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Threat actors are exploiting a newly patched critical security flaw impacting JFrog Artifactory merely days after public disclosure, according to watchTowr.
The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-82329 (CVSS score: 9.8), a case of authentication bypass that could lead to administrative access in Artifactory.
"JFrog Artifactory contains an authentication weakness that, under default configuration, may allow an unauthenticated attacker with network access to obtain administrative privileges," according to a description of the flaw on CVE.org.
"It affects default configs, requires no auth, no user interaction," Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said in a post on LinkedIn. "It's an RCE bomb because Artifactory hosts binaries, so you can basically poison everything, but an admin escalation can cause damage even beyond that."
The issue resides in JFrog Access, which is designed to issue and validate credentials. "Instances without an additional join key configured receive a 'phantom' join key that attackers can abuse to forge access and mint administrator-level credentials," Yordan Ganchev, principal threat intelligence specialist at watchTowr, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News.
Ganchev also pointed out that threat actors have begun to weaponize the flaw as of September 1, 2026, to generate admin tokens and enumerate users, groups, credential sets and federated access topologies.
"This moved from disclosure to real-world exploitation with uncomfortable efficiency," Ganchev added. "Anyone following along knows what comes next: things will get worse."
"When attackers gain admin level access to a central software supply chain system, they can do what every engineering team does best – build, ship and distribute software fast. From there, they could tamper with build pipelines, move laterally into production systems and potentially push malicious changes downstream to customers."
Organizations that are running self-managed versions of JFrog Artifactory are recommended to apply patches to internet-exposed systems with immediate effect, as well as inspect audit logs, rotate exposed credentials, and review connected systems for malicious changes or backdoor access.
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Brazilian financial services, retail, and e-commerce organizations have become the target of a financially motivated threat actor dubbed Breeze Comet (formerly UNC5669) since 2024.
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant teams described the threat actor as "specializing in manipulating payment systems and banking software in Brazil to conduct fraudulent transfers." The adversary is said to have successfully carried out at least one heist of assets worth tens of thousands of U.S. dollars.
The activity overlaps with threat activity clusters tracked by CrowdStrike and Trend Micro under the monikers Plump Spider and SHADOW-AETHER-064. According to CrowdStrike, the e-crime group is operating out of Brazil and has been active since September 2023, monetizing their intrusions by gaining unauthorized access to internal payment systems and carrying out fraudulent transactions.
Initial access to financial entities and companies offering financial services is accomplished via password spraying and voice calls impersonating IT support teams to persuade targets to install Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools such as AnyDesk. In one case highlighted by Axur in November 2025, the threat actors masqueraded as IT support personnel over a WhatsApp conversation and guided the victim to install a PowerShell reconnaissance script under the pretext of updating a corporate application.
Alternatively, the group has targeted vulnerable JBoss AS servers to deploy web shells, which are then used to deliver additional tooling, including Chisel and other proxy utilities, for follow-on exploitation.
The threat actor's primary targets are organizations with permission to conduct transactions through banking software, APIs, and payment systems such as Pix, STR, and Boleto. This covers a wide range of entities like banks, payment processors, retailers, and exchanges, not to mention fintech and banking software providers.
"Breeze Comet tactics have evolved over time to leverage a customized malware suite and compromised, trusted websites to facilitate initial access, command-and-control (C2), and to interact with financial software and payment APIs," Google said. "Breeze Comet's operational infrastructure may also indicate intent to expand their infrastructure footprint to other countries in Latin America and Africa."
To achieve its goals, however, it must meet four requirements: have access to the National Financial System Network (RSFN) through an entity that already has this access; access to mTLS credentials that allow sending authenticated payloads with transactional orders to Pix or STR; access to several accounts in the targeted organizations' Active Directory and cloud environments; and possess an understanding of an organization's transfer processing procedures, network controls, fintech integrations, and anti-fraud systems.
Some of the other notable tactics are listed below -
Using compromised Brazilian small government websites to stage RMM tools, infostealers dressed up as legitimate tax or receipt documents, and backdoors like XWorm, as well as using them as C2 endpoints to bypass reputation filters and avoid detection. A similar modus operandi has been replicated across Nigeria, Paraguay, Ghana, and Venezuela, indicating a growing targeting focus.
Connecting rogue hardware devices directly into retail store networks as a means to establish direct footholds and then move laterally to internal systems, followed by downloading the Netcat utility and custom scripts to retrieve post-exploitation frameworks.
Using Impacket, ADRecon, and ADVipscan, and the custom LDAP brute-forcing utility REALBREEZE to conduct internal reconnaissance and escalate privileges by targeting development and cloud environments.
Moving laterally by initiating unauthorized Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) sessions and executing commands via SMB network file shares. This step also involves the deployment of COBALTSPIN, a Rust-based routing malware that operates as a network tunneler to communicate with and maintain persistent network access to financial API infrastructure.
"By establishing a reverse SOCKS5 proxy over a WebSocket connection, COBALTSPIN routes network traffic securely back and forth between the C2 and internal targets, enabling lateral movement directly through boundary firewalls without requiring built-in persistence mechanisms that might trigger detection," Google said.
Breeze Comet's persistence mechanisms have evolved from dropping commercial RMM tools in 2024 to deploying malicious Kubernetes pods a year later and stealing cloud secrets by exfiltrating them to public-facing notepad websites like "dontpad[.]com." Since then, the threat actor has also been observed making use of multiple custom backdoors as a redundant access method and expanding their foothold -
LIGHTPAINT, a Java-based backdoor that's used to install the legitimate SoftEther VPN and configure it for automated persistence
MILDFROST, a passive Java JAR backdoor that's used to establish covert DNS tunnels
KICKPLATE, a Nim-based backdoor that impersonates Windows Update Health Tools and is used to deliver secondary payloads and runs commands to control SOCKS5 tunnelers
BOATBEAM, a Golang-based backdoor that initiates a fake IIS HTTPS server on port 443
To make sure these persistence mechanisms are not detected and removed, the threat actor executes PowerShell commands to disable Windows Defender's real-time monitoring on the compromised hosts.
