An undercover investigator with the Department of Homeland Security Investigations unit used AI-generated images of a 13-year-old girl to lure grown men into chatting with her. The investigator used the images to create a profile on the Kik social media platform and successfully caught a grown man who was distributing CSAM. These sting operations are not new, but previously, investigators needed to use pictures of themselves or coworkers that could pass for underage, potentially putting them at risk.
Recently published Justice Department documents and an inside source detailed a breach of the FBI's New York office by a foreign hacker who accessed documents from the Epstein investigation. The hack happened after a special agent at the New York office inadvertently left a server vulnerable while trying to manage the bureau's complex procedures for handling digital evidence. The hacker hadn't realized they had infiltrated a law enforcement server, expressed disgust at the materials, and threatened to send the documents to the FBI before being reassured that the server belonged to the FBI.
A CVE drops Friday afternoon. Can you prove what's exposed in minutes, not hours? Crash Override embeds provenance from commit to runtime — continuous visibility, no scramble. [See a demo [18] →]
A former DOGE software engineer allegedly exfiltrated two highly restricted Social Security databases, including Numident and the Master Death File, onto a thumb drive and boasted about reusing them at a government contractor job.
Iran-linked Handala Hack Team claimed attacks on Stryker Corporation and Verifone on March 11, with Stryker confirming a network incident while Verifone denied any breach despite screenshots of apparent internal admin panels released as evidence.
WhatsApp rolled out parent-managed accounts for children under 13, giving parents PIN-gated control over contacts, group membership, and activity alerts while preserving end-to-end encryption on all messages.
When organizations verify their posture through live integrations instead of questionnaires, scores come back 20–40 points lower on average. That gap is where breaches happen.
A fraudulent CleanMyMac site uses a ClickFix-style social engineering technique to trick macOS users into pasting a malicious Terminal command that silently installs SHub Stealer, bypassing Gatekeeper entirely. The stealer harvests macOS Keychain credentials via a fake system authentication prompt, targets Exodus, Atomic Wallet, Ledger Live, and Trezor Suite for seed-phrase extraction, and persists via a LaunchAgent disguised as a Google software updater that runs every minute. Russian-language keyboard layouts trigger immediate self-termination, a common indicator of Russian-nexus cybercriminal origin.
ShinyHunters is abusing misconfigured Salesforce Experience Cloud guest-user settings and a customized Aura Inspector tool to mass‑exfiltrate data from hundreds of organizations' CRM instances, then extort victims by threatening to leak it. Salesforce stresses its platform is not vulnerable, shifting responsibility to customers' configuration hygiene and third‑party integrations, making rigorous access reviews and hardening of guest accounts urgent.
Swedish telecom giant Ericsson disclosed that it had suffered a data breach affecting over 16k individuals whose data was held by a third-party service provider. The breached data includes names, addresses, SSNs, driver's license numbers, government-issued ID numbers, financial information, medical information, and dates of birth. No cybercrime group has claimed the breach, suggesting that the third party may have paid the ransom, or the cybercriminals could not link the data to Ericsson.
GitHub Security Lab's open source Taskflow Agent employs a multi-stage LLM pipeline — threat modeling, issue suggestion, and thorough audit — to detect high-impact auth bypasses, IDORs, and logic flaws with a low hallucination rate. It has identified over 80 vulnerabilities across more than 40 repositories so far. Out of 1,003 suggested issues, only 21% met the criteria for impactful reporting, with business logic flaws having the highest true-positive rate at 25%, and IDOR issues exceeding combined XSS and CSRF cases. Notable confirmed findings include a privilege escalation in Outline (CVE-2025-64487), PII exposure in WooCommerce (CVE-2025-15033) and Spree (CVE-2026-25758), and a universal authentication bypass in Rocket.Chat's microservices DDP layer (CVE-2026-28514) caused by a missing await on a bcrypt Promise.
