🔴 ShieldBreak Defender zero-day bypasses RoguePlanet fix, 🎯 vCenter exploit reaches 361 hosts via reverse_ssh, ⚠️ SharePoint RCE chain joins summer exploit wave, 💣 Clop and MajinaHanashi post ten victims in a day, 📡 WindRelay NFC relay joins SpyNote card fraud, 🛡️ Joint Gunra advisory adds Linux encryptor

The day's defining story is ShieldBreak, a public Windows zero-day exploit for Microsoft Defender released on August 12 by the researcher known as Nightmare Eclipse, hours after Patch Tuesday. The researcher presents it as a full bypass of the July 9 RoguePlanet fix (CVE-2026-50656); Tharros Labs contests that framing and describes instead an abuse of Defender's cloud-hydration scan path that still produces a reliable standard-user to SYSTEM chain on fully patched Windows 11 25H2 and Windows Server 2025, with Windows 10 support claimed. It is the tenth exploit in the researcher's 2026 series against Microsoft and the first to defeat a patch built against an earlier release, so treat the PoC as the seed of next week's tooling and hunt the cfapi hydration and QueueReporting scheduled-task indicators now. The August Patch Tuesday release now tallies 421 CVEs across outlet counts with three zero-days: the exploited AFD.sys privilege escalation flaw Lazarus uses for SYSTEM plus two publicly disclosed issues, with follow-up reporting putting the Lazarus exploitation window since early July and showing the campaign hitting defense firms in Europe and India.

SharePoint remains the most churned Microsoft product this summer: CVE-2026-63520, the unauthenticated RCE chain fixed in the August release, pairs with CVE-2026-55040, Rapid7's CVSS 9.1 JWT validation bypass confirmed exploited in the wild within a day of its public PoC, making it the fifth SharePoint flaw exploited this year. Microsoft's advisory still does not list exploitation for 55040 and CISA has not yet added it to KEV, while SharePoint 2016 and 2019 passed end of extended support on July 14 with no update path, leaving unsupported installs exposed. Metabase is the other actively exploited web application: CVE-2026-72898, a CVSS 10.0 pre-auth SQL injection in the reset_password endpoint, exploited since around August 3 and now in CISA's KEV, lets attackers seize administrator accounts and steal credentials for every connected database.

The vCenter campaign exploiting CVE-2026-59310, a CVSS 9.8 directory traversal patched July 29 in VMSA-2026-0006, has reached 361 victim IP addresses across 47 countries, with an assessed APT operator planting reverse_ssh backdoors since August 3 and a generic YARA rule published for the tool. City-Forum is the first observed in-the-wild abuse of Salesforce's guest UI-API surface and a lightly documented ServiceNow search endpoint, with one tenant logging 560,000 guest enumeration events and the fix purely configuration: disable self-registration and audit what guest profiles expose. Adobe's Commerce CVE-2026-71362, a CVSS 9.1 incorrect authorization flaw, was blocked by Sansec's WAF from the day of disclosure even though Adobe reported no in-the-wild exploits, so the patch-to-exploit window is effectively closed, and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security's AV26-808 makes the ColdFusion branch the priority of the August Adobe round since APSB26-90 is rated Priority 1 for 17 flaws enabling arbitrary code execution.

The appliance queue kept growing. Cisco's firewall zero-day is now tracked as CVE-2026-20349, a CVSS 8.6 unauthenticated DoS in ASA and FTD remote-access VPN services, with CCCS advisory AV26-807 mirroring the KEV addition and the August 14 federal patch deadline. SonicWall patched unauthenticated command injection and RCE in the discontinued GMS management platform (CVE-2026-66147 at CVSS 9.4), a reminder that retired platforms become standing targets, and GlobalProtect flaws let a local attacker reach SYSTEM on Windows and root on Linux and macOS across app versions 6.0, 6.2, and 6.3. Ivanti EPM fixed CVE-2026-18129, a cleartext leak of external SQL credentials to a man-in-the-middle, in 2024 SU7, and the ICS Patch Tuesday roundup is headlined by a maximum-severity missing-authentication RCE in Simatic IoT2050 Advanced devices. Chrome 151 fixes five high-severity use-after-free bugs across V8, TabStrip, Extensions, HTML, and Blink, WordPress 7.0.4 closes CVE-2026-65640, an authenticated RCE reachable by Author-level accounts on Imagick plus Ghostscript upload configurations, and the chipmaker patch round fixes more than 80 Intel and AMD flaws with Xeon, TDX, and CSME privilege escalation the datacenter priorities. Zoomsday follow-up expands the zero-click annotation-engine RCE to three CVEs, CVE-2026-53413 through 53415, with affected versions spanning Workplace before 7.1.5 plus VDI Client, Rooms, and Meeting SDK, the spots a client-update sweep easily misses.

