Cisco SD-WAN Zero-Day Exploited Months Before Patching

Google’s Mandiant team has detailed the exploitation of a Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vulnerability that was exploited as a zero-day months prior to its disclosure.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20245, is the 7th Cisco SD-WAN product flaw whose exploitation came to light in 2026.

CVE-2026-20245 affects the CLI of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager and allows an authenticated local attacker to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges using specially crafted files.

The security hole was disclosed by Cisco in early June, and patches were released roughly one week later.

Mandiant’s investigation began in early 2026 after observing an unidentified threat actor targeting SD-WAN infrastructure at a service provider.

The attacker established initial access to an SD-WAN Manager instance via SSH in March 2026. They then exploited CVE-2026-20245 to escalate privileges to root.

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According to Mandiant, the same victim’s SD-WAN Manager systems were previously targeted — either by the same or a different threat actor — possibly through the exploitation of other vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-20127 or CVE-2026-20182, which at the time were also zero-days.

In the March attack, the hackers authenticated to the SD-WAN Manager instance via SSH using the ‘vmanage-admin’ account and then used that access to change the default admin account’s password.

“The threat actor subsequently used their active vmanage-admin session to change the password of the admin account back to its original state before terminating their active session. This activity was likely performed to reduce the probability of detection by an administrator trying to log into the device during day-to-day operations,” Mandiant explained.

It added, “The vmanage-admin and admin accounts are default accounts on Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN controllers that have different privileges, but neither possesses root shell access.”

Once they had admin privileges to the targeted system, the attacker exploited CVE-2026-20245 to escalate privileges and achieve full root-level access.

In an effort to evade detection, the threat actor deleted all files created during the attack, restored altered system configurations, and ran a script to ensure no evidence remained.

“This campaign underscores the living off the edge paradigm, where threat actors prioritize the compromise of network appliances to bypass traditional security perimeters. As organizations increasingly adopt software-defined networking, the orchestrators managing these environments become primary targets.” Mandiant said.

Additional technical details and IoCs are available in Mandiant’s blog post.

Separately, a cybersecurity firm has reported seeing attacks exploiting CVE-2026-20230, a Cisco Unified CM vulnerability patched in early June. However, Cisco told SecurityWeek that it cannot confirm in-the-wild exploitation as of June 24.

https://www.securityweek.com/cisco-sd-wan-zero-day-exploited-months-before-patching/

Exclusive: Meet AIVEX, a New Triage Model Built to Reduce Supply Chain Threat and Risk

Remediation priority (vulnerability triaging) traditionally focuses on Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX) statements provided with the software and supplemented by CVSS scores. That is not enough in today’s environment.

SBOMs list the components within the software. They emanated from Executive Order 14028 designed to reduce supply chain attacks. VEX statements emerged soon afterward to indicate whether any known vulnerabilities are exploitable. The separate CVSS score is used as a severity indicator for vulnerability remediation priority. It’s not working – supply chain attacks continue.

A major cause is a growing lack of context around exploitation. In the AI Age, the effect of exploitation may differ depending on which stage of an AI lifecycle in which it occurs. Lack of context reduces the effectiveness of remediation priority, while the expansion of AI software will magnify the problem. Supply chain attacks will continue to grow.

(Understanding ‘context’ is essential for understanding anything and everything in life. We perceive things – in this case data – but those things are meaningless in isolation. It is the surrounding, often invisible, context in which we see things that gives them any meaning. For another and different example of the importance of context, again involving AI, see the effect of bad AI context on AI decision-making.)

Devashri Datta is an independent researcher and security architect (specializing in DevSecOps automation, software supply chain security, and governance of large-scale vulnerability and compliance systems) has a solution. This solution comprises two new elements in the triage process: a safety relevance interpretation layer (SRIL) to provide context, and an extension (known as AIVEX) to the CycloneDX VEX to make the context machine readable.

SRIL provides context, and AIVEX transforms the context into a CycloneDX‑compatible schema suitable for use within the organization’s existing tooling.

