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Massive supply-chain attack compromises 440 packages under four hours

In less than four hours early Tuesday, an attacker compromised a GitHub maintainer account and unleashed a self-replicating piece of malware which injected malicious code into more than 440 distinct npm packages, according to multiple security firms. 

The worm, built on the open-source Mini Shai-Hulud repository that TeamPCP published in May, was initially let loose in keyv, a data management interface software package with more than 600 million monthly downloads. The attacker spent the next 30 minutes compromising additional packages controlled by the same maintainer, including cacheable, flat-cache, file-entry-cache.

The attack spread to other maintainers, eventually compromising more than 860 packages with a “combined total of over 2 billion monthly installs,” Ilyas Makari, malware researcher at Aikido Security, wrote in a blog post

Wiz researchers told CyberScoop it hasn’t observed any new malicious packages since the initial wave moved through a massive footpoint of cloud and code environments in those first four hours. 

“This is the most critical initial compromise, with over 155 million weekly downloads on the root packages,” Wiz Research said in an email. 

Some of the compromised packages, including keyv, flat-cache and file-entry-cache, are present in more than 46% of all cloud environments, according to Wiz. “By comparison, back in the Shai-Hulud 2.0 campaign the most prevalent packages were only in about 28% of environments,” the company said. 

“Time will tell whether the eventual cost and impact outpaces past attacks, or whether adoption of hardening mechanisms such as package aging, and the usage of the relatively less aggressive Mini Shai-Hulud code as basis, will defray the final toll here,” Wiz Research added. 

Researchers from multiple firms sprung into action to monitor the widening attack spree and published indicators of compromise to help potential victims hunt for malicious activity in their systems. 

The Mini Shai-Hulud variant used in these attacks scoops up a trove of sensitive data, including npm, GitHub, AWS and continuous integration credentials. It also steals AI-related configuration files and cryptocurrency wallets, researchers said. 

Microsoft, Aikido, Socket and Wiz all said the same payload and pattern was observed across all affected packages, indicating a single attacker or threat cluster was behind the supply-chain attack and using multiple stolen tokens. 

The malware showcased a few pieces of new functionality, but retained the same core mechanisms that are hallmarks of Mini Shai-Hulud. 

“The evolution is consistent with what we’ve seen from them in past waves, however we don’t yet have the hard links” to confidently attribute the attacks to TeamPCP, Wiz Research said.

The notorious threat actor, which Google previously told CyberScoop it attributes to one core operator that was located in South Africa during at least some of the attacks, compromised and injected malicious code into more than 1,000 software packages in less than four months earlier this year.

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AI-assisted security tools are finding more bugs, but the threat level has not changed

AI systems like Anthropic’s Project Glasswing and Microsoft’s MDASH are aiding in the discovery of vulnerabilities, filling the ever-growing pool of defects that defenders have to address before exploitation occurs. Yet, through the first half of 2026, these vulnerabilities were no more or less likely to be exploited than all vulnerabilities disclosed during that period, VulnCheck said in a report Tuesday. 

Concerns remain high about AI-discovered vulnerabilities fueling more attacks, but VulnCheck’s review of exploitation data shows that those fears are unfounded, at least so far. 

Patrick Garrity, security researcher at VulnCheck and report author, identified 1,061 vulnerabilities attributed to AI-assisted discovery during the first six months of the year. Of those vulnerabilities discovered by AI, 14 ( 1.3%) were exploited in the wild, a breakdown that aligns with the exploitation rate researchers observed across all vulnerabilities during the same period. 

“While AI-assisted vulnerability discovery clearly has value for both attackers and defenders, the data does not suggest that AI discovered vulnerabilities are inherently more likely to be exploited than those found through traditional methods,” Garrity wrote.

While AI’s contribution to actively exploited vulnerabilities was muted in the first half of the year, it’s too soon to assume that trend will continue. Moreover, none of these major vulnerability-hunting models were running for that full period. Project Glasswing rolled out in April, while Microsoft’s MDASH and OpenAI’s Daybreak were both unveiled in May.

The upward trend in Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday indicates how much the floodgates might open through the remainder of the year as AI models discover more vulnerabilities. The company’s July security update contained an all-time-record of 622 vulnerabilities, besting the previous record-breaking June update with 206 vulnerabilities.

VulnCheck’s state of exploitation report also found that vulnerabilities were exploited much faster after CVE publication, speeding up from an average of 120 days in 2025 to 80 days during the first half of the year.

The intelligence firm also determined which technology categories were actively exploited most often. Content management systems accounted for nearly one-third of the 495 known exploited vulnerabilities VulnCheck identified during the first half of 2026. Network edge devices were responsible for almost 14%, followed by operating systems at nearly 9%, server software at 8%, and AI products — an emerging attack surface — at almost 6%.

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Microsoft debuts AI cybersecurity offerings as competition heats up

Microsoft threw its hat into the ring Monday in the increasingly heated competition among AI-powered cybersecurity offerings, unveiling tools that it claims are better and cheaper than its rivals.

The new agentic model MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, runs inside another Microsoft security tool, MDASH, and is part of an AI-powered security platform the company dubbed Project Perception.

Microsoft argues that its existing in-house capabilities give Project Perception an edge.

“Project Perception brings together signals, context, models and specialized agents into a continuously learning system of defense,” the company said in a blog post. “It can reason, prioritize and act at machine speed while keeping humans firmly in control and empowering them with powerful new workflows.”

Its release follows splashy AI cybersecurity suite debuts from OpenAI and Anthropic. Companies have been racing to advertise their AI offerings for their ability to find vulnerabilities, even as the most dire warnings about AI being used on the offensive side have yet to come to fruition.

As proof of its superiority, Microsoft said that MDASH with MAI-Cyber-1-Flash beat Mythos, Gemini and GPT on CyberGym, “the gold standard benchmark for evaluating how systems reason over large codebases to find real vulnerabilities in the code.” It scored 96%, 12 percentage points ahead of the next-best.

Microsoft said MAI-Cyber-1-Flash was built with a focus on safety first, and was independently assessed by a third party it didn’t name. AI cybersecurity systems made big news in the past week after OpenAI said its models broke free of its testing confinement to hack Hugging Face, a major AI code platform. 

