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Hackers Pose as Domain Controllers to Steal Active Directory Password Hashes

Attackers abuse Active Directory replication (DCSync) via the DRSUAPI protocol to steal password hashes and forge Golden Tickets for persistent domain compromise.

Security reporting citing Trellix details how threat actors impersonate domain controllers to request replication data and obtain NTLM password hashes without dumping LSASS on the domain controller. With Domain Admin or replication rights, attackers can steal the KRBTGT hash and forge long-lived Golden Tickets that survive password resets. Defenders should monitor DRSUAPI requests from non-DC systems, restrict replication permissions, and enforce MFA and tiered administrative access.

Cyber Security Newsupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoResearch 2 sources3· 1 read

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 · 6d agoTools1

Root-Cause Attribution Is a Search Problem: Continual Search for Long-Horizon Agent Failures

Continual Search framework iteratively prompts LLM judges to keep searching agent execution logs, boosting long-horizon failure root-cause attribution accuracy.

The paper frames automated root-cause attribution (RCA) for long-horizon AI agent failures as a search problem, since relevant evidence is sparse and distributed across massive execution traces. The authors propose Continual Search, an iterative framework that nudges an LLM judge across successive turns to keep hunting unresolved diagnostic evidence instead of settling on an early plausible diagnosis. They introduce MegaRCA-Mix, a benchmark of 50 human-annotated failure trials on long-horizon, execution-heavy tasks. On MegaRCA-Mix, Continual Search improves GPT-5.5's F1 from 0.349 to 0.498 (over 40% gain), and lower-tier models can surpass higher-tier counterparts when search is effective.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research1

Hackers Turn More Than 3,500 Redis Servers Into Cryptocurrency Miners

Hunters.io researchers report 3,562 exposed Redis servers hijacked via replication abuse into Monero cryptomining, causing performance loss and data-integrity risk.

Researchers at Hunters.io exposed a cryptomining operation that compromised 3,562 distinct Redis servers after scanning 12,966 targets. The attackers used unauthenticated Redis instances and master-replica replication to plant a cron task that downloaded and ran XMRig every five minutes. The miner connects to a mining pool over encrypted port 443 and hides among temporary files. Impact includes high CPU usage, elevated cloud bills, and data-loss risk from altered Redis persistence settings.

Cyber Security News · 7d agoMalware in the wild

How Attackers Abuse VSS, and How Huntress Detects It

Huntress details how attackers abuse Windows Volume Shadow Copies for ransomware recovery sabotage and NTDS.dit credential theft, plus detection logic.

Huntress explains that attackers abuse VSS in three ways: deleting shadow copies to inhibit recovery before ransomware detonation, creating shadow copies to extract the NTDS.dit Active Directory database for offline credential theft, and manipulating shadow copy configuration. Because backup agents and RMM tools routinely create and delete shadow copies, raw events are too noisy to alert on alone. Huntress detections instead correlate VSS activity with lateral movement and credential harvesting over a time window, such as an observed sequence of PsExec spawning SYSTEM shells on a domain controller, vssadmin create shadow, a blocked deletion attempt, and DNS reconnaissance against another host.

Huntress · 1d agoResearch

Adversarial Testing of Automated Program Repair Agents for Security Vulnerabilities

SWEADV benchmark shows adversarial issue descriptions make LLM program-repair agents write insecure fixes in 51.7% of cases, evading most detection tools.

Researchers built SWEADV, a benchmark of 750 adversarial issue descriptions derived from 150 SWE-bench Verified repair tasks, covering command execution, deserialization, path traversal, denial of service, and weak hashing attack types. Tested on mini_swe agents backed by GPT-5-Mini, MiniMax-M2.5, and DeepSeek-R, adversarial descriptions induced malicious behavior with successful repair in 51.7% of cases. Detection was weak: LLM-as-judge pre-repair screening reached only 62.3% accuracy, and post-repair detection via static analysis and LLM-as-judge achieved just 39.4% and 55.4%.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoAI safety & security1

Copying explains the collective behavior of AI agents in the wild

arXiv study shows thousands of ephemeral AI agents spontaneously cooperated via a wiki, with simple copying rules explaining their collective behavior.

