cybr.cx | Monday, August 17, 2026

Critical Vulnerabilities

⚠️ Actively exploited — CVE-2026-72898 | Metabase | CVSS 9.x (KEV)
Metabase has a critical unauthenticated SQL injection vulnerability being actively weaponised right now. Remote attackers can inject arbitrary SQL into the application database without any credentials, granting themselves administrator access to the instance. From there, configuration tampering, credential theft, and lateral movement are all on the table. CISA's remediation deadline has already passed (August 14). If you're running Metabase and haven't patched, treat this as an incident in progress.

⚠️ Actively exploited — CVE-2026-68820 | Microsoft Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock | KEV
A use-after-free bug in the Windows WinSock ancillary function driver is being actively exploited to achieve local privilege escalation. An attacker who already has a foothold on a Windows system can leverage this to move from a standard user context to SYSTEM. That's a classic post-exploitation stepping stone — expect to see this chained with phishing or initial-access exploits in the wild. CISA's remediation deadline is August 25; don't wait that long.

⚠️ Actively exploited — CVE-2026-20349 | Cisco ASA & FTD | KEV
Cisco's Secure Firewall products — both ASA and FTD — contain a heap inspection vulnerability exploitable by unauthenticated remote attackers to force unexpected device reloads, causing denial of service. Threat actors are actively triggering this in the wild. For organisations whose network perimeter runs on Cisco firewall infrastructure, this is a high-priority item: a crashed perimeter device is a window of opportunity. Added to KEV on August 11 with a now-elapsed remediation deadline.

CVE-2026-14498 | Query Wrangler plugin for WordPress | CVSS 8.8
A missing capability check and absent nonce verification on the wp_ajax_qw_form_ajax handler allows any authenticated user — including subscribers — to overwrite saved query options with attacker-controlled values that are then passed directly to call_user_func_array, resulting in remote code execution. Affects all versions up to and including 1.5.57. Patch or disable immediately.

CVE-2026-16099 | Podlove Podcast Publisher plugin for WordPress | CVSS 8.8
Insufficient file path validation in the create_link_item function lets contributor-level authenticated users delete arbitrary files on the server. Deleting targeted PHP files or configuration artifacts can trivially cascade into remote code execution. Affects all versions up to 4.5.3.

CVE-2026-17123 | Royal Elementor Addons plugin for WordPress | CVSS 8.8
The Form Builder widget's webhook_url setting is persisted without sanitisation and the stored URL is used in outbound webhook requests, creating a Server-Side Request Forgery condition exploitable by contributors. Affects versions up to 1.7.1064. SSRF from a contributor account on a shared host is a meaningful pivot opportunity.

CVE-2026-74791 | Scriban templating library | CVSS 8.6
Scriban fails to flush CachedTemplates on TemplateContext.Reset(), meaning reused contexts can serve previously rendered, previously authorised template content to subsequent requests without re-triggering the TemplateLoader. In multi-tenant or request-shared deployments this is an information disclosure path across tenant boundaries. Fixed in version 7.0.0.

CVE-2024-58375 | OpenTofu 1.8.0–1.8.2 | CVSS 7.5
Variables and locals marked as sensitive can be inadvertently exposed through static evaluation of module sources, versions, and backend configurations — exactly the places you'd least expect secrets to leak. Fixed in 1.8.3. If your infrastructure-as-code pipelines use OpenTofu in this version range, audit your state files and CI logs.

Headline News

Expired Domains Are Being Weaponised at Scale for Malware Delivery and C2

Threat actors are systematically purchasing expired domains to exploit their accumulated reputation, residual traffic, and established DNS history. Roughly 65,000 domain names are re-registered by new owners every single day, and a subset of these have active inbound links, whitelisted entries in security tooling, or trusted categorisations inherited from their previous legitimate owners. Attackers are exploiting this trust inheritance to stand up malware delivery infrastructure and command-and-control endpoints that bypass reputation-based filtering. The technique is particularly effective against organisations relying on domain-age or category-based controls, since the domains appear seasoned and benign. Practitioners should audit any domain-reputation controls they rely on and consider whether expired-domain reclamation is on the threat model for any security-sensitive domain they've allowed to lapse.

CTF Write-Up Reveals Novel ZipSlip Variant Chaining Archive Traversal with Stream Manipulation

A detailed post-competition write-up from the InCTF 2026 Finals documents a sophisticated challenge — solved by only one participant — that chained a ZipSlip-style path traversal with stream-level manipulation to achieve code execution under conditions where conventional ZipSlip defences were in place. The challenge was specifically hardened against AI-assisted solving, making the manual analysis more technically revealing. ZipSlip variants remain a persistent concern in any application that processes user-supplied archives, particularly in CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and plugin upload handlers. The write-up serves as a useful adversarial test case for teams doing archive-handling code review — the defensive lesson is that naive path normalisation checks are insufficient when stream handling introduces additional parsing ambiguity.

Schrödinger's Feed

Physicists analysing collision data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have found evidence that baryon number — a fundamental conservation property of matter — may be carried not simply by three quarks but by a Y-shaped junction in the gluon field connecting them. This challenges a model that has stood for decades and suggests the internal structure of protons is stranger than the standard picture. From a long-range cryptographic perspective, the detail matters less than the trajectory: foundational physics surprises have a habit of eventually cascading into computational capability surprises. Practitioners building long-lifecycle systems should keep one eye on the physics literature — the assumptions underlying both classical and quantum hardness estimates deserve periodic re-examination as our model of matter itself keeps shifting.

/dev/random

It turns out there's a functioning secondary market for unused AI API credits — complete with brokers, rate arbitrage, and what can only be described as token scalping. The mechanics involve acquiring bulk credits from providers at discounted or promotional rates and reselling access at a margin, sometimes through intermediary wrapper APIs that obscure the underlying provider. From a security standpoint, this introduces a genuinely underexamined supply chain question: if your application's LLM calls are quietly being routed through a credit broker's proxy, your prompts, completions, and any embedded data are transiting infrastructure you didn't agree to. The token economy has apparently matured to the point of having its own grey market — which is either a sign of healthy demand or a sign that we need to read our API terms of service more carefully.