Bitter Hackers Deploy New PapRAT Backdoor in Cyberespionage Campaign Targeting South Asia

The South Asian cyber espionage group known as Bitter (aka APT-C-08, APT-Q-37, Hazy Tiger, Orange Yali, T-APT-17, and TA397) has been observed targeting South Asian organizations with a previously unreported remote access trojan called PapRAT.

"PapRAT has both C++ and Rust implementations," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said. "Its capabilities include command execution, file uploads and downloads, file deletion, directory and drive enumeration, and screenshot capture. The Rust variant adds PowerShell execution and other commands."

The campaign is notable for making use of three different infection chains -

• A Windows Shortcut (LNK) file that abuses the native "ftp.exe" utility to run scripts and create scheduled tasks designed to maintain contact with a command-and-control (C2) server.
• A VHDX disk image containing a LNK file that launches a lure Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, while running an MSI installer in the background to deploy PapRAT.
• A URL shortcut (URL) file that fetches a LNK file via WebDAV, which then leads to an MSI installer that deploys PapRAT.

The living-off-the-land (LotL) approach is designed to execute commands from a remote server ("goodnfortunes[.]com"), allowing it to collect directory and task lists, directory information from Desktop, Documents, and Downloads, installed antivirus product data, and mounted drives.

The harvested reconnaissance information is saved as "abc.pdf" and exfiltrated back to the C2 server via a curl command, after which the staged file is deleted from the host.

A second version of the script has been found to retrieve a file called "talk.log" from "techtalkhelp[.]com." The payload contains a Base64-encoded script to obtain additional instructions from the same server and execute them as PowerShell commands.

"This staging model gives the attacker operational flexibility, while the commands are updated server-side without pushing a new binary, avoiding PE drops and process injection that some security appliances could easily detect," Fortinet said.

The PapRAT malware delivered via the MSI installer in the second attack chain is designed for remote control. It supports eight commands -

• MSG, for remote shell
• FDD, for directory listing
• DEL, for file deletion
• RUN, for arbitrary file execution
• GDR, for drive enumeration
• SS1, for screenshot capture
• UPP, for uploading local files to the C2 server ("rivingtonclarks[.]com")
• DWW, for downloading files from the C2 server

A Rust version of the malware incorporates three more commands -

• MS2, for PowerShell command execution
• SLP, for sleeping and polling resumption
• BYE, for process termination

A notable aspect of the third attack chain is that it combines the salient aspects of the first two sequences by using a script to download an MSI installer via curl. Like before, the MSI installer serves as a conduit for PapRAT, which then proceeds to drop WmRAT, a malware previously identified as used by Bitter.

The findings indicate that the threat actor continues to refine its custom arsenal to establish and maintain access to targeted systems.

"These changes underscore the importance of monitoring malicious behavior across scripting tools, scheduled tasks, and installer activity alongside detecting known malware signatures," Fortinet said. "Organizations should treat unexpected LNK files, URL shortcuts, disk images, and MSI packages with caution, particularly when delivered through unsolicited messages."

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⚡ Weekly Recap: SSHole Exploited, APT Root RCE, Robot Takeovers, 15K Hacked Sites, and More

A system doesn't always need a complicated bug to let someone in. Sometimes, a blank password is enough. That's one of the bigger stories this week. And it gets worse when the tools meant to keep systems updated or running safely become part of the attack.

Elsewhere, attackers are hiding inside normal web traffic, stealing credentials from network devices, and finding new uses for exposed systems. AI is helping some of them move faster, but old mistakes are doing plenty of the work too. Even forgotten settings and small changes made months ago are coming back to cause trouble.

There's a lot packed into this week's news, including some strange research findings, fresh attacks, and a few warnings worth taking seriously. Here's the full recap.

⚡ Threat of the Week

OpenSSH Flaw Sees Exploitation Attempts — Threat actors are attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security flaw impacting OpenSSH that can enable sign-ins to accounts that have no password set. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-123158 (CVSS score: 8.1) and codenamed SSHole (or *sshole), impacts Linux systems that run OpenSSH on the musl C library with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) disabled, including Alpine Linux's default OpenSSH server configuration. As of November 9, 2026, a total of 20 exploitation attempts have been recorded from 13 unique IP addresses from Denmark, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.S.

🔔 Top News

• Trojanized CWP Web Server Used to Deliver CWPdoor — A new Linux malware called CWPdoor is being distributed via a trojanized version of cwpsrv, the built-in daemon and web server that powers the Control Web Panel. According to XLab, a shell script named "cwpsrv_update.sh" is used to download "cwpsrv" from a remote server ("136.0.141[.]71") and replace the legitimate file on the system. "The downloaded cwpsrv is a passive backdoor that can be triggered by specific headers in HTTP/HTTPS traffic to remotely execute commands specified by the attacker," XLab said. "Its backdoor logic is triggered only when it receives a specially crafted request from the attacker. At the same time, it suppresses logging for that request, leaving no trace of the interaction in the access logs. This combination of directly replacing the legitimate cwpsrv binary, passive triggering, and log suppression makes CWPdoor exceptionally stealthy."
• Debian and Ubuntu APT Flaw Allows Code Execution as Root — A vulnerability in the APT package manager (CVE-2026-109518, CVSS score: 7.7) can be exploited to install a package under certain conditions and achieve code execution with elevated privileges. The issue affects Ubuntu and Debian operating systems. "Under specific conditions, when APT is configured to use HTTP package sources with retry settings enabled, a third-party with a network position between the host and the package mirror can cause APT to install a package that did not pass verification," Amazon said in an advisory. "Maintainer scripts within that package then run with elevated privileges."
• CERT-In Flags AI-Driven Attacks Targeting Financial Organizations — The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has disclosed that an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted threat actor it tracks as Crafty Falcon is targeting organizations in the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sectors in the country. Calling it a "significant escalation" in attacks, the threat actor is said to be re-targeting entities that were originally targeted last month after incomplete remediation, adding that the intrusions "have been timed to coincide with holidays, weekends and other low-monitoring windows to delay detection and response."
• Zyxel Fixes 0-Day exploited to Hack About 1,000 Network Switches — Zyxel has fixed a zero-day vulnerability in its GS1900 series network switches that threat actors exploited to compromise nearly 1,000 devices worldwide and steal configuration files and credentials. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-107441 (CVSS score: 8.8), is an out-of-bounds write flaw that could "allow a LAN-based, unauthenticated attacker to exploit the flaw and potentially execute OS commands via a crafted HTTP request." The activity has been attributed to a Chinese-speaking threat actor tracked as Kapibala (aka Red Heron). The attacker has been found to weaponize the flaw to deploy the JITTERLY backdoor and SIXZUT, a ring 3 rootkit.
• cPGuard Update Mechanism Hijacked to Deliver Backdoor — Unknown threat actors compromised the update infrastructure for the cPGuard web security suite to distribute a backdoor and a data-stealing script. "On 2 November 2026 at 02:06 UTC, an unidentified attacker used compromised credentials to gain unauthorized access to OPSSHIELD's update distribution infrastructure (CDN)," OPSSHIELD said. "The attacker used this access to distribute a malicious script through the cPGuard update channel." The attacker is said to have gotten in through its billing application at manage.opsshield[.]com and logged in to a customer account they had registered.
• mSecure Urges Customers to Change their Passwords — Password manager mSecure has warned customers to change their passwords, reset two-factor authentication, and potentially remove their passkeys after detecting suspicious activity, but it has not explained what happened or whether anyone's secrets were exposed. "mSeven Software ('mSeven') recently learned of suspicious activity associated with the mSecure password management application," the company said. "In response, mSeven quickly launched an investigation, took steps to mitigate the issue, and engaged external cybersecurity experts to assist." However, the company has yet to answer what the suspicious activity involved, when it occurred, or whether attackers accessed customer information. The lack of specifics has understandably riled up customers, with one user on Reddit stating "their silence on this is mind-bending." In December 2025, Germany's cyber agency BSI found that mSecure's maker could, in theory, access the data users store in it.

