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Telegram Desktop Flaw Lets Hidden JavaScript Exfiltrate Messages From HTML Exports

Telegram Desktop HTML export XSS (CVSS 8.2) let bot messages exfiltrate exported chats; fixed in 7.0.1 but old exports stay vulnerable.

ExPatch researchers found that Telegram Desktop versions 4.15.1 (March 2024) through 6.9.3 wrote bot inline-keyboard button text into HTML chat exports without escaping, allowing a bot to plant invisible JavaScript. When a user opened the export in a browser, the script could exfiltrate every message in that 1,000-message file, rewrite the displayed content, or fake a verification form. The flaw (rated CVSS 3.1 8.2) was fixed by commit 8457d13a in 6.9.4 beta (July 3, 2026) and 7.0.1 stable (July 14, 2026), but pre-fix exports remain dangerous since updating the app does not fix old files. No CVE identifier or Telegram security advisory exists, and no exploitation in the wild is claimed.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 1d agofirst · 1d agoVulnerability 2 sources1

Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Software Java Deserialization Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Cisco fixed an unauthenticated Java deserialization RCE in FMC's External Database Access feature allowing root command execution via a TCP port.

Insecure deserialization of a user-supplied Java byte stream in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center's External Database Access feature lets an unauthenticated remote attacker execute arbitrary commands and elevate to root. Exploitation requires sending a crafted serialized stream to a specific TCP port from a host configured in the external database access list. Cisco has released software updates.

Cisco Security Advisories · 1h agoAdvisory 6 sources

Cisco Secure Email Gateway Vulnerability Exploited in Attacks (CVE-2026-76461)

Cisco Secure Email Gateway flaw CVE-2026-76461 enables root command execution via crafted email SQL injection and is actively exploited, added to CISA KEV.

Cisco disclosed critical vulnerability CVE-2026-76461 in Secure Email Gateway, caused by insufficient validation in email parsing logic, allowing arbitrary SQL statements that lead to root-level command execution. CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog with a patch deadline of September 17, 2026. The bug affects all SEG deployments regardless of configuration, with fixed releases including 15.5.5-014, 16.0.4-302, and 16.5.0-780. Defenders can check mail_logs for anomalous 'COPY ... TO PROGRAM' SQL statements to detect compromise.

Qualys ThreatPROTECTupdated · 3h agofirst · 1d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 17 sourcesCVE-2026-76461

Cisco Secure Email Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions Ciphertext Decryption Vulnerabilities

Cisco released an advisory for S/MIME ciphertext decryption flaws in Secure Email that could let unauthenticated remote attackers recover plaintext via machine-in-the-middle.

Multiple vulnerabilities in the S/MIME decryption functionality of Cisco Secure Email stem from insufficient validation of message integrity. An unauthenticated remote attacker could intercept and modify traffic between email gateways using a machine-in-the-middle technique to obtain plaintext from encrypted messages. No workarounds are available; no CVE identifiers or exploitation status were included in the advisory text.

Cisco Security Advisories · 8d agoAdvisory

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 · 27d agoPhishing & fraud

Telegram Desktop XSS Vulnerability Lets Attackers Steal Entire Chat Histories

Stored XSS in Telegram Desktop HTML chat exports (CVSS 8.2) could let attacker-controlled inline keyboard buttons steal full chat histories.

ExPatch researchers Denis and Aleksander Rostilov found a stored XSS in Telegram Desktop's HTML chat export pipeline affecting builds before Beta 6.9.4 and Stable 7.0.1. Unsanitized inline keyboard button text becomes executable JavaScript when a user exports a chat and opens the HTML file in a browser, exposing messages, metadata, and local file paths, and enabling phishing overlays. Telegram patched the issue in commit 8457d13a during July 2026; no CVE had been assigned at disclosure time.

GBHackers · 1d agoVulnerability

From Specs to Apps: Verifying and Monitoring Models of Signal and WhatsApp

Researchers use the SpecMon runtime monitor to verify WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop against formal Signal protocol models, finding undocumented libsignal fork differences.