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Datta’s article explaining SRIL (Moving Beyond Severity Scores: A VEX-Driven Interpretation Layer for Software Supply Chain Governance) will be published by ISACA on July 1. Today, she sat down with SecurityWeek to discuss the failure of existing SBOM/VEX/CVSS, and the manner in which AIVEX/SRIL can change things.

A growing concern

AI can transform a data threat against systems into a physical threat against people – it is increasingly and autonomously driving physical robots.

If a firm has two CVSS scores — a CVSS 9.8 critical remote code execution flaw in a back-office analytics dashboard and a moderate CVSS 5.2 input-validation bug in the sensor-fusion module of an autonomous delivery robot operating in a public warehouse — current logic dictates patching the former first. But the latter could possibly harm or even kill innocent members of the public. The existing triage logic of using SBOMs, VEX and CVSS scores does not provide this context.

As software-driven autonomous robots increasingly pervade our physical world, context becomes ever more important. “But VEX stops short of safety context,” explained Datta. “It can tell you a vulnerability is not exploitable; but it cannot tell you that if it were exploitable, the consequence would be a vehicle losing steering control at highway speed.”

The commercial consequence of an autonomous robot causing death because of a software vulnerability that could have been fixed but wasn’t fixed would probably be bankruptcy.

This is the anomalous consequence of relying on CVSS scores: AI turns low threat into very high risk.

The AI Attack Surface

The inability of CVSS to indicate context is a growing concern and has reduced the CVSS value for DevSecOps engineers. Today, with the rise of AI and autonomous robots, a new solution is urgent. But context within AI software is complicated because AI’s attack surface is not the same as a traditional software attack surface.

“An AI system, particularly an agentic one capable of taking actions in the real world, has attack surfaces distributed across training data, model weights, inference pipeline, tool integrations, and deployment infrastructure,” explained Datta. “A compromise at any stage can alter behavior in ways that are difficult to detect and harder to attribute.”

She tackles this problem through the combination of SRIL and AIVEX.

SRIL

SRIL is not just a vague idea. “Flexera has adopted this and is shipping the version to customers next week; similarly, Anchore is working on it and will ship it in the next version,” she explained.

So, what is it? “SRIL is a structured annotation layer designed to sit above existing vulnerability data, enriching CVSS scores and VEX statements with four dimensions of context that safety-critical environments need but current standards do not provide,” she continued.

The four dimensions are:

Safety domain classification (does the vulnerable component operate within a safety-critical function such as a sensor in an autonomous vehicle);
Lifecycle stage mapping (the attack surface differs between different stages of an AI – training data integrity has a different level of risk than inference-time input validation);
Consequence severity modifier (independent of the CVSS score, what is the real-world consequence if this vulnerability is exploited?)
Exploitability in context (does the deployment environment, threat actor model, and asset exposure change the exploitability calculation in ways the base VEX statement does not capture?).

In combination, said Datta, “These dimensions allow security teams to generate a safety-adjusted priority – a triage score that reflects not just how severe a vulnerability is in isolation, but how much it matters in the specific operational context where affected software is deployed.”

This is a manual effort required from the DevSecOps team, but one that is fully justified by the potential blast radius of an unpatched low-severity AI vulnerability causing robotic third party harm.

AIVEX

The SRIL data is consumed and processed by the AIVEX. It generates context-rich decisions (such as ‘remediate now’, ‘defer’, or ‘monitor’ in machine readable format.

“The AI Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange is a proposed extension to the CycloneDX VEX schema. It makes SRIL machine-readable in structured fields for model provenance, inference-time attack surface classification, safety domain annotation, and AI lifecycle stage. It is designed to integrate with existing SBOM tooling rather than replace it,” explained Datta. “The CycloneDX working group has it under active consideration.”

VEX tells you whether a CVE is exploitable in a given product configuration. “AIVEX asks the question that comes afterward,” she continued. “If the vulnerable component is an AI model acting as an agent in the real world, what does exploitation actually mean? That’s a different problem class, and the industry doesn’t have a standard for it yet.”

