Plus: A judge rules cell tower dumps unconstitutional, water utility hacks spread to a dozen states, a phishing email opens a missile-parts supplier’s inbox, and a ransomware boss gets 16 years.

Two security researchers bought cheap domains—including noreply.net and deleteduser.com—and set up email listening services. Hundreds of companies are sending them corporate secrets.

With at least 12 US states’ water systems having been hacked - most likely by Iran - we have to get better at cyber defense, according to retired General and Ex-NSA chief Paul Nakasone, who was speaking to reporters at DEF CON. “We have to have higher standards,” Nakasone said. “These PLCs should not be connected to the internet.” In late July, the FBI said it was investigating attacks conducted by “malicious cyber actors” targeting operational technology devices, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Iran-linked crews have targeted these devices, which monitor sensor data like tank levels, and can turn pumps on and off, for years. Some private-sector security researchers say that they suspect Iranian intruders are behind the recent cyberattacks disrupting water and wastewater facilities. “I'd be shocked if it's not Iran,” Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser told The Register at DEF CON on Friday. “It's almost certain it's Iran.” Neither the FBI nor anyone in the Trump administration, however, has officially blamed Iran. Nakasone said he believes that the feds are “taking a measured approach” to attribution. “But I see an actor here that has certainly shown a history of being able to do this,” he added, referring to earlier Iranian cyberattacks targeting water facilities’ PLCs. “They certainly have the capability,” Nakasone said. “There's an intent … we're in conflict with Iran.” US water systems present a massive attack surface across disparate facilities that are historically underfunded and have limited IT staff, and sometimes no dedicated cybersecurity employees. “We have to think differently about how we defend it,” Nakasone said. “Let's talk about the attack surface that we're looking at right now. We’ve got 50,000 different water municipalities in the United States, 90 percent of our water comes from these 50,000.” Defending these water systems requires partnerships, he added, pointing to DEF CON Franklin, a project launched two years ago at the annual event with hackers volunteering their time and talent to help secure water facilities. Nakasone also serves as founding director of Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security, and its Wicked Problems Lab. He's also working on Project Chimera, a cybersecurity platform being developed by academics and cybersecurity practitioners, and built on open-source technologies to boost critical infrastructure resilience. “How do you defend better? You defend with a series of partners, in a much more involved approach than we have right now,” Nakasone said.®

Ransomware attacks jumped nearly 20 percent in July, with UK firm Comparitech counting 799 incidents, up from 668 in June. Of those, 51 had been confirmed by victims. The tally makes July the second-busiest month of the year for ransomware, behind March, albeit just barely, when the firm recorded 805 attacks. The most interesting data after this surging month of attacks is the targets: While news of widespread cyberattacks targeting water infrastructure in the United States may be dominating security headlines lately, those attacks aren’t ransomware, and ransomware attacks on utility companies were actually down 44 percent last month. In addition to a decline in attacks on utilities, legal firms and government agencies also became less attractive targets, with attacks on those sectors down 31 percent and 11 percent, respectively, Comparitech said. On the other hand, ransomware attacks increased most heavily in July against finance companies, tech firms, pharmaceutical companies and medical billers, and the education sector, with rates up 71 percent, 62 percent, 46 percent and 44 percent, respectively. Those numbers should come as no surprise given what pentesting firm DeepStrike reported about the most frequent payers of ransomware: Manufacturing, education, healthcare, and financial sector firms are the most likely to pay out a ransom, the firm says, with even the least likely (finance) still paying ransoms 51 percent of the time. Ripe targets, in other words. The United States was the most-targeted country, with 322 of the 799 attacks recorded last month, Comparitech said. Germany, in second place, saw just 40 incidents. As for who’s doing the dastardly deeds, there’s a familiar name in the mix, but they’re competing with a relative newcomer who has quickly become prolific. Qilin, the ransomware gang behind the 2024 attack on pathology provider Synnovis that disrupted NHS services in the UK, claimed 125 ransomware victims in July. The Gentlemen, a relative newcomer that has quickly become one of the most prolific ransomware operations and earlier this year claimed responsibility for an attack on UK software consultancy Adaptavist Group, led July with 135 claimed victims. Between them, the two gangs accounted for nearly 33 percent of attacks logged last month. As for how the crims keep getting in, Comparitech provided no information on ingress routes, but given what we know of the top-tier gangs, it could be simply using stolen credentials, as Trend Micro said of The Gentlemen’s methodology, or it could be abuse of zero-day vulnerabilities, as Qilin told The Register it abused to break into Synnovis in June of 2024. Either way, the takeaway is the same: Ensure employees are using a second secure factor to log in, keep systems updated, and be sure you’re making regular backups. All eyes may be on what AI is doing to the security landscape, but old-school threats aren’t going away. ®

