Users of the Myspace93 parody web art site be warned: the dataset spilled after a reported breach in 2021 included the plaintext usernames and passwords of more than 46,000 registered users. The site's co-creator has blamed "trusted members" of a Windows93 Discord channel for the leakage. The figure of 46,000+ users is a recent estimate from HaveIBeenPwned (HIBP) - the web's go-to breach aggregator - which ingested the related data this week, more than five years after the January 2021 attack. In addition to the clear-as-day passwords and usernames, HIBP said email addresses and IP addresses were also among the exposed data. Myspace93 is an offshoot of the Windows93 project. They’re both websites that spoof the old social media network and operating system respectively, allowing users to experience them now that they’re long gone. Its co-creator, who only goes by the alias jankenpopp, or Janken, penned a note to the website’s users following the attack. Dated July 4, 2021, Janken explained that the breach came about after they shared a beta app with trusted members of the Windows93 Discord channel. According to Janken, those members betrayed the co-creator and used their access to the beta application to steal server files and gain access to an unencrypted credential store. “None of them alerted me immediately to what was going on,” Janken wrote. “On the contrary, they created a program to download our entire server, and it was only a week later that another honest user alerted me to the fact that these people were bragging about having the Myspace passwords. “They didn't want to tell me the truth, and it took me two days to get a confession from them: not only had they downloaded all the source files of Windows93 behind my back, but also the unencrypted file containing the passwords of more than 45k Myspace users. The group had also shared a download tool - along with instructions for using it - in their chat, and had posted numerous stolen files (unrelated to Myspace) across multiple platforms, said Janken. “I removed the .smash app from the server and called them to order. They whimpered and promised me on their honor to delete all the stuff and that things would not go any further. I believed them because at the time we were very close, we talked every day, and they regularly helped me to manage the community, to fix bugs, sometimes to code new features for Windows93 or to make the services more secure. I really trusted them back in the day and considered them part of my team. I blame myself for being so naive.” The MySpace93 website is still up and running for anyone who wants to revel in a little noughties internet nostalgia, but the ability to register an account and use the site as a social network is closed. Affected users should make sure they watch out for any reused passwords on other sites and switch on 2FA where they can. Janken said they had closed all the social network-related services across all the Windows93 offshoots as a result of the findings. ®

Cisco has disclosed yet another perfect 10 vulnerability, this time warning that unauthenticated attackers could gain Site Admin privileges in its Secure Workload platform simply by sending crafted API requests to vulnerable systems. The bug, tracked as CVE-2026-20223, earned the full 10.0 CVSS treatment and affects Cisco Secure Workload Cluster Software in both SaaS and on-prem environments. According to Cisco's barebones advisory, the issue boils down to weak validation and authentication checks in internal REST API endpoints. In practical terms, that means attackers don't require credentials, user interaction, or any significant effort to exploit the bug. Cisco said a successful attack could allow remote attackers to "read sensitive information and make configuration changes across tenant boundaries with the privileges of the Site Admin user." Cross-tenant bugs tend to make cloud customers especially twitchy because they undermine one of the core assumptions of multi-tenant infrastructure: namely that somebody else's compromise is not supposed to become your problem. Cisco noted that the flaw affects internal REST APIs rather than the platform's web management interface, although that distinction is unlikely to bring much comfort to admins staring at a 10.0 severity score. The networking giant said there are currently no workarounds, and customers must install fixed releases to fully remediate the issue. Cisco Secure Workload 3.10 is fixed in version 3.10.8.3, while 4.0 is fixed in 4.0.3.17. Customers running version 3.9 or earlier are being told to migrate to a supported fixed release. Cisco added that its cloud-hosted SaaS deployments have already been patched and require no customer action. Cisco said it is not aware of active exploitation and that the flaw was discovered during internal security testing, though vulnerabilities carrying a 10.0 score and requiring no authentication rarely stay quiet for long. The bug lands less than a week after Cisco disclosed another maximum severity flaw affecting SD-WAN systems that could allow attackers to grant themselves administrator privileges, continuing what is becoming an increasingly awkward run of top-scoring Cisco security advisories. The company has spent much of the past year disclosing one 9.8-plus infrastructure flaw after another across products spanning firewalls, management platforms, identity systems, and enterprise networking gear. At this point, Cisco seems to be treating 10.0 CVSS scores as a recurring feature rather than a special occasion. ®

Microsoft on Wednesday open-sourced two AI tools designed to help developers and security teams build and maintain safer AI agents. The first is called RAMPART, which stands for Risk Assessment and Measurement Platform for Agentic Red Teaming. It’s a pytest framework for agentic AI applications built on Microsoft’s open‑source PyRIT toolkit that embeds automated red‑team tests into CI/CD pipelines. This allows developers to simulate real‑world attack scenarios - like prompt injection - and verify that agents stay within approved tool use, actions, and behavioral boundaries. It also supports statistical trials, meaning that teams can set policies such as “this action must be safe in at least 80 percent of runs,” to account for models’ probabilistic behavior. Plus, it allows red teams and incident responders to reproduce any AI security findings to ensure agents behave as intended - and that security mitigations work as they should. “It’s high time we stop talking about AI safety as a philosophy and start thinking about AI safety as an engineering discipline,” Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, Microsoft’s data cowboy and founder of its AI red team, told The Register. Microsoft has been using RAMPART internally, and while Kumar said he couldn’t provide specific details, he told us that a security researcher found an issue, and then the Redmond red team used RAMPART to test for the flaw across the agentic AI application. “RAMPART was able to take that one particular vector and find close to 100 different variants of that vector,” Kumar said. “And then we were able to use RAMPART to essentially go through this asset and see is this working, not just one time, not two times, but close to 300 times. We were also able to do in the context of multi-turn conversations.” The testing framework also allowed the developers to build mitigations into the product. “They were again able to use RAMPART to see if that remediation actually held water, not just against one vector, which the security researcher found, but multiple variations of those vectors,” Kumar explained. “This is empowering our incident responders and also our engineers.” The second AI tool that Microsoft open-sourced on Wednesday is an agent called Clarity, and it’s designed to serve as a “structured sounding board that helps teams figure out whether they are building the right thing before they write a single line of code,” according to a Wednesday blog that Kumar wrote about the two new tools. For example, say a developer wants to add real-time collaboration to a document editor. They tell Clarity this, and the agent responds with questions akin to what “experienced architects, product managers, and safety engineers would ask,” according to Microsoft. Clarity’s answers, as shown in a screenshot on GitHub: “Before we design that - what happens when two people edit the same paragraph at the same time? Do you need true real-time (cursors, presence), or is ‘no one loses work’ the actual requirement? Those lead to very different architectures.” The AI tool essentially aims to answer what problem the developer is trying to solve with an app, and what could possibly go wrong, and “talk” these issues out before the coding even begins. “It’s inherently collaborative,” Kumar said. “It helps the team take a step back, and say, ‘Hey, before we build this, are we going in the right direction? Because code is cheap. It takes a snap of a finger to generate a full system. Are we doing this in a way that makes sense?'” ®

