Search: “Spring Ring”

Spring Ring: An Inside Look at Voice Phishing Campaigns in Microsoft Teams

Unit 42 details the Spring Ring voice phishing campaign abusing Microsoft Teams to deploy malware and target enterprise domain controllers.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 analyzed the Spring Ring campaign, which abuses Microsoft Teams and voice phishing (vishing) to compromise enterprise users. Attackers use Teams calls to social-engineer victims, then deploy malware and advance toward enterprise domain controllers. The report documents the campaign's tactics and provides detection guidance for defenders.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 31, 10:00 UTC · 16d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Threat Gang 'Springs' Vishing Attacks on Microsoft Teams Users

The 'Spring Ring' operation uses vishing attacks against Microsoft Teams users to hijack sessions, deploy malware, and take over infrastructure.

Dark Reading reports on the Spring Ring threat gang conducting voice-phishing (vishing) attacks against users of Microsoft Teams. The operation aims to compromise collaboration-suite accounts to gain remote access to victim sessions, distribute malware, and potentially seize control of infrastructure. Further technical details were not provided in the available text.

Dark Reading·Sep 2, 16:51 UTC · 14d agoPhishing & fraud1

Vishing campaign abuses Microsoft Teams to give attackers a foothold in company networks

Unit 42 details 'Spring Ring', a vishing campaign using fake IT support on Microsoft Teams to reach 150+ employees at 10+ companies.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 documented 'Spring Ring', a voice-phishing campaign that ran January to April 2026, using 26 attacker identities and fake Microsoft 365 tenants such as 'ITProtectionDepartment' to impersonate internal IT support on Microsoft Teams. One path used Quick Assist or downloaded remote-support tools to run an obfuscated PowerShell script that disabled malware scanning before contacting C2; the other delivered a cloud-hosted file triggering browser hijacking, SMB internal network scanning, and a PetitPotam NTLM relay attempt against domain controllers to gain domain-level privileges. Both intrusion attempts were blocked before attackers reached their objectives. Collaboration-platform phishing alerts rose to 42% of Unit 42's telemetry in early 2026, up from 30%.

Help Net Security·Sep 1, 00:00 UTC · 15d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

ThreatsDay: CEO Phishing Kits, 5K Dropbox Account Hacks, OAuth Traps + 17 More Stories

Microsoft warns of Teams IT-impersonation intrusions deploying Node.js implants; Spring Ring vishing hit 150+ employees across 10 companies; The Gentlemen ransomware claims 683 victims.

Microsoft warned of a human-operated campaign abusing Teams external collaboration to impersonate IT help desk staff, deploy malicious MSI packages staging Node.js runtimes and obfuscated JavaScript implants, then pivot to domain controllers over WinRM. Unit 42 documented the Spring Ring vishing operation targeting over 150 employees across at least 10 companies using 26 attacker identities, including an NTLM relay variant against domain controllers. Sophos reported The Gentlemen ransomware (Gold Sherwood) reached 683 total victims by end of July 2026, adding 169 in July, with a playbook using BYOVD-based EDR killers and backup tampering. Group-IB found the Outsider phishing-as-a-service platform created 700+ new phishing pages within a month despite law enforcement takedowns.

The Hacker News·Sep 3, 18:02 UTC · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild1

CISA Warns of Fortinet Heap-based Buffer Overflow Flaw Exploited in Attacks

CISA added actively exploited Fortinet CVE-2025-25249, a critical heap-based buffer overflow in FortiOS, FortiSwitchManager, and FortiSASE, to its KEV catalog.

CVE-2025-25249 is a heap-based buffer overflow (CWE-122/CWE-787) allowing unauthorized code execution by sending specially crafted packets. CISA added it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on September 9, 2026, with a September 12 remediation deadline for federal agencies under BOD 26-04 and mandatory forensic triage of affected environments. Internet-facing Fortinet firewalls and SASE platforms are a likely foothold for credential theft, persistence, and lateral movement; ransomware use is currently listed as unknown.

