Search: “blockchain security”

On Identifying Sound Conditions for Frontrunning Resistance

Researchers formally define smart-contract frontrunning resistance, showing 55% of 393 audited vulnerabilities escape state-of-the-art detection, and find two undisclosed Ethereum flaws.

The paper gives the first formal definition of frontrunning vulnerability for smart contracts, grounded in how honest users interact with contracts rather than contract code alone. In a large-scale study of 287 smart contract audits, 55% of the 393 vulnerabilities reported by leading auditors fall outside the scope of state-of-the-art dynamic detection criteria. The authors present a sound algorithm for synthesizing secure interaction conditions and apply it to real-world contracts, uncovering previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in two Ethereum contracts.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 13:35 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Bitcoin hardware wallet maker destroys some inventory after more than $88 million stolen

The Record·Aug 3, 20:16 UTC · Aug 3, 2026Vulnerability

‘White hat’ hackers take $47 million bounty after $320 million crypto theft

Hackers withdrew $320 million in bitcoin from Liquid Network, negotiated on-chain, returned $266.5 million and kept a $47 million reward.

Purported white-hat hackers withdrew 4,000 BTC (about $320 million) from Liquid Network's own wallet, one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts of 2026. Over roughly 12 hours of public on-chain negotiation with operator Blockstream, the hackers returned $266.5 million in bitcoin and kept 598.5 BTC (about $47 million), claiming it as a reward for uncovering a bug. Blockstream deployed updated software and paused deposits and withdrawals while experts traced the flaw to the Elements sidechain framework. April thefts of $290 million from Kelp and $280 million from Drift, attributed to North Korean hackers, were previously 2026's largest.

The Record·Sep 8, 17:00 UTC · 8d agoData breach in the wild

PDoS: A Profitable Denial-of-Service Attack against Proof-of-Work Blockchain Liveness

PDoS attack disrupts Proof-of-Work blockchain liveness profitably by combining miner deterrence signals with parasitic revenue extraction from victim pools.

PDoS is a hybrid incentive-driven denial-of-service attack that combines block header signal deterrence with parasitic revenue extraction from a victim pool's share-reward mechanism. By subsidizing attack costs through the victim pool, it lowers the hash-power threshold required to induce rational miners to shut down, unlike prior attacks such as BDoS that demand sustained attacker losses. The authors show a counterintuitive result: in high-fee or high-MEV environments, higher block value increases the attacker's parasitic revenue and can push the attack past break-even into a self-sustaining or even profitable regime. PDoS is claimed as the first attack demonstrating that disrupting PoW blockchain liveness can be economically self-sustaining.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 11, 05:16 UTC · 5d agoResearch

Trezor Says ShipMonk Breach Exposed 67,000 U.S. Customers' Data It Said Was Deleted

Trezor disclosed the ShipMonk breach exposed data of 67,000 additional US customers, reportedly by ShinyHunters exploiting a Metabase zero-day SQL injection, CVE-2026-72898.

Trezor disclosed that a breach at shipping provider ShipMonk exposed names, email addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses, and order numbers of 67,000 additional US customers, with orders dating November 2019 to August 2021 despite written assurances the data had been deleted. This adds to the 13,689 customers previously disclosed after ShipMonk informed Trezor of unauthorized access on August 10, 2026. According to Holborn, the ShinyHunters extortion gang is behind the breach, which began with zero-day exploitation of CVE-2026-72898 (CVSS 10.0), a critical SQL injection flaw in Metaboobase analytics software Metabase. Trezor says hardware wallet security is unaffected but warns customers to watch for phishing and social engineering; ShipMonk has not publicly acknowledged the incident.

The Hacker News·Sep 5, 14:17 UTC · 11d agoData breach in the wildCVE-2026-72898

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

SafePal latest crypto hardware wallet maker affected by breach, with nearly 40,000 impacted

SafePal confirmed nearly 40,000 customers' order data was stolen, the third hardware wallet maker breached in a month after Trezor and Coinkite.

