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.

Gamers Nexus makes the point that while the invasive ad tech is gross, it’s mostly limited if the user does not agree to the end-user license agreement – but the infrastructure required to enable it is riddled with security flaws, both discovered and likely additional undiscovered issues. A smart TV is basically a computer, usually running either some flavor of Android or Linux, with the attendant flexibility, power, and problems. A vulnerability in the TV operating system or its apps can provide a route into your internal network. (Not that this required an exploit: LG was called out earlier this summer because 42% of apps on the official app store contained residential proxy systems to sell your home Internet connection.) But it can also access any of the attached hardware, like the microphone.

Gamers Nexus demonstrates that a LG TV can be exploited to gain local root, and from there, it can record audio from attached devices – even when the primary microphone is muted. Gamers Nexus also discovered that muting the microphone on some models does not disconnect or disable the microphone, it simply sets the gain levels extremely low; recording is still possible, and with amplification, audio is still recoverable.

Spy tech and ad tech goes hand in hand; it will be interesting to see if LG responds by at least hardening the security on the devices, or if another company finds traction in selling modern televisions and monitors without the “smart” advertising.

Shai-Halud NPM Worm Returns

Aikido.dev reports that after 111 days, the Shai-Halud worm returned to the NPM repository.

Shai-Halud was one of several worms hitting package repositories in the Spring of 2026, installing backdoors, stealing cryptocurrency wallets, and taking every login credential and authentication token it could find before infecting every package the tokens linked to. Since then, infections have remained quiet, and repositories like NPM have stated that they now scan every package as it is uploaded.

Charlie Erkisen at Aikido.dev observed that on September 7, 2026, four additional packages uploaded to NPM were infected with Shai-Halud; not a variant of the worm, but the original code, matching the known public signatures. Whatever scanning is in place in the NPM repository didn’t filter them, and if an exact match for a known, major worm isn’t caught by the infrastructure, it’s unclear how a new threat would be.

Boston Scientific Hack Continues

The apparent ransomware attack against Boston Scientific continues to have impacts, with Boston Scientific filing a report with the SEC that the attack is expected to have an impact on the company earnings.

Boston Scientific makes medical devices, like pacemakers, stents, and monitoring equipment. It has not yet been publicly disclosed what happened, or if customer data was compromised, but the SEC filing confirms that unauthorized access on “certain systems” causing an outage. After several weeks of outages, the company reports that it is able to ship almost at capacity, and that the sterilization facilities for medical devices are online. While there is no estimate provided for full recovery, efforts are ongoing.

Commerce Sites Vulnerable

Adobe released a security bulletin that the Adobe Commerce and Magento platforms are under active exploitation from CVE-2026-75650, a flaw in the template engine.

These platforms power tens of thousands of commerce sites, and vulnerabilities in them are usually used to steal payment data or serve malware to customers during the checkout process. Previously this year, Magento patched another vulnerability which allowed uploading executable files to any store, and indications are that the current vulnerability has been exploited in the wild since early September 2026.

The current vulnerability allows implantation of PHP code by injecting custom styles into a query, which is then executed when Magento generates a failure email and renders the template. The attackers then download and install a control binary written in Rust which masquerades as a kernel thread task, which then monitors the store and collects payment data.

The vulnerability was publicly known and used for several days before Adobe made official statements of a fix being available, leaving any store running on Magento vulnerable with no official fixes, but as of writing this, Adobe has published patches and an advisory.

Microsoft to Block Unpatched Servers

Microsoft plans to block emails to to the cloud-hosted Exchange Online from unpatched on-premises Exchange servers.

Apparently the urge to self-host Microsoft Exchange is coupled with antipathy about actually patching it, to such a significant level that Microsoft is taking the steps to detect incoming mail from servers that have not patched since October 2025. While Microsoft updates rarely apply with zero problems, nearly a year is more than enough time to have tested and deployed a security fix.

“This update released nearly a year ago, and all organizations should have updated to it”: so say we all.

Hackers Pose as Recruiters

Government-backed groups in Iran have been posing as recruiters trying to infect targets with malware.

The group, designated “Nimbus Manticore”, is known to develop custom malware and remote access tools (RATs), and typically target specific individuals via spear-phishing attacks. The latest malware from the group is cross-platform and can infect Windows, macOS, and Linux, installing services to run websocket-based remote access tunnels, SSH tunnels, and a command-and-control client that allows live control of the infected device.

