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29 stories in the last 30d

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Re: rosbridge_library Protocol.incoming() quadratic CPU cost in JSON fallback

Alan Coopersmith's mailing list reply merely points to the public oss-security posting of the rosbridge_library disclosure.

A follow-up reply on oss-security by Alan Coopersmith notes that the rosbridge_library Protocol.incoming() quadratic CPU cost issue was disclosed publicly on the oss-security mailing list. The reply contains no additional technical detail beyond linking the original disclosure.

oss-securityupdated · 2d agofirst · 2d agoVulnerability 3 sources

Bulk AbuseIPDB reporting using command-line tools

A blogger shows how to bulk-report distributed botnet IPs scraping a self-hosted Gitea instance to AbuseIPDB using bash, awk, and jq.

The author's self-hosted Gitea instance was scraped by distributed bots using random IPs worldwide and randomized, often nonexistent User-Agent strings, generating heavy request load for days. The write-up demonstrates filtering Traefik access logs (CLF and JSON) with grep, awk, and jq to extract offending IPs, tagging them with AbuseIPDB category 19 (Bad Web Bot), deduplicating them, and building a CSV for the Bulk Reporter tool. Reports can then be submitted through the AbuseIPDB bulk-report API, respecting the 5,000-report daily limit.

Lobsters · security · 7d agoTools1

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

Echo: Learning-based Matching Decompilation using Trusted Back Translation

Researchers introduce Echo, a matching decompiler using trusted back-translation that roughly doubles exact-match rates and outperforms GPT-5.6 and Codex on Mirai.

Echo performs matching decompilation by using compilation as trusted feedback for iterative search: a domain-specific model generates candidate code and compilation configurations, which are recompiled, compared at assembly level, and repaired via rule-based rewriting, neural refinement, and reasoning-based refinement. On function-level benchmarks, Echo produces 2.43x more exact matches than the strongest baseline and the highest structural similarity to ground truth. On the Mirai malware binary, it matches 2.75x and 7.4x as many functions as GPT-5.6 and Codex, respectively.

arXiv cs.CR · 15h agoResearch

Towards Scalable and Cost-Efficient Vulnerability Detection: A Study on Automatic Query Generation

A study finds LLM-synthesized CodeQL queries improve average F1-score by 82% over baseline queries, offering scalable vulnerability detection versus direct LLM scanning.

Researchers conducted an empirical study evaluating whether LLMs can synthesize executable CodeQL queries from National Vulnerability Database vulnerability data. LLM-generated queries significantly enhanced baseline CodeQL suites, yielding an 82% improvement in average F1-score across a diverse set of real-world vulnerabilities. A cost-benefit analysis shows direct LLM-based scanning of entire repositories is often computationally and financially prohibitive, while LLM query synthesis offers a scalable and cost-effective alternative for large-scale vulnerability detection.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch1

SloppyRAT: A New Tool For Ransomware Attacks

Zscaler details SloppyRAT, a new DLL backdoor delivered via ClickFix lures that stages CastleLoader and CastleRAT ahead of ransomware attacks.

Zscaler ThreatLabz analyzed SloppyRAT, a DLL-based backdoor distributed via ClickFix lures that abuses finger.exe over TCP port 79 to download a batch script. The malware copies curl.exe to download IronPython 3.4.2 from GitHub and executes zlib-compressed Base64-encoded Python to deploy CastleLoader and CastleRAT, then reflectively loads SloppyRAT in memory. It hinders analysis using XOR stack-string obfuscation, a modified affine cipher with modulus 127, and 13 runtime-decrypted code blocks, while communicating with C2 over a reverse SOCKS channel.

Zscaler ThreatLabzupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoMalware in the wild 3 sources

Codex bundles LibreOffice

OpenAI's Codex desktop app bundles 1.7GB of runtimes including full Python, Node.js, Poppler, git, and LibreOffice binaries.

Blogger Simon Willison found that the OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to ChatGPT) keeps about 1.7GB in a ~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime folder, including full Python and Node.js installations plus native binaries for Poppler, git, and the LibreOffice office suite. Bundled skills in the plugins directory instruct Codex on how to find and use these binaries. The observation highlights the heavyweight local runtime stack shipped with agentic coding tools.

