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Sociotechnical Aspects of Tor Relay Rejection

User study and simulations of Tor's relay end-of-life rejection policy find operators favor it; network churn affects anonymity more than EoL exclusions.

The study examines the Tor Project's 2019 end-of-life policy that rejects outdated relays, which constitute a notable fraction of consensus weight. A user study of 26 relay operators found they generally view the policy favorably despite limited awareness, though operational practices occasionally exclude newly installed relays. Historical-data-driven simulations show the policy gives adversaries only marginal advantage, with network churn exerting a more pronounced effect on user anonymity. Analysis of four exclusion rounds shows a minority of rejected relays typically account for over 50% of the security provided by all excluded relays, informing EoL policy recommendations.

arXiv cs.CR · 3d agoResearch

Release Notes: Faster TI Investigations, Fresh Threat Research, and 650+ Threat Coverage Updates

ANY.RUN August release adds TI Lookup connections view, 81 behavior signatures, 16 YARA rules, 559 Suricata rules, and three new threat intelligence reports.

ANY.RUN released August product updates expanding its Threat Intelligence Lookup with a Connections block for pivoting between related observables (domains, IPs, URLs), JSON export for retrohunting and SIEM/NDR integration, and hidden whitelisted data by default. Detection coverage grew with 81 new behavior signatures, 16 YARA rules, and 559 Suricata rules covering malware execution, phishing, and C2 traffic. Three new Threat Intelligence Reports cover a US-focused RMM phishing campaign across 46 countries, the Mirage2FA phishing-as-a-service targeting Microsoft 365 (1,249 sandbox sessions, 9,332 potential compromise events), and a threat brief on OVERLORD RAT, CRPX0, and TRIBACK loader.

ANY.RUN · 14d agoTools1

Week in review: Salesforce and ServiceNow portals exposed for 17 months, exploited Metabase 0-day

Weekly digest: exploited Metabase zero-day breached Framework; Salesforce/ServiceNow portals read for 17 months; Microsoft patched 400+ flaws.

Help Net Security's week in review aggregates top stories: a 'City-Forum' campaign tracked by Reco has been pulling records from Salesforce and ServiceNow portals worldwide for 17 months, and Framework suffered a breach via an exploited Metabase zero-day exposing customer contact and IP data. It also covers Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday fixing 400+ flaws including exploited zero-day CVE-2026-68820, Cisco's fix for exploited firewall DoS bug CVE-2026-20349 (added to CISA KEV), and a second N-able N-central hotfix for actively exploited CVE-2026-18577. Other items include GitHub expanding Dependabot malware alerts to eight package ecosystems and EU AI Act enforcement beginning on 2 August 2026.

Help Net Security · Aug 16, 2026Industry in the wildCVE-2026-18577CVE-2026-68820CVE-2026-203491

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

Are Unreachable Nodes Truly Safe? Fully Eclipsing Monero's P2P Network!

Researchers present Nyx and Moros, the first eclipse attacks against Monero nodes behind NATs, requiring no inbound access and demonstrated on mainnet.

The paper presents the first eclipse attacks tailored to unreachable Monero nodes operating behind NATs, requiring no inbound access to the victim. The attacks poison the peerlists of reachable nodes, which relay contamination to unreachable nodes' whitelists, then exploit Monero's outbound connection refresh logic to evict benign neighbors and monopolize all outbound connections. Nyx achieves a complete, persistent eclipse of long-running unreachable nodes in large-scale SEED Emulator simulations, while Moros stealthily eclipses newly joined nodes during bootstrapping and was demonstrated on the Monero mainnet. Countermeasures are proposed.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch

Trump Targets Foreign Technology in New U.S. Power Grid Security Order

Trump's Executive Order 14420 declares a national emergency to restrict foreign-made bulk-power grid equipment over cyber, sabotage and supply-chain risks.

Executive Order 14420, signed August 26, declares a national emergency regarding the foreign supply of bulk-power system electric equipment to the United States. It empowers the Energy Secretary to restrict transactions with designated Covered Foreign Entities involving equipment, software, firmware, digital services, maintenance services, and remote-access capabilities. Covered equipment includes transformers, generators, inverters, RTUs, PLCs, intelligent electronic devices, and protective relays, with transmission rated 69 kV or higher in scope while local distribution is excluded. Already-installed foreign equipment may be subject to identification, isolation, monitoring, or replacement requirements, with phased compliance and pre-qualified vendor exemptions permitted.

Security Affairs · 19d agoPolicy & legal

ThreatsDay: 200 Android Flaws, Browser-Built Phishing, 119K Scam Shops + 23 More Stories

Hacker News ThreatsDay digest: malicious browser extensions, AI-agent intrusions, NCSC shadow AI warning, M&A wire fraud, and 119,000-domain fake shops.

Socket found four malicious Chrome and Firefox extensions (J7Tracker, VREO, Orbit Tracker) stealing session tokens and wallet data from Axiom Trade and Padre users via attacker-controlled Vercel deployments. Hunt.io reported a Chinese-speaking operator using Claude Code, Alibaba Qwen, and DeepSeek with the SecFlow orchestration framework to automate intrusions against government and financial targets in Afghanistan, Thailand, Taiwan, and the US. The UK NCSC warned shadow AI use risks breaches and regulatory failure, Microsoft announced privacy-preserving Windows Age APIs, and Gen Digital described fake M&A wire-fraud scams. A 119,000-domain fake-shop operation called DoppelCart was also highlighted.

