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Source: Help Net Security

14 stories in the last 30d

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Turn it off and on again, but for critical infrastructure

KTH researchers trained a reinforcement-learning intrusion response agent on an emulated segmented OT network that autonomously resets hosts and processes to disrupt intruders.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology built a containerized replica of a segmented industrial network, attacked it across 14 days, and captured 40,000 30-second traffic intervals to train a defense agent under partial observability. The agent observes six packet-count numbers per interval, maintains 500 running state hypotheses, and can reset supervisory hosts, water tank processes, or entire subnets, with resets rebooting the target, renewing credentials, and changing its IP. The best agent approached a full-visibility baseline but depends on an assumed attacker behavior model; the testbed comprised three supervisory hosts, two PLCs, two tanks, weak credentials, and CVE-2017-7494 exposure. The team released its implementation and plans validation on a real industrial testbed with a partner.

Help Net Security · 1d agoResearchCVE-2017-74942· 1 read

Getting a stranger’s phone kicked off the cellular network costs a few dollars

Researchers show attackers can remotely block strangers' phones and alarm gateways on US cellular networks by abusing lost/stolen IMEI reporting for $2.50-$4 per device.

Researchers from Michigan State University and three partner schools found six weaknesses in the lost/stolen device reporting ecosystem spanning devices, carrier systems, and cross-carrier block-list sharing. They demonstrated blocking unopened Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 phones and home alarm gateways on three major US carriers, with each block costing $2.50-$4 and taking roughly 20-80 seconds. The attacks exploit thin identity and ownership checks in prepaid accounts, IMEI leakage from vulnerable cellular chipsets used by two vendors with over 40% global market share, and pre-release IMEI databases purchasable for $600. Victims receive no notification, and restoring service requires proving device ownership to the carrier.

Help Net Security · 4d agoResearch

AI is changing what Salesforce security needs to govern

WithSecure's Trust Mapping paper proposes a framework for governing trust relationships across Salesforce workflows, AI agents, integrations and connected SaaS systems.

WithSecure's paper 'Navigating Trust in the Modern Salesforce Ecosystem' introduces a Trust Mapping Framework spanning five domains: entities, information, connections, actions and system outcomes. It applies to Salesforce, Agentforce, Headless 360, third-party SaaS and AI-assisted workflows where users, AI agents, APIs and integrations form trust relationships. A Discovery step maps relationships, a Governance step assesses, restricts or retires them, and the paper defines 'trust drift' such as stale credentials, excessive access and unvalidated AI recommendations.

Help Net Security · 4d agoResearch1

Your threat feed is someone else's database: What ingesting malware intel at scale takes

GitHub's Dependabot lead shares five production lessons for ingesting community malware intelligence feeds across eight package ecosystems at scale.

GitHub's Dependabot team monitors over 30 million repositories and extended malicious-package advisories from npm to eight package ecosystems by ingesting OpenSSF's malicious-packages intelligence. The team catalogued roughly 18 new malicious npm packages per day in the year ending May 2026. The write-up argues that provenance with batch reverts, fingerprinting to catch echo-chamber duplicates, and heavyweight normalization are the make-or-break engineering for feed ingestion. It also recommends automated publishing with import caps and anomaly flagging, and quarantining malformed records rather than silently repairing them.

Help Net Security · 12d agoResearch1

Researchers built a $7 gadget for anyone paranoid about hidden cameras in hotel rooms

KAIST-led researchers built SweepLED, a sub-$7 smartphone LED clip using AI to detect hidden cameras with 93.9-95.1% accuracy.

SweepLED, built by KAIST with the National University of Singapore and Singapore Management University, clips 15 LEDs to a smartphone camera and sweeps multi-angle light while the phone films reflections. A spatio-temporal AI model compares LED-on and LED-off frames to distinguish lens reflections from glossy surfaces across three viewpoints. Testing on 30 objects, 12 with hidden cameras, achieved 93.9% accuracy handheld and 95.1% static. Core components cost under $7, targeting privacy checks in hotels and short-term rentals.

