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CISA: WatchGuard RCE flaw now exploited in ransomware attacks

CISA confirms ransomware gangs are exploiting critical unauthenticated RCE CVE-2025-14733 in WatchGuard Firebox firewalls, with roughly 9,000 devices still unpatched.

CVE-2025-14733 is an out-of-bounds write in WatchGuard Fireware OS allowing unauthenticated remote code execution, exploitable on firewalls configured for IKEv2 VPN and potentially even after the configuration was deleted if a static branch-office VPN peer remains. WatchGuard released patches in December and confirmed in-the-wild exploitation; Shadowserver found over 115,000 exposed Fireboxes at the time, with nearly 9,000 still unpatched after nine months. CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog in December under BOD 22-01 and on Thursday confirmed ransomware gangs are now exploiting it, without providing campaign details. WatchGuard serves more than 250,000 small and mid-sized companies through 17,000+ security resellers and service providers.

BleepingComputer · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2025-14733CVE-2022-23176CVE-2025-9242

SAFIRE: Safety-Critical Benchmark for Fine-grained Fire and Smoke Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

SAFIRE, an 83K-image fire and smoke benchmark, shows open-source multimodal LLMs average only 61.9% accuracy on safety-critical fire reasoning.

SAFIRE is a large-scale benchmark for fire-smoke understanding in multimodal LLMs with 83K captioned images across 20 scenarios and 193K multiple-choice VQA questions spanning 10 evaluation dimensions from perception to higher-order reasoning. Annotations were built via a GPT-5.4-assisted multi-stage pipeline with MLLM majority voting. Ten open-source MLLMs (8B-38B) average 61.9% accuracy, exposing major gaps in safety-critical reasoning. Adapting vision encoders on 7% of the domain data raises fire-scene classification from 20.1% to 64.5%.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

Sandworm-Linked Cyclops Blink Returns With Network Scanning and Packet-Sniffing Capabilities

Sophos uncovers a 64-bit Cyclops Blink variant on hacked Cisco FMC appliances, adding internal network scanning and selective packet capture; linked to Sandworm.

Sophos CTU analyzed a new 64-bit x86-64 Cyclops Blink implant (timezone_check) deployed on Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center appliances compromised via CVE-2026-20079 authentication bypass and CVE-2026-20316 low-privileged login. The activity is assessed with high confidence as Russian-nexus, with a moderate-confidence link to Sandworm (IRON VIKING, also tracked as Seashell Blizzard). The implant runs a parent controller plus five worker modules, masquerades as [kworker/0:1], persists via SysV init scripts at /lib/tz/timezone_check, and beacons to hard-coded C2 89.34.96.56 over a custom TLS protocol on ports 43856 and 49172. New module 0x11 scans internal IPv4 networks for SSH, SMB, LDAP, VMware, HTTP/HTTPS and VPN services, while module 0x12 performs filtered packet capture that can expose cleartext credentials, cookies and tokens.

GBHackers · 2d agoMalware in the wild 11 sourcesCVE-2026-20079CVE-2026-20316

Analysis of Smoke Loader in New Tsunami Campaign

Fake Japanese Meteorological Agency tsunami warning emails delivered Smoke Loader and AzoRult malware to steal credentials from targets in Japan.

A fake tsunami warning email impersonating Japan's Meteorological Agency asked recipients to click a link on a registered fake agency domain, delivering the commodity loader Smoke Loader to targets in Japan. Smoke Loader, active since 2011, is modular, and its payloads have included banking trojans, ransomware, cryptominers, password stealers, and PoS malware; the campaign later also deployed AzoRult. New samples add junk-jump obfuscation, encrypted network traffic and payload files, a unique machine ID used for tracking and encryption, and PROPagate injection into explorer.exe, with persistence via a Startup folder shortcut and RC4-encrypted C2 communication.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild

The VMs Powering Mobile Agents (Instinct, Claude Code)

A teardown reveals Claude Code runs in Firecracker microVMs with a Rust PID 1 and MITM'd egress, while Instinct rents E2B sandboxes with git-based memory.

The author inspects the virtual machines hosting cloud agents: Claude Code runs in a Firecracker microVM with a custom Rust init (process_api) as PID 1, a 324 MB Bun harness on a read-only disk, and 443-only MITM'd SSE egress to api.anthropic.com with host-rotated OAuth tokens and no inbound access. Instinct rents E2B sandbox-as-a-service Firecracker microVMs (Ubuntu 22.04, 2 vCPU, 1.9 GB RAM) where agent memory is a git repo of Markdown committed by the agent and pushed to S3 as a single bundle, using short-lived STS credentials. Both platforms rely on Firecracker, differing mainly in fleet operator and guest boot configuration.