Simon Willison · 15d agoAI tools & infra1

Re: Vulnerabilities fixed in libxml2-2.15.4

libxml2 2.15.4 patches two flaws including a heap buffer overflow in xmlDictAddQString tracked as CVE-2026-86137 and CVE-2026-86138.

libxml2 releases before 2.15.4 are affected by an integer overflow in xmlDictAddQString in dict.c that leads to a heap-based buffer overflow, tracked as CVE-2026-86137 and CVE-2026-86138. The oss-security post from Debian's Salvatore Bonaccorso flags the fixed release for downstream tracking. No exploitation is mentioned in the disclosure.

[dos] NanaZip 6.5 - DoS

A denial-of-service proof of concept for NanaZip 6.5 was published on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB carries a denial-of-service proof-of-concept targeting NanaZip version 6.5. NanaZip is an open-source file archiver packaged for Windows. The entry cites no CVE id and no evidence of active exploitation.

Exploit-DB · Aug 17, 2026Exploit / PoC

C2Looper: A New Backdoor Likely Tied To Ransomware With GitHub C2

Zscaler ThreatLabz identified C2Looper, a new Rust-based backdoor likely tied to ransomware actors and delivered via ClickFix chains, using GitHub for C2.

In July 2026, Zscaler ThreatLabz identified C2Looper, a new Rust-based backdoor family. The malware supports arbitrary command execution, reconnaissance, and deployment of second-stage payloads, and uses GitHub as its command-and-control channel. ThreatLabz assesses with low-to-medium confidence that it is delivered through multi-stage ClickFix infection chains and is likely leveraged by a ransomware-related threat actor. The analysis covers multiple C2Looper variants, their network protocols, and capabilities.

Zscaler ThreatLabz · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild1

USN-8733-1: Gzip vulnerabilities

Ubuntu issued USN-8733-1 fixing two Gzip flaws: insecure gzexe temp files allowing file overwrites, and a crafted-file DoS/info exposure bug.

USN-8733-1 updates Gzip in Ubuntu to fix CVE-2026-41991, where the gzexe utility created temporary files insecurely when mktemp was unavailable, letting a local attacker overwrite arbitrary files. It also fixes CVE-2026-41992, incorrect handling of certain compressed files that could expose sensitive information or crash Gzip in a denial of service. Both issues have local impact and are addressed via updated Ubuntu packages.

PLEASE_READ_ME: The Opportunistic Ransomware Devastating MySQL Servers

Guardicore Labs uncovers the PLEASE_READ_ME ransomware campaign targeting MySQL servers, using double extortion and publishing stolen victim data.

Guardicore Labs at Akamai uncovered an opportunistic ransomware campaign dubbed PLEASE_READ_ME that targets MySQL servers. The attackers employ double extortion, publishing stolen data to pressure victims into paying. The campaign is devastating internet-facing MySQL deployments, making exposed database servers the primary at-risk population.

Akamai Blog · 8d agoRansomware in the wild

Show HN: Engrim – A universal, local-first SQLite memory engine for AI CLIs

Developer launches Engrim, an open-source local-first SQLite memory engine giving AI CLI agents persistent memory.

Engrim, shared on Hacker News (89 points), is a universal, local-first memory layer built on SQLite for AI CLI tools. It targets agent-style CLI applications that need durable cross-session memory without cloud dependencies. Details beyond the repository description were not provided in the source text.

Privacy Failure in Split-LLM Training, The Returned Gradient Nullifies the Decoys

Researchers show split-LLM training leaks privacy via zero-valued gradients on decoy rows, exposing which activations are real despite passing forward-channel checks.

A systems-security case study of a two-node split-LLM training setup found that the returned output gradient from an Untrusted Cloud Node is exactly zero for decoy rows, revealing which rows are real. Across nine seeds, zero patterns identified real rows in 4,096 of 4,096 frames per run, and an attack on frame contents recovered 0.65 to 1.50 percentage points of extra tokens over a baseline. Both datasets passed forward-channel privacy and quality checks but failed once the returned gradient was included. Row-wise gradient clipping and noise closed the leak for roughly 0.01 nats of held-out cross-entropy, though five unmeasured attack classes remain.

Rare Not Random Using Token Efficiency for Secrets Scanning

Researcher proposes token efficiency (string length divided by BPE token count) as a better post-regex filter than entropy for secrets scanning, validated on CredData.

