This Week in Security

303 Articles

This Week In Security: Ubiquiti Fixes, And FreeBSD Joins The Club You Don’t Want To Join

May 29, 2026 by No comments

Ubiquiti released a new security bulletin detailing fixes for six security issues, including one rated 9.1 (critical) and one scoring a perfect 10.0 on the CVE risk scale.

The vulnerabilities range from path traversal revealing configuration files (escaping from the web server by requesting a path like “../../../../../etc/passwd” for instance), to command injection (running arbitrary shell commands on the system), and actually changing device configurations. Some of the reported vulnerabilities require an account on the management server, but some only require network access .

Fortunately, all of the vulnerabilities require access to the network in the first place to exploit – but this could include access to open guest networks as well as trusted users. If you run Ubiquti or UniFi equipment, chances are the automatic update function has already integrated the fixes, but make sure to check the advisory to see if you’re impacted and update accordingly!

FreeBSD Root Exploit

FatGid lets FreeBSD join the fun of kernel exploits to gain root.

The FatGid vulnerability doesn’t require any manipulation of disk cache; instead it is a direct kernel stack overflow in a system call. The kernel miscalculates the size of a variable as 8 bytes instead of 4, which when used later interacting with a user buffer allows the stack overflow.

Like the recent spate of Linux local privilege escalation attacks, this requires the attacker to already have an account on the system or the ability to run arbitrary programs, but remember that any bug in network services which allows command execution gets you there, so if you run network exposed FreeBSD, it’s time to update!

Kali365 Phishing-as-a-Service

Phishing-as-a-service platforms have been gaining traction, allowing criminals to automate targeting users with crafted lures. The FBI has issued a warning about the Kali365 service in particular.

Kali365 targets credentials for Microsoft 365 accounts by directing users to the official Microsoft portal for linking additional devices to the account, attaching an attacker device directly to the user identity. Alternatively, the framework steals credentials by directing the user through a hostile service which presents a false login page which captures browser sessions along with authentication cookies and tokens once the user answers the fake multi-factor login prompts.

Automating the phishing process lowers the bar for the skill level needed to create authentic-looking lures and makes it simpler for criminal groups to attack large numbers of users; Phishing-as-a-service groups operate as companies offering customer support, tracking dashboards, and pre-made phishing templates.

Glassworm Botnet Takedown

CrowdStrike, Google, and the ShadowServer Foundation have done a coordinated takedown of the infrastructure used by the Glassworm supply-chain botnet.

Glassworm has been mentioned previously; it is one of several major worms infecting the open source package supply chain repositories like NPM and PyPi or the Visual Studio extension repository. Once a victim installs a compromised package or extension, the Glassworm trojan steals any saved authentication tokens for package repositories, GitHub accounts, AI services, and any SSH keys found, and begins the stage two infection. Using the stolen credentials, the worm infects any GitHub workflows, packages, and extensions the user has access to, and installs a remote-access trojan which waits for further commands.

Glassworm used a complex control server structure including blockchain memos, BitTorrent files, and public Google Calendar entries, but the coalition of companies was able to interrupt all control channels simultaneously. Hard-coded aspects of the worm will continue to function, but all behavior which requires downloading payloads from the control servers has been disrupted.

This isn’t the first time multiple Internet companies have coordinated to take down malware, but it’s always good to see action against threats which have been decimating the package repository infrastructure lately.

TechCrunch Spyware Avoidance

On the positive side of things, TechCrunch has an article about modern features to protect users against spyware. If this isn’t news to you, there’s still almost certainly someone in your life who will benefit from a user-friendly write up of best practices!

Both major commercial mobile platforms (iOS and Android) offer advanced protection features which are minimally invasive. For users who are likely to be higher targets of spyware like journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists, or simply those who are worried, these features offer real protection.

