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Multiple ArtraDownloader Variants Used by BITTER to Target Pakistan
BITTER used three ArtraDownloader variants since 2015 to target Pakistan, China, and Saudi Arabia, deploying BitterRAT and exploiting CVE-2017-11882 in one wave.
Palo Alto Unit 42 documents ArtraDownloader, a previously unreported downloader family used by the suspected South Asian group BITTER, with three variants and roughly 80 unique samples dating back to February 2015. Between September 2018 and January 2019, BITTER used spearphishing documents hosted on compromised Pakistani websites to target Pakistan and, for the first time, Saudi Arabia; one RTF sample exploited the EQNEDT vulnerability CVE-2017-11882. The downloader retrieves BitterRAT over HTTP, uses simple registry keys for persistence, and byte-level string obfuscation. Infrastructure overlap with the previously reported MY24 InPage-exploit payload was also observed.
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Hardware Fingerprinting FTQC via Quantum Decoder Timing
Quantum decoder timing on IBM Heron processors forms a side channel enabling device fingerprinting with 89% accuracy and workload inference.
The work demonstrates that wall-clock syndrome-decoding times on fault-tolerant quantum computers constitute a novel hardware side channel. Using per-shot decoder timings from three IBM Heron processors collected over 68 days, a passive observer can reconstruct detector-firing distributions, estimate logical error rate, infer code distance, and fingerprint the specific device with up to 89% accuracy versus 33% for random guessing. Noisy simulation based on Google's 105-qubit Willow processor distinguishes nine surface-code patches at 81% accuracy, showing the channel persists across vendors and code families.
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PostgreSQL Fixes 12-Year-Old Logical Decoding Flaw Enabling Replication-Role Code Execution
PostgreSQL fixed CVE-2026-6471 (CVSS 7.2), a 12-year-old logical decoding flaw letting replication-role accounts execute arbitrary code as the database OS user.
PostgreSQL patched CVE-2026-6471 (CVSS 7.2), a flaw present since logical decoding shipped in 9.4 (2014) that lets an account with the REPLICATION attribute run arbitrary code as the database server's OS user when wal_level is logical. Versions before 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24 are affected; exploitation requires such an account, which backup, CDC, and monitoring tooling routinely holds. The fix adds an output_plugin_libraries whitelist, so administrators using non-default plugins such as wal2json and decoderbufs must add them and reload configuration after updating. Cyera Research, whose write-up names the flaw PostGREShell, demonstrated escalating a replication user to superuser with persistence; no PoC or KEV entry existed as of September 4.
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ROSETTA: Efficient and Accurate Privacy-Preserving LLM Decoding via Hybrid CKKS/TFHE Evaluation
ROSETTA is a hybrid CKKS/TFHE homomorphic encryption framework for privacy-preserving LLM decoding, achieving up to 4.8x Softmax and 2.1x end-to-end speedups.
The paper proposes ROSETTA, a hybrid CKKS/TFHE fully homomorphic encryption framework for private inference on generative LLMs, targeting the nonlinear operations that dominate autoregressive decoding cost. It introduces an adaptive segmented lookup-table protocol based on TFHE and a scheme-aware operator-selection framework that assigns each nonlinear operator to CKKS or TFHE to minimize latency. Experiments show up to 4.8x Softmax speedup and 1.5-2.1x end-to-end decoding speedup over the state-of-the-art CacheMir framework.
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ClearFake WebDAV infection chain delivers Amatera stealer, ZigCryptoStealer, and NetSupport Manager
Cisco Talos details ClearFake WebDAV chains delivering Amatera stealer to a Ukrainian government organization, with cryptocurrency and credential theft payloads.
Cisco Talos investigated DLL executions named 'verification.google' via WebDAV UNC paths at a Ukrainian government organization, tracking the actor as UAT-10820 and assessing with moderate confidence the activity is Russian and opportunistic rather than targeted. The infection chain uses ClearFake JavaScript injected via a Cloudflare Worker, EtherHiding storage on BNB Smart Chain contracts, and a ClickFix fake Google CAPTCHA prompt to deliver Amatera stealer. Secondary payloads differ by C2: one loader deploys ZigCryptoStealer with a Go reverse TCP proxy and a vulnerable driver that kills EDR, while the other installs an unauthorized NetSupport Manager with a Russia-based C2. Similar Amatera chains were separately documented by Malwarebytes and Blackpoint Cyber, but with no shared infrastructure.
