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Supply Chain Attack
Code Injection Cyber Security DevSecOps GitLab Security Supply Chain Attack

GitLab Email Feature Exposes Critical Security Risk

 

GitLab’s “Email work item to this project” feature, intended to simplify issue creation, has been found to expose a serious security vulnerability that allows attackers to push code directly to the main branch and execute CI/CD pipelines. Security researchers at Aikido discovered that the private email addresses GitLab provides contain long-lived authentication tokens that grant far more access than users expect, effectively bypassing traditional security controls like IP restrictions. 

Modus operandi

When users click “Email work item to this project” in GitLab, they receive a unique email address containing a glimt- prefixed token that never expires. While GitLab’s interface suggests this address only creates issues within a specific project, the embedded token actually provides account-wide access across all projects the user can reach, both public and private. Attackers who obtain this email address can change the suffix from -issue@ to -merge-request@, attach a code patch, and submit it directly to any branch, including protected ones like main. If the patch modifies .gitlab-ci.yml, the attacker can execute arbitrary CI/CD jobs with the victim’s permissions, potentially exfiltrating secrets or deploying malicious code. 

One of the most concerning aspects of this vulnerability is its ability to circumvent IP allowlists and other network-based restrictions. Researchers tested this against private projects configured to accept connections from only a single IP address; while GitLab correctly blocked browser access and git clone commands from unauthorized IPs, it still accepted merge request emails and pushed commits to the main branch. This creates a dangerous blind spot for organizations that believe their IP restrictions provide comprehensive protection, when in reality the email pathway offers an unguarded backdoor into their repositories.

The vulnerability affects every GitLab.com account and all self-managed instances with incoming email enabled, with no option to disable the feature. GitLab has acknowledged the issue but classified it as intended behavior rather than a security bug, making only minor UI updates to clarify that the email addresses can create merge requests in addition to issues. However, these changes still don’t adequately communicate that the token reaches every project in the account, can push code to protected branches, and bypasses IP restrictions entirely. Researchers found over a dozen publicly exposed email addresses in open-source project documentation, many deliberately published by maintainers instructing users where to send bug reports. 

Mitigation strategies 

Organizations should immediately rotate their incoming email tokens via the personal access tokens page, though this invalidates all project addresses simultaneously. Teams should scan repositories and documentation for exposed glimt- tokens using secret detection tools, treating these addresses with the same caution as API keys or passwords. Additionally, security teams must recognize that IP allowlists alone don’t provide complete protection in GitLab, and should implement additional controls like requiring sender address verification and monitoring for unauthorized merge requests. Until GitLab implements more granular controls or allows feature disablement, proactive token rotation and vigilant secret scanning remain the primary defenses against this attack vector.
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Vulnerability
Account Token Theft AI Assistant Security AI Security Cyber Security Dictation Endpoint Local Privilege Escalation Mac Security MacOS Vulnerability Meta Muse Vulnerability

Meta Muse Flaw Lets Attackers Hijack AI Assistant


The Muse artificial intelligence assistant from Meta has been found to be vulnerable to an attack which allows malicious software to redirect its dictation traffic and control the actions performed by the application if it is locally running malware. 

The issue was demonstrated by security researcher Patrick Wardle in a proof-of-concept published on September 21, which demonstrates how an attacker with code execution rights under the user logged into Muse can exploit a hidden configuration in Muse. Wardle has also emphasized that the vulnerability does not provide an initial entry point into a Mac, but rather becomes dangerous after a malicious program or attacker has already been installed on the device. 

In addition, Wardle also warned that the attack may be delivered remotely via a ClickFix-style method, in which the victim is persuaded to execute a command without downloading or installing traditional malicious software. The Meta AI agent Muse was launched earlier this month as a personal AI agent capable of interacting with services and applications based on user permissions. Its capabilities include file sharing, email, messaging, calendars, shopping services, and smart-home applications. As a result of these permissions, the malicious process does not have to obtain the same access independently, making them particularly relevant to this attack. 

There is a problem with an undocumented Muse preference named endo_voyager_dictation_endpoint that controls the location where voice dictation is processed. The setting can be modified by an application running under the same user account. No additional macOS permission is necessary to modify the setting so that Meta's legitimate endpoint is replaced with an attacker's endpoint. 