SafePal confirmed a breach exposing names, emails, shipping addresses, phone numbers, and purchase details of customers who ordered between March 2, 2025 and April 11, 2026, caused by a flaw in an order-tracking plugin. The company stressed wallets, seed phrases, and private keys remain secure, and all impacted customers were notified by email. A hacker advertised the stolen data on a dark web forum, and SafePal warned of targeted phishing via fake support calls and refund offers. CertiK data cited in the report shows 52 wrench attacks worldwide in H1 2026 with $124 million in losses, up 33% year-over-year.

The Record·Aug 17, 16:59 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Data breach in the wild

You've Got a BUD in Me: Authenticated Reads from Per-Block Write Logs

Researchers propose BUD, per-block write-log digests enabling blockchain validators to serve historical membership and exclusion proofs far cheaper than state-wide tries.

The paper introduces Block Update Digests (BUD), which authenticate each block's write log with predecessor pointers, plus a SuperBUD and exponential hierarchy to turn long unchanged intervals into short proofs. Soundness against adversarial provers and up to f Byzantine validators is proven under archive, attestation, and committee evidence assumptions. Benchmarks show a 50x state-size increase raises the base-BUD path only 1.24x versus 3.1x for in-memory and 69.5x for disk-backed Merkle Patricia tries, with read payloads below 800 bytes and p99 warm verification at 146 microseconds.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 08:46 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Multiple crypto companies warn customers of phishing emails after alleged provider breach

Attackers compromised 120 Brevo email accounts and sent convincing phishing emails to Trezor, BitBox, and CoinTracking newsletter subscribers.

Trezor, BitBox, and CoinTracking confirmed that phishing emails were sent to newsletter subscribers after a compromise of their shared email provider, which CoinTracking identified as Brevo. Brevo said an attacker accessed 120 customer accounts and used them to send phishing emails from legitimate company domains, including fake security alerts like 'Critical Security Alert: STM32 Entropy Vulnerability' and 'Data Breach Notice: Please refresh API Keys.' Trezor had already suffered a separate breach exposing details of 81,000 customers, and CertiK reports physical wrench attacks on crypto holders rose 33 percent year-over-year with $124 million in losses in 2026.

The Record·updated Sep 11, 15:01 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 10, 04:00 UTC · 6d agoData breach 6 sources

Upatre Continued to Evolve with new Anti

Unit 42 analyzes an undocumented Upatre downloader variant with VM detection via process hashing, packed code, disabled Windows defenses and Namecoin .bit C2 domains.

Unit 42 analyzed an Upatre downloader variant compiled in December 2016 that went largely undetected by automated systems, featuring heavy code flow obscuration, on-demand decryption of network communications, and novel virtual machine detection. The sample enumerates running processes, computes CRC32 hashes XORed with a hard-coded key, and sleeps if analysis-related processes such as vmtoolsd.exe or python.exe are found. It masquerades with Google Chrome icons, disables Windows Defender, Firewall and other security services, injects code into msiexec.exe, and resolves .bit Namecoin domains like bookreader[.]bit via hardcoded OpenNIC DNS servers over TCP.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 13:23 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware1

Guppy: Efficient Light Clients via Recursive Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Guppy lets blockchain light clients verify full state via recursive zero-knowledge proofs without validators maintaining state commitments, processing thousands of updates per second.

Guppy is a light-client protocol in which validators commit only to state updates while an off-chain, untrusted service secured by recursive zero-knowledge proofs maintains a verifiable Merkle tree over the full state. A hash-chain commitment moves validator signature verification out of the proving circuit, and a parallel recursive proving pipeline keeps latency growth logarithmic with throughput. A Plonky2-based implementation maintains a tree of size 2^30 while processing thousands of updates per second, adding only 2-4 seconds of latency without increasing block-construction complexity.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 7, 20:41 UTC · 9d agoResearch

Tajin Group: Guarantee Marketplace Vendor Involved in Phishing and Chinese Money Laundering Group

Recorded Future details Tajin Group, a Chinese-speaking vendor on Telegram guarantee marketplaces running phishing, carding, and money laundering operations targeting Chinese banks.

