Cisco disclosed and patched a second perfect-score authentication bypass in its Catalyst SD-WAN Controller and Manager (formerly vSmart and vManage). The bug, CVE-2026-20182 (CVSS 10.0), was found by Rapid7 while investigating the earlier CVE-2026-20127 wave, and lives in the same vdaemon service over DTLS port 12346. An unauthenticated attacker can become a trusted peer of the controller, log in as a privileged internal account, hit the NETCONF interface, and rewrite the entire SD-WAN fabric. Cisco Talos already attributes limited in-the-wild exploitation to UAT-8616, an actor with operational-relay-box ties that has been targeting Cisco SD-WAN since 2023.
Exim, the open-source mail transfer agent that ships as default on Debian and powers a large slice of internet mail, has a critical use-after-free in how it parses message bodies sent with the BDAT chunking extension over TLS. The flaw, CVE-2026-45185 (CVSS 9.8) and nicknamed Dead.Letter by discoverer XBOW, triggers when a TLS connection closes via close_notify mid-BDAT and Exim then processes one more cleartext byte. That byte gets written into already-freed memory, corrupting the heap, and XBOW turned it into an unauthenticated RCE primitive. Only Exim builds compiled with USE_GNUTLS=yes are affected; OpenSSL builds are not.
Day one of the Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 hacking contest at OffensiveCon paid out 523,000 dollars across 24 unique zero-days, with Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative reporting wins against fully patched Microsoft Edge, Windows 11, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations, NVIDIA Container Toolkit and Megatron Bridge, OpenAI Codex, and LiteLLM. Orange Tsai's four-bug logic chain that escaped the Edge sandbox took the biggest single prize at 175,000 dollars. An Anthropic Claude Code entry was ruled a collision (the bug was already known to the vendor). Each affected vendor now has 90 days to ship a fix before ZDI publishes technical details.
Two days after the Mini Shai-Hulud worm tore through TanStack and Mistral AI packages, the named-victim count grew sharply. OpenAI confirmed that two employee devices were compromised through the TanStack supply-chain chain and that a limited subset of internal source code repositories had credential material exfiltrated; the company is rotating its macOS code-signing certificates and tells Mac users they must update ChatGPT Desktop, Codex, and Atlas apps by June 12, 2026, or the apps will stop launching. TeamPCP separately listed 450 Mistral AI private repositories on a criminal forum for 25,000 dollars. Mistral confirmed a codebase management system was temporarily compromised on May 12 but says hosted services and user data were not impacted.
ESET researchers documented a new wave of activity from FrostyNeighbor (a.k.a. Ghostwriter, UNC1151, UAC-0057), the Belarus-aligned group that has been targeting Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania since 2016. Since March 2026, the group has been sending spear-phishing PDFs impersonating Ukrainian telecom operator Ukrtelecom. The lure server checks the visitor's IP: Ukrainian addresses get a malicious RAR archive that drops a JavaScript version of PicassoLoader, which in turn pulls down a Cobalt Strike Beacon, while everyone else just sees a clean decoy PDF. Operators appear to manually approve which fingerprinted victims actually get the implant.
Symantec's Threat Hunter Team detailed a global cyber-espionage campaign by MuddyWater (a.k.a. Seedworm, Static Kitten, Temp Zagros), an APT linked to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The group hit at least nine organizations on four continents in Q1 2026 - including a major unnamed South Korean electronics manufacturer where attackers maintained access from February 20 to 27. They abused signed legitimate binaries fmapp.exe (a Fortemedia audio utility) and sentinelmemoryscanner.exe (a SentinelOne component) to sideload malicious DLLs called fmapp.dll and sentinelagentcore.dll, both carrying the ChromElevator post-exploitation tool that lifts data from Chrome-based browsers. Stolen files were staged through public file-transfer service sendit[.]sh to blend in.
ReliaQuest researchers say initial access broker KongTuke has shifted from web-based ClickFix and FileFix lures to Microsoft Teams social engineering, taking as little as five minutes to gain persistent access. The attacker reaches employees from one of five rotating Microsoft 365 tenants, uses Unicode whitespace tricks to make the display name look like internal IT help desk, then talks the victim through pasting a PowerShell command. That command downloads a ZIP from Dropbox containing a portable WinPython runtime and a Python-based RAT called ModeloRAT. The new ModeloRAT variant adds a five-server C2 pool with automatic failover, self-update, and randomized URL paths, and several major EDR products did not detect it.
PraisonAI, an open-source multi-agent orchestration framework with about 7,100 GitHub stars, shipped a legacy Flask API server with authentication hard-coded off (AUTH_ENABLED = False, AUTH_TOKEN = None). When the GitHub advisory and CVE-2026-44338 (CVSS 7.3) became public at 13:56 UTC on May 11, Sysdig's threat research honeypots saw a scanner identifying itself as CVE-Detector/1.0 probing the exact vulnerable endpoint at 17:40 UTC the same day - just 3 hours and 44 minutes later. The scanner enumerated /agents to confirm the auth bypass worked, then moved on. The actual impact ceiling depends on whatever the operator's agents.yaml workflow is configured to do.
West Pharmaceutical Services - the Pennsylvania-based S&P 500 maker of injectable pharmaceutical packaging and drug delivery components, with annual revenues over $3 billion and 10,800 employees - filed an SEC 8-K disclosing a 'material cybersecurity attack.' The company detected the intrusion on May 4, 2026, and confirmed on May 7 that attackers had exfiltrated data and encrypted certain systems. West took infrastructure offline globally for containment, engaged Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 for forensics, and partially restored core enterprise, shipping, and manufacturing systems by May 13. No ransomware group has publicly claimed the attack, and West says it has 'taken steps intended to mitigate the risk of dissemination of the exfiltrated data.'
Broadcom released a security update for VMware Fusion to fix CVE-2026-41702, a high-severity local privilege escalation that lets any non-administrative user on a Mac running Fusion become root on the host. The flaw is a time-of-check time-of-use race condition inside a SETUID binary used by Fusion - the kind of bug that turns a foothold on a developer workstation into full host control. Researcher Mathieu Farrell reported it privately. Broadcom rated the issue 'important' (CVSSv3 7.8). The advisory landed the same week as Pwn2Own Berlin, where VMware ESXi exploits can earn participants up to 200,000 dollars - Broadcom is on-site.