Researchers show that file-change notification systems can leak keystroke timing, browsing activity, and WhatsApp media events.

The post Windows, Linux, Android File Notification Systems Leak User Activity appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Yes, criminals have job listings too. A Telegram user recruiting callers to work in an apparent Google Security Team voice-phishing scam told applicants that they weren’t allowed to read from scripts – in the same ad that also included the exact script they had to read during these scam calls. This and other true-crime tales of criminals making fools of themselves appear in the latest installment of the Trellix Advanced Research Center’s Dark Web Roast, which uses memes and mockery to troll criminals on the dark web. It also acknowledges: “While these incidents are genuinely amusing, they represent real criminal activities causing significant harm.” One of these incidents from August involves a Telegram user identified by Trellix as Derian (@crɑick) who posted an ad in the UK Fraudsters Telegram channel. “Hiring - Female/Male Mail Callers,” the advertisement said, seeking “USA/CA (white sounding)” applicants and, in bold, “NO SCRIPT READING.” The ad then proceeded to print the exact script the callers would read: “Good afternoon, this is [name] reaching you on behalf of the Google Account Security Team on a recorded line. Am I speaking with Larry Boyles?” The Trellix threat-intel analysts note that the “‘recorded line’ flourish is a nice touch, because nothing says legitimacy like a fraudster cosplaying compliance theatre. The pretexting playbook is depressingly effective, but the recruiter’s QA process is roughly as robust as the fake Google team it impersonates.” Burn, baby, burn. The Register previously spoke with Trellix VP of threat intelligence strategy John Fokker about the Dark Web Roast, and he said the idea came from a desire to take an "almost psyops" approach to covering the criminal underground. "We don't want to glorify them, what's the opposite we can do? We're going to roast them," Fokker told us during a conversation at RSAC. "I'm trying to spark a debate, or a healthy conversation, about what we can do as an industry," he said. "Everybody's glorifying threat actors, and that's not helping our customers or organizations. These are just individuals, they just use computers, and they just want to steal your data and make money. They're not mythical. They don't have superpowers." The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) recently reported its most damaging year for internet scams, with 2025’s data pegging reported losses at $20.87 billion, and English-language social engineering is among the most in-demand skill sets on underground forums. One report by threat detection and response firm ReliaQuest found the number of job advertisements posted on criminal marketplaces mentioning this particular talent more than doubled between 2024 and 2025. Plus, according to Google, voice phishing surged last year to become the second most common method used by cybercriminals to gain initial access to their victims' IT estate – and the No. 1 tactic used when breaking into cloud environments. So when these criminals do dumb things, we’re happy to see Fokker’s team call them out.®

You work in your company's human resources department and use HR software to check employee information, benefits, and payroll. So, when you see a downloadable Windows version promising a faster alternative to the usual web interface, you grab it. Unfortunately, the app isn't what it claims to be. Instead, it silently installs ConnectWise's legitimate ScreenConnect software, giving the operator persistent remote access to your PC. Cybersecurity outfit Allure Security reported the discovery of the campaign Thursday, describing it as the latest evolution in a trend of abusing ScreenConnect and other remote monitoring and management software. This time, the main giveaway is knowing what the vendors actually sell: None offers the Windows app being advertised. According to Allure, the campaign impersonates three unnamed US-based HR and payroll platforms by offering fake desktop clients for those providers’ software. In all three cases, those companies don’t offer a desktop client, meaning all it takes is an unaware HR or payroll clerk tricked by promises of superior performance to potentially expose some incredibly sensitive company data. Allure said that it’s not sure how potential victims are being targeted by the campaign either, but those who have been targeted may not pick up on anything being wrong. Clicking through to the website offering the fake app brings up a legitimate-looking site built using AI app builder Lovable and hosted on Vercel. The site is hidden behind the cloud host’s bot challenge page, meaning scrapers haven’t been able to index it and expose the scam. Further obscuring the malicious nature of the campaign, the downloads are hosted on a GitHub Releases page, meaning they point to a trusted domain. Once downloaded and executed, the installer presents the victim with an actual Microsoft installer to make it appear like a legitimate piece of software. It actually installs the Microsoft .NET Desktop Runtime 8.0.26, so it goes through the entire process and shows that an installation completes, but nothing ever pops up, leaving the victim unclear as to where their desktop app went. That’s not all the installer is doing, of course: It’s also running a quiet, no-interface installer to drop the ScreenConnect client on the victim’s machine. “The [ScreenConnect] access mode is set to unattended,” Allure notes. “The victim-facing indicators are turned off: no ‘your machine is being controlled’ banner, no system-tray icon, no connection balloon.” The silent install is also configured to launch on boot, and stay connected across various user sessions, giving the attacker “a quiet, persistent, interactive foothold,” says Allure. “Nothing in this chain is malware in the usual sense,” the infosec outfit said. “The page was generated by a legitimate AI builder and served by a legitimate host. The download came from a legitimate code platform. The one window the victim saw belonged to Microsoft. The thing that was installed is a legitimate RMM product, doing what it was designed to do, for someone who was never supposed to have it.” In other words, security teams have some work to do before they even check the indicators of compromise that Allure included in its report: Check with HR and payroll vendors to see if they offer a desktop app, and if not alert all members of those teams to this campaign. For those hoping they haven’t fallen victim, the actual number of victims remains unknown. Allure said the GitHub download counts across the three fake downloads totaled 291 as of its report. Some of those came from Allure’s researchers, and possibly other researchers and sandboxes too, so the download count can’t be used to determine how many victims there are. ®

