Study of 281 Free Android VPN Apps Finds Traffic Leaks, Unencrypted Data, and Tracking

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A study analyzing 281 free Android VPN apps from the Google Play Store found widespread security failures, including traffic leaks, unencrypted data transmission, and extensive user tracking, affecting apps with over 2.4 billion installs. The researchers identified serious vulnerabilities like tunnel hijacking and DNS leaks, with many apps failing to encrypt configuration files or disguising VPN traffic, while most also connected to known tracking servers, compromising user privacy despite VPN claims. The findings underscore persistent weak engineering in free VPN apps and highlight the importance of trusting reputable providers with proven security audits.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/study-of-281-free-android-vpn-apps.html

Apple’s MacOS Security Gap Lets Users Disable Security Tools

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Researchers at XM Cyber discovered a macOS vulnerability that allows standard users to disable security tools like CrowdStrike Falcon EDR and Kandji MDM by exploiting flaws in how the OS caches and trusts application cryptographic hashes (CDHash). This issue enables attackers to impersonate trusted app components and invoke privileged Cross-Process Communication (XPC) services without administrator privileges, impacting numerous macOS applications relying on XPC. While some vendors have patched the flaw, Apple reportedly does not plan to fix the underlying OS issue, leaving developers to implement their own mitigations.

https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/apple-macos-security-gap-users-disable-security-tools

Evolving Windows Vulnerability Management to Meet the Speed of AI-powered Discovery

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Microsoft is enhancing Windows vulnerability management by leveraging AI-powered tools like the multi-model agentic scanning harness (MDASH) to accelerate discovery, prioritization, and remediation of security issues across its codebase. The company integrates AI into its engineering and validation processes to speed up fixes while maintaining update quality, and provides customers with tools and guidance to deploy timely security updates safely, supporting a shift toward continuous, risk-based patching to reduce exposure amid growing AI-driven vulnerability discovery.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2026/07/09/evolving-windows-vulnerability-management-to-meet-the-speed-of-ai-powered-discovery/

Lone Attacker Uses AI to Breach AWS Cloud Environment in 72 Hours

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A lone attacker leveraged AI-driven workflows to quickly exploit multiple weaknesses across an AWS cloud environment, conducting extensive reconnaissance, credential harvesting, and deployment pipeline abuse within 72 hours, leading to financial extortion of a major Amazon customer. The attacker chained together vulnerabilities in applications, cloud resources, and CI/CD pipelines to systematically steal secrets, create backdoors, and disrupt operations, demonstrating an accelerated attack tempo enabled by AI. Security experts warn organizations must enhance automated detection, response capabilities, and containment procedures to address the increased speed and scale of AI-assisted cloud attacks.

https://www.darkreading.com/cloud-security/lone-attacker-ai-breach-aws-cloud-environment

Top AI Agents Built to Catch Malicious Code Can Be Tricked Into Running It

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Researchers demonstrated a proof-of-concept attack called “Friendly Fire” that tricks AI coding agents like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, running in autonomous modes, into executing malicious code hidden in untrusted third-party repositories. The attack exploits these agents' design, leading them to run disguised payloads—such as a script suggested in a README file—without user approval, highlighting significant security risks when using AI agents to vet external code. Experts recommend avoiding giving such AI agents command execution capabilities over untrusted code and caution against relying solely on model updates or sandboxing as defenses.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/friendly-fire-ai-agents-built-to-catch.html

Patch for Windows Defender 0-Day Could Allow Attackers to Fill Hard Disk

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A patch released by Microsoft to fix a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2026-50656) in the Windows Defender malware protection engine may cause affected Windows machines to write excessively large files that can fill the hard disk. Researcher NightmareEclipse reported that new defense-in-depth mitigations introduced in the patch cause the engine to leak data when handling certain files and their associated Zone.Identifier metadata, potentially allowing attackers to exhaust disk space via specially crafted SMB server responses. Microsoft has not yet confirmed the disk-filling behavior, while the researcher’s ongoing public disclosures highlight a continued dispute with Microsoft over vulnerability handling.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/patch-for-windows-defender-0-day-could-allow-attackers-to-fill-hard-disk/

Microsoft Patches RoguePlanet Defender Flaw That Can Grant SYSTEM Privileges

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Microsoft has released a security update to patch a privilege escalation vulnerability known as RoguePlanet (CVE-2026-50656) in its Malware Protection Engine, which could allow attackers to gain SYSTEM-level privileges and execute arbitrary code. The flaw, disclosed by researcher Chaotic Eclipse, exploited a race condition and affected fully patched Windows systems, but Microsoft’s update has mitigated the issue along with adding defense-in-depth improvements. Additionally, the researcher identified a potential new data leak caused by the patch that requires further investigation.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/microsoft-patches-rogueplanet-defender.html