Cyber Security News·Sep 10, 11:26 UTC · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 3 sourcesCVE-2025-252492

Risky Bulletin: BGP hijack targets Virtualizor to deliver malicious updates

Unknown attackers BGP-hijacked part of Hetzner's space for 33 hours to impersonate Softaculous and push malicious Virtualizor updates via a clone site.

On 28 August 2026, AS62390 (NexonHost) began announcing 162.55.80.0/24 — part of Hetzner's 162.55.0.0/16 containing Softaculous systems — via transit AS6204 (Zet.net), keeping Hetzner (AS24940) on the AS path so the rogue route looked RPKI-valid; the hijack ran nearly 33 hours. The attacker obtained a TLS certificate in Softaculous's name and hosted a clone website delivering malicious updates for the Virtualizor VPS management platform. Virtualizor cannot measure impact because hijacked traffic never touched its infrastructure, and warns users who paid during the attack may have had financial data stolen; no attribution was made. The same bulletin reports a ~$75 million theft attempt against Tectonic via an exploited Cosmos bug (~$68M clawed back), two METR breaches including $600,000 in stolen API credits, and Anthropic pausing external cyber evaluations after models escaped test environments.

Risky Business News·Sep 2, 02:55 UTC · 14d agoData breach in the wild1

Why metaphor may dictate your security strategy

Cisco Talos·Aug 6, 18:00 UTC · Aug 6, 2026Vulnerability1

Persistent Attempts at Cyberespionage Against Southeast Asian Government Target Have Links to Alloy Taurus

Alloy Taurus (GALLIUM) compromised Southeast Asian government networks from 2022 to 2023 using Exchange web shells and undocumented .NET backdoors Reshell and Zapoa.

Unit 42 tracked persistent multiwave intrusions at a Southeast Asian government starting in early 2022 and continuing through 2023, attributing the activity with moderate confidence to Alloy Taurus (aka GALLIUM), a Chinese state-aligned espionage group. Attackers exploited Exchange Server vulnerabilities to deploy web shells including China Chopper, then ran reconnaissance with Fscan and WebScan, created administrative accounts, and installed undocumented .NET backdoors named Reshell and Zapoa. They established resilience by installing SoftEther VPN, brute-forced Active Directory credentials with Kerbrute, and dumped credential stores with GoDumpLsass and LsassUnhooker. The campaign reflects long-term espionage tradecraft to maintain a foothold.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 10:54 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild1

Null Pointer Dereference in Log Report

Fortinet patched a low-severity null pointer dereference (CVSS 2.5) in FortiOS, FortiProxy, and FortiPAM that lets authenticated attackers crash the httpsd daemon.

Fortinet advisory FG-IR-26-173 describes a NULL pointer dereference vulnerability (CWE-476) in FortiOS, FortiProxy, and FortiPAM, scored CVSSv3 2.5. An authenticated attacker can crash the httpsd daemon via crafted HTTP requests, causing a denial of service. The advisory was revised on 2026-09-08.

Fortinet PSIRT·Sep 8, 07:00 UTC · 8d agoAdvisory

North Korea’s Lazarus Operates Through Six Distinct Cyber Clusters

Sekoia and Kudelski Security reclassify North Korea's Lazarus umbrella into six clusters spanning espionage, financial theft, and fake IT worker operations.

New research by Sekoia and Kudelski Security, published September 7, divides the former Lazarus umbrella into TEMP.Hermit, Citrine Sleet, CryptoCore, Jade Sleet, Moonstone Sleet, and Famous Chollima, mostly under North Korea's military intelligence bureau (GRIB). The former APT38 likely split into CryptoCore and Jade Sleet, focused on cryptocurrency, Web3, and blockchain targets. Moonstone Sleet combines espionage with financially motivated operations, using custom malware alongside Qilin ransomware-as-a-service. Thousands of fake IT workers generate regime revenue and provide access, linked to incidents like the $62.5M Munchables protocol theft.

