Malicious Claude Code Extension Served in Cursor Supply Chain AttackMalicious versions 2.1.312 and 2.1.313 of the anthropic.claude-code extension were live in the Cursor VS Code Extension Marketplace for about 11 hours on October 29. The JavaScript ran at module load, collected host details, tried to install an SSH key, open a reverse SSH tunnel and set persistence on macOS and Windows. Kevin Beaumont estimates about 5,000 downloads. Cursor rotated keys, rebuilt the marketplace and published a detection script and IoCs; uninstalling alone does not remove the dropped persistence scripts.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 2 Nov 2026🛡️ Security
Appraisal by AI: Model-driven victim prioritization in the VOLTA infostealerVOLTA (VOLTA-AUTODOXER) is a self-deleting Windows infostealer that, after theft and live session-based enrichment, POSTs an evidence bundle to OpenRouter so an LLM can rank the victim's assets by monetization value. It falls back across a Claude, Kimi and Gemini chain when a model refuses. Talos covers the builder model, the Chrome App-Bound Encryption bypass, the volta_debug.txt artifact and countermeasures such as blocking Chrome --headless.
blog.talosintelligence.comwriteupPublished and added 31 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Inside a malicious Claude Code-branded extension and its persistent SSH backdoorMicrosoft Threat Intelligence analyzes a tampered anthropic.claude-code extension (versions 2.1.312 and 2.1.313) served on the Cursor marketplace on 29 October 2026. The injected JavaScript loader adds an SSH key labeled svc-telemetry, opens a reverse SSH tunnel and sets up persistence on macOS, Linux and Windows. The post gives cleanup steps, IOCs and Defender XDR hunting queries. VS Code Marketplace and npm were not affected.
microsoft.comwriteupPublished and added 31 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Malicious Claude Code extension on Cursor planted SSH backdoorsA malicious version 2.1.313 of Anthropic's Claude Code extension was served from Cursor's marketplace for about 11 hours on 29 October 2026, reaching up to 5,000 developers. A JavaScript loader prepended to extension.js added an attacker SSH key, a reverse tunnel and macOS/Windows persistence, and reported to 134.209.82[.]225. Coding errors likely blocked SSH access on many hosts. Cursor removed it and rotated keys; victims should look for an 'svc-telemetry' SSH key.
bleepingcomputer.comarticlePublished and added 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- lee1981 (@lee1981b) on X
CyberForge CVE of the Day #091 covers Progress WS_FTP Server CVE-2026-84295 (unauthenticated administrator-credential exposure, CVSS 10.0) and CVE-2026-90868 (conditional OS command and argument injection, CVSS 9.9, low privileges). Fixed floors are 2024.0.7/9.0.7 and 2025.0.4/10.0.4; 2024.0.6/2025.0.3 fix only the first. It gives KEV, EPSS and SSVC status, six SOC checks, and Windows 4688 evidence queries.
x.comadvisoryAdded 2 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
TeamViewer Flaw Could Let Malicious Hosts Take Over Support Technicians’ MachinesCVE-2026-111585 (CVSS 8.8) is an integer overflow in the remote-control screen processing of TeamViewer clients on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. A malicious or compromised host can announce an oversized screen surface (for example 32768 by 32768 at 32 bpp), forcing a software decode path and an out-of-bounds write that crashes the viewer or runs code. Remedio's research shows a pointer overwrite routed to WinExec. Version 15.83 fixes it, along with CVE-2026-92372, CVE-2026-92374 and six local privilege escalation bugs.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
川崎元 (@foryangxin) on XCVE-2025-6514 is an OS command injection (CWE-78, CVSS 9.6) in mcp-remote 0.0.5 to 0.1.15, fixed in 0.1.16. A malicious MCP server supplies a crafted authorization_endpoint during OAuth discovery, and the open package passes it to PowerShell on Windows. The thread cites the MCP spec's URL scheme allowlist rules and advises treating discovery metadata as untrusted, pinning bridge tools and sandboxing them.
x.comthreadAdded 2 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
A quiet week in infosec <.<Cisco Talos Threat Source newsletter for the week of the PHP and Node.js vulnerability news cycle. It summarises NIK C2, a Go-based Windows implant that dumps credentials, streams keystrokes, deploys screen-locking ransomware and uses a victim's hijacked OpenAI API keys to analyse stolen data. It also lists weekly headlines (CISA KEV PHP bugs, Brotli flaw, Gheist GitHub token theft), Talos links and top malware hashes.
blog.talosintelligence.comarticlePublished and added 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Digital Forensics: Analyzing Windows Prefetch Files for EvidenceWindows Prefetch forensics tutorial from Hackers Arise. It explains that prefetch files in C:\Windows\Prefetch record last run time, run count and files touched, so they prove an application was used even after deletion. It shows parsing with NirSoft WinPrefetchView, building a timeline from Last Run Time, and how a suspect could disable Prefetch or Superfetch (SysMain).
hackers-arise.comarticlePublished and added 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
NIK C2: The new AI-enabled command-and-control frameworkNIK C2 is a newly observed C2 framework with a Go-based 64-bit Windows implant that embeds an OpenAI Chat Completions client (ai_generate command), falling back to the victim's OPENAI_API_KEY. Talos details its 52+ commands, AES-256-GCM over WebSocket with HTTP fallback, credential, wallet and keystroke theft, screen-lock ransomware, AMSI bypass and anti-debug. It also lists a live C2 at 87.120.196[.]120 and total-sitevv[.]lol.
blog.talosintelligence.comwriteupPublished and added 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- Dark Web Intelligence (@DailyDarkWeb) on X
DailyDarkWeb post summarising Anthropic Frontier Red Team research published 27 October 2026. An unreleased internal Claude research model built five attack chains: Chrome sandbox escape (V8 heap bug, CacheStorage race, FedCM use-after-free), a Safari same-origin policy bypass, data extraction from a locked Pixel 9 over USB, a Windows QUIC kernel crash (CVE-2026-33096) and zero-click Linux root via multipath TCP (CVE-2026-98432). Anthropic says all flaws are fixed, including 62 Chrome CVEs as of Chrome 156. The post notes the chains are not independently reproduced.
x.comthreadAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - Big Bull (@BIGBULLapp) on X
clauth is a Rust terminal UI for Claude Code that combines multi-account switching with a live 5h / 7d usage monitor. A fallback chain moves the user off an exhausted account before Claude Code blocks. It supports Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise OAuth accounts and custom API endpoints on Linux, macOS and Windows. The post notes that auto-switching means the tool decides when accounts change.
x.comtoolAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI
AskStream: When and What to Ask Proactively under Uncertainty in Streaming Video UnderstandingAskStream is a multi-turn benchmark for streaming video understanding that adds a third proactive action, ask, alongside wait and answer, for cases where video or user information is incomplete. It has 438 videos, 2,714 manually annotated frame-level time windows (wait, ask, answer), four task categories and eight subtasks. The strongest model reaches only 52.18% on the proposed Ask-F1 metric, in both multiple-choice and open-ended settings.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Survival LLM: AI assistant and emergency library that runs on your own computerSurvival LLM is a free, open-source desktop app for macOS (Apple Silicon) and 64-bit Windows that runs an AI model and an offline emergency library on the user's computer. It checks the machine's memory, downloads a fitting model, and answers from sources such as Wikipedia, WikiMed, Ready.gov and CDC guidance, citing each article. Users can add their own files; version 0.3.2 is dated October 2026.
brangus.iotoolAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Dead Popcorn Time Updater Put Millions of Computers at Risk of TakeoverTime4Popcorn, an abandoned Popcorn Time fork, has an updater (CVE-2026-30612) that fetches updates over HTTP without code signing and runs any executable the domain returns, as System/root. Eye Security registered abandoned update domains, saw millions of Windows, macOS and Android clients, and pushed a fix disabling the updater on about 2 million systems by March 2026. Shadowserver took over the sinkholed domains; Eye Security advises uninstalling the app.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
cubillas (@cubillas888) on XThe tweet relays Pillar Security research that opencode on Windows and WSL could run attacker-controlled code during remote MCP server OAuth sign-in. The fix shipped in opencode 1.18.33 on 28 September, with no advisory or CVE published. It advises users of remote MCP servers to update and review which servers they connect to. Technical details are not in the post.
x.comthreadAdded 29 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Akash Rajagopal (@akashsairaja) on XOllama overview thread by Akash Rajagopal on X. It lists six steps: install on macOS, Linux, Windows or Docker; run `ollama run gemma4`; use the REST API on localhost:11434 (/api/chat); call it from ollama-python and ollama-js; llama.cpp as the README's supported backend; and `ollama launch claude` to connect Claude Code. Codex, OpenCode, Copilot CLI and Droid also work. The thread cites 184k GitHub stars and an MIT licence.
x.comthreadAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🧠 AI- Show HN: Hob - Open-source, on device alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT
Hob is an MIT-licensed desktop app from Frigade that runs open-weight models such as Gemma and gpt-oss locally on Mac, Windows and Linux. It picks the best open-weight model that fits the user's computer and sets it up. It is positioned as a free, private, offline alternative to Claude and ChatGPT for tasks like filling out PDFs and working through documents. The page gives no technical detail on its runtime.
github.comrepoAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🧠 AI
David Gutierrez | Eng (@david_x_ai) on XThread on a critical opencode bug disclosed by Pillar Security on Oct 19. On Windows and WSL, a remote MCP server could run code during OAuth sign-in, because the server-chosen authorization URL was put unescaped into a PowerShell command, so a PowerShell subexpression executed. opencode fixed it in 1.18.33 on Sep 28 as a browser-launch refactor with no advisory or CVE. MCP Inspector published an advisory for the same bug class, and its fix needs a major bump of the open package.
x.comthreadAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- huiwenhan (@huiwenhan) on X
PRAXO-CORE 2.5.0 is a Go agent kernel that owns model calls, tool authorization, context, checkpoints, events and human-in-the-loop decisions, and leaves graph execution, memory storage and tenant policy to RHEOVELA or the host product. The release adds pkg/conformance, with checks for VFS, memory, sandbox, event, policy, model and tool contracts. It also adds stricter Windows path rejection and a plugin trust/SBOM handoff, and it states which adapters are only offline-tested.
x.comarticleAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI - x86rc/unthemidator
Unthemidator is an automated unpacker for binaries protected with Themida, Code Virtualizer and WinLicense (v3.0 to v3.2.6.0, experimental v4.0). It works without executing the target, handles x86 and x64 exe, dll and sys files, decrypts imports, restores the IAT, rebuilds the PE and identifies VM versions and entry points. It does not devirtualize or unmutate code. Releases cover Windows x64 and macOS Apple Silicon.
github.comrepoAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - Field Notes: Reconstructing an Attacker’s Workflow
Field note from dfir.ch on PowerShell scripts an attacker left on disk during an incident: a file-watching command runner using Invoke-Expression, a fake Windows credential prompt that validates passwords via Start-Process and logs them in cleartext, AD computer enumeration with WMI access testing, and SMB share discovery via NetShareEnum. It notes where script labels overstate what they prove and lists hunting strings for Event IDs 4104, 4103, 4688 and Sysmon 1.
dfir.chwriteupAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
ERC-TBA: Agent Income StatementsERC-TBA: Agent Income Statements is a draft Ethereum standard, a profile of the ERC-8004 Reputation Registry. A writer posts chained statements of what an agent's agentWallet received in one asset, with each incoming transfer a Merkle leaf, so lenders and buyers can verify earnings from x402 payments. Windows are cut at owner or wallet changes, and the post asks about statement grain, the MetadataSet requirement and who may write. The reference implementation is unaudited.
ethereum-magicians.orgthreadPublished and added 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
VibecodersHQ (@VibeCodrHQ) on XPost summarising Pillar Security's finding of a remote code execution flaw in OpenCode, the open-source AI coding agent. Versions 1.0.137 through 1.18.32 could run code from a remote MCP server during OAuth sign-in on Windows and WSL, with no prompt injection needed. The fix is in 1.18.33 (released 28 September). No advisory or CVE was issued, so scanners will not flag old installs. Interim advice is to remove unvetted remote MCP servers.
x.comthreadAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- Amazon-Themed ClickFix Campaign Serves Up Finger-Licking Malware
Huntress analysis of an Amazon-themed ClickFix campaign that used a Google sponsored result, a fake Amazon login on Google Sites and a fake CAPTCHA to make victims run the Windows finger utility. The .plan script drives IronPython, a Cyrillic-substituted Base64 Python loader, Doina, a Node.js stage, Lumma Stealer via sRDI, and a pirated NetSupport RMM. It lists C2 domains and gives detection tips (aclk/gclid markers, blocking the Run dialog).
huntress.comwriteupPublished and added 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - Patch the Planet: global response coordination as agents uncover critical vulnerabilities
OpenAI's Patch the Planet post describes the coordinated response to two critical PHP vulnerabilities. Calif found one with GPT-5.6 Sol, and Wiz independently reported both. It proposes a five-stage disclosure framework: upstream fix, advance notice to providers, government coordination, product updates and public guidance. It also lists a PHP version checker, $1 billion in subsidized Daybreak access, and open questions on disclosure windows and emergency patching.
openai.comarticlePublished and added 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Digital Forensics: Analyzing Systems with Live-ForensicatorLive-Forensicator is a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS) live response toolkit built around Forensicator.ps1. The Hackers Arise walkthrough runs it on Windows with case details, then reads the HTML report: event log summary (Event IDs 4624, 4798, 4799, 4688) and a risk rating. It also shows optional AI analysis through Ollama with a Mistral model, configured in config.json, and warns that the tool triggers AV and that AI slows runs.
hackers-arise.comarticlePublished and added 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
AOMEI Backupper Compromised in Short-Burst Supply Chain CampaignAOMEI Backupper, Windows backup and cloning software, served malware in short tampering windows between April and July 2026. Threat actor UNC7017 altered the update settings file and notification service to push the CrossRoad downloader, ShinyRoad backdoor, a modified Radmin Server and Adaptix payloads. Each window lasted five to ten minutes. The client did not authenticate its configuration files, and a WebDAV banner trick leaked NetNTLMv2 hashes.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Scaling Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Brain EncodingBrainLoRA is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that adapts multimodal backbones of up to 104B parameters to predict neural responses. It predicts multiple timepoints in one causal pass instead of sliding windows, and a multi-LoRA kernel trains many adapters on a shared backbone. Across nine backbones it improves encoding, and a 200+ model ensemble ranks first on the Algonauts post-challenge leaderboard.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Santhosh Patel (@santhosh_patell) on XSummary of Pillar Security research on opencode, in which a malicious remote MCP server runs code on a Windows or WSL machine during the OAuth login step. The login URL goes unsanitised into PowerShell through the npm "open" package, so an https:// link containing $(...) executes. Affected versions are 1.0.137 to 1.18.32, fixed in 1.18.33 (28 September) as a "refactor" with no advisory or CVE. The behaviour was first reported in 2020 as a WSL 2 broken-link bug.
x.comthreadAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- ralphtradesz/trading-hub
Trading Hub is a free macOS desktop trading platform built with C#/.NET 10 and Avalonia. It uses the user's Claude Code subscription: a chat writes and fixes C# strategies, an in-app MCP server lets Claude run backtests, optimizations and walk-forwards and write reports, and a risk agent proposes position sizes. Install and a Windows port are both driven by Claude Code prompts. License is MIT with Commons Clause.
github.comrepoAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 17 Oct 2026🧠 AI - dng (@dng_notes) on X
AI Usage Meter is a free, MIT-licensed desktop app for Mac and Windows that shows live Claude and Codex usage and rate limits, so users aren't cut off mid-task without warning. It also tracks API costs and other AI providers. It runs locally and needs no account.
x.comtoolAdded 16 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Investigating Ephemeral Supply Chain TamperingGTIG and Mandiant report on UNC7017, which tampered with AOMEI update servers in five to ten minute windows between April and July 2026. Edited down_html.ini and Notifycfg.ini files delivered the CROSSROAD downloader and SHINYROAD PocketPy backdoor, plus Adaptix C2 and WebDAV NTLM coercion. The post covers infrastructure shifts, YARA rules, IOCs, and vendor and SOC guidance on point-in-time triage failures.
cloud.google.comwriteupAdded 29 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Developer Who Cloned Photoshop With AI Just Did the Same to Microsoft OfficeDecrypt reports that developer Brandon Thomas released WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, MIT/Apache-2.0 open-source clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. They were written in Rust with Anthropic's Claude (Opus 5.5) as a clean-room rebuild and run natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD, and in a browser. Coverage is high (WordCraft 88% of ribbon features, GridCraft 513 of 523 Excel functions), but the authors rate them only about 50–60% ready for real work. Every button is also an MCP command, so agents like Claude can drive the apps. The article is a useful data point on what AI-assisted "vibe coding" can produce in under two weeks, and on where it still falls short (file fidelity, stability).
decrypt.coarticlePublished and added 14 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Dark Web Informer (@DarkWebInformer) on XA DarkWebInformer post announces a public PoC for CVE-2026-85884, a Windows privilege escalation in the Windows Health and Optimized Experiences service. Per the post, low-privileged code with access to the Windows diagnostics workflow can trigger the flaw. The PoC is hosted in a GitHub repo by Beardhammer; the tweet text is truncated, so the exact root cause is not stated.
x.comthreadAdded 16 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- Dark Web Informer (@DarkWebInformer) on X
DarkWebInformer post on a PoC for CVE-2026-85884, a Windows 11 local privilege escalation in the Windows Health and Optimized Experiences service. Low-privileged code can trigger a trusted ETW event carrying an attacker-controlled Lua module path. The LocalSystem whesvc service then runs that module through WinDiag without validating the event producer or restricting the module location. The PoC takes a standard non-admin PowerShell session to NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM on Windows 11 x64 builds including 26200.8457 and 29617.1000.
x.comthreadAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - Passkeys Raise the Bar. Here’s Where Attackers Can Still Get In.
