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USENIX

0 mentions in 7 days · 2 in 30 days · 2 total · first seen Aug 20, 2026 · last 25d ago

Timeline2 articles

Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall

Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.

US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.

Risky Business NewsAug 21, 02:55 UTC · 25d agoResearch2

Zombie Card Attack Can Revive Expired Visa Cards for Contactless Payments

UMass Amherst researchers demonstrate Zombie Card, an NFC relay attack that revives expired Visa contactless cards for in-store purchases without breaking cryptography.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst presented the Zombie Card attack at USENIX Security 2026, showing that Visa's Kernel 3 does not cryptographically bind the Application Expiration Date (tag 5F24) the terminal reads with the Track 2 expiry seen by the issuer. By positioning an NFC man-in-the-middle relay, an attacker can rewrite the terminal-facing expiration date of an expired card and complete contactless purchases, provided the account remains open under the same PAN and the bank does not independently re-check expiry. Testing across five major US banks found three distinct policies; Visa Kernel 3 accepted the modified date, while Mastercard, American Express, and Discover kernels declined modified transactions. Findings were disclosed to Visa and affected banks in May 2025, no CVE has been assigned, and no exploitation has been reported.

The Hacker NewsAug 20, 18:30 UTC · 26d agoResearch

Appears with

threat actor Salt Typhoon 1 organization Bill Marczak 1 organization EMVCo 1 organization Khwarizmi Lab 1 organization Risky Business 1 organization University of Massachusetts Amherst 1 product SumUp Plus 1 product SumUp Solo 1 product Tiangou Secure Gateway 1 product TSG 1 product Visa Kernel 3 1 vendor Alation 1 vendor American Express 1 vendor ClarityCheck 1 vendor Discover 1 vendor Geedge Networks 1

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