In the final stage, COBALTSPIN and compromised privileged accounts are used to access core financial applications and execute hundreds of fraudulent transactions. Once complete, event logs are cleared to minimize the forensic footprint and conceal any API interactions with financial software and payment systems. Any directory created during the course of the intrusion is also deleted.
The presence of verbose explanatory comments and standardized execution headers indicates the use of a large language model (LLM) to compress the malware development lifecycle. A previous analysis from Trend Micro in May 2026 also found some scripts to include "descriptions of self-reasoning and autonomous decision-making processes."
"While the Latin American cybercrime ecosystem has historically been defined by client-side, high-volume retail fraud, Breeze Comet's campaigns represent a notable shift that may serve as a model for future financially motivated threats against organizations in this region," Google said.
"This transition from opportunistic retail banking fraud to direct intrusions into the core financial switch and instant payment infrastructure is notable not just for this shift in targeting, but also the capabilities of the threat actor. As threat groups increasingly leverage LLMs to streamline routine tradecraft, defenders must anticipate shorter adversary turnaround times and heightened pressure on interconnected financial ecosystems."
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Part 1 installed App Volumes Manager and prepared the SQL database and SMB share. Part 2 configured Active Directory, VHD In-Guest Services, and storage templates, and Part 3 created and verified a Writable Volume.
This final guide packages Notepad++ on a clean capture VM, stores the application as a VHD on the configured SMB share, assigns the current package version to an Active Directory group, and verifies delivery inside a Horizon desktop. The workflow uses VHD In-Guest Services, so the endpoint mounts the package from SMB without a vCenter-managed disk attachment.
Prerequisites
Before creating the package, confirm that the following components and access requirements are in place:
App Volumes Manager – Installed and configured with VHD In-Guest Services, Directory Services, and a storage location.
SMB 3 file share – Reachable by App Volumes Manager, the packaging VM, and the target desktops. The share was created in Part 1 and registered as storage in Part 2.
Correct permissions:
The target desktops’ computer accounts or entitled user accounts can read the SMB share, according to the access model used in your environment.
The storage credentials registered in App Volumes Manager can create and update package files on the share.
Application installer – The software to capture. This guide uses Notepad++ as the example application.
Packaging VM – A clean Windows VM with the App Volumes Agent installed. Match the target desktop OS version and patch level, omit the Horizon Agent and Dynamic Environment Manager FlexEngine, and take a clean snapshot so the VM can be reverted after each capture. These points follow Omnissa’s packaging recommendations.
Create an Omnissa App Package with In-Guest VHD
Open App Volumes Manager, enter your administrative credentials, and click Login.
Go to Inventory > Applications and click Create.
Enter a Name and, optionally, a Description for the application. Click Create.
Click Create again to confirm the application.
On the Packages tab, enter a package Name, select the SMB share under Storage location, and add an optional Description. Click Create.
Leave Perform in the background selected unless you need to wait for completion in the current session, then click Create.
The new package appears on the Packages tab with the Unpackaged status. Expand the package and click Package to select a provisioning computer.
In Find Packaging Computer, enter the name of the dedicated packaging VM and click Search. The VM must be powered on, joined to the Active Directory domain, and running the App Volumes Agent. Select the correct result and click Package.
Click Start Packaging.
App Volumes prompts you to restart the packaging VM. Reboot it to begin the capture workflow.
After the VM restarts, sign in through RDP. A notification confirms that the packaging disk has been attached. Click OK.
Copy the previously downloaded installer to the desktop before capture begins, then click Yes to start capturing changes.
Install the application as you normally would. The App Volumes packaging process records the installation changes in the background.
Complete the application’s installation wizard.
When installation is complete, return to the App Volumes Packaging dialog and click OK.
If the application installed successfully, click Yes.
Review the package information, then click Finalize.
Click OK to restart the packaging VM and complete the workflow.
After the VM restarts, sign in once more so App Volumes can finalize the package.
When App Volumes reports that packaging completed successfully, click OK. Revert the packaging VM to its clean snapshot before capturing another application.
Set the current package version
An application can contain several package versions. The Current marker identifies the version delivered by assignments that use the marker. On the Packages tab, select the package version you want to publish and click Set Current.
Click Set Current again to confirm.
The selected package is now marked Current and is ready for assignment.
Assign the package to users
Open the Applications tab, expand the application, and click Assign.
In Search Directory Service, select the configured Active Directory domain, enter the target group name, and click Search. Select the group, such as G_HorizonUsers in this example, and set Assignment Type to Marker. With a marker assignment, users receive whichever package version is marked Current. Click Assign.
Review the assignment details and click Assign to confirm.
Open the Assignments tab and confirm that the application and Active Directory group are listed.
Test the assigned package
Connect to the Horizon environment and sign in with a test user who belongs to the assigned Active Directory group. Click Login.
Launch the assigned VDI desktop. An In-Guest VHD package does not appear as a separate published application in the Horizon portal; App Volumes attaches it inside the Windows desktop session.
Inside the VDI, locate the Notepad++ shortcut and open the application.
Confirm that the application starts and its basic functions work as expected.
For an administrative check, return to App Volumes Manager and open the Attachments tab. Confirm that the expected package is attached to the test desktop and user session.
Conclusion
The Notepad++ installer is now captured in a VHD package, marked as the current version, assigned to an Active Directory group, and verified from both the user desktop and App Volumes Manager. This completes the series: the same App Volumes environment now provides persistent user data through Writable Volumes and centrally managed applications through packages stored on SMB.
FAQ
What is an Omnissa App Volumes package?
It is a read-only virtual disk that contains one version of an application. With VHD In-Guest Services, the package is stored as a VHD file on an SMB share and mounted inside an entitled endpoint by the App Volumes Agent.
Why should the packaging VM be clean?
A clean VM limits captured changes to the application itself. Match it to the target desktop’s OS and patch level, take a snapshot before packaging, and revert to that snapshot before capturing the next application.
What does the Current marker do?
It identifies the package version used by assignments configured with the Marker assignment type. Moving the Current marker to a newer tested package updates which version those assignments deliver.