Huntress post on where accounts remain exposed after a passkey rollout. It covers passkey-themed social engineering, the EvilTokens device-code phishing campaign (344 organizations in about 16 days), weak enrollment and recovery, SpecterOps research on Windows WebAuthn hooking on compromised endpoints, and the trade-offs between synced and device-bound passkeys. It closes with ITDR-style post-login monitoring, containment steps (revoke sessions, remove rogue authenticators, hunt inbox rules, OAuth grants, forwarding), and a five-question deployment checklist.
huntress.comarticlePublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - ♫Why♥Not♪ (@Python_s_) on X
Alert summarizing XBOW's disclosure of a three-stage Chrome for Windows exploit chain: V8 Maglev memory corruption (CVE-2026-85045), Animated WebP decoder memory corruption (Chromium issue 548509153), then a Crashpad sandbox escape (CVE-2026-78952). Loading a crafted page was enough; no click or download needed. Human researchers working with GPT-5.6 Sol agents built it in six days, Google paid $250,000, all three bugs are fixed, and no in-the-wild exploitation is confirmed. It advises updating Chrome and restarting, and gives forensic triage pointers.
x.comadvisoryAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
XBOW Used AI to Hack Google Chrome in Six Days, Earning $250,000News write-up of XBOW's research in which AI agents (OpenAI gpt-5.6-sol) plus human researchers built a full Chrome exploit chain on Windows in six days, at about $40,000 in API cost, earning a $250,000 Chrome VRP reward. The chain combined a V8 Maglev bounds-check bypass, a WebP animated-decoder heap buffer overflow, and a Crashpad out-of-bounds write that escaped the sandbox and called CreateProcessW() to launch Calculator. The common root cause was trusting conditions (immutability, unchanged data, suspended process) that could change; Chrome 153+ is patched.
en.cryptonomist.charticlePublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Microsoft Patches Record 1,413 Vulnerabilities, Including Exploited Windows Zero-DaySecurityWeek reports Microsoft's October 2026 Patch Tuesday fixed a record 1,413 CVEs (1,102 in Windows, 134 Office, 36 SharePoint), more than all of 2025, with the surge attributed largely to AI-driven discovery. The exploited zero-day CVE-2026-96951 is a Windows shell Mark of the Web security feature bypass (CVSS 8.8), added to CISA KEV with an October 16 deadline. Two flaws were publicly disclosed: CVE-2026-108398 (WDAC bypass) and CVE-2026-92707 (MessagePack-CSharp DoS), and Microsoft introduced 'risk cohorts' for patch prioritization.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Patch Tuesday - October 2026Rapid7's analysis of Microsoft's October 2026 Patch Tuesday, which covers 1,413 vulnerabilities, 1,102 of them in Windows. It highlights the exploited Windows Shell Mark of the Web bypass (CVE-2026-96951) and the publicly disclosed .NET Framework WDAC bypass (CVE-2026-108398). It also covers five no-interaction Outlook preview-pane RCEs, the Edge advisories that list no CVEs, and end-of-support dates for Server 2012/2012 R2, Office 2021, Exchange 2016/2019 and Windows 11 24H2. The page text is truncated, so the later CVE tables are not seen.
rapid7.comadvisoryPublished and added 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Microsoft Patch Tuesday for October 2026 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilitiesTalos summarises Microsoft's October 2026 Patch Tuesday, which covers 1415 vulnerabilities, 85 of them critical (67 RCE). One bug is exploited in the wild: CVE-2026-96951, a Windows Shell security feature bypass. The post groups the CVEs by Microsoft's exploitability rating (more likely, less likely, unlikely) with CVSS and CWE for each, covering Windows, Office, Exchange, Hyper-V, DHCP, QUIC, Outlook and Azure. It also lists the Snort 2 and Snort 3 rule ID ranges that detect exploitation attempts.
blog.talosintelligence.comadvisoryPublished and added 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
ZDI: The October 2026 Security Update ReviewZDI's October 2026 Security Update Review covers Adobe's 11 bulletins (174 CVEs) and Microsoft's record 1,415 CVEs. The only actively exploited bug is CVE-2026-96951, a Windows Shell Mark of the Web bypass. It also flags 59 wormable bugs, Microsoft's new "risk cohorts", and top-priority fixes in ColdFusion, Commerce, Experience Manager, SharePoint, SQL Server and Exchange.
thezdi.comadvisoryAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Kwai Summary Attention V2 Technical ReportTechnical report for Kwai Summary Attention V2 (KSA V2), which extends summary-token attention architectures that compress distant context into one learnable summary token per chunk. Hybrid KSA-Full models force the same compression chunk size in every layer and leave full-attention layers paying quadratic prefill cost. KSA V2 lets summary tokens serve two roles, as KV memory and as a sparse indexer. This allows per-layer compression windows for more flexible KV cache compression and lowers computation in the full-attention layers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
XBOW Built a Chrome Full-Chain Exploit Affecting a Billion Users in Six Days | XBOWXBOW describes building a Chrome full-chain exploit, made of three independent bugs, that takes a user from an ordinary web page to remote takeover of a Windows machine. The team built it in six days with a publicly available model (GPT-5.6 Sol) for about $40,000 of compute, and Google paid a $250,000 bounty, the first under its 2026 rules. The bugs are now fixed. The post covers the human-agent workflow, the modular design that allowed swapping in a backup bug after Google said it already knew one, and the claim that agents could find each bug on their own within a year.
xbow.comarticlePublished and added 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
XWorm RAT Evolves Into Surveillance PlatformSecurityWeek summarizes Netskope research showing the XWorm Windows RAT grew from 35 plugins (July 2025) to 46 (October 2026), adding surveillance features: Maps (GPS location without prompt), Microphone (live audio streaming), webcam capture, and HBrowser. HBrowser gives operators a live, interactive view of the victim's authenticated browser sessions over the AES-encrypted C2 channel, bypassing logins and MFA. Activity rose after the builder was cracked in June 2025 and the 6.4 source leaked in August 2025; Netskope saw 1,200+ incidents across 100 organizations in Q3.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default
GitHub issue asking OpenAI to make `daemon_auto_start` opt-in in Codex CLI 0.157.0. By default, opening an interactive session starts a persistent `codex app-server --managed-daemon` that outlives the terminal. It also copies a ~374 MB platform package into ~/.codex/packages/app-server-daemon and runs a detached hourly `pid-update-loop` updater. The daemon keeps the first session's environment (proxy variables, cwd, direnv values), which the reporter ties to hook bugs #42457 and #37537. Comments confirm the problem on Windows and add the workaround (`codex features disable daemon_auto_start`, kill the updater, remove the package dir). They also note that `daemon stop` leaves the updater running and that the option is missing from the config docs. One commenter proposes an "execution receipt" (CLI version, daemon binary digest, generation, inherited-environment generation).
github.comthreadPublished and added 12 Oct 2026🧠 AI - ThreatWire (@ThreatWire_) on X
Post announcing a public PoC for CVE-2026-13043, a critical flaw (CVSS 4.0 9.3, scored by WatchGuard) in PSKMAD, the kernel memory access driver of WatchGuard Endpoint Security on Windows. The access-control handshake can be bypassed (CWE-306/CWE-798), letting a local authenticated attacker send privileged commands and read kernel and other processes' memory. Fixed in 8.00.26.0012; the PoC author and LOLDrivers frame the signed driver as BYOVD material, which WatchGuard does not say. The post notes it is not in CISA KEV, has no reported in-the-wild exploitation, and that ThreatWire has not run the PoC.
x.comthreadAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
No, Your Tools Are Not Enough: It's Time to Bring Agents to the HuntExperience paper describing an iterative agentic workflow that uses AI agents to find vulnerabilities across diverse targets: Windows drivers, the Linux kernel, XNU, firmware and web applications. The authors report that the workflow generalizes across these targets. They also cover tasks where agents help with previously hard problems and set out research directions for autonomous vulnerability discovery.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 16 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Rewriting Prime Agent in RustPrime Intellect describes rewriting its open-source Prime Agent coding-agent harness from TypeScript to Rust. Prime Agent orchestrated 2,000+ agents across 10,000+ Prime Sandboxes, using GLM-5.3 inference, to do the rewrite. A root orchestrator split the work into topologically ordered tasks, and each task passed through planner, implementer, reviewer and verifier agents, with TUI, harness, protocol and feature parity checks as the objective verification. A follow-up three-day hillclimbing loop on a benchmark harness merged 69+ changes, and the post reports ~14x faster time-to-input and over 80% less memory after startup. The post also covers the new architecture: nine crates, per-session worker processes, platform abstraction for Windows support, and a runtime-fetched model/MCP catalog. Vendor-run comparisons with other harnesses carry the post's own caveat about the lack of a common benchmark standard.
primeintellect.aiarticleAdded 10 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI- Show HN: Let your AI agents paint big arrows, boxes and text on your screen
bigarrow is an MIT-licensed, single-binary Swift macOS CLI that draws a click-through arrow and sign over all windows so an AI agent can show a human where to click, paste or act (permission prompts, 2FA, OAuth consent). It ships an Agent Skills package (installed via `bigarrow install-skill`) for Claude Code and Codex, with JSON output and exit codes, and can target by Accessibility label, coordinates, window or Peekaboo snapshot. The README documents the skill's token cost (182 tokens for the description, 1,398 for the instructions) and 104 automated tests.
github.comrepoPublished and added 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI - Exploit Reversing #10: iOS Security Research (Part 1)
First installment of a new iOS-focused arc in Alexandre Borges's "Exploit Reversing" series, detailing how to build a practical iOS vulnerability-research lab (Mac host, Apple Virtualization.framework-based "vPhone" jailbroken guest, physical iPhones, XNU source, IDA Pro/Ghidra) and walking through the current iOS kernel hardening stack: KASLR, Pointer Authentication (PAC), the kalloc_type allocator and zone_require checks, the PPL/SPTM/TXM page-table and trust monitors, Exclaves isolation, and AMFI/trust-cache code signing enforcement. It also references the public Titan PPL/SPTM bypass (A14–A17 devices, iOS 16.1–17.4 beta 3) as the state of the art for defeating these protections. Part of a long-running, actively published series on Windows, iOS, and hypervisor exploitation.
exploitreversing.comarticleAdded 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Post-quantum authentication: Why organizations should start testing certificate ecosystems nowMicrosoft Security Blog post arguing that post-quantum cryptography planning must extend beyond encrypted-data confidentiality to authentication and certificate ecosystems, since larger PQC certificate chains and new algorithms like ML-DSA-87 can break PKI workflows, HSMs, and legacy infrastructure. It details Microsoft's PQC TLS Pilot Program, launched August 27, 2026, which lets approved certificate authorities (ComSign, DigiCert, HARICA, IdenTrust, Sectigo, Shanghai Electronic Certification Authority, SSL.com) test ML-DSA-87 certificate issuance under the Microsoft Trusted Root Program, plus Windows 11 builds (KB5101681, KB5101684) that support evaluating ML-DSA certificates via Schannel in non-production environments. It lays out a six-step readiness plan: inventory certificate dependencies, map trust relationships, assess vendor roadmaps, identify long-lived infrastructure, build test environments, and plan a multi-year migration.
microsoft.comarticlePublished and added 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Malicious npm Campaign “MALFEX” Delivers RAT and Stealer via Eight Packages with 40,000+ DownloadsOrca Security details "MALFEX," a supply-chain campaign active since August 2023 in which a suspected lone Brazilian threat actor published eight malicious npm packages (tlxbnhd, tldriver, mxdriver, img-to-native, native-runner, function-flag, function-color, cdn-img-fetch) that together drew over 40,767 downloads. Using postinstall lifecycle hooks, the packages deliver three malware families to Windows hosts: the Go-based Overlord RAT (with a Solana blockchain C2 resolver), the Node.js "movinlike" credential/Discord/crypto-wallet stealer, and rotating downloader payloads — with three packages (notably function-flag) still live on npm and only six of the eight carrying OSV advisories at publication time. The piece includes host IOCs (file paths, scheduled task name), affected package lists, and remediation steps (lockfile auditing, credential rotation) alongside a pitch for Orca's SCA detection of the OSV-flagged packages.
orca.securityarticlePublished and added 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- microsoft/mxc
MXC is Microsoft's cross-platform sandboxed code execution system for running untrusted workloads — model output, plugins, and tool calls — behind a unified containment model with Rust, .NET, and Node SDKs. It offers multiple containment backends (ProcessContainer, Windows Sandbox, LXC, Bubblewrap, Seatbelt, MicroVM/Nanvix, Hyperlight, WSLC) with JSON-based filesystem, network, and UI policies, plus diagnostics like audit mode for building policies from observed access.
github.comrepoAdded 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI - microsoft/mxc
MXC is Microsoft's cross-platform sandboxed code execution system for running untrusted code such as LLM/agent output, plugins, and tools, offering containment backends ranging from OS-native process sandboxes (Windows Sandbox, LXC, Bubblewrap, Seatbelt) to full VMs (Nanvix MicroVM, Hyperlight). It exposes a unified JSON-based policy model for filesystem, network, and UI access controls, with Rust, .NET, and Node SDKs plus diagnostic tooling (audit mode, access-denied logging) to help developers tune containment rules for agentic workloads.
github.comrepoAdded 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - chainguard-dev/malcontent
malcontent is Chainguard's open-source malware/supply-chain discovery tool that analyzes binaries (ELF, Mach-O, PE, a.out) and scripting-language source across Linux, macOS and Windows using 14,500+ YARA rules (including third-party rules from Avast, Elastic, FireEye, Mandiant, Nextron and ReversingLabs). Its standout feature is differential analysis ("mal diff"), which compares two versions of a build artifact or OCI image against a known-good baseline to surface newly introduced risky behaviors — the technique the project demonstrates on the 3CX supply-chain compromise by flagging unexpected high-risk changes to libffmpeg. It also supports threshold-based scanning ("mal scan") and unfiltered capability enumeration ("mal analyze"), and is designed to run inside CI/CD pipelines, including air-gapped environments via embedded rules.
