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The MAL Simulator: Cyber Operations Simulation based on Attack & Defense Graphs

MAL Simulator grounds attack-defense graph simulations in a CRATE-emulated network, training RL attacker and defender agents where attackers outperform search methods.

The MAL Simulator is a cyber operations simulator built on the Meta Attack Language (MAL), enabling decision-driven attack and defense simulations adaptable to new domains without modifying source code. Case studies trained defensive and offensive agents, grounded in data collected from an emulated network implemented in the CRATE cyber range. The trained attacker policy reached designated targets more efficiently than compared search methods, and the trained defender induced lower costs than a naive heuristic under noisy alerts, though defender performance dropped significantly against an RL attacker.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

Week in review: Linux rootkit deployed on F5 BIG-IP APM devices, Cisco FMC bugs exploited

Weekly roundup: Cisco FMC and N-able N-central zero-days exploited in the wild, MikroTik RouterOS hijacks, Microsoft Patch Tuesday ships two exploited zero-days.

State-sponsored and financially-motivated attackers are actively exploiting CVE-2026-20079, a critical authentication bypass in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC), alongside CVE-2026-20316. N-able issued an emergency hotfix for CVE-2026-86218, a critical pre-auth RCE in the N-central RMM platform exploited in the wild. CERT Polska disclosed six RouterOS vulnerabilities being chained to hijack internet-exposed MikroTik devices. Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday shipped a record patch count including two zero-days, while roughly 67,000 Trezor customers faced phishing after a shipping-partner breach and researchers privately disclosed a zero-click WeChat worm to Tencent.

Help Net Security · 3d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-20079CVE-2026-20316CVE-2026-862182· 1 read

Attack Chains, Not Just Attack Surfaces: Why Testing Individual Techniques Misses the Point

Filigran introduces Attack Chaining in OpenAEV to continuously simulate multi-stage attack paths, exposing gaps that isolated MITRE ATT&CK technique testing misses.

Filigran announced Attack Chaining, a new scenario type in its OpenAEV platform that links individual techniques into automated, continuously-run multi-stage attack paths, using each step's real output (credentials, tokens, open ports) to branch dynamically toward a final objective. The article cites Filigran's State of Threat Management report, in which 93% of security leaders reported a business-impacting cyberattack in the past 12 months, 88% said AI accelerates attackers, and 84% blamed siloed tools and disconnected testing. The 2025 DGFiP breach is cited as an example where individually survivable weaknesses chained into a major intrusion. The feature includes conditional chaining logic, live attack path mapping, structured findings for identifying chokepoints, and predefined scope and safety guardrails.

The Hacker News · 1d agoTools

Phishing Research Challenges Conventional Security Awareness Testing

Pistachio's 2.47 million phishing simulations across 1,200 organizations show click rates alone mislead, with 30% of IT staff clicking and leak rates more predictive.

Between June 2025 and May 2026, Pistachio sent 2.47 million simulated phishing attempts to more than 123,000 employees at over 1,200 organizations, analyzing click, credential-leak and reporting behavior. Click rates ranged from 26% in Design to 41% in Construction; 30% of tech development and IT staff clicked at least once, while financial services were the most resilient sector. The report argues that click rate alone creates a false sense of security and that combined click, leak and report trends are better resilience indicators.

SecurityWeek · 5d agoResearch

What Zero-Day Response Should Be in the Post-Mythos Era

Picus Security outlines a zero-day response playbook where defenders simulate exploit technique chains before public PoCs exist.

The article uses PaperCut NG/MF's August incident — exploitation in the wild before any patch, with the first emergency fix bypassed the same day and a third landing September 1 — as the template for AI-accelerated vulnerability response. It walks through a hypothetical CVE-2026-1001 (explicitly made up) to argue defenders should map CVEs to ATT&CK technique chains and simulate them against NGFW, WAF, EDR, endpoint hardening, and SIEM controls within minutes of disclosure. It notes disclosure-to-exploitation time has fallen from 21.5 days to hours.

