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RightClickTools โ€” If thereโ€™s an easier way, Iโ€™m gonna find it!

3 August 2026 at 03:43
FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen I think my goal in life is to sit back in my easy chair, eat cherry cordials, and do all my computer work with one hand. RightClickTools by our good friend Les Ferch is getting me a little closer to that goal. If youโ€™ve been reading my articles for a [โ€ฆ]

KAPE 101: A Kroll Artifact Parser and Extractor Cheatsheet

By: BHIS
15 July 2026 at 10:00

Spend time performing forensic analysis on the Windows Operating System and you'll see a host of artifacts that can be used to identify adversary activity. From changes to the registry to the System Resource Utilization Monitor, Windows artifacts run deep. The challenge is locating, extracting, and parsing these artifacts in an efficient manner.

The post KAPE 101: A Kroll Artifact Parser and Extractor Cheatsheet appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

14 July 2026 at 15:22

Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence.

A picture of a windows laptop in its updating stage, saying do not turn off the computer.

Nearly 60 of the bugs quashed in Julyโ€™s Patch Tuesday earned a โ€œcriticalโ€ severity rating, meaning miscreants or malware could use them to seize remote control over a Windows device with little or no help from the user. Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws, including two that are already being exploited in the wild.

Two of the zero-day weaknesses allow an attacker to elevate their user rights on a Windows system, as do approximately 250 other elevation of privilege flaws fixed this month; they include CVE-2026-56155 โ€” an Active Directory Federation Services bug โ€” and CVE-2026-56164, a Microsoft Sharepoint vulnerability.

CVE-2026-50661 is a security feature bypass in Windows BitLocker that could allow attackers to gain access to encrypted data if they have physical access to the device. Microsoft said this bug has been detailed publicly, but that it is not aware of any active exploitation.

In a blog post on July 9, Microsoft Executive Vice President Pavan Davuluri wrote that Windows users will notice โ€œa higher volume of security updates included in each security releaseโ€ as a result of AI aiding in the discovery of vulnerabilities.

โ€œThe pace of vulnerability discovery is changing with advances in AI making it possible to find more issues, faster, across more code, with new mechanisms that can accelerate both discovery and analysis,โ€ Davuluri wrote.

Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, called attention to CVE-2026-48561, a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Copilot (with a 9.6 CVSS threat score) that allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over the network. Microsoft says an attacker could exploit this bug by hosting a malicious website that causes Microsoft Edge for Android to automatically send crafted prompts to Copilot when a user visits the site.

As AI advances the state of vulnerability discovery and remediation, it is also making it easier for attackers to quickly devise working exploits for known software flaws. Microsoft has long labeled security bugs using its โ€œexploitability index,โ€ which is Redmondโ€™s best guess as to how likely it is that attackers will be able to figure out a reliable way to exploit a given vulnerability.

But Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, argues that Microsoftโ€™s exploitability index needs to do a better job of shifting with the machine speed of discovery. For example, Microsoft originally gave this monthโ€™s SharePoint zero-day an exploitability rating of โ€œless likely,โ€ although the flaw was added to CISAโ€™s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list on July 1.

โ€œAnthropicโ€™s Red Teamโ€™s own findings for known vulnerabilities (n-days) revealed how fragile this system has become, with its Mythos Preview model being able to produce proof-of-concept exploits for 13 of 14 vulnerabilities that were rated โ€˜Exploitation Less Likelyโ€™ or โ€˜Exploitation Unlikely,'โ€ Narang said. โ€œWhat this means is that our way of looking at Patch Tuesday has changed, because the exploitability index is centered around humans, not AI tools, and as these tools continue to improve, defense needs to improve alongside it.โ€

Chris Goettl at Ivanti observed that the record patch numbers from Microsoft come as a number of other major software makers are increasing their patch cadence, including Adobe which announced today it is moving to twice-monthly security bulletins published on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month (Adobe also cited AI for accelerating their patch cycles). Cisco, Mozilla and Oracle also are shipping updates more frequently, while Googleโ€™s patch batches in June 2026 totaled more than 900 security fixes, Goettl noted.

