4 posts
The Hot Take: Its really telling when they do this stuff. So was it a backdoor for some three lettered agency?
Microsoft's GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: Linux becoming a target with people migrating over to it for sure.
Qualys's Threat Research Unit (TRU) has discovered and published a logic flaw in Linux kernel "that permits an unprivileged local user to disclose sensitive files and execute arbitrary commands as root on default installations of several major distributions." Friday their blog pointed out "The bug has resided in mainline Linux since November 2016 (v4.10-rc1)." "Upstream patches and distribution updates are already available." Working exploits are circulating publicly, and administrators should apply vendor kernel updates without delay. During ongoing research into Linux kernel privilege boundaries, TRU identified a narrow window in which a privileged process that is dropping its credentials remains reachable through ptrace-family operations even though its dumpable flag should have closed that path. By pairing this window with the pidfd_getfd() syscall (added in v5.6-rc1, January 2020), an attacker can capture open file descriptors and authenticated inter-process channels from a dying privileged process and re-use them under their own uid. The primitive is reliable and turns any local shell into a path to root or to sensitive credential material [including host private keys under /etc/ssh ] CVE-2026-46333 is local-only, but the impact is severe... Any unprivileged shell on a vulnerable host is enough to read /etc/shadow, exfiltrate SSH host private keys, or execute arbitrary commands as root through hijacked dbus connections to systemd. In practice, the distinction between an unprivileged foothold and full host compromise collapses: a phished developer account, a constrained CI runner, a low-privilege service account, or a shared multi-tenant host all become direct paths to root. With the vulnerable code shipping in mainline kernels since v4.10-rc1 (November 2016), the historical exposure spans nine years of enterprise fleets, cloud images, and container hosts. Qualys followed responsible disclosure throughout. Qualys reported the vulnerability privately to the upstream Linux kernel security contact on 2026-05-11. Over the following three days the kernel security team developed and reviewed the fix, CVE-2026-46333 was assigned, and the patch was committed publicly on 2026-05-14. We then engaged the linux-distros mailing list, the standard pre-disclosure channel for downstream coordination. A short time later, an independent exploit derived from the public kernel commit appeared.... Qualys is releasing the complete advisory today because the underlying technique is novel, the public picture is now incomplete and uneven, and independent researchers have already achieved local root and published exploit material. Doing so gives defenders, detection engineers, and downstream maintainers a single authoritative reference for the flaw, the race against do_exit(), the role of pidfd_getfd(), and the four exploitation case studies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: As Linux gains market share just put a target on its back for compromise.
A new report from Sonatype identifies 21,764 malicious open source packages in the first quarter of the year, up 21 percent from the same period last year and bringing the total logged since 2017 to 1,346,867. The npm registry continues to be the target of most new malicious attacks, at 75 percent, seeing the equivalent of 46 malicious packages per day, with the quarter defined by credential theft, host reconnaissance, and staged payload delivery aimed at developer and CI/CD environments. Python package index PyPI saw 18 percent of total malware in Q1, with other registries significantly lower, suggesting that attackers… [Continue Reading]
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: More GPU security issues, #FUN.
Two new Rowhammer attacks for GPUs have been discovered that can cause bit flips in VRAM to gain arbitrary read/write access over it. These attacks target page files and the page directory that are otherwise protected from electrical disturbance by the driver. By "massaging" these data structures into vulnerable regions where a bit flip can occur, the attacker can access even the CPU memory.
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