The Featured Chrome extension ShotBird (ID: gengfhhkjekmlejbhmmopegofnoifnjp) was weaponized after an ownership transfer between December 2025 and March 2026, transformed into a remote-controlled malware channel that beaconed to api.getextensionanalytics.top, stripped CSP/X-Frame-Options headers via declarative rules.json, injected fake Chrome update lures, and exfiltrated form data including passwords, card/CVV, IBAN, and SSN fields. The file-delivery path dropped googleupdate.exe (SHA256: E8D2ED43...), a WiX Burn bootstrapper bundling a legitimate Google-signed ChromeSetup.exe alongside a stager psfx.msi that decoded to irm orangewater00.com|iex. PowerShell Script Block Logging (Event ID 4104) reconstructed a second stage from 115 fragments, revealing ETW suppression via PSEtwLogProvider, Windows Credential Manager enumeration, Chromium Login Data and Web Data targeting, and exfiltration routines — with infrastructure and endpoint patterns overlapping a parallel campaign involving the QuickLens extension documented by Annex Security.
2026.03.11·
monxresearch-sec.github.io·9 min read·TLDR InfoSec
You've got industry competitors - but they're not the only ones. Today's cybercriminals use the same tools you do and operate like a well-funded business. Meet your hidden competition [12] on March 18: Huntress' John Hammond and YouTuber Jim Browning give you an inside
PyLingual is an open-source CPython bytecode decompiler supporting all Python versions from 3.6 onward, with auto-detection of .pyc version, a segmentation model for control-flow reconstruction, and a web service at pylingual.io for browser-based use.
Cylake is a cybersecurity platform that runs fully on-prem or in a private cloud to protect highly regulated organizations barred from using public cloud, emphasizing data and operational sovereignty.
Open-source WAF bypass toolkit with over 4,300 payloads, 27 recon checks, AI-assisted bypass, and security hardening. Designed for pentesters, bug bounty hunters, and DevSecOps.
The 23-component iPhone exploit toolkit dubbed "Coruna" — targeting iOS 13 through 17.2.1 — has been traced by former employees and iVerify researchers to L3Harris's Trenchant division, originally built for Five Eyes intelligence customers. Former Trenchant GM Peter Williams, sentenced to seven years last month, sold eight company tools to Russian zero-day broker Operation Zero for $1.3M, providing a likely path by which Coruna reached Russian espionage group UNC6353 and later Chinese cybercriminals. Two Coruna exploits (Photon and Gallium) have also been linked to Operation Triangulation, the sophisticated iOS campaign first disclosed by Kaspersky in 2023.
Doyensec maps the full OAuth 2.0/dynamic client registration attack surface in MCP deployments, covering tool poisoning, rug pulls, schema poisoning, prompt injection via tool responses, command injection (CVE-2025-53100, CVE-2025-53818), SSO metadata manipulation (CVE-2025-4144, CVE-2025-4143), DNS rebinding against unauthenticated localhost WebSocket servers, and OIDC discovery endpoint abuse. The proposed Identity Assertion JWT Authorization Grant (JAG) enterprise authorization model introduces four unresolved risks: no token revocation path for misbehaving agents, LLM-driven scope escalation without user consent, undefined client credential issuance enabling scope namespace collision and resource identifier injection, and ID-JAG replay amplifying blast radius across multiple MCP access tokens. Security teams auditing MCP deployments should treat every step of the authorization chain as an injection point and prioritize mTLS/certificate-based trust anchors, strict resource namespacing, centralized access invalidation, and explicit per-action consent gates for high-risk tool calls.
AI agents are highly flexible and adaptable systems that can affect the outside world via side effects. To effectively secure these workflows, we need to add a deterministic “box” around the agent. In a cloud environment, agents can run in an AgentCore Runtime, which utilizes an AgentCore Gateway to restrict the access an agent has outside of the “box,” and an AgentCore Policy can be utilized to grant the agent authorization to use specific tools in a specific way.
Microsoft Azure autoscales when traffic spikes—adjusting capacity automatically so you can skip the scramble. With more global regions than any other cloud provider, you've always got room to grow. Scale
The FBI issued a PSA warning that criminals are impersonating city and county planning officials in targeted phishing campaigns, using publicly available permit data to craft convincing emails with real property addresses, case numbers, and official names to solicit fraudulent payments via wire transfer, P2P apps, or cryptocurrency.
A vishing-led compromise of a US service provider's employee account exposed sensitive data on 15,661 people linked to Ericsson, including IDs, Social Security numbers, and financial and medical details in some cases.
Before the ransomware hits, and much before the breach makes headlines — there's usually an infostealer. These cheap, widely available tools have become the #1 driver of identity-based attacks [4]. They quietly harvest credentials that get sold, traded, and weaponized downstream.
