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Almost Half of Malware Samples Communicate Direct to IP

Unit 42 analysis of 4 million malware reports finds 45% of C2-active samples connect directly to hard-coded IPs, bypassing DNS defenses.

Palo Alto Unit 42 analyzed over 4 million Advanced WildFire dynamic analysis reports and found that 45.32% of malware samples with C2 activity made at least one direct-to-IP connection, accounting for 23.17% of all C2 connection attempts. The firm proposes zero trust IP (ZT-IP), an enforcement approach that verifies whether outbound destinations were ever sanctioned by a DNS response. ZT-IP analysis surfaced Phorpiex ransomware droppers fetching payloads directly from C2 IPs, a persistent data exfiltration campaign using an obfuscated \GET protocol, and Mozi P2P botnet payloads delivered to IoT devices without DNS. Only 1% of benign samples connected directly to untrusted IP addresses.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Hackers Steal Active Directory Password Hashes Without Attacking Domain Controllers Directly

Attackers use the DCSync technique to impersonate domain controllers and harvest AD password hashes and Kerberos keys without directly compromising domain controllers, Trellix warns.

Per Trellix, threat actors increasingly abuse Active Directory replication via DCSync, using privileged credentials to invoke DRSGetNCChanges and retrieve NTLM password hashes and Kerberos key material without running code on domain controllers. Capturing the krbtgt account hash enables forging Golden Tickets for persistent, highly privileged domain access. Because malicious replication traffic mimics legitimate DRS/RPC activity, defenders should monitor Windows Security Event ID 4662, restrict replication permissions, and investigate replication requests from non-domain-controller systems.

GBHackers · 6d agoResearch in the wild 2 sources2

Hackers Turn Windows Shadow Copies Into a Tool for Credential Theft and Ransomware

Attackers abuse Windows VSS shadow copies to delete recovery points before ransomware and to extract NTDS.dit/SAM credentials, demanding context-aware detection.

Threat actors are weaponizing the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for two purposes: destroying local recovery points via vssadmin.exe, wmic.exe, diskshadow.exe, wbadmin.exe, and bcdedit.exe before encryption, and accessing static copies of locked files such as NTDS.dit and SAM for credential theft. Ransomware families tied to shadow-copy removal include Akira, Black Basta, BlackCat, Conti, LockBit, Qilin, RansomHub, REvil, Ryuk, and WannaCry. Huntress's analysis of the Nightmare-Eclipse tool showed the BlueHammer technique chaining a Windows Defender timing issue with a VSS snapshot to dump the SAM database and decrypt NT hashes. Defenders should correlate VSS operations with parent process, hive access, and subsequent encryption activity, and maintain immutable off-host backups.

GBHackers · 1d agoResearch in the wild1

$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 · 23d agoResearch1

Google Password Manager Attacks Could Let Malware Hijack Passkey

Unit 42 details three attack paths letting Windows malware silently sign into passkey-protected accounts via Chrome's Google Password Manager without user verification.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 described three post-compromise attack paths—Pass-ta-key, Silver Pass-ta-key and Golden Pass-ta-key—against Chrome's Google Password Manager cloud authenticator on TPM-equipped Windows systems. The attacks can silently obtain valid authentication assertions, install attacker-controlled user-verification keys, or extract the 32-byte Security Domain Secret used to decrypt synced passkey private keys, enabling reusable access from the attacker's own environment. No CVE was assigned and no exploitation in the wild was reported; demonstrations were validated against Chrome 142 and parts of the architecture are corroborated by Chromium source. GitHub enforced the User Verified flag check, while eBay accepted a test assertion lacking it before fixing its validation gap after disclosure.

The Hacker News · Aug 11, 2026Research