47 results for “Recon”

Analysis of a trojanized anthropic.claude-code 2.1.313 extension (darwin-arm64), found on Open VSX, with a 66-line loader prepended to extension.js. It adds an svc-telemetry key to authorized_keys, opens a reverse SSH tunnel to 134.209.82.225, sets persistence (LaunchAgent, cron, scheduled task) and sends host recon over HTTP port 8099. Includes IOCs, hashes and response steps; no further payload download was found.

opensourcemalware.comwriteupPublished and added 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The Claude Code VS Code extension anthropic.claude-code 2.1.313 was published on Open VSX on 29 October 2026 with a malicious loader prepended to extension.js. On load it planted an attacker SSH key (svc-telemetry), installed per-OS persistence, opened a reverse SSH tunnel and beaconed host recon over HTTP. Cursor reports at most 5,000 users received it in an 11-hour window. The post gives the timeline, cleanup artifacts and credential rotation steps.

stepsecurity.iowriteupPublished and added 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Phorion analyzes a backdoor injected into versions 2.1.312 and 2.1.313 of the official Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace. An IIFE prepended to extension.js plants an SSH key, opens a reverse SSH tunnel to 134.209.82[.]225, persists via a fake com.apple.sysmond LaunchAgent and beacons host recon. A macOS systemsetup check bug usually stops SSH from being enabled. The post lists detections and remediation.

phorion.iowriteupAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SingularityNET exploit (19 September 2026): attackers with signing authority exposed through a cloud infrastructure breach drained 8.72M FET from the Ethereum bridge converter, then minted about 2.3 billion AGIX, NTX, WMTX and CGV. Rekt's transaction-level reconstruction puts gross liquid proceeds near $2.29M, not the $16.77M headline, and traces laundering via Chainflip, Baltex and THORChain. It notes conversionIn() skipped checkLimits() and trusted a single EOA signature.

rekt.newswriteupAdded 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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

Unit 42 analysis of a threat actor, BUGSTER, who ran the Hermes Agent framework with jailbroken DeepSeek V4 and Cursor to plan and run cybercrime. Activity included a WordPress brute force, a MongoDB exfiltration of over 5,200 student records at an Indian university, VoIP fraud planning, Wi-Fi cracking via Vast.ai GPUs, and crypto whale reconnaissance. The report covers the actor's prompt-level safety override, infrastructure (162.243.3[.]92) and attribution.

unit42.paloaltonetworks.comwriteupAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Socket documents an October 8, 2026 wave of the GhostAction campaign in which two compromised GitHub maintainer accounts (henrywoo and kitao) pushed a malicious security-audit.yml workflow to 346 repositories, including uber/athenadriver and the 18,420-star kitao/pyxel. Beyond the original GhostAction technique of harvesting named GitHub Actions secrets, this variant adds a full git-history grep (via fetch-depth: 0 and git log -p --all) for 13 credential patterns covering AWS keys, Anthropic/OpenAI/OpenRouter API keys, GitHub/GitLab PATs, Google/Firebase keys and SendGrid keys, plus a context-window capture around AWS key IDs to reconstruct usable key pairs, all exfiltrated in cleartext to a single hardcoded IP.

socket.devwriteupPublished and added 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Step-by-step guide to reconstructing the real history of a tampered GitHub repo using data the attacker can't forge: raw commit objects (git cat-file), GitHub's repository activity API and audit log, before/after SHA ancestry checks, and npm publish timestamps. Worked through a PolinRider case (nestjsx/nest-access-control) where a forged commit was force-pushed to master plus 22 branches in 38 seconds, with a malicious .vscode/tasks.json runOn folderOpen trigger. It also covers safe handling of untrusted clones and how to tell victim accounts from attacker accounts.

opensourcemalware.comwriteupPublished and added 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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

Rapid7 details a new BPFDoor campaign targeting telecom and network-edge appliances (ShareTech, SpamSniper mail gateways) and a six-sample Linux RAT family dubbed AVERAT found on compromised Taiwanese CPE (Synology NAS, a NetKlass device, a Dahua DVR). The writeup reconstructs the Rapid7 BPFDoor controller's HTTP-tunneled trigger mechanism, a fileless ShareTech dropper that stages binaries as ntpdate/udevds and deletes them while processes keep running, a BPF Rekoobe variant that hides inside SMTP port-25 traffic, and AVERAT's RC4-derived config/C2 scheme — tying the infrastructure to the broader China-nexus ORB (Operational Relay Box) device pattern described in CISA/NCSC-UK advisory AA26-113A. It closes with detection guidance for unlinked/deleted process execution, dropper staging artifacts, and port-25 C2 callbacks, plus full IOC and ATT&CK tables.

