Daily Edition · Page 5

THE DAILY INDEX

Technology, AI, software, security, crypto and business

ATTACKS & VULNERABILITIES

TLDR InfoSec

GOOGLE FIXES CLOUD COMPOSER PRIVILEGE ESCALATION VULNERABILITY

Google has fixed a privilege escalation vulnerability impacting the Cloud Composer 2 managed workflow orchestration service. Cloud Composer allows any user with edit permissions to install a package from PyPi, which is then installed by Cloud Build. Prior to this fix, Cloud Build used the highly privileged default Cloud Build service account. An attacker could install a malicious PyPi package that exfiltrates the sensitive Cloud Build credentials.

HOW I MADE $64K FROM DELETED FILES — A BUG BOUNTY STORY

Security researcher Sharon Brizinov earned $64,000 by discovering secrets in deleted GitHub repository files. His research highlighted how Git retains copies of all files in its commit history, even after they are deleted from the working directory. Completely removing sensitive files requires specific tools, such as git filter-branch or git-filter-repo, as Git maintains references in its object storage for several weeks before performing garbage collection.

MCP: BUILDING YOUR SECOPS AI ECOSYSTEM

MCPs offer a standardized way for LLMs to interact with various tools, which can significantly aid SecOps teams in leveraging disparate security tools for investigations. AI Agents can currently perform specialized automations to complete tasks that require minimal human intervention, whereas MCPs can facilitate flexible workflows guided by humans. In the future, we may see vendors create more MCPs for their tooling, as well as a convergence between agents and MCPs.

GAINING LONG-TERM AWS ACCESS WITH CODEBUILD AND GITHUB

Attackers can exploit AWS CodeBuild and GitHub for persistent access after compromising an AWS account. They can modify an IAM role's trust policy to allow CodeBuild to assume it, link CodeBuild to an attacker-controlled GitHub repository, and create GitHub Actions workflows that execute commands using the permissions of the assumed role. This technique is more discreet than creating new IAM users with admin privileges, as the activity appears as legitimate CodeBuild operations from AWS infrastructure IPs, not external ones.

OUTSIDE EXPERTS PICK UP THE SLACK ON TESTING OPENAI'S NEWEST MODEL RELEASE

AI red teaming company SplxAI chose to publish its own testing after OpenAI failed to publish a safety report for GPT-4.1 as it did for 4.0. SplxAI used the same prompts from its 4.0 testing to simulate a financial advisor and evaluate its safety in 11 categories across 1,000 simulated tests. GPT-4.1 performed 3x worse than GPT-4.0. Following OpenAI's guidance that 4.1 may require more explicit prompting, the SplxAI team developed a 1,400-word prompt over 5 hours of iterating that performed better than their initial prompt.

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