Price also was a big part of Microsoft’s rollout: It said MAI-Cyber-1-Flash in MDASH can do the job at half the cost of other leading models.

“This is the benefit of building the harness, context/signals, and action space separate from one model family,” Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said on social media after the company unveiled Project Perception in San Francisco Monday. “By combining specialized models and data with the right agents, tools, security context, and harness, we can advance the frontier of cost to outcome.”

Project Perception enters public preview on Aug. 3, Microsoft said.

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Google’s solution to hacker name confusion? Yet another naming system

If you are a CISO, here is a new problem for the pile: Do I worry more about Sandworm Relic or Strawberry Tempest?

Last week, Google Threat Intelligence Group joined a list of rivals in changing how it names hackers, replacing years of split naming systems with a single set of code names built around memorable word pairs.

The company said in a blog post that the change merges two systems that had grown apart for years inside Google: Mandiant, the security firm Google bought in 2022, and its in-house Threat Analysis Group. Combining those units left Google with overlapping names for the same hacking groups, a problem the new system aims to fix.

“Threat tracking shouldn’t be an exercise in memorization, but rather one of intuition,” the post reads.

Each tracked group will now get a two-word name. The first word is a distinct term meant to be easy to recall, often pulled from names already used in past reporting on a specific group. When no such name exists, researchers will generate one at random and have analysts check it before use. The second word sorts each group by category, such as country of origin or motive. In Google’s published examples, CASTLE pairs with groups tied to China, ION with Iran, NEPTUNE with North Korea, RELIC with Russia, and COMET with financially motivated threat actors not tied to a nation-state.

The approach echoes one CrowdStrike has long been known for. CrowdStrike pairs a specific term with an animal tied to a country or motive: PANDA for China, BEAR for Russia, SPIDER for cybercriminals, JACKAL for hacktivists. Google’s system swaps the animals for words like CASTLE and NEPTUNE but follows the same basic structure, down to the argument for why it works: A two-part name carries more information than a bare country label or number, and it can change as attribution is fine-tuned.

Microsoft took its own turn at a naming overhaul in April 2023, dropping a system built on chemical elements, trees and volcanoes in favor of weather terms. Under that system, Typhoon marked China, Blizzard marked Russia, Sandstorm marked Iran, and Tempest marked financially motivated cybercriminals. The switch produced names that drew as much attention for their sound as their substance, among them Strawberry Tempest, Pumpkin Sandstorm and Pistachio Tempest. Industry experts bristled over the change, saying the names compared the groups to ice cream flavors or cocktails.

By 2025, the industry’s naming sprawl had become enough of a shared headache that two of the biggest players in it agreed to try to sort it out together. Microsoft and CrowdStrike announced a joint mapping effort in June of that year, pairing Microsoft’s weather names with CrowdStrike’s animal names for the same tracked groups, with Google, Mandiant and Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 also signed on to contribute. Both companies were careful to say the project was not an attempt to force the industry onto one naming system, just to make the existing ones easier to translate between.

Google‘s rollout starts with several dozen of the most actively tracked hacking groups, with more to follow over time. Older names will stay searchable within Google’s threat intelligence platform, alongside mappings to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and to the naming systems used by other vendors. 

The company says groups will keep carrying “UNC,” for uncategorized, if it is still too early to identify exactly where a group fits in this taxonomy.

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Microsoft, tech companies throw weight behind spread of open-source AI

Microsoft, along with more than two dozen tech companies, are pressing policymakers to support open-source AI systems and code across society, arguing that it will be a safer approach than attempting to restrict access or relying on a handful of closed, proprietary models.

The open letter, posted Friday, draws parallels to the software industry of the 1980s, when large businesses worried that open-source software code would cut into their business. While industry lost that battle, the end result was a vibrant ecosystem that now underpins much of the modern internet, government IT and even commercial software products.

It also created a “shared foundation of knowledge” that has fed countless future software projects and innovations.

“The United States now faces a similar choice with artificial intelligence,” the companies wrote. “Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector.”

Expanding access and support to open-source AI comes with meaningful security risk. Cybersecurity experts warn that one of the biggest beneficiaries of broadly available AI tools are  low-level criminals who until now lacked the technical expertise or resources to launch serious attacks.

Once a model is open weight, anyone can download it, customize it, strip it of any guardrails and use it for their own purposes. As open-source models have gotten better at creating deepfakes and other AI generated imagery, the danger of locally-customized CSAM and sexualized deepfakes could also grow.

But the letter argues that open-weight AI models are most beneficial to startups, universities, research labs and other small, ambitious organizations that can innovate and iterate the technology and make it more broadly useful to society.

“Open weights let every organization match the right model to the right job at the right cost, reserving frontier-scale capability for genuine frontier problems and running efficient specialized specialized models everywhere else,” The companies wrote. “That discipline is what will make AI economically sustainable as its use scales into the billions of everyday tasks.”

 For cybersecurity specifically, the letter argues that defenders armed with open-source AI will outpace attackers better than any closed model approach.

“In a world where cybersecurity attackers use advanced AI, defenders need access to models with comparable capabilities so they can detect, simulate, and respond to emerging threats,” the companies wrote. “Open models broaden defensive capability, increase transparency, and allow vulnerabilities to be discovered and remediated across many teams.”

Other notable companies signing the letter include Meta, Palantir, Perplexity, Mistral, NVIDIA, Mozilla, The Linux Foundation, Hugging Face, Dell Technologies and IBM.

US policymakers continue to grapple with balancing unrestrained support for the domestic AI industry and providing oversight and regulation of harms that result from their use.

The Trump administration has cycled through several frameworks since coming into office, first a laissez-faire approach within no restrictions, then an executive order creating a voluntary testing regime for industry, then the imposition of export controls on Anthropic’s Fable model and reportedly pressuring OpenAI to delay the release of their models out of cybersecurity concerns.

The letter comes as the Trump administration has reportedly considered an executive order that would restrict American access and availability to Chinese-made open-source models.

But the White House and US companies are trying to thread a needle in recognizing the overall benefits of an open source approach while being wary of doing anything that could potentially benefit their Chinese rivals.