The group contacts targets posing as recruiters, but first the target must solve a coding challenge contained in a zip file. The zip contains a trojaned Node.js project which infects the victim system when compiled, deploying the remote access tools and setting up persistence to relaunch them if disabled. Multiple variants have already been spotted, generally targeting different countries, predominately Egypt, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia.

The latest version of the malware package also looks for settings and data from major security vendors like Symantec, CrowdStrike, and SentinelOne, as well as the contents of directories related to Google and Microsoft services.

The fake recruiting method has also been used by other groups in Iran and North Korea. Remember: any project with a build script can execute any commands as part of the build, and most IDE project files also allow embedding custom plugins and commands into the project. Triggering a compile on a project is the same as running arbitrary commands!

150 Million US Drivers Licenses Stolen

As many outlets are now reporting, a major ID validation company was compromised, leading to the theft of scans and data of 150 million US drivers licenses.

IDScan provides drivers license and identification card scanning services used by car rental companies, bars and dispensaries, hotels, concert venues, and a multitude of other businesses. If you’ve ever had to hand your ID over for validation, there’s a high chance you’ve interacted with IDScan or a similar company.

Evidence points to IDScan being compromised for at least a year, with full scans of licenses continually exfiltrated. The scans include everything visible on a typical license or ID card, including name, license identification number, ID photo, and home address, but also the date that it was scanned in. The collection even includes additional scans of the ID in ultraviolet and infrared to catch any watermarks. With 150 million entries, the data set contains everyone from the security researcher Brian Krebs who broke the story, to government officials like Pete Hegseth.

The data has been available for sale, individually or in bulk, although with the recent press coverage the site claiming to sell the data has gone offline for now. Before disappearing, the site claimed that all data was exfiltrated into their own databases, which means it’s still available somewhere, and shutting them out of the IDScan service won’t protect data already stolen.

Many aspects of this echo the scanned ID data stolen from validation services used by Discord and other online services: almost like scanning unchangeable government IDs is a bad plan?

American Meteor Society Knocked Offline

It’s all fun and games until they come for the geek hobbies. The American Meteor Society Fireball tracking program is was knocked offline, seemingly from a ransomware attack. Fortunately it looks like as of writing this, the admins were able to restore a backup and the site is online again.

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.

Vulnerability in Qubes

The security-focused distribution Qubes has an important security bulletin for recently discovered issues.

Qubes is built on top of the Xen virtualization system, where each application can be given a dedicated container. The utility to copy files from the primary container into an application container, qvm-copy-to-vm, displays a message if there is an error copying the file. To show the message, the utility launches kdialog with the error as arguments, but fails to ensure that the error doesn’t include shell commands.

The system call used to show the alerts has the dangerous side effect of calling the command as if it was a normal shell. This is extremely powerful, but equally risky: a shell typically allows multiple commands per lines, require quoted strings to protect arguments with spaces or complex text, and can expand variables. Generating an error that escapes out of the message and runs arbitrary commands was all it took.

Qubes already has a fix ready and everyone getting standard updates should have it waiting.

Were US Military Freezers Hacked?

The controls for the freezers used in the commissaries of a growing number of US military bases may have been compromised.

Independent researchers noticed growing reports in Reddit threads that freezer units were out of service, with other service members and families reporting the same. At least fourteen bases throughout the United States appear impacted, and the story has been picked up by the official military newspaper “Stars and Stripes” as well as by mainstream media outlets.

Posts by staff at the bases clarify that it was not a power loss or cooling loss, the fridges and freezers were placed in defrost mode where they self-heated. The commissaries are operated by the Defense Commissary Agency, with central monitoring and control of facilities. Central monitoring makes complete sense when you need to ensure devices are keeping food at a safe temperature, but something definitely seems to have gone wrong.

Diving into it further, M. Elizabeth finds a post from August 9, 2026 describing vulnerabilities in the Danfoss controllers that allow unauthorized access to the refrigeration controller, and a second paper by the same team exposing over 20 vulnerabilities in Copeland refrigeration controllers that included full control of the unit settings. M. Elizabeth is careful to point out that without confirmation from the commissary agency, it’s impossible to know for sure that this was a hack of the control system, but the evidence is mounting.

BGP and SSL Hijack Used to Push Bad Updates

Virtualizor, a web interface for managing virtual machines in an enterprise (bring-your-own AWS), was recently targeted in a global route hijacking scheme.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a core routing system underlying the Internet at large. Service providers use BGP to announce the ranges of IP addresses they handle and how to reach them. BGP is operated as basically a global gentleman’s agreement: the protocol itself lacks any authentication or encryption. If you think this sounds vulnerable to disruption, you’d be completely right.