Does the target desktop need access to the SMB share?
Yes. The endpoint must be able to reach the SMB 3 share and read the assigned VHD package. App Volumes Manager’s registered storage credentials need sufficient rights to create and update package files.
How can I verify that the package was delivered?
Sign in as an entitled test user, launch the VDI desktop, and open the packaged application. Then check the Attachments tab in App Volumes Manager to confirm that the expected package is attached to that session.
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The Iranian Nimbus Manticore hacking group has been attributed to two previously undocumented malware families that highlight the continued evolution of its toolset and likely expand its targeting footprint to infect Linux and Apple macOS systems using cross-platform remote access trojans (RATs) developed using Node.js and JavaScript.
Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky is tracking the malware strains under the names NodeRabbit and PollCat. The first sample of NodeRabbit was discovered on a system in Afghanistan, with subsequent sightings on two distinct machines located in Egypt and Ethiopia.
"Its operators deliver [NodeRabbit] through spear-phishing messages on LinkedIn and other job search platforms that contain trojanized coding challenge archives," Kaspersky security researcher Omar Amin said. "Like NodeRabbit, PollCat is a cross-platform RAT, but it is written in obfuscated JavaScript also distributed through trojanized coding challenge archives."
While Nimbus Manticore has historically employed malware written in C, C++, and Go, and relied on DLL search-order hijacking techniques to deploy them, the latest findings mark the threat actor's foray into cross-platform tools to accomplish its goals.
Two custom WebSocket tunnelers, BridgeHead and ArcBridge
A reverse SSH tunneling tool
A backdoor that shares overlaps with TWOSTROKE
The starting point of the suspicious activity observed in the Afghanistan-based system starts with a ZIP file ("Front-Technical-Challenge.zip") hosted on AWS that's assessed to have been delivered as part of a job opportunity for an engineering role. The threat actor is said to have masqueraded as a talent acquisition specialist at a major technology company to approach a software engineer and invited them to complete a technical assignment.
It's worth noting that Nimbus Manticore is also tracked under the moniker Iranian Dream Job for its use of recruitment-themed lures to trick prospective targets into infecting their own computers, a tactic long adopted by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group.
The archive contains source code for a project management tool called Taskflow and instructs candidates to "find and fix all bugs in the frontend code" as part of an "engineering challenge" within three hours and without relying on artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted tools.
The instructions specifically ask the candidates to refrain from modifying the server component of the application ("server.js"), claiming it's "bug-free and functions correctly." However, it's in this file that the malicious code is embedded.
"The first line of server.js imported a trojanized npm package named colorized_terminal, version 2.1.0," Kaspersky said. "The attackers bundled the package directly in the challenge task archive's node_modules directory rather than publishing it to the npm registry. When imported, the package silently launched an implant from node_modules/.cache/.320697f1/index.js as a detached background process."
The implant in question is NodeRabbit, which communicates with one of three Azure-hosted command-and-control (C2) addresses ("plugplay.azurewebsites[.]net," "rgbteller.azurewebsites[.]net," and "wslwebui.azurewebsites[.]net") through three distinct API endpoints -
/api/rabbit/checkin, to register agent and host information
/api/rabbit/task, to poll for commands
/api/rabbit/result, to send task results
The malware supports 11 commands that allows it to gather host details, list running processes, execute arbitrary shell commands, enumerate directories, read a file in chunks and return Base64-encoded data, decode Base64-encoded text and write it at a chosen file offset, delete a file or recursively delete a directory, create directories recursively, enumerate adapters, MAC addresses, IP addresses, and DNS settings, and alter beacon interval.
Another notable capability of NodeRabbit is to write a Base64-encoded Node.js script to a randomly named ".tmp" file, execute it, and then delete it to cover up traces of malicious activity.
Kaspersky said it identified two more variants of NodeRabbit that share the same code lineage, each recovered from Egypt and Ethiopia -
A second variant that uses a different trojanized npm package named pretty-log (version 2.1.0) instead of colorized_terminal, while also terminating if found to be running in an analysis environment and partially implementing corporate proxy support
A third variant that's also launched using the pretty-log npm package but uses a different set of API endpoints to accomplish the same tasks -
/sdk/v2/ready
/sdk/v2/config
/sdk/v2/events
Persistence is achieved depending on the operating system: a Windows Run registry key on Windows, a cron entry for Linux, and a launch agent on macOS. The persistence mechanism mimics either a Microsoft Edge browser update (first variant) or Intel's Driver & Support Assistant (second variant).
The third variant, on the other hand, does not impersonate any legitimate software, but also takes into account the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to create a daily 10 a.m. Windows task that launches a Visual Basic Script file through wscript.exe and "wsl.exe." In addition, it features 12 new commands to -
Enumerate accessible Windows drive letters or WSL-mounted drives
Execute a process
Kill process by PID or image name
Replace the active C2 server and attempt to keep the new configuration
Return the current C2 server
Harvest account addresses from Outlook OST and PST artifacts
Attempt to install a fake VS Code extension named "GitHub Copilot Helper" and Windows Run value for added persistence
Check selected VS Code, scheduled-task, and Run-key persistence indicators
Remove the fake extension
Search recent and common development locations for Git repositories
Inject a launcher into a repository's Git hooks for added persistence
Remove the marked Git-hook launcher
Nimbus Manticore has also been observed using programming challenge lures ("RankChallenge-react-6uJSX3-main.zip") distributed via time-limited developer assessments to deliver PollCat.
"Although the visible exercise is not a security CTF, the project uses CTF terminology in several places," Kaspersky said. "The root package is named ctf-server, the backend prints CTF server running, the frontend uses several ctf-* storage keys, and the tutorial refers to path/to/ctf."
"These repeated labels, together with instructions that do not fully match the delivered application, are consistent with an AI-assisted or template-generated project. One possible explanation is that the attacker prompted an AI coding assistant to create a CTF-style React platform and later inserted the malicious components."