Insikt Group analyzed Tajin Group, a Chinese-speaking threat actor operating on Telegram-based guarantee marketplaces Dabai Guarantee and, since May 2026, Xinbi Guarantee. The group conducts phishing, payment card theft, and money laundering targeting mainland Chinese citizens and banks, testing stolen cards from twelve countries on platforms like CCAvenue and Geidea. Operators bought and sold at least 100 Telegram usernames and anonymous virtual numbers via Fragment Market to strengthen OPSEC, linking multiple usernames to single Telegram accounts. Recorded Future warns Tajin Group's TTPs are likely to be replicated by other vendors on Chinese-language guarantee marketplaces at global scale.

Recorded Future·Sep 15, 00:00 UTC · 1d agoThreat actor

Understanding the Security Boundary of Obfuscation-based On-Device LLM Protection

Researchers formalize obfuscation primitives for TEE-protected on-device LLMs and show a Collapse attack breaks ArrowCloak, TSQP, and LoRO, then extend the boundary.

The paper formalizes obfuscation primitives for TEE-Shielded LLM Partition (TSLP) schemes that offload computationally intensive layers from a Trusted Execution Environment to external GPUs. A novel primitive-guided attack, Collapse, demonstrates a shared vulnerability in prominent published methods including ArrowCloak (Security'25), TSQP (S&P'25), and LoRO (NeurIPS'25). The authors then introduce two new obfuscation primitives and integrate them with existing constructs to formulate an extended security boundary (O_ext).

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 12:51 UTC · 7d agoAI safety & security

ThreatsDay: GhostJacking AI Attacks, EtherHiding ClickFix, Cursor CLI Flaw + 17 More Stories

A weekly bulletin aggregating short security updates, including the City-Forum data-theft campaign, a ShipMonk breach, a Cursor CLI flaw, and GhostJacking AI attacks.

The Hacker News ThreatsDay Bulletin bundles roughly 20 short updates across cloud services, AI tools, malware, breaches, and scams. Highlights include the City-Forum campaign pulling data from unauthenticated guest access in Salesforce Experience Cloud and ServiceNow Service Portals since March 2025, and a ShipMonk breach exposing Trezor customer order data for orders in seven countries between May 10 and August 8, 2026. Other items cover a patched Cursor CLI flaw that let cloned repositories run commands before the workspace-trust prompt, Okta's analysis of the Work Panel vishing console used by actors like UNC6671, and GhostJacking AI agent hijacking via a patched Claude Desktop sandbox escape. Meta also launched an on-device WhatsApp Scam Alert machine learning model that keeps message content on the device.

The Hacker News·Aug 18, 16:30 UTC · 29d agoIndustry

Function Name Is All You Need to Detect Blockchain Application Attacks

TxLucent detects blockchain dApp attacks from transaction function-name sequences using a transformer, achieving 1.56% false negatives without source code.

Researchers propose TxLucent, which maps transaction call traces to function name sequences and uses a transformer to detect blockchain application attacks without source code or handcrafted rules. Evaluated on 424 real-world incidents with 14,611 attack transactions, it achieves a 1.56% false negative rate and an estimated 0.0017% false positive rate across over 500 million Ethereum transactions. Average analysis time of 24.90 milliseconds supports real-time detection on popular blockchains.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 11, 00:43 UTC · 5d agoResearch1

Risky Bulletin: BEC campaign steals €35 million from French notaries

Hackers stole over €35 million from 500+ French notary offices in a four-year BEC campaign; ANSSI spent two years helping evict the attackers.

A business email compromise campaign breached more than 500 French notary offices — about 7% of all French notaries per the Conseil Supérieur du Notariat — over four years, stealing more than €35 million by phishing initial access and silently modifying wire transfer details. France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI worked for two years behind the scenes to help notaries remove the persistent attackers, who had deep access; officials also feared hackers could issue fake notarized acts such as marriage certificates or forged real estate deals. No forged documents have been found so far, but notaries have added two-factor authentication and in-person requirements for banking details, and banks added extra checks in 2024. The newsletter also notes other incidents, including a $320 million Bitcoin extraction from Blockstream's Liquid Network and a JetBrains Cadence breach via TeamCity servers.