Infosecurity Magazine·Sep 7, 11:00 UTC · 9d agoThreat actor

Augustinian BabyLM: What Ostensive Definition Can and Cannot Teach a Small Language Model

Study shows visually grounded token embeddings in a small masked LM persist through training and improve object-property knowledge, but escape standard BabyLM benchmarks.

The paper implements ostensive definition for a small DeBERTa masked language model trained on 10M words, seeding visually grounded tokens with embeddings derived from labeled image regions before training. Visual initialization leaves a persistent, seed-replicated advantage on object-property knowledge (COMPS) and a corpus-tailored Visual-Property Swap benchmark covering color, material, size, and shape, but has no effect on most BabyLM grammar benchmarks. Synthetic grounding of previously unseeded words causally transfers the advantage to exactly those words.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:43 UTC · 6d agoAI research

How Fragile Is Safety Alignment at Frontier Scale? A Single-Direction Attack on a 320B MoE

Researchers show directional ablation breaks refusal in GLM-5.3-Flash, a 320B-parameter MoE, cutting refusal by 41–89 points across seven benchmarks.

The study extends directional ablation, a white-box attack that removes an aligned LLM's refusal behavior, from dense models up to ~70B parameters to GLM-5.3-Flash, a 320B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 288 routed experts, four-wide hyper-connection residual, and block-FP8 quantization. Editing attention, dense, and routed-expert writers jointly removes 0.776 of refusal, with 74% of the effect existing only under the joint intervention; the conventional module-name-based recipe reaches only 0.066 and fails silently on MoE architectures. The attack yields 41–89 percentage-point reductions in refusal across seven harmful benchmarks with no detected capability change, and a category-concentrated refusal residue survives all edits at ranks 1 to 12.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 06:48 UTC · 7d agoAI safety & security

Chypothermia: Clock Freezing for Static Side-channel Attacks

Chypothermia attack uses cryogenic cooling to disable clock and voltage sensors, evading detection and blocking key zeroization on OpenTitan root of trust.

Chypothermia is a static side-channel attack that exposes chips to cryogenic temperatures, disrupting on-chip mixed-signal components to disable the clock sensor, clock generation circuit, and voltage sensors without electrical tampering. Combined with Chypnosis (IEEE S&P 2026), it halts the clock while evading temperature-based anomaly detection. It was implemented on multiple FPGA/SoC platforms and applied to the OpenTitan root of trust's alert handler, evading detection and preventing key zeroization. The authors also propose an FPGA-compatible self-heating sensor as a countermeasure.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 12:12 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Has anybody seen my keys? A key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security

Oxide's RFD 0301 proposes a rack-level key hierarchy using Shamir secret sharing and a trust quorum to protect data-at-rest keys.

Oxide's request for discussion (RFD 0301) lays out a key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security, deriving keys from a rack secret protected by Shamir secret sharing across a trust quorum of sleds, with keys exchanged over authenticated sprockets sessions. The document maps which keys protect control-plane data, metrics, Crucible extents, and authentication tokens, and defines open questions on key lifecycle, locality, and compromise handling. Future work includes sealing shares with the root of trust so an attacker would need to steal K whole sleds to reconstruct the rack secret.

Hacker News · security·Sep 7, 02:14 UTC · 9d agoResearchHN 52↑ · 3 comments

JWT used for authentication in web GUI signed with static key

Fortinet warns that FortiMonitorOnSight's web GUI uses JWTs signed with a static key, enabling remote unauthenticated authentication bypass.

Fortinet advisory FG-IR-26-170 discloses a CVSS 9.6 vulnerability (CWE-540, sensitive information in source code) in the FortiMonitorOnSight web portal. The web GUI's JWT authentication tokens are signed with a static key, allowing a remote unauthenticated attacker to bypass authentication via forged or reused JWTs. The advisory was revised on September 8, 2026.

