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9 stories in the last 7d

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DomainAllCyberAIWindow24h3d7d30dAllIn the wildImportant onlyShow duplicates
CategoryAllAI industry 40Malware 24Industry 17Tools 15Threat actor 14Phishing & fraud 13AI safety & security 13Data breach 10AI tools & infra 10Vulnerability 10Exploit / PoC 9Research 9Advisory 8Policy & legal 8
SeverityAllcritical 6high 46medium 37low 8info 114

Abandoned IoT apps keep sending sensitive data to broken servers

UMass Amherst researchers found 61,500 abandoned Android IoT apps send sensitive data to unreachable, blocklisted, or re-registered domains.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst built a dataset of 61,500 abandoned IoT companion apps from AndroZoo and found 73.6% bundled dependencies with vulnerabilities listed in the National Vulnerability Database. About a quarter of extracted domains no longer resolved, roughly one in nine URLs matched threat-intelligence blocklists for phishing, scam, spyware, or malware links, and domains affecting over 2,000 apps had changed ownership since the apps' last update. 38.4% of unique data-flow sources and sinks in abandoned apps were tied to unreachable, blocklisted, or ownership-changed domains, versus under 1% in 500 actively maintained comparison apps. Disclosure emails prompted some app removals and fixes, including a Tuya SDK issue patched on the vendor's cloud platform.

Help Net Security · 8h agoResearch

Researchers Find Security Risks in 73.6% of 61,500 Abandoned IoT Apps

A study of 61,500 abandoned Android IoT companion apps found 73.6% contain vulnerable libraries, dead domains, or insecure data flows exposing sensitive user data.

The study 'When Apps Outlive Vendors: Security Implications of IoT Abandonware' analyzed 61,500 abandoned Android IoT companion apps, including 54,886 removed from Google Play and 6,614 unpatched since March 2023. 45,248 apps (73.6%) contained libraries with known CVEs, 67.6% of them rated High or Critical, though manual validation showed a 52.5% false-positive rate for CVE applicability. Researchers extracted 168,718 unique domains, 24.2% unreachable, and found 3,066 apps with malicious URLs, while 40.8% of unique data sinks flowed to dead, blocklisted, or ownership-changed infrastructure versus 0.4% for maintained apps.

GBHackers · 4h agoResearch

Mapping out your unknown: A threat hunter’s guide to GitHub

Datadog Security Labs publishes a threat-hunting guide with audit-log queries to detect GitHub token theft, device code phishing, and source code exfiltration.

Datadog's threat-hunting guide covers GitHub audit log queries for detecting compromised accounts, stolen personal access tokens, and malicious OAuth app authorizations. Attackers typically obtain credentials through phishing, credential stuffing, leaked secrets, or device code phishing, then map private repositories, exfiltrate source code, and pivot into connected cloud and CI/CD environments. The guide maps detections to MITRE techniques like T1078 and T1528 and documents GitHub logging quirks affecting attribution, token metadata, and visibility fields.

Datadog Security Labs · 2d agoResearch in the wild1

Can We Stop The Ads? Taxonomy and Characterization of Smartphone Splash Ads and Existing Countermeasures

Study of 108 ad-defense implementations finds only one tool blocked splash-ad navigation across ten popular apps, and it required Accessibility permission.

The paper taxonomizes smartphone splash ads — full-screen ads at app launch that trick users into trigger mechanisms such as moving the phone — and analyzes 108 documented advertising defenses for deployment barriers. Many defenses require device rooting, jailbreaking, runtime code injection, or application modification; others need extra permissions, rule maintenance, compilation, or payment. In evaluating 13 configurations of 11 tools across 10 popular apps, only one prevented ad-triggered navigation across all ten apps, requiring Accessibility permission and leaving ads visible roughly one second before dismissal. Documented harms include delayed emergency response, driver distraction, and degraded accessibility for vision-impaired users.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

The modern attack chain: Rethinking Google Workspace security in the age of AI

Analysis of Vercel and Composio breaches shows stolen OAuth tokens, not phishing email, now open Google Workspace attacks — a path authorized AI agents follow.

The author analyzes the Vercel and Composio breaches as the same OAuth-first attack chain run twice: a stolen OAuth token, obtained via a compromised supplier, becomes the entry point rather than email. These tokens survive password resets, are hard to observe, and let attackers read Gmail and Drive data, take over accounts, and pivot laterally using stored credentials and password-reset magic links. The piece warns that authorized AI agents with overbroad OAuth grants can unintentionally traverse the same path — accessing inboxes, reading sensitive content, and exfiltrating data downstream — without any malicious actor or compromised credential.

Help Net Security · 2d agoResearch in the wild

Forgery of C2PA on a Pixel 10

Researcher forged a Google Pixel 10 C2PA content credential with genuine signatures, showing root-level attackers can fake photo provenance.

A Hacker Factor blog post demonstrates an AI-generated 'unicorn glitter milk' news photo carrying a valid, cryptographically signed C2PA manifest traceable to Google's Pixel camera certificate chain, passing validation in Adobe Inspect and the CAI Verify tool with a verified timestamp. The author, working with UMBC's PASAWG working group, reported to Google and C2PA in November 2025 that root access on a Pixel device could sign arbitrary images as camera captures; after 90 days without resolution, details were published. The finding undermines C2PA Assurance Level 2 claims made for Pixel 10 Content Credentials.

Lobsters · security · 2d agoResearch

A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos

Hacktron researchers chained a libheif heap overflow in Discourse with an OpenAI SSO flaw to take over employee ChatGPT/Codex accounts and access internal repositories.

On July 25, 2026, Hacktron researchers chained a heap buffer overflow in libheif 1.19.7/1.19.8 (missing Debian security backports, upstream fix never assigned a CVE), reached through Discourse image uploads processed by ImageMagick, to gain remote code execution on community.openai.com. Combined with an SSO identity misconfiguration in the 'Sign in with OpenAI' flow, they took over employees' ChatGPT/Codex accounts with connected GitHub, Slack, and email access, and proved it by opening PR #1186742 in OpenAI's internal openai/openai monorepo. They reported the issues for coordinated patching, received a $6,500 bounty from OpenAI, and Debian shipped fixed libheif packages on August 8, 2026. The team used Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Opus 5 to locate the missing backport and autonomously develop working x86-64/ARM64 exploits.

Hacker News · securityupdated · 36m agofirst · 11h agoResearch in the wild 9 sourcesHN 334↑ · 128 comments1

Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People

Hackers who removed a Flock Safety license plate camera dumped its data, revealing person-detection capabilities and an encryption key stored unencrypted on the device.

A hacker collective calling itself stegan0gram physically removed a Flock Safety automatic license plate reader camera from a roadway, copied its storage, and shared the files with 404 Media, WIRED, and Distributed Denial of Secrets. Analysis found an encryption key in an unencrypted 'media' partition that unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections, with logs showing more than a million images generated in weeks. The software explicitly detects people, bicycles, and even bumper stickers, and records from one Georgia city were searchable by more than 2,000 agencies nationwide. The findings follow 2025 research by Jon Gaines documenting flaws enabling root-level access to Flock cameras.

404 Mediaupdated · 19h agofirst · 2d agoResearch in the wild 6 sources

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 · 6d agoResearch2