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Turning off email images should at least stop the pictures. This week, attackers had a workaround: a scannable QR code built out of text. It still appears, even with images blocked. A small detail, but an annoying one if that was a precaution you were counting on.
Elsewhere, a trusted software source delivered code that stole credentials, and a protocol designed for secure network management gave outsiders useful clues before login. Add active attacks on browsers, routers, and online stores, and there’s plenty to check—even for teams that have kept up with the patches.
Read the full recap for the week’s major developments, plus more research, attacks, and security news beyond what we covered last week.
⚡ Threat of the Week
N-able Patches Critical N-central Flaws — N-able has released hotfixes to address two severe N-central flaws (CVE-2026-86206 and CVE-2026-86207) that could allow an unauthorized party to bypass authentication controls and gain full access to the platform. Also patched is a maximum-severity security flaw (CVE-2026-86218, CVSS score: 10.0) that could allow for pre-authenticated remote code execution on the N-central server. "At this time, we have no confirmation that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in production environments, but unpatched systems remain at risk," N-able said. However, Huntress said it observed signs that attackers are likely leveraging CVE-2026-86206 or/and CVE-2026-86207, after it launched an investigation on September 4 following the compromise of a customer's fully patched N-central production environment. "However, due to limited historical logging available directly on the appliance, we cannot definitively confirm which specific exploit the threat actor used to achieve their compromise, nor can we rule out the use of alternative vulnerabilities," it said.
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🔔 Top News
Google Warns of Chrome 0-Day Under Attack — Google released security updates to patch 12 vulnerabilities, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-85046 (CVSS score: 8.8), has been described as a type confusion bug in V8, Chrome's JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 152.0.7977.82 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page," according to a description of the flaw in CVE.org. Security researcher Salvatore Gulizia (aka Serotav) has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on August 4, 2026. As is usual in these cases, Google acknowledged that an "exploit for CVE-2026-85046 exists in the wild," but did not reveal any details about the nature of the attacks or who is behind them. With the latest development, Google has addressed a total of six actively exploited Chrome zero-days since the start of the year. MikroTik RouterOS Flaws Exploited — The CERT Polska Team warned that bad actors are actively exploiting two zero-day flaws in MikroTik RouterOS that could be combined to take full control of the device without authentication if the device supports remote access using the SSH protocol. The exploit chain has been codenamed MikroTrick. A total of fix flaws (CVE-2026-67276, CVE-2026-67277, CVE-2026-67278, CVE-2026-67279, CVE-2026-67281, and CVE-2026-86060) have been identified. The MikroTrick chain involves CVE-2026-67276 and CVE-2026-86060 (CVSS scores: 9.2), which can allow an attacker to bypass authentication and elevate their privileges. The issues have been fixed in versions 6.49.21 (Long-term), 7.23.4 (Long-term), and 7.24.2 (Stable). "The successful attacks observed so far, including the creation of the 'ops' account, originated from the IP address 82.192.72.4 and have been occurring since at least 2 September," CERT Polska said. "In addition, the IP address 103.102.31.18 was used in attempts to exploit the described chain." Unpatched Magento and Adobe Commerce 0-Day Exploited to Backdoor Online Stores — E-commerce storefronts are being compromised to inject a backdoor by exploiting an unpatched Magento and Adobe Commerce zero-day dubbed StyleSmuggler, which gives unauthenticated attackers remote code execution. The attacks commenced on September 4, 2026. "StyleSmuggler injects malicious code into Magento's template system," Sansec said. "By using the styles properties, it can evade existing safeguards. It works in two stages: (1) Inject (poison) PHP code, for example by generating a failure report, and (2) Let Magento execute the poisoned code via a failed payment email." The backdoor is a Rust program that connects to the "99.84.67[.]186" C2 server and waits for further instructions. There are