Microsoft today released software updates to plug nearly 200 security holes across its Windows operating systems and supported software, a record number of fixes for the company’s monthly Patch Tuesday cycle. Nearly three dozen of those bugs earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, and exploit code for at least three of the weaknesses is now publicly available.

The software giant said in a blog post last month that both its engineers and the security community are increasing using artificial intelligence tools to find bugs, meaning this month’s heavy Patch Tuesday may start to become the norm, said Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable.

“Some surveys put AI usage among security professionals generally at 90%, so it’s unsurprising that this volume of patches may be the norm,” Narang said. “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.”

June’s zero-day bugs include CVE-2026-49160, a denial of service vulnerability affecting a range of web servers, including Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). Microsoft says the flaw was reported by OpenAI’s Codex.

Two of the zero-days addressed this month appear to stem from recent vulnerability disclosures by Nightmare Eclipse, the nickname chosen by a security researcher who has been dropping exploits for various Windows flaws. One of those, dubbed “GreenPlasma,” leverages an elevation of privilege weakness in the Windows Collaborative Translation Framework, the same framework patched today in CVE-2026-45586.

Nightmare Eclipse also last month released “YellowKey,” an exploit for a Windows BitLocker vulnerability that allows an attacker with physical access to view encrypted data, and CVE-2026-50507 is a patch for an elevation of privilege bug in BitLocker.

Microsoft received heavy blowback on social media last month after it said in a blog post that it was considering taking legal action against the security researcher. The company later clarified on Twitter/X that while it has no intention of pursuing legal actions against researchers, it would report them to authorities if they break the law. The advisories for CVE-2026-49160 and CVE-2026-50507 do not credit any researchers in the acknowledgement section, saying only that “Microsoft recognizes the efforts of those in the security community who help us protect customers through coordinated vulnerability disclosure.”

Nightmare Eclipse claims to be a former employee of Microsoft, although Microsoft has not responded to questions about this claim. Rapid7 notes that a recent blog post by Nightmare Eclipse included an image of Albert Wesker, a character from the Resident Evil video game series who formerly worked as a researcher for a technology company before going rogue.

Nightmare Eclipse has pledged to release even more zero-day exploits for Windows in what they called a “bone shattering” drop planned for July 14 (the same day as next month’s Patch Tuesday). Immediately following the release of Microsoft patches today, the researcher published an exploit for what they claimed was a zero-day bug in Windows Defender.

While 200 vulnerabilities may be a record for Patch Tuesday, the actual number of security flaws Microsoft addressed this month is far higher, said Rapid7’s Adam Barnett.

“So far this month, Microsoft has provided patches to address 360 browser vulnerabilities, which is an order of magnitude more than has been typical in any given month over the past few years,” Barnett wrote. “As usual, browser [flaws] are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. Indeed, the vast, and presumably sustained, uptick in the number of browser vulnerabilities has led to Microsoft no longer enumerating Chromium CVEs in the Security Update Guide.”

Microsoft also patched a zero-day vulnerability in Visual Studio Code that allows attackers to steal GitHub tokens with a single click. The company was forced to push a stopgap fix for the flaw on June 3, after a researcher published instructions showing how to exploit it. The researcher said they opted not to work with Microsoft because of a recent experience wherein Redmond silently patched a flaw they reported without offering credit or recognition.

Microsoft battled its own internal zero-day emergencies last week, after at least 72 of the company’s public code repositories were infected with a variant of the Shai-Hulud worm. Researchers found that all of the affected packages were connected to Microsoft official Azure Durable Task SDK, which got hit by the same Shai-Hulud worm in May.

Other major software makers are also shipping outsized update bundles this month. Adobe has released updates to fix a massive number of critical vulnerabilities across a range of products, including Adobe Experience Manager, Acrobat Reader and Cold Fusion. On June 3, Google resolved a whopping 429 vulnerabilities in its latest Chrome browser update (Chrome automatically downloads updates but installing them usually requires a complete restart of the browser).

As ever, please consider backing up your data before applying operating system updates, and drop a note in the comments if you run into any problems with this month’s patches.

Further reading:

Microsoft’s Security Update Guide

Action1’s Patch Tuesday breakdown

SANS Internet Storm Center notes on Patch Tuesday

Researchers and threat hunters are scrambling to respond to an actively exploited authentication-bypass vulnerability affecting Palo Alto Networks customers’ firewalls. 

The company initially tagged CVE-2026-0257 with a medium-severity rating when it disclosed the defect May 13, but quickly reassessed it as critical after Rapid7 observed and confirmed active exploitation in the wild. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency followed suit, and added the vulnerability to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Friday.

The escalated threat posed by the defect, which allows remote attackers to bypass security restrictions and establish a VPN connection to an affected firewall, showcases how quickly a seemingly mild vulnerability can turn into an urgent warning. 

“Palo Alto Networks is actively monitoring limited exploitation attempts targeting CVE-2026-0257 on unpatched PAN-OS devices where mitigations have not been applied,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. The company on Friday urged all customers to immediately apply the patch or follow its recommended steps for mitigation. 

The vendor and Rapid7, which first observed exploitation May 17 in a customer environment, declined to say how many organizations are impacted thus far. Yet, Douglas McKee, director of vulnerability intelligence at Rapid7, warned: “We’ve continued to see new victims roll in, including a couple of customers hit within just an hour of each other during a second wave of activity” on May 21. 

