DefCon34
DEF CON hackers add new muscle to water utility protection - On Friday, at the annual hacker’s conference, DEF CON Franklin and the National Rural Water Association (NRWA) announced a new program called the Water Watch Center. It will initially fund five providers - Defendify, Legato Security, L1 Secure, Rapid7, and Sentinel Technologies - to help small water utilities serving fewer than 10,000 people detect and mitigate breaches.
DEF CON dingus suspected of trying to take over Delta in-flight Wi-Fi - “HEY ALERT CORP SECURITY WE HAVE A PAX [passenger] ON THAT HAS CREATED A SCAM WIFI CALLED DELTA WIFI FAST WE BELIEVE THEY ARE TRYING TO SCAM THE OTH PAX,” the first notice read. Several minutes later, the flight crew followed up with a second message stating they had little additional info at the time, but pointing the blame at “A BUNCH OF PAX THAT WERE AT A CYBER CONFERENCE IN LAS” who “WERE ABLE TO JAM OUR WIFI” and broadcast their own signal.
Copilot
Copilot tricked into telling reseachers how to hack itself - The helpful AI assistant told the researchers that under specific session conditions, this undocumented parameter causes a ?q=-supplied prompt to execute automatically on page load with no user action and no visible confirmation on the user interface. It also told them the exact session conditions required to make this auto-execution work, and described the content filtering behaviour on the first response cycle while indicating that none of the subsequent cycles used the same content filter.
Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see - Key “brand fact” statements that make for great regurgitable facts are also included in the AI-only advertisement, as are answers to questions like “is Ally good for everyday banking,” “can you deposit cash at Ally Bank,” and the like. The FAQ is flagged as sponsored content on the markdown page, but it doesn’t change the fact that the entire thing is written like it was designed to be spit back out by a chatbot in response to specific questions.
Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list - “The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people’s reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through,” the agent told him in response to his request. “So you’ve moved from #4 to #3 already.”
OpenAI ditches Recall-style screenshot surveillance for friendly keylogging - Computer History is, to put it bluntly, a keylogging and event capture system.
Apple Spyware
If Apple sends you a push notification alerting you to a spyware attack, take it seriously | TechCrunch - When received, a threat notification will read: “Apple detected a mercenary spyware attack targeted at your iPhone. There are actions you can take now to protect your data and device.” The push notification also opens up advice on who to reach out to for help. You will also be advised to switch on Lockdown Mode, a security feature that makes it far more difficult for spyware attacks to succeed. According to Apple, it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked while Lockdown Mode was enabled.
‘Unprecedented’ number of Apple users received recent spyware alert, say investigators | TechCrunch - Several people publicly and privately reported receiving Apple’s spyware alerts over the weekend, after Apple sent out a new wave of notifications on Friday alerting customers in 110 countries that they had been targeted with powerful spyware.
HackBack
Private security firms will soon be allowed to hack overseas cybercriminals - Ars Technica - n a National Security Presidential Memorandum issued Thursday, US President Donald Trump directed the National Coordination Center (NCC), which operates under the Homeland Security Task Force, to develop a program for conducting specific cyber operations that combat foreign transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security will provide oversight. The lynchpin of that program is bringing in private sector companies to participate.
Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Expands Capabilities to Combat Transnational Cyber-Enabled Crime – The White House - - The NSPM directs the NCC to leverage the capability and innovation of the private sector to help conduct these cyber operations under the direction, control, and authority of the U.S. Government.
Trump wants to grant private cyber firms a license to hack back - Participating companies will undergo “rigorous vetting” and will be subject to “strict operational procedures,” the memo adds.
FBI investigating North Korean remote IT staffer working for US agency | Federal News Network - “Without getting into ongoing investigations, we identified just this past week a [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] remote IT worker that was working for the federal government,” Hemmen said. “Still kind of unpacking that recent case. It’s actually a little bit baffling to me, not understanding this particular agency’s process. But the short answer is yes, we are seeing remote IT workers not just in the private sector – although a vastly higher proportion in the private sector – but we’re also seeing this impact the government to a degree.”
Nightmare Eclipse
Microsoft-vendetta hacker has a new zero day that gives system privileges on fully patched Windows - ShieldBreak is the 10th zero-day from Nightmare Eclipse since they began their scorched-earth strategy against Microsoft in early April. The prolific bug finder and exploit developer is suspected to be a former, very disgruntled, Microsoft employee. And in typical fashion, this latest zero-day drop occurred just hours after Redmond’s monthly Patch Tuesday that fixed 421 security problems in its products - but ShieldBreak isn’t one of them.
US Government
US courts will start publishing how often the government uses spyware | TechCrunch - For almost two decades, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which coordinates operations across the judiciary, has issued annual Wiretap Reports. These reports detail how many wiretaps were authorized every year, breaking the numbers down by whether federal or state judges ordered them, in which states the wiretaps were conducted, what type of crime was investigated, and other data. Starting in 2029, U.S. judiciary will disclose how many times wiretaps are carried out with hacking tools and spyware, which fall under the category of what the feds call network investigating techniques, or NITs.
