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.
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.
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.
An AI-discovered bug hidden in NGINX since 2008 lets anyone on the internet crash NGINX worker processes or, with ASLR disabled, run code on the server using a single crafted HTTP request. The flaw, named NGINX Rift (CVE-2026-42945, CVSS 9.2), sits in the rewrite module that powers URL rewriting in almost every NGINX deployment. It triggers when a config uses a rewrite directive with unnamed regex captures and a question mark, followed by another rewrite, if, or set directive - a common pattern in API gateway setups. NGINX runs roughly a third of the websites on the public internet.
A researcher who calls themselves Chaotic Eclipse - and who has weaponized every prior Windows flaw they have leaked this year - dropped working proof-of-concept code for two unpatched zero-days on May 12. YellowKey lets anyone with physical access to a Windows 11 or Server 2022/2025 machine plug in a USB stick, hold CTRL during a reboot into the Windows Recovery Environment, and get a shell with full access to the BitLocker-protected drive. GreenPlasma is a privilege escalation against the CTFMON service that hands an unprivileged user a path to SYSTEM. Independent researchers including Will Dormann and Kevin Beaumont have confirmed that YellowKey works as advertised.
Six days after Dirty Frag was patched, researcher William Bowling and the V12 Security team disclosed Fragnesia - a separate Linux kernel bug in the same ESP-in-TCP networking code that lets any unprivileged local user become root in one command. The public proof-of-concept overwrites /usr/bin/su in memory using a logic flaw that loses track of shared socket-buffer fragments, then re-runs su to drop into a root shell. The on-disk binary is left untouched, which makes the change harder to spot. Tracked as CVE-2026-46300 (CVSS 7.8), it follows Copy Fail (April 29) and Dirty Frag (May 7) in the same family.
Quest KACE has a year-old maximum-severity authentication bypass (CVE-2025-32975, CVSS 10.0). Hunt.io researchers now report that an attacker exploited an unpatched KACE appliance at a Boston-area managed services provider called HIQ - then left their entire toolkit on a publicly accessible server with directory listing turned on. The exfiltrated 512 MB MariaDB dump turned out to contain the full appliance-managed endpoint list for over 60 named client organizations spanning law enforcement, government, healthcare, education, and private companies. None of those 60-plus organizations had any KACE relationship of their own - they were just customers of the MSP that ran it unpatched.
Microsoft fixed 120 vulnerabilities on Tuesday - 17 Critical, no zero-days for the first time since June 2024. Two Word RCEs (CVE-2026-40361 and CVE-2026-40364) trigger just by viewing a malicious document in Outlook's Preview Pane and are rated 'Exploitation More Likely.' Windows DNS Client (CVE-2026-41096) lets an attacker-controlled DNS server execute code on any Windows machine resolving a hostile name - echoing SigRed. Other priorities: Netlogon RCE (CVE-2026-41089) and Microsoft SSO Plugin for Jira and Confluence (CVE-2026-41103, CVSS 9.1).
Fortinet patched two critical RCE flaws Tuesday. CVE-2026-44277 in FortiAuthenticator (Fortinet's IAM/MFA platform) lets unauthenticated attackers execute code via crafted requests. CVE-2026-26083 (CVSS 9.1) in FortiSandbox's web UI lets unauthenticated attackers run code via HTTP requests. Neither is confirmed exploited yet, but Fortinet products have a long exploitation history - CISA flagged FortiClient EMS as actively exploited in April. FortiSandbox is the threat-detection backbone for many Fortinet-centric SOCs; FortiAuthenticator gates MFA and SSO.
SAP's May Patch Day included two CVSS 9.6 critical flaws. CVE-2026-34263 in Commerce Cloud is a missing authentication check from improperly ordered Spring Security rules - unauthenticated attackers can upload configurations and inject code. CVE-2026-34260 in S/4HANA is a SQL injection in the ABAP Enterprise Search component that lets low-privilege authenticated users steal sensitive database records. Both land less than two weeks after four SAP npm packages were hit in the Mini Shai-Hulud attack, putting SAP customers under compounding patch pressure.
TrustStrike Labs