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INC Ransomware Emerges as Dominant Actor Exploiting SonicWall SMA 1000 Flaws

INC Ransomware operation has emerged as the “dominant threat actor” exploiting the recently disclosed security flaws in SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1,000 series VPN appliances.

In a report published over the weekend, Resecurity said it observed the INC Ransomware accelerating its activity since the beginning of August 2026, listing multiple victims on its data leak site. Per statistics listed on Ransomware. Live, the group has claimed 885 victims to date, with the most recent victim listed on August 2, 2026.

The attacks are suspected to involve the exploitation of CVE-2026–15409 and CVE-2026–15410, which could be chained to facilitate arbitrary command execution and take over susceptible devices. Fixes for the vulnerability pair were released by SonicWall in mid-July 2026.

Hotel Wi-Fi attacks use custom malware to breach Microsoft 365 accounts

Microsoft has linked a global campaign targeting hospitality Wi-Fi networks to the Russian threat actor Midnight Blizzard, also known as APT29.

The activity was previously disclosed in a report from cybersecurity company ReliaQuest, which detailed how the attacker changed DNS settings on Wi-Fi devices to steal Microsoft 365 accounts.

Besides attributing the campaign to Russian hackers tracked as Storm-2945 — a sub-cluster of Midnight Blizzard, Microsoft identified two malware families called CornFlake and ChocoShell with capabilities for persistent access, credential theft, surveillance, and data exfiltration.

New Pass-ta-key attacks let malware hijack Google-synced passkeys

Security researchers have discovered three attacks that allow malware on already-compromised Windows devices to abuse Google Password Manager’s synced passkeys to take over accounts, bypass user verification, and extract passkey private keys.

Passkeys are a passwordless authentication method that uses cryptographic keys stored on a user’s device to sign in to online accounts.

They are considered safer than passwords because they cannot be guessed, reused, or easily stolen through phishing, while also allowing users to authenticate with a PIN or biometrics, such as a fingerprint or facial recognition.

New DOUBLECUP ClickFix service hides malware in browser cache images

A new Russian loader-as-a-service named DOUBLECUP uses ClickFix attacks to hide malicious code in PNG images cached by victims’ browsers, ultimately delivering CountLoader to Windows and macOS devices and a new remote access trojan named DeviceManager to Windows systems.

SOCRadar’s Threat Research Unit says DOUBLECUP has operated since early June 2026, providing customers with licenses and a Go-based Windows tool for creating malicious campaigns and generating the code operators add to their websites.

The service handles much of the infrastructure required to conduct the attacks, including hosting the steganographic PNG images, managing session and signal endpoints, providing encryption keys, and automatically rebuilding payloads.

New Generation Of Intelligent Drones Defined By Technology Convergence

One of the most fascinating instances of current technological convergence is the quick development of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), also referred to as drones. A sophisticated ecosystem of intelligent autonomous platforms that can support defense, homeland security, critical infrastructure, emergency response, agriculture, logistics, energy, healthcare, and environmental protection is rapidly emerging from what started out as remotely piloted aircraft for military reconnaissance and commercial photography.

It is increasingly evident in our new digital era that the most significant technological advancements seldom come from a single invention; rather, they emerge when several technologies develop concurrently and start to support each other. This is called technology convergence, and it is true with trends in drones.

According to Grandview Research The global drone market size was valued at USD 83.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow from USD 96.4 billion in 2026 to USD 182.4 billion by 2033. Those are impactful statistics.

How AI helps scientists design the next generation of medicines

Ultimately, Sapra says, the end-state vision for AI in biologic drug discovery is what the field calls “de novo” design. For this, the goal is for AI to generate entirely new protein sequences that precisely fit the desired drug properties. This includes designing the structure, predicting safety, how it will behave in the body and how to make it manufacturable.

“The field is making great progress toward a completely AI-generated biologic, designed from scratch all the way to a clinical candidate,” Sapra says. “As we continue to leverage frontier models and fine-tune them with the right datasets, we bring ourselves closer to this reality. I believe it will come. It’s a matter of time.”

Several key elements are needed to reach this point, however. First is richer and more standardized training data across the industry. Second, robust evaluation benchmarks for AI-generated candidates. And third, teams that know how to work at the intersection of machine learning and biology. Of all the prerequisites, however, safety prediction may be the most consequential, and perhaps the least discussed, Sapra says.

Scientists reveal the hidden force driving the universe’s hottest fluid

When atomic nuclei crash into one another at nearly the speed of light, they briefly produce quark-gluon plasma, an extraordinarily hot state of matter in which quarks and gluons can move freely. This exotic material behaves like an almost perfect fluid and offers scientists a way to study conditions similar to those that existed shortly after the Big Bang.

Researchers have devoted considerable attention to the plasma’s intense swirling motion and powerful electromagnetic fields. Its acceleration, however, has received far less scrutiny, even though it directly contributes to the fireball’s rapid expansion. In hydrodynamics, acceleration is considered just as fundamental as vorticity, much as electric and magnetic fields are treated as equally important parts of electromagnetism.

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