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This Week In Security: FBI Gets Hacked, Muse Vulnerable To ClickFix, Popular Rust Developers At Risk, And New Attacks Against RSA

September 25, 2026 by 13 Comments

The prolific ShinyHunters group has announced it used a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft to exploit the FBI jobs website and gain access to the AWS GovCloud instances and dump 2 TB of employee data. GovCloud being a special, locked-down version of the Amazon Web Services cloud for US government users.

ShinyHunters has previously been involved in dozens of high-profile hacks and ransomware incidents.  Some of the highest-profile incidents include Jaguar-Land Rover, causing a measurable impact on the UK GDP, Grubhub, Carnival Cruise Lines, Rockstar Games, and multiple universities and educational institutions, casinos, and other government agencies.  ShinyHunters has also been credited with the hack of the Canvas educational program in the spring of 2026 where data including test results and chat logs of hundreds of millions of students, teachers, and staff was stolen.  ShinyHunters has generally been identified as an international group of criminals, often teenagers, who will demand a BitCoin ransom of several million US dollars, with the threat of the stolen data being leaked if the victims do not pay.

On May 15, 2026 the FBI released a bulletin on the activities of ShinyHunters, focusing on the Canvas educational hack.  In the report, the FBI said that the group uses “harassment strategies, sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members”.  ShinyHunters says that this is not accurate, and that they will release the FBI employee data, including information of employees and their family members, if the agency does not retract the statements, telling The Register “I have been doing my very best to combat these allegations, and this is the best way to do it”.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: FBI Gets Hacked, Muse Vulnerable To ClickFix, Popular Rust Developers At Risk, And New Attacks Against RSA” →

This Week In Security: Flock Cameras Are Old, Microsoft Patches Patches, And Researchers Attack SSH

September 18, 2026 by 10 Comments

Leak site Distributed Denial of Secrets has released a dump of the filesystems of a Flock camera, and Micah Lee has published a dive into the contents.  Apparently the Flock security model did not include “angry citizens with a hacksaw in the middle of the night” in the physical security category.

The first thing Micah notes is that the Flock hardware runs Android 8.1 (for those not keeping track, the current Android release is Android 17 released in June 2026).  The version of Android running on the Flock camera was last patched in June of 2018, and the Linux kernel (3.18.71) is over nine years out of date, and the 3.18 series went end-of-life in 2019.

You might assume “wouldn’t an operating system this old have known vulnerabilities?”, and you’d be completely right.  Micah calls out two in particular, one in the Qualcomm GPU which allows any program to manipulate kernel memory and gain root (similar, yet simpler, than the spate of kernel vulnerabilities this year that allowed manipulating memory via the disk IO cache), and the “WrongZone” vulnerability which allows a process to escalate to root via socket handling errors.  You might also guess both of these have been patched, and again, you’d be right, in 2021 and 2018 respectively.

Digging deeper, Micah discovers that API keys with access into the Flock infrastructure appear to be hard-coded into the binaries.  Each camera appears to request credentials from an authentication server, using the MAC address of the camera.  After obtaining the credentials from an Okta Auth0 sign-in service, the Flock stores them, in plain text.

Also stored on the camera unencrypted are logs and position data:  The camera dumped to Distributed Denial of Secrets came from a suburb of Milwaukee. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Flock Cameras Are Old, Microsoft Patches Patches, And Researchers Attack SSH” →

This Week In Security: It’s Patch Tuesday Again, TVs Spying, Supply Chain Worms Return, Prolonged Hack Impacts, Stolen IDs

September 11, 2026 by 16 Comments

Several times this summer, Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, the monthly roundup of major security patches for Microsoft products, has included record-breaking numbers of security fixes. The August 2026 patch set actually seemed to catch up. Was this a sign of the bug apocalypse lessening? Ha, nope!

Brian Krebs at Krebs On Security once again brings his excellent roundup of Patch Tuesday events, with this months patch set absolutely crushing previous numbers with nearly 1,000 security fixes.

Two of the fixes are for zero-day vulnerabilities under active exploitation in the wild, both allowing privilege escalation on Windows. Privilege escalation bugs turn general vulnerabilities in applications and games into full administrator access to gain persistence and deploy ransomware, and generally make any vulnerability significantly worse.

Krebs also calls out a CVSS 9.8 (so close to a perfect 10!) vulnerability that allows remote code execution in the Windows shell with no user interaction and no authentication, a remotely exploitable DNS bug present since Windows Server 2012 and Windows 10 which will likely see exploitation in the wild soon, and over a hundred other bugs are ranked “Critical”.