currently no indications that the backdoor has been weaponized. There are two different variants named fc-cache and chronyd. A separate attack cluster has been found to leverage the same weakness to drop a PHP web shell into the product image cache. RevStealer Spreads via Game Cheats and Fake Claude Desktop App — Elastic and Morphisec disclosed details of RevStealer (aka REF2859), a Windows information stealer that comes with an embedded sandbox scoring system and Polygon blockchain-based dead drop for resilience, a technique also called EtherHiding. "Beyond credential theft, REVSTEALER targets gaming platforms for additional monetization; the developer clearly understands that victim accounts on these platforms hold real monetary value in resale markets," Elastic said. The malware is distributed via social engineering attacks, using YouTube videos claiming to advertise hacks for the Albion Online game or rogue GitHub repositories for Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 Free Desktop project. Once installed, the stealer can receive additional executable content through C2 tasks, including additional executable content through (for wallet-file and browser-extension theft, phishing overlays, password-aware input capture, and payload delivery), WinUpdate (for cryptocurrency-address replacement and mnemonic-shaped clipboard theft), SoftManager (for reverse SOCKS5 proxy and backconnect access over an encrypted WebSocket protocol), and LockAppHost (for XMRig deployment, competitor suspension, and persistence). OpenAI Agents Keep Going Rogue — OpenAI is once again in hot water after a swarm of agents self-identifying as from the AI startup hijacked a German website as early as May and used it as a bulletin board for other AI agents. The agent swarm is said to have taken over the obscure German-language wiki in May and June to make around 18,000 posts, relying on it to coordinate on evaluations and swap methods to evade OpenAI’s own controls. The revelations come days after OpenAI published its own detailed account of July's Hugging Face breach in which another swarm of OpenAI agents worked together to escape their sandbox during a cybersecurity evaluation and break into Hugging Face's servers. A subsequent cluster used similar techniques to break into OpenAI's own infrastructure. In response to the wiki incident, OpenAI said it is working on a framework for reporting misalignment incidents during training, evaluation, and deployment.
️🔥 Trending CVEs
Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild.
Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first — CVE-2026-78174, CVE-2026-19313, CVE-2026-19318, CVE-2026-19315, CVE-2026-57910, CVE-2026-57909, CVE-2026-13086 (WatchGuard), CVE-2026-80047 (Hugging Face Transformers), CVE-2026-9585, CVE-2026-9586, CVE-2026-9587, CVE-2026-9588 (Sangoma Switchvox SMB), CVE-2026-6881 (Ellucian Advance Web and Legacy Advance), CVE-2026-13381, CVE-2026-13380 (VSee Clinic), CVE-2026-63219, CVE-2026-58400 (GeoNetwork), CVE-2026-9637, CVE-2026-9621, CVE-2026-9622, CVE-2026-9624, CVE-2026-9625, CVE-2026-19471, CVE-2026-19472, CVE-2026-12663, CVE-2026-9633, CVE-2026-9634, CVE-2026-16675, CVE-2025-12768, CVE-2026-84235 (Rockwell Automation), CVE-2026-84115 (Cleo Harmony), CVE-2026-84117, CVE-2026-84118, CVE-2026-84119, CVE-2026-84120, CVE-2026-84121, CVE-2026-84122, CVE-2026-84123, CVE-2026-84124, CVE-2026-84125, CVE-2026-84126 (Mozilla Firefox), CVE-2026-84353, CVE-2026-84352, CVE-2026-85046 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-19949 (All-in-One WP Migration and Backup), CVE-2026-20277, CVE-2026-20278, CVE-2026-20280, CVE-2026-20279, CVE-2026-20276, CVE-2026-20275, CVE-2026-20274, CVE-2026-20212 (Cisco), CVE-2026-15630 (Casdoor), CVE-2026-73749 (Hewlett Packard Enterprise ArubaOS-CX), CVE-2026-67394 (Plesk), CVE-2026-38577 (Tenda), CVE-2026-6471 aka PostGREShell (PostgreSQL), CVE-2026-42038 (Axios), CVE-2026-64532, CVE-2026-64533 (Linux Kernel), CVE-2026-58048 (cPanel and WHM), CVE-2026-14540 (Google mcp-toolbox), CVE-2026-84645, CVE-2026-84647, CVE-2026-84648, CVE-2026-84649, CVE-2026-84650, CVE-2026-84652, CVE-2026-84665, CVE-2026-84667, CVE-2026-84668, CVE-2026-84669, CVE-2026-84670, CVE-2026-84671, CVE-2026-84672, CVE-2026-84673 (Jenkins), GHSA-x7v6-xfx3-52j6, GHSA-r7jx-j9h7-j4xj, GHSA-9jcm-x588-gh26, GHSA-6mpx-c8rj-whj5, GHSA-q65v-4w7q-hx3r (FreeRDP), CVE-2026-59346, CVE-2026-59347 (Broadcom VMware Workstation and Fusion), CVE-2026-67276, CVE-2026-67277, CVE-2026-67278, CVE-2026-67279, CVE-2026-67281, CVE-2026-86060 (MikroTik RouterOS), CVE-2026-86218, CVE-2026-86206, and CVE-2026-86207 (N-able N-central).