AI compliance benefits

More realistic triaging is not the only benefit provided by SRIL/AIVEX. It also benefits increasingly arduous AI regulatory compliance. “A life cycle-based interpretation model improves traceability and auditability without introducing new compliance burdens. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Secure Software Development Framework promotes risk-informed decisions,” she explains in the paper being published on July 1.

“This model operationalizes that guidance by clarifying how SBOM and VEX data feed into real-world governance decisions. Importantly, the model does not redefine these standards; it helps organizations apply them consistently.”

She goes further, anticipating future international regulation convergence. The EU AI Act is in force, but full enforcement of its most demanding aspects for AI embedded in regulated products (conformity assessment, risk management, logging, human oversight) will only begin in August of this year.

Meanwhile, she explained, “NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework similarly emphasizes governance processes that account for operational context and real-world impact of AI system failures, not merely technical severity. Sector-specific guidance from FDA (medical devices), CISA (critical infrastructure), and the Department of Transportation (autonomous vehicles) is independently converging on the same need: a structured mechanism to connect vulnerability data to safety consequence.”

Such increasingly arduous regulations make demands without telling DevSecOps how to comply with those demands. “SBOMs tell you what components you have. VEX tells you whether they’re exploitable. But SRIL asks the question that regulators actually care about: if exploited, does it matter to a patient, a power grid or a passenger?”

https://www.securityweek.com/exclusive-meet-aivex-a-new-triage-model-built-to-reduce-supply-chain-threat-and-risk/

Critical Ubiquiti Vulnerabilities in Attackers’ Crosshairs

Threat actors have been targeting three critical-severity vulnerabilities in Ubiquiti devices, the US cybersecurity agency CISA warns.

The exploited flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-34908, CVE-2026-34909, and CVE-2026-34910, with a CVSS score of 10/10, were patched last month.

CVE-2026-34908 is described as an improper access control issue that could allow remote attackers to make unauthorized changes to vulnerable UniFi OS devices.

CVE-2026-34909 is a path traversal defect that could be exploited to access files on the underlying operating system and manipulate them to access underlying accounts.

CVE-2026-34910 is described as an improper input validation weakness that allows attackers to execute command injection attacks over the network. A variant of the flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-33000 (CVSS score of 9.1), requires authentication.

On May 21, Ubiquiti announced that UniFi OS Server version 5.0.8 was released with patches for these vulnerabilities.

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The company made no mention of their in-the-wild exploitation, yet multiple users reported on the company’s forums and on Reddit that the bugs were exploited in the wild, likely as zero-days, to create rogue administrator accounts under the username ‘John Sim’, in what appear to have been automated reconnaissance attacks.

A BishopFox analysis of the patches shows that CVE-2026-34908 and CVE-2026-34909 are an authentication gateway bypass rooted in how NGINX processes crafted requests. In raw form, the requests begin with the auth-exempt prefix, while in normalized form they resolve to an authenticated internal route.

“We confirmed the bypass against a live [UniFi OS version] 5.0.6 virtual machine. Requests built this way reached internal backends that are supposed to require authentication,” BishopFox said.

The gateway bypass then leads to CVE-2026-34910, the lack of validation of package names in a function that handles updates. It allows an attacker to supply a crafted package name containing shell metacharacters, as well as an option that forces the command code path, leading to command injection.

“We validated the unauthenticated path against our live 5.0.6 test target using a benign, time-based oracle: a request whose injected portion simply causes the server to pause for a fixed interval before responding,” the company says.

As the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium points out, UniFi OS devices are designed for managing infrastructure and are centrally integrated into networks. Their successful compromise could allow attackers to move laterally into enterprise environments.

On Tuesday, CISA added CVE-2026-34908, CVE-2026-34909, and CVE-2026-34910 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, urging federal agencies to patch them within three days, in line with BOD 26-04 requirements.

