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The Machine With Many Faces: Post-Exploitation Identity Misuse in SPIFFE/SPIRE

Unit 42 demonstrates that root access on a Kubernetes node lets attackers spoof SPIFFE/SPIRE attestation and harvest co-located workloads' SVIDs.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 describes post-exploitation techniques in which an attacker with root on a compromised Kubernetes node spoofs Linux cgroup metadata used by the SPIRE agent during workload attestation, tricking it into issuing a co-located workload's SPIFFE Verifiable Identity Document to an attacker-controlled process. The research shows the core trust assumption of machine-identity systems—that the node is trusted—collapses once root is obtained, exposing all cryptographic identities scoped to that node. Unit 42 released an open-source tool, Spooffe, for defenders to test identity exposure, and notes the technique has not been observed exploited in the wild.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 6d agoResearch1

Viggle/Viggle-Animate — new model trending #28 on Hugging Face

Viggle released Viggle-Animate, a 33.1B MiniMax-H3 finetune replacing video characters from one repainted frame, rendering 124 frames in 26 seconds on one GPU.

Viggle-Animate replaces the character in a video using only a driving video and one of its own repainted frames, with no pose estimator, segmentation mask, face tracker, or text encoder. It is a 33.1B full finetune of MiniMax-H3's ref2va transformer, jointly distilled with DMD across two teachers split by noise level, so rendering takes three forward passes per clip. On a B200 GPU it renders 124 frames in 26 seconds, 6.1x faster per clip than Wan2.2-Animate-14B in matched comparisons. The method assumes no person-specific representation, so it generalizes beyond humans; a demo, research write-up, and ComfyUI nodes are available.

Hugging Face trending models · 16d agoModel release

Speculative Decoding in vLLM on AMD GPUs

vLLM benchmarks speculative decoding on AMD Instinct MI300X and MI355X GPUs across five drafting methods including EAGLE-3 and native MTP.

The vLLM project documents draft-and-verify speculative decoding support for AMD GPUs via ROCm, comparing native MTP, Gemma 4 MTP, EAGLE-3, DFlash, and DSpark drafting approaches. Output-token throughput effects varied with drafting method, proposal length, model family, draft checkpoint, workload, and acceptance behavior. The post also covers how to enable each method plus practical tuning and observability considerations.

Privileged File System Vulnerability Present in a SCADA System

Unit 42 details CVE-2025-0921 (CVSS 6.5), a privileged file operations flaw in Iconics Suite enabling DoS and privilege escalation.

Unit 42 disclosed CVE-2025-0921 (CVSS 6.5), an execution-with-unnecessary-privileges flaw in the Pager Agent of the AlarmWorX64 MMX feature of Mitsubishi Electric Iconics Digital Solutions GENESIS64. Attackers could misuse privileged file system operations to corrupt critical binaries, causing denial-of-service or integrity loss on vulnerable SCADA systems. The analysis demonstrates a chain with CVE-2024-7587, which grants excessive permissions to the C:\ProgramData\ICONICS directory via the GenBroker32 installer. Iconics released an advisory with a workaround that addresses the reported issues.

Top 10 Best AWS Security Tools in 2026

Editorial roundup ranking the ten best AWS security tools of 2026, from native GuardDuty and Security Hub to CNAPPs like Wiz and Prisma Cloud.

The article recommends enabling AWS-native services first: GuardDuty for threat detection, Security Hub for posture aggregation, the free IAM Access Analyzer, plus CloudTrail logging and Config rules. It then reviews third-party platforms including Wiz, Palo Alto Prisma Cloud, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, Trend Micro Cloud One, and Orca Security. It is an editorial vendor assessment with pricing described by model only, highlighting cross-account correlation and attack-path prioritization as third-party differentiators.

Cyber Security News · 10h agoTools

EITest Campaign Evolution: From Angler EK to Neutrino and Rig

Unit 42 details the EITest campaign's shift from Angler to Neutrino and Rig exploit kits while distributing ransomware, downloaders, and banking trojans.

Unit 42 updated its tracking of the EITest campaign, first identified in October 2014, which compromises websites with injected scripts that redirect victims through a gate to exploit kits. After Angler EK disappeared in June 2016, EITest switched to Neutrino and then primarily used Rig EK by August 2016. In September 2016 the campaign began using hex-obfuscated JavaScript and simplified gate URLs, while continuing to distribute payloads including Gootkit, Cerber, Bart, CryptFile2, Vawtrak, Ursnif, and Tinba. Gate infrastructure consistently reused IP blocks such as 85.93.0.0/24 even as domain names changed.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild

Campaign Evolution: EITest from October through December 2016

Unit 42 details the EITest campaign's late-2016 changes: gates and obfuscation dropped, with Rig EK variants delivering ransomware and infostealers.

Unit 42 tracks the EITest campaign through late 2016, noting it abandoned the gate between compromised websites and exploit kit landing pages after its October 2016 report, and stopped obfuscating injected script URLs by October 15. The campaign primarily uses the Rig-E (Empire Pack) variant and sometimes Rig-V of Rig EK to deliver Cerber and CryptoMix ransomware plus infostealers such as Gootkit, the Chthonic banking Trojan, Ursnif variants, and Latentbot. Tracked since 2014 by Malwarebytes Labs and others, EITest targets unpatched Windows systems without specific victimology.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild

Campaign Evolution: pseudo

Unit 42 traces the pseudo-Darkleech campaign's 2016 shift from Angler to Neutrino to Rig exploit kits and rotating ransomware payloads.

Unit 42 documents how the pseudo-Darkleech exploit kit campaign evolved through 2016, switching from Angler EK to Neutrino EK in June and to Rig EK in September after Neutrino ceased operations. Payloads rotated from TeslaCrypt to CryptXXX, CrypMIC, and finally Cerber ransomware by October 2016. Injected script on compromised websites changed from 12,000-18,000 character obfuscated blocks to short, unobfuscated hidden iframes starting July 1, 2016.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild

NIS2 compliance: Fixing IAM and access control before the 2026 audit

EU NIS2 enforcement deadlines approach; organizations are urged to prioritize service account inventory, lifecycle offboarding, and phishing-resistant MFA before audits.

EU member states are moving from NIS2 transposition into enforcement, with fines up to 10 million euros or 2% of global turnover for essential entities and personal liability for management bodies. The article argues access management is the fastest high-ROI starting point, estimating 2-4 weeks to enforce fine-grained password policy, vault shared credentials, and deploy phishing-resistant MFA versus 6-12 months for supply chain risk management. It flags three common pre-audit failures: unmanaged service accounts and API keys, dormant accounts from broken offboarding, and SMS OTP instead of phishing-resistant MFA under NIST SP 800-63B. The piece promotes Passwork as a single control plane for credential storage, RBAC, and WebAuthn.

Help Net Security · 15d agoIndustry