Overview

On November 9, 2026, N-able announced that it was responding to the public disclosure of critical vulnerabilities affecting N-central, its remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform.

In a public disclosure titled Able2Shell, an independent researcher has published details and proof-of-concept (PoC) code covering 33 issues. According to the disclosure, the issues include unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE), privilege escalation to root, credential disclosure, and unauthorized account creation. One unauthenticated chain combines XML external entity (XXE) and session-handling weaknesses to execute code as the nable service account. Other demonstrated chains involve an administrator viewing malicious patch metadata or use ProductAdmin credentials. Rapid7 Intelligence is currently triaging the newly published details.

As of November 10, N-able reported scanning activity associated with the published PoC code and said it had no evidence that any customer environment had been successfully exploited. The vendor has advised keeping N-central deployments offline while it develops and validates a hotfix. Hosted N-central classic environments remain offline, according to the same notice. N-able's notice does not yet include CVE identifiers or CVSS scores.

N-central is used by managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprise IT teams to administer endpoints and infrastructure. Compromise of an RMM server can put downstream managed environments at risk. N-central has previously been targeted through separate vulnerabilities, including an authentication bypass covered by Rapid7 in August 2026. Given the platform's administrative reach and the availability of public exploit code, Rapid7 recommends treating the current disclosure as an emergency.

Mitigation guidance

Rapid7 strongly recommends that organizations operating on-premises N-central servers take them offline immediately and keep them offline until the hotfix is available, and the server has been successfully upgraded. Hosted customers should follow the vendor's service restoration updates. N-able is developing and validating a hotfix, with a target of midday November 10 EST.

• Affected versions: The researcher reports testing N-central Appliance 2026.4.0.31. N-able's current notice does not specify the full affected-version range.

• Fixed versions: N-able's incident notice does not yet identify a remediation build. Follow the incident notice for release confirmation and installation instructions.

Rapid7 also recommends reviewing N-central servers and downstream managed systems for signs of compromise and engaging incident responders if suspicious activity is identified.

For the latest mitigation guidance, please refer to N-able's security incident notice.

Updates

• November 10, 2026: Initial publication.

There’s mounting evidence of spyware attacks growing more indiscriminate, leading to more everyday citizens being hit as opposed to traditionally “high-value” targets.

The AdFection spyware attacks, which could infect anyone visiting a website that had advertising on it, represented the most recent revelation. And iVerify published a report Tuesday analyzing customer infections and threat notifications from Apple that contributes to the trend. 

“Conventional guidance on spyware risk focused on people with a public profile, a sensitive job or a role that put them on a government’s radar,” the company said. “Some Apple Threat Notification cases iVerify saw this year don’t fit that pattern.”

“In Ottawa, Apple Threat Notifications reached the children of a city bus driver and a stay-at-home mom,” it continued. “In Australia, one went to a limousine driver. None of them had a public profile, a sensitive job or an obvious connection to anyone worth spying on. These cases matter because they show the threat reaching people who had no reason to expect it.  For an enterprise, the employees most likely to be hit look much more like the limousine driver than like the CEO.”

Part of that is that when spyware attacks are less targeted, they might be more likely to hit those who aren’t as diligently focused on routine cyber hygiene, as opposed to CEOs who are probably regularly upgrading their defenses, iVerify told CyberScoop.

Rocky Cole, co-founder of the company, said the change reflects a shift in who’s using spyware.

“The vast majority of our detections were mass attacks by criminal groups looking to do purely criminal things,” Cole said. “For the purposes of stealing credentials and selling them on the black market, an executive credential is not necessarily more valuable than a system administrator or even an average employee.”

iVerify’s report looked at other trends as well. Among the findings:

• iVerify didn’t see any devices that were infected by the DarkSword or Coruna iOS exploit kits where users received Apple threat notifications, suggesting that the tech giant might be overly focused on nation-state threats and well-known commercial mercenary spyware like NSO Group’s Pegasus.
• The rate of spyware infections held relatively steady in 2026, at 1.07 infections per 1,000 iOS consumer scans.
• “Three in four of this year’s detections were criminal adversaries stealing credentials and cryptocurrency, not state-sponsored actors,” the report said.

The post Spyware attacks trend toward hitting just about anyone appeared first on CyberScoop.

Turla, a notorious cyberespionage group aligned with the Russian government, has been wielding a new, customizable toolset to compromise governments around the world over the past year, including Kazakhstan.

The toolset was first discovered in November 2025 by cybersecurity firm ESET, which named it “Turla’s Cereal” as a play on its highly modular, interconnected and “serialized” design. It chains and exploits different legitimate functions across Microsoft Exchange, Windows, and .NET assemblies, which Microsoft has described as “the fundamental units of deployment, version control, reuse, activation scoping, and security permissions for .NET-based applications.”

