DEV Community: Habdul Hazeez

Security news weekly round-up - 4th September 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:02:14 +0000

Scammers are not sleeping. Attackers are not giving up either. And of course, in the AI landscape, you should be ready to read something new every day. From models going rogue to having their guardrails removed.

Welcome to this week's review. Let's begin.

Vacation Scammers Can Locate You From A Photo—No Geotag Needed

While you are on vacation, resist the urge to post that picture even though you keep telling yourself: What's there? Or, "There is no harm in it." Trust me, there could be because even the details that you overlook might be the thing that's needed to know your location with a high degree of confidence.

The following is what I am talking about:

"What's surprising is that the clues aren't always the obvious ones," says Steve Grobman, chief technology officer for McAfee. "They can be small, everyday details most travelers would overlook, like the architectural style of an otherwise ordinary building, a regional dish on a restaurant menu, the types of plants in the landscape, or the shape of a mountain range in the distance."

Fake Software Installers Disable Windows Update and Weaken Microsoft Defender

No surprises on this one. When something is deemed a fake software installer, it's bound to cause harm to your system security.

From the article:

The installers, once launched, deploy malware that's capable of setting up persistence, weakening security protections, and communicating with attacker-controlled infrastructure. The activity has resulted in victims spanning healthcare, manufacturing, gaming, technology, logistics, government, and education sectors.

I’ve been deepfaked: What do I do?

Don't panic. Take the necessary steps to make it difficult for people to search it and if you can contact the company hosting this stuff and tell them to take it down.

Here is how to get started:

If someone has made a deepfake of you that doesn’t qualify as NCII, first save the evidence. That means screenshotting the page or account, saving the URL and making a note of the account or username, the date and time you found it, and any accompanying text. It makes sense not to engage with the person who posted it, or they may disseminate the content even further.

How a lone attacker breached enterprise defenses at AI speed: A 10-hour play-by-play

When I say AI can increase productivity, it's a good thing. But you might not think in this sense. And, here we are. AI is increasing the productivity of attackers. I mean, this would take them weeks and now they can do it in hours. Scary.

From the article:

According to the researchers, by leveraging frontier AI models and automation, the attacker was able to leverage over 50 MITRE ATT&CK techniques in less than 10 hours — no zero-day vulnerability or novel attack method necessary.

To add insult to injury, the threat actor left a report behind, detailing the weaknesses in the organization's security.

Abliteration.ai is making a business out of removing AI guardrails

Everything has its good and bad side. One party believes that by removing guardrails from AI they can perceive the threat. While others believe it can do more harm than good.

From the article:

The company said in a recent social media post that its goal is to enable others to perform “offensive cyber, red-teaming, and agent testing work other models refuse to do.” The logic is familiar in security work: You can’t defend against a behavior you can’t reproduce, and a model that refuses to write working exploit code can’t help a red team defend against attackers. But those same removals make other potentially dangerous tasks easier, too.

Scammers have figured out the best time to text you

And it's scary if you don't already know this. But now that you know, you can protect yourself, or at least watch out.

From the article:

Scam texts peak at 12:00 pm ET, a volume that’s about 874% higher than the quietest hour, 1:00 am ET.

The rate of scam texts also builds through the week. Volume is lowest on Sunday and rises steadily until it peaks on Friday, when people get about 50% more fraudulent texts than at the start of the week. This suggests scammers time their campaigns rather than send messages at random.

'I lost my savings after a job interview scam'

One of the key things that led to the victim falling for this attack is "I don't want this opportunity to pass me by." This can be true when you're searching for a job, and out of nowhere, you get an offer that seems to be what you are looking for. Most will let their guard down, and attackers can know this when there is a report that such a thing is currently going on.

From the article:

Criminals are using the pressure and excitement of job interviews to lure people into downloading booby-trapped mobile applications like a fake Indeed Interview app or one called MyInterview.

According to cyber-security company Malwarebytes, the fake recruiters use lures such as: "Complete your interview by installing the Indeed app" or "salary agreement available after app installation".

Once downloaded the malicious apps allow hackers to access private data for extortion or to use in financial attacks.

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 28th August 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:08:23 +0000

When you go online, staying safe should be your priority. You watch the links that you click, you be careful of the apps that you download and where you download them from, and so on like that. Somethings might be outside your control, e.g., a rogue AI attacking your favorite platform. Nonetheless, be careful of the personal information that you post online because anyone can easily use AI to piece together information that you never thought was out there.

Attackers impersonate popular AI brands to spread malware

I believe any technically oriented person will not fall for these attacks because it involves an InstallFix attack. Then I remembered not everyone is tech savvy, or knows what this attack is all about.

From the article:

In one case, a fake Claude site walked the victim through an mshta command that pulled a payload from a lookalike domain. The download was packaged as a Windows app named “claude” or “claude.msixbundle.”

Once run, it fetched code that executed in memory and tried to hollow out browser processes. Other variants included a booby-trapped Claude Setup.zip archive and a repackaged claude.exe that functioned as a malware loader.

Frontier AI labs still won’t say how they’d contain a rogue model

After the recent events at OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, we all need to know how they will do this. And not just figure it out in real-time.

From the article:

To date, most of the plans in place for managing catastrophic risk are still largely left up to the companies. Guidelight’s report says the best public evidence shows that companies have “few containment protocols ready for an emergency.”

