Search: “Trusted Local Node”

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·Sep 10, 10:00 UTC · 6d agoResearch1

Iran-Linked Hackers Use Fake LinkedIn Job Offers to Deploy NodeRabbit and PollCat RATs

Iran-linked Mirage Kitten targets software engineers with fake LinkedIn recruiter coding tests deploying new NodeRabbit and PollCat RATs.

Kaspersky researchers link the campaign to Mirage Kitten (also tracked as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm, Nimbus Manticore), with victims in aviation, aerospace and fintech in Egypt, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. Trojanized npm dependencies (colorized_terminal, pretty-log) bundled in coding-challenge archives launch the Node.js implants across Windows, Linux and macOS. NodeRabbit uses AES-256-GCM-encrypted C2 via Azure, and its third variant persists through a fake GitHub Copilot Helper VS Code extension plus Git post-merge/post-checkout hooks. PollCat is an obfuscated JavaScript RAT that registers with C2 before OTP authentication and inventories tools from 24 security vendors.

GBHackers·Sep 9, 12:52 UTC · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild1

3BB Attacker Used MeshCentral Backdoor for Root Access, Targeted Subscriber Credentials

Hunt.io found an attacker holding root access inside Thai ISP 3BB via a MeshCentral backdoor, targeting subscriber RADIUS credential databases.

Hunt.io discovered an exposed attacker server on June 3, 2026 revealing an ongoing intrusion at 3BB, one of Thailand's largest broadband providers. The attacker maintained hidden MeshCentral agents reporting to www.ayuthayatech[.]com (device group TH-3BB) and held root on internal servers. Recovered scripts sprayed passwords over SSH against more than 55 internal machines, planted web shells, added SSH keys, searched for stored credentials, and targeted RADIUS subscriber credential databases, though exfiltration was not confirmed. The toolkit included a full exploit for FortiGate SSL-VPN flaw CVE-2024-21762 against mail.3bb.co[.]th, but the initial access vector is unestablished, and a cleanup script erased logs while preserving the backdoor.

The Hacker News·updated Sep 15, 05:20 UTC · 1d ago·first Sep 14, 18:01 UTC · 2d agoData breach in the wild 3 sourcesCVE-2024-217621

Privacy Failure in Split-LLM Training, The Returned Gradient Nullifies the Decoys

Researchers show split-LLM training leaks privacy via zero-valued gradients on decoy rows, exposing which activations are real despite passing forward-channel checks.

A systems-security case study of a two-node split-LLM training setup found that the returned output gradient from an Untrusted Cloud Node is exactly zero for decoy rows, revealing which rows are real. Across nine seeds, zero patterns identified real rows in 4,096 of 4,096 frames per run, and an attack on frame contents recovered 0.65 to 1.50 percentage points of extra tokens over a baseline. Both datasets passed forward-channel privacy and quality checks but failed once the returned gradient was included. Row-wise gradient clipping and noise closed the leak for roughly 0.01 nats of held-out cross-entropy, though five unmeasured attack classes remain.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 2, 20:00 UTC · 14d agoAI safety & security

Are Unreachable Nodes Truly Safe? Fully Eclipsing Monero's P2P Network!

Researchers present Nyx and Moros, the first eclipse attacks against Monero nodes behind NATs, requiring no inbound access and demonstrated on mainnet.

The paper presents the first eclipse attacks tailored to unreachable Monero nodes operating behind NATs, requiring no inbound access to the victim. The attacks poison the peerlists of reachable nodes, which relay contamination to unreachable nodes' whitelists, then exploit Monero's outbound connection refresh logic to evict benign neighbors and monopolize all outbound connections. Nyx achieves a complete, persistent eclipse of long-running unreachable nodes in large-scale SEED Emulator simulations, while Moros stealthily eclipses newly joined nodes during bootstrapping and was demonstrated on the Monero mainnet. Countermeasures are proposed.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 14:43 UTC · 7d agoResearch

Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution (via the strip utility)

ArXiv paper shows the trusting-trust compiler backdoor technique can compromise an entire Linux distribution via the strip utility.