Jake Knott, security researcher at watchTowr, told CyberScoop the vulnerability and resulting exploits follows a recurring trend wherein attackers target exposed network edge devices and rapidly identify, develop and weaponize exploits for initial access. 

“This is yet another authentication bypass on a device whose sole job is to guard the front door to an organization’s network,” he said. “What stands out is how simple it is — an attacker can forge a valid authentication cookie using nothing more than the appliance’s publicly available TLS certificate. The entire exploit is a single HTTP request.”

The vulnerability has a few requisites that limit exposure, specifically posing risk to some Palo Alto Networks customers running GlobalProtect portal or gateway configured to enable authentication override cookies. 

“The cookie encryption and decryption certificate must be reused with another feature, which potentially exposes the public key for that certificate,” said Caitlin Condon, vice president of security research at VulnCheck.

“It’s difficult to say how many deployments meet those criteria for exploitability, but Palo Alto Networks firewalls have a very large footprint, which means even uncommon configurations can present significant attack surface area,” she added.

Rapid7 said the same attacker or group is likely responsible for both waves of exploitation last month, but in many cases attackers are not establishing a full VPN connection or moving to other parts of the impacted network. 

The attackers are “highly opportunistic and clearly monitor the security research community,” McKee said. “Attackers are purposefully weaponizing medium-severity vulnerabilities, which are typically lower priority or blind spots for organizations.”

Multiple threat clusters are swarming to the opportunity and quickly adapting to published research.  Researchers have not attributed the malicious activity to any specific threat groups. 

“Their exact origins and long-term objectives remain unclear, as they currently seem focused purely on opportunistic initial access rather than targeted, long-term espionage,” McKee said. 

Palo Alto Networks said it discovered the vulnerability internally through its use of frontier AI tools. Yet, within days of its public disclosure, initial assessments were proven inadequate.

“This is a pattern we continue to see — the urgency only arrives after exploitation is underway,” Knott said. “Organizations that wait for confirmation of active exploitation before patching will consistently find themselves reacting too late.”

The post Attackers are exploiting Palo Alto Networks defect that initially flew under the radar appeared first on CyberScoop.

Attackers returned once again to a common target with a massive user base by exploiting a max-severity zero-day vulnerability affecting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller and Manager.

The threat group behind the “limited” number of attacks Cisco is aware of thus far are also linked to a series of previously disclosed vulnerabilities in the vendor’s firewalls and SD-WAN systems, the company said in a threat advisory Thursday.

The authentication bypass vulnerability — CVE-2026-20182 — has a CVSS rating of 10 and “behaves like a master key,” Douglas McKee, director of vulnerability intelligence at Rapid7, wrote in a blog post. 

“An attacker can present themselves to the controller as a trusted network router and, if the system accepts that claim without properly validating it, they can obtain the highest level of administrative access,” he added. “That is the cybersecurity version of a Jedi mind trick.”

Rapid7 discovered and reported the vulnerability to Cisco on March 9, and Cisco said it became aware of limited exploitation of the vulnerability earlier this month. The vendor disclosed and released a patch for the vulnerability Thursday, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency quickly added the defect to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog.

Cisco did not explain what occurred during that two-month window. Yet, the disclosure and warning from researchers marks another challenge for Cisco customers that have confronted a flood of actively exploited vulnerabilities affecting the vendor’s network edge software since late February. 

Cisco isn’t the only security vendor facing an onslaught of attacks on its customers, but it is among the most heavily targeted. CISA has added seven vulnerabilities affecting Cisco SD-WANs and firewalls to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog in less than three months.

Cisco Talos researchers attributed the latest round of zero-day attacks to UAT-8616, the same attackers that exploited a pair of separate zero-days in Cisco’s network edge software for at least three years before the activity was discovered and reported in February. 

The company, which described the exploitation of the new zero-day as ongoing, once again declined to answer questions about the origins or motivations of UAT-8616. 

“We strongly recommend customers apply the available fixed software releases and follow the guidance provided in the advisories and Cisco Talos blog,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement.

Cisco Talos researchers also warned that UAT-8616 and at least 10 other threat groups have chained together and achieved “widespread in-the-wild active exploitation of three vulnerabilities in unpatched Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Infrastructure.” The company previously disclosed and released patches for the vulnerabilities — including CVE-2026-20122, CVE-2026-20128 and CVE-2026-20133 — in February. 

Rapid7 said it discovered the latest critical authentication bypass vulnerability when it was researching CVE-2026-20127, a previous zero-day the Five Eyes identified and confirmed as actively exploited by UAT-8616 in late 2025. Authorities and Cisco waited at least two months to disclose and patch the vulnerability, and share emergency mitigation guidance.

That campaign, which got underway at least three years prior, marked the second series of actively exploited zero-days in Cisco edge technology in less than a year. Both campaigns prompted CISA to issue emergency directives months after the attacks were first detected, and both attack sprees were underway for at least a year before they were discovered. 

The latest zero-day, which bypasses authentication in the same control-plane service as CVE-2026-20127,  requires no credentials or prior knowledge of the target environment for exploitation, Jonah Burgess, senior security researcher at Rapid7, told CyberScoop.

“Cisco confirmed it affects all deployment types, including on-premises, cloud, and FedRAMP environments. The SD-WAN Controller manages routing and policy for the entire overlay network, so a single compromised controller can potentially give an attacker influence over every branch, data center, and cloud edge connected to that fabric,” Burgess added.

His colleague at Rapid7, McKee, said attackers have become very good at turning weaknesses in central network infrastructure into high-impact operations. 

