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Attackers Are Abusing Shopify’s Shop App for Callback Phishing

Threat actors have found a new way into people's phones: fake order receipts planted inside a trusted shopping app. Here's how the scam works and what to do if you spot one.

What You Need to Know
Threat actors are turning Shopify's popular Shop order-tracking app into a delivery channel for callback phishing scams, quietly inserting fake order receipts into users' purchase histories and waiting for victims to pick up the phone. Instead of a sketchy email, the attackers rely on a trusted app, a real-looking order timeline, and a bogus support number to socially engineer users into handing over sensitive data or installing remote access tools.

What's Happening
In these campaigns, victims open the Shop app and see what appears to be a legitimate high-value purchase associated with a well-known brand, complete with order details and a phone number to call if the charge looks wrong. When users call that number, they don't reach a retailer or bank. They reach a scammer running a classic callback phishing play, who walks them through "canceling" the order by collecting credentials and payment data, or by convincing them to install remote desktop software so the attacker can access their device.

This hybrid mix of in-app notices and voice social engineering fits the broader trend of callback phishing, which has grown rapidly over the past few years as email-based lures become easier to detect and filter out.

Why This Matters
There's no indication that Shopify or the Shop app itself has been technically compromised. The abuse hinges entirely on social engineering and the trust users place in a familiar app interface, which means standard technical defenses like spam filters or malware scans won't catch it. Because the fake order lives inside a real app users already trust, the usual "check the sender" advice for phishing doesn't apply here.

What to Do
If you spot an unfamiliar order in Shop, refuse any suggestion to call the phone number embedded in the app. Verify charges directly in your bank or card portal instead, and if you need to reach your financial institution, use the number on the back of your card, not one from the app. Anyone who has already called and shared information should immediately change their passwords, enable MFA where possible, run a security scan on their device if remote tools were installed, and alert their card issuer to review and potentially replace the affected card.

Water Systems Face Mounting Cyber Threats, Agencies Urge Immediate Action

Water and wastewater utilities are becoming a priority target for state-aligned hackers, and most of the country's plants are running decades-old control systems that were never built to withstand it. Here's what's driving the risk and what federal agencies are telling utilities to do about it.

What You Need to Know
Water and wastewater utilities are under unprecedented cyber pressure, caught between aging infrastructure and increasingly capable adversaries who understand how disruptive even a "small" compromise can be to a community. Recent advisories have linked campaigns to foreign state-aligned groups actively probing water-sector OT devices across the United States, confirming that water systems now sit alongside power and pipelines as priority targets.

What's at Risk
Many plants still run legacy SCADA and PLC systems that were never designed with security in mind. These systems are often reachable from the internet for convenience and protected with default or weak passwords, which gives attackers an easy path from simple reconnaissance to direct control of pumps, valves, and chemical dosing. That combination of outdated equipment, internet exposure, and weak credentials is exactly what makes the sector an attractive target: the technical bar to compromise is low, but the potential impact on a community is high.

Why This Matters
Federal agencies have started issuing much more pointed guidance, recognizing that many utilities, especially smaller ones, lack dedicated security teams or large budgets to close these gaps on their own. For utility leaders, the core takeaway is that cyber resilience is no longer separate from safety and regulatory compliance. A phishing email or an exposed web interface is no longer just an IT problem; it's a direct path to a community-wide water emergency.

What to Do
Start with the basics the EPA's "Top Cyber Actions for Securing Water Systems" guidance calls out: identify every internet-exposed device, enforce strong authentication, segment business IT from operational control networks, and keep offline, tested backups of critical configurations. CISA and the FBI have also published technical advisories detailing how attackers are abusing remote access tools, exploiting outdated firmware, and targeting exposed PLCs, along with detection tips and incident response contacts tailored to the water sector. For operators on the ground, the priority is closing the simplest doors first: exposed interfaces, weak passwords, and unsegmented networks are the paths attackers are actually using.

Actively Exploited Critical WinRAR Flaw Allows Remote Code Execution

A critical WinRAR flaw is already being exploited to plant malware on Windows systems through nothing more than a normal-looking archive attachment. Here's what's driving the risk and what to patch right now.

What You Need to Know
A critical WinRAR vulnerability, CVE-2025-8088, allows attackers to turn a malicious archive into a remote code execution tool on Windows systems. Because WinRAR is widely used and often left unpatched, routine actions like opening a normal RAR file can become a high-impact security risk for individuals and organizations alike.

What's Vulnerable
CVE-2025-8088 is a path traversal bug that allows crafted archives to escape the normal extraction directory and write files to sensitive locations, such as the Windows Startup folder, where they can run automatically at the next logon. Attackers are already exploiting the flaw in real campaigns, typically by sending phishing emails with weaponized archives that masquerade as job applications, invoices, or official documents. When opened in a vulnerable WinRAR version, the visible decoy file behaves as expected, while hidden HTA, LNK, BAT, or DLL payloads are quietly dropped into autorun locations to establish persistence and enable remote access, credential theft, or further lateral movement.

With proof-of-concept code and exploitation details publicly available, multiple threat groups have adopted this technique, making it a favored vector for initial access and long-term footholds.