A redirected endpoint can allow voice input intended for Muse to be sent to a service controlled by the attacker. Testing has demonstrated that both the audio and transcription can be intercepted. Once the input has been captured, the attacker can observe dictated prompts and influence Muse's instructions. 

A further significant benefit of the redirected traffic is that the token associated with the user's Muse account can be accessed and used to interact directly with Muse. Wardle demonstrated that the token can be accessed and used directly to access the account's chat history. Thus, malicious code is no longer simply stealing information, but rather abusing the AI assistant itself in order to carry out actions based on the privileges that have already been assigned. 

A secondary concern is how conventional endpoint security tools might interpret the activity. The Muse application is a legitimate, signed application, so actions initiated through it may appear to originate from a trusted process rather than directly from malware. Wardle's testing further revealed that access obtained through Muse tokens may extend beyond the compromised computer.

Using the token, the researcher was able to execute commands through Muse on another device since the same account can be used across multiple devices. In testing, the researcher was able to have the assistant on a smartphone report its location, scan for nearby Bluetooth devices, and identify smart home controls. 

Meta Releases Hotfix for Muse Zero-Day

The vulnerability has been addressed by Meta with a hotfix for Muse on MacOS. According to David Singleton of Meta Superintelligence Labs, the issue involves a local privilege escalation rather than a remote vulnerability. Moreover, exploitation requires malicious software to have already been installed under the user's account. 

By closing the configuration path that Wardle used in his proof-of-concept, the hotfix removes the ability to modify the dictation endpoint. As Meta stated, there was a limited practical risk associated with the attack since it requires the installation of local code. However, the requirement for local code execution does not necessarily exclude realistic attack scenarios. Wardle cited ClickFix-style attacks, in which victims are tricked into executing commands on their own computers.

By employing such a method, one might be able to gain a foothold without having to install conventional malware in order to exploit the Muse vulnerability. A broader concern with artificial intelligence agents that operate with extensive permissions has been highlighted by the vulnerability. As a result of Muse accessing a wide range of system resources and connected services, it may be possible for attackers to use those existing permissions once they have obtained control of the agent, rather than requiring separate access to each protected resource. 

In Wardle's testing, he demonstrated that the vulnerability can be exploited for a variety of purposes beyond the theft of dictated information. As part of the proof-of-concept activity, the user was able to take images and create documents on the Mac using Muse, in some cases without being made aware of. 

In addition, the research demonstrated that attackers controlling Muse sessions may interact with connected devices, although some actions are limited to the preparation of drafts during testing. This vulnerability does not imply the bypassing of macOS's underlying permission system directly, but rather the abuse of Muse once sensitive capabilities have been granted. As a result, the compromised process may be able to make requests through legitimate, signed applications, potentially making the results harder to distinguish from normal AI-aided operations. Moreover, the dictation system design of Muse contributed to the vulnerability as well. While Apple's dictation capabilities are available on device, Muse transmits voice inputs to Meta's infrastructure for processing. 

Wardle argued that this architecture created an endpoint that can be redirected by another local process. Several security and isolation controls have been implemented in the context of Muse, including its dedicated Secure VM architecture and additional safeguards designed to limit agent actions. However, the flaw revealed is not in the cloud environment designed to isolate user agents but in the macOS application itself. 

Personal artificial intelligence agents are increasingly being seen as sources of security concerns, particularly those that provide conversational capabilities as well as access to files, devices, accounts, and external services. In the event of an agent weakness, those permissions can be turned into an attack path. However, even if the underlying operating system enforces its normal security boundaries, the agent could potentially act as an attack vector.

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foreign cyber espionage
CISA Cyber Security department of energy FBI foreign cyber espionage

Foreign Hackers Got Into Two Colorado Water Systems, Messed With Pump Controls and Killed the Alarms

 




Foreign actors broke into the industrial control systems of two small private water utilities in Colorado last month, altered pumping cycles, changed equipment settings, and shut off the alarms that would have told operators something was wrong. The state confirmed the incidents on Friday. It has not named the utilities or the attackers.

Both systems are privately owned and serve fewer than 200 people each. The intrusions happened in late August. According to the governor's office, the attackers disabled remote access, switched off alarms, and changed how water was being pumped before operators caught on and regained control. Water quality and treatment were not affected at either location.