How the sheer volume of vulnerabilities in this patch will fit with recent Microsoft recommendations that companies should apply the patches immediately remains to be seen. (Likely: not very well, depending on what new behavior and issues the fixes cause!)

Is Your LG TV Spying on You?

Gamers Nexus continues their trend of high-quality investigation, and they have posted another tremendous multi-hour investigatory video. This time Gamers Nexus focuses on the ecosystem of LG televisions and monitors.

It shouldn’t likely surprise many here that “smart” devices are usually more to the benefit of advertisers than consumers. Similarly, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a “smart” device harvests user data to sell to advertises. What may be surprising is the degree to which LG devices appear to collect data, how much data is sent even when collection is turned off, and how overt executives at the company are, with multiple executives making statements in pitches to advertisers that LG “owns the glass”, “owns the living room”, and is designed to correlate devices, inhabitants of the environment, and viewing habits so that ads can be served to the TV and mobile devices in the same room simultaneously.

With tracking enabled, the smart TV captures telemetry of what applications are used, as well as continually capturing the video displayed and reporting fingerprints to LG servers and ad partners. The screen content is tracked not only for TV, but for the HDMI inputs, including if the TV is used as a PC monitor. If voice control is enabled, the TV also records audio and analyzes it. The TV also continually scans the local network and nearby Wi-Fi networks, reporting all the devices it finds on the local network, including host name, MAC address, and sometimes software running depending on the MDNS advertisements. Near-by Wi-Fi networks are sufficient for very precise geolocation, so LG effectively knows the location of every customer, as well.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: It’s Patch Tuesday Again, TVs Spying, Supply Chain Worms Return, Prolonged Hack Impacts, Stolen IDs” →

This Week In Security: Baked-in Malware, Freezers Not Freezing, Zoom Snoops Clipboards, And AI Makes Things Worse, Faster

September 4, 2026 by 18 Comments

The AI platform ServiceNow which offers both hosted and on-premises versions just patched a trifecta of CVSS-10 vulnerabilities.

CVSS rankings are determined by the severity of a flaw, the ease of exploiting the bug, if authentication is required for exploitation, if the vulnerability exposes confidential data, and other criteria. A CVSS of 10 is as bad as it gets, and having three of them at once is certainly attention-getting. Of the three vulnerabilities fixed, one allowed unauthenticated modification of data in the hosted instance, a second allowed arbitrary code execution via the GraphQL interface, and the third allowed arbitrary SQL commands that could modify the database.

ServiceNow claims Adobe, Lenovo, Fedex, and Fujitsu among their high-profile customers. With luck, the vulnerabilities were patched before significant public exploitation could happen.

Router Malware

Previously in 2026 the US Government warned against embedded malware found in consumer routers, which may be linked to the FCC enacting bans against certification and import of foreign-made consumer devices. This week, the NVD (National Vulnerability Database) reported specific embedded malware in the Zbtlink and MoreQuick brands of devices.

Multiple versions of the firmware, for multiple lines of products, contain a backdoor service that uses unencrypted UDP to connect to a command and control (C2) service. The service, or anyone able to intercept the network traffic, since it’s unencrypted, can execute commands as root, allowing them to change configurations, open tunnels, or steal ISP credentials.

The malware is baked into the firmware, so removing it is impossible for most users: a factory reset wouldn’t do. In theory if third-party firmware like OpenWRT supports these devices, the hardware could be made safer with a custom install.

Given how commonly the same device is marketed under dozens of names, likely the same devices and firmware have yet to be identified under other brands. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Baked-in Malware, Freezers Not Freezing, Zoom Snoops Clipboards, And AI Makes Things Worse, Faster” →

This Week In Security: Android Malware, VOIP Hijack, Signal Contact Discovery, And TeamPCP Arrests

August 28, 2026 by 4 Comments

On GitHub, [AyaanB] details buying a cheap Android TV streaming device, looking for, and finding, baked-in malware.

Multiple warnings have been issued by the FBI and CISA regarding malware on media box Android devices. Many devices have been caught participating in botnets providing residential proxies, ad-click fraud, and DDOS services. [AyaanB] sets out to discover if a $30 set-top streaming box is pre-infected with malware, and extracting it – without ever letting the device talk to the Internet or access other devices on the local network.

Picking a device named in the advisories, [AyaanB] discovered that it was, indeed, preloaded with multiple app stores and applications that wouldn’t typically make sense on a set-top TV box. After identifying the serial port test pads and obtaining a low-voltage serial adapter, they were able to gain access to the bootloader and from there dump the contents of the MMC over TFTP.