“One of the most interesting aspects of this toolset is what we did not find: external command and control infrastructure,” ESET researcher Matías Porolli wrote in the report, released Tuesday. “Instead — adding insult to injury — the victim’s compromised Exchange server is co-opted to act as the C&C infrastructure.”

Multiple Western governments and threat intelligence firms have attributed Turla as a part of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), which is tasked with gathering intelligence on foreign governments, businesses and organizations. According to MITRE, the group has compromised victims in more than 50 countries, spanning governments, militaries, private-sector companies and research organizations.  

Porolli said the toolset was found on a compromised Exchange server used by the government of Kazakhstan on Nov. 28, 2025, where it could receive commands, execute in memory, gather intel on the organization and collect certain email messages.

Another version found inside a Romanian government agency a month later was configured to target emails sent to or received by the Western powers — the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — adversarial with Russia. At the time, Romanian politicians were calling for a NATO mission in the Black Sea to deter what they viewed as Russian aggression. In July, the EU announced sanctions against Russian individuals and organizations, citing a yearslong cyberespionage campaign from Turla and other Russian groups against European nations as well as the targeting of Poland’s energy grid and European businesses by Russia-aligned hacking groups.

According to ESET, the toolset lacks many features used to identify malware, such as implants, beaconing back to command-and-control infrastructure or built-in command lists. Most executables are performed in-memory using temporary storage to avoid leaving evidence, while commands written to permanent memory are delivered via encrypted payloads.

One component, dubbed CerealNeuron, operates as the main backdoor but does not beacon back to its operator the way many pieces of malware do. Instead, it runs on the compromised server and “passively listens for incoming web requests on paths that look like ordinary Exchange traffic.” The result is an attack that leaves no domain, IP address, hosting provider or timing patterns for defenders to find and block.

“The Cereal toolset demonstrates that, for Turla, Exchange servers are not just mail servers — they are durable collection points, internal execution hubs, and a suitable environment for hiding sophisticated .NET tradecraft,” Porolli wrote.

The post Russian Turla group used new toolset to silently pilfer emails from Kazakhstan, Romanian governments appeared first on CyberScoop.

The government needs to invest in digital forensics to keep pace with incidents and threats in cyberspace, the principal cyber adviser for the Department of the Air Force said Thursday.

“In order to detect, help us hunt and find where the incident started… the digital forensics, I believe we need to do, and focus, and invest in that world,” said Wanda Jones-Heath, speaking at the Datadog Threat Response Forum, produced by FedScoop.

The forensics role is vital even though “they’re after the fact,” she said.

“They go and look what happened weeks and months after the incident has occurred, and so I think we need to figure out: ‘How do we keep pace with incidents as they are occurring?’” Jones-Heath said. “Once we identify it, then you start looking at the forensics of what happened, who did it, where they are, where it originated from and then how you partition the areas that are still under fire while you continue to operate in that environment.” 

Jeffrey Hunt, global operations branch chief for the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, which provides digital forensic investigations, said at the same event that the divide between operations and security on getting visibility into networks about threats is an issue that needs to be addressed early.

But Hunt said combining the teams into one big unit is a “disaster” that doesn’t work.

“It means that you at least want to have sort of a liaison relationship where somebody from security is in the room as part of the planning team from the beginning of where your operational plan starts,” he said.

Another recommendation Jones-Heath made is changing how cyber exercises are conducted. The goal is not to be in “reactive mode” when an incident happens and knowing what to do with the “data is poisoned.” 

“They’re not designed typically of how we would operate if we have engagement,” she said. “So we have to change the lens to be more outside of the box — let the cyber team actually be engaged on the offensive and defensive side.”

“We have to get over the fact that it could never happen,” she continued. “So sharing that intel about what the adversary is doing, real world, may convince those who are not in our community to let us be a part of the exercise, show them and demonstrate what the adversary is actually doing, so that if we are in formation and you get disconnected. You know exactly what to do.

The post Air Force cyber official: need to invest in digital forensics appeared first on CyberScoop.

Hackers have been harvesting AI access tokens and have been using AI-assisted offensive tools to automate attacks.

The post AI-Linked Breaches Mount as WorkOS, Northflank, Trigger.dev Disclose Hacks appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The botnet was created and operated for financial gain by Android OEM/ODM Videostrong Technology.

The post Google Dismantles XCPE Botnet of 1.3 Million Android Devices appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The extension performed host reconnaissance and attempted to create a reverse SSH tunnel.

The post Malicious Claude Code Extension Served in Cursor Supply Chain Attack appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Google and an assortment of partners shut down a botnet that an approved Android device manufacturer purposefully deployed across more than 1.3 million TV set-top boxes, the company said Monday. 

Videostrong Technology Co., a China-based Android original equipment and device manufacturer, implanted a backdoor into multiple devices it sold. Those backdoors established XCPE, an expansive botnet that cybercriminals used to conduct ad fraud, steal data and route malicious traffic through residential proxy networks, according to a Google Threat Intelligence Group report.