Help Net Security · 12d agoResearch1

Scareware ads keep running on Google's transparency tool, even after they're reported

NYU and Radboud researchers built AdLens, which found 238 scareware and 3,346 false-claim ads in Google's ad archive; reported ads often stayed live.

The AdLens tool, built by NYU and Radboud University researchers, mined Google's Ads Transparency Center and screened 188,000 software ad creatives using similarity search plus a panel of open-source language models, finding 238 scareware ads, 3,346 false-claim ads, and 258 anonymity-avoiding ads with over 100 million impressions in Europe. Reporting ads through Google's standard flow produced inconsistent removals: some ads acknowledged as violations stayed live, and after one takedown tied to the TamperedChef malware domain, 41 other ads pointing to the same domain kept running. The pipeline runs entirely on open-weight models at low cost (a $96 DigitalOcean VM plus $1.57/hour L40S inference) and is designed to extend to Meta and Amazon ad libraries.

Help Net Security · 13d agoResearch

A battery storage cyberattack would look exactly like a badly tuned controller

Risk modeling suggests a few hundred compromised grid-scale batteries dispatched through cloud optimizers could trigger blackouts in Texas or Great Britain.

Centrii analysis estimates 1,500 compromised one-megawatt units (5.4% of ERCOT's ~28 GW fleet) or 400 units (about 29% of Great Britain's ~1,400-unit fleet) could destabilize the grids, with modeled damage of $12-65 billion in Texas and a national blackout costing £2-10 billion in Britain. The study puts the probability of a major attack affecting at least one million people by 2031 at 92.1%, dropping to 61.4% with IEC 62443 certification and quarterly drills, based on 10,000 Monte Carlo runs. Because hostile battery swings are phased like legitimate frequency response, control rooms would see nothing unusual; Centrii proposes hunting for a reverse-governor signature where inverter output feeds oscillations. Spain's April 2025 blackout took an expert panel until March 2026 to rule out cyberattack, partly because key plants had no recordings.

Help Net Security · 13d agoResearch

AI AppSec tools agree on just 5% of security findings

Contrast Security report finds 42 confirmed exploit attempts per application monthly and three AI scanners agreeing on only 5% of findings.

Contrast Security's AppSec Overflow 2026 report, drawing on telemetry from hundreds of thousands of production applications and APIs, found adversaries touch the average application every four minutes with 42 confirmed viable exploit attempts per application monthly, led by untrusted deserialization, path traversal, and method tampering. Legacy flaws Log4Shell and Spring4Shell remain widespread, mean time to exploit fell from over two years in 2018 to under three weeks for most 2025 exploited vulnerabilities, and average critical fix time is 92 days. Three AI scanners set on the same codebase agreed on only 5% of findings, and triaging a 2-million-line codebase scan cost roughly $128,000 versus $315 in API charges. Among exploited CVEs in the dataset, 82% of KEV-listed entries carried EPSS scores of 90% or higher, while CVE-2006-1547 and CVE-2023-38180 were confirmed exploited despite EPSS scores under 25%.

Help Net Security · 15d agoResearch in the wildCVE-2006-1547CVE-2023-381801

The best human hacking team still out-solved the best AI team

Hack The Box 2026 benchmark data shows AI agents helped top teams but human-only teams still solved everything while best AI teams stalled at 32 of 36 challenges.

At the 2026 Global Cyber Skills Benchmark (Project Nightfall) run by Hack The Box, 93 designated AI agent accounts across 54 teams held 2.7% of registered accounts but produced 4.2% of submitted flags and 4.6% of awarded points, and appeared in 17 of the Top 25 finishers. Median solve time dropped from 26 hours in 2024 to 13.8 hours in 2026, though the data cannot attribute the change to AI. At the November 2025 NeuroGrid CTF, AI-augmented teams solved challenges 3.2x faster overall but only 1.69x among the Top 5%, and the only team to complete all 36 challenges was human, while the best AI team stopped at 32.