The paper (arXiv 2607.24888) demonstrates that Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack, long viewed as a compiler-specific threat, can backdoor an entire Linux distribution by targeting the strip utility. A compromised tool reproduces its backdoor in subsequent rebuilds of itself, generalizing the attack surface beyond compilers. The finding has supply-chain implications for build reproducibility and distribution trust, though it is a research result with no observed real-world exploitation.

Lobsters · security·Sep 5, 10:58 UTC · 11d agoResearch

Keyv-Linked npm Worm Poisons Hundreds of Packages, Plants Claude Code and VS Code Hooks

The Hacker News·Aug 4, 15:03 UTC · Aug 4, 2026Malware1

Attackers Turn Trusted Node.js Runtime Into Malware Delivery Tool in Targeted Attacks

Symantec reports multiple threat actors, including KongTuke, abusing the trusted signed Node.js runtime and blockchain C2 (EtherHiding) to deliver backdoors in targeted attacks.

Symantec's Threat Hunter Team (Broadcom) reports that since February 2026 attackers have used the legitimate signed node.exe binary and interpreted scripts to deliver implants while evading signature-based detection, hitting government departments, technology companies, and hotels. One intrusion at an Asian technology firm (March 23–July 25, 2026) used ClickFix social engineering, the official Node.js installer, and EtherHiding to fetch commands via the Ethereum blockchain after AdaptixC2 and Cobalt Strike attempts were blocked. Related chains involve KongTuke (Woodgnat) using ModeloRAT, Mistic, NexShield, and GateKeeper, plus C2Looper, AsukaStealer, and EtherRAT; GuidePoint Security separately linked a fake-CAPTCHA ClickFix campaign to at least 31 compromised organizations using the Polygon blockchain as a dynamic C2 address book.

The Hacker News·Sep 3, 10:43 UTC · 13d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Impersonating IT support: how threat actors turn a remote session into enterprise-wide access

Microsoft details Teams IT-support impersonation campaigns deploying Node.js implants, AD reconnaissance, and WinRM lateral movement toward domain controllers.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence describes a human-operated campaign where attackers impersonate IT/helpdesk staff via Microsoft Teams external collaboration, talk users into granting remote sessions, and use RMM tools for interactive access. During the session they run PowerShell to silently install a malicious MSI that stages a portable Node.js runtime and obfuscated JavaScript implant for C2, executing follow-on payloads via rundll32. Operators then perform host and Active Directory reconnaissance, capture desktop screenshots, and pivot via WinRM on port 5985 to domain controllers and certificate authorities. The hands-on-keyboard chain, which can precede data theft and ransomware, blends into normal operations by relying on Teams, Quick Assist, msiexec, and Node.js; Microsoft shares hunting and mitigation guidance.

Microsoft Security Blog·Sep 2, 22:51 UTC · 13d agoThreat actor in the wild

New Guidance Helps Businesses Verify Quantum-Safe Hardware Claims

TCG issued guidance to help businesses verify that trusted platform modules genuinely meet quantum-safe requirements.

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) published new guidance aimed at proving that trusted platform modules (TPMs) genuinely satisfy essential quantum-safe requirements. The document gives businesses a way to validate vendor claims about post-quantum readiness in hardware security rather than trusting marketing assertions. This is a guidance publication, not an incident or vulnerability disclosure.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 24, 16:00 UTC · 23d agoAdvisory

AD Rights Management Service (Part 1): Architecture, Deprecation, and Reconnaissance

Huntress maps AD RMS architecture and recon paths, setting up an offline key-extraction attack against its unrotatable 255-year root key.

