Google says Chrome's anti-abuse systems reduced unwanted notifications on Android by more than 7 billion per day during the first quarter of 2026. In a new blog post, Google argues that notification abuse has increasingly been used to distribute scams, malware, phishing attempts, and fraudulent payment requests. To reduce the abuse, Google developed a "Swiss cheese" defense model, where several overlapping systems try to stop abuse at different stages. "Our goal is to ensure that if abuse slips through one layer, another is there to catch it," Google explained. "This approach allows us to halt abuse at the source, preventing deceptive content from reaching users while maintaining a healthy balance between utility and security." Chrome already removes notification permissions from inactive websites, as well as sites that repeatedly trigger suspicious-notification warnings.
The DeadLock ransomware operation is using a decentralized infrastructure that relies on blockchain-backed services to protect its communication with victims and data-leak activity. The threat actor emerged in mid-2025 and uses double-extortion tactics (data theft/leak and file encryption) to pressure victims into paying a ransom. By July this year, DeadLock's data leak site listed 80 organizations, mostly from Europe. Victims include companies in the IT, mining, transportation, manufacturing, hospitality, and consumer goods sectors. Microsoft researchers observed the malware being deployed by multiple groups, including an affiliate previously linked to the Lynx and INC ransomware ecosystems. The DeadLock ransomware operators adopted a new approach that uses the Polygon blockchain to store configuration data and the posts on the leak site.
Hackers associated with the Russian threat group Sandworm have been targeting system administrators and IT professionals through fake job offers since at least May. A report from the Ukrainian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) details a social engineering campaign attributed to UAC-0145, which is believed to be a sub-cluster of Sandworm (APT44). In the campaign, the threat actor targets victims while posing as IT companies and recruiters. The agency says that the attacker studies the targets' resumes uploaded on job sites and then initiates direct contact. Conversations are then moved to Telegram to arrange a video interview over Zoom. During the interview, which is conducted in English, the candidates receive mock technical assignments that require them to connect to a corporate VPN. In one case that CERT-UA observed, the attacker impersonated the international IT firm Sopra Steria using seemingly legitimate email addresses similar to the company’s office in Bulgaria.
Microsoft released its monthly security updates on Tuesday, and one of the flaws it closed is already being used in attacks. The bug sits in a core Windows kernel driver that handles network socket operations. An attacker with code already running on a machine can use it to escalate to SYSTEM. That patch goes out first. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS score: 7.0) and is the only
Microsoft released its monthly security updates on Tuesday, and one of the flaws it closed is already being used in attacks. The bug sits in a core Windows kernel driver that handles network socket operations. An attacker with code already running on a machine can use it to escalate to SYSTEM. That patch goes out first. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS score: 7.0) and is the only one in this month's release Microsoft flags as under active exploitation. Exploitation depends on triggering a race condition in the driver. Microsoft has not publicly attributed the exploitation. Check Point Research says Lazarus used the zero-day in its Operation Dream Job campaign. Four other flaws in the release need nothing at all from the victim: no account, no password, no click. They affect Windows DNS Server, Windows Deployment Services, Microsoft's implementation of the QUIC transport protocol, and High Performance Computing (HPC) Pack, and each carries a CVSS score of 9.8. None was flagged as exploited when the updates shipped.
Cisco is warning that a high-severity denial-of-service vulnerability in Secure Firewall ASA and Threat Defense (FTD) software is being actively exploited in attacks to remotely crash affected devices. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20349, has a severity score of 8.6 and impacts devices running Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) or Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) software with certain remote access services enabled. In a security advisory published today, Cisco said the vulnerability is caused by insufficient error checking while processing HTTP requests. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to the Remote Access SSL VPN service on an affected device," Cisco explains in the advisory. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition."
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new version of the Kimwolf/AISURU Android and Internet of Things (IoT) botnet that comes with significant improvements to improve its operational resilience and conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The new version, tracked as Kimwolf v7, was discovered by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in February 2026. "Kimwolf v7 adds an HTTP/2-based
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new version of the Kimwolf/AISURU Android and Internet of Things (IoT) botnet that comes with significant improvements to improve its operational resilience and conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The new version, tracked as Kimwolf v7, was discovered by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in February 2026. "Kimwolf v7 adds an HTTP/2-based DDoS flood that constructs complete browser fingerprints," researchers Asher Davila, Chris Navarrete, and Doel Santos said. "This makes attack traffic more difficult to distinguish from legitimate browsing." The botnet also aims to make its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure more resistant to takedown efforts by using a tiered mechanism that employs Ethereum Name Service (ENS) to obtain the C2 address, a hard-coded Tor .onion hidden service, and a local proxy for routing between clearnet and Tor, while removing all scanning, exploitation, and brute-force functionality.
Anyone sharing their screen on a Zoom call could have taken over the computers of everyone watching, and anyone watching could have taken over the presenter's. The flaw sat in the annotation tool, the feature that lets participants draw and type on a shared screen, and it asked nothing of the victim beyond being in the meeting. No click, no download, no prompt, and nothing on screen to show it
Anyone sharing their screen on a Zoom call could have taken over the computers of everyone watching, and anyone watching could have taken over the presenter's. The flaw sat in the annotation tool, the feature that lets participants draw and type on a shared screen, and it asked nothing of the victim beyond being in the meeting. No click, no download, no prompt, and nothing on screen to show it had happened. The patches are not new. Client fixes shipped in June and July, roughly two months before the flaws were made public, and no exploitation has been reported as of publication. None of the three identifiers appear in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The research came from "A Security," an Israeli-founded offensive-security startup that left stealth in June with $37 million in funding. It says it went from finding the flaw to a working exploit in under a day, using fewer than 20 prompts on publicly available AI models.
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