Hacker News · AI · 8d agoAI tools & infraHN 58↑ · 19 comments1

Advanced WildFire Archives

Palo Alto Networks describes Advanced WildFire as its cloud malware analysis engine using machine learning and crowdsourced intelligence.

The Unit 42 blog page is a product category archive for Advanced WildFire. The description calls it the industry's largest cloud-based malware analysis and prevention engine, using machine learning and crowdsourced intelligence to detect hard-to-catch threats. No research findings, incidents, or vulnerabilities are discussed.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 8d agoIndustry 6 sources

FrostyGoop’s Zoom-In: A Closer Look into the Malware Artifacts, Behaviors and Network Communications

Unit 42 dissects FrostyGoop OT malware, which sent Modbus TCP commands to disrupt heating for 600+ apartment buildings in Ukraine.

Palo Alto Unit 42 analyzed new FrostyGoop/BUSTLEBERM samples, the ninth known ICS-centric malware, first used against a Ukrainian municipal energy company by sending Modbus TCP commands to ENCO control devices. The attack caused a two-day heating outage affecting over 600 apartment buildings during sub-zero temperatures. The Go-compiled malware accepts Modbus register operations and timing parameters via command-line arguments or a JSON configuration file, uses an obscure open-source Modbus library, and checks the Windows BeingDebugged flag to evade debuggers. Unit 42 telemetry recorded over 1 million Modbus TCP devices exposed to the internet between September and October 2024.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 28d agoMalware in the wild

Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall

Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.

US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.

Risky Business News · 26d agoResearch2

Show HN: Stuxnet – A reconstructed source code of the infamous cyber-weapon

A GitHub project publishes reconstructed source code of Stuxnet, the infamous industrial cyber-weapon, drawing 161 Hacker News points and 49 comments.

A Show HN post links to a GitHub repository (Sadpainy/Stuxnet) containing reconstructed source code of Stuxnet, the well-known industrial sabotage cyber-weapon. The post gained significant community attention with 161 points and 49 comments on Hacker News. The repository offers a historical code-level reference for studying one of the most famous malware specimens rather than describing new threat activity.

Hacker News · AI · 8d agoResearchHN 161↑ · 49 comments

Feature Recovery for Object Understanding After Irreversible Fire Damage

TRACE benchmark with 21.4K scenes studies post-fire object understanding; a Feature Recovery Module improves degraded-image retrieval by 12.5% and material recovery by 20.1%.

The paper introduces TRACE, a transformation-aware benchmark with 21.4K real-image-grounded synthetic scenes, 499 object identities across 189 categories, and five tasks covering degraded-object detection, pristine-state recovery, material recovery, description generation, and functional reasoning. Existing models degrade sharply: RF-DETR mAP falls 71% relative from least to most severe level, and InternVL3.5 retrieval R@1 drops from 93.85 to 28.11. The proposed Feature Recovery Module maps degraded encoder features to pristine-aligned representations while keeping the host model frozen, averaging relative gains of 12.5% for retrieval and 20.1% for material recovery across VLM hosts and severity levels.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Free streaming boxes may be routing criminal traffic through your home

Researchers found SuperBox streaming boxes and the CyberFlix TV app enroll home connections into the Popanet residential proxy network, routing criminal traffic.

Researchers found that SuperBox devices and the CyberFlix TV app, distributed through SuperBox's custom app store, contain Popanet proxy functionality that registers the device with servers controlled by the proxy operator, enrolling household connections into residential proxy networks. The reported configuration weakens Android safeguards with exposed ADB access, root-level privileges without authentication, and removal of app-install protections. Plume's research warns these proxy networks can also function as malware-delivery platforms, and the FBI notes foreign entities use residential proxies to conceal activity such as credential stuffing and account abuse. Malwarebytes advises disconnecting and replacing affected SuperBox/CyberFlix devices rather than factory-resetting them.

Malwarebytes Labs · 12d agoMalware in the wild

Post-DEF CON Phishing Uses Malicious Google Doc to Deliver Malware

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 · 28d agoPhishing & fraud

Mythos Vulnerability Firehose Hits a Human Bottleneck

Analysis of Project Glasswing findings shows only a fraction of discovered vulnerabilities have reached disclosure and even fewer are fixed.