Global disruptions have happened accidentally, like when an ISP in Pakistan took down YouTube, deliberately, such as when thieves hijacked the routes to cryptocurrency exchanges, and mysteriously, like when China hijacked parts of the Internet repeatedly with no explanation.

This time, the BGP attack targeted the IP range used by Virtualizor, and was combined with spoofed SSL certificates for the Virtualizor servers to push spoofed updates. The BGP announcement was targeted to a specific class C: a relatively small allocation of 253 addresses, similar to what a home network would use. BGP gives precedence to the smallest announcement for an IP range, so all systems that received the spoofed announcement routed those addresses accordingly. The network advertising the false route was based in Romania, though of course they could also be a victim.

With control over the IP range, the attackers were able to generate a certificate via Lets Encrypt, which was sufficient for browsers and the updater to accept the rerouted addresses. The attackers then published a malicious package that appears to install additional services. The company has not provided details about the trojaned update, so it’s not clear what other risks it poses.

Virtualizor does not have a public list of customers, but one has to assume it includes high-profile companies to make such an attack viable. Hijacking BGP is extremely obvious, and isn’t frequently used for such obvious spoofing attacks.

Linux Zoom Steals Clipboard Contents

Simon Tatham, the author of the extremely popular PuTTY SSH client among other projects, posted on Mastodon an interesting observation about the clipboard behavior of recent Zoom clients on Linux.

Relatively recently, some operating systems have added the ability to alert the user when an application access the clipboard. Unfortunately, Linux is not yet one of them, but thanks to other clipboard management tools, Simon noticed that the recent update to Zoom 7.1.5 copies the contents of the clipboard as soon as they change. What happens to the clipboard contents once copied is currently a mystery.

Considering that the clipboard can often contain passwords, authentication tokens, or simply data you might not want to share with Zoom, automatically scraping the contents isn’t what you’d hope for.

Plex Vulnerabilities

The Plex media streaming software sent out an advisory this week warning about security updates for the server and desktop application.

Details are currently thin, with the promise of future details once CVEs have been assigned. For now, make sure you’re on version 1.43.4 or newer. The Plex post has additional directions for updating on platforms that may not have pushed new packages yet.

AI Accelerates Exploit Development

Security company CrowdStrike has released their 2026 report on threats, focusing on the proliferation of AI tools in exploit writing.

CrowdStrike observed that 88% of exploits happened with 48 hours of the proof of concept code being released, crediting AI tools for shortening the adaptation. Typically proof of concept code is designed to demonstrate the vulnerability without providing an immediate mechanism for malicious use, and the window from exploit announcement to wide-spread risk was on the order of weeks. The report notes some vulnerabilities being widely exploited in 20 hours after public disclosure.

The tightening window makes patching even more important, but rapid patching caries the risk of instability when the patches themselves haven’t had extensive testing. Unfortunately there’s no simple solution; faster exploitation via AI tools drives faster patching, often also with AI tools that can introduce more bugs as well.

If you want improve a model rocket’s performance, all the common options come with serious trade-offs: you could increase the motor’s size, which raises safety issues, or you could cut down on weight, which limits the possible payload. [Con Hathy] was therefore intrigued by the design of the Arcas sounding rockets, which with the aid of a gas-fed launch tube could reach an altitude of 100 km. Even in models without a gas generator, a launch tube apparently boosted performance, an effect which [Con] was able to replicate in a much smaller model rocket.

In theory, as the rocket engine fires, it should pressurize the tube behind the rocket, providing an extra boost out of the tube. To test this, [Con] 3D printed a test rocket, launched it both from a standard rail and from a tube, and compared the results. During tube launches, a printed sabot fit around the rocket and formed a seal with the launch tube. The results were surprising: the tube-launched rocket actually performed substantially worse than a rail launch. After building a simulation, [Con] found that, as the rocket moves down the tube, the volume of tube it needs to back-fill with gas increases faster than the engine puts out exhaust; it was pulling a slight vacuum behind it, slowing itself down.

To solve this, [Con] decreased the diameter of the launch tube. To let the rocket fit into the tube, he also modified it to use pop-out stabilizer fins which wrap around the rocket while in the tube. The sabot was also shrunk, and had foam added to improve the seal between it and the rocket. For this second test, [Con] also connected a pressure sensor to the base of the launch tube. The results on the second launch were much better: according to an altimeter, it managed to fly 72% higher. Based on the pressure sensor’s data, a longer tube could have squeezed out still more performance, but this still demonstrated the principle quite well.

