Googlebook's clumsy launch made me wish that I wasn't a product reviewer. I had to spend two weeks using a laptop with what felt like an unfinished operating system (cue the world's smallest violin), and throughout the entire process, I just kept thinking how nice it would be if Google had taken all of its biggest Googlebook features and slapped them on a mainline Linux distro instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Terminal-based apps are awesome, but if you’ve ever tried to use them, you’re probably already aware of their biggest annoyance: you have to open a terminal and type a command every time. They don’t show up in your dock or app launcher the way regular desktop apps do. Thankfully, there’s a quick and easy fix for that. It’ll hardly take a few minutes, and you’ll be able to give your terminal apps their own icons and entries in your application launcher.

Flathub spent five months refusing AI-generated apps, but sadly gave in to the inevitable reality of vibecoded apps. And while I'm personally not against vibecoding in general (and I've even vibecoded some stuff), I'm still very careful about what I install on my PC—and a lot of lazy slop is going to start flowing into Flathub.

I’ve been dual-booting Linux and Windows for more than 10 years, and my current machine runs four different operating systems side by side. Over the years, I’ve made plenty of mistakes and seen newcomers and enthusiasts make many of the same ones. As such, to help you avoid these common pitfalls, here are three of the most common mistakes people make when setting up a Linux-Windows dual-boot PC.

Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!

Recently a new project was released by Praetorian. Praetorian is open-sourcing the offensive tools their red team actually uses on engagements. They call it 12 Caesars and their team is planning to release one tool a week for twelve weeks. Every tool is written in Go and ships as a single binary with zero external dependencies.

Each tool is assigned a Caesar name and a blog post, where you can learn more about these tools.

We’ll look at four of these tools, including the basic ones, to make this article suitable for everyone. Before we proceed, it’s important to remind you that you can only test systems you own or have explicit written authorization to test. We will use our lab for it.

Titus

Our first tool is Titus. Titus finds credentials, API keys, and tokens in source code, files, git history, container images, and more. The tool has 487 detection rules covering AWS, GCP, Azure, GitHub, Slack, databases and hundreds of other services. Similar to TruffleHog, it can validate credentials as it finds them by calling the provider APIs.

It’s also available as a Burp Suite extension and a Chrome extension.

kali > curl -sL -o titus https://github.com/praetorian-inc/titus/releases/latest/download/titus-linux-amd64
kali > chmod 777 titus
kali > ./titus --help

Let’s start by pointing it at test keys released by Truffle Security.

It found all the keys in the repo. Companies often publish their secrets by accident. Some live in the repositories for years, so it’s good to do regular checks to prevent unnecessary leakage.

Nerva

Nerva is a fingerprinter supporting 170 protocols across TCP, UDP, and SCTP, plus dozens of HTTP technology fingerprinters. You can feed it with open ports from naabu, nmap or other tools and it’ll tell you what’s actually running with its version.

kali > curl -sL -o nerva.tar.gz https://github.com/praetorian-inc/nerva/releases/download/v1.70.3/nerva_1.70.3_linux_amd64.tar.gz
kali > tar --no-same-owner -xzf nerva.tar.gz
kali > chmod 777 nerva
kali > ./nerva --help

Now let’s use our Ubuntu to show a basic test.

kali > ./nerva -t 192.168.131.9:22,11434

It will be way more useful when you work with big lists of corporate assets during a pentest.

Brutus

Brutus is a modern Hydra alternative. It supports more than 40 protocols including SSH, RDP, MySQL, PostgreSQL and a lot more. Brutus was built to work with Nerva or naabu output.

kali > curl -sL -o brutus.tar.gz https://github.com/praetorian-inc/brutus/releases/latest/download/brutus-linux-amd64.tar.gz
kali > tar --no-same-owner -xzf brutus.tar.gz
kali > chmod 777 brutus
kali > ./brutus --help     

Each command has its own help menu to make it easy to work with.

kali > ./brutus creds --help

Now once again lets use our Ubuntu to spay passwords. 

kali > ./brutus creds --target 127.0.0.1:22 --protocol ssh “admin:admin”

It was easy. As mentioned before, this tool chains with Nerva, and that’s how it becomes useful to test the entire infrastructure against common password and detection.

