Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a critical vulnerability in the open-source mcp-remote project that could result in the execution of arbitrary operating system (OS) commands. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-6514 , carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of 10.0. "The vulnerability allows attackers to trigger arbitrary OS command execution on the machine running mcp-remote when it initiates a connection to an untrusted MCP server, posing a significant risk to users – a full system compromise," Or Peles, JFrog Vulnerability Research Team Leader, said . Mcp-remote is a tool that sprang forth following Anthropic's release of Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source framework that standardizes the way large language model (LLM) applications integrate and share data with external data sources and services. It acts as a local proxy, enabling MCP clients like Claude Desktop to communicate with remote MCP servers, as opposed to running them locally on the same...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered new artifacts associated with an Apple macOS malware called ZuRu, which is known to propagate via trojanized versions of legitimate software. SentinelOne, in a new report shared with The Hacker News, said the malware has been observed masquerading as the cross‑platform SSH client and server‑management tool Termius in late May 2025. "ZuRu malware continues to prey on macOS users seeking legitimate business tools, adapting its loader and C2 techniques to backdoor its targets," researchers Phil Stokes and Dinesh Devadoss said . ZuRu was first documented in September 2021 by a user on Chinese question-and-answer website Zhihu as part of a malicious campaign that hijacked searches for iTerm2, a legitimate macOS Terminal app, to direct users to fake sites that tricked unsuspecting users into downloading the malware. Then in January 2024, Jamf Threat Labs said it discovered a piece of malware distributed via pirated macOS apps that s...

Semiconductor company AMD is warning of a new set of vulnerabilities affecting a broad range of chipsets that could lead to information disclosure. The flaws, collectively called Transient Scheduler Attacks (TSA), manifest in the form of a speculative side channel in its CPUs that leverage execution timing of instructions under specific microarchitectural conditions. "In some cases, an attacker may be able to use this timing information to infer data from other contexts, resulting in information leakage," AMD said in an advisory. The company said issues were uncovered as part of a study published by Microsoft and ETH Zurich researchers about testing modern CPUs against speculative execution attacks like Meltdown and Foreshadow by stress testing isolation between security domains such as virtual machines, kernel, and processes. Following responsible disclosure in June 2024, the issues have been assigned the below CVE identifiers - CVE-2024-36350 (CVSS score: 5.6) ...

For the first time in 2025, Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates did not bundle fixes for exploited security vulnerabilities, but the company acknowledged one of the addressed flaws had been publicly known. The patches resolve a whopping 130 vulnerabilities , along with 10 other non-Microsoft CVEs that affect Visual Studio, AMD, and its Chromium-based Edge browser. Of these, 10 are rated Critical and the remaining are all rated Important in severity. "The 11-month streak of patching at least one zero-day that was exploited in the wild ended this month," Satnam Narang, Senior Staff Research Engineer at Tenable, said. Fifty-three of these shortcomings are classified as privilege escalation bugs followed by 42 as remote code execution, 17 as information disclosure, and 8 as security feature bypasses. These patches are in addition to two other flaws addressed by the company in the Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The vulnerability ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added four security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The list of flaws is as follows - CVE-2014-3931 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A buffer overflow vulnerability in Multi-Router Looking Glass (MRLG) that could allow remote attackers to cause an arbitrary memory write and memory corruption CVE-2016-10033 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability in PHPMailer that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code within the context of the application or result in a denial-of-service (DoS) condition CVE-2019-5418 (CVSS score: 7.5) - A path traversal vulnerability in Ruby on Rails' Action View that could cause contents of arbitrary files on the target system's file system to be exposed CVE-2019-9621 (CVSS score: 7.5) - A Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite that could ...

Threat actors are weaponizing exposed Java Debug Wire Protocol ( JDWP ) interfaces to obtain code execution capabilities and deploy cryptocurrency miners on compromised hosts. "The attacker used a modified version of XMRig with a hard-"coded configuration, allowing them to avoid suspicious command-line arguments that are often flagged by defenders," Wiz researchers Yaara Shriki and Gili Tikochinski said in a report published this week. "The payload used mining pool proxies to hide their cryptocurrency wallet address, thereby preventing investigators from pivoting on it." The cloud security firm, which is being acquired by Google Cloud, said it observed the activity against its honeypot servers running TeamCity, a popular continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool. JDWP is a communication protocol used in Java for debugging purposes. With JDWP, users can leverage a debugger to work in a different process, a Java application, on the same com...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two security flaws in the Sudo command-line utility for Linux and Unix-like operating systems that could enable local attackers to escalate their privileges to root on susceptible machines. A brief description of the vulnerabilities is below - CVE-2025-32462 (CVSS score: 2.8) - Sudo before 1.9.17p1, when used with a sudoers file that specifies a host that is neither the current host nor ALL, allows listed users to execute commands on unintended machines CVE-2025-32463 (CVSS score: 9.3) - Sudo before 1.9.17p1 allows local users to obtain root access because " /etc/nsswitch.conf " from a user-controlled directory is used with the --chroot option Sudo is a command-line tool that allows low-privileged users to run commands as another user, such as the superuser. By executing instructions with sudo, the idea is to enforce the principle of least privilege, permitting users to carry out administrative actions without the need for el...