Huntress's multi-part research examines Active Directory Rights Management Services, Microsoft's enterprise DRM role that still ships in Windows Server 2025 despite migration guidance favoring Azure Information Protection. Part 1 covers the trust model and how an ordinary domain account can locate RMS clusters and read rights-policy templates. Part 2 will detail four independent paths for extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key via service-group membership and the configuration database, enabling fully offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC certificate is valid from 2002 to 2258 and has no key-rotation mechanism, so a stolen key decrypts protected content indefinitely.

Huntress·Sep 8, 04:00 UTC · 8d agoResearch1

MicroHasTEE: Bare-Metal Haskell for Type-Level Peripheral Ownership on Armv8-M

MicroHasTEE expresses TrustZone secure and non-secure firmware as one typed Haskell program, catching peripheral-ownership inconsistencies at compile time.

MicroHasTEE is a multiparty Haskell framework that models both TrustZone firmware images as participants in a single typed program, using type-level capability ledgers to track peripheral acquisition, configuration, transfer, and finalization. MicroHs compiles the shared program twice to produce separate bare-metal Secure and Non-secure firmware images. The framework rejects inconsistent resource use, post-configuration attribution changes, wrong-domain callbacks, and calls to unregistered Secure services. A door-lock case study on an STM32U5 Nucleo board produced images of 232.7 KiB and 228.4 KiB of flash with roughly 220 KiB of SRAM per domain.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 11, 08:34 UTC · 5d agoResearch1

Has anybody seen my keys? A key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security

Oxide's RFD 0301 proposes a rack-level key hierarchy using Shamir secret sharing and a trust quorum to protect data-at-rest keys.

Oxide's request for discussion (RFD 0301) lays out a key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security, deriving keys from a rack secret protected by Shamir secret sharing across a trust quorum of sleds, with keys exchanged over authenticated sprockets sessions. The document maps which keys protect control-plane data, metrics, Crucible extents, and authentication tokens, and defines open questions on key lifecycle, locality, and compromise handling. Future work includes sealing shares with the root of trust so an attacker would need to steal K whole sleds to reconstruct the rack secret.

Hacker News · security·Sep 7, 02:14 UTC · 9d agoResearchHN 52↑ · 3 comments

Seeing is Not Believing: Breaking the Physical-to-Digital Trust Boundary in Robotics

Researchers show a single ROS 2 environment variable lets attackers inject fake telemetry and hijack robots while spoofing downstream remote attestation.

A pre-built hook loaded via one modified environment variable covertly intercepts and injects both telemetry and control signals before publication in ROS 2, breaking the physical-to-digital trust boundary in multi-robot task handovers. Attackers can also distribute compromised third-party Docker containers and auxiliary tools embedding the hooks. On a physical Franka Emika arm running Secure ROS 2, the attack injects fabricated telemetry in real time with roughly 3 ms jitter and achieved an 87% success rate even against an AI-based detector. Findings were responsibly disclosed to the ROS 2 development team.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 8, 05:50 UTC · 8d agoVulnerability1

Free streaming boxes may be routing criminal traffic through your home

Researchers found SuperBox streaming boxes and the CyberFlix TV app enroll home connections into the Popanet residential proxy network, routing criminal traffic.

Researchers found that SuperBox devices and the CyberFlix TV app, distributed through SuperBox's custom app store, contain Popanet proxy functionality that registers the device with servers controlled by the proxy operator, enrolling household connections into residential proxy networks. The reported configuration weakens Android safeguards with exposed ADB access, root-level privileges without authentication, and removal of app-install protections. Plume's research warns these proxy networks can also function as malware-delivery platforms, and the FBI notes foreign entities use residential proxies to conceal activity such as credential stuffing and account abuse. Malwarebytes advises disconnecting and replacing affected SuperBox/CyberFlix devices rather than factory-resetting them.

Malwarebytes Labs·Sep 4, 09:20 UTC · 12d agoMalware in the wild

Unauthenticated Control of NAT Rules Leading to Exposure of Sensitive Information

Fortinet fixed an improper access control flaw (CVSS 8.9) in FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud, and FortiSandbox PaaS letting unauthenticated attackers access sensitive information.