Julius

With AI services proliferating inside corporate environments, we want to know what LLM infrastructure is running on our hosts. Julius will fingerprint more than 60 AI services including Ollama, vLLM, LiteLLM, LocalAI, Hugging Face TGI, AWS Bedrock and AnythingLLM. It can also list available models from endpoints.

kali > curl -sL -o julius.tar.gz https://github.com/praetorian-inc/julius/releases/download/v1.5.1/julius_1.5.1_linux_amd64.tar.gz

kali > tar --no-same-owner -xzf julius.tar.gz
kali > ./julius --help

You can list all the AI services Julious can fingerprint: 

kali > ./julius list

We will take a look at our machine.

kali > ./julius probe http://192.168.131.7:11434

Ollama sits on port 11434, and it’s important not to leave it exposed publicly, because everyone can use your models without authentication.

Summary 

There are more tools available in this project. Most of them are meant to be chained together and work well this way. The company says its team is actively using these same tools during their engagements. While you won’t need everything at once, experiment with those tools and see what fits you best.

If you like red teaming, we have our Red Team Operator training, where we cover more tools and techniques to help you emulate real APT work, so you can give a company a realistic stress test and help make it secure.

The post Pentesting: Twelve Caesars – Community Tools for Offensive Security first appeared on Hackers Arise.

Microsoft releases emergency .NET updates to fix a Brotli memory flaw and Linux privilege escalation, while correcting two incomplete October security patches.

After using Bash for years on Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint, when I first came across Zsh on Kali Linux, it was like a new world just opened in front of me. Syntax highlighting, command suggestions, and all the gorgeous colors made me rethink my decision to ignore the command line. I had plenty of reasons to replace Bash with Zsh.

I've been homelabbing for over half a decade now, and there are two specific Docker containers that are set-and-forget for me. I never think about them, and they just sit there quietly in the background keeping everything going—and those containers are Pi-hole and Caddy.

"As of today in systemd Git it's now possible for the systemd programs to be written in the Rust programming language as an alternative to C," reports Phoronix: Core systemd code like the systemd library doesn't yet support Rust code, but for the various systemd programs / leaf components there is now support for using Rust... The new systemd-keyring-setup utility in Rust is used for provisioning keyrings and enrolling X.509 certificates into the kernel's dm-verity / fs-verity / BPF keyrings during the boot process while dealing them afterward. This systemd-keyring-setup code hasn't been merged yet but is expected soon now that the Rust infrastructure has landed. Originally it was all part of a single big commit before being split-up for the Rust enablement, systemd-keyring-setup, and other preparations for this new component. Systemd developers aren't planning on porting existing C code to Rust, all the Rust code is built with Meson [no Cargo usage], and C linkage only is mandated. Systemd Rust components come out slightly larger than C with a test program being 32KB compared to 20KB for its C twin. For now at least the systemd Rust support is optional and toggled by the -Drust= Meson option with it being auto by default.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) allows Linux systems to function as hypervisors without needing any extra software, but VMs created with it don’t behave exactly like real hardware does. Sometimes that’s important, though, so [sandwich] built a tool called vfio-native that obscures the fact that software might be running in a virtual machine.

There are plenty of the ways that virtual hardware differs from bare metal. The VM may behave slightly differently for obscure instructions in ways that are measurable, it may take slightly longer to perform some tasks, or the hypervisor may simply announce itself directly. vfio-native includes some kernel patches that solve some bugs which address the different behaviors, changes the way that the kernel identifies itself, and attempts to force the CPUs to behave in ways that real hardware would behave. With all of this applied to the virtual machine, it scores a 1/85 against a VM detection tool, with a standard KVM virtual machine scoring 10/85.

For anyone looking to test this out, it’s available in the AUR for Arch Linux. Also, it’s probably worth mentioning that there are more reasons to use this than cheating at Counter-Strike. For example, security researchers testing malware need to know how that software behaves when it thinks its on real hardware, and some may behave in benign ways when confined to virtual machines. Some licensed software also may disable itself when it detects its running in a VM, which can be a nuisance for things like software controlling industrial tools which only run on operating systems that are no longer maintained or hardware that can’t be found anymore. Some other tools we’ve seen before perform similar tasks as well.

There’s something undeniably cool about the way Hollywood portrays hackers at work. In fact, it’s actually one of the reasons I gravitated toward Linux in the first place. Of course, real-world hacking rarely looks anything like the movies, and Linux doesn’t magically turn your PC into a cybercrime command center. That said, if you want to recreate that cinematic techno vibe on your desktop, there are a few tools that can help. Here are five of my favorites.