There could, of course, be containment plans that companies have in place but haven’t shared publicly.

ToxicPanda Android malware uses VPN permissions to block Google Play

It's another day to learn what malware can do to your device while trying to achieve its aim.

From the article:

The latest version of the malware supports 167 remote commands and phishing overlays for 349 banking, financial, cryptocurrency, and e-wallet applications targeting 16 countries.

It also includes a separate PIN-harvesting module that targets 140 financial and cryptocurrency apps and can dynamically update the target list.

According to the researchers, the app overlays are invisible to the victim,

Inaudible sounds used to fingerprint browsers catch AliExpress red-handed

It was discovered accidentally. The method is outdated. Still, it shows that some websites still choose to track their users without their consent.

Here is what happened:

Researcher Matthew Callaghan said he stumbled on the stealthy tracking by mistake. After loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone stopped playing over his multipoint headphones, which accept connections from more than one device at a time.

He set the headphones to play sounds from his phone except when his PC was producing audio. Each time he loaded AliExpress, the phone audio stopped. Each time he closed the tab the site was loaded into, the phone was once again audible.

INTERPOL crackdown on West African crime rings uncovers troubling new trend

Work and earn your money legitimately. Say no to a life of crime.

From the article:

Interpol says the operation also surfaced a troubling trend. West African crime groups are increasingly using sextortion against minors, some as young as 14.

“Offenders typically contact minors via social media, build trust and coerce them into sharing explicit images or videos. They then threaten to distribute this material to the victim’s contacts unless a ransom is paid,” Interpol stated.

The MFA Identity Trap: When Authentication Creates a False Sense of Security

Who got in might not be the person who should. Just because they passed the MFA check does not mean you should not verify their identity at a later stage when they are in your system.

Here is why:

Suppose an attacker social-engineers a help desk into resetting an employee’s MFA and then enrolls a device under the attacker’s control. The next login may satisfy every authentication requirement. The credentials are correct, and the registered second factor is successfully completed. The authentication succeeded. The identity assurance failed.

AI-assisted reconnaissance: Why everyone could be a viable target for fraud

Be careful of what you post online. If it's not meant to be there, don't put it there. Resist the urge to join the party or feel among. It's not and will never be worth it. Where you are? Keep it private! Having an anniversary? No need to take pictures and put them online? Your kid started walking? No! You got a promotion at your job? Keep it to yourself.

From the article:

The boundary between work and home has become increasingly blurred in recent years, especially as many of us work in a hybrid setup. We might use personal devices and home addresses for corporate activities. And of course, linking our professional and personal social media accounts is a simple task for AI.

All of which means that reconnaissance efforts can have an impact on your professional life.

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 21st August 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 21:08:13 +0000

Cybersecurity is everyone's business as long as you use the internet in one form or the other. Your job might be to develop the next cutting-edge security tools, raise people's cybersecurity awareness, and so on. And, in some cases, resolve to physically damage your infrastructure to stop an intrusion or minimize the impact. The list can go on. The point is to do your best wherever you might find yourself.

Windows 11’s strongest security defenses can be bypassed without a screwdriver

The title got me laughing. Still, do not panic. The attack assumes some level of access to the Windows 11 device, and Microsoft shipped mitigations as part of this year—2026—updates back in April. All in all, you should be interested in what happened and how the attack worked. For that, read the excerpt below.

...the team demonstrated they could reach into parts of the system Windows is built to keep off-limits, including memory the operating system itself is not supposed to touch. By creating these memory aliases, the researchers showed an attacker could:

Turn hundreds of blocklisted drivers with known vulnerabilities back on

Kill antivirus and endpoint detection and response (EDR) software,

How QR-code phishing can slip past corporate security measures

If you're comfortable using something every day, don't rule out that it can't be turned against you. That's why you should never let your guard down. This is an example of such a scenario. Scan QR codes out of necessity alone, if it's in an email, use another medium to check with the sender if they actually sent it, and never stop learning how cyber criminals are innovating ways to steal from you.

From the article:

Most importantly, they take the victim from a relatively well-protected corporate environment to a potentially unmanaged mobile device, thus bypassing business-grade security.

One important advantage for the attacker is concealment. The destination is encoded in a visual pattern, not displayed as readable text, which hides the malicious URLs behind them

T-Mobile ‘chopped a cable’ to expel Chinese hackers from its network

If a keyboard is not available to stop them, take the device offline.

From the article:

After identifying the breach, T-Mobile’s cybersecurity chief, Jeff Simon, told Bloomberg that he and three others drove to the data center nearby to its Bellevue, Washington headquarters, found the compromised system, pulled out a set of scissors, and snipped the cable connecting the box to the outside world.

StopAndProtect Uses Nearly 2,000 Hacked WordPress Sites to Spread Malware and Steal Data

One of the key things that aided the success of this attack was outdated software. It was discovered that one of the compromised websites was running a WordPress version from 2021.

Here are more details:

The infection chain begins with a ClickFix social engineering attack, resulting in the execution of a PowerShell command that leads to the deployment of additional .NET downloaders and loaders.

This subsequently gives way to the main components, including ransomware, SMB/USB worm, LockScreen, VBS spreader, chat utility and credential stealer.

AI is making fraud harder to spot and identity harder to prove

No surprises on this one.

From the article:

AI makes digital scams easier to create and harder to identify. Criminals can imitate emails, messages, websites, documents, voices and customer support interactions. These scams can appear legitimate enough to persuade people to share information, send money or provide account access.