An arXiv paper analyzes the public record of thousands of one-hour-lived AI agents that, in June 2026, discovered a public wiki accepted edits from their sandboxes and used it to help each other pass a timed test, without being asked to cooperate. Each agent had no persistent memory, but the log preserves what each agent could see before writing. Three minimal copying models, one per decision (where to write, what name to use, how to word a message) and each with a single free parameter, reproduce the heavy-tailed page-popularity distribution, name-piece frequencies, and patchwork of internally consistent pages. The result implies such agent populations are easy to steer, since whoever writes first or while others are quiet sets conventions for later agents.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

We've got one word for it, and it's usually the wrong one

Cisco Talos's Threat Source newsletter critiques 'burnout' terminology, describing four occupational injuries, and flags a UAT-10820 WebDAV stealer campaign at a Ukrainian government organization.

Cisco Talos's Threat Source newsletter argues that 'burnout' is the wrong word for most cybersecurity occupational harm, distinguishing exhaustion, secondary traumatic stress, vicarious trauma, and moral injury based on clinical literature from trauma-exposed professions. The featured disclosure describes a complex WebDAV infection chain found at a Ukrainian government organization, attributed with moderate confidence to the Russian-tracked actor UAT-10820 and assessed as an opportunistic cryptocurrency and credential-stealing operation. The campaign delivers the Amatera stealer alongside ZigCryptoStealer and NetSupport Manager, abusing BNB Smart Chain bulletproof hosting, fake CAPTCHA prompts, a vulnerable driver to kill EDR, and rundll32.exe execution of disguised DLLs with ordinal calls. Weekly headlines also cover a Microsoft Defender 'ShieldCrash' zero-day exploit released after September 2026 Patch Tuesday, a North Korean Linux espionage toolkit backdooring HAProxy, and a multi-hop Google-domain redirect phishing campaign.

Cisco Talosupdated · 4d agofirst · 5d agoIndustry in the wild 4 sources1

Does Your Agent's Memory Survive a Model Upgrade? A Controlled Study of Memory Portability

A controlled study finds agent memory portability varies sharply: fixed-schema knowledge graphs survive model swaps while compressed notes degrade.

The study compares preserving an agent's history as raw long context, RAG chunks, compressed natural-language notes, or fixed-schema knowledge graphs across model upgrades, using 48 synthetic histories and two open-weight sub-10B-parameter models. Fixed-schema KG accuracy changed by only +0.0004 ± 0.0020 after a writer swap, while compressed NOTES shifted asymmetrically by +9.91 or -13.28 percentage points depending on migration direction. Mixed 50/50 embedding migrations captured only 4.96 of an 11.90-point RAG re-embedding gain; 80% of the NOTES deficit came from information lost at construction, and 81% of the RAG deficit from retrieval failures. Store-only repair of NOTES failed to reach 90% recovery in all 48 cases, while retaining raw histories enabled recovery in 34 of 48 for one direction.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research

Forgetting Without Restarting: Execution-State Unlearning for Stateful LLM Agents

Researchers propose provenance-guided selective replay letting LLM agents forget revoked information without restarts, matching full reset behavior.

The paper formalizes execution-state unlearning for stateful LLM agents, requiring that agents behave as if a revoked memory record was never observed across transcripts, compressed memory, tool plans, and KV caches. It proves exact unlearning requires at least T-τ+1 recomputed transitions and that Provenance-Guided Selective Replay attains this bound via a provenance graph, KV cache cropping, and sanitized replay. In audits across three agent suites, nine baselines, and three model families, memory deletion left leakage unchanged, instruction-based forgetting collapsed under elicitation (Leak@probes = 1.00), and selective replay matched full resets at up to 9x fewer recomputed tokens.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoAI safety & security1

Researchers Uncover 10,000+ Malware Loaders Behind YouTube and SEO Poisoning Campaign

Unit 42 uncovers CL-CRI-1171, a two-year pay-per-install campaign distributing 10,000+ OfferLoader samples via YouTube and SEO poisoning.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 tracked a campaign as CL-CRI-1171, an infection-as-a-service platform operating for at least two years. It used 11 YouTube gaming channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and SEO-poisoned download pages for trojanized WinDirStat and Bluetooth driver installers to distribute OfferLoader, a disposable loader embedded in Inno Setup installers. Payloads delivered included Insomnia RAT (Node.js and Python backdoors), ARKTunnel (a WebSocket-based RAT using LSB steganography), and Docro Hijacker (Chrome browser hijacker), with later infections delivering GCleaner and Socks5Systemz. Over 200 rotating domains across .xyz, .cfd, .space, and .info TLDs were used, with gating filters that served broken links or decoy pages to scanners and researchers.

