Researchers showed that confused deputy weaknesses persist in Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, where a trusted service can be tricked into acting on an attacker's behalf against resources it should not reach. The pattern shows up when one service holds broad permissions and accepts instructions or identifiers from a less-trusted source without verifying who is really asking, which can enable cross-tenant access or privilege escalation. It is the same class of issue behind recent findings in enterprise agent and integration tooling, where a component with a user's permissions follows attacker-supplied input. The takeaway is architectural: identity and authorization must be checked at every trust boundary, not assumed from the calling service.
Security firms ThreatBook and Imperva report attackers targeting a critical flaw in Fastjson, Alibaba's widely used JSON library for Java. On affected Spring Boot applications, a malicious JSON request can execute code without authentication, running with the privileges of the Java process. Tracked as CVE-2026-16723 with an Alibaba-assigned score of 9.0, the confirmed chain needs Fastjson 1.2.68 through 1.2.83, a Spring Boot executable fat-JAR, a network-reachable path that feeds attacker-controlled JSON to the parser, and SafeMode left at its disabled default. Notably, the AutoType feature can stay off and no classpath gadget is required. As of July 25, Alibaba had not shipped a fixed 1.x version.
A researcher at depthfirst published a working exploit on July 24 for a GitLab flaw patched on June 10, running commands as the git user on any self-managed 18.11.3 server that has not updated. Any authenticated user who can push to a project can trigger it: the attacker commits a crafted Jupyter notebook and opens its commit diff to leak a heap pointer, repeats until an automated probe locates libraries in memory, then fires the payload with two more notebooks. No administrator rights, runner access, or victim interaction are needed. The bug sits in the notebook renderer, which passes repository-controlled data to a parser inside a long-lived worker.
Researchers published a working exploit on July 24 for Certighost, an Active Directory Certificate Services flaw that lets a low-privileged domain user obtain a certificate for a domain controller and authenticate as that machine. Because domain controller accounts hold directory replication rights, the resulting credential can extract the krbtgt secret through DCSync, effectively handing over the whole domain. Microsoft patched it in the July 14 updates as CVE-2026-54121, an improper authorization issue scored 8.8. Exploitation needs only network access and an ordinary domain account, with no administrator rights or user interaction, and it was tested against a default enterprise certificate authority setup.
Cl0p affiliates are exploiting internet-exposed PTC Windchill and FlexPLM product lifecycle platforms through an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw, in a data theft extortion campaign. Product lifecycle management systems track a product from design to retirement and hold computer-aided design files, bills of materials, engineering data, and workflows, making them a concentrated store of intellectual property for manufacturers in automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, and electronics. Cl0p's established pattern is mass exploitation of one enterprise product followed by extortion over stolen data rather than encryption. PTC patched a critical deserialization flaw in the Windchill data management component earlier this year that has already seen exploitation.
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.
TrustStrike Labs