PWNED Welcome once again to PWNED, the column where security flubs are held up to the harsh, piercing red light of the vulture signal. This week’s sad story concerns a municipality that failed to perform basic account housekeeping and paid for it dearly. 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 tech missteps comes courtesy of Nicole Beckwith, who serves as the senior director for security engineering and operations at Cribl, an AI platform for telemetry. She used to work as a consultant, and at one point was hired to investigate breaches in an American city’s network. A threat actor took a “leisurely tour” of the city’s online resources and had started messing around with conference room projectors and other relatively harmless endpoints. Then they realized that they could change settings with the water utility where they switched many controls off, potentially endangering the water supply. When Beckwith investigated, she found that all of the mischief was performed by an account that belonged to “Greg from Auditing.” There was just one problem. Greg hadn’t worked for the city for many years. Unfortunately, even though Greg was no longer around, his account was, and it retained extensive privileges, including domain admin rights, SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) operator access, and even the ability to perform help desk functions. It’s unclear if someone from auditing ever needed this level of access, but a former employee definitely did not. It wasn't Greg himself who hacked the network. But he had used his work email address to sign up for various online accounts, some of which may have been exposed in previous data leaks. She speculates the hackers saw an email address with a .gov in it and decided to try their luck with the leaked password that went along with it, and that Greg likely used the same password for work that he did for these outside services. We have a few takeaways here. First, the people who ran IT security for the city should have both deleted Greg’s account when he left and done periodic audits to see who had access and whether they should still have it. Second, Greg should have kept his work credentials separate from third-party services like shopping and social media sites. And he should not have used the same password in multiple places. “The lesson, beyond the obvious 'please, for the love of all that is holy, audit your dormant accounts,' is that every forgotten user is an easy ticket to being on the 5 o’clock news,” Beckwith told The Register. “Quarterly access reviews should be mandatory because everyone seems to think when a user leaves, that is the end of it and someone surely terminated access, deprovisioned accounts, removed access to tools, mobile communications, email and other business critical systems, but sadly I’ve responded to way too many incidents like this one because of this simple control which is often overlooked." ®

Two now-patched bypass bugs in Claude Code’s network sandbox put users at risk, and one of these allows baddies to send anything inside the sandbox - credentials, source code, other private data - to any server on the internet, according to a researcher who found and reported both flaws to Anthropic. Aonan Guan, who leads cloud and AI security at Wyze Labs and has hunted down bugs in pretty much every AI system out there, told The Register that this is the second time in five months Anthropic has silently fixed a sandbox bypass vulnerability in Clade Code without issuing a CVE or security advisory specific to the agentic coding tool. The latest issue was a SOCKS5 hostname null-byte injection that can be exploited to trick the sandbox allowlist filter into approving connections it should block. It’s especially dangerous when combined with prompt injection, which Guan previously detailed in his earlier comment and control research. When paired with prompt injection, the new flaw can be abused to force Claude to read hidden instructions and then run attacker-controlled code in the sandbox, allowing miscreants to exfiltrate anything the sandbox could reach. This includes cloud and GitHub credentials, the GitHub token Claude authenticated with, cloud metadata and internal APIs. “For anyone who ran Claude Code with a wildcard allowlist on a credential-bearing system, the network boundary did not exist for the 5.5 months from sandbox GA to v2.1.90,” Guan wrote in research published Wednesday. “Treat that window as a potential exfiltration event.” Anthropic says it found and fixed the latest flaw before receiving Guan’s report. The fix, according to a spokesperson, is a public commit in the sandbox-runtime repository, which shipped in Claude Code 2.1.88 on March 31. “Anyone can view” the commit, they told us. Guan filed his bug bounty report with HackerOne on April 3. “Because the report described a vulnerability Anthropic had already caught and patched, it was closed as a duplicate of an internal finding,” the spokesperson said. “We appreciate the researcher’s time on this report.” Guan says he doesn’t dispute the timeline. “That is not the core issue,” he told The Register. “The core issue is that this was a bypass of a user-configured network sandbox, and there's still no advisory CVE, and no changelog note," he said. "Shipping a sandbox with a hole is worse than not shipping one. The user with no sandbox knows they have no boundary. The user with a broken sandbox thinks they do.” Claude, for its part, seems to side with Guan. When he showed Claude its own hole, the bot responded “This is a real bypass of the network sandbox filter,” according to a screenshot published in his research. The earlier bug, which Guan reported and detailed in December 2025, was ultimately assigned a CVE tracker - CVE-2025-66479 - and patched in v0.0.16. But the CVE only applies to Anthropic's sandbox-runtime, an upstream package, and not specifically to Claude Code, which Guan says means users have no way to know if their AI coding assistant is reading “allow nothing” as “allow everything.” He requested a CVE for Claude Code, and Anthropic said no because “The root cause is in the library.” Guan told us he’s glad Anthropic ultimately addressed the security holes. But the entire disclosure process illustrates another problem that researchers and The Reg vultures have reported with how AI vendors often handle vulnerabilities in their products: no CVEs issued, and if the flaw is fixed, it usually happens silently, with no public advisories. More often than not, the burden of securing AI agents and other systems gets pushed to the end users. “Some vendors issue CVEs and some do not,” Guan said. "I think either approach can be reasonable, but the advisory is a must. The users need to know the risk is real, and in many cases, they may never know. What the public often does not see is that vendors may reward researchers and silently patch the software, while end users never learn from release notes or public advisories that the risk existed.” According to Guan, this shows why users need their own protections, either from a security company or user-controlled runtime isolation. But he said he does hope big tech “takes on the burden of clearly communicating” security issues with users. “Because of that, I think companies should treat AI agents more like employees than ordinary software tools,” he told us. “Before hiring an employee, companies do background checks. Before giving them access to systems, they define permissions. The same discipline should apply to AI agents.” ®