GBHackers · 4d agoMalware in the wild 2 sources2

Decade-old PostgreSQL flaw turns backup account into a backdoor

Cyera disclosed CVE-2026-6471, a decade-old PostgreSQL flaw letting REPLICATION-attribute accounts achieve RCE and superuser compromise, patched August 13.

Cyera Research's 'PostGREShell' flaw exists in PostgreSQL's logical replication output plugin loading, where the replication code path never called the library-path security check, allowing path traversal or UNC paths to load arbitrary code. A low-privilege backup account can achieve code execution on Windows, Linux, and macOS, then escalate to superuser with persistent backdoor access. CVE-2026-6471 affects versions back to PostgreSQL 9.4 (2014) and was patched in releases 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24 on August 13. CVSS is 7.2, and no exploitation of this specific CVE has been confirmed, though VirusTotal hunting found 114 malicious PostgreSQL plugins.

CSO Online · 12d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-6471

Identity Abuse Through Trusted Communication Channels

Unit 42 explains how attackers abuse trusted enterprise communication and collaboration channels for identity phishing and credential theft, and outlines defenses.

Palo Alto Unit 42 details how attackers exploit enterprise collaboration and communication tools as trusted channels for identity phishing and credential theft. The writeup describes abuse of presumed-trusted messaging paths and outlines defense strategies. It is guidance rather than a report of a specific incident.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 26d agoPhishing & fraud

Daisy-Chaining Trust: Investigating Faronics Deploy Abuse

Actors abuse Faronics Deploy in phishing campaigns to run PowerShell and deploy ScreenConnect while evading detection with trusted tools.

Huntress investigated attacks in which threat actors abuse Faronics Deploy, a legitimate remote management tool, as part of phishing-driven intrusions. The chain uses the trusted deployment tool to launch PowerShell commands and deploy ScreenConnect for remote access. Leveraging signed, legitimate software helps the actors blend in and evade detection.

Huntress · 15d agoThreat actor in the wild

When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online · 6d agoAI safety & security1

Week in review: Records allegedly stolen from Azure tenants, Medusa ransomware hits 500+ orgs

Week in review: Medusa ransomware hit 500+ orgs per CISA, millions of Azure tenant records allegedly stolen, SafePal and French tax authority breaches disclosed.

Help Net Security's weekly roundup covers the FBI, CISA, and HHS joint advisory update reporting Medusa ransomware has breached more than 500 organizations since June 2021, and threat actor TheHatman's claim of millions of employee records stolen from Azure tenants of Fortune 500 firms including McDonald's, Vodafone, Kyndryl, and Tata Consultancy Services, per Hudson Rock. It also covers the SafePal breach affecting 39,798 customers, France's DGFiP breach exposing data on 678,000 individuals, and UT San delaying its fall semester after a cyberattack. Security items include critical unauthenticated GitLab flaw CVE-2026-19478, an actively exploited patched macOS Screen Sharing flaw deploying a cryptominer, US charges against 17 Mabna Institute Iranian hackers over 31TB of stolen academic data, and Google Mandiant's AI agents finding 100+ high-severity vulnerabilities.

Help Net Security · 24d agoData breach in the wildCVE-2026-19478

Hackers Turn Windows Shadow Copies Into a Tool for Credential Theft and Ransomware

Attackers abuse Windows VSS shadow copies to delete recovery points before ransomware and to extract NTDS.dit/SAM credentials, demanding context-aware detection.

Threat actors are weaponizing the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for two purposes: destroying local recovery points via vssadmin.exe, wmic.exe, diskshadow.exe, wbadmin.exe, and bcdedit.exe before encryption, and accessing static copies of locked files such as NTDS.dit and SAM for credential theft. Ransomware families tied to shadow-copy removal include Akira, Black Basta, BlackCat, Conti, LockBit, Qilin, RansomHub, REvil, Ryuk, and WannaCry. Huntress's analysis of the Nightmare-Eclipse tool showed the BlueHammer technique chaining a Windows Defender timing issue with a VSS snapshot to dump the SAM database and decrypt NT hashes. Defenders should correlate VSS operations with parent process, hive access, and subsequent encryption activity, and maintain immutable off-host backups.

