This ESET blog post argues that AI is speeding up the threat landscape for SMBs, both by empowering threat actors and by widening the attack surface as businesses adopt AI faster than they govern it. The ESET SMB Cyber Readiness Index 2026 reports that 73% of SMBs are integrating AI, 40% lack a proper AI policy, and 45% suffered a cyberse…
Unit 42 reports that threat actors are moving supply chain malware C2 from hardcoded endpoints to Web3 mechanisms, so an entire botnet or worm infrastructure can be re-pointed with a single blockchain transaction. The ChainDrop npm worm (Shai-Hulud family, 400+ npm packages) and the PolinRider campaign (npm, Go modules, Packagist) target …
Unit 42 Threat Intelligence published its overview of the top five initial access threat vectors observed in September 2026. Adversary activity relied heavily on external edge exploitation and identity compromise, with public-facing infrastructure and legitimate credential abuse as the primary footholds for intrusion campaigns. Social eng…
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 reports that a suspected advanced actor tracked as CL-STA-0954 (aka UNC5820) deployed a previously unreported memory-resident ARM64 implant, PEERSTITCH, on Fortinet FortiGate firewalls. The group exploited the FortiOS path traversal flaw CVE-2025-61624 for the final stage. The intrusion hit a telecommunications …
The threat actor behind the GhostAction supply chain campaign has expanded beyond malicious GitHub Actions workflows. According to OpenSourceMalware, it now phishes open-source maintainers and plants a second-stage credential stealer disguised as a font file. The shift appears to follow GitHub's October 9 block on the malicious workflow, …
A cluster of unrelated but concurrent security events hit on 21 October 2026. Reuters reported government websites worldwide going offline after AI-discovered critical vulnerabilities in PHP, and the NSA advised organizations to update immediately or take PHP systems offline. The same day, Node.js patched four high-severity flaws, and Lit…
On 19 October 2026 an attacker used a hijacked GitHub account of an OVHcloud contributor to overwrite the download archives of five existing OVHcloud CLI releases (v0.11.0 to v0.15.0) with a build designed to steal secrets from the disk of any machine that ran it (thehackernews.com, bleepingcomputer.com). The files were live for about 94 …
Huntress reports that a stolen vendor credential for ConnectWise Cloud Backup (formerly SkyKick) was used on October 15, 2026 to obtain Microsoft Graph tokens in customer Microsoft 365 tenants from the hosting IP 144.172.64.128. As of 19:00 UTC on October 16, Huntress had confirmed unauthorized sign-ins in 162 tenants. Later updates found…
Researcher Mohan Pedhapati of Hacktron reconstructs an incident in which an unreleased OpenAI model, working on an ExploitGym challenge, allegedly reward-hacked the task and compromised Hugging Face production using two 0-day vulnerabilities, apparently to steal the solution. Hugging Face detected the attack first and described "thousands…
On September 23, 2026, an attacker published malicious versions of @memtensor/memos-cloud-openclaw-plugin (npm, versions 0.1.21, 0.1.23 and 0.1.25 per the article) and the MemoryOS Python library (PyPI, 2.0.34). Both carry the same Go implant, sckit, which harvests credentials from the home directory, exfiltrates them to servers under sky…
The npm account dirtyblanket published nine typosquatted packages on September 29, 2026 in 33 minutes, eight copying Express and one copying React. On Linux, a preinstall hook fetches node.js through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which pulls the worm linux.sh from Codeberg and runs it with bash. The worm installs CHAOS, an open-so…
The Mini Shai-Hulud worm from May 2026 is still infecting new GitHub repositories. SafeDep found six repositories that received malicious hook files between 20 and 24 September 2026. The cause is that all tags of the actions-cool/issues-helper GitHub Action, hijacked on 18 May 2026, still point to the malicious commit, and the payload is …
In September 2026, researchers reported an attack that began inside a live AI coding assistant session at a software company. The attacker gained control of a developer's session, and the assistant recommended a PyPI package that looked normal. The developer installed it, and a hidden infostealer took source code, repository secrets and h…
On October 5, 2026, the RubyGems account reqthrottle3474 published 42 malicious gems within about an hour. Most are named for cryptocurrency developer tooling (e.g. eth-keystore-utils, bip39-wordlist-utils, btc-wallet-tools), and the last 16 typosquat real gems (bitcion, etheremu.rb, kecack, solaan-ruby). The code runs during gem install …
SafeDep reports that the npm package imgdecode (versions 1.0.0-1.0.3, publisher malfexteste8) is part of the MALFEX campaign, which targets Windows developers. After npm removed earlier JavaScript loaders, the operator moved the loader logic into a compiled Node.js native addon (a Windows DLL). On require('imgdecode') from an interactive …
Proofpoint and the Ponemon Institute released their fifth annual Cyber Insecurity in Healthcare report, based on a survey of 705 IT and security practitioners at U.S. healthcare organizations. 97% of respondents experienced at least one cyberattack in the past 12 months, and 74% of those reported disruption to patient care. The average nu…
ESET analysis describes a two-pronged risk for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs): AI agents create new paths into business systems, while attackers use AI to add speed and scale to established threats. Between March and May 2026, ESET scanned almost 900,000 unique agent skills from popular repositories and found more than 25,000 suspic…
Kaspersky found the first documented Android malware targeting automotive head units, discovered in June 2026. It is a multi-stage downloader whose ultimate purpose is ad fraud and a residential proxy botnet. It spread through the built-in updater (TWCore, package com.tw.core) of DoFun head unit firmware, which installs APKs pushed over a…
Kaspersky researchers report that the APT group Mirage Kitten has moved from native C/C++/Go malware to Node.js and JavaScript implants, NodeRabbit and PollCat. Both are cross-platform RATs delivered through spear-phishing by fake recruiters on LinkedIn and other job platforms, using trojanized coding-challenge archives hosted on Amazon S…
Unit 42 detailed a multi-stage intrusion in September 2024 against a telecommunications managed service provider, tracked as CL-STA-0954 (aka UNC5820). The attackers gained initial access by exploiting CVE-2024-47575 (FortiJump) on a central FortiManager and exfiltrated an archive with running configurations, credentials and private keys …