Researchers
A researcher bought noreply.net. Companies started sending him secrets. - Ars Technica - Solovewicz is receiving the avalanche of messages as he’s the owner of the domains noreply.us and noreply.net, which he purchased in 2020 and 2024, respectively. After originally planning to use the noreply.us domain as a catch-all email—which receives mail sent to any @ address on that domain—to filter messages and enhance his privacy, the researcher quickly noticed that other systems were sending mail to @noreply.us addresses. “I created an accidental honeypot,” Solovewicz tells WIRED. “I had no idea it was going to turn into this.”
Researchers found a way to hijack devices through Zoom screen sharing - Ars Technica - “If you just get on a Zoom with us, we can take over your device,” A Security cofounder Yossi Torati told WIRED on a call. (It was, incidentally, hosted on Microsoft Teams.) “The worst-case scenario is that we can take over an enterprise just by having this vulnerability in our hands. If I’m an attacker, I can be on a call with someone from a company, take control of their computer and their credentials, and then use them to move laterally in the enterprise.”
Vulnerability giving attackers full control of Macs is under active exploitation - Ars Technica - “The NCSC has received a notification indicating that active abuse of this vulnerability has been observed on multiple systems on which port 5900 was accessible from the Internet,” the Netherlands National Cyber Security Centrum warned earlier this week. “In all these cases, root had been accessed on the affected system and a Monero crypto miner had been placed.”
Malicious SIMs can shut down phones, steal files, and drag 5G back to 2G - They tested 26 devices – 18 smartphones and eight IoT modems – and found that nine exposed an AT command interface to the SIM. The IoT kit was particularly accommodating, with seven of the eight modems exposing it. The researchers uncovered four vulnerabilities and demonstrated attacks including code execution, arbitrary file reads, denial of service, and downgrading connections to 2G.
This ‘adversarial’ pattern can prevent surveillance cameras from detecting you | TechCrunch - Swearingen’s computer-generated patterns do not block surveillance cameras from recording video footage. Instead, they scramble the camera’s ability to identify objects, people, or faces so that the cameras do not trigger any detection alerts. By blocking the camera’s ability to detect what the pattern covers, the person becomes a needle in a haystack again — until someone knows where to look.
Tactics
Smooth-talking fraudsters clone contactless cards, authorize payments in just 13 minutes - It goes like this: The attacker calls the target while posing as a helpdesk employee at their bank, convincing the victim-in-waiting that there is a problem with their payment card. While still on the phone, the attacker gets the target to install a version of SpyNote on their Android device. The file name includes the target’s name, which the researchers said could suggest that each target is singled out specifically, and a degree of reconnaissance has to be carried out prior to the attack. Once installed, the attacker quickly uses the RAT’s remote access to quietly install WindRelay on the attacker’s device without their knowledge or input, all while the call was ongoing. The attacker then instructs the target to tap their payment card on their NFC-enabled smartphone and, when prompted, enter their PIN. WindRelay then captures the data from that interaction between the card’s chip and the reader, similarly to how genuine point-of-sale machines authorize contactless payments. This is known as a live EMV APDU exchange.
Deepfake hiccup unmasks suspected digital certificate fraudster - The disguise dropped for “barely a second,” exposing his real face to the verification camera, police said. Investigators eventually identified and located the suspect, who was arrested on suspicion of repeatedly forging official documents. A search of his home yielded a laptop protected by high-grade encryption, several mobile phones, storage devices, and documents, according to police.
Mystery attacker spent a year raiding Salesforce and ServiceNow portals - Reco isn’t naming the targets, but said it spotted the attacker poking around portals belonging to telecoms companies, banks and other financial services firms, enterprise software vendors, cybersecurity companies, and public sector bodies. On Salesforce, the attacker targets Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) sites through the UI API’s GraphQL layer, an approach Reco says it has not found documented in public research or incorporated into publicly available attack tools. Over at ServiceNow, the same operator queries a native Service Portal search endpoint that has received little public attention.
ChainDrop worm crawls into npm supply chain, evades standard defenses - When executed, the software scours the user’s workspace for npm tokens with full write privileges, as well as for other credentials like cloud keys and secrets. It looks in shell configurations, environment variables and even live memory. Any purloined data is encrypted and sent back to attacker-controlled endpoints.
Three Critical VMware Flaws Allow Auth Bypass, Code Execution, and VM Escape - The first of the three critical-rated flaws is CVE-2026-59309 (CVSS score: 9.8), which has been described as an authentication bypass in VMware vCenter. “A malicious actor with network access to vCenter may exploit this issue to bypass authentication and gain unauthorized access to the system,” Broadcom said.