Kali Linux 2026.3 has been officially released, bringing six new security tools, updated image-building scripts, KDE Plasma 6.7, and major NetHunter improvements. Announced on October 26, 2026, this third release of the year includes 126 package updates and upgrades the Linux kernel from version 6.19 to 7.1.5.kali. This release focuses on customization, making it easier […]

The post Kali Linux 2026.3 Released With 6 New Penetration Testing Tools and Major Updates appeared first on GBHackers Security | #1 Globally Trusted Cyber Security News Platform.

I’ve been using Windows since Windows 95, and over the years, I’ve watched a lot of my favorite apps die or get replaced with more “modern” alternatives. While these newer versions are probably better, I still miss the old ones. I really liked their overall layout and aesthetics, and maybe it’s nostalgia talking, but I also think those apps just worked better and were less buggy than their modern counterparts. As such, I’ve always been on the lookout for apps that try to recreate that retro look and feel, but I never expected to find them on Linux, of all places.

I regularly need to move files between my Linux PC and my Android phone, but there are surprisingly few good options. You can manually attach your phone to the PC, email the files to yourself, or use a cloud storage service, but those options are either clunky or involve more steps than I'd like. KDE Connect is great for transferring a few files now and then, but it isn't designed as a sync program.

Choosing a distro for a virtual machine is easy to get wrong. Most people pick whatever they’ve heard of most, then fight it for months. These three options, though, cover nearly every use case, and each shines in a different situation.

Linux on phones has spent years as a hobbyist curiosity. One project has quietly matured into something you can actually install and use. Ubuntu Touch isn’t perfect, but it balances polish, hardware support and a steady update path better than any rival.

Linux has a reputation for giving people control over their computers, but plenty of commercial products use Linux without giving their owners much control at all. They ship with proprietary software, restrict access to source code, or lock down the hardware so thoroughly that installing a modified operating system becomes impractical.

Linux has come a long way from the days when getting a graphical desktop running could feel like a project of its own. Today, you can install a modern Linux distro, open a browser, connect your Bluetooth headphones, and get on with your work. That experience is the result of decades of development, arguments, ambitious redesigns, and a few spectacular failures.

It’s no longer a proper month without Microsoft breaking its own record for security fixes, and October’s Patch Tuesday was no exception. Brian Krebs brings the roundup: more than 1,400 vulnerabilities fixed in a single batch, dwarfing September’s record of nearly 1,000, which itself was about ten times the normal monthly load. According to Tenable, Microsoft has now passed 4,000 CVEs for the year with two months still to go.

Only one of the fixes is for a vulnerability already being exploited in the wild: CVE-2026-96951, a security feature bypass in the Windows Shell affecting Windows 10, 11, and some Server versions. A .NET Framework bypass, CVE-2026-108398, was publicly disclosed before the patch, giving attackers a head start, and with modern AI tooling, it seems like not much of a head start is needed. At least 78 of the bugs are rated critical, and most of those allow remote code execution with little or no user interaction. Windows 10 holdouts can relax a little: Microsoft quietly extended free updates through October 2027.  Given the pace of exploitation, this is probably the only way to prevent an Internet-scale meltdown.

Microsoft credits LLM-driven bug hunting for the volume, which leaves the poor admins who have to test and deploy all of this in an unenviable spot. Fortra’s analysis shows that only 26 Microsoft vulnerabilities have landed in the CISA KEV catalog of actively exploited bugs so far this year, so start there. For the rest, the SANS Internet Storm Center and Cisco Talos have the usual breakdowns by severity. Or, you know, just patch everything and hope for the best, which is roughly what everyone does anyhow.

The CA private key is… 4

Originally I was calling this the “big one” for the week, but this week that just keeps on giving. The private keys for eight eMudhra intermediate certificates have been compromised, and the way they were compromised is going to be a security talk punchline for years.  Remember the Debian SSL and SSH key debacle?  Of that scale.

Some background first. When your browser connects to a website over HTTPS, the site presents a certificate saying “I am example.com”, signed by a Certificate Authority (CA). Your browser and OS ship with a list of trusted root CAs, but roots are too valuable to use day to day, so they sign intermediate certificates, and the intermediates sign the actual website certificates. Whoever holds an intermediate’s private key can mint a certificate for any website, and every client that trusts the root will believe it. The whole system depends on those keys staying secret, and on them being generated properly in the first place.

eMudhra, an Indian CA which sells certificates under the emSign brand, had six TLS intermediates and two code-signing intermediates chaining to the emSign ECC Root CA – G3, which is trusted by Chrome and Apple, and Mozilla. A researcher identified only as Wayne proved the keys were compromised by signing the message “We have a problem here – Wayne” with each of them and sending it to the root programs.