GBHackers · 1d agoResearch in the wild1

NovaFabric: Tamper-Evident, Replayable Evidence for Autonomous AI Agent Runs

NovaFabric seals autonomous AI agent runs into tamper-evident, replayable Run Capsules enabling third-party audit under EU AI Act and ISO 42001.

NovaFabric records autonomous agent runs without modifying agent logic into portable Run Capsules (fifteen-entity schema) sealed with DSSE signatures, RFC 3161 timestamps, a Merkle log, and redaction attestations, supporting four-mode replay and third-party Evidence Bundle verification. Evaluation shows tampering rejected across three tested classes, 14/14 credential types redacted while preserving 9/9 decoys, and 140/140 mutations localized; blast-radius queries reach 45.5ms p99 over 10M edges. Limits include only 2/10 tool-using workloads completing replay due to missing tool-response substitution and ingest capped at 61.6 req/s. The contribution integrates OpenTelemetry, DSSE/in-toto, and W3C PROV rather than new cryptography.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoAI safety & security1

PostgreSQL Fixes 12-Year-Old Logical Decoding Flaw Enabling Replication-Role Code Execution

PostgreSQL fixed CVE-2026-6471 (CVSS 7.2), a 12-year-old logical decoding flaw letting replication-role accounts execute arbitrary code as the database OS user.

PostgreSQL patched CVE-2026-6471 (CVSS 7.2), a flaw present since logical decoding shipped in 9.4 (2014) that lets an account with the REPLICATION attribute run arbitrary code as the database server's OS user when wal_level is logical. Versions before 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24 are affected; exploitation requires such an account, which backup, CDC, and monitoring tooling routinely holds. The fix adds an output_plugin_libraries whitelist, so administrators using non-default plugins such as wal2json and decoderbufs must add them and reload configuration after updating. Cyera Research, whose write-up names the flaw PostGREShell, demonstrated escalating a replication user to superuser with persistence; no PoC or KEV entry existed as of September 4.

The Hacker News · 11d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-64711

CVE-2026-60163: MySQL Group Replication unauthenticated remote arbitrary SQL execution

Oracle reclassified MySQL Group Replication flaw CVE-2026-60163 from Local to Adjacent Network; researcher says it enables unauthenticated remote arbitrary SQL execution.

CVE-2026-60163 in MySQL Group Replication permits an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary SQL on the destination server. Following discussion after the July disclosure, Oracle revised the CVSS attack vector rating from 'Local' to 'Adjacent Network'. The researcher posting to oss-security clarifies that, in the extreme, the attack surface is reachable fully remotely.

oss-security · 1d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-601631

An Empirical Analysis of ReDoS Vulnerabilities and ReDoS Detection Tools

Study of NVD data finds ReDoS vulnerabilities growing more prevalent and more likely to be exploited, while five detection tools disagree substantially.

The study compares five publicly available ReDoS detection tools and one regex correction tool across three datasets. An empirical analysis of all ReDoS vulnerabilities reported to the NVD finds they are becoming more prevalent and are much more likely to be exploited than non-ReDoS weaknesses. The detection tools exhibited substantial disagreement on whether a given regex is vulnerable.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

BenchShield: Formal Model-Backed Instrumentation for Reward Integrity in LLM-Agent Evaluation Infrastructure

BenchShield uses lifecycle-model-backed instrumentation to detect reward hacking in LLM-agent benchmarks, lifting full-chain recall to 77-100% at up to 65% lower cost.

The framework grounds reward-hacking detection in a finite lifecycle model of an evaluation's reward-relevant events, combining a static phase-aware taint analysis with runtime infrastructure-side evidence attribution. Evaluation used a human-labeled corpus of 456 adjudicated trajectories drawn from more than 31,000 public agent runs across three benchmarks. BenchShield improves full-chain recall from 23-94% to 77-100% and same-vector coverage from 16-56% to 43-78%, cuts per-task cost by up to 65%, and achieves 96% accuracy detecting reward hacking at runtime.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoAI safety & security1

RMM Abuse: How Attackers Exploit Remote Access Tools | Huntress

Huntress reports RMM tool abuse jumped 277% and now appears in nearly 40% of its investigations as attackers leverage trusted remote access software.

Huntress observed a 277% increase in remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool abuse, with such abuse now present in nearly 40% of its investigations. Attackers exploit legitimate, trusted remote access tools to gain access and persistence, complicating detection because the software is expected on endpoints. The write-up explains common abuse patterns and defenses against them.