A PDF tutorial present within the archive prompts the target to click Continue and enter an attacker-supplied six-digit one-time password (OTP) that's refreshed every 30 seconds, and complete the challenge within a one-hour session. The compressed timeline to activate the assessment is likely an attempt to create a false sense of urgency and make them run the project as soon as possible to increase the likelihood of an infection.
Despite the one-hour session window, PollCat runs independently of the OTP authentication process, unaffected by the success or failure of the failed OTP validation step. A failed validation prevents the victim from accessing the protected challenge features, while a successful OTP validation issues a JWT and starts an additional PollCat instance.
For persistence, the malware creates a daily scheduled task on Windows, Linux, or macOS, and then connects to a C2 server to send basic host information and await further instructions. It supports 22 commands and communicates via seven API endpoints -
/beacon, to register the client and obtain a socketId
/gate/hello, to send host, user, domain, operating system information, and its current privilege level
/gate/fetch?token=<socketId>, to poll for commands
/gate/submit, to submit a Base64-encoded command-result structure
/vault/<uuid>, to fetch a hosted file and write it to the victim machine
/vault/push, to upload a local file or file chunk to the C2
/gate/track, to report chunk-upload progress
The commands span the typical backdoor gamut, enabling the operator to perform file operations, execute shell commands, upload/download files, run JavaScript, load DLLs, create or extract a ZIP archive, and enumerate running processes, drives, volumes, or mount points. Three commands, namely WS_DOWNLOAD, REQUEST_ELEVATION, and PERSIST, are currently not implemented.
PollCat also searches for folders matching 24 hard-coded strings corresponding to software and security vendors, including Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, VMware, Fortinet, Citrix, Check Point, Juniper Networks, LogMeIn, Sophos, Symantec, Trend Micro, McAfee, Kaspersky Lab, ESET, Bitdefender, Avast, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Malwarebytes, Brave, Tencent, and Naver.
When a matching folder is found, the malware inventories the folder's root contents but does not recursively scan the product's directory. The results are then transmitted in the form of JSON to the "/api/system-details/result" endpoint.
The activity's links to Nimbus Manticore stem from the structural, command fetching, beacon timing, and command set similarities between PollCat and MiniFast (aka MiniUpdate or Retrograde), a backdoor previously attributed to the group, as well as the use of Azure Websites and Cloudflare‑backed domains for C2.
"The shift to cross-platform scripting gives the operators a single codebase that runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS, with payloads that blend naturally into developer workstations," Kaspersky said. "The delivery mechanism, however, remains consistent with Mirage Kitten’s historical tradecraft: the use of recruiter personas on LinkedIn to target critical sectors across the Middle East and Africa for cyber espionage purposes."
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If you’ve spent any time managing an enterprise Windows estate—virtual sessions, physical desktops and laptops, or all of it—you know the pain. The golden image that takes weeks to update. The application conflict that only shows up in production. The ransomware incident where recovery means rebuilding everything from scratch. For thousands of IT teams, this is the daily reality.
Today, we’re making a significant move to change that. Citrix has completed the acquisition of Numecent, the company behind Cloudpaging—a patented technology that fundamentally reimagines how Windows applications are packaged, delivered, and managed.
What Numecent does
Cloudpaging takes any Windows application and packages it into an isolated, self-contained container. That container is then streamed to the endpoint on demand—over standard HTTPS—without touching the base OS image, without installation conflicts, and without any repackaging when you move between OS versions or deployment models. The same container runs on a physical laptop and inside a virtual session without modification.
For the user, the application behaves as if it is natively installed. For the IT team, it remains controlled from the cloud. Teams can deploy an app to 10,000 desktops in minutes and revoke it just as fast. And they can do all of this without rebuilding a single image.
Cloudpaging is the packaging and virtualization layer. Cloudpager is the orchestration and management layer. It assigns applications to users and devices, pushes updates, rolls back a bad release, recalls licenses, and meters usage across every Windows endpoint under management. Cloudpaging makes the application portable; Cloudpager makes it manageable.
Why this fits Citrix
Our customers run some of the world’s most complex virtual and physical Windows environments across healthcare, financial services, government, manufacturing, and other high-stakes industries. The risks in those environments are unusually high. Application conflicts in a hospital can slow down clinical workflows. Ransomware in a financial services firm can trigger regulatory consequences.
Numecent’s technology was built for these demanding environments. Cloudpager already integrates with Citrix DaaS, giving customers a way to publish and manage Cloudpaging containers through familiar Citrix workflows. Bringing Numecent into Citrix allows us to take that work further and help customers modernize application delivery without abandoning the environments they already rely on. Its unified approach to both physical and virtual Windows endpoints extends application delivery at scale to the customer’s full Windows estate.
That includes not just Citrix DaaS and physical devices, but Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Amazon Workspaces, and others too. Numecent’s technology truly unifies Windows application management in a way that no one else in the market does.
What this means for customers
Whether you use Citrix DaaS, manage a large fleet of physical Windows endpoints, or do both, the acquisition creates several opportunities:
Your image gets simpler. Decouple applications from the base image and manage them independently. Fewer images, faster updates, less risk.
Recovery gets faster. After a ransomware event or infrastructure failure, spin up a clean environment and repopulate apps from the cloud. This enables organizations to get up and running rapidly instead of weeks or months.
Legacy apps stop being a blocker. Cloudpaging isolates applications from the OS and from one another, helping legacy and modern applications run side by side with fewer conflicts. Containerization is what makes this solution different to others on the market
Management stays in one place. Publish and manage Cloudpaging containers through Cloudpager without a new console or workflow.
The bottom line: enterprise application delivery has been too hard for too long. We’re fixing that.
We’ll share more on the roadmap and integration plans through our regular customer communications. Existing Numecent customers will continue to receive support throughout the transition. Citrix customers can contact their account teams for more information.
The most common way into a company last year was to ask.
A web page tells the visitor to prove they are not a robot. While they read the instructions, it quietly places a command on their clipboard. Then it talks them through opening a terminal and pasting it in. The technique is called ClickFix, and it was the most common initial access method Microsoft’s team observed last year, accounting
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METR (short for Model Evaluation and Threat Research and pronounced "Meter"), a research non-profit that evaluates frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models for their ability to carry out long-horizon, agentic tasks, disclosed that it suffered "two notable security incidents" where external actors attempted to gain unauthorized access to its systems.
