Cybersecurity News

During a recent internal collaboration, we dug into publicly known SNS abuse attempts and our knowledge of the data source to develop detection capabilities.

In this article, we explore what hotkey-based keyloggers are and how to detect them. Specifically, we explain how these keyloggers intercept keystrokes, then present a detection technique that leverages an undocumented hotkey table in kernel space.

By the end of this series, you'll have a robust knowledge of both common and rare Linux persistence techniques; and you'll understand how to effectively engineer detections for common and advanced adversary capabilities.

Have you ever wondered how many vulnerabilities you've missed by a hair's breadth, due to a single flawed choice? We've just released Shadow Repeater, which enhances your manual testing with AI-powere

In this article, we’ll explore how threat actors leverage Amazon S3’s Server-Side Encryption with Customer-Provided Keys (SSE-C) for ransom/extortion operations.

ChatGPT Operator is a research preview agent from OpenAI that lets ChatGPT use a web browser. It uses vision and reasoning abilities to complete tasks like researching topics, booking travel, ordering groceries, or as this post will show, steal your data! Currently, it’s only available for ChatGPT Pro users. I decided to invest $200 for one month to try it out. Risks and Threats OpenAI highlights three risk categories in their Operator System Card:

REF7707 targeted a South American foreign ministry using novel malware families. Inconsistent evasion tactics and operational security missteps exposed additional adversary-owned infrastructure.

During a recent investigation (REF7707), Elastic Security Labs discovered new malware targeting a foreign ministry. The malware includes a custom loader and backdoor with many features including using Microsoft’s Graph API for C2 communications.

Building on foundational concepts and techniques explored in the previous publications, this post discusses some creative and/or complex persistence mechanisms.

Imagine your AI rewriting your personal history… A while ago Google added memories to Gemini. Memories allow Gemini to store user-related data across sessions, storing information in long-term memory. The feature is only available to users who subscribe to Gemini Advanced so far. So, in the fall of last year I chimed in and paid for the subscription for a month to check it out. As a user you can see what Gemini stored about you at https://gemini.google.com/saved-info.

Welcome to the Top 10 Web Hacking Techniques of 2024, the 18th edition of our annual community-powered effort to identify the most innovative must-read web security research published in the last year

Elastic is launching an expansion of its security bounty program, inviting researchers to test its SIEM and EDR rules for evasion and bypass techniques, starting with Windows endpoints. This initiative strengthens collaboration with the security community, ensuring Elastic’s defenses remain robust against evolving threats.

Unicode codepoint truncation - also called a Unicode overflow attack - happens when a server tries to store a Unicode character in a single byte. Because the maximum value of a byte is 255, an overflo

This document continues the exploration of Linux detection engineering, emphasizing advancements in monitoring persistence mechanisms. By building on past practices and insights, it provides a roadmap for improving detection strategies in complex environments.

WinVisor is a hypervisor-based emulator for Windows x64 user-mode executables that leverages the Windows Hypervisor Platform API to provide a virtualized environment for logging syscalls and enabling memory introspection.

In this post, I will introduce the "cookie sandwich" technique which lets you bypass the HttpOnly flag on certain servers. This research follows on from Bypassing WAFs with the phantom $Version cookie

Learn how Elastic Security leveraged open-source BOFs to achieve detection engineering goals during our most recent ON week.

Nominations are now open for the top 10 new web hacking techniques of 2024! Every year, security researchers from all over the world share their latest findings via blog posts, presentations, PoCs, an

At Black Hat Europe I did a fun presentation titled SpAIware and More: Advanced Prompt Injection Exploits. Without diving into the details of the entire talk, the key point I was making is that prompt injection can impact all aspects of the CIA security triad. However, there is one part that I want to highlight explicitly: A Command and Control system (C2) that uses prompt injection to remote control ChatGPT instances. Remote Controlling ChatGPT Instances! An adversary can compromise ChatGPT instances and have them join a central Command and Control system which provides updated instructions for all the remote controlled ChatGPT instances to follow over-time.

I regularly look at how the system prompts of chatbots change over time. Updates frequently highlight new features being added, design changes that occur and potential areas that might benefit from more security scrutiny. A few months back I noticed an interesting update to the M365 Copilot (BizChat) system prompt. In particular, there used to be one enterprise_search tool in the past. You might remember that tool was used during the Copirate ASCII Smuggling exploit to search for MFA codes in the user’s inbox.

Happy to share that I authored the paper “Trust No AI: Prompt Injection Along The CIA Security Triad”. You can download it from arxiv. The paper examines how prompt injection attacks can compromise Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) of AI systems, with real-world examples targeting vendors like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Microsoft. It summarizes many of the prompt injection examples I explained on this blog, and I hope it helps bridge the gap between traditional cybersecurity and academic AI/ML research, fostering stronger understanding and defenses against these emerging threats.

Grok is the chatbot of xAI. It’s a state-of-the-art model, chatbot and recently also API. It has a Web UI and is integrated into the X (former Twitter) app, and recently it’s also accessible via an API. Since this post is a bit longer, I’m adding an index for convenience: Table of Contents High Level Overview Analyzing Grok’s System Prompt Prompt Injection from Other User’s Posts Prompt Injection from Images Prompt Injection from PDFs Conditional Prompt Injection and Targeted Disinformation Data Exfiltration - End-to-End Demonstration Rendering of Clickable Hyperlinks to Phishing Sites ASCII Smuggling - Crafting Invisible Text and Decoding Hidden Secrets Hidden Prompt Injection Creation of Invisible Text Grok API is also Vulnerable to ASCII Smuggling Developer Guidance for Grok API Automatic Tool Invocation Responsible Disclosure Conclusion High Level Overview Over the last year I have used Grok quite a bit. It’s pretty good and I use it daily, especially the recent i

Elastic Security Labs share details about the SADBRIDGE loader and GOSAR backdoor, malware used in campaigns targeting Chinese-speaking victims.

PUMAKIT is a sophisticated loadable kernel module (LKM) rootkit that employs advanced stealth mechanisms to hide its presence and maintain communication with command-and-control servers.

Explore AWS STS AssumeRoot, its risks, detection strategies, and practical scenarios to secure against privilege escalation and account compromise using Elastic's SIEM and CloudTrail data.

Last week Leon Derczynski described how LLMs can output ANSI escape codes. These codes, also known as control characters, are interpreted by terminal emulators and modify behavior. This discovery resonates with areas I had been exploring, so I took some time to apply, and build upon, these newly uncovered insights. ANSI Terminal Emulator Escape Codes Here is a simple example that shows how to render blinking, colorful text using control characters.

HTTP cookies often control critical website features, but their long and convoluted history exposes them to parser discrepancy vulnerabilities. In this post, I'll explore some dangerous, lesser-known

About two weeks ago, DeepSeek released a new AI reasoning model, DeepSeek-R1-Lite. The news quickly gained attention and interest across the AI community due to the reasoning capabilities the Chinese lab announced. However, whenever there is a new AI I have ideas… Apps That Hack Themselves - The 10x Hacker There are some cool tests that can be done when pentesting LLM-powered web apps, I usually try some quick fun prompts like this one:

This article will guide you through the process of setting up the Amazon Bedrock integration and enabling Elastic's prebuilt detection rules to streamline your security operations.

The strength of our URL Validation Bypass Cheat Sheet lies in the contributions from the web security community, and today’s update is no exception. We are excited to introduce a new and improved IP a