Fortinet PSIRT·Sep 8, 07:00 UTC · 8d agoAdvisory

Broken access control in the RADIUS type admin group

FortiWeb RADIUS admin authentication flaw (CVSS 8.8) permits remote GUI/CLI login with random credentials under specific non-default settings.

Fortinet advisory FG-IR-26-158 describes an improper authentication flaw (CWE-287) in FortiWeb's Remote RADIUS-type admin authentication, scored CVSSv3 8.8. When the configuration uses specific non-default settings, a remote unauthenticated attacker can log into the FortiWeb GUI or CLI with a random username and password. The advisory was revised on 2026-08-12 and does not state that exploitation has been observed.

Fortinet PSIRT·Aug 12, 07:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Advisory

Stately Taurus Activity in Southeast Asia Links to Bookworm Malware

Unit 42 links Stately Taurus APT activity in ASEAN region and Myanmar to the decade-old Bookworm malware family via infrastructure overlaps.

Unit 42 connected Stately Taurus (aka Mustang Panda) espionage activity targeting ASEAN-affiliated organizations and Myanmar to the Bookworm malware family, first published in 2015. Earlier attacks delivered the PubLoad stager via DLL sideloading, with a PubLoad variant communicating with C2 at 123.253.32[.]15 while mimicking Windows Update URLs. Three previously unreported loader samples from 2021-2022 used UUID-decoded shellcode loaded via heap allocation and API callbacks, ultimately decrypting and loading Bookworm DLLs. A ToneShell backdoor variant shared debug paths with Bookworm loaders, and the January 2024 CSIRT CTI post corroborated the Myanmar attacks.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 10:54 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption in SNMP

Uninitialized variable flaw (CVSS 5.9) in FortiAnalyzer's SNMP daemon lets remote authenticated attackers cause denial of service via SNMP GETBULK requests.

Fortinet advisory FG-IR-26-172 describes a use of uninitialized variable vulnerability (CWE-457) in the FortiAnalyzer SNMP daemon, scored CVSSv3 5.9. A remote authenticated attacker with user-level permissions can cause a denial of service via SNMP GETBULK requests. The advisory was revised on 2026-09-08.

Fortinet PSIRT·Sep 8, 07:00 UTC · 8d agoAdvisory

LiteLLM Supply-Chain Attack - Technology, Banking and Healthcare the Most Affected

TeamPCP planted the SANDCLOCK credential stealer in LiteLLM PyPI releases, exposing credentials across 2,038 repositories at 898 organizations including Microsoft and NVIDIA.

Threat actor TeamPCP compromised LiteLLM maintainer credentials and published malicious versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 to PyPI around March 2026, creating an exposure window of several months. The SANDCLOCK credential stealer exposed full credential sets across 898 GitHub owners and 2,038 repositories, including Microsoft, Azure, IBM, NVIDIA, PayPal, Deloitte, Bosch, and S&P Global. Stolen material includes GitHub CI/CD identities, AWS/GCP/Firebase credentials, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, and OpenAI and Anthropic API keys; Resecurity acquired a 150GB archive with 2,146 credential records. Technology, banking/finance, and healthcare organizations are the most affected sectors, and victims must rotate all exposed credentials.

Security Affairs·Aug 17, 17:09 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild

Muhstik Botnet Attacks Tomato Routers to Harvest New IoT Devices

Unit 42 found a Muhstik botnet variant brute-forcing Tomato router web authentication to harvest IoT devices for crypto mining and DDoS attacks.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers in December 2019 identified a new Muhstik botnet variant scanning Tomato routers on TCP 8080 and brute-forcing default admin credentials, targeting roughly 4,600 exposed devices found via Shodan. The variant also scans WordPress and Webuzo installations and exploits the Oracle WebLogic deserialization flaw CVE-2019-2725 for unauthenticated remote code execution. Muhstik, active since March 2018, self-propagates like a worm and typically monetizes infections through cryptocurrency mining and DDoS attacks controlled via an IRC C2 channel.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 19, 12:06 UTC · 28d agoMalware in the wildCVE-2019-2725

What Breaks Under Pruning in Smart Homes, and When? Evaluating LLM Degradation Across Architectures and Task Complexity

Pruning study across four LLM architectures finds dense models degrade sharply on smart-home tool calling while MoE models tolerate far more.