Dark Reading reports that an analysis of Project Glasswing findings shows only a fraction of the vulnerabilities discovered by the program have reached disclosure, and an even smaller number have been fixed. The article examines how the volume of findings from the discovery program is bottlenecked by limited human triage and remediation capacity. The piece highlights growing tension between high-volume vulnerability discovery and the industry's ability to process, disclose and patch reports.

Dark Reading · 6d agoResearch

AsyncRAT Malware Abuses AutoIt and PowerShell to Hide Inside Legitimate Windows Process

Point Wild details a five-stage AsyncRAT campaign using AutoIt abuse and process injection to hide a .NET RAT inside Microsoft's signed charmap.exe.

Researchers at Point Wild Threat Intelligence analyzed a campaign starting from a lure batch file ('Right-click to open Invoice Details.bat') that launches hidden PowerShell to reconstruct a Base64/XOR-obfuscated payload. The stage drops a renamed signed AutoIt interpreter and loader script into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp and achieves persistence via a batch file in the user's Startup folder (T1547.001). The loader decrypts the payload in memory with single-byte XOR key 0x36 and injects it into SysWOW64\charmap.exe using OpenProcess/VirtualAllocEx/WriteProcessMemory/CreateRemoteThread, with PE-sieve confirming an in-memory implanted PE and patched AMSI modules. The final AsyncRAT payload performs screen capture and data theft, with observed C2 at 158[.]51[.]122[.]136:4944 over raw TCP.

GBHackers · 2d agoMalware3· 1 read

China Is Strapping ‘Digital Bombs’ to Civilian Infrastructure—Is the US Ready?

WIRED examines Volt Typhoon pre-positioning 'digital bombs' in US civilian infrastructure via a war game simulation discussion.

WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast features reporter Andy Greenberg discussing a war game simulating a cyberattack by Chinese hacking group Volt Typhoon. The episode examines Volt Typhoon's practice of planting persistent access in US civilian infrastructure that could be activated during conflict, and questions whether the US is prepared.

WIRED · Security · 26d agoThreat actor

Next

Palo Alto Networks product-category page describing Next-Generation Firewall threat detection, including encrypted traffic; no standalone article.

The page is a product category listing for Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls, stating the products detect known and unknown threats, including in encrypted traffic, using intelligence from many thousands of customer deployments. It contains no research findings, vulnerabilities, or incident details relevant to defenders.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 28d agoIndustry

Using AI for Weapons Development

Anthropic report reveals Yemen-based actors used Claude Code to build guidance software for guided rockets and ballistic missiles.

Bruce Schneier highlights Anthropic's misuse disclosure describing a threat actor cell in northern Yemen running three weapons programs: a guided rocket with phone-class homing guidance, a 2,000+ km multi-stage ballistic missile, and the 'R2000' hypersonic glide vehicle set. The actors used Claude Code as a substitute for human engineers to write GNC software, integrate an open-source autopilot, tune controls, and run flight simulations, orchestrating multiple Claude instances in delegated roles. Safeguards blocked many requests but evasion tactics included hiding intent and splitting work across sessions; one guided rocket test-fire failed but no operational device was fielded.

Schneier on Security · 2d agoAI safety & security in the wild

Cliff Stoll’s DEF CON Talk

Schneier on Security posts about Cliff Stoll's DEF CON talk; the visible text provides no substantive details about its content.

Schneier on Security published a brief post referencing Cliff Stoll's talk at DEF CON. The available text consists almost entirely of standard blog navigation, author biography, and archive listings, with no concrete details about the talk itself. As a general security-community item, it carries no direct risk impact for defenders.

Schneier on Securityupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoIndustry 2 sources1

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 · 7d agoAI safety & security

Code to Cloud Platform Archives

Unit 42 archive page for Code to Cloud platform product-category articles; no new research or announcements.

This Unit 42 archive page lists product-category posts about Palo Alto Networks' Code to Cloud platform, which secures public cloud environments, SaaS applications and remote locations. It contains no new research, incidents, or announcements.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 28d agoIndustry

10 Hacker Summer Camp Standouts at Black Hat and DEF CON

Huntress researchers recap standout talks, panels, and villages from this year's Black Hat and DEF CON conferences.

Huntress researchers and SOC analysts published a recap of highlights from Black Hat and DEF CON, covering panels, villages, and standout sessions from Hacker Summer Camp. The post is a community roundup rather than an incident, vulnerability, or research disclosure.

Huntress · Aug 14, 2026Industry

Hackers Abuse AutoIt to Inject AsyncRAT Into Microsoft-Signed Windows Process

Attackers use AutoIt and an invoice-themed batch file to inject AsyncRAT into Microsoft-signed charmap.exe for stealthy remote access.