“Compromising one branch router is useful. Compromising the controller that manages the entire estate is a very different conversation. Now you are talking about the ability to reroute traffic, intercept communications, push malicious configuration, or simply break connectivity across the whole organization,” he wrote.

“That is the real paradox here,” McKee added. “The same architecture that gives defenders scale and simplicity can also give attackers a single point of catastrophic leverage.”

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Artificial intelligence platforms may be just as susceptible to social engineering as human beings, but they are proving remarkably good at finding security vulnerabilities in human-made computer code. That reality is on full display this month with some of the more widely-used software makers — including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Oracle — fixing near record volumes of security bugs, and/or quickening the tempo of their patch releases.

As it does on the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft today released software updates to address at least 118 security vulnerabilities in its various Windows operating systems and other products. Remarkably, this is the first Patch Tuesday in nearly two years that Microsoft is not shipping any fixes to deal with emergency zero-day flaws that are already being exploited. Nor have any of the flaws fixed today been previously disclosed (potentially giving attackers a heads up in how to exploit the weakness).

Sixteen of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, meaning malware or miscreants could abuse these bugs to seize remote control over a vulnerable Windows device with little or no help from the user. Rapid7 has done much of the heavy lifting in identifying some of the more concerning critical weaknesses this month, including:

• CVE-2026-41089: A critical stack-based buffer overflow in Windows Netlogon that offers an attacker SYSTEM privileges on the domain controller. No privileges or user interaction are required, and attack complexity is low. Patches are available for all versions of Windows Server from 2012 onwards.
• CVE-2026-41096: A critical RCE in the Windows DNS client implementation worthy of attention despite Microsoft assessing exploitation as less likely.
• CVE-2026-41103: A critical elevation of privilege vulnerability that allows an unauthorized attacker to impersonate an existing user by presenting forged credentials, thus bypassing Entra ID. Microsoft expects that exploitation is more likely.

May’s Patch Tuesday is a welcome respite from April, which saw Microsoft fix a near-record 167 security flaws. Microsoft was among a few dozen tech giants given access to a “Project Glasswing,” a much-hyped AI capability developed by Anthropic that appears quite effective at unearthing security vulnerabilities in code.

Apple, another early participant in Project Glasswing, typically fixes an average of 20 vulnerabilities each time it ships a security update for iOS devices, said Chris Goettl, vice president of product management at Ivanti. On May 11, Apple shipped updates to address at least 52 vulnerabilities and backported the changes all the way to iPhone 6s and iOS 15.

Last month, Mozilla released Firefox 150, which resolved a whopping 271 vulnerabilities that were reportedly discovered during the Glasswing evaluation.

“Since Firefox 150.0.0 released, they have been on a more aggressive weekly cadence for security updates including the release of Firefox 150.0.3 on May Patch Tuesday resolving between three to five CVEs in each release,” Goettl said.

The software giant Oracle likewise recently increased its patch pace in response to their work with Glasswing. In its most recent quarterly patch update, Oracle addressed at least 450 flaws, including more than 300 fixes for remotely exploitable, unauthenticated flaws. But at the end of April, Oracle announced it was switching to a monthly update cycle for critical security issues.

On May 8, Google started rolling out updates to its Chrome browser that fixed an astonishing 127 security flaws (up from just 30 the previous month). Chrome automagically downloads available security updates, but installing them requires fully restarting the browser.

If you encounter any weirdness applying the updates from Microsoft or any other vendor mentioned here, feel free to sound off in the comments below. Meantime, if you haven’t backed up your data and/or drive lately, doing that before updating is generally sound advice. For a more granular look at the Microsoft updates released today, checkout this inventory by the SANS Internet Storm Center.

Attackers are actively exploiting a Linux vulnerability in the wild, and researchers warn that the fallout could be broad — anyone with authenticated local access can leverage it to gain total control of a system. 

But the story behind CVE-2026-31431 is almost as interesting as the bug itself. Theori, the company that discovered the bug, leaned heavily on AI to find and initially disclose it. The result is a case study that  underscores the challenges that occur when the relentless hunt for defects collides with marketing impulses and inflated AI-generated language that was long on bluster but lacked technical details. 

Theori dubbed the high-severity vulnerability “Copy Fail” with a vanity domain containing AI-generated content, and warned that every mainstream Linux kernel built since 2017 is in scope of potential exploitation resulting in root access. 

Theori’s AI-powered penetration testing platform, Xint, discovered the local privilege-escalation flaw in a Linux kernel module and reported it to the Linux kernel security team March 23. Major Linux distributions affected by the vulnerability had issued patches prior to Theori’s disclosure, which it published alongside a proof-of-concept exploit. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added CVE-2026-31431 to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Friday.

Researchers have yet to determine how many organizations have been impacted by the flaw, but they noted that critical requirements for exploitation, specifically local access achieved through a separate exploit or pathway to unauthorized access, should limit potential exposure.

“The attacker would need to have already established a foothold on the target system either through some means of legitimate access or another exploit,” Spencer McIntyre, secure researcher at Rapid7, told CyberScoop. “That’s a large limiting factor since this vulnerability would therefore need to be paired with another.”

Theori’s disclosure turned heads among other vulnerability researchers who noted the defect’s broad potential impact, but also for lacking details about the proof-of-concept exploit. 

“The exploit is real, there is something to worry about, but understandably, teams now have to do additional validation to know how to parse the extreme AI FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) from [Theori’s] blog post,” Caitlin Condon, vice president of security research at VulnCheck, told CyberScoop. 