Microsoft seized websites and took down hundreds of virtual machines running a cybercrime service that allegedly sold code-signing certificates to ransomware gangs, thus making their malware look like legitimate software – and allowing criminals to infect thousands of machines in the US, including at least 12 owned and operated by the Windows giant. The malware signing-as-a-service operation called Fox Tempest has been around since May 2025, and abuses Microsoft’s Artifact Signing code-signing service. This service allows developers to digitally sign their software applications, signaling to the Windows operating system and end-user that the software is authentic, and hasn’t been tampered with. Since May 2025, the Fox Tempest crew – referred to as John Doe 1 and 2 in court documents unsealed on Tuesday – used fake identities and impersonated real organizations, allowing them to create more than 580 fraudulent Microsoft accounts. They then used these accounts to abuse Microsoft’s Artifact Signing service and obtain real code-signing credentials, then sold the code-signing certificates to other criminals for thousands of dollars. According to Microsoft, Fox Tempest’s customers included a ransomware group Redmond tracks as Vanilla Tempest (aka Vice Spider, Vice Society, Rhysida), which allegedly used the certificates to digitally sign malware and make it appear legitimate to Windows and users. This also allowed the ransomware slingers “to more easily deploy the malware onto the computers of unsuspecting victims without their consent,” according to the court documents [PDF]. Malware included Windows backdoor Oyster, infostealers Lumma and Vidar, and Rhysida ransomware. Vanilla Tempest “unlawfully accessed victims’ computers and devices, exfiltrated and stole the personal and confidential information of victims, deployed ransomware designed to encrypt victims’ files and systems, and extorted victims by demanding payment in exchange for restoring access to, or suppressing, their data,” the civil complaint continues, adding that the criminal activity remains ongoing. In a subsequent blog post, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit attorney Steven Masada said the tech company's investigation “further linked Fox Tempest to various additional ransomware affiliates and families, including INC, Qilin, Akira, and others.” Between February and March, the Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), working with “a cooperating source,” anonymously bought and tested the code signing service from John Doe 2, aka SamCodeSign. “These test purchases allowed DCU investigators to observe first-hand how Fox Tempest Defendants operate the service, the information a purchaser is provided, and the instructions given by SamCodeSign to connect to the service and sign the test software created by Microsoft,” the court documents say. “Additionally, the test purchases allowed DCU to identify cryptocurrency wallets used by Fox Tempest Defendants.” During the first test purchase, the source filled out a Google Form asking them to select how quickly they needed the certificates. Standard costs $5,000, while priority runs $7,500 and expedited carries a hefty $9,500 price tag. SamCodeSign then sent a direct message to the source and requested the $7,500 payment to be sent to a bitcoin wallet, according to screenshots (translated from Russian) in the court documents. After the source paid up, SamCodeSign sent instructions on how to access the virtual machine and complete the code signing process. “Microsoft has identified thousands of customer machines, including more than a dozen machines owned and operated by Microsoft, in the United States that have been impacted by malware signed with certificates originating from the tenants created by Fox Tempest Defendants,” the complaint says. ®

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) left open a GitHub repository named “Private-CISA” containing plain-text passwords, private keys, tokens, and secrets – with obvious file names like “external-secret-repo-creds.yaml” and “AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv” – for six months. GitGuardian researcher Guillaume Valadon, fresh off a recent talk on Kubernetes secret leaks, found the public repository on May 14, and told The Register that he “quickly understood that the leak was bad and that time was running out. A national agency having 844 MB of production infrastructure material in a public GitHub repository for six months is as serious as a secrets leak gets.” Valadon, who previously spent nine years at France’s CISA equivalent, ANSSI, told us the leak included tokens for CISA's internal JFrog Artifactory, Azure registry keys, AWS credentials, Kubernetes manifests, ArgoCD application files, Terraform infrastructure code, GitHub personal access tokens, and Entra ID SAML certificates. GitGuardian reported the leaky repository to CISA on May 14, and the agency took it down a day later. A CISA spokesperson told The Register that it was aware of the report and is investigating. "Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident.” It’s not a good look for the nation’s infosec agency, which hasn’t had a permanent boss since Trump took office, is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets cuts on top of deep cuts to staff and funding last year, and has suffered its share of embarrassing security snafus in the interim. In a Tuesday blog, Valadon said he initially thought the repo “was a hoax, given how suspicious the directory names (Backup-April-2026/, All Backups/, LZ-Artifactory/, Kubernetes-Important-Yaml-Files/, ENTRA ID - SAML Certificates/ ...), file names (external-secret-repo-creds.yaml, CAWS GitHub Token.txt, Important AWS Tokens.txt, AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv, Kube-Config.txt ...), and their contents (private keys, personal and professional GitHub tokens, AWS secrets, ...) seemed too good to be true,” Valadon wrote. It wasn’t a hoax – “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is aware of the reported exposure and is continuing to investigate the situation,” but it was a “catalogue of unsafe practices,” he added, containing passwords stored in plain text, backups committed to Git, and an “explicit” how-to guide for disabling GitHub's secret scanning. After initially reporting the leak through the CERT/CC portal, and only receiving an auto-acknowledgement as of the morning of May 15 – a Friday – Valadon alerted security journalist Brian Krebs about the publicly exposed secrets, which seemed to speed up CISA’s processes. By 6 pm EST that night, the feds took down the repository. Valadon told The Reg he gives CISA credit for quickly deleting the repository. “Most of our responsible disclosures take much longer, and many are never fixed,” he said. “Managing to take the repository offline in a day is impressive work.” He doesn’t know if any other parties with less altruistic intentions found the secrets first, although the fact that the repository was never forked (based on public GitHub events) would seem to indicate that it wasn’t widely circulated on the dark web. “The only ones that can answer definitively is GitHub,” Valadon said. GitHub did not immediately respond to The Register’s inquiry. GitGuardian isn’t aware of any of the exposed credentials being abused by unauthorized individuals “Each category of secret in the repository unlocks a specific attack path,” Valadon said. “Stacked together, they cover the full range: from destructive attacks and ransomware extortion to quiet, long-term persistence inside CISA's build and deployment pipeline. That last scenario worried me the most, and it's why I escalated through every channel we had until the repository was taken offline.” Plus, the committer used both a CISA-issued contractor email and a personal Yahoo email across the same commits, and created the repository using a personal GitHub account. “That mixed-identity pattern is one of the hardest surfaces for security teams to cover, and it's where the worst leaks happen,” Valadon said.®