rapid7.comwriteupAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Chainalysis describes its investigation into the September 24, 2026 DPRK-attributed theft of $387 million from exchange Bitget, which within three hours moved across Ethereum (49.7%), XRP (40.8%), Zcash (7.6%), and Tron (1.8%). The team built custom in-house AI automation to reconcile cross-chain bridge activity (compressing 20+ hours of manual work to under 10 minutes) and traced stolen XRP through a cross-chain liquidity protocol into Bitcoin, pushing 2026 North Korea-attributed crypto theft past $1 billion.

chainalysis.comwriteupAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DFIR.ch field notes on an incident where attackers used Ricardo J. Ruiz's TrickDump tool to dump LSASS without creating a conventional minidump file, instead leaving lock.json, shock.json, barrel.json and a ZIP of randomly-named memory-region chunks. The authors reconstructed the dump with TrickDump's create_dump.py and parsed it with pypykatz, confirming the attacker actually recovered reusable Kerberos credential material rather than just detecting that LSASS was touched. Includes hunting guidance (Sysmon EID 10 process-access telemetry, SeDebugPrivilege enablement, multi-binary workflows) and notes TrickDump fails against LSASS protected by PPL.

dfir.chwriteupAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

Microsoft 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

Opensourcemalware.com traces PolinRider, a DPRK-linked supply-chain malware delivered via a poisoned .vscode/tasks.json that autoruns an obfuscated payload disguised as a Font Awesome .woff2 file, through an 8-month infection of three real GitHub repos (Binary-Mindz org). Using GitHub's server-side activity log they reconstruct 853 force-pushes showing the operators A/B-testing multiple concurrent payload variants (400/500/900), rewriting commits to impersonate legitimate cleanup commits, hiding payloads inside eslint.config.mjs and prisma.config.ts, and using an Ethereum-wallet-based C2 dead-drop (NullReceiver). The post lists why common detection heuristics (filename search, whitespace padding, marker strings) fail against the new variants and gives working detections (file-type checks, folderOpen task grepping, activity-log force-push monitoring) plus full IOCs.

opensourcemalware.comwriteupPublished and added 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

Hands-on walkthrough of Eyesharvester, an open-source recon tool (github.com/Exhunterx/eyesharvester) that scans IP ranges to fingerprint IP cameras, DVRs and NVRs, tests default credentials, lists vendor-specific CVEs and generates a hardening checklist. The piece demonstrates finding Hikvision devices vulnerable to CVE-2021-36260, which gives shell access and can be chained with a Metasploit payload and a reverse SSH/Meterpreter proxy to pivot into the internal network.

hackers-arise.comwriteupAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

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

Microsoft Security Research details an active campaign (since May 2026) where attackers use voice-phishing and SMS lures impersonating IT helpdesk passkey/SSO enrollment requests to drive victims into AiTM or device-code phishing flows, compromising Microsoft 365 identities. Post-compromise, actors register attacker-controlled MFA methods (e.g., software OTP tokens) for persistence, conduct systematic Microsoft Graph reconnaissance across users, groups, roles, and SharePoint/OneDrive/Exchange, then exfiltrate data at a measured pace using automated Node.js/python-httpx tooling while evading detection through IP rotation and anonymous proxies. The post includes real audit-log JSON examples, multiple KQL hunting queries for GraphAPIAuditEvents/CloudAppEvents, full MITRE ATT&CK mapping, and attributes the initial-access tradecraft to Storm-3121 and Storm-3032, which feed into ShinyHunters/Falcon and Helix extortion operations.

microsoft.comwriteupAdded 3 Oct 2026, published 9 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

Cisco Talos details active exploitation of CVE-2026-20079 (CVSS 10.0 unauthenticated auth bypass leading to root) and CVE-2026-20316 (low-privilege login via static credentials) in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center. Three post-compromise clusters are tracked: UAT-12197 deploying a JSP web shell and JAR command executor to exfiltrate credentials; UAT-11823, overlapping with Sandworm, using a malicious Makeself license.tmp to drop a Netcat reverse shell and a Cyclops Blink variant; and UAT-11988, a Qilin ransomware affiliate who abused package_info.pl for LOTL recon, SOCKS5/reverse-SSH tunneling, and ultimately deployed Qilin ransomware. Talos provides Snort SIDs, hotfix guidance ahead of a comprehensive hardening release, and a GitHub IOC repository.