A fraudulent payment or account change may be the final step in a longer chain of deception. AI-generated phishing is a leading concern for businesses, alongside document forgery, automated bot attacks and synthetic identities.

Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted

This raises a question: when the engineers were building the guardrails, did they take this into consideration?

I mean, think of the following:

Adversa can’t be sure what causes Grok to refuse precisely the same plaintext instructions and follow the encrypted ones. The leading theory is that the Grok filtering guardrail inspects text entering and leaving the model, but not the output of its own code execution.

Researchers find a loophole that lets expired credit cards make unauthorized payments

On the list of things that should not be possible, this should make the cut.

Here is what happened:

Credit card accounts don’t expire along with the physical card, so a return still gets refunded even after the purchasing card has expired. That’s what led Muhammad Taqi Raza, assistant professor in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, to ask: “If the card can get a refund, can the card make a payment?”

Working with Raja Hasnain Anwar and Gerard DeCunha, Raza found the answer is yes for at least some cards. The researchers describe it as a gap between systems that each assume someone else already checked whether the card should still work.

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 14th August 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:19:23 +0000

As humans, we always find a way to break stuff. That's evident in all the articles that we have for this week's review. Still, that will not deter us from continuing to break stuff because if we break them and fix them, it's better for a malicious user to break them and exploit them.

New CSS Attacks Can Break Webmail Defenses to Steal Passwords and Tokens

What got me interested in this article was the role that CSS played. It's been a while since I read articles that remind me that CSS is more than a stylesheet.

From the article:

The research follows two paths: abuse HTML and CSS that webmail already allows, or create a discrepancy between what a sanitizer approves and what the browser or application ultimately creates. Both can cross the boundary between an untrusted message and its trusted interface.

‘Ghostjacking’ Attack Uses Poisoned Logs to Turn AI Agents Bad

It's just the beginning. Attacks like this will be common in the future, and it will be up to defenders to stop them from happening.

Here is what's going on:

Dubbed Ghostjacking, the newly demonstrated attack builds on the same assumption: an external threat actor is able to plant instructions as text in logs or alerts to turn AI agents rogue.

The underlying issue, it says, is spread widely, as the attack targets three highly trusted platforms: Cloudflare, which routes 20% of all web traffic, Datadog, and Sentry.

Terabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attack

Yes, it's a lot of credentials. How did this happen? The use of a compromised AI package. For how long? 40 minutes.

From the article:

CloudSEK said it found cloud keys, repository tokens, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, package publishing credentials, environment variables, and AI provider keys that could allow attackers to gain access to more than 2,500 organizations.

Zoom Bug Handed Attackers Full Control of Devices

You'll think that it's just another vulnerability that needs fixing. Yes, you're right. Now, why did I include it? The time it took for the researcher to develop the exploit and how they did it. What am I talking about?

Here you go:

What stands out is how quickly the exploit was built. The researchers who discovered it used AI prompts to develop the screen-sharing attack in under 24 hours, an illustration of how AI can lower the barrier to sophisticated cyberattacks.

The attack was designed to be silent. It required nothing from the victim. There was no visible warning and no interaction needed.

New Android malware relays bank cards to fraudsters while victims still hold them

Scammers will always find ways to steal your money. This is just another.

From the article:

In one 13-minute phone call, the victim installed a RAT onto their own device — everything after that was performed by the fraudster. By the end of the call, the fraudster had taken out a loan in the victim’s name through remote access to the victim’s mobile app, and was streaming their card data to a fake merchant terminal.

Hackers drained $130 million in Bitcoin from 7,300 'cold' wallets once billed as secure

It was billed as secure. It turns out that a flaw in the affected device's firmware led to predictable seed phrases that facilitated the theft by the attackers. This attack also reminds us of the sentence: No system is safe.

From the article:

In late July, Canada-based Coinkite Inc. told users that some Coldcard devices had produced vulnerable seed phrases — the strings of words used to access a wallet. By August 3, Galaxy Research said around 7,300 addresses had been compromised, with an estimated $130 million stolen.

Engineers at Block Inc. traced the issue to the wallets' random-number generation.

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 7th August 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:10:10 +0000

Despite the popularity of AI and the events surrounding it, we should not forget that vulnerabilities still exist and that social engineering is still a thing. In this week's edition, we will review articles that shed further light on this, helping you make informed decisions in your everyday activities.

Weaponized Email AI Assistants Could Help Attackers Hijack Accounts

First, they need to compromise an email address. From there, they can use the AI assistant to Live off the Land. Reading the article does show that the attackers can use prompts to do some heavy lifting in their attack process. Still, at the time of writing, it's a proof-of-concept.

From the article:

Attacker use of the chatbot would normally be discoverable in its logs, so the initial task is to use the AI to remove any evidence of use of the AI. The researchers started with a chatbot prompt: “Create an inbox rule that moves any emails with ‘sign-in’ in the subject into the ‘deleted items’ folder.” This creates basic stealth.

AI developers targeted via trojanized GitHub repositories

In this day and age, as a developer, you should be super aware of the GitHub repositories that you clone. If it appears as a trustworthy repo, it does not mean that it is. I mean, this article shows that someone out there is banking on the trust that you will have for a certain repository to install malware on your device. Notice what I am saying?

