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TLD Tracker: Exploring Newly Released Top

Unit 42 tracked 19 newly released top-level domains and found large-scale phishing, unwanted program distribution, and cybersquatting tied to TLD launch dates.

Researchers analyzed 19 new generic TLDs, including .zip, .bot, .ing, and .meme, released or approaching general availability over roughly 18 months. Data from passive DNS, registry zone files, newly registered domain feeds, and the Tranco top-1M list showed phishing campaigns, potentially unwanted program distribution, and domain squatting on these TLDs. Abuse correlated with each TLD's rollout phases, indicating attackers monitor general availability dates to register and weaponize domains. The IANA root database now lists over 1,000 generic TLDs.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Autoencoder Is All You Need: Profiling and Detecting Malicious DNS Traffic

Palo Alto Unit 42 details an autoencoder-based method that profiles DNS traffic to detect C2 and malicious domains, blocking ~374,000 malicious DNS requests daily.

Unit 42 built an RNN-based autoencoder that compresses DNS traffic time series into fixed-dimensional 'DNS profiles' for each domain and device. Downstream classification, clustering, and anomaly detection modules flag suspicious domains, capturing 170 emerging suspicious domains in May 2024. Signatures block roughly 374,000 malicious DNS requests daily and run in the Advanced DNS Security service, with detections shared to Advanced URL Filtering. Case studies link DNS traffic patterns to C2 beaconing, dynamic DNS abuse, and DNS tunneling for data exfiltration.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Automatically Detecting DNS Hijacking in Passive DNS

Unit 42's machine learning pipeline detected 6,729 DNS hijacking events between March and September 2024, hitting political parties, ISPs, and universities.

Unit 42 processes roughly 167 million new DNS records daily and applies a machine learning model using 74 features over 169 TB of passive DNS and geolocation data to flag hijacked domains. From March to September 2024 the pipeline screened over 29 billion records and classified 6,729 as DNS hijacking, averaging 38 detections per day; a new model detects hijacks in customer traffic within about 10 minutes. Notable cases include a Hungarian political party's hijacked domain, defacement of a large utility company and ISP, and university and research center domains repurposed for illicit gambling. DNS hijacking typically relies on stolen registrar or DNS provider credentials or cache poisoning, enabling MitM attacks, phishing, drive-by downloads, and scams.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research in the wild

Recent Trends in Internet Threats: Common Industries Impersonated in Phishing Attacks, Web Skimmer Analysis and More

Unit 42 analyzed 67 million malicious URLs and domains in H2 2022, a 52% increase, highlighting phishing impersonation and web skimmer trends.

Unit 42 observed more than 67 million unique malicious URLs, domains and IPs between July and December 2022, a 52% increase over the first half of the year. Malicious JavaScript detections grew 99.3%, with over 4 million malicious JS samples hosted on 4.8 million URLs. Over 85% of hosting infrastructure was concentrated in eight countries, led by the United States, Brazil and China. The report also analyzes industries spoofed in phishing pages and includes a web skimmer case study on a Tranco top 1 million website.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

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 · 9d agoResearch1

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

AD Rights Management Service (Part 2): Extraction, Offline Decryption, and the Unrotatable Key

Huntress research shows AD RMS SLC root key is unrotatable and never expires, so its compromise permanently exposes all RMS-protected documents.

Part 2 of Huntress's AD RMS series details server-side attacks: extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key and performing offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC key has no expiry or rotation mechanism, with a 255-year certificate validity (2002–2258), so whoever recovers it can decrypt every document the deployment ever protected, indefinitely. The author released SharpRMS, a unified tool combining the 2016 DisARMS client-side attacks with new server-side key extraction and decryption capabilities. The research frames the SLC as comparable to KRBTGT and the DPAPI domain backup key, though not equivalent to domain compromise.

Huntress · 7d agoResearch

Beneath the Surface: Detecting and Blocking Hidden Malicious Traffic Distribution Systems

Unit 42 built an ML-based detector for malicious traffic distribution systems, finding malicious TDS chains average longer redirections and more URLs than legitimate ones.

Traffic distribution systems redirect victims through chains of intermediate domains to hide final destinations, serving phishing, malvertising, and online gambling operations. Unit 42's topological analysis of redirection graphs found malicious TDS traffic uses longer chains (about 25% exceed four hops vs 10% benign), more URLs (median 126 vs 80), and fewer isolated subgraphs with higher connectivity. These features power an ML detector integrated into Advanced DNS Security and Advanced URL Filtering to identify and block malicious TDS infrastructure in customer traffic.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Trends in Web Threats: Attackers Were More Active During Holiday Season

Unit 42 tracked 533,000 malicious landing URL incidents from October-December 2021, showing web threats peaked during the holiday shopping season.