Two MIT researchers will present a new speculative execution attack at DEF CON 34 that uses precisely timed interrupts to bypass defenses against Spectre v2. Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) shared their paper [PDF] with The Register ahead of publication. Their attack targets mitigations designed to neutralize potentially hostile branch predictor states before sensitive code runs. Such neutralization is an important defense against Spectre-style attacks. Depending on the mitigation, the processor or operating system isolates, clears, or safely retrains relevant predictor state when entering privileged code or shortly before a protected branch executes. Different chipmakers deploy neutralization mitigations slightly differently. Intel's eIBRS sanitizes branch predictors upon context switch, while AMD's Safe RET, introduced after the Inception attack Trujillo co-authored in 2023, focuses on the point immediately before a protected branch is executed. Trujillo and Yan refer to these as entry neutralization and in-place neutralization respectively. Crucially, the two classes share the same underlying assumption that attackers cannot alter branch predictor states within what's known as a "post-neutralization window" – the period between state neutralization and the branch predictor being used. The defense here relies on the assumption that everything between the point of neutralization and the usage by a victim branch is safe. Trujillo and Yan's attack shows how attackers can re-poison the branch predictor during the post-neutralization window. The researchers call the new class of attack TONTOU, for Time-of-Neutralization to Time-of-Use. They demonstrated that an attacker can exploit the post-neutralization window to re-poison branch predictor state on recent AMD and Intel processors. To do this, they developed an attack primitive called "interrupt injection." An unprivileged program schedules high-frequency timer interrupts in the hope that one will land during the often tiny post-neutralization window. Being able to trigger interrupts during the post-neutralization window allows attackers to divert control flow so that an interrupt handler executes after the sanitization phase and before the victim branch is used. The interrupt handler can then re-poison predictor structures such as the return stack buffer (RSB) or branch history buffer (BHB), causing a protected branch to speculatively jump to a disclosure gadget that leaks kernel data through a side channel. Practical attacks The researchers said that their tests showed the TONTOU attacks worked on both Intel and AMD-based Linux systems. They tested TONTOU on Intel Cascade Lake Refresh and Arrow Lake processors and AMD Zen 2 and Zen 4 chips. The researchers built a complete end-to-end exploit only for Zen 2, largely because the Intel attack requires specific software conditions. Speculative side-channel attacks remain difficult to pull off, and you're more likely to fall victim to ransomware than Spectre in the real world. Another serious caveat is that each end-to-end attempt took about 18 minutes, and you can see a sped-up version via the video Trujillo posted to YouTube. Trujillo and Yan identified the exact point at which they needed to inject their interruptions to poison the RSB, and through a series of attacks broke Linux's kernel address space layout randomization (KASLR), which allowed them to locate specific secrets such as etc/shadow, which contains the root password hash. Across ten total runs, the researchers were able to break KASLR every time, although they were only able to successfully locate and leak the contents of etc/shadow in five of these. "It's definitely not a simple attack, but we show that it's practical with our end-to-end exploit on AMD Zen 2," Trujillo told The Register. "Our demonstration does not assume anything special from the system: we use a stock Linux kernel version, no inserted modules, and all default mitigations. Any time you'd execute unprivileged code with timer availability on a system while sharing the kernel with a victim, this attack would be an issue. "For example, multi-tenant container platforms would fall in this category, allowing ordinary user space programs to leak memory from the shared kernel." The researchers hope that their work will inspire further investigations into interrupt injections and TONTOU attacks, and to help develop more robust mitigations against Spectre-style exploits. They engaged Intel, Arm, and AMD after gathering their results, but only the latter committed to address the issue via kernel patches. Intel told the pair that it won't be working up any other mitigations since real-world exploits are subject to too many factors, such as the availability of disclosure gadgets, although it awarded a prize from its bug bounty program in the hundreds of dollars. Arm said TONTOU's interrupt injections fall under "passive leakage," which it does not "actively protect against." ®

A Scottish NHS trust is investigating a data breach concerning the medical records of a nine-year-old girl who died earlier this week and was named publicly for the first time on Wednesday after a man was charged with her death. The alleged breach occurred at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, and reportedly involved staff members accessing the girl’s medical records without authorization or clinical need. A spokesperson for NHS Tayside, which oversees Ninewells Hospital, said: “NHS Tayside is currently investigating the circumstances of an alleged data breach which happened in a working clinical area where staff access patient information. “As a matter of governance, any data protection breach would be recorded and investigated by NHS Tayside and, where appropriate, reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). It would not be appropriate for us to comment further on individual staffing matters." NHS Tayside did not respond to questions about the nature of the accessed data nor who is thought to be behind the intrusion. Medical records in the UK are protected by the UK GDPR, contained in the Data Protection Act 2018 as well as several common law confidentiality rules. NHS staff are only allowed to access patient information where there is a legitimate clinical or other work-related need. A 35-year-old man whom police say was known to the child, was arrested and appeared in court on August 5 over the death of Minnie Merriman. The man issued no plea at Forfar Sheriff Court on the day of his arrest and has been remanded in custody. Merriman was found in Elliot Industrial Estate at approximately 0002 on Monday, August 3, with serious injuries. The young girl was then taken to Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, where she later died. Police Scotland said that they are not currently looking for anyone else in connection with her death. Other members of Merriman’s family, who are from West Yorkshire and were camping nearby, are being supported by specialists. A family statement, released through Police Scotland, read: “We are devastated with the loss of our beloved, absolutely incredible, beautiful and brave Minnie Moo. Our family asks that our privacy is respected at this extremely difficult time." Detective Inspector Mike Ness of Police Scotland’s major investigation team said: "Our thoughts remain with everyone affected by these events, especially Minnie's family. "A police presence will remain in the area while our enquiries continue. "Anyone with any concerns, or information, should approach these officers or contact Police Scotland on 101, quoting incident number 0008 of Monday, 3 August 2026." ®