Backing up your Windows system and/or data is always a good idea before applying operating system updates. Given the volume of patches addressed this month it may be wise for end users to wait a few days before applying these fixes. Itโ€™s not uncommon for security patches to introduce system stability issues, and those chances probably increase quite a bit with the gigantic patch count released today.

Further reading:

Action1โ€™s Patch Tuesday blog

Automoxโ€™s rundown

Everyoneโ€™s Selling AI That Kills Pentesting. We Built One That Doesnโ€™t.

By: BHIS
17 June 2026 at 09:00

What we built, Fusion AI, runs at about a third the cost of a traditional external pentest, a human tester still signs off on every finding, and it is not here to replace anybody.
We have been hearing that one a lot. So when Melisa from our Business Capture team sat down with Brian Fehrman and me for this episode of AI Security Ops, she started with, โ€œWhat is this thing you built, and is it the same hype everyone else is selling?โ€

The post Everyoneโ€™s Selling AI That Kills Pentesting. We Built One That Doesnโ€™t. appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

9 June 2026 at 18:07

Microsoft today released software updates to plug nearly 200 security holes across its Windows operating systems and supported software, a record number of fixes for the companyโ€™s monthly Patch Tuesday cycle. Nearly three dozen of those bugs earned Microsoftโ€™s most dire โ€œcriticalโ€ rating, and exploit code for at least three of the weaknesses is now publicly available.

The software giant said in a blog post last month that both its engineers and the security community are increasing using artificial intelligence tools to find bugs, meaning this monthโ€™s heavy Patch Tuesday may start to become the norm, said Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable.

โ€œSome surveys put AI usage among security professionals generally at 90%, so itโ€™s unsurprising that this volume of patches may be the norm,โ€ Narang said. โ€œPandoraโ€™s proverbial box has been opened, and as more advanced AI models become available, we expect the norm to continue upward across the board, not just for Patch Tuesday.โ€

Juneโ€™s zero-day bugs include CVE-2026-49160, a denial of service vulnerability affecting a range of web servers, including Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). Microsoft says the flaw was reported by OpenAIโ€™s Codex.

Two of the zero-days addressed this month appear to stem from recent vulnerability disclosures by Nightmare Eclipse, the nickname chosen by a security researcher who has been dropping exploits for various Windows flaws. One of those, dubbed โ€œGreenPlasma,โ€ leverages an elevation of privilege weakness in the Windows Collaborative Translation Framework, the same framework patched today in CVE-2026-45586.

Nightmare Eclipse also last month released โ€œYellowKey,โ€ an exploit for a Windows BitLocker vulnerability that allows an attacker with physical access to view encrypted data, and CVE-2026-50507 is a patch for an elevation of privilege bug in BitLocker.

Microsoft received heavy blowback on social media last month after it said in a blog post that it was considering taking legal action against the security researcher. The company later clarified on Twitter/X that while it has no intention of pursuing legal actions against researchers, it would report them to authorities if they break the law. The advisories for CVE-2026-49160 and CVE-2026-50507 do not credit any researchers in the acknowledgement section, saying only that โ€œMicrosoft recognizes the efforts of those in the security community who help us protect customers through coordinated vulnerability disclosure.โ€

Nightmare Eclipse claims to be a former employee of Microsoft, although Microsoft has not responded to questions about this claim. Rapid7 notes that a recent blog post by Nightmare Eclipse included an image of Albert Wesker, a character from the Resident Evil video game series who formerly worked as a researcher for a technology company before going rogue.

Nightmare Eclipse has pledged to release even more zero-day exploits for Windows in what they called a โ€œbone shatteringโ€ drop planned for July 14 (the same day as next monthโ€™s Patch Tuesday). Immediately following the release of Microsoft patches today, the researcher published an exploit for what they claimed was a zero-day bug in Windows Defender.

