SecurityWeek’s cybersecurity news roundup provides a concise compilation of noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar.
We provide a valuable summary of stories that may not warrant an entire article, but are nonetheless important for a comprehensive understanding of the cybersecurity landscape.
Each week, we curate and present a collection of noteworthy developments, ranging from the latest vulnerability discoveries and emerging attack techniques to significant policy changes and industry reports.
Here are this week’s stories:
Amazon ECS attack
Sweet Security has disclosed the details of ECScape, an attack method that enables privilege escalation in Amazon ECS from a compromised container. The security firm’s researchers managed to obtain keys that would allow an attacker to move laterally, access private repositories and secrets, and seize broad control of the cloud environment. Sweet Security said AWS acknowledged the attack could work against hundreds of millions of machines and containers worldwide, but the cloud giant does not classify it as a vulnerability in its products. It did, however, update its documentation as a result of the research.
Alera Group data breach impacts 155,000
Insurance and financial services firm Alera Group revealed that an intrusion detected in August 2024 resulted in the personal information of 155,000 customers and employees getting compromised. Hackers had access to the company’s systems between July 19 and August 4, 2024, and obtained highly sensitive information, including SSNs, passports, and medical information.
Nvidia promises GPUs do not and should not have kill switches and backdoors
In a new blog post, Nvidia says embedding backdoors and kill switches into chips would be a gift to hackers and hostile actors, and would undermine global digital infrastructure and fracture trust in US technology.
Chanel data breach
Chanel has joined the increasingly long list of fashion retailers targeted recently by hackers. The company said threat actors targeted a third-party service. Chanel is likely one of the many organizations targeted by the ShinyHunters cybercrime group in a campaign aimed at Salesforce instances. Other victims include Dior, Louis Vuitton, Google and Cisco.
CISA issues emergency directive for Microsoft exchange vulnerability
CISA has issued an emergency directive instructing federal agencies to address a recently disclosed Microsoft Exchange vulnerability by August 11. The vulnerability, CVE-2025-53786, was disclosed on August 6 and it impacts hybrid deployments. It allows attackers with admin access to escalate privileges. CISA says while there is no evidence of in-the-wild exploitation, it’s “deeply concerned at the ease with which a threat actor could escalate privileges and gain significant control of a victim’s M365 Exchange Online environment”.
Streamlit vulnerability enabled stock market dashboard tampering
Cato Networks has discovered a vulnerability in Streamlit, an open source framework for building data applications, including ML prototypes, healthcare analytics dashboards, and financial data visualizations. The flaw, patched in March, could enable threat actors to conduct a cloud account takeover attack. Cato demonstrated the vulnerability’s potential impact by showing how threat actors could manipulate stock market dashboards built with Streamlit.
Exposure assessment of US energy sector
SixMap has released a comprehensive cybersecurity assessment of 21 US energy providers. The research identified 39,986 hosts with 58,862 services exposed to the internet across these organizations. Roughly 7% of all exposed services are running on non-standard ports, creating dangerous blind spots for security teams. The research also found that, on average, each organization had 9% of its hosts in the IPv6 space, another area of potential risk, as most security teams have no way of monitoring these assets.
Satellite hacking research
VisionSpace Technologies researchers demonstrated at Black Hat how easy it is to hack satellites by exploiting software vulnerabilities in the satellites themselves and the ground stations used to control them. The researchers found vulnerabilities that can be exploited to crash the software on a satellite, and also showed how hackers could change a satellite’s orbit by sending commands to its thrusters, The Register reported.
Federal court filing system hack
Sensitive court data from multiple US states is believed to have been exposed following a serious breach of the electronic case filing system used by federal courts, Politico learned from sources. The full extent of the breach is still being investigated. While it’s unclear who was behind the hack, state-sponsored threat actors are the main suspect.
Axis Communications video surveillance vulnerabilities
Researchers at Claroty have found potentially serious vulnerabilities in Axis Communications video surveillance products. An attacker could hijack video feeds, shut down cameras, or move laterally across a target network. Internet scans revealed over 6,500 exposed instances, with more than half located in the US. Axis has released patches and says it’s not aware of in-the-wild exploitation.
Related: In Other News: Microsoft Probes ToolShell Leak, Port Cybersecurity, Raspberry Pi ATM Hack
Related: In Other News: $30k Google Cloud Build Flaw, Louis Vuitton Breach Update, Attack Surface Growth