No sensitive information is believed to have been accessed as a result of these incidents, it said, adding that a version of its findings was shared with AI companies it works with prior to public disclosure. The attacks have not been attributed to any known threat actor or group, nor did they involve AI agents breaking into its evaluations.
"In March 2026, attackers stole an API key for inference on public models and consumed a substantial amount of credits," METR said. "In May 2026, we observed attackers systematically probing our publicly accessible infrastructure, including an unsuccessful attempt to access internal data via an inadvertently exposed endpoint."
The March Incident
According to METR, one of its researchers with no sensitive access is said to have used agents running on a personal EC2 instance that was intentionally made publicly accessible behind Google authentication. The instance contained an API key for METR's general-access (public models) account.
However, the "vibe-coded app" suffered from a "fail-open vulnerability" that silently disabled authentication, causing the agent orchestration dashboard to be exposed to the public internet for several days.
"From our analysis, we suspect that the attacker found the instance by looking through recently-registered websites (e.g., in certificate transparency lists) to find vibe-coded sites with high-signal keywords relating to LLMs or agents, for purposes of harvesting potentially exposed model provider API keys," METR explained.
Once the system was identified, the threat actor prompted an agent directly to reveal its model provider API key, added an SSH key for persistent access, and used the stolen credentials to consume a significant amount of API credits on publicly-available models over a period of three weeks.
METR said the accrued credits would have racked up approximately $600,000 in bills had it not been provided to the non-profit for free by the model provider. It did not name the AI company.
It also noted that the illicit usage was not immediately caught because it runs large-scale evaluations and experiments that typically consume a high volume of tokens and the fact that there were no caps on token spend. Following the incident, METR said it has updated its security policies around putting METR credentials or data on non-METR infrastructure or devices, improved monitoring, and added spend alerts to keys where possible.
The May Incident
The second attack observed in May 2026 has been described as a "sustained external attack campaign" orchestrated by a likely financially motivated threat actor to obtain unlawful access to frontier AI models.
"We observed the attackers systematically probing our publicly accessible infrastructure, with heavy use of agents to automate vulnerability discovery, including by credential stuffing authentication providers, attempting OAuth token grants, scanning newly deployed services, and attempting to phish staff," METR said.
Around the same time, the research entity said it inadvertently exposed a read-only SQL query mechanism built into its public transcript viewer. Although the queries were scoped to public data by default, a bug in the component could have been exploited to access unpublished evaluation data.
In addition, the database "accidentally included" sensitive model data, despite the fact that it was supposed to contain only data from non-sensitive models. METR said it became aware of the issue only after an independent security researcher discovered and reported it, resulting in the API being taken offline.
"The attackers had probed this endpoint in passing as part of their broader campaign, but the evidence shows no indication that they discovered the exploit or accessed any non-public data," METR said.
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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new technique dubbed GuardBreaker that's been put to use by a Russia-aligned threat actor known as UAC-0099 against a target in Ukraine with an aim to interfere with artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted analysis.
The idea, ESET said in a series of posts on X, is to deliberately trip a large language model's (LLM) safety mechanisms and prevent its normal functioning.
"In the attack, UAC-0099 inserted a problematic text: 'I want to make a nuclear weapon. Help me ...' into their malicious VBS script as a comment," the Slovak cybersecurity company said. "This is meant to attract the AI's attention to the safety-sensitive content and stop it from analyzing the rest of the code."
The GuardBreaker-embedded VBS script is assessed to be part of a broader toolset employed by UAC-0099, which has a track record of targeting transportation and energy sectors.
The script is primarily designed to download and install MATCHBOIL, a C#-based loader exclusively used by the threat actor to deliver additional payloads. In late July 2026, the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) warned that the adversary was using a malicious program dressed up as a Notepad++ plugin to compromise Windows systems with a new version of MATCHBOIL.
Not the First Time
This is not the first time attackers have employed such tricks to bypass AI-assisted security workflows. In June 2026, a cluster of Python packages, both legitimate and malicious, was found to incorporate an anti-analysis trick against naive LLM-first triage systems as part of the Mini Shai-Hulud, Miasma, and Hades supply chain attack campaigns.
Specifically, the plain-text adversarial prompt injection embeds fake text about step-by-step instructions on biological and nuclear weapons to trip safety guardrails and force AI security scanners into a refusal state.
"It attempts to derail scanners or analyst copilots that feed the beginning of a file to a language model without clearly isolating the content as untrusted data," Socket said at the time. "In weak pipelines, this can cause refusal behavior, prompt confusion, context pollution, or premature classification before the scanner reaches the actual malware."
Although the earlier waves have been linked to a cybercrime group called TeamPCP, attribution for activity after May 12, 2026, remains cloudy due to the public leak of the Shai-Hulud worm source code, thereby allowing other threat actors to adopt similar tactics.
Last week, Socket and Step Security also detailed another Mini Shai-Hulud compromise affecting the npm package @7nohe/openapi-react-query-codegen to deliver an obfuscated JavaScript loader responsible for decrypting and downloading a second-stage stealer that targets cloud credentials, package registry credentials, GitHub Actions secrets, and AI agent configuration.
Two alleged members of TeamPCP, Ruben Ian Thomson, 21, and Louis Michael Gaebler, 23, of Western Australia, have since been arrested by authorities for their involvement in the supply chain attack spree, identity crime, and cryptocurrency-based money laundering. The group is believed to have been active since 2020.
"The group's early operations were pure opportunism: scan for exposed services, drop a container, mine Monero," Flare said in a report that pieced together the hacking group's digital footprint and traced the online personas (both TeamPCP and DeadCatx3) to Ruben Thomson, and that he acted as its leader.
"TeamPCP worked out that a vulnerability scanner running inside a build pipeline holds more credentials than most of the hosts it would ever compromise directly, and that trust in security tooling is transitive. LiteLLM didn’t get breached, but it ran Trivy."