While 200 vulnerabilities may be a record for Patch Tuesday, the actual number of security flaws Microsoft addressed this month is far higher, said Rapid7โ€™s Adam Barnett.

โ€œSo far this month, Microsoft has provided patches to address 360 browser vulnerabilities, which is an order of magnitude more than has been typical in any given month over the past few years,โ€ Barnett wrote. โ€œAs usual, browser [flaws] are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. Indeed, the vast, and presumably sustained, uptick in the number of browser vulnerabilities has led to Microsoft no longer enumerating Chromium CVEs in the Security Update Guide.โ€

Microsoft also patched a zero-day vulnerability in Visual Studio Code that allows attackers to steal GitHub tokens with a single click. The company was forced to push a stopgap fix for the flaw on June 3, after a researcher published instructions showing how to exploit it. The researcher said they opted not to work with Microsoft because of a recent experience wherein Redmond silently patched a flaw they reported without offering credit or recognition.

Microsoft battled its own internal zero-day emergencies last week, after at least 72 of the companyโ€™s public code repositories were infected with a variant of the Shai-Hulud worm. Researchers found that all of the affected packages were connected to Microsoft official Azure Durable Task SDK, which got hit by the same Shai-Hulud worm in May.

Other major software makers are also shipping outsized update bundles this month. Adobe has released updates to fix a massive number of critical vulnerabilities across a range of products, including Adobe Experience Manager, Acrobat Reader and Cold Fusion. On June 3, Google resolved a whopping 429 vulnerabilities in its latest Chrome browser update (Chrome automatically downloads updates but installing them usually requires a complete restart of the browser).

As ever, please consider backing up your data before applying operating system updates, and drop a note in the comments if you run into any problems with this monthโ€™s patches.

Further reading:

Microsoftโ€™s Security Update Guide

Action1โ€™s Patch Tuesday breakdown

SANS Internet Storm Center notes on Patch Tuesday

Auditing GitLab: The CI/CD Kill Chain

By: BHIS
3 June 2026 at 08:00

Welcome to GoGatoZ โ€” a purpose-built Go tool for GitLab CI/CD security auditing that can perform and automate the entire CI/CD kill chain along with everything those one-off scripts did and then some.

The post Auditing GitLab: The CI/CD Kill Chain appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

How to Identify and Exploit New Vulnerabilities

By: BHIS
13 May 2026 at 10:00

In the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity, staying ahead of the curve is not just a goalโ€”itโ€™s a necessity. As new vulnerabilities emerge, the race to identify and mitigate them begins. But how do we, the guardians of the digital realm, rapidly pinpoint these threats as they become public? Letโ€™s dive into the fascinating world of vulnerability identification and see how the magic happens.

The post How to Identify and Exploit New Vulnerabilities appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, March 2026 Edition

10 March 2026 at 20:32

Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing โ€œzero-dayโ€ flaws this month (compared to Februaryโ€™s five zero-day treat), but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from organizations using Windows. Here are a few highlights from this monthโ€™s Patch Tuesday.

Image: Shutterstock, @nwz.

Two of the bugs Microsoft patched today were publicly disclosed previously. CVE-2026-21262 is a weakness that allows an attacker to elevate their privileges on SQL Server 2016 and later editions.

โ€œThis isnโ€™t just any elevation of privilege vulnerability, either; the advisory notes that an authorized attacker can elevate privileges to sysadmin over a network,โ€ Rapid7โ€™s Adam Barnett said. โ€œThe CVSS v3 base score of 8.8 is just below the threshold for critical severity, since low-level privileges are required. It would be a courageous defender who shrugged and deferred the patches for this one.โ€

The other publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-26127, a vulnerability in applications running on .NET. Barnett said the immediate impact of exploitation is likely limited to denial of service by triggering a crash, with the potential for other types of attacks during a service reboot.