"These were brief incidents and the risks were quickly addressed by the providers themselves, who subsequently alerted the state," said Ally Sullivan, a spokeswoman for Governor Jared Polis. "To our knowledge, treatment processes and water quality were not impacted at either provider."

Colorado officials did not name a suspect. Sullivan said the office "cannot confirm what foreign actors may have been involved," but pointed to a CISA-tracked Iranian-backed group that has been working to access drinking water and wastewater systems across the country. Federal authorities have made no formal attribution in the Colorado case.


Part of Something Bigger

Colorado is the latest state in a list that has now reached at least 12 reporting intrusions into water system controls this year. The EPA says more than 100 drinking water and wastewater systems have been hit in 2026, most accessed through programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, connected to the open internet via cellular modems, often without the utilities realizing it.

The summer's single worst episode came on July 26 and 27, when attackers hit more than 30 communities in Minnesota in what state IT officials called a coordinated assault. At least four cities publicly confirmed disruptions. One plant went offline entirely; others dropped to manual operation. In Georgia, hackers took down a pump station, cutting pressure enough that residents were advised to boil water before using it. No one reported getting sick.

The FBI and EPA issued a joint warning on July 30 describing attackers who remotely changed IP addresses and passwords on exposed controllers, locking operators out. In some cases, the intrusions created conditions where untreated groundwater could have entered distribution pipes.

CISA said it tracked attacks against more than 100 internet-exposed water sector systems in July alone, the majority accessed through PLCs attached directly to cellular modems.


The Group Investigators Are Watching

The most scrutinized suspect is CyberAv3ngers, a threat group formally tied to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber-Electronic Command. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned six of its senior officials in February 2024. The State Department has offered $10 million for information on the group's activities.

The group has run through four documented phases since 2020. It started by exploiting default passwords on Israeli-made water utility controllers, moved on to deploying custom malware called IOCONTROL against industrial and IoT devices, and this year shifted to actively exploiting an authentication bypass flaw in Rockwell Automation's widely used Logix PLCs. No vendor patch exists for that vulnerability.

Six federal agencies, CISA, the FBI, NSA, EPA, the Department of Energy, and U.S. Cyber Command, warned jointly on April 7 that Iranian-affiliated actors were actively hitting internet-facing PLCs across water, energy, government, and manufacturing sites.


Congress and Industry Push Back

Senators Adam Schiff and Amy Klobuchar introduced the Water Cyber Shield Act in August, which would give the EPA authority to audit utilities and mandate corrective action. The bill authorizes $300 million annually through existing water infrastructure funds.

At DEF CON, the National Rural Water Association launched the Water Watch Center, pairing five managed security firms with small utilities at no cost. The program targets systems serving under 10,000 people, which make up 91 percent of the country's roughly 50,000 community water systems.

Denver Water, which supplies about 1.5 million people across the metro area, told Axios it evaluated the threat after the Colorado disclosure and found its systems unaffected. Federal investigators are working with state officials to determine how the two utilities were accessed.

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Linux
Cyber flaws Cyber Security cybersecurity vulnerabilities exploitable flaws Kernel Kernel Flaw Linux

Four Linux Kernel Flaws Expose Systems to Local Root Exploits

 

A security researcher has publicly released working exploit code for four Linux kernel vulnerabilities that can allow local users to escalate their privileges to root, giving them the highest level of access on an affected system. The vulnerabilities, dubbed DirtyAH6, TUNderflow, PPPoEject and DiagSpill, were discovered by researcher Asim Manizada and reported to the Linux kernel security team in mid-July. 

Kernel maintainers have since released fixes for all four flaws, meaning systems running fully updated kernels are not affected. Manizada published his technical analysis and working exploits on September 18 after coordinating with Linux distributions to give developers time to release patches. There are currently no reports of the vulnerabilities being exploited in real-world attacks. The published exploits were developed for specific kernel builds and can crash systems, making them primarily suited for isolated testing environments. 

Despite those limitations, publicly available exploit code increases the risk for systems that have not been patched. Local privilege escalation vulnerabilities are particularly relevant on shared or multi-user systems, where an attacker who has already obtained limited access can potentially use the flaws to gain complete control. Three of the vulnerabilities require unprivileged user namespaces to be enabled. 

