Microsoft confirmed yesterday that a Windows Shell spoofing flaw, CVE-2026-32202, is being exploited in the wild. The bug lets an attacker craft files that appear in File Explorer with fake names, icons, and paths - so a malicious .exe can show up looking like a benign PDF, leading users to double-click and run it. Microsoft patched the bug in the April 14 Patch Tuesday but only confirmed in-the-wild exploitation on April 28, raising urgency for any environment that hasn't deployed April patches. The flaw is particularly dangerous on shared file servers, USB drops, and email attachments - any path where users trust File Explorer to tell them what's what.
cPanel disclosed a critical authentication bypass on Monday affecting every cPanel and WHM version - including end-of-life builds. CVSS 9.8. The bug let unauthenticated attackers log in as administrators by abusing how the cPanel session daemon writes session files during login. Hosting providers including Namecheap, KnownHost, hosting.com, HostPapa, and InMotion took cPanel and WHM offline globally for hours while patches deployed. Researchers at watchTowr published a working proof-of-concept on April 29. KnownHost reports possible targeted exploitation as early as February 23, 2026 - more than two months before disclosure.
CISA added four flaws to KEV on April 24 with a May 8 federal deadline. The headline is CVE-2024-57726 (CVSS 9.9), a missing authorization in SimpleHelp RMM that lets a low-privileged technician mint API keys above their role and escalate to server admin; companion CVE-2024-57728 (CVSS 7.2) chains a path traversal for RCE. SimpleHelp featured in DragonForce and Akira ransomware campaigns last year. CVE-2024-7399 (CVSS 8.8) is a Samsung MagicINFO 9 path traversal with a public PoC since 2024. The fourth, CVE-2025-29635, is the D-Link DIR-823X bug we covered last week.
Shadowserver scan data published Friday shows over 10,500 Zimbra Collaboration Suite instances still unpatched against CVE-2025-48700, a Classic-UI XSS that Synacor fixed in June 2025 but CISA only added to KEV on April 20. Exposed servers split nearly evenly between Asia (3,794) and Europe (3,793). The flaw triggers when a victim simply views a crafted email - no clicks - and runs JavaScript inside their authenticated session for mailbox theft and MFA backup-code retrieval. Zimbra is a recurring APT target: Russia's Winter Vivern, APT29, and APT28 have all run Zimbra-XSS campaigns against NATO and Ukrainian targets.
Federal agencies have until April 30 - this Wednesday - to patch Apache ActiveMQ servers against CVE-2026-34197, a remote code execution flaw that has been hiding in the open source message broker for 13 years. Shadowserver shows more than 7,500 ActiveMQ servers still exposed online and unpatched. The bug normally requires a login, but on ActiveMQ versions 6.0.0 through 6.1.1 a separate older flaw lets attackers skip the login step entirely - making this an unauthenticated remote takeover on those builds. The vulnerability was found using Anthropic's Claude AI assistant by a researcher at Horizon3.ai, who said the discovery was '80% Claude.'
CISA and the UK's National Cyber Security Centre jointly published a malware analysis report for FIRESTARTER, a persistent backdoor that China-linked group UAT-4356 (the same crew behind 2024's ArcaneDoor campaign) planted on Cisco ASA and Firepower firewall devices by chaining CVE-2025-20333 (VPN web server RCE) and CVE-2025-20362 (unauthorized access). The implant hooks into Cisco's Service Platform mount list, a boot-time configuration that controls which programs run when the device starts, so it survives reboots, firmware upgrades, and the September 2025 patches for those two CVEs. CISA found FIRESTARTER on an already-patched US federal civilian agency's Cisco Firepower device through continuous network monitoring - attackers silently returned in March 2026 to deploy a second-stage implant called Line Viper without needing to re-exploit the original vulnerabilities. Updated Emergency Directive ED 25-03 now orders federal agencies to audit every Cisco ASA and Firepower device they run and submit device memory snapshots for CISA analysis. The stark guidance for everyone else: if you confirm a compromise, replace the hardware. Reimaging is not enough because the bootloader itself may be implanted.