We’ve seen a tube-launched rocket before, though not with such a performance focus.

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.

Hijacking Calls to Military Bases with DNS

In the early 2000s, a domain name scheme was developed to directly map telephone numbers to DNS records for SIP and VOIP calling. (Who knew? I didn’t!) But [Lina] did, with an excellent writeup on accidentally positioning themselves to intercept phone calls by registering an expired domain.

The e164-arpa number to name scheme was never widely adopted, and quickly forgotten about. As is the way with all forgotten standards, the infrastructure slowly fell apart. [Lina] noticed that several country records were delegated to name servers hosted in expired domains, and by simply registering them, they were able to begin resolving queries. For a five Euro registration fee, [Lina] gained control over an abandoned DNS resolution protocol for Saint Helena, Diego Garcia, and Ascension Island. After watching the logs for some time and not getting any traffic, and running into the bureaucratic tangle of standards committees and the actual United Nations, the project was shelved.

Six months later, [Lina] examined the logs of the other domains, and found hundreds of thousands of records of attempted calls, and since you read the section header, you already know where the calls were headed. Clearly some phone systems still attempt to use the ill-fated e164-arpa calling scheme even in 2026, and because the DNS records control the destination of the call, it would have been possible to hijack all the calls transparently and mine them for information, and all for five Euros. With military bases involved, and with one of the bases targeted by missiles during recent conflicts, suddenly agencies cared significantly more, and the story has the happy ending of the domains being transferred to the National Cyber Security Center in the UK.

AliExpress Fingerprinting Browsers

AliExpress has been caught using a hidden fingerprinting technique to try to identify users.

The fingerprinting plays a waveform in the background of the page with the volume set to zero, and measures variances in the computed values. Variances in the computed waveform are introduced by the browser type, CPU, audio hardware, and even the driver versions. While most of the headlines have focused on the audio fingerprinting, AliExpress also used other fingerprinting techniques to build profiles of each browser, including WebGL, WebRTC, screen resolution, and other web integrations.

The purpose of the advanced device fingerprinting is unknown: AliExpress could use it for fraud prevention, but could also be using it to identify and track customers when they have disabled traditional tracking cookies. The audio fingerprinting was discovered when a user experienced trouble with Bluetooth headphones being attached to the silent audio stream.

Unfortunately with fingerprinting techniques which leverage standard features in the browser it can be difficult to block them. Sometimes, ad blockers may be able to identify and block some of the fingerprinting resources, as can disabling some features in the browser, but many features like audio and WebGL can’t usually be turned off.

[Tom Ritter], who works for Firefox, mentions that they head this fingerprinting method off at the pass three years ago as part of their anti-fingerprinting campaign. This is clearly not the case for all browsers.

Attacking Signal’s Contact Discovery

Most chat apps allow you to discover users from your contacts list who also use that app – but then you’ve given your contact list to the app, helping them build their marketing and social graphs. Signal of course handles it differently, allowing you to discover users from your contacts list while preventing the Signal corporation from being able to access your list of contacts. Well, mostly.

Signal runs the contact discovery process inside an Intel SGX Enclave. A SGX Enclave is an Intel extension similar to a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on Arm, where memory and execution can be partitioned for a restricted process. In theory, code and memory inside an enclave can not be read by other processes, root processes, or even a hypervisor or virtualization system. Signal uses enclaves so that the users encrypted contacts list and the encryption key itself are fully insulated. The Signal client is then able to validate the integrity of the enclave using known measurement values baked into the client releases.

Researchers using the V12 AI agent discovered this wasn’t always the case. Because a SGX Enclave shares resources with the rest of the system, a malicious host could create exploitable race conditions in the algorithm by generating page faults and pausing execution of the enclave. The malicious server running the enclave is still unable to directly read the contents, but it could extract the secret values needed to then create false servers which could fully expose the user contact list.

A second attack would allow a malicious host to manipulate the list of clients connected to the enclave, gaining full code execution inside the enclave with the predictable result of exporting contact data.

Both of the issues were reported to Signal and fixed before the public writeup, and there is no evidence they were ever abused: to attack either flaw, a compromised host would have to be running the Signal enclave code and be part of the Signal infrastructure that clients would connect to.