BleepingComputer · 1d agoResearch in the wildCVE-2026-1001

Companies may be measuring phishing resilience the wrong way

Pistachio's 2026 report analyzing 648 organizations finds click rates alone mislead; combining clicks, credential submission, and reporting better measures phishing resilience.

Pistachio's Phishing Behaviour Report 2026 analyzed 648 organizations and 123,692 users across 354,962 simulations between June 1, 2025 and May 31, 2026. It found click and credential-submission rates rose during the first six months of training before declining, and from the six-month peak to the 12-month stage clicks fell 27% while credential leaks dropped 41%. The report-to-click ratio increased from 1.3 at three months to 1.8 at 12 months, framing employees as an active detection channel. Departmental analysis showed Construction had the highest cumulative click rate (41.31%) and Health the lowest report rate (13.17%), supporting more targeted training.

Help Net Security · 6d agoPhishing & fraud

A Cyber Range Evaluation of Autonomous Network Incident Response Agents

Cyber range evaluation shows reinforcement learning incident response agents defend emulated networks more efficiently than heuristic policies, depending heavily on adversary behavior.

The paper evaluates agents for automated network intrusion response in a cyber range designed for human operator training, featuring variable topology, red-team emulation, and simulated users. Alerts are generated by a SIEM platform and mapped to a data modeling language used by the agents, with reinforcement learning policies optimized to minimize combined defense and availability costs using a cyber attack simulator. Reinforcement learning agents defended the system more efficiently than heuristic policies, with performance highly dependent on the adversary policy and simulated user behavior.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

Tuskira Vector brings autonomous red teaming to attack surface validationnew

Tuskira launched Vector, an autonomous red teaming agent that validates exploitable external attack surface against deployed controls using a Security Data Fabric digital twin.

Tuskira announced Vector, an agentic autonomous red teaming capability that simulates attacker behavior from outside an organization to identify its exploitable attack surface. Findings are validated against deployed compensating controls, internal risk data, and application/infrastructure topology via Tuskira's Security Data Fabric, which normalizes third-party tool signals into a live digital twin. The release extends Kairo (introduced May 2026), adding red team sensors and an agentic defense loop spanning agents Kairo, Lattice, Quell, and Iris. Tuskira claims Kairo has deprioritized up to 99% of scanner findings as unreachable and recomputes breach-path maps in minutes.

Help Net Security · 22m agoTools

Evaluating Practical Enumeration and Blocking Attacks on the Snowflake Circumvention System

Ethical measurements enumerated 21,000+ Snowflake proxy IPs across ~1,000 ASes; blocking top 1% of ASes disrupts 30% of Snowflakes.

Researchers tested Snowflake's assumptions that proxy IPs cannot be easily enumerated and that blocking them causes unacceptable collateral damage. Over 48 days of real-world measurements (May-June 2025), malicious-client-style enumeration collected over 21,000 unique proxy IPs across almost 1,000 autonomous systems. Blocking the top 1% of ASes blocks more than 30% of observed Snowflakes while affecting about 2.5% of Tranco Top 1M domains, and the broker's load-aware matching leaks stable high-capacity proxies to attackers. Some proposed mitigations have already been integrated into Snowflake.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch1

ENISA: Frontier AI Is Changing the Speed of Cyberattacks. Europe Needs to Catch Up

ENISA warns frontier AI compresses attack lifecycles to minutes, with exploits possible within 15 minutes of disclosure and median 72-minute breach-to-exfiltration times.

ENISA's July 2026 paper 'ENISA's view on Cybersecurity in the Frontier AI Era' argues AI-assisted attackers may weaponize vulnerabilities within 15 minutes of disclosure and achieve initial-access-to-data-exfiltration in a median 72 minutes, creating a 'negative time-to-exploit' problem. The report cites one organisation whose CVE volume rose from roughly 80 in Q1 2025 to almost 500 in Q1 2026, then about 500 reports per day when frontier-AI tools were used. ENISA recommends machine-speed defence under 'Cybersecurity as Code', EPSS and VEX-based prioritisation, AI-assisted incident response with human oversight, and an assume-breached architecture.