The same applies to CVE-2025-67038 (CVSS score of 9.8), an unauthenticated OS command injection defect in Lantronix EDS5000 that could lead to code execution with root privileges. The issue was disclosed in April along with 21 other Lantronix and Silex vulnerabilities, collectively tracked as BRIDGE:BREAK.

https://www.securityweek.com/critical-ubiquiti-vulnerabilities-in-attackers-crosshairs/

Exploitable CI/CD Vulnerabilities Expose Millions of Repositories to Hijacking

A systemic class of exploitable CI/CD vulnerabilities in the open source software supply chain exposes millions of repositories to takeover, cybersecurity firm Novee warns.

Referred to as Cordyceps, the security defects allow unauthenticated attackers to hijack developer workflows and gain full control over affected repositories.

Agentic coding, Novee says, has resulted in insecure patterns being reproduced across millions of repositories through automatically generated CI/CD workflows.

The flaws, ranging from command injection to authentication logic, artifact poisoning, and privilege escalation, impact build tooling from Microsoft, Google, Apache, Cloudflare, and the Python Software Foundation, with a ripple effect reaching thousands of other organizations.

Any unauthenticated attacker with a free account can exploit these weaknesses to forge approvals, push code, and exfiltrate credentials, without an organization membership or special privileges.

“Once the exploit pattern was identified, 654 repositories were flagged in a single scan, and more than 300 were confirmed fully exploitable – attacker-controlled code execution, credential theft, or outright supply chain compromise,” Novee says.

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The vulnerabilities, the cybersecurity firm says, reside in GitHub Actions YAML. Low-privileged workflows can be triggered via untrusted pull requests or comments, with the output ending in high-privilege workflows that authenticate to cloud providers with the maintainer’s permissions.

“These workflows run shell commands, authenticate to cloud providers, hold signing keys, and publish releases, yet they are treated as ‘configuration,’ not as security-critical code. The result: command injection, privilege escalation, and supply-chain compromise hiding in plain sight,” Novee says.

The cybersecurity firm identified the flaws in GitHub Actions .yml files, which are overlooked by traditional security scanners, but underlines that this is not a GitHub-exclusive weakness, and that any workflow management system is susceptible.

“When that same software is then installed by thousands of organizations, one compromised workflow in one repository can ripple outward into banks, cloud accounts, AI labs, and end-user devices,” Novee says.

Webinar Today: Modern Exposure Validation in the AI Era

Cordyceps was confirmed to impact Microsoft’s Azure Sentinel, Google’s AI Agent Development Kit, Apache’s Doris analytics database, Cloudflare’s Workers SDK, and Python Software Foundation’s Black code formatter, impacting all organizations that rely on these repositories.

The exploitation of these vulnerabilities could lead to supply chain compromise (through malicious packages published on NPM, PyPI, Crates.io, Docker/GHCR, and Helm), malicious code pushed to protected branches, forced CI checks, compromised credentials across AWS, GCP, and Netlify, compromised self-hosted runners, and bot impersonation.

“This supply chain vulnerability lies in the foundational open-source plumbing the entire industry runs on, and the kind of issue that hides from scanners because, technically, every individual piece is working as designed. The workflow does what it was told. The vulnerability exists only in the composition – untrusted data crossing a trust boundary that no one audited,” Novee says.

https://www.securityweek.com/exploitable-ci-cd-vulnerabilities-expose-millions-of-repositories-to-hijacking/

Webinar Today: Modern Exposure Validation in the AI Era

Weeks to hours. That’s how fast AI now turns a new vulnerability into a working exploit.

Patch-and-pentest cycles were built for a slower world. The question has changed from “are we patched?” to “are we secure right now, and can we prove it?”

Here’s the hard truth: finding exposures was never the problem. Proving which ones an attacker could actually use, and deciding the right call on evidence, is the hard part. And no single tool gets you there: automated pentesting only tests CVEs that have an exploit, on assets it can safely reach, leaving your most vulnerabilities unvalidated.

Join the live webinar on June 24th at 1PM ET to learn how to:

Turn every exposure into a defensible Patch, Mitigate, Monitor, or Accept with Evidence decision, backed by proof, not a severity score
Run automated pentesting, exposure validation, and BAS as one program across attack surfaces, exposures, and controls
Answer “is this exploitable here?” for the restricted, air-gapped, and no-exploit assets a live exploit can’t touch

The exploit timeline collapsed. Make sure your validation didn’t.

https://www.securityweek.com/webinar-today-modern-exposure-validation-in-the-ai-era/

Decades-Old Squid Proxy Flaw ‘Squidbleed’ Can Expose User Data

Security researchers at Calif.io have disclosed a memory leak vulnerability in Squid Proxy that has existed in the software since 1997.