At DEF CON, researchers presented Plug and Pwn, a family of chains that turns automatic Windows Plug and Play driver installation into SYSTEM-level code execution: emulating a targeted vendor and product ID gets signed driver packages installed at the highest privilege with no administrator rights and, in some chains, no physical USB hardware, so the trust Windows places in its signed driver delivery ecosystem is the abuse surface.

Ransomware activity stayed dense. Gunra is the subject of a new joint CISA and South Korean advisory after chaining FortiOS authentication bypasses CVE-2024-55591 and CVE-2025-24472 into persistent superuser accounts on Fortinet VPNs, and fresh reporting adds a Linux encryptor that launches up to 100 ChaCha20 threads plus an incident where primary and disaster-recovery backups were deleted before encryption. Akira keeps converting MFA-less VPN exposure into full intrusions, with one affiliate rebooting Windows into Safe Mode with Networking to disable EDR and Defender. Leak-site volume was high: Clop posted five victims including Fiserv, Philips, GE, and ALDO, MajinaHanashi listed five more including an Italian healthcare provider holding 135,000 files, and FulcrumSec dumped the remainder of Novo Nordisk's AI/ML stack, 30 models, 70 datasets, and half a terabyte of microscopy imagery, after two unpaid demands. DeadLock moved its infrastructure onto Polygon smart contracts and the Session network so victims resolve chat and C2 addresses without operator action, which makes takedown far harder, and the Ethics and Krybit groups claimed unverified hits on Philadelphia Insurance and Labindia Instruments. A Weaxor deep dive shows exposed SQL Server instances serving as the ransomware launcher, with operators clearing OS and application logs to obscure the vector, and ransomware reached building automation at a Winnipeg hospital, disabling doors and HVAC even as clinical systems went untouched.

On mobile and browser fronts, WindRelay is a new Android family paired with SpyNote for live NFC card-relay fraud: a bank-impersonation call gets the victim to sideload a personalized SpyNote APK and grant accessibility, then the attacker relays the victim's contactless payment data mid-call, card-present fraud without a physical card in a segment where NFC attacks rose 188 percent year over year. A network of 737 fake VPN and proxy extensions impersonating Proton, NordVPN, Surfshark, and Cloudflare put roughly 75,000 users into an adversary-in-the-middle position, routing all browsing through the operator's SOCKS5 proxies, and a counterfeit CCleaner installer drops GhostDesk, a Chrome extension that steals credentials, cookies, and keystrokes. Abyssos is a C++ post-exploitation RAT whose hidden VNC opens invisible desktops for interactive hijacking of authenticated browser sessions, and a SmartApeSG ClickFix campaign uses fake verification prompts to drop two remote access trojans, keeping ClickFix a top initial-access technique.

On the espionage side, Dream Research Labs documented the first near-autonomous AI-driven intrusion against a government target, suspected Chinese hackers using open-source models in self-adapting learning cycles against Taiwanese government systems and extracting more than 2,500 personnel records, an operational economics shift that raises what small teams can attempt. CERT-UA ties the trojanized WireGuard job-interview campaign to UAC-0145, a cluster containing the Sandworm subcluster, with a fake corporate VPN test variant that creates a scheduled task and downloads malware on Windows. Armored Likho is expanding its implant arsenal in a Russia-targeting campaign that starts with a fake donation app, CAV3RN added a Google Apps Script C2 relay fronted by DNS queries so blocking one channel just shifts traffic, and the Kimwolf botnet rebuild dropped its own scanner and exploit components to leave infection to external loaders while its HTTP/2 floods spoof Chrome fingerprints. Phantom Stealer keeps spreading through phishing, cracked software, and Discord, with PNG-steganography loaders and PowerShell-injected shellcode hiding the payload.

The LiteLLM supply-chain compromise attributed to Team PCP has a reconstructed blast radius of more than 2,500 organizations and roughly 434,000 CI/CD pipelines, so treat dependency chains as compromised and rotate cloud credentials even without a confirmed impacted build. NIST opened an RFI on overhauling the NVD for the AI age, and Cloudflare's H1 2026 DDoS report logged 935 attacks above 1 Tbps with a record 31.4 Tbps peak, evidence that terabit-scale floods now reach mid-size targets through reflection and amplification.

Watchlist: hunt ShieldBreak cloud-hydration and QueueReporting indicators on Windows endpoints, patch AFD.sys, SharePoint, and Metabase chains first, treat unauthenticated vCenter, ColdFusion, and Commerce exposure as actively targeted, require MFA on every VPN and remote-access surface, keep offline and immutable backups given Gunra and DeadLock behavior, and audit guest-visible data on Experience Cloud and ServiceNow portals plus the browser extension inventory.