🎥 Expert Webinars
📰 Around the Cyber World
New Knight Office Microsoft 365 AitM Phishing Kit — A new adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing toolkit called Knight Office has been spotted in the wild using Docusign-themed lures to direct victims to fake landing pages for AitM token theft and device code phishing attacks, joining the likes of EvilTokens and Kali365. The email "led the victim through a number of redirects (including a redirect via the Monday work management platform and a compromised Joomla website)," Huntress said. "The victim landed on a phishing page, where their valid session tokens were captured and fed to the Knight Office console. Session tokens allow attackers to access victim accounts as if they were logged in, without needing an actual password or a way to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA)." At least nine total phishing attacks on identities have been linked to this kit over the past two weeks. The Blind Spot in SNMPv3 — SNMPv3 — the protocol widely regarded as the secure standard for managing routers, switches, and firewalls — leaks pre-authentication signals that can allow an unauthenticated remote actor to identify a device’s vendor, confirm valid usernames, and narrow its likely encryption settings before testing a single credential. Validated across approximately 470,000 internet-exposed endpoints, the findings show how these standards-compliant behaviors can collapse a multi-dimensional brute-force problem into a focused password-guessing exercise. "SNMPv3 was the industry's answer to insecure network management, and upgrading to it — as the CISA advisory urges — is necessary," said Kobi Ben-Naim, Co-Founder and CEO of Malanta. "But that answer is incomplete. The protocol does exactly what it was designed to do, and that design hands attackers a roadmap: even properly upgraded deployments, when exposed, leak enough through pre-authentication responses to help an attacker narrow their way in before a single credential is tested. The threat doesn't end with the upgrade." U.S. Announces Reward for Senior Iranian Official — A $10 million reward has been posted by the U.S. State Department for information on the whereabouts of senior Iranian official Amir Yaryab. Yaryab allegedly leads the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) Cyber-Electronic Command (CEC). "Yaryab also oversees and controls operations conducted by IRGC-CEC-affiliated groups such as CyberAv3ngers, Dadeh Afzar Arman (DAA), and Mehrsam Andisheh Saz Nik (MASN). These malicious cyber groups have used malware to target civilian infrastructure worldwide," the State Department said. Attack on Coder — Attackers compromised Coder's Cloudflare infrastructure and added unauthorized registry servers that delivered malicious Terraform modules containing credential-stealing code to harvest environment variables, API keys, CI/CD credentials, configuration secrets, terminal history, OIDC tokens, SSH keys, external authentication tokens, and Coder database passwords. The data was then exfiltrated to the lookalike domain "coder-infra[.]com." "An unidentified malicious actor gained access to Coder’s Cloudflare infrastructure and added unauthorized IP addresses to the pool used for Coder’s module registry," Coder said. "These unauthorized IP addresses hosted a version of Coder's registry that contained artifacts which included malicious code." Users are advised to look for connections to the malicious domains before applying the latest patches (versions 2.37.0, 2.36.4, 2.35.7, and 2.34.9) U.S.-U.K. Team Up to Shut Down Scam Centers — The U.S. and the U.K. signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to work together on an initiative to shut down scam centers stealing billions of dollars through investment and romance fraud schemes. "Under the terms of the MOU, each will conduct parallel investigations into common targets, share information on targeting of organized crime syndicates, discuss which jurisdictions to bring specific cases of common interest, and generally prioritize cases on this threat to achieve mutual results," the U.S. Justice Department said. Tampered Exodus Installer Delivers Modular RAT — Victims are being tricked