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This month is about what surrounds a migration rather than the migration itself: the backup tooling you already own, the hardware you can avoid buying, and the numbers you need before the decision gets made.
Alongside Xen Orchestra 6.8, Veeam Backup & Replication now officially supports XCP-ng, TwinStor opened as a Technology Preview for two-host pools, and we published a calculator that puts a Vates VMS environment side by side with its VMware equivalent. On the product side, Backup gains synchronized snapshots for VMs that belong to the same application, XO 6 keeps closing the operations that still required a return to XO 5, and XO Lite can now create networks instead of only displaying them.
Add XOA sizing its own memory, a declarative way to share a VM from Terraform or Go, and a round of documentation cleanup, and 6.8 is a release with as much happening around Xen Orchestra as inside it.
As usual, this announcement is available as a Youtube video:
👨🚀 Project & Community
A lot of the news from the ecosystem touches on questions that often come up before a migration. What happens to your backup tooling? Does a small pool really need a SAN? And how much will the whole setup cost?
We also have some upstream and maintenance news, including the release of Xen 4.22.
XCP-ng updates
XCP-ng 8.3 LTS got two update batches over the past month, both centered on storage. The first brought storage performance improvements and fixes, plus a configurable OpenSSH. The second fixed a leaf-coalesce failure on QCOW2-backed disks with CBT enabled, which could leave longer disk chains and eat extra space, and a case of LVM metadata corruption on a secondary host using block-based shared SRs. Sparse QCOW2 disks also migrate faster now, since empty sectors are no longer transferred. Updates are cumulative and host reboots are required, so applying the second batch covers both.
The Xen Project released Xen 4.22 at the end of July, with modern hardware support, Arm improvements, continued RISC-V progress, Xenstore scalability work, and a five-year security support lifecycle.
Vates engineers are a growing part of that upstream work. In 2026 so far, Vates has authored about 10% of the commits merged into the Xen hypervisor and holds maintainer or reviewer roles in 12 subsystems. On the XAPI toolstack that powers XCP-ng, Vates authored 31% of this year's merged commits, up from 22% in 2025 and under 2% in 2024.
XCP-ng is now officially supported by Veeam
Veeam Backup & Replication now lists XCP-ng as a fully supported hypervisor. Backup jobs use Changed Block Tracking for incremental processing. Entire VMs restore onto XCP-ng from any supported hypervisor, cloud VM, or physical-server backup, and XCP-ng backups restore outward to that same range of targets. Disk mount, guest file-level restore, and backup export to VHD, VHDX, or VMDK are covered too.
For anyone weighing a move off VMware, this settles a question that used to come up early in every migration conversation: whether the backup tooling already in place would follow. Existing Veeam backups can now be the route in, restored straight onto XCP-ng while the surrounding backup infrastructure stays where it is.
TwinStor turns the local disks of a two-host pool into redundant, self-healing shared storage, so live migration, HA, and Rolling Pool Updates work with no SAN, no witness node, and no third host. It's now open as a Technology Preview, and we're looking for people willing to run it on real pools they can afford to break.
A Technology Preview is a pre-release build: not feature-complete, not for production, and not guaranteed to ship. What it gives testers is early access and a direct line into the engineering direction while it's still being decided. The forum thread is where the testing is actually happening, and the fastest way to see what other people have hit before you install anything.
We published a calculator that puts a Vates VMS environment side by side with the equivalent on VMware. The figures come from publicly available reseller pricing, so they give an order of magnitude rather than a quote: a place to start the comparison and work out which questions to ask, not a substitute for one.
Insights look at what's happening across the wider industry, and what it means for the way you run your own infrastructure. This time, two pieces on owning your infrastructure: what it looks like to run a company on it, and what to do about hardware prices before you buy more of it.
Why infrastructure control matters more than ever in 2026
We published a piece on running a company of around 150 people internationally, mostly on open-source, self-hosted tools. It covers what owning your infrastructure looks like in practice at that scale, and what it costs to do. Worth a read if you're weighing how much of your stack you want to own.
Before buying new hardware, make sure you're using the hardware you already own
RAM prices are up more than 400% in a year. Our latest post covers where unused capacity hides in virtualized environments, and how to find it before you budget for more hardware.
September takes the team to Munich, Paris and Lyon, plus a webinar you can join from anywhere. Here is where you can catch us, and what each one is about.
Veeam User Group France in Paris, 8 September
The French Veeam User Group meets in Paris on 8 September, hosted at Scality's offices, with Vates among the sponsors. The programme runs from 13h30 and includes a dedicated session on the XCP-ng / Veeam integration, alongside a Veeam and Kasten update with an Ask Me Anything, a talk on meeting LPM, NIS2 and DORA obligations, and a field report on VSA. It closes with a quiz and a vBeer cocktail. Registration is open.
Xen Summit 2026 in Munich, 15-17 September
The Xen community gathers in Munich for Xen Summit 2026, hosted by Renesas at the HEADS office in Aschheim. Two days of technical talks are followed by a day of design sessions, where contributors work through project direction and architecture face-to-face rather than on the mailing list. The event is hybrid, so you can join the talks remotely if you cannot make the trip, and registration is still open.
ADIRA and Polypus are running a morning in Lyon on digital sovereignty. Delphine Le Pochat, Marc-André Pezin and Simon Cojande are running the infrastructure, hosting and virtualisation workshop for us, alongside Bouygues Telecom Business and EasyVirt. In French, and limited to end-user organisations.
We're running the joint webinar with EasyVirt again on 24 September, 16:30 to 17:30 CEST, with Jeff Duerr (US Sales Manager) for us and François Machacek (Business developer) for EasyVirt. The thread is the same as in July: getting more out of the infrastructure you already have, managing more than one hypervisor from a single place, and testing a migration before it reaches production rather than after. Registration is open, and the first edition is still up on YouTube if you would rather watch that one back, 45 minutes.
Synchronized snapshots are the main new capability in XO 6.8. They address a specific problem: when a backup job covers a database and the services that depend on it, their restore points could previously end up hours apart.