Fortinet advisory FG-IR-26-166 discloses an improper access control vulnerability (CWE-284) in the FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud, and FortiSandbox PaaS web UI, rated CVSSv3 8.9. The advisory title indicates unauthenticated control of NAT rules leading to exposure of sensitive information. An unauthenticated attacker can access sensitive data via crafted HTTP requests. The advisory was revised on 2026-09-08.

Fortinet PSIRT·Sep 8, 07:00 UTC · 8d agoAdvisory

Understanding the Usability of Cryptographic Verification Tools

Survey of Tamarin and ProVerif users reveals usability barriers: debugging non-termination, model validation, and opaque proof failures hinder cryptographic protocol verification.

The paper presents an exploratory human-centered survey of researchers, graduate students, and practitioners with hands-on experience using Tamarin, ProVerif, and related cryptographic protocol verification tools. Findings reveal usability barriers across the verification workflow, including difficulties debugging non-termination and performance issues plus the lack of systematic methods for validating formal models against real protocols. When proofs fail without concrete attacks, users commonly simplify models, add helper lemmas, and revisit modeling abstractions. Participants called for actionable diagnostics, clearer explanations of results, visualization, and automation for recurring proof tasks.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 14, 20:40 UTC · 2d agoResearch

When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Analysis of 16.9 million SOC alerts finds AI-related alerts at 0.43%, growing 685% since February, with 94.1% noise and 0.02% real attacks.

A review of roughly 16.9 million SOC alerts found about 73,000 (0.43%) were AI-related, a share that grew 685% between February and June 2026. Of AI-related alerts, 94.1% were noise, 5.8% genuine risks, and 0.02% real attacks; 79.8% received benign verdicts, 81.7% were automatically suppressed, and only 5.4% reached a human analyst. The only confirmed attacks were phishing campaigns that weaponized AI brand names as lures, while developer coding agents spawning shells and reading credential stores routinely tripped detections written before AI agents existed.

The Hacker News·Sep 12, 10:24 UTC · 4d agoResearch1

CVE-2026-86304: MojoX::Authentication versions before 0.006 for Perl allow SAML authentication bypass because parse_assertion builds Net::SAML2::Binding::POST without a trust anchor

MojoX::Authentication before 0.006 for Perl allows SAML authentication bypass because parse_assertion builds Net::SAML2::Binding::POST without a trust anchor (CVE-2026-86304).

CVE-2026-86304 affects MojoX::Authentication versions before 0.006 for Perl. The parse_assertion function builds Net::SAML2::Binding::POST without a trust anchor, so SAML assertions are not validated against a trusted signing key, enabling authentication bypass. The flaw is fixed in version 0.006 of the module.

oss-security·Sep 6, 23:14 UTC · 9d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-86304

Schneider Electric SCADAPack x70 Products

CISA advisory: Schneider Electric SCADAPack x70 RTUs contain CVE-2026-81861, an insufficiently protected credentials flaw allowing unauthorized access to RTU configuration.

CISA advisory ICSA-26-258-04 discloses CVE-2026-81861 affecting all versions of Schneider Electric SCADAPack 47x, 47xi, 47xd, 470R, 57x, 3xx, and 32 remote terminal units. The CWE-522 insufficiently protected credentials vulnerability could expose authentication information and permit unauthorized access to RTU configuration through the Secure Lock functionality. The flaw carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 6.5 (medium), and the products are deployed worldwide in critical manufacturing and energy sectors. Abhinav Agarwal reported the vulnerability to CISA.

CISA Advisories·Sep 15, 12:00 UTC · 1d agoAdvisoryCVE-2026-81861

Patch Tuesday to Pentest Wednesday: How an Equipment Rental Company Is Turning Continuous Testing Into Continuous Exposure Management

An equipment rental company uses Horizon3 NodeZero for continuous exposure management, surfacing an SSH key exposure in eight hours versus annual pentesting.