The features explained in the article include Apple’s Lockdown mode, Androids Advanced protection mode, and WhatsApp specific application settings, all of which work to reduce common attack surfaces for devices. The advanced security modes typically have minor impacts on performance and battery life due to disabling optimization features which introduce additional complexity and attack surfaces (such as just-in-time compilation of JavaScript code into native instructions.). When situations call for an abundance of caution, a few percent of battery life daily is a reasonable compromise.

Go check out the full write up!

Microsoft Bans NightmareEclipse

An exploit researcher known only as “NightmareEclipse” has been featured here several times in the past months already. Showing intense frustration with their experience with the administrators of the Microsoft security bug bounty program, they have taken to releasing zero-day exploits against Windows, often coinciding with Patch Tuesday (clearly no accident; by releasing a new exploit on the same day as the Microsoft patch set, it’s unlikely to be fixed before the next months Patch Tuesday at the earliest). Previous exploits released by NightmareEclipse include BlueSun and RedHammer (local user to Windows SYSTEM privilege escalation), UnDefend to disable Windows Defender, and YellowKey which unlocks BitLocker drives using a collection of nothing more than magically named files.

Toms Hardware reports that Microsoft has disabled the researchers GitHub accounts (GitHub being owned by Microsoft has long been a point of concern for security researchers who find vulnerabilities in Microsoft products), as well as the actual Microsoft account used by the researcher.

While it’s certainly within the terms of service of Microsoft and GitHub that accounts may be terminated, the optics are particularly poor in this case, given the confusion around the initial interactions which led the researchers original anger. NightmareEclipse has moved their example code repositories to GitLab in the mean time, and promises Microsoft that “I will make sure your bones are shattered on July 14”, implying there will be additional releases (on, you guessed it, what looks like another Patch Tuesday).

Further clouding the issue, an official Microsoft statement indicates they are attempting to bring criminal (not just civil) charges against researchers who do not cooperate with the Microsoft disclosure policies, a stance which will certainly in no way exacerbate the situation.

Fingerprinting Devices by SSD

Dan Goodin at Ars Technica highlights a new paper on fingerprinting users via SSD disk performance, using just standard JavaScript.

The modern web is a hellscape of user tracking, and this attack, dubbed FROST, highlights another technique for identifying unique devices and user patterns based entirely on hardware behavior. By generating a large file using local browser storage via OPFS (origin private file system, an API for JavaScript to create raw files inside the browser storage area) and continually reading and writing data while monitoring the performance, a web page is able to monitor the disk access performance of the device.

Using a neural network trained on timing data, researchers say they are able to determine what apps may be running on the computer alongside the browser – and sometimes even what other websites are being viewed, based solely on the delays in disk IO caused by other applications and websites accessing the SSD. The paper will be presented in July, with researchers saying that the neural network can be trained to recognize “any system which reliably generates SSD accesses”.

Likely, browser developers can mitigate FROST by decreasing the performance of file operations in the OPFS API so that the performance data lacks the fidelity needed to derive user behavior.

FROST is a “side channel attack”; by monitoring one set of characteristics, side channel attacks are able to infer other system behaviors. Side channel attacks can be incredibly subtle and difficult to predict: Another side channel attack method has been to use extremely fine-grained monitoring of the power consumption of a device to derive encryption keys, predicting the CPU instructions and values based on the amount of power used to set the internal registers.

Improving Memory Safety in C#

Programming languages have been moving towards stronger default memory models, making programs more secure by default by eliminating behaviors which are commonly exploitable. Using a memory-safe language does not prevent logic errors or other security issues, but can still help by eliminating common mistakes.

Microsoft has posted an extensive article about new enhancements for C# in .NET 11. Borrowing in many ways (that’s a programming joke) from the Rust memory model, C# 16 will add additional memory enforcement and object lifetime, detecting when memory is no longer available and preventing invalid memory accesses on expired objects, with the goal of eliminating use-after-free memory corruption and attacks.