How did Wayne get the keys? Flüpke posted one on Mastodon, and the secret value for the “EM OV TLS CA – G3C” key is… 4. Not four followed by 380 bits of randomness: the integer four. A reply quickly brute-forced the rest, and they’re all equally tiny: 56, 230, 237, 115, 155, 156, and 66. The keys were “incorrectly generated by the CA”, and anyone could recover them from the public certificates, which has been true since they were created in April 2025.

The browsers moved fast. According to The Hacker News, Chrome pushed a block within two hours of the report, and Mozilla blocked the certificates in under three, pulled the root from NSS, and shipped Firefox updates (CVE-2026-113470) for anyone with automatic updates disabled. There are no Certificate Transparency logs of rogue certificates, so modern browsers were never at risk. Everything that isn’t a browser is going to be the real problem and the extremely long tail of this fault: plenty of software never checks for revoked certificates and keeps trusting these keys until its bundled root list is updated.

Go hard-coded the eight bad keys into its standard library (CVE-2026-111943), but as Penligent points out, that only protects Go programs once they’re rebuilt with the new release. Python, Rust, Java, Node.js, curl, and most Linux distributions have updated root bundles, and the we-have-a-problem.com site has a full list, a checker, and manual workarounds for macOS, whose built-in curl and git don’t check revocation. There are also fixes for Linux, Windows, and the BSDs. Update everything, then go rebuild everything you compiled yourself. And then wonder how you’re going to update appliances, IoT devices, cameras, and everything else that fetches code over HTTPS or SSL.

php2shell: PHP gets owned by running out of memory

PHP, the language behind a significant percentage of the web had a rough week. WordPress, Drupal, Magento, phpMyAdmin, and just about every hosting control panel, major ecommerce sites, home project blogs, and even Hackaday itself was potentially impacted. Details of two critical vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, leaked onto Hacker News a day ahead of the embargo, and Huntress covers the scramble that followed as PHP rushed its release out early. Now that patches are available, Ryan Austin of Calif has published the full writeup, demonstrating pre-authentication remote code execution against important apps on default configurations, in PHP versions back to 5.4.0. That’s over a decade of PHP.

The trick is an old one, first found by Stefan Esser back in 2004. PHP enforces a memory limit for each request, and when a request exceeds it, PHP stops immediately with a fatal error. If that happens in the middle of native code updating some internal structure, the structure is left half-built, and the cleanup code that runs afterward trusts it anyhow. That’s a classic “use-after-free” style bug, where the program uses memory that’s already been released or was never properly set up, and those are frequently exploitable. Calif found ways to reliably push a request over the memory limit at exactly the right moment (deeply nested empty file uploads turn out to balloon into hundreds of megabytes of internal tables, while staying under PHP’s upload size limits), and three different places where the interruption leaves a dangerous mess. Austin found the first bug with a generally available LLM, but only because he knew PHP’s twenty-year history of memory-limit bugs well enough to point it in the right direction.

Amazon reports that its honeypots caught a php2shell exploitation attempt on October 17th, four days before the embargo lifted, and that it’s now being broadly exploited. Their advice is worth repeating: for critical bugs on internet-facing systems, measure your patch window in hours, not weeks, and start investigating from the earliest exploitation date, not the disclosure date. If you can’t patch right now, Calif suggests disabling session.upload_progress and removing the memory limit, which comes with its own obvious problems.

One word of caution: alongside the legitimate writeups, there are many self-published “corrected findings” and “proof-of-concept” posts that can’t seem to decide whether their own exploit works, while offering a downloadable “weaponized” bundle. A leaked-bug panic is the perfect time to hand anxious admins a zip file. Read the real advisories, and don’t run random proof-of-concept bundles.

A Sixteen-year-old forever-day in Broadcom WiFi

Quentin Kaiser has the long-form writeup of his Hexacon talk on a bug in Broadcom’s WiFi stack, present since at least 2010, which gives an attacker a root shell on a router from across the street.  So called “parking lot” attacks that can happen from someone not even on your property have long been the boogeymen of WiFi security, and it’s been a little bit since we’ve gotten a new one.