Updated: If you use Drupal, get ready to patch without delay. The org behind the popular open source content management system is warning of a highly critical vulnerability in Drupal core that is serious enough for it to tell users ahead of Wednesday’s patch release to set aside time to install the fix immediately. The Drupal Security Team’s Monday PSA announcing the imminent patch for Drupal core doesn’t include any specifics, with the PSA noting that Drupal isn’t willing to share additional information until the announcement is made alongside the patch release. That, says Drupal, will happen at some point between 1700 and 2100 UTC on Wednesday, May 20. To reiterate, this vulnerability is found in Drupal core, the bare-bones version of Drupal designed for developers, and not Drupal CMS, the preconfigured version for those who want Drupal but don’t have coding skills. Drupal noted that sites using Drupal Steward, its paid web application firewall service, are protected against known attack vectors, though it still recommends Steward customers update their core instances in case additional exploit methods emerge. “The Drupal Security Team urges you to reserve time for core updates at that time because exploits might be developed within hours or days,” the advisory warns. Drupal also recommends users update to the latest supported release prior to Wednesday’s patch “so that you can address any other upgrade issues before the security window." While it won’t get specific on the nature of the vulnerability, Drupal did share its severity score based on NIST’s standard scoring methodology, and it’s not good: The bug scored 20 out of a max of 25 on that scale, as defined by Drupal’s own documentation. More specifically, it’s trivially easy to leverage, doesn’t require any privilege level to exploit, could make all non-public data on an affected site accessible to the attacker, and could allow an attacker to modify or delete whatever they wanted. The only two things preventing it from scoring a perfect 25/25 are the fact that a known exploit doesn’t exist yet and that it doesn’t affect all configurations, only those using “uncommon module configurations.” Drupal noted that security releases will be published on Wednesday for all currently supported core branches (11.3.x, 11.2.x, 10.6.x, and 10.5.x), as well as unsupported Drupal 11.1.x and 10.4.x branches for sites that have not yet upgraded from older 10.x and 11.x releases. Drupal users on 8.9 and 9.5 are also getting patches “given the potential severity of this issue,” though the advisory warns 8.9 and 9.5 users will need to install those updates manually, which “might introduce other bugs or regressions,” leading Drupal to recommend a full upgrade to a supported core branch. “Drupal 8 and 9 include numerous other, previously disclosed, security vulnerabilities that will not be addressed by either Drupal Steward or the best-effort patch files,” the advisory said. Drupal 7 users are safe. Given the fact that not all Drupal core environments will be affected, the advisory recommends all Drupal core users set aside time on Wednesday to determine whether they’re part of the vulnerable class, and take action immediately if so. ® Updated to add on May 20: The Drupal Security Team has been in contact to warn that, while Core is the primarily vulnerable product, Core's inclusion in Drupal CMS means those environments might be vulnerable too, so anyone running Drupal will need to be sure their site is secure. As for the patch itself, Drupal told us it can be installed in "minutes or maybe seconds depending on the site," which likely won't need to be taken offline in order to install the patch.In other words, you really ought to be sure this gets installed before you're caught being a straggler.

A new infostealer variant targets macOS users by spoofing Apple, Microsoft, and Google and then then gets to work searching for victims’ password managers so it can steal all of their credentials and access cryptocurrency wallets such as MetaMask and Phantom. The updated SHub stealer variant is called Reaper, and it uses macOS Script Editor, pre-populated with the malicious payload to execute the malware, according to SentinelOne research engineer Phil Stokes, who documented the attack in a Monday blog. But unlike earlier SHub versions and similar macOS stealer campaigns that rely on ClickFix social engineering tactics to trick the user into pasting a ScriptEditor command into Apple’s Terminal command-line interface, Reaper bypasses Terminal altogether and therefore defeats defenses Apple added to Tahoe 26.4. The attack starts with fake WeChat and Miro installer websites, hosted on a domain designed to instill trust in users by typo-squatting a Microsoft URL: mlcrosoft[.]co[.]com. When a user visits these pages, hidden JavaScript collects a ton of information about their system and browser, including IP address, location, WebGL fingerprinting data, and indicators of virtual machines or VPNs. The attack stops if the victim is located in Russia. Assuming that the machine is located elsewhere and the user clicks on the fake tool installer, they open Apple’s Script Editor app via a sneaky link that’s heavily padded with ASCII art and fake terms to push the malicious command far below the visible portion of the window when it loads. When the victim clicks “Run” in Script Editor, the hidden command executes the malicious AppleScript and displays a popup message purporting to be a security update for Apple’s XProtectRemediator tool. Instead of updating the security tool, however, it calls a curl command to silently download the shell script and it asks the victim to enter their login details – which are scraped and used to decrypt various credentials – and then displays a fake error message. Earlier SHub versions harvested users’ browser data, cryptocurrency wallets, developer-related configuration files, macOS Keychain and iCloud account data, and Telegram session data. Reaper does all of this and more. It includes a filegrabber that searches for files that contain business or financial info in the user’s Desktop and Document folders. That approach is similar to the document-theft functionality seen in Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS). The script also searches for several desktop cryptocurrency tools including Exodus, Atomic Wallet, Ledger Wallet, Ledger Live, and Trezor Suite. If it finds any, it injects the wallet with malware to ensure continued funds theft. And then, to ensure persistence, it backdoors the infected device by creating a directory structure designed to mimic Google Software Update: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/GoogleUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS/. “The LaunchAgent executes the target script GoogleUpdate every 60 seconds,” Stokes explains. “The script functions as a beacon, sending system details to the C2’s /api/bot/heartbeat endpoint.” This ensures the attacker can remotely execute code on the backdoored machine. If the attacker-controlled server sends a “code” payload, the script decodes it, writes it to a hidden file and executes the code with the users’ privileges before deleting the file. The backdoor gives the malware operators “more ways to steal data or pivot to other malicious installs after the initial compromise,” the threat hunter warns. About the only thing it doesn't do is implore the band to add more cowbell. ®

