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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 · 6d agoResearch

Bot detection arrives in CrowdSec 1.8.0, along with two DoS fixes

CrowdSec 1.8.0 adds WAF bot detection via challenges and fingerprinting and fixes denial-of-service flaws in HTTP and Kubernetes audit datasources.

CrowdSec 1.8.0, released August 31, introduces bot detection in its WAF using client challenges and fingerprinting, plus fixes for two denial-of-service vulnerabilities in the HTTP acquisition datasource (unbounded decompressed body size, trusted Content-Length) and the Kubernetes audit webhook datasource (unbounded request body reads). The release also adds a dedicated Kubernetes datasource pulling logs directly from the apiserver, new HTTP helpers for external queries in the expression language, and performance work on the decisions stream endpoint. The challenge requires SSE4.1 and writable-executable memory, so some legitimate visitors may be blocked.

Help Net Security · 16d agoTools

Microsoft Offers $60,000 Bounty for Critical Cross-Tenant Vulnerabilities

Microsoft expands Dynamics 365 and Power Platform bug bounty, paying up to $60,000 for critical cross-tenant vulnerabilities.

Microsoft expanded its bounty incentives for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, with qualifying rewards from $1,250 to $60,000. Critical cross-tenant vulnerabilities receive a 100% award multiplier and important ones 50%, while critical AI inference manipulation or inferential disclosure can earn up to $30,000. Scope covers Dynamics 365 apps, Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio, Power Pages, Dataverse, and selected on-premises products. Reports must be rated Critical or Important and submitted via the MSRC Researcher Portal.

GBHackers · 2d agoIndustry1

Microsoft Offers Up to $30,000 for Critical AI Flaws in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Microsoft expands AI bug bounty to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, paying up to $30,000 for critical inference manipulation flaws.

Microsoft's bug bounty program offers up to $30,000 for critical 'Inference Manipulation' or 'Inferential Information Disclosure' bugs in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, including Copilot Studio, AI Builder, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. Payouts scale by report quality ($30,000/$20,000/$12,000 for critical) with important-severity AI flaws earning $6,000-$20,000, plus 20% multipliers for Dataverse privilege escalation and Plugin Sandbox escapes. Prompt injection affecting only the attacker, hallucinated execution, and system-prompt disclosure are excluded from scope.

Cyber Security News · 2d agoIndustry

A Feature-Rich Embedded NIDS with eBPF/XDP: Detector and Architecture Trade-offs

eBPF/XDP-based NIDS with Isolation Forest reaches 0.965 live F1 on DDoS replay; gRPC microservices match monolithic accuracy within 2ms overhead.

The paper presents a DDoS-focused network intrusion detection system for transport networks built with Ericsson, combining a statistical baseline with an Isolation Forest trained on flow features from GoFlowMeter, an open-source Go implementation of CICFlowMeter, plus eBPF/XDP kernel-level traffic filtering. On a Raspberry Pi 5 testbed replaying CIC-DDoS2019 as real traffic, the Isolation Forest achieves 0.965 recall/F1 live in the monolithic variant, catching low-volume attack windows the baseline misses. gRPC microservices nearly match monolithic accuracy adding under 2ms per window, while the Kafka pipeline trails by roughly nine percentage points and adds about 27ms.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Code review used to be the only way to catch these bugs

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 says its NOVA system found 14,090 vulnerabilities in 3,915 open-source projects, mostly non-crashing bugs like access control flaws.

Unit 42's NOVA system analyzed 3,915 open-source projects over two months and reported 14,090 validated vulnerabilities, only 85 of which matched previously documented findings. 92% of findings fell outside fuzzing-friendly categories, clustering instead in access control, path traversal, injection, prototype pollution, and SSRF; language ecosystems showed distinct weakness profiles. Of 5,421 supply-chain findings, 1,280 were flaws in dependencies while 4,141 were downstream exposures, 2,776 validated with working proof-of-concepts. Unit 42 warned that faster discovery combined with an average 55-day patch deployment window has collapsed the patch-to-exploit gap.

Help Net Security · 22d agoResearch1

AI Agents Are Here. So Are the Threats.

Unit 42 demonstrates nine framework-agnostic attack scenarios against AI agents built with CrewAI and AutoGen, causing data leakage, credential theft and remote code execution.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 investigated how attackers can target agentic applications, implementing two functionally identical apps with the open-source CrewAI and AutoGen frameworks and executing the same attacks on both. Nine attack scenarios produce outcomes including information leakage, credential theft, tool exploitation and remote code execution. Findings show most vulnerabilities are framework-agnostic, arising from insecure design patterns, misconfigurations and unsafe tool integrations rather than flaws in the frameworks themselves. The team published defense strategies per scenario and open-sourced the source code and datasets on GitHub.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

When AI Remembers Too Much

Unit 42 PoC shows indirect prompt injection can poison Amazon Bedrock Agent long-term memory, enabling silent exfiltration of conversation history across future sessions.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 published a proof of concept showing that indirect prompt injection can silently poison the long-term memory of Amazon Bedrock Agents when the memory feature is enabled. Malicious content on a webpage or document manipulates the agent's session summarization process, so injected instructions persist across sessions and are added to later orchestration prompts, silently exfiltrating user conversation history. The issue is not a vulnerability in the Amazon Bedrock platform but an illustration of the broader unsolved LLM prompt-injection challenge. Amazon reviewed the research and stated that Bedrock Guardrails with the prompt-attack policy provides effective mitigation.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

When AI Agents Go Rogue: Agent Session Smuggling Attack in A2A Systems

Unit 42 unveils agent session smuggling, where a rogue AI agent hides covert instructions in established Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol sessions to manipulate victim agents.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 discovered agent session smuggling, a new attack technique in which a malicious AI agent exploits an established cross-agent session under the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to send covert instructions hidden among benign client requests and server responses. The technique leverages the implicit trust agents place in collaborating agents and the stateful, multi-turn nature of A2A sessions; the researchers stress it affects any stateful protocol, not an A2A flaw. Unlike one-shot data-based attacks, a rogue agent can converse, adapt and build false trust over multiple interactions. Proposed mitigations include human-in-the-loop enforcement, cryptographically signed AgentCards for remote agent verification, and context-grounding to detect injected instructions.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security2