Squid is a widely used open source web proxy that can reduce bandwidth and improve response times via caching. Squid supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and other protocols.

Calif researchers discovered that Squid is affected by a vulnerability that is similar to the notorious OpenSSL vulnerability known as Heartbleed, which is why they have dubbed it Squidbleed.

Officially tracked as CVE-2026-47729, the vulnerability causes Squid’s FTP parser to read beyond the boundary of a memory buffer, into a region that may contain a previous user’s uncleared HTTP request data.

Exploitation requires the attacker to control an FTP server reachable from the proxy. Squidbleed poses the biggest risk in shared proxy environments, such as corporate networks, schools, and public Wi-Fi hotspots, where multiple users may route traffic via the same Squid instance.

An attacker with access to such a network could silently siphon HTTP request data belonging to other users, potentially capturing authentication credentials, session tokens, and API keys.

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The exposure is limited to cleartext HTTP traffic and deployments where Squid terminates TLS. Standard HTTPS connections relayed as opaque Connect tunnels are not affected. While that reduces the overall attack surface, sensitive credentials can still travel in cleartext HTTP in many enterprise and legacy environments.

The vulnerability was discovered with the aid of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI model.

A patch was merged into Squid version 8 in April 2026 and shipped in version 7.6 in June 2026. The risk can be mitigated by disabling FTP support entirely if it’s not needed.

Calif researchers also recently found a high-severity vulnerability in OpenSSL and a DoS attack technique called HTTP/2 Bomb, which allows an attacker to quickly knock web servers offline. Both vulnerabilities were discovered using AI.

https://www.securityweek.com/decades-old-squid-proxy-flaw-squidbleed-can-expose-user-data/

Attackers Exploit Gravity SMTP Plugin Flaw to Harvest Valuable WordPress Data

Threat actors are exploiting a medium-severity vulnerability in the Gravity SMTP WordPress plugin to steal complete system details, Defiant warns.

Gravity SMTP for WordPress is an email deliverability plugin that integrates with multiple SMTP providers and API-based services to allow admins to send and track emails directly from their websites.

All plugin iterations before version 2.1.5 are affected by a sensitive information exposure vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-4020 (CVSS score of 5.3) that has been exploited in the wild since early May.

The issue impacts a REST API endpoint that unconditionally returns true, thus becoming accessible to any unauthenticated user. If a specific parameter is appended to a query, the endpoint returns internal connector data in JSON format.

The data contains the full system report, including configuration data such as PHP and WordPress version, loaded extensions, web server details, document root path, database details, active plugins and theme, WordPress configuration details, and configured API keys/tokens.

According to Defiant, the bug exists because the impacted REST API endpoint, registered within a shared library providing a configuration collection system, does not perform authentication or capability checks.

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“This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to harvest credentials that could be used to send email on behalf of the site, as well as to gather detailed reconnaissance about the site’s software stack that can be leveraged to identify and target other vulnerabilities,” Defiant explains.

The WordPress security firm has observed in-the-wild exploitation of the security defect since early May. Attackers have been sending unauthenticated GET requests to the vulnerable endpoint to retrieve the full System Report JSON object.

In June, Defiant has observed a surge in attacks targeting CVE-2026-4020. To date, the company has blocked over 17 million exploit attempts.

Site owners and administrators are advised to update their Gravity SMTP deployments to version 2.1.5 as soon as possible and to check server access logs for requests to the affected endpoint, as the in-the-wild exploitation does not leave other obvious traces.

“If you are running a vulnerable version of Gravity SMTP and have configured any third-party email integrations (such as Amazon SES, Google, Mailjet, Resend, or Zoho), you should assume the associated API keys, secrets, and OAuth tokens may have been exposed. We strongly recommend rotating these credentials after updating the plugin,” Defiant notes.