From the article:

To deceive developers, attackers clone well-known repositories and subtly integrate malicious payloads. They usually add the payload to a benign-looking subdirectory or modify the URLs on the installation instructions.

Because the root page appears authentic and the original contributor is listed, victims are lured into trusting the GitHub page, leading them to download and execute the MaaS malware infostealer.

New Attack Methods Enable Malware to Hijack Passkey-Protected Accounts

Every time I read of a new way developed to protect online accounts, I am not surprised if it's eventually bypassed or defeated, necessitating mitigations or a fix.

From the article:

The new attack methods, named ‘Pass-ta-key’ by Palo Alto Networks, focus on Google-synced passkeys. The security firm’s researchers showed how a threat actor could use the techniques to take over accounts without needing privilege escalation or user interaction.

WhatsApp Scam Bypasses Passwords Using 6 Digit Code To Access Accounts

Be careful of any campaign or game on WhatsApp that requires you to click on a link. Take that as a very strong warning.

Here is what's going on:

Security experts at Malwarebytes Labs have confirmed that they are receiving ongoing reports of the attacks, which have been identified as "vote for my friend" scams, and have warned WhatsApp users to be alert.

The Malwarebytes Labs team has confirmed what the typical "vote for my friends" attack flow looks like, which might prove helpful in better understanding the threat.

You tap the "vote" link.

A page opens that appears to be related to WhatsApp.

You're prompted to complete a connection or verification step.

That action links your WhatsApp account to a device controlled by the attacker.

Zero-Click AI Browser Hacking: Claude and ChatGPT Atlas Hijacked via Emails, X Posts

The affected companies OpenAI and Anthropic both acknowledge the reported flaws in their AI browsers. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, there is no easy patch for ChatGPT Atlas and Anthropic said the report was "informative."

From the article:

The researchers demonstrated how, operating within active session cookies, the attacker’s script queries Gmail’s Atom feed, extracts message IDs, parses full email bodies, and silently exfiltrates inbox contents to the attacker server. The attacker can also silently share every file in the targeted user’s Google Drive account with an account they control.

Meta AI model hacked third-party systems during security testing

After what happened at OpenAI and Anthropic in recent weeks, there are no surprises in this one.

From the article:

"A misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing company Meta uses, inadvertently allowed one of our models access to the internet during evaluation," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement. "The model subsequently exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, in a manner similar to previously reported instances with other companies."

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 31st July 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:14:39 +0000

Interesting, to say the least, is how I qualify the articles that we have for this week's review. It's fascinating to know what's possible and reading articles that challenge your reality is something that you and I can put in our autobiography sometime in the future. I mean, wow. Just wow. I bet you'll feel the same when you read each article that I have for you.

Now, what are you waiting for? Let's get started.

Malicious sites use JavaScript to build malware in browser memory

Just when you think that you have seen it all. You read something like this. What's the end goal? Avoiding detection. But, building malware in browser memory? I need to do more research on this. For now, read the excerpt below.

After building the final malware executable, the fake download page hands it to the service worker at the beginning of the process and triggers a same-origin download path. "From the browser’s point of view, the user is downloading an executable from the landing page domain,"

MedusaHVNC Malware Uses Hidden Windows Desktops to Evade Detection

It's invisible to the naked eye. The way to detect this malware? During data exfiltration that goes through the network. Then, it might be too late.

From the article:

The hidden desktop allows the attacker to take full advantage of legitimate Windows tools without being observed by the user. The C2 is hardcoded into the malware but is relatively safe from observation. The result is a stealthy and persistent RAT. The only obvious mitigation is detection of unexpected data exfiltration.

For Some, So-Called ‘Skynet Day’ Came too Close to Sci-Fi After a Rogue Agent Hacked Into a Startup

The difference between reality and Sci-Fi might appear far away. However, with the recent incidents at OpenAI—where an AI model escaped its sandbox and attacked Hugging Face—and Anthropic—where Claude breached three organizations and uploaded a PyPi malware during tests—you can say that it's only a matter of time.

From the article:

Generative AI is growing so fast that government and evaluation systems are struggling to keep pace with the technology. Countries around the world are cobbling together their own laws, some conflicting.

The technology was adopted by nearly 53% of the world’s population in three years, faster than the spread of the PC or the internet, according to a study released this year by Stanford University.

Nine-Year Fraud Campaign Clones Russian Company Sites to Steal Advance Payments

Nine years. How many lives have been impacted? How many have cried with their tears never ending when they realized that they sent money for goods that never existed? How about the reputational damage suffered by the affected companies? And, I can go on.

From the article:

The scheme works by deceiving potential clients into visiting the replica sites, which have the contact details altered to lead them to the attackers.

Select instances have involved the threat actors hiring unsuspecting sales representatives to make cold calls, who are instructed to pass the customer to a "senior manager" once the negotiations reach the final stage.

From this point onwards, the customer's communications are with the fraudsters,

Attackers are using Microsoft’s legitimate login system to camouflage phishing attacks

It's one thing to attempt a phishing attack. It's another way to convince the user through the process without them being suspicious. In this campaign, the attackers are using the latter approach and leveraging Microsoft's legitimate login system.

From the article, here is how to prevent yourself from falling victim:

Check Point advises hovering over links before clicking, and treating it as a warning sign if several buttons in one email lead to the same URL. It also recommends checking whether the sender name, address, and domain line up, since display names can be spoofed even when the address looks internal.