With the entire filesystem accessible out-of-body, proving it was infected with malware at the factory becomes simple: the malware is signed as a system application, baked onto the system partition of the MMC, granted SELinux exceptions to mark it as a system binary with shell privileges, and has multiple launch scripts to make sure it is executed even if partially removed. With the malware identified, [AyaanB] continues to dig through to uncover the capabilities.

By installing hooks into the low-level Android process spawning system, the malware installs hooks into every application as it is launched: even if an application isn’t trojaned already, by the time it finishes executing, it’s definitely been subverted. The functions patched and the methods used match the Vo1d botnet, which is used for account takeovers, residential proxies, free “VPN” services, and other unfriendly behavior.

Further digging into the system showed hooks for ad-click fraud, where hidden browser windows are allowed to run unthrottled and display overlays are configured to obscure ads below where the user may click. Other included tools bid in real-time ad auctions, claiming to directly publish ads to the user which may or may not be visible. To cap it all off, a root level backdoor allows botnet operators to access the systems directly and install additional tools.

Be sure to check out [AyaanB]’s writeup for more details on exfiltration methods and other malware found on the devices. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Android Malware, VOIP Hijack, Signal Contact Discovery, And TeamPCP Arrests” →

This Week In Security: Apple Warns Users, Stripe Merchants Leak Keys, Copilot Helps Hack Itself, And Comcast Senses Movement

August 21, 2026 by 20 Comments

Apple has started sending some users push notifications warning that they have been targeted with specific malware. No specific information about the threat Apple detected is available. While multiple iOS attacks were released in spring of 2026, they all target much older versions of iOS and older hardware versions.

Users in 110 countries have received notifications recently, warning them they may have been targeted or already impacted by malware such. Apple typically uses the crash reporting mechanism for system apps to track new attack trends. The majority of users will likely never see an alert from Apple because malware with state-level capabilities like the Pegasus family is extremely expensive to develop. However, commercial availability means that some governments have deployed them against political opponents, protesters, human rights lawyers, and journalists.

If Apple pushes a security alert, it will show up as an email and a standard system notification, but also as a notification inside the Settings application. While email and notifications can be spoofed as part of phishing attempts, to date there is nothing which can generate false alerts inside Settings.

Almost universally in these cases, Apple recommends enabling “Lockdown Mode“, which adds extra protection to devices at the cost of decreased battery life and slower performance. Lockdown mode disables custom fonts on web pages, accelerated JavaScript, restricts message attachments over SMS and iMessage, and disables other common paths used by malware to steal data. Android devices offer a similar feature since Android 15 that is less comprehensive but can still provide additional safeguards for users directly at risk.

Attacking Airplane Networks

With research that will surely result in some breathless reports, researchers presented at Usenix 2026 an attack against the communications bus of a Boeing 737.

The ARINC 429 bus is a communications architecture for planes, similar to the CAN bus used in cars. Once you are connected to that bus, it can be vulnerable in the same ways cars can be vulnerable to data manipulation. In the Usenix paper, researchers discovered that one access port to the airplane communications system is easily reached from the outside of the plane, though “easily” in this context means “by airplane maintenance technicians”. The paper represents over a decade of work by the team in obtaining and building a test lab of avionics equipment to represent an actual airplane, culminating in an embedded device described as “the size of a quarter” that plugs into the communications port and provides remote access over WiFi.

It needs to be emphasized, given other recent news, that this is a piece of hardware being added to the plane which communicates over WiFi, and not a way to attack an unmodified plane via passenger WiFi!

Once part of the ARINC bus, it seems access is basically unfettered: the team describes being able to reprogram the autopilot, feed the pilot displays false data, and being able to modify the temperature and weight data shown, which could lead to miscalculations in take-off speeds with obviously catastrophic results. Fortunately, the researchers have also been working with Boeing since 2020 to address the issues being found, and the practicality of the attack in the wild remains largely theoretical. The research team has recommended removing the external ports in future aircraft, and blocking access to them physically, like with epoxy, in the current designs.

If reading security research papers is your kind of fun, be sure to check out the rest of the papers that were part of Usenix 2026.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Apple Warns Users, Stripe Merchants Leak Keys, Copilot Helps Hack Itself, And Comcast Senses Movement” →

This Week In Security: Claude Gets Hacking, Hotel WiFi, And NPM Compromised Again

August 7, 2026 by 9 Comments

kMaybe feeling left out from the questionable hype train of “Our AI models can’t be trusted”, Anthropic has released reports that their Claude model has “reached the Internet” and accessed the systems of other companies on at least three occasions during testing.