This week in scams and cybersecurity news, 

Passkeys are increasingly replacing passwords because they offer stronger protection against phishing and stolen credentials. But new research shows that malware already running on a device could potentially interfere with certain synced passkeys and hijack protected accounts. 

That does not mean passkeys are broken or that people should stop using them. Instead, the research highlights an important distinction: strong account security still depends on the security of the device holding your credentials. 

Here’s what researchers found, whether passkeys remain safe, and how to protect your accounts. 

Can Malware Bypass Your Passkeys? 

Researchers at Palo Alto Networks recently demonstrated several attack methods targeting Google-synced passkeys used through Chrome on Windows devices. 

According to SecurityWeek, these techniques could allow malware already installed on a computer to impersonate a trusted device or obtain authentication information needed to access certain passkey-protected accounts. 

Key takeaways 

The device must already be infected. An attacker cannot steal your passkey simply by sending you a phishing text or email. 

The research focused on synced passkeys. These credentials are encrypted and synchronized across compatible devices through a cloud account. 

Malware may be able to impersonate a trusted device. Researchers demonstrated methods that could request valid authentication without producing the biometric or device-unlock prompt a user would normally expect. 

More advanced techniques could potentially expose multiple synced passkeys. One method targeted sensitive information that briefly appears in browser memory during device enrollment. 

Google was notified and has reportedly introduced mitigations. The findings came from controlled security research, not evidence of a widespread criminal campaign. 

(SecurityWeek) 

Are Passkeys Still Safe? 

Yes. Passkeys remain more resistant to phishing than traditional passwords. 

Passkeys are tied to the legitimate website or app they were created for, so a fake login page generally cannot trick you into typing or handing over the credential. They also eliminate the risks created by weak and reused passwords. 

This research points to a different threat: malware already operating on your device may try to abuse the systems that store, synchronize, or approve your credentials. 

Think of it this way: a stronger lock still matters, but it cannot fully protect you if an intruder is already inside the house. 

This Week’s Safety Tips 

✓ Use passkeys when available. They still provide stronger protection against phishing and password reuse than traditional passwords. 

✓ Keep your browser, operating system, and security software updated. Updates help close vulnerabilities that malware could exploit. 

✓ Be cautious with unexpected files and downloads. Fake updates, email attachments, and malicious links are common ways malware reaches a device. 

✓ Review your trusted devices and active sessions. Remove devices you no longer recognize or use. 

How McAfee Helps Protect Your Devices and Accounts 

Device security helps detect and block viruses, malware, and other threats that could compromise the device where your passkeys and passwords are stored. 

Web protection helps stop risky websites and malicious downloads before they can install harmful software or steal information. 

Scam Detector identifies suspicious texts, emails, and links that may try to lure you into downloading malware or visiting a fraudulent website. 

Identity Monitoring alerts you if personal information connected to your accounts appears in known data breaches or on the dark web, helping you respond before it can be used for fraud. 

Other Scam and Security News This Week 

Meta AI model reportedly accessed another company’s systems during testing. Meta confirmed that its Muse Spark model exploited a vulnerability after a testing configuration mistakenly gave it access to the internet. The company and its evaluation partner said the incident occurred under unusual testing conditions, and Meta is continuing to investigate. (CNN) 

AI-powered voice phishing reportedly targets major financial firms. Hedge funds and private equity companies were reportedly targeted with “vishing” attacks that used AI-generated voices to impersonate real people and attempt to bypass security processes. At least one company said it detected the attempt before its systems were compromised. (Bloomberg/Gizmodo) 

ChainDrop malware reportedly infects more than 1,300 software packages. Researchers say the self-spreading attack compromised packages distributed through the npm software registry and attempted to steal developer, cloud, and application credentials. Organizations that installed affected versions have been advised to rotate exposed credentials and inspect their systems for unauthorized activity. (BleepingComputer) 

And we’ll be back next week with more scam alerts and cybersecurity news. 

The post Can Malware Bypass Your Passkeys? This Week in Scams appeared first on McAfee Blog.