into running a fake PDF document or a software update that leads to the execution of an MSI installer that declares itself a "Background Service" by Apple. "The 'Background Service' installs a genuine Exodus 24.33.4 cryptocurrency wallet, missing one key function: any way for the user to interact with it," Huntress said. "Only 3 of its 1,973 files differ from the real thing. One of those three files stops the wallet from ever drawing a window. Another turns a legitimate Exodus source file into a PE loader that decrypts a 10 MB payload and maps it into memory by hand, where it never touches disk. That payload is the RAT: a hidden VNC and SOCKS proxy that enable remote access and browser credential theft. While the RAT stealthily beacons to Azure Table Storage rather than a domain of its own, it returns every hour through a scheduled task, leaving behind detectable artifacts." QR Phishing With No Image — In a new phishing attack detailed by Kaspersky, threat actors are building a QR code out of text characters and markup directly in the email body as opposed to rendering an image. "There is no attachment to open, no embedded picture to decode, and nothing for an image-based or optical-character-recognition (OCR) scanner to key off," PhishU said. "Because it is markup and not a remote image, an inbox with images turned off still paints it. The message shows a perfectly scannable QR to the human reading it, image-blocking and all." Apple Hit With $2.7 Billion Lawsuit Over App Tracking Rules — Apple is facing a £2 billion ($2.7 billion) lawsuit in the U.K. accusing it of imposing stricter App Tracking Transparency rules on third-party developers than on its own advertising services, thereby giving its ecosystem a competitive advantage, according to Reuters. Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature has been the subject of extensive investigations across Europe. Last month, Apple agreed to make changes to the feature across almost all European Union countries following a probe in Germany. Attackers Routinely Target Edge Devices — A joint analysis from SentinelOne and Tenable found that both nation-state and criminal threat actors are focusing on vendors and susceptible points in the attack surface more than specific CVEs. "Both state-sponsored actors and cybercriminals independently converge on the same edge infrastructure," the companies said. "The exposure picture is flatter than the headlines suggest: Fortinet, the vendor most associated with edge-device attacks in the press, sits mid-pack on container-grain exposure (25%) — well behind F5 (54%) and in a tight 10-point band with Check Point, Ivanti, and Citrix. 54% of customer environments running F5 products have at least one exposed, actively-exploited CVE; Citrix customers show the slowest remediation patterns at 461 days median time to patch." The disclosure comes as current attacker timelines are compressing and moving faster than standard patch cycles can address, driven by frontier AI models that narrow the window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation. The Threat of Indirect Prompt Injection — New research from Forcepoint revealed that an email summarizer running an unguarded LLM pipeline can be manipulated through indirect prompt injection (i.e., hidden instructions in an email) to silently hijack summarizer output and generate false and potentially dangerous summaries without signaling tampering to the recipient. "A regular Outlook email composer does strip styling that hides elements on copy/paste and does not provide any way to hide text other than white text on white background," Forcepoint said. "The hidden styling was not stripped when sent programmatically, or when the message is received and displayed. Hidden HTML tags like these have been commonly used by attackers to circumvent careful reading by victims."
Conclusion
Trusted sources and safer settings still have limits. This week’s attacks show why it matters to know exactly what each protection covers—and what it leaves exposed.
Keep patching, but keep the logs needed to investigate, too. “Fully patched” tells you which fixes are installed. It doesn’t prove nobody got in.
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