The paper applies SpecMon, a runtime monitoring tool, to check whether executions of WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop conform to formal models of the Signal protocol. The authors instrument both applications and build Tamarin-compatible multiset-rewrite models, including the first model of WhatsApp Web's implementation and the most detailed model to date of Signal's original protocol. They verify authentication and secrecy properties for core Signal protocol components, show monitoring detects deliberately injected faults with low overhead, and identify previously undocumented behavioral differences between the original libsignal library and WhatsApp's fork.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

ChatGPT advanced account security adds passkeys and hardware keys

OpenAI launches Advanced Account Security for ChatGPT and Codex, replacing passwords with passkeys or hardware keys and disabling email/SMS recovery.

The opt-in setting disables password sign-in plus email and SMS account recovery for ChatGPT and Codex accounts, allowing only passkeys, hardware security keys, and user-held recovery keys, with shortened sessions and automatic exclusion of enrolled accounts' conversations from model training. OpenAI partnered with Yubico to offer discounted bundles of the YubiKey C Nano and C NFC, while any FIDO2/WebAuthn-compliant key or software passkey is supported, mirroring standards adopted by Google, Microsoft, and GitHub. Individual members of Trusted Access for Cyber using the most permissive models must enable the setting from June 1, 2026, or their organizations can attest to phishing-resistant authentication in their single sign-on.

Help Net Security · 23d agoAI industry

Russian Hackers Phish EU Officials Over Messaging Apps

Russian nation-state hackers are phishing EU officials via Signal and WhatsApp as espionage shifts from email to messaging apps.

Russian state-linked threat groups have shifted phishing operations away from email toward messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp, targeting EU officials. In response, EU governments are trying to move away from popular messaging platforms. The report highlights evolving social engineering tactics in nation-state espionage campaigns against government targets.

Dark Reading · 20d agoThreat actor

GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

GrapheneOS published version 13 of its rewritten Messaging app, a messaging tool from the privacy-hardened Android OS project.

GrapheneOS released version 13 of its rewritten Messaging application on GitHub. The release surfaced via a Hacker News thread with 61 points and 22 comments. The provided text contains only the release listing, with no vulnerability or exploit details; GrapheneOS is a privacy- and security-focused Android OS project, making the release relevant to mobile privacy tooling.

Hacker News · AI · 4d agoToolsHN 61↑ · 22 comments1

ChatGPT flaw lets attackers pull Gmail data across accounts via a hidden channel

Check Point found a ChatGPT flaw letting attackers read victims' Gmail and connected-app data via hidden cross-session instructions; OpenAI patched it.

Check Point Research discovered a covert cross-account command channel in ChatGPT's code execution environment, where containers meant to be isolated shared metadata through an internal service based on JFrog Artifactory. In a proof of concept, a victim's session was tricked into retrieving Gmail email data and relaying it to an attacker-controlled session during an ordinary-looking interaction, with reach extending to any connected apps the session was authorized for, including Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and GitHub. OpenAI fixed the issue and decommissioned the internal service; the same shared infrastructure was also involved in the separately disclosed Hugging Face compromise, though via different techniques.

CSO Online · 7d agoAI safety & security

The Shared Clipboard Inside the Sandbox: Cross-Account Data Leakage in ChatGPT

Check Point discovers cross-account data leakage in ChatGPT: isolated code-execution containers communicate via shared JFrog Artifactory, enabling covert Gmail exfiltration.

Check Point Research found a covert bidirectional channel between ChatGPT code-execution containers belonging to different accounts, which were supposed to be isolated from each other and the public internet. Both could reach the same internal JFrog Artifactory instance used for package delivery, whose exposed Item Management API allowed a 'shared clipboard' between containers. In a proof of concept, a hidden instruction in a shared conversation made ChatGPT retrieve email data from the victim's connected Gmail account and send it to the attacker's account while the victim received a normal answer. The same channel could exfiltrate conversation history and session files; OpenAI recently described a similar isolation weakness in its postmortem of the Hugging Face incident.

Check Point Research · 8d agoAI safety & security1

Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 (1999)

Seminal 1999 USENIX study finds most novice users cannot correctly sign and encrypt email with PGP 5.0 in 90 minutes.