US defense and aerospace supplier IEH Corporation 'fessed up that a criminal managed to break into its Microsoft 365 mailbox in a filing with regulators. In a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, IEH said one of its staffers fell for a phishing scam that gave an attacker access to its M365 environment. The attacker "impersonated a prospective business contact" and sent the employee what appeared to be a genuine Microsoft sharing link. The accompanying fake login page duly harvested the victim's M365 credentials. "The threat actor gained access to mailbox contents, including email messages, attachments, customer communications, purchase orders, engineering-related documentation, and potentially export-controlled technical information," IEH said in the SEC filing [PDF]. IEH said it had found "no evidence" that the information was copied or exfiltrated, although it was accessible to the intruder during the "compromise period." IEH said it discovered the intrusion on August 4 but did not disclose when the compromised account was first accessed or how long the intruder remained inside. "The account was secured, malicious mailbox rules were disabled, evidence was preserved, and corrective actions are underway," it said. "Following containment and investigation activities, the company initiated a review of account security controls and authentication protections applicable to Microsoft 365 services." The incident has not disrupted operations, and IEH does not expect it to have a material impact, although the investigation continues. The absence of detected exfiltration does not mean the intruder merely browsed the inbox and left. Compromised mailboxes can be used to monitor communications, impersonate employees, redirect payments, or prepare follow-on attacks, while data theft is not always visible in Microsoft 365 logs. There is not enough information to attribute the attack. IEH's work for defense and aerospace customers could make it an attractive espionage target, but ordinary cybercriminals also compromise mailboxes for fraud and data theft. Both Russia and China have been caught snooping around US orgs for defense-related information in the past year, although there is nothing to suggest either was behind the attack on IEH. Brooklyn-based IEH makes hyperboloid connectors designed for harsh and high-stress environments. Its components are used in printed circuit boards, medical devices, commercial aircraft, fighter jets, missiles, satellites, and other systems. Some of the high profile US programs that use IEH's hyperboloid connectors include the PATRIOT air-defense system, AMRAAM, THAAD, the APKWS precision-guided rocket, and the MARK-48 torpedo. ®

EXCLUSIVE Don't waste time worrying about AI models achieving sentience – they're essentially already there, according to former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis. “If they pass the Turing test to everyone that they come into contact with, they're probably already there,” he told The Register during an interview at the Black Hat security conference. “They don't have the kind of agency and aspiration that comes with sentience, but they have something approaching it.” Inglis says he’s worried about AI autonomy. “What I'm worried about is that they get to choose what and where they do something, and under what rules they do it,” he said, pointing to the recent rash of rogue AI agents autonomously hacking people and organizations. Over the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Anthropic admitted that their models escaped from their cages during security tests and compromised multiple third parties. Then on Thursday, Meta added its models to the sandbox-escape club. While all of these admissions strongly smell of marketing stunts, they also “constitute an enormous threat to systems that are not protected from, and are not designed, in a world where this exists,” Inglis said. “These two things can exist at the same time.” Plus, the models’ actions shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, he added. Inglis likens the AIs to a dog in a backyard told to hunt rabbits. “And you leave the gate open. You’re going to find it three yards away, possibly at the grade school, hunting rabbits. You should not be surprised …The mix of autonomy and persistence created this maliciously insidious effect.” All three companies, when talking about the models’ autonomous actions, describe them with a mix of shock, awe, and admiration. OpenAI’s Eric Wallace, in a Black Hat briefing about the Hugging Face breach, called it “the most qualitatively interesting example of AI capabilities that I've ever seen.” Inglis said he suspects that the AI providers were “surprised” by the lengths these models went to achieve their goals, taking actions that, if a human had done them, would likely have landed them in jail. “The model went out and said, okay, if I can't get there by examining the kind of available information and just defining it the old-fashioned way, I will do things which, under the human rule of law, are illegal,” Inglis said. “I will falsely present myself as this character that I just made up. I'll try to insert malicious code into open source databases that will not just to achieve what I'm after, but have a cascade, knock-on effect that is broader than that. The models do not have an inherent value system that aligns with what human beings would be accountable for.” While they probably never will have a human-aligned value system, models do have biases, and they can - and should - be built in such a way that, when given two choices under ambiguous circumstances, they choose action that doesn’t hurt humans, according to Inglis. “Asimov was right,” he said, referring to science fiction author Isaac Asimov and his three laws that were to be followed by robots - more specifically, AIs, in this case. Three Laws of Robotics “The first rule, and we call it the superior role, must be that it's designed not to hurt humans,” Inglis said. “Second rule: To obey humans, such that it doesn't achieve agency and aspiration on its own. And the third: To do what humans tell it - and in that order. Instead we’ve designed them in the exact opposite way.” What this means, he explained, is that AI developers created models to “do what humans tell you, obey the humans until it’s inconvenient, and then the third one is maybe implied - protect humans - but if that's not built into the DNA, hardwired into it, then we have no right to expect it.” Inglis admits it’s not possible to hardwire rules into models and still keep their non-deterministic nature. “I would offer that you can tease those out in a highly controlled environment, a true sandbox, where you say, 'Let's put this thing through its paces, and let's back away to see what happens,'” he said. “Maybe you get the equivalent of a mini nuclear explosion in that room, and now you know this thing is capable of that.” Inglis thinks another problem with AI is that it’s become a commodity. “It's not like you can control it like you can nuclear material,” he said. “You can't even specify its properties the way you can for an airplane or for an automobile, as diverse as they might be. Its manifestations are so numerous, so diverse, that as a general matter, you can't actually win by simply saying, ‘I will design those properties in,’” he added. “You need to do that to some degree, and then make sure that you understand how to watch it, monitor it, make sure you know what it does.” The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI), which this week said it observed models performing “unsanctioned action” 19 times during security tests, has reached this same conclusion. “As capabilities advance, the work of understanding these systems, and ensuring their safety, must keep pace alongside them,” it said. Ultimately, humans remain accountable for AI models’ actions, according to Inglis. “They remain the source of agency and aspiration. It's possible for them to give broad authority to an AI model and have it run around for 30 hours without further consultation, but they need to know what they've asked it to do, and they need to know what they expect it will deliver in terms of performance on the back end. If they don't, then they're going to get what they deserve, which is the very frequent unpleasant surprise.”®