Boston Scientific Hit by Cyberattack

Boston Scientific reported in a SEC filing that it has been hit with an unspecified cyber attack impacting operations, causing the stock to drop by almost 5% in a day.

The company has been unwilling to release any details of the attack, but expects to be able to resume shipping of medical products in “less than three weeks,” which sounds like a pretty major disruption. Boston Scientific manufactures defibrillators, pacemakers, and surgical equipment. It’s unclear if any patient data has been compromised, though presumably regulations will require disclosure if that’s determined to be the case.

With no additional information about the attack, it’s also unclear if any source code or other data which could aid attacking medical devices was impacted, either.

Carhartt Hit by Ransomware

The Carhartt clothing company has also been hit by ransomware, with 13 million accounts leaked.

The ShinyHunters group claims responsibility; previous victims of the group include casinos, car manufacturers, medical companies, and government agencies. The leak claims to include over 50 gigabytes of customer and employee data, with customer data including email, phone numbers, and physical shipping addresses. The group demanded $3.3 million in ransom for the data, and published it when Carhartt didn’t pay.

Have I Been Pwned linked the data to a compromise of the Databricks instance used by Carhartt, which is a platform for linking business data and AI.

AI Agents Installing Unknown Code

Multiple AI agents (Codex, Hermes, and Claude) have been observed executing arbitrary instructions and code contained in the llms.txt files on websites.

Normally, llms.txt and llms-full.txt are used to instruct AI agents on how to summarize and index the sites content, but researchers in Israel indexed the files of Fortune 500 companies, defense contractors, and tech companies and found that over a hundred of them included directions to install packages which didn’t exist or referenced domain names that were not registered. The researchers were able to create packages with matching names and record agents inside multiple high-profile companies installing and executing them.

While documenting the reach of the exposed packages, researchers found at least one had already been replaced by attackers with live malware which would execute inside whatever context the agent was executing in, potentially exposing authentication tokens or company data. The attacks which have been rampant in the NPM and PyPI package repositories can make even legitimate packages dangerous to install, but agents blindly following instructions from arbitrary websites inflates the danger even higher.

Alleged Members of TeamPCP Arrested

Finally, security reporter extraordinaire Brain Krebs brings news that suspected key operators of the TeamPCP group have been arrested in Australia.

TeamPCP has been behind some of the worst of the supply chain attacks plaguing PyPI, NPM, and VSCode plugin repositories, and have released the source code to some of the worms used in the supply chain attacks to muddy the waters and recruit new members. TeamPCP has also been involved in compromising thousands of GitHub repositories, and is affiliated with multiple other crime and malware groups.

While the identities of the arrested individuals have not been officially released, in typical Brian Krebs fashion, dozens of connections are correlated showing their likely identities and links to TeamPCP and other groups. If nothing else, this should serve as a reminder that the best time to pay attention to operational security was ten years ago.

As TeamPCP doesn’t appear to be a state-sponsored group, or even strongly organized, the arrests of a few members are unlikely to drastically slow down the compromises. Krebs details conversations held with one of the arrested men, in which they discuss struggles with sobriety and plans to leave the malware scene, stating that others have already taken over leadership roles in the group.

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.

Copilot Reveals Secrets

Microsoft Copilot was tricked into executing hostile prompts without user intervention, and the team that accomplished it used Copilot itself to expose the vulnerability.

Copilot has a set of guardrails in place intended to safeguard against disclosing private information. Given the initial question — asking how to submit a prompt without the user confirming — the model said this was impossible. Over the course of many questions, researchers at Varonis were able to get Copilot to disclose the exact errors and restrictions that prevented running unauthorized queries, culminating in it admitting that there was an undocumented URL parameter (“autorun=1”, naturally) that would automatically execute a query.

Why such a parameter would exist in the first place is a little unclear. The Ars Technica article says that when Microsoft removed the parameter as part of the initial fix, it caused several AI browser extensions to fail, hinting that it may have been in place to enable automation on behalf of the user without showing the user the actual prompts being run. Regardless, prompts set to autorun were allowed to execute with no intervention, including prompts to disclose the contents of the users inbox, stored information in the users Copilot session, and any connected apps and services.

Comcast Senses Motion With WiFi

Comcast is enabling “WiFi Motion Detection” on its fleet of home router/access point devices. Conceptually, it’s a fairly simple trick. When a WiFi device changes position, or if something partially blocks the signal, the signal level of the device will change. People and pets are basically various sized bags of radio-blocking water, and as we move around we cause fluctuations in the signal levels of surrounding devices.

