Top Cybersecurity Stories of the Week: WordPress XSS Flaw, Microsoft Patch Tuesday, Cisco Zero-Day and More
Security NEXT has released its weekly ranking of the ten most-read articles published between August 9 and August 15 2026. The list highlights a series of high-severity vulnerabilities affecting major enterprise and consumer platforms.
The top story concerns a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the WordPress login screen. A patched version has already been made available to administrators. In second place, WordPress 7.0.4 was released specifically to address a remote code execution flaw that can be triggered under certain conditions.
Microsoft issued its monthly security update, resolving more than 400 vulnerabilities across its product portfolio. Cisco followed with multiple advisories, including a zero-day denial-of-service vulnerability in the SSL VPN feature of its firewalls and critical flaws affecting Catalyst SD-WAN and IOS XE software.
FortiOS received patches and virtual patching options for several vulnerabilities. Google shipped an update for Chrome that fixes five security issues. Zoom corrected a flaw that could allow remote code execution between meeting participants.
Other notable entries include an operational error at Japan’s Digital Agency that resulted in the accidental disclosure of personal information, and multiple vulnerabilities in Jenkins where some affected plugins still lack official fixes.
Related articles
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.
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 and WebAssembly engine that is being actively exploited in the wild. The flaw is a type confusion issue tied to the Maglev compiler and optimizations around Array.prototype.sort, which can lead to arbitrary memory read and write primitives inside the JavaScript heap. Successful exploitation allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code within the browser sandbox after a victim visits a specially crafted HTML page, a technique commonly seen in malvertising and compromised-site campaigns. The fix is included in Chrome 152.0.7977.82 and later for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and the update also resolves a total of twelve vulnerabilities. The vulnerability was reported on 4 August 2026 by researcher Salvatore Gulizia, known as Serotav, who received a $1,000 reward. Other Chromium-based browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi will require corresponding updates from their respective vendors.