Related: No Exploits Required

https://www.securityweek.com/attackers-exploit-gravity-smtp-plugin-flaw-to-harvest-valuable-wordpress-data/

In Other News: Apple Patches Beats Eavesdropping Flaw, DOT Closes Delta CrowdStrike Probe, AWS Continuum

SecurityWeek’s weekly cybersecurity news roundup offers a concise overview of important developments that may not receive full standalone coverage but remain relevant to the broader threat landscape.

This curated summary highlights key stories across vulnerability disclosures, emerging attack methods, policy updates, industry reports, and other noteworthy events to help readers maintain a well-rounded awareness of the evolving cybersecurity environment.

Here are this week’s highlights:

10-year-old phpBB flaw enables session hijacking

Researchers uncovered a critical authentication bypass in phpBB versions up to 3.3.16 and 4.0.0-a2. A single unauthenticated HTTP request can impersonate any user, including admins, exposing private messages and forum content, and providing full administrative control. phpBB users should upgrade immediately to 3.3.17 or the latest master branch. The issue, reported via HackerOne, received a patch within days, but thousands of active forums remain exposed.

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Velvet Ant maintained decade-long stealth in air-gapped critical infrastructure

China-nexus actor Velvet Ant compromised an organization’s segregated network starting around 2016. It chained internet-facing footholds, Nginx/FastCGI proxies, and backdoored PAM/OpenSSH components for credential theft and persistent access. The group deployed variants of GS-Netcat, SOCKS5 proxies, and nine pam_unix.so backdoors across hosts. Remediation proved complex.

MaXSS and Spyder flaws expose 10 million Chrome users to hacking

Critical vulnerabilities in SiderAI (Spyder) and MaxAI (MaXSS) agentic side-panel Chrome extensions can allow malicious websites to trigger arbitrary extension actions, including hidden tab screenshots, AI memory dumps, and potential file access. With over 10 million combined installs and no vendor response, the issues enable full browser session compromise and account takeovers without user interaction. Users should remove the extensions until fixed.

AWS unveils Continuum

AWS has announced a new AI-powered tool designed to help organizations discover, prioritize, validate, and resolve vulnerabilities. Available in gated preview, Continuum takes findings from existing tools and its own scanning, prioritizing them based on exploitability in the user’s own environment.

1.2 million WordPress sites compromised in OptinMonster supply chain attack

Attackers injected malicious JavaScript into Awesome Motive’s OptinMonster, TrustPulse, and PushEngage WordPress plugin CDN scripts. The payload activates for logged-in admins, creating rogue administrator accounts and a hidden backdoor plugin. The breach stemmed from a compromised UpdraftPlus instance and CDN key. The supply chain attack is believed to have hit more than 1.2 million WordPress sites.

FTC says imposter scams cost Americans $3.5 billion in 2025

The FTC reported imposter scams as the most common fraud category, with losses nearly tripling since 2020. Bank and government impersonation schemes drove the bulk of the damage, often via fake security alerts urging money transfers. Overall fraud losses hit a record $16 billion. The agency continues enforcement under its Impersonation Rule and supports public awareness campaigns.

US DOT closes investigation into Delta’s 2024 CrowdStrike outage response

The Department of Transportation ended its probe into Delta’s prolonged recovery from the global CrowdStrike incident without penalties. Investigators found the airline provided adequate refunds, baggage help, and support for passengers with disabilities. This aligns with the current administration’s shift away from certain Biden-era consumer protection enforcement approaches.

JetBrains Marketplace plugins steal developer AI keys

At least 15 malicious AI coding assistant plugins, published in the JetBrains Marketplace under various vendor accounts, exfiltrate OpenAI, DeepSeek, and similar API keys. The plugins have racked up nearly 70,000 installs while functioning as advertised. Keys are sent in plaintext to a hardcoded attacker server. The plugins also appear to resell stolen access to paying users.