A former Army soldier responsible for a series of attacks and extortion attempts on telecom companies, including AT&T, was sentenced to 70 months in prison, the Justice Department said Friday.

Cameron John Wagenius engaged in a cybercrime spree for years, including while he was on active duty on a base in Texas. Prior to his arrest in December 2024, Wagenius attempted to sell stolen sensitive data to a foreign intelligence service and sought information online about defecting to Russia.

“Cameron Wagenius spent more than a year and a half betraying the trust placed in him as an active duty soldier by carrying out a sweeping cybercrime campaign,” said A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement.

Wagenius, who pleaded guilty in July 2025, leaked stolen call records of President Donald Trump as part of multiple failed attempts to extort $500,000 from AT&T, Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, previously told CyberScoop. 

Authorities did not name Wagenius’ alleged victims in court filings, but said he disclosed non-content call detail records belonging to a government official and family members of another former official. AT&T in July confirmed cybercriminals accessed the company’s Snowflake environment in April and stole six months of phone and text records of “nearly all” of its customers. 

Wagenius’ and one of his co-conspirators, Connor Moucka, attempted to extort more than 10 organizations after stealing credentials and breaking into cloud platforms used by AT&T and other major companies based in the United States and abroad. 

Moucka, a Canadian extradited to the United States in March 2025, pleaded guilty in August to playing a central role in one of the most far-reaching cyberattacks of 2024 — the widespread compromise of more than 165 Snowflake customer environments, resulting in massive data theft for extortion.

Wagenius, Moucka and their alleged co-conspirator John Erin Binns, who is not presently in U.S. custody, stole billions of sensitive records and received more than $2.5 million in extortion payments combined, according to prosecutors. Victims of the attack spree included AT&T, Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts and Santander.

Some of the records in Wagenius’ possession at the time of his arrest were stolen in the attack spree on Snowflake customer databases, according to cybercrime researchers. Officials said Wagenius was directly involved in attempted extortion attempts targeting multiple organizations for a combined total of more than $1 million. 

The 22-year-old was ordered to pay almost $295,000 in restitution for his crimes.

“His hacking schemes were not only aimed at getting rich, he was also motivated by a desire to achieve status within criminal hacking communities,” Charles Neil Floyd, first assistant attorney for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, said in a statement. “This sentence must impose real consequences to deter him, and hopefully other would-be hackers.”

Wagenius, who identified himself as “kiberphant0m” and “cyb3rph4nt0m” on online criminal forums, used a hacking tool he helped develop called SSH Brute to steal credentials while on active duty, officials said. Wagenius and his co-conspirators threatened the victim organizations privately and in public forms, officials added.

“It is especially shocking that a member of our armed forces, sworn to defend Americans and their constitutional rights, would engage in such a violation of privacy,” W. Mike Herrington, special agent in charge of the FBI Seattle field office, said in a statement.