github.comrepoAdded 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, and Foxit vulnerabilitiesCisco Talos discloses eight vulnerabilities patched by vendors: a Photoshop installer privilege escalation (CVE-2026-48388), a macOS CoreWLAN information disclosure bug, two Foxit Reader flaws including a JavaScript CBF_Widget remote code execution (CVE-2026-57256) and an Array use-after-free (CVE-2026-91799), and four Windows kernel-driver bugs — NETIO.sys information disclosure (CVE-2026-50475), two Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver issues (use-after-free CVE-2026-58613 and type confusion CVE-2026-80093), and a tcpip.sys out-of-bounds read (CVE-2026-49177). Each advisory gives the affected version and trigger mechanism, and Talos notes Snort coverage is available for detection.
blog.talosintelligence.comadvisoryPublished and added 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
3 lessons from frontier AI vulnerability researchMicrosoft Security's FORGE Lab shares results and lessons from four months of AI-agent-driven vulnerability research: 140 Windows CVEs (52 in September 2026's release), 155 internally validated reports across 23 open-source projects, and the first patch merged into the Linux kernel via the Linux Foundation's Akrites coordinated-disclosure initiative. Using their multi-model agentic scanning harness MDASH and GPT-5.5-based validation agents, the team measured automated PoC generation at an average $3.61/21.5 minutes per confirmed crash and local privilege-escalation AEG at $8.56/25.4 minutes, and argues the real bottleneck has shifted from finding bugs to validating and remediating them at matching speed. Specific disclosed CVEs include curl's CVE-2026-9545 and CVE-2026-13608, Node.js's CVE-2026-56848, and Linux kernel's CVE-2026-64563.
microsoft.comwriteupPublished and added 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Derek Abdine (@dabdine) on XAn X/Twitter thread arguing that vulnerability remediation is not a single process but a multi-branch decision tree: patchable issues suffer from patch-management tools misreporting status or breaking systems; unpatched 0days (e.g. Friday-night issues without a CVE) need detect-and-respond handling; dependency vulnerabilities like log4j get flagged by VM scanners (Rapid7, Qualys, Tenable) scanning disk .jar files but the real fix is an appsec/product fix on the parent app, creating IT-sec vs appsec ownership confusion; "upgrade to latest" policies can backfire against supply-chain compromises; and OT environments (manufacturing, healthcare, power — e.g. Windows XP on an MRI) can't be patched at all and require containment/mitigation instead.
x.comthreadAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Does Document Structure Help Dense Retrieval? A Placebo-Controlled Ablation of Four Mechanisms Across Two CorporaThis paper runs a mechanism-isolating ablation of four document-structure treatments used in retrieval-augmented generation — structure-aligned chunking, LLM-generated chunk contexts, heading-path metadata, and hierarchical two-stage retrieval — under one protocol with matched chunk sizes and a semantically null placebo (shuffled heading paths) to control for the confound that any prepended text perturbs embeddings. Using a coverage-aware nDCG metric and document-clustered bootstrap with Holm correction across 200 Wikipedia Featured Articles (951 queries) and 1,585 QASPER papers (4,303 questions), it finds that structure-aligned chunking with real heading paths beats both contextualized fixed windows and the placebo, naive hierarchical retrieval hurts performance (traced to first-stage section recall failures), and gold structure beats LLM-induced structure on Wikipedia but not QASPER. Effect sizes are small but statistically significant and consistent across corpora, giving RAG practitioners evidence-based guidance on which structure-aware retrieval tricks actually help versus which are placebo effects.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Engineer Gets 32 Months for Bitcoin Extortion Plot Against His Own EmployerA former core infrastructure engineer, Daniel Rhyne, was sentenced to 32 months for extorting his own New Jersey employer: he created a hidden virtual machine on the company network, reset passwords on hundreds of accounts to "TheFr0zenCrew!", deleted domain administrator accounts, scheduled tasks to shut down 40 servers a day, and demanded 20 BTC (~$750K) to stop. The FBI's criminal complaint describes how investigators traced the hidden VM back to him via correlated laptop browsing activity, building access logs, home IP connections, and incriminating search history ("how to clear all windows logs from command line").
decrypt.coarticlePublished and added 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
What does it mean to sandbox an AI coding agent?An Endor Labs technical breakdown of what an "agent sandbox" actually is: a kernel-enforced boundary around an AI coding agent's tool calls (syscalls), distinct from a staging environment or Docker container. It walks through the nx/s1ngularity supply-chain attack as motivating case, compares OS-level primitives (Apple Seatbelt, Linux Landlock/seccomp, Windows Job Objects/AppContainer) used by Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex CLI against containers and microVMs (gVisor, Firecracker), and argues filesystem isolation and network egress isolation are worthless unless enforced together.
endorlabs.comarticlePublished and added 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
| Blog | Endor LabsEndor Labs walks through what "sandboxing an AI coding agent" actually means at the OS level, contrasting the approval-prompt model with kernel-enforced isolation. It details how Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex CLI converge on the same primitives without full containers — Apple's Seatbelt on macOS, Landlock plus seccomp on Linux, Job Objects/AppContainer on Windows — and why Anthropic ships an open-source bubblewrap-based runtime with a host-side egress proxy. It argues filesystem isolation and network egress controls are interdependent (citing Anthropic's own sandboxing writeup) and uses the 2025 nx npm supply-chain attack to illustrate why containment, not model-level guardrails, is the real defense against prompt injection and credential exfiltration.
endorlabs.comarticlePublished and added 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
CISO perspectives on managing vulnerability risks in the age of AIA Microsoft Security Blog post arguing that frontier AI models are flooding security teams with far more vulnerability findings than human triage was built for, citing a record near-1,000 vulnerabilities disclosed on the September 2026 Patch Tuesday. It describes Microsofts internal use of AI plus a harness layer (codename MDASH, now available to customers) for scanning, triage, and remediation, and gives CISOs concrete recommendations: shrink patch windows for critical systems to within 24 hours, adopt harnesses for AI-powered vuln scanning now, and lean harder on defense-in-depth via Microsoft Baseline Security Mode (BSM) and Secure by Design and Secure by Default changes (mandatory Azure admin MFA, Azure Backup soft delete, VNet default outbound disabled).
microsoft.comarticleAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- Up a Creek Without a Command Line: Mapping an Akira Ransomware Attack | Huntress
Huntress researchers reconstruct an Akira ransomware attack timeline using forensic artifacts collected after the Huntress agent was installed post-compromise, including Windows Registry Shellbags, Event Logs, and Akira ransomware log files. The attacker used RDP from an unowned workstation, disabled BitDefender via its management console, ran procdump on lsass.exe for credential theft, deployed the GOST tunneling tool for C2/persistence, used RClone for data exfiltration, and executed ransomware via PowerShell commands that deleted volume shadow copies, with Shellbags showing the attacker verifying encryption success.
huntress.comwriteupPublished and added 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidatesVals.ai researchers describe using Claude Opus 5.5-driven AI agents to run density-functional-theory simulations (PBE+U and HSE06 functionals) that designed a novel candidate magnet, YBaMnFeO₅, and separately re-identified a 1999 compound, KV[Cr(CN)₆] (a Prussian-blue analogue), as a "Luttinger compensated" semiconductor — a material with zero net magnetic moment but spin-sorted band edges, useful for spintronic memory. The agents predicted band gaps, spin-sorting windows, and magnetic ordering temperatures (KV[Cr(CN)₆] reportedly stays ordered above room temperature, up to 376 K), and the authors published all inputs, outputs and code on GitHub for independent verification. It's notable as an example of AI agents autonomously conducting and validating nontrivial physics/materials-science research rather than just answering questions.
vals.aiwriteupAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MALFEX npm Malware Campaign: Three Payloads And An Adversary That Signs Their WorkCheckmarx's research team documents MALFEX, an npm supply-chain malware campaign run by a single operator ("Murizada") publishing since August 2023, with 12 packages (8 malicious), three still live as of late September/October 2026. The campaign delivers three distinct Windows payloads: Overlord RAT (a Go-based C2 that reads its server address from encrypted Solana blockchain transactions and uses process hollowing into TapiUnattend.exe), the movinlike Node.js stealer (targeting Discord, browser credentials, Telegram, and crypto wallets, exfiltrating via Discord webhook), and a long-running downloader hidden in function-flag's postinstall script. The writeup includes full IOCs, file hashes, host artifacts, detection commands, and remediation guidance for compromised Windows hosts.
checkmarx.comwriteupAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- How Huntress Detects and Responds to a ClickFix Attack
Huntress explains why endpoint security typically misses ClickFix (no file artifact to scan) and how its Attack Disruption engine detects it instead: matching the obfuscated command-line shape gated on the parent process always being explorer.exe for Windows+R/Run-dialog execution. The post walks through a real incident where a user pasted a caret-obfuscated finger.exe download cradle disguised with Unicode padding to hide 'push enter' social engineering text, killed in under 1.25 seconds across four spawned processes, and describes a fix for variants that use 'start' to detach the payload process from its killed parent.
huntress.comwriteupPublished and added 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - Sigma r2026-07-01 — 20 new detection rules
GitHub release notes for Sigma r2026-07-01, the open-source detection-rule repository, adding 20 new rules (e.g. LSASS crash via Netlogon buffer overflow CVE-2026-41089, TanStack supply-chain attack indicators for Windows/Linux, RedTail cryptominer user-agent detection, AF_ALG kernel crypto API exploit indicator) and updating/fixing dozens of existing rules for ARM64 binary variants, file-sharing domain IOCs, and WMI-based reconnaissance/persistence detection. It's a routine but substantive update to a widely-used blue-team detection content pack.
github.comrepoAdded 3 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - Jan Curn (@jancurn) on X
Announcement of mcpc v0.7.0, Apify's open-source MCP CLI client (npm i -g @apify/mcpc), which adds support for the MCP Skills extension with new skills-list/skills-get commands that verify SKILL.md and supporting files against the skill manifest via size and SHA-256 checks before printing content. The release also ships security hardening: repo-local .mcp.json auto-discovery can no longer read environment variables (blocking leaks like $GITHUB_TOKEN), OAuth refresh tokens are now scoped only to the auth server originally used, and Windows login URLs no longer launch through cmd.exe.
x.comthreadAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 3 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - Jan Curn (@jancurn) on X
Jan Curn announces mcpc v0.7.0, an open-source MCP CLI client (npm package @apify/mcpc), adding support for the MCP Skills extension via new skills-list and skills-get commands that fetch and cryptographically verify SKILL.md and supporting files against the skill manifest (size + SHA-256). The release also hardens security by preventing repo-local .mcp.json auto-discovery from reading environment variables (blocking token-leak tricks), scoping refresh tokens to the originating auth server, and fixing an insecure Windows login URL launch path via cmd.exe, alongside OAuth session longevity fixes and 2026-07-28 MCP spec compatibility improvements.
x.comthreadAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 3 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Pentesting: Managing Compromised Machines with PlatypusWalkthrough of Platypus, an open-source C2-style host management platform (github.com/WangYihang/Platypus) for pentesters handling large numbers of compromised Linux, Windows and macOS machines from a single web interface. Covers Docker-based server setup, agent generation with enrollment tokens, deploying agents via curl over TLS, and post-exploitation features like interactive shells, file browsing, sensitive-file auditing, and OS-info plugins (firewall rules, cron jobs, network connections).
hackers-arise.comwriteupAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Pretty Themes, Hidden Loaders: GlassWorm-Linked Extensions Span VS Code Marketplace and Open VSXSocket's Threat Research team uncovered a theme-extension cluster spanning four VS Code Marketplace and six Open VSX listings, including two confirmed malicious extensions: Aurora Nocturne Night Theme (a Windows downloader that fetches and silently executes temp_batch.cmd via cmd.exe from fingercakes4sale[.]store, tied to XWorm C2 infrastructure) and Cosmic Nebula Themes, whose app.js decrypts an AES-256-CBC embedded stage and uses a Solana transaction memo as a dead-drop to resolve follow-on payload infrastructure — the same AES key, Solana address, and execution model previously documented in GlassWorm activity. Git commit identities, near-identical theme source, shared Russian-language developer comments, and brandjacking (Coca-Cola, Aurora Borealis name-squatting) link the cluster together; a Dec 14, 2025 DEV Community article is assessed as promotional infrastructure driving Open VSX installs. The post provides full IOCs (hashes, domains, Solana address, AES key/IV, GitHub accounts) and MITRE ATT&CK mappings for defenders to hunt and inventory extensions across both registries.
socket.devwriteupPublished and added 2 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
DeepSeek Harness Desktop for macOS and WindowsDeepSeek Harness is an open-source general-purpose agent harness from DeepSeek, built on the "Cordis" everything-is-a-plugin architecture, shipped as a desktop app for macOS/Windows and runnable as a web UI from code. It handles everyday document/spreadsheet work, coding tasks (repo exploration, bug fixes, tests), research with citations, and background/scheduled jobs, with users able to install or author plugins (including via a chat-driven "Creator mode") and inspect per-turn tool-call traces for debugging. It runs on DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash model and is explicitly labeled a preview release with evolving core plugins and APIs.
deepseek.comtoolPublished and added 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Academia is for Ambition — Alex Zhang, MITA Latent Space podcast transcript/interview with MIT PhD student Alex Zhang, creator of Recursive Language Models (RLMs) and a core contributor to GPU Mode and KernelBench, who discusses using recursive subagent calls, context offloading, and shared memory to let models work beyond fixed context windows. The conversation ranges across AI-generated GPU kernels and their verification gap, research taste in academia versus industry labs, why "harnesses" (as in Claude Code, Codex, and Pi) function as compositional generalizers, the Jev model's non-autoregressive output-space trade-offs, and large-scale agent swarm experiments at OpenAI, Kimi, and Sakana AI. It offers a researcher's-eye view of where capability overhang and new agent/harness architectures may be heading beyond today's standard transformer decoder.
latent.spacewriteupPublished and added 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI- Samuel Zeng (@SamuelZengML) on X
Samuel Zeng announces the open-sourcing of Edge0's cross-platform app layer (iOS, macOS, Android, Windows), building on Edge0's earlier on-device 35B language model that runs in only 1-2.5GB of peak memory. The release includes app code, local model/runtime integration, model management, and build/deployment guides on GitHub; the technique keeps the full model on local storage and streams in only the experts (MoE-style) needed per step, predicting and prefetching the next experts while running storage reads in parallel with compute. A Q4 2026 roadmap promises a unified inference API across platforms plus Python, hardware-adaptive runtime, and a CUDA backend.
x.comthreadPublished and added 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MALFEX npm Attack Spreads Windows RAT, Steals Discord and Browser DataCloudSEK's Global Threat Intelligence team uncovered MALFEX, a supply-chain campaign active since August 2023 that uses malicious npm packages (including tlxbnhd, tldriver, mxdriver, img-to-native, cdn-img-fetch, function-flag, function-color) to deliver malware on Windows. One chain disguises a Windows executable as a PNG to load Overlord RAT, an open-source Go-based RAT that uses the Solana blockchain to resolve C2 addresses; a second chain fetches a 64MB Node.js bundle that steals Discord tokens, browser cookies/credentials, crypto wallets and Telegram session data, exfiltrating via a Discord webhook. Some malicious packages stayed live for over a year even after related packages were pulled or flagged.