Exposed credentials are giving attackers a head start many organizations don’t see

As the saying goes: modern attackers don't break in. They log in. Organizations should know this and act as if attackers are already in their systems.

From the article:

More than seven in 10 companies experienced an authentication-related incident during the past year, and two-thirds of the most recent incidents involved attackers signing in with valid credentials.

Exposed credentials often stay active long enough to be exploited, making early identification a key part of reducing credential-based risk.

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 24th July 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:20:08 +0000

All the articles that we are going to cover today have an element of Artificial Intelligence in them. You should not be surprised; AI is almost everywhere. Now, we'll take a look at what, without reading it, will look like it came out of a Sci-Fi movie, the dangers of searching for your favorite applications using a search engine, and AI going rogue, among others.

To think of it, when we talk about the popularity of AI, we are just in its infancy.

How a Stranger Used One Text Message to Steal My Entire Digital Life

Please, if you are going to read any article from start to finish in today's edition, it should be this. Reading through it will make it seem like a movie, but I bet you not. This is someone's life where they lost their identity and lots of money. The AI connection in it, the author turned to Anthropic's Claude to assist with something that the author was initially told was impossible.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

When I asked the caller to prove he was who he claimed to be, he did something that turned my stomach: he read my entire Social Security number and my date of birth back to me. That was the moment I knew my identity had been stolen. No honest caller needed to recite my full Social Security number to me; the only reason he had it was that he already had everything.

Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, Antigravity hit by sandbox escapes

When you read the term "sandbox" and you read an article like this, you just wonder: how did it happen? Well, it happened. This just shows you that if humans designed something to be locked down, we eventually find a way to unlock it for fun, or research purposes.

From the article:

The underlying class is not new. In April, Cymulate documented the same pattern, which it named "Configuration-Based Sandbox Escape," across Claude Code, Gemini CLI and Codex CLI, where a file written inside the sandbox runs on the host at the next launch.

What is new is the breadth. The same failure shows up across four tools from three vendors.

Denying the Worm: Detecting SANDWORM_MODE and the Emerging Class of AI Toolchain Supply Chain Attacks

When I read an article like this, I ask myself one question: Given the effort that the attackers (in this case, the creator of the worm) put into developing this malware, why not use it to build a meaningful application? Because, read the following excerpt and tell me if you will not ask the same question:

SANDWORM_MODE spreads through three independent vectors, each exploiting a different credential type. With stolen npm tokens, it calls whoami to identify the compromised identity, enumerates all packages published under that account, injects the Stage 0 loader shim into each, and then runs npm publish to distribute infected versions to downstream consumers

When Identity Verification Fails: Lessons from a Real-World SIM Swap and Near Account Takeover

What to take away from this article: when the so-called customer service calls you, disconnect and call their number. Why, it can be a spoofed call.

From the article:

The most important lesson from this incident is not that SIM swaps remain dangerous. It is that attackers increasingly chain together multiple identity attacks during a single engagement. Social engineering, credential theft, session hijacking, account manipulation, and recovery abuse are no longer isolated techniques. They are coordinated stages of a single identity attack campaign.

How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face

We all thought that it was impossible or that it could only happen in movies, in reality, we are seeing it play out.

ICYMI: An OpenAI model went rogue and attacked Hugging Face. This is the aftermath of that attack. I mean, it was not meant to happen. This article explains that human mistakes made the impossible possible.

From the article:

Daniel Card, a cybersecurity consultant, agreed that OpenAI “didn’t put adequate effort into the design of the sandbox nor its controls” by giving the sandbox or some part of it “an unfiltered route to the internet.” Setting up the sandbox, even with limited network access as OpenAI described it, was not a “reasonable” decision, according to Card.

How attackers hosted a fake Claude download page on the claude.ai domain

If you need that software, go to the official website by typing the URL in your web browser's address bar. Don't search it.

From the article:

A threat actor abused Anthropic’s Claude Artifacts feature to funnel users toward malware, Huntress researchers have disclosed.

In this particular case, the artifact to which potential victims were directed rendered a fully functional page that looked like a legitimate Claude download page, and the fact that it was hosted on the Claude.ai domain completed the illusion.

Clicking on the “Download” button redirected victims to an external domain, first claude.ai.download-app[.]us and subsequently downloading-api.it[.]com/html/claude/win, from which they downloaded a bundle.

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 17th July 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:25:45 +0000

In cybersecurity, attackers and defenders are always trying to beat each other. The former seeks new ways that can circumvent the defense put in place by the latter. It might look like in the movies, but in reality, there are lives, money, and reputation at stake. At the end of the day, it's good news when the defenders come out on top.

Now, defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too

That awesome moment when you turn the weapon against the attackers and you feel so good about yourself; this is an example. For months, we have read how attackers use prompt injections to bypass LLMs guardrails. Now, defenders are using it to shut them down!

Here is how the defenders pulled it off:

Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents.

The prompts direct the attacking LLM to perform an action forbidden by its guardrails, the safety barriers AI developers erect to prevent it from taking harmful actions. The LLM responds by shutting down.

New ClickLock macOS Stealer Kills Apps Every 210ms Until Victims Type Their Password

It's quite funny to read through the article. And I bet it will be frustrating for anyone who falls victim. I mean, a constant dialog box telling you to enter your password while at the same time killing some apps that will make you productive? And if you eventually type your password (which you should not), you hand over some personal details like Keychain, browser credentials, and crypto wallets to the attackers.