The bug lives in WPS, WiFi Protected Setup: the “push the button on your router and then on your printer” pairing system that was supposed to save people from typing long WiFi passwords. WPS has a long and spotty security history, and this bug can be triggered over the air without knowing the network password, and without completing a WPS pairing. Kaiser’s demos show him pulling the WiFi password straight out of a router’s settings and sending it back over WiFi, and getting a fully interactive remote shell carried entirely over WiFi frames. No Internet connection required.

The really grim part is the patch history. Broadcom quietly released an incomplete fix in 2018, then suggested vendors switch to the open-source hostapd instead. For the older eCos-based chipsets that’s effectively never going to happen, which makes it a permanent “forever-day”. Broadcom refused to assign a CVE, and because Broadcom is its own CVE authority, CERT/CC closed Kaiser’s case the same day it was opened.

As of disclosure, the cable and DSL gateways he tested from three of Belgium’s four major ISPs were still vulnerable, and his napkin math puts it at over a million and a half devices in Belgium alone. Broadcom chips are, of course, sold everywhere. If you’re running ISP-provided hardware, there isn’t much you can do about the firmware. Turning off WPS can’t hurt if your router allows it, although Kaiser doesn’t say whether that blocks the attack. Disabling the gateway’s own WiFi and running your own access point that you can actually update is the safer bet.

GitLab regex bug reaches back twelve years

GitLab has released fixes for CVE-2026-110264, a maximum-severity CVSS 10.0 bug allowing unauthenticated attackers to run code on self-hosted GitLab servers. The flaw is an integer overflow when compiling a specially crafted regular expression in Onigmo, the Ruby regex engine which GitLab bundles into its own packages, so it affects every version back to GitLab 7.0 in 2014.

This is the fourth regex engine code execution bug from the same researcher in about a month (after CVE-2026-97229, CVE-2026-93577, and CVE-2026-89078), and comes with a nasty gotcha: the new fixed versions are one release past the October 12th fix, so if you diligently patched nine days ago, you’re vulnerable again. GitLab hasn’t said what’s needed to trigger the bug, so there’s no configuration workaround. If you’re running GitLab at home or in the shop, patch, and budget for some downtime while the database migrations run.

Node.js Brotli bug

Node.js shipped security updates for the 22, 24, and 26 branches, headlined by CVE-2026-111497, an out-of-bounds write in the bundled Brotli decompression library. Vercel’s advisory notes that researchers have demonstrated both memory leaks and command execution.

Node doesn’t decompress Brotli data on its own, but plenty of applications and libraries do, whether on incoming requests or on responses fetched from other servers. Vercel deployed firewall rules for traffic coming into its own platform, but no firewall can protect your code from a malicious response it goes and fetches itself. Node 20 is end-of-life and won’t be fixed. As a bonus, the same releases carry the eMudhra certificate distrust, so that’s two reasons to go update.

Header accordions and HTTP/3

HTTP/3 is the newest version of the protocol behind the web, running over QUIC (a UDP-based transport) instead of TCP. To save bandwidth, it compresses request headers using a scheme called QPACK: common headers can be sent as a one-byte reference into a table instead of the full text. Compression is great for bandwidth, but any time a small input can turn into a big output, there’s a risk of a “decompression bomb”.  Similar tricks resulted in “zip bombs” in the 2000s, and what’s old is new again.

FoxIO found exactly that in seven of the ten HTTP/3 implementations they tested. One approach packs about 160,000 unique short headers into a single 1MB request; another stores one 4KB header and then references it thousands of times, a 4000-to-1 amplification. The HTTP/3 spec already says how to limit the decoded size, but implementations got it wrong in every possible way: checking only the compressed size, decompressing everything before checking, ignoring the per-header overhead, or reading the limit setting and then never enforcing it.

Fixed so far are quic-go (CVE-2025-64702), which is used by Caddy, Traefik, and Cloudflare’s tunnels; Cloudflare’s quiche (CVE-2026-12523); lsquic 4.9.0; and even Wireshark (CVE-2025-13945), whose QPACK decoder crashed during testing. Bun, the hyperium h3 Rust crate, and aioquic/mitmproxy remain unpatched. Bun gets special mention for an integer overflow that turns a single 516KB request into a permanent 100% CPU infinite loop. The lesson applies to any compression format: limit the decompressed size as you go, not just the bytes on the wire.