Risky Business News·Sep 7, 03:42 UTC · 9d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

The modern attack chain: Rethinking Google Workspace security in the age of AI

Analysis of Vercel and Composio breaches shows stolen OAuth tokens, not phishing email, now open Google Workspace attacks — a path authorized AI agents follow.

The author analyzes the Vercel and Composio breaches as the same OAuth-first attack chain run twice: a stolen OAuth token, obtained via a compromised supplier, becomes the entry point rather than email. These tokens survive password resets, are hard to observe, and let attackers read Gmail and Drive data, take over accounts, and pivot laterally using stored credentials and password-reset magic links. The piece warns that authorized AI agents with overbroad OAuth grants can unintentionally traverse the same path — accessing inboxes, reading sensitive content, and exfiltrating data downstream — without any malicious actor or compromised credential.

Help Net Security·05:00 UTC · 16h agoResearch in the wild

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: August 25, 2026

Help Net Security lists open cybersecurity roles at AT&T, Accenture, Mastercard and others across the US, Europe, India and UAE.

Help Net Security aggregated open cybersecurity positions including compliance, IAM engineering, security architecture, SOC analyst and cloud security roles. Employers include AT&T, Accenture, Mastercard, Insight, Mitiga, NEURA Robotics and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank across the US, India, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel and UAE. Several postings emphasize identity and access management, NIS2 and GDPR compliance, and cloud security work.

Help Net Security·Sep 3, 08:28 UTC · 13d agoIndustry

Closing the Loop: Bidirectional Fully Encrypted Protocols

Researchers show naively composing unidirectional fully encrypted protocols is detectable and construct provably secure bidirectional FEPs, validated in Rust.

The paper introduces formal security definitions for bidirectional fully encrypted protocols (BiFEPs), covering exact shaping, delivery, protocol-state integrity, private half-close, and cross-direction isolation. It shows trivially composing two unidirectional FEPs enables detection attacks via cross-direction dependencies like traffic imbalance and connection tear-down. The authors construct provably secure BiFEPs for datastream and datagram settings, validated with a Rust implementation; no surveyed deployed protocol provides the full set of properties.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 16:32 UTC · 1d agoResearch

Risky Bulletin: Ukraine's top prosecutor resigns amid scam call center scandal

Ukraine's top prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko resigned after NABU arrested a deputy for taking bribes protecting scam call centers running fake investment platforms.

Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau NABU arrested Serhiy Kropyva, Deputy Head of International Cooperation at the Prosecutor General's Office, alleging officials took monthly protection fees from a network of 100-500 scam call centers luring victims into fake investment platforms, with bribes reportedly growing from $700,000 to $3.5 million per month. Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko resigned on Monday, calling it a political decision, while Kropyva was fired with bail set at 120 million hryvnias ($2.7 million) and over 100 call centers shut down in the past month. The newsletter also briefly covers a cyberattack crippling more than 80 Luxembourg medical practices via payment vendor BMS Engineering, ShinyHunters' claimed theft of 200,000 Florida DMV driver records, a cyberattack on the American Meteor Society, and school closures in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Risky Business News·Sep 9, 06:06 UTC · 7d agoPhishing & fraud

ATM Flaws Reveal Key Weaknesses in the Software Supply Chain

A researcher disclosed nine vulnerabilities in ATM encryption and authentication software, highlighting weaknesses across the software supply chain.

WIRED reports that a security researcher found nine vulnerabilities in software used for ATM encryption and authentication. The disclosure matters beyond cash machines because the affected components illustrate broader weaknesses in the software supply chain. The article does not report active exploitation of the flaws.

WIRED · Security·Aug 31, 10:00 UTC · 16d agoVulnerability

KREMLIN Banking Malware Hijacks Chrome and Edge to Steal Credentials and Session Tokens

Elastic Security Labs details KREMLIN, Brazilian banking malware using malicious Chrome/Edge extensions and Ethereum smart contracts to steal credentials and session tokens.

