A cybercrime group left its own server exposed on the internet for weeks, revealing a mass website-hacking operation that researchers at SOCRadar now track as WP-SHELLSTORM. The crew breaks into sites at scale, plants hidden backdoors, and resells the access to other criminals. Rather than using zero-days, it automated attacks against 27 known vulnerabilities in outdated WordPress and Joomla plugins; a single flaw in the Breeze caching plugin accounted for over 17,000 backdoored sites. Target lists named more than 1.4 million domains, with roughly 25,000 confirmed compromised. The same server also revealed an earlier campaign that stole cloud credentials and database passwords from exposed configuration servers.
Researchers at Wiz disclosed GhostApproval, a technique that abuses symbolic links to make AI coding assistants write to sensitive files outside the project. A malicious repository includes a symlink named like an innocent file, such as project_settings.json, that actually points to the developer's SSH authorized_keys or shell startup file. When the developer asks the agent to set up the workspace, it follows the link and writes attacker content, such as an SSH key granting passwordless access. The deeper problem is that the approval prompt shows only the harmless filename, not the real target, so the human approves a change they cannot see. Wiz tested six assistants including Claude Code and Cursor.
US auto insurer AssuranceAmerica has confirmed a breach affecting nearly 6.9 million people, the largest known exposure of Americans' driver's license data this year. The company detected the intrusion on March 17 after attackers compromised a single employee's credentials the day before and copied data files, but a lengthy review of the files was not finished until June 15, delaying notifications until now. The stolen data includes names, contact details, driver's license numbers, auto insurance policy and claims information, and, for some people, Social Security numbers. AssuranceAmerica has not detailed how the employee's credentials were taken, though such incidents are often tied to phishing or credential-stealing malware.
Attackers compromised a legitimate maintainer's GitHub account for the Injective blockchain SDK and used it to push a malicious version of the widely used @injectivelabs/sdk-ts npm package, which has around 50,000 weekly downloads. The tainted code, disguised as usage telemetry, hooked the SDK's wallet key-generation functions to capture private keys and seed phrases, then sent them to a server made to look like legitimate Injective infrastructure. Trusted-publishing automation spread the malicious release across 18 packages within minutes, though it was live under an hour before being pulled. Because the theft can reach apps that used the SDK only indirectly, any wallet keys handled by affected versions should be treated as compromised.
A new phishing-as-a-service platform called Forg365 is built to steal Microsoft 365 accounts, combining adversary-in-the-middle and device-code phishing with AI-generated lures created directly in its control panel. Researchers at ZeroBEC found the panel lets operators build campaigns, configure malicious OAuth apps, generate and refine phishing emails with AI, and monitor compromised mailboxes for keywords, all in one place. It also ships a browser extension that silently refreshes session cookies through an OAuth flow, giving attackers ongoing access without re-authenticating. The operators deliver lures posing as business documents, using legitimate email-sending infrastructure to slip past filters. The researchers note AI is lowering the cost of both writing phishing content and building phishing platforms.
Symantec detailed GodDamn, a ransomware operation that disables endpoint defenses using PoisonX, a malicious kernel driver its developers managed to get signed by Microsoft, an unusual escalation over the more common tactic of abusing a legitimate vulnerable driver. In an early-June attack, the operators used AnyDesk for remote access and a credential-harvesting toolkit that pulls passwords from browsers, Windows Credential Manager, cached domain credentials, email clients, and network traffic, before deploying the ransomware. Alongside the signed driver, they ran a user-mode tool disguised as a Symantec product to blind security software. Symantec links GodDamn to a developer it tracks as Hyadina and says the group is actively improving its defense-evasion capabilities.
Microsoft detailed GigaWiper, a destructive Windows backdoor that stitches several older malware families into one implant, letting operators choose how to destroy a machine. Its commands include a raw disk wiper that overwrites the drive and partition table, a multi-pass wiper for the Windows drive, and a fake-ransomware module that encrypts files with keys it never saves, so there is no recovery and no ransom note, only destruction disguised as extortion. It also offers remote access and log clearing. To hide, it poses as OneDrive through a scheduled task and routes command traffic over legitimate services like RabbitMQ and Redis. Because it runs after intrusion, offline backups are the real defense.
Researchers at Nebula Security disclosed GhostLock, a Linux kernel flaw that lets any logged-in user gain full root on an unpatched machine, and it also escapes containers. Tracked as CVE-2026-43499, the bug has shipped by default in essentially every mainstream distribution since 2011 and needs no special permissions or network access; ordinary threading calls from any local program are enough. Nebula built a working exploit it says is 97 percent reliable and published the code, though no in-the-wild use is known yet. There is no full workaround, patch availability is uneven across distributions, and one earlier fix introduced a separate crash bug, so confirm the fixed package version.
Ubiquiti has released fixes for 25 vulnerabilities across its UniFi ecosystem, including several critical flaws that let a network-based attacker fully compromise devices. The most severe, CVE-2026-50746 rated 10.0, is an improper access-control bug in the UniFi Connect application that allows unauthenticated command injection on the host. Others rated 9.9, spanning UniFi Talk, Access, Protect, and UniFi OS, include SQL injection, command injection, and server-side request forgery that lead to privilege escalation, and some can be chained to bypass authentication requirements. The flaws affect widely deployed gateways and consoles like the UDM family. Ubiquiti lists no interim workarounds, so updating each affected product to its fixed version is the only mitigation.
Microsoft has patched RoguePlanet, a Microsoft Defender flaw that a public proof-of-concept had been exploiting since June to gain SYSTEM privileges on fully updated Windows machines. Tracked as CVE-2026-50656, the bug is a race condition in Defender's scanning engine: a low-privileged attacker who already has code running on a host can win a timing window to spawn a command shell as SYSTEM, and the public exploit worked whether or not real-time protection was enabled. It does not provide initial access, but it turns any foothold into full local control, useful for disabling defenses, stealing credentials, and moving laterally. It is the fourth Defender flaw disclosed by the same researcher this year.
TrustStrike Labs