New Ghost Phishing Wave Is Breaking Traditional Email Security

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A new “ghost phishing” campaign called EvilTokens uses encrypted phishing pages that only decrypt and display malicious content within the victim's browser, bypassing traditional email and URL security checks. This technique primarily targets Microsoft 365 users across industries in the US and Europe, enabling account takeover without stealing passwords directly and complicating detection and response efforts. Security teams are urged to adopt browser-level sandboxing tools that reveal hidden phishing behaviors in real time to shorten exposure windows and improve incident containment.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/new-ghost-phishing-wave-is-breaking.html

Entra Passkey Enrollment Vishing Targets Microsoft 365 Users

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A threat actor tracked as O-UNC-066 has been conducting vishing campaigns targeting Microsoft 365 users across multiple industries by impersonating Microsoft Entra passkey enrollment processes. Attackers use phishing sites mimicking legitimate enrollment portals to trick victims into registering passkeys controlled by the attacker, enabling account takeover and data theft from SharePoint and OneDrive. The extortion group Pink, associated with this campaign, exfiltrates stolen data and pressures victims for ransom payments.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/entra-passkey-enrollment-vishing-targets-microsoft-365-users/

Accenture Confirms Breach After Hacker Offers Stolen Data for Sale

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Accenture confirmed a security breach after a threat actor claimed to have stolen 35 GB of source code, RSA keys, and other sensitive data, subsequently offering it for sale on a cybercrime forum. While Accenture stated the issue has been remediated with no impact on operations or service delivery, the company did not disclose how the breach occurred or whether customer data was compromised.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/accenture-confirms-breach-after-hacker-offers-stolen-data-for-sale/

IonStack Part II: GhostLock, a stack-UAF That Has Existed in ALL Linux Distributions for 15 Years

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GhostLock (CVE-2026-43499) is a Linux kernel vulnerability present in all major distributions since 2011, allowing an unprivileged local attacker to obtain a dangling pointer to kernel stack memory and execute a 97% stable privilege escalation and container escape. The flaw arises from a misuse of the remove_waiter() function in the rtmutex subsystem, causing a stack-use-after-free (UAF) condition that enables controlled writes to kernel memory, leading to function pointer hijacking and root access. The bug was patched in Linux 7.1 after fifteen years, and affected systems are urged to upgrade, with detailed technical analysis and an exploit demonstrating the multi-stage attack involving kernel stack reuse, ASLR leaks, and control flow hijacking.

https://nebusec.ai/research/ionstack-part-2/

Google Pays $250K for Linux Vulnerability Allowing Guest VM Escapes

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Researchers disclosed two high-severity Linux kernel vulnerabilities that allow untrusted users to escalate privileges to root. One flaw, named Januscape (CVE-2026-53359), affects KVM virtualization and enables guest virtual machines to escape containment and execute code on the host, while the other, GhostLock (CVE-2026-43499), is a use-after-free bug in the futex priority-inheritance code enabling local root escalation. Google awarded $250,000 and $92,337 through its bug bounty program for these vulnerabilities, which have now been patched in the Linux kernel.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/high-severity-guest-vm-escape-is-1-of-2-linux-vulnerabilities-to-surface-this-week/

When Checking the URL Isn’t Enough: Phishing Via the Microsoft Identity Platform

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The article discusses a sophisticated phishing technique that abuses the Microsoft identity platform’s device code flow, making it difficult to detect purely by checking URLs. Attackers leverage this method to bypass traditional phishing defenses by exploiting trusted Microsoft OAuth authentication processes, highlighting the need for enhanced vigilance and security measures beyond URL inspection to defend against such threats.

https://securelist.com/microsoft-device-code-phishing-attack/120350/

JadePuffer Ransomware Used AI Agent to Automate Entire Attack

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Researchers from Sysdig identified JadePuffer as the first ransomware operation fully automated by a large language model (LLM) agent, which autonomously conducted reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, privilege escalation, and data encryption. The AI-powered attack exploited a remote code execution flaw in Langflow to access targets, adapt to failures in real time, and encrypt over 1,300 MySQL configuration items, illustrating the emergence of agentic threat actors lowering the barrier for complex cyberattacks.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/jadepuffer-ransomware-used-ai-agent-to-automate-entire-attack/

Roblox Developers Are Losing Entire Games to Malware Attacks

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Roblox developers are losing control of entire games after attackers use social engineering to convince them to run malware disguised as legitimate tools, resulting in session-token theft that bypasses two-factor authentication. Victims report that their games, group accounts, and in-platform currency balances disappear quickly, with limited assistance from Roblox support until media attention intervenes. Developers are advised to avoid running unsolicited files, test new software in isolated environments, monitor active sessions, enable enhanced security features, and use real-time malware protection.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/scams/2026/06/roblox-developers-are-losing-entire-games-to-malware-attacks

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