Varonis' "CoSnitch" (CVE-2026-24301) shows a single crafted link auto-runs a Copilot Personal prompt that pulls data from connected Gmail, Drive, and OneDrive, plus a separate path that permanently poisons the victim's memory. The twist: researchers "meta-hacked" the assistant into revealing its own undocumented autorun parameter. Microsoft patched August 18, 2026; no in-the-wild exploitation seen.
Assetnote researcher Adam Kues used GPT 5.6 Sol to find wp2shell, a pre-auth RCE in WordPress Core affecting roughly 40% of the internet, a capability output tenfold beyond earlier frontier models that still needed heavy human steering. The co-founder calls it a step-change in frontier-class vulnerability discovery, and says it's getting worse before it maybe gets better.
GitLab shipped an out-of-band patch for CVE-2026-19478 (CVSS 9.4), a code injection flaw in a GraphQL directive letting unauthenticated attackers modify or delete public projects and user data on self-managed CE/EE. Self-hosted versions 18.2 through 19.2.3 are affected; upgrade to 18.11.11, 19.0.8, 19.1.6, or 19.2.4. GitLab.com is already patched, with no exploit seen yet.
Cloudflare rebuilt a remote Spectre proof-of-concept against its production Workers environment, leaking up to 12 bit/s at 99% accuracy by exploiting a gap in Dynamic Process Isolation. The team shipped fixes via the V8 Sandbox and in-process isolation, and found no signs of active exploitation.
Researchers at OpenSourceMalware tracked 16 typosquatted RubyGems packages (dubbed StubMaker) that abuse the extconf.rb install hook to drop a Rust/Go Windows info stealer targeting browser credentials, crypto wallets, seed phrases, and Telegram data. Two gems also exposed how yanked namespaces can be reclaimed by attackers. All packages have since been pulled.
Researchers have found a Python malware framework, TwinLoot, that pushes living-off-the-land to new extremes: all of its command-and-control runs from inside Microsoft Azure and 365 services, so nothing on the attacker's side is ever exposed. A modular implant steals credentials and persists with far less to catch.
Netskope breaks down eight malware families, including the ChainDrop npm supply-chain compromise, that hide C2 addresses in smart contracts on EVM, Solana, and TON, fetched via free, traceless read-only calls like eth_call. The trick is takedown-resistant and blends into legitimate crypto RPC traffic, defeating host-only detection. Includes runnable one-liners and detection guidance.
The Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment against 17 Mabna Institute hackers tied to Iran's IRGC, adding eight defendants to the 2018 case. Since 2013 they allegedly breached 144 U.S. universities, 178 foreign ones, and dozens of companies, stealing 31TB of research and intellectual property worth roughly $3.4 billion.
Cloudflare's global measurement of RFC 9234 adoption shows the new BGP Role/OTC mechanism for rejecting route leaks is spreading, but two Tier 1 networks unexpectedly strip the OTC attribute from forwarded routes, silently undermining leak prevention for early adopters. Cloudflare is working with them to fix propagation and explains how to deploy BGP Roles.
You’re caught up.
That was all 9 stories in the 19 August issue.