It would hardly be a proper Patch Tuesday without at least one critical Microsoft Office exploit, and this month doesnโ€™t disappoint. CVE-2026-26113 and CVE-2026-26110 are both remote code execution flaws that can be triggered just by viewing a booby-trapped message in the Preview Pane.

Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that just over half (55%) of all Patch Tuesday CVEs this month are privilege escalation bugs, and of those, a half dozen were rated โ€œexploitation more likelyโ€ โ€” across Windows Graphics Component, Windows Accessibility Infrastructure, Windows Kernel, Windows SMB Server and Winlogon. These include:

โ€“CVE-2026-24291: Incorrect permission assignments within the Windows Accessibility Infrastructure to reach SYSTEM (CVSS 7.8)
โ€“CVE-2026-24294: Improper authentication in the core SMB component (CVSS 7.8)
โ€“CVE-2026-24289: High-severity memory corruption and race condition flaw (CVSS 7.8)
โ€“CVE-2026-25187: Winlogon process weakness discovered by Google Project Zero (CVSS 7.8).

Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive, called attention to CVE-2026-21536, a critical remote code execution bug in a component called the Microsoft Devices Pricing Program. Microsoft has already resolved the issue on their end, and fixing it requires no action on the part of Windows users. But McCarthy says itโ€™s notable as one of the first vulnerabilities identified by an AI agent and officially recognized with a CVE attributed to the Windows operating system. It was discovered by XBOW, a fully autonomous AI penetration testing agent.

XBOW has consistently ranked at or near the top of the Hacker One bug bounty leaderboard for the past year. McCarthy said CVE-2026-21536 demonstrates how AI agents can identify critical 9.8-rated vulnerabilities without access to source code.

โ€œAlthough Microsoft has already patched and mitigated the vulnerability, it highlights a shift toward AI-driven discovery of complex vulnerabilities at increasing speed,โ€ McCarthy said. โ€œThis development suggests AI-assisted vulnerability research will play a growing role in the security landscape.โ€

Microsoft earlier provided patches to address nine browser vulnerabilities, which are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. In addition, Microsoft issued a crucial out-of-band (emergency) update on March 2 for Windows Server 2022 to address a certificate renewal issue with passwordless authentication technology Windows Hello for Business.

Separately, Adobe shipped updates to fix 80 vulnerabilities โ€” some of them critical in severity โ€” in a variety of products, including Acrobat and Adobe Commerce. Mozilla Firefox v. 148.0.2 resolves three high severity CVEs.

For a complete breakdown of all the patches Microsoft released today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Centerโ€™s Patch Tuesday post. Windows enterprise admins who wish to stay abreast of any news about problematic updates, AskWoody.com is always worth a visit. Please feel free to drop a comment below if you experience any issues apply this monthโ€™s patches.

Who is the Kimwolf Botmaster โ€œDortโ€?

28 February 2026 at 07:01

In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to build Kimwolf, the worldโ€™s largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf โ€” who goes by the handle โ€œDortโ€ โ€” has coordinated a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), doxing and email flooding attacks against the researcher and this author, and more recently caused a SWAT team to be sent to the researcherโ€™s home. This post examines what is knowable about Dort based on public information.

A public โ€œdoxโ€ created in 2020 asserted Dort was a teenager from Canada (DOB August 2003) who used the aliases โ€œCPacketโ€ and โ€œM1ce.โ€ A search on the username CPacket at the open source intelligence platform OSINT Industries finds a GitHub account under the names Dort and CPacket that was created in 2017 using the email address jay.miner232@gmail.com.

Image: osint.industries.

The cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 says jay.miner232@gmail.com was used between 2015 and 2019 to create accounts at multiple cybercrime forums, including Nulled (username โ€œUubuntuuโ€) and Cracked (user โ€œDortedโ€); Intel 471 reports that both of these accounts were created from the same Internet address at Rogers Canada (99.241.112.24).