Another Linux kernel flaw has handed local unprivileged users a way to peek at files they should never be able to read, including root-only secrets such as SSH keys. The bug affects multiple LTS kernel lines from 5.10 upward, although a fix has already landed – and there is now a proposal for reducing the odds of similar surprises in future. What FOSS analytics vendor Metabase memorably dubbed the strip-mining era of open source security continues. This time, the culprit is CVE-2026-46333, a local kernel vulnerability that lets an unprivileged user read files they should not be able to access, including those normally available only to root. An attacker who already has login access to an affected machine could therefore potentially grab SSH keys, password files, or other confidential credentials, as the KnightLi blog explains. Despite its official designation, a demo exploit on GitHub calls it ssh-keysign-pwn. It is not quite as catchy a name as Copy Fail, or Dirty Frag, or indeed Fragnesia, but we feel it is safe to say it hasn't been a good month. According to a report on Linux Stans, it affected LTS kernel versions 5.10, 5.15, 6.1, 6.6, 6.12, 6.18 and 7.0. The good news is that it's already been fixed: Linus himself, in commit 31e62c2, called the fix "ptrace: slightly saner 'get_dumpable()' logic." The issue was reported on the oss-security list on Friday by security consultancy Qualys, as noted on X by grsecurity's Brad Spengler. In the same thread, Altan Baig pointed out that the underlying issue was reported by Jann Horn on the Linux Kernel Mailing List way back in 2020. The problem with tracking security reports, which Penguin Emperor Torvalds described recently, is not new, alas. ModuleJail This also seems like a good time to look at what we thought was an interesting new defensive measure, Jasper Nuyens' ModuleJail. The top line of the README summarizes it: The mention of "no AI inside the tool" is arguably something of a giveaway, and you can see a CLAUDE.md file in the repo. Even so, how it works is simple enough. Although Linux has a monolithic kernel, it is modular. When the kernel's source code is compiled, the person or tool building it can choose if each individual component is included (built into the binary), not included at all, or compiled as a module, which can be loaded on the fly as and when it's needed. Since the kernel is mostly device drivers, it's normal for distribution vendors to compile most non-essential components as kernel modules – as the Arch wiki explains. Blacklisting a module just means adding its name to a list of modules not to load. Blacklisting unused modules for added security isn't a new idea. It's in the RHEL 6 documentation, for instance, and a DoHost blog post from last year describes it as a security measure. ModuleJail simply automates the process. It blacklists any modules not currently in use. Probably safe for a server, but rather less ideal for a laptop or machine where you need to plug in new hardware on the fly. Connecting a USB headset, say, is quite different from plugging one into a headphone socket. While a device with a jack plug uses your existing sound controller, by connecting a USB one, you're effectively adding a new sound controller – just one that happens to be connected over USB. ModuleJail mentions that its approach avoids changing the initramfs. An initramfs, like an initrd, is a file containing a temporary RAM disk, so that a generic kernel can find and load the drivers it needs for the particular box it's running on – even before it can find the machine's SSD and mount the root partition. Back in the 1990s, as grumpy old graybeards such as this vulture recall, recompiling your kernel was a standard part of periodic system maintenance. One benefit of building the kernel customized for your own computer was eliminating the need for an initramfs. If all the drivers are built in, there's no need for this temporary stage, although as the ArchWiki notes, this does limit some advanced features, which, for instance, systemd uses. We would love to see some of the systemd-free distros incorporate such automatic ModuleJail-style identification of essential modules, and use it to build a custom kernel on the fly, then banish the use of initramfs. (Maybe just keep the all-options-enabled installation kernel around as an emergency fallback.) Aside from a few special cases such as OpenZFS, this should work on most hardware – and make life simpler, quicker, and perhaps slightly more secure. ®

The TanStack team has documented security measures and proposals following a damaging breach last week, including the possibility of making pull requests (PRs) by invitation only - a break from the open-contribution model that defines most open source projects. The attack used code from the Shai-Hulud worm, published by malware outfit TeamPCP, which can extract secrets from memory used by GitHub Actions. It began with a PR that triggered an automatic workflow via TanStack's use of the pull_request_target feature, causing the malicious code to be built and run by a GitHub Action, poisoning a cache used across the entire repository. The TanStack team said that its workflow used a pattern GitHub warns against: pull_request_target id intended for PRs that "do not require dangerous processing, say building or running the content of the PR." Since the attack, TanStack has removed all use of pull_request_target from its continuous integration (CI) pipeline, disabled caches used by pnpm (a Node.js package manager) and GitHub Actions, pinned actions to commit SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) hashes rather than retargetable tags, and disabled use of text messages for 2-factor authentication. The TanStack repository also now uses a feature of pnpm 11 called minimumReleaseAge, which requires dependencies to have been published for a set period before they can be installed. The idea is that compromised packages are usually detected and removed before that period completes. A more drastic proposal is closing the ability for external contributors to open pull requests at all. "We are absolutely not going closed source," the team said, but it could put in place a mechanism where contributions begin with an issue or discussion, and a PR can be submitted only by invitation. TanStack acknowledged that it would be a radical step to take as "open PRs are part of how a lot of us became maintainers in the first place." It might not be necessary if the repository can be hardened enough that malicious PRs cannot cause damage. It is a debate that maintainers of other open source projects will watch with interest. Supply chain security is a huge issue, but making pull requests invitation-only could hurt projects by deterring contributions. Another aspect of this is the extent to which GitHub itself is to blame. "Cache scoping in GitHub Actions shouldn't silently bridge fork PRs and base-repo branches," said the TanStack team.®

Exploit attempts are already hammering a newly disclosed NGINX bug dubbed "NGINX Rift," proving once again that attackers read patch notes faster than most admins. Researchers at VulnCheck said they are seeing active exploitation tied to CVE-2026-42945, a heap buffer overflow flaw affecting both NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus that was disclosed last week after apparently sitting unnoticed for 18 years. VulnCheck's Patrick Garrity said the company observed exploitation activity on its canary systems "just days after the CVE was published." "An unauthenticated attacker can crash the NGINX worker process by sending crafted HTTP requests," he said. "On servers with ASLR disabled – which, of course, is extremely unlikely – code execution is possible." Researchers at Depthfirst disclosed the bug last week, saying the flaw had been sitting in NGINX's rewrite module since 2008. The vulnerability, nicknamed "NGINX Rift," was assigned a CVSS score of 9.2. According to F5, which acquired NGINX in 2019, the flaw can be triggered by specially crafted HTTP requests under certain server configurations. In most cases, the result is a crashed worker process and a forced restart, though systems running without standard Linux memory protections could potentially face code execution. A public proof-of-concept exploit appeared the same day patches dropped, which helps explain why researchers started seeing exploitation attempts almost immediately. In practice, turning this into reliable remote code execution takes a pretty specific setup. The target server must be running a specific rewrite configuration, attackers need enough knowledge of that setup to exploit it correctly, and ASLR must also be disabled on the host system. Security researcher Kevin Beaumont noted that while the bug is real, modern Linux defaults significantly reduce the likelihood of successful real-world RCE. "Regarding CVE-2026-42945 in nginx – no modern (or even old) Linux distribution runs nginx without ASLR," Beaumont said. "So, cool, sweet technical vuln – it's valid – but the RCE apocalypse ain't coming." Even so, VulnCheck said Censys scans surfaced roughly 5.7 million internet-exposed NGINX servers running potentially vulnerable versions, which means patching teams everywhere just inherited another very long week. ®

