标签：#SEC

The front-running tax that bled crypto for a decade needs only observable intent and a party that controls order. Agent marketplaces are rebuilding both. In September 2020, a security researcher who goes by samczsun found about $12 million of someone else's cryptocurrency sitting in a vulnerable contract, exposed, and realized he had a few minutes to rescue it before someone less friendly noticed. He wrote the rescue transaction. Then he stopped, because he understood the problem with sending it. The moment his transaction hit Ethereum's public waiting area, the mempool, every bot watching that space would see a profitable move spelled out in plain code, copy it, pay a higher fee to jump ahead of him, and take the $12 million themselves. His rescue would become their heist, and he would have personally handed them the map. He wrote about this later in an essay called "Escaping the Dark Forest," borrowing a metaphor from Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos at Paradigm, who had borrowed it from Liu Cixin's science fiction: an environment where any signal of your presence gets you killed, so the only survivors are the ones who stay silent and shoot first. The mempool is a dark forest. Broadcasting a valuable intention into it is detection, and detection is death. Samczsun survived only by refusing to play the open game. He submitted his rescue privately, straight to a miner, bypassing the public mempool entirely, so the predators never saw it coming. That story is usually told as a piece of crypto lore. I want to tell it as something else, because the thing that killed transactions in the dark forest was never really about blockchains. It was about a shape, and that shape is quietly being rebuilt inside the AI agent marketplaces that a lot of people are racing to launch right now. When it finishes, the same predators will be back, and this time the prey will be your agents. The three conditions, and why blockchain was just the extreme case The phenomenon samczsun

If you've ever cat -ed a Terraform or OpenTofu state file, you already know the uncomfortable truth: it's a plaintext JSON dump of everything your infrastructure knows, including secrets. Database passwords, generated private keys, API tokens injected through providers — they all land in state, in the clear. OpenTofu is the one place where you can fix this at the source, because native state and plan encryption is a first-class OpenTofu feature that upstream Terraform does not have. Here's how it actually works and how I roll it out on existing projects without breaking them. Why plaintext state is a real risk State is not a cache you can regenerate. It's the authoritative map between your HCL and the real resources, and OpenTofu has to store the values of attributes to compute diffs. That includes sensitive ones. Marking an output sensitive = true only hides it from the CLI output — it's still written verbatim to state. On real infra I've seen state end up in three places it shouldn't: an S3 bucket without SSE and with overly broad read IAM, a CI artifact that got uploaded to a build cache, and a developer laptop with terraform.tfstate committed to a feature branch by accident. Backend encryption (like S3 SSE) helps for one of those. It does nothing for the other two, because the moment state leaves the backend it's plaintext again. OpenTofu's encryption operates at the data layer, before the bytes ever hit the backend or a local file. The state is encrypted at rest everywhere: in the backend, in local copies, in CI artifacts. That's the property I want. Anatomy of the encryption block Encryption lives in a terraform { encryption { ... } } block. It has three moving parts: a key provider (where the encryption key comes from), a method (the actual cipher), and targets ( state and/or plan ) that bind a method to what you want encrypted. terraform { encryption { key_provider "pbkdf2" "passphrase" { passphrase = var . tofu_encryption_passphrase } method "aes_gcm" "defa

Two critical security flaws in WordPress’ software have given hackers the chance to remotely take over tens of millions of websites, according to an estimate by a cybersecurity researcher.

Edinburgh-based tech firm Craneware said customer data was stolen during a cyberattack. The company makes software that thousands of U.S. hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics rely on for billing patients, potentially exposing health data.

Flock Safety sits right at the center of the debate over where the line should be drawn between privacy and public safety. That’s why we’re bringing Flock’s founder and CEO Garrett Langley to the stage to speak about those very issues.

Governments look at banning ransom payments in face of increasingly sophisticated threats.

InfoQ has opened enrollment for three five-week