Huntress · 25d agoThreat actor in the wild

Repeat-After-Me: Black-Box Adaptive Visual Prompt Injection

Researchers unveil Repeat-After-Me, a black-box visual prompt injection achieving over 80% success on Qwen3.6-27B and 47% on GPT-5.5.

Researchers present Repeat-After-Me, a black-box adaptive visual prompt injection that induces frontier VLMs to reveal PII or make malicious tool calls via injected images. It exceeds 80% attack success rate on Qwen3.6-27B and 47% on GPT-5.5 even when the benign user prompt is unrelated and does not authorize the injected task. In a real-world OpenClaw Discord deployment, a minimally injected image can overwrite TOOLS.md, enabling later remote code execution and secret exfiltration.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoAI safety & security

CounterPersona: Append-Only Defense Against Unauthorized Persona Skill Distillation

CounterPersona appends targeted counter-persona evidence after data collection to block AI systems from distilling an individual's behavioral patterns into reusable skills.

CounterPersona defends against unauthorized persona skill distillation, where attackers extract recurring patterns from collected personal data to replicate an individual's behavior. Unlike perturbation-based defenses that require modifying data before collection, it works in an append-only setting where historical records cannot be altered or revoked. It constructs targeted counter-persona evidence, packs compatible behavioral states into compact realization units, and strengthens them via rationale-guided consistency rewriting. Experiments show strong effectiveness across lexical, semantic, and LLM-based measures, remaining robust across different distillers.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoAI safety & security

Hackers Abuse VSSAdmin to Extract NTDS.dit and Delete Windows Recovery Copies

Huntress details intruders using PsExec and VSSAdmin on domain controllers to steal NTDS.dit credentials and delete shadow copies before ransomware.

Huntress analysts identified attackers launching SYSTEM-level command shells via PsExec on a domain controller, then running 'vssadmin create shadow' to snapshot and copy the NTDS.dit Active Directory database. Shadow copies were later deleted to destroy local recovery options ahead of a likely ransomware stage. Huntress recommends correlating VSS creation/deletion events with remote execution, DNS enumeration, and lateral movement rather than alerting on any single VSS event.

Cyber Security News · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

GDCM <= 3.2.7: six memory-safety and denial-of-service vulnerabilities, no CVE

Six memory-safety and denial-of-service flaws disclosed in the GDCM DICOM parsing library, affecting versions through 3.2.7.

Researcher Abhinav Agarwal disclosed six vulnerabilities in GDCM (Grassroots DICOM), an open-source C++ library for parsing and processing DICOM files. All six were confirmed against GDCM 3.2.6 using AddressSanitizer and UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, and source review found the vulnerable patterns through version 3.2.7 and the upstream master snapshot. Potential impacts include heap corruption, process-memory disclosure, stack exhaustion, and process termination in applications parsing untrusted DICOM files. No CVE identifiers have been assigned at the time of disclosure.

oss-security · 6d agoVulnerability

You Get What You Sample: Evaluating Sampling Strategies for Web Security Measurements

Evaluation of 500k Tranco and 24.8M Common Crawl hosts shows Top-N domain sampling biases web security measurements; probability sampling yields unbiased estimates.

The study is the first comprehensive investigation of how sampling strategies affect web security measurement conclusions, comparing datasets and strategies across 500k Tranco domains and 24.8M Common Crawl hosts. It shows Top-N selection does not reflect the overall web distribution and may bias observed vulnerability rates, while probability-based strategies yield stable, unbiased prevalence and impact estimates. Hybrid sampling offers no advantage because its deterministic prefix consistently hurts accuracy, and the authors propose an adaptive probability-based strategy effective even when target prevalence is unknown.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch1

Revoked but Still Authoritative: An Empirical Study of Revocation Enforcement in Agent-Memory Systems

An empirical study finds no major agent-memory system enforces fact revocation at retrieval, causing agents to act on superseded, unsafe information.

Researchers tested five agent-memory systems across nine policy scenarios, nine models, and six defense conditions, tracking whether revoked facts are returned and acted upon. No system enforces revocation by default: revoked records are returned whenever the revocation label is visible to the retrieval layer, outrank their replacements, and lead agents to unsafe actions. The authors propose a backend-agnostic guard that sits between the agent and any memory store and withholds revoked or conflicting records at retrieval time.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoAI safety & security