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CategoryAllVulnerability 2205Malware 1409AI tools & infra 922Data breach 862Ransomware 804Exploit / PoC 670Policy & legal 482Threat actor 425Phishing & fraud 378AI safety & security 242Tools 145AI industry 95Model release 83Research 74
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Harnessing LLMs for Automating BOLA Detection

Unit 42's BOLABuster methodology uses LLMs to automate detection of broken object-level authorization vulnerabilities, uncovering flaws in Grafana, Harbor, and Easy!Appointments.

Palo Alto Unit 42 details BOLABuster, a methodology combining large language models with heuristics to automate detection of broken object-level authorization (BOLA) flaws, which traditional fuzzing and static analysis struggle to find. The approach uses LLM reasoning to understand application logic, map endpoint dependency relationships, and generate and interpret test cases. It found CVE-2024-1313 in Grafana, CVE-2024-22278 in Harbor, and 15 CVEs in Easy!Appointments. The team is continuing to hunt for BOLAs in open-source and internal projects.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearchCVE-2024-1313CVE-2024-22278CVE-2023-3285+14 CVEs

How to correlate Kubernetes audit logs with container runtime data

Elastic Security Labs shows how to join Kubernetes audit logs with Defend for Containers runtime data to investigate service account abuse and container escapes.

Elastic Security Labs demonstrates correlating Kubernetes audit logs with Defend for Containers (D4C) runtime telemetry in Elastic. In an Amazon EKS lab, a compromised workload service account performed discovery, read secrets, minted a token, created a privileged pod, and execed into it to attempt a container escape via nsenter and chroot. The escape wrappers appeared only in the decoded Kubernetes audit requestURI, not in runtime process events. The post covers join fields, prebuilt EQL sequence rules, and continues the control-plane correlation thread from the TeamPCP container attack scenario and the Hugging Face intrusion write-up.

Elastic Security Labs · 12d agoResearch1

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 · 5d agoResearch 9 sources1

NHIs Now the Number One Corporate Entry Point for Hackers

SpyCloud survey finds non-human identities like AI agents and API keys were the primary entry point in 31% of intrusions, nearly double phishing.

SpyCloud's Identity Threat Report, based on a survey of 750 security leaders at organizations with 500+ employees, found non-human identities caused 31% of intrusions versus 17% for social engineering. Only 36% of organizations actually monitor NHIs although 95% believe they have adequate visibility into them. Some 68% of respondents suffered an identity-based event, with NHI-related misuse at 42%, and organizations able to see stolen session cookies reported identity incidents at a lower rate (37% vs 50%).

Infosecurity Magazine · 6d agoResearch in the wild

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 · 16d agoResearch in the wildCVE-2006-1547CVE-2023-381801

SpyCloud 2026 Identity Threat Report Finds Non-Human Identities Are Now the Leading Path into the Enterprise

SpyCloud survey of 750 security leaders finds compromised non-human identities are the top enterprise entry point, yet only 36% monitor them.

The 2026 Identity Threat Report surveyed 750 cybersecurity leaders at organizations with 500+ employees across North America and Europe. Compromised non-human identities (31%) were the most cited primary attacker entry point, nearly double phishing (17%), while only 36% of organizations monitor AI agents, service accounts and API keys. 68% of respondents reported identity-based events, averaging eight each, and 91% use AI tools but only 56% have formal governance over their privileges.

GBHackers · 6d agoResearch 3 sources

The AI Malware Maturity Gap

Recorded Future introduces AIM3, a five-level maturity model for AI malware, showing current attacker AI use is mostly AI-assisted rather than autonomous.

Recorded Future proposes AIM3, a five-level model defining AI malware from LLM-translated to LLM-embedded, spanning experimentation to fully autonomous agentic campaigns. Public examples remain early-stage: PROMPTFLUX uses Google Gemini to rewrite its VBScript dropper (Level 1), while Lamehug/PROMPTSTEAL, attributed to APT28, invokes the HuggingFace API to generate reconnaissance commands (Level 3). The authors argue most current AI malware augments existing tradecraft rather than enabling one-click autonomous attacks.

Recorded Future · 21d agoResearch

Attack Paths Into VMs in the Cloud

Unit 42 maps attack paths into AWS, Azure, and GCP VMs through intended features like startup scripts and SSH key pushes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 reviewed attack vectors against virtual machine services on AWS, Azure, and GCP, finding that 11% of internet-exposed cloud hosts carry Critical or High severity vulnerabilities. The attack paths rely on legitimate features such as EC2 User Data, VM custom data, EC2 Instance Connect, SSM Run Command, and serial consoles rather than vulnerabilities, and exploiting them requires attackers to first obtain control plane permissions. A compromised VM exposes not only its data but the workload identity and cloud permissions assigned to it, making identity compromise potentially more damaging than data theft. The firm places mitigation responsibility on cloud users and administrators.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch1

Unmasking Cloud Identities: From Behavioral Clustering to Automated Detection

Unit 42 clusters behavior of 40,000+ AWS identities from 125 cloud environments to map functional roles and enable lightweight SQL-based detection.

Palo Alto Unit 42 built an unsupervised behavioral clustering model using UMAP and HDBSCAN on AWS CloudTrail logs to map cloud identities to functional roles such as administrators, backup services, security tooling and DevOps. The study analyzed over 40,000 identities across 125 cloud environments over two months. The researchers show that heuristics extracted from the clustering map can be implemented in standard SQL, enabling role classification at scale without running a continuous ML pipeline. The methodology extends to audit logs from other cloud providers, SaaS and Kubernetes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 1d agoResearch

An untrusted site can freeze a Mac using WebGPU

A security researcher shows an untrusted website can trigger a system-wide freeze of a Mac via the WebGPU API.