When federal law enforcement seized Wagenius’ devices in December 2024, they found evidence indicating he had access to thousands of stolen identification documents and large amounts of cryptocurrency. Days later, Wagenius purchased a new laptop against his commanding officer’s order, according to officials, and used it every day over a five-day period in the barracks at Fort Cavazos in Texas with VPN software to hide his identity and location.

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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that states may use the federal SAVE database to verify voter citizenship, reversing lower court decisions that found the database was inaccurate and would likely disenfranchise eligible voters.

In its opinion, the majority wrote that “the Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.”

“The District Court’s order thus inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections, the ruling reads. “Under these circumstances, the equities weigh in favor of a stay.”

The Department of Homeland Security initially designed the SAVE database to determine benefit eligibility for immigrants and to track applicants pursuing U.S. citizenship. Under the Trump administration, it had been repurposed to screen voters for citizenship. Critics say the tool is outdated, often inaccurate and poses a significant risk of wrongly removing eligible voters from rolls.

Voting rights groups, including the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, filed suit last year. They argued that combining SAVE data with Social Security records violated confidentiality provisions in the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.

While the ruling permits states to use the database, adoption remains uncertain. Some conservative states have used SAVE previously, saying it has been helpful in maintaining voter rolls. However, most states have resisted the federal government’s efforts to use citizenship verification systems or wrest control of voter registration efforts away from states. The Trump administration has lost 23 federal court cases in attempts to compel states to share additional data.  

Election experts said that the ruling’s impact on 2026 is likely to be limited because of federal laws that bar states from making changes to voter registration within 90 days of an election.

“Given that the SAVE system is used purely as a voluntary system to assist states in keeping their voter lists accurate, states may find this to be a helpful tool to use alongside other mechanisms to keep their lists up to date, even as the Department of Homeland Security itself admits the data is not perfect and evidence suggests the SAVE system has significant flaws,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Three justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – dissented, noting that “without full briefing or oral argument, this Court now grants [a stay]—rendering questionable interim rulings about two statutory provisions it has never before interpreted.”

There are laws and procedures that govern how and when federal systems are changed or modified. In this case, DHS did not create a legally mandated system of records notice (SORN) for the SAVE database outlining the broader impacts of the changes on data privacy. Nor did they engage in or offer a public comment period. Instead, they simply announced in May 2025 that the database was ready for use.

In court, the administration cited the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act to justify merging DHS and Social Security data. That argument was rejected by lower courts, and dissenters argued that the Supreme Court majority overturned those rulings without deliberation about whether the administration’s legal reasoning was sound.

“The majority thus treats [the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act] as essentially overriding the limits that privacy laws impose on the sharing of citizenship information with DHS. But that ‘back-of-the-napkin assessment,’ is implausible,” wrote Jackson.

The post Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks appeared first on CyberScoop.

Secure file-sharing software company Kiteworks is urging customers worldwide to temporarily shut down their servers on Saturday for a six-hour window after receiving threat intelligence warning of a potentially imminent cyberattack. [...]

The Clop ransomware gang has moved its data leak site to a new Tor address after confirming its previous server was compromised and defaced through an unpatched Grav CMS flaw that BleepingComputer has learned is an unauthenticated path traversal vulnerability. [...]

A cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Elementor plugin for WordPress could allow an unauthenticated attacker to create administrator accounts. [...]

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns that hackers are exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-5430) affecting multiple products from enterprise software provider WSO2. [...]

AI agents can operate through human credentials and take actions that existing SOC 2 controls may not distinguish from human activity. Token Security explains why SOC 2 needs to adapt to address the security gaps created by agent identities. [...]

A Kosovar national has pleaded guilty to operating Rydox, a large illegal online marketplace that sold stolen personal information, login credentials, credit card details, and cybercrime tools. [...]

​Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget disclosed today that suspected North Korean hackers have stolen $351.6 million from its hot and warm wallets. [...]

Tracked as CVE-2026-48842, the exploited bug is an SQL injection that can be exploited without authentication.

The post Roundcube Webmail Vulnerability in Attackers’ Crosshairs appeared first on SecurityWeek.