Dort was an extremely active player in the Microsoft game Minecraft who gained notoriety for their โ€œDortwareโ€ software that helped players cheat. But somewhere along the way, Dort graduated from hacking Minecraft games to enabling far more serious crimes.

Dort also used the nickname DortDev, an identity that was active in March 2022 on the chat server for the prolific cybercrime group known as LAPSUS$. Dort peddled a service for registering temporary email addresses, as well as โ€œDortsolver,โ€ code that could bypass various CAPTCHA services designed to prevent automated account abuse. Both of these offerings were advertised in 2022 on SIM Land, a Telegram channel dedicated to SIM-swapping and account takeover activity.

The cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint indexed 2022 posts on SIM Land by Dort that show this person developed the disposable email and CAPTCHA bypass services with the help of another hacker who went by the handle โ€œQoft.โ€

โ€œI legit just work with Jacob,โ€ Qoft said in 2022 in reply to another user, referring to their exclusive business partner Dort. In the same conversation, Qoft bragged that the two had stolen more than $250,000 worth of Microsoft Xbox Game Pass accounts by developing a program that mass-created Game Pass identities using stolen payment card data.

Who is the Jacob that Qoft referred to as their business partner? The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds the password used by jay.miner232@gmail.com was reused by just one other email address: jacobbutler803@gmail.com. Recall that the 2020 dox of Dort said their date of birth was August 2003 (8/03).

Searching this email address at DomainTools.com reveals it was used in 2015 to register several Minecraft-themed domains, all assigned to a Jacob Butler in Ottawa, Canada and to the Ottawa phone number 613-909-9727.

Constella Intelligence finds jacobbutler803@gmail.com was used to register an account on the hacker forum Nulled in 2016, as well as the account name โ€œM1CEโ€ on Minecraft. Pivoting off the password used by their Nulled account shows it was shared by the email addresses j.a.y.m.iner232@gmail.com and jbutl3@ocdsb.ca, the latter being an address at a domain for the Ottawa-Carelton District School Board.

Data indexed by the breach tracking service Spycloud suggests that at one point Jacob Butler shared a computer with his mother and a sibling, which might explain why their email accounts were connected to the password โ€œjacobsplugs.โ€ Neither Jacob nor any of the other Butler household members responded to requests for comment.

The open source intelligence service Epieos finds jacobbutler803@gmail.com created the GitHub account โ€œMemeClient.โ€ Meanwhile, Flashpoint indexed a deleted anonymous Pastebin.com post from 2017 declaring that MemeClient was the creation of a user named CPacket โ€” one of Dortโ€™s early monikers.

Why is Dort so mad? On January 2, KrebsOnSecurity published The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network, which explored research into the botnet by Benjamin Brundage, founder of the proxy tracking service Synthient. Brundage figured out that the Kimwolf botmasters were exploiting a little-known weakness in residential proxy services to infect poorly-defended devices โ€” like TV boxes and digital photo frames โ€” plugged into the internal, private networks of proxy endpoints.

By the time that story went live, most of the vulnerable proxy providers had been notified by Brundage and had fixed the weaknesses in their systems. That vulnerability remediation process massively slowed Kimwolfโ€™s ability to spread, and within hours of the storyโ€™s publication Dort created a Discord server in my name that began publishing personal information about and violent threats against Brundage, Yours Truly, and others.

Dort and friends incriminating themselves by planning swatting attacks in a public Discord server.

Last week, Dort and friends used that same Discord server (then named โ€œKrebsโ€™s Koinbase Kallersโ€) to threaten a swatting attack against Brundage, again posting his home address and personal information. Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity that local police officers subsequently visited his home in response to a swatting hoax which occurred around the same time that another member of the server posted a door emoji and taunted Brundage further.

Dort, using the alias โ€œMeow,โ€ taunts Synthient founder Ben Brundage with a picture of a door.