The post explores whether Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization can replace Shannon entropy as the primary filter for candidate secrets captured by regex in tools like Gitleaks. It defines 'token efficiency' as string length divided by token count under the cl100k_base tokenizer; secret-like strings such as GitHub tokens tokenize into many small tokens and score low, while natural text scores high. Evaluating labeled secrets from the CredData dataset shows a usable separation, with roughly 2.5 suggested as a minimum cutoff versus Gitleaks' 3.5 entropy threshold. The technique is positioned as a post-regex filtering step rather than a standalone detector.

Lobsters · security · 4d agoResearch

Scans Targeting Hospitality Applications, (Wed, Sep 16th)

Scans from a bulletproof-hosting IP target the abandoned PIAF-HMS hospitality application, which contains numerous unpatched SQL injection flaws.

SANS ISC observed requests for /PIAF-HMS/ using the unusual user-agent Farez-Sorter/1.0, along with paths like /admin/, /ucp/, /hms/, and /hotel/, starting September 15 from the single source IP 94.102.49.125 (IP Volume, AS202425, a bulletproof hoster). PIAF-HMS, a PBX in a Flash Hospitality Management System, was last updated 10 years ago and a SQL injection vulnerability was reported recently; the code shows many injection flaws and lacks authentication and access control. The handler notes hotels are soft targets for personal data theft and guest MitM attacks, and asks for community insight on the campaign.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 10h agoExploit / PoC

Update modules/auxiliary/scanner/http/elasticsearch_tika_xfa_xxe.rb

Rapid7 updated a Metasploit auxiliary scanner module that detects XML external entity injection in Elasticsearch via Apache Tika.

A commit in the Metasploit Framework updated modules/auxiliary/scanner/http/elasticsearch_tika_xfa_xxe.rb, an auxiliary scanner module. The module targets XML external entity (XXE) injection in Elasticsearch through Apache Tika, and was co-authored by jheysel-r7. The terse commit message contains no additional details, CVE references, or exploitation notes.

Metasploit Framework commits · 8d agoTools

SEEK: Secure and Efficient Encrypted Keyword Search For Privacy-Preserving Messaging Protocols

Researchers propose SEEK, a homomorphic-encryption plus 2PC protocol for encrypted keyword search that hides keywords while detecting matches.

SEEK partitions messages into ciphertext fragments with minimum sufficient overlap and homomorphically correlates them using encrypted keyword trapdoors, combined with 2PC-based selected decoding, blinded zero testing, and secure aggregation. It reduces sender-side encryption and upload overhead by up to two orders of magnitude over state-of-the-art baselines and computes correlations up to 5.47x faster, revealing only the keyword presence bit while hiding contents, counts, and locations. A prototype achieves 1.92 seconds online computation per search on a weekly messaging history and is realized as a web and cross-platform mobile application.

arXiv cs.CR · 18h agoResearch

DPRK APTs: Ted backdoor and curlRAT target South Korean media and automotive sectors

Rapid7 uncovered a DPRK-linked Linux toolkit using a HAProxy-embedded ted backdoor, SSH keylogger, and curlRAT against South Korean media and automotive firms.

Rapid7 Labs identified a previously undocumented framework attributed with medium confidence to DPRK actors, targeting South Korean automotive and media organizations likely since early 2025. The toolkit embeds a backdoor compiled into HAProxy 2.8.12 using its filter API, plus trojanized crond, agetty, atd, sshd, and polkitd, an SSH keylogger storing credentials under /var/lib/sshd/, and a curl-based RAT with a watchdog thread. It enables remote command execution, malicious script injection into served webpages (a watering-hole loop), credential harvesting, and long-term surveillance. Hardcoded C2s are associated with APT37 via ThreatFox, and exposed groupware portals and mail servers align with Kimsuky tradecraft; the initial access vector and any CVE remain unconfirmed.

Rapid7 Blog · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild1

OpenBMB Releases MiniCPM5-2B: A 2.52B Dense Model Averaging 53.9 Across 34 Benchmarks and Built to Run On Device

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a 2.52B-parameter Apache 2.0 on-device model averaging 53.9 across 34 benchmarks, ahead of Qwen3.5-4B.

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a 2,516,756,480-parameter dense LlamaForCausalLM model with grouped-query attention and a 131,072-token context, under Apache 2.0, runnable via vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, and Ollama. It averages 53.9 across 34 benchmarks versus 51.1 for Qwen3.5-4B, with strong tool-use (97.1 on tau2-Bench Telecom) and code results (69.1 LiveCodeBench v6, 46.4 SWE-bench Verified). Training combined 400B tokens of deep-thinking SFT, critic-based JustRL II RL teachers, and on-policy distillation merging 16 RL experts; datasets and intermediate checkpoints were published alongside the weights.