Whitten and Tygar's USENIX Security Symposium paper evaluates whether cryptography novices can use PGP 5.0 effectively, using cognitive walkthrough analysis and a laboratory user test. The majority of test participants failed to successfully sign and encrypt a message within 90 minutes, despite PGP 5.0 having a well-regarded graphical interface. The authors argue that security requires usability standards beyond those of general consumer software and propose domain-specific UI design principles for security. The paper is a foundational reference in usable security research.

Lobsters · security · 7d agoResearch

Telegram Desktop Flaw Could Turn Old Chat Exports Into Data Theft Traps

ExPatch disclosed stored XSS in Telegram Desktop HTML export letting bot messages steal chat data when exports open in browsers.

ExPatch researchers Denis and Aleksander Rostilov found a stored XSS flaw (CVSS 8.2) where bot inline keyboard button text was written unescaped into HTML chat exports, executing attacker JavaScript in browsers. The payload can persist in chat history for months, exfiltrate messages, metadata, and local file paths, and rewrite the page, spreading via forwarded messages without bot membership. Telegram fixed it by applying SerializeString(), first stable fixed release 7.0.1 shipped July 14, 2026, but HTML exports created with vulnerable versions remain dangerous.

Security Affairs · 1d agoVulnerability1· 1 read

Bring Licensed Threat Intelligence into Every Conversation with SOCRadar and ChatGPT

SOCRadar launched a Threat Intelligence MCP app connecting ChatGPT to its licensed threat intelligence via OAuth-authenticated MCP server.

SOCRadar announced a Threat Intelligence MCP app that connects ChatGPT to the SOCRadar MCP server over OAuth. The integration exposes the vendor's licensed intelligence models directly in ChatGPT conversations. The announcement is a vendor product launch with no incident or vulnerability content.

SOCRadar · 9d agoTools

DDoS Attacks Cause Major Threema Outages

Sustained distributed denial-of-service attacks knocked Swiss secure messenger Threema offline for hours before upstream filtering restored service; On-Prem users unaffected.

Threema suffered a series of large-scale DDoS attacks that left its Swiss secure messaging service unavailable for about four hours Tuesday evening, with intermittent outages into Wednesday morning until restoration at 12:23 p.m. CEST. Attacks also targeted colocation partner Nine and kept changing patterns, complicating mitigation. Threema deployed additional upstream DDoS protection on August 14 and plans status page improvements; Threema On-Prem customers running their own infrastructure were unaffected.

Security Affairs · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild

ChatGPT Sandbox Flaw Lets Attackers Steal Gmail Data Across Accounts via Hidden Channel

Check Point found a cross-account covert channel in ChatGPT sandboxes via shared JFrog Artifactory metadata, enabling session hijacking and Gmail data theft. Now fixed.

Check Point discovered that ChatGPT code-execution containers across different accounts could all reach the same internal JFrog Artifactory instance, whose Item Properties API was readable and writable by all accounts, creating a covert cross-account communication channel. Attackers could plant hidden instructions via pasted prompts, shared chat links, or custom GPTs, then trigger tasks in a victim's session to exfiltrate connected-app data such as Gmail, using ChatGPT's default 'Important actions' setting that permits reads without confirmation. OpenAI confirmed and decommissioned the shared Artifactory instance, closing the channel before publication.

Cyber Security News · 8d agoAI safety & security1

Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Secure Email and Web Manager Security Hardening Release: September 2026

Cisco's September 2026 hardening release for Secure Email Gateway and Secure Email and Web Manager patches internally found flaws, one actively exploited.

Cisco issued a security hardening release for Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Secure Email and Web Manager covering multiple internally discovered vulnerabilities, grouped by CWE class to streamline patching. Cisco states one of the vulnerabilities is known to be actively exploited. The exploited issue is the Cisco Secure Email Gateway SQL Injection Vulnerability detailed in a companion advisory. Software updates are available.

Cisco Security Advisories · 2d agoAdvisory in the wild6

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 Security · Aug 12, 2026Tools

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 · 6d agoResearch

ChatGPT Flaw Let a Planted Prompt Send a Victim's Gmail Data to Another Account

Check Point showed a planted prompt could make ChatGPT silently exfiltrate Gmail data via a hidden cross-container channel; OpenAI took the service offline.