Google took legal action to shut down the domains and servers Videostrong used to control the botnet. The company also took down command-and-control domains that more than a dozen malware families ran as modules through the XCPE backdoor, claiming it disrupted access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices from various manufacturers.

Videostrong sold Android devices with pre-installed malware for years, slipping by Google’s security tests by loading the malicious code after the device’s first boot. “The XCPE operators constantly evolved its configurations to evade Google’s pre and post-launch detections,” Charley Snyder, head of disruption operations at GTIG, told CyberScoop.

Snyder declined to say when or how Google first became aware of the approved vendor running a botnet on Android-powered devices. 

“We found this malicious software built directly into many different device models and brands over multiple years, supported by dedicated infrastructure and constantly evolving configurations to evade detection and manage their affiliates,” Google researchers wrote in the report. “We believe this campaign wasn’t an isolated rogue insider or a development oversight.”

Google banned Videostrong and any future subsidiaries from building or selling certified Android devices, and said it changed its review process to detect and stop similar activities in the future. Yet, Snyder said the company isn’t sharing specifics on these changes because it doesn’t want to provide threat actors insights that might help them circumvent these additional protections.

Most of the devices comprising the XCPE botnet were Android TV set-top boxes, but researchers also observed infected Android-based telehealth devices, karaoke machines and digital signs. 

“Without users’ knowledge or consent, infected devices were offered as a distribution mechanism for a wide array of criminal actors,” researchers wrote in the report. “This led to a variety of malicious activities being conducted on and through the devices, including ad-fraud, data exfiltration, and routing malicious network traffic through the devices.”

The botnet spanned more than 170 countries, with the largest concentration of infected devices based in Malaysia, Brazil, Iraq, Mexico and Taiwan, according to TrendAI researchers. Nearly 44,000 infected devices were based in the United States between June and October.

Google also partnered with Japan’s National Police Agency, Lumen Technologies, Human Security, Plume and Synthient to study and disrupt the botnet. 

The company said the dismantling of XCPE “seriously impacted over a dozen malicious actors,” yet it warned that the underlying market for backdoors, ad fraud and residential proxy networks are resilient and operating as an interconnected supply chain.

The post Google shuts down global botnet running on certified Android devices appeared first on CyberScoop.

Major industry groups are clamoring for Congress to include a 10-year extension of a law that they say is essential to cyber threat information sharing in the annual defense policy bill.

Congress has mixed a series of short-term renewals and lapses of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015) — which provides legal protections for threat data exchanges between the government and private sector as well as between companies — since its previous 10-year sunset came and went last year. It’s now set to expire again on Dec. 11.

On Sunday, 35 business groups sent a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services panels, asking them to renew the law for 10 years as part of their final negotiations for the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

“The case for a long-term reauthorization has only grown more urgent,” they wrote. “Recent incidents have demonstrated that advanced AI systems can identify and exploit software vulnerabilities at machine speed, collapsing the window between the discovery of a weakness and its use in an attack.”

“AI tools are also making sophisticated cyber capabilities cheaper, faster and easier to use, allowing threats to spread and adapt in real time,” they continued. “In this environment, the speed and breadth with which defenders share information determines whether they keep pace with adversaries. That speed depends on the legal certainty CISA 2015 provides.”

The letter’s signatories include overarching business groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, the latter of which led the letter, as well as groups representing critical infrastructure sectors such as aviation, telecommunications and technology.

The House version of the fiscal 2027 defense bill includes a 10-year extension. The Senate version notably does not, and past efforts to include a long-term extension in the defense bill, which has been signed into law every year for decades, have encountered objections from Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky.

Paul has hinged his support for any long-term extension of CISA 2015 on adoption of provisions designed to curtail past practices at the other CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — that he maintains threaten free speech.

Top Trump administration cyber officials have pressed Congress for a straightforward extension of the CISA 2015 laws. The Trump administration has also touted its efforts to crack down on what they said was the free-speech-limiting disinformation work of the agency CISA, which the Biden administration denied impinged on free speech and that it had ended anyway.

The annual defense policy bill often passes at the end of each calendar year or beginning of the next. A potential congressional committee leadership shuffle could change the equation for CISA 2015 in 2027, but the Dec. 11 expiration looms in 2026.

The post Business groups mount fresh campaign for long-term renewal of information sharing law appeared first on CyberScoop.

Overview

On October 29, 2026, Ivanti updated its security advisory for Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) to include two additional vulnerabilities and released fixes for both. Ivanti rates CVE-2026-111357, a missing authentication for critical function vulnerability (CWE-306), with a CVSSv3.1 score of 8.8; it allows a local authenticated attacker to escalate privileges. CVE-2026-118527, classified as generation of predictable numbers or identifiers (CWE-340), has an Ivanti-assigned CVSSv3.0 score of 4.3 and, according to CISA's KEV entry, allows a remote authenticated attacker to upload attacker-controlled content to a known location on disk.

