Daily Edition · Page 5

THE DAILY INDEX

Technology, AI, software, security, crypto and business

GENERAL

TLDR InfoSec

ESA CALLS COPS AS CRIMS LIFT OFF 500 GB OF FILES, SAY SECURITY BLACK HOLE STILL OPEN

The European Space Agency faces a new breach after Scattered/Shiny Lapsus$ Hunters claimed to have stolen 500 GB of highly sensitive operational, spacecraft, and contractor data from ESA systems, including information on missions involving partners such as SpaceX and Airbus. The attackers say their access remains open. The ESA has referred the case for a criminal inquiry amid a history of prior security incidents dating back to 2011.

DECODING THE GITHUB RECOMMENDATIONS FOR NPM MAINTAINERS

Following recent npm supply chain attacks, GitHub's hardening guidance centers on three controls: adopting Trusted Publishing Framework (OIDC-based short-lived credentials instead of long-lived tokens), enforcing 2FA for all publishing operations, and using WebAuthn/passkeys instead of TOTP for phishing-resistant authentication. npm deprecated new TOTP setups in October and disabled legacy tokens in November, requiring maintainers to use granular access tokens with expiration for CI/CD automation. Maintainers should configure trusted publisher relationships in package settings, enable 2FA across all sensitive operations, and enroll WebAuthn authenticators while maintaining repository access controls.

DO SMART PEOPLE EVER SAY THEY'RE SMART? (SMARTERTOOLS SMARTERMAIL PRE-AUTH RCE CVE-2025-52691)

A critical pre-auth remote code execution flaw (CVE-2025-52691) in SmarterTools SmarterMail, a business email and collaboration server for Windows and Linux, arises from an unauthenticated file upload endpoint that accepts attacker-controlled parameters. It includes a GUID used to construct file paths, enabling arbitrary file writes via path traversal and by crafting a multipart/form-data request with specific context and contextData values. With a malicious file, an attacker can place a web shell in the webroot and gain full remote code execution.

KERNEL BUGS HIDE FOR 2 YEARS ON AVERAGE. SOME HIDE FOR 20

Analysis of 125,183 Linux kernel bugs with Fixes: tags revealed an average bug lifetime of 2.1 years, with race conditions averaging 5.1 years, and the longest-lived bug persisted for 20.7 years. Detection rates improved dramatically, from 0% bugs found within one year in 2010 to 69% in 2022, driven by tools such as Syzkaller and kernel sanitizers. The VulnBERT model achieved 92.2% recall and a 1.2% false-positive rate by combining CodeBERT embeddings with 51 handcrafted features targeting patterns such as unbalanced refcounts and missing NULL checks.

CHATGPT FALLS TO NEW DATA-PILFERING ATTACK AS A VICIOUS CYCLE IN AI CONTINUES

Security researchers at Radware show how a new “ZombieAgent” attack revives a previously blocked ChatGPT data‑exfiltration technique by tweaking prompts to bypass URL restrictions and leak information character by character. Indirect prompt injection and weak separation between user instructions and embedded content keep LLM agents vulnerable, forcing vendors into an endless patch-and-bypass cycle rather than a fundamental fix.

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