A blog post describes how an untrusted website can use the WebGPU API to cause a Mac to freeze, taking down the whole system rather than just the browser tab. The write-up appears to analyze the underlying GPU/browser behavior that leads to the hang. The source text provided is minimal, so technical specifics such as affected browsers, macOS versions, and disclosure status are not stated.

Lobsters · security · 5d agoResearch

Package Manager Trends

Sixteen-week roundup finds package managers converging on release-age cooldowns, install-script blocking, malware scans, and recurring path-traversal and credential-leak fixes.

The author aggregates supply-chain security trends from sixteen weeks of This Week in Package Management, built from about 80 RSS feeds. Release-age cooldown gates shipped in Deno 2.8, Bundler, npm, Yarn, mise, Hex, Mamba, and Cargo, with Dependabot making a three-day cooldown default in August. npm 12 and Bun 1.4 now block lifecycle install scripts by default, and Composer 2.10 and uv added install/publish-time malware checks, while npm's registry began scanning at publish time. Path traversal on archive extraction was fixed in 14 of 16 weeks across tools including uv, pnpm, Docker, and Composer, and credential-misdirection bugs affected Cargo, ORAS, Composer, and Renovate.

Lobsters · security · 5d agoResearch1

$536 and 8 Hours: AI Learns to Attack a Different PLC

Forescout used Claude to port a WAGO PLC exploit for $536 in 8 hours, and an AI-generated payload later permanently bricked the test device.

Forescout researchers used Claude Code with Ghidra, terminal access, and physical hardware to port CVE-2021-31886, a pre-authentication buffer overflow in the Nucleus FTP server, from a WAGO 750-852 PLC to the WAGO 750-831 without source code or debugger access. The final RCE development stage cost $535.74 in API fees over an 8-hour, 32-minute session (2.6k input and 1.3M output tokens) and required heavy researcher guidance. Claude produced working ICMP and UDP beacon exploits in 12 minutes after identifying that normal FTP command completion was overwriting its shellcode, fixed by omitting the CRLF terminator. A follow-up session extending the payloads toward a C2 implant wrote to flash-mapped memory and permanently bricked the PLC, underscoring the risks of autonomous agents operating against physical infrastructure.

Security Affairs · 13d agoResearchCVE-2021-318861

Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall

Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.

US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.

Risky Business News · 26d agoResearch2

Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

Two developers built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini in one month via clean-room reverse engineering.

Niklas and the author reverse engineered Apple's AGX GPU firmware ABI and user-space components in about a month, a process that normally takes years, producing an OpenGL ES 3.0 conformant driver fast enough to run Minecraft at 200fps on an M4 Mac Mini. The work was done transparently using hypervisor traces without examining Apple binaries, following clean-room practices, and included a custom shader compiler, command stream builder, and a full Linux kernel driver for the firmware ABI. The A18 Pro firmware ABI proved significantly more complex than the M1's, with 1.5x as many structs and twice as many pointers. All experiments and provenance evidence were published in public agx-re repositories.

Hacker News · AI · 12h agoResearchHN 40↑ · 5 comments

Rare Not Random Using Token Efficiency for Secrets Scanning

Researcher proposes token efficiency (string length divided by BPE token count) as a better post-regex filter than entropy for secrets scanning, validated on CredData.

The post explores whether Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization can replace Shannon entropy as the primary filter for candidate secrets captured by regex in tools like Gitleaks. It defines 'token efficiency' as string length divided by token count under the cl100k_base tokenizer; secret-like strings such as GitHub tokens tokenize into many small tokens and score low, while natural text scores high. Evaluating labeled secrets from the CredData dataset shows a usable separation, with roughly 2.5 suggested as a minimum cutoff versus Gitleaks' 3.5 entropy threshold. The technique is positioned as a post-regex filtering step rather than a standalone detector.

Lobsters · 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 · 5d agoResearch1

Subgroup Membership Inference Audits of Differentially Private Synthetic Text

Audits of 32 differentially private synthetic-text releases show subgroup membership leakage is concentrated in few records and systematically underestimated by average-case attacks.

The paper defines a subgroup-targeted membership inference game in which the target pool is an explicit parameter, to audit residual leakage in differentially private synthetic text releases. The audit instantiates 32 proxies across four datasets, three generators (DP-SGD fine-tuning, API-based prompting, and activation steering), and five privacy budgets. DP substantially reduces average leakage at every budget, but remaining leakage is concentrated: roughly a tenth of records carries about 40% of it, and the noise removes more measured leakage from random records than from high-risk ones. Which records leak depends on the release mechanism, so record-level risk cannot be assessed independently of the release.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch

Automatic Key Exchange: faster, post-quantum secure origin handshakes for 45 billion daily connections (and counting)

Cloudflare's Automatic Key Exchange probes origins to lead with preferred key exchange, cutting HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7% and enabling automatic post-quantum origin connections.

Cloudflare announced Automatic Key Exchange, an extension of Automatic SSL/TLS that probes each origin's supported key agreement algorithms and leads with the preferred one, favoring the post-quantum hybrid X25519MLKEM768. Rollover across roughly 45 billion daily origin connections cut HelloRetryRequests from about 52% to 3.7%, saving more than 150 ms of p90 handshake latency. Hundreds of thousands of domains now receive post-quantum origin connections without manual configuration, supporting Cloudflare's goal of quantum-safe encryption by 2029 to counter harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks.

Cloudflare Blog · 7d agoResearch