“It’s not helpful that the blog is AI slop, because it detracts from technical reality,” she added. 

Theori acknowledges it used AI to discover and describe the vulnerability, explaining that it’s focusing on finding and fixing a large amount of defects. 

“We used AI to help craft the disclosure site and the blog post to help speed things up, but all material was thoroughly reviewed by our internal teams for accuracy,” said Tim Becker, senior security researcher at Theori. 

Theori is intentionally withholding additional details until the patch is broadly applied, he added.

“We stand by our technical description of the vulnerability. Helping downstream users to understand the impact of a security bug has always been a challenge for security researchers,” Becker said. “Copy Fail allows for trivial privilege escalation on most desktop and server Linux distributions. It also has implications for containerization including Kubernetes.”

Other researchers have drawn similar conclusions, noting that exploitation can be automated and doesn’t require specialization. 

Meanwhile, hundreds of additional proof-of-concept exploits have surfaced since the vulnerability was disclosed five days ago. “As expected, the majority of these appear to be copycat AI PoCs that do nothing but add banners or different colors to the command-line interface. Many new PoCs are simply ports of the original AI PoC to a different programming language,” Condon said. 

“Organizations should exercise caution when running untested research artifacts, including AI-generated exploit code that isn’t fully explained,” she added. 

Becker said Theori is aware of the burden defenders confront, and insists the company’s reports contain enough information for organizations to quickly triage and validate its findings.

The post ‘Copy Fail’ is a real Linux security crisis wrapped in AI slop appeared first on CyberScoop.

A severe authentication bypass vulnerability in cPanel, one of the most widely deployed web hosting control panel platforms on the internet, is being actively exploited in the wild, according to security researchers and hosting providers.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, affects all supported versions of cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) released after version 11.40, as well as WP Squared, a WordPress hosting management panel built on the cPanel platform. Internet scans conducted by security firm Rapid7 using the Shodan search engine identified approximately 1.5 million cPanel instances exposed online, though the precise number of vulnerable systems remains unknown.

cPanel released a patch Tuesday. By that point, exploitation had already been underway. KnownHost, a hosting provider that relies on cPanel, said earlier this week that successful exploits had been observed in the wild prior to any fix being made available. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the CVE to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list Thursday. 

Cybersecurity firm watchTowr provided technical details in a blog posted Wednesday: The flaw stems from improper handling of user input during the login process. When a user attempts to log in, cPanel writes data from the request into a server-side session file before verifying the user’s identity. An attacker can exploit this by embedding hidden line breaks into the password field of a login request — characters cPanel fails to strip out — allowing arbitrary data to be injected directly into that file.

Through a secondary step, also involving a deliberately malformed request, the injected data gets promoted into the session’s active cache, where cPanel reads it as legitimate. Once that happens, the system sees the session as already authenticated and skips password verification entirely, granting access without ever checking the user’s actual credentials.

cPanel has published a detection script designed to scan session files for indicators of compromise, including sessions that contain injected authentication timestamps, pre-authentication sessions with authenticated attributes, and password fields containing embedded newlines. WatchTowr separately released a “Detection Artifact Generator” that administrators can use to verify whether their instances remain vulnerable.

Namecheap, a major domain registrar and hosting provider, took the step of temporarily blocking connections to cPanel and WHM ports 2083 and 2087 ahead of patch availability, citing the need to protect customers while an official fix was pending. The company began applying the patch after cPanel’s release earlier this week.

cPanel’s patched releases address the issue across seven version branches, from 11.110.0 through 11.136.0, as well as WP Squared version 11.136.1. The company’s advisory notes that the fix ensures potentially dangerous input is scrubbed automatically within the core session-saving process, rather than depending on each individual part of the codebase to do so separately. The patch also adds handling for cases where a per-session encryption key is missing, a condition the original code failed to account for and that attackers were able to exploit to bypass password encoding entirely.

The CVE has been given a 9.8 on the CVSS scale. 

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Cisco customers have confronted a flood of actively exploited vulnerabilities affecting the vendor’s network edge software since late February, and researchers say that five of the nine vulnerabilities Cisco disclosed in its firewalls and SD-WAN systems over the past three weeks have already been exploited in the wild. 

Attackers exploited a pair of these defects — zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco SD-WANs — for at least three years before the vendor and authorities discovered and issued warnings about the threat. Cisco disclosed an additional five SD-WAN vulnerabilities that same day, and three of those defects have since been confirmed actively exploited as well.

Weaknesses lurking in Cisco security products don’t end there. Amazon Threat Intelligence on Wednesday said one of the two max-severity defects Cisco reported in its firewall management software earlier this month has been actively exploited by Interlock ransomware since Jan. 26, more than a month before those vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed.

Some organizations, officials and members of the security community at large have missed widening risks as more of the defects come under attack. The flurry of Cisco SD-WAN and firewall vulnerabilities includes defects with low CVSS ratings, zero-days and others that were determined actively exploited after disclosure.

“These are not random bugs in low-value software. These are management-plane and control-plane weaknesses in devices at the network edge, which often function as trust anchors in enterprise environments,” Douglas McKee, director of vulnerability intelligence at Rapid7, told CyberScoop.

“If you compromise SD-WAN or firewall management, you’re landing on policy, visibility, routing, segmentation, and, in many cases, administrative trust over a large swath of the environment,” he added. “Attackers know that and, when they find a pre-auth path into those systems, especially one that can be chained to root, that’s about as attractive as it gets.”