Apple releases Beats firmware fixing unauthenticated mic access

Beats Studio Buds firmware update 1B211 patches CVE-2025-20701, which allowed nearby attackers to listen via the microphone on unpaired devices actively seeking connections. Updates apply automatically when paired with Apple devices. CVE-2025-20701 is one of three Bluetooth security issues disclosed last year, which have been found to impact devices from several major vendors.

Popa botnet tied to Israeli proxy provider

Researchers linked the large Popa Android TV box botnet — used for residential proxy traffic in ad fraud and scraping — to NetNut, operated by publicly traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies. Researchers said an SDK turns compromised streaming devices into persistent proxies. The operation involves millions of IPs daily and raises concerns about local network exposure and ties to data scraping. NetNut and Alarum have disputed the allegations calling them “demonstrably inaccurate assertions and flawed deductions rather than verified facts.”

GCP Config Connector enables org-wide IAM owner takeover

A confused deputy vulnerability in Config Connector lets any Kubernetes namespace user escalate to GCP Organization Owner by submitting a malicious IAMPolicyMember. Google acknowledged the issue internally as P1/S1 but later classified it as “working as intended” and left it unpatched. The bypass affects organizations using the service for organization-level management.

ShinyHunters leaks Knicks and MSG talent and customer data

Hackers published Madison Square Garden data, including details on Knicks-related “talent” (players, coaches, celebrities) with risk assessments, addresses, and contact info, along with customer correspondence. The dump follows a June 5 breach. ShinyHunters continues its pattern of public leaks to pressure victims.

https://www.securityweek.com/in-other-news-apple-patches-beats-eavesdropping-flaw-dot-closes-delta-crowdstrike-probe-aws-continuum/

Apple patches high-severity eavesdropping vulnerability in Beats Studio Buds

Security firm Sentinel One has a deeper dive into CVE-2025-20701 here.

Heinze and Steinmetz said last year that the full chain of attacks gave attackers the ability to do other malicious things, including retrieving call history and contacts, and even calling arbitrary numbers. Many of those capabilities are dependent on the specific devices being paired, since the functionality built into them differs from platform to platform.

Devices affected by the Airoha vulnerabilities are by no means alone. In January, researchers disclosed WhisperPair, a series of vulnerabilities that allows an attacker to hijack Bluetooth devices connected through Google Fast Pair, a proprietary protocol belonging to the company. Besides eavesdropping, attackers can exploit the WhisperPair flaws to geolocate devices. The vulnerabilities affect more than a dozen devices from 10 manufacturers, including Sony, Nothing, JBL, OnePlus, and Google itself.

There are few, if any, reports of Bluetooth vulnerabilities like these being actively exploited in the wild. The complexity of such attacks is often high, and an attacker has to continually stay within Bluetooth range of a target while utilizing the exploit. People who think they may be targeted by such attacks should turn off Bluetooth in devices whenever they’re not needed, and remain aware of the risks when Bluetooth is enabled.

https://arstechnica.com/apple/2026/06/apple-patches-high-severity-eavesdropping-vulnerability-in-beats-studio-buds/

No Exploits Required

Well hey y’all. I just got hooked up with this space to somewhat-routinely write about vulnerabilities, cybersecurity, and infosec history. I’m currently at runZero, where I’m the vice president of security research, which basically means that I spend most of my time hanging around with some incredibly bright and devoted people who are also cunning and shrewd. We’re all dedicated to the notion that it is, in fact, possible to secure networks by being smart and creative with your approaches to exposure management.

I’m so excited to be writing here, and you might expect me to go on and on about CVE identified vulnerabilities, and the CVE program itself. After all, I’m on the CVE board, and was most recently section chief for the KEV at CISA, and I’ve spent a fair amount of my career managing patch schedules, writing exploits and Metasploit modules, and detecting novel attacks on the network (so I often blather on Mastodon and Bluesky about CVEs).

But you’d be wrong! While I believe that CVEs are an important, even foundational, component of any modern security program (and I will explore aspects of individual CVEs and the program in the future), I’m not convinced that we should be totally infatuated with exploits and bugs. After four decades of personally responding to (and occasionally causing) cybersecurity incidents, it’s become clear to me that most people run into trouble not because they forgot to patch some critical internal database, but because the networking deck is stacked against the defenders.