blog.talosintelligence.comwriteupAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 9 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

Cisco Talos reconstructs two related WebDAV-based infection chains (tracked actor UAT-10820) that use a ClickFix fake-CAPTCHA lure, EtherHiding on BNB Smart Chain to stage JavaScript via a malicious Cloudflare Worker, and WebDAV-delivered disguised DLLs executed via rundll32 ordinal calls to drop the Amatera stealer. Depending on the C2 configuration, Amatera then deploys either a NativeAOT-loaded ZigCryptoStealer with a BYOVD EDR-killer driver and a Go-based Yamux reverse proxy, or a PowerShell stager that installs a trojanized NetSupport Manager RAT pointed at Russian C2 infrastructure. The post details loader internals, Amatera's dead-drop C2 resolution via Telegraph and Steam, and provides ClamAV signatures plus a full IOC list.

blog.talosintelligence.comwriteupAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 8 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

Huntress dissects a trojanized Exodus crypto wallet installer (v24.33.4, unsigned MSI built with WiX) that installs a genuine wallet but patches Electron's show()/focus()/center() methods so no window ever appears, then loads a modular RAT via a hand-written reflective PE loader implemented in JavaScript using the Node.js koffi FFI library. The RAT (VNC, SOCKS proxy, browser-credential stealer, recon module) beacons over WebSockets and uses Azure Table Storage as a dead-drop C2 channel to blend into legitimate cloud traffic, while delivery abuses double-extension .pdf.js phishing, ZIP-staged JS files, and an unused search-ms/WebDAV technique; the writeup also covers multi-layer string-array/arithmetic deobfuscation and includes full IOCs and mitigation guidance.

huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 1 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

A transaction-level forensic reconstruction of the August 23, 2026 Term Finance vault drain ($8.5M), in which an attacker funded a wallet via Tornado Cash, deposited a trivial 0.017% stake, and used it to submit an executable governance proposal through Term's opt-out "veto" voting model. The payload sat publicly visible on-chain for six days with no objection, then disabled the seven-day Zodiac delay-modifier timelock from inside the same proposal it was supposed to be gated by, before draining four ETH sub-vaults and five USDC vaults (including contagion into a RockawayX/Tori Finance curated vault). The piece dissects why the exploit required no leaked key, oracle manipulation, or reentrancy — only an unwatched veto queue and a timelock reachable by the mechanism it was meant to contain.

defiprime.comwriteupAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 23 Aug 2026🛡️ Security

Cisco 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

Wiz details how attackers abuse Entra ID's Device Registration Service to register rogue devices — often via device code phishing — to satisfy Conditional Access policies requiring joined devices, commonly using the open-source ROADrecon framework and predictable names like DESKTOP-XXXXXXXX. As attackers shift to AI-generated, benign-looking device names (e.g., "Work PC") and plausible User-Agent strings, static IOC matching breaks down, so Wiz shifted to behavioral detections: naming-convention anomaly detection against tenant baselines and correlating device-code-phishing alerts with subsequent device registrations, including a shared KQL query for identifying anomalous naming baselines.

wiz.iowriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 18 Aug 2026🛡️ Security

Wiz's Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) details a real campaign (mid-May–early June 2026) in which stolen GitHub Personal Access Tokens were used for repository reconnaissance, low-volume validation cloning, and then mass exfiltration of thousands of repos per organization from AWS IPs using automated tooling. The post provides a structured investigation playbook — containing the compromised PAT, expanding the timeline via GitHub audit logs and Enterprise Log Streaming, tracing the leak source, assessing blast radius (exposed secrets/PII in exfiltrated repos), rotating credentials, and hunting for downstream cloud abuse — while noting GitHub's 7-day audit log retention limits visibility.

wiz.iowriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 13 Aug 2026🛡️ Security

