ZeroHour

Search: “blockstream”

32 stories

Smart search ranks by meaning as well as keywords (one row per story, last 45 days).

PhysStream: Streaming Physics-Grounded Video Generation with Structured Scene Memory and Fine-Grained Motion Control

PhysStream enables mid-generation interactive control of physics-grounded video via structured scene memory and velocity-increment signals, reducing motion distribution distance 33%.

PhysStream is an autoregressive physics-grounded image-to-video model that maintains structured scene memory—positional maps and object tracking maps derived online from previously generated frames—and accepts fine-grained motion control via sparse velocity-increment signals encoding physical quantities. Training runs in two stages: a bidirectional model finetuned with motion-control conditioning, then a causal autoregressive model with structured scene memory. It supports interactive mid-generation control over multi-object tabletop rigid-body scenes, reducing motion distribution distance (FVMD) by 33% and trajectory error by 12% over the strongest baselines. Human evaluators preferred it in over 85% of in-the-wild comparisons.

Hugging Face daily papersupdated · 17h agofirst · 1d agoAI research 2 sources

A hacker stole $340M in a crypto heist, then returned most of it

A hacker exploited a bug to steal about 4,000 BTC (~$340M) from Blockstream's Liquid Network, then returned roughly 3,400 BTC after the bug was fixed.

A hacker exploited a bug to withdraw roughly 4,000 bitcoins worth about $340 million from Liquid Network, a settlement service launched in 2018 by crypto firm Blockstream and used by several cryptocurrency exchanges. Liquid Network paused operations, and the hacker, described as a white hat, offered to return the funds once the bug was fixed. Former Blockstream executive Samson Mow said the bug was fixed and about 3,400 BTC (~$293M) returned, leaving roughly 600 BTC (~$47M) under the hacker's control pending further security improvements. Rekt's leaderboard ranks the heist among the largest cryptocurrency thefts to date.

TechCrunch · Security · 7d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

Hackers Drain $320 Million From Liquid Network, Then Return Most of It

Hackers exploited an Elements bug to drain about 4,000 BTC (~$320M) from Liquid Network's federation wallet, then returned 3,400 BTC after Blockstream patched.

An attacker drained roughly 4,000 of 4,200 BTC (~$320M) from Bitcoin's Liquid Network federation wallet on September 6 by exploiting a bug in Elements, the open-source code powering the sidechain, which allowed unbacked L-BTC tokens that were redeemed for real Bitcoin through SideSwap's authorized peg-out mechanism. The self-described white-hat attackers negotiated publicly via OP_RETURN on-chain messages, demanding the bridge nodes be patched before returning 3,400 BTC (~$262.6M) and keeping about 598 BTC (~$47M). Blockstream confirmed the affected bridge nodes were patched; the network remains paused while federation members complete security work, and experts debate whether the act legally constitutes extortion.

Security Affairs · 7d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

Liquid Hackers Return 3,400 Bitcoin Taken via Elements Bug, Still Holding $47M in BTC

Hackers exploited an Elements bug to take ~4,000 BTC from Liquid Network, returned 3,400 BTC (~$265M), and still hold ~598.5 BTC (~$47M).

Attackers exploited a bug in Elements, the software behind Blockstream's Liquid Network Bitcoin sidechain, to create L-BTC and withdraw roughly 4,000 BTC (about $320 million) via SideSwap's Peg-out Authorization Key, roughly 95% of Liquid's reported reserves. They returned 3,400 BTC (about $265 million at ~$78,000 per BTC) to the federation address on September 7, keeping about 598.5 BTC (roughly $47 million). The group called itself white hats, demanded node patches before returning funds, and negotiated via on-chain and PGP-encrypted messages; Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet characterized the arrangement as extortion. Blockstream says the peg-out key and other keys were not compromised, updated software is deployed, and the network remains paused pending a coordinated restart.

The Hacker News · 7d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

Hackers drain $320M in Bitcoin from Liquid Network, claim they’re the good guys

Hackers withdrew roughly 4,000 BTC (about $320M) from the Liquid Network federation wallet backing the Blockstream-developed Bitcoin sidechain, claiming benign intent.

