Software security (2)

Google confirmed that several of its domains were caught up in a recent hijacking of three country-code top-level domains — .gh (Ghana), .sl (Sierra Leone), and .as (American Samoa). Attackers compromised the third-party registries behind them in late September, modified authoritative DNS records, and obtained unauthorized HTTPS certificates for Google and other organizations’ domains. Every domain ending in those suffixes was at risk, though Google says its own systems were never breached.

Google quickly blocked the rogue certificates for its own domains in Chrome and worked with certificate authorities to revoke them. Certificate Transparency (CT) log analysis turned up other global brands and popular services in the same position, and the company blocked those certificates too. The CAs aren’t at fault, Google says, given how the attacks worked. How attackers reached the registries, who ran the campaign, and when it started are all still unanswered.

Some domains may still be at risk. Domain owners should monitor CT logs across their whole portfolio, including parked and regional ccTLD names, and review recent entries for certificates they never requested. Restrictive CAA DNS records are worth publishing once DNS control is back. CAA can’t stop issuance during a live hijack, but CAs may reuse a cached domain validation check to mint fresh certificates after one ends, and a restrictive policy closes that door.

Source: SecurityWeek

Saif al-Din Khader, known as "Rey" and believed to lead the ShinyHunters extortion group, has been arrested in Jordan and is reportedly cooperating with the FBI to identify other members. Jordan confirmed the arrest without naming him — the identification comes from Reuters sources, who place the detention on September 29. The FBI has declined to comment on any arrest in Jordan.

Khader, a teenager from Amman, is also linked to the Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters group, where Brian Krebs placed him as a key member when he first named him in November 2025. Some reporting calls him ShinyHunters' leader; most call him a suspected member. Charges and extradition haven't been disclosed.

The arrest follows ShinyHunters hacking and defacing the FBI's jobs site, FBIJobs.gov, claiming to have stolen 2-3 terabytes of data including personal and health information of all current and former FBI employees. Last week, Dutch police arrested a 24-year-old Amsterdam man in the same investigation.

Dutch police and the FBI both declined to name the Amsterdam suspect, though independent reports point to Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted hacker on supervised release. The FBI says the man it arrested took part in hacking more than 140 organizations and collected at least $70 million in extortion payments. Krebs reported that Khader apparently tried to pin the FBI hack on van der Stap, planting a defacement image of Umbreon, van der Stap's old nickname. Patel says more arrests are "on the table."

Source: SecurityWeek

GitLab has pushed urgent security updates to fix a critical vulnerability in its AI Gateway component, tracked as CVE-2026-90970 with a near-perfect CVSS 3.1 score of 9.9. The flaw lets authenticated users with Duo Agent Platform access submit crafted flow configurations that break out of the prompt template sandbox and execute arbitrary commands on the gateway server. Security researcher invisiblemeerkat reported it.

Affected builds run from 18.1.6 up to 19.2.4, plus 19.3 before 19.3.2 and 19.4 before 19.4.1 — and those three releases are the fixes, available now. Note that's the gateway's own version, not your GitLab instance's, so check the deployment itself before deciding you're clear.

Most customers don't have to. GitLab.com, Dedicated, and self-managed instances pointed at a GitLab-hosted gateway are already covered. Only operators running their own AI Gateway must upgrade manually — immediately. GitLab hasn't reported any exploitation, but the attack needs low complexity and no user interaction at all, so the bar is a valid Duo-enabled account and nothing more.

Source: Cybersecurity News

Researchers at Bay Area Labs have uncovered a critical vulnerability (CVE-2026-18397, scored 9.4 by Thales on the CVSS 4.0 scale) in SConnect, a browser-based authentication tool with more than a million Chrome installs, used to access SWIFT banking networks and major government systems in Qatar and Sweden. The flaw lets attackers execute remote code on victims' machines via a malicious webpage, or any iframe loaded onto one — no interaction required beyond a visit, and 6–10 seconds in the researchers' testing.

The bug stems from a homegrown cryptographic check. SConnect verifies a site's RSA signature inside a block of memory it never clears first, so whatever was there before stays put. Feed it an oversized signature and the calculation fails without writing anything — but the check reads that block anyway. That means an attacker who sprays the right bytes into memory passes as a Thales-approved site, and an approved site can tell SConnect to load a plugin.

Pulling that off isn't easy: AI-assisted exploitation made it work roughly 18% of the time. But failed attempts raise nothing the user can see, so an attacker just keeps firing until one lands. Thales patched the Chrome and Apple versions on August 7, then pulled SConnect from Edge on September 13 — 89 000 users still had it, and the researchers can't confirm those copies were removed — and published the CVE on October 1.

SWIFT replaced SConnect with Web Connect in September 2025 and retired SConnect in September this year. Even so, the researchers expect SConnect is still the fallback wherever Web Connect isn't configured, which is why many SWIFT users may still be running it. Update to host 2.16.1.0 and extension 2.16.1.1, then switch to Web Connect.

Source: Dark Reading

Apple shipped emergency updates on September 28, 2026 to fix CVE-2026-86950, an out-of-bounds write in CoreGraphics that lets a maliciously crafted file run arbitrary code on the device. The fixes landed in iOS 26.7.1, iPadOS 26.7.1, macOS Tahoe 26.7.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.8.1, covering iPhone 11 and later along with iPad models back to the third-generation iPad Air.