Security Affairs · 2d agoAdvisory

Top 10 Best Cloud Detection & Response (CDR) Solutions in 2026

Editorial scorecard ranks ten 2026 cloud detection and response platforms; Sysdig, Wiz, and CrowdStrike lead, with Wiz's Gem Security acquisition highlighted.

The editorial scorecard rates ten CDR platforms on real-time detection (30%), cloud telemetry depth, response automation, correlation, and value. Sysdig earns the best real-time detection score for its Falco- and eBPF-powered runtime telemetry, Wiz (8.7) folds acquired Gem Security's real-time CDR into its security graph, and CrowdStrike (8.7) leads response automation. Specialists Stream.Security, Skyhawk Security, Sweet Security, and the open-source Falco project are also assessed.

Cyber Security News · 22h agoIndustry

EFI Pairs Without One-Way Puzzles: Oracle Separations from Communication Complexity

Theorists build a classical oracle where one-way puzzles fail yet EFI pairs survive, separating two candidate minimal assumptions of quantum cryptography.

The paper constructs a single classical oracle relative to which one-way puzzles do not exist, even with an unbounded verifier, while an EFI pair survives every classical-query distinguisher holding advice, making one superposition query at the end. Security is proven by reducing adversary knowledge to communication complexity for Vector-in-Subspace, with the superposition query bounded using random matrix theory. Relative to the oracle, quantum polynomial time offers no advantage on tasks with classical inputs and outputs and there is no proof of quantumness, separating the leading minimal assumptions of quantum cryptography.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

How Threat Actors Are Turning Trusted AI Platforms Into an Attack Surface

Huntress details campaigns abusing Claude Artifacts, claude.ai/share links, and ChatGPT/Grok conversations to deliver SectopRAT, MacSync, and AMOS stealers.

Huntress SOC documented nine months of campaigns in which attackers weaponized trusted AI platform features—Claude Artifacts, public claude.ai/share links, and indexable ChatGPT/Grok conversations—to deliver malware. The July FakeAgent campaign hit more than 29 organizations via a malicious Claude Artifact posing as a Claude Desktop download page that redirected to SectopRAT. A claude.ai/share link disguised as an Apple Support guide tricked a victim into running a curl command that deployed the MacSync stealer, harvesting cookies, credentials, keychain secrets, Telegram sessions, and SSH/cloud keys, while SEO-poisoned ChatGPT and Grok conversations delivered the AMOS stealer via ClickFix-style instructions.

BleepingComputer · 5d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Your Critical Vulnerabilities Might Not Be Your Biggest Risk

Autonomous penetration testing advocates prioritize exploitable attack paths over raw vulnerability severity for continuous security validation.

The article argues that scanner severity scores lack context: a critical flaw behind strong segmentation may be low priority, while a medium flaw on internet-facing systems can provide a foothold chained toward sensitive data. It positions autonomous penetration testing and attack path validation as the execution layer for continuous security validation, replacing point-in-time assessments. The piece is vendor-authored thought leadership rather than incident or vulnerability news.

The Hacker News · 5d agoIndustry1

RobResilience: Implementing and Evaluating a Resilience Framework for Cyber-Physical Embodied Systems

RobResilience implements a runtime resilience framework for robots in Webots/ROS2, evaluating tolerable disruption, degradation, and mitigation feasibility across eight attack scenarios.