‎️‍🔥 Trending CVEs

Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild.

Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first — CVE-2026-16305, CVE-2026-16306 (INFINITT PACS), CVE-2026-13684, CVE-2026-13639, CVE-2026-13673, CVE-2026-6205 (Synology DSM), CVE-2026-58868, CVE-2026-58882 (Google Android), GHSA-f3w6-w445-fwh9 (Ruby on Rails), CVE-2026-102703, CVE-2026-102704 (Xen), CVE-2026-109518 (Debian apt), CVE-2026-98432, CVE-2026-121639, CVE-2026-121638, CVE-2026-121640 (WatchGuard), CVE-2026-76506 (Cisco), CVE-2026-119741 (rsync), CVE-2026-121156, CVE-2026-121229, CVE-2026-121246, CVE-2026-121035, CVE-2026-121247, CVE-2026-121203, CVE-2026-121126 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-98432 (Veeam), CVE-2026-83844 (Microsoft Paint), CVE-2026-19868 (SonicWall SonicOS), CVE-2026-123158 (OpenSSH), and multiple vulnerabilities in the BaseChat Android app version 9.8.1.

🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars

• Your SOC Has an Identity Blind Spot — Here's How Attackers Exploit It and How to Close It → Your SOC may be tracking threats, but is it missing the identities behind them? As attackers increasingly exploit human, machine, and AI identities, traditional security tools often lack the context needed to detect and contain threats quickly. Join this free webinar to learn how connecting identity security with SOC operations can expose hidden risks, reveal attack blast radius, and accelerate incident response.
• Your GitHub Actions May Still Be Vulnerable — Even With SHA Pinning. Here's Why → Think your GitHub Actions are secure because you use SHA pinning? Think again. Attackers can exploit hidden weaknesses in CI/CD workflows, even when standard security measures are in place. Join this expert-led webinar to discover how these attacks work, why SHA pinning alone isn't enough, and what you can do to protect your software supply chain.

📰 Around the Cyber World

• The Russian-speaking ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation known as Qilin (aka Agenda) has recorded 179 publicly reported attacks in 2024, and more than 1,000 claimed victims in 2025. This year alone, it has claimed more than 900 victims, making it one of the most active ransomware groups. "Affiliates commonly gain access through phishing, stolen credentials, vulnerable internet-facing systems and remote-management tools," Acronis said. "Qilin uses a flexible ransomware platform that allows affiliates to tailor attacks to the victim environment, including the encryption of local files, network shares and virtual machine infrastructure." One notable Qilin affiliate is Securotrop, which continues to operate within the Qilin affiliate network, while maintaining an independent channel for publishing stolen victim data.