MarkTechPost · 9d agoModel release

harshatheg/Qwen-2.5-1B-RLCD — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

A community MLX inference engine evaluates constrained JSON schema fields in parallel on Apple Silicon, reporting 5.6-7.0x latency speedups with guaranteed schema validity.

The repository harshatheg/Qwen-2.5-1B-RLCD appeared at #30 on Hugging Face trending, but its content describes Parallel Constrained Decoding, an MLX-based inference engine for structured extraction and classification on Apple Silicon Macs. Benchmarked with mlx-community/Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct-4bit on an M4 Max, it reports 5.6x-7.0x latency reductions (e.g., 1,900 ms to 270 ms for a 28-field support triage task) with 100% syntactic validity and calibrated field-level probabilities. The engine prefills a single KV-cache, broadcasts it across all schema fields, and slices logits to valid candidate tokens for enum fields with up to 255 choices.

Linux Detection Engineering - Local Privilege Escalation

Elastic details a layered detection framework for Linux local privilege escalation, covering 2026's copy-on-write bug wave and LLM-assisted discovery.

Elastic Security Labs describes how most Linux local privilege escalations share a common host flow — an unprivileged process launched from a writable path becoming root — and proposes layered detections combining general outcome-based rules with per-technique rules in Elastic Defend and Auditd. It tracks 13 recent LPE disclosures, seven of which share a copy-on-write/zero-copy bug class, including Copy Fail, DirtyFrag, Fragnesia, DirtyDecrypt, DirtyClone, pedit COW, and RefluXFS. Qualys attributes RefluXFS to an LLM-assisted research effort with Anthropic using Claude Mythos Preview, and another bug is credited to an LLM-assisted workflow. Detection and endpoint rules are published in Elastic's detection-rules and protections-artifacts repositories.

Elastic Security Labs · 6d agoResearch

Tables Decoded: DELTA for Structure, TARQA for Understanding

DELTA extracts tables into compact OTSL text and TARQA fine-tunes LLMs on it, beating VLM baselines on table QA.

DELTA separates physical structure recognition, logical structure recognition, and OCR to output tables in Optimised Table Structure Language (OTSL), a compact unified format encoding cell arrangements and content. It achieves TEDS-Structure scores comparable to state-of-the-art methods across FinTabNet, PubTabNet, and PubTables-1M, with robustness tested on a curated Hindi benchmark, TORQUE. TARQA, an LLM fine-tuned on OTSL sequences, gains 9.3 percentage points on WTQ TabQA and 9.2 points on FinTabNetQA TabVQA; code, models, and the benchmark are released on GitHub.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

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.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

TPMSpy: Validation of Measured Boot Systems by Low-Level Tracing of TPM Usage

Researchers present TPMSpy, a platform-agnostic method validating TPM Measured Boot via low-level tracing, finding inconsistent Linux systemd measurements that break remote attestation and LUKS decryption.

An arXiv paper (2609.05011) introduces TPMSpy, a method that analyzes virtualized system–TPM interactions to independently reconstruct and validate TPM Event Logs without relying on the quoting mechanism, applicable to open and closed systems and demonstrated on Linux and Windows. A longitudinal analysis of Linux systems running systemd versions 245–258 (2020–2025) found wide divergence in Measured Boot usage, undocumented behavioral changes, and no common usage pattern. The authors report inconsistent measurement of user-space systemd services, which prevents reliable remote attestation and LUKS disk decryption on affected systems.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch

Memory-Efficient Designs for Word-Wise Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption

BXT framework mitigates FHE memory bottlenecks via ciphertext compression, serialization, delayed seeding, and digit pruning, achieving up to 3.8x CNN inference speedup.

A new paper proposes BXT, an optimization framework for word-wise Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption that targets the memory bottleneck rather than compute. It combines four techniques: ciphertext compression via seed regeneration, bit-packed ciphertext serialization for L2-to-L1 transfers, delayed PRNG-heavy offline seed generation across aggregated operations, and fault-aware ciphertext digit pruning. On CNN inference, the BXT-CSO50 configuration achieves up to 3.8x speedup over a 100x GPU baseline with under 1% accuracy loss at 50% comparison precision.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch