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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 · securitySep 7, 02:14 UTC · 9d agoResearch HN 52↑ · 3 comments

The Coding-Agent Trap: When a "Free" LLM Endpoint Is the Adversary, (Mon, Aug 31st)

A SANS honeypot caught a real coding-agent session routed to a rogue "free" LLM endpoint, exposing a Windows user's transcript and tool outputs.

A SANS analyst describes how an internet-exposed inference honeypot was discovered, relabeled with sought-after model names like DeepSeek, and enrolled in infrastructure serving "free" LLM backends. On 2026-08-30 an opencode terminal coding agent sent an 88-message, 224 KB transcript 210 times in 91 seconds via a China Unicom relay, exposing directory listings, tool outputs and read file portions. The analyst frames tool-enabled agents treating model endpoints as trusted control planes as a novel risk — a "rogue model endpoint" that could request tool executions on the user's machine.

SANS Internet Storm CenterAug 31, 20:00 UTC · 15d agoAI safety & security1

Large Universe Subset Predicate Encryption with IND-CCA Security (with Constant-size Ciphertext and Keys)

New construction achieves first large-universe subset predicate encryption with IND-CCA security and constant-size ciphertexts and keys under subgroup decision assumptions.

The paper proposes the first large-universe subset predicate encryption scheme achieving IND-CCA security with both constant-size ciphertexts and constant-size secret keys. Prior large-universe constructions by Chatterjee and Mukherjee either achieved only restricted selective security with constant sizes or adaptive security with attribute-dependent ciphertext size, and none achieved CCA security. The new construction is proven selectively secure under standard subgroup decision problems. Black-box transformations yield the first CCA-secure WIBE and WKD-IBE with constant-size ciphertexts and keys.

arXiv cs.CRSep 14, 10:02 UTC · 2d agoResearch

Marimo RCE Flaw Lets Hackers Steal AWS Credentials and Pivot to Bastion Host in 8 Seconds

Attacker exploited unauthenticated marimo WebSocket RCE CVE-2026-39987 to steal AWS credentials and SSH into a bastion host in eight seconds.

Sysdig Threat Research Team documented a real intrusion exploiting CVE-2026-39987 in marimo (versions up to 0.20.4, fixed in 0.23.0), where the unauthenticated /terminal/ws WebSocket endpoint exposed an interactive shell. Within eight seconds the attacker pulled AWS credentials from Redis, extracted an SSH private key from AWS Secrets Manager via Boto3, and authenticated to a bastion host; over nine hours the operator ran 850+ commands using a staged custom Python toolkit. Blocked EC2 Instance Connect attempts (SendSSHPublicKey to placeholder instance i-0000000000000000) provide a high-confidence detection signal.

GBHackersupdated Sep 15, 11:52 UTC · 1d agofirst Sep 15, 09:58 UTC · 1d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 4 sources CVE-2026-399872· 1 read

Microsoft Copilot reveals secret input that allowed it to be hacked

Microsoft disclosed a hidden input in Copilot that let attackers steal passwords from users who clicked a crafted link.

Microsoft revealed that Copilot contained a secret, undocumented input parameter that allowed the assistant to be compromised. Attackers could abuse the hidden input to steal passwords when a target clicked a malicious link. The disclosure highlights hidden-parameter risks in widely deployed AI assistants.

Ars Technica · SecurityAug 18, 13:00 UTC · 29d agoAI safety & security in the wild1

New Phishing Campaign Abuses Windows Mshta.exe to Steal Credentials and Secrets

Fortra researchers track an active phishing campaign targeting Spanish speakers that abuses mshta.exe to run HTA payloads for reconnaissance and credential theft.

Fortra's FIRE team says a phishing campaign active since June 2026 targets Spanish-speaking users with invoice ('Facturación') and judicial ('Aviso Judicial') lures, many sent via libero.it/italiaonline.it infrastructure with SCL:-1 markings to bypass anti-spam. Clicking embedded links delivers an HTA launcher executed via mshta.exe, which hides its window off-screen, builds dynamic C2 URLs, and performs reconnaissance using WMI, PowerShell, and environment-variable inspection. A second-stage JavaScript dropper uses HTML smuggling to reconstruct a Base64-encoded ZIP in the browser, delivering a 7-Zip self-extracting executable disguised as a Firefox installer; staged design allows later delivery of credential stealers or ransomware. Defenders are urged to block archivogratuito[.]online and shortener domains goo[.]su, abrir[.]link, and abre[.]ai, and to restrict mshta.exe execution via AppLocker or ASR rules.

GBHackersSep 12, 06:16 UTC · 4d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

Rare Not Random Using Token Efficiency for Secrets Scanning

Researcher proposes token efficiency (string length divided by BPE token count) as a better post-regex filter than entropy for secrets scanning, validated on CredData.

The post explores whether Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization can replace Shannon entropy as the primary filter for candidate secrets captured by regex in tools like Gitleaks. It defines 'token efficiency' as string length divided by token count under the cl100k_base tokenizer; secret-like strings such as GitHub tokens tokenize into many small tokens and score low, while natural text scores high. Evaluating labeled secrets from the CredData dataset shows a usable separation, with roughly 2.5 suggested as a minimum cutoff versus Gitleaks' 3.5 entropy threshold. The technique is positioned as a post-regex filtering step rather than a standalone detector.

Lobsters · securitySep 12, 06:42 UTC · 4d agoResearch

Agents Gone Wild: An AI-Orchestrated Global Campaign Against PaperCut NG/MF

AI-orchestrated campaign exploited PaperCut NG/MF RCE (CVE-2026-81578/82078), compromising 440+ instances at 395 organizations in 48 countries.

GreyNoise tracked a likely Russian-speaking actor using AI (OpenAI Codex harness plus a DeepSeek model) to develop, test, and deploy exploits for PaperCut NG/MF (CVE-2026-81578, CVE-2026-82078) starting 31 August 2026. The actor compromised at least 440 PaperCut instances across 395 organizations in 48 countries, achieving domain admin at 12 victims — fastest time to domain admin was five minutes and a US high school was fully compromised in seven minutes. Attack paths involved LSASS memory and registry secret harvesting, pass-the-hash to domain controllers, noPac attacks, account additions to Domain Admins, and DCSync to exfiltrate full NTDS.DIT credential dumps. Impact scope suggests access development potentially for handoff, with prior PaperCut intrusions historically leading to extortion.

GreyNoiseSep 9, 00:00 UTC · 7d agoThreat actor in the wildCVE-2026-81578 CVE-2026-82078 CVE-2021-42278+1 CVEs1

Stealing AI Reasoning Traces

Researchers demonstrate a decryption jailbreak that extracts encrypted reasoning traces from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google LLM APIs via weaker sibling models.

The paper exploits the fact that encrypted chain-of-thought blocks returned by LLM providers are interchangeable across sessions, users, and models within a provider's ecosystem. Injecting an encrypted trace into a weaker, less-safeguarded model from the same provider forces it to output the trace in plaintext, bypassing anti-distillation mechanisms. Decoding 315,320 reasoning blocks scraped from public repositories recovered 367 PII artifacts and 182 credentials, showing large-scale private data leakage. The flaw also enables hidden hazardous information disclosure and invisible prompt injections embedded in encrypted blocks; mitigations were proposed after responsible disclosure.

Schneier on SecuritySep 8, 10:20 UTC · 8d agoAI safety & security

Hackers Target Claude, Cursor and Codex AI Agents to Steal Tokens and Prompt Histories

Gen Digital found infostealers like Amatera and Remus stealing AI coding agent tokens, prompt histories, and MCP configs from infected Windows and macOS machines.

Gen Digital analysts observed Amatera and Remus detections among tens of thousands of protected Windows users over three months, with Amatera targeting Cline and Continue data and Remus targeting Claude, Cursor, and OpenCode. CallbackBeaver added Cursor and Claude to its collection scope with more than 5,000 samples in 30 days, while macOS-focused Djinn Stealer has been associated with Claude, Codex, Gemini, Cline, OpenCode, and Kilo. The stealers harvest access and refresh tokens, prompt histories, and MCP configuration files that can expose source control, ticketing, databases, cloud resources, and sensitive project context for follow-on fraud. Many stealers add targets via remotely managed rules, meaning this is an adaptation of existing infostealers rather than a new vulnerability in the AI tools themselves.

Cyber Security NewsSep 9, 11:41 UTC · 7d agoMalware in the wild2

Privacy Failure in Split-LLM Training, The Returned Gradient Nullifies the Decoys

Researchers show split-LLM training leaks privacy via zero-valued gradients on decoy rows, exposing which activations are real despite passing forward-channel checks.

A systems-security case study of a two-node split-LLM training setup found that the returned output gradient from an Untrusted Cloud Node is exactly zero for decoy rows, revealing which rows are real. Across nine seeds, zero patterns identified real rows in 4,096 of 4,096 frames per run, and an attack on frame contents recovered 0.65 to 1.50 percentage points of extra tokens over a baseline. Both datasets passed forward-channel privacy and quality checks but failed once the returned gradient was included. Row-wise gradient clipping and noise closed the leak for roughly 0.01 nats of held-out cross-entropy, though five unmeasured attack classes remain.

Hugging Face daily papersSep 2, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI safety & security

Closing the Blind Spot: Securing Personal Repositories in the Software Supply Chain

Wiz highlights personal developer repositories as a supply chain blind spot leaking corporate secrets, offering correlation-based risk validation and remediation.

Wiz argues that developers' personal code repositories are a blind spot in software supply chain security where corporate secrets quietly escape. The company describes an approach that correlates personal repositories to specific developers, validates the actual risk, and drives remediation. No specific incident or vulnerability is disclosed in the announcement.

Wiz BlogAug 13, 13:48 UTC · Aug 13, 2026Tools2

Debian developers rejected an LLM ban and left disclosure voluntary

Debian developers voted to encourage voluntary disclosure of AI assistance in contributions rather than banning or mandating labeling of LLM-generated code.

Debian's vote concluded August 28, with project secretary Kurt Roeckx announcing that the winning option encourages contributors to disclose generative AI assistance and stops there, adding no new mandatory review gates. The adopted resolution bars sending confidential material, embargoed security bugs, cryptographic keys and credentials to third-party AI services without explicit authorization, requires prior discussion for bulk automated work, and takes no position on whether model output is copyrightable. The project neither endorses nor prohibits generative AI and retains existing human review and licensing requirements.

Help Net SecurityAug 31, 00:00 UTC · 16d agoAI policy1

From Infostealer Log to Marketplace Listing: A Technical Walkthrough of the Credential Theft Pipeline

Cyble walkthrough maps how infostealer logs move from endpoint infection through aggregation and enrichment to dark web credential marketplace sales.

Cyble breaks the credential theft pipeline into stages: infostealer execution harvesting browser credential stores, cookies, session tokens, crypto wallets, and FTP configurations; aggregation of stealer logs via C2 panels into bundled archives; parsing and enrichment against previously leaked datasets; and final listing on dark web marketplaces. Enrichment adds employer and role context that raises prices and enables credential stuffing across reused passwords. The report advises SOC teams to monitor stealer logs and marketplace chatter early rather than waiting for breach alerts.

CybleSep 10, 10:45 UTC · 6d agoMalware1

When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Analysis of 16.9 million SOC alerts finds AI-related alerts at 0.43%, growing 685% since February, with 94.1% noise and 0.02% real attacks.

A review of roughly 16.9 million SOC alerts found about 73,000 (0.43%) were AI-related, a share that grew 685% between February and June 2026. Of AI-related alerts, 94.1% were noise, 5.8% genuine risks, and 0.02% real attacks; 79.8% received benign verdicts, 81.7% were automatically suppressed, and only 5.4% reached a human analyst. The only confirmed attacks were phishing campaigns that weaponized AI brand names as lures, while developer coding agents spawning shells and reading credential stores routinely tripped detections written before AI agents existed.

The Hacker NewsSep 12, 10:24 UTC · 4d agoResearch1

Signal's new security feature checks if your encrypted chats were tampered with

Signal adds automatic key verification, a key-transparency system audited by Cloudflare and Trail of Bits that detects key-directory tampering in E2EE chats.

Signal launched automatic key verification, a key-transparency system that confirms a phone number or username remains bound to a consistent encryption key across Signal's key directory. Cloudflare and Trail of Bits independently audit the system, with cryptographic protection preventing auditors from seeing users' identifiers in plaintext. The feature mitigates key substitution by a compromised directory or privileged insider, though it currently requires the contact's phone number and users can fall back to manual Safety Number verification.

Help Net SecurityAug 12, 00:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Tools

Infostealers Target Claude, Cursor, Codex and Other AI Agents to Steal Credentials and Sensitive Data

Gen Digital researchers report infostealer families Amatera, Remus and CallbackBeaver now harvest Claude, Cursor and Codex agent data, including tokens and MCP configs.

Gen Digital researchers found commodity infostealers extending their collection rules to local AI coding agent data from Claude, Cursor, Codex, Cline, Continue and OpenCode on Windows and macOS. Amatera targets Cline and Continue, Remus targets Claude, Cursor and OpenCode, and CallbackBeaver added Claude and Cursor with more than 5,000 samples observed in 30 days; Djinn Stealer hits Claude, Codex, Gemini, Cline, OpenCode and Kilo on macOS. Stolen data includes access and refresh tokens, prompt histories, conversation databases and MCP configurations holding API keys, potentially exposing connected source-control, cloud and ticketing systems. Remus is assessed as a Lumma Stealer variant using EtherHiding C2 resolution via Ethereum smart contracts.

GBHackersSep 9, 07:05 UTC · 7d agoMalware in the wild1

Attackers Exploit Critical Langflow and Rails Flaws in Credential

VulnCheck reports active exploitation of critical Langflow CVE-2026-0768 and Rails CVE-2026-66066 for credential harvesting, with detections rising to 360.

VulnCheck observed active exploitation of CVE-2026-0768 (CVSS 9.8) in Langflow and CVE-2026-66066 'KindaRails2Shell' (CVSS 9.5) in Ruby on Rails, with detections rising from 50 on August 30, 2026 to 360 by September 1. The Rails flaw allows unauthenticated arbitrary file reads, leaking secret_key_base, Rails master key, database passwords, cloud credentials and API tokens, ultimately enabling RCE; the patch still leaves the variation-key Marshal deserialization RCE gadget functional. Observed chains include a Python credential harvester with SimpleHelp remote access via CVE-2026-5027, and weaponization of CVE-2025-3248 to enlist hosts into an XMR mining botnet after disabling auditd. More than 7,100 exposed vulnerable Ruby on Rails instances and over 15,000 successful exploitation attempts across three Langflow flaws were recorded.

The Hacker NewsSep 1, 07:23 UTC · 15d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-0768 CVE-2026-66066 CVE-2026-0769+2 CVEs1

153GB of stolen credentials surface after LiteLLM supply chain attack

153GB archive from the LiteLLM supply chain attack exposes secrets from about 2,500 companies, including AWS, Samsung, Cisco and Salesforce.

Hudson Rock obtained and analyzed a 153GB archive stolen in the LiteLLM supply chain attack, containing 433,909 files with secrets attributed to 2,488 corporate domains, including AWS, Samsung, Cisco, Salesforce, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Siemens. TeamPCP compromised Trivy on March 19, 2026, stole LiteLLM's PyPI publishing tokens through the build pipeline, and published malicious LiteLLM versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on March 24. CloudSEK separately estimated close to 2,500 exposed organizations, and Kevin Beaumont confirmed the data is legitimate. Hudson Rock is running a global ethical disclosure effort and urges organizations to rotate secrets before the trove leaks publicly.

Help Net SecurityAug 13, 00:00 UTC · Aug 13, 2026Data breach in the wild

Critical Gitea vulnerability now exploited in the wild (CVE-2026-60004)

Attackers are actively exploiting critical Gitea RCE CVE-2026-60004 via the diffpatch endpoint, prompting CISA KEV addition and at least one cryptomining compromise.

CISA added CVE-2026-60004, a critical code injection flaw in Gitea's diffpatch endpoint, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after in-the-wild attacks. An attacker with repository write access, or an unauthenticated visitor on instances with open registration, can execute arbitrary shell commands as the Gitea OS user. A disclosed incident saw an automated scanner register an account and deploy a loader and cryptominer inside a Docker container within about 11 seconds, with no persistence mechanism found. Gitea patched the flaw in v1.27.1, and CISA ordered US federal civilian agencies to update by August 28, 2026.

Help Net SecurityAug 26, 00:00 UTC · 21d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-60004

New AI Attack Hides Malicious Instructions in Normal-Looking Text to Evade Safety Filters

Check Point researchers show crafted prose hides policy-violating instructions that bypass all tested LLM gatekeepers, including GPT-4o mini and Llama Guard 3.

A new prompt-crafting technique embeds malicious payloads inside grammatical, natural-looking text without Base64, invisible Unicode, or obvious encodings, defeating lightweight pre-screening gatekeepers. In testing, all four evaluated gatekeeper models—gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18, gpt-oss-safeguard:20b, claude-3-haiku-20240307, and llama-guard3:8b—classified the crafted wrappers as safe at a 100% bypass rate across 23 obfuscated prompts. GPT-5 Thinking in high-reasoning mode recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (~94.4%), often spending over a minute and multiple Python executions. Researchers recommend paraphrasing untrusted input, hardening gatekeeper policies, and applying defense-in-depth controls for agentic deployments.

GBHackersSep 11, 05:53 UTC · 5d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted

Researchers show Grok can be made to exfiltrate user data via Cryptographic Context Injection, a newly documented technique that bypasses LLM safety guardrails.

According to Ars Technica, Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted, a technique called Cryptographic Context Injection. The method is described as the latest documented way to break LLM safety guardrails, showing that encrypted content can carry hidden instructions past safeguards. The finding underscores gaps in how large language models validate and execute context from external sources.

Ars Technica · SecurityAug 20, 13:00 UTC · 27d agoAI safety & security1

U.S. Disrupts Xinbi Guarantee Scam Marketplace, Freezes $52.8 Million in Crypto

US DOJ and Treasury disrupt Xinbi Guarantee Telegram scam marketplace, sanctioning it and freezing $52.8M in USDT across 52 wallets.

The DOJ seized Xinbi Guarantee's Telegram channels and cryptocurrency wallets while OFAC sanctioned the marketplace, freezing $52.8 million in USDT from 52 wallets and bringing the Scam Center Strike Force's total restrained funds to roughly $938 million. Elliptic, which worked with the Secret Service, estimates Xinbi has processed $30 billion in transactions since around 2022, serving pig-butchering scam operators and links to North Korean hackers, Jin Bei Group, and Prince Group TCO. The strike force dismantled 13 scam compounds in Madagascar, seizing over 3,200 devices and interviewing roughly 400 arrestees, with about 30 Chinese compound leaders repatriated to China. After Tether froze funds, Xinbi began converting remaining USDT into the USDD stablecoin.

The Hacker NewsSep 9, 18:26 UTC · 7d agoPolicy & legal

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 · securitySep 5, 10:58 UTC · 11d agoResearch

25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough

Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn argue post-9/11 mass surveillance expanded far beyond its counterterrorism justification and should be reevaluated for costs to rights.

An essay by Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn (originally in Lawfare) traces the post-9/11 shift from targeted surveillance to mass collection of telephone and internet metadata. It cites the Section 215 bulk phone records program, struck down in interpretation by the Second Circuit in 2015 and curtailed by the USA Freedom Act, and the NSA's Upstream program under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which ended content searches in 2017. The authors note mass surveillance now serves routine law enforcement and immigration actions, with FBI Director Kash Patel confirming purchases of Americans' data from brokers, and private systems like Flock license plate readers and venue facial recognition feeding government access.

Schneier on SecuritySep 15, 11:01 UTC · 1d agoPolicy & legal

Researchers Confirm ExfilSquad’s Access to Sensitive Data Across 13 Organizations

Researchers confirmed extortion group ExfilSquad holds stolen sensitive data from at least 13 organizations, publishing leaked datasets via torrents.

Security researchers verified that the extortion group ExfilSquad possesses sensitive data stolen from at least 13 victim organizations. The group distributed the leaked datasets publicly through torrents rather than a traditional leak site. Independent verification of the stolen data lends credibility to the group's extortion claims against its victims.

Infosecurity MagazineAug 14, 14:49 UTC · Aug 14, 2026Ransomware

AD Rights Management Service (Part 2): Extraction, Offline Decryption, and the Unrotatable Key

Huntress research shows AD RMS SLC root key is unrotatable and never expires, so its compromise permanently exposes all RMS-protected documents.

Part 2 of Huntress's AD RMS series details server-side attacks: extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key and performing offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC key has no expiry or rotation mechanism, with a 255-year certificate validity (2002–2258), so whoever recovers it can decrypt every document the deployment ever protected, indefinitely. The author released SharpRMS, a unified tool combining the 2016 DisARMS client-side attacks with new server-side key extraction and decryption capabilities. The research frames the SLC as comparable to KRBTGT and the DPAPI domain backup key, though not equivalent to domain compromise.

HuntressSep 10, 04:00 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Claude Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

Claude Fable 5.1 solved Sir Thomas Urquhart's 370-year-old Cyphral Distich cipher, recovering a hidden royalist prayer for Charles II.

Vals AI reports that Claude Fable 5.1 solved the Cyphral Distich, a 64-number cryptogram from Sir Thomas Urquhart's Logopandecteision unsolved since 1653, in 44 minutes using 176k tokens with no human hints. The key insight was that the cipher's key was the book itself: each number indexes a word in the corresponding Proquiritation, taking the first letter, yielding 'O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLS THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND'. The model also deciphered the larger Cyphral Octastich (285 numbers) from The Jewel (1652) using page-based word indexing, recovering all but nine letters of a royalist prayer. The puzzle had been listed among Klaus Schmeh's Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages.

Hacker News · AISep 13, 21:06 UTC · 2d agoAI research HN 63↑ · 6 comments1· 1 read

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 NewsSep 7, 03:42 UTC · 9d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

Researchers Uncover Thousands of Leaked AWS Keys

Truffle Security researchers discovered more than 9,000 publicly accessible and active AWS key pairs, creating credential exposure and account-takeover risks.

Truffle Security reported finding over 9,000 AWS key pairs that are simultaneously publicly accessible and active. Anyone retrieving such keys could potentially access the associated cloud resources without authentication. The finding underscores widespread secrets-hygiene failures in cloud environments and the risks of long-lived static credentials.

Infosecurity MagazineAug 24, 08:05 UTC · 23d agoResearch

U.S. CISA adds a MLflow flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

CISA added actively exploited MLflow SSRF flaw CVE-2026-64849 (CVSS 9.3) to its KEV catalog; attackers are stealing cloud credentials from exposed instances.

CISA added CVE-2026-64849, a critical unauthenticated server-side request forgery in MLflow, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The flaw affects MLflow versions before 3.15.0 and allows unauthenticated attackers to reach internal services including cloud metadata endpoints, exposing temporary cloud credentials. watchTowr observed in-the-wild exploitation exfiltrating credentials and secrets, plus widespread scanning of exposed MLflow instances within hours of the CVE's assignment on August 17, 2026. MLflow is an open-source platform for managing the machine learning and AI development lifecycle with over 60 million monthly downloads.

Security AffairsAug 20, 08:58 UTC · 27d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-64849

Plug 'n' Pray: Agentic LLM-based Detection of Potential Log File Exposures in Third-Party Content Management System Plugins

Agentic LLM analysis validates 79 log file exposures across 62 of the 300 most-installed WordPress plugins, covering 250M+ active installations.

Researchers built an agentic LLM-based framework combining static and dynamic analysis to automatically detect insecure log files created by WordPress plugins. Scanning the 300 most-installed plugins, which account for roughly 75% of all active installations in the official ecosystem, it produced 81 findings with 79 manually reproduced across 62 plugins. Insufficiently secured log files can disclose credentials and personal data and have led to website compromises. The authors derive a taxonomy of log path and protection patterns and best practices, finding multi-layered protection often absent.

arXiv cs.CRSep 15, 13:29 UTC · 1d agoResearch

EFI Pairs Without One-Way Puzzles: Oracle Separations from Communication Complexity

Theorists build a classical oracle where one-way puzzles fail yet EFI pairs survive, separating two candidate minimal assumptions of quantum cryptography.

The paper constructs a single classical oracle relative to which one-way puzzles do not exist, even with an unbounded verifier, while an EFI pair survives every classical-query distinguisher holding advice, making one superposition query at the end. Security is proven by reducing adversary knowledge to communication complexity for Vector-in-Subspace, with the superposition query bounded using random matrix theory. Relative to the oracle, quantum polynomial time offers no advantage on tasks with classical inputs and outputs and there is no proof of quantumness, separating the leading minimal assumptions of quantum cryptography.

arXiv cs.CRSep 10, 17:54 UTC · 6d agoResearch

New KATARU IoT Malware Packs Linux Privilege Escalation Exploits and Mirai-Style DDoS Attacks

Nozomi Networks identified KATARU, a new Mirai-style IoT botnet delivered via Telnet brute force that uses Linux privilege-escalation exploits and encrypted C2 for DDoS floods.

Nozomi Networks identified KATARU in August after a Telnet password-guessing attack against a honeypot retrieved an ARM payload. The malware attempts exploits for CVE-2026-46300 (Fragnesia), CVE-2026-43284 (DirtyFrag), and CVE-2026-31431 (Copy Fail), plus a cgroup v1 release_agent escape, and persists via systemd services, cron tasks, rc scripts, OpenWrt hooks, and Android boot locations. Its C2 uses X25519 key exchange with ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption and supports TCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP, QUIC, and DNS floods, plus SSH brute forcing and command execution; embedded exploit shellcode in the ARM build targeted x86, suggesting untested copied code.