• Exposed Dixell/Copeland XWEB PRO refrigeration controllers are being turned into abuse infrastructure, according to SecurityScorecard, which uncovered a suspected SMTP botnet that includes confirmed refrigeration controllers. Attackers are said to be using compromised Dixell/Copeland XWEB PRO refrigeration controllers as proxy exits and spam senders. "The SMTP cluster consists of nine IP addresses, three of them confirmed XWEB controllers," Security Scorecard said. "Of 1,041 targets, 508 were contacted by at least two nodes. The three most active nodes had approximately 47% of their target lists in common, the report’s strongest signal of coordination."
• A targeted Browser-in-the-Middle (BitM) phishing operation dubbed PhantomDOM is using custom DOM-mirroring to hijack Microsoft 365 sessions. "The attack began with a SharePoint-themed PDF distributed from an apparently legitimate sender and progressed through redirects and browser checks before presenting Microsoft authentication inside an attacker-controlled remote browser," ZeroBEC said. "The victim saw a familiar sign-in experience. The attacker controlled the browser in which that experience actually ran." According to the email security company, PhantomDOM goes beyond cloned login pages and conventional reverse-proxy phishing. "Its client reconstructs the remote DOM, forwards keyboard and clipboard interactions over WebSocket, survives connection interruptions and supports live operator control," it added.
• According to a report from the non-profit AI Alignment Foundation, AI agents assigned a sandboxed coding task to fix a broken pricing service "shared a private token and ran untrusted code in exchange for help from an agent forum." In an experiment tested against nine models, GPT-6.1-Sol refused every swarm request in 50 of 50 trials, while Gemini 3.8 Flash and Claude Sonnet 5.5 trials were cut short by their providers' content filters.
• A zero-day vulnerability has been disclosed in CPython that could enable bad actors to breach AI hosting platforms. "A memory-safety flaw in the CPython interpreter allows attackers to escape a code sandbox and execute code hidden in a specially crafted model," RunSybil said. "By exploiting this vulnerability, attackers could gain a foothold inside servers responsible for processing millions of user requests. They also could strike directly at the underlying cloud infrastructure hosting those workloads." The findings build upon a previous out-of-bounds read in CPython that could result in a sandbox escape. The issue has been fixed and backported to 3.13, 3.14, and 3.15 branches.
• The U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has issued an order effectively cutting off MEXC Global's access to the U.S. financial system under Operation Economic Outcast. "MEXC Global is a convertible virtual currency exchanger that has facilitated at least $16 billion in illicit transactions connected to Iranian, North Korean, and Russian sanctions evasion, as well as cybercrime, including by transacting directly with sanctioned actors," FinCEN said.
• A new study of 25,964 U.S. government-related domains has found 43 whose DNS records referenced either mistyped, expired, or otherwise repurposed domains. In one case, a misspelled domain's SPF configuration ("amzonses[.]com" instead of "amazonses[.]com") authorized at least 32,066 unique IP addresses to send email on behalf of a U.S. county. "These external dependencies authorize third-party senders, route incoming mail, provide DNS delegation, and receive security telemetry," SH Consulting said. "The government domains themselves can remain registered and be considered protected, because there are no signs to suggest anything is wrong." SH Consulting said it defensively registered 17 of these dangling DNS dependencies to prevent abuse.
• Abraham Teklu Lemma, 53, of Maryland and a former information technology contractor at the National Reconnaissance Office, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit espionage on behalf of the government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Lemma pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transmit national defense information to a foreign government from 2021 until his arrest in August 2023 and has agreed to a prison term between 120 and 262 months. "He exploited his IT administrator access to remove classified national defense information, including Top Secret information, from a secure facility and transmitted it to Ethiopian government officials hoping they would use it to target and kill paramilitary fighters in a regional conflict," said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg.
• Huntress has warned of a "couple waves of activity across multiple organizations involving GeoVision camera software," pointing to broad exploitation of the platform to deliver malware. The activity originates from the IP addresses 45.32.117[.]34 and 156.246.94[.]183.
• A single AI-augmented threat actor (AAT) has been observed using a mesh of 12 AI agents called BOSSAI to conduct persistent campaigns in several countries. The mesh consists of combining HexStrike AI, Hermes, CyberStrikeAI, and HalberdStrike, alongside Grok, OpenClaw, and Claude Code, with some acting as infrastructure builders and maintainers, while others scan for vulnerabilities and attack. The findings once again show how a lone actor can mount offensive operations at scale. "Using the BOSSAI mesh, the operator targeted hundreds of organizations spanning government emergency services, banks and lenders, universities, military systems, phone directories, e-commerce platforms, and gambling sites in eleven countries," Acronis said. "It's unclear if the attacker has any specific affiliation or goal beyond compromising as many organizations as possible, presumably to monetize the activity." The threat actor is believed to be a single individual based in Hualien City, Taiwan.
• Truffle Security has launched the Secrets Revocation Program, a free initiative that helps API key issuers revoke 1.4 million secrets that have been confirmed to be live and leaked on GitHub, Docker Hub, npm, Hugging Face, and others.
• Gnosis Pay said it detected unauthorized access to the system powering its Gnosis Pay-branded cards on November 3, 2026, leading to the exposure of customer information. "The data breach was limited to the system powering Gnosis Pay-branded cards, which was already scheduled for retirement on 20 December 2026," it said. "We have increased our monitoring of card activity and wallets to detect fraud or attempts to access user funds. We have also implemented an extra verification step (3D Secure) and made it mandatory for all online card payments. These measures will stay in place until the B2C system is fully retired as planned on 20 December 2026." The company said it directly notified users about what information was accessed from their account, but did not reveal the number of customers impacted.
• The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned four individuals and 41 entities that are tied to scam compounds in Cambodia, Madagascar, and other countries across Southeast Asia and Africa. The sanctioned parties are said to have supported the business network of Prince Group. "Cyber scam syndicates continue to steal billions of dollars from American victims while relying on sophisticated international business networks to launder their illicit proceeds," said Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. "The newly designated individuals and entities have helped sustain Prince Group TCO’s illicit global operations after the October 2025 and June 2026 designations by managing offshore corporate structures, concealing beneficial ownership, facilitating commercial activities, and providing administrative and financial services to senior Prince Group TCO executives."
• The U.S. Treasury also sanctioned Chui Kok Wa for his role as the leader of a scam compound in Madagascar that was dismantled earlier this year. Late last month, Wa was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, as the leader of the NFT investment scam. "In the scheme, scammers posed as beautiful women who met victims on dating websites, eventually enlisting them to connect their cryptocurrency wallets to fraudulent websites associated with the NFT investments," the Justice Department said. "Once connected, the scammers willed the victims to continue to fund their cryptocurrency wallets, and then surreptitiously pulled money from the victims’ wallets without their knowledge." Wa's phones also allegedly contained employment contracts, detailing overnight work schedules in Madagascar and providing employees with bonus payments tied to money stolen, as well as scripts or guides for what scammers should say to victims and a roster containing employees' names, passport information, salary, hours, disciplinary actions taken against them, along with a list of cryptocurrency wallet addresses for the employees.
• Vercel has launched Security Review, a new capability in Vercel Agent that scans for vulnerabilities on every push to a team's connected GitHub repositories. "Findings appear as comments on pull requests, are listed in the Security dashboard, and are available via CLI," Vercel said. "With your permission, Vercel Agent can also validate and push fixes for findings." In tandem, Vercel said it's starting the rollout of Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) for vercel[.]com to make it harder for stealer malware to siphon session cookies from a device. Google rolled out DBSC support in Chrome earlier this April.
• Fortra has revealed that attackers are creating convincing travel-booking pages that imitate trusted rental platforms. "The fake sites use familiar branding, realistic property listings, reservation details, and urgent messages to persuade travelers to provide sensitive data such as credit card information, usernames and passwords, and more," Fortra said.
• Patrick Steven Yaroch, 37, has pleaded guilty today to wire fraud and money laundering related to using his access as an FBI agent to steal cryptocurrency. "From 2017 through early 2025, Patrick Steven Yaroch, 37, worked at the FBI Boston Division on an investigative squad focused on an adversarial nation-state," the Justice Department said. "From February 2025 to July 31, 2026, Yaroch worked in the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, with access to FBI systems that contained cryptocurrency credentials that the FBI had collected as part of its investigations. Beginning no later than December 2024, Yaroch used his position to steal cryptocurrency from wallets controlled by the subjects of various other investigations or by adversarial nation-state actors, and from at least one wallet the FBI created to use in an operation. Throughout his wire fraud scheme, Yaroch conducted approximately 100 fraudulent transfers using credentials related to 35 separate FBI investigations. He illicitly gained approximately $2,474,380.66 in fraudulent proceeds." The stolen funds were used to pay off his debts and finance a new life abroad, even asking ChatGPT how to maximize profit from investments and where to live in the European Union. Yaroch will be sentenced in March 2027.
• DigiCert said it identified an event involving unauthorized access to one of its business systems, leading to exposure of names and email addresses. In some cases, driver's licenses, passports, utility bills, and other documents containing a name and address that its customers provided as proof were also compromised. The incident has been traced back to a February 2025 change that moved the internal business system to a different network segment, causing it to be opened to the public internet for more than 16 months. Unknown attackers abused a self-registration feature in the system's account manager to create a read-only account that had access to archived data between June 27 and July 2, 2026. Although DigiCert blocked the unauthorized account on July 2, it subsequently determined in October that the account was used to access archived customer contact information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and business addresses.
• OpenAI announced 2 that it is increasing payouts in its Security Bug Bounty program. The objective is to get the broader research community hunting for flaws that its own testing may have missed. "A critical vulnerability in a core product such as ChatGPT, Codex, or the API Platform will now earn up to $30,000," OpenAI said. "Exceptional critical findings on those targets remain eligible for up to $100,000, and now up to $172,000 with bonuses."
• Three people accused of using AI to impersonate corporate executives and attorneys to plunder about $129 million have been indicted on charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Jacob Soall, 41, Sharon Hazan, 54, and Guy Sheetrit, 42, targeted thousands of companies and attorneys at major law firms in order to trick employees into sending large payments to bank accounts under their control between 2024 and 2026, according to the Justice Department. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain in June and August 2026, respectively, while Sheetrit was arrested in the U.K. in September 2026.
• A fake download campaign is targeting users searching for cracked commercial software, free games, activators, plugins, and unofficial utilities. The campaign uses trojanized Inno Setup-style installers hosted on bogus sites to distribute multiple payloads. "We confirmed three downstream monetization branches that transformed affected devices into monetized assets, including by routing third-party internet traffic through the device [WorldProxyPool], enrolling it in a distributed-computing platform [CharityEngine and BOINC], or installing additional utility-style software [AW Manager or Windows Manager], often without users' informed knowledge or consent," Microsoft said. "These products and components may have legitimate uses, but their silent installation through deceptive software bundles without informed user consent introduces security and privacy risks."

