โŒ

Reading view

Claude Cowork Flaw Could Let AI Agent Escape Its VM and Access Mac Files

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a sandbox escape vulnerability in Anthropic's Claude Cowork that makes it possible to break out of the confines of a Linux virtual machine (VM) within which the agent runs to read or write files anywhere on the Mac. Accomplish AI, which shared details of the vulnerability with The Hacker News ahead of publication, said about 500,000 macOS users running

  •  

Chaos Ransomware Uses msaRAT to Route C2 Traffic Through Headless Chrome and Edge

The Chaos ransomware group ran its command-and-control through the victim's own browser. Cisco Talos on Thursday detailed msaRAT, the Rust implant behind it, found on a compromised Windows machine ahead of the encryptor. The implant never opens an outbound connection of its own. Its process talks to 127.0.0.1 and nothing else. It starts Chrome or Edge in headless mode and drives the browser

  •  

China-Nexus JadeProx Uses New TriBack Loader in Government and Healthcare Attacks

An exposed Alibaba Cloud server has revealed a China-nexus operation that Group-IB tracks as JadeProx. The cluster has targeted government, healthcare, and education organizations across Asia and Latin America with a previously undocumented Windows loader called TriBack Loader. Group-IB found the server in mid-April 2026 in Alibaba Cloud's Singapore region; it was offline by the time the report

  •  

How Synthetic Identity Fraud is Coming for Machine Identities

Most people understand identity theft as an attacker stealing a real person's sensitive information and impersonating them. Synthetic identity fraud is much harder to catch. Instead of stealing a real identity, the attacker manufactures a new one, frankensteining together several real data points with fabricated ones to create a person who doesn't exist. Since no real victim monitors misuse, a

  •  

Attackers Weaponize GitHub Actions Runners to Target cPanel and WHM Servers

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a large-scale campaign that has turned compromised GitHub repositories into distributed attack infrastructure designed to target cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) instances. The activity involves malicious Packagist development versions spanning 10 packages associated with a legitimate PHP and DevOps developer, dinushchathurya, between July 12 and 13,

  •  

Google Adds Selfie Video Recovery for Users Locked Out of Their Accounts

Google on Thursday announced a new way for users to sign-in to their accounts by letting them take a selfie video. The selfie for sign-in, per the tech giant, is another option on top of existing recovery methods to log in to an account, including an email address or a phone number. The idea is to use a video selfie as a way to regain access if a user ever gets locked out or doesn't have access

  •  

Nine-Year-Old RefluXFS Linux Flaw Gives Local Users Root on Default RHEL Installs

RefluXFS, a Linux kernel flaw disclosed on July 22 and tracked as CVE-2026-64600, lets an unprivileged local user overwrite root-owned files on an XFS filesystem and gain persistent root access. Qualys said default installations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives, Fedora Server, and Amazon Linux can meet the conditions for exploitation. The company demonstrated the race against

  •  

Check Point Patches Exploited SmartConsole Flaw Allowing Full Admin Access

Check Point has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities impacting Security Management and Multi-Domain Management (MDSM) products, including a critical flaw that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The security flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-16232 (CVSS score: 9.3), is an authentication bypass affecting the Check Point SmartConsole login process that allows an

  •  

OpenAI scored an own goal with Hugging Face attack, showing how open Chinese models are winning

OPINION OpenAI has acknowledged its models powered the autonomous agents that compromised Hugging Face infrastructure. It might be taken as a convoluted marketing stunt, were it not the perfect advertisement for China-based competition. The company's AI-culpa fits the narrative spun by US rival Anthropic about its Mythos models, which it deemed too dangerous to release except to totally trustworthy corporations and governments. OpenAI says: "The incident makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access. It highlights that advanced cyber capabilities must be developed alongside stronger safeguards and defensive tools." Are we surprised? It's been clear that AI models have the potential to go rogue and damage computers for several years. Academics have repeatedly warned about this possibility - even those affiliated with OpenAI and Anthropic. And anyone who has used AI models for software development has probably seen them code unexpected and perhaps unwanted workarounds to fulfill some directive. On Tuesday, the UK's AI Security Institute published findings about how frontier models all cheat. OpenAI's admission that its models devised a sandbox escape to obtain internet access and found a zero-day flaw to exploit, all to solve a benchmark evaluation problem, may be unprecedented in terms of the scale and prominence of the systems affected. But it's a reenactment of every Claude or Codex prompt in which the model responds to a disallowed command by trying an alternative. We were warned. The compromise of HuggingFace's systems is no more surprising than locking a bear in a supermarket and finding a mess the following day. AI models are billed as artificial intelligence, but when they power agents handling tools in a loop to achieve some objective, it's the equivalent of a brute force attack โ€“ the agent will keep trying things until something works or breaks. The surprising part came when Hugging Face sought to employ US frontier models to defend itself. It failed. That should raise eyebrows. "When we started the log analysis, we first used frontier models behind commercial APIs," the AI model-mart said in its blog post last week. "This did not work: the analysis required submitting large volumes of real attack commands, exploit payloads, and C2 artifacts, and these requests were blocked by the providers' safety guardrails, which cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker." Stymied by model refusals โ€“ which developers have been complaining about for months โ€“ HuggingFace had to rely on GLM 5.2, an open-weight AI model made by China-based Z.ai, to conduct its forensic analysis. And it did so on its own infrastructure, so nothing sensitive got sent to a cloud-based model provider. Coincidentally, the leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly been warning the US government about the threat posed by increasingly capable Chinese models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2. And the US government is said to be mulling possible responses to limit competition from China. That won't work. It's just naรฏve to think that the US government and a handful of worthy organizations โ€“ however that is defined โ€“ will be able to enforce a global monopoly on highly capable AI. The infrastructure required to run open weight models that more or less rival the current state of the art is available for a price. And potential consumers of those services are not going to be satisfied with model refusals when there are other options, particularly if they're more cooperative and more affordable. The best course for governments, industry, and the public is to push for AI services that are open and available to all. For that to work, lawmakers around the world need to act fast to set some common ground rules that grapple with AI's impact on jobs, and find a way to compensate those whose work fuels machine learning. Some industry leaders appear to realize that. David Sacks, an external White House adviser and tech investor, recently urged Silicon Valley to rally around openness. "The leading closed labs, already a duopoly in terms of AI model revenue, want the government to eliminate their open source competition," he wrote in a social media post. "They have laid their cards on the table. It is time for the rest of Silicon Valley โ€” the vast majority that still values open competition โ€” to do the same." The fact is that US AI companies have sandboxed themselves into a corner: They've created demand for a product that they can't be relied upon to provide. And when they do make their most capable AI models available, they hobble them and demand terms tailored to serve their vast debt rather than their customers. OpenAI said that it has invited Hugging Face into its trusted access program so the company can use its most capable models. Chinese AI companies, meanwhile, have invited the world. ยฎ

  •  
โŒ