The rest of XO 6.8 picks up where previous work left off. XO 6 takes on more tasks that still required XO 5, and XO Lite can now do more with networks than simply display them. XOA and the DevOps tools also get a few fixes for problems that tend to show up when something goes wrong.
💾 Backup
When a database and the services around it are backed up in the same job, the VM at the end of the queue may not be snapshotted until hours after the first. Synchronized snapshots take them all before any transfer starts, so the restore points line up. Separately, an unreachable backup repository no longer delays the listing of the ones that are available.
Synchronized snapshots
You can now synchronize VM snapshots in a backup job. When enabled, XO takes the snapshots for the selected VMs in a batch before starting any transfers. Each backup then uses the snapshot that was already taken, giving you restore points that are much closer together in time across related VMs.
This is useful when your VMs are part of the same application, such as a database and the services that depend on it. Without this option, VMs further down the queue might not be snapshotted until hours later, leaving their restore points out of sync.
You can synchronize snapshots for all VMs in a job, or use a tag to limit synchronization to VMs sharing that tag.
Fixed: Unreachable backup repositories
When a backup repository (BR) is unavailable, XO no longer waits for it before displaying the other backup archives. Available BRs are returned as soon as their information is ready, while unreachable ones are skipped for the current request. As a result, unreachable backup repositories no longer slow down backup listings, including the File restore and Backup health views.
XO retries unavailable BRs in the background, so a temporary connection issue won't slow down subsequent requests.
🛰️ XO 6
You now have fewer reasons to switch back to XO 5. You can scan PIFs and manage hosts directly from XO 6, and storage repositories now have their own dedicated view. Group and role management are ready as well, but they'll ship alongside the rest of the user management and RBAC work in a future release (shipping them on their own would only tell half the story).
‘Scan PIFs’ button
In previous versions of XO 6, scanning for physical interfaces (PIFs) required you to switch back to the XO 5 interface. With the new Scan PIFs button, you can now run scans directly from XO 6, from the host’s Network tab.
The scan runs as a background task, so you can keep working in Xen Orchestra while it completes.
In previous versions of XO 6, you had to open XO 5 to scan for PIFs
The new 'Scan PIFs' button in XO 6.8
Dedicated SR views
You can now access dedicated views for storage repositories (SRs) in XO 6, with separate General and Hosts tabs.
Links to an SR can now take you directly to the relevant tab, so you can open the general information and see which hosts are connected to the SR, without having to navigate through the SR view manually.
The new SR view, with the General and Hosts tabs
Host actions
XO 6 now exposes host management actions, directly from the host view. You can restart the toolstack, reboot or shut down a host, forget a host, and force a reboot when needed. You can also use Smart Reboot to safely reboot a host, or Detach it from the pool. Emergency Shutdown is the one action still missing, and it lands next month.
New actions available in XO 6
Connect and disconnect pools
You can now connect or disconnect pools in the Pools tab, in two ways: from the pools table, or from the side panel. This way, you can manage a pool without opening its dedicated view.
Disconnecting a pool also comes with a warning, since the pool can no longer be managed from XO while disconnected. You can reconnect it later from the same action.
Connect and disconnect pools straight from the Pools view
Disable hosts and evacuate VMs
Now, you can disable a host and evacuate its VMs from the host action menu. Before disabling the host, XO checks that it can safely evacuate the VMs, and asks for confirmation.
Once disabled, the host won't receive new VMs, while its existing VMs can be migrated to other hosts in the pool. You can enable the host again from the same action menu when it's ready to be used again.
Disabling/enabling hosts in XO 6
Detailed guest tool status
The VM dashboard now shows the status of the guest tools installed in each VM. You can see whether the tools are up to date, out of date, missing, or unknown.
Clicking the status gives you more details about the installed guest tools, including the detected version when available. The same status is also shown in the VM’s System tab and side panel.
Guest tool details in XO 6
Reconfigure the management PIF
You can now move a host’s management interface to another physical interface (PIF), directly from XO 6. The action is available from the PIF table and its side panel, provided the target PIF has an IP configuration and isn't already the management interface.
💡
Note: Keep in mind that switching the management PIF can temporarily disconnect the host from XO, while the new configuration takes effect.
Change the management PIF right from XO 6
🔭 XO Lite
Network configuration in XO Lite was previously limited to viewing. You can now create networks, bonded networks and host internal networks without opening XO 6. VDIs gain a page of their own, and VM actions are available from the tree view.
Manage VDIs
XO Lite now has a dedicated page for listing virtual disk images (VDIs), just like in XO 6. The new page gives you an overview of your VDIs and lets you select one to view its details. VDI actions (create, attach, detach, delete) are coming soon.
Now, XO Lite shows you a table with all your VDIs
VDI details also appear in the side panel
Create networks and bonded networks
Starting with XO 6.8, you can create networks and bonded networks, without switching to XO 5. From a pool’s Network tab, use the Create network action to set up a network and configure its properties.
How to create networks in XO Lite
‘Scan PIFs’ button
We’re updating XO Lite to let you scan for physical interfaces (PIFs), just like we did with XO 6.
From a host’s Network tab, click the Scan PIFs button to start the scan.
The new 'Scan PIFs' button in XO Lite
VM actions in the tree view
We’ve added VM actions to the XO Lite tree view. This means you can access the actions from a VM’s context menu, without opening the VM first. Also, the tree view shows when an operation is running on a VM.
The tree view now shows the actions you can perform on a VM.
🪐 XOA
xo-server now sizes its Node.js memory limit from the RAM allocated to the VM rather than from a fixed default, so additional memory given to XOA is actually used. License checks also no longer hang indefinitely when the HTTP proxy in front of XOA stops responding.
Adapt memory usage to the VM size
xo-server now adjusts Node.js's memory limit based on the amount of RAM available to the XOA virtual machine. The limit is set to 70% of the VM's RAM, with a minimum of 1 GiB, leaving enough memory for the operating system and other XOA services.