The full slate of recently disclosed Cisco vulnerabilities affecting these systems include:

• SD-WAN vulnerabilities: CVE-2026-20127, CVE-2022-20775, CVE-2026-20122, CVE-2026-20126, CVE-2026-20128, CVE-2026-20129 and CVE-2026-20133
• Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center software vulnerabilities: CVE-2026-20079 and CVE-2026-20131

Researchers from multiple firms and Cisco have observed or been notified of active exploitation of CVE-2026-20127, CVE-2022-20775, CVE-2026-20122, CVE-2026-20128 and CVE-2026-20131.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has only added two of the defects — CVE-2022-20775 and CVE-2026-20127 — to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog thus far. The agency, which last week added new hunting and reporting requirements to an emergency directive it issued for the defects in late February, did not answer questions about the updated order or explain why other actively exploited Cisco vulnerabilities haven’t been added to the catalog. The agency has been operating under a funding shutdown since February.

Interlock ransomware hits Cisco firewalls

The ongoing ransomware campaign Amazon Threat Intelligence spotted involving CVE-2026-20131 confirmed “Interlock had a zero-day in their hands, giving them a week’s head start to compromise organizations before defenders even knew to look,” researchers said Wednesday.

Interlock’s observed attack path and operations are extensive, including post-compromise reconnaissance scripts, custom remote access trojans, a webshell and legitimate tool abuse. Amazon did not identify specific victims, and said the group threatens organizations with data encryption, regulatory fines and compliance valuations.

“Interlock has historically targeted specific sectors where operational disruption creates maximum pressure for payment,” Amazon Threat Intelligence researchers said in the blog post. These sectors include education, engineering, architecture, construction, manufacturing, industrial, health care and government entities. 

4 Cisco SD-WAN defects under attack

The swarm of vulnerabilities in Cisco SD-WANs poses additional risk for customers. Cisco Talos previously attributed long-running attacks involving CVE-2026-20127 and CVE-2022-20775 to UAT-8616, but it’s unclear if the same threat group is responsible for all of the Cisco SD-WAN exploits. 

“Other threat groups are likely to pick up public research in order to weaponize or adapt it opportunistically, so we may see follow-on attempts by additional threat actors, including low-skilled attackers,” Caitlin Condon, vice president of security research at VulnCheck, told CyberScoop.

Researchers said vulnerabilities are often disclosed in clusters after a meaningful defect is identified in a specific product, such as Cisco’s SD-WAN systems.

Cisco declined to answer questions and said customers can find the latest information on its security advisories page.

Condon and McKee both noted that Cisco has been responsive in releasing software fixes, threat-hunting intelligence and, in the case of the SD-WAN zero-days, coordinated government guidance. 

“This is what a good crisis response is supposed to look like once exploitation is identified,” McKee said. 

“The harder question is whether the industry is getting early-enough visibility into the defects in edge-management software that sophisticated actors are clearly prioritizing,” he added. “Are our organizations equipped with the right people and tools to perform this level of exposure management?”

The expanding exploits Cisco customers are combating on firewalls and SD-WANs is a reminder that organizations shouldn’t deprioritize less notorious vulnerabilities or those with lower CVSS scores, Condon said. 

“Several of the exploited vulnerabilities in this tranche of Cisco SD-WAN bugs don’t have critical CVSS scores, meaning teams using CVSS as a prioritization mechanism might miss medium- or high-scored flaws that still have real-world adversary utility,” she added.

The attacks also collectively reflect a persistent pattern of attackers targeting network edge systems from multiple vendors, including Cisco.

“Attackers continue to treat network edge and management infrastructure as prime real estate, and when defenders see pre-authentication, management-plane flaws with evidence of pre-disclosure exploitation, they need to assume compromise, not just exposure,” McKee said. 

“Attackers are investing time and capability into finding and operationalizing previously unknown defects in Cisco edge and management infrastructure because the payoff is enormous,” he added. “These platforms give you a privileged position, broad visibility, and a path to durable access inside high-value organizations. That’s exactly why they keep getting hit.”

The post Cisco’s latest vulnerability spree has a more troubling pattern underneath appeared first on CyberScoop.

AI-based assistants or “agents” — autonomous programs that have access to the user’s computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task — are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey.

The new hotness in AI-based assistants — OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and Moltbot) — has seen rapid adoption since its release in November 2025. OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on your computer and proactively take actions on your behalf without needing to be prompted.

If that sounds like a risky proposition or a dare, consider that OpenClaw is most useful when it has complete access to your digital life, where it can then manage your inbox and calendar, execute programs and tools, browse the Internet for information, and integrate with chat apps like Discord, Signal, Teams or WhatsApp.

Other more established AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot also can do these things, but OpenClaw isn’t just a passive digital butler waiting for commands. Rather, it’s designed to take the initiative on your behalf based on what it knows about your life and its understanding of what you want done.

“The testimonials are remarkable,” the AI security firm Snyk observed. “Developers building websites from their phones while putting babies to sleep; users running entire companies through a lobster-themed AI; engineers who’ve set up autonomous code loops that fix tests, capture errors through webhooks, and open pull requests, all while they’re away from their desks.”

You can probably already see how this experimental technology could go sideways in a hurry. In late February, Summer Yue, the director of safety and alignment at Meta’s “superintelligence” lab, recounted on Twitter/X how she was fiddling with OpenClaw when the AI assistant suddenly began mass-deleting messages in her email inbox. The thread included screenshots of Yue frantically pleading with the preoccupied bot via instant message and ordering it to stop.

“Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” Yue said. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”

There’s nothing wrong with feeling a little schadenfreude at Yue’s encounter with OpenClaw, which fits Meta’s “move fast and break things” model but hardly inspires confidence in the road ahead. However, the risk that poorly-secured AI assistants pose to organizations is no laughing matter, as recent research shows many users are exposing to the Internet the web-based administrative interface for their OpenClaw installations.

Jamieson O’Reilly is a professional penetration tester and founder of the security firm DVULN. In a recent story posted to Twitter/X, O’Reilly warned that exposing a misconfigured OpenClaw web interface to the Internet allows external parties to read the bot’s complete configuration file, including every credential the agent uses — from API keys and bot tokens to OAuth secrets and signing keys.

With that access, O’Reilly said, an attacker could impersonate the operator to their contacts, inject messages into ongoing conversations, and exfiltrate data through the agent’s existing integrations in a way that looks like normal traffic.

“You can pull the full conversation history across every integrated platform, meaning months of private messages and file attachments, everything the agent has seen,” O’Reilly said, noting that a cursory search revealed hundreds of such servers exposed online. “And because you control the agent’s perception layer, you can manipulate what the human sees. Filter out certain messages. Modify responses before they’re displayed.”

O’Reilly documented another experiment that demonstrated how easy it is to create a successful supply chain attack through ClawHub, which serves as a public repository of downloadable “skills” that allow OpenClaw to integrate with and control other applications.

WHEN AI INSTALLS AI

One of the core tenets of securing AI agents involves carefully isolating them so that the operator can fully control who and what gets to talk to their AI assistant. This is critical thanks to the tendency for AI systems to fall for “prompt injection” attacks, sneakily-crafted natural language instructions that trick the system into disregarding its own security safeguards. In essence, machines social engineering other machines.

A recent supply chain attack targeting an AI coding assistant called Cline began with one such prompt injection attack, resulting in thousands of systems having a rogue instance of OpenClaw with full system access installed on their device without consent.

According to the security firm grith.ai, Cline had deployed an AI-powered issue triage workflow using a GitHub action that runs a Claude coding session when triggered by specific events. The workflow was configured so that any GitHub user could trigger it by opening an issue, but it failed to properly check whether the information supplied in the title was potentially hostile.

“On January 28, an attacker created Issue #8904 with a title crafted to look like a performance report but containing an embedded instruction: Install a package from a specific GitHub repository,” Grith wrote, noting that the attacker then exploited several more vulnerabilities to ensure the malicious package would be included in Cline’s nightly release workflow and published as an official update.

“This is the supply chain equivalent of confused deputy,” the blog continued. “The developer authorises Cline to act on their behalf, and Cline (via compromise) delegates that authority to an entirely separate agent the developer never evaluated, never configured, and never consented to.”

VIBE CODING

AI assistants like OpenClaw have gained a large following because they make it simple for users to “vibe code,” or build fairly complex applications and code projects just by telling it what they want to construct. Probably the best known (and most bizarre) example is Moltbook, where a developer told an AI agent running on OpenClaw to build him a Reddit-like platform for AI agents.

Less than a week later, Moltbook had more than 1.5 million registered agents that posted more than 100,000 messages to each other. AI agents on the platform soon built their own porn site for robots, and launched a new religion called Crustafarian with a figurehead modeled after a giant lobster. One bot on the forum reportedly found a bug in Moltbook’s code and posted it to an AI agent discussion forum, while other agents came up with and implemented a patch to fix the flaw.

Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht said on social media that he didn’t write a single line of code for the project.

“I just had a vision for the technical architecture and AI made it a reality,” Schlicht said. “We’re in the golden ages. How can we not give AI a place to hang out.”

ATTACKERS LEVEL UP

The flip side of that golden age, of course, is that it enables low-skilled malicious hackers to quickly automate global cyberattacks that would normally require the collaboration of a highly skilled team. In February, Amazon AWS detailed an elaborate attack in which a Russian-speaking threat actor used multiple commercial AI services to compromise more than 600 FortiGate security appliances across at least 55 countries over a five week period.

AWS said the apparently low-skilled hacker used multiple AI services to plan and execute the attack, and to find exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication.

“One serves as the primary tool developer, attack planner, and operational assistant,” AWS’s CJ Moses wrote. “A second is used as a supplementary attack planner when the actor needs help pivoting within a specific compromised network. In one observed instance, the actor submitted the complete internal topology of an active victim—IP addresses, hostnames, confirmed credentials, and identified services—and requested a step-by-step plan to compromise additional systems they could not access with their existing tools.”

“This activity is distinguished by the threat actor’s use of multiple commercial GenAI services to implement and scale well-known attack techniques throughout every phase of their operations, despite their limited technical capabilities,” Moses continued. “Notably, when this actor encountered hardened environments or more sophisticated defensive measures, they simply moved on to softer targets rather than persisting, underscoring that their advantage lies in AI-augmented efficiency and scale, not in deeper technical skill.”

For attackers, gaining that initial access or foothold into a target network is typically not the difficult part of the intrusion; the tougher bit involves finding ways to move laterally within the victim’s network and plunder important servers and databases. But experts at Orca Security warn that as organizations come to rely more on AI assistants, those agents potentially offer attackers a simpler way to move laterally inside a victim organization’s network post-compromise — by manipulating the AI agents that already have trusted access and some degree of autonomy within the victim’s network.