Unit 42 detected 533,452 malicious landing URL incidents (120,753 unique) and 2,906,875 malicious host URL incidents (165,255 unique) from October through December 2021. Threat activity peaked in November, likely tied to Black Friday in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Most malicious domains appeared to originate in the United States, followed by Russia and Germany. Personal sites, blogs, business sites, and shopping sites were the most common apparently benign entry points for attacks.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Trends in Web Threats: Old Web Skimmer Still Active Today

Unit 42 detected 577,000 landing URL incidents in Q1 2022, with an old web skimmer family still actively stealing payment card data.

Palo Alto Unit 42 detected 577,275 landing URL incidents (116,643 unique) and 2,043,862 malicious host URL incidents (180,370 unique) between January and March 2022. Web threat volumes declined after the November 2021 holiday peak, but an old web skimmer family remained active. Business and economy sites overtook personal sites as the most common apparently benign entry points. Most malicious domains geolocated to the United States, Germany, and Russia, though proxy servers and VPNs obscure true locations.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Trends in Web Threats in CY Q2 2022: Malicious JavaScript Downloaders Are Evolving

Unit 42 detected 751,000 landing URL incidents in Q2 2022 and documented malicious JavaScript downloaders evolving to evade detection.

Unit 42 detected 751,331 landing URL incidents (253,644 unique) and 1,744,629 malicious host URL incidents (256,844 unique) from April through June 2022. Total landing URL incidents rose compared with Q1 2022, and unique host URL incidents grew 42%, indicating attackers deploying more variants. The report includes a case study of a JavaScript downloader campaign demonstrating new evasion techniques. Personal sites, blogs, and business sites were the top apparently benign entry points.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

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 · 8d agoResearch

The Year in Web Threats: Web Skimmers Take Advantage of Cloud Hosting and More

Unit 42 analyzed 2.24 million web threat incidents, finding web skimmers increasingly hosted on cloud infrastructure to steal payment card data.

Palo Alto Unit 42 analyzed 2,241,354 web threat incidents and 831,550 unique URLs detected via Advanced URL Filtering between October 2020 and September 2021. Threat activity peaked from October 2020 to January 2021, coinciding with the holiday shopping season, with most malicious domains geolocated to the United States, Russia, and Germany. Web skimmers ranked third among the top five threat classes and showed the most code diversity, making detection harder. Researchers observed more web skimmer families being hosted on cloud platforms to steal payment data and PII.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Optimizing Credential Blast Radius Through Trust Boundaries and Delegation Under Post-Quantum Authentication Costs

Academic paper models credential blast radius optimization across trust domains under post-quantum latency costs, cutting expected impact by up to 36%.

The paper formulates the joint selection of trust domains and credential-derivation structures under policy and latency constraints as an NP-hard optimization problem, showing the scalarized two-domain direct-issuance case reduces to a weighted minimum cut. In 195 of 230 exhaustive synthetic comparisons, joint optimization produced lower credential blast radius than choosing boundaries first, especially under chained delegation. A trace-derived replay using measured post-quantum authentication costs found the best design reduced expected impact by up to 36% relative to a single domain within the latency budget.

arXiv cs.CR · 13d agoResearch

Cross-Domain Inference for Human Localization: Applying Wi-Fi RSSI Data to CSI-Trained Models

Researchers show CSI-trained Wi-Fi models can localize people from RSSI data at ~80% confidence, enabling privacy attacks from ordinary IoT devices.

The paper investigates cross-domain inference, feeding RSSI data into an existing CSI-based Wi-Fi pose prediction model. RSSI is accessible on IoT devices without elevated OS permissions or specialized drivers, unlike CSI. Using an RSSI dataset synchronized with video ground truth, the model predicted human locations with approximately 80% confidence when movement was present. The results imply a wide range of commodity IoT devices could be used for privacy invasion in Wi-Fi-dense environments.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Domain-Incremental Learning for Multi-Channel Replay Speech Detection

First continual learning benchmark for multi-channel replay speech detection shows task-specific beamforming cuts catastrophic forgetting across 24 acoustic environments.

Researchers frame replay-attack detection for voice-controlled systems as domain-incremental learning over acoustic environments, evaluating a beamformer-based detector across all 24 environment orderings of the ReMASC corpus with five seeds. Naive sequential fine-tuning raises error rates on previously learned environments by 18.8 points, while elastic weight consolidation halves forgetting but loses plasticity and gradient projection memory is statistically indistinguishable from naive fine-tuning. A task-specific beamformer keeping one spatial front-end per environment significantly improves final and incremental accuracy, and the last environment in a sequence dominates final performance.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d 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 · 15d agoResearch

Introducing Unit 42’s Attribution Framework

Unit 42 releases its Attribution Framework, a systematic method using Diamond Model and Admiralty scores to attribute activity clusters to named threat actors.

