Top 10 Security Stories: Critical Flaws in PaperCut NG/MF, Chrome, WatchGuard and Others Dominate Week
Security NEXT has released its weekly list of the ten most-read articles published between August 30 and September 5 2026. The ranking highlights continued industry focus on high-severity vulnerabilities and confirmed exploitation activity.
The top story concerns a critical vulnerability in PaperCut NG/MF print-management software that has already been observed in active attacks. Second place went to Google’s latest Chrome update that resolved 26 vulnerabilities, two of which were rated Critical. A separate Chrome update addressing 12 additional issues, including a zero-day, also ranked in the top five.
Other notable vulnerability reports include WatchGuard Fireware OS, SonicWall SMA 1000, Cisco IOS XR and Apache Tomcat. WatchGuard and SonicWall advisories both urged immediate patching after proof-of-concept exploits surfaced. Apache Tomcat received fixes for multiple flaws, four of which were rated Critical.
Three confirmed incidents also attracted significant attention. 01 Bank disclosed unauthorized access resulting in customer-information leakage. Hands HD reported a ransomware infection that may have exposed personal data, while Corona confirmed a possible cloud-based leak of customer records.
The weekly ranking underscores the community’s priority on timely vulnerability disclosure and real-world breach reporting.
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CVE-2026-85046 Exploited in Chromium V8 Engine, Affecting Chrome, Edge and Other Browsers
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added CVE-2026-85046 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after confirming active exploitation in the wild. The flaw resides in the V8 JavaScript engine of Chromium and stems from a type confusion issue that can allow arbitrary code execution inside the sandbox when a crafted HTML page is processed. Google released a patch for Chrome on September 3, 2026, while the vulnerability carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 8.8 and is rated High severity. Because numerous browsers including Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi are built on Chromium, they are potentially exposed until their respective vendors issue updates. Security teams are advised to verify that all Chromium-based browsers in their environments have been updated to the latest versions containing the fix.
Gmail Address Variants Bypass String Comparison and Enable Multiple Registrations
A single user created four separate accounts using valid Gmail address formats that all deliver to the same inbox: Ivan.Petrov@gmail.com, ivanpetrov@gmail.com, ivan.petrov+shop@gmail.com, and IVAN.PETROV@gmail.com. Simple string comparison in the registration code treated these as distinct entries, allowing circumvention of new-user promotions, free-tier limits, and one-application-per-person rules. The root cause lies in three Gmail-specific behaviors: case-insensitive local parts, plus-addressing that ignores everything after the + symbol, and dots that carry no semantic meaning in the local part. Additional risks arise from IDNA homograph domains that visually mimic legitimate addresses but encode to different Punycode strings. Proper mitigation requires storing both the original email for delivery and a domain-aware normalized form for uniqueness checks, combined with explicit IDNA validation on registration.
Dangling DNS Records Expose Companies to Subdomain Takeovers Years After Projects Shut Down
A marketing team requested reactivation of a three-year-old promotional landing page, only to discover that its domain now served an unrelated third-party website. The root cause was a forgotten CNAME record in the company's DNS zone that continued pointing to a project name on external hosting after the original service had been decommissioned. Because many hosting providers use wildcard DNS entries, standard availability checks and simple DNS resolution tests fail to detect that the target project no longer exists. Attackers who re-register the freed project name can then serve content under the company's legitimate subdomain, automatically obtaining valid TLS certificates and inheriting domain-wide cookies. The article details how such dangling records accumulate across infrastructure, marketing, and acquired company zones, and explains the concrete risks including cookie theft, bypass of Content-Security-Policy, and unauthorized domain ownership proofs. It concludes with a practical remediation workflow: export the full zone, assign owners to every record, validate external targets by application response rather than DNS resolution, and embed record removal into decommissioning procedures.
Google Patches Actively Exploited V8 Zero-Day in Chrome (CVE-2026-85046)
Google has released an urgent update for Chrome to address CVE-2026-85046, a high-severity zero-day vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript engine that is being actively exploited in the wild. The flaw is a type confusion issue within the Maglev compiler, specifically tied to optimizations around Array.prototype.sort, which can lead to arbitrary memory read and write primitives inside the JavaScript heap. Attackers can exploit the vulnerability by tricking victims into visiting a specially crafted HTML page, enabling remote code execution within the browser sandbox. The update brings Chrome to version 152.0.7977.82 or higher on Windows, macOS, and Linux, while also addressing a total of 12 vulnerabilities. The issue was reported by researcher Salvatore Gulizia, known as Serotav, who received a $1,000 reward. Other Chromium-based browsers such as Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi will require corresponding updates from their vendors.