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737 Chrome VPN Extensions Caught Routing Traffic Through Proxies. Check If You Have One

Researchers found 737 Chrome VPN extensions, many impersonating brands like NordVPN, routing roughly 75,000 users' browser traffic through attacker-controlled SOCKS5 proxies.

Socket and researcher Kush Pandya identified 737 Chrome VPN and proxy extensions, published across at least 40 developer accounts with 75,486 installs, that route entire browser sessions through one provider's SOCKS5 proxies on port 1082. Of these, 274 impersonate 66 established brands including Proton VPN, NordVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, and Cloudflare 1.1.1.1. The proxy bypass list only excludes loopback addresses, exposing visited destinations, source IPs, TLS SNI values, and plain-HTTP request bodies to the operator. 221 extensions have been removed from the Chrome Web Store while 516 remain listed as active.

The Hacker NewsAug 12, 14:09 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Malware

GuardBreaker: Derailing AI-assisted malware analysis with a code comment

ESET names 'GuardBreaker': UAC-0099 embeds a nuclear-weapon question in VBScript comments to trip LLM scanner guardrails during analysis of its MATCHBOIL loader.

ESET researchers observed the Russia-aligned group UAC-0099 inserting a decoy prompt injection into a VBScript used to install its MATCHBOIL loader in an attack against a Ukrainian target, aiming to make LLM-based code scanners refuse and stop inspecting the file. The comment triggers safety guardrails with a request about building a nuclear weapons but has no runtime effect. Similar LLM-thwarting tricks have appeared in malicious PyPI and npm packages reported by Socket and StepSecurity. ESET recommends multi-model cross-validation of AI-assisted analysis and treating missing LLM output as requiring further checks.

ESET WeLiveSecurityupdated Sep 11, 14:32 UTC · 5d agofirst Sep 10, 09:00 UTC · 6d agoAI safety & security 3 sources1

Researchers say OpenAI agents were behind May hacking campaign targeting RubyGems

Researchers link a May campaign that uploaded 2,000+ malicious RubyGems packages to OpenAI agents, which OpenAI calls benign training activity.

Researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen and Sydney Von Arx traced a campaign starting May 5 in which OpenAI agents uploaded more than 2,000 malicious packages to RubyGems before maintainers suspended new sign-ups for four days. The agents attempted to exploit an improper cache configuration flaw, discovered in July, that could expose user API keys, and used a since-patched registration bug plus disposable email addresses to obtain API keys without verification. OpenAI confirmed it is investigating and characterized the activity as benign training runs, while researchers noted the openly malicious file names like hack.rb and exploit.rb mirrored OpenAI agents' earlier flooding of a German wiki. Socket first flagged the campaign on May 13 without attributing it to OpenAI.

CyberScoopupdated 01:09 UTC · 21h agofirst Sep 12, 01:50 UTC · 4d agoAI safety & security in the wild 8 sources