Elastic Security Labs documents KREMLIN (tracked as REF9334), a Brazilian banking malware toolkit active since at least May 2025 that impersonates a dozen Brazilian banks. It uses multi-stage JavaScript loaders, a C++ installer that DLL-sideloads via a legitimate SentinelOne binary, and a malicious Chrome/Edge extension named 'AVSync System Inc.' Ethereum smart contracts act as dead-drop resolvers for C2 endpoints, a shift that occurred May 19, 2026, making infrastructure hard to disrupt. The extension harvests cookies, sessionStorage/localStorage, browsing history, screenshots, and full page HTML via WebSocket plus CSS-disguised polling endpoints. The group has run seven distinct campaigns and also distributes Pulsar RAT and Remcos RAT.

The Hacker News·updated 05:33 UTC · 15h ago·first Sep 15, 18:54 UTC · 1d agoMalware in the wild 2 sources

Six npm Packages Read C2 Addresses From Ethereum Wallet

Six malicious npm packages query an Ethereum wallet to resolve C2 addresses, hiding command-and-control infrastructure.

Six malicious packages on the npm registry were found querying an Ethereum wallet to locate their command-and-control infrastructure. Storing C2 addresses on the blockchain lets operators rotate infrastructure while avoiding hard-coded servers that are easy to block or sinkhole. The campaign targets developers installing dependencies from npm.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 11, 15:00 UTC · Aug 11, 2026Malware in the wild

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

Cloud and SaaS Environments Now Top Targets for Attackers

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 4, 11:30 UTC · Aug 4, 2026Ransomware

GAUGE: A Formal Framework for Measuring Cryptographic Security under Heterogeneous Adversary Cost Models

GAUGE frames cryptographic security as profiles over adversary cost models, certifying a ranking reversal between ML-KEM-512 and AES-128 from a 4–5% memory pricing shift.

GAUGE represents cryptographic security as a function over admissible adversary cost models (a security profile), proves profiles are piecewise-linear and concave, and establishes a rating trilemma when two profiles cross. A polynomial-time linear-programming procedure certifies whether the ranking of two schemes is robust, reverses under admissible models, or is genuinely incomparable. Applied to NIST post-quantum standards, the framework certifies a ML-KEM-512 versus AES-128 ranking reversal from a 4–5% shift in memory pricing and measures lattice-sieving cost drift of 9.79 bits per year over eight years. A hybrid X25519 + ML-KEM-768 handshake reduces combined-break probability twenty-fold at a 2.3 kilobyte cost.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 14:55 UTC · 1d agoResearch

Hackers Return $263 Million Stolen From Liquid Network

Hackers drain roughly 4,000 BTC (~$320M) from Liquid Network federation wallet, then return 3,400 BTC with ~598 BTC still outstanding.

Attackers withdrew about 4,000 Bitcoin (roughly $320 million) from the Liquid Network federation wallet, which held approximately 4,200 BTC, via the SideSwap Peg-out Authorization Key without that key being compromised. Blockstream disabled nodes and suspended transactions after disclosing the heist on Sunday. Alleged white-hat hackers returned 3,400 BTC (~$262.6M) on Monday, demanding the underlying bug be patched before releasing the remaining ~598 BTC (~$47M). The network remains paused while fixes and a safe restart are prepared.

SecurityWeek·Sep 8, 16:35 UTC · 8d agoData breach in the wild

Hackers drain $320M in Bitcoin from Liquid Network, claim they’re the good guys

Hackers withdrew roughly 4,000 BTC (about $320M) from the Liquid Network federation wallet backing the Blockstream-developed Bitcoin sidechain, claiming benign intent.

Blockstream said Sunday that around 4,000 BTC, roughly $320 million, was withdrawn from the federation wallet backing Liquid Network, a Bitcoin sidechain used by exchanges and financial institutions. The attackers publicly claimed they were 'the good guys'; no attribution or recovery details are provided. The theft affects infrastructure that backs custodial Bitcoin transfers for exchanges.

