This week’s intelligence highlights an aggressive pivot by threat actors targeting core authentication mechanics, underlying network topologies, and developer ecosystems. Adversaries are discovering pathways to bypass passkeys, deploying self-propagating worms into npm registries, and exploiting zero-days across critical BI tools and enterprise edge gateways to achieve unauthenticated network dominance.

SISA Weekly Threat Watch – our weekly feature brings to you a quick snapshot of all the major security vulnerabilities that posed a threat to organizations worldwide. These recurring actionable threat advisories will also provide information and recommendations that will help security teams take appropriate actions to defend against the latest and critical threats.

1. Identity Evasion, Phishing & Passwordless Attacks

Threat actors are actively undermining modern authentication boundaries, finding ways to bypass passkeys and weaponizing benign CSS to steal credentials in real-time.

• "Pass-ta-key" Attack Vectors — A newly disclosed class of post-compromise attacks targets Google Password Manager and synced passkeys on Windows. Unprivileged local malware can misuse local key storage and re-enrollment mechanics to execute "Silver" or "Golden" Pass-ta-key attacks, spoofing user verification or extracting the master Security Domain Secret (SDS) to hijack synced passkeys without triggering biometrics or device unlock.
• CSS Bomb Attacks — Malicious actors are weaponizing standard CSS formatting (which bypasses DOMPurify and webmail sanitizers) to create password-stealing keyloggers. By exploiting CSS attribute selectors and pseudo-classes (:has(), :checked), attackers can hijack HTML inputs and exfiltrate typed keystrokes via out-of-band background image requests in real-time, completely bypassing JavaScript restrictions across major webmail platforms.
• Advanced macOS ClickFix Campaign — A widespread macOS social-engineering campaign distributing stealers (AMOS, MacSync) has evolved to use a highly sophisticated, 2.5 KB server-side fingerprinting gate. Utilizing WebGL GPU rendering data, context checks, and anti-analysis instrumentation, the gate strictly filters out sandboxes and crawlers, serving the malicious ClickFix Terminal payloads exclusively to genuine macOS desktop browsers.

2. Supply Chain Attacks & Ecosystem Hijacking

Adversaries are leveraging AI-generated packages and misconfigured CI/CD triggers to deploy fast-moving, destructive worms deep into developer pipelines.

• Self-Propagating npm Supply Chain Worm — A highly automated attack compromised the keyv and cacheable npm namespaces. By abusing preinstall hooks and IDE execution triggers (.vscode/tasks.json, .claude/settings.json), the worm uses a polymorphic baseE91 encoded payload to harvest cloud instance metadata and publish trojanized packages across the victim’s namespaces at a rate of one per second. It deploys a dead-man's switch watcher that executes arbitrary commands if tokens are revoked.
• "Flooding Dropper" AI Slopsquatting Campaign — Tracking over 850 packages, this campaign leverages automated npm account creation and AI-generated typosquatted names (bigops, bnpl) to distribute WEL1DROPPER. Bypassing standard lifecycle hooks, it executes upon require(), pulling cross-platform stage-two payloads via HTTPS or covert DNS TXT records to deploy the Sliver C2 framework and infostealers.

3. Edge, Network & Infrastructure Vulnerabilities

Foundational networking protocols, management controllers, and edge VPNs are being systematically targeted for stealthy, root-level infrastructure takeover.

• NatJack Attack Class — A novel class of NAT vulnerabilities enables a downstream attacker (sharing a NAT boundary) to manipulate connection tables without layer-2 access. The exploit (affecting Linux Netfilter and Windows WinNAT) enables TCP session hijacking, UDP DNS response spoofing, and NAT table exhaustion, bypassing traditional isolation in multi-tenant environments and container networks.
• SonicWall SMA 1000 Zero-Days (INC Ransomware) — Actively weaponized by INC Ransomware and UTA0533, this exploit chain uses an unauthenticated SSRF (CVE-2026-15409) against the /wsproxy endpoint and a privilege escalation path traversal flaw (CVE-2026-15410) in the ctrl-service. Attackers achieve remote root access to harvest TOTP seeds and deploy web shells for network-wide ransomware execution.
• TP-Link Omada ZTP Ecosystem Flaws — A chain of newly disclosed flaws in TP-Link’s Omada Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) ecosystem allows attackers to intercept sensitive credentials, execute MitM traffic decryption via broken trust chains, and hijack cloud management accounts. Unauthenticated external adversaries can achieve root-level RCE across managed gateways, switches, and access points.
• Cisco IMC Argument Injection RCE (CVE-2026-20200) — A critical CVSS 8.8/9.9 flaw in the web management interface of the Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC) allows a low-privileged authenticated attacker to perform argument injection via curl. With public exploit code (CIMCown) available, attackers can execute arbitrary OS commands as root, taking over the hardware trust anchor entirely.