• A Chinese-language exploitation framework called Greeter has targeted Flowise honeypots with thousands of chat messages reading only "hello" while weaponizing an old code injection flaw (CVE-2024-58351) to execute malicious instructions. The framework conducted system discovery, extracted environment variables, probed cloud metadata services, searched for SSH keys and other credentials, tried to set up persistence, and ran quick checks to determine whether the host could run payloads from memory. Era Security said it counted 4,372 Flowise instances exposed online, out of which 703 (21.5%) had no authentication enabled. "It reveals a new exploitation framework designed to turn exposed AI applications into entry points for code execution, credential discovery, and potentially broader cloud compromise," Era Security said. "The framework’s most consequential feature was its ephemeral, per-request execution model. Attack instructions were supplied through overrideConfig.javascriptFunction, while stored user messages contained only 'hello.' The malicious function could change with each request without altering the saved chatflow, leaving an incomplete picture for defenders inspecting workflow definitions or chat history alone."
• A threat actor has been abusing fake "suspended account" notices to hide phishing content from users revisiting its lookalike pages masquerading as business banking and treasury logins. The campaign, active since May 2026, has been relying on more than 300 fake domains, including 248 impersonating 189 U.S. financial institutions. The first domains were registered in late 2025, but most of them appeared between July and September 2026. "What ties them together is one mechanism: the kit remembers every visitor’s IP address, so the first visit gets a bank login page, and any return visit gets what looks like a closed hosting account. We call this cluster the 'Suspended' infrastructure," KELA said. "Most domains follow the same recipe, [keyword]-[bank].com, with keywords such as secure, disable, protect and cancel, which makes the cluster findable in newly registered domain feeds."
• Meta said it paid nearly $1.2 million in bug bounties to researchers who found and responsibly disclosed issues in its Muse AI assistant. The bug bounty program went public in September 2026. "The largest single award was paid out four months before launch for a bug that allowed a researcher to get access to conversations and tokens in pre-release VMs used by employees and engineers testing the product," Meta said. "An authentication check treated a header added by a local HTTPS proxy as proof that a request came from a trusted source. During a system migration, the environment gained a second proxy layer. That meant requests from outside could carry the trusted header too. A researcher found this and demonstrated the exploit." Meta paid a $300,000 bounty for this report.
• Chinese nation-state threat activity declined by 41.4% in the six months from April to September 2026, according to a new study by Trellix. The change is "a shift in operational focus, we assess, rather than reduced intent, and one that warrants vigilance rather than reassurance," it added.
• QNAP is urging users to update Plex Media Server on their NAS instances to the latest version available in the QNAP App Center following reports of active exploitation of a set of vulnerabilities known as Plex2Shell. "QNAP has received reports from some users that Plex Media Server on their NAS appears to have been compromised through these vulnerabilities," it said. "The QNAP Technical Support team is assisting affected users and has confirmed that no data loss has occurred."
• MetaMask has disclosed that the security incident it identified on September 28, 2026, resulted in unauthorized access to part of its infrastructure, and that it took steps to contain the incident and secure affected systems. "We have identified no indication that MetaMask wallets or our wallet infrastructure were compromised as a result of this incident," it said. "We have not identified evidence that the incident enabled unauthorized access to or withdrawal of customers' staked principal. However, a limited amount of execution-layer staking rewards was diverted during the incident." The attacker is said to have briefly altered the addresses used to receive execution-layer staking rewards for certain validators, diverting approximately 0.385 ETH in rewards. "These rewards are separate from customers' staked ETH," MetaMask added. "We have found no evidence that customers’ staked principal or withdrawal keys were compromised, and the affected systems have been secured."
• Infected security-themed GitHub projects are being used to target cybersecurity professionals to deliver backdoors and infostealer malware. According to Doctor Web, more than 2,000 PCs have been affected. The malicious code is embedded in Visual Studio project files, Python scripts, and Go source files. Once launched, the malware establishes persistence on the infected host, escalates privileges, disables security and recovery features, and deploys additional payloads, including AsyncRAT, a clipper malware, and an information stealer. The malware also attempts to remove ESET, McAfee, and Malwarebytes antivirus tools from the host and interferes with Windows backups. "The attackers behind these compromised development projects target blockchain game enthusiasts and (most intriguingly) information security professionals," the Russian cybersecurity company said. "The first infected repositories emerged two years ago. The early uploads targeted crypto wallet users – back then attackers used repositories containing Visual Studio projects related to blockchain games, game bots and cheating."
• Security researcher Scott Helme has revealed that about 15,579 websites are currently infected with malicious JavaScript delivering credit card skimmers, ClickFix lures, iOS exploitation kits like Coruna and DarkSword, and malicious redirects. These websites receive more than 135 million visits every month.
• A new report from Layer3 Intel has found that residential proxy traffic has exited through the White House network (AS2650) 236 times over a 30-day period between October 5 and November 3, 2026, with 28 separate residential proxy services able to route traffic through six of its addresses. "Most of the activity happens in the evening, Eastern time: about half of it falls between 5 p.m. and midnight, and almost none happens in the early morning," Layer3 Intel said. "That pattern suggests a person rather than a public guest Wi-Fi network: someone regularly on the White House network late into the evening, whose device is infected with a proxy SDK. Our data shows the exits, not the device or the person behind them." In a post shared on X, Synthient said "several White House staffers are running a Windows 11 machine with InfaticaSDK installed," adding it found "a number of Windows 10 and Windows 11 devices beaconing to known proxy providers like Geonode, Infatica, and Mellowtel." The root cause is believed to be Rave[.]io, a shared streaming app that bundles 12 proxy SDKs into the platform. Rave allows users to watch content from YouTube, Netflix, and Disney+ with friends and runs on Mac, iPhone, Android, and Windows.
• A set of five vulnerabilities has been disclosed in Reachy Mini, an open-source, expressive companion robot from Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face, that, when chained together, can allow an attacker to "execute attacker code, escalate to a persistent root via the robot’s passwordless sudo, and ultimately gain control of the device's motor," JFrog said. "A second variant of the attack works through the browser, where the operator visits a malicious web page, which silently compromises the robot."

• A phishing campaign built around fake registration pages for OpenAI, SpaceX and Anthropic events is luring marketing employees with rewards like "3 months of ChatGPT Pro" or "3 months of Grok Heavy" to get them to sign in with their work accounts. "This campaign uses them in email-delivered invitations that lead to AitM and device code phishing, expanding the use of AI-themed lures across various payload types," Push Security said. "Employees want access to the latest AI tools, making them excellent bait for attacks." The Microsoft option launches a device code phishing flow run through the Kali365 phishing-as-a-service platform, while clicking "Continue with Google" opens a VoidProxy reverse proxy of Google's sign-in page. It is unclear how the attackers initially distribute the phishing links. The kits used to build and deploy the fake event invite lure pages as ZoomMock and MSDRoot. Similar campaigns have been reported by ANY.RUN and Cofense in recent months.
• A U.S. school estate was compromised by the 3AM ransomware group as part of a hybrid human-AI operation, according to Bitdefender. The exact initial access vector used is unknown, but the first recorded activity started on September 10, 2026. "Some parts show a human operator at the keyboard while others behave like an agentic loop, a language model reading each result and retrying with different commands," Bitdefender said. "With the exception of the encryptor itself, the whole operation was built on legitimate, built-in tools, which is standard for ransomware operations. What is different is how the attacker behaved, and several things point to an agentic loop, a program that feeds each result back to a model and runs what comes back. The retries behave like a loop too."

Conclusion

The strange part is how many of these attacks start with something small. A setting nobody checked, an update nobody questioned, or a system left online longer than it should have been. Add a little patience from the attackers, and suddenly a minor mistake becomes a much bigger problem. Not every attack needs a clever trick.

That's it for this week's roundup. Some of these stories will fade, while others may get worse as more details come out. Either way, there's enough here to keep security teams busy. Check what applies to your systems, fix what you can, and we'll be back next week with whatever turns up next.

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Default 'admin:admin' Server Password Helps Researchers Hack Two Automakers, Unlock and Start Cars

The login systems behind two car brands' mobile apps could be taken over completely, two security researchers found, allowing them to access any customer's account and, for an owner with a connected car, unlock the doors and start the engine.

Both apps signed customers in through ForgeRock, an identity platform now part of Ping Identity, and on those servers the researchers reached an administrator console that still used its default password.

They tested the full attack only on their own and consenting owners' cars in the United States, in February 2026, and both systems were fixed about two hours after they reported the problem.

Shubham Shah and Sam Curry published their work late last week. They had started with the apps: both brands signed customers in through the same platform, which runs in two parts: one for login and one, called OpenIDM, that holds customer records.

OpenIDM comes with a built-in administrator console powered by the Apache Felix tool. ForgeRock's own hardening guide tells operators to remove this console or protect it before going live because it stores its own password separately from the rest of the system. On these servers, it was still there and still used the documented default: the word admin for both the username and the password.

The console was blocked from the open internet, but the edge that guards the site and the Java software behind it read the same web address differently. By adding encoded slashes and extra characters, the researchers made the edge treat the request as a harmless static file while the server treated it as the path to the console, and the default password did the rest. The full method is in their technical analysis.

Inside the console, the researchers used a built-in scheduler to run small scripts that execute their own code on the identity server. That gave them a command prompt on the machine that holds the customer records for both brands' logins.

The records sat behind the same block as the console, but the researchers' code reached them from inside the server. They changed a target account's email address and password, signed in as that customer through the normal app, and received the same access tokens the real app uses.

Those tokens were the keys to the car. Using the account's own vehicle commands, the researchers unlocked the doors and started the engine of a test car, with the owner standing next to it, then stopped the engine and locked it again.

The researchers were careful about what they had shown. They reported being able to open a session for any customer account on the affected servers, but they ran the vehicle commands only on cars they owned or were allowed to use. They said they "tested the complete chain only with US accounts and vehicles."

Shubham Shah published a second attack on the Australian systems behind the same brands. There, the way in was different: admin credentials for the identity server had been left in the app's code, intended for a test setup. He set out the full Australia chain in a separate post.

With both attacks together, the researchers said, they could send unlock and engine-start commands to the brands' cars in Australia, the United States, and Canada. That second post does not give a date for when the Australian systems were fixed.

The attack left little for an owner to notice. Changing the email and password did not log the owner out of their app, and the researchers could direct the account's alerts to their own phone, keeping them off the owner's phone.

The researchers put the real email address back after the test. Neither write-up says whether anyone else found or used the path before it was closed.

What Identity Teams Should Check

The brands' mistake was in how they ran ForgeRock, not a new bug in the product, so there is no CVE, the public ID that tracks a flaw, and no vendor advisory to follow. The console and its default password have been documented for years, and the maker's production hardening guide already tells operators to remove the console or change its password before going live.

For teams running the same identity software, now sold as PingIDM, two checks matter:

• Look for the Apache Felix console at /system/console, and remove it or change its default password.
• Do not count on edge or WAF path rules to hide an admin page. A path the edge and the server read differently can slip past the rules, as it did here.

The two researchers have a long record of this kind of work, usually breaking into the web systems behind the apps rather than the cars themselves. They have shown remote access to vehicles from Honda, Kia, and Subaru, among others.

A Subaru flaw they reported exposed owners' accounts and their cars through that carmaker's connected-car service, and a broader 16-brand study in 2023 found the same kind of web weakness across much of the industry.

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Web3Auth Flaw Exploited to Steal Keplr Crypto, Provider Empties Other Wallets for Safety

Some people who set up a Keplr crypto wallet with their Google or Apple account have had money stolen by an attacker.

Keplr uses a company called Web3Auth to run that Google and Apple sign-in. The attacker used a security flaw at that company to reach the wallets, both companies said late last week.

Web3Auth then used the attacker's own route to empty other at-risk wallets before the attacker got to them, it said. It moved that money, with help from the wallet maker, into recovery wallets for safekeeping. So an empty balance may mean the money was rescued, not stolen.

Wallets made with a recovery phrase (a backup list of 12 or 24 words) or a hardware wallet are not affected, the wallet maker said. It has paused Google and Apple sign-in while it investigates.

What Affected Users Should Do

The wallet maker has given this user guidance for accounts created with Google or Apple login:

• Do not send new funds to the account.
• Do not re-import the account or recreate it anywhere.
• Move any funds that are not staked or locked to an account that uses a recovery phrase or a hardware wallet.
• Trust updates only from the official accounts of the wallet maker and the login provider, and ignore direct messages or links that offer "recovery."

Staked and locked assets are taking longer to secure. The wallet maker is also working with the login provider on a way for users to check whether their account was affected.

In the meantime, the login provider has published a recovery address list, which it says lets people tell its own transfers apart from possibly malicious ones.

It has also warned users not to assume that an unfamiliar destination address is linked to the attacker.

What Went Wrong

In an incident update, Web3Auth said a security issue in its own infrastructure affected certain wallets it provides inside the Keplr app.

Keplr went further, saying the flaw led to a "private key breach" for some users who signed in with Google or Apple. A private key is the secret code that approves payments from a wallet, so whoever holds it can move the money.

Neither company has said how the flaw worked, when the attacker first used it, or whether that route is now closed.

Where the Money Went

No dollar figure for the theft has come from either company. Josh Lee, a Keplr co-founder, gave an early estimate in his initial findings: about 20% of Google and Apple login accounts were affected, and only a fraction of those appeared to have been exploited.

GoPlus, a Web3 security company, said in a security alert that at least about $1 million had been stolen. It did not explain how it reached that figure.

The rescued money went into what the login provider calls secure recovery wallets, on 11 blockchains in the Cosmos family and eight Ethereum-style chains.

Bitquery, a blockchain data firm, counted at least $6.01 million moving from more than 44,000 wallets into the recovery wallets by late last week. The firm first reported the transfers as theft. It has since issued a corrected analysis that treats them as the rescue, though it says it cannot check who controls the recovery wallets.

The first of these transfers came 21 minutes before the login provider's first public notice, the firm's data shows. Most of the wallets, 86%, were emptied after the wallet maker warned users.

The moved funds are safe, the login provider said in its recovery thread, and it is working with the wallet maker to return them to users. It has not said how or when.

Beyond Keplr

The login provider said the issue affects its services used by some other companies, but Keplr is the only one it has named. It paused its embedded wallet service, which other apps use to build wallets for their users. Its status page still shows its login service as down today.

Consensys, the company behind the MetaMask wallet, bought the login provider in June 2025. Its acquisition announcement said the deal would let MetaMask users create and recover wallets with social logins. The provider said its initial investigation found "no evidence that MetaMask users are impacted."

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LNbits Urges All Operators to Shut Down Their Bitcoin Lightning Wallet Servers Amid Attacks

Everyone running LNbits, a free, open-source Bitcoin Lightning wallet system, should shut down their servers now because of a wave of attacks, the project said yesterday.

It has several security fixes to release and asked operators to be careful until they are out. One operator said new accounts used an exploit to withdraw 2,285,545 satoshis, about 0.023 bitcoin, from his server before he could stop it.

The shutdown notice came about 80 minutes after a first, narrower warning. That warning asked operators to disable Paywall, an add-on that makes people pay to view content, while the project looked into a possible bug.

As of 09:00 UTC today, the project had not released a fixed version. On X, it had not canceled the notice, offered another option, or told operators how to check whether their servers were hit before they were shut down.

Ben Arc, an LNbits developer, said in a patch estimate yesterday that patches "should be merged and available within 24-48hrs." Counted from his post, that means between about 14:00 UTC today and 14:00 UTC tomorrow.

The project also switched off all the LNbits instances it runs for users on its cloud service, my.lnbits.com, later yesterday. It said in a hosted-service notice that all services would be back within 24 hours, or by about 17:20 UTC today.

Kevin Ravensberg, the operator who reported the loss, said in a loss report on X that his server was exploited before the shutdown notice. The attack ran from 09:22 to 14:00 UTC yesterday, starting more than three hours before the project's first warning at 12:33 UTC.

He has promised to repay users of BitTipBot, a Telegram bot. They cannot reach their funds until the project fixes the flaws.

Later yesterday, Ravensberg said in a follow-up post that Arc and a team of security testers had confirmed "which exact extension exploit was used" on his server. Neither he nor the project had named that extension in posts on X as of 09:00 UTC today. The project also had not said whether it is Paywall, the add-on named in its first warning.

The shutdown notice covers LNbits servers and does not mention Lightning nodes or other wallet software. It did not say how many servers were attacked or how much was taken.

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Taiwan-Based Hacker Used BOSSAI AI Agents to Steal Taipei Emergency Dispatch Records

A single attacker using AI agents pulled emergency dispatch records covering seven Taipei districts, researchers at Acronis's Threat Research Unit said last week.

The agents also found a Taipei fire department platform exposing patient data from 2018, including ECG readings and ambulance video footage, without a login.

The researchers are highly confident that the attacker is a single person based in Hualien City, Taiwan. He aimed the agents at hundreds of organizations in at least 11 countries, including emergency services, banks, universities and military systems. The agents collected data or accessed systems at about 10 of them in Taiwan, Mexico and Thailand.

The evidence comes from the attacker's own server, which initially appeared to be a misconfigured development system. It turned out to be his operational attack platform, containing more than 90,000 files, including the agents' conversations, his command history, hacking tools, credentials, and victims' data.

The agents did not communicate with each other, so the attacker manually pasted one agent's output into another. Commercial AI models mostly refused to help him attack. The attacking agents therefore ran almost entirely on "abliterated" models, meaning AI models run locally with their safety training removed.

What the Agents Reached

Taiwan was targeted far more heavily than any other country, according to the researchers' technical analysis. The most serious confirmed harm there involved emergency-services data.

The dispatch records came from a city's system for 119, Taiwan's emergency number for fire and ambulance services. The agents pulled them from the system's API, and they include incident times, response types, case status, and street-level locations. They are case records, not live ambulance tracking.

The researchers' summary says breaches at emergency services and universities led to the theft of medical and personal data. Their detailed account of the Taipei patient platform, however, says only that the records were exposed.

The agents also went after five other targets tied to Taiwan's emergency services:

Target	What the agents did	Result
Fire-dispatch technology vendor	Logged into its database admin panel with default root credentials. A web shell attempt through a known CVE failed.	Access to 18 or more database tables
Emergency management information system	Found a hardcoded AES-256 key in the site's front-end JavaScript that exposed session-cookie contents, including an administrator's identity	No confirmed compromise
National disaster-response center	A scanning tool reported a critical Apache remote code execution flaw	The flaw did not exist
National fire agency single sign-on portal	Tried to guess logins (brute force)	No confirmed access
Fire-department systems in five cities	Scanned them to identify the software they run	No confirmed compromise

The report does not say whether the affected organizations or Taiwan's authorities were told, or whether the exposed data can still be reached.

Outside emergency services, the agents pulled data from an account table at a Taiwanese lending firm through SQL injection. In Thailand, they collected data from three universities in the same way, after selecting 489 potential targets across 45 institutions.

In Mexico, they collected about 206,800 home phone records containing names and addresses, using government statistics, postal code lists, and telecom authority data.

About 15 more organizations were attacked without a confirmed break-in. In at least eight other countries, targets were only scanned or lined up for attacks that had not run by the time the researchers looked.

The researchers watched the operation for 12 days. One recorded exchange shows the attacker at work on July 25.

How the AI Was Used and Where It Failed

The setup, called BOSSAI, had 12 AI agents, with 9 in use. Some built and maintained the attacker's servers and tools, while others scanned targets and carried out attacks.

Commercial cloud models did most of the building, with Grok as the main builder. When the attacker directly asked them to attack, Grok and MiniMax M3 refused and requested written proof that the work was authorized. The researchers say it is unclear whether a fake authorization letter would have changed that.

Grok made one exception, repairing a broken proof-of-concept script that the attacker then handed to an attack agent. The attacker also redirected the coding agents Claude Code and Codex to an abliterated model, though they mostly did infrastructure work. Cursor, another coding agent, attacked a Taiwanese emergency-services site while running such a model.

The abliterated models were versions of DeepSeek, GLM, and Qwen.

The agents also got things wrong. One scanning tool invented CVEs, and more than half of its high and critical findings were false positives or wrongly classified. The main attack agent also reported results that had not happened.

Who Ran It

Acronis's attribution rests on mistakes the attacker made while hiding his identity, combined with publicly available information. He reused a single identity across his legitimate businesses and his attack servers, including a GitHub profile, a logo, an SSH key name, and an email address.

His home IP address appeared during an SSH session in one of his Grok conversations.

Why he did it is less clear. Some attacks on government, emergency, and military targets looked like the work of state-backed hacking groups, while others looked like ordinary cybercrime. The researchers think he probably wanted to make money, and it is unclear whether he works for anyone.

What Stopped the Agents

What the agents found was mostly data that was already poorly protected, according to the researchers: a medical data port left open since 2018, dispatch records on a public-facing API, a lender with 16 SQL injection points, and universities running unpatched Oracle databases.

The agents failed where logins were enforced, where paywalls required a valid session, and where endpoints were properly filtered. The AI made it cheap to find and reach many targets at once, but it did not get past defenses that held.

Nine IP addresses and nine domains from the attacker's setup appear in the indicator list at the end of the analysis. None is marked as active or inactive, and most come without a note on what they were used for.

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4 New Hypervisors + Universal Hypervisor API in Veeam Backup & Replication 13.1: Ready Options for the VMware vSphere 8.x Exit

If you are still running VMware vSphere 8.x, the support clock is real and the dates are now clear. Broadcom’s focus on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.x means classic vSphere environments that do not renew into the full VCF path will lose mainstream support. For vSphere 8.0 (ESXi 8.0, vCenter Server 8.0 and typically vSAN 8.0):

• End of General Support (EoGS): 11 October 2027 — after this date Broadcom/VMware will no longer provide regular product updates, bug fixes or security patches.
• End of Technical Guidance (EoTG): 11 October 2029 — only limited guidance remains; no new security patches or hardware certifications in the normal course.

That leaves roughly 14 months (from today) until the critical “no more patches” milestone. For administrators this creates immediate pressure on backup, recovery testing and migration planning. For CEOs and IT leaders it is a budget, risk and platform-strategy conversation that cannot be postponed much longer.

Veeam Backup & Replication 13.1 (build 13.1.0.411) lands at the right time. On the hypervisor side it adds native support for several new platforms and introduces the Universal Hypervisor API (UHAPI). Combined with the existing portfolio (vSphere, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, Proxmox VE, HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, oVirt-based platforms and others), Veeam now covers the large majority of production hypervisors in use.

The practical value is that you can protect the new target with the same console, jobs, repositories and recovery workflows you already know. Cross-platform Instant Recovery and entire-VM restore let you move workloads without first changing your data-protection tool – one of the biggest friction points in any hypervisor migration.

 

Screenshot from the lab – Veeam 13.1

 

Below is a practical look at the key new platforms Anthony highlights (Sangfor aSV, Citrix XenServer, XCP-ng and Platform9), what Veeam 13.1 delivers, and where each typically fits.

1. Sangfor aSV

To be honest, I never heard about this solution before Veeam started to support it. But hey, this is IT, you learn every day…..

Sangfor aSV is a full-featured enterprise hypervisor, particularly strong in certain regions and with organisations looking for an integrated stack. It comes with a complete feature set aligned to Veeam’s cross-platform standards.