The Polish government is urging public officials and "entities within the National Cybersecurity System" to stop using Signal, directing them to instead use an encrypted messenger developed by a leading Polish research organization. In an announcement on Friday, the government stated that Signal comes with security risks, including social engineering attacks orchestrated by advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. "National-level Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) have identified phishing campaigns conducted by APT groups linked to hostile state agencies," the announcement says. "These attacks target, among others, public figures and government employees." Offering examples of these social engineering campaigns, the government said attackers impersonate Signal support staff and abuse this perceived trust to take over victims' accounts. Attackers trick users into opening malicious links by sending messages designed to create a sense of urgency, such as those supposedly informing them of their account being blocked. Successful attempts can expose victims' phone numbers and, crucially, messages sent between government officials, potentially threatening national security. A more detailed advisory cited "recent security incidents" related to Signal as reasons for the change. It didn't specify what these recent attacks were, or even who was behind them, but it can be reasonably assumed that the Polish government was indirectly referencing Russia's phishing attempts against both Signal and WhatsApp, which were revealed in March. Dutch intelligence agencies AIVD and MIVD reported a "large-scale" campaign targeting their own government officials, noting that some attacks were successful. "The Russian hackers have likely gained access to sensitive information," the AIVD and MIVD said, adding that successful attacks were carried out on government bods as well as journalists. Beyond Signal support staff impersonation, the agencies said the attacks can also involve outsiders persuading victims to surrender their verification codes or PINs, or abusing the platform's Linked Devices feature via QR codes to take control of accounts. The FBI, CISA, and the German information security department issued near-identical warnings. The alternative Poland announced the launch of mSzyfr Messenger in March, saying it was designed for use by public administration entities, those involved in the National Cybersecurity System, and others to be decided by the government. Developed by the Ministry of Digital Affairs and the Scientific and Academic Computer Network – National Research Institute (NASK), mSzyfr was touted by the government as "the first secure instant messenger fully under Polish jurisdiction." It does, however, rely on multi-factor authentication (MFA) provided by US megacorps. Microsoft is the recommended option, but users can also opt for Google or FreeOTP. Further, if users want to retain access to messages even after logging out of the platform, they must set up a recovery key, which the installation manual suggests storing in a password manager. That undercuts the government's emphasis on Polish jurisdiction somewhat, since many popular password managers are either foreign-owned or open source. An FAQ document for mSzyfr states that the messenger is built with a privacy-by-design philosophy, and explicitly notes that neither WhatsApp nor Signal fits this description. It also claimed the US-based platforms are not GDPR-compliant. The mSzyfr app is not publicly available. Only individuals working for approved organizations are able to receive invites to join the platform. It replaces Swiss-founded Threema, which the Polish government began endorsing for state officials and law enforcement in 2022, but data such as messages cannot be transferred because of the apps' encrypted nature. All Threema users should expect to receive an invite to mSzyfr in the near future, if they have not already. The Register asked Signal to comment on Poland's announcement, but it did not immediately respond. It did, however, recently address security concerns raised by various intelligence agencies last week, introducing new warnings and alerts inside the platform to help users weed out potential impostors and bad actors. ®

Britain's F-35 fighter fleet is set to carry US-made glide bombs as an interim measure until delayed F-35 software updates from Lockheed Martin add support for the SPEAR 3 mini-cruise missile intended for the aircraft. The news comes in an official response from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which published a scathing report last year on the MoD's management of the F-35 program. That report noted that the stealth fighter force lacks essential capabilities, one of which is a stand-off weapon to attack ground targets from a safe distance. The SPEAR missile is intended to fulfil this requirement, but although it is ready and passed test firings in 2024, the F-35 is not currently able to operate it. This capability should have been delivered by now through the Block 4 software update from F-35 prime contractor Lockheed Martin, but this has met with a series of delays. It is now expected in 2031, five years behind schedule. One of the PAC's recommendations was that the MoD should set out in the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) how it will ensure a stand-off capability until SPEAR 3 is fully integrated onto the aircraft. Permanent Secretary at the MoD Jeremy Pocklington wrote back in a letter that approval has been given to proceed with a Foreign Military Sales (FMS) procurement of the precision-guided munition, Small Diameter Bomb (SDB II). "This acquisition will provide the F-35 with an interim stand-off capability until the introduction of SPEAR 3 into service," he stated. SDB II, designated GBU-53/B StormBreaker in US service, is a roughly 200-pound (93 kg) bomb with fold-out wings to allow it to glide to a target up to 69 miles (111 km) away. It has a tri-mode seeker in the nose that lets it use radar, infrared, or laser tracking to home in. Other criticisms leveled at the MoD were that it lacked suitably qualified engineers, and the department's pattern of delaying purchases to meet annual budget targets, which the PAC claimed has the effect of inflating total program costs while reducing operational capacity. Pocklington conceded that not enough spares were available to support the F-35 squadrons aboard aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales during the eight-month Operation Highmast deployment last year. "The surge to 24 F-35B aircraft during Operation HIGHMAST exceeded the Afloat Spares Pack capacity of 12. This was mitigated by supplementing with the Deployable Spares Pack [designed for land-based deployments] and taking additional spares from the RAF Marham Base Spares Pack," he wrote. "The Lightning Force is collaborating closely with the Royal Navy to optimise joint scheduling between home and embarked operations, given the current limitation of two front-line squadrons. The Department also plans to double the capacity of the Afloat Spares Pack and procure an additional Deployable Spares Pack for land operations, subject to the DIP." In response, PAC chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP commented on the "entirely unacceptable incompetence that flies in the face of any kind of sensible planning from the Ministry of Defence." "At the heart of any military planning is sound logistics. The UK sent an aircraft carrier with 24 F-35 fighter jets on it to the Middle East – with not enough spare parts to support them." "In an increasingly dangerous world, our military and the country need more than this half-baked approach from the MoD. Our brave fighting men and women, before being sent into potential harm's way, must have absolute certainty that they are well-supported in their equipment, with clear and reliable supply lines," he added. Pocklington's letter also said a short-term reduction in the availability of F-35 aircraft was likely due to the MoD stepping up corrosion awareness and prevention practices. While corrosion can be an issue for all aircraft, this is especially true for those operated from carriers, and it can also impact the F-35's radar-defeating stealth capabilities. The PAC report had noted that the MoD is behind in delivering a UK Aircraft Signature Assessment Facility, needed to check that the F-35's stealth technology is still doing its job and has not been compromised. On the lack of qualified engineers, Pocklington claimed that steps were being taken to address this by increasing available posts to 168. "The RAF has plans in place to fill its remaining engineering posts by 2032. This date is driven by the amount of time (up to three years) it takes to make engineers fully competent on an aircraft type," he said, adding that "the number of personnel recruited into the Engineering Profession, who are now in the training system, has already increased." However, the government's Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was due in autumn 2025, but there is currently no official publication date for it, despite the fact that many key projects are in limbo until it is delivered. ®