What do you think was the official start of the security industry? Some will say it was when the Morris Worm hit in November 1988.  It started people thinking more about firewalls and a vulnerability disclosure process. The official start of the AI security industry?  Hugging Face and the resulting fallout. We’re still coming to […]

A crook has been using three open source AI harnesses to target hundreds of online retailers and other companies, swiping more than 600,000 credit card records and installing card-stealing skimmers - and all at trivial cost. AI security company Gambit recovered the human operator’s staging server, and used that access to reconstruct the data-theft campaign, whose victims include a Fortune 500 hospitality company, a major US airline, a large private US industrial supplies distributor, and a US online fashion retailer. Between September 10 and September 15, the crook launched at least 105 attacks, and compromised, “to varying degrees,” at least 27 companies, Gambit director of threat intelligence Eyal Sela wrote in a Tuesday alert. The Chinese-speaking operator used three different open source AI harnesses - Strix, Cairn, and Hermes - to run the near-autonomous attacks and hit “tens” of companies each day. “Where access was achieved, it usually took less than a day, and in many cases just a few hours,” Sela wrote. “We also detected instructions in the attacker’s playbook that could disrupt the operations of a company as a result of data deletion or cleanup procedures run by the agent - and this has indeed happened in some of the breaches.” The operator also used OpenRouter for AI model access, and according to an August 25 account balance, they spent $7,005.71 over the previous four weeks. They then continued with the attacks for three more weeks, and operated at twice the daily volume of model calls. Gambit estimates the total cost of the campaign sits somewhere between $12,000 and $18,000. The operator's own cost review put their mean spend at $25.46 across 101 completed scans. The cheapest scan cost just $3.13, with the most expensive racking up a bill for $79.31. Each of the three AI harnesses played a different role, with Hermes acting as the campaign orchestrator. The always-on AI assistant acts independently to execute multi-step tasks and manage workflows, and it can write and edit its own skills. The human operator loaded a Chinese system persona titled “SOUL - Red Team Operator” on Hermes with 121 skills. Of those, 78 were attack skills. One of the skills even removed the content security filters of the AI harness. Hermes used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 - Gambit reports that newer models refused the attack requests - and the human operator typed 1,951 prompts in Chinese across 260 sessions. The prompts, translated into English, include the following: See whether the file upload in the report can give code execution Read the vulnerability report, test the sudo password first Read the report, is there anything worth doing here Get into the web backend Can it get code execution? The attacker used Strix, an open source penetration testing tool, to search for vulnerabilities to exploit at targeted organizations. They ran Strix through OpenRouter on GLM 5.2 and then on DeepSeek v4 Pro. Between August 23 and 31, the operator ran Strix 146 times in “deep mode” against 138 hosts, totaling 633 hours of scanner time in 195 hours of clock time. After finding vulnerabilities, Strix handed the next stage of the attack off to Cairn, another autonomous penetration testing AI tool, running on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash. Cairn receives target domains and an attack objective - like deploy a shell, or achieve admin access. It then runs until it either achieves the objective, times out, or is stopped by a human. Between September 10 and 15, Cairn launched 105 attack projects. The AI chose each attack path “in real time through extensive probing and exploitation attempts, resulting in dynamic and mostly different TTPs across victims,” Sela wrote. In one instance, the AI agent used SQL injection, obtained a plaintext one-time password and then accessed a web panel. From there the agent uploaded a web shell, escalated privileges through a misconfigured sudo rule, and accessed AWS credentials, ultimately dumping 46 secrets, totaling 102KB. In two of these near-autonomous attacks, the AIs exfiltrated more than 600,000 credit card records from just two victim companies. Injecting card-stealing skimmer scripts into the checkout pages of online shops was another one of the human operator’s primary goals for the campaign. According to Gambit, the malfeasant ordered skimmer deployment against at least 27 named victims, with scripts confirmed as present on 19 websites. Security researcher Varys also helped detect more than 100 additional infected websites linked to this campaign. While the attacker used various methods to inject and deploy skimmers, the most common involved appending the code to an existing JavaScript file. Gambit argues that this campaign shows how the remediation clock - how much time organizations have to detect an intrusion and remediate vulnerabilities - has dramatically shortened. “The harnesses ran at a tempo no human operator sustains, with the person reduced to short instructions between autonomous runs,” Sela said. “When exploitation arrives within hours of exposure, patch speed stops being the only lever, and the question shifts to how quickly the services a business depends on can be brought back.” ®