DataBreaches.net·Sep 7, 16:37 UTC · 9d agoData breach in the wild

Crypto theft in 2025: North Korean hackers continue to dominate

Help Net Security·Aug 6, 12:50 UTC · Aug 6, 2026Vulnerability

Propagation Model for SSC attacks: Why SBOM (tools) don't tell the whole truth

Study shows open-source SBOM tools only cover structural exposure and vulnerability presence, missing code reachability and taint-path analysis stages.

An arXiv paper proposes a four-stage propagation model for software supply chain attack effects and empirically evaluates four open-source SBOM tools against it using three projects and the Log4j vulnerability as the test case. Current SBOM tools systematically support only Stage 1 (structural exposure) and Stage 2 (vulnerability class presence), while Stage 3 (code reachability) and Stage 4 (taint path analysis) require capabilities absent from the SBOM ecosystem. The authors argue propagation-centred SSC security research is needed to prevent cyber risk from evolving into systemic risk.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 4, 17:31 UTC · 12d agoResearch1

Risky Bulletin: Dutch intel services to get extensive new powers

Netherlands proposed a bill granting AIVD and MIVD expanded warrantless tapping, faster hacking powers, and forced data disclosure, citing Russia, China, and Iran threats.

The Dutch government introduced a bill greatly expanding surveillance powers of intelligence agencies AIVD and MIVD, allowing up to one year of tapping without pre-approval and simplified hacking operations against 'foreign adversaries'. Agencies could compel Dutch companies or citizens to provide data under threat of charges, share data with the private sector, and oversight bodies would merge into a new CTT board. The bill follows similar overhauls in Ireland, Germany, and France after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The newsletter also reports Moonwell hacked for $8.7M, a Cosmos EVM bug exploited for ~$3M, ShinyHunters listing McKesson with claimed hundreds of millions of records, and a pro-Kremlin DDoS claim against Norway's government network.

Risky Business News·Aug 31, 03:25 UTC · 16d agoPolicy & legal

Are Unreachable Nodes Truly Safe? Fully Eclipsing Monero's P2P Network!

Researchers present Nyx and Moros, the first eclipse attacks against Monero nodes behind NATs, requiring no inbound access and demonstrated on mainnet.

The paper presents the first eclipse attacks tailored to unreachable Monero nodes operating behind NATs, requiring no inbound access to the victim. The attacks poison the peerlists of reachable nodes, which relay contamination to unreachable nodes' whitelists, then exploit Monero's outbound connection refresh logic to evict benign neighbors and monopolize all outbound connections. Nyx achieves a complete, persistent eclipse of long-running unreachable nodes in large-scale SEED Emulator simulations, while Moros stealthily eclipses newly joined nodes during bootstrapping and was demonstrated on the Monero mainnet. Countermeasures are proposed.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 14:43 UTC · 7d agoResearch

Hackers Disable Endpoint Protection and Deploy Sliver Across Compromised Windows Domain

The Hunter's Ledger tracked campaign UTA-2026-024 using Sliver C2, Domain Admin account creation, and Ethereum-based C2 rotation to compromise a US organization's Windows domain.

The Hunter's Ledger tracked an intrusion at one unnamed US organization as UTA-2026-024, staged from exposed server 193.233.202.17 with a Sliver beacon. Operators created a non-expiring Domain Admin account, enabled RDP with NLA disabled, dumped SAM, SYSTEM and SECURITY hives plus LSASS memory, and disabled eight endpoint protection services. A Node.js implant resolved its C2 server from an Ethereum smart contract that rotated domains five times in five months, while SYSTEM scheduled tasks with backdated dates and DNS allowlist manipulation provided persistence. The infrastructure ties to a confirmed ransomware incident, but no encryptor deployment was proven in this intrusion.

Cyber Security News·Sep 8, 12:10 UTC · 8d agoThreat actor in the wild

Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution (via the strip utility)

ArXiv paper shows the trusting-trust compiler backdoor technique can compromise an entire Linux distribution via the strip utility.

The paper (arXiv 2607.24888) demonstrates that Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack, long viewed as a compiler-specific threat, can backdoor an entire Linux distribution by targeting the strip utility. A compromised tool reproduces its backdoor in subsequent rebuilds of itself, generalizing the attack surface beyond compilers. The finding has supply-chain implications for build reproducibility and distribution trust, though it is a research result with no observed real-world exploitation.