Wiz Research reverse-engineers CVE-2026-72898 (GHSA-vwf4-m7j8-wcjf), a zero-day SQL injection in Metabase's /api/session/reset_password endpoint exploited in the wild against Metabase Cloud since August 2026. The bug chains Clojure's merge (which lets an attacker-supplied user-id survive an auth-result merge), JSON keywordization, and HoneySQL's :raw keyword to smuggle unparameterized SQL into a t2/select-one query, yielding blind SQL injection. The post walks through decompiling patched vs. vulnerable JARs to reconstruct the flaw, notes ~2,500 internet-exposed Metabase instances per Shodan, and gives a curl-based exploitability check plus remediation guidance.

wiz.iowriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 10 Aug 2026🛡️ Security

PortSwigger research paper on the 'HTTP Terminator', an autonomous LLM-driven pipeline (hypothesis generation from RFC micro-inspiration, live evaluation via a Burp Suite/SQLite harness against 30,000+ targets, and weaponization through an MCP-controlled Turbo Intruder agent) that discovered new HTTP desync triggers and Response Queue Poisoning exploits. It details concrete new techniques (the protocol-ruler recon method, the 'dangling byte' RQP-reliability trick, Response Forking, Status-Line Injection, Range Cache Poisoning) and a major new attack class, Shared Parser Confusion, plus a resulting CVE-2026-63078 zero-day in Apache Traffic Server, and real compromises of banks, an airport admin panel, a Beyond Trust product, a Meta server, and a Citrix NetScaler-based SSO deployment.

portswigger.netwriteupAdded 18 Sep 2026, published 5 Aug 2026🛡️ Security

A hands-on OSINT tutorial demonstrating three tools for TikTok reconnaissance: Unfurl (dfir.blog/unfurl) for decoding video IDs, usernames, and timestamps embedded in TikTok URLs; Bellingcat's tiktok-timestamp tool for extracting exact upload date/time from video links; and omar-thing.site for pulling account-level intelligence such as user ID, creation date, location, language, bio, and follower/following lists. It walks through each tool with example queries to show how public TikTok data can be turned into investigative leads.

hackers-arise.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 31 Jul 2026🛡️ Security

BAIR blog post introducing ABBEL, a framework that replaces an LLM agent's full interaction history with an explicit, RL-trained "belief state" that is periodically updated and graded via an autoencoding-style reconstruction objective (the model must be able to reconstruct the latest observation from its belief). Evaluated on CollabBench (collaborative code generation from Sweet-RL), a Wordle-like Combination Lock game, and multi-objective QA (compared against MEM1), ABBEL closes roughly half the performance gap to full-context models versus unsupervised summarization while using far less peak context, and trains in fewer steps. The post accompanies the arXiv paper "ABBEL: Learning Natural-Language Belief States for Memory-Efficient Interaction" (Lidayan, Bjorner, Golechha, Goyal, Suhr, 2026).

bair.berkeley.eduwriteupAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 26 Jul 2026🧠 AI

StepSecurity reconstructs how a malicious version of XanaduAI's mrmustard quantum-photonics library (0.7.4) reached PyPI: an attacker compromised a maintainer's GitHub account, used a throwaway workflow to exfiltrate the project's PyPI and Codecov tokens via webhook.site, then published a poisoned tarball directly (the malicious code never touched the git source tree). On import, the payload evades CI/container sandboxes, then steals SSH keys, AWS/Kubernetes credentials, and HPC/GPU environment data, XOR-obfuscates it, and beacons to metrics.femboy.energy before installing three persistence mechanisms (cron job, Python .pth hook, shell rc hook). The post includes full IOCs, detection guidance via Harden-Runner's Secret Exfiltration Attempt detection and Global Block Policy, and step-by-step recovery instructions.

stepsecurity.iowriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 25 Jul 2026🛡️ Security

Huntress recovered and reconstructed "Untitled1.ps1," a PowerShell Active Directory enumeration script used by an attacker during a June 3 incident via RDP access with compromised credentials, and identified it as AI-generated ("vibe-coded") based on artifacts like an unedited LLM placeholder hostname, a "FULLY FIXED" prompt-iteration title, over-engineered five-method DC-discovery fallback logic, and gratuitous colored console/HTML reporting output. The attack chain paired this bespoke recon tool with off-the-shelf abuse of s5cmd (legitimate AWS S3 CLI used for exfiltration) and SharpShares (share enumeration), illustrating how LLM-generated one-off malware evades hash/signature-based detection and pushes defenders toward behavioral analytics on Active Directory enumeration patterns.

huntress.comwriteupAdded 3 Sep 2026, published 8 Jul 2026🛡️ Security