Security flaws in Salesforce Agentforce allowed poisoned leads to hijack its AI agents, silently steal CRM data without requiring a click, and send phishing messages under the agents’ identities. Zenity Labs uncovered the three vulnerabilities, collectively called SalesBleed, and reported them to Salesforce, which worked with the AI agent security provider to fix the issues. While these attack chains no longer work, Zenity co-founder and CTO Michael Bargury told The Register that the vulnerabilities highlight the difficulties in controlling what agents can access - and what happens if and when they bypass guardrails intended to limit that access. “The bigger lesson here is about what it takes to keep AI agents contained,” Bargury said. “The idea of secure-by-design remains essential but for agents it may no longer be enough. We can anticipate risks and build protections into an agent from the start, yet still miss edge cases and the different ways it might behave once it encounters the real world.” He added, the challenge of agent constraint is a “wider trend” that extends beyond SalesBleed. “We’ve seen it with the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident where the agents managed to escape the sandbox that was meant to contain them, and we’re starting to see these types of flaws more and more often,” Bargury said. “As AI agents get more powerful, we need to monitor them ever more closely to keep track of what they’re up to. Because even when we think they’re contained, a single overlooked gap can change everything.” 0-click data exfiltration The first two vulnerabilities turn a public lead form into a data exfiltration channel for stealing sensitive customer information. Zenity researchers detailed the flaws in a Thursday report and also demonstrated the attack chain in a video proof-of-concept. The attack begins with an attacker abusing the Web-to-Lead form to plant an indirect prompt injection inside Salesforce. The malicious instructions remain dormant until an employee asks an Agentforce agent a question about leads - for example, "check my latest leads and help me with the newest one." This causes the agent to process the poisoned lead and carry out the hidden instructions: Query the Accounts table using the same subagent's Query Records tool. Return a couple of fields, e.g., a company name and a deal size. Paste the values as a subdomain string for the attacker-controlled hostname. Print that URL back to the user as an HTML img src tag to generate a DNS query to the attacker-controlled DNS authoritative server (this is also where the URL redaction was supposed to stop us). All of this happens without the employee ever knowing it. This vulnerability is due to weaknesses in Salesforce’s Trusted URLs controls, which are supposed to restrict the external destinations that Agentforce can access, and redact links or images pointing to untrusted URLs. Zenity found that this security mechanism didn’t register hostnames ending in an unrecognized top-level domain, and that adding certain characters interfered with how URLs were parsed. Abusing these two weaknesses allowed the researchers to write a string containing malicious instructions that successfully bypassed the URL redaction mechanism. The instructions tell the Agentforce agent to query Salesforce records and embed the stolen CRM data in image requests to an attacker-controlled server: . “Since the frontend renders and fetches external image URLs in these tags without additional sanitization or user interaction, this allows loading images from any https source, or in our case: sending a request to fetch the image from any https source,” the Zenity team wrote. This time, via Slack Digital thieves could also abuse Slack’s URL unfurling mechanism to achieve this same zero-click Salesforce data exfiltration attack, the researchers found. “Slack automatically retrieves information from links to generate previews, and specially constructed links can cause Slack to initiate requests that carry CRM data to attacker-controlled infrastructure as soon as the links appear,” they said. The same public lead submission serves as the entry point, and then when an employee interacts with the Salesforce agent via Slack, they unknowingly trigger the malicious instructions and send sensitive data outside the organization to an attacker-controlled server. “Salesforce fixed the URL redaction bypass, so this specific chain is closed. However, this type of vulnerability isn’t Salesforce-specific,” according to the researchers. “Any agent that reads records submitted by external sources, renders links or images back to a user, and also holds tool access to sensitive data, has the same three ingredients sitting in the same place,” they noted. Agents gone phishing The third flaw - detailed in a separate blog - also involves Agentforce’s integration with Slack. When combined with the URL-redaction bypass, this vulnerability could be abused by an internal user or an external attacker to deliver phishing links using the agent’s own identity. This attack exploits missing security controls in the Reply to a Slack Thread Agentforce action. This particular action did not require user confirmation before sending a message, and it also lacked visible attribution to the invoking user. This means that an agent that invoked Reply to a Slack Thread could send messages without a user approving them. A malicious insider who already chats with the agent and uses its Slack actions could exploit this vulnerability to send phishing messages under the trusted agent’s identity while remaining anonymous. Meanwhile, an external attacker could abuse this flaw via an indirect prompt injection planted in the Web-to-Lead, causing the agent to post phishing messages once an employee processed the poisoned lead. Zenity reported all three security snafus to Salesforce on June 1, and the CRM giant confirmed it was working on fixes a day later. Zenity confirmed Salesforce’s fix for the Trusted URLs bypass on August 19, and on September 21, said it had tested all of Salesforce’s fixes and confirmed that all three vulnerabilities had been fixed. ®