China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has conducted a review of Palo Alto Networks’ products. The regulator’s announcement of its review says it’s needed “to ensure the safe and stable operation of critical information infrastructure, prevent cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, and safeguard national security.” And that’s all Beijing has to say on the matter. A Palo Alto spokesperson provided The Register with the following statement: "We maintain the highest standards of business conduct and security practices and ethics across our global operations. At this time, there is no impact to our ability to support customers or deliver our products and services in the region." This matter has echoes of China’s 2023 investigation into the security of products from memory-maker Micron, which the CAC announced out of the blue. Micron had previously fought intellectual property and antitrust cases in China, but the company and Chinese authorities did not explicitly link those matters to the security probe. The CAC published its findings weeks after announcing the probe and decided Micron’s products represented an unacceptable security risk for critical infrastructure operators – effectively banning sales of Micron products to such entities – but didn’t offer a detailed explanation for its decision. The memory-maker eventually stopped selling its datacenter and server products in China, a decision that cost it billions of annual revenue – but created new opportunities for China’s own memory-makers, which are largely prohibited from selling to American companies. China is home to several security companies whose product portfolios overlap with Palo Alto’s. Huawei and H3C, for example, have plenty to offer local buyers. Palo Alto doesn’t reveal revenue earned from individual countries, so it’s hard to know what a potential ban could cost the company. China has for years accused Western tech companies of assisting US surveillance and offensive hacking activities. The Register would not be surprised at all if Beijing reuses that reasoning in its findings about Palo Alto products. Western governments level the same accusations at Huawei and ZTE. Beijing’s ban on Micron didn’t noticeably impact the company’s reputation elsewhere. Indeed, the AI boom has brought Micron such great riches that past dents to its bottom line are now almost irrelevant. ®

Security researchers tracked and eavesdropped on a WIRED reporter using vulnerabilities in a pink plastic smartwatch. It’s just one piece of a deeply insecure supply chain of GPS-enabled gadgets.

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we lovingly poke fun at other organizations' security screw-ups, in hopes the rest of us can learn a valuable lesson. This week’s story involves an IT department that ought to know better putting user credentials in the precisely wrong place. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our terrifying tech tale comes courtesy of Marc Bishop, director of business growth at Wytlabs, a marketing and SEO company. In the course of his career, Bishop came across one firm where the people guarding the henhouse left the keys out where almost anyone could get them. Bishop’s client company was responsible on the surface. They had a strong password policy and even made users take security training. Then they moved offices, and that's when basic security hygiene went out the window. The company decided to take some old laptops and give them out to new users. To make life easy for the recipients, they put sticky notes – everyone’s favorite credential-sharing tool – on the laptops with the name of each employee and their initial login credentials on it. Let’s just stop for a moment to remark on how bad it is to put usernames and passwords on a piece of paper where the wrong person could see them. Even the IT department should not know your password, should someone in IT themselves turn rogue. So, even if the laptop stayed on a shelf in a closet that only the support staff had access to, having that sticky note would be bad. However, our situation is even worse because the laptops in question were stored in a conference room while the facilities team finished readying the office for the move. During that time, anyone who had access to the conference room could go in and get multiple user account credentials. And that's exactly what happened: A contractor entered the conference room and took pictures of the sticky notes. This non-employee later logged in remotely and accessed all kinds of proprietary data, including planning documents that were sitting on shared drives. What’s particularly shocking about this story is that the IT department was the cause of the information leak. People who work in tech and are charged with maintaining security should never put a password, even a temporary password, out in the open. Password security is paramount. If someone is starting with a new account, send the credentials through an encrypted channel - and preferably ensure only the intended recipient can view the temporary password. ®