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RANCOR: Targeted Attacks in South East Asia Using PLAINTEE and DDKONG Malware Families
Unit 42 names RANCOR, a previously unidentified espionage group targeting Southeast Asian political entities with newly discovered PLAINTEE and DDKONG malware families.
Unit 42 tracks a previously unidentified group it dubs RANCOR conducting highly targeted espionage attacks in Singapore and Cambodia using two custom malware families, DDKONG and PLAINTEE. Attacks appear to have begun with spear phishing, with decoy political news documents hosted on legitimate sites including a Cambodian government website and Facebook. Infrastructure links to IP 89.46.222[.]97 and KHRAT-associated domains such as facebook-apps[.]com, and the activity is grouped into two clusters tied together by PLAINTEE usage and similar targeting.
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Tracking OceanLotus’ new Downloader, KerrDown
Unit 42 identifies KerrDown, a new OceanLotus (APT32) downloader active since 2018 targeting Vietnamese speakers via malicious macros and DLL side-loading.
Unit 42 tracks KerrDown, a previously undocumented downloader family used by OceanLotus (APT32) since at least early 2018, primarily targeting Vietnam or Vietnamese-speaking individuals. Delivery uses macro-laced Microsoft Office documents embedding base64-encoded 32-bit and 64-bit DLLs, and RAR archives containing a legitimate program abused for DLL side-loading. KerrDown is dropped as main_background.png, downloads a DES-encrypted payload from a URL, and executes it directly in memory. Researchers used Jaccard-index similarity analysis to identify the new family, connect campaign samples, and infer patterns in the group's working hours and days.
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Has MIMO decoding been proved hard from lattice problems?
Researchers show the published lattice-hardness proof for MIMO decoding fails, as Regev's LWE reduction structure does not carry over to non-modular MIMO.
The paper re-examines Dean and Goldsmith's proposed polynomial-time reduction from lattice problems to MIMO decoding, which adapted Regev's reduction for learning with errors (LWE). Prior works had presented attacks and counterexamples against the construction, leaving the reduction's precise validity unclear. The authors identify which structural features of the LWE reduction fail to transfer to the non-modular MIMO setting, showing the published proof does not establish the claimed hardness of MIMO decoding. They distinguish flaws in the hardness proof from direct attacks on specific parameter choices and do not rule out physical layer security for MIMO systems in general.
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CVE-2026-82435: Apache Storm Worker: Unauthenticated Remote Memory Exhaustion in the Worker Messaging Decoder
Unauthenticated remote memory exhaustion in Apache Storm Worker 3.0.x Netty decoder fixed in 3.1.0, allowing pre-auth denial of service.
CVE-2026-82435 (rated important) affects Apache Storm Worker (org.apache.storm:storm-client) versions 3.0.0 before 3.1.0. The worker's Netty message decoder sits ahead of SASL authentication handlers and processes frames before any authentication occurs. It allocates buffers sized from an attacker-controlled length field, so a single frame from an unauthenticated peer reaching the worker can exhaust memory. Users must upgrade to 3.1.0.
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Memory-safety defects in the upstream (abandoned) AOSP OpenCORE AAC decoder, shipped unpatched by Samsung TizenRT
Abandoned AOSP OpenCORE AAC decoder has out-of-bounds-write and wild-pointer flaws reachable from attacker-controlled frames, unpatched in Samsung TizenRT.
The OpenCORE AAC decoder in AOSP's abandoned external/opencore tree contains memory-safety defects of the out-of-bounds-write and wild-pointer class. The code is still vendored and built by multiple projects, most notably Samsung's widely deployed TizenRT embedded RTOS. The defects are reachable from untrusted media because an AAC frame is attacker-controlled. The researcher is requesting a CVE ID for the issue.
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