C# 16 will also increase the meaning of the “unsafe” keyword, a mechanism introduced in C# 1.0 and since heavily adopted by newer languages such as Rust and Swift. Code marked as unsafe in C# 16 is able to bypass the stricter memory model, but all code referencing it must also be marked as unsafe. Making unsafe code more difficult to use increases the overall friction of doing things the dangerous way, while clearly marking code which is higher risk.

There are few magic bullets for secure programming, but reducing the ways a programmer can make simple mistakes can be a big win.

This Week In Security: Android Exposes ADB, ShinyHunters Get Paid, Robot Dogs, And More

May 18, 2026 by 26 Comments

Google has patched an Android ADB bug in the May security patch set. If you have a Pixel phone you should already have the patches, and most other major manufacturers should be close behind. Unfortunately, the biggest risk from this patch will be to the vendors who are also the least likely to release timely – or any – security updates.

ADB, the Android Debug Bridge, is the main tool for installing apps during development and debugging apps while they’re running. It can also be used to side-load apps from a PC. While most normal users are unlikely to ever enable it, developers typically do and some power users might when jailbreaking a device or setting parameters not exposed in the Android UI. Debugging can be done locally via USB, or optionally over the network. To protect the device, the user must unlock the Android device and authorize each new debug agent.

Covered by Risky.Biz, a bug introduced in 2020, and present in every Android release since, allowed bypassing authorization entirely if network debugging was enabled and at least one connection had been made to the ADB service in the past. This happens because ADB compares the certificate of the incoming debug connection with the list of saved certificates. If the certificate type does not match — for instance supplying an Ed25519 certificate instead of a RSA certificate — ADB has been incorrectly handling the error code, and allowing the connection.

In most programming languages, false is considered zero, and true is considered anything not zero. The certificate API returns a 1 for a valid match, a zero for an invalid match, and a negative-one for a type mismatch. Negative one is not zero, so when treated as a boolean value, it becomes true.

To exploit the bug, ADB must be enabled in wireless mode, and there must be at least one trusted device in the ADB configuration. For the average user this is an unlikely combination, but for developers, the time to update is now.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Android Exposes ADB, ShinyHunters Get Paid, Robot Dogs, And More” →

This Week In Security: Another Linux Exploit, Ubuntu Knocked Offline, Finals Interrupted, And Backdoored Tools

May 8, 2026 by 15 Comments

After the CopyFail vulnerability gave root access from any user on almost all distributions last week, this week we’ve got DirtyFrag. This chains the vulnerability in CopyFail (xfrm-ESP) and a new vulnerability in a RPC function which allows similar overwriting of the page cache.

Both vulnerabilities manipulate the Linux page cache where data from disk is stored for rapid access. The kernel will always prefer the cached version of a file, which means that anything that is able to manipulate the contents of the cache can effectively replace the contents of the file. Both of the vulnerabilities leverage a similar mechanism – picking a binary which is flagged to run as root, such as su, and replacing the contents that would prompt for the users password with a launcher to immediately run a shell.

Like CopyFail, DirtyFrag requires the ability to execute code on the target in the first place, but turning almost any code or command execution vulnerability in any network service into root raises the impact significantly, allowing an attacker to break out of containers and privilege environments, or establish a persistent presence in the system when the original vulnerabilities are discovered and closed.

The previous mitigations to block specific kernel modules related to CopyFail are not sufficient to block the new vulnerabilities. At the time of writing this, there are no available patches from the distributions, however the vulnerable kernel modules can be temporarily disabled.

CopyFail added to KEV

CISA (the United States cyber security agency) has added CopyFail to the KEV, or Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list. Attacks on the KEV have been observed under active exploitation, which in the case of CopyFail is hardly a surprise.

The KEV is designed as a tool to allow security teams in government and commercial industry to prioritize the highest risk vulnerabilities – or at least give another source of data to point at when you say “we really need to patch this now”.