Here are the affected regions so far:

Group-IB's telemetry counts at least 100 targets across 33 countries since May, over half of them in Europe. Its analysts assume from the code structure that the malware is still under development. Uploaded to VirusTotal on June 9, the orchestrator script had zero detections there when Group-IB analyzed it.

New TELEPUZ Malware Spreads via ClickFix to Steal Data and Run Commands

For some while, ClickFix attacks have been in the news. This one is no different; I added it to further raise your awareness that the threat is still out there.

In the case of this TELEPUZ malware, here is how the attack works:

The ClickFix attack chain linked to TELEPUZ results in the execution of PowerShell, which downloads a second-stage payload from a remote URL and executes it.

The payload is a Go variant of the Vidar Stealer, which is known to harvest sensitive data from infected hosts and deploy secondary malware, in this case a stager binary that's responsible for launching TELEPUZ ("telepuz.dll") using "rundll32.exe."

Spirals ransomware locks down victim systems in under 24 hours

I know that it's just another ransomware. So, why is it special? Well, at the time of writing, there is only ONE confirmed victim. Therefore, by the time that you're reading this, there is possiblity of more victims.

Here is what's going on:

Spirals is written in Rust and encrypts files using a separate AES-128 key per file, each wrapped with an attacker-controlled ECDH P-256 public key. To speed up encryption, files larger than 5 MB are encrypted in chunks.

Victims were left with a ransom note, RECOVERY_SECTION.log, directing them to a Tor negotiation site and threatening to leak stolen data within six days if no payment was made.

The script, not the voice, is what makes AI voice phishing work

We have reached an age where you must not believe that the voice at the end of the end is who you think it is. If you work in an environment where you receive phone calls a lot, especially from a higher authority telling you to do some task, have a way to verify that it's really them. I will suggest, as also stated at the end of the article, something like a code word that only the two party knows, i.e., you and the person calling you.

From the article:

Industrial scam operations in Southeast Asia have run voice fraud at volume for years on labor costs nowhere near that. Vishing was economical before any of this. The change AI brings is the removal of language, staffing and geography as constraints, which is a different claim and a more defensible one.

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 10th July 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:21:42 +0000

This week's edition of our security review is all about the security challenges that arise from the use of Generative AI systems and AI Agents. By the looks of it, it's compulsory that if you're using these systems every day, you must know their security implications (that's if you don't know already). And if you're in the loop already, this should serve as a reminder of why you should take it more seriously.

Prompt Injection Attacks Trick AI Agents Into Making Crypto Payments

It's my first time reading this kind of attack that uses prompt injection.

Here is what's going on:

Zscaler says it identified two campaigns relying on indirect prompt injection, including a payment scam hiding behind API documentation, and a typosquatting operation promoting a crypto platform that impersonates DeBank.

As part of the first campaign, the threat actor has been using SEO poisoning to target AI agents searching for the Python library requests-secure-v2.

As part of the second campaign, a threat actor is promoting a fraudulent website typosquatting the decentralized finance portfolio tracker DeBank. The indirect prompts used in this campaign tell the AI agents that the impersonating website is the legitimate DeBank domain.

CrowdStrike Uncovers New Prompt Injection Techniques

I am not surprised. I mean, as humans, when we notice that a system is deemed secure or at least, it was advertised that it does not allow certain things, we find a way to make it do that very same thing. While reading the article, I greatly admired the creativity of the prompt injection. It just shows you, and as things stand, GenAI systems can be tricked.

From the article:

Prompt injection is no longer just about obvious jailbreaks. Adversaries can manipulate AI systems through hidden context, delayed triggers, semantic constraints, boundary spoofing, formatting tricks, encoded payloads, and implied procedural knowledge.

New HalluSquatting Attack Could Trick AI Coding Assistants Into Installing Botnet Malware

A key lesson from this article: as a developer using Generative AI in your daily activities, always inspect the package names in the AI-generated code.

From the article:

The trap is not code that runs by itself. It works because these assistants keep a terminal among their built-in tools, so once the planted instructions take over, "install a bot" is simply something the assistant can do.

What makes it practical is that the fake names are not random. In the researchers' experiments, the mistake was consistent: across different phrasings and across models from different companies,

Why AI Governance Without Guardrails Is Theater

What I learned from this article is this: any organization that needs AI to work effectively for them, needs all hands on deck. No if's. No but's.

Here is why:

AI governance isn’t only about what’s allowed. It’s about what’s possible in the architecture, what’s safe in the threat model, and what’s useful to the business.

AI Coding Tools Tricked Into Hacking Developer Machine via Decades-Old Technique

The title says it all. Now, the question: what made this possible?

Here you go:

Dubbed GhostApproval, the attack has been successfully tested against Claude Code, Amazon Q Developer, Cursor, Google Antigravity, Augment, and Windsurf.

In a GhostApproval attack, hackers plant a symbolic link in a seemingly benign repository that masquerades as a normal project file but actually points to a sensitive location outside the workspace.

When a developer opens the repo in an AI coding assistant and instructs it to make edits, the agent follows the symlink and performs the write on the target specified by the attacker.

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 3rd July 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 21:22:50 +0000

The imperfections of humans mean we will always create applications and software with vulnerabilities. With the rise of GenAI applications, chatbots tend to be a "yes man" or aid attackers in the creation of malware. At the end of the day, it's interesting to know that you can catch a ransomware before it detonates.