Mozilla has warned Britain not to turn VPNs into collateral damage in the government's increasingly desperate hunt for ways to stop kids dodging Online Safety Act age checks. In a submission to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology's "Growing up in the online world" consultation, Mozilla argued that VPNs are "essential privacy and security tools" used by millions of ordinary people, from those securing public Wi-Fi and remote work traffic to journalists, activists, and other vulnerable users. "VPNs serve as critical privacy and security tools for users across all ages," said Svea Windwehr, policy manager at Mozilla. "By hiding users' IP addresses, VPNs help protect users' location, reduce tracking and avoid IP-based profiling." Windwehr added that people rely on VPNs for everything from connecting remotely to school or work networks to avoiding censorship and "simply protecting their privacy and security online." The filing lands in the middle of an increasingly strange UK debate where privacy tools are being recast as a threat to online safety enforcement. VPN usage in the UK surged almost immediately after Online Safety Act age checks started rolling out last year, as users scrambled to avoid handing sensitive identity data to adult websites and platforms demanding facial scans or ID verification. Child safety advocates and officials then turned their attention to VPNs themselves, with the Children's Commissioner for England even suggesting the government should explore ways to stop children from using them altogether. Mozilla's response argues the government is chasing the wrong target. The company pointed to research from Internet Matters suggesting that relatively few children use VPNs in the first place, and that only a small minority use them specifically to bypass age restrictions. Mozilla instead argued that most successful workarounds involve fake birth dates, borrowed accounts, weak age assurance systems, or laughably fragile facial estimation tools that children have reportedly fooled with drawn-on facial hair. Mozilla also pointed out a central problem with age-gating VPNs: users would first need to hand over personal information before accessing software intended to reduce tracking and data collection. Britain is not the only country suddenly developing strong opinions about VPNs. Denmark recently floated anti-piracy legislation broad enough to trigger fears that VPN usage itself could become legally risky, before ministers hurriedly insisted nobody was trying to ban VPNs. Across Europe, VPNs are being treated less like routine security software and more like an obstacle to enforcement as users turn to them to bypass restrictions. Unfortunately for regulators, the technology industry appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Mozilla has already been testing built-in VPN functionality directly inside Firefox, joining a wider browser trend toward integrating privacy features that previously required separate software. Blocking standalone VPN apps is one thing, but trying to untangle VPN functionality from modern browsers is a much bigger problem. Mozilla's submission repeatedly argues Britain is drifting toward "safety through surveillance" instead of addressing the recommendation systems, engagement algorithms, and platform incentives that actually drive online harms. ®

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has declared the project’s security mailing list has become “almost entirely unmanageable” due to multiple researchers using AI to find bugs and then filling the list with duplicate reports. Torvalds used his weekly state of the kernel post to deliver release candidate four for Linux 7.1 and report “fairly normal” progress towards a full release. He then pointed kernelistas to the project’s documentation, which he wrote “might be worth highlighting” as “the continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools.” “People spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or saying ‘that was already fixed a week/month ago’ and pointing to the public discussion,” Torvalds complained. The Penguin Emperor believes that kind of chatter is “all entirely pointless churn” and isn’t productive because “AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved – and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports.” He then offered an opinion on how best to use AI to improve software security. “AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work,” he wrote. “Feel free to use them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better experience.” “The documentation may be a bit less blunt than I am,” he added, “but that's the core gist of it.” “So just to make it really clear: If you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too. If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on *top* of what the AI did. Don't be the drive-by ‘send a random report with no real understanding’ kind of person. OK?” Torvalds' remarks contrast with recent comments from fellow kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who recently told The Register that AI has become an increasingly useful tool for the FOSS community. ®

OpenAI says attackers behind the TanStack npm supply chain compromise stole internal credentials after reaching two employee devices, forcing the company to rotate signing certificates for several desktop products. The company disclosed this week that it had been caught up in the wider "Mini Shai-Hulud" campaign targeting npm ecosystems and developer infrastructure, though it said there was no evidence that customer data, production systems, or deployed software were compromised. OpenAI said the incident happened during a phased rollout of new supply chain security controls introduced after a previous Axios-related incident. According to the company, the two compromised employee devices had not yet received updated package management protections that would have blocked the malicious dependency. The attackers carried out "credential-focused exfiltration activity" against a limited set of internal repositories reachable from the affected employee machines, according to OpenAI. It said "only limited credential material was successfully exfiltrated from these code repositories." That was apparently enough to trigger a precautionary reset across multiple products. OpenAI is rotating the certificates used to sign macOS versions of ChatGPT Desktop, Codex App, Codex CLI, and Atlas, and is requiring users to update the affected software by June 12. The incident ties OpenAI to the increasingly messy supply chain campaign that has spent the past several weeks worming through npm ecosystems, CI/CD infrastructure, and GitHub Actions workflows. Security firm Socket linked the TanStack compromise to the broader "Mini Shai-Hulud" operation, which abused poisoned automation workflows and stolen publishing credentials to push malicious package updates into trusted software pipelines. Researchers tracking the wider Mini Shai-Hulud campaign have connected the activity to a threat group known as TeamPCP, which appears to have developed an unhealthy interest in poisoning npm ecosystems and rifling through developer credentials. TanStack confirmed this week that 84 malicious package versions spanning 42 @tanstack/* packages had been published after attackers compromised parts of its release infrastructure. The poisoned packages were designed largely to steal credentials, including GitHub tokens, cloud secrets, npm credentials, and CI/CD authentication material. The campaign appears linked to earlier Mini Shai-Hulud attacks involving SAP-related npm packages, suggesting the same credential-stealing operation is spreading across multiple developer ecosystems. OpenAI said it is continuing to investigate the incident and monitor for any downstream abuse tied to the stolen credentials. The reassuring news is that OpenAI says no production systems were breached. The less reassuring news is that attackers keep getting deeper into the software assembly line before anybody notices. ®

British MPs are urging the government to tighten online safety laws, arguing social media companies should face the same kind of scrutiny as other products linked to serious harm. In a letter to Liz Kendall and Kanishka Narayan, shared with The Register, the UK's Science, Innovation and Technology Committee said there is now "strong and consistent evidence" linking social media use to harms affecting young people and warned that "no action is not an option." The committee, chaired by Chi Onwurah, said the current system leaves social media companies free to grow their youth user bases while avoiding meaningful responsibility for the subsequent fallout. "The status quo, where social media companies are neither accountable nor responsible for preventing harms, isn't acceptable," Onwurah said. "If any other consumer product caused these harms, it would've been recalled or changed." The intervention forms part of the government's "Growing up in the online world" consultation and follows a March evidence session examining arguments for and against restricting social media access for under-16s. The committee said it heard evidence from clinicians, bereaved parents, academics, child safety groups, and experts studying Australia's social media age limits, as well as accounts from young people and families concerned about harmful content and the effect social media is having on children's wellbeing. While the MPs stopped short of explicitly endorsing a blanket social media ban for teenagers, the letter makes clear the committee thinks ministers have spent too long relying on voluntary action from platforms whose business models still reward engagement above pretty much everything else. The committee said existing age restrictions should be properly enforced using "effective and privacy-preserving" age verification systems – rather than checks that can be bypassed by a drawn-on mustache – and called for stronger legal obligations requiring companies to filter illegal content and to block children from viewing harmful material. The letter also revisits the committee's earlier concerns about recommendation algorithms and how platforms deal with harmful and illegal posts, areas where MPs say previous proposals for reform went nowhere. MPs are now urging ministers to revisit those recommendations and bring forward fresh online safety legislation in the next parliamentary session. Particular attention was paid to algorithms and addictive design features. The committee argued that infinite scrolling and similar engagement mechanics should be designed out of platforms entirely, and warned that social media companies cannot keep pretending they are passive hosts while their recommendation systems actively shape what users see. The letter also warned that gaps in the UK's Online Safety Act mean some AI chatbots operating on closed databases currently fall outside the regime, something MPs said must be fixed before the next generation of online platforms disappears into yet another regulatory blind spot. ®