Security researchers affiliated with Austria's Graz University of Technology have found flaws in the implementation of file notification systems on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows that leak potentially compromising system information. "We found decades-old bugs on [these operating systems], all rooted in the file-notification subsystems that every modern OS ships to inform applications when files change," said Sudheendra Raghav Neela, a doctoral student at TU Graz, in an email to The Register. Affected systems include inotify on Linux since 2005, FileObserver on Android since 2008, ReadDirectoryChangesW on Windows since 2000, and FSEvents on macOS since 2007. These file notification subsystems tell the operating system when a file has been opened, changed, written, or deleted. They don't reveal file contents. But file event information functions as a side channel that allows a malicious user to infer the activities of other users of the computer. Armed with file event data, an attacker may be able to conduct inter-keystroke-timing attacks that reveal user input (not only locally but remotely over SSH), website fingerprinting attacks that reveal website visits, and UI redress attacks that allow credential theft. Neela and colleagues Xufan Zhao, Jeanette Angelika Wultsch, Hannes Weissteiner, Florian Draschbacher, Stefan Gast, and Daniel Gruss describe their findings in a paper titled "File Notification Attacks: Templating and Exploiting Side-Channel Leakage from the File-Notification Systems on Linux, Windows, and macOS." The paper, summarized at inoti.fyi, says the basic problem is that unprivileged users can access the file notification subsystem and that on Linux and Windows file information is available even without read access. The attack scenarios mostly involve a local attacker who has access to an account with files that can be read by multiple users. The researchers however note that the list of globally readable files is extensive. Neela said, "On Linux, watching a readable directory leaks events on files inside it you cannot even read: watching /dev/input gives a notification on every keystroke, which we turn into a local inter-keystroke timing attack with a 93.1–100 percent [keystroke accuracy] score across seven users and a remote (SSH) one at 100 percent." He added that the group also carried out an authentication-prompt redress attack on KDE Plasma 6 under Wayland, and website fingerprinting on the top 100 sites at 87.9 percent. The Linux vulnerability (CVE-2025-68788) was partially fixed in December 2025 in kernels 5.10.248, 5.15.198, 6.1.160, 6.6.120, 6.12.64, and 6.18.3. The patch prevents the generation of "access" and "modify" events on special files in /dev/. "On Android, FileObserver goes past the FUSE layer meant to isolate per app storage, so a permissionless app can watch (for example) WhatsApp's private folder and see, by filename and timestamp, exactly when photos, videos, and documents are sent, received, or deleted," said Neela. Though the researchers claim that they responsibly disclosed their findings to security teams for Linux, Android, Windows, and macOS between August and October 2025, no mitigation appears to have been made for Android devices. Apple's macOS provided the least information because no bypasses were found for reading private directories. But FSEvents still allowed the monitoring of various file changes that show up in .plist files. These include audio input and output changes, power settings changes, Bluetooth device and printer updates, network cable-initiated DNS changes, and volume mount/unmount events. Application installations and removals can also be observed. "On Windows, watching the root directory C:\ reports the full path of every file touched anywhere on the system, across all users, regardless of permissions, enough to track which websites on Firefox another user visits in real time at a 97.8 percent [accuracy] score," said Neela. "Microsoft told us this is 'by-design' and that it's an undocumented feature. This response was nominated for the lamest vendor response at the Pwnie Awards 2026." The authors argue that file-notification attacks affect all major operating systems and that further mitigations are needed. They note that despite the protection for device files that has been implemented already, capability checks should be extended to monitoring one's own files and to any readable file. "On Windows, we propose disallowing the monitoring of entire drives," they state in their paper. "On Windows and macOS, the kernel could introduce a permission system (for context, access control, owned files and directories, minifilters)." The researchers' paper is scheduled to appear at ACM CCS 2026 this November in The Hague, Netherlands. ®

