Bruce Schneier gave a DEF CON talk on AI hacking, exploring what happens when AI models become hackers; it drew over 100K YouTube views.
Bruce Schneier presented at DEF CON on 'AI hacking,' combining ideas from his 2022 book 'A Hacker's Mind' with lessons from current AI models exhibiting hacking behavior. The talk exceeded 100,000 YouTube views within days, and a related interview with him in the AI Village is also available.
Huntress uncovered post-DEF CON phishing via X direct messages using a malicious Google Doc to deliver AMOS and NetSupport RAT malware.
Huntress uncovered a phishing campaign targeting attendees after Black Hat and DEF CON. Attackers used X direct messages pointing to a malicious Google Doc as the delivery vehicle. Payloads include AMOS, a macOS infostealer, and the NetSupport RAT, among other malware.
Huntress reports a persistent and elaborate phishing campaign targeting attendees following the Def Con security conference.
A Huntress researcher documented being targeted by an elaborate and persistent phishing scam after attending Def Con. The campaign specifically went after conference attendees, suggesting deliberate targeting of the security community. Details of the social engineering approach and persistence were shared.
Security researcher Bill Swearingen's noRecognition project uses 31 million tested patterns to defeat license plate reader and surveillance camera AI detection.
Kansas City researcher Bill Swearingen built noRecognition, using reinforcement learning across roughly 31 million tests to generate printed patterns that break the detection layer of license plate readers and surveillance cameras. The strongest validated result achieved 61.7% non-detection against a detector taken from a real deployed camera, though most headline figures remain digital simulations. At DEF CON he covered a 2009 Toyota Yaris in a new pattern and reported it effective against a Flock Safety camera, with curved wheels the main weak point. He is crowdfunding apparel products and withholding his best patterns to prevent camera makers from blocking them.
DEF CON 34 research shows AI customer-service agents can be manipulated via prompt injection and email tricks to leak OTPs and act as victims.
Inti De Ceukelaire, presenting at Bug Bounty Village during DEF CON 34, demonstrated attacks against AI-powered customer service bots with access to customer profiles, billing data, support inboxes, and refund tools. Techniques include transcript-based phishing from trusted support addresses, From-header identity confusion, email normalization abuse to bypass OTP rate limits, and knowledge-base poisoning via RAG crawlers. He recommends separating untrusted content from system prompts, session-bound authentication, consistent email normalization, server-side tool validation, and least-privilege permissions for AI agents.
Wiz found LiteLLM auth bypass (CVE-2026-59822) and post-auth RCE (CVE-2026-59821) chainable to cloud compromise; the bypass is in CISA KEV with in-the-wild exploitation.
Wiz scanned roughly 3,074 internet-facing LiteLLM deployments and found 9.6% accepted the default master key sk-1234 or required no authentication, making post-auth attacks effectively pre-auth. The MCP endpoint accepts any Bearer token and grants a valid session (CVE-2026-59822), confirmed exploited in the wild via honeypots and added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Custom code guardrails allow post-auth root-level RCE via exec(compile(...)) (CVE-2026-59821), while pass-through endpoints lack URL validation, enabling cloud credential theft in post-auth scenarios. All assigned vulnerabilities have been patched; the research was presented at DEF CON 34.
Former Waco CIO argues cellular-connected water controllers sit outside scanned networks, and accountability plus operating-budget funding—not technology—block segmentation.
Writing as Waco, Texas's former CIO, the author describes July water-sector intrusions that CISA linked to over 100 compromised systems, typically controllers on public cellular links absent from asset lists. The FBI and EPA reported incidents at utilities in at least seven states since July 27, and a Clayton County, Georgia pump station failure triggered a boil-water advisory. He argues accountability and funding—using mechanisms like the Texas Water Development Board's new cybersecurity scoring criteria—are the binding constraints, citing Waco's 43-day segmentation of five treatment plants with operating funds.
Dark web service Nexus offered 153M+ US and Canadian driver's license scans, traced to suspected IDScan.net breach; the FBI opened an investigation.
A dark web identity theft service called Nexus began offering searchable access to more than 153 million scanned US and Canadian driver's licenses, plus 10M+ ID cards, 3M+ travel documents, and 579,000+ medical cards. KrebsOnSecurity traced the records to New Orleans identity verification firm IDScan.net, whose clients include Hertz, Target, FedEx, Motorola Solutions, Caesars Entertainment, Jack Henry, and Planet13 dispensaries. The FBI's New Orleans field office opened a formal investigation, and Nexus went offline soon after the story broke. Operators claim exfiltration has been ongoing for over a year, with records growing by roughly 400,000 per day.
Check Point revealed BTR Reforged, a technique weaponizing Microsoft Defender's built-in BTR.sys driver to delete security software at boot without exploiting any vulnerability.
Check Point Research disclosed BTR Reforged, a technique that abuses BTR.sys, a legitimately signed Windows Defender boot-time remediation driver, to perform arbitrary kernel-level file and registry operations on Windows 7 through Windows 11 25H2 without exploiting a software flaw. The BTR_CLI proof-of-concept tool, presented at Black Hat USA 2026 and DEF CON 34, installs the driver via direct registry writes and executes deletions during the boot-time 'golden window' before Defender's user-mode services start, demonstrated by deleting the full Defender stack on a patched Windows 11 machine. Exploitation requires SeLoadDriverPrivilege; Microsoft confirmed it does not meet criteria for immediate servicing and no patch is planned. No evidence of real-world abuse was found, and related indicators of compromise via Sysmon events were published.