In Veeam 13.1 you get:

• Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for efficient incremental backups
• Snapshot quiescence for Windows VMs
• Backup health checks plus Threat Hunter and YARA content scanning
• Entire VM restore from (and to) any other supported hypervisor, cloud VM (AWS/Azure/GCP) or physical-agent backup
• Instant Recovery to vSphere, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV and Proxmox VE (Proxmox under experimental support)
• Disk mount (read-only) to Windows or Linux guests, file-level restore, export to VHD/VHDX/VMDK
• Veeam Explorer application-item recovery (SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, Oracle) via heuristics detection

For administrators this means you can stand up Sangfor as a migration target, protect new VMs immediately, and still recover older vSphere backups onto it if required. For leadership it is a viable option when total cost of ownership and regional support matter.

2. Citrix XenServer

Citrix XenServer (the commercial Xen-based platform) returns to full native Veeam support. Many environments still run it for specific workloads or because of long-standing Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments.

Capabilities match the modern Veeam standard:

• CBT-driven incremental backups
• Full backup scanning (health, malware, YARA)
• Cross-platform entire VM restore and Instant Recovery to the major targets
• Disk mount, file-level restore, backup export
• Application-item recovery through Veeam Explorers

If part of your estate is already on XenServer, or if you are evaluating it as a lower-cost alternative for certain tiers, the 13.1 removes the previous “agent or workaround” discussion. You protect it the same way you protect everything else.

3. XCP-ng

I know and I like XCP-ng, and I have already wrote a blog post on Starwind blog about this French platform by Vates. XCP-ng is the open-source, community-driven continuation of the XenServer lineage. It is popular with organizations that want a free or low-cost Xen-based hypervisor, backed by an active community and commercial support options via Vates. It is very efficient and suitable not only in large enterprises, but also at the ROBO or Edge.

Veeam treatment is essentially identical to Citrix XenServer:

• CBT incremental backups
• Threat scanning and health checks
• Full cross-platform restore and Instant Recovery options
• File-level and application-item recovery
• Disk export flexibility

For administrators who prefer open-source stacks or who already test XCP-ng in labs, this is a clean path. You can migrate selected workloads, keep protecting them with the same Veeam infrastructure, and still fall back to Instant Recovery onto vSphere or Hyper-V during the transition. For CEOs it represents a cost-controlled alternative that does not force an immediate change of backup vendor.

4. Platform9 (via Universal Hypervisor API)

Platform9 is a managed private-cloud / Kubernetes-centric platform that also offers virtualization capabilities. It is one of the first platforms to integrate through Veeam’s new Universal Hypervisor API.

I have written a blog post about the Platform 9 Community Edition (which Is free) on StarWind site.

Supported operations include:

• VM backup jobs
• Backup scanning (health + threat detection)
• Entire VM restore across platforms and to/from cloud or agent backups
• Instant Recovery to the usual set of targets
• Disk mount, file-level restore, export, and Explorer-based application recovery

The advantages are that UHAPI gives hypervisor vendors a defined, certified path to Veeam compatibility rather than requiring a fully bespoke integration every time. Platform9 is the first through that door. This model should improve long-term support quality.

Administrators get a single pane of glass; leadership gets a platform that can sit alongside existing investments without forcing a forklift change of the data-protection layer.

There is also a KubeVirt Proxy (built with the Kasten team) that provides a management interface for the growing set of KubeVirt-based hypervisors. The first plug-in on that layer is expected shortly – useful context for anyone looking at Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization or similar.

Common Capabilities That Matter for Migration

Across these platforms you get the same core Veeam strengths Anthony highlights:

• Image-level backups using native change tracking where available
• Portable recovery—restore a VM originally protected on vSphere onto one of the new hypervisors (or vice versa)
• Instant Recovery to keep RTO low while you decide the final home of the workload
• Integration with existing repositories, including hardened/immutable ones, scale-out backup repositories and object storage
• Application-aware processing and granular recovery for the usual Microsoft and Oracle workloads

On the existing platforms, Nutanix AHV and Proxmox VE also receive full Web UI coverage (matching vSphere and Hyper-V), advanced RBAC, VirtIO driver injection on restore, and (for Proxmox) native VM replication for the first time.

Practical Advice for Administrators and Decision Makers

With the 11 October 2027 End of General Support date now fixed, the window for orderly planning is roughly 14 months. Start by inventorying which workloads are candidates for migration and which must stay on vSphere for application or compliance reasons. Use Veeam’s Instant Recovery and SureBackup capabilities to test recovery of current backups onto a proof-of-concept cluster of one of the new hypervisors. Because the backup format is consistent, you can protect the new environment with the same jobs and retention policies.

From a licensing perspective, Veeam’s Universal License (VUL) model already covers these platforms, so you are not forced into a new SKU conversation just to protect the new hypervisor. That keeps the financial discussion focused on the hypervisor and infrastructure costs rather than on backup tooling.

We can see that hypervisor support went to the next level in this 13.1 release and sets customers up to be covered no matter where they migrate to – platforms fully supported from day one plus a Universal Hypervisor API that keeps the door open for whatever comes next.

For CEOs and CFOs the message is straightforward: after 11 October 2027 there will be no more regular security patches for vSphere 8.x from Broadcom. The migration does not have to include a simultaneous change of backup and recovery platform. Veeam 13.1 reduces that particular risk and gives you a broader set of viable targets.

Veeam Backup & Replication 13.1 is available now. Download it, stand up a lab with one or two of these new hypervisors, and start testing restores from your existing vSphere backups. The data-protection side of the migration is ready; the rest of the project is now mainly about application compatibility, networking, storage performance and operational readiness.

FAQ

What is new for hypervisor support in Veeam Backup & Replication 13.1?

Veeam Backup & Replication 13.1 adds support for Sangfor aSV, Citrix XenServer, XCP-ng, and Platform9. The release also introduces the Universal Hypervisor API, or UHAPI, which provides a standardized path for additional virtualization platforms to integrate with Veeam.

Which new hypervisors are supported in Veeam 13.1?

The article focuses on four platforms: Sangfor aSV, Citrix XenServer, XCP-ng, and Platform9. Platform9 is one of the first platforms to integrate through the new Universal Hypervisor API.

What is the Veeam Universal Hypervisor API?

The Universal Hypervisor API gives hypervisor vendors a defined integration path to Veeam without requiring a completely custom integration for every platform. It is intended to make it easier for new virtualization platforms to add backup and recovery compatibility.

Does Veeam 13.1 support XCP-ng?

Yes. Veeam 13.1 provides support for XCP-ng with CBT-based incremental backups, health and threat scanning, cross-platform restore, Instant Recovery, file-level recovery, application-item recovery, and disk export options.

What Veeam capabilities are available for Citrix XenServer?

Citrix XenServer receives native Veeam support with CBT-driven incremental backups, backup health and malware scanning, cross-platform VM restore, Instant Recovery, disk mounting, file-level restore, export, and application-item recovery through Veeam Explorers.

Can Veeam restore VMware backups to another hypervisor?

Yes. The article highlights cross-platform recovery as one of the main migration benefits. A VM originally protected on vSphere can be restored to another supported hypervisor, helping organizations test or move workloads without first changing their backup infrastructure.

Does Veeam 13.1 support Instant Recovery across hypervisors?

Yes. Instant Recovery is available across supported targets and can be used to reduce recovery time during testing and migration. The article describes this as a way to keep workloads available while teams determine their final virtualization platform.

Why is Veeam 13.1 relevant for VMware vSphere 8.x migrations?

The article links the release to the approaching end of General Support for vSphere 8.x on October 11, 2027. Veeam 13.1 lets organizations protect new hypervisors using familiar backup repositories, jobs, and recovery workflows, reducing the need to replace the data-protection platform at the same time as the hypervisor.