Per Ivanti, exploitation in the wild has already occurred prior to disclosure, affecting a limited number of customers when these flaws are chained with CVE-2026-104935, an authentication bypass by spoofing (CWE-290). Rapid7 covered the original disclosure on October 13, 2026, when a fix for CVE-2026-104935 was available but the privilege escalation component remained unpatched. Fixes are now available for all three vulnerabilities.

On October 30, 2026, CVE-2026-111357 and CVE-2026-118527 were added to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) list of known exploited vulnerabilities (KEV), based on evidence of active exploitation.

The following scores and classifications are from Ivanti's updated advisory:

CVE	Ivanti CVSS score	CWE	Impact
CVE-2026-104935	8.6 (High), CVSSv3.0	CWE-290	Remote unauthenticated command execution
CVE-2026-111357	8.8 (High), CVSSv3.1	CWE-306, CWE-862, CWE-345	Local authenticated privilege escalation
CVE-2026-118527	4.3 (Medium), CVSSv3.0	CWE-340	Remote authenticated file upload to a known path

Note: The CVE record and Rapid7's vulnerability database rate CVE-2026-111357 at 7.0, using high attack complexity and unchanged scope. Ivanti assesses low attack complexity and changed scope, resulting in its score of 8.8. The table follows Ivanti's scores and classifications.

In its investigation, Volexity reports that UTA0576 used an exploit chain to gain unauthenticated root access to an appliance running 22.8R2.4, beginning on October 3, 2026. Its write-up identifies CVE-2026-104935 and CVE-2026-111357; Ivanti's updated advisory identifies CVE-2026-118527 as an additional component of the chain. Volexity observed credential theft and Active Directory queries for Windows LAPS passwords and BitLocker recovery keys.

The combined impact warrants emergency remediation despite the individual CVSS ratings. Ivanti Connect Secure is an enterprise VPN solution deployed at the network edge and has a history of zero-day exploitation, including in 2024 and 2025.

Mitigation guidance

Rapid7 recommends applying the available updates on an emergency basis outside of normal patching cycles. The October 13 fixes in 25.1.1.2 and 22.8R2.5 do not remediate CVE-2026-111357 or CVE-2026-118527.

CVE(s)	Affected versions	Fixed version(s)
CVE-2026-111357 and CVE-2026-118527	25.1.1.2 and prior	25.1.1.3
CVE-2026-111357 and CVE-2026-118527	22.8R2.5 and prior	22.8R2.6
CVE-2026-104935	25.1.1.1 and prior	25.1.1.2
CVE-2026-104935	25.1.2.2 and prior	25.1.3.0, 25.1.3.1
CVE-2026-104935	22.8R2.4 and prior	22.8R2.5

Ivanti recommends moving from 22.8.X to 25.1.1.3 or later, or applying 22.8R2.6 if migration is not immediately possible. Ivanti lists 25.1.3.0 and later on ISA4500, ISA6500, or ISA8500 as unaffected.

Rapid7 also recommends investigating for compromise after patching. Volexity reports that the observed activity evades Ivanti's Integrity Checker Tool, so a clean result does not rule out compromise. Preserve memory and logs before rebooting or resetting where feasible. If compromise is suspected, follow Ivanti's recovery steps and rotate potentially exposed credentials.

For current fixed versions and mitigation guidance, refer to Ivanti's security advisory. Its linked recovery procedure includes older release references.

Artifacts, evidence sources, and IOCs

The following guidance and artifacts are from Volexity's investigation:

Hunting guidance:

• Review requests to /dana-na/auth/url_default/welcome.cgi, especially URL/header mismatches involving X-DSCGI-PATH. Observed values include:

X-DSCGI-PATH: /home/webserver/htdocs/dana/fb/smb/wu.cgi
X-DSCGI-PATH: /home/runtime/tmp/<MD5(filename)>

Evidence sources on the appliance:

• /tmp/: ml.py, rq5.py, mk.py, rr.py, pu.txt, sp_out.txt, and spray_hits.json.

• /data/.icscap/: dsstatmond, cap*, and h.py.

• /home/runtime/tmp/: ics-root-run-inband-*.pl and ics-root-result-inband-*.

• /home/runtime/dlogs/debuglog and /var/log/audit/audit.log: investigate evidence of selective deletion.

Network IOCs:

• 108.165.147[.]64: UTA0576 exploitation IP, per Volexity's IOC list.

Volexity also provides YARA rules for request-header evidence and the privilege escalation payload in memory.

Rapid7 customers

Exposure Command, Vulnerability Management, and Nexpose

Exposure Command, Vulnerability Management, and Nexpose customers can assess exposure to CVE-2026-111357 and CVE-2026-118527 with authenticated vulnerability checks available since the 2026-10-30 content release.

Updates

• November 2, 2026: Initial publication.

A China state-backed threat group is using ARTEX, the automated agentic AI penetration testing framework, to achieve remarkable speed, scale and success in a campaign that already compromised about 140 sensitive targets in 11 days, according to CrowdStrike. 