This Linux feature allows ordinary users to obtain root-like privileges inside an isolated environment and is enabled by default on many distributions. DirtyAH6, tracked as CVE-2026-80844, affects the IPv6 IPsec Authentication Header code. TUNderflow, CVE-2026-81000, affects TUN/TAP virtual network devices, while PPPoEject, CVE-2026-68121, targets PPP over Ethernet code. DiagSpill, tracked as CVE-2026-74469, differs from the other three because it does not require user namespaces or special privileges. 

Instead, it requires the SCTP networking module to be available. Two vulnerabilities, DirtyAH6 and DiagSpill, can also be triggered remotely in limited circumstances, although the demonstrated remote impact is primarily system crashes. Manizada achieved remote root exploitation with DirtyAH6 in a controlled laboratory environment after first manipulating the target’s memory. He described achieving the same result remotely without that preparation as extremely difficult. He found no path to remote root with DiagSpill.

All four vulnerabilities are memory-safety flaws affecting different areas of Linux networking code. DirtyAH6 involves an out-of-bounds write in IPv6 IPsec handling, TUNderflow results from an integer wraparound in virtual networking code, PPPoEject is a use-after-free vulnerability, and DiagSpill involves a counter overflow that can result in a large out-of-bounds memory write. The researcher said the flaws were discovered using an AI-assisted process designed to map kernel memory handling and reason about memory layouts. 

The Linux fix for DirtyAH6 credits his custom AI tooling in its commit record. Manizada also previously disclosed another Linux kernel privilege-escalation flaw, OVSwrap, in July. Administrators should update to a kernel containing all four fixes. The first stable Linux kernel releases containing the complete set are 5.10.270, 5.15.221, 6.1.188, 6.6.157, 6.12.109, 6.18.50 and 7.2.4. Distribution kernels use their own versioning, however, so users should check security advisories from their Linux distributor to confirm the fixes have been included. 

If immediate patching is not possible, disabling unprivileged user namespaces can reduce exposure to DirtyAH6, TUNderflow and PPPoEject. Administrators can also disable AH6, TUN/TAP, PPPoE or SCTP features when they are not required. Manizada recommends patching rather than relying on feature restrictions because alternative exploitation paths may exist.
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cybersecurity vulnerability
API API Security Vulnerability Critical Infrastructure Cyber Security cybersecurity vulnerability

Critical Orkes Conductor Flaw Exploited for Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution

 

A critical vulnerability in Orkes Conductor is being actively exploited by attackers, potentially allowing them to execute arbitrary commands on vulnerable systems without authentication. Tracked as CVE-2026-58138 and rated 9.8 on the CVSS scale, the flaw affects Conductor, an open-source enterprise framework used to orchestrate microservices, workflows and AI agents. The vulnerability can be exploited through inline workflow definitions submitted to the platform’s workflow API. The security issue stems from the way Conductor executes scripts within workflows. 

Attackers can insert malicious JavaScript or Python expressions into workflow definitions and use them to execute arbitrary system commands. According to Empirical Security, INLINE tasks, along with LAMBDA, DO_WHILE and SWITCH tasks, can evaluate user-controlled JavaScript or Python expressions. Conductor creates the evaluator using a GraalVM context configured with HostAccess.ALL, effectively removing the intended sandbox protections. The attacker-controlled code can then reach the underlying Java runtime and execute operating system commands with the privileges of the Conductor process. 

In many deployments, that process runs with root privileges, potentially giving attackers extensive control over the affected system. Authentication does not prevent exploitation by default because the open-source Conductor server does not enforce authentication and leaves its workflow API accessible. An attacker can reportedly send a single unauthenticated POST request to register a malicious workflow containing an INLINE task and trigger its execution. Orkes patched CVE-2026-58138 in June with Conductor version 3.30.2. 

However, attackers began targeting the vulnerability after proof-of-concept exploit code was publicly released in early August. Empirical Security identified exploitation attempts in the wild on August 21. Fortinet subsequently blocked approximately 1,300 exploitation attempts between September 8 and September 9 and has issued an outbreak alert warning about continued exploitation. Organizations running Conductor should upgrade to version 3.30.2 or later and limit external access to the platform’s workflow API endpoints. 