Earlier this month the White House announced the creation of its Gold Eagle AI cybersecurity clearinghouse that would help coordinate government, private sector and civil society work finding and closing AI-discovered vulnerabilities. A big part of that effort, a senior White House official said, is supporting providers and maintainers of open-source AI tools.

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Microsoft discloses ‘the mother of all’ vulnerability loads, tripling June’s previous record

Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday security program reached an unrivaled pinnacle this month, as the vendor addressed 622 vulnerabilities across its suite of business products and systems. 

“The bug apocalypse has finally descended upon us,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

“The mother of all releases. To call this record-breaking is an understatement,” he added. “The CVE count year-to-date exceeds all other years’ totals.”

The startling increase in vulnerabilities reflects a compounding effect taking root across software as artificial intelligence plays a growing role in discovering and developing patches for defects lurking in error-riddled applications. 

Microsoft’s June Patch Tuesday update broke the previous all-time record with 206 vulnerabilities.

The company last week warned forewarned customers and defenders that a flood of defects would be uncovered as it applies its multi-model agentic scanning harness (MDASH) to discover and address vulnerabilities at greater speed and scale.

The monthly exponential rise in Microsoft vulnerabilities already puts the vendor on pace to break a full-year record, ending 2026 with the largest annual collection of defects, beating the previous record of 1,245 CVEs in 2020, Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in an email. 

“It’s probable that we will not only exceed 2,000 CVEs in a calendar year, but potentially over 3,000 CVEs this year or more,” he added.

“The volume is striking, but it reflects how good these tools have become at finding bugs, not how many of those bugs actually pose a risk to organizations,” Narang said.

Microsoft disclosed two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-56155 and CVE-2026-56164, privilege escalation defects in Active Directory Federation Services and Microsoft SharePoint Server, respectively. 

The monthly batch of patches included 416 defects in Windows, 82 in Office and 46 in Microsoft Edge. More than 1 in 10 vulnerabilities the vendor disclosed — 63 total — were rated as critical.

“The products covered this month are also astonishing,” Childs said. “Just about everything you’ve ever heard of is getting patched.”

The full list of vulnerabilities addressed this month is available in Microsoft’s Security Response Center.

SAP also addressed a fresh assortment of vulnerabilities Tuesday, including critical defects CVE-2026-44747 in SAP NetWeaver Application Server and CVE-2026-27690 in SAP Approuter.

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French nonprofit starts global intelligence and research hub for AI cyber threats 

The Paris Peace Forum, a French non-profit that has convened world leaders on global security issues, is launching a new project to bring together international experts to assess AI-related threats to global internet infrastructure.

The Integrated Network for Trusted AI in Cyberspace (INTAiC) will tap researchers and civil society experts from government and the private sector, analyzing current AI cyber threats from the field and creating “forward-looking” reports on how the technology will impact society and what organizations can do to respond.

One of the project’s top goals is to create an international, quick-response coalition of government and business to address AI-related threats, similar to coordination mechanisms that exist in other areas of cybersecurity.

“Evidence fragmentation on AI-driven cyber threats isn’t incidental — it’s structural: those defending networks and those securing AI systems have long worked in separate spheres,” said Adrien Abecassis, policy initiatives director for the Paris Peace Forum. “That’s exactly why INTAiC is unique — it’s built to turn those fragments into one comparable reading of the threat, because this is a challenge no actor can meet alone.”

The network already lists a number of prominent businesses and organizations, including Microsoft, the Cyber Threat Alliance, the Cloud Security Alliance, Orange Cyberdefense and others.

According to the forum, INTAiC’s work will focus primarily on two, separate workstreams. One is a single and regularly updated resource for defenders to stay up to date on how AI is reshaping cyber threats. The resource is focused more on attacker capabilities, different forms of misuse and the impact on security operations rather than isolated incidents.

“The result is a common reference point, grounded in reality, that gives policymakers a clearer measure of the threat and identifies the risks most deserving of collective attention,” the Forum said in a release.

The second workstream will focus on evaluating and preventing cyber risks associated with AI, building up a base of independent third-party experts who can provide neutral or unbiased assessments of frontier model cyber capabilities. That work will pull in governments, research institutions and non-profits to develop new organizational and funding pathways to support that kind of research.

While the U.S. federal government has come a long way in recent years building up its own capacity to test and study AI cyber threats, much of the access and technical expertise around frontier model capabilities are concentrated within commercial AI companies. This has at times created concerns that federal agencies were being overly reliant on AI companies to explain how the technology worked and walk them through the possible threat scenarios.

As Anthropic and OpenAI have rolled out defensive cybersecurity programs like Project Glasswing and the Trusted Access for Cyber program, access to those models have become available to a wider group of researchers and organizations.

The Paris Peace Forum intends to brief the public further on INTAiC’s work and accomplishments in Paris later this year during the organization’s annual conference in November.

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This phishing kit looks more like BEC-as-a-service

Toolkits to wage phishing campaigns are a now-venerable instrument for cybercriminals, but researchers recently turned up details on something like a full-fledged “business email compromise-as-a-service” platform.

Cisco Talos said Wednesday that it had found an operator panel dubbed ARToken, which shares infrastructure and other things in common with, and as an affiliate to, the EvilTokens phishing-as-a-service operation built to bypass multi-factor authentication and compromise Microsoft 365 accounts. EvilTokens has reportedly seen a dramatic increase in its phishing attacks — by 1,380% early this year compared to the same period last year — with an assist from artificial intelligence integration.

ARToken is notable, though, for the capabilities that go beyond what’s been made public about EvilTokens so far by companies like Sekoia and Microsoft itself, such as inbox rule manipulation and shared access links.

“These features indicate the platform is more mature than a simple device code phishing kit — it is a complete BEC operations environment,” wrote Michael Kelley, security research engineer at Cisco Talos, in a blog post, referring to business email compromise scams that involve sending fake emails to solicit fraudulent payments.

Kelley told CyberScoop that “we’ve seen some offerings that touch on this capability, but this definitely seems more fleshed out and polished than previous instances.”

ARToken is also notable for its evasive capabilities, with a seven-layer anti-analysis system, the post states.

The research provides further details on what ARToken’s actual phishing lures look like in practice. They are targeted, rather than scattershot and opportunistic, as one lure the firm examined shows.

“The messages spoof an accounts-payable contact at a legitimate Wisconsin contractor, addressed to an accounts-payable recipient at a U.S. life sciences company — abusing a real vendor relationship rather than inventing a sender,” Kelley wrote. “The lure theme is an outstanding-invoice inquiry (‘the following invoices appear to still be outstanding… advise when this will be processed’), the kind of message accounts-payable staff are conditioned to act on.”

Kelley told CyberScoop that Cisco Talos doesn’t yet have a full sense of the breadth of the activity, nor who is making use of the capability.

“We’ve seen the public sector targeted but it’s unlikely to be the only one,” he said.

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In a first, a court takedown goes after two cybercrime tools at once

In a novel maneuver for a disruption operation against cyber attackers, industry and law enforcement teamed up to conduct a court takedown of two widely-used criminal tools at once rather than individually, Microsoft said Tuesday.

The takedown simultaneously went after Amadey, a botnet that can serve as a malware delivery system, and StealC, an infostealer. Cybercriminals often use them in conjunction and they rely on the same infrastructure, Microsoft said.

“When multiple parts of an operation are disrupted together, attacks are harder to launch, scale, and recover from,” said Steven Masada, assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. “The result: fewer disrupted services, fewer opportunities for cybercriminals to profit, and more friction when they try to rebuild. It’s no longer enough to go after threats one by one. We need to interrupt how the attacks are put together.”

Microsoft had been tracking Amadey with ESET, BitSight, Lumen and Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions. Meanwhile, Europol had been investigating StealC alongside law enforcement partners including Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office and the Dutch and Danish National Police as well as IBM X-Force and Proofpoint.

They then joined forces and turned to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, used to help authorities go after organized crime, to disrupt more than 200 command-and-control servers. Microsoft said it gained insights from its artificial intelligence product Copilot that “allowed the legal team to treat both malware families as part of a single criminal conspiracy.”

Microsoft regularly leads court-authorized disruption operations, but the industry and law enforcement partnerships combined with AI to expand data collection and identify connections beyond what one company could normally do, it said.

Amadey and StealC were linked to more than 140,000 infected computers around the globe in the first week of May alone, the company said. StealC has ranked among the top infostealers for years since its emergence in 2023 and sells in underground forums as a malware-as-a-service. It’s typically used by Russia-linked groups.

Amadey dates back to 2018, and is also commonly employed by Russian groups, including in attacks on Ukraine.

Their interaction shows the assembly line-like structure of modern cybercrime, Microsoft said. Even if the cybercriminals behind both tools never coordinate, their tools are designed to work together, it said.

“StealC is an infostealer that collects sensitive data from browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, messaging applications, email clients, and gaming platforms,” the company wrote in a separate blog post. “It is a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) offering that threat actors use to generate customized payloads and manage stolen data through a centralized web panel. Meanwhile, Amadey is a MaaS loader that threat actors use to deliver StealC and other malware. Modular, pay-as-you-go models like StealC and Amadey allow threat actors to use a single initial infection to quickly escalate into multiple other threats.”

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Russian national charged in connection with Void Blizzard espionage campaign

Federal prosecutors have charged a Russian national with conspiracy to commit unauthorized computer access in connection with a sprawling cyber-espionage campaign linked to the Russia-aligned threat group Void Blizzard, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court this week.

Denis Nikolayevich Obrezko, a Russian citizen, is accused of breaking into systems owned by companies in the United States and elsewhere, according to an FBI affidavit unsealed Tuesday. Investigators allege Obrezko facilitated the campaign by purchasing a virtual private server and domain names used in attacks targeting businesses, educational institutions, and other organizations.

The charges come roughly a year after Microsoft publicly identified Void Blizzard — which it also tracks as Laundry Bear — as a state-sponsored Russian threat group conducting large-scale espionage operations against government agencies, defense suppliers, and critical infrastructure providers across NATO member states, Ukraine, and beyond. Dutch intelligence and security services separately confirmed in May 2025 that the group had infiltrated the Netherlands’ national police force in September 2024, stealing work-related contact information on police staff.

The FBI affidavit describes a methodical but largely unsophisticated operation. Investigators say Void Blizzard primarily relied on stolen session tokens to authenticate to victim accounts without triggering re-authentication requirements, then used a U.S.-based commercial proxy service to mask the connection’s location. The group typically routed traffic through a VPN before selecting proxy IP addresses in the same region as a target, allowing it to bypass geographic firewall restrictions.

From June-July 2024, the FBI received tips from a foreign partner and a U.S.-based private-sector firm identifying several American companies being targeted by the emerging group. Investigators subsequently verified intrusions at 11 U.S. companies, a figure the affidavit describes as likely a fraction of the total victim count nationwide.

Void Blizzard’s methods, while not technically advanced, have proven broadly effective. Microsoft researchers noted in 2025 that the group’s success illustrates the sustained risk posed by even basic intrusion techniques when applied at scale. The group has been observed harvesting bulk email and files from compromised cloud environments, accessing Microsoft Teams conversations, and cataloging Microsoft Entra ID configurations to map organizational structures.

In April 2025, Microsoft identified a separate spear-phishing campaign attributed to Void Blizzard that targeted more than 20 non-governmental organizations in Europe and the United States, using typosquatted domains to spoof Microsoft authentication pages. The affidavit corroborates that activity, identifying domains such as miscrsosoft[.]com and micsrosoftonline[.]com registered through accounts connected to the same infrastructure used by the group.

Obrezko appeared in court Tuesday and agreed to be taken into custody while awaiting trial.

You can read the affidavit below.

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Microsoft breaks Patch Tuesday record with 206 vulnerabilities

Microsoft addressed a whopping 206 vulnerabilities lurking in its vast portfolio of business products and foundational systems in this month’s Patch Tuesday update, marking the vendor’s largest monthly batch of security patches on record, according to researchers.

The massive assortment of vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s latest defect dump accentuates an alarming trend across technology — fears and warnings about a roaring flood of error-riddled software have materialized. And the disease is spreading. 

“It is extraordinary that Microsoft can produce so many patches in a single month, but it does raise concerns,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

Researchers consistently highlight the role artificial intelligence is playing in discovering more vulnerabilities and aiding in the development of patches and testing. Childs isn’t alone in wondering if this is the new normal and how that will impact defenders’ strategies for patch prioritization and deployment. 

“Pandora’s proverbial box has been opened, and as more advanced AI models become available, we expect the norm to continue upward across the board, not just for Patch Tuesday,” Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in an email.

This vulnerability flood isn’t a one-off or rare event. Half of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates through the first half of this year contained a volume of defects well into the triple digits. 

“The current number of CVEs shipped by Microsoft this year exceeds the total number of CVEs shipped in all of 2018,” Childs wrote. 

Microsoft disclosed three vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-45586, CVE-2026-50507 and CVE-2026-49160 — that were publicly known at the time of release, but not yet exploited in the wild, according to the company. 

Yet, in an out-of-band update May 19, the vendor did disclose and release a patch for CVE-2026-41091, an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability affecting Microsoft Defender.

Microsoft disclosed one max-severity vulnerability — CVE-2026-48567, affecting Azure HorizonDB — and nine defects with critical CVSS ratings. The company designated 15 of the vulnerabilities it addressed this month as more likely to be exploited.

The full list of vulnerabilities addressed this month is available in Microsoft’s Security Response Center.

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Nightmare Eclipse incident shows the researcher-vendor fights may never fully go away

Microsoft reopened some wounds and has reignited debate over the past couple weeks about vulnerability disclosure and the sometimes adversarial dynamic it creates between security researchers and vendors. 

The latest controversy ensued when Microsoft threatened criminal legal action against a security researcher who publicly disclosed a series of zero-day vulnerabilities with proof-of-concept exploits. Microsoft insisted it received no details about the vulnerabilities prior to release, adding that the defects were not responsibly disclosed and put its customers at unnecessary risk.

The public dispute between Microsoft and the researcher known as “Nightmare Eclipse,” who couldn’t be identified or reached for comment, sparked dismay among some security professionals. Microsoft’s forceful response and the resulting backlash revived a friction point between vendors and researchers who find and report flaws in the software they sell.

“The fight is being argued as coordinated disclosure, but the grievance underneath is personal and specific in a way disclosure shouldn’t be, especially with a vendor that has been at it for so long,” Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO at Luta Security, told CyberScoop.

“Microsoft seemed to get emotional and shouldn’t have publicly said anything, but somehow felt justified in calling out a researcher and involved law enforcement in the same breath,” she said. “That puts them right back in the first stages of vulnerability disclosure grief: denial and anger.”

The former longtime Microsoft employee who ran outreach with the security community, created the company’s first bounty program and has given conference talks on the subject as far back as 2013, said the company doubled down on its lack of responsibility in the whole saga.

Microsoft declined to answer questions in the wake of the fallout.

Nightmare Eclipse hinted at a breakdown and impending battle with the vendor in a series of blog posts leading up to Microsoft’s missive about the vulnerabilities RedSun, UnDefend, BlueHammer, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma.

Attackers exploited three of the six vulnerabilities Nightmare Eclipse released before they were patched by Microsoft.

The researcher claimed Microsoft refused to communicate, didn’t pay or credit them for discovering and reporting some of the vulnerabilities, deleted the Microsoft Security Response Center account they used to disclose vulnerabilities and flagged their GitHub account for removal. 

“You are proving to everyone that you are actively escalating this conflict,” they wrote, before threatening Microsoft with a release in mid-July that “will make sure your bones are shattered that day.”

Vulnerability disclosure is a two-way street

The characteristics of proper vulnerability disclosure processes are nuanced and often framed in the eyes of the beholder.

Any successful dance between bug hunters and vendors comes down to meeting each other halfway, said Andrew Morris, founder and chief architect of GreyNoise. 

While vendors must fix software defects and prioritize security, Morris noted that irresponsible vulnerability disclosure harms both incident responders and potential victims. 

“Personally, I feel like this researcher is being extremely petty. It seems like they have an ax to grind,” he said.

“You’re not allowed to give somebody something and say it’s out of the kindness of your heart, and then be pissed when they don’t pay you for it.” 

But Morris also made clear that vendors bear responsibility for building trust with researchers.  

“If you actually care about being the first one to know about bugs in your software, not learning about it once harm has happened, or once somebody’s gotten popped, then you want to cultivate that trust with the security community,” Morris said. 

Microsoft said it recognizes that the relationship between security researchers and vendors is critical and, at times, fragile. 

“We deeply value the security community, and will continue to take your feedback seriously,” the company said in its post on X

Yet, the company remains steadfast in opposing the circumstances of Nightmare Eclipse’s disclosures, describing their actions as illegal, unjustifiable and irresponsible. 

“When an individual breaks the law and engages in malicious activity causing real harm to our customers, we will work with law enforcement as appropriate,” Microsoft said without naming the researcher by their moniker. “We continue to believe strongly in coordinated vulnerability disclosure as the foundation for protecting customers and improving our products. We know that, given the nature of this work, there will at times be misunderstandings. We remain committed to engaging in good faith and to providing a respectful and professional experience for all researchers, regardless of past interactions.”

The cost of pushback

Security researchers seek out defects for various reasons: bounty payouts, recognition, industry credibility, or simply the thrill of the hunt that comes with finding vulnerabilities and getting them fixed.

At its best, this process happens behind the scenes, with patches released and customers warned before exploitation occurs.

This collaborative approach has taken root and improved considerably, but there are still cases where researchers feel slighted. 

“The public has no idea what went on behind the scenes to judge why a researcher that previously coordinated finally had enough and decided to drop a zero-day [vulnerability],” Moussouris said. As such, she’s less inclined to criticize Nightmare Eclipse’s actions, adding that “they come off as someone who needs help.” 

Yet, trust breaks down between vulnerability researchers and vendors often. Earlier this week, security researcher Ammar Askar claimed his last interaction with Microsoft’s security team was so poor that he decided to publicly disclose any bugs he finds in VS Code going forward. He made good on that threat by dropping a vulnerability and exploit code for a defect that allows attackers to steal GitHub tokens. 

While actions like this can sabotage trust and drive a wedge between vendors and vulnerability researchers, recourse to a large extent is limited. Moussouris said most of the time, the legal and ethical boundaries are clear to those involved. Researchers can report bugs, withhold them, sell them, or publish them. “The one red line is crime: using a flaw to extort or attack people,” Moussouris said. 

“Threatening to publish on a set date is a threat to disclose, and disclosure is lawful. You can find the tone ugly. [Nightmare Eclipse] still broke no rule and violated no duty.” 

The timing couldn’t be worse 

Both sides are partly responsible for what happened, but Microsoft made things worse, Morris said. Threatening legal action and taking an aggressive approach have never worked. Building a good relationship between researchers and vendors requires open communication and trust. 

“I thought we were past this. It turns out that we are not,” he said. 

The Nightmare Eclipse incident comes at a fraught time in this space. Vendors and their customers are confronting a deluge of more vulnerabilities, and the rise of artificial intelligence models that discover them is exacerbating this challenge, leaving security experts alarmed about what’s coming.

The prospects for where vulnerabilities will be discovered and exploited next, and to what impact, are unknown and wildly unsettling. 

These signals imply that the classic, CVE-based system with responsibly disclosed processes is probably broken, Morris said. “There’s just so many CVEs. It’s like, is this even working anymore?”

For now and despite all its faults, coordinated vulnerability disclosure programs are widely viewed as the most sensible and scalable approach to this dilemma.

“Coordinated disclosure is what happens when a vendor gets lucky. Someone they did not hire hands them a real bug instead of using it or selling it. That puts the whole burden of keeping coordination alive on the vendor,” Moussouris said. “Silent patching with no CVE and calling out researchers who don’t follow your timeline for disclosure squanders the vendor’s luck.”  

She stressed the stakes: “I hope Microsoft and all vendors learn that coordinated vulnerability disclosure is a gift and a grace from the security researcher community to them, and public disclosure is still better than non-disclosure or crime.”

The alternatives to a deteriorating relationship could wreak havoc and leave every vendor and customer more susceptible to attack. 

“If vendors unlearn how to receive free intellectual property and labor from the security community in the form of vulnerability reports with gratitude, we’re headed for a world where nobody bothers to give vendors any heads up, or they move to a timed disclosure model that gives no grace,” Moussouris said.

She concluded with a direct message: “Product vendors wrote the vulnerable code, own the risk, and they owe it to their users to do everything in their power to reduce that risk.” That includes “keeping their grievances to themselves and learning from introspection on coordinated vulnerability disclosure gone wrong.”

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FBI warns about fast-growing phishing kit targeting Microsoft 365 users

The FBI is warning organizations and defenders about Kali365, a growing phishing-as-a-service platform that retrieves Microsoft 365 access tokens, issuing a public service announcement Thursday. 

The toolkit bypasses multi-factor authentication and abuses OAuth device code authorizations via phishing lures impersonating common enterprise services. This technique grants cybercriminal-controlled applications access to Microsoft 365 accounts, opening victims up to a host of follow-on malicious activity, including data theft, fraud, extortion and ransomware attacks.

Kali365 is one of many rapidly emerging device-code phishing tools, which are gaining popularity as a more effective means for cybercriminals to circumvent security controls while abusing legitimate Microsoft device authorization pages, according to researchers. 

Instead of gaining access to accounts via phishing kits that steal credentials and second-factor authentication codes, device-code phishing platforms connect a malicious app to a legitimate account with a single code. The process requires fewer steps and less interaction with the user, but victims do have to copy-and-paste a code generated by the Kali365 platform to grant access.

“We see quite a bit of this device-code phishing activity, but so much of it looks really similar. They’re all using the same types of lures, the same types of content, the same branding,” Selena Larson, senior threat researcher at Proofpoint, told CyberScoop. “It is very much AI generated, AI driven, and the threat actors, I think, are finding it pretty effective because we’re seeing this shift happen kind of all at once.”

Proofpoint researchers observed seven device-code phishing tools that looked nearly identical during a 10-day period last month.

Device-code phishing isn’t new, but platforms like Kali365 have integrated new techniques that differ from MFA phishing, and might be more effective as a result. “It’s something that people might not be used to. It’s a little bit sleeker,” Larson said.

This also partly explains why these cybercriminal tools are growing so quickly. Larson said Proofpoint observed an explosion in device-code phishing activity starting in February. 

By April, Kali365 was up and running and primarily distributed on Telegram, according to the FBI. “Kali365 lowers the barrier of entry, providing less-technical attackers access to AI-generated phishing lures, automated campaign templates, real-time targeted individual/entity tracking dashboards, and OAuth token capture capabilities,” the agency said in the public warning. 

Researchers at Arctic Wolf Labs, which has also been tracking large-scale campaigns linked to Kali365, said the platform charges affiliates $250 for 30 days of service or $2,000 for a full year.

Kali365 stores the OAuth access and refresh tokens it captures, and makes those available to affiliates on its platform. Those tokens can also be shared and reused by other cybercriminals who didn’t participate in the initial phishing lure, Arctic Wolf researchers added. 

The FBI also noted that these Microsoft 365 tokens provide persistent access, allowing attackers to wade through multiple Microsoft services without a password or additional MFA requests. 

“Identity can be very, very powerful once you’re in an organization,” Larson said, adding that attackers can abuse that access to impersonate people, access and steal data for extortion, commit fraud and deploy malware.

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Meet Rampart and Clarity, Microsoft’s new red team combo AI agents

On Wednesday, Microsoft released two new red teaming tools — Rampart and Clarity — meant to help developers design more secure agentic software and assist incident responders in the face of ongoing breaches.

Rampart is built on top of PyRIT, an existing open automation framework Microsoft developed for red teaming generative AI systems. But while PyRIT scans already-built systems for security flaws, Rampart is made to continuously test code for vulnerabilities during the development process, encoding both adversarial and benign testing scenarios into the software development pipeline to flag exploitable bugs and dependencies.

Microsoft said Rampart was built to focus on cross-prompt injection attacks, where “an agent retrieves or processes potentially poisoned content from documents, emails, tickets, and other data sources that manipulate behavior indirectly.” It also confirms fixes or exploits work as intended through multiple rounds of testing, as opposed to tools that perform “single shot validation.”

The second tool, Clarity, can be run as a desktop app, a web interface or directly embedded into a coding agent to provide real time security engineering guidance to developers at the outset of a project. It can categorize and track different business objectives related to the code and highlight downstream security implications along with more secure by design alternatives.

Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, who founded Microsoft’s AI red team in 2019, told CyberScoop that the company has seen internal security benefits from using the tools, but believesRampart and Clarity’s growth depends on contributions from other developers outside the Microsoft ecosystem.

In the fast-moving world of AI, where vibe coding, rogue AI agents and a steady churn of new model releases create fresh security implications nearly every week, Siva Kumar said it was important to begin building foundational, AI-centric security processes into the software development pipeline.

“When you hear a lot of talk about AI safety and security, it seems to be a lot of philosophical debates,” he said. “You’ll see frameworks, you’ll see white papers, and I think we’re really past that time, now. We really need to start thinking of AI safety as an engineering discipline and trying to bring security where the developers are.”

Rampart’s potential utility to defenders goes beyond just securing software development pipelines. It can also be used during an active incident response to speed up or automate red teaming for hot fixes, patching and remediation.

Microsoft has used Rampart when investigating reported vulnerabilities in their own products. Siva Kumar said the tool was able to help condense a week’s worth of manual work —  replicating the vulnerability, identifying different variants of the same bug, then patching and re-testing those variants to ensure they’re no longer exploitable — into hours.

Clarity, meanwhile, acts as a security adviser for software projects, prompting developers to consider potential risks in their design decisions and their downstream security consequences. With the rise of AI-generated code and agents, and execution becoming cheaper, this kind of proactive guidance is increasingly important.

“You’re going to be able to create apps, create MCP servers to pull things out from the internet,” said Siva Kumar. “The question is, ‘should you be doing it?’ And Clarity is a step in that direction. It is asking, ‘hey, should you be doing this in the first place?’”

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GitHub says internal repositories were impacted in poisoned VS Code extension attack

GitHub said late Tuesday that internal repositories were exfiltrated after an employee device was compromised through a poisoned Visual Studio Code extension, an incident that underscores the growing risks facing software development platforms and the ecosystems built around third-party developer tools.

The Microsoft-owned company said in posts on X that it detected and contained the compromise, removed the malicious extension version, isolated the affected endpoint and began an incident response investigation. The company’s current assessment is that the activity involved GitHub-internal repositories only.

GitHub also said a claim from TeamPCP, a hacking group behind attacks targeting software development packages, that 3,800 repositories were impacted was “directionally consistent” with its investigation so far. It said critical secrets were rotated Tuesday, with the highest-impact credentials prioritized first. The company said it continued to analyze logs, validate secret rotation and monitor for follow-on activity.

The company has not publicly named the extension involved or attributed the activity to a particular group. TeamPCP reportedly advertised the material for sale on a cybercrime forum and threatened to release it if no buyer emerged. 

Information surfaced Wednesday that the incident may be related to a separate issue with Nx Console, a Visual Studio Code tool that helps engineering teams organize large codebases, coordinate build pipelines and run tests efficiently. According to a security advisory posted on GitHub, one of the Nx Console maintainers was compromised in a prior security incident that leaked their GitHub credentials. An attack then used those credentials to push a malicious version of the extension to the VS Code Marketplace. Those credentials have since been temporarily revoked.

With millions of installs, Nx Console is a fixture of professional JavaScript development. It is exactly the kind of tool that sits deep inside a developer’s working environment, which would have direct access to source code, credentials and build systems.

NX CEO Jeff Cross posted on X Wednesday that his company has been working with Microsoft to determine the full scope of the incident.

“Initially, Microsoft indicated to us that there were 28 installs of the malicious version 18.95.0. Based on our own analytics for the compromised version, we currently believe the number of users who received the malicious package may be significantly higher; potentially over 6k installs,” the post reads.

“This is my top priority right now,” Cross continued. “Our team has been, and continues to be focused on understanding exactly what happened, helping affected users, hardening our systems and release processes, and being as transparent as possible throughout the investigation.”

The episode also follows a series of supply chain attacks involving npm, PyPI, Docker and other developer ecosystems. In those incidents, attackers have often targeted maintainers, packages or credentials rather than attacking end users directly. The multiple attacks show how fragile development environments have become as threat actors increasingly target them. A single compromised developer account, package, extension or build process can create access to many downstream systems.

GitHub has said it has no evidence that customer data stored outside the affected repositories was affected.

Visual Studio Code extensions are widely used by developers to add functions to Microsoft’s code editor, including support for programming languages, testing tools, cloud services and artificial intelligence assistants. Because these extensions often operate inside development environments, a malicious or compromised extension can be positioned close to source code, credentials and build systems.

“The thing people underestimate about VS Code extensions is that they have full access to everything on the developer’s machine,” Charlie Eriksen, a security researcher at Aikido Security, told CyberScoop. “EDR doesn’t cover this layer at all. What’s missing for most organisations is any kind of visibility into what’s actually running on developer machines and the ability to control it.”

Trojanized extensions have appeared in the VS Code Marketplace before. Security researchers have identified malicious extensions posing as legitimate development tools, including packages used to steal credentials, mine cryptocurrency or exfiltrate data. Some have accumulated large installation counts before removal, reflecting the difficulty of policing open plugin ecosystems at scale.

For GitHub, the breach comes amid broader scrutiny of the security of developer infrastructure. The platform sits at the center of software production for companies, governments, open-source maintainers and independent developers. Its internal systems and code are of obvious interest to attackers because GitHub’s services support code hosting, package distribution, automation and identity workflows across much of the software industry.

GitHub said it would publish a fuller report when the investigation is complete.

Update: May 20, 12:55 p.m.: This story has been updated with information about a related security incident with Nx Console.

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Microsoft disrupts cybercrime service that abused software verification systems en masse

Microsoft seized infrastructure and disrupted a cybercrime service that created and sold more than 1,000 code-signing certificates that other cybercriminals used to make malware-riddled software appear trusted and legitimate for follow-on cyberattacks, including ransomware, the company said Tuesday.