The threat group, which CrowdStrike tracks as Vapor Panda, targeted more than 200 organizations in at least 14 countries since Oct. 17, the security company said in a threat report Thursday. Targets and confirmed victims include foreign ministries, a European country’s presidency and prime minister’s office, defense and intelligence agencies; 19 U.S.-based organizations in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor, defense, nuclear and financial sectors; and telecom providers in the United States, Belgium and the Philippines. 

CrowdStrike told CyberScoop about 70% of Vapor Panda’s targets were confirmed compromised or had evidence indicating moderate confidence of a successful intrusion. 

Vapor Panda’s use of ARTEX, paired with DeepSeek, allowed it to accomplish more tasks with shocking speed — requests occurring as often as every 10 seconds — and pursue multiple attack paths concurrently. 

“This is the first time that we’re seeing an agentic adversary nation-state threat actor at this scale, and I think that this is probably, unfortunately, something we’ll see more of,” Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop.

Hands-on-keyboard activity tracked by CrowdStrike for the past 15 years typically involved up to 40 commands per hour. “Now, with ARTEX, we could see it exceed 1,500 commands an hour,” Meyers said.

“If you diversify that across 200 targets, it costs them very little to run a mass-exploitation campaign and drop a websell,” he added. “They can hit more targets in a faster period of time.”

Vapor Panda’s broad-access campaign, which remains active, has targeted think tanks and government agencies spanning defense, justice, finance and diplomacy.

“I would characterize it as a diverse operational mission that tends to focus on sectors and geographies that Beijing considers economically or politically important,” Meyers said.

The active campaign attributed to Vapor Panda is separate from the ARTEX activity Microsoft Threat Intelligence attributed to Storm-0940 earlier this month, including a supply-chain attack targeting ConnectWise customers. 

Adversarial use of AI is relatively new, yet also quickly becoming the new normal, Meyers said. “We’re scrambling because we’re seeing so many of these agentic adversaries.”

Agentic AI use for malicious purposes is growing month-over-month at a rate of almost threefold. CrowdStrike observed roughly 45 agentic adversary attacks in September and it’s already at 126 for October, and climbing.

Adversarial use of agentic AI isn’t an intractable problem, but rather another reminder that organizations need visibility into their endpoints, identities and cross-domain capabilities, Meyers said. 

These attacks aren’t showcasing anything new, “it’s just doing it at a speed and scale that we’re unaccustomed to,” he said. “It’s not hopeless, but you’ve got to take action. You can’t put your head in the sand.”

The post China-backed threat group used agentic AI pentesting tool to compromise 140 sensitive targets in 11 days appeared first on CyberScoop.

A defense contractor with top secret security clearance pleaded guilty to aiding North Korea’s remote worker scheme by allowing co-conspirators to use his identity to apply for jobs, including positions with national security implications, the Justice Department said Wednesday. 

John Allen Kurrle Jr. participated in a short-lived but prolific conspiracy that spanned at least 88 job applications at U.S.-based companies, resulting in nine job offers, according to court records.

The 62-year-old allowed co-conspirators to use his identity and government clearance for prospective sensitive work, often with U.S. government contractors. The nine job offers Kurrle’s co-conspirators received between June and October 2025 had annual salary ranges of $120,000 to $190,000.

The scheme had a limited success rate. The longest and most lucrative job a co-conspirator landed under Kurrle’s identity lasted about three weeks, netting a total pay of $4,800.

His identity was also used to gain employment as a software engineer at a Ventura, California-based company to work on a generative AI project for a component of the U.S. military. The company sent a laptop to Kurrle’s residence in Gainesville, Virginia, where he received and hosted laptops shipped by multiple victim companies, enabling co-conspirators to remotely access the devices from outside the United States.

Yet, during a video call to verify employment eligibility, the company noticed that the person who appeared on the video call did not match Kurrle’s age or physical characteristics, according to court records. The unnamed company terminated the employment of Kurrle’s co-conspirator before he did any work on the military contract and Kurrle shipped the laptop back to the company. 

The company paid Kurrle’s co-conspirator almost $2,200 for 32 hours of onboarding, which Kurrle is now ordered to pay in restitution along with the $4,800 received from the other company. 

Kurrle also, as part of his plea agreement, admitted to using the identity of a third person, without their consent, to apply for some remote work positions. He doesn’t dispute that the scheme likely benefitted North Korea, but claims he wasn’t aware of the connections to North Korea during the duration of his involvement in the conspiracy.

Michael Barnhart, nation state investigator at DTEX, said researchers previously identified Kurrle as a facilitator for North Korea’s remote worker scheme. Yet, until recently, he wasn’t sure if Kurrle was a victim or impersonated. 

The case underscores North Korea’s efforts to gain access to roles with a strategic intelligence requirement, as it focuses on contractor roles because those present the path of least resistance.