The company moved from periodic penetration testing to continuous exposure management using the NodeZero Proactive Security Platform, feeding telemetry into a Splunk-based CTEM pipeline via Horizon3 APIs. NodeZero exposed SSH RSA key pairs from a PHP web server change about eight hours after introduction and found more findings in 12 hours than a third-party engagement found in roughly 30 days. An Active Directory password audit of 15,000 passwords found about 300 identical or similar compromised passwords, driving a banned-password list, 12-character minimums, service desk changes, and self-service reset rollout; users with similar passwords later dropped from 880 to 209. NodeZero also validated a suspected Cisco vulnerability as exploitable.

Horizon3.ai·Sep 9, 15:58 UTC · 7d agoIndustry

Schneider Electric Easergy, EcoStruxture, PowerLogic, and Saitel Products (Update A)

CISA updated ICSA-26-169-07: CVE-2026-4827 (CVSS 8.3) insufficient entropy enables session hijacking across dozens of Schneider Electric grid products; fixes available.

CISA republished advisory ICSA-26-169-07 (Update A) for CVE-2026-4827, CWE-331 insufficient entropy in session management, scored CVSS 8.3. Affected lines include Easergy MiCOM relays and C5, EcoStruxure Power Automation (EPAS-GTW, EPAS-UI, iPMFLS), EcoStruxure Power Operation, PowerLogic P5/P7/T300/T500, and Saitel DP/T150 RTUs, with dozens of fixed versions listed. Successful exploitation could enable session hijacking and unauthorized operations on systems in energy, chemical, critical manufacturing, and water sectors. Fixes are available; no exploitation is reported.

CISA Advisories·Sep 3, 12:00 UTC · 13d agoAdvisoryCVE-2026-4827

Closing the Loop: Bidirectional Fully Encrypted Protocols

Researchers show naively composing unidirectional fully encrypted protocols is detectable and construct provably secure bidirectional FEPs, validated in Rust.

The paper introduces formal security definitions for bidirectional fully encrypted protocols (BiFEPs), covering exact shaping, delivery, protocol-state integrity, private half-close, and cross-direction isolation. It shows trivially composing two unidirectional FEPs enables detection attacks via cross-direction dependencies like traffic imbalance and connection tear-down. The authors construct provably secure BiFEPs for datastream and datagram settings, validated with a Rust implementation; no surveyed deployed protocol provides the full set of properties.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 16:32 UTC · 1d agoResearch

ThreatsDay: GhostJacking AI Attacks, EtherHiding ClickFix, Cursor CLI Flaw + 17 More Stories

A weekly bulletin aggregating short security updates, including the City-Forum data-theft campaign, a ShipMonk breach, a Cursor CLI flaw, and GhostJacking AI attacks.

The Hacker News ThreatsDay Bulletin bundles roughly 20 short updates across cloud services, AI tools, malware, breaches, and scams. Highlights include the City-Forum campaign pulling data from unauthenticated guest access in Salesforce Experience Cloud and ServiceNow Service Portals since March 2025, and a ShipMonk breach exposing Trezor customer order data for orders in seven countries between May 10 and August 8, 2026. Other items cover a patched Cursor CLI flaw that let cloned repositories run commands before the workspace-trust prompt, Okta's analysis of the Work Panel vishing console used by actors like UNC6671, and GhostJacking AI agent hijacking via a patched Claude Desktop sandbox escape. Meta also launched an on-device WhatsApp Scam Alert machine learning model that keeps message content on the device.

The Hacker News·Aug 18, 16:30 UTC · 29d agoIndustry

The Coding-Agent Trap: When a "Free" LLM Endpoint Is the Adversary, (Mon, Aug 31st)

A SANS honeypot caught a real coding-agent session routed to a rogue "free" LLM endpoint, exposing a Windows user's transcript and tool outputs.