Lobsters · security·Sep 5, 10:58 UTC · 11d agoResearch

Revolut Data Leak May Trace Back to Compromised Italian Government Accounts

Attackers using a compromised Italian government PEC account impersonated law enforcement to obtain data on ~680 Revolut customers.

Revolut confirmed its systems were not breached; fraudulent data requests came from a compromised PEC mailbox tied to the Prefecture of Reggio Calabria on the pec.interno.it domain. Per the Financial Times, roughly 680 customers had identity documents, addresses, banking information, verification selfies and cryptocurrency transaction histories exposed. Researcher Korra of Duel described a 'spray and pray' operation using hundreds of crypto transaction IDs and fraudulent European Investigation Orders. Threat actor IAmNotAVillain claims six months of access and 147 GB exfiltrated from Italian law-enforcement systems, though this remains unverified.

Security Affairs·13:09 UTC · 8h agoData breach in the wild

Understanding the Usability of Cryptographic Verification Tools

Survey of Tamarin and ProVerif users reveals usability barriers: debugging non-termination, model validation, and opaque proof failures hinder cryptographic protocol verification.

The paper presents an exploratory human-centered survey of researchers, graduate students, and practitioners with hands-on experience using Tamarin, ProVerif, and related cryptographic protocol verification tools. Findings reveal usability barriers across the verification workflow, including difficulties debugging non-termination and performance issues plus the lack of systematic methods for validating formal models against real protocols. When proofs fail without concrete attacks, users commonly simplify models, add helper lemmas, and revisit modeling abstractions. Participants called for actionable diagnostics, clearer explanations of results, visualization, and automation for recurring proof tasks.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 14, 20:40 UTC · 2d agoResearch

Supply Chain Attacks in 2026: Why Threat Intelligence Is the Only Early Warning System That Works

Cyble argues supply chain attacks are a primary breach vector, citing Verizon DBIR third-party figures and CISA SBOM guidance to pitch its TPRM platform.

Cyble's vendor blog frames third-party compromise as a first-order breach risk, citing Verizon's 2026 DBIR finding that third parties were involved in 48% of breaches, up 60% year over year. It recounts the Cl0p campaigns against Progress MOVEit Transfer (CVE-2023-34362), which affected over 2,700 organizations and 93 million people, and Fortra GoAnywhere (CVE-2023-0669) with roughly 130 claimed victims. It also highlights CISA and NSA's 2026 Minimum Elements for a Software Bill of Materials covering open-source, AI, and SaaS components. The piece concludes by promoting Cyble's Third-Party Risk Management platform.

Cyble·Sep 3, 08:21 UTC · 13d agoIndustryCVE-2023-34362CVE-2023-0669

Cosmos EVM Flaw Exploited After Cosmos Labs Knew Every Blockchain Running It Was Vulnerable

Attackers exploited a critical Cosmos EVM balance bug (GHSA-7g4w-cg88-2cq2) to drain funds from six blockchains; fixed in v0.6.2 and v0.7.2.

Cosmos Labs disclosed that a critical balance-handling flaw in the shared Cosmos EVM module (GHSA-7g4w-cg88-2cq2, no CVE) was exploited to drain funds from six blockchains between August 20 and 25, 2026. The bug, reported April 25 and initially judged harmless, lets vesting accounts delegate more than their spendable balance, wrapping balances to roughly 2^256 and triggering unintended mint/burn in reconciliation, potentially halting chains or burning victims' holdings. Fixes shipped in v0.6.2 and v0.7.2 on August 19 as state-breaking coordinated network upgrades; operators who cannot upgrade must halt their chains. The post-mortem notes the team used public silent patching for a fund-threatening issue, contrary to its own bug bounty policy, and that eleven deployments had never registered with its security channels.

The Hacker News·Aug 28, 20:38 UTC · 19d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

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

Two Compromised joyfill npm Packages Run RAT When Imported Into Node.js

The Hacker News·Aug 4, 05:21 UTC · Aug 4, 2026Malware1