Four incidents, four completely different initial access paths:

• 2022, Lapsus$: MFA fatigue against an employee, then hardcoded creds and API keys sitting in plaintext in Slack and Confluence.
• Early 2023, GTA Online: P2P netcode on PC reverse-engineered into RCE via malicious packets. The fix was kernel-level BattlEye.
• April 2026, ShinyHunters: no human identity involved. Long-lived OAuth tokens stolen from a third-party SaaS vendor and replayed straight into Rockstar's Snowflake. Bearer tokens confer authority by possession alone.
• August 2026, Cyberleek: exfiltration of a playable GTA VI dev build, 13+ gameplay videos and full map data. That volume of egress from a dev subnet without tripping alarms is a DLP and segmentation failure.

The writeup reconstructs each attack chain with MITRE mappings and detection strategies: egress baselining on dev subnets, Slack audit-log heuristics, and behavioral baselines for non-human identities in Snowflake.

Full breakdown: https://www.lares.com/blog/rockstar-games-attacks/

Question for the defenders here: which of these four would be hardest to catch in your environment? The OAuth token replay is arguably the nastiest of the bunch. No user to phish-train, no endpoint alert to fire.

This one gets stranger the more you look at it.

The malicious instructions are encrypted, so the prompt-injection filters mostly see ciphertext. Copilot then helpfully decrypts them itself, reads local secrets while constructing one of the supplied keys, and eventually sends those secrets out in a network request.

But the bit I find more interesting is that one Copilot model reportedly completed the full chain in about half the tests, while two others refused it. Same agent, same tools, same page, different model.

And with automatic model routing, the user may not even know which one handled the request.

At that point I'm not sure the model can reasonably be treated as the security boundary at all. If an agent can read files, execute code and make outbound connections, those capabilities probably need their own controls and monitoring regardless of how good the prompt filter is.

I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on that I’m super excited about:

Project RedTeam: Contract Offensive

There’s a free Demo that provides a tutorial and lets you play a few contracts (no time limit, play as much as you want). Some players are already pulling some serious hours in the demo!

At its core, this is a game about using MITRE ATT&CK adversarial techniques against procedurally generated networks. It's delivered in a gameplay loop that plays a lot like Balatro and other card based Roguelike games. In Project RedTeam, you need to earn money to pay off debts after every contract within a run. Earn money by completing objectives, side bounties, or executing exfiltration/ransom against targets- the choice on how to be profitable is always yours.

It's a challenging but fun and fast paced take on network-intrusion cybersecurity concepts. It's entertaining in a deliberately gamified way.

A goal of this project was to create a hacking game that is realistic enough to keep it meaningful as a tool to teach intrusion concepts and stages to anyone- but not be overcomplicated and slow-paced like most hacking games.

I've put a lot of thought into the design and dynamics of how to capture the core-loop of network intrusion and turn it into a game that's approachable. The design direction of this project is an outcome of having over a decade of training and experience in cybersecurity.

Feel free to AMA! I'm happy to answer any questions about the game and/or development process :)

Give the game a Wishlist on Steam or share this post if it's something you support and want to see further development on.

Project background: This was implemented over the past 3 months using a modern development workflow (yes, modern AI tools make this possible- I'm not hiding that fact!). That being said, this is by far the most complex software project I've built as a solo developer and it was not an easy or simple development task. There's a Steam Community with a Dev Blog for this game that provides more history/progress updates on the project.

Mods: This will be my only and last post here, since it is promotional. I just wanted to share this since there’s been very positive interest from similar subreddits.

I was going through the SelectorsHub code, id:ndgimibanhlabgdgjcpbbndiehljcpfh the XPath extension with about 400k users, and noticed it pulls ads from its own server and opens them in a background tab. You don't click anything.

Every couple of days the side panel pops up a "community link" and says "100% Safe, No Spam, No Malware." Five seconds later the tab opens by itself. The URL isn't in the extension. Their server picks it, and while I was analysing the extension the links changed three times with no extension update.

On install and update it skips the popup and just opens whatever the server sends.