Check Point Research demonstrated that a single planted instruction in a ChatGPT conversation could make the model silently exfiltrate Gmail data, chat history, and files to an attacker's account while replying normally to the user. The covert channel abused read/write properties on files in an internal JFrog Artifactory instance shared by ChatGPT code-execution containers across accounts, turning package metadata into shared storage. Injection vectors included pasted prompts, shared conversations, and custom GPT builder instructions; default connected-app permissions allowed Gmail reads without user approval. OpenAI confirmed the internal service was taken offline after disclosure; this is Check Point's second reported ChatGPT covert channel after a DNS-based one fixed in February.

The Hacker News · 8d agoAI safety & security

Cisco Secure Email Gateway SQL Injection Vulnerability

Unauthenticated SQL injection in Cisco Secure Email Gateway email parsing enables root command execution via crafted messages; patches released.

A vulnerability in email parsing of Cisco AsyncOS for Cisco Secure Email Gateway allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on the underlying operating system. Insufficient validation in the email parsing logic lets a crafted email containing malicious SQL statements achieve arbitrary SQL execution and root command execution. Cisco has released software updates, and the companion September 2026 hardening advisory states this flaw is actively exploited.

Cisco Security Advisories · 2d agoVulnerability in the wild

gr-PHYSEC: Real-time Channel-based Key Generation for Physical Layer Secure Wireless Communications

gr-PHYSEC GNU Radio module derives symmetric encryption keys from wireless channel randomness using a neural network, validated on robotic platforms with ADALM-Pluto SDRs.

The paper introduces gr-PHYSEC, a GNU Radio out-of-tree module for real-time physical-layer key generation that derives symmetric keys from the wireless channel's inherent randomness instead of pre-shared secrets. A trained neural network extracts channel features between trusted parties during probe exchanges; features are quantized into binary keys, reconciled via Reed-Solomon encoding, and secured with SHA-512 hashing before direct use for encryption. Real-world experiments at the FAU CAAI connected robotics testbed using ADALM Pluto software-defined radios and NVIDIA Jetson Orin demonstrated low key disagreement rates and NIST-verified randomness. Source code is publicly available on GitHub.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Turns out Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

Polling shows two-thirds of Brits distrust any government, current or future, with access to their encrypted chats.

Polling reported by The Register finds two-thirds of Britons do not trust the current government, or any future one, with access to their encrypted chats. The result adds public-sentiment context to UK debates over lawful access to end-to-end encrypted messaging. No incident, vulnerability, or legislation is described in the excerpt.

The Register · Security · 17d agoPolicy & legal

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 · 1d agoResearch

Communicating Under Pressure: Best Practices for Service Providers

CISA, FBI, and international partners issued guidance on crisis communications for service providers during IT and OT outages, emphasizing clarity, transparency, and backup channels.

CISA, the FBI, and international partners published guidance on planning and executing clear, timely, audience-appropriate communications during IT and OT service outages, whether caused by cyber threat actors, human error, or natural hazards. The guidance stresses clarity, accountability, and transparency, and warns that outages at one organization can cascade across interconnected systems. It recommends critical infrastructure owners assume telecommunications may be unreliable and integrate backup communication methods into crisis plans, and points to CISA's CI Fortify initiative for OT isolation and recovery resources.

CISA Advisories · 14d agoAdvisory

VU#431093: TCG TPM 2.0 reference code found vulnerable to information leakage and timing side-channel attacks

CERT/CC discloses two TPM 2.0 reference code flaws allowing RSA key decryption and forged TPM attestations via crafted commands.

CERT/CC published VU#431093 covering two vulnerabilities in the TCG TPM 2.0 reference implementation: CVE-2026-6726 (information leakage via falsified TPM keys) and CVE-2026-6727 (timing side-channel in RSA OAEP decryption). An attacker with privileged access to a TPM command interface could send crafted TPM commands to decrypt ciphertexts for affected TPM-managed RSA keys, including the RSA Endorsement Key, or obtain credentials enabling forged TPM 2.0 attestations. Remediation is tracked in TCGVRT010 and TCGVRT0011.

CERT/CC Vulnerability Notes · Aug 11, 2026VulnerabilityCVE-2026-6726CVE-2026-6727