Blockstream said Sunday that around 4,000 BTC, roughly $320 million, was withdrawn from the federation wallet backing Liquid Network, a Bitcoin sidechain used by exchanges and financial institutions. The attackers publicly claimed they were 'the good guys'; no attribution or recovery details are provided. The theft affects infrastructure that backs custodial Bitcoin transfers for exchanges.

DataBreaches.net · 8d agoData breach in the wild

Hackers drain $320M in Bitcoin from Liquid Network, claim they're the good guys

Attackers withdrew about 4,000 BTC (~$320M) from Liquid Network's federation wallet via a SideSwap peg-out, claiming whitehat status.

Hackers drained roughly $320 million in Bitcoin — about 4,000 BTC, 95% of holdings — from the federation wallet backing Blockstream's Liquid Network sidechain. The withdrawal occurred through SideSwap using its Peg-out Authorization Key (PAK), yet no PAK appears to have been compromised, and the exact mechanism remains under investigation. The actors embedded an on-chain message identifying themselves as whitehats, asked Blockstream to patch federation nodes first, and promised to return most of the funds after fixes are confirmed. Liquid disabled its bridge nodes and asked exchanges to suspend L-BTC deposits and withdrawals; other Liquid assets and the Bitcoin network were unaffected.

The Register · Security · 8d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

ShallowStream: Index Shallow then Answer Deep for Streaming Video Understanding

ShallowStream builds streaming-video retrieval indexes from shallow MLLM layers, cutting per-frame prefill latency by up to 52.1x.

ShallowStream is a framework for streaming video understanding with multimodal LLMs that uses the model's shallow layers to simultaneously encode frames and maintain an always-on lightweight retrieval index via shallow-layer KV caches, avoiding full-depth prefill for every incoming frame. At query time, shallow-layer attention scores plus a diversity-aware selection strategy retrieve relevant context frames. It reports performance on par with the strongest existing streaming methods while reducing per-frame prefill latency by up to 52.1x and 10-second end-to-end latency by up to 11.9x, with code released on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

‘White hat’ hackers take $47 million bounty after $320 million crypto theft

Hackers withdrew $320 million in bitcoin from Liquid Network, negotiated on-chain, returned $266.5 million and kept a $47 million reward.

Purported white-hat hackers withdrew 4,000 BTC (about $320 million) from Liquid Network's own wallet, one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts of 2026. Over roughly 12 hours of public on-chain negotiation with operator Blockstream, the hackers returned $266.5 million in bitcoin and kept 598.5 BTC (about $47 million), claiming it as a reward for uncovering a bug. Blockstream deployed updated software and paused deposits and withdrawals while experts traced the flaw to the Elements sidechain framework. April thefts of $290 million from Kelp and $280 million from Drift, attributed to North Korean hackers, were previously 2026's largest.

The Record · 7d agoData breach in the wild

You've Got a BUD in Me: Authenticated Reads from Per-Block Write Logs

Researchers propose BUD, per-block write-log digests enabling blockchain validators to serve historical membership and exclusion proofs far cheaper than state-wide tries.

The paper introduces Block Update Digests (BUD), which authenticate each block's write log with predecessor pointers, plus a SuperBUD and exponential hierarchy to turn long unchanged intervals into short proofs. Soundness against adversarial provers and up to f Byzantine validators is proven under archive, attestation, and committee evidence assumptions. Benchmarks show a 50x state-size increase raises the base-BUD path only 1.24x versus 3.1x for in-memory and 69.5x for disk-backed Merkle Patricia tries, with read payloads below 800 bytes and p99 warm verification at 146 microseconds.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth

Princeton researcher Yifan Zhang proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer, carrying full decoder state across every token for unbounded temporal depth.

Yifan Zhang's technical report defines the Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT), pairing a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder whose final output and layerwise sliding-window attention cache carry into every subsequent token with no prompt-response boundary reset. The reference configuration ties 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, executing 96 logical blocks per token while the state path grows to 48t blocks after t tokens at fixed per-token compute. The report details RL replay contracts that rebuild all states under current parameters and exact prefix snapshots for multi-turn serving, but explicitly reports no measured efficiency, reasoning quality, or scaling results.