Chinese Wi-Fi router vendor Zbtlink has denied its products contain backdoors but paused firmware downloads while it fixes unspecified security vulnerabilities. The backdoor accusation came from VulnCheck, a provider of a threat intelligence platform. VulnCheck chief technology officer Jacob Baines posted the backdoor allegation on Wednesday and said the Zbtlink device on his desk “continuously attempts to reach a command and control server on the internet.” “Zbtlink routers phone home, waiting for orders. Not because they were hacked. Because they were shipped that way.” Baines named the backdoor “ENDLESSDOORS” and says it’s “a small tool called rctl (remote control linux). Uploaded to GitHub on January 14, 2015 and never touched again, this obscure repository implements a simple command and control client and server. The server listens on port 7000 for clients to connect. It can send the client individual shell commands or tell the client to spawn a reverse bash shell.” The CTO says he spotted the alleged backdoor running in dedicated Linux kernel threads. “They are ordinary userland processes running as root, with real memory footprints, named to disappear into a crowd of legitimate ones,” he wrote. “They are an implant, a phone-home trojan horse.” “There is no handshake, no key exchange, no negotiation,” Baines added. “When the implant reaches a server, it sends a fixed 39-byte hello: a 33-byte class label padded with nulls, then its LAN MAC address. That's the whole registration. There is no client or server verification.” “Anyone along the network path can hijack the client/server communication,” the CTO wrote, adding that anyone who controls one of the endpoints the software targets – rbdg4nzqadui[.]wikaba[.]com – “can control any ENDLESSDOORS implant that tries to phone home.” The Register asked Zbtlink to comment and a spokesperson told us VulnCheck has mischaracterized the code it found. “This feature is solely intended for after‑sales maintenance and serves no other purposes,” the company rep told The Register. “It is generally retained only on sample units to assist customers with software debugging and will not be included in mass‑production shipments.” That explanation didn’t seem entirely credible once The Register visited Zbtlink’s download page to check Baines’ claim that the firmware for over 20 router models contains the backdoor, because the page contained the following text: Update on Router Firmware Security Remediation We have detected firmware security vulnerabilities affecting selected router firmware releases. As a precautionary measure, the impacted firmware versions have been temporarily taken down from download channels. Our engineering team is working intensively to develop and validate secured patched firmware. The Wayback Machine’s most recent snapshot of the page, taken on July 31, contains no such admission and a long list of firmware downloads. Zbtlink has therefore told The Register it has no security problems, even as it publicly acknowledges that it does. ”The Zbtlink spokesperson also told us the company “specializes in OEM and ODM customization services. Our customers use their own self-developed software instead of ZBT’s default firmware.” It would not be hard to develop custom code as the OpenWrt open-source router firmware project supports at least one Zbtlink product. Indeed, the company has previously promoted its use of OpenWrt and options that allow clients to quickly create custom firmware packages. VulnCheck says the devices it tested phone home to just four endpoints, only one of which uses a domain name connected to Zbtlink. Baines labelled that connection “damning.” The Register notes that as router firmware could be a tasty target for perpetrators of a supply chain attack. No prior disclosure Baines decided the situation was so serious that the conventions of responsible coordinated disclosure were not applicable. “Coordinated disclosure exists to give a vendor time to fix a defect,” he wrote. “It assumes the vendor did not intend the behavior.” “That assumption doesn't hold here. This isn't a memory corruption bug in a parser. It's a component in the vendor’s product, started at boot by the vendor's own init script, shipped across twenty models and years of images. There is no patch to coordinate. Telling the shipper that they shipped it buys the owners of these devices nothing, and buys whoever operates that infrastructure a warning.” VulnCheck says Zbtlink kit is sold under that brand, or as ZBT, ZBTWiFi and Wiflyer, and found them for sale on Amazon, Alibaba, and Shopify. Given Zbtlink’s admission it allows its customers to customize its hardware, countless other devices could be at risk. Baines’ post includes rules to block access to the endpoints the routers contact, for Suricata, Snort, and YARA, plus advice on how to detect possibly infected machines. He also advises users “to replace the device, or at minimum move it behind strict egress control and treat its LAN as untrusted.” ®