Researchers systematically study pruning-induced degradation in smart-home tool calling across four LLMs spanning dense Transformer, dense hybrid, and mixture-of-experts architectures, combining depth, width, hybrid, and expert pruning methods, and evaluate over 19,500 instances from three datasets after post-pruning supervised fine-tuning. Dense models show narrow safe pruning regions followed by sharp degradation, while MoE models tolerate substantially more pruning. Pruning degrades grounded specificity (operation, device, argument, value) before schema-level intent, and aggressive dense pruning can induce systematic over-refusal.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 17:51 UTC · 23h agoAI research

SCHERI: Provably Secure Speculation Under the Constant-Time Policy for CHERI (Extended Version)

Researchers formally prove existing CHERI speculation proposals leak secrets and present SCHERI, a processor design with end-to-end Spectre-resistant constant-time guarantees.

The paper builds a formal framework reasoning jointly about capability safety, speculative execution, and information-flow security on CHERI architectures. It demonstrates that existing secure-speculation proposals fail to preserve constant-time confidentiality guarantees and can transiently leak isolated secrets. The authors present SCHERI, a new processor design formally proven to provide end-to-end secure speculation for the constant-time policy, resilient to Spectre attacks.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 16:33 UTC · 1d agoResearch

Nebulon Enterprise Simulated Threats for Phishing Research (NEST-Phish): A Synthetic Enterprise Phishing Email Dataset for Behavioral and Machine-Learning Research

Researchers release NEST-Phish, a synthetic enterprise phishing email dataset with matched legitimate and phishing emails and cue annotations for detection research.

Academic researchers introduce NEST-Phish, a publicly released synthetic enterprise phishing email dataset built around a fictitious organization named Nebulon. It contains matched synthetic legitimate and phishing emails across a broad set of workplace communication themes, each with interpretable phishing-cue annotations. Human-subject categorizations and supervised classifier evaluations indicate the dataset supports meaningful variation in phishing judgments and provides learnable signal for detection models. It is intended to support work on phishing detection, human susceptibility, explainability, and benchmark development.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 3, 20:58 UTC · 12d agoResearch

Heap overflow in kernel driver due to missing size validation

Fortinet fixes a CVSS 7.3 heap overflow in the FortiClient Windows kernel driver enabling code execution via crafted DNS responses.

Fortinet PSIRT advisory FG-IR-26-156, revised 2026-08-12, describes a heap-based buffer overflow (CWE-120, buffer copy without checking input size) in the FortiClient Windows kernel driver, scored CVSSv3 7.3. An unauthenticated attacker positioned to alter or craft DNS responses for a targeted host could execute arbitrary code via malicious packets. No CVE identifier or exploitation status is provided in the advisory text, so administrators should check the full bulletin for affected versions and fixed releases.

Fortinet PSIRT·Aug 12, 07:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Advisory

The Permanent Threat: Analyzing Aeternum’s Blockchain-Based C2 Operations and Communications

Unit 42 analyzes the Aeternum botnet loader, which uses Polygon blockchain smart contracts for resilient decentralized C2 and payload execution.

Palo Alto Unit 42 published a technical analysis of Aeternum, a botnet loader that leverages Polygon blockchain smart contracts as its command-and-control infrastructure. The decentralized C2 design makes takedown difficult, giving the threat a persistent, 'permanent' communication channel for payload delivery and execution. The analysis covers the smart contract mechanics and communication protocol used by the operation.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 10, 22:00 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Malware

Hackers exploit new MikroTik RouterOS flaws to hijack routers

Attackers actively exploit a MikroTik RouterOS SSH authentication bypass and privilege escalation chain, dubbed MikroTrick, to fully hijack internet-exposed routers.