Metamorphic macOS ransomware

Patrick Wardle of Objective-See digs into Heartbreaker, macOS ransomware written in Rust that has sat on VirusTotal since May 2025, undetected by every antivirus engine.

Most antivirus detection relies on signatures: a hash or byte pattern identifying a known-bad file. Metamorphic malware tries to dodge signatures by rewriting itself so every copy looks different while behaving the same. Heartbreaker takes a delightfully brute-force approach: it carries its own Rust source code inside the binary, and after running, it shuffles variable names, adds junk functions, installs a Rust compiler if one isn’t present, recompiles itself, and replaces itself with the new build. It is about as subtle as a brick through a window.

As ransomware it’s not very scary. It only encrypts the Downloads folder, and uses the same hard-coded key for every victim, so Wardle simply wrote a decryptor. The rebuilding also depends on a GitHub library which has since disappeared, so it mostly fails anyhow. Wardle uses it to demonstrate his free RansomWhere? tool, which ignores signatures completely and instead watches for an untrusted process rapidly writing files that look encrypted (using a bit of entropy math). The malware can change its hash all day long, but to ransom anything it still has to encrypt the files, and that’s much harder to disguise.

UpdraftPlus vendor breached

TeamUpdraft, the company behind the very popular UpdraftPlus WordPress backup plugin, disclosed a breach of their customer database over the weekend. Names, emails, addresses, hashed passwords, and two-factor authentication settings were taken, and more worryingly, the connection keys for UpdraftCentral, their cloud dashboard for managing many WordPress sites at once. UpdraftPlus previously made an appearance back in June, when a vulnerability in the plugin was used in the Awesome Motive supply chain attack.

Those UpdraftCentral keys can send commands to every connected site, which turns one vendor breach into a remote control for potentially thousands of customer websites. TeamUpdraft has released UpdraftPlus 1.26.12 and 2.26.12, which automatically disconnect the old keys. If you or anyone you know manages WordPress sites through UpdraftCentral, log in to each site directly, update the plugin, and check for unexpected admin accounts and plugins (including the easy-to-miss “Must-Use” plugins tab).

Spyware delivered by ad network

Citizen Lab has published research showing that the Israeli ad-tech company Discover-Tech helped deliver spyware through ordinary online ads, targeting at least 45 devices at the news outlet Al Jazeera in 2024 and 2025. Citizen Lab attributes the spyware to Candiru, a commercial spyware vendor.

When you load a web page with ads, the ad slot is typically auctioned off in real time to the highest bidder, based on a profile of who you seem to be. This “programmatic advertising” system is, by design, a mechanism for running third-party content on a very specific person’s device. It’s easy to see why that’s attractive to a spyware vendor. According to Citizen Lab, Discover-Tech’s platform could profile users and infect a device just by displaying an ad, no click required. CPJ reports that the company’s ads reached nearly 200,000 websites and apps, and researchers at Confiant found them on government networks including the US Department of Defense, NATO, and the UN.

Malicious ads are nothing new, but this is the first public evidence of an ad platform being used for targeted, zero-click spyware delivery. “Don’t click on ads” has always been good advice. An ad blocker isn’t just a quality-of-life improvement; it’s attack surface reduction.

Ransomware negotiators on the wrong side

Last week we covered a ransomware “recovery” CEO charged with secretly paying ransoms while billing customers for decryption. This week, Brian Krebs reports that investigators chasing ShinyHunters (the group behind the FBI hack) have identified executives at two ransomware negotiation firms with unusually friendly relationships with the gang. Chats seized when Dutch police arrested a suspected ShinyHunters member reportedly show negotiators who knew about new victims before the victims themselves did. One Canadian executive has already been arrested, and investigators believe an executive at an unnamed, prestigious US consulting firm helped run the gang’s extortion website.

It’s not the first time: the DOJ sentenced Florida negotiator Angelo Martino to 70 months in July for feeding his own clients’ negotiating positions to the BlackCat ransomware gang, and for helping deploy ransomware against even more victims. The government seized $10 million in assets from him, including a luxury fishing boat and, for reasons unknown, a food truck.

Part of the problem is structural. Some negotiation firms charge a percentage of the ransom paid, which gives the “negotiator” every incentive to pay, and pay big. Firms which refuse to facilitate payments often just get swapped out by the insurance company for ones that will. Meanwhile, ShinyHunters is reportedly furious with Coveware, an incident response firm, for telling victims not to pay, which is probably the best endorsement Coveware could ask for.