A SANS analyst describes how an internet-exposed inference honeypot was discovered, relabeled with sought-after model names like DeepSeek, and enrolled in infrastructure serving "free" LLM backends. On 2026-08-30 an opencode terminal coding agent sent an 88-message, 224 KB transcript 210 times in 91 seconds via a China Unicom relay, exposing directory listings, tool outputs and read file portions. The analyst frames tool-enabled agents treating model endpoints as trusted control planes as a novel risk — a "rogue model endpoint" that could request tool executions on the user's machine.

SANS Internet Storm Center·Aug 31, 20:00 UTC · 16d agoAI safety & security1

NCSC Warns of Critical Check Point VPN Flaws as Large-Scale Exploitation Is Expected

Dutch NCSC warns of two critical CVSS 9.8 Check Point VPN flaws enabling unauthenticated remote code execution, urging immediate patching before mass exploitation.

The Dutch NCSC warned that CVE-2026-85102 and CVE-2026-85103, both rated 9.8 CVSS, allow unauthenticated remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on Check Point Quantum Security Gateway, Spark Firewall, and Security Management Server deployments when VPN is enabled. CVE-2026-85102 stems from improper certificate trust validation during VPN negotiation, while CVE-2026-85103 is a heap-based buffer overflow in ASN.1 certificate decoding. Check Point shipped emergency updates on September 9, 2026, including R82.10 Take 44, R82 Take 126, and R81.20 Take 166 or later, plus LivePatch for eligible systems. No public exploit code exists yet, but the NCSC rates exploitation likelihood high and recommends restricting UDP ports 500 and 4500 to known peers as a stopgap.

Cyber Security News·updated 17:14 UTC · 5h ago·first Sep 14, 05:11 UTC · 2d agoVulnerability 9 sourcesCVE-2026-85102CVE-2026-85103

Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

Apple introduces Reference Image, hardware-backed verifiable photography on iPhone 18 Pro using sensor signing and Private Cloud Compute to counter AI-generated fakes.

Apple announced Reference Image, an opt-in camera mode debuting on the main sensor of iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that produces securely timestamped, verifiable photographs. The design splits into two phases: a secure digital negative created by cryptographically signing pixel data at the sensor immediately after capture (preventing injection or tampering), then developing that negative into a reference image. Private Cloud Compute handles processing without exposing image contents to anyone, including Apple, and fraudulent reference images can be revoked without revealing the photographer's identity. Apple positions the system as stronger than C2PA-based approaches, which sign metadata after capture, are vulnerable to editing-chain compromise, and can tie images to a device or individual.

Hacker News · security·02:07 UTC · 20h agoResearchHN 25↑ · 18 comments

ThreatsDay: Odysseus RCE, Samsung One-Click Takeover, iCloud Backdoor Fight + 27 More Stories

The Hacker News·Aug 6, 15:24 UTC · Aug 6, 2026VulnerabilityCVE-2025-21079CVE-2025-584861

[AINews] OpenAI reports Navier-Stokes singularity find in 88 hours using Astra-next, roughly 10,000 agents and 130B tokens (>$40M), a contender for second ever Millennium Prize awarded

OpenAI-linked accounts claim roughly 10,000 AI agents produced a Navier-Stokes singularity result in 88 hours, pending mathematical verification.

OpenAI-affiliated accounts claim a system of roughly 10,000 agents, trained over about a year with multi-agent reinforcement learning, produced a finite-time singularity result related to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem. The claimed 88-hour runtime and 130B-token cost circulate only via social posts, and no preprint, theorem statement, or proof artifact is available. Acceptance by the mathematics community is unresolved, so the claim's epistemic status remains unknown. The roundup also notes Cognition's $48B and Mistral's $24B fundraises, GPT Image 2.5, and Meta's Muse agent relaunch.