Prolonged Ubuntu DDOS

On the heels of the CopyFail vulnerability impacting almost all distributions, Ubuntu has had to face a prolonged distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the main infrastructure. Ars Technica reported at the beginning of the attack, and after several days, services appear to be restored. In the meantime, core services such as package updates, core repositories, and even the Ubuntu and Canonical websites were largely unreachable.

An Iraqi group claims responsibility for the attack, but it is unclear if they were the actual perpetrators – or why. The timing with the CopyFail vulnerability seems like an opportune moment to cause chaos by taking the update mechanisms of a major distribution offline, but in the era of modern Internet behavior, it could also just have been a Tuesday.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Another Linux Exploit, Ubuntu Knocked Offline, Finals Interrupted, And Backdoored Tools” →

This Week In Security: State Malware, State Hardware Bans, And Stuxnet Before Stuxnet Was Cool

May 1, 2026 by 8 Comments

Making headlines everywhere is the CopyFail Linux kernel vulnerability, which allows local privilege escalation (LPE) from any user to root privileges on most kernels and distributions.

Local privileges escalations are never good, but typically are not “Internet-melters”: they are significantly less dangerous than remote vulnerabilities, but are often combined with a remote vulnerability to gain complete access to a system.

This time, the vulnerability is in the Linux kernel handling of cryptographic functions used in IPSec. The mistake allows writing into the in-memory cache of file data; this allows modifying what the system thinks a file contains, without ever touching the contents of the actual file. Coupled with a suid binary — a binary configured to always run as root, no matter what user starts it — the binary can be modified to run any code as root. In this case, that means launching a new interactive shell. Nearly every distribution includes several standard suid binaries, such as the command su which requires root privileges to switch users.

The bug is pervasive, impacting kernels from 2017, and can be triggered on any distribution where the IPSec kernel modules are enabled and loaded, which is the vast majority of them. Kernel patches are available, and most distributions should have them at this point. For the average home user, you’ll want to upgrade as soon as is practical; for services with untrusted users or containerized systems which might run untrusted workloads, if updating immediately is not practical, Theori has mitigation suggestions on the blog post. Continue reading “This Week In Security: State Malware, State Hardware Bans, And Stuxnet Before Stuxnet Was Cool” →

This Week In Security: Annoyed Researchers, Dangling DNS, And Hacks That Could Have Been Worse

April 24, 2026 by 13 Comments

The author of the BlueHammer exploit, which was released earlier this month and addressed in the last Patch Tuesday, continues to be annoyed with the responses from the Microsoft security research and vulnerability response team, and has released another Windows zero-day attack against Windows Defender.

The RedSun exploit targets a logic and timing error in Windows Defender, convincing it to install the target file in the system, instead of quarantining the file and protecting the system. Not, generally, what you would hope would happen.

Since the RedSun attack requires local access in the first place, it seems unlikely Microsoft will release an out-of-sequence patch for it, however with public code available, we can probably expect to see malware leveraging it to establish higher permissions on an infected system.

Releasing exploits out of spite feels like a return to the late 1990s, and I almost don’t hate it.

University Domains Hijacked

Reported in Bleeping Computer, a group tracked as “Hazy Hawk” has been hijacking unmaintained DNS records of universities and government institutions to serve ad click spam.

The attack seems simple and doesn’t even require compromising the actual institution, using dangling DNS “CNAME” records. A “CNAME” entry in DNS acts essentially as an alias, pointing one domain name at another, which can be used to provide content from an official domain that is hosted on a cloud service where the IP address of the service might change.

A DNS “A” (or “AAAA” if you speak IPv6) record points a hostname – like “foo.example.com” – to an IP address – like “1.1.1.1”. A “CNAME” record points a hostname to another hostname, like “foo.some_cloud_host.com”. Scanning “high value” domains (like Ivy League universities) for “CNAME” records which point to expired domains (or domains on cloud hosted providers which no longer exist) lets anyone able to register that domain (or create an account with the proper naming scheme on the cloud host) to post any content they wish, and still appear to be the original name.