The paper implements a formal resilience framework for embodied cyber-physical systems using a PR2 robot and ROS2 in a Webots simulation. At runtime it evaluates three predicates — tolerable disruption (δ), tolerable degradation (γ), and mitigation feasibility (μ) — over a compromised device set derived from IDS confidence scores, triggering mitigation strategies when resilience is lost. Eight attack scenarios systematically covering the full predicate state space confirm runtime behavior matches theoretical definitions. The work addresses 'graceful failure paralysis,' where autonomous systems cannot distinguish safe degraded states from catastrophic hazards during attacks.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

AI-powered attack exploited PaperCut flaws to hack 395 organizations

AI-driven campaign exploited PaperCut flaws CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078, compromising 440 servers at 395 organizations in 48 countries.

GreyNoise reports a likely Russian-speaking threat actor used hundreds of AI agents combining OpenAI Codex and DeepSeek models to build, test, and refine exploits for CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078 in PaperCut NG/MF, launching the campaign on August 31. At least 440 PaperCut instances at 395 organizations across 48 countries were compromised, with the education sector accounting for roughly half of victims and the US most targeted. Attackers harvested credentials from 280 victims, obtained OS or domain secrets from 147, and gained admin privileges at 12 organizations, using LSASS dumping, pass-the-hash, noPac, and DCSync to dump NTDS.DIT. The adversary went from empty workspace to first RCE in under four hours, and compromised at least 11 organizations within 26 seconds once the campaign launched.

BleepingComputerupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 6 sourcesCVE-2026-81578CVE-2026-82078CVE-2021-42278+1 CVEs1· 1 read

Cisco FMC flaws exploited by ransomware gang, state-sponsored hackers

Cisco Talos confirms ransomware and state-sponsored groups exploited CVE-2026-20079 and CVE-2026-20316 in Secure Firewall Management Center, deploying Qilin ransomware and Cyclops Blink.

Cisco Talos identified three threat clusters (UAT-12197, UAT-11823, UAT-11988) exploiting CVE-2026-20079, a CVSS 10.0 authentication bypass, and CVE-2026-20316, a CVSS 5.3 static-credential flaw, in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center. Qilin affiliates used static credentials for reconnaissance and deployed Qilin ransomware; a Sandworm-linked cluster deployed a Cyclops Blink backdoor via a malicious license.tmp file; a third cluster stole credentials through a JSP web shell. Cisco has released hotfixes and urges immediate installation, with broader patches expected next week.

BleepingComputerupdated · 2d agofirst · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 9 sourcesCVE-2026-20079CVE-2026-203161

IDScan confirms breach tied to 153 million stolen driver’s licenses

IDScan confirmed hackers accessed customer data in its cloud, linked to over 153 million stolen driver's license scans offered on a dark-web platform.

Identity verification firm IDScan disclosed on September 4 that an unauthorized third party may have accessed or copied customer data in its IDScan.net cloud, including full names and government-issued ID numbers. The incident was linked to a dark-web 'Nexus' platform advertising over 153 million US and Canadian driver's license scans, plus 10 million ID cards, 3 million travel documents, and 579,000 medical cards. Multiple lawsuits have been filed, the FBI confirmed it is investigating, and IDScan is offering free credit monitoring to potentially affected individuals.

BleepingComputerupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoData breach 4 sources

New 'BlueMoon' kit exploited Windows and Chrome zero-day flaws

Multiple China-linked espionage groups share the BlueMoon exploit kit chaining Chrome V8 zero-days and a Windows ALPC LPE to deploy backdoors.

Proofpoint and Volexity report that multiple espionage clusters share the BlueMoon exploit kit, chaining Chrome V8 zero-days CVE-2026-85046 and CVE-2026-87491 with the Windows ALPC local privilege escalation CVE-2026-85880. Proofpoint observed spearphishing use since August 28 by JungleBamboo (APT31), while Volexity saw UTA0560 targeting NGOs from September 1; UNK_LateNight hit US aerospace/defense with ShadowPad and UNK_DoubleCheck targeted Vietnamese manufacturers. The kit's maintainers reverse-engineer public Chromium fixes before stable Chrome releases, and Proofpoint suspects the ALPC exploit has existed since 2025.