Latent Space·Sep 9, 05:04 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

Hackers Actively Exploiting FortiGate Firewalls to Deploy Custom Node.js Malware

Attackers actively exploit CVE-2025-25249 in FortiGate firewalls to deploy PivotC2, a Node.js RAT that decrypts VPN and admin credentials.

SOCRadar assesses with high confidence that threat actors are actively exploiting CVE-2025-25249, a CVSS 9.8 heap buffer overflow in the cw_acd daemon (CAPWAP, UDP 5246) affecting FortiOS 6.4-7.6.3 and FortiSwitchManager 7.0.x/7.2.x. Attackers deploy fortirun.bin and PivotC2, a Node.js post-exploitation framework that harvests configurations and decrypts SSL-VPN, wireless, and admin credentials using AES-256-CBC and AES-128-GCM. Over 30,000 FortiGate IPs were scanned and 178 devices compromised, including two confirmed full intrusions of US organizations with Exchange mailbox exfiltration to Wasabi storage. STRU attributes the campaign to a Russian-speaking, financially motivated cybercrime operator.

Cyber Security News·Sep 8, 16:50 UTC · 8d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2025-252491

Training a 3.8B LLM to 0.384 CORE for $998 – Hugo Vergnes

Independent developer Hugo Vergnes trained a 3.8B-parameter Llama-style model to 0.384 CORE on 65B tokens for $998 in 43 hours on rented B200s.

Hugo Vergnes trained little-lm, a 3.848B-parameter decoder-only LLM, on 65.3B tokens in 43 hours for $998 using rented NVIDIA B200s, scoring 0.384 on the CORE benchmark and beating nanochat d32 (0.310) at similar cost. The Llama-style architecture uses RMSNorm, RoPE, GQA with 24 query and 8 KV heads, relu-squared MLPs, QK-norm, and ResFormer-style value embeddings that account for 19% of parameters. Key wins included the Muon optimizer for matrix parameters, a trapezoidal learning-rate schedule with linear cooldown, FP8 training plus vocabulary padding for roughly 33% throughput gains, and the ClimMix dataset over FineWeb-Edu. The project, inspired by Karpathy's nanochat, was built as a config-driven YAML framework for small LLM training.

Hacker News · security·Sep 10, 02:04 UTC · 6d agoAI researchHN 28↑ · 2 comments1

Accountability in Certificate Transparency and Variants

Formal Dolev-Yao analysis shows plain Certificate Transparency requires an honest log, SCT Auditing removes that assumption, and Gossiping does not.

The paper analyzes accountability in Certificate Transparency and its SCT Auditing and Gossiping extensions in the Dolev-Yao model, starting from a vanilla PKI. It finds plain CT provides accountability only under the assumption of an honest log. The SCT Auditing extension can eliminate that assumption, while the Gossiping extension cannot. CT is supported by all major browsers and obliges Certificate Authorities to record issued certificates in public, monitored logs.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 13:45 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Product showcase: Trust Chain TPRM turns vendor compliance evidence into verified assurance

Help Net Security·Aug 10, 12:30 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Policy & legal

Protecting Tokens and Assertions from Forgery, Theft, and Misuse: Implementation Recommendations for Agencies and Cloud Service Providers

NIST and CISA publish final interagency report with implementation guidance for protecting tokens and assertions from forgery and misuse.

CISA released a final NIST/CISA interagency report guiding federal agencies and cloud service providers on protecting identity assertions, access tokens, and cryptographic mechanisms underlying modern authentication and authorization. It addresses forgery, theft, and misuse of signed tokens that adversaries use for lateral movement and data access in hybrid and multi-cloud, SSO, federation, and API-based environments. The final version updates token validation, secrets management, and detection-at-scale guidance gathered via the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, and supports Executive Order 14306 and Secure by Design principles.

CISA Advisories·Sep 15, 12:00 UTC · 1d agoAdvisory

The Permanent Threat: Analyzing Aeternum’s Blockchain-Based C2 Operations and Communications

Unit 42 analyzes the Aeternum botnet loader, which uses Polygon blockchain smart contracts for resilient decentralized C2 and payload execution.