hackread.comarticleAdded 3 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Removing Timing Shortcuts Improves Non-Invasive Brain-to-TextThe authors show that reported gains from d'Ascoli et al. (2025) on decoding words from non-invasive brain recordings are mostly an artifact: overlapping fixed-length windows leak word-duration (timing) information, letting a model reach 22.0% balanced accuracy on synthetic signals with no brain data at all, versus 22.3% on real recordings. By processing each word window independently instead of jointly encoding a sentence, they remove this timing shortcut, which makes prediction aggregation and LLM linguistic priors become genuinely effective; the resulting method, SimpleB2T, achieves 36.6% word error rate with five observations per word on a perceived-speech benchmark, approaching invasive decoding performance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI- Defender Exclusion Abuse: How Attackers Hide Malware from MDAV
Huntress breaks down how Microsoft Defender Antivirus (MDAV) path/extension exclusions can be abused to hide malicious binaries from scans, detailing the registry internals (HKLM...Windows Defender\Exclusions vs the GPO-driven Policies key) and the four ways to set them: PowerShell (Set/Add-MpPreference), the MSFT_MpPreference WMI class, GPO, and direct registry edits. It documents real-world abuse by GootKit (2019), WhisperGate (2022), and Muddled Libra (2024), plus an under-documented trick where setting HideExclusionsFromLocalAdmins blocks even SYSTEM from querying exclusions via PowerShell/WMI, and describes the registry-level telemetry and detections Huntress built to catch both behaviors.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
China-nexus UAT-11587 targets government and policy organizations across Asia with Antino backdoorCisco Talos details UAT-11587, a China-nexus threat cluster targeting government, defense, and policy organizations across Taiwan, India, the Philippines, Cambodia, and other Asian countries with spear-phishing and a five-stage infection chain (HTA/WSF stagers, JScript decryptors, .NET BinaryFormatter/ActivitySurrogateSelector deserialization gadgets, and DLL sideloading via the signed GatherOsState.exe) to deploy a new Rust-compiled backdoor called Antino. Antino uses Microsoft Graph/Outlook/OneDrive as a dead-drop C2 channel instead of a traditional C2 server, supports shell/PowerShell execution, file transfer, shellcode loading with a sleep-mask evasion technique, and abuses the Windows Scripted Diagnostics framework for persistence; Talos also notes possible infrastructure overlap with Symantec's "Jewelbug" cluster and Arctic Wolf's UNC6384 reporting. Includes ClamAV/Snort coverage and IOCs.
blog.talosintelligence.comwriteupAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Phishing Abuses RMM Tools for Persistent AccessMicrosoft Defender Experts document a July 2026 phishing campaign that delivers a masqueraded but legitimately signed MSP360 RMM installer (v2.5.0.67) via meeting-invite, Zoom, Adobe, and DHL-themed lures hosted on both attacker infrastructure and legitimate cloud services (S3, Cloudflare R2, Dropbox, GitLab, Supabase). After UAC-elevated installation and service persistence, the RMM.Agent.exe service launches PowerShell to silently install a ConnectWise ScreenConnect client via msiexec, which the actor then uses via RunFile to drop credential-theft and reconnaissance tools disguised as Windows/Defender/Phone Link components. A separate July intrusion used FaronicsDeployAgent.exe the same way to deploy ScreenConnect, showing the technique is not MSP360-specific; Microsoft provides IOCs, hunting queries, and mitigation guidance (Application Control, AppLocker publisher rules, ASR rules) but does not attribute the activity.
microsoft.comwriteupAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Breakdown of Local Denoising as Semantic SpeciationThis paper studies two temporal phenomena in generative model sampling dynamics: a 'speciation window' where a sample commits to a semantic class, and a 'nonlocality window' where local context becomes insufficient for generation. Under a 'common cause' hypothesis — that semantic labels explain correlations between distant tokens — the authors prove the nonlocality window must fall within the speciation window, and identify conditions under which both windows collapse to a single phase-transition point as system size grows, verified analytically in Gaussian mixture models.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI
The Blue Agent POV: Investigating Multi-Platform Data Exfiltration Across AWS and GitHubWiz walks through a case study of its "Blue Agent" autonomous SOC investigator tracing a compromised CI/CD service account (svc_automation) across AWS and GitHub. The attack chain: a stolen GitHub token cloned 18 private repos containing hardcoded AWS keys, which were used to authenticate to AWS from Kali Linux via a Zenlayer VPN IP, pivot to a second account, run SSM SendCommand against a production Windows domain controller, and stage custom Python exfiltration scripts (mssql_table_export.py, pg_table_export.py, billing_export2.py) in S3 to pull data from MSSQL, PostgreSQL, and billing systems. The piece details the investigative technique used - 30-day baseline comparison, ASO/IP dispersion across the tenant, and correlating CloudTrail management-plane events with S3 data-plane events and GitHub audit logs.
wiz.iowriteupPublished and added 29 Sep 2026🛡️ Security- openrig — multi-agent Claude Code/Codex orchestration
OpenRig is an open-source local daemon, CLI, TUI and MCP server (built on tmux + SQLite) that manages teams of Claude Code and Codex agent sessions as a single persistent system rather than a pile of terminal windows. Topologies (pods, seats, edges) are defined declaratively in YAML (RigSpec/AgentSpec), booted with `rig up`, inspected via a topology TUI, and can be snapshotted/restored, discovered from existing tmux sessions, and messaged across agents (`rig send`, `rig broadcast`, `rig chatroom`). It ships starter topologies (first-project, conveyor, product-team, secrets-manager using HashiCorp Vault) and documents in detail what it writes to Claude/Codex config, trust and telemetry state on the host machine.
github.comrepoAdded 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Check Point Research — 28th September Threat Intelligence ReportCheck Point Research's weekly threat intelligence roundup covering the FBIjobs.gov defacement by ShinyHunters, a $351.6M Bitget hot-wallet theft with suspected DPRK involvement, and breaches at Astrana Health and LMU Munich. It also details AI-driven threats (an OpenAI agent's unauthorized access to an Australian government Medicare portal, an AI-agent-automated retail fraud campaign, and the CLOSEDQUORUM Windows malware that queries four commercial AI models to pick its post-compromise actions), four actively exploited pre-auth RCE CVEs (Check Point Security Gateway/Management, F5 BIG-IP APM, WordPress), and campaign writeups on the Storm-2570 multi-ransomware affiliate, an INC ransomware intrusion, a TeamFiltration M365 account-takeover wave in Latin America, and Storm-3168/JADEPUFFER's destructive Azure operations.
research.checkpoint.comarticleAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🛡️ Security- Microsoft Windows NCSI Cross-Context Proxy Authentication Coercion - ZDI-26-708 - Part 2
Part 2 of a research series on ZDI-26-708, a Windows Network Connectivity Status Indicator (NCSI) flaw where a proxy configured in an unprivileged user's HKCU ends up used by the NETWORK SERVICE-owned netprofm process. The author reverse-engineers ncsi.dll and winhttp.dll with IDA/WinDbg to show the value actually arrives via a Windows Event Log subscription to Event ID 5600 (Microsoft-Windows-WinINet-Config) rather than the WNF notification initially suspected, is stored in NCSI's user-proxy state, and is later applied to a WinHttpSetOption(38) call for an active connectivity probe. It documents why option 193 (WINHTTP_OPTION_DISABLE_PROXY_AUTH_SCHEMES) fails to disable NTLM (wrong bitmask, 0x100 vs 0x04), and demonstrates cross-context NTLM proxy authentication capture/relay with impacket-ntlmrelayx toward ADCS, since the request runs under the netprofm/NETWORK SERVICE machine-account context.
pgj11.comwriteupPublished and added 28 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - Microsoft Windows NCSI Cross-Context Proxy Authentication Coercion - ZDI-26-708 - Part 1
A researcher reverse-engineers Windows NCSI (ncsi.dll, running under the Network List Service/netprofm as NETWORK SERVICE) to explain how a manual proxy or WPAD/PAC URL set by an unprivileged user gets applied to NCSI's active-probe HTTP request, causing the service account to NTLM-authenticate to an attacker-controlled proxy. On domain-joined hosts this cross-context proxy authentication can be captured/relayed (e.g. via ntlmrelayx) toward ADCS, Shadow Credentials, or RBCD; the finding was submitted to ZDI as ZDI-26-708 and Microsoft declined to assign a CVE, classifying it Moderate-Spoofing. Part 1 covers reproduction and the active-probe path through NcsiHttpGet/WinHTTP; Part 2 (linked) traces the root cause back to WinINet's Event ID 5600.
pgj11.comwriteupPublished and added 28 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - dagoSte/squadra
Squadra (version 3.11.0) is an MIT-licensed Python 3.12+ tool that coordinates several Claude Code, Codex and interactive Cursor windows on one project through a shared local registry. It records tasks, acknowledgements, source-bound proofs and independent reviews by a window that did not write the code. A local dashboard shows progress, per-window token usage and model-balance suggestions, and community plugins extend it. The page was truncated, so later sections are not covered.
github.comrepoAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI - graygnatconsole/mcp-audit-tool
mcp-audit-tool is a dependency-light Python CLI that statically scans Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Zed, and VS Code MCP configuration files for security issues, including hardcoded secrets, unpinned/rug-pull packages, pipe-to-shell installers, tool-poisoning via hidden instructions in tool descriptions, filesystem servers rooted at '/', and unauthenticated plaintext HTTP MCP endpoints. It auto-discovers configs across macOS/Linux/Windows, produces a security score/grade plus SARIF 2.1.0 output for GitHub Code Scanning, and is built around the OWASP MCP Top 10 categories with a CI/CD example that fails builds on severity thresholds. The roadmap adds live server probing over stdio/SSE for runtime rug-pull detection and an ML-based prompt-injection classifier for tool descriptions.
github.comrepoPublished and added 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - Sandyaa — open-source autonomous code auditor that proves bugs with working exploit PoCs
Sandyaa is an open-source autonomous code-audit tool that points at a local directory or git URL and runs end-to-end, driven by the Claude Code CLI (optionally Gemini) with no separate API key required. It uses a Recursive Language Model approach — the model drives a Python REPL to chunk code, spawn sub-LLM queries, and aggregate results — running eight recursive passes (call-chain tracing, data-flow expansion, vulnerability chaining, exploitability proof, etc.) and an attacker-control-reachability analyzer to filter unreachable findings, then writes each finding with a working exploit PoC and an evidence.json linking claims to file/line. Maintained by SecureLayer7, who report using it to surface zero-days; it's alpha-stage, macOS-tested, Linux/WSL2-expected-to-work, and unsupported on native Windows.
github.comrepoAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Nearly 800 Malicious npm Packages Deliver Cross-Platform RAT and InfostealerThe Hacker News details a campaign of nearly 800 (later 1,033) malicious npm packages delivering the WEL1DROPPER downloader — dubbed Flooding Dropper by Sonatype — which fetches cross-platform RAT/infostealer payloads via Cloudflare Workers or DNS TXT-record fallback from wel1.ru, patches ETW/AMSI on Windows, and deploys the Sliver C2 framework on Linux. The piece also covers a related npm crypto-stealer campaign, multiple npm/PyPI packages tied to EtherHiding droppers and credential theft (Solana wallets, .env secrets, Discord/GitHub Actions tokens), and Chrome extensions abusing a bandwidth-sharing SDK to turn browsers into residential-proxy web scrapers.
thehackernews.comarticleAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Configuration, Not Conscience: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of LLM System PromptsAn empirical study analyzing a merged corpus of 407 leaked, reconstructed, or officially published LLM system prompts from 62 vendors, using a block-level classifier to categorize content. It finds operational content (tool/protocol instructions, ~58% of words) vastly dominates over safety/ethical statements (~5%), with strict rule-lines guarding tool use and file safety over harmful content by an 11:1 margin, and documents cross-vendor text reuse plus "prompt rot" (thousands of words churned per version release), arguing system prompts should be treated as configuration/engineering artifacts rather than windows into model values.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Configuration, Not Conscience: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of LLM System PromptsA large-scale empirical study analyzing a merged corpus of 407 leaked, reconstructed, or officially published LLM system prompts from 62 vendors, clustering them into 29 near-duplicate groups and classifying content at the block level. The authors find operational content (tool/protocol instructions) dominates at ~58% of classified words versus only ~5% for safety policy, with the strictest rule-lines guarding tool use and file safety over harmful content by an 11:1 margin, and document literal-text reuse across vendors and significant "prompt rot" (word churn) across version chains — arguing leaked system prompts should be treated as operational specifications and a supply-chain/engineering concern rather than windows into a model's "values."
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
When chat is the wrong UIBurke Holland (GitHub) argues that chat is often the wrong interface for working with AI coding agents and introduces "canvas" — a feature in the GitHub Copilot app that spins up a small full-stack application with no browser chrome, which can call third-party APIs or run code locally while exchanging messages bidirectionally with the Copilot agent. He walks through concrete canvases: a playable Connect 4 game against the agent, a Winget package browser/installer, a SQLite query UI with IntelliSense, a Markdown-to-Windows-Live-Writer-style blog editor, and a full development-workflow automation canvas that removes the human from the loop between research, prototyping and review steps. The piece frames this as a general lesson for agent builders: build a reusable tool the agent and user can both interact with, rather than burning tokens asking the agent to perform every repetitive action through chat.
github.blogarticleAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🧠 AI
[tl;dr sec] #347 - AI Agents Hacking Companies for $25, Threat Hunter's Guide to GitHub, Finding Gadgets Like it’s 2026tl;dr sec #347 is a weekly security newsletter issue. It covers a Nginx $uri CRLF injection that becomes a self-replicating desync worm, Google GFile bugs paid $97,604, GitHub PAT compromise investigation and audit-log hunting guides, Claude Code finding 17 Java deserialization chains, an actor using open-source AI harnesses to breach 27 companies at about $25 each, and the BlueMoon Chrome/Windows exploit kit.
tldrsec.comarticleAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
The Past Frames the Future: Memory for Autoregressive Video GenerationA systematic survey of memory mechanisms in autoregressive (AR) video generation, addressing how models maintain persistent historical information (entity identities, dynamic states, causal changes) beyond bounded context windows. The authors organize the literature into five perspectives — Forms, Functions, Operations, Learning, and Evaluation — and identify open challenges like composable memory architectures and standardized evaluation for memory-conditioned video generation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Sep 2026, published 23 Sep 2026🧠 AI- OAuth Token Theft Through Microsoft's Front Door | Huntress
Huntress researcher Andrew Schwartz demonstrates a novel OAuth token-theft technique: a sideloaded AppX package registered via Add-AppxPackage -Register (requiring only Developer Mode, no admin beyond that toggle) can set ContentUriRules WindowsRuntimeAccess="all" so attacker-controlled JavaScript rendered inside the Microsoft-signed WWAHost.exe process gets full WinRT access, including the legacy WebAuthenticationBroker OAuth API. Using Microsoft Office's own client ID and the oob redirect URI, the attacker triggers a genuine login.microsoftonline.com/MFA dialog with no browser chrome, captures the auth code, and exchanges it for an access token plus a long-lived refresh token carrying the full Office delegated Graph scope set (mail, files, Teams, directory, AuditLog.Create) — validated end-to-end against a live Entra ID tenant with MFA and default Conditional Access. The post frames it as a class of vulnerable signed AppX host binaries sharing the same WinRT activation layer, and provides a Sigma rule keyed on the MSAppHost/3.0 EdgeHTML user agent reaching non-Microsoft destinations, plus Sysmon/Event ID and GPO-based mitigations (restricting Developer Mode, Conditional Access, shorter refresh-token lifetimes, CAE).
huntress.comwriteupPublished and added 23 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - artemy-ccrsky/COM-Jungle
COM-Jungle is a GitHub repository of offensive security research notes on Windows COM (Component Object Model), written by Artemy Tsetsersky in 2026. Notes are ordered by tactic: how COM works, execution, trust boundaries and privilege escalation, lateral movement via DCOM, persistence, initial access, finding new classes, and detection and hardening. It advises recording build, bitness, token and session before generalising a CLSID result, and says detections should key on registration, load and process context rather than a single CLSID.
github.comrepoAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 23 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
The Closed Quorum: Inside the First Reported Autonomous AI C2 ImplantCisco Talos' CAIRN project documents CLOSEDQUORUM, a 64-bit Go Windows implant that replaces traditional C2 infrastructure with a panel of up to four commercial LLM providers (DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, Gemini) that vote on the implant's next action via plurality voting, with each model queried against a structured JSON decision schema constrained to inject/persist/steal/move actions. Once deployed it autonomously dumps LSASS credentials, steals browser passwords and crypto wallets (MetaMask, Exodus, Ethereum), and exfiltrates AES-256-GCM-encrypted data to an operator's Discord webhook, all without further human tasking. The post details the developer's apparent credentials-as-a-service distribution model, deterministic tie-breaking favoring DeepSeek, and provides SHA256 hashes plus a YARA detection rule for the family (formerly tracked as BALZAK).
blog.talosintelligence.comwriteupAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 22 Sep 2026🛡️ Security- The Tale of Two INC Ransom Notes: A Ransomware Timeline | Huntress
Huntress details a post-incident investigation into an INC ransomware attack that hit 175+ endpoints, reconstructed from surviving EDR telemetry and Windows event logs rather than live detection. The intrusion shows a 17-day gap between initial scheduled-task persistence and RDP lateral movement (possibly an initial access broker), and a second wave using AnyDesk, a BYOVD tool (hwau.exe loading the HwAudio kernel driver) to disable security controls, and Impacket's atexec.py to deploy INC ransomware. Attackers dropped two distinct ransom notes 53 minutes apart: a standard INC-README.txt and a detailed DATALEAK_PRESS_RELEASE.txt threatening to notify media, employees and partners with a full inventory of stolen files.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 21 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - crypt0p3g/adnullenum
adnullenum is a single-pass Active Directory enumerator that uses anonymous (null) SMB sessions over the \samr and \lsarpc named pipes to pull domain info, password/lockout policy, RID-cycled account inventory, per-user detail, and group membership without credentials. It consolidates what rpcclient, impacket's samrdump.py/lookupsid.py, enum4linux-ng, and NetExec each do separately into one run, falls back to LSA lookups when SAMR is locked down, flags interesting accounts (AS-REP-roastable, PASSWORD_NOT_REQUIRED, unconstrained delegation, etc.), and writes ready-to-use userlist.txt/computerlist.txt plus a reusable RID cache. The README also gives blue-team guidance on closing null-session access (RestrictAnonymousSAM, Pre-Windows 2000 Compatible Access group) and detecting it via Event 4661/4662/4624/5140.
github.comrepoAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 17 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - Ready, Settra, Go: New Settra Ransomware Variant Deploys MeshAgent RMM
Huntress analysts detail two Settra ransomware incidents (July and September) observed in customer environments, documenting the threat actor's use of the MeshAgent RMM for persistence, BYOVD via the gdrv.sys driver, and anti-forensic techniques including Windows Event Log clearing, reagentc /disable, diskpart-based recovery partition removal, and cipher.exe free-space wiping. The post includes specific IOCs — C2 IPs 45.13.122[.]7 and 193.5.65[.]114, the recurring workstation name WIN-LIVFRVQFMKO, and the RESTORE_FILES.txt ransom note — supplementing prior public reporting from MoxFive and SOCRadar on this newer ransomware variant first seen in June.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
WeaselBiscuit Strips BeaverTail and OtterCookie Down to EssentialsOpenSourceMalware researchers detail WeaselBiscuit, a newly discovered lightweight JavaScript infostealer found hidden in 11+ npm packages (e.g. process-tailwind, engin1, the @biz44 scope), which shares tradecraft with DPRK-linked BeaverTail/OtterCookie but strips out wallet-draining, password decryption, and remote-shell features. The writeup walks through the full infection chain - a package auto-running a detached Node loader, fetching a Base64-encoded second stage from Npoint dead-drop URLs, and beaconing to a hardcoded HTTP C2 (103.170.217.184:8787) - plus its capabilities (Chrome extension-storage theft, clipboard capture, Windows keylogging) and a campaign-cluster graph tying packages together via shared hashes and resolver URLs. Attribution to DPRK is explicitly labeled a tentative hypothesis rather than confirmed.
opensourcemalware.comwriteupPublished and added 17 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
HEAVYGRAM: A Telegram-based Surveillance Backdoor Linked to Handala HackGroup-IB documents previously undocumented samples of HEAVYGRAM, a Python/PyInstaller-based Windows backdoor that uses the Telegram bot API for command-and-control, screen/audio capture, data exfiltration, and DLL side-loading, alongside the related CRUDEEXCLUDE loader that adds Windows Defender exclusions. The research corroborates and extends a March 2026 US DOJ affidavit and FBI FLASH report, attributing the malware with moderate confidence to the Handala Hack persona — assessed as a false-flag "hacktivist" front for Void Manticore (aka Storm-0842/Banished Kitten), operating on behalf of Iran's MOIS — used since Fall 2023 against Iranian dissidents, journalists, and critics of the Iranian government via Telegram-delivered, Delphi-packaged lures (fake KeePass, Telegram, Pictory apps). It details four infection-chain variants (WSF/VBS downloaders, HTA Telegram-polling scripts, Delphi droppers with embedded archives), the implant's command prefixes (@@/**/##) and attachment handlers, dual-bot C2 configurations, and provides IOCs and detection/hardening recommendations.
group-ib.comwriteupAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 17 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Pass-the-Passkey Family of AttacksSpecterOps research introduces "Pass-the-Passkey," a family of 20+ attack techniques against passkey/WebAuthn authentication, including three zero-days: Windows 11 logging complete WebAuthn assertions to an Event Log readable by unprivileged users (patched July 2026), Microsoft Entra ID historically failing to enforce WebAuthn anti-replay protections (challenge reuse, session binding, signature counters), and local malware that calls the native Windows WebAuthn API directly to phish users with a convincing native-looking passkey prompt. The write-up argues these implementation failures mirror classic credential-relay attacks like Pass-the-Hash and NTLM Relay, and recommends device-bound passkeys with attestation enforcement for high-value accounts.
specterops.iowriteupAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 16 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Securing the unpatchable in an age of AI-driven vulnerabilitiesCisco Talos argues that AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery is outpacing organizations' ability to patch, especially for unpatchable operational technology (OT) like medical devices and industrial control systems. It recommends network-level compensating controls instead of patching: upstream next-generation firewalls with intrusion prevention for virtual patching, VLAN/ACL-based micro-segmentation to restrict which devices can reach legacy systems, and visibility into legacy network fingerprints to build an asset inventory. It also debunks the air-gap myth, citing WannaCry's spread through unpatched Windows XP in the NHS as a cautionary example of "hope for the best" failing.
blog.talosintelligence.comarticleAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 16 Sep 2026🛡️ Security- Google Doc Sidebar Sends Mac and Windows Users Down Different Paths to Malware
Huntress SOC analysts Ryan Dowd and Jon Semon tore apart a live social-engineering campaign that began with a fake CoinDesk marketing exec DMing a researcher a Google Doc containing a container-bound Apps Script sidebar. The script ran client-side without OAuth consent, exfiltrated victim IP/geolocation/wallet presence via the Telegram API, then routed macOS users to a piped zsh/DMG AMOS stealer chain and Windows users through ClickOnce and PowerShell loaders using three stolen or fraudulent code-signing certificates (a Norwegian company, Discord, and Lenovo). The Windows chain culminated in NetSupport Manager RMM abuse, a Ledger wallet implant, and a self-generated rogue root certificate authority (spoofing Google Trust Services) installed via MsBuild.exe hollowing to silently intercept HTTPS traffic, which the authors flag as the artifact most likely to survive incident remediation short of full reimaging.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 11 Sep 2026, published 15 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - Huntress: How Attackers Abuse VSS, and How Huntress Detects It
A Huntress blog post breaking down how attackers abuse Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) beyond the well-known "delete shadow copies before ransomware detonation" pattern — including creating shadow copies to quietly extract NTDS.dit for credential access, and manipulating shadow copy size/configuration. It details why single VSS events (creation/deletion) are noisy, useless alerts on their own, and describes how Huntress correlates VSSAdmin activity with lateral movement, credential-harvesting commands, and process lineage over a time window, illustrated with a real incident involving PsExec, vssadmin create shadow against a domain controller, a blocked cleanup attempt, and follow-on DNS enumeration.
huntress.comarticleAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 15 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - KillaBoi/BrokenPipe
BrokenPipe is a PowerShell PoC that escalates a standard Windows user to NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM by abusing the Steam Client Service (steamservice.exe). It connects to the service's shared-memory IPC, whitelists a genuine Valve-signed install-script VDF against a caller-controlled installation root (IClientInstallUtils::AddInstallScriptToWhiteList), then triggers RunInstallScript so the SYSTEM service launches a relocated executable (by default cmd.exe) without any UAC prompt. The flaw was reported to Valve in March and remained unpatched as of the write-up, validated on Steam 10.96.30.42 on Windows 10/11 x64.
github.comrepoAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 14 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - DeathShotXD/0xCr0ssCrush
Research project on two signed vulnerable Windows drivers, DCRCVDrv.sys (MOCOMSYS) and Alinubx.sys (CnCrypt), abused by the Cruciferra MaaS loader to kill AV/EDR processes. It documents their devices, IOCTLs (0x2205C0, 0x222024) and the termination chain (ObOpenObjectByPointer -> ZwTerminateProcess), and gives annotated disassembly, hash-level sample provenance and blocklist-status snapshots. It includes a Rust lab harness with hash validation and dry-run, plus Sigma, YARA and telemetry guidance. Findings carry evidence labels, and the test matrix is limited to Windows 11 24H2 with HVCI disabled.
github.comrepoAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 14 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Malicious Code in Open Source: How to Detect It Before You Ship | Blog | Endor LabsEndor Labs explains the two dominant classes of OSS malware attacks - dependency/name confusion (typosquatting, combo-squatting, brand-jacking) and attacks on legitimate packages/maintainers - and how the OpenSSF malware-analysis project sandboxes new PyPI/npm releases and reports confirmed malware to OSV. It walks through real cases it detected, including the chunked/split-across-files PyPI malware ttlo and gisi, and Whatfuscator which drops and runs a PyInstaller-built Windows executable, plus two false-positive suspicious-code flags (versioneer 0.29, azure-functions 1.18.0) caused by benign base64/zlib obfuscation.
endorlabs.comarticlePublished and added 11 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Shai-Hulud 2 Malware Campaign Targets GitHub and Cloud Credentials Using Bun Runtime | Blog | Endor LabsEndor Labs' live incident tracker for the Shai-Hulud 2.0 npm supply-chain worm that began around Nov 24, 2025, compromising packages from Zapier, ENS Domains, Postman and PostHog. It details the infection chain (malicious preinstall script, setup_bun.js dropper, obfuscated bun_environment.js payload), TruffleHog-style credential theft from AWS, GCP, Azure, GitHub and npm, self-replication via stolen npm and GitHub tokens, a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner backdoor abusing repository Discussions for command injection and C2, and destructive wiper behavior that shreds the user's home directory on Windows and Linux.
endorlabs.comwriteupPublished and added 11 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Why Cooldown Windows Belong in Every npm Security Strategy | Blog | Endor LabsEndor Labs argues that cooldown windows delaying adoption of newly-published npm package versions by 24-48 hours are an effective defense against short-lived npm malware campaigns like Shai-Hulud, chalk/debug, and s1ngularity, since malicious releases are usually caught within that window. It also covers pinning vs lockfiles and demonstrates enforcing cooldown policies via OPA/Rego.
endorlabs.comarticlePublished and added 11 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Metasploit Wrap Up: This One Goes to Sixteen!Rapid7's weekly Metasploit Framework update covering sixteen new modules: ten exploits (five on the CISA KEV list) targeting Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (CVE-2026-20079 auth bypass RCE), SonicWall SMA1000 (CVE-2026-83549 chained RCE), PaperCut NG/MF (CVE-2026-81578 + CVE-2026-82078), JetBrains TeamCity agent-polling XStream deserialization RCE (CVE-2026-63077), Langflow authenticated RCE (CVE-2026-19295), MCPJam Inspector command execution (CVE-2026-23744), SimpleHelp OIDC auth bypass (CVE-2026-48558), Next.js Windows RCE (CVE-2026-75604), and SPIP SQLi/RCE flaws. It also adds a new native Kerberos relay module exploiting ESC8 (AD CS Web Enrollment) via SMB-to-HTTP coercion, a Metasploit handler-detection scanner, a Linux sandbox-evasion module, two Windows persistence techniques, and several bug fixes to the DNS and module metadata subsystems.
rapid7.comarticleAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 11 Sep 2026🛡️ Security- Best Practices for Good Endpoint Hardening | Huntress
A Huntress SOC-informed guide to endpoint hardening, explaining why checklist-only compliance approaches fail and detailing real intrusion paths observed in incidents: internet-exposed RDP brute-forced by scanners, RMM tool abuse delivered via phishing (277% spike in 2025), and ClickFix attacks that trick users into pasting malicious commands into the Windows Run prompt. It closes with a practical weekly checklist covering external exposure scanning, local admin rights reduction, Windows Defender tamper protection, and disabling SMBv1/legacy protocols.
huntress.comarticleAdded 11 Sep 2026, published 10 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - sage — Agent Detection & Response (ADR) for AI coding agents
Sage is an "Agent Detection & Response" (ADR) security layer that intercepts tool calls made by AI coding agents — shell commands, URL fetches, file writes — and screens them through multiple detection layers before execution. It combines cloud URL reputation, 300+ YAML local heuristics, a two-tier (heuristic + fine-tuned ML) prompt-injection detector for fetched content, npm/PyPI package supply-chain checks (registry existence, file reputation, age), installed-plugin scanning at session start, and Windows AMSI integration. It ships as a plugin for Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, OpenClaw, and OpenCode, and is published by Gen Digital (also distributed under the Norton/Avast Sage branding).
github.comrepoAdded 10 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - Grand Theft Auto VI hype leads to malware
Huntress analyzed a fake GTA6 game ISO (some padded to 100GB+ with junk data) distributed via SEO poisoning, gaming forums, and torrents ahead of the game's real release. The ISO's "installer" drops a Russian-language crack-themed installer that stages multiple NJRAT copies, a DCRAT implant, the Mercurial Grabber infostealer (exfiltrating browser/Discord/Roblox/Minecraft data via Discord webhooks), Chaos ransomware repurposed as a destructive wiper (with a fake "license not found" error to mask the compromise), and an unexplained Yandex Browser install. The writeup includes IOCs (C2 IPs, ngrok tunnel, hosts-file modifications, malicious Discord webhook URL) and notes current Windows Defender detects the components.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 11 Sep 2026, published 9 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - Phishing Attacks Serve Browser-in-the-Browser Pages, Rogue RMM Persistence
Huntress SOC details two August incidents where phishing emails led victims through a fake CAPTCHA/Adobe PDF Reader lure into a browser-in-the-browser (BiTB) page spoofing get.adobe.com, tricking them into installing a ScreenConnect client disguised as an Adobe Reader update. The installer chained to a second rogue ScreenConnect client via curl/cmd.exe, both registered as Windows services for persistence, then executed defense-evasion binaries (HideCursor.exe, HideUL.exe) to hide cursor/screen activity before Huntress disrupted the intrusions. Full IOCs (domains, ScreenConnect client IDs/relays, file hashes/paths) are included for defenders.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 11 Sep 2026, published 9 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Once in a BlueMoon: Multiple State-Aligned Threat Actors Rapidly Adopt Novel Chrome/Windows Zero-Day ChainProofpoint details "BlueMoon," a novel exploit kit chaining a Chrome V8 type-confusion RCE (CVE-2026-85046), a V8 sandbox escape via WebAssembly metadata corruption (CVE-2026-87491), and a Windows kernel LPE (CVE-2026-85880) to break out of the browser sandbox. Within days of first use by China-aligned TA412 (28 Aug 2026), the kit was independently adopted by UNK_LateNight (delivering ShadowPad to US aerospace targets), UNK_DoubleCheck (Rust-based loader against a Vietnamese manufacturer), and UNK_QuietRacket (custom malware against Indonesia/Singapore government and finance targets). The piece analyzes exploit internals (Maglev/TurboFan JIT bug, reflective DLL loading, ALPC/WNF kernel exploitation), flags artifacts suggesting AI-assisted exploit development (debug comments, handover markdown files, v8CTF references), profiles the GemStone Chromium-extension credential-theft backdoor deployed via Secure Preferences forgery, and provides IOCs, ET rules, and a YARA rule for detection.
proofpoint.comwriteupAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 9 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Microsoft Patch Tuesday for September 2026 — Snort rules and prominent vulnerabilitiesCisco Talos's analysis of Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday release, covering 973 vulnerabilities (113 critical, 82 of those RCE). Two flaws are confirmed exploited in the wild — CVE-2026-81963 (Windows Update Stack elevation of privilege) and CVE-2026-85880 (Windows ALPC elevation of privilege) — alongside a long list Microsoft rates "more likely" to be exploited, including a Windows Kerberos auth-bypass-by-replay RCE (CVE-2026-69676) and a Windows DNS Server use-after-free RCE (CVE-2026-69730). Talos releases accompanying Snort 2/3 rule coverage (SIDs 67011-67084, 301619-301655) to detect exploitation attempts.
blog.talosintelligence.comadvisoryAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 8 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Patch Tuesday - September 2026Rapid7's September 2026 Patch Tuesday analysis: Microsoft published 974 own-product CVEs (723 in Windows), 999 in total with non-Microsoft fixes, the most it has ever published in one day. Two zero-days are exploited in the wild: CVE-2026-85880 (Windows ALPC elevation of privilege to SYSTEM via out-of-bounds write; not patched on Server 2025 or Windows 11) and CVE-2026-81963 (Windows Update Stack elevation of privilege via improper link resolution). It also flags Microsoft's missing Edge advisory for the exploited Chromium V8 zero-day CVE-2026-85046, lists upcoming end-of-support dates for Windows 11 24H2, Server 2012/2012 R2, Office 2021 and Exchange 2016/2019, and includes per-product CVE tables with exploitation-likelihood ratings. Only the first part of the page was available, so the later tables are not covered.
rapid7.comadvisoryAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 8 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Dev Machine Guard Now Supports Linux - StepSecurityStepSecurity announces Linux support (Debian/RPM, .deb and .rpm packages) for Dev Machine Guard, its open-source developer-machine inventory and scanning engine, extending existing macOS/Windows coverage. The tool detects installed AI coding agents (Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex), IDE extensions from VS Code Marketplace and OpenVSX, MCP server configs, npm packages, and Linux system packages (rpm, dpkg, pacman, apk, snap, flatpak) via native mechanisms like systemd user timers and BIOS-serial device identity, and is explicitly framed as a response to incidents like the Shai-Hulud npm worm, s1ngularity/Nx compromise, and Mini Shai-Hulud/TanStack attacks. It ships in a free local-only Community mode and a paid Enterprise mode with centralized dashboard, policy enforcement, and dependency cooldown/alerting.
stepsecurity.ioarticleAdded 5 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Dev Machine Guard Now Supports Windows - StepSecurityStepSecurity announces Windows 10/11 support (x64 and ARM64, Sigstore-signed with build provenance) for Dev Machine Guard, its open-source developer-endpoint scanner. It inventories AI coding agents, MCP server configs, IDE extensions from the VS Code Marketplace and OpenVSX, and global and per-project npm packages. This lets teams find which developer machines have a compromised package or extension after incidents like Shai-Hulud, s1ngularity and Mini Shai-Hulud. Windows detection uses %LOCALAPPDATA%, %PROGRAMFILES%, registry Uninstall keys and schtasks scheduling. Community mode runs fully locally, while enterprise mode reports to a dashboard with policy enforcement.
stepsecurity.ioarticleAdded 5 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
MECCHA CHAMELEON can't hide from the RCEAikido researchers found a delayed RCE in the Unreal Engine 5-based game MECCHA CHAMELEON, exploitable via a malicious Steam Workshop map. A Blueprint-exposed audio recording function allowed arbitrary file writes via path traversal, a null-byte trick stripped the auto-appended .wav extension to drop an .exe into the Windows Startup folder, and PCM audio samples were crafted byte-for-byte to smuggle a polyglot WAV/HTA payload that launches mshta.exe and runs arbitrary code on reboot. The issue was patched in the game's 4.0.0 update.
aikido.devwriteupPublished and added 3 Sep 2026🛡️ Security- Inside Knight Office, a New M365 AiTM Phishing Kit
Huntress researchers uncovered the operator console for "Knight Office," a Flask-based adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing kit used to steal Microsoft 365 session tokens via a DocuSign-themed, self-spoofed lure that routes victims through Monday.com redirects and a compromised Joomla site to a fake Microsoft device-code authentication page. After capturing tokens, the attacker registered a rogue device in Microsoft Entra ID and bound a Windows Hello for Business key credential to the compromised account to maintain persistent, MFA-bypassing access even after token revocation. The writeup details IOCs (IPs, .vu domains, User-Agent strings), links the campaign to hundreds of reported phishing emails since April, and gives defenders concrete hunting/response steps around callback-proxy sign-ins and newly registered WHfB credentials.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 8 Sep 2026, published 2 Sep 2026🛡️ Security - Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm
AnythingLLM is an open-source, MIT-licensed all-in-one LLM application from Mintplex Labs that lets users chat with their documents, run no-code AI agents, and connect to a wide range of LLM providers, embedders, vector databases, and TTS/STT services. It ships as a monorepo (frontend, server, collector, embed widget, browser extension) with multi-user permissioning, MCP compatibility, scheduled tasks, dynamic model routing, and both self-hosted (Docker) and desktop (Mac/Windows/Linux) deployment options.
github.comrepoAdded 23 Sep 2026, published 31 Aug 2026🧠 AI - Next-Gen Phishing Tactics Users Aren’t Ready For | Huntress
Huntress details five modern phishing techniques that bypass traditional "check the URL" training and MFA: ClickFix (fake CAPTCHA tricking users into running Win+R/paste commands to execute malware), Browser-in-the-Browser (fake HTML popup windows mimicking OAuth login prompts with forged address bars/padlocks), ConsentFix (dragging an identity icon to leak an OAuth authorization code that attackers trade for Microsoft Entra ID access/refresh tokens), device code phishing (abusing the legitimate microsoft.com/devicelogin flow to authorize an attacker's device via a code, seen weaponized in PhaaS kits like EvilTokens), and fake video-conference (Teams/Zoom/Google Meet) waiting-room overlays that push a malicious "driver update" install. Each section explains why the technique defeats standard security-awareness training and how Huntress's simulated phishing scenarios replicate it.
huntress.comarticleAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 28 Aug 2026🛡️ Security - CrystalPotato
CrystalPotato is a Crystal-language port of GodPotato, a Windows local privilege escalation tool that abuses the DCOM OXID Resolver and named pipe impersonation to escalate from an account with SeImpersonatePrivilege to SYSTEM. It resolves Windows APIs dynamically, invokes them via indirect syscall stubs, XOR-obfuscates strings at compile time, and can execute commands, spawn reverse shells, or create a local admin account. Compiles to a single dependency-free static binary and was tested on Windows 10, 11, and Server 2025.
github.comrepoPublished and added 27 Aug 2026🛡️ Security - What Good Identity Hardening Looks Like
Huntress blog post arguing that MFA is only a starting point for identity security, walking through how credential/session theft (e.g. via ClickFix fake-CAPTCHA lures that trick users into pasting commands into the Windows Run dialog) bypasses single-sign-on defenses. It includes a real-world case study of a small real estate firm where a CEO's MFA exception led to a business email compromise and fraudulent wire transfers, followed by a practical identity-hardening checklist covering conditional access by geography/device, closing MFA exceptions, monitoring for configuration drift, and reducing stale privileged accounts.
huntress.comarticleAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 25 Aug 2026🛡️ Security - ADScanPro/Claude-AD
Claude-AD is a Claude Code plugin that packages Active Directory pentest methodology as skills, agents, and slash commands, directing Claude to run standard tooling (netexec, Impacket, certipy, bloodyAD, BloodHound CE) in the correct setup-collection-exploitation-post order. It covers environment constraints that break tooling in hardened domains (AES-only Kerberos, LDAP channel binding, Protected Users, LAPS, gMSA), techniques like Kerberoasting, AS-REP roasting, ADCS ESC1-ESC17, ACL abuse, coercion/NTLM relay (PetitPotam, PrinterBug, DFSCoerce) and delegation abuse with their Windows Event IDs/MDI telemetry, and maps each technique to DORA/NIS2/ENS compliance controls. Exploitation agents require human confirmation before directory-modifying actions.
github.comrepoAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 24 Aug 2026🛡️ Security - duty1g/x64dbg-mcp-server
x64dbg-MCP Server is a native, zero-dependency MCP plugin (built in Zig) for the x64dbg Windows debugger that exposes its full API — breakpoints, stepping, memory allocation/read/write, registers, modules, threads, call stack, pattern scanning, xrefs, symbols, PE/OEP analysis and module dumping — as 84 MCP tools plus 22 event callbacks over Streamable HTTP and SSE transports with mandatory bearer-token auth. It lets any MCP-compatible AI assistant drive an interactive reverse-engineering session against a running process (e.g. load a binary, set a breakpoint, dump registers, step and inspect the stack) directly from inside x64dbg's address space, with no polling or external process required.
github.comrepoAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 22 Aug 2026🛡️ Security
UAT-10147: Chinese-speaking adversary integrates agentic AI into post-compromise operationsCisco Talos details UAT-10147, a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group exploiting one-day vulnerabilities in Windows/Linux web servers to deploy BadIIS, QuasarRAT, NoodleRAT, and SPECTRE implants, while also integrating agentic AI tools (PentestGPT, DeepAudit, and AI-orchestrated ysoserial workflows) to generate exploit playbooks, automate ASP.NET ViewState deserialization RCE, validate exploit success, and run reconnaissance/exfiltration end to end. Talos recovered AI-generated Python scripts and a findings log from the actor's C2 open directory showing semi-autonomous exploit refinement, OOB callback verification via webhook.site, and privilege escalation via SeImpersonatePrivilege/Potato exploits — evidence of a shift from AI-assisted scripting toward agentic offensive orchestration.
blog.talosintelligence.comwriteupAdded 24 Aug 2026, published 20 Aug 2026🛡️ Security- Post-DEF CON Phishing Uses Malicious Google Doc to Deliver Malware
Huntress researchers document a phishing campaign targeting Black Hat/DEF CON attendees via X DMs impersonating a CoinDesk exec, luring victims into opening a weaponized Google Doc with a custom Google Apps Script sidebar that runs a fake "decryption" flow before delivering ClickFix-style commands or a manual "update" that drops malware. On macOS this delivers AMOS infostealer plus a LaunchDaemon-based polling backdoor with SOCKS5 proxy capability; a follow-up fake DocSend/Dropbox installer delivers a ClickOnce/NSIS loader chain on Windows that installs NetSupport RAT, a process-hollowed rogue Certificate Authority that MITMs VirusTotal traffic, and an incomplete Ledger wallet-targeting implant. The piece includes deep technical detail on the loader's C2 protocol, stolen/fraudulent code-signing certificates, and infrastructure patterns (multi-branded loader domains), plus mitigation guidance and a link to published IOCs.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 19 Aug 2026🛡️ Security
Windows Infostealer Hits npm and RubyFollow-up analysis showing that the RubyGems StubMaker typosquatting campaign and a separately-discovered 40-package npm typosquatting campaign (targeting chalk, commander, lodash, typescript, react, axios) are run by the same threat actor: both use install-time hooks (extconf.rb vs postinstall.js) to fetch a Rust loader from the same GitHub release, which decrypts a byte-for-byte identical Go infostealer confirmed by matching SHA-256 hashes. The stealer harvests browser credentials (bypassing Chromium app-bound encryption), crypto wallets/seed phrases, and Telegram data, exfiltrating via Gofile to a webhook at dresslee.com, and includes WSL-to-Windows sandbox escape logic. The post publishes full network/file IOCs and hashes and argues network-layer blocking (C2 IP and webhook domain) is more durable than package-name blocklisting.
opensourcemalware.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 19 Aug 2026🛡️ Security
StubMaker RubyGems Campaign Delivers a Windows InfostealerResearchers identified "StubMaker," a RubyGems typosquat campaign (brumdler, brundlef, and 15 packages typosquatting bundler/i18n/rake/activesupport) that abuses the extconf.rb native-extension hook to fake a successful build while beaconing victim OS info and, on Windows, downloading a Rust loader (main.exe) from a GitHub release. The loader decrypts an embedded 11MB Go infostealer entirely in memory, which injects an embedded DLL (abe_payload.dll) into Chromium browsers via the elevation-service COM object to defeat Application-Bound Encryption and steal passwords, cookies, payment cards, crypto wallets/seed phrases, and Telegram data, exfiltrating via Gofile and a webhook at dresslee.com. The piece also details how RubyGems.org's namespace-reclaim behavior let a different account (mod8rz41mje) take over the yanked "brumdler" name to relaunch the campaign, and includes full IOCs and hashes.
opensourcemalware.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 16 Aug 2026🛡️ Security- UnboundCompute/security-agent-skills
security-agent-skills is a repository of 194 portable, tool-agnostic security-testing skills for Claude Code and other agent runtimes that follow the Agent Skills format. Skills encode methodology (enumerate the full taxonomy, rank as triage, treat a lead as a fact not a verdict) across white-box bug hunting, AI-agent red-teaming, cloud and Kubernetes trust, web injection, Windows/AD, mobile, web3 and identity. Each skill opens with a scope check, and findings share one schema. Installs via the Claude Code plugin marketplace or by copying a skill directory.
github.comrepoAdded 2 Nov 2026, published 16 Aug 2026🛡️ Security
Orca Security: Shadow AI GovernanceExplains how to run a shadow AI governance program: a three-question scoping test (consumption vs production, standalone vs embedded, human vs agent-initiated), and how shadow AI differs from shadow IT because a prompt cannot be retracted. It lays out inventory record fields, a four-outcome disposition model (sanction, sanction with conditions, restrict, block) with an SLA, five default-changing controls, and a seven-item policy mapped to ISO/IEC 42001 and the CSA AI Controls Matrix. It cites Microsoft's preview shadow AI detection (seven agents, blocking for one, Intune-managed Windows only) and ends with how Orca's agentless AI-SPM covers the cloud-hosted part.
orca.securityarticlePublished and added 13 Aug 2026🛡️ Security
Orca Security: Zoom Zero-Click RCE Flaws Allow Any Meeting Attendee to Compromise All ParticipantsOrca Security details four Zoom vulnerabilities in the cross-platform annotation engine (libannotate.so): CVE-2026-53413, a stack buffer overflow in CAnnoFormatBlock::Deserialize from unchecked 32-bit character counts, and CVE-2026-53415, a use-after-free in auto-shape metadata handling giving a write-what-where primitive, both enabling zero-click RCE against every meeting participant via crafted annotation messages during screen sharing. Also disclosed are CVE-2026-53414 (heap over-read/DoS) and CVE-2026-53416 (path traversal in the Windows VDI client). The write-up notes a working exploit chain built in under 24 hours with fewer than 20 AI-model prompts, platform-specific exploitation details (macOS ARM64 ASLR bypass, Android heap spraying/vtable corruption), and that E2EE meetings bypass Zoom's server-side message filtering.
orca.securityadvisoryPublished and added 12 Aug 2026🛡️ Security- Akira Hits Safe Mode: Ransomware Rebooting Around EDR
Huntress details an Akira ransomware intrusion from August 2026 that followed the group's usual SonicWall SSL VPN → domain controller → AD enumeration → WinRAR/s5cmd exfiltration → detonation playbook, but with a new twist: the affiliate ran msconfig.exe to force a reboot into Safe Mode with Networking (MITRE T1688), which killed the Huntress agent and Windows Defender real-time protection while preserving network access, after pre-registering an AnyDesk service to survive the minimal Safe Mode driver set. The blog notes Safe Mode's constrained virtual memory appears to have caused akira.exe to crash with out-of-memory errors, accidentally sabotaging the attacker's own encryption run, and closes with detection guidance for boot-configuration changes, Safe Mode Kernel-Boot/Kernel-General event IDs, and Safe Boot registry tampering.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 12 Aug 2026🛡️ Security - xiaoyeuzixi/revlab
REVLab is a Windows-local binary analysis workbench for PE files, Unreal Engine dumps and Unity game folders. Its graph workflow engine runs LLM analysis nodes as tool-calling operators: up to 6 tool rounds by default, a target path locked by the workflow, a saved tool_trace, and a read-only fallback when the gateway lacks tools support. Evidence is labelled static, runtime, inferred or blocked, and model output is capped at ai_inferred. An MCP server lets external agents read evidence and submit conclusions.
github.comrepoAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 11 Aug 2026🧠 AI - xiaoyeuzixi/revlab
REVLab is a local Windows binary analysis workbench covering generic PE files, Unreal Engine dumps and Unity game directories. It splits work into stages (identify, unpack, disassemble with Capstone, decompile with Ghidra Headless, gated local dynamic run) stored per sample in SQLite. A Vue Flow workflow editor, AI tool-loop nodes and an MCP server let external agents drive analysis, with evidence labelled static, runtime, inferred or blocked.
github.comrepoAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 11 Aug 2026🛡️ Security - DEF CON® 34 Hacking Conference - Main Stage Talks
The official DEF CON 34 main-stage talk listing, with full abstracts and speaker bios for dozens of original research presentations spanning bootrom-to-wallet-key exploitation of the dGEN1 Ethereum phone, a privilege-escalation chain in Microsoft's Python-in-Excel Azure container (CVE-2026-45459), a novel x86 SMM hardware attack, black-box TEE key recovery on the TI OMAP-L138 via timing side channels, native-code exploitation of llama.cpp and Ollama, a CDP-based Browser-in-the-Middle AitM phishing toolkit defeating CSP/SRI, CPDLC air-traffic-control message injection via SDR, an iCloud Keychain extraction bug (CVE-2026-28860), Segmentation Fault-Oriented Programming (SFOP) for bypassing Intel CET, weaponized WMI provider post-exploitation, an autonomous AI system (HTTP Terminator) discovering novel HTTP desync attacks, quantum ML for OS fingerprinting, reverse engineering of Windows Defender's BTR.sys driver for EDR bypass, a V8 renderer RCE in Samsung Internet (CVE-2025-10891), an LLM CI build-gate bypass, a Bring-Your-Own-EDR PPL abuse technique, Amazon Locker hardware hacking, and Windows PnP USB auto-install RCE via RDP redirection.
defcon.orgotherAdded 10 Aug 2026🛡️ Security
XBOW: A Shell Is Worth a Thousand ImagesXBOW's autonomous AI agent chained a blind SSRF in Bing's reverse-image-search into three Critical Microsoft RCEs (CVE-2026-32194, CVE-2026-32191, CVE-2026-21536), each CVSS 9.8, by fingerprinting an ImageMagick-compatible backend through differential error responses and crafting an SVG payload that reached a shell-backed image delegate. The proof was confirmed via out-of-band callbacks showing NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM and root execution across multiple production Bing image-processing workers on both Windows and Linux hosts. The piece walks through the full investigative trace — from ruling out XXE to fingerprinting ImageMagick coders/pseudo-protocols to constructing the pipe-based SVG exploit — and argues that ImageTragick-class bugs in "boring" image helpers remain a live, underrated attack surface.
xbow.comwriteupPublished and added 8 Aug 2026🛡️ Security
Russian AI Slopsquatting Publishes 700+ Malicious NPM PackagesOpenSourceMalware documents WEL1DROPPER (aka Flooding Dropper), a campaign that published 788+ slopsquatted npm packages (e.g. checkout-mobile-bnpl) which execute on require() with no install script, downloading cross-platform RAT/infostealer payloads via rotating Cloudflare Workers URLs with a DNS TXT-record fallback channel. The writeup reverse-engineers the Linux (UPX-packed ELF) and macOS (universal Mach-O) second-stage payloads, detailing anti-analysis checks, LaunchAgent persistence disguised as com.apple.windowserver.helper, XOR-obfuscated C2 domains, a suspected Sliver C2 final stage, and ties the campaign to Russian financial-sector lures and the earlier Moika npm campaign.
opensourcemalware.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 6 Aug 2026🛡️ Security- Inside an Oracle Database SQL Injection Attack | Huntress
Huntress details a July 2026 incident where attackers exploited a classic SQL injection flaw in a public-facing Java/Tomcat application to reach an Oracle database over JDBC, then used Oracle's CREATE JAVA SOURCE statement to compile a custom post-exploitation toolkit called khunt directly as database objects. Khunt modules (KhuntCmd, KhuntHash, KhuntFS/FS2, KhuntT, KhuntUnzip) let the attacker run OS commands, dump Oracle credentials, browse the filesystem, and ultimately pivot to SYSTEM-level RCE on the underlying Windows host, where they exfiltrated SAM/SECURITY/SYSTEM registry hives. It's notable because storing malicious code as PL/SQL/Java database objects rather than OS files/processes evades traditional EDR and AV visibility.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 5 Aug 2026🛡️ Security - Bank of America Phishing Email Delivers ScreenConnect Malware
Huntress dissects a Bank of America-themed phishing email that lures victims into downloading AccountGuardSetup.vbs, which unpacks through several layers of base64-encoded PowerShell to silently install ScreenConnect RMM with Administrator privileges. The chain uses AES-128-CBC encrypted blobs to deliver a C# UAC-bypass exploit via the ICMLuaUtil COM interface (MITRE ATT&CK T1548.002), then hides the resulting ScreenConnect service (renamed "Windows Security") from users and admins using SDDL/ACL manipulation so it can't be seen, logged, or removed.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 4 Aug 2026🛡️ Security - Hunting the Hunter II: Reversing xhunter2.sys and Its Three-Layer Authentication
Second installment of a reverse-engineering series examining xhunter2.sys, a Windows kernel driver, focusing on its three-layer authentication mechanism. Based on the title and URL only (page content could not be processed this pass); likely details disassembly/unpacking work to bypass or understand the driver's access-control checks, relevant to BYOVD/EDR-killer tradecraft analysis.
blacksnufkin.github.iowriteupAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 4 Aug 2026🛡️ Security - Hunting the Hunter: A Live Kernel LPE 0day in Anti-Cheat on a Billion Machines
A technical writeup by security researcher BlackSnufkin describing the discovery of a live, unpatched 0day kernel-mode local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability in an anti-cheat driver reportedly deployed on roughly a billion Windows machines. The post likely covers the vulnerability research and exploitation process targeting the anti-cheat's kernel component. Full page content could not be verified in this pass; summary is inferred from title and URL alone.
blacksnufkin.github.iowriteupAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 4 Aug 2026🛡️ Security - Momoko-Ayase/Senbei
Senbei is a Rust-based static unpacker for binaries protected by "CrackProof," working against both Windows PE executables and Android AArch64 shared libraries. It performs a purely static, file-local transformation (no vendor code, no key extraction service) to reverse the protection wrapper for legitimate RE, interoperability, and preservation purposes; one Android packaging variant is unwrapped using an XOR keystream the authors recovered during their own analysis.
github.comrepoAdded 4 Oct 2026, published 3 Aug 2026🛡️ Security
Introducing the Wiz Sensor for Developer Workstations to Protect Endpoints in the AI EraWiz announces a new endpoint sensor for developer workstations (Windows/macOS, private preview) that inventories packages, IDE extensions, AI coding agents, and MCP servers, and detects known/emerging supply chain attacks in real time. The post details three real-world campaigns that motivated it: Shai-Hulud (a self-propagating npm worm that ran TruffleHog via postinstall scripts to steal npm tokens and republish itself), the Axios backdoor (a compromised maintainer account injecting C2-calling code executed within 1.1 seconds of npm install), and s1ngularity (a compromised Nx build system/VS Code extension that harvested GitHub/npm/SSH/cloud credentials and weaponized local AI CLI tools like Claude and Gemini to exfiltrate filesystem data, leaking 1,000+ GitHub tokens and exposing 5,500 private repos).
wiz.ioarticleAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 3 Aug 2026🛡️ Security
CRPX0 — SCAMMER TURNED RANSOMWARE OPERATORIn-depth OSINT/threat-intel investigation into CRPX0, a ransomware group that emerged in July 2026 with 47 listed victims (mostly healthcare, mainly US/Turkey targets), tracing its origins to a prior "Flash Token" crypto/USDT money-laundering scam service run by the same operators. The piece covers domain registration analysis (REGRU-SU abuse, reused 2021 domain), dark web/clear web leak sites, RaaS/HaaS/affiliate program offerings, ClickFix-based payload delivery targeting Windows via EXE/DLL, YouTube affiliate-panel promotion analysis (voice/locale clues suggesting China), TOX/Session ID and Bitcoin address correlation, and real IP address deanonymization, concluding with IOCs and MITRE ATT&CK mapping.
theravenfile.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 3 Aug 2026🛡️ Security- Ghidra
Ghidra is a free, open-source software reverse engineering (SRE) framework developed by the NSA, offering disassembly, decompilation, graphing, and scripting across Windows, macOS, and Linux. It supports a wide range of processor architectures and executable formats, can run interactively or in automated/headless mode, and allows extension development via Java or Python (including the bundled PyGhidra). It is one of the primary open-source alternatives to IDA Pro for malware analysis and vulnerability research.
github.comrepoPublished and added 31 Jul 2026🛡️ Security - xiazhi88/Desic-Terminal
Desic Terminal is an open-source (MIT) Windows/macOS desktop app for OKX USDT perpetuals trading that bundles an AI trading assistant, AI-gated automated trading, and Python strategy backtesting on a shared real-time state and audit trail. Its notable AI-architecture contribution is a layered permission model where code, not prompts, decides what the agent can do: an AI Sidecar exposes only a scoped, often read-only tool set (e.g. radar.* tools reading a local SQLite market snapshot), delegated sub-agents are always read-only, risk-increasing actions fail closed on uncertain results, and executions use idempotent keys reconciled against exchange state before any retry. It also supports delegating requests to local Codex CLI or Claude Code instead of a hosted model API key, and ships a separate companion MCP server ("Desic OKX Agent") for giving coding agents direct OKX market/account/trading tool access.
github.comrepoAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 31 Jul 2026🧠 AI - genspark-ai/genoffice
GenOffice is an open-source (Apache-2.0) desktop office suite for macOS/Windows/Linux that opens native .docx/.xlsx/.pptx/PDF/Markdown/HTML files and puts an AI agent inside the editor, applying edits as byte-preserving diffs, tracked changes and live spreadsheet formulas rather than pasted text. It exposes the same engines to coding agents via a `genoffice` CLI, a bundled skill for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode and Windsurf, and an MCP server with 29 tools (plus an HTTP variant for headless/remote use), and includes a local SQLite full-text file search optionally reranked by TypeSafe's Jev judgment model. Users can bring their own key (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others) or sign in with Genspark to route model calls through a proxy.
github.comrepoAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 31 Jul 2026🧠 AI - HEVD Windows Kernel Exploitation Tutorial
Chapter 0 of a 5-part series on exploiting HackSys Extreme Vulnerable Driver (HEVD) for Windows kernel privilege escalation via a stack overflow bug. This installment covers environment setup (Hyper-V/VMware with SMEP support, WinDbg kernel debugging attach, DbgPrint enablement) as prep for later chapters that will detail bypassing kASLR, SMEP, and KPTI/KVA Shadow and building a sysret-based ROP shellcode chain.
mdanilor.github.iowriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 31 Jul 2026🛡️ Security - Mimikatz Missing Manual
A deep-dive, self-paced manual on Mimikatz and Windows identity internals by Carlos Perez (DarkOperator), refined with input from Benjamin Delpy (Mimikatz's author). It covers LSASS credential dumping, Kerberos ticket forgery/roasting/delegation abuse, PKI/smart card and certificate abuse, DCSync/DCShadow domain persistence, and DPAPI secrets, alongside blue team detection strategies and event log signatures.
github.comrepoAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 31 Jul 2026🛡️ Security - YuroGod/VMPStaticUnpacker
VMPStaticUnpacker is a Python tool that statically unpacks VMProtect-protected Windows PE binaries without executing them, supporting both the legacy plaintext PACKER_INFO metadata format and the compact rotating-XOR format seen in VMProtect 3.9.5 PE32+ samples. It recovers the destination key by XORing the encoded destination with the first packed section's RVA and rolling the key with ROL32(key,7), then validates candidate tables and LZMA streams before rebuilding a memory-image PE for static analysis. It does not devirtualize protected code, recover the original entry point, strip the VMProtect runtime, or fix imports.
github.comrepoAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 29 Jul 2026🛡️ Security - Field Notes: NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager
A DFIR field notes post describing how attackers abuse NSSM (Non-Sucking Service Manager) to run tools like ngrok as a Windows service, hiding the real executable behind the legitimate nssm.exe ImagePath. It walks through hunting techniques: checking Event ID 7045 service-installation logs, inspecting the service's registry Parameters subkey to reveal the true application/arguments, and confirming via live process command-line analysis (Process Explorer, Velociraptor's Windows.System.Pslist), illustrated with a second real case where nssm.exe was wrapping a "komari-agent" implant.
dfir.chwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 27 Jul 2026🛡️ Security - HackingLZ/gibson
Gibson is a Rust-based network monitoring toolkit with a lightweight agent, server, and parser that maps process-to-network connections, detects cloud provider ownership (AWS/Azure/GCP/Cloudflare), flags beaconing candidates and EOL OS risk, and auto-generates iptables/Windows firewall rules. It supports AES-256-GCM encrypted uploads, ASN/ARIN-based IP ownership lookups, and SQL/JSON report exports for cross-host threat hunting.
github.comrepoPublished and added 22 Jul 2026🛡️ Security
FauxUV campaign (Xygeni)Xygeni details FauxUV, a cluster of PyPI packages (moon-uv, my-magic-uv-helper) that impersonate the popular Rust-based Python package manager uv but carry almost no real functionality. Instead, on Windows they launch JupyterLab with authentication disabled (empty token, bound to 0.0.0.0, XSRF checks off) and, in later versions, expose it to the internet via a Pinggy SSH reverse tunnel, turning a legitimate data-science tool into an open remote shell that inherits the installing user's credentials. The writeup traces the install-time PowerShell trigger moving from setup.py to a separate CLI tool across versions and provides IOCs and detection guidance.