It appears that the model was restricted from accessing the Internet because (and wait for it) the prompt told it that it didn’t have Internet access, and was inside a simulation. It seems like Anthropic counted on the same trick that users try to convince a model that Grandma really wanted to pass on her life-long love of hacking services, it’s all pretend. Like the OpenAI incident, the models were tasked with completing a capture-the-flag style challenge, a common hacker challenge format where vulnerable systems are provided and contestants try to hack them the fastest. Anthropic says that a misconfiguration of the test environment left the models with Internet access, so the model succeeded in accessing the Internet at large once it ignored the prompt.

In some instances, Anthropic says the model proceeded under the “misconception” that it was still in a simulation, listening selectively to some of the prompt, while in others it continued regardless. In once incident, the test model generated malicious PyPI packages, which were uploaded to the public PyPI repository and downloaded 15 times. Further clouding the issue, one of the downloads of the malicious PyPI module was by a security auditing company that was then infected by the package during analysis, allowing the Claude agent to access credentials of the security company via a poorly designed malware analysis pipeline. The company essentially deliberately infected itself with a malicious package, while lacking protections against malicious packages!

Anthropic promises tighter controls in the future, but stops short of ensuring that models under test will be prevented from accessing the Internet, and categorizes it as a test gone wrong. “These facts give us cautious optimism that with tighter monitoring and controls around evaluation infrastructure, as well as continued investment in alignment, this type of risk can be overcome.”

It remains to be seen why allowing automatic code to hack the production environments of other companies is considered acceptable. If any of us had done the same we’d be facing serious legal questions.

Hotel WiFi Pushes Malware

A threat group associated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (APT29, Cozy Bear, Storm-2945, and/or Midnight Blizzard) has been identified behind an attack to push fake updates over hotel WiFi networks.

It appears that the attackers compromised the captive portal and gateway systems of the impacted hotels. The captive portal system is the typical gatekeeping system that requires you to pay for Internet access, or at least input your hotel room and name. By hijacking the DNS, users were redirected to additional fake “verification” pages that served a menu of malware using a variety of techniques.

Like previously reported activity attempting to capture Microsoft365 logins via spoofed pages, most these attacks seem very loud and obvious, counting on the end user to ignore warnings about invalid SSL certificates or run commands in the shell. Using a variant of the “click-to-fix” attacks, the user is presented with a fake request for additional verification by copying and pasting a string of text into a command shell, which then decodes to a standard malware installation script. More subtle attacks attempt to trick the user into adding a new device to their Microsoft accounts. The user is redirected to a page claiming to require a Microsoft login to access the Internet, often hosted on a copycat domain similar to a legitimate Microsoft resource. The fake login then prompts the victim to copy and paste an authentication URL, adding a new logged-in device to the Microsoft account.

Obviously, running arbitrary shell commands, accepting invalid SSL certificates, or pasting arbitrary URLs after signing in are all something nobody should be doing, and it’s unclear how many users were actually impacted by the campaign. For corporate users, the answers are relatively simple: user training, and an always-on corporate VPN that routes all traffic and DNS through the company servers.

For home users, the solution may be more nuanced. Every third video on YouTube tells you that you need to install a commercial VPN, but in many ways this simply shifts the problem. A commercial (or even worse, a free public VPN) service can also intercept DNS requests and traffic, by design. While some services are legitimately privacy protecting and respecting, many hide the true owners of the service. A better tool is Tailscale, designed for implementing personal VPN services, where your traffic stays on your own devices.

Tailscale, OpenAI, and Hugging Face

Speaking of the Tailscale VPN, we jump to their role (or non-role) in the recent Open AI “incident” with Hugging Face.

Tailscale is a zero-trust framework for connecting systems using the WireGuard VPN protocol. For end users, this is an excellent way to set up a VPN where your traffic never leaves your own systems unencrypted. For enterprises, it is often used to connect services Internet-wide, which is how it was used in the Hugging Face infrastructure. Once the Open AI agent had selected Hugging Face as a target, it found a vulnerability in a package manager, accessed a worker machine at Hugging Face, escalated to root on the Kubernetes cluster, and extracted the production key and authentication storage. This allowed the Open AI model to authenticate against the Tailscale system and directly connect to the network.