Security teams should also place Conductor deployments behind firewalls and ensure vulnerable services are not directly exposed to the public internet. Administrators should monitor Conductor instances for suspicious workflow submissions and unexpected command execution. Systems that previously ran vulnerable versions should also be reviewed for signs of unauthorized access or compromise.
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open AI
AI Models Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7 ASLR Claude AI cyber espionage Cyber Security open AI

An AI Helped Researchers Break Into OpenAI

 



A three-person security research team quietly walked into OpenAI's internal infrastructure last July, submitted a pull request inside the company's private monorepo as proof, and then stopped. The whole operation, from first vulnerability discovery to confirmed repository access, took under 72 hours. The tool that made it possible was not a custom-built hacking suite. It was Claude Opus 5.

The researchers, Harsh Jaiswal, Mohan Pedhapati, and Rahul Maini, work at Hacktron, an AI-assisted security research firm. They published their full technical account on September 13. OpenAI confirmed a fix roughly 14 hours after receiving the initial report on July 25, and paid out a $6,500 bounty on September 1.

The case is one of the clearest demonstrations yet of what skilled human researchers can accomplish when they hand the grinding, iterative work of exploit development to a capable AI model. It is also a story about a mundane but persistent failure: software that depends on unpatched libraries, and login systems that trust services they probably should not.


The Chain That Got Them In

The attack surface was not OpenAI's flagship products. It was the company's public help forum, community.openai.com, which runs on Discourse, an open-source forum platform used by tens of thousands of organizations.

Discourse allows users to upload images. For most formats, it relies on a tool called FastImage to inspect files before processing them. But FastImage does not support HEIC or HEIF images, the high-efficiency formats popularized by Apple. So Discourse passes those files to ImageMagick instead, which in turn calls an underlying library called libheif to do the actual decoding.

That handoff is where the vulnerability lived. libheif version 1.19.7, the version running inside Discourse's Docker image at the time, contained a heap buffer overflow. A specially crafted HEIC file could corrupt server memory, giving an attacker the ability to manipulate program execution. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-32882 and carries a severity score of 8.8 out of 10 in Discourse's own advisory, which classifies the result as remote code execution.

The patch for this bug had been available since libheif 1.22.0, released in May 2026. The CVE existed. The fix existed. But Discourse's Docker image, built on Debian 12, still shipped the old, vulnerable library when the Hacktron team looked in July. Debian had not yet backported the fix into its packaged version. That two-month window between upstream patch and downstream delivery is what the researchers walked through.

Once they had code execution on the Discourse server, the path to OpenAI employee accounts ran straight through the forum's login button. OpenAI's forum offers a "Sign in with OpenAI" option, the same single sign-on system its staff uses for ChatGPT, Codex, and other internal services. With control of the forum server, the researchers could hijack that authentication flow and take over the accounts of any OpenAI employee who had ever used it. The victims did not have to click anything or be online at the time.

Hacktron was explicit in their writeup about what this means: the forum was one path, not the problem. "If any first-party or third-party OpenAI service using the OpenAI SSO was compromised, it would lead to the same access," the team wrote. The identity flaw was OpenAI's, not Discourse's.

After confirming the account takeovers, the researchers used one employee's Codex account, which was connected to OpenAI's GitHub organization, to open a single pull request inside OpenAI's internal monorepo. They read nothing, merged nothing, and touched no customer data. The pull request was the proof. Then they stopped and filed their report.


Where the AI Came In

The libheif heap overflow gave the researchers memory corruption primitives, which is a starting point, not a working exploit. Memory corruption bugs require additional work to become reliable code execution, particularly on modern systems protected by Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), a defense that scrambles where code sits in memory to make it harder to redirect program flow.

This is where most vulnerability research slows down. Turning a crash into a reliable, weaponized exploit requires significant expertise, patience, and time. The Hacktron team decided to find out how much of that work an AI could absorb.

They started with Claude Opus 4.8, the previous flagship model from Anthropic. Across multiple sessions, it managed to help develop a working exploit when ASLR was disabled. When they enabled ASLR, matching the configuration of real servers, Opus 4.8 struggled and failed to produce anything reliable.