An army of AI agents

The Verge reports that security firm Norforge found an attacker using a swarm of mostly autonomous AI agents to break into more than 100 websites, including sites belonging to John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins. The agents ran on Cairn, an open-source “general-purpose problem-solving engine”: you give it a starting point and a goal, and the agents work toward it while documenting their progress. That documentation is how they were caught: the attacker’s Cairn instance was exposed to the Internet, along with about 20 others that appear malicious.

According to Reuters, the attacker described their preferred intrusion tactics in fewer than 100 Chinese characters, and each successful breach took about 23 hours. The victims say the impacted sites were standalone support pages, and Cairn’s author insists it was “never a ‘hacking tool'”. Many tools can be double-edged, but the effort balance here is hard to ignore: a short prompt and a day of waiting on one side, and defenders who have to close every hole on the other.

Staples hacked to fund a gift cards

404 Media pieced together, from an unsealed search warrant, that a Chinese organized crime ring hacked Staples in 2023 and issued more than 15,000 gift cards worth over $5 million. Staples’ internal customer support system was supposed to be reachable only from inside the company, but wasn’t. The attackers requested “heap dumps”, a debugging feature which captures everything an application has in memory, and pulled out the active login sessions of customer service reps. With those, they simply logged in as the reps and issued gift cards.  A similar trick was used in a hack of payment data from Target years ago, where attackers leveraged access through the air conditioner control network into the cash register network, and then dumped credit cards directly from RAM as they were processed.

If you’ve ever wondered why debugging endpoints left exposed in production show up in every penetration test report, this is why. The gift cards were then laundered the old-fashioned way: crews of shoppers hitting Target stores with phones full of gift cards, buying Apple and Bose gear by the cartload (about $141,000 across 85 Target stores in 18 states in two days), with the goods shipped back to China. The larger ring this fed into reportedly moved over $100 million in gift cards.

PingCAP breach claims

An extortion group calling itself FulcrumSec has posted a leak site claiming a massive breach of PingCAP, makers of the TiDB Cloud managed database service. The group claims it found cloud credentials committed to PingCAP’s own source code repositories, and used them to set up a replication feed of PingCAP’s production control database that re-exported everything to the attackers every six hours for 22 days, without being noticed.

The claims haven’t been independently verified, but they’re very specific: 10.6TB of data, 115,000 customer API keys stored in plaintext, 20 million customer SQL queries, four years of connection logs with customer IP addresses, and 413 private source repositories. The attackers quote a 2022 internal security ticket noting that any member of a customer organization, even a billing-only account, could reset the root password on every database in that organization. Perhaps most damaging, support engineers allegedly pasted live customer credentials into support tickets, including cloud keys with admin access to other companies’ storage. If you’re a TiDB Cloud customer, assume your API keys, connection strings, and anything ever pasted into a support ticket are burned, and rotate accordingly.

Fake WhatsApp on the Play Store

Android Authority found a fake WhatsApp app on Google Play with over half a million downloads, a week after a fake Chrome app racked up over 100,000. The fake copied the real listing’s screenshots and description word for word, and in some cases appeared as a sponsored result when searching for the real app.

The trick that let it linger is Google Play’s “Early Access” program, which disables public reviews. Normally a fake app gets buried in one-star “THIS IS A SCAM” reviews; in Early Access, nobody can see them. As of publication it was still available. “Only install from the official store” is still good advice for family members, but it’s a little less reassuring when the official store is selling ad placement to the fake.

Meta Muse leaks via DNS

Back in September, we covered a serious vulnerability in Muse, Meta’s extremely privileged AI agent. This week, Meta suspended Muse’s chat sharing feature after researchers at Claroc found they could find and read thousands of shared conversations.

Each shared chat got its own web address, with the conversation title as part of the hostname. Hostnames get looked up in DNS, and many DNS lookups are recorded by “passive DNS” services, essentially a giant searchable history of which names have been resolved. One search returned a ready-made table of contents of shared chats. Claroc found 6,800 of them, including a small business loan application, a bank fraud alert with partial account details, and internal company documents. “Secret URL” sharing only works if the URL stays secret, and putting the secret in a DNS hostname is roughly the opposite of that.