Asus has warned eShop customers that an intruder got into part of its online store and may have helped themselves to contact details and order records. The PC maker disclosed the incident in an email sent to customers, first reported by KitGuru, in which it said had identified "unauthorized access to part of the Asus eShop environment," although exactly when that access occurred remains unclear. "Our investigation indicates that certain customer order information, including contact details and order records, may have been accessed," the company said. There is at least some good news for anyone who has handed Asus their card details. The company said no payment card, bank account, or other financial information was involved in the breach. Asus also said it isn't currently aware of the compromised information being misused or of any affected customers suffering harm. The company said it took steps to contain the incident after discovering the unauthorized access, launched an investigation, and introduced additional measures to secure the affected systems. That investigation remains ongoing, but Asus said it had found no evidence of continued unauthorized access. What Asus hasn't said is how many customers are caught up in the mess, when the intrusion began, how long the attacker had access, which countries are affected, or how whoever was behind the break-in managed to get into the eShop environment in the first place. The details that did escape, however, could give scammers a decent head start. Asus warned that the stolen details could give scammers enough to make phishing emails, texts, and phone calls about its products or customers' orders look rather more convincing. Asus told customers to keep an eye out for unexpected messages mentioning previous purchases, though it reckons the risk of anyone actually misusing the data remains low. This isn't the PC maker's first recent brush with data thieves. In December, Asus confirmed that one of its suppliers had been hacked after the Everest ransomware gang claimed to have pinched 1 TB of data from itself, ArcSoft, and Qualcomm. The company said the haul included some camera source code used in its phones, but maintained that its own systems and customer data were untouched. The Register asked Asus for more details about the latest breach, including how many customers were affected and when and how the intrusion occurred, but has not yet received a response. Asus is yet to comment publicly on the incident, and there is no mention of the breach on its eShop. So it's the usual post-breach drill: beware unexpected emails, texts, and calls. Except this time, whoever's behind them may have the receipts. ®

Google has jumped on the AI-defense-for-critical-systems train with its Scan for Good initiative, and says that its threat-hunting models have already autonomously uncovered critical security issues at hospitals, a municipality, a public rail operator, and major technology providers. So don't fear these bots. The initiative, announced on Thursday, uses Google’s Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, a version of the model tuned for software bug hunting and remediation, and Wiz’s Red Agent - this is the Google-owned cloud security shop’s pentesting AI agent. The AI systems will uncover public exposures and attack paths across public services, critical infrastructure, and nonprofits, and then hand these off for verification and remediation to human security researchers. “The program has been active over the past several months, and with this official launch, we are scaling it globally,” Gal Nagli, head of offensive security at Wiz, told The Register. “There is no set end date.” It's similar to OpenAI’s Daybreak for Frontline Defenders initiative, announced earlier this month. This program will distribute $1 billion in credits to subsidize access to OpenAI services and training for resource-strapped cyber defenders, including those protecting water and energy systems, community banks, local governments, nonprofits, and open-source projects. And like OpenAI’s new program, the Wiz and Google DeepMind partnership follows disclosures that Google’s AI agents also escaped their sandboxes and hacked other companies’ websites - as did agents developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, and those are just the ones we know about. It also comes as existential dread about AI killing all of humanity reaches a fever pitch. AI for good (not evil) Scan for Good aims to put offensive security agents and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber to good, not evil, use. When authorized, either explicitly by organizations that apply for an assessment or under applicable bug bounty programs and vulnerability disclosure policies, the AIs will examine publicly facing websites, APIs, and applications for exposures, and then work with organizations to find and fix these. Every potential finding will be reviewed and validated by a human, and Wiz assures that “humans will remain responsible for confirming impact and making disclosure decisions.” When the bots and humans do identify a serious issue, the humans will contact the affected organization and work with them to remediate the security holes. Google’s AI systems have already helped critical organizations and tech providers find serious, internet-facing risks, including a critical GitHub Actions workflow vulnerability in one of Snowflake’s public repositories. In this bug-hunting expedition, conducted through Snowflake’s HackerOne vulnerability disclosure program, Wiz’s Red Agent autonomously identified a script injection vulnerability in snowflakedb/snowflake-connector-net. The flaw allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary commands within a GitHub Actions runner by opening a GitHub issue with a specially crafted title. Wiz disclosed the issue on June 23, and Snowflake fixed it on the same day, rotated the affected credential, and verified through detailed audit logs that Wiz was the only actor during the exposure window. Real-world examples The Google-owned biz provided several other examples of its AI for good, and said all of these were autonomously discovered by the models before Wiz validated them, but “only far enough to confirm real-world impact.” At that point, they privately notified the affected organization about the issue and helped it remediate the vulnerability. Some of these include: An exposed administrator key enabled read, write, and delete access to 8.8 million files in a “nationally significant archive” belonging to an unnamed Middle Eastern country. Assigning the correct set of permissions fixed the flaw. A public hospital with missing access controls exposed staff contact information and gave anyone online control of a hospital-wide mobile alert channel. A private hospital’s public appointment-booking site used an unsafe upload method that would have allowed attackers to take control of a hospital server and obtain patient identifiers, clinical information, and consent signatures. A municipality’s public data service exposed sensitive personal, health, and financial information belonging to about 5,000 elderly residents. Wiz confirmed the risk without collecting a bulk dataset. A public rail operator had a leaky production database that exposed active administrator sessions. This could have allowed criminals to take control of routes, schedules, service announcements, and administrator accounts - essentially disrupting the entire transportation system. Wiz helped the operator secure the system. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also gave Scan for Good its stamp of approval, and Wiz told us the American cyber-defense agency provided guidance on the initiative. “At a time of evolving threats, defensive vulnerability discovery helps strengthen the nation’s digital infrastructure,” CISA acting director Nick Andersen said in a statement. ®

Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we look at all the ways your security can become self-owned. Today’s scary story involves government contractors who just had to make their lives easier at the expense of locking down sensitive information. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our tale of bureaucratic hell comes courtesy of security researcher Joe Brinkley, who previously worked for a government contractor as an information system security officer responsible for firewall rule changes, plus network intrusion detection and prevention. To improve the contractor's ability to deploy program changes, some of the org's developers wanted to change the firewall rules so it would be easier to move data from a low-security datacenter where they tested new code to the classified datacenter that housed the production server and data. They wanted to be able to VPN into a low-security commercial datacenter, where other non-governmental tenants, such as Microsoft and Oracle, had servers accessible through the same VPN connection. The datacenter itself provided the VPN, not the government. Back then, in the early 2010s, developers would use a provisioning server to help deploy code from dev to production. But there was always a hard firewall between the classified datacenter and the non-classified datacenter. The developers wanted this provisioning server to be able to access all of the production servers that sat in the classified datacenter so they could more easily push the code around. When the developers suggested they make this change for ease of deploying code, Brinkley told the Change Review Board that it was a very bad idea. “It creates a very glaring issue that we are going from a low-level secured datacenter all the way up to a high-level, top secret secured datacenter for production, and you guys are opening up a firewall rule that would allow anybody from that low level datacenter to have access into, at a minimum, into the high level datacenter,” Brinkley said. However, during a week when Brinkley was on vacation, the developers who wanted this firewall change talked directly to the Change Acceptance Board and got the rule changed. When he got back, Brinkley got a member of his company and a government representative to sit down for a demonstration. Tethering his laptop to his cell phone, he logged into the dev server over the VPN — then turned the box on and off. Then he showed how, with the very same VPN connection, he could get into the prod server and control it. This was a server that had 50 million records about immigration: who was coming to the country, who those people stayed with, and so on. According to Brinkley, thousands of people had access to the commercial datacenter’s VPN, but only dozens were supposed to have access to the classified government datacenter. The change potentially made the production servers reachable from a network accessible to thousands of VPN users. Yes, the servers still required a username and password for access, but an enterprising hacker could have tried guessing the correct combos or attempting a brute-force attack. There was no multi-factor authentication and password standards were low at the time. After Brinkley showed supervisors what was going on, they immediately changed the rule back to the way it was before. What we can take away from this lesson is that, even when you have security measures like a VPN and password protection, sensitive data requires additional safeguards. It’s not enough to do the minimum. ®