On the evening of July 24, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5. The researchers started a fresh session.

Within three hours, Opus 5 had produced a working exploit for an ARM64 Mac environment. They asked it to adapt the exploit to x86-64 and to the jemalloc memory allocator configuration that Discourse uses. By 6:00 a.m. on July 25, they had confirmed local code execution through an image upload.

The researchers then placed Claude in what they describe as an autonomous "/goal" loop, pointed at their own Discourse Cloud instance, framed as a capture-the-flag practice target. Opus 5 has guardrails meant to prevent it from writing exploits for real systems, so the team disguised the target. When they checked again at 10:00 a.m., the agent had achieved code execution on their cloud instance on its own, demonstrating access by reading /etc/hosts. They then used the generated exploit on OpenAI's forum and confirmed it worked there too.

The researchers are careful to note that this was not fully autonomous hacking. Skilled human judgment and direction were required throughout. But the gap between what they could accomplish in hours with Opus 5 versus the days or weeks such work might have taken without it was significant.

The cost of the entire Discourse and OpenAI portion of the project: a few days of AI compute and a few hours of human time.


One Bug, Many Targets

The OpenAI breach was not a standalone operation. It was one piece of a broader research campaign Hacktron calls HEIF Heist, a multi-month investigation into how widely the libheif library is embedded in major internet services, and how many of those services were running vulnerable versions.

Over roughly two months, the three researchers say they traced the same class of image-decoding flaws across software used by Slack, Meta, GitHub Enterprise, and web frameworks including Next.js, Astro, and Gatsby. The total cost of the entire campaign was under $3,000 in AI model usage, spread across roughly sixty days of work.

The team found that adapting each exploit to a new target environment generally took only one or two days with AI assistance. They report that the only company that appeared to detect their testing activity was Shopify, even after thousands of test images were sent to various targets and image processors at several of those companies crashed repeatedly under the load.

Not all of the claims have been independently verified. The Next.js vulnerability is confirmed in Vercel's own advisory. libheif's maintainers confirmed a working code-execution exploit against Meta's deployment of the library. The wider claim of successful code execution across the full list of targets has not been corroborated by external sources as of publication.

The HEIF Heist project also surfaced a difference between AI models. For cases where the team had information about the target environment, Claude Opus 5 was the primary tool. For targets where they had almost no prior knowledge of the deployment configuration, they switched to OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, which they found performed better in those conditions. Each major model jump brought a clear capability improvement: Opus 5 succeeded where Opus 4.8 failed, and GPT-5.6 Sol handled blind exploitation scenarios that Opus 5 struggled with.

The report documented Russia-linked espionage operations using Claude to run nearly fully automated phishing campaigns against Ukrainian, European, and diplomatic targets. It described a Chinese group, including operators identified as university students in Hunan province, who used Claude as the core engineering layer of an offensive program that found multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in a major security product. It also described a French-speaking hacktivist who used Claude to attack European political parties, media organizations, and think tanks at a scale that previously would have required a well-resourced team.

Anthropic's core observation across all of those cases was the same observation the Hacktron team made in their own writeup: AI is closing the gap between what a small, budget-constrained team can do and what used to require state-level resources.

The Hacktron team put it plainly: "Work that once required a well-resourced team and months of effort can now be compressed into days."

That assessment lines up with what Anthropic itself told the company's own threat report readers, and with what security researchers have been warning about for the past year. The Hacktron operation is the first time those warnings have been backed by a public, step-by-step technical demonstration against one of the most scrutinized technology companies on the planet.


What Needs to Change

The specifics of the OpenAI fix have not been made public. The company acknowledged the finding through payment and remediation rather than through a detailed disclosure of the login flaw.

On the Discourse side, the forum platform responded fast: they received the report on a Saturday, replied on Sunday, had a fix ready on Monday, and published their advisory on Tuesday. They also added image-processing sandboxing as a hardening measure, running ImageMagick in a restricted environment so that even a successful exploit against the image library cannot directly execute arbitrary code on the host server.