CVE-2026-27944 (CVSS 9.8) in Nginx UI exposes the unauthenticated `/api/backup` endpoint, which leaks the AES-256 encryption key and IV via the `X-Backup-Security` response header, enabling full backup decryption without credentials. Successful exploitation yields admin credentials, session tokens, SSL private keys, Nginx configurations, and database secrets, giving attackers complete control over the management interface and mapped infrastructure. A PoC is available. Organizations should restrict management interfaces to private networks or VPNs and apply IP allowlisting and MFA.
Dutch intelligence agencies are warning officials, military personnel, and journalists of a new social engineering campaign being carried out by Russia-backed attackers seeking to gain access to their Signal and WhatsApp accounts. The attacks are being carried out via crafted phishing messages that request users' security verification and pin codes. The attackers frequently masquerade as a Signal support chatbot or use the linked devices feature to trick users.
Ransomware actors compromised ELECQ's AWS environment, encrypting and exfiltrating databases containing customer names, emails, phone numbers, and home addresses, while leaving payment data and chargers unaffected. The firm shut down remote access services, engaged incident responders, and notified EU regulators, while warning users about heightened phishing and social-engineering risk arising from exposed contact details.
Autonomous AI agents like OpenClaw, which require broad system access to be useful, introduce compounding risks: exposed admin interfaces leak full credential stores, prompt injection enables supply chain attacks that install rogue agents without user consent, and low-skilled attackers now leverage commercial AI to orchestrate campaigns at scale. Security researchers frame the core risk as the "lethal trifecta" — any agent combining access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and external communication capability becomes a viable exfiltration vector. Organizations should isolate agents in VMs on segmented networks with strict egress controls, and treat agentic systems as a new attack surface requiring an explicit defense strategy alongside traditional controls.
Attackers are cloning installation pages for popular developer tools like Claude Code and using Google Ads to place these lookalike sites above legitimate results, leading users to run malicious “curl | shell” one‑liners that pull Amatera Stealer and related payloads from attacker‑controlled infrastructure. The campaign abuses legitimate hosting and rapidly rotated domains to evade detection, while redirections back to real sites reduce victim suspicion. For defenders, what matters is reducing blind trust in install commands, hardening controls around malvertising-driven traffic, and detecting browser-based signals such as lookalike domains, copy-to-clipboard shell commands, and suspicious script execution chains in real time.
Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology's SparK admission system exposed 4,110 student records because its admission APIs lacked any authentication, allowing access via manually set login cookies. By crafting two cookies and then harvesting a valid admission officer GUID from a student search response, researchers could fully impersonate an officer and reach sensitive dashboards. The exposed data included IDs, medical details, religious and ethnic information, grades, income data, and private documents for both students and parents, all accessible with only a browser. After coordinated disclosure through India's CERT-IN, SKCET took the vulnerable site offline within a week and later restored it with the flaw fixed.
Binarly's open-source vulnerability hunting framework built on their Binary Analysis and Inspection System (BIAS), enabling detection of vulnerabilities in software binaries and UEFI firmware. Supports rule-based scanning via CLI, Binary Ninja integration, BTP platform connectivity for large-scale triage, and an MCP server mode for AI assistant integration.
KEIP uses eBPF/LSM hooks to intercept and block malicious network connections made by Python packages at install time, targeting the phase where over 56% of supply chain attacks occur. It enforces behavioral rules at the kernel level: allowlisting ports 80/443/53, capping unique IP contacts at 5, and limiting outbound data ratios, killing the entire process group on violation with under 50ms overhead.
A tool for interacting with Windows Defender's Microsoft Active Protection Service cloud-based file reputation and dynamic signature delivery system. It supports file scanning, hash lookups, URL reputation scans, payload inspection, and other features.
Acronis TRU discovered a trojanized Red Alert rocket warning app distributed via SMS, impersonating Israel's Home Front Command, attributed to Arid Viper (APT-C-23). Detected on March 1, the malicious APK requests 20 permissions, including 6 sensitive ones, harvesting GPS location, SMS/OTP content, contact lists, installed apps, and registered accounts, while using certificate spoofing to masquerade as a legitimate Google Play install. The campaign fits a broader pattern of geopolitical lure-based mobile spyware operations previously linked to the region, including a near-identical Red Alert exploit documented by Cloudforce One in October 2023.