At least 30 educational institutions have been impacted, along with several government agencies including the CDC.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Annoyed Researchers, Dangling DNS, And Hacks That Could Have Been Worse” →

This Week In Security: Docker Auth, Windows Tools, And A Very Full Patch Tuesday

April 17, 2026 by 5 Comments

CVE-2026-34040 lets attackers bypass some Docker authentication plugins by allowing an empty request body. Present since 2024, this bug was caused by a previous fix to the auth workflow. In the 2024 bug, the authentication system could be tricked into passing a zero-length request to the authentication handler. In the modern vulnerability, the system can be tricked into removing a too-large authentication request and passing a zero-length request to the authentication handler.

In both cases, the authentication system may not properly handle the malformed request and allow creation of docker images with access to stored credentials and secrets.

Bugs like these are increasing in visibility because AI agents running in Docker, like OpenClaw, may be tricked via prompt injection into leveraging the vulnerability.

Windows CPU Tools Compromised

videocardz.com notes that the popular Windows monitoring software Cpu-Z and HWMonitor appear to have been compromised. Reports indicate that the download site was compromised, not the actual packages, but that it was redirecting update requests to packages including malware. While the site has been repaired, unfortunately it looks like there is no warning to users that the downloads were compromised for a period of time.

Anecdotally, there has been a rash of Discord account takeovers in the past week, where long-standing accounts in multiple servers have been compromised and turned into spambots. While there is no evidence these events are linked, clearly a new credential or authentication stealing malware is in play, which involves stealing credentials from Discord.

X.Org and XWayland Updated

The X.Org and XWayland servers saw security updates this week, fixing a handful of vulnerabilities involving uninitialized memory use, use-after-free, and reading beyond the end of a buffer.

The vulnerabilities are generally classified as “moderate”, but of course, don’t leave known vulnerabilities when you can avoid it! Fixed releases should find their way into distributions soon.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Docker Auth, Windows Tools, And A Very Full Patch Tuesday” →

This Week In Security: Flatpak Fixes, Android Malware, And SCADA Was IOT Before IOT Was Cool

April 10, 2026 by 10 Comments

Rowhammer attacks have been around since 2014, and mitigations are in place in most modern systems, but the team at gddr6.fail has found ways to apply the attack to current-generation GPUs.

Rowhammer attacks attach the electrical characteristics of RAM, using manipulation of the contents of RAM to cause changes in the contents of adjacent memory cells. Bit values are just voltage levels, after all, and if a little charge leaks across from one row to the next, you can potentially pull a bit high by writing repeatedly to its physical neighbors.

The attack was used to allow privilege escalation by manipulating the RAM defining the user data, and later, to allow reading and manipulation of any page in ram by modifying the system page table that maps memory and memory permissions. By 2015 researchers refined the attack to run in pure JavaScript against browsers, and in 2016 mobile devices were shown to be vulnerable. Mitigations have been put in place in physical memory design, CPU design, and in software. However, new attack vectors are still discovered regularly, with DDR4 and DDR5 RAM as well as AMD and RISC-V CPUs being vulnerable.

The GDDR6-Fail attack targets the video ram of modern graphics cards, and is able to trigger similar vulnerabilities in the graphics card itself, culminating in accessing and changing the memory of the PC via the PCI bus and bypassing protections.

For users who fear they are at risk — most likely larger AI customers or shared hosting environments where the code running on the GPU may belong to untrusted users — enabling error correcting (ECC) mode in the GPU reduces the amount of available RAM, but adds protection by performing checksums on the memory to detect corruption or bit flipping. For the average home user, your mileage may vary – there’s certainly easier ways to execute arbitrary code on your PC – like whatever application is running graphics in the first place!

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Flatpak Fixes, Android Malware, And SCADA Was IOT Before IOT Was Cool” →