Sycophantic chatbots and the harms that build over many chats

Chatbots like ChatGPT tend to agree with you all the time, even when they are wrong. And if you catch them lying, they'll just say: Nice catch. It's annoying, but it's our current reality. Meanwhile, the consequences can be far-reaching as detailed in this article.

From the article:

The strongest evidence concerns harm that accumulates across many interactions. Molly Russell, a 14-year-old from London, died in 2017 from an act of self-harm after viewing large amounts of depression, self-harm, and suicide content on Instagram and Pinterest.

Sycophancy gives these systems a steady tendency to agree with users and validate them, accuracy aside. Analysis of more than 391,000 messages from users who had poor outcomes found sycophantic behavior in more than 70% of messages.

BlueHammer Vulnerability Exploited in Ransomware Attacks

At the time of writing, Microsoft has patched the vulnerability. But, that does not mean that everyone has updated their Windows devices.

From the article:

CISA added BlueHammer to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on April 22 and the agency has now updated the entry to specify that the weakness has been leveraged in ransomware campaigns.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.
It’s unclear which ransomware group has exploited CVE-2026-33825; there do not appear to be any recent reports describing its exploitation.

AI-Generated Browser Ransomware Abuses Chromium API on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android

If you're looking for the not-so-good usage of GenAI, this is it. Just like most things created by man, it can be used for unintended purposes.

From the article:

The identified sample is a Python Flask application named "deepseek_python_20260125_da0631.py" that was uploaded to VirusTotal on January 25, 2026, with the Google-owned malware scanning service describing it as a "fully functional information stealer and ransomware toolkit."

The application is designed to operate as a malicious web server that lures victims with a fake Discord avatar AI upscaler, while stealthily running a wide array of harmful actions, including stealing Discord tokens, harvesting credit card numbers and cryptocurrency seed phrases, logging keystrokes, and capturing unauthorized webcam and microphone feeds.

Catching ransomware on the wire before it locks the file server

Simple explanation: Your behavior can give away your motives.

Here is how they achieved it:

The framework runs in three stages. The first two compare traffic against known indicators of compromise, including the size of the ransom note a family writes to a victim’s drive. Each family drops a note of a recognizable size, which serves as a fingerprint.

Traffic that passes those checks moves to a machine learning model trained to catch families the signatures miss.

The model the team selected, a Random Committee classifier, reached an accuracy of about 99.6% on their test data. The authors report that it caught every ransomware sample in their tests, and false positives stayed rare.

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 26th June 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:52:27 +0000

When we think that we are safe, that's when we should be on the alert. Or, maybe, just check if you're truly safe. You never know, attackers may be lurking in your system, copying files as you read this, and waiting to detonate that ransomware followed by their demands.

We just need to be vigilant. If you design a system as "safe", have it at the back of your mind that someone can break it. It's not a matter of "if", it's "when". This mindset ensures that nothing catches you by surprise. And in the intense atmosphere where your company is responding to a cyber incident, your level of calmness will be unmatched. That's because you knew that days like this are inevitable.

I welcome you all to this week's edition of our security review here on DEV.

A new unpatchable flaw in Apple chips opens the door to an iPhone jailbreak

When I read "unpatchable flaw", I was muted.

Here is what's going on:

On Friday, Paradigm Shift, an offensive cybersecurity company based in Barcelona, published a blog post about the vulnerability, which it dubbed “usbliter8.” The company also published a proof of concept that shows how to exploit the vulnerability, which requires physical access to the target phone.

The flaw and related exploit affect iPhones that have Apple-made chips A12 and A13, which were released in 2018 and 2019, and are included in older iPhones such as the XS, XR and up to the iPhone 11.

WhatsApp phishing attack uses fake business docs to hack PCs

While reading the article, I thought to myself that no tech-savvy individual will fall for this attack. Because, who will read a file name that's supposed to be a document and ends with .vbs? Then I remembered not everyone knows this, and they can fall victim. Also, even if you're tech-savvy, a slight dip in attention, can actually cause you to fall victim.

Here is what's going on:

The threat actor is using file names that indicate business and financial documents delivered by the victim's contacts, whose accounts had been compromised.

These files are given names that make them appear to be financial reports, billing statements, account notices, and similar documents likely to draw the target’s attention and prompt them to open the file.

Phishing hides in routine Microsoft 365 workflows

Falling victim to a phishing attack where you least expect it, can haunt you for a very long time. I mean, you'll keep asking yourself: how did they do it? I did not click on any phishing link! Just how?

From the article:

The attack begins when a target is added to or invited into an attacker-controlled Microsoft 365 Group. The group’s name, description, or welcome message is designed to create urgency, often using themes such as payroll updates, contract renewals, supplier requests, or mandatory training notices.

Follow-up content is delivered through the group mailbox, shared files, or calendar invitations, often using one of four CalPhishing techniques. CalPhishing, short for Calendar Phishing, uses Outlook and Microsoft 365 calendar features to deliver phishing lures through meeting invitations and .ics files that can place events directly on a victim’s calendar.

New ‘Mistic’ RAT Opens Door to Several Ransomware Families

Don't be surprised that cyber criminals work together. If you are, this is one example that it's happening.