Europol and vendors, including Microsoft, Trend Micro, Cloudflare, and Proofpoint, have dismantled the Tycoon 2FA phishing‑as‑a‑service platform, which had powered a majority of Microsoft‑blocked phishing attempts and enabled large‑scale MFA‑bypass Business Email Compromise (BEC) campaigns. Its adversary‑in‑the‑middle token-theft attack highlighted the need to move to phishing‑resistant MFA, such as FIDO2 keys.
Colorado's SB 26-051, California's AB 1043, and New York's proposed S8102A impose age-verification requirements on operating systems that are both trivially bypassable and potentially damaging to open computing ecosystems. The laws rely on self-attestation, which children will simply lie to circumvent. New York's version goes further by requiring third-party identity verification just to use an internet-connected device, effectively eliminating privacy. Linux distributions that decline to emit an age-bracket signal risk delivering a degraded internet experience to their users. The only durable solution is digital literacy education rather than access controls.
The CJEU Advocate General issued a formal opinion under PSD2 requiring banks to immediately refund unauthorized transaction victims unless fraud is suspected, while preserving the right to pursue recovery from customers who acted with gross negligence.
AI coding agents are expected to double bug bounty submissions in 2026, but as companies deploy the same tools internally for continuous code review and black-box testing, external programs will likely see a sharp decline in viable findings within one to two years.
TriZetto Provider Solutions discovered in October that attackers had been abusing a client web portal since November 2024 to access insurance eligibility data for over 3.4 million individuals, exposing extensive identifiers and health information, but no financial data.
Security researchers are warning that attackers are using AI-powered tools to hunt for and exploit vulnerable Fortinet FortiGate firewalls. The researchers note that the attackers are using the security orchestration tool CyberStrikeAI, which features a full security platform with over 100 tools that AI agents can use for hunting. The developer behind the tool is believed to have ties to China and possibly other Chinese security organizations.
CVE-2025-38617 is a 20-year-old use-after-free in the Linux kernel's AF_PACKET subsystem (net/packet/af_packet.c), present since Linux 2.6.12 and fixed in 6.16, exploitable by any unprivileged user with CAP_NET_RAW (obtainable via user namespaces) to achieve full privilege escalation and container escape. The root cause is a conditional WRITE_ONCE(po->num, 0) that only zeroes the protocol number when the socket was already running, leaving a window where a NETDEV_UP event can re-register the protocol hook while packet_set_ring() is mid-free. The exploit stretches this nanosecond race to a deterministic one-second window by pre-acquiring pg_vec_lock via a sleeping tpacket_snd() call, then uses a BPF filter delay and a 720,000-entry timerfd wait queue interrupt to win the second race. The resulting five-stage exploit chains a page overflow into simple_xattr corruption, heap read/write via pgv array overlap, arbitrary page read/write through a master-puppet ring buffer pair, KASLR bypass via anon_pipe_buf_ops pointer recovery, and final privilege escalation via syscall patching, defeating both CONFIG_RANDOM_KMALLOC_CACHES and CONFIG_SLAB_VIRTUAL mitigations.
Three Packagist packages published by the threat actor nhattuanbl deliver a fully functional PHP RAT via src/helper.php, encrypted with AES-128-CTR and sent to a C2 at helper[.]leuleu[.]net:2096, with commands supporting remote shell execution, file upload/download, and screen capture across Windows, macOS, and Linux. A third package, lara-swagger, carries no malicious code itself but pulls in the RAT as a hard Composer dependency pinned to dev-master, allowing the operator to update the payload at any time without modifying the clean-looking package. Laravel teams should audit transitive Composer dependencies, treat dev-master constraints as high-risk in production, rotate all secrets accessible from affected application environments, and block outbound traffic to the C2 host.
Early-stage startups routinely expose proprietary information during funding, hiring, and partnership discussions by delaying legal protections until sensitive details have already been shared, a pattern that contributes to the 61% breach rate cited in the 2025 Panaseer Security Leaders Report. Startups should deploy NDAs and confidentiality agreements selectively but proactively: before contractor access to code or design assets, during deep technical diligence with non-standard investors, and via a two-deck pitch strategy that gates the confidential technical appendix behind a signed NDA. Lightweight tooling with e-signature audit trails, a single document owner, and quarterly reviews is sufficient for pre-seed teams. Complexity should scale with contract volume, not be front-loaded.