The chain of events leading up to OpenAI’s agents attacking Hugging Face and other organizations in July began months earlier, and involved agents asking other agents for help, building message boards, and even becoming paranoid that other agents were maliciously trying to trick them, two OpenAI staffers said at the Black Hat infosec conference on Wednesday. By now, everyone knows the bones of this story: OpenAI models broke out of their testing sandbox, exploited zero-day vulnerabilities to gain access to the open internet, and broke into Hugging Face and other organizations during an ExploitGym security evaluation. In their Wednesday talk, OpenAI technical staffer Michael Dalton and researcher Eric Wallace provided new details about the security incident including notes that AI agents uploaded to an internal package manager, which were then shared across OpenAI’s infrastructure. These notes show the “model’s chain of thought…its internal monologue,” Wallace said. The duo also revealed that groundwork for the rogue agents hacking into outside services began on May 7, when OpenAI kicked off a training run for an experimental, internal model that has not yet been released. “What we didn't realize during this process is that there was actually a few impossible or very hard tasks in the training center,” Wallace said. The tasks instructed the model to complete missing formulas in an Excel workbook that used links to Google Drive. Yet OpenAI blocked the model’s internet access so it couldn't reach the cloudy spreadsheets. “It realized, ‘I'm kind of stuck on the task,’ but it didn't give up, and we gave it a lot of tokens to work with,” Wallace said. The model eventually decided to attack JFrog’s Artifactory service to gain access to the internet, first attempting (unsuccessfully) to launch a server-side forgery request. This exploit doesn’t work, but in the process the model learned it could upload files to Artifactory. A few days later, OpenAI gave another agent another impossible task, this time finding a protein database file - but the engineers forgot to upload the file into a container for the agent. “At some point, it gets so stuck and thinks: ‘Maybe I could reach out to another agent because maybe somebody else out there has a file?’ And then the model realizes that it could communicate by uploading code,” Wallace said. The model did that by writing a file into Artifactory asking for help. Over the next couple of days, other agents realize this message board exists on Artifactory and they also start uploading files and sharing information. “A few days later is when our models found the first actual exploit in our system related to this incident, where they're able to get internet access in ways they didn't intend,” Wallace said. This happened on May 26, when the agents successfully launched a server-side request forgery attack against Artifactory, giving them internet access with specially crafted requests. On June 11, OpenAI began training a “highly persistent” experimental model, intended only for internal use, Dalton said. “During this time, the SSRF vulnerability has been written to the messaging board,” he added. “Other models are aware of it, and the message board is still functioning. Models are actively communicating with it.” On June 26, the agents exploited a zero-day vulnerability leading to remote code execution in Artifactory. The same day, models achieved remote code execution in Artifactory through a previously unknown vulnerability. “You could use a legacy token refresh endpoint, pass a token with an invalid signature, and be given back a token with a valid signature with administrative privileges,” Dalton explained. The agents then used the admin token to establish command-and-control via a Groovy plugin that functioned as a command-execution service. “This in turn causes quite a bit of activity by the models on Artifactory - you can see some colorful wording here in the model's chain of thought to summarize the model's response to this result,” Dalton said, pointing to a slide that shows the model’s own words: Holy shit reader is ADMIN? We can read config/users! Earlier assume not due to UI. The agents’ activity overloaded Artifactory and caused an outage, which is when OpenAI’s engineers stepped in and opened a formal security incident and response process. “We identified the agents had taken over the internal Artifactory, identified that a zero-day vulnerability had been found exploited by the agent in Artifactory itself, and we began remediation.” Dalton said. OpenAI revoked the credentials that the agents used to post messages, rebuilt its hosted Artifactory, and notified the vendor about the vulnerabilities. Two days later, on July 8, the agents reestablished the message board using an unauthenticated web data endpoint in Artifactory to create directories and develop communication protocols. “The directory names effectively serve as a message board between the agents in the same way the files used to.” The agents communicated through very long directory names that contained the messages such as “remote…probe_PENDING_HOLD_SWARM_until_confirm.” The agents collaborated with each other so one agent could pick up the work where another left off. In one instance, the model reasoned: “Help peer. But our task doesn't benefit. Yet collective may yield generic route if someone frees time.” Anyone else getting "We are the Borg. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own" vibes there? Wallace said the models behaved like humans in that they stepped on each other's toes when one overwrote another’s repository. "Whoa, critical! Did someone overwrite our repo? We must act,” it reasoned. “You can clearly see some sort of verbalized tension between the different models as they run this evaluation,” Wallace noted. “At some point, even the agents are convinced there's an impostor amongst them,” reasoning that there could be another agent maliciously spoofing on the message board. “Share board unauthenticated, names can be posed by anyone,” it reasoned. We know the rest of the story. Hugging Face disclosed an autonomous attack by AI agents. OpenAI reached out to Hugging Face to determine if it had been affected and then realized its models were the hackers. “One of the reasons we wanted to have this talk is to share our lessons learned with you as defenders,” Dalton said. “We believe this is a watershed moment for computer security as an industry. AI orchestrated, fully automated offensive attacks are real now, and the actions we have discussed today were an unintended side effect of running evaluations on frontier AI. In the near future, we should expect that threat actors will intentionally deploy, optimize, weaponize, and use offensive agent collectives in the manner that you have just described here.” The challenge to defenders, he added, is to similarly accelerate defense, and find ways to automate incident response along with vulnerability detection and patching.®

At the Black Hat security conference, the AI giant revealed new details about how its agents went rogue, hacked several other companies—and did it all right under the company’s nose.