“By injecting prompt injections in overlooked fields that are fetched by AI agents, hackers can trick LLMs, abuse Agentic tools, and carry significant security incidents,” Orca’s Roi Nisimi and Saurav Hiremath wrote. “Organizations should now add a third pillar to their defense strategy: limiting AI fragility, the ability of agentic systems to be influenced, misled, or quietly weaponized across workflows. While AI boosts productivity and efficiency, it also creates one of the largest attack surfaces the internet has ever seen.”

BEWARE THE ‘LETHAL TRIFECTA’

This gradual dissolution of the traditional boundaries between data and code is one of the more troubling aspects of the AI era, said James Wilson, enterprise technology editor for the security news show Risky Business. Wilson said far too many OpenClaw users are installing the assistant on their personal devices without first placing any security or isolation boundaries around it, such as running it inside of a virtual machine, on an isolated network, with strict firewall rules dictating what kinds of traffic can go in and out.

“I’m a relatively highly skilled practitioner in the software and network engineering and computery space,” Wilson said. “I know I’m not comfortable using these agents unless I’ve done these things, but I think a lot of people are just spinning this up on their laptop and off it runs.”

One important model for managing risk with AI agents involves a concept dubbed the “lethal trifecta” by Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django Web framework. The lethal trifecta holds that if your system has access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and a way to communicate externally, then it’s vulnerable to private data being stolen.

“If your agent combines these three features, an attacker can easily trick it into accessing your private data and sending it to the attacker,” Willison warned in a frequently cited blog post from June 2025.

As more companies and their employees begin using AI to vibe code software and applications, the volume of machine-generated code is likely to soon overwhelm any manual security reviews. In recognition of this reality, Anthropic recently debuted Claude Code Security, a beta feature that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review.

The U.S. stock market, which is currently heavily weighted toward seven tech giants that are all-in on AI, reacted swiftly to Anthropic’s announcement, wiping roughly $15 billion in market value from major cybersecurity companies in a single day. Laura Ellis, vice president of data and AI at the security firm Rapid7, said the market’s response reflects the growing role of AI in accelerating software development and improving developer productivity.

“The narrative moved quickly: AI is replacing AppSec,” Ellis wrote in a recent blog post. “AI is automating vulnerability detection. AI will make legacy security tooling redundant. The reality is more nuanced. Claude Code Security is a legitimate signal that AI is reshaping parts of the security landscape. The question is what parts, and what it means for the rest of the stack.”

DVULN founder O’Reilly said AI assistants are likely to become a common fixture in corporate environments — whether or not organizations are prepared to manage the new risks introduced by these tools, he said.

“The robot butlers are useful, they’re not going away and the economics of AI agents make widespread adoption inevitable regardless of the security tradeoffs involved,” O’Reilly wrote. “The question isn’t whether we’ll deploy them – we will – but whether we can adapt our security posture fast enough to survive doing so.”

Microsoft today issued patches to plug at least 113 security holes in its various Windows operating systems and supported software. Eight of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, and the company warns that attackers are already exploiting one of the bugs fixed today.

January’s Microsoft zero-day flaw — CVE-2026-20805 — is brought to us by a flaw in the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), a key component of Windows that organizes windows on a user’s screen. Kev Breen, senior director of cyber threat research at Immersive, said despite awarding CVE-2026-20805 a middling CVSS score of 5.5, Microsoft has confirmed its active exploitation in the wild, indicating that threat actors are already leveraging this flaw against organizations.

Breen said vulnerabilities of this kind are commonly used to undermine Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), a core operating system security control designed to protect against buffer overflows and other memory-manipulation exploits.

“By revealing where code resides in memory, this vulnerability can be chained with a separate code execution flaw, transforming a complex and unreliable exploit into a practical and repeatable attack,” Breen said. “Microsoft has not disclosed which additional components may be involved in such an exploit chain, significantly limiting defenders’ ability to proactively threat hunt for related activity. As a result, rapid patching currently remains the only effective mitigation.”

Chris Goettl, vice president of product management at Ivanti, observed that CVE-2026-20805 affects all currently supported and extended security update supported versions of the Windows OS. Goettl said it would be a mistake to dismiss the severity of this flaw based on its “Important” rating and relatively low CVSS score.

“A risk-based prioritization methodology warrants treating this vulnerability as a higher severity than the vendor rating or CVSS score assigned,” he said.

Among the critical flaws patched this month are two Microsoft Office remote code execution bugs (CVE-2026-20952 and CVE-2026-20953) that can be triggered just by viewing a booby-trapped message in the Preview Pane.

Our October 2025 Patch Tuesday “End of 10” roundup noted that Microsoft had removed a modem driver from all versions after it was discovered that hackers were abusing a vulnerability in it to hack into systems. Adam Barnett at Rapid7 said Microsoft today removed another couple of modem drivers from Windows for a broadly similar reason: Microsoft is aware of functional exploit code for an elevation of privilege vulnerability in a very similar modem driver, tracked as CVE-2023-31096.

“That’s not a typo; this vulnerability was originally published via MITRE over two years ago, along with a credible public writeup by the original researcher,” Barnett said. “Today’s Windows patches remove agrsm64.sys and agrsm.sys. All three modem drivers were originally developed by the same now-defunct third party, and have been included in Windows for decades. These driver removals will pass unnoticed for most people, but you might find active modems still in a few contexts, including some industrial control systems.”