BleepingComputerupdated · 14h agofirst · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 11 sourcesCVE-2026-85046CVE-2026-87491CVE-2026-858801

CISA: WatchGuard RCE flaw now exploited in ransomware attacks

CISA confirms ransomware gangs are exploiting critical unauthenticated RCE CVE-2025-14733 in WatchGuard Firebox firewalls, with roughly 9,000 devices still unpatched.

CVE-2025-14733 is an out-of-bounds write in WatchGuard Fireware OS allowing unauthenticated remote code execution, exploitable on firewalls configured for IKEv2 VPN and potentially even after the configuration was deleted if a static branch-office VPN peer remains. WatchGuard released patches in December and confirmed in-the-wild exploitation; Shadowserver found over 115,000 exposed Fireboxes at the time, with nearly 9,000 still unpatched after nine months. CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog in December under BOD 22-01 and on Thursday confirmed ransomware gangs are now exploiting it, without providing campaign details. WatchGuard serves more than 250,000 small and mid-sized companies through 17,000+ security resellers and service providers.

BleepingComputer · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2025-14733CVE-2022-23176CVE-2025-9242

Trezor warns users of email provider breach, phishing attacks

Trezor says attackers breached its third-party email provider and are phishing customers with fake STM32 entropy vulnerability alerts.

Trezor warned customers that threat actors breached its third-party email provider and sent fake 'Critical Security Alert: STM32 Entropy Vulnerability' emails from [email protected], claiming wallet seeds were exposed to brute-force attacks; the phishing domain has been taken down while Trezor investigates. This follows the ShipMonk breach, revised upward from about 14,000 to 81,000 customers (including 67,000 additional US customers) who received orders between May 10 and August 8, 2026. Attackers reportedly exploited a Metabase SQL injection zero-day to access ShipMonk data, and ShinyHunters sent extortion emails.

BleepingComputerupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoData breach in the wild 5 sources

A GAN-Based Framework for Robust DDoS Attack Detection

WGAN-GP-generated adversarial DDoS traffic augments training data, improving detection resilience against evasion attempts.

Researchers built a DDoS detection framework combining Random Forests, deep neural ensembles, and Transformer-based models trained on CICDDoS2019 with synthetic adversarial flows generated by a Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty. Hybrid datasets of benign, malicious, and generated traffic taught models more generalizable decision boundaries. Experiments showed improved accuracy and resilience against unseen adversarial traffic, validated on real-world generated flows.

arXiv cs.CR · 22h agoResearch

12 Best Ransomware Protection Solutions Compared (2026): Features & Pricing

GBHackers compares 12 ransomware protection solutions for 2026, recommending layered stacks of EDR prevention, managed detection, containment, and guaranteed recovery.

The editorial comparison argues no single product stops ransomware, recommending a layered strategy across prevention, early detection, blast-radius containment, and clean recovery. CrowdStrike and SentinelOne are named best-in-class EDR, Huntress and Sophos MDR for managed 24/7 coverage, ColorTokens for microsegmentation containment, and Rubrik and Acronis for guaranteed recovery. The guide notes ransomware is now professionalized with double extortion and encryption sprints measured in minutes.

GBHackersupdated · 20h agofirst · 5d agoIndustry 14 sources1

New Android malware encrypts files, steals data, and harasses victims

Zimperium details Mantax Otax, an Android malware combining ransomware, spyware, and harassment, spread via phishing APKs to Indonesian users.

Zimperium researchers report Mantax Otax is distributed through malicious APKs hosted outside Google Play via phishing and social engineering, then abuses Accessibility permissions for broad device control. It encrypts files with a C2-provided AES key on Android 9 and older, adds '.enc' extensions, and hosts ransom chats on Firebase; researchers exposed attacker chats via a Firebase misconfiguration. The malware steals lock-screen PINs, SMS one-time codes, contacts, WhatsApp and Telegram chats, and captures screens via MediaProjection, while version 2 adds jumpscare overlays and text-to-speech harassment. Google Play Protect already detects and blocks it on up-to-date devices via the App Defense Alliance.

BleepingComputerupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoMalware in the wild 6 sources

Redtail Payload Analysis [Guest Diary], (Wed, Sep 9th)

SANS guest analyst detonated a RedTail Linux sample from a DShield honeypot, finding process masquerading as php-fpm, monitoring-kill behavior, and a TCP listener.

A DShield honeypot captured multi-architecture RedTail Linux executables (ARM, ARM64, i686, RISC-V, x86-64) deployed via shell scripts. Dynamic analysis of the UPX-packed, statically linked x86-64 sample (SHA-256 63be5f38...d35e) in an isolated Ubuntu 24.04 VM on Proxmox showed it renamed its process via prctl(PR_SET_NAME), killed a filesystem-monitoring process, and opened a TCP listening socket while surviving processes posed as php-fpm or PostgreSQL-like workers. Differential memory images pre- and post-execution were captured from the hypervisor for forensics.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 6d agoMalware in the wild1

Most Firms Unable to Recover Quickly from Ransomware

Fenix24's first State of Recoverability report finds only 0.5% of 800+ ransomware clients neared 24-48 hour recovery targets, with identity failures central.

Drawing on 500+ ransomware recoveries, Fenix24 found only four of 800+ clients (0.5%) came close to their own 24-48 hour recovery targets, and none reached full operations for weeks. 99.2% lacked a documented identity recovery plan, Active Directory typically fell first, and 94% tied backup systems to the compromised directory. In 38% of engagements backups survived but could not carry recovery; storage ran short in 82% of cases and 95% lacked meaningful MFA on critical infrastructure consoles.

Infosecurity Magazine · 1d agoResearch

KREMLIN Banking Malware Hijacks Chrome and Edge to Steal Credentials and Session Tokens

Elastic Security Labs details KREMLIN, Brazilian banking malware using malicious Chrome/Edge extensions and Ethereum smart contracts to steal credentials and session tokens.

Elastic Security Labs documents KREMLIN (tracked as REF9334), a Brazilian banking malware toolkit active since at least May 2025 that impersonates a dozen Brazilian banks. It uses multi-stage JavaScript loaders, a C++ installer that DLL-sideloads via a legitimate SentinelOne binary, and a malicious Chrome/Edge extension named 'AVSync System Inc.' Ethereum smart contracts act as dead-drop resolvers for C2 endpoints, a shift that occurred May 19, 2026, making infrastructure hard to disrupt. The extension harvests cookies, sessionStorage/localStorage, browsing history, screenshots, and full page HTML via WebSocket plus CSS-disguised polling endpoints. The group has run seven distinct campaigns and also distributes Pulsar RAT and Remcos RAT.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 1d agofirst · 1d agoMalware in the wild 2 sources

The extension you never installed: KREMLIN forges Chrome's own integrity checks to steal banking sessions

Elastic details KREMLIN, a Brazilian banking malware whose malicious Chrome/Edge extension forges Chromium integrity checks to steal sessions.

Elastic Security Labs tracked operation REF9334 and its KREMLIN toolkit, a Brazilian banking malware campaign impersonating twelve banks across seven campaigns since May 2025. The infection chain uses multi-stage obfuscated JavaScript loaders with sandbox checks (file and process counting), scheduled-task persistence, and an Ethereum smart contract acting as a dead-drop resolver for C2 and payload URLs, abusing Archive.org for hosting. The malicious browser extension bypasses Chromium integrity mechanisms by manipulating Secure Preferences and regenerating required HMACs and App-Bound encrypted hashes. Threat Command disrupted over 1,500 infections by registering the kill-switch canary domain.

Elastic Security Labs · 3d agoMalware in the wild