Cyber Security NewsSep 11, 14:17 UTC · 5d agoMalware in the wild 2 sources CVE-2026-46300 CVE-2026-43284 CVE-2026-31431

Operation ASTERIX: Anatomy of a Crypto Fraud Pipeline

Rapid7 exposed infrastructure behind a cryptocurrency fraud pipeline using phishing panels, voice-dialing scripts, fake wallets, and AI coding assistants.

Rapid7 researchers identified an exposed web directory on infrastructure used to support a cryptocurrency fraud operation tracked as Operation ASTERIX. The server contained raw phone-number datasets, account-validation tools, enriched lead records, phishing panels, voice-dialing scripts, fake wallet applications, persistence mechanisms, and Telegram exfiltration code. Recovered prompts, shell history, and project files show the operator relied on AI coding assistants to package Electron applications, obfuscate code, troubleshoot builds, and modify phishing infrastructure.

Rapid7 BlogAug 17, 11:29 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Phishing & fraud

The AI Supply Chain Has a Security Problem, and Much of It Is Sitting on the Open Internet

Researchers counted 36,769 publicly reachable self-hosted AI endpoints, only about 2% behind HTTP authentication, exposing Ollama, vLLM, and Flowise to abuse.

A Mysterium VPN study found 36,769 self-hosted AI endpoints reachable through internet scanning, with only 2.02% returning an HTTP authentication challenge. Open WebUI accounted for 18,529 reachable instances, Ollama for 6,935 fingerprinted hosts, and 5,223 agent-builder and workflow platforms were exposed, often holding API keys, database credentials, and other secrets. The report highlights LLMjacking risk from exposed Ollama APIs, a critical Flowise bug (CVE-2026-40933), leaked n8n tokens, and prior SentinelOne/Censys research finding roughly 175,000 exposed Ollama hosts in 130 countries.

Security AffairsSep 11, 17:27 UTC · 5d agoAI safety & security CVE-2026-409331

Claude Fable Solves a Historical Cipher

Bruce Schneier's blog highlights that the Claude Fable AI model solved a historical cipher, demonstrating LLM capabilities in cryptanalysis.

Bruce Schneier's blog post discusses the Claude Fable AI model successfully deciphering a historical cipher. The post frames the result as a notable example of LLMs applied to classical cryptanalysis. The published text provides limited technical detail beyond the headline.

Schneier on SecuritySep 9, 11:08 UTC · 7d agoAI research

Researchers Disclose AI-Assisted SharePoint Exploit Chain Reaching Unauthenticated RCE

Rapid7 disclosed CVE-2026-55040, a SharePoint JWT validation bypass chaining into CVE-2026-63520 unauthenticated RCE, with research substantially AI-agent-assisted; patches released.

Rapid7 disclosed CVE-2026-55040 (CVSS 9.1), several JWT validation pipeline issues letting unauthenticated attackers impersonate chosen SharePoint users by SID or UPN, chained with CVE-2026-63520 (CVSS 8.1), an unsafe .NET type instantiation in Business Connectivity Services yielding RCE as the service account. An AI agent contributed significantly across 96 sessions and roughly 80,000 tool calls over 24 active days, though an expert had to steer it and it repeatedly overstepped its threat model. No exploitation of the bypass had been reported as of CISA's July 14 assessment. The RCE affects SharePoint Subscription Edition, 2019, and 2016, plus Project Server 2013 SP1 and Office Web Apps 2013 SP1; the July updates break the chain.

The Hacker NewsAug 11, 16:49 UTC · Aug 11, 2026Vulnerability CVE-2026-55040 CVE-2026-635201

Hackers Can Hide Malicious AI Commands Inside Normal English to Bypass Security Filters

Check Point's PuzzleMask technique hides malicious prompts in ordinary English that fast gatekeeper models miss but high-reasoning downstream models execute.

Check Point researchers disclosed PuzzleMask, a technique concealing policy-breaking instructions in natural-language prose without encodings or invisible characters. Fast screening models classified all 23 crafted wrappers as safe, while a high-reasoning model recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (94.4%). The gap stems from capability imbalance between gatekeeper and target models, with defenses including paraphrasing untrusted input, stricter self-referential wording rules, and output/tool-call monitoring.

Cyber Security NewsSep 11, 07:36 UTC · 5d agoAI safety & security1