The French cybersecurity agency on Tuesday revealed that a number of entities spanning governmental, telecommunications, media, finance, and transport sectors in the country were impacted by a malicious campaign undertaken by a Chinese hacking group by weaponizing several zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Cloud Services Appliance (CSA) devices. The campaign, detected at the beginning of September 2024, has been attributed to a distinct intrusion set codenamed Houken , which is assessed to share some level overlaps with a threat cluster tracked by Google Mandiant under the moniker UNC5174 (aka Uteus or Uetus). "While its operators use zero-day vulnerabilities and a sophisticated rootkit, they also leverage a wide number of open-source tools mostly crafted by Chinese-speaking developers," the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI) said . "Houken's attack infrastructure is made up of diverse elements -- including commercial VPNs and d...

Cisco has released security updates to address a maximum-severity security flaw in Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM) and Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition (Unified CM SME) that could permit an attacker to login to a susceptible device as the root user, allowing them to gain elevated privileges. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-20309 , carries a CVSS score of 10.0. "This vulnerability is due to the presence of static user credentials for the root account that are reserved for use during development," Cisco said in an advisory released Wednesday. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by using the account to log in to an affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to log in to the affected system and execute arbitrary commands as the root user." Hard-coded credentials like this usually come from testing or quick fixes during development, but they should never make it into live systems. In tools lik...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to phishing campaigns that impersonate popular brands and trick targets into calling phone numbers operated by threat actors. "A significant portion of email threats with PDF payloads persuade victims to call adversary-controlled phone numbers, displaying another popular social engineering technique known as Telephone-Oriented Attack Delivery (TOAD), also known as callback phishing," Cisco Talos researcher Omid Mirzaei said in a report shared with The Hacker News. An analysis of phishing emails with PDF attachments between May 5 and June 5, 2025, has revealed Microsoft and Docusign to be the most impersonated brands. NortonLifeLock, PayPal, and Geek Squad are among the most impersonated brands in TOAD emails with PDF attachments. The activity is part of wider phishing attacks that attempt to leverage the trust people have with popular brands to initiate malicious actions. These messages typically incorporate PDF attachments...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a critical security vulnerability in artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic's Model Context Protocol ( MCP ) Inspector project that could result in remote code execution (RCE) and allow an attacker to gain complete access to the hosts. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-49596 , carries a CVSS score of 9.4 out of a maximum of 10.0. "This is one of the first critical RCEs in Anthropic's MCP ecosystem, exposing a new class of browser-based attacks against AI developer tools," Oligo Security's Avi Lumelsky said in a report published last week. "With code execution on a developer's machine, attackers can steal data, install backdoors, and move laterally across networks - highlighting serious risks for AI teams, open-source projects, and enterprise adopters relying on MCP." MCP, introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, is an open protocol that standardizes the way large language model (LLM) appli...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged the tactical similarities between the threat actors behind the RomCom RAT and a cluster that has been observed delivering a loader dubbed TransferLoader . Enterprise security firm Proofpoint is tracking the activity associated with TransferLoader to a group dubbed UNK_GreenSec and the RomCom RAT actors under the moniker TA829 . The latter is also known by the names CIGAR, Nebulous Mantis, Storm-0978, Tropical Scorpius, UAC-0180, UAT-5647, UNC2596, and Void Rabisu. The company said it discovered UNK_GreenSec as part of its investigation into TA829, describing it as using an "unusual amount of similar infrastructure, delivery tactics, landing pages, and email lure themes." TA829 is something of an unusual hacking group in the threat landscape given its ability to conduct both espionage as well as financially motivated attacks. The Russia-aligned hybrid group has also been linked to the zero-day exploitation of security flaws in Mozil...

Google has released security updates to address a vulnerability in its Chrome browser for which an exploit exists in the wild. The zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-6554 (CVSS score: N/A), has been described as a type confusion flaw in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 138.0.7204.96 allowed a remote attacker to perform arbitrary read/write via a crafted HTML page," according to a description of the bug on the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Type confusion vulnerabilities can have severe consequences as they can be exploited to trigger unexpected software behavior, resulting in the execution of arbitrary code and program crashes. Zero-day bugs like this are especially risky because attackers often start using them before a fix is available. In real-world attacks, these flaws can let hackers install spyware, launch drive-by downloads, or quietly run harmful code — sometimes just by getting...

The threat actor known as Blind Eagle has been attributed with high confidence to the use of the Russian bulletproof hosting service Proton66 . Trustwave SpiderLabs, in a report published last week, said it was able to make this connection by pivoting from Proton66-linked digital assets, leading to the discovery of an active threat cluster that leverages Visual Basic Script (VBS) files as its initial attack vector and installs off-the-shelf remote access trojans (RATS). Many threat actors rely on bulletpro While Visual Basic Script (VBS) might seem outdated, it's still a of hosting providers like Proton66 because these services intentionally ignore abuse reports and legal takedown requests. This makes it easier for attackers to run phishing sites, command-and-control servers, and malware delivery systems without interruption. The cybersecurity company said it identified a set of domains with a similar naming pattern (e.g., gfast.duckdns[.]org, njfast.duckdns[.]org) beginning i...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has revealed that it has observed the notorious cybercrime group Scattered Spider broadening its targeting footprint to strike the airline sector. To that end, the agency said it's actively working with aviation and industry partners to combat the activity and help victims. "These actors rely on social engineering techniques, often impersonating employees or contractors to deceive IT help desks into granting access," the FBI said in a post on X. "These techniques frequently involve methods to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), such as convincing help desk services to add unauthorized MFA devices to compromised accounts." Scattered Spider attacks are also known to target third-party IT providers to obtain access to large organizations, putting trusted vendors and contractors at risk of potential attacks. The attacks typically pave the way for data theft, extortion, and ransomware. In a statement shared ...