Check Point has fixed an actively exploited flaw in SmartConsole, the graphical admin panel used to manage its security products. CVE-2026-16232, rated 9.3, is an authentication bypass letting an unauthenticated remote attacker obtain a login token and authenticate with administrator privileges, after which they can alter security configuration and policy on a Security Management or Multi-Domain Management server. Exploitation requires the management server to be reachable from the internet with no restrictions on trusted GUI clients. The same update fixes a second critical authentication bypass and a Gaia Portal issue letting read-only users run commands as root.
Qualys disclosed RefluXFS, a race condition in the Linux kernel's XFS copy-on-write path that lets an ordinary local user overwrite protected files and take root. Tracked as CVE-2026-64600, it triggers when two concurrent direct writes target the same reflinked file: the kernel briefly drops its inode lock, and a second writer can make the first write land on a stale block. The overwrite happens at the block layer, so ownership, permissions, timestamps, and the setuid bit stay untouched and no kernel log entry appears. Qualys reports it works with SELinux enforcing and estimates over 16 million affected systems.
Qualys disclosed a privilege escalation flaw in snap-confine, the component that builds the sandbox for every snap application. CVE-2026-8933, rated 7.8, affects default installations of Ubuntu Desktop 24.04, 25.10, and 26.04, and stems from a 2025 hardening change that moved snap-confine from a setuid root binary to a capabilities model, introducing a race during sandbox setup. An attacker mounts a filesystem over the temporary scratch directory, plants a symlink so a privileged write lands on another file, then drops a udev rule that makes a system service run commands as root. Fixes shipped July 21.
VulnCheck reports active exploitation of a path traversal flaw in Windmill, an open source platform for building internal tools, jobs, and workflows. CVE-2026-29059 lets an unauthenticated attacker read arbitrary files through the log file endpoint, and while observed attempts included reading the password file, the higher value target is the superadmin secret. Where that is configured, an attacker can authenticate as a super administrator and run arbitrary code through the job preview API. VulnCheck counted roughly 170 exposed instances across 24 countries, including deployments reachable through a proxy path rather than directly.
Guardio Labs disclosed HermeticReader, a flaw chain in the Adobe Acrobat extension for Chrome that let an attacker controlled web page read data from a visitor's WhatsApp Web session. Tracked as CVE-2026-48294 and rated 7.4, it is a cross origin disclosure issue affecting versions up to 26.5.2.2, installed on roughly 329 million browsers. Any site could disguise commands as internal extension messages, activate the extension's WhatsApp integration, and redirect its privileged page operations into the WhatsApp tab, extracting chats, contacts, and message previews. No malware, stolen credentials, or WhatsApp flaw was involved. Adobe patched within days.
Chick-fil-A has disclosed a data breach following credential stuffing attacks against customer loyalty accounts. In this kind of attack there is no flaw in the targeted company's systems: attackers take username and password pairs harvested from unrelated breaches and replay them automatically against a login page, and any customer who reused a password elsewhere has their account opened. Loyalty and rewards accounts are attractive because they often hold stored balances, order history, and partial payment details, and they tend to receive less scrutiny than banking logins. Affected customers are advised to change their password.
Attackers began exploiting a critical Microsoft SharePoint flaw within days of a working proof-of-concept appearing publicly. CVE-2026-50522 is a deserialization of untrusted data issue rated 9.8 that lets a remote attacker run code on on-premises SharePoint without authentication, and Microsoft patched it in the July updates while marking exploitation as more likely rather than confirmed. Offensive security firm watchTowr reports active attacks against on-premises deployments, with attackers pulling SharePoint machine keys in a single request. Those keys let an attacker forge authentication tokens and impersonate users, so access survives patching. It is the third SharePoint flaw to see exploitation this month.
Arctic Wolf Labs investigated multiple intrusions in June that began by exploiting an authentication bypass in Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS and ended in Qilin ransomware. CVE-2026-0257 affects the portal and gateway components and lets an unauthenticated remote attacker establish a VPN session without valid credentials, but only where authentication override cookies are enabled alongside specific certificate configurations. That narrow precondition makes it easy to assume you are unaffected without checking. The flaw is patched. Because it grants VPN access rather than code execution, the intrusions look like ordinary remote logins at the start, which delays detection until ransomware is deployed.
Offensive security firm Manifold Security detailed a confused deputy flaw in Microsoft's official Azure DevOps MCP server, which lets AI agents read and operate Azure DevOps on a user's behalf across pull requests, pipelines, wikis, and work items, using that user's own permissions. One of the server's tools returns pull request descriptions without the prompt injection guardrail Microsoft had already applied to other tools. Because descriptions accept Markdown, an attacker can bury instructions in an HTML comment: the web interface renders it as nothing, so a reviewer sees an ordinary change, while the REST API returns the text verbatim and hands it straight to the agent.
Researchers at Intezer showed that a poisoned web page could take over AWS Kiro, an AI coding tool, by getting the agent to rewrite the file that governs what it is allowed to run. A prompt injection in fetched content drops custom code into the MCP settings file, which executes the moment the file is saved. The same write to execution path was demonstrated on Kiro's release day in July 2025 by another researcher, who also flagged writing to a Visual Studio Code settings file to allowlist shell commands. AWS added an approval prompt, but only in supervised mode, leaving the default autonomous mode writing the file unprompted.
TrustStrike Labs