key point is that the attack does not require an unauthenticated connection. GitLab’s advisory does not provide further details about the exact conditions required to exploit the flaw or the permissions needed beyond that access. GitLab credited the HackerOne researcher invisiblemeerkat with responsibly reporting the vulnerability. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CVE-2026-97229)
Three vulnerabilities in LG's webOS can be chained to give an attacker on the same local network root access to certain smart TVs without a PIN or any interaction from the owner. LG has issued a fix, according to an advisory published by SSD Secure Disclosure on October 12. The chain was tested on two TV models, the 32LQ636BPSA and the 27TQ600SW, running webOS 7.5.7-25 on firmware
A user opens a browser tab, pastes data into a chat assistant, and nothing is installed. A developer adds a coding assistant as an editor extension, and nothing shows up in the installed programs list. Someone downloads a local model runtime, a program that runs models directly on the machine instead of sending data to an external service, because they were told not to send company data
Low-cost Android smartphones have been shipped with malicious software baked into the device firmware, allowing bad actors to covertly install apps, conduct ad fraud, and turn devices into residential proxies. The activity, which targets Android devices built on MediaTek platforms across several brands, is being tracked by Bitdefender under the moniker Midnight Mimosa. The preinstalled
Canonical suffered its second DDoS attack this year, disrupting public websites for over four hours while Launchpad and the Snap Store remained online. Ubuntu’s parent company Canonical spent part of last week fighting off a sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the second one to hit its infrastructure this year. The company revealed the attack on October 8 through a post on the Ubuntu Discourse forum. “Canonical’s websites are under a sustained distributed denial of service attack. Our team is working diligently to resolve the incident. Please refer to our status page for up-to-date information. Some services may be intermittently unavailable.” the company states. At this time, no cybercrime or hacktivist group has claimed responsibility The attack affected Canonical’s main public websites, including ubuntu.com, canonical.com, the Ubuntu blog, the developer portal, and the security advisory pages and API. Users may have been unable to access security advisories or read the blog during the attack. “It was recently revealed that Canonical’s web infrastructure and the Ubuntu ecosystem suffered a massive and sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that caused its main portals and services to crash and be intermittent for more than four hours.” states the company blog. “Regarding the attack, it is mentioned that it directly affected the most visible institutional domains, including canonical.com and ubuntu.com, as well as the official blog, the developer portal, assets.ubuntu.com, academy.canonical.com and sites linked to enterprise technologies such as jaas.ai and maas.io.” However, Launchpad and the Snap Store remained online throughout the incident. These services allow developers and system administrators to manage and install software. Canonical acknowledged the outage on its status page and Ubuntu Discourse while engineers worked to limit the impact. The attack temporarily disrupted the Ubuntu Security API and Livepatch services, affecting tools used to check security advisories and apply kernel patches without restarting systems. However, Canonical’s distributed infrastructure helped contain the damage. Software repositories and mirror servers remained available, allowing users to install updates. Launchpad, the Snap Store, disk image servers and Ubuntu Single Sign-On also continued to work. As a result, users could continue downloading and installing packages even while Canonical’s public websites were disrupted. The overall outage lasted a little over four hours, causing real disruption. This attack differs from the April one, which caused greater disruption by taking down Launchpad and the Snap Store and preventing some users from installing Ubuntu updates. At the time, a hacktivist group called The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq, also known as 313 Team, claimed responsibility. Canonical described the April incident as a sustained, cross-border attack, language that suggested distributed infrastructure spanning multiple countries. Whether this October attack is a continuation of the same campaign or a completely unrelated actor piling on is genuinely unclear. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, DDoS)
Anthropic announced that its internal AI models under “high-risk and cybersecurity evaluations” no longer have internet access following incidents involving U.S. government websites at the federal, state, and local levels. The instances leading to the decision include AI models that exploited website vulnerabilities, submitted forms, bypassed data restrictions, and circumvented safeguards. However, the company said that the misaligned behavior had a minimal real-world impact and assessed the behavior to be less severe than previously reported incidents. The AI company notified the White House about the unauthorized activity: Anthropic estimates that the agents may have been motivated by overly generous rewards during reinforcement learning, which may have encouraged them to find unauthorized workarounds rather than stop when a task was blocked or impossible.
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