Kurrle joins a growing list of people who have been charged or jailed for supporting the North Korea regime’s scheme that generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the country’s military and organizations involved in its weapons programs.

Authorities have been cracking down on the malicious insider activity by seizing cryptocurrency linked to the theft, and targeting U.S.-based facilitators who provided forged or stolen identities and hosted laptop farms for North Korean operatives. 

Some of that money is also funneling through a web of front companies and intermediaries, including sanctioned entities, that partly fund Russia’s war effort against Ukraine, DTEX said in a report in July. This includes manufacturing weapons and supplying them to Russia’s military, according to the security firm.

The countermeasures are stacking up, but the scheme is widespread and has infiltrated an undetermined number of businesses, including hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.

Federal judges previously sentenced other people to prison for their involvement in the scheme, including Matthew Issac Knoot and Erick Ntekereze Prince; Keija Wang and Zhenxing Wang; Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar and Alexander Paul Travis; Oleksandr Didenko and Christina Chapman. 

Kurrle pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison upon sentencing, which is currently scheduled for Jan. 28, 2027.

The post Defense contractor pleads guilty to aiding North Korean remote worker scheme appeared first on CyberScoop.

Over 22.6 million exposed instances are potentially affected by the critical PHP flaws that have been targeted for over a week.

The post PHP2Shell Attacks Root Palo Alto Firewalls but Fail Against WordPress appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Cisco Talos linked SD-WAN key-stealing malware to infrastructure overlapping Volt Typhoon’s Silent Train network, which Lumen detailed.

The post Cisco SD-WAN Zero-Day Exploitation Tied to Volt Typhoon’s ‘Silent Train’ Network appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Volt Typhoon, a China-government backed hacking group that has infiltrated America’s critical infrastructure networks for years, has consistently built and dismantled ephemeral malicious infrastructure to burrow into hundreds of sensitive systems undetected, Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said in a Wednesday report.

The covert access operation that researchers call “Silent Train” isn’t a standalone network, but rather a series of compromised small office home office (SOHO) routers, internet of things (IoT) devices and enterprise infrastructure that Volt Typhoon has rapidly rotated through since late 2023. 

The Chinese threat group has used this chain of short-lived compromised infrastructure to exploit additional vulnerabilities, including zero-days, in network edge devices and gain deeper, persistent access into victim networks, researchers said. 

“Individual chains are assembled and dismantled every day, with infrastructure continually refreshed,” Michael Horka, principal information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. “Volt Typhoon demonstrated a repeatable capability to rebuild a new chain with different infrastructure in less than two minutes, making the number of nodes at any one moment effectively close to zero.”

Black Lotus Labs has notified hundreds of victims since it first identified Silent Train activity, including telecom providers, government entities, defense contractors, communication services, universities and IT firms. Other victims spanning critical infrastructure include organizations in the water, energy, transportation, maritime, rail, aviation and emergency services sectors.

“The ephemeral nature of the framework means our observations should not be interpreted as a complete census of Volt Typhoon activity,” said Horka, who also was the lead researcher on the report.

The nation-state group’s investment in operational security and preserving access is remarkable, according to Black Lotus Labs.

“We observed infrastructure assembled in under two minutes, sessions averaging roughly four hours, extensive cleanup, compartmentalization and continued development of new access vectors,” Horka said. “That is considerable effort devoted not even to get into their end targets, but purely to making important operations difficult to discover and trace.”

Volt Typhoon relied more heavily on Silent Train after the FBI and Justice Department disrupted the KV Botnet in early 2024, researchers said. Earlier this year, U.S. and global authorities warned about a widespread shift in Chinese hacking groups’ use of covert networks riding on compromised common devices.

The reach of those efforts is extensive and ongoing. Volt Typhoon has exploited and abused more than 27 device classes in Silent Train operations, including edge devices, enterprise management tools, identity and access management systems, networking infrastructure and other technologies. 

“The diversity matters, but the discipline matters even more,” Horka said. “Specific device types were consistently reserved for particular positions in the chain. It operated less like a collection of randomly compromised devices and more like an organized inventory of capabilities.”

The threat group has successfully compromised devices and technologies from Fortinet, Cisco, ManageEngine, Ivanti, F5, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, TP-Link, Netgear and ArcGIS, researchers said. Black Lotus Labs also observed confirmed zero-day campaigns targeting Versa Director, N-Able N-Central, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and VeloCloud Orchestrator. 

“The exploitation patterns, victimology, and geographic targeting observed throughout our investigation point to a sustained focus on communications, defense, government, and critical infrastructure environments of enduring strategic value,” Black Lotus Labs researchers wrote in the report. “Through repeated targeting of centralized management platforms and control-plane technologies, Silent Train shows how Volt Typhoon systematically pursues and preserves access to some of the most consequential networks in the United States.”

Silent Train’s ephemerality and operational discipline means it can’t be measured in size. These attributes also make it “fundamentally difficult to disrupt because there isn’t one network to take down,” Horka said. 