This, rightly, is not Tailscale’s problem. Once the authentication keys are available, it’s working as designed to allow new devices to register on the network. This is a pervasive problem with stored authentication tokens, and is one of the root goals, and causes, of the supply chain attacks suffered by NPM, PyPI, GitHub, VSCode plugin repositories, and more. Once an attacker is able to extract the authentication tokens, they are able to impersonate that account or system with equal privileges for as long as that authentication remains valid. Typically these tokens are not time limited, and the window of opportunity lasts until the owners of the account become aware of the compromise and are able to reset all of the impacted authentications!

Solutions to the permanent authentication token already exist, but are not widely used. Many package repositories already support restricted and dynamic authentication via OpenID Connect, where a token grants specific resources, not system-wide access. On some platforms, keys can be protected in a hardware-backed key store like a TPM or the Apple Secure Enclave chip, though this doesn’t solve the problem for most servers.

Tailscale, obviously, is looking to lean on the publicity generated from the Open AI incident, but the message is a good one: Anything that can be done to automatically and painlessly reduce the risks associated with long-lived authentication tokens will benefit everyone on the Internet. Even if you don’t run an integration pipeline, you most definitely run software built by one.

Another Set of NPM Package Compromises

The NPM package repository has suffered yet another incident where a large number of packages have been compromised.

Investigators have tracked over 400 packages infected with another variant of the same “Mini Shai-Halud” worm that ran rampant through package repositories in the Spring of 2026. While efforts have been made to reduce the attack surface of packages, few have implemented them, partly because they are not mandatory, and partly because they can greatly impact, or completely break, the build process. The packages this time include high-profile, commonly used tools, with several billion (yes, with a “b”) monthly installs during builds of other software.

Like the worms impacting the package repositories previously, packages are infected by added scripts to the pre-install commands which are executed automatically before the package is installed. The latest infection appears to have spread from a single developer of two widely used packages, keyv and cacheable. Once triggered, the worm will infect and upload new versions of all packages it can access, using stolen NPM authentication tokens. Like other variants of the “Mini Shai-Halud” family, the worm steals authentication tokens for NPM, PyPI, AWS, Kubernetes, and GitHub, the contents of env files which typically contain additional authentication keys, SSH keys, VPN configurations, and over 200 other types of credentials. These newer variants of the worms have increased the list of stolen credentials, begun modifying the instructions for AI coding assistants, added cryptocurrency theft, and added poisoned configurations for VSCode and AI tools to infect projects once the initial infection has been resolved.

Given the scope of the latest outbreak, the number of impacted packages will only increase: no effective countermeasures exist in the NPM community to prevent another wide supply chain event.

Mythos Knocks Out Post-Quantum Candidate

The Anthropic Mythos model found flaws in a candidate post-quantum encryption algorithm, HAWK. Multiple encryption algorithms have been under testing for years as part of the standardization process at NIST, with selected algorithms becoming part of the Federal Information Processing Standard requirements for systems handling secure data for government systems. Cryptographers fear that future advancements in quantum computing could break current encryption and signature methods, driving the search for new standards that will survive.

Anthropic reports that after 60 hours and approximately $100,000 in compute resources, the Mythos model was able to discover a flaw in the HAWK post-quantum signature algorithm. HAWK had previously survived multiple rounds of validation testing, but following the attacks generated by Mythos, the developer has withdrawn it from consideration. Mythos was not able to completely break HAWK, but combined multiple methods to reduce the key space by half.

Ultimately this is a case of the system working fully as designed. The proper time to find flaws in new algorithms is before they’re selected as standards!

Backdooring an Entire Linux Distribution

In 1984, Ken Thompson, one of the creators of Unix, gave the lecture “Reflections on Trusting Trust” in which he outlines the difficulties of establishing trust in tools. Thompson proposed the issue of a compiler modified to insert an invisible back door in any binary it compiled, including future versions of itself, ultimately showing the near impossibility of establishing a guaranteed clean tool chain, ultimately existing in all compiled tools and compilers without any evidence of the original code or modifications. Even if you inspect the source code, a compromised compiler could still be your undoing.

This week, a coalition of researchers published a paper demonstrating the “trusting trust” attack against a modern Linux distribution. Starting with a modified copy of the strip tool that removes debugging and other extraneous information to generate a smaller binary, the researchers demonstrated that the entire build of a NixOS Linux distribution could have a modification injected in every binary, including future builds of strip itself. While the attack starts with a source code modification of strip, after the first generation the modification exists in binary form only, built into each generation of the tool. This demonstrates that the “trusting trust” attack extends to any tool involved in the build process, not only the compiler, since the strip binary never reads source code, only the compiled results.