MarkTechPost · 2d agoAI research1

Hackers Return $263 Million Stolen From Liquid Network

Hackers drain roughly 4,000 BTC (~$320M) from Liquid Network federation wallet, then return 3,400 BTC with ~598 BTC still outstanding.

Attackers withdrew about 4,000 Bitcoin (roughly $320 million) from the Liquid Network federation wallet, which held approximately 4,200 BTC, via the SideSwap Peg-out Authorization Key without that key being compromised. Blockstream disabled nodes and suspended transactions after disclosing the heist on Sunday. Alleged white-hat hackers returned 3,400 BTC (~$262.6M) on Monday, demanding the underlying bug be patched before releasing the remaining ~598 BTC (~$47M). The network remains paused while fixes and a safe restart are prepared.

SecurityWeek · 7d agoData breach in the wild

How Does mHC Use Its Residual Streams? Selective Routing and Near-Identity Mixing

Analysis of DeepSeek-V4-Flash shows four-stream mHC residual blocks use only about two streams effectively, with late-layer mixing providing little benefit.

The study examines the four-stream residual pathway of DeepSeek-V4-Flash, finding typical attention or FFN sites effectively use about two streams and that residual mixing is modest, occurring primarily in early layers. Replacing late mixers with identity increases C4 perplexity by only 1.9% while replacing early mixers raises it by 41%. Retaining the three largest routing weights per token increases perplexity by at most 2.7%, showing the model uses only part of the flexibility afforded by the four-stream design.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research

Guppy: Efficient Light Clients via Recursive Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Guppy lets blockchain light clients verify full state via recursive zero-knowledge proofs without validators maintaining state commitments, processing thousands of updates per second.

Guppy is a light-client protocol in which validators commit only to state updates while an off-chain, untrusted service secured by recursive zero-knowledge proofs maintains a verifiable Merkle tree over the full state. A hash-chain commitment moves validator signature verification out of the proving circuit, and a parallel recursive proving pipeline keeps latency growth logarithmic with throughput. A Plonky2-based implementation maintains a tree of size 2^30 while processing thousands of updates per second, adding only 2-4 seconds of latency without increasing block-construction complexity.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch

Risky Bulletin: BEC campaign steals €35 million from French notaries

Hackers stole over €35 million from 500+ French notary offices in a four-year BEC campaign; ANSSI spent two years helping evict the attackers.

A business email compromise campaign breached more than 500 French notary offices — about 7% of all French notaries per the Conseil Supérieur du Notariat — over four years, stealing more than €35 million by phishing initial access and silently modifying wire transfer details. France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI worked for two years behind the scenes to help notaries remove the persistent attackers, who had deep access; officials also feared hackers could issue fake notarized acts such as marriage certificates or forged real estate deals. No forged documents have been found so far, but notaries have added two-factor authentication and in-person requirements for banking details, and banks added extra checks in 2024. The newsletter also notes other incidents, including a $320 million Bitcoin extraction from Blockstream's Liquid Network and a JetBrains Cadence breach via TeamCity servers.

Risky Business News · 9d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

ReactVAU: A Slow-Fast Decoupled Framework for Streaming Video Anomaly Understanding

ReactVAU is a slow-fast streaming framework for real-time video anomaly understanding that reserves heavyweight MLLM reasoning for suspicious events, improving efficiency.

ReactVAU addresses causal streaming video anomaly understanding with three components: a lightweight Fast Detection Module using Spatial Grid Folding, Anomaly-Aware Persistent Memory that protects critical visual cues from temporal decay, and a Slow Reasoning Module activated only on suspicious events. This design minimizes heavyweight MLLM invocations during long normal intervals. Experiments show competitive anomaly detection and causal reasoning under strict streaming constraints with significantly enhanced computational efficiency.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

CVE-2026-16028: Protocol::HTTP2 versions before 1.14 for Perl allow memory exhaustion via closed streams that stream_state never removes from the connection stream table

CVE-2026-16028: Protocol::HTTP2 Perl library before 1.14 lets closed streams linger in the connection table, enabling remote memory exhaustion.