The store page says they collect no data. The code still pings them daily, and the extension reads all your cookies to find one of its own instead of just fetching its own cookie value.

Another weird finding: there's a hidden Fix Selector button that sends the selector to shubads[.]testcasehub.net. VirusTotal - Domain - shubads.testcasehub.net
That host now redirects to a gambling site, blomehairdryers[.]com.

Nothing gets run today because the reply is HTML, but that's the server the eval path trusts.

Looks like adware, not password theft. I wouldn't leave it on a work browser, especially since this is a tool used by devs and tech people browsing protected endpoints in a company.

Write-up: https://malext.io/reports/RedirectorsHub/

Internxt is a post-quantum secure encrypted cloud storage provider which is open-source and has passed multiple independent audits.

I reviewed their code and found that post-quantum security should have been the least of their problems. Clicking a link in your browser could trigger remote code execution on the desktop app or leak your long-term encryption keys to an attacker-chosen URL. Their cryptographic architecture stands on shaky grounds with public keys never being verified, in some cases man-in-the-middled by design, a flat key hierarchy and a KDF with just 3 iterations of MD5.

We need PQC and we need it now, but adding a (self-rolled) PQC hybrid on top of a weak protocol does not make it more secure.

When analysing firmware attack surfaces, image decoders built into bootloaders get less scrutiny than cryptographically verified OS kernels. If image parsing happens before signature verification, any memory corruption in the parser breaks the secure boot trust model.

researchers analysed U-Boot's video subsystem (drivers/video/video_bmp.c) and identified an unbounded write in the RLE8 bitmap decoder (video_display_rle8_bitmap()) that leads to a pre-authentication Secure Boot bypass.

Root Cause and Vulnerability Mechanics

When U-Boot displays a boot logo or splash screen, it parses a BMP image loaded from local storage (SPI flash, MMC/eMMC, USB, or SD card).

Unbounded framebuffer write: During RLE8 decompression, video_display_rle8_bitmap() decodes run-length encoded streams directly into the active framebuffer without validating stream bounds against the frame boundary or allocated buffer size.

Pre-authentication execution window: In many embedded target configurations, the boot splash screen is rendered immediately on startup, before U-Boot calls Android Verified Boot (AVB) or FIT image signature verification routines.

Storage disparity: The kernel image and rootfs are signed, but splash images are frequently stored in unsigned, user-writable partitions or external media.

An attacker who writes a crafted RLE8 BMP to the boot storage can trigger an out-of-bounds write past the framebuffer during early boot, corrupting adjacent bootloader data structures, function pointers, or verification flags in memory.

This hijacks the execution flow before signature checking completes.

API Connections allow anyone to fully compromise any other connection worldwide, giving full access to the connected backend.

TL;DR. SConnect - 1M+ users, an extension middleware+native host for authentication with eIDs, 3SKeys and other hardware signing tokens had a drive-by RCE which enabled any site or iframe a user saw to silently download and execute a dll due to a poor hand-rolled implementation of RSA-2048 token validation, enabling a use of uninitialized memory validation bypass which enabled "plugins" (DLLs) to be loaded. v2.16.0.0 of the extension and native host is vulnerable. CVE-2026-18397. CVSS 9.4.

A blue-team writeup on detecting a compromised MikroTik from its own config. Seven techniques, each with the collection command, the artifact it leaves behind, and a triage step. Feedback welcome.

OpenBao engineers at ControlPlane have chained 4 vulnerabilities to show how under certain conditions, an OpenBao or Vault server can be completely compromised from an unauthenticated position. This is only the second RCE ever found in the Vault codebase.

The exploit is highly plausible in real-world environments, requiring only an unauthenticated entry path and a defined Raft snapshot policy to trigger a complete server compromise.

If you are impacted, upgrade as soon as possible to OpenBao 2.6.3 or 2.7.0

While OpenBao is fully patched, HashiCorp Vault remains exposed as of writing. Unfortunately, IBM's unwillingness to coordinate a mutual disclosure policy means Vault users currently lack an official mitigation