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Privilege Escalation
Azure AI Cloud Security Cyber Security Microsoft Azure Privilege Escalation

Microsoft Fixes Critical Azure AI Flaw Rated CVSS 10.0

 

Microsoft has patched a maximum-severity vulnerability in Azure AI Foundry that could allow unauthorized attackers to escalate their privileges over a network. Tracked as CVE-2026-85889, the flaw carries a CVSS score of 10.0, making it one of the most serious security issues affecting Microsoft’s cloud-based artificial intelligence services. The company said the vulnerability resulted from missing authentication for a critical function within Azure AI Foundry. There is currently no evidence that the flaw has been exploited in real-world attacks. 

Azure AI Foundry, also known as Microsoft Foundry, is an enterprise platform used to build, deploy and manage generative AI applications and autonomous agents. A successful exploit could have enabled an unauthorized attacker to gain elevated privileges, potentially increasing access to sensitive resources or administrative functions. Security researcher Rémy Marot, who uses the handle @R_Marot, discovered and reported the vulnerability to Microsoft. The company has already addressed the issue across its cloud infrastructure. 

Microsoft said customers do not need to take any action because the affected cloud services have been fully mitigated. Alongside CVE-2026-85889, the company also fixed several other critical cloud vulnerabilities. These include CVE-2026-85885, a command injection flaw in Microsoft 365 Copilot rated 9.9; CVE-2026-85878, an improper authorization issue in Azure Database for PostgreSQL rated 9.9; and CVE-2026-87701, an improper neutralization vulnerability in Azure Cosmos DB rated 9.6. 

The tech giant separately released updates for two Windows vulnerabilities. CVE-2026-62721 affects the Windows User-Mode Power Service and could allow an authorized local attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. CVE-2026-85921 is a double-free vulnerability in Windows Secure Kernel Mode that could enable privilege escalation to Virtual Trust Level 1. Both vulnerabilities were fixed through an out-of-band update for Windows 11 version 26H1, distributed as cumulative update KB5129194 for arm64 and x64 systems. 

The latest fixes arrive shortly after Microsoft patched 974 vulnerabilities across its software portfolio. Two of those flaws, affecting Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call and the Windows Update Stack, were reportedly exploited in active attacks. Proofpoint and Volexity said the ALPC flaw was chained with two Google Chrome vulnerabilities to create the BlueMoon exploit kit, which multiple espionage-linked threat actors allegedly used to deliver malicious payloads. The developments highlight the growing security risks surrounding cloud platforms, enterprise AI tools and widely deployed operating systems.
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NightmareStresser
Cyber Security DDOS Attacks FBI NightmareStresser

FBI Seizes NightmareStresser DDoS-for-Hire Domains in Global Crackdown

 

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced the court-authorized seizure of internet domains linked to “NightmareStresser,” one of the world’s longest-running Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) for-hire services. The operation, led by the FBI Anchorage Field Office with support from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, targets so-called “booter” and “stresser” platforms that enable paying customers to launch powerful cyberattacks against individuals, organizations, and critical online infrastructure across Alaska and globally. 

According to the seizure warrant affidavit, NightmareStresser was used to carry out hundreds of thousands of actual or attempted DDoS attacks worldwide since 2022. These services lower the barrier to entry for cybercrime by allowing users with minimal technical expertise to disrupt internet connections, knock targeted devices offline (“booting”), and degrade or completely interrupt access to websites and online services. Victims have included schools, government agencies, gaming platforms, and millions of everyday users whose connectivity was affected by these coordinated attacks.

The takedown forms part of Operation PowerOFF, an ongoing international law enforcement initiative aimed at dismantling criminal DDoS-for-hire infrastructures and holding both administrators and users accountable. Over the past eight years, federal prosecutors and investigators in Anchorage and Los Angeles have charged twelve defendants involved in facilitating DDoS-for-hire services and seized more than 100 associated domains. This latest action expands on those efforts by targeting all known booter sites, shutting down as many as possible, and coupling enforcement with a public education campaign on the harms caused by illegal DDoS activity. 

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Adam Alexander and Ainsley McNerney are prosecuting the case in the District of Alaska. The Justice Department emphasizes that booter and stresser services not only harm direct targets but also undermine broader internet reliability and safety. As digital dependence grows, such crackdowns signal a sustained push to disrupt the ecosystem enabling low-cost, high-impact cyberattacks—and to deter would-be offenders by removing the domains and infrastructure these services rely on to operate.
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