Point Wild Threat Intelligence documented a five-stage campaign starting with 'Right-click to open Invoice Details.bat' that launches hidden PowerShell, drops a renamed AutoIt interpreter and encrypted loader into a random Temp folder, and persists via a Startup-folder batch file. The loader decrypts AsyncRAT only in memory and injects it into the Microsoft-signed charmap.exe (Windows Character Map) process, leaving no payload file on disk. The final payload patches AMSI inside the infected process and includes screen-capture code that prepares images for transfer to a command-and-control server at 158[.]51[.]122[.]136:4944.

Cyber Security News · 2d agoMalware in the wild1

TCRF taken offline by DDoS attack after Claude user ban

The Cutting Room Floor game wiki was taken offline by a DDoS attack after a user leveraging Claude was banned.

The Cutting Room Floor (TCRF), a wiki documenting unused video game content, was knocked offline by a distributed denial-of-service attack. The attack reportedly followed moderation action banning a user who was using Anthropic's Claude. The incident highlights friction between community sites and AI-assisted users and tools.

Lobsters · security · 18d agoAI safety & security in the wild

ZDI-26-639: Oracle VirtualBox VMSVGA Heap-based Buffer Overflow Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

ZDI disclosed a heap-based buffer overflow in Oracle VirtualBox's VMSVGA component (CVE-2026-71116) enabling local privilege escalation.

Zero Day Initiative published ZDI-26-639, a CVSS 7.5 heap-based buffer overflow in the VMSVGA component of Oracle VirtualBox. Local attackers who already execute high-privileged code on the guest system can leverage the flaw to escalate privileges on affected installations. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-71116. No exploitation is reported.

ZDI Published Advisories · 7d agoVulnerability 6 sourcesCVE-2026-71116

China-linked Fire Ant Hides Inside Trusted Infrastructure

China-linked Fire Ant backdoored Cisco IOS XR routers, injected TACACS libraries to steal credentials, and rewrote logs across infrastructure targets.

Sygnia reports the China-linked espionage group Fire Ant compromised Cisco IOS XR routers with purpose-built malware, injected a library into the TACACS authentication daemon to capture live credential material, and manipulated syslog so only messages containing 'Health' were logged. The group used GRE tunnel interfaces with no commit history, rewrote wtmp/utmp/btmp login records, and deployed dormant deep backdoors on Linux systems — one disguised as a SentinelOne agent, another activated by raw network traffic carrying a magic string. Code-level overlap with UNC3886 tooling suggests evolution of that China-nexus cluster's TACACS credential-collection techniques, and Fire Ant used compromised infrastructure to scan SSH, RDP and web ports toward high-value networks.

Security Affairs · 16d agoThreat actor in the wild

iceener/files-stdio-mcp-server: sandbox escape in fs_search via a symlinked directory (recursive walker validates only the top level)

iceener/files-stdio-mcp-server allows a read-side sandbox escape: fs_search follows symlinked directories while the recursive walker validates confinement only at the top level.

A vulnerability report describes a read-side sandbox escape in iceener/files-stdio-mcp-server, an MCP server for text-based file access that explicitly promises 'Sandboxed filesystem access. Only these paths are available'. The fs_search tool can follow symlinked directories outside the allowed paths, and the recursive directory-listing walker used by fs_search (and by fs_read) validates confinement only at the top level. The same flaw affects fs_read's directory-listing walker. No CVE identifier was assigned in the provided report text.

oss-security · 6d agoVulnerability

Rogue ScreenConnect Installations Across Unrelated Hosts Suggest Worm-Like Activity

Huntress observed rogue ScreenConnect deployments with worm-like VBScript propagation across unrelated organizations, prompting a ConnectWise advisory on file transfer behavior.

Huntress identified multiple incidents in late August 2026 where social engineering led to rogue ScreenConnect remote access clients deployed on victim machines, which then spawned wscript.exe to run four VBScript payloads (1.vbs through 4.vbs) for profiling, telemetry collection, and persistence via a WindowsServiceHost Run key. Modified ScreenConnect clients propagated the VBScript chain to connected endpoints, creating worm-like spread. ConnectWise published an advisory on September 3, 2026, confirming an issue affecting file transfer behavior in both cloud and on-premises ScreenConnect deployments, with a CVE and fix expected within the week; partners were advised to review and disable TransferFiles permissions in the interim.

Huntress · 13d agoExploit / PoC in the wild1