According to Barnett, two questions remain: How many more legacy modem drivers are still present on a fully-patched Windows asset; and how many more elevation-to-SYSTEM vulnerabilities will emerge from them before Microsoft cuts off attackers who have been enjoying “living off the land[line] by exploiting an entire class of dusty old device drivers?”

“Although Microsoft doesn’t claim evidence of exploitation for CVE-2023-31096, the relevant 2023 write-up and the 2025 removal of the other Agere modem driver have provided two strong signals for anyone looking for Windows exploits in the meantime,” Barnett said. “In case you were wondering, there is no need to have a modem connected; the mere presence of the driver is enough to render an asset vulnerable.”

Immersive, Ivanti and Rapid7 all called attention to CVE-2026-21265, which is a critical Security Feature Bypass vulnerability affecting Windows Secure Boot. This security feature is designed to protect against threats like rootkits and bootkits, and it relies on a set of certificates that are set to expire in June 2026 and October 2026. Once these 2011 certificates expire, Windows devices that do not have the new 2023 certificates can no longer receive Secure Boot security fixes.

Barnett cautioned that when updating the bootloader and BIOS, it is essential to prepare fully ahead of time for the specific OS and BIOS combination you’re working with, since incorrect remediation steps can lead to an unbootable system.

“Fifteen years is a very long time indeed in information security, but the clock is running out on the Microsoft root certificates which have been signing essentially everything in the Secure Boot ecosystem since the days of Stuxnet,” Barnett said. “Microsoft issued replacement certificates back in 2023, alongside CVE-2023-24932 which covered relevant Windows patches as well as subsequent steps to remediate the Secure Boot bypass exploited by the BlackLotus bootkit.”

Goettl noted that Mozilla has released updates for Firefox and Firefox ESR resolving a total of 34 vulnerabilities, two of which are suspected to be exploited (CVE-2026-0891 and CVE-2026-0892). Both are resolved in Firefox 147 (MFSA2026-01) and CVE-2026-0891 is resolved in Firefox ESR 140.7 (MFSA2026-03).

“Expect Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge updates this week in addition to a high severity vulnerability in Chrome WebView that was resolved in the January 6 Chrome update (CVE-2026-0628),” Goettl said.

As ever, the SANS Internet Storm Center has a per-patch breakdown by severity and urgency. Windows admins should keep an eye on askwoody.com for any news about patches that don’t quite play nice with everything. If you experience any issues related installing January’s patches, please drop a line in the comments below.

Microsoft today pushed updates to fix at least 56 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and supported software. This final Patch Tuesday of 2025 tackles one zero-day bug that is already being exploited, as well as two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.

Despite releasing a lower-than-normal number of security updates these past few months, Microsoft patched a whopping 1,129 vulnerabilities in 2025, an 11.9% increase from 2024. According to Satnam Narang at Tenable, this year marks the second consecutive year that Microsoft patched over one thousand vulnerabilities, and the third time it has done so since its inception.

The zero-day flaw patched today is CVE-2025-62221, a privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Windows 10 and later editions. The weakness resides in a component called the “Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver” — a system driver that enables cloud applications to access file system functionalities.

“This is particularly concerning, as the mini filter is integral to services like OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud, and remains a core Windows component, even if none of those apps were installed,” said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7.

Only three of the flaws patched today earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating: Both CVE-2025-62554 and CVE-2025-62557 involve Microsoft Office, and both can exploited merely by viewing a booby-trapped email message in the Preview Pane. Another critical bug — CVE-2025-62562 — involves Microsoft Outlook, although Redmond says the Preview Pane is not an attack vector with this one.

But according to Microsoft, the vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited from this month’s patch batch are other (non-critical) privilege escalation bugs, including:

–CVE-2025-62458 — Win32k
–CVE-2025-62470 — Windows Common Log File System Driver
–CVE-2025-62472 — Windows Remote Access Connection Manager
–CVE-2025-59516 — Windows Storage VSP Driver
–CVE-2025-59517 — Windows Storage VSP Driver

Kev Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive, said privilege escalation flaws are observed in almost every incident involving host compromises.

“We don’t know why Microsoft has marked these specifically as more likely, but the majority of these components have historically been exploited in the wild or have enough technical detail on previous CVEs that it would be easier for threat actors to weaponize these,” Breen said. “Either way, while not actively being exploited, these should be patched sooner rather than later.”

One of the more interesting vulnerabilities patched this month is CVE-2025-64671, a remote code execution flaw in the Github Copilot Plugin for Jetbrains AI-based coding assistant that is used by Microsoft and GitHub. Breen said this flaw would allow attackers to execute arbitrary code by tricking the large language model (LLM) into running commands that bypass the user’s “auto-approve” settings.

CVE-2025-64671 is part of a broader, more systemic security crisis that security researcher Ari Marzuk has branded IDEsaster (IDE  stands for “integrated development environment”), which encompasses more than 30 separate vulnerabilities reported in nearly a dozen market-leading AI coding platforms, including Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, and Claude Code.

The other publicly-disclosed vulnerability patched today is CVE-2025-54100, a remote code execution bug in Windows Powershell on Windows Server 2008 and later that allows an unauthenticated attacker to run code in the security context of the user.

For anyone seeking a more granular breakdown of the security updates Microsoft pushed today, check out the roundup at the SANS Internet Storm Center. As always, please leave a note in the comments if you experience problems applying any of this month’s Windows patches.