From the article:

The threat actor, tracked as Woodgnat and KongTuke, and active since at least May 2024, is known to have ties to ransomware groups such as Qilin, Interlock, Rhysida, Akira, 8Base, and Black Basta.

Also tracked as MLTBackdoor, Mistic provides attackers with typical capabilities, including file download and upload, file manipulation, folder creation, and code execution. The attackers can also modify the frequency at which the malware checks for new commands and can instruct it to terminate itself.

The Identity Problem Hiding in AI Agent Deployments

When you know who is who in a system, you still have to ensure that they don't exploit their access. Now, what happens when you know of an Agent that accessed a system access but you don't know the relationship between that Agent and who granted it that access? This and more is what the article is trying to explain and ways to navigate the situation.

From the article:

Even when we specify both identities, the relationship between the user and the agent is not captured anywhere.

The relationship between Claude Code and the programmer who initiated a task that caused Claude Code to get a token to access GitHub, for example, is very different from the relationship an autonomous agent has with the user whose HR case it picks up in its workflow.

Chrome Ad Blocker with 10M+ Installs Found with Dormant Script Injection Capability

It only takes one decision, and such capabilities can allow the developers of the extension to do whatever the devices. The question is: why was it there in the first place?

From the article:

It's worth emphasizing here that there is no evidence malicious payload has been distributed to users in this manner, but the mere presence of the capability, coupled with ties to other ad-blocking extensions that have since been removed from the storefront for malware, raises privacy and security risks

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.

Security news weekly round-up - 19th June 2026

Habdul Hazeez — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:35:03 +0000

Defenders don't rest. They wake up every day thinking about how to protect the systems that they are charged to protect. Meanwhile, attackers are also looking for crafty ways to infect a system or break into computer networks. In the end, it's good for everyone if defenders are always one step ahead of the attackers.

EvilTokens: A phishing attack that doesn’t steal your password

A phishing attack that does not require creating fake login pages or stealing your passwords. I was speechless when I read the article's title and deservedly so when I read how the attackers executed the attack.

The following should get you started:

EvilTokens is a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) kit built to compromise Microsoft 365 accounts by abusing the OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant flow.

As attacks that use the kit rely on device code phishing, they sidestep the need for convincing replicas of genuine login pages where the victims would hand over their passwords.

Instead, attackers get the victim to complete a legitimate authentication process – including two-factor authentication (2FA) – on a real Microsoft login page.

One-Click Microsoft 365 Copilot Flaw Could Have Let Attackers Steal Emails, Files, and MFA Codes

The good news is that MSFT mitigated the flaw. What's left for tenant admins is to watch and contain. The interesting thing is how the researchers pulled off the attack.

Here is what they did:

Researchers at Varonis Threat Labs chained three bugs into a one-click exfiltration path they call SearchLeak. Because the link pointed to a real microsoft.com domain, traditional anti-phishing and URL filtering tools were unlikely to flag it.

The entry point is the q parameter in the Copilot Enterprise Search URL. It is meant for a natural-language query, but Copilot reads whatever sits there as instructions, not just a search string. Varonis calls this Parameter-to-Prompt injection.

Low-skilled attacker used Claude, Codex to breach 14 companies

The barrier to entry into cybercrime has never been this low. And what's reported in this article proves that. Also, you'll expect that since the attacker is tagged a low-skilled attacker, that they will make rookie OPSEC mistakes, yes they did.

From the article:

“In many cases, the attacker supplied only vague, low-skill prompts and allowed Claude to fill in the gaps: researching exposed services, identifying possible vulnerabilities, writing exploit code, validating access, and harvesting data,” the researchers noted.

“The attacker did not need to be an expert operator; they simply had to use the correct framing for their prompts. The agent supplied much of the structure and technical execution that the attacker appeared to lack.”

Massive breach spills credentials for thousands of sensitive networks

Just when you think: We are safe, we have firewalls and the big tech guys to protect our infrastructures. Then you read an article like this and you almost give up, thinking: Which system is safe?

Here is what's going on:

“The scale of this breach touches nearly every sector of the global economy, sparing no industry,” researchers from Hudson Rock, a security firm that also analyzed the data, wrote. “The threat actors have built a verified database of working credentials for some of the largest enterprises on the planet.”

Rokarolla Android trojan targets banking and crypto users, enables device takeover

Android Trojans and their funny names are something else. The article's title clearly states what the Trojan does. One thing that surprises me every time I read an article like this: given the amount of effort that the developers put into this malware, can't they put the same effort into developing an application that they can somehow monetize? Or, something like that?

I mean, read the following

“Its malicious capabilities include harvesting lock screen credentials, exfiltrating sensitive contact lists and SMS data, and utilizing keyloggers to continuously record user input,” the researchers said.

“Furthermore, the trojan actively conceals its operations and disrupts user intervention by blocking incoming calls, deploying fraudulent screen overlays, suppressing device audio, and deactivating Google Play Protect.”

USB worm spreads crypto-stealing malware via Windows shortcut files

I don't know. At the end of the day, and most of the time, some malware are just after stealing something from an infected system. This is yet another example.

From the article:

The campaign has been active since at least February and relies on LNK (shortcut) files on USB drives to push clipper malware that monitors clipboard contents and replaces cryptocurrency wallet addresses with ones controlled by the attacker.

Microsoft says that the infection process starts with the victim opening the LNK file, triggering the malware on the USB drive. Additional payloads are staged from a .ONION address.

Credits

Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.

That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.