Daily Edition · Page 5

THE DAILY INDEX

Technology, AI, software, security, crypto and business

ATTACKS & VULNERABILITIES

TLDR InfoSec

USE ONE VIRTUAL MACHINE TO OWN THEM ALL — ACTIVE EXPLOITATION OF VMWARE ESX HYPERVISOR ESCAPE ESXICAPE

VMware has released patches for three zero-day vulnerabilities in ESXi, which allowed threat actors to escape the hypervisor and access critical server data. The vulnerabilities are actively being exploited in the wild, posing a significant risk to organizations using VMware environments. It is crucial to patch affected systems promptly to prevent potential security breaches.

NEW VULNERABILITY IN GITHUB COPILOT AND CURSOR: HOW HACKERS CAN WEAPONIZE CODE AGENTS

Researchers from Pillar Security have discovered a new prompt injection technique on Cursor and GitHub Copilot. These systems use rules files to guide the prompting for the LLM, which is often distributed by open-source projects or from other untrusted locations. This attack involves utilizing invisible Unicode characters to hide malicious instructions for the LLM that can be used to instruct it to poison the generated code.

TURNING THE SECURITY FLYWHEEL

This post outlines seven security flywheels: reducing costs to raise security baselines, transitioning threat intelligence from push to pull, creating digital twins through asset inventory, enhancing detection via red teaming, identifying adjacent business benefits of security measures, implementing continuous control monitoring and forming federated teams that seek assistance instead of pushing initiatives. Each flywheel creates a cycle where initial investments yield benefits that can be reinvested, ultimately easing the burden on security teams while sustaining or improving security posture.

NEW AKIRA RANSOMWARE DECRYPTOR CRACKS ENCRYPTION KEYS USING GPUS

A researcher has released an open-source decryptor for Akira ransomware that brute forces encryption keys. Akira generates unique keys for each file using four timestamp seeds, hashes them through 1,500 rounds, and encrypts them with another key, appending them at the end of each file. The researcher analyzed logs to estimate when the ransomware was active and used 16 4090s via RunPod & Vast.ai to decrypt a friend's files in 10 hours.

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