4. Kernel Privilege Escalation & Virtualization Flaws

Deep OS-level logic bugs and legacy protocol flaws are granting unprivileged local accounts and guest VMs reliable root execution and hypervisor escapes.

• OVSwrap Linux Kernel LPE (CVE-2026-64531) — A high-severity integer wraparound flaw in the Linux kernel's Open vSwitch (openvswitch) module. An unprivileged local user can load the module via user namespaces and trigger the flaw using an oversized nested connection tracking action stream. The exploit reliably corrupts kernel credentials to grant a root shell, affecting major enterprise distributions.
• Zapscape & SCTPhantom Critical Linux Flaws — Zapscape (CVE-2026-64561) is a KVM shadow MMU Use-After-Free flaw allowing a root user inside a guest VM to escape and execute arbitrary code on the host kernel under nested virtualization. Concurrently, SCTPhantom (CVE-2026-64564) is an 18-year-old UAF in the SCTP protocol enabling local privilege escalation and container-to-host escapes across default configurations.

5. Enterprise Application & Database Exploitation

Attackers are manipulating trusted enterprise analytics platforms and embedded database engines to execute arbitrary system commands.

• Metabase SQLi Zero-Day (GHSA-vwf4-m7j8-wcjf) — A critical, actively exploited CVSS 10.0 unauthenticated SQL injection vulnerability resides in the Metabase /api/session/reset_password endpoint. Attackers use HoneySQL injection to achieve full administrative takeover, extracting connected database credentials, manipulating configurations, and exfiltrating sensitive financial and customer data warehouses.
• Oracle Embedded JVM Abuse (khunt Toolkit) — Threat actors are abusing application-level SQL injection flaws in public-facing Java/Tomcat web applications to exploit the embedded Java Virtual Machine (JVM) inside Oracle databases on Windows. Attackers execute CREATE JAVA SOURCE statements to compile the khunt post-exploitation toolkit directly within the database schema, evading EDR to achieve NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM access and dump critical Windows registry hives (SAM, SECURITY, SYSTEM).

Proactive Steps for the Week

• Harden Passwordless & Identity Workflows: Relying parties must configure WebAuthn to explicitly set userVerification = "required" and strictly validate the User Verified (UV) bit on server-side response assertions to mitigate the "Pass-ta-key" exploit vectors.
• Secure the CI/CD and Developer IDE Perimeter: Explicitly disable IDE automatic workspace task execution globally (task.allowAutomaticTasks: off in VS Code settings) to neutralize the autostart hooks utilized by the keyv/cacheable supply chain worm. Pin dependency versions via exact hashes and mandate npm --ignore-scripts during automated builds.
• Remediate Edge Zero-Days Immediately: Apply SonicWall SMA hotfixes (12.4.3-03453+ or 12.5.0-02835+) to halt active INC Ransomware exploitation. Update Cisco IMC firmware (e.g., 4.3(6.260033)) to remediate the CVE-2026-20200 argument injection flaw, ensuring out-of-band management interfaces are isolated from public segments.
• Patch Metabase and Rotate Analytics Secrets: Self-hosted Metabase environments must upgrade immediately to patched branches (e.g., 0.63.5). If exploitation is suspected, block /api/session/reset_password, revoke all active sessions, and immediately rotate credentials for all transactional databases connected to the instance.
• Apply Kernel Updates and Disable Namespace Loading: Upgrade hypervisors and Linux hosts to remediate OVSwrap, Zapscape, and SCTPhantom. Disable unprivileged user namespace cloning (sysctl -w kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=0) and blacklist unused modules like sctp and openvswitch (install openvswitch /bin/false) to break the LPE exploit chains.
• Defend Against NAT Hijacking & CSS Bombs: Deploy end-to-end transport layer encryption (TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS) to render NatJack TCP hijacking and DNS spoofing ineffective across shared infrastructures. Configure email security gateways and webmail preview panes to strip complex interactive CSS pseudo-classes (:has(), :checked) used in CSS Bomb exfiltration.

Explore our DFIR Solutions to discover how our advanced incident response support, compromise assessments, and threat hunting frameworks can insulate your enterprise infrastructure against these campaigns.