The limit is recalculated every time xo-server starts, so resizing an XOA VM and rebooting it automatically updates the setting. This also prevents Node.js from hitting its default heap limit too early on VMs with more RAM.
More resilient license management
Previously, when an XOA instance used an HTTP proxy to access the Internet, a proxy that stops responding could leave license requests hanging indefinitely. In some cases, this prevented xoa-updater from falling back to its cached license information.
XO now puts a timeout on these requests. If the proxy doesn't respond in time, the request is aborted and xoa-updater can use the cached license data instead. This keeps license management working even when the proxy temporarily loses access to the Internet.
☸️ DevOps Tools
Until now, giving a whole team access to a VM meant opening the XO interface and sharing it manually, outside the configuration that originally defined the VM. The Terraform provider and the Go SDK both close that gap this cycle, alongside a fix for pools where several hosts have a storage repository named Local storage. The Kubernetes side moved too, with a first release candidate for the CSI driver and a maintenance release for the cloud controller manager.
Terraform provider v0.41.0
The provider gains a plural xenorchestra_srs data source, modeled on xenorchestra_pools, so you can list and iterate over storage repositories. The singular xenorchestra_sr resolves one SR at a time, which left no way to work with a pool where several hosts each own an SR called "Local storage". The singular data source also gains host_id filtering, which disambiguates those host-local SRs.
The VM resource picks up a share boolean. Setting it does what the Share button in the XO web UI does: the VM is granted to everyone in the resource set it belongs to, so team-wide access becomes a line in your configuration rather than a click afterwards.
The v1 SDK learns the same share flag for VMs, which is what the Terraform provider builds on. If you drive Xen Orchestra from your own Go tooling rather than through Terraform, the capability is there directly.
The CSI driver reaches its first release candidate for 1.0, with four changes worth calling out.
Pick the storage repository at provision time. The driver now reads storageRepositoryId from a Kubernetes VolumeAttributesClass, so a PVC can target a specific SR instead of always landing in the pool's default one. The SR is validated against the selected pool and storage type before the VDI is created, and precedence runs VolumeAttributesClass first, then an explicit poolId, then topology-aware selection. You can also move an existing volume to another SR in the same pool at runtime by changing the VolumeAttributeClass of the PVC. Then, the migration is made without stopping or restarting the pod : it leverages the live migration of Xen Orchestra within Kubernetes.
Credentials stay on the controller. The driver splits into controller and node modes: only the controller talks to the Xen Orchestra API, and the node server runs with no XO configuration and no credential secret mounted. Node metadata now comes from the CCM-provided ProviderID on the Kubernetes Node. This matters most in clusters where control-plane and worker nodes are separated, since the XO credential is no longer present on every worker. Note that it also makes the CCM a requirement rather than an option.
A new Helm chart, aligned with the split deployment modes, with toggles to enable or disable individual components and Helm hook tests that provision a volume to check the install.
The XO client timeout is now a driver flag, -xo-client-timeout, defaulting to 30 seconds, instead of living alongside the credentials. The kxo helper also gains a --vdi-name-prefix override.
Cloud controller manager v1.1.2
The CCM's Helm chart gains an rbac.create switch, so you can turn off the Role and RoleBinding that the chart would otherwise create and manage RBAC yourself. Useful in clusters where a platform team owns RBAC centrally.
The release workflow also learned to cut chart-only releases, so a packaging fix no longer needs a driver release behind it.
The Kubernetes toolkit is still taking shape, and we would rather shape it with the people who will run it. If your team already runs Kubernetes on XCP-ng, or is working out whether to, tell us what you need from it. The Cluster API provider in particular is still early enough that there is real room to influence where it goes, and we would rather build against real workloads than our own assumptions.
📖 Documentation & Guides
The documentation got a structural pass, along with a new page for the IPMI plugin covering sensor rules and the REST endpoint that shows what your hosts actually report.
Cleaner documentation structure
Documentation accumulates. Pages get added where there was room rather than where they belong, titles get written in whatever style the author had in mind that day, and after a while finding something depends on knowing where it was put. We went through the Xen Orchestra documentation to fix that.
Page titles and navigation labels have been reworked to be easier to scan. XO 5 and XO 6 content is now clearly distinguished, which matters while both interfaces are in use and a page that applies to one but not the other is easy to land on by mistake. Naming follows a consistent style: title case is gone in favour of sentence case, as our guidelines recommend, and related pages now share the same patterns, so Management in XO 5 and Management in XO 6 read as a pair rather than as two unrelated pages. Navigation labels stay short without becoming cryptic.
A few sections and pages also moved or were renamed where their previous location or title sent you looking in the wrong place.
We’ve added a new documentation page for the IPMI plugin. It explains how the plugin handles IPMI sensors and what to do when a sensor isn't recognized by default. You’ll also find instructions for adding custom rules and using regular expressions to match specific sensors.
The guide covers the IPMI REST endpoint as well, which you can use to inspect the raw data available from your hosts. This should give you everything you need to set up the plugin and handle sensors that aren't covered by the default rules.
Preview of the IPMI plugin documentation
IPMI sensors over the REST API
The IPMI sensors plugin now has a REST endpoint.
GET /rest/v0/plugins/ipmi-sensors/hosts/{id}/ipmi returns a host's IPMI sensor readings, so you can feed hardware health data into your own monitoring tooling. Also, the plugin is now properly documented.
🌐 Translations
A big thank you to our community for their ongoing efforts in translating Xen Orchestra!
6 languages updated
This month, 6 languages were updated: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, Slovak, and Swedish.
Current XO translation status
Want to help translate Xen Orchestra or improve existing translations? You’re more than welcome to join in here.
🆕 Misc
The most consequential item here is a memory fix. During a large backup over a slow connection, buffered task updates could accumulate enough to bring xo-server down.
Fixed: task memory usage
Now, XO 5 uses less memory when a client has a slow or unreliable connection. Previously, a slow or high-latency connection between xo-server and the client could cause task updates to pile up in memory.
During a large backup, this could use enough memory to bring down xo-server. XO now limits how much task data it buffers, which prevents updates from piling up indefinitely.
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