CISA added CVE-2026-33825 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on April 23 with a May 7 federal patch deadline. The flaw, nicknamed BlueHammer, is a race condition in Windows Defender's file-remediation logic that lets an unprivileged local attacker overwrite arbitrary files on disk and escalate to SYSTEM on fully-patched Windows 10 and Windows 11 hosts. It was patched in Microsoft's April 8 Patch Tuesday but a working proof-of-concept had already been published to GitHub by a researcher called 'Chaotic Eclipse' on April 7, before the fix shipped. Huntress Labs saw in-the-wild exploitation from April 10, with attackers also picking up two sibling Defender zero-days the same researcher leaked: RedSun (another local privilege escalation) and UnDefend (a denial-of-service that blocks Defender from pulling security definition updates, effectively disarming the EDR). Those two still have no Microsoft patch. The combination - a working privilege-escalation path plus an unpatched technique to silently cripple Defender itself - makes this a priority hunt, not just a priority patch.
Wordfence has seen more than 170 live exploit attempts against CVE-2026-3844, a critical unauthenticated arbitrary file upload in the Breeze Cache WordPress plugin from Cloudways. Breeze has roughly 400,000 active installations, making this one of the larger exposure events of the month. The flaw lives in the fetch_gravatar_from_remote function, which fetches avatar images from an arbitrary remote URL and saves them locally without validating the downloaded file's MIME type - so an attacker can point it at a .php payload and drop a webshell directly into a web-accessible directory. The attack is only possible when the 'Host Files Locally - Gravatars' add-on is enabled, which is not the default, but any site that turned it on for performance reasons is wide open. Cloudways shipped the fix as Breeze 2.4.5 earlier this week; as of publication only about 138,000 of the 400,000 installations had downloaded the patched version, leaving hundreds of thousands of sites exposed to a pre-auth RCE with 9.8 CVSS.
Shadowserver data shows 1,300+ internet-exposed Microsoft SharePoint servers remain unpatched against CVE-2026-32201, a spoofing flaw Microsoft confirmed as a zero-day and CISA added to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog the same day the fix dropped in April Patch Tuesday. Fewer than 200 systems have been patched since the update shipped last week. The flaw affects SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016, SharePoint Server 2019, and SharePoint Server Subscription Edition. An unauthenticated attacker can perform network spoofing through improper input validation in a low-complexity attack that needs no user interaction, letting them view sensitive information and modify data, though not affect availability. Microsoft has not described the exploitation technique or attributed the attacks to a specific group, which is unusual for a zero-day and hints at an ongoing investigation. CISA ordered federal agencies to patch by April 28 under Binding Operational Directive 22-01, and given ongoing in-the-wild abuse, private-sector operators should treat that as their own deadline. SharePoint's habit of holding cached Office 365 tokens, SharePoint-signed refresh tokens, and IP on sensitive business processes makes any compromise a serious lateral-movement foothold, not a minor information disclosure.
CISA added a Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager information disclosure flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on Monday, ordering federal agencies to patch by Friday, April 24 - an unusually aggressive 4-day deadline that reflects confirmed active exploitation. CVE-2026-20133 is an unauthenticated remote flaw in the SD-WAN Manager (formerly vManage) API, caused by insufficient file system access restrictions. An attacker can access the API and read sensitive information from the underlying operating system - including credentials that enable follow-on attacks. Cisco patched it in late February alongside two other SD-WAN Manager flaws (CVE-2026-20128 and CVE-2026-20122, both also added to KEV this week and confirmed exploited in the wild). Catalyst SD-WAN Manager is used to centrally manage up to 6,000 SD-WAN devices from one dashboard, making it a high-value target. Oddly, Cisco's PSIRT still says they have no evidence of public exploitation - contradicting CISA. CISA is treating its own intelligence as authoritative and has issued Emergency Directive 26-03 plus a Hunt & Hardening Guide for Cisco SD-WAN. Over the past several years CISA has tagged 91 Cisco vulnerabilities as exploited in the wild, six used by ransomware operations.