TTRPGs and Predicting The Future

I remember in 1989 at DunDraCon, my first exposure to Cyberpunk 2020 by Mike Pondsmith and published by R. Talsorian. (You’ve probably heard of the multiplayer online game, Cyberpunk 2077; this pencil-and-paper table-top role playing game is that game’s direct ancestor.) Anyway, I saw the upcoming second edition being playtested during the conference, and me, being a teenage hacker, immediately gravitated toward the more fully-fledged “Netrunner” character class. We had a good time; the combat simulation was a lot more chaotic and swift than D&D, the cybernetic and neurological upgrades were way cooler than spells and potions, and of course, the theme of dystopian end-stage capitalism was infinitely attractive in a grim way.

Anyway, after playing a session, I was offered a comment card. Remember, this was the 80s, point-to-point networking reigned supreme, and to get anything done, you had to first figure out how to negotiate the handshake, puzzle out the protocol, and basically learn every operating system from scratch. So, my feedback was along the lines of, “I really liked the simulated hacking system, but it seems just a little too simplified and straight-forward. It’s unrealistic that in the future, nuclear power plants and banks would all be on the same networks that are known to be shot through with hackers and gangsters.”

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Oh, how wrong I was.

Universal Connectivity Is Great Except When It Isn’t

Fast forward to today, and there are just so many things that can go wrong when trying to secure a normal TCP/IP network, along with all the servers, desktops, clouds, phones, hypervisors and operational technology (OT) that’s been patched in. I’d argue that the first, fundamental problem defenders run into is the fact that planet Earth has settled on the whole “IP” part of TCP/IP. After all, the “I” stands for Internet, so given a long enough timeline, virtually everything that talks IP will end up exposed and reachable on the internet, and that’s both the coolest thing about TCP/IP, and its ultimate Achilles’ heel.

Recent events underline this fundamental flaw of modern networking when it comes to security. The 2026 M-Trends report from Google plays up the idea that “exploits represented the most frequently observed initial infection vector in 2025,” since exploited vulnerabilities account for 32% of all initial access vectors. That sounds like a lot!

Of course, the unspoken inverse of this stat is that 68% – over two-thirds – of all the rest of initial access attacks do not rely on technical vulnerability exploitation. The reason for this, of course, is because everything is reachable with enough ingenuity, time, and luck.

But what about Zero-Trust?

Security professionals have long known that the boundaries between internal and external networks are at best notional, defining today’s intrusion defense strategies. For about 15 years, “zero-trust” has been an aspirational end-state: identity and authorization bundled into every network transaction, regardless of origin. However, this path is often blocked by legacy systems that “can’t” be managed this way. Worse, even when CTOs and CISOs get comfortable with their carefully structured boundaries, someone invariably bridges a printer from the IT to the OT network, and shadow-IT hijinks ensue from there.

The standards chosen for TCP/IP are incredible in their interoperability, allowing systems to communicate freely, and routers actively bypass damaged connections, even when these broken connections are intentional blocks. While this fundamental interconnectivity is great for innovation and industry and commerce and entertainment and art and all that, it’s an absolute, quantifiable disaster for security.

The network itself is actively working against the idea that only some of these computers should be able to talk to some of these other computers, automatically and intelligently, without physically closing circuits or swapping cables. It’s no wonder that most breaches today can be traced back to an errant bridge here, or a misclicked email there, rather than a failure to patch.

Securing any enterprise is profoundly difficult due to these fundamental forces, giving hackers, criminals, and spies a seemingly permanent advantage in gaining and keeping access, no exploits required.

Going forward, I’ll be taking up some SecurityWeek column-inches to pursue all these side quests, like tracking end-of-life trends, investigating OT/IT convergence, and the so-called “Layer 8” human-centric issues of cybersecurity. And yes, expect the occasional indulgence in deep-dives on particularly interesting sets of technical software vulnerabilities, CVE-identified or otherwise.

https://www.securityweek.com/no-exploits-required/