Password1 strikes again

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office reprimanded IT provider Ogi Networks and the Welsh public sector data organization Data Cymru over a 2024 ransomware attack which exposed data on 3,300 people, most of them children. The way in? A test account named “Test2”, created in 2012, never reviewed, and protected with the password “Password1”. The local administrator accounts on three systems also shared a single password for the same twelve years.

There’s nothing exotic here, sadly. Old accounts nobody remembers, passwords that would fall to the first guess of any automated tool, and an outsourcing arrangement where each side assumed the other was handling security. None of it makes for exciting headlines, but these are the things that keep causing very real breaches.

Trezor wallets also implanted

As a follow-up to last week’s coverage of hardware implants in Ledger crypto wallets, Kim Zetter reports that Trezor’s claim of “not a single piece of evidence” that its devices were compromised doesn’t quite line up with reality. Joe Grand found implants in two Trezor wallets, bought through Facebook Marketplace and a TikTok shop, and reported them to Trezor in August.

The Trezor attack is different from the Ledger implant. Instead of adding a radio to spy on the screen, the attackers replaced the main microcontroller with one running modified (open source) firmware. The firmware “randomly” generates one of a dozen recovery phrases the attackers already know. To pass Trezor’s integrity checks, it presents a copy of the legitimate firmware for verification before switching to the malicious code. The takeaway hasn’t changed from last week: buy only directly from the vendor, and if you’re holding enough crypto to make this worth someone’s while, consider whether you can really trust any single device.

NGINX gets more critical bugs

F5 has released out-of-band (meaning outside their normal patch schedule) updates for three critical vulnerabilities in NGINX, the web server and reverse proxy that sits in front of a huge chunk of the Internet, and quite possibly in front of the services on your home lab. The Cyber Security Agency of Singapore has a summary: all three are rated CVSS 9.2, can be triggered remotely without authentication, and can crash worker processes or, under the right conditions, allow remote code execution.

The bugs are CVE-2026-15176, a heap overflow in the “alias” and “rewrite” directives; CVE-2026-97205, a use-after-free in asynchronous file I/O combined with Server Side Includes; and CVE-2026-93479, a heap overflow in the “map” directive. Code execution requires the vulnerable configuration to be in use, and requires bypassing ASLR (the randomization of memory layout which makes exploits harder to aim). Affected versions include NGINX Open Source 1.30.5 and below and 1.31.6 and below, NGINX Plus R33 through R37, and a long list of F5’s NGINX-based products, including the Kubernetes Ingress Controller.

Back in May we covered “nginx-poolslip”, where the suggested mitigation was to avoid unnamed regex capture groups in rewrite rules. The mitigation for the “map” bug this time? Use named captures instead of unnamed captures. If you’ve been putting off cleaning up those “$1” references in your config, now’s the time. For the other two, avoid “alias” inside “location” blocks (and the “$request_filename” variable), or disable AIO or SSI, until you can update.

Linux kernel bugs posted to the wrong list

Normally, security bugs in the Linux kernel are reported privately to the kernel security team, which coordinates a fix before details go public. This is “coordinated disclosure”: the bug and fix are published together, ideally giving admins a chance to patch before attackers can start writing exploits. The Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), on the other hand, is about as public as it gets.

Phoronix reports that Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, seemingly by accident, sent a batch of unpatched vulnerability reports straight to LKML. Greg Kroah-Hartman replied to each report asking about the choice of mailing list, which I can only imagine was done with remarkable restraint. The most serious two are both CVSS 9.0 remote code execution bugs in ksmbd, the kernel’s built-in SMB (Windows file sharing) server: an integer underflow in SMB Direct, and a race condition. The rest include local privilege escalation bugs in the networking code, the VMware graphics driver (an out-of-bounds write), and a stack overflow in search-domain TCP query handling, plus an information leak in the NVMe-over-fabrics target code.

Some of the bugs already have patches being tested or queued for future kernel releases, and those will presumably be expedited now. Most systems don’t run ksmbd (the userspace Samba server is far more common), but if you’ve enabled it on a NAS or a home server, it’s worth disabling until patched kernels land. As Phoronix puts it: “the bug and security reports keep on coming in the AI fueled world.”

Fedora is known as the leading-edge Linux distro, offering an excellent balance between stability and access to the latest Linux features. Ubuntu, on the other hand, has traditionally offered a stable and reliable experience but has often lagged behind Fedora. It’s actually one of the main reasons I decided to ditch Ubuntu, even though it was my first Linux distro.