Protocol::HTTP2 versions before 1.14 for Perl allow memory exhaustion because closed streams are never removed from the connection stream table by stream_state. The flaw was disclosed on oss-security by Robert Rothenberg on September 7, 2026. Users should upgrade to Protocol-HTTP2 1.14 or later on CPAN.

oss-security · 8d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-16028

PDoS: A Profitable Denial-of-Service Attack against Proof-of-Work Blockchain Liveness

PDoS attack disrupts Proof-of-Work blockchain liveness profitably by combining miner deterrence signals with parasitic revenue extraction from victim pools.

PDoS is a hybrid incentive-driven denial-of-service attack that combines block header signal deterrence with parasitic revenue extraction from a victim pool's share-reward mechanism. By subsidizing attack costs through the victim pool, it lowers the hash-power threshold required to induce rational miners to shut down, unlike prior attacks such as BDoS that demand sustained attacker losses. The authors show a counterintuitive result: in high-fee or high-MEV environments, higher block value increases the attacker's parasitic revenue and can push the attack past break-even into a self-sustaining or even profitable regime. PDoS is claimed as the first attack demonstrating that disrupting PoW blockchain liveness can be economically self-sustaining.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

Evaluating Practical Enumeration and Blocking Attacks on the Snowflake Circumvention System

Ethical measurements enumerated 21,000+ Snowflake proxy IPs across ~1,000 ASes; blocking top 1% of ASes disrupts 30% of Snowflakes.

Researchers tested Snowflake's assumptions that proxy IPs cannot be easily enumerated and that blocking them causes unacceptable collateral damage. Over 48 days of real-world measurements (May-June 2025), malicious-client-style enumeration collected over 21,000 unique proxy IPs across almost 1,000 autonomous systems. Blocking the top 1% of ASes blocks more than 30% of observed Snowflakes while affecting about 2.5% of Tranco Top 1M domains, and the broker's load-aware matching leaks stable high-capacity proxies to attackers. Some proposed mitigations have already been integrated into Snowflake.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch1

Understanding the Security Boundary of Obfuscation-based On-Device LLM Protection

Researchers formalize obfuscation primitives for TEE-protected on-device LLMs and show a Collapse attack breaks ArrowCloak, TSQP, and LoRO, then extend the boundary.

The paper formalizes obfuscation primitives for TEE-Shielded LLM Partition (TSLP) schemes that offload computationally intensive layers from a Trusted Execution Environment to external GPUs. A novel primitive-guided attack, Collapse, demonstrates a shared vulnerability in prominent published methods including ArrowCloak (Security'25), TSQP (S&P'25), and LoRO (NeurIPS'25). The authors then introduce two new obfuscation primitives and integrate them with existing constructs to formulate an extended security boundary (O_ext).

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoAI safety & security

Online Draft Co-Training for Speculative Decoding in Large-Scale, Long-Context RL Post-Training

NVIDIA researchers detail an end-to-end system for online draft co-training that speeds speculative decoding in large-scale long-context RL post-training.

The paper tackles scaling online draft co-training for speculative decoding in RL post-training, where rollout generation dominates cost. It extends packed, load-balanced zigzag ring attention to merge rank-local branch attention with causal main-sequence attention for context parallelism, and introduces TapChannel to transport target features across pipeline-parallel stages without changing the schedule. Experiments show co-trained drafts tracking the policy baseline with substantial rollout and end-to-end speedups up to 122B parameters and strong scaling at 256K tokens.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama

Opinion piece urges migrating 35KB preprompts from Anthropic/OpenAI to self-hosted Ollama, citing session privacy risks and safety filters blocking security research.

The author documents gotchas migrating 35KB preprompts from Claude Opus to self-hosted Ollama, motivated by fears that frontier providers train on user sessions, citing the OpenAI Navier-Stokes controversy. The piece argues inference providers cannot audit their own retention or training pipelines and that only self-hosted hardware offers verifiable privacy. It also criticizes frontier safety filters for refusing vulnerability research tasks and calls for models that support exploitability testing in CI/CD pipelines.

SpecGuard: Inference-Time Backdoor Detection For Free

SpecGuard detects backdoored LLM behavior at inference time using speculative decoding acceptance rates, adding no extra model computation.