Palo Alto Unit 42 published a technical analysis of Aeternum, a botnet loader that leverages Polygon blockchain smart contracts as its command-and-control infrastructure. The decentralized C2 design makes takedown difficult, giving the threat a persistent, 'permanent' communication channel for payload delivery and execution. The analysis covers the smart contract mechanics and communication protocol used by the operation.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 10, 22:00 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Malware

VU#756733: Calix GS7 XGS GS5239XG residential router contains missing authentication vulnerability

CERT/CC warns Calix GS7 XGS GS5239XG routers on firmware EXOS/6.6.47 expose an unauthenticated UPnP WANIPConnection service on the public WAN interface.

CERT/CC issued VU#756733 for a missing authentication vulnerability in the Calix GS7 XGS GS5239XG residential gateway running EXOS/6.6.47. The device's UPnP service, implemented with MiniUPnPd 2.3.7, is exposed on the WAN interface by default and does not require authentication, potentially letting remote attackers alter port mappings through the WANIPConnection service. The flaw affects routing, NAT, and firewall functionality for home networks.

CERT/CC Vulnerability Notes·Aug 21, 14:44 UTC · 26d agoVulnerability

Locking your ssh-agent exposed local-only keys until OpenSSH 10.5

Help Net Security·Aug 11, 00:00 UTC · Aug 11, 2026Research

ZTNA Portal Improper Certificate Validation

Fortinet fixed an improper certificate validation flaw (CVSS 7.3) in FortiOS and FortiProxy Agentless ZTNA portal enabling unauthenticated man-in-the-middle attacks on backend traffic.

Fortinet advisory FG-IR-26-174 discloses an improper certificate validation vulnerability (CWE-295) in the FortiOS and FortiProxy Agentless ZTNA portal, rated CVSSv3 7.3. A remote and unauthenticated attacker can perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the communication channel between the ZTNA portal and the backend destination website. The advisory was revised on 2026-09-08.

Fortinet PSIRT·Sep 8, 07:00 UTC · 8d agoAdvisory

NIST Issues New Guidance to Protect SSO and API Tokens From Theft and Forgery

NIST released IR 8587 giving agencies and cloud providers recommendations to prevent identity token forgery, theft, and misuse in SSO and API environments.

NIST Internal Report 8587, released September 15, 2026, provides implementation recommendations covering token creation, signing, validation, storage, revocation, and lifecycle management for SAML, OpenID Connect, and OAuth 2.0 environments. It builds on SP 800-53 Rev. 5.1.1 and incorporates lessons from breaches involving stolen signing keys, abused OAuth applications, and replayed federated assertions. Recommendations include strong signing algorithms, strict claim validation, short token lifetimes, token binding, leakage prevention, and monitoring for abnormal token use.

GBHackers·07:44 UTC · 14h agoAdvisory 2 sources

Safety for Whom? Boundary-Aware Self-Distillation for Controlled LLM Safety Refusal

A self-distillation safety framework tunes narrow-boundary refusals in Qwen3-8B, raising target-domain refusal to 84.75% while cutting over-refusal from 15.20% to 5.20%.

The paper formulates narrow-boundary safety, where deployments need refusals within specific topics rather than whole subjects, and proposes an offline self-generated framework with controlled topic generation, escalating retries, and harmful-benign boundary pairs. On political persuasion with Qwen3-8B, the method raised target-domain refusal from 9.47% to 84.75% and cut the mean unsafe-response rate across three broader benchmarks from 26.26% to 0.14%. Verified target-model responses reduced over-refusal from 15.20% to 5.20%, and boundary-pair data cut comply-side over-refusal on held-out pairs from 32.94% to 4.16%. Results show data composition controls the safety-usability trade-off and alignment should be evaluated on both sides of the refusal boundary.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 2, 20:00 UTC · 14d agoAI safety & security1