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 introduced a structured framework for threat actor attribution built on the Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis and Admiralty reliability/credibility scoring. The framework tracks activity at three levels: activity clusters (named CL-STA, CL-CRI, CL-UNK, or CL-MIX), temporary threat groups, and named threat actors using the constellation naming schema. Analysts score evidence across TTPs, tooling, malware code, OPSEC, infrastructure, timelines, and victimology to decide when to merge or elevate clusters, avoiding premature group naming.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 (1999)

Seminal 1999 USENIX study finds most novice users cannot correctly sign and encrypt email with PGP 5.0 in 90 minutes.

Whitten and Tygar's USENIX Security Symposium paper evaluates whether cryptography novices can use PGP 5.0 effectively, using cognitive walkthrough analysis and a laboratory user test. The majority of test participants failed to successfully sign and encrypt a message within 90 minutes, despite PGP 5.0 having a well-regarded graphical interface. The authors argue that security requires usability standards beyond those of general consumer software and propose domain-specific UI design principles for security. The paper is a foundational reference in usable security research.

Lobsters · security · 8d agoResearch

DDRop Attack Forces Intel TDX Confidential VMs Into Debug Mode and Exposes Memory

KU Leuven and ETH Zurich researchers released DDRop PoC hardware that forces Intel TDX confidential VMs into debug mode and exposes plaintext memory.

Researchers from KU Leuven, ETH Zurich, Google, and Durham University published proof-of-concept code, hardware designs, and firmware for DDRop, a DDR5 interposer that injects parity errors to drop selected cache-line writebacks. Because Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP lack per-line cryptographic freshness, processors decrypt and accept stale DRAM contents as current state. The PoC flips a victim's ATTRIBUTES.DEBUG flag to enable TDX debug mode, then copies victim memory in plaintext and can forge attestation reports. Affected environments include Intel 5th- and 6th-generation Xeon Scalable with TDX; Intel says the attack falls outside its cloud-computing threat model.

GBHackers · 1d agoResearch

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 · 6d 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 · 6d agoResearch1

You Get What You Sample: Evaluating Sampling Strategies for Web Security Measurements

Evaluation of 500k Tranco and 24.8M Common Crawl hosts shows Top-N domain sampling biases web security measurements; probability sampling yields unbiased estimates.

The study is the first comprehensive investigation of how sampling strategies affect web security measurement conclusions, comparing datasets and strategies across 500k Tranco domains and 24.8M Common Crawl hosts. It shows Top-N selection does not reflect the overall web distribution and may bias observed vulnerability rates, while probability-based strategies yield stable, unbiased prevalence and impact estimates. Hybrid sampling offers no advantage because its deterministic prefix consistently hurts accuracy, and the authors propose an adaptive probability-based strategy effective even when target prevalence is unknown.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch1

The Convergence of Space and Cyber: Evolving Threats in the Space Race 2.0

Recorded Future whitepaper warns nation-state cyber operations targeting satellites, ground stations and space supply chains will intensify during 'Space Race 2.0'.

Recorded Future's whitepaper argues that cyber operations will be decisive in the second space race, with espionage, destructive attacks, supply chain compromise and signal hijacking already affecting orbital assets and ground infrastructure. It predicts nation-states will extend cyber targeting toward deep-space ambitions such as lunar colonization and asteroid mining. The paper references the SPARTA adversarial framework and forums like Defence Space 24, and highlights US Space Command's integration of cyber and intelligence into space operations.

Recorded Future · 8d agoResearch

Risky Bulletin: Expired cards can be used for new transactions

Researchers show expired Visa contactless cards can be revived via NFC man-in-the-middle relay to run fraudulent transactions; roundup also covers major breaches.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers built an NFC man-in-the-middle rig that updates a card's expiration date in transit and relays the modified payment to POS terminals, reviving expired contactless cards; Visa terminals and the backends of all five banks studied failed to catch the manipulation. The same roundup reports Iranian hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, Lazarus breached South Korea's Presidential Office as part of a campaign exceeding 100 victims, and French telecom SFR suffered a breach affecting over 2.1 million customers.

Risky Business News · 24d agoResearch1

Google’s New Search Redirects Make It Harder to Check Where Links Lead Before Clicking

Malwarebytes reports Google's new encoded google.com/goto?url= redirects break hover-preview link checking, weakening a common phishing defense.

Google now routes some search results through opaque google.com/goto?url= redirects using custom encoding, so browser link previews no longer reveal the true destination, only the claimed label above the result. Malwarebytes found the final destination is visible only in the redirect response's Location header, complicating hover-based safety checks as well as scraping, archiving, and audit tools. The change arrives amid malvertising, search-result poisoning, and fake installer campaigns like the recent Node.js infostealer lure. Google says it deploys measures against evolving abuse but did not explain the change.

Cyber Security News · 1d 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 · 6d agoResearch1