Help Net Security · 19d agoResearch

Code review used to be the only way to catch these bugs

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 says its NOVA system found 14,090 vulnerabilities in 3,915 open-source projects, mostly non-crashing bugs like access control flaws.

Unit 42's NOVA system analyzed 3,915 open-source projects over two months and reported 14,090 validated vulnerabilities, only 85 of which matched previously documented findings. 92% of findings fell outside fuzzing-friendly categories, clustering instead in access control, path traversal, injection, prototype pollution, and SSRF; language ecosystems showed distinct weakness profiles. Of 5,421 supply-chain findings, 1,280 were flaws in dependencies while 4,141 were downstream exposures, 2,776 validated with working proof-of-concepts. Unit 42 warned that faster discovery combined with an average 55-day patch deployment window has collapsed the patch-to-exploit gap.

Help Net Security · 21d agoResearch

$20 per zero-day is already the WordPress plugin reality

TrendAI and CHT Security used an AI pipeline to find over 300 verified WordPress plugin zero-days at roughly $20 per vulnerability.

A pipeline built in three days by TrendAI and CHT Security, presented at Ekoparty Miami, paired AI-driven static analysis with automated Docker provisioning and Chrome DevTools MCP dynamic verification to surface more than 300 critical zero-days in WordPress plugins within 72 hours. The run consumed about 222 million tokens across 95 tasks, averaging roughly $20 per verified vulnerability, with findings including pre-auth RCE, SQL injection, privilege escalation, SSRF, and an AI-assembled downgrade attack chain. Dynamic verification eliminated over 80% of false positives, but manual review at 30-60 minutes per finding remains the bottleneck, straining ZDI and NIST triage backlogs.

Help Net Security · 22d agoResearch1

Can your coding style predict whether your code is vulnerable?

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth researchers present VulStyle, a stylometry-based vulnerability detector that also exposes benchmark reliability problems.

VulStyle combines stylometric features with syntax-tree structure and source tokens, pre-trained on about 4.9 million functions across seven programming languages and fine-tuned on five vulnerability detection datasets. It beat token-only detectors on some benchmarks but its F1 drops sharply on DiverseVul, which the authors link to noisy labels inflating reported performance across popular datasets. The authors argue style-aware detection should be harder to evade but did not test this empirically, and they note that uniform LLM-generated code may strip away the individual developer style the model depends on.

Help Net Security · 22d agoResearch1

8,539 Reasons To Rethink How Vulnerabilities Get Patched

Rapid7 counted 8,539 high and critical CVEs in Q2 2026, double last year, with PoC availability up 76%.

Rapid7's Q2 2026 Threat Landscape Report tallied 8,539 high- and critical-severity vulnerability disclosures, twice the number recorded in Q2 2025, with newly disclosed flaws having public proof-of-concept code up 76% year over year. Of newly exploited vulnerabilities, 62% were network-exploitable and required neither authentication nor user interaction. Fake CAPTCHA and ClickFix social engineering accounted for 31.8% of incident response cases, the United States recorded 881 listed ransomware victims, and APT28 exploited SOHO routers for DNS hijacking while Iranian groups targeted US industrial control and OT systems.

Help Net Security · 26d agoResearch

Researchers find a loophole that lets expired credit cards make unauthorized payments

UMass Amherst researchers showed at USENIX Security 2026 that NFC relay attacks can rewrite unprotected expiration dates, letting expired Visa contactless cards keep making payments.

UMass Amherst researchers presented the Zombie Card attack at USENIX Security 2026, using two smartphones to relay and modify NFC payment data from expired Visa cards. The expiration date lies outside the card's digital signature coverage in Visa Kernel 3, and one major US bank accepted $1-$500 test purchases plus live $2.79 and $3.19 purchases with rewritten dates. Mastercard, American Express, and Discover rejected tampered dates; researchers notified Visa in May 2025 and no CVE or confirmed fix existed at publication.

Help Net Security · 26d agoResearch