# Today's Top Stories

Cisco disclosed CVE-2026-20245, a high-severity unpatched zero-day in Catalyst SD-WAN Manager that allows root privilege escalation and is actively being exploited in attacks — the 7th SD-WAN zero-day exploited in 2026 alone. No patch is available yet, making this an immediate priority for network security teams managing SD-WAN infrastructure.

Chrome 149 patches a massive 429 vulnerabilities, with over 100 rated critical or high-severity, predominantly use-after-free and insufficient input validation flaws. Security teams should prioritize pushing this update across enterprise environments given the volume and severity of the patched bugs.

Chinese espionage group UNC5221 has been deploying two newly documented malware families — Plenet and AgentPSD — alongside the previously known Brickstorm backdoor to maintain persistent access to Microsoft 365 environments. This represents a significant evolution in UNC5221's post-compromise toolkit targeting M365 tenants.

JFrog researchers uncovered two simultaneous npm supply chain attacks: IronWorm, a Rust-based information stealer that scrapes secrets and hides behind an eBPF kernel rootkit, and a new Miasma worm variant that used over 50 poisoned legitimate packages to self-propagate. The dual-campaign scope targeting developer machines represents an escalating threat to software supply chain integrity.

CVE-2026-3300 (CVSS 9.8), a remote code execution vulnerability in the Everest Forms Pro WordPress plugin affecting all versions up to 1.9.12, is being actively exploited in the wild to achieve full site compromise. With approximately 4,000 active installations, admins should apply the available patch immediately.

Cisco patched a critical SSRF vulnerability (CVE-2026-20230) in Unified Communications Manager that allows unauthenticated remote attackers to write files and escalate to root, with public proof-of-concept exploit code already released. Cisco's PSIRT states no active exploitation has been observed yet, but the PoC significantly shortens the window before attacks begin.

Symantec and Carbon Black's Threat Hunter Team reported a five-month espionage campaign against a senior executive at a major global stock exchange, where attackers silently exfiltrated the victim's Outlook inbox in small batches routed through Dropbox and OneDrive to blend with legitimate cloud traffic. The extended dwell time and use of trusted cloud services for exfiltration makes this a textbook advanced persistent threat case study.

CISA added a recently patched high-severity SolarWinds Serv-U flaw to its active exploitation alerts, warning that threat actors are using it to crash servers in ongoing attacks. Security teams running Serv-U should apply available patches immediately given confirmed active exploitation.

Security researcher RyotaK of GMO discovered a flaw in Anthropic's Claude Code GitHub Action that allowed an attacker to hijack public repositories — including Anthropic's own action repo — using nothing more than a single malicious GitHub issue, potentially poisoning downstream projects that consume the action. The vulnerability illustrates the systemic risk of AI-assisted CI/CD tools running with excessive permissions in public repositories.

A Five Eyes joint advisory warns that Chinese intelligence officers are systematically posing as recruiters on LinkedIn and other platforms to target government and military personnel with access to classified information across member nations. The alert specifically calls out front companies based outside China being used as cover for talent recruitment operations aimed at insider threat cultivation.