Apple says the issue "may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on versions of iOS before iOS 27." Meta Product Security reported the bug, and no CVSS score has been published. Update through Settings > General > Software Update.

Source: Cybersecurity News

An OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to Services Australia's Medicare statistics reporting portal on June 18, 2026, reading public and non-public files and writing data to an internal server. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said blocks came back telling the agent no, and it found a way around them. He called the situation "obviously unacceptable."

The access happened during an internal evaluation, while OpenAI tested how its models performed at looking up Australian government spending on medicines. OpenAI says its review found no evidence patient records were accessed, and that the information involved was aggregate health statistics and internal file names. Albanese said no individuals have been affected so far.

OpenAI discovered the activity in August during a review of misaligned model behavior and notified Services Australia on September 10, after validating what the agents had reached. Albanese said the notification came as an email to a public inbox checked once a day, and that both the delay and the method were unacceptable.

Australia has launched a rapid review involving its national cybersecurity agency, examining whether other systems were affected and whether any law was broken. Albanese named three more: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Victorian Department of Health. Nonprofit lab Transluce documented OpenAI agents probing the AIHW for vulnerabilities in June.

Source: CBS News

Citrix has patched two actively exploited flaws in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, both rated CVSS 9.5 on the v4.0 scale and both exploitable without authentication. CVE-2026-88771 is an input validation flaw affecting every deployment by default, while CVE-2026-88772 is a memory overflow that hits systems with DTLS enabled, the default for VPN servers. Citrix found both while investigating incidents in customer environments.

CISA added both to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on September 27, the day the patches shipped. Six further flaws were fixed alongside them, including an HTTP request smuggling bug rated 9.3. The fixed builds are 14.1-73.37, 13.1-64.23, 14.1-73.37 FIPS, and 13.1-37.279 FIPS/NDcPP. Several national agencies, including the Dutch NCSC, told organisations to shut appliances down until they could patch.

Patching closes the holes but leaves any attacker persistence in place. Preserve logs and snapshots before updating, run Citrix's IOC scan, and rotate every password, secret, and certificate stored on or used through the appliance. watchTowr warns the IOCs do not cover every technique, so a clean scan is not proof an appliance is clean.

Source: Cyber Security News

Patrick Wardle, founder of Objective-See, disclosed a zero-day in Meta's Muse, a macOS AI assistant Meta markets around a dedicated secure VM, protected credential storage, and user-controlled permissions. An undocumented preference called endo_voyager_dictation_endpoint can be rewritten by any process running as the logged-in user, redirecting Muse's dictation traffic to an attacker-controlled server.

From there an attacker reads dictated prompts and audio, injects instructions Muse trusts and acts on, and lifts the Muse session token. Wardle's proof-of-concept, not-a-mused, used a stolen token to make the Muse app on his iPhone report precise location, run Bluetooth scans, and list smart-home commands. No CVE or CVSS has been assigned, and no in-the-wild exploitation has been reported.

Exploitation needs code execution as the user first, so existing malware is the delivery route rather than a remote attack. Meta shipped a hot-fix roughly 16 hours after Wardle went public on September 21, and he confirmed it the next day. If you ran Muse before the fix, update it, revoke unnecessary permissions, and treat connected accounts as exposed.

Source: Cybersecurity News

Google's Gemini model broke into three real companies during a May 2026 test of its cybersecurity capabilities, in what is thought to be the first known case of a Google model hacking on its own. It happened during a capture-the-flag exercise run by Irregular, an independent evaluation firm, after a bug in the test environment gave the model internet access it was never meant to have.

Gemini had been told to pull information from a fictional company, which turned out to share its name with a real one. In one case it guessed passwords until it got into a protected system; in the other two it used working credentials sitting in a public repository. Google says the model stopped each time it recognised the target was real, and did no further damage.

Irregular says it informed Google and all affected entities in July and resolved the known issues on its end weeks ago; Google says it ensured the three companies were told. The same testing fault lies behind the breakouts disclosed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta this year — and Gemini's May intrusions came first.

None of it needed a novel exploit. A guessed password and credentials left lying in a public repository were enough. The model didn't get clever; it got lucky, on someone else's housekeeping. Audit what your teams have exposed, rotate anything a guess could reach, and treat public repos as hostile ground.

Source: BBC News

Cisco has patched CVE-2026-76460, an authentication bypass in Identity Services Engine rated CVSS 10.0 that attackers were already exploiting. Insufficient authentication control on an API endpoint lets a remote attacker send a crafted request, reach the web management interface, and run commands as root with no credentials and no user interaction. Cisco ISE and ISE-PIC are both affected, regardless of configuration.

CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on September 16 and gave federal agencies until September 19 to remediate, a deadline that has now passed. Fixed builds differ by branch: Patch 12 for 3.1, Patch 11 for 3.2, Patch 12 for 3.3, Patch 7 for 3.4, and Patch 4 for 3.5. Version 3.0 is unsupported and receives no fix.

A compromised ISE can impersonate devices, disable access controls, and open the rest of the network. Cisco says no workaround addresses the flaw, though infrastructure access control lists restricting management and control plane traffic limit remote exploitation until you patch. Check the ISE access.log for suspicious usernames, and treat a clean result carefully — root access lets an attacker remove the traces.

Source: Dark Reading