Someone on the server then linked to a cringeworthy (and NSFW) new Soundcloud diss track recorded by the user DortDev that included a stickied message from Dort saying, โ€œUr dead nigga. u better watch ur fucking back. sleep with one eye open. bitch.โ€

โ€œItโ€™s a pretty hefty penny for a new front door,โ€ the diss track intoned. โ€œIf his head doesnโ€™t get blown off by SWAT officers. Whatโ€™s it like not having a front door?โ€

With any luck, Dort will soon be able to tell us all exactly what itโ€™s like.

Update, 10:29 a.m.: Jacob Butler responded to requests for comment, speaking with KrebsOnSecurity briefly via telephone. Butler said he didnโ€™t notice earlier requests for comment because he hasnโ€™t really been online since 2021, after his home was swatted multiple times. He acknowledged making and distributing a Minecraft cheat long ago, but said he hasnโ€™t played the game in years and was not involved in Dortsolver or any other activity attributed to the Dort nickname after 2021.

โ€œIt was a really old cheat and I donโ€™t remember the name of it,โ€ Butler said of his Minecraft modification. โ€œIโ€™m very stressed, man. I donโ€™t know if people are going to swat me again or what. After that, I pretty much walked away from everything, logged off and said fuck that. I donโ€™t go online anymore. I donโ€™t know why people would still be going after me, to be completely honest.โ€

When asked what he does for a living, Butler said he mostly stays home and helps his mom around the house because he struggles with autism and social interaction. He maintains that someone must have compromised one or more of his old accounts and is impersonating him online as Dort.

โ€œSomeone is actually probably impersonating me, and now Iโ€™m really worried,โ€ Butler said. โ€œThis is making me relive everything.โ€

But there are issues with Butlerโ€™s timeline. For example, Jacobโ€™s voice in our phone conversation was remarkably similar to the Jacob/Dort whose voice can be heard in this Sept. 2022 Clash of Code competition between Dort and another coder (Dort lost). At around 6 minutes and 10 seconds into the recording, Dort launches into a cursing tirade that mirrors the stream of profanity in the diss rap that Dortdev posted threatening Brundage. Dort can be heard again at around 16 minutes; at around 26:00, Dort threatens to swat his opponent.

Butler said the voice of Dort is not his, exactly, but rather that of an impersonator who had likely cloned his voice.

โ€œI would like to clarify that was absolutely not me,โ€ Butler said. โ€œThere must be someone using a voice changer. Or something of the sorts. Because people were cloning my voice before and sending audio clips of โ€˜meโ€™ saying outrageous stuff.โ€

Further reading:

Jan. 8, 2026: Who Benefited from the Aisuru and Kimwolf Botnets?

Jan. 20, 2026: Kimwolf Botnet Lurking in Corporate, Govt. Networks

Jan. 26, 2026: Who Operates the Badbox 2.0 Botnet?

Feb. 11, 2026: Kimwolf Botnet Swamps Anonymity Network I2P

Mar. 19, 2026: Feds Disrupt IoT Botnets Behind Huge DDoS Attacks

Patch Tuesday, February 2026 Edition

10 February 2026 at 16:49

Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 50 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including patches for a whopping six โ€œzero-dayโ€ vulnerabilities that attackers are already exploiting in the wild.

Zero-day #1 this month is CVE-2026-21510, a security feature bypass vulnerability in Windows Shell wherein a single click on a malicious link can quietly bypass Windows protections and run attacker-controlled content without warning or consent dialogs. CVE-2026-21510 affects all currently supported versions of Windows.

The zero-day flawย CVE-2026-21513 is aย security bypass bug targeting MSHTML, the proprietary engine of the default Web browser in Windows. CVE-2026-21514 is a related security feature bypass in Microsoft Word.

The zero-day CVE-2026-21533 allows local attackers to elevate their user privileges to โ€œSYSTEMโ€ level access in Windows Remote Desktop Services. CVE-2026-21519 is a zero-day elevation of privilege flaw in the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), a key component of Windows that organizes windows on a userโ€™s screen. Microsoft fixed a different zero-day in DWM just last month.

