Netz0

🚨 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.

‼️🚨 BREAKING: An AI found a Linux kernel zero-day that roots every distribution since 2017. The exploit fits in 732 bytes of Python. Patch your kernel ASAP. The vulnerability is CVE-2026-31431, nicknamed "Copy Fail," disclosed today by Theori. It has been sitting quietly in the Linux kernel for nine years. Most Linux privilege-escalation bugs are picky. They need a precise timing window (a "race"), or specific kernel addresses leaked from somewhere, or careful tuning per distribution. Copy Fail needs none of that. It is a straight-line logic mistake that works on the first try, every time, on every mainstream Linux box. The attacker just needs a normal user account on the machine. From there, the script asks the kernel to do some encryption work, abuses how that work is wired up, and ends up writing 4 bytes into a memory area called the "page cache" (Linux's high-speed copy of files in RAM). Those 4 bytes can be aimed at any program the system trusts, like /usr/bin/su, the shortcut to becoming root. Result: the next time anyone runs that program, it lets the attacker in as root. What should worry most: the corruption never touches the file on disk. It only exists in Linux's in-memory copy of that file. If you imaged the hard drive afterwards, the on-disk file would match the official package hash exactly. Reboot the machine, or just put it under memory pressure (any normal system load that needs the RAM), and the cached copy reloads fresh from disk. Containers do not help either. The page cache is shared across the whole host, so a process inside a container can use this bug to compromise the underlying server and reach into other tenants. The original sin was a 2017 "in-place optimization" in a kernel crypto module called algif_aead. It was meant to make encryption slightly faster. The change broke a critical safety assumption, and nobody noticed for nine years. That bug then rode every kernel update from 2017 to today. This vulnerability affects the following: 🔴 Shared servers (dev boxes, jump hosts, build servers): any user becomes root 🔴 Kubernetes and container clusters: one compromised pod escapes to the host 🔴 CI runners (GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins): a malicious pull request becomes root on the runner 🔴 Cloud platforms running user code (notebooks, agent sandboxes, serverless functions): a tenant becomes host root Timeline: 🔴 March 23, 2026: reported to the Linux kernel security team 🔴 April 1: patch committed to mainline (commit a664bf3d603d) 🔴 April 22: CVE assigned 🔴 April 29: public disclosure Mitigation: update your kernel to a build that includes mainline commit a664bf3d603d. If you cannot patch immediately, turn off the vulnerable module: echo "install algif_aead /bin/false" > /etc/modprobe.d/disable-algif.conf rmmod algif_aead 2>/dev/null || true For environments that run untrusted code (containers, sandboxes, CI runners), block access to the kernel's AF_ALG crypto interface entirely, even after patching. Almost nothing legitimate needs it, and blocking it shuts the door on this whole class of bug...

‼️🇪🇺 The EU's new Age Verification app was hacked with little to no effort. When you set it up, the app asks you to create a PIN. But that PIN isn't actually tied to the identity data it's supposed to protect. An attacker can delete a couple of entries from a file on the phone, restart the app, pick a new PIN, and the app happily hands over the original user's verified identity credentials as if nothing happened. It gets worse. The app's "too many attempts" lockout is just a counter in a text file. Reset it to 0 and keep guessing. The biometric check (face/fingerprint) is a simple on/off switch in the same file. Flip it to off and the app skips it entirely.