The risks lie in the second-order aspects: how much data is collected, how is it stored, and what does it expose about your home? Comcast says the feature is optional, and is opt-in: it won’t be turned on unless a customer enables it. This is refreshing, but once enabled, how is the data protected? Currently, Comcast states that the fidelity of the information may not be able to distinguish between a large pet and a small child, and can not identify individual people, but other public projects have refined a similar process to identify the number of people and characteristics about specific people, all based on the signal level. (Be careful when looking for other projects, though. There are several that appear to be completely AI generated, with both false claims and false data!)

As a company subject to the laws of any countries they operate in, Comcast may also be legally compelled to turn over motion and presence data in criminal or civil cases, or may opt to re-sell the data for other training or advertising purposes. Leveraging equipment you already have to collect more data is cool, but personally I’m not sure I want even more tracking data of when I’m home or where I spend time in my home to be that easily collected by a third party.

Stripe Merchant Keys Leaked

The payment processor Stripe has not been hacked, but it looks like 650 companies using it may have been.

Someone has collected hundreds of Stripe API keys, probably from GitHub, mis-configured servers, and infostealer malware, and made them available on trading forums. Despite guardrails by GitHub, a common mistake is committing configuration files, environment files, or code with API keys into public repositories. Once data goes into git, it’s fairly hard to remove it without resetting the entire repository: the whole point of code management is to be able to go back in time and identify the changes! The prevalence of information stealing malware on developer devices, VSCode plugin repositories, and inside packaging systems is another excellent source of stolen authentication tokens for many services.

A Stripe API token acts as the login credentials for the company using Stripe to process payments: it allows creating charging, listing past customers, extracting stored payment data, and essentially anything else a logged in administrator can do.

Stripe themselves say that they actively scan GitHub and other source management platforms looking for leaked keys and notifying customers, and hopefully impacted companies will be notified and can rotate their API tokens before they are used against actual customers.

More Windows Defender Issues

Last week was another Microsoft Patch Tuesday, which somehow didn’t set a third record for the highest number of security fixes in a month. Nonetheless, it would hardly be a proper Patch Tuesday in 2026 without another bypass of Windows Defender.

Previous exploits released by the researcher known as NightmareEclipse have demonstrated bypasses for BitLocker and Windows Defender and have stirred legal threats from Microsoft. Previous attacks against Windows Defender were fixed in the July set of patches, however now the “ShieldBreak” exploit, identified as CVE-2026-69414, uses Windows Defender itself to escalate to admin privileges.

The current fix? Disable Windows Defender. Which probably isn’t a great plan. Hopefully Microsoft is able to release an official fix rapidly.

Kicking Out Hackers by Cutting the Cable

A new article discusses how, during the Salt Typhoon attacks, T-Mobile operators drove to the datacenter physically cut the cable from a compromised system to prevent the attackers from accessing the rest of the network.

Salt Typhoon is believed to be a group based in China, often credited as part of the Ministry of State Security, which perpetrated widespread hacks of the United States telecom industry in 2024. The attackers utilized the hooks in the infrastructure devices required for US wiretap law, which gave them access to call records, contents of text messages, and voice recording of calls, targeting industry, government, and election officials.

Stopping a hack with a pair of wire cutters is definitely a story worth remembering.

Supply Chain Attacks Hit Rust

Supply chain attacks appear to be spreading to Rust packages now. The Rust Security Response Team was notified that a set of packages were downloading malicious payloads during build and confirmed the behavior.

To facilitate building required components, Rust packages can include a build script that is automatically compiled and executed. This is extremely similar to the build hooks enabling the spread of malware in the NPM and PyPI repositories, and could be used to perform the same authentication token theft and manipulation of packages.

Time will show if the Rust Cargo repository is able to prevent a similar scourge of infected packages now that the alarm is raised.

DEF CON Speakers and Attendees Targeted

Huntress reports some DEF CON speakers and attendees are being targeted with a phishing campaign on X/Twitter.

Starting with a claim to be the vice president of Coindesk, the phishing lure asks to collaborate on a future conference and provides a link to a Google document. The Google doc then tries to trick the user into running a click-fix style attack where the user is asked to copy and paste malware into a command shell, or into downloading a malware binary outright.

The malware payload targets the usual selection of cryptocurrency, authentication tokens, SSH keys, and the like. The Huntress article dives deep into the makeup of the malware, which has custom deployments if the victim is on Windows or macOS and can download several dynamic stages as the infection is triggered.