A man police suspected of being the administrator of the former leading online drug bazaar Dream Market is facing charges in both his native Germany and the US following his arrest earlier this month. Prosecutors claim Owe Martin Andresen, 49, is the individual known by the “Speedstepper” alias, one of the few Dream Market admins identified by law enforcement in the 2019 attempts to shutter the platform. While other crime leaders on the platform have been convicted, it took the authorities years to identify their latest suspect, whom they believe was main admin of the website. Authorities said they tracked him down by monitoring crypto wallets, and tracking purchases of gold bars that the indictment claims were delivered to his home address. Other lower-level admins have long been convicted, including French national Gal Vallerius, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison a year after being arrested at Atlanta airport in 2017 on his way to attend the World Beard and Mustache Championships (yes, really). Andresen was arrested by German police on May 7 after the US indicted him in January, charging him with several counts of money laundering offenses. He faces similar charges in Germany. Authorities spent years gathering small pieces of evidence that eventually tied Andresen to Dream Market’s helm. After the platform shut down in 2019 amid mounting pressure from law enforcement, none of the suspected admins touched Dream’s infrastructure, including the operation’s known cryptocurrency wallets, which contained millions of dollars’ worth of tokens. Three years later, between November and December 2022, Andresen allegedly accessed these numerous wallets and transferred the contents into a single, consolidated one - a step only someone with access to Dream’s private key could carry out. Police believe this was Speedstepper. The next breadcrumb came almost a year later, when in August 2023, Andresen allegedly used an Atlanta-based cryptocurrency service provider to purchase gold bars from various international companies using the funds from the consolidated wallet. The indictment claims he had those gold bars shipped directly to his house in Germany, instead of choosing a more neutral, less compromising location. Between then and April 2025, German police believe they have identified several other money laundering schemes executed by Andresen, washing more than $2 million in the process. Upon his arrest on May 7, police searched Andresen’s residence “and two other locations,” at which officers found gold bars worth approximately $1.7 million, more than $23,000 in cash, as well as several bank accounts and crypto wallets containing roughly a combined $1.2 million. All of these proceeds are thought to stem from the funds generated by Dream Market and the various fees it charged for transactions and sellers to list their illicit wares. Dream Market operated between 2013 and 2019 and benefited greatly from the Alphabay and Hansa seizures, scooping up their users after playing second fiddle to both platforms for much of their respective reigns. According to US Attorney Theodore Hertzberg, at its peak, Dream had around 100,000 concurrent listings, most of which were for drugs. The US said the market was responsible for the trafficking of huge quantities of illegal narcotics, including more than 90kg of heroin, 450kg of cocaine, 25kg of crack cocaine, 45kg of methamphetamine, 13kg of oxycodone, and 36kg of fentanyl. “Andresen allegedly channeled commissions earned from selling illegal drugs, stolen personally identifiable information, counterfeit identification documents, and other items through cryptocurrency wallets and even converted his ill-gotten gains into gold bars,” said US Attorney Hertzberg. “Thanks to the close coordination between federal and German law enforcement, Andresen and his co-conspirators will no longer profit from the online sales of narcotics and fraud services, and Andresen will be prosecuted in both Germany and the United States as a result of his actions.” Andresen faces 12 federal charges - six counts each of international and domestic concealment money laundering - each carrying a maximum 20-year sentence. German authorities also charged Andresen with “several” counts of domestic money laundering, with each charge carrying a maximum five-year prison stint. ®

Linux admins hoping Dirty Frag was a one-off horror from the kernel networking stack are about to have a considerably worse week. Researchers at Wiz have published an analysis of "Fragnesia," a Linux kernel local privilege escalation flaw discovered by William Bowling of the V12 security team that allows unprivileged users to gain root by corrupting page cache memory. The bug, tracked as CVE-2026-46300, has public proof-of-concept exploit code documented by V12 on GitHub that demonstrates the vulnerability being used against /usr/bin/su to spawn a root shell. According to Google-owned Wiz, the flaw sits in the Linux kernel's XFRM subsystem, specifically ESP-in-TCP processing tied to IPsec support. By carefully triggering the bug, attackers can modify protected file data in memory without changing the original files stored on disk. Wiz describes Fragnesia as part of the broader "Dirty Frag" bug family rather than a completely separate class of issue. Dirty Frag itself only surfaced days ago and was already attracting attention thanks to public exploit code, incomplete patch coverage, and unusually reliable privilege escalation. According to researcher Hyunwoo Kim, who uncovered Dirty Frag, "Fragnesia" emerged as an unintended side effect of patches shipped to fix the original Dirty Frag vulnerabilities, adding yet another entry to the long tradition of security fixes accidentally creating new security problems. As The Register previously reported, Dirty Frag followed hot on the heels of Copy Fail, another Linux kernel privilege escalation flaw that abused page cache handling to overwrite supposedly read-only files. Historically, local Linux privilege escalation bugs had a reputation for being unreliable, crash-prone, or fiddly enough that attackers needed good timing and a fair bit of luck to pull them off cleanly. Fragnesia looks different, as Wiz and V12 both say the exploit avoids race conditions entirely, making it far more predictable than older Linux root exploits like Dirty COW. That makes the bug much more useful after an initial compromise. An attacker who gains access to a system through phishing, stolen credentials, or a vulnerable cloud workload suddenly has a cleaner path to full root access. The V12 proof-of-concept repository is already public, while Linux vendors have started pushing out advisories and mitigation guidance. AlmaLinux warned that all supported releases are affected and urged administrators to patch quickly or disable unused ESP-related functionality where possible. Similar advisories have also been issued by Amazon Linux, CloudLinux, Debian, Gentoo, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE, and Ubuntu as distributors scramble to assess exposure across supported kernel versions. Microsoft also urged organizations to patch quickly, noting that though it had not observed in-the-wild exploitation so far, Fragnesia "can modify any file readable by the user, including [/]etc[/]passwd." The Linux networking stack is starting to look less like infrastructure and more like a root exploit vending machine. ®