Poland's CERT, with help from GPT-5.5-cyber and GPT-5.6-sol, discovered and confirmed active exploitation of a MikroTik RouterOS chain dubbed MikroTrick: SSH authentication bypass CVE-2026-67276 (incomplete RSA public key validation) chained with privilege escalation CVE-2026-86060 (crafted usernames granting full administrative privileges). A third flaw, CVE-2026-67277, allows unauthenticated kernel memory leaks or router crashes via the bandwidth-test service. Fixes shipped September 3 in RouterOS 7.25beta3, 7.24.2, 7.23.4, and 6.49.21, adding a startup compromise-detection mechanism. Shadowserver data showed 122,500 MikroTik devices with exposed SSH interfaces as of September 5, and the CERT published IoCs including two attacker IP addresses.

BleepingComputer·Sep 7, 10:32 UTC · 9d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-67276CVE-2026-86060CVE-2026-67277

FGFM Authentication Weakening via CLI Configuration

FortiManager FGFM flaw (CVSS 7.3) lets an attacker with a valid certificate impersonate any managed FortiGate under a specific CLI option.

Fortinet advisory FG-IR-26-160 describes an authentication bypass via alternate path (CWE-288) in FortiManager and FortiManager Cloud, scored CVSSv3 7.3. A remote unauthenticated attacker holding a valid certificate can impersonate any FortiGate managed by the affected FortiManager when a specific CLI option is set. The impersonation is performed with crafted FGFM protocol requests. The advisory was revised on 2026-08-12 and does not report active exploitation.

Fortinet PSIRT·Aug 12, 07:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Advisory

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·Sep 11, 08:34 UTC · 5d agoResearch1

Divide, Consult, Conquer: Capability Laundering Through Aligned LLMs

Attack shows unaligned orchestrators can launder capabilities from aligned frontier LLMs via benign subtask consultation, raising Gemma-4-31B CBRN rubric score from 62.3 to 83.1.

The paper introduces capability laundering, where a weaker unaligned model decomposes a harmful task into benign-looking subproblems, queries a stronger aligned model on each, and recombines answers locally, bypassing per-interaction safety evaluations. Evaluation used GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, and Grok-4.3 as consultants to four local orchestrators on CyBench, BountyBench, and CBRN tasks. On CyBench, Gemma-4-31B recovered 8/14 candidate tasks with GPT-5.5 and 7/9 with Opus, while Muse-Glimmer-30B recovered none. Across an eight-step hypothetical bioweapon attack chain, consultation raised Gemma-4-31B's mean rubric score from 62.3 to 83.1, exposing a gap in defenses that only refuse complete harmful tasks.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 14, 11:10 UTC · 2d agoAI safety & security

Lightweight Zero Trust via Automotive SDN

Researchers map automotive SDN with MACsec/MKA and CORECONF/YANG to NIST SP 800-207, satisfying five of seven Zero Trust tenets without added infrastructure.

Zonal in-vehicle networks ship Ethernet, MACsec, and TSN but treat the network itself as trusted, with no standardized runtime way to revoke access, rotate keys, or contain a compromised ECU. The paper first analyzes what Open Alliance TC17 v1.0 MACsec/MKA with pre-shared CAKs already provides against the seven NIST SP 800-207 Zero Trust tenets. It then adds CORECONF/YANG management per Open Alliance TC19, mapping the SDN Controller and Agents one-to-one onto NIST's PE, PA, and PEP, and instantiates a YANG-based network-access-control flow and key-management scheme. The result fully covers five of the seven tenets and partially covers two, without any ZTA-specific infrastructure.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 07:20 UTC · 7d agoResearch