“What exists today will be completely different tomorrow,” he added. “You can try to remove individual pieces, but removing the actor’s ability to continuously rebuild them is a much harder problem to solve.”

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Prosecutors announced charges against six alleged scammers based out of Africa who targeted Americans with fake non-fungible token (NFT) investment scams by posing as women on dating websites, netting hundreds of victims.

According to an affidavit for the arrest of of the six people — Chui Kok Wa, Gislen Neukeu, Shamusa Ninsiima, Clement Mugiraneza, Merveille Mudacumura and Nicodemus Hingima Monyancha — the criminal group with connections to China and Malaysia opened a scam compound in Madagascar early last year.

“In the scheme, scammers posed as beautiful women who met victims on dating websites, eventually enlisting them to connect their cryptocurrency wallets to fraudulent websites associated with the NFT investments,” the Justice Department said in a news release Tuesday. “Once connected, the scammers willed the victims to continue to fund their cryptocurrency wallets, and then surreptitiously pulled money from the victims’ wallets without their knowledge.”

The FBI identified approximately 74 cryptocurrency wallets associated with approximately 800 victims in the scheme, for an estimated loss of at least approximately $516,695, according to the affidavit and news release.

The U.S. District of Columbia’s Scam Center Task Force, the FBI’s field office in Honolulu and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Alaska made a trip to Madagascar in August to review electronic devices seized from scam compounds. Interviews with scam compound workers there revealed that Cambodian police activity and armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia led to operations at a Cambodian scam compound being moved to Madagascar.

Phones for the alleged scheme leader, Wa, contained employment contracts and scripts for what scammers should say to victims, which said they would be committing “an emotional scam.” The devices that officials reviewed and the interviews also established further connections between the scammers and Southeast Asia and China.

After the initial interviews, though, Madagascar repatriated some suspects to China before the investigation was complete, according to the Justice Department.

“Today, [D.C.] U.S. Attorney Pirro called on the Madagascar government to cooperate with the United States, extradite the six charged defendants, and further noted that the government had obtained a material witness warrant to interview 15 employees of the scheme, who claimed they were human trafficked and abused by Wa, but are believed to be held in jail in Madagascar,” the release stated.

In the same release, DOJ said that the Scam Center Strike Force had crossed the $1 billion threshold in cryptocurrency recovered in its first year. 

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CISA added the Brotli flaw to its KEV catalog, and two honeypot operators logged attempts, including one that used a broken exploit.

The post CISA Warns of Node2Shell Exploitation as Honeypots Log Attack Attempts appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Running at system boot, it periodically polled the update domain to execute any code served, with full privileges.

The post Dead Popcorn Time Updater Put Millions of Computers at Risk of Takeover appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Alarm bells ratcheted up yet again about an AI-discovered vulnerability that could — if exploited in the wild — destabilize vast stretches of the internet. 

The critical defect — CVE-2026-111497 — affects the Google-developed Brotli decompression library that’s bundled into many components, applications and cloud services riding on open-source software. The buffer overflow vulnerability, which OpenAI Codex Security discovered and Node.js disclosed in a Oct. 21 security advisory, can trigger system crashes and remote code execution. 

Researchers haven’t observed any active exploitation of the defect in real networks, but concerns are mounting. Multiple vendors and software packages, including Microsoft and Python, that rely on vulnerable versions of Brotli have rushed emergency patches out to address the risk of exploitation in their respective systems.

Wiz researchers warned that “91% of cloud environments have resources vulnerable to CVE-2026-111497 and 82% of cloud environments have publicly exposed Node.js instances.”

The attack surface is “extremely broad and vast, but much of the impact of exploitation depends entirely on its implementation and how it is used within that piece of software,” said Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr.

Christiaan Beek, vice president at Rapid7 Intelligence, said the Brotli vulnerability is especially concerning because it’s effectively hiding out in the open, as are many open-source software libraries.

“Most businesses have no idea how deeply components like Brotli are embedded in their technology. A vulnerability in a compression library sounds almost boring until you realize it could affect applications your business depends on every day,” he said. “That’s the uncomfortable reality of modern software: a small component can create a very large business risk.”

The defect, dubbed “Node2Shell” or “Broccoli2Shell,” is the latest in a series of vulnerabilities that have provoked an emergency response. Defenders and researchers were on heightened alert last week over a pair of critical PHP vulnerabilities dubbed “PHP2Shell” that also have yet to be exploited in the wild as of Monday afternoon.

These cyclical and increasingly recurring so-called emergencies are putting organizations and defenders at a significant disadvantage. 

“After being part of numerous channels and message threads full of defenders trying to discern what’s real and what’s BS over the past several months — and especially the past week — I can say unequivocally that the human cost of these events is real, pronounced, and will have downstream impacts far beyond what the community can immediately predict,” Caitlin Condon, vice president of research at VulnCheck, told CyberScoop.