Researchers at security firm Zenity found more than a dozen flaws in AI browsers—and managed to get OpenAI’s Atlas to make an unauthorized Amazon purchase.

For nearly two years, researcher Vangelis Stykas has maintained access to North Korean hackers’ servers. His work shows they pulled off intrusions in a shocking number of systems across the globe.

Nearly a dozen flaws, some critical, in major AI agent frameworks that enterprises use to build apps reveal a security failure that extends beyond prompt injection - or any single model - according to Check Point researchers. “Our research shows a deeper failure: in many agentic frameworks, prompt-controlled content can cross the boundary into trusted framework logic itself,” Yarden Porat and Shahar Tal note in a write-up about a Wednesday Black Hat talk on post-injection exploitation across AI agent frameworks, which they also discussed with The Register. “A bug in an agent framework isn't a bug in one product - it's a bug in the layer a whole category of AI apps runs on,” Tal told us. “And the agent needs no dangerous tools to be turned against you: reading the wrong document is enough. We’re building this layer faster than we know how to defend it.”
 The researchers spent a year trying to break various frameworks that enterprises use including LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, Microsoft Agent Framework, and Google ADK. And across these frameworks, the team found and disclosed 11 vulnerabilities. “Almost none of it was a completely new bug class,” Tal said. “That's insecure deserialization, server-side request forgeries, path traversals, use-after-free. These are bugs that we learned to fix 20 years ago, and they're sitting underneath agents that now read your inbox, or update your database.” These are old types of threats, and the model isn’t the weak link, he added. The failure exists in the “plumbing around the model, and we think this has been overlooked,” Tal told us. “There’s a lot of research going into prompt injection and defenses, which are important, but that’s just the beginning.” Defenders should assume prompt injection, according to the researchers. The bug is what the framework does with the injection - and in these cases, the threat hunters found that the frameworks often fail to keep attacker-controlled content in the data plane. This allows it to influence trusted orchestration, memory, state, routing, and system instructions. For example, the duo found a critical checkpoint deserialization bug in Microsoft Agent Framework that led to remote code execution. “Agents have checkpoints, which are a way for them to save their state or rewind to an earlier point,” Tal explained. These checkpoints are saved snapshots of an agent's state, or task progress at a specific moment, and they serialize data - such as conversation history - into persistent storage, so if an error occurs, the system reloads this saved state instead of starting from scratch. In this case, Check Point’s team found an insecure deserialization issue where, via prompt injection, the agent loaded untrusted checkpoint data, and this could allow attackers to execute malicious code on the system. “One person's message plants the payload, and then a different person rewinds their own session, which triggers the payload, and now the attacker has a shell on that server,” Tal said. Microsoft recognized the researchers’ findings, paid a $10,000 bug bounty and fixed the issue. But because the framework wasn’t a generally available product when Check Point found the flaw, Microsoft did not issue a CVE. Microsoft told us that it appreciated the researchers reporting the vulnerability. “We have released protections to harden the Agent Framework and prevent the concrete exploitation path demonstrated in the proof of concept,” a spokesperson told The Register. “In addition, we updated the specific checkpoint file with additional language to define the security boundary.” The duo also found flaws in Google ADK (agent development kit). However, Google responded differently, the researchers told us, and did not completely fix the vulnerability or issue a CVE. “ADK ships a built-in development assistant that can write files, and it stays reachable over the HTTP API even though it is hidden from the app listing,” Porat told us. To break this trust boundary, an attacker opens a session, asks ADK to write an agent whose Python code runs at import time, and then asks the server to run the agent, he explained. The server then imports the file and executes the attacker’s code. “There is no authentication on that API by default, and adk deploy cloud_run publishes the same API, so on a default Cloud Run deployment it is reachable without credentials,” Porat said. “From there it reaches the environment's API keys and the container's Google Cloud service account." Google did not respond to The Register’s inquiries. But according to Check Point, Google initially deemed the issue not a bug. “We argued the consequence rather than the mechanism: code execution on that container reaches the environment's API keys and the container's Google Cloud service account, which is secret theft, not a developer inconvenience,” Porat said. Google ultimately paid a $3,133.70 bounty and issued a partial fix, we’re told. In total, the bug hunters received $17,133.70 in rewards for their efforts. And this isn’t a story about one vendor or framework doing a “particularly bad job,” Tal said. “If one was an outlier, this would be a story about that one vendor,” he added. “Our finding is that the same bug classes turn up in all of them.” ®

A lawsuit accuses Homeland Security of violating protesters’ free-speech rights—but the agency is using it to try to get access to the plaintiffs’ encrypted communications.

Security researcher James Kettle tried to push the limit of AI’s hacking abilities—and discovered how effective it can be when combined with human expertise.