The Hacker News · 6d agoIndustry in the wild

How to Keep Malware’s Rotating Infrastructure From Becoming a Detection Gap

ANY.RUN marketing piece argues SOC detection lags rotating malware and phishing infrastructure, citing a 46-country campaign and 3DBlast kit to promote TI feeds.

ANY.RUN describes how malware and phishing campaigns rotate domains and hosting, making single-IOC blocking ineffective for SOC teams. One investigated phishing campaign spanned 46 countries with 425 kit URLs across 240 hosts, 94% of which were seen for only a single day. A phishing kit dubbed 3DBlast impersonates Microsoft 365 and Google using BitB, AiTM, OAuth device-code phishing and DOM relay techniques. The article is primarily a promotion for ANY.RUN TI Feeds and TI Lookup products.

Cyber Security News · 1d agoIndustry

A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over

404 Media reveals DHS Border Patrol's secretive Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT) analyzing Americans' financial activity and feeding intelligence to local police for traffic stops.

404 Media identified Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT) in the Spokane Sector (Washington) and Laredo Sector (Texas), which review law enforcement-sensitive databases including Americans' financial activity and pass intelligence to local police. In one case, a PITT analyst flagged financial patterns associated with narcotics activity, leading Montana Highway Patrol to stop a driver for an obstructed license plate and charge him with DUI and possession with intent to distribute. CBP declined to say what financial data is monitored or whether warrants are obtained; the program extends AP's earlier reporting on ALPR-based predictive policing.

404 Media · 8d agoPolicy & legal

A battery storage cyberattack would look exactly like a badly tuned controller

Risk modeling suggests a few hundred compromised grid-scale batteries dispatched through cloud optimizers could trigger blackouts in Texas or Great Britain.

Centrii analysis estimates 1,500 compromised one-megawatt units (5.4% of ERCOT's ~28 GW fleet) or 400 units (about 29% of Great Britain's ~1,400-unit fleet) could destabilize the grids, with modeled damage of $12-65 billion in Texas and a national blackout costing £2-10 billion in Britain. The study puts the probability of a major attack affecting at least one million people by 2031 at 92.1%, dropping to 61.4% with IEC 62443 certification and quarterly drills, based on 10,000 Monte Carlo runs. Because hostile battery swings are phased like legitimate frequency response, control rooms would see nothing unusual; Centrii proposes hunting for a reverse-governor signature where inverter output feeds oscillations. Spain's April 2025 blackout took an expert panel until March 2026 to rule out cyberattack, partly because key plants had no recordings.

Help Net Security · 15d agoResearch

The Top 4 Threats We Found by Investigating Every Alert for a Quarter

Prophet Security's quarterly threat report finds identity attacks made up roughly half of confirmed malicious activity, with stolen authenticated sessions bypassing conditional access controls.

Between May 1 and July 31, 2026, Prophet Security investigated every alert in customer environments immediately on arrival; about 7% of completed investigations were confirmed malicious. Direct account/session attacks made up roughly 18% of confirmed activity, with replayed authenticated sessions bypassing conditional access since no re-authentication occurs. Infostealer activity affected about a quarter of investigated organizations, mostly delivered via browsers through compromised websites, malicious ads, sponsored search results and ClickFix fake CAPTCHA gates, with payloads including Lumma Stealer, Vidar, HijackLoader and AsyncRAT. Credential phishing was the largest category at about 28%, with adversary-in-the-middle relays revealed by seconds-long MFA approvals from distant countries and MFA fatigue attacks exploiting automatic unlock policies.

BleepingComputer · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild

Metasploit Wrap Up: This One Goes to Sixteen!

Metasploit adds 16 modules including 10 exploits, five covering CISA KEV vulnerabilities in Cisco, SonicWall, PaperCut, JetBrains and Langflow.

Rapid7's weekly Metasploit update ships 16 new modules, 10 of them exploit modules, with five targeting CISA KEV entries. New exploits cover Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center auth bypass (CVE-2026-20079), a SonicWall SMA1000 SSRF-to-root RCE chain (CVE-2026-83548/CVE-2026-83549), JetBrains TeamCity deserialization RCE (CVE-2026-63077), PaperCut NG/MF chain (CVE-2026-81578/CVE-2026-82078), and Langflow authenticated RCE (CVE-2026-19295). The SonicWall and PaperCut chains were reported as actively exploited zero-days, and a new ESC8 relay module exploits CVE-2026-20929 against AD CS Web Enrollment.

Rapid7 Blog · 5d agoTools in the wildCVE-2025-66516CVE-2025-54988CVE-2026-20929+8 CVEs1

Honeypot-Omaha and batch.py [Guest Diary], (Wed, Sep 2nd)

A SANS ISC guest diary describes batch.py, a Python tool that consolidates honeypot logs and enriches IOCs with threat intelligence data.

Written by a SANS.edu BACS intern, the diary explains analysis of the DShield Honeypot-Omaha sensor, which uses Cowrie to emulate SSH and Telnet and log attacker activity. The author's batch.py script implements a four-phase pipeline with SHA-256-generated master and guest authentication to consolidate JSON and log files, correlate data via external APIs, and produce MITRE, CVE, geolocation, threat-score and fingerprint enrichment for investigated indicators.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 14d agoTools1