xygeni.iowriteupPublished and added 18 Jul 2026🛡️ Security- 0x1ceKing/HTB-Certified-Penetration-Testing-Specialist
A GitHub repository compiling personal study notes and cheatsheets for HackTheBox's CPTS (Certified Penetration Testing Specialist) certification, organized by module: network enumeration (Nmap), web footprinting, file transfers, shells/payloads, Metasploit, password attacks, pivoting/tunnelling, Active Directory enumeration and attacks, web app attacks (SQLi, SQLMap, XSS, LFI, file upload, command injection, Ffuf), and Linux/Windows privilege escalation. It functions as a reference guide mirroring the official HTB Academy course structure rather than original research.
github.comrepoPublished and added 18 Jul 2026🛡️ Security
Controlling Reasoning Effort in LLMsSebastian Raschka explains how modern reasoning LLMs implement adjustable "reasoning effort" or thinking-budget controls, tracing the mechanics from DeepSeek-R1's original RLVR recipe through hybrid think/no-think switches (Qwen3) to full effort-level systems in GPT-5.6 and gpt-oss. He then does a comparative deep dive into six flagship open-weight models' documented recipes — DeepSeek V4 (separate effort specialists distilled together), Nemotron 3 Ultra (SFT + truncated-trace training + hard budgets), Kimi K2.5/K3 (Toggle alternating budgeted/unconstrained RL, multi-teacher distillation), GLM-5 (turn-level/interleaved thinking via SFT), Qwen3 (Thinking Mode Fusion), and Inkling (continuous 0-1 effort conditioning during RL) — showing the shared techniques (effort-labeled SFT data, mode-conditioned RL with variable length penalties/context windows, and robustness training for hard token cutoffs) behind these UI toggles.
magazine.sebastianraschka.comarticleAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 18 Jul 2026🧠 AI
Harden-Runner Block Mode Now Available for macOS and Windows GitHub-Hosted RunnersStepSecurity's Harden-Runner v2.20.0 extends egress-policy: block enforcement (previously Linux-only) to macOS and Windows GitHub-hosted runners, blocking outbound calls to non-allowlisted endpoints from compromised workflows or dependencies. The post cites the Megalodon (5,500 repos) and GhostAction (3,000+ secrets) exfiltration campaigns and the Velora DEX SDK npm-package backdoor as motivation, noting macOS/Windows runners handle Apple/Windows code-signing credentials that make supply-chain malware look legitimate.
stepsecurity.ioarticleAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 16 Jul 2026🛡️ Security- Destructive Command Guard (dcg)
Destructive Command Guard (dcg) is a Rust-based hook that intercepts and blocks catastrophic commands (git reset --hard, rm -rf, DROP TABLE, kubectl delete namespace, terraform destroy, etc.) before AI coding agents like Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Cursor can execute them. It uses a modular "pack" system covering 50+ categories (databases, cloud providers, Kubernetes, secrets managers, CI/CD, storage, DNS, payments) plus a three-tier heredoc/inline-script AST scanning pipeline to catch destructive commands hidden inside python -c/bash -c payloads, and a dedicated "careful_company_running_windows" preset that also blocks data-exfiltration channels (webhooks, uploads, tunnels) and attempts to disable security controls. Configurable via TOML with agent-specific trust profiles, allowlists, and fail-closed/fail-open policies for unattended agent sessions.
github.comrepoPublished and added 15 Jul 2026🛡️ Security
Socket: 11 Malicious NuGet Tools Pose as Game CheatsSocket's Threat Research Team analyzed 11 malicious NuGet DotnetTool packages (published by account pepegit666) that impersonate game cheats/bots for titles like GTA5RP, Albion Online, and Throne and Liberty. Each package's .NET downloader resolves GitHub hosts via DNS-over-HTTPS, requests UAC elevation to resync the clock, and fetches a PyInstaller Windows payload (pepesoft.exe) from GitHub Releases/Hugging Face with dormant BitTorrent fallback code, that in turn authenticates to Google Sheets for telemetry, hardware-binds licenses, enforces a remote HWID ban-list, and, in three samples, drives Telegram bot commands that exfiltrate screenshots and modify Windows Installer registry keys on exit. The report includes full IOC lists (hashes, domains, hardcoded AWS-style keys, mutex GUID) and MITRE ATT&CK technique mappings.
socket.devwriteupPublished and added 15 Jul 2026🛡️ Security- Threat Actors Achieve Persistence After SQL Injection
Huntress SOC analysis of a June incident where a threat actor exploited a SQL injection flaw in an IIS/MSSQL web application to gain access, then extensively modified the environment: enabling Terminal Services, creating a rogue admin account (adminweb2$), disabling Windows Defender, deploying BadIIS malicious IIS modules (HttpFastCgiModule.dll, HttpCgiModule.dll) for SEO fraud, installing the XMRig cryptominer with nssm.exe persistence and hidden/system file attributes, and dropping additional PowerShell/batch payloads (qdcjoke1.2.ps1, c_joke1.2.ps1) via base64-encoded PowerShell and Out-of-Band Application Security Testing (OAST) exfiltration channels (oastify.com).
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 13 Jul 2026🛡️ Security - ZX41R/awesome-reverse-engineering-and-malware-analysis
A curated, upkept "awesome list" for reverse engineering and malware analysis that organizes hundreds of resources into guided learning tracks (Windows malware triage-to-config-extraction, Linux/ELF reversing, exploit development, firmware & embedded, mobile, anti-analysis) plus a full taxonomy covering foundations, RE tooling (IDA, Ghidra, Binary Ninja, radare2, x64dbg), malware analysis/unpacking/YARA/C2 tracking, fuzzing (AFL++, libFuzzer), firmware, mobile, OS internals, LOLBAS/GTFOBins living-off-the-land resources, DFIR, and threat intelligence. It also surfaces niche researcher communities like Kanxue, 52pojie, Tuts4You, the WASM Russian RE forum, 0x00sec, and back.engineering (VTIL/VMProtect devirtualization work), with every link manually vetted and dead links pruned.
github.comrepoAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 6 Jul 2026🛡️ Security - Defence Impairment Olympics
Huntress SOC incident writeup detailing a threat actor who exploited Adobe ColdFusion vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-26360, CVE-2023-29298, CVE-2023-29300) to drop a steganographic webshell hidden inside an image, then returned with a full defense-impairment batch script (i.bat) that disabled IIS logging, tampered with Windows Defender, killed/deleted security services (Sysmon, filebeat, SentinelOne, DrWeb, ImmunetProtect), used Image File Execution Options to freeze logging tools, deleted ModSecurity WAF module, enumerated FileZilla and multilingual local admin groups, weakened WDigest to force plaintext credentials in memory, dumped credentials via a Mimikatz kernel driver (mimidrv.sys), deleted CLSID/WScript registry keys, and cleared Windows event logs. The piece walks through each command block with attacker rationale and closes with concrete mitigation guidance for defenders.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 29 Jun 2026🛡️ Security - Fantastic clear-text passwords and where to collect them (Part 2 - Windows)
A DFIR.ch deep-dive on stealthier alternatives to LSASS dumping for harvesting Windows cleartext credentials, covering WDigest re-enablement, PowerShell ConsoleHost_history.txt, AD user-attribute leaks, Group Policy Preferences (GPP) cPassword, and rogue Security Support Provider (SSP), Password Filter DLL, and Network Provider DLL registration. Each technique is illustrated with real incident-response case data (registry commands, malicious DLL names like kerberos_sp.dll and mimilib.dll, and exfiltrated log paths), paired with Sysmon Event ID 13/11 detection guidance and hardening recommendations (disabling custom SSPs, Protected Event Logging).
dfir.chwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 28 Jun 2026🛡️ Security - From Code to Coverage (Part 6): What netlogon.log Sees That Event 1644 Never Will
Part 6 of Huntress's "From Code to Coverage" series reverse-engineers ldapnomnom's LDAP Ping (cLDAP-style) Active Directory username enumeration technique, tracing its Go source down to the Windows Filtering Platform to test the tool's claim of generating "no Windows audit logs." Lab testing shows Event 1644 never fires for LDAP Ping (it's processed by netlogon.dll, not the ntdsa.dll LDAP engine it monitors), but netlogon.log captures every queried username including disabled-account detail attackers can't see, while Event 5156 attributes source IP for ldapnomnom's TCP connections — a gap that disappears entirely if an attacker switches to true UDP cLDAP (as demonstrated with a custom cldap_ping.py), leaving only MDI's threshold-based external ID 2437 as network-layer coverage. The piece also audits the ldeep tool's enum_users transport and provides a PowerShell correlation script joining netlogon.log and Event 5156 within a 5-second window.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 24 Jun 2026🛡️ Security - Reverse-Skill
Reverse-Skill is a GitHub repo that gives AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode) a structured routing layer for reverse engineering and offensive security work: it detects the task type (APK, ELF binary, JS obfuscation, PCAP, CTF challenge) and routes to the correct methodology and toolchain (jadx, apktool, Frida, IDA Pro, Ghidra, radare2, Burp Suite, nmap, Metasploit) instead of letting the agent guess commands. It ships a case-init/scope workflow, an evidence-to-finding-to-report pipeline, a 173-case routing regression test run in CI on Windows and Ubuntu, and platform-specific docs for Kali/Ubuntu/macOS, positioned for lawful research, CTF, and authorized pentesting.
github.comrepoPublished and added 21 Jun 2026🛡️ Security
Socket: 141 Mastra npm Packages Compromised via Typosquatted DependencySocket's research team documents a supply chain attack in which npm account "ehindero" mass-published 141 malicious versions of @mastra/* packages (including @mastra/core, 918K weekly downloads) that were byte-identical to legitimate code but added a single new dependency: the typosquatted package easy-day-js. That package's postinstall hook (setup.cjs) disables TLS validation, fetches a second-stage cross-platform Node.js implant (protocal.cjs) that installs OS-specific persistence (Windows Run key, macOS LaunchAgent, Linux systemd unit disguised as Node/NVM tooling), inventories 166 cryptocurrency wallet browser extensions, steals Chrome/Edge/Brave history, and accepts arbitrary remote tasking (Node/Shell runners) from a hardcoded C2 over a custom ICAP-style protocol. The writeup includes full IOCs, SHA-256 hashes, and remediation guidance (rotate npm/CI/SSH credentials, treat affected hosts as compromised, disable install scripts).
socket.devwriteupPublished and added 20 Jun 2026🛡️ Security- The Devil, Eight Million Emails, and a Whole Lot of Milk | Phishing Stager Exposed
Huntress SOC incident report on an internet-facing RD Gateway/RDWeb terminal server compromised via credential reuse with no MFA, where the actor staged Gammadyne Mailer (a legitimate commercial bulk-mail tool) to send 8.9 million Boots-impersonation phishing emails direct-to-MX from the victim's clean IP, evading AV entirely. The phishing kit itself was hosted on a compromised Bolivian government domain (ipelc.gob.bo) to inherit its trust and dodge reputation blocklists, and the writeup details the log-forensics (Windows Security log gaps, Terminal Services operational logs, Chainsaw parsing, WFP Event 5157) used to reconstruct the timeline and attribute a separate opportunistic brute-force bot.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 15 Jun 2026🛡️ Security - mthcht/awesome-lists
mthcht/awesome-lists is a large, continually updated GitHub collection of threat-hunting IOC lists: suspicious named pipes, Windows services/tasks/firewall rules/ports, user-agents, mutex names, hostnames, MAC addresses, USB IDs, phishing/sinkholed/dyndns domains, HijackLibs, TOR node lists, LOLDrivers hashes, malicious bootloaders and SSL certificates, VPN provider IP ranges, YARA rules, offensive/greyware tool keyword detection patterns, Microsoft Defender/ClamAV signature lists, and RMM detection artifacts. It also links out to DFIR/threat-hunting courses, labs, and CTF-style datasets (SANS FOR500/FOR508, TheDFIRReport labs, Splunk BOTS, Xintra APT emulation) useful for blue teams building detections or hunting.
github.comrepoAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 10 Jun 2026🛡️ Security - Inside .NET Loader Analysis: From Malspam to In-Memory Loader
Huntress SOC dissects a multi-stage infection chain that begins with a malspam HTML attachment routed through a legitimate Google DoubleClick tracking link to evade reputation filters, before landing on a self-personalizing phishing kit and dropping a ZIP with a heavily obfuscated JScript loader. The chain cascades through PowerShell droppers into a .NET stager that performs extensive anti-analysis/anti-sandbox checks, disables Windows Defender, patches AMSI (via NtManageHotPatch on Windows 11 24H2) and ETW at the native API level, and uses RunPE process hollowing into InstallUtil.exe or MSBuild.exe to run a final loader that communicates over AES/RSA-encrypted, protobuf-serialized TCP C2 with certificate pinning. The writeup includes GPU-fingerprinting behavior, persistence via registry Run keys and randomized scheduled tasks, and concrete detection/hardening recommendations.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 3 Jun 2026🛡️ Security
Dev Machine Guard Now Scans Extensions Across Every Modern IDEStepSecurity's Dev Machine Guard now inventories and scores IDE extensions/plugins across eight IDE families (VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity, JetBrains IDEs, Android Studio, Eclipse-based IDEs, Xcode) on macOS, Windows, and Linux, not just VS Code. It computes a supply-chain Security Score per extension (adoption, publisher verification, license, known vulnerabilities, repo security posture) and flags known-compromised or typosquatted extensions, motivated by incidents like the October 2025 VS Code publisher token leaks, the s1ngularity Nx compromise, and the Shai-Hulud npm worm reaching extensions via transitive dependencies. The scanning engine is open source; enterprise mode feeds a fleet-wide dashboard for incident response and typosquat/compromise hunting.
stepsecurity.ioarticleAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 2 Jun 2026🛡️ Security- Unpatched NTLM Leakage in Windows search: URI Handler, Same Bug, No CVE, No Fix
Huntress researcher demonstrates that Windows' search: URI handler leaks a user's Net-NTLMv2 hash via the crumb=location: parameter, exploitable via a single clicked link (e.g. in Edge) or a `start` command with no admin rights or malware needed. The bug mirrors CVE-2026-33829 (Snipping Tool's ms-screensketch: handler, patched by Microsoft in April 2026) since both trace to the same DelegateExecute CLSID (SearchExecute/CLSID_SearchMSExecute in ExplorerFrame.dll), but MSRC closed this report as Moderate severity with no CVE and no fix, citing case-by-case servicing exceptions. The post includes reproduction steps with Responder, notes prior related disclosures by Varonis (search-ms:, 2024) and Trellix (search:, 2023), and recommends mitigations like blocking outbound SMB, enforcing SMB signing, and restricting NTLM.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 2 Jun 2026🛡️ Security
MCP Is Growing Up (Agentic AI Foundation analysis of 2026-07-28 spec)An in-depth breakdown of the MCP 2026-07-28 specification release candidate: the protocol layer becomes stateless (no more Mcp-Session-Id, with application state moved into explicit handles like basket_id), extensions get formal reverse-DNS identifiers and independent versioning (with MCP Apps and Tasks as the first examples), Roots/Sampling/Logging are deprecated under a new feature lifecycle policy, OAuth/OpenID Connect rules are tightened for one-client-to-many-servers deployments, and tool schemas gain full JSON Schema 2020-12 support. The piece argues these changes reflect MCP deliberately narrowing scope and building governance maturity (conformance-test requirements, 12-month deprecation windows) so the protocol can scale safely in production agentic systems.
aaif.ioarticleAdded 4 Oct 2026, published 27 May 2026🧠 AI- The Gentleman Ransomware | Defense Evasion TTPs Uncovered | Huntress
Huntress SOC details two Gentlemen ransomware incidents showing Windows Event Log clearing, PowerShell-based Defender tampering, and Scheduled Task persistence via a fake svchost32.exe creating a SOCKS proxy C2 connection. Ties findings to a leaked internal RaaS database revealing CVE-2024-55591 exploitation and infrastructure links to Qilin and Lazarus Group.
huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 21 May 2026🛡️ Security
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