Researchers propose SpecGuard, an inference-time backdoor detector that repurposes draft-token acceptance rates from speculative decoding as a detection signal at zero added model-computation cost. When a trigger shifts the target model toward attacker-controlled behavior, the clean draft model's acceptance rate changes, exposing the backdoor; the paper formalizes when this signal appears and shows suppressing it weakens the backdoor. Experiments across diverse backdoor types and model families show reliable detection, including stealthy cases invisible to input-level filters. Speculative decoding is positioned as a free, always-on monitor for frequently updated deployed models.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoAI safety & security 2 sources2

WireGuard-Linux Stack-Based Buffer Overflow in lsiio (Linux IIO Userspace Tool) Due to Unbounded fscanf

The Linux IIO userspace tool lsiio has a stack buffer overflow in find_type_by_name() caused by unbounded fscanf reads of oversized filesystem-backed attribute values.

A stack-based buffer overflow exists in the Linux Industrial I/O (IIO) userspace utility lsiio. In the find_type_by_name() function, the program reads an unbounded string from a filesystem-backed attribute into a fixed-size stack buffer using fscanf("%s", ...). A crafted or oversized attribute value causes a write beyond the bounds of the destination buffer. Despite the title's reference to WireGuard-Linux, the flaw described is in the IIO lsiio utility.

Full Disclosure · 12d agoVulnerability

"They don't care about this": A Systematic Study of TEE Build Reproducibility in the Wild

91% of 115 surveyed TEE deployments across Intel SGX, TDX, and AMD SEV fail to provide reproducible builds needed for verifiable remote attestation.

A systematic study of 115 TEE deployments found 91% were not reproducible and 80% lacked both source code and a reference build, undermining remote attestation guarantees. Interviews with 12 developers of 50 Intel SGX projects confirmed that only one participant treats reproducibility as a development priority. The authors identify technical barriers such as embedded timestamps plus ecosystem-level issues like lack of build-environment control in multi-stakeholder projects, and call for holistic, committed reproducibility practices.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

OPEN-1B: A Fully Auditable Training Run

Open-1B releases a 1B-parameter model with bitwise-reproducible training, letting independent auditors verify every step of the run on commodity hardware.

The paper introduces a 'fully auditable' tier of model transparency: every training operation is reproducible with bitwise certainty on heterogeneous commodity hardware by imposing definite ordering on GPU kernel reductions, data batch ordering, and collective communication. Because replaying a full run on one machine is infeasible, a collective verification scheme lets many independent auditors certify individual steps covering the whole run. The authors release Open-1B with its full pretraining dataset, every intermediate checkpoint, the training codebase, and an audit harness. This rules out undisclosed data, injected biases, or backdoors that proof-of-learning or proof-of-training-data techniques cannot exclude.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 19h agoAI research

Event-Native Symbolic-Temporal Spike Encoding Framework for Heterogeneous Cyber Streams

An event-native spike encoding framework lets recurrent spiking neural networks run intrusion detection directly on heterogeneous packet and CAN bus streams.

The paper maps heterogeneous cyber events—categorical identifiers, local frequency context, and inter-event timing—directly into sparse spike-compatible inputs for spiking neural networks. This avoids flow aggregation and fixed windows that add buffering latency and obscure temporal structure in traditional IDS pipelines. Compact recurrent SNNs under edge-oriented neuromorphic hardware constraints achieve a hybrid anomaly metric of 0.987 on packet-level Network IDS and 0.980 on message-level CAN IDS.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

New Chaos Variant Targets Misconfigured Cloud Deployments, Adds SOCKS Proxy

Darktrace says the Chaos botnet now targets misconfigured cloud deployments like Hadoop and added a SOCKS proxy for traffic relaying.

Darktrace identified a new 64-bit ELF variant of the Chaos botnet targeting misconfigured cloud deployments, expanding beyond the malware's traditional focus on routers and edge devices. Captured in a deliberately misconfigured Hadoop honeypot instance, the intrusion began with an HTTP request creating an application that ran embedded shell commands to fetch the Chaos agent binary from pan.tenire[.]com, set chmod 777 permissions, execute it, and delete the artifact to reduce forensic traces. The restructured variant adds a SOCKS proxy feature letting compromised systems ferry attacker traffic, while removing SSH-based spread and router-exploit functions, suggesting monetization beyond crypto mining and DDoS-for-hire. Possible Chinese origin is suggested by language artifacts and infrastructure; the delivery domain was previously used in Silver Fox's Operation Silk Lure phishing campaign delivering ValleyRAT.