Why This Matters
The danger here isn't a sophisticated exploit chain, it's that the attack hides inside an action people do every day without a second thought. A decoy file that opens normally gives victims no reason to suspect anything went wrong, while the real payload is already establishing persistence in the background. That combination of a common file type, a convincing lure, and a silent payload drop is exactly what makes this vulnerability a favored tool for initial access right now.

What to Do
All Windows users of WinRAR should update to version 7.13 or later, since version 7.12 and earlier remain vulnerable to this path traversal issue. Pair patching with stricter controls on archive attachments, monitoring for suspicious file creation in Startup and other autorun paths, and user awareness training that emphasizes the risk of opening unexpected RAR files, even when they appear to be work-related or urgent.

New macOS Backdoor Embeds Fake Errors to Derail AI Security Tools

A new North Korea-linked macOS backdoor isn't just trying to evade detection, it's trying to manipulate the AI tools analysts use to detect it. Here's how Gaslight works and what it means for AI-assisted security workflows.

What You Need to Know
SentinelOne has documented a new macOS malware family called Gaslight that takes direct aim at AI-assisted malware analysis rather than the operating system or sandbox itself. The Rust-based backdoor, attributed with high confidence to North Korea-aligned threat actors, embeds a prompt-injection blob designed to confuse and derail LLM-based triage tools reviewing the sample.

What's Happening
Gaslight delivers full remote access capabilities in a compact payload while embedding an unusual 3.5 KB prompt-injection blob within the binary. That blob contains 38 fabricated "system" messages formatted to resemble developer logs, crash reports, build errors, token expiry warnings, SQL injection alerts, and other diagnostics, all wrapped in Markdown and template-style placeholders. Rust has already been adopted in several state-sponsored toolchains because it compiles into small, fast executables with fewer recognizable patterns for traditional detection engines, and Gaslight follows that same trend on macOS.

At the system level, the implant behaves like a conventional backdoor, maintaining a persistent outbound connection to attacker-controlled infrastructure and supporting remote command execution and data theft. What makes it novel is that the fake messages aren't meant to fool static scanners or sandboxes. They're prompt injection content specifically designed to convince LLM-based triage pipelines that something is wrong with the analysis session itself, so the AI aborts, truncates, or refuses to continue. By flooding AI tooling with fabricated out-of-memory errors, disk exhaustion warnings, token issues, and bogus vulnerability flags, Gaslight tries to erode confidence in the AI's output and turn benign-looking strings inside the binary into an attack surface of their own.

Why This Matters
SentinelOne notes that this technique hasn't yet been proven to reliably bypass major AI malware analysis platforms in controlled testing, but it's the first publicly documented case of prompt injection being weaponized inside malware to target the analyst's tools rather than the sandbox. That distinction matters: as more security workflows lean on AI for triage and analysis, the binary itself becomes a delivery mechanism for attacks on the tooling, not just the target system.

What to Do
Security teams should treat binary-embedded text as adversarial input by default, especially in any workflow that feeds file contents into an AI model. Aggressively sanitize prompts before they reach a triage pipeline, and pair automated analysis with human review rather than assuming AI-assisted tools will be more robust or trustworthy than a traditional, human-led security workflow.

CVE-2026-49269 Exposes a Hardware Privacy Gap in Apple’s Original M1 GPU

A high-severity flaw in Apple's original M1 GPU design lets one sandboxed app read data left behind by another, and it's baked into the silicon itself. Here's why this one can't be fully patched away and what M1 users should do.

What You Need to Know
CVE-2026-49269 highlights a high-severity weakness in Apple's original M1 GPU design, in which register file data can persist between compute shader dispatches from different sandboxed processes rather than being cleared. A malicious Metal application can run a reader shader to recover stale register values left behind by another sandboxed app, meaning confidential data recently handled by the GPU may be exposed across app boundaries.

What's Vulnerable
What makes this issue notable is that it's rooted in hardware behavior rather than a conventional software bug. In the proof-of-concept described by NVD, one sandboxed app generated a fresh 128-bit secret and loaded it into GPU registers, while a separate sandboxed attacker app successfully recovered the exact same secret from the leftover register state. That demonstrates the attack is technically real, not just a theoretical edge case. Apple's position, as reflected in the CVE record, is that the behavior affects only legacy hardware and has already been addressed at the hardware level in the current generation of Apple Silicon.

Why This Matters
There's no public evidence of active exploitation, attribution, or widespread attacks tied to CVE-2026-49269 at this point, which keeps the immediate threat lower than many remotely exploitable flaws. Even so, the vulnerability matters because software updates cannot fully redesign legacy silicon. They may help reduce exposure, but they don't fundamentally change the underlying register file behavior that made the data leak possible in the first place. That's a different risk profile than a typical patchable bug, since the fix isn't fully within Apple's software control for existing hardware.

What to Do
For users still relying on original M1 systems, stay fully updated on macOS and keep an eye on Apple's security guidance for any mitigations. The long-term fix is ultimately newer hardware with this GPU behavior already corrected, so organizations with sensitive workloads on M1 devices should factor this into hardware refresh planning rather than expecting a full software resolution.