The bug was simple: the login let you choose where your sign-in code went. Proving it on a live website was the hard part. TL;DR During an authorized assessment, an AI pentesting agent found a critical authentication bypass on a major insurer's production website, on its own. One login request let the user choose where the one-time passcode went. The attack was the easy part. Proving it
Unit 42 dissects a cyberattack targeting a European bank's IT infrastructure, delivering concrete defense strategies to help organizations detect and counter comparable threats. The post The Noise Inside the Network: How an Unsophisticated Attack Exposed a Third-Party Risk appeared first on Unit 42.
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.
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.
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
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.
Attackers are exploiting SonicWall SMA 1000 vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-102255 (CVSS score of 10.0), just days after its public disclosure. Attackers have begun exploiting a critical flaw in SonicWall SMA 1000 appliances, tracked as CVE-2026-102255 (CVSS score of 10.0), just days after public disclosure. The vulnerability is a server-side request forgery (SSRF) flaw that requires no login. Attackers could abuse it to make the appliance send requests and access internal functions, allowing unauthorized actions. “A Pre-authentication SSRF vulnerability exists in the SMA1000 Appliance Work Place interface due to an unintended alternate access path.” reads the advisory. “By abusing this path, a remote unauthenticated attacker could potentially exploit this vulnerability to direct the appliance to issue requests on their behalf and reach internal functionality and perform unauthorized operations.” The vendor said it has found no evidence of exploitation, but recommends applying the fixes. The vulnerability affects the following product and versions: Affected ProductAffected Version(s)SMA1000 Models – 6210, 7210, 8200v 12.4.3-03526 (platform-hotfix) and older versions. 12.5.0-02952 (platform-hotfix) and older versions. The company pointed out that the flaws do not impact SSL-VPN running on SonicWall firewalls or the SMA 100 Series product line. The hotfix is available through the MySonicWall portal, the vendor pointed out that there is no workaround. Multiple researchers warn the vulnerability is now being actively exploited. Cybersecurity firm Defused has detected unauthenticated SSRF traffic targeting its SonicWall SMA decoys since October 8, 2026. Defused alerted subscribers through its Radar service. Since yesterday we have been observing unauthenticated SSRF traffic against our SonicWall SMA decoys. CVE-2026-102255 (alternate access path SSRF, CVSS 10.0) was disclosed earlier this week by SonicWall. We notified Defused subscribers of the anomalous traffic via our Radar… pic.twitter.com/h0w30YT0Y3 — Defused (@DefusedCyber) October 9, 2026 Cybersecurity firm Previdian also announced that its sensors have detected exploitation attempts targeting SonicWall SMA 1000 appliances, consistent with CVE-2026-102255. The reported attacker IP is 146.70.143[.]142. SonicWall SMA1000 exploitation attempts are now being observed by Previdian sensors, consistent with CVE-2026-102255 (CVSS 10.0). The vulnerability allows unauthenticated server-side request forgery (SSRF). Attacker IP: 146.70.143[.]142 Apply SonicWall's hotfix and… pic.twitter.com/YBovnuEkvD — Previdian (@PrevidianCyber) October 9, 2026 According to Previdian, researchers have recorded 135 attack attempts from two IP addresses in the United States. Researchers have recorded 135 attempts from two different IP addresses in the United States. SonicWall has not yet updated its security advisory to confirm that attackers are exploiting the flaw. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, SonicWall)
Confirm this action.
Leaving now will discard your changes.