🚨 BREAKING: cPanel and WHM, the control panels behind an estimated 70+ million websites, have a critical security flaw that lets anyone become root admin without a password. CVE-2026-41940 affects every supported version. It’s already being exploited in the wild.

watchTowr Labs published the full attack today, after the hosting company KnownHost confirmed the bug was already being used to break into a significant chunk of the internet.

If you've never heard of cPanel: it's the dashboard that hosting providers and millions of website owners use to manage their servers, domains, email accounts, databases, and SSL certificates. WHM is the admin version that controls the entire server. If someone gets root access to WHM, they get the keys to the kingdom and to every apartment inside it.

How the attack works, in plain English:

🔴 Step 1: The attacker sends a deliberately wrong login. cPanel still creates a temporary "you tried to log in" record on disk and gives the attacker a cookie tied to it.
🔴 Step 2: The attacker tweaks the cookie to disable cPanel's password encryption. Normally cPanel encrypts the password field on disk. With one small change to the cookie, cPanel just stores it as plain text instead.
🔴 Step 3: The attacker sends a fake login attempt where the password field secretly contains hidden line breaks. cPanel does not strip these line breaks out, so they get written straight to the session file. Each line break creates a brand new fake record. The attacker uses this to inject lines that say "this user is root" and "this user already authenticated successfully."
🔴 Step 4: The attacker visits one more random page on the site to nudge cPanel into re-reading the file. cPanel then promotes the injected fake lines into its main session memory.
🔴 Step 5: On the next request, cPanel sees a flag that says "this user already passed the password check." cPanel trusts that flag, skips checking the actual password, and lets the attacker in as root.

From start to finish, the attack takes a handful of HTTP requests.

If you run cPanel or WHM, the patched versions are:

🔴 cPanel/WHM 110.0.x → 11.110.0.97
🔴 cPanel/WHM 118.0.x → 11.118.0.63
🔴 cPanel/WHM 126.0.x → 11.126.0.54
🔴 cPanel/WHM 132.0.x → 11.132.0.29
🔴 cPanel/WHM 134.0.x → 11.134.0.20
🔴 cPanel/WHM 136.0.x → 11.136.0.5

If your version is older than these, assume someone has already broken in and act accordingly. Patch right now, then rotate every password and key the server touched: root passwords, API tokens, SSL private keys, SSH keys, mail passwords, and database passwords.

watchTowr has released a free tool on GitHub to help check if a server is vulnerable.

Detection tool: https://github.com/watchtowrlabs/watchTowr-vs-cPanel-WHM-AuthBypass-to-RCE.py

Full write-up: https://labs.watchtowr.com/the-internet-is-falling-down-falling-down-falling-down-cpanel-whm-authentication-bypass-cve-2026-41940/

❗️ Apple accidentally shipped Claude[.]md files in the Apple Support app update (v5.13).

For context, Claude[.]md is the instruction file Anthropic's Claude Code uses to understand a project's structure, conventions, and developer guidance. They typically live in source repos and are not meant to ship inside production apps.

Source: aaronp613

🚨 Two US cybersecurity professionals have been sentenced for moonlighting as ALPHV BlackCat ransomware affiliates.

Ryan Goldberg, 40, of Georgia, and Kevin Martin, 36, of Texas, deployed BlackCat ransomware against multiple US victims between April and December 2023. They paid the operators a 20% cut for access to the platform, hit medical and engineering firms, leaked patient data to pressure payment, and split a $1.2 million Bitcoin ransom three ways with co-conspirator Angelo Martino.

Martino had a second job. He worked as a ransomware negotiator for victims, and used that role to leak confidential victim information to the attackers to push ransom prices up.

When Goldberg tried to flee abroad, the FBI tracked him through 10 countries before he was caught.

Both men were sentenced yesterday. Martino is sentenced July 9.

🚨 BREAKING: Chirayu Rana was caught rehearsing his fake sexual abuse claims on a legal chatbot 10 months before going public. He swapped the company name and flipped the abuser's gender, but the rest of the story matched what he later alleged.

Source: https://askalawyeroncall.com/employment-law/saw60-raped-secually-assulted-harassed-forced.html

🚨 A Redditor's brand-new MacBook M5 arced, zapped, and went totally dead within 48 hours of unboxing, just from moving the hinge.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1t1qgqe/i_have_had_this_m5_mac_for_less_than_48_hours_and/

🚨 BREAKING: GTFO ICE, the new anti-ICE "rapid response network" launched by ex-DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, has allegedly exposed 17,662 users' names, emails, phones, and ZIPs on a public API.

The exposed data was sent to law enforcement agencies by the people who found it. They are now sending the following email to everyone who was exposed on the list.

❗️ Why the GTFO ICE breach matters beyond the open API:

🔴 17,662 anti-ICE signups reportedly handed to FBI, ICE, HSI by the researchers
🔴 Affected users were not notified by the operator(s) first
🔴 No allegation of user crime, no GDPR-style breach process
🔴 This inverts responsible disclosure into political targeting

‼️🚨 NEW RESEARCH: Fiber-optic cables can be turned into a hidden microphone and used for eavesdropping.

Researchers from Hong Kong's PolyU and CUHK just proved it works in real conditions. The paper was presented at NDSS 2026, one of the top cybersecurity conferences in the world.

When someone talks in a room, the sound waves cause tiny vibrations in everything around them, including the thin glass fiber that runs into your apartment from your internet provider. Those vibrations slightly disturb the laser light traveling through the cable. If an attacker plugs the other end of that cable into a special device called a Distributed Acoustic Sensing system, they can read those tiny disturbances and turn them back into recognizable speech.

The problem for the attacker: a normal fiber lying along your baseboard is not sensitive enough on its own. Sound fades too fast in the air, and the fiber is too thin to pick it up.

So the researchers built a small device they call a "Sensory Receptor." It is basically a 65mm plastic cylinder with about 15 meters of fiber wound around it. The cylinder catches and amplifies sound waves enough for the fiber to register them. Crucially, it is small enough to hide inside the same little plastic junction box your internet installer leaves on the wall to manage extra cable.

What the attack can actually pick up:

🔴 Daily activities (typing, walking, snoring, washing dishes): 83% recognition accuracy
🔴 Where in the room a sound is coming from: accurate to within about one meter
🔴 Spoken words at meters from the receptor
🔴 In a real office test, with the receptor hidden in a fiber box and the attacker 50+ meters away in another room, around 80% of the conversation was recoverable

Why this attack is different from a hidden microphone:

🔴 No electricity, no batteries, no radio signals
🔴 Cannot be found by professional bug sweeps that look for hidden mics or cameras
🔴 Cannot be jammed by ultrasonic jammers (the kind some boardrooms use against phone microphones)
🔴 Looks identical to a normal fiber cable

The researchers tested a commercial ultrasonic jammer right next to their device and it had zero effect. The defenses meant to protect sensitive meetings simply do not see this attack coming.

What you can do:

🔴 If you run a sensitive office or meeting room, ask your IT team about polished fiber connectors and optical isolators. Both make this attack much harder.
🔴 Do not let your internet installer leave excess fiber coiled up inside the room. Have them coil it inside the wall or in a sealed box outside the room.
🔴 Keep fiber cable runs away from desks and walls that resonate with conversation.
🔴 In high-security spaces, soundproof the walls and ceilings where fiber runs.

The researchers have published actual audio samples reconstructed from fiber vibrations: osf.io/wna5d/