The Hacker News · 28d agoMalware1

Survey of filesystem MCP servers: how the "sandboxed filesystem" boundary is enforced (one breach, four defended-by-design)

Survey finds one filesystem MCP server vulnerable to a symlink-based sandbox escape while four others are defended by design.

A survey of five filesystem MCP servers assessed how each enforces its path-confinement boundary against symlink escapes in recursive directory walkers. The iceener/files-stdio-mcp-server is vulnerable to a read-side sandbox escape. The other four are defended by design or make no confinement claim. The author describes the vulnerability class as small but real.

oss-security · 6d agoVulnerability

What It Took to Reach 1 Billion Build Manifests

Chainguard doubled container build manifests to over 1 billion in six months, powered by Factory 2.0's agentic self-correcting rebuild system.

Chainguard reports growing from 500 million to over 1 billion container build manifests in six months, across more than 3,000 unique images and 675,000 image versions. Its Factory 2.0 system, built on the purpose-built Chainguard OS, uses an agentic reconciliation engine called DriftlessAF to decide when to rebuild across thousands of interdependent projects without human intervention. All artifacts ship with SLSA Level 3 provenance, Sigstore signatures, and full SBOMs.

The Hacker News · 7d agoIndustry

Wireshark 4.6.8 patches 28 security bugs, nine in file parsers

Wireshark 4.6.8 fixes 28 security bugs, including nine crash-prone capture file parsers, misdecoded 5G fields, and memory-safety issues.

Wireshark 4.6.8 fixes 28 security bugs spanning advisories wnpa-sec-2026-64 through wnpa-sec-2026-91, including nine crash bugs in file parsers such as pcapng, Endace ERF and Tektronix K12xx that trigger when opening capture files. Fixes cover dissectors for RDP, SSH, Kerberos, H.245, CMS, C12.22 and several Bluetooth protocols, plus unnumbered memory-safety issues like a stack buffer overflow in the K12/RF5 writer. The release also corrects eight misdecoded 5G NAS/5GSM fields and moves the Unix extcap path to /usr/libexec/wireshark/extcap.

Help Net Security · Aug 13, 2026Advisory

Graph Machine: Towards Better Pretraining via Edges

Researchers propose Graph Machine, an O(n)-state sparse architecture that replaces 75% of Qwen3-0.6B dense layers with only slight loss change.

The paper introduces the Graph Machine (GM), an architecture that maintains an O(n)-sized state accessed through sparse, dynamic routing via pointer-like edges updated differentiably by a referral mechanism resembling pointer chasing. The authors replaced 75% of dense Transformer layers in Qwen3-0.6B with GM sparse layers and pretrained from scratch on 15.7B tokens. Retrieving 2 of 4,096 tokens per KV head in each sparse layer degrades loss only slightly, while retrieving 4 marginally improves loss over the dense baseline.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

PEEP Turns Chrome and Edge Into Post-Compromise Backdoors for Host Command Execution

SOCRadar disclosed PEEP, a post-exploitation Chromium extension toolkit that turns Chrome and Edge into host-level backdoors via native messaging and C2 polling.

SOCRadar researchers detailed PEEP, a Chromium-based post-exploitation toolkit masquerading as a 'Smart Bookmarks' extension injected directly into Chrome and Edge profiles by forging Secure Preferences integrity values, bypassing Web Store checks. A native-messaging host binary (nm_host.exe) extends the browser agent to host-level command execution, file management, credential theft, and session hijacking, while the extension polls C2 endpoints at 206.237.30.232 or xfjcc.fun every 30 seconds over plaintext HTTP and exfiltrates browsing history, cookies, and tab metadata. PEEP is derived from the open-source RedExt red teaming framework, adds PowerShell persistence scripts, and includes a Linux-targeting Python script, suggesting cross-platform intent. The activity is unattributed but contains Chinese-language artifacts; a C2 /health endpoint showed 34 agent entries and 10 active sessions.

The Hacker News · 8d agoMalware in the wild