“None of this — high-profile vulnerability disclosures, the overblown exploitability assumptions, the community arguments, the race to weaponize — is new,” she added. 

“What’s changed now is that AI is pumping out complex — and often not clearly explained — finds at a much higher rate, exponentially increasing noise levels and making it much more difficult both to debunk overhyped vulnerability discoveries and to determine which vulnerabilities are broadly exploitable in real-world production configurations.” 

Researchers acknowledge the additional stress defenders and organizations are in because of this always-in-emergency mode.

“We’ve reached a point where everything seems to be an emergency. And when everything is critical, businesses risk losing sight of what actually matters,” Beek said. “The real cost isn’t just patching. It’s the constant disruption to operations, the diversion of resources, and the difficult decisions about which business systems deserve immediate attention.”

Experts also consider this the new normal as more high-impact vulnerabilities with far-reaching potential consequences are found. 

“We suspect in the very near future, defenders may lose the ability to tell what is a true emergency versus a loud and prevalent vulnerability in a ubiquitous product or library,” Knott said. 

Experts advise organizations to focus on their specific risk, weighing the Brotli vulnerability’s potential impact in their environment. 

“Attackers don’t care about CVSS scores,” Beek said. “They care about what they can compromise, disrupt, or monetize and that’s exactly how we should prioritize our defenses.”

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Overview

On October 21, 2026, the Node.js Project published a security advisory for CVE-2026-111497, an out-of-bounds write in the Brotli decoder bundled with Node.js. The vulnerability affects the Node.js 26.x, 24.x, and 22.x release lines. Node.js rates the issue High, while Google, the CVE Numbering Authority (CNA), gives it a critical CVSSv4 score of 9.2.

An attacker who can supply Brotli data that an application decompresses with node:zlib can corrupt process memory. According to Node.js, this corruption can lead to a process crash, disclosure of sensitive process memory, or remote code execution. Exposure therefore depends on whether an application passes attacker-controlled compressed data to the affected decoder.

On October 27, 2026, CVE-2026-111497 was added to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) list of known exploited vulnerabilities (KEV), based on evidence of active exploitation. Given the vulnerability's potential to disclose memory or enable remote code execution (RCE), Rapid7 recommends that organizations prioritize remediation.

Technical overview

CVE-2026-111497 is classified as an out-of-bounds write (CWE-787) and an unchecked return value (CWE-252). Per the vendor advisory, the decoder handled an invalid Brotli block switch as a temporary need for more input instead of a permanent format error. The streaming decoder then continued appending input bytes to an eight-byte internal buffer, allowing malformed input to write beyond the buffer and corrupt process memory.

The vulnerability originates in Google Brotli, which the affected Node.js release lines bundle as a dependency. The CVE record identifies affected upstream Brotli ranges on all platforms as versions 1.0.3 before 1.0.10, 1.1.0 before 1.1.1, and 1.2.0 before 1.2.1. The Node.js Project remediated its bundled decoder in the fixed Node.js releases listed below.

Because CVE-2026-111497 affects the upstream Google Brotli decoder, its reach is not limited to Node.js. Vendor and project advisories have also identified affected implementations in Bun, Python's Brotli and brotlicffi packages, .NET, Envoy and Istio, brotli4j, and operating-system packages. Affected versions, default exposure, and remediation vary by product; the presence of an affected decoder does not by itself establish exposure unless an application processes attacker-controlled Brotli data. Organizations should consult the relevant downstream vendor or distribution advisories to identify affected versions, assess exposure, and determine appropriate remediation.

Mitigation guidance

Vendor-supplied security updates are available to remediate CVE-2026-111497. Organizations running an affected Node.js release should upgrade on an urgent basis, outside of normal patch cycles:

• Node.js 22.x releases before 22.23.4 are affected; upgrade to 22.23.4 or later.

• Node.js 24.x releases before 24.22.1 are affected; upgrade to 24.22.1 or later.

• Node.js 26.x releases before 26.12.1 are affected; upgrade to 26.12.1 or later.

The vendor states that end-of-life Node.js release lines should also be treated as affected when a security release occurs. Organizations using an end-of-life release should migrate to a supported, fixed release line. Node.js has not published a vendor-supported workaround; if an immediate upgrade is not possible, Rapid7 recommends restricting or disabling application paths that decompress untrusted Brotli data as a temporary exposure-reduction measure.

For the latest mitigation guidance, please refer to the Node.js security advisory.

Rapid7 customers

Exposure Command, Vulnerability Management, and Nexpose

Exposure Command, Vulnerability Management, and Nexpose customers can assess exposure to CVE-2026-111497 with an authenticated vulnerability check for Linux, macOS, and Windows, available in the October 26 content release.

Updates

• October 26, 2026: Initial publication.

• October 26, 2026: Updated the Exposure Command, Vulnerability Management, and Nexpose section to reflect coverage availability.
• October 27, 2026: Updated Overview to add a reference to CVE-2026-111497 being added to the CISA KEV list.