The sixth zero-day is CVE-2026-21525, a potentially disruptive denial-of-service vulnerability in the Windows Remote Access Connection Manager, the service responsible for maintaining VPN connections to corporate networks.

Chris Goettl at Ivanti reminds us Microsoft has issued several out-of-band security updates since Januaryโ€™s Patch Tuesday. On January 17, Microsoft pushed a fix that resolved a credential prompt failure when attempting remote desktop or remote application connections. On January 26, Microsoft patched a zero-day security feature bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-21509) in Microsoft Office.

Kev Breen at Immersive notes that this monthโ€™s Patch Tuesday includes several fixes for remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting GitHub Copilot and multiple integrated development environments (IDEs), including VS Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains products. The relevant CVEs are CVE-2026-21516, CVE-2026-21523, and CVE-2026-21256.

Breen said the AI vulnerabilities Microsoft patched this month stem from a command injection flaw that can be triggered through prompt injection, or tricking the AI agent into doing something it shouldnโ€™t โ€” like executing malicious code or commands.

โ€œDevelopers are high-value targets for threat actors, as they often have access to sensitive data such as API keys and secrets that function as keys to critical infrastructure, including privileged AWS or Azure API keys,โ€ Breen said. โ€œWhen organizations enable developers and automation pipelines to use LLMs and agentic AI, a malicious prompt can have significant impact. This does not mean organizations should stop using AI. It does mean developers should understand the risks, teams should clearly identify which systems and workflows have access to AI agents, and least-privilege principles should be applied to limit the blast radius if developer secrets are compromised.โ€

Theย SANS Internet Storm Centerย has aย clickable breakdown of each individual fix this month from Microsoft, indexed by severity and CVSS score. Enterprise Windows admins involved in testing patches before rolling them out should keep an eye on askwoody.com, which often has the skinny on wonky updates. Please donโ€™t neglect to back up your data if it has been a while since youโ€™ve done that, and feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience problems installing any of these fixes.

GoSpoofย โ€“ Turning Attacks into Intelย 

By: BHIS
29 October 2025 at 10:00

Imagine this: Youโ€™re an attacker ready to get their hands on valuable data that you can sell to afford going on a sweet vacation. You do your research, your recon, everything, ensuring that thereโ€™s no way this can go wrong. The day of the attack, you brew some coffee, crack your knuckles, and get started. A few hours into the service scan, you come to realize that all the network ports are open, but in use.

The post GoSpoofย โ€“ Turning Attacks into Intelย  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Wrangling Windows Event Logs with Hayabusa & SOF-ELK (Part 2)

By: BHIS
1 October 2025 at 10:00

But what if we need to wrangle Windows Event Logs for more than one system? In part 2, weโ€™ll wrangle EVTX logs at scale by incorporating Hayabusa and SOF-ELK into my rapid endpoint investigation workflow (โ€œREIWโ€)!ย 

The post Wrangling Windows Event Logs with Hayabusa & SOF-ELK (Part 2) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Stop Spoofing Yourself! Disabling M365 Direct Send

By: BHIS
20 August 2025 at 10:00

Remember the good โ€˜ol days of Zip drives, Winamp, the advent of โ€œOffice 365,โ€ and copy machines that didnโ€™t understand email authentication? Okay, maybe they werenโ€™t so good! For a [โ€ฆ]

The post Stop Spoofing Yourself! Disabling M365 Direct Send appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

DNS Triage Cheatsheet

By: BHIS
6 August 2025 at 11:00

DNS Triage is a reconnaissance tool that finds information about an organization's infrastructure, software, and third-party services as fast as possible. The goal of DNS Triage is not to exhaustively find every technology asset that exists on the internet. The goal is to find the most commonly abused items of interest for real attackers.

The post DNS Triage Cheatsheet appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

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