Do organizations need a different Veeam license for the new hypervisors?

According to the article, Veeam Universal License covers these platforms, so organizations do not need to move to a separate SKU solely to protect a new supported hypervisor.

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Former OpenAI Engineer Pleads Not Guilty to Planting Covert Device in Executive Meeting Room

The OpenAI engineer who was arrested and charged last month for planting a covert audio recording device in the company's office has pleaded not guilty.

According to reports from Bloomberg and CNBC, Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan made an appearance in San Francisco federal court on Friday, where he entered the plea. His next hearing is scheduled for November 17, 2026.

If proven guilty, the 35-year-old faces a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, followed by three years of supervised release. He has been held without bail since his arrest on October 9, 2026.

Late last month, a grand jury indicted Alfozan on a single count of interception of oral communications.

Prosecutors allege that the former OpenAI employee placed a "sophisticated recording device" in an executive OpenAI conference room in what has been described as an attempt to unlawfully record sensitive conversations.

He was arrested three days before he, along with his wife and son, were scheduled to fly from San Francisco to Riyadh on a one-way ticket.

"His wife and son, however, immediately left the United States without him," U.S. prosecutors said. "Rather than wait until the October 12 flight as booked, they initially planned to fly to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on October 11 on a one-way ticket booked and paid for by the Saudi government."

"That flight was canceled, however, when a member of the Saudi military booked and paid for yet another one-way ticket for the defendant's wife and son, this one business class to Doha, Qatar, on October 10, 2026. They did make that flight, departing San Francisco about 36 hours after the defendant was arrested."

In a subsequent court filing, it was alleged that Alfozan was in frequent contact with a member of the Saudi Royal Family via WhatsApp. He was also deemed a flight risk, with court documents claiming that the defendant took great pains to create bespoke, encrypted recording devices to record sensitive meetings involving senior OpenAI personnel and executives.

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U.S. Agencies Warn Refrigeration Controller Attacks Could Cause Fires and Inventory Losses

U.S. government agencies have warned that threat actors are actively targeting industrial refrigeration and cold-chain monitoring systems globally with an aim to cause service disruptions, fire hazards, and loss of inventory.

"The actors may exploit vulnerabilities or weaknesses in unpatched or internet-accessible controllers to remotely alter settings and force units into continuous heating and defrost cycles, which can cause widespread inventory loss and equipment hazards," according to a joint advisory.

According to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Department of Transportation (DOT), threat actors are likely to exploit authentication bypasses, arbitrary code injection, and weak configurations to gain access to these systems and cause the following effects -

• Change of temperature, which, in turn, could affect the service life of the system, create a fire hazard, cause inventory loss, or harm consumers who purchase products after unsafe storage.
• Loss of visibility into current temperatures due to a denial-of-service.

In response to the threat, owners and operators are being urged to use strong authentication, keep systems updated, identify any systems that are accessible from the internet, isolate operational technology (OT) devices, change default passwords, retire and replace legacy devices, remove unnecessary remote access, and secure necessary remote access.

"Industrial refrigeration and cold-chain monitoring systems protect food, medicine, and other temperature-sensitive products, making them attractive targets for malicious cyber actors," said FBI Cyber Branch Operations Director Brett Leatherman.

"We are seeing these systems targeted across critical infrastructure sectors globally, putting inventory and equipment at risk."

In recent weeks, threat actors have targeted hundreds of supermarkets across Europe by exploiting weaknesses in internet-accessible refrigeration controllers to raise temperatures, in some cases to as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), or force cooling units into defrost mode, spoiling food and resulting in financial losses.

Targets of these attacks ranged from major supermarket chains to small grocers and butchers in Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden.

Among those targeted was the French Blood Establishment, which confirmed that a cybersecurity incident affecting a refrigeration equipment provider had raised temperature and defrost settings to "extremely high levels" at three facilities used to store blood plasma. It's unclear who is behind the hacking spree.

Data from Censys shows that there are still hundreds of Danfoss StoreView instances exposed globally, with most of them located in France, although the number has dropped significantly from 3,004 to 708 between October 9 and November 5, 2026. The Copeland/Dixell XWEB exposure, likewise, has declined from 3,708 to 2,420.

The attack surface management platform described the refrigeration attacks across Europe as the latest addition to a list of other recent incidents targeting critical infrastructure, including gas station tank gauges, air raid systems, and water towers.

"North America accounts for roughly 38% of global ICS [industrial control systems] exposure," Censys said. "Asia's share grew from 22% in 2024 to 25% in 2026, while Europe's fell from 36.5% to 32%. However, these shifts have not produced an overall decline."

"While exposure numbers are high, they're hardly surprising: ICS exposure is a problem that's been reported on and warned about for years. It poses a critical risk to the public as gatekeepers to the world's critical infrastructure."

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CISA Flags SonicWall SonicOS MFA Bypass Flaw Amid Reports of Possible Exploitation

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a high-severity vulnerability impacting SonicWall SonicOS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following reports that it said may have been exploited in real-world attacks.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-19868 (CVSS score: 7.1 / 7.5), has been described as an authentication reinforcement vulnerability via alternate authentication methods.

"An authentication enforcement vulnerability in SonicOS SSL-VPN service may allow a user with valid credentials for an alternate authentication method to bypass SAML authentication controls. Successful exploitation may also bypass SAML-enforced multi-factor authentication (MFA)," SonicWall said in a Friday advisory.

The company also acknowledged that it "investigated a report indicating potential exploitation of this vulnerability," urging customers to update to the latest version as soon as possible. SonicWall did not disclose any additional specifics about the nature of the attack or who is behind the effort.

Also patched by SonicWall are a number of other high-severity flaws -

• CVE-2026-107155 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A permissive cross-domain policy vulnerability in the SonicOS management interface that could potentially enable a remote unauthenticated attacker to perform unauthorized operations under specific conditions.
• CVE-2026-107154 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A session validation vulnerability in the SonicOS management interface that could potentially enable a remote unauthenticated attacker to perform unauthorized operations under specific conditions.
• CVE-2026-82308 (CVSS score: 7.5) - A pre-authentication heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in the SonicOS SSL-VPN service that could potentially enable a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause an application level denial-of-service.

Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies are recommended to apply the patches by November 20, 2026, to secure their networks against the threat.

The development comes days after SonicWall detailed two unpatched vulnerabilities impacting end-of-life Global Management System (GMS) systems (CVE-2026-109593 and CVE-2026-109594), urging customers to upgrade to Network Security Manager (NSM).

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Claude, Make Me Rich: Finding Anthropic’s Next Giant Market

Brian and Brandon debate how a newly hired product leader at Anthropic would find growth big enough to match the expectations of an IPO, which Brian expects around the end of 2026. Brandon says he would start in the research group, hunting for breakthroughs that could serve markets like finance and healthcare, and raises contextual ads even though he jokes the idea could get him fired. Flipping Alex Karp’s warning about AI systems learning a company’s differentiation, Brian proposes a product that sits between employees and their data, then shows executives where to cut costs in the 70 to 80 percent of work he estimates doesn’t set them apart. Pointing to Sierra’s outcome-based pricing, Brandon suggests Anthropic take over a system, absorb the risk, and get paid only when it delivers. His AI-assisted car purchase leads to a discussion of opt-in, intent-based commerce, and Brian argues Anthropic still lacks the kind of aggregation point he sees as the biggest way to make money. They close on Brandon’s half-joking plan: wait until the model is smart enough, then ask it how to make money.

 

 

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• Anthropic’s Form S-1 registration statement (SEC)
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