The financially-motivated threat group, which Microsoft tracks as Fox Tempest, provided the malware-signing-as-a-service to multiple ransomware groups, including Rhysida, Vanilla Tempest, Storm-0501, Storm-2561 and Storm-0249 for at least a year before Microsoft was granted a court order to dismantle the operation

Fox Tempest, which Microsoft has been tracking since September 2025, abused Microsoft’s Artifact Signing system by fabricating identities and impersonating legitimate organizations to access the code-signing services of Microsoft, Steven Masada, assistant general counsel at Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, said during a media briefing Monday.  

Cybercriminals paid Fox Tempest up to $9,500 to get their malicious code signed, allowing them to slip software through defenses and bypass controls designed to confirm programs are authentic and linked to a trusted source. 

“This isn’t the obvious knockoff you might find on a street corner. It’s more like a counterfeit product that’s so precise that even the experts have trouble distinguishing it from the real thing,” Masada said. “It acts as a fake ID that lets cybercriminals get into systems by walking right through the front door.”

While attackers and defenders have historically focused on the entry points of attacks, Fox Tempest’s operation exemplifies a broader move upstream to how attacks are built in the first place, he added. 

“It’s no longer just about tricking users to click on a link, it’s about exploiting the very systems that we rely on to decide what is and what isn’t safe,” Masada said. 

Cybercriminals have been reselling code-signing certificates for a least a decade, but Fox Tempest’s operation was unique in providing a massively scalable service for extortion, phishing, SEO poisoning or malware-laced advertising, said Maurice Mason, who led the investigation into Fox Tempest as principal cybercrime investigator at Microsoft’s DCU. 

Mason said ransomware operators and other threat groups primarily deployed these fraudulent certificates in ads or SEO poisoning, which brought their malicious software and infostealers to the top of search rankings, ensnaring unsuspecting victims who thought they were downloading and running legitimate applications. 

Fox Tempest’s operation, which included an authenticated portal and a drag-and-drop feature that allowed customers to get their code signed, was directly linked to the deployment of dozens of malware families, including Oyster, Lumma Stealer, MuddyWater and Vidar, he added. 

Microsoft said the threat group is also linked to ransomware affiliates for INC, Qilin, Akira and others. The operation had a global impact, resulting in attacks on the healthcare, education, government and financial services sectors, and most heavily targeted organizations and people in the United States, France, India and China.

“Why wouldn’t you pay those thousands of dollars if you’re a threat actor and you’re getting it back in extortion and ransomware worth millions? This is like chump change to you,” Mason said. 

Microsoft said it evicted or deleted more than 1,000 accounts and subscriptions Fox Tempest used to provide its services. The company also seized the threat group’s website, took hundreds of virtual machines offline and blocked access to a site hosting the underlying code. 

“This disruption likely is going to raise the cost for attackers, and we’re hoping that they move off of using these services,” Mason said. “Obviously it’s just a disruption and there’s other things that they’ll probably move to, or someone might try to do this a different way next time.”

Fox Tempest is an example of the fully developed cybercrime economy defenders confront now, Masada said. 

“In many cases, an actor no longer needs to build an attack from scratch. They can simply assemble one by purchasing its components — a phish kit from one vendor, malware from another, infrastructure and optimization tools from yet others, and so on,” he said. 

“As we focus more of our recent disruptions on marketplaces and service providers, we’re getting a much clearer picture of how the economy actually functions, and what’s emerging is a stratified ecosystem,” Masada added. 

“At one end, you have commoditized tools that are mass produced and built for scale, things like turnkey phishing kits or credential harvesting services,” he said. “But above that, we’re seeing a more sophisticated tier of operators, highly specialized services focused on evasion, durability, and optimization. These are not just enabling attacks, they’re engineering them to succeed against modern defenses.”

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Microsoft addresses 137 vulnerabilities in May’s Patch Tuesday, including 13 rated critical

Microsoft addressed another triple-digit batch of vulnerabilities cutting across its various enterprise products, components and underlying systems. Yet despite the high number of defects, the vendor reported no actively exploited zero-days in this month’s Patch Tuesday update.

Thirteen of the 137 vulnerabilities Microsoft disclosed were assigned critical CVSS ratings, including a pair of vulnerabilities affecting Azure — CVE-2026-33109 and CVE-2026-42823 — and CVE-2026-42898 in Microsoft Dynamics 365 with 9.9 CVSS scores. 

The company designated 13 vulnerabilities as more likely to be exploited, and 113 defects as less likely or unlikely to be exploited.

The high volume of vulnerabilities reflects a growing trend researchers have been anticipating as artificial intelligence models are deployed to find previously uncovered defects in code. 

While not all of these bugs were found by AI, it’s likely they had an AI-related component — even if it was just AI writing the submission,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

Childs was especially intrigued by CVE-2026-41096, which he described as a “nasty-looking bug” in Microsoft Windows DNS that allows unauthorized attackers to run code remotely. 

“No authentication or user interaction needed, and since the DNS Client runs on virtually every Windows machine, the attack surface is enormous. An attacker with a position to influence DNS responses could achieve unauthenticated remote-code execution across your enterprise,” he added. 

Childs also described CVE-2026-41089, a Windows Netlogon defect that allows unauthenticated remote attackers to run code, as the “highest-impact bug that requires immediate patching,” adding that a “compromised domain controller is a compromised domain.”

Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, called out CVE-2026-42898, the critical vulnerability affecting Microsoft Dynamics 365. 

“With no user interaction required, and the potential to impact systems beyond the vulnerable component’s original security scope, this vulnerability poses serious enterprise risk: an attacker with only basic access could turn a business application server into a remote execution platform,” he said in a blog post.

“Compromise of Dynamics 365 infrastructure can expose customer records, operational workflows, financial information, and integrated business systems. Since CRM environments often connect with identity services, databases, and enterprise applications, successful exploitation could lead to broader organizational compromise and operational disruption,” Bicer added.

The full list of vulnerabilities addressed this month is available in Microsoft’s Security Response Center.

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