⚡ Weekly Recap: Chrome 0-Days, Router Botnets, AWS Breach, Rogue AI Agents & More

Some weeks in security feel normal. Then you read a few tabs and get that immediate “ah, great, we’re doing this now” feeling.

This week has that energy. Fresh messes, old problems getting sharper, and research that stops feeling theoretical real fast. A few bits hit a little too close to real life, too. There’s a good mix here: weird abuse of trusted stuff, quiet infrastructure ugliness, sketchy chatter, and the usual reminder that attackers will use anything that works.

Scroll on. You’ll see what I mean.

⚡ Threat of the Week

**Google Patches 2 Actively Exploited Chrome 0-Days **— Google released security updates for its Chrome web browser to address two high-severity vulnerabilities that it said have been exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities related to an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the Skia 2D graphics library (CVE-2026-3909) and an inappropriate implementation vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine (CVE-2026-3910) that could result in out-of-bounds memory access or code execution, respectively. Google did not share additional details about the flaws, but acknowledged that there exist exploits for both of them. The issues were addressed in Chrome versions 146.0.7680.75/76 for Windows and Apple macOS, and 146.0.7680.75 for Linux.

🔔 Top News

Meta to Discontinue Instagram E2EE in May 2026— Meta announced plans to discontinue support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for chats on Instagram after May 8, 2026. In a statement shared with The Hacker News, a Meta spokesperson said, "Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months. Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp."

Authorities Disrupt SocksEscort Service— A court-authorized international law enforcement operation dismantled a criminal proxy service named SocksEscort that enslaved thousands of residential routers worldwide into a botnet for committing large-scale fraud. "The malware allowed SocksEscort to direct internet traffic through the infected routers. SocksEscort sold this access to its customers," the U.S. Justice Department said. The main thing to note here is that SocksEscort was powered by AVrecon, a malware written in C to explicitly target MIPS and ARM architectures via known security flaws in edge network devices. The malware also featured a novel persistence mechanism that involved flashing custom firmware, which intentionally disables future updates, permanently transforming SOHO routers into SocksEscort proxy nodes to blindside corporate monitoring.

UNC6426 Exploits nx npm Supply Chain Attack to Gain AWS Admin Access in 72 Hours— A threat actor known as UNC6426 leveraged keys stolen following the supply chain compromise of the nx npm package in August 2025 to completely breach a victim's AWS environment within 72 hours. UNC6426 used the access to abuse the GitHub-to-AWS OpenID Connect (OIDC) trust and create a new administrator role in the cloud environment, Google said. Subsequently, this role was abused to exfiltrate files from the client's Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets and perform data destruction in their production cloud environments.

KadNap Enslaves Network Devices to Fuel Illegal Proxy— A takedown-resistant botnet comprising more than 14,000 routers and other network devices has been conscripted into a proxy network that anonymously ferries traffic used for cybercrime. The botnet, named KadNap, exploits known vulnerabilities in Asus routers (among others), leveraging the initial access to drop shell scripts that reach out to a peer-to-peer network based on Kademlia for decentralized control. Infected devices are being used to fuel a proxy service named Doppelganger that, for a fee, tunnels customers' internet traffic through residential IP addresses, offering a way for attackers to blend in and make it harder to differentiate malicious traffic from legitimate activity.

APT28 Strikes with Sophisticated Toolkit— The Russian threat actor known as APT28 has been observed using a bespoke toolkit in recent cyber espionage campaigns targeting Ukrainian cyber assets. The primary components of the toolkit are two implants, one of which employs techniques from a malware framework the threat actor used in 2010s, while the other is a heavily modified version of the COVENANT framework for long-term spying. COVENANT is used in concert with BEARDSHELL to facilitate data exfiltration, lateral movement, and execution of PowerShell commands. Also alongside these tools is a malware named SLIMAGENT that shares overlaps with XAgent.

️🔥 Trending CVEs

New vulnerabilities show up every week, and the window between disclosure and exploitation keeps getting shorter. The flaws below are this week's most critical — high-severity, widely used software, or already drawing attention from the security community.

Check these first, patch what applies, and don't wait on the ones marked urgent — CVE-2026-3909, CVE-2026-3910, CVE-2026-3913 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-21666, CVE-2026-21667, CVE-2026-21668, CVE-2026-21672, CVE-2026-21708, CVE-2026-21669, CVE-2026-21671 (Veeam Backup & Replication), CVE-2026-27577, CVE-2026-27493, CVE-2026-27495, CVE-2026-27497 (n8n), CVE-2026-26127, CVE-2026-21262 (Microsoft Windows), CVE-2019-17571, CVE-2026-27685 (SAP), CVE-2026-3102 (ExifTool for macOS), CVE-2026-27944 (Nginx UI), CVE-2025-67826 (K7 Ultimate Security), CVE-2026-26224, CVE-2026-26225 (Intego X9), CVE-2026-29000 (pac4j-jwt), CVE-2026-23813 (HPE Aruba Networking AOS-CX), CVE-2025-12818 (PostgreSQL), CVE-2026-2413 (Ally WordPress plugin), CVE-2026-0953 (Tutor LMS Pro WordPress plugin), CVE-2026-25921 (Gogs), CVE-2026-2833, CVE-2026-2835, CVE-2026-2836 (Cloudflare Pingora), CVE-2026-24308 (Apache ZooKeeper), CVE-2026-3059, CVE-2026-3060, CVE-2026-3989 (SGLang), CVE-2026-0231 (Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR Broker VM), CVE-2026-20040, CVE-2026-20046 (Cisco IOS XR Software), CVE-2025-65587 (graphql-upload-minimal), CVE-2026-3497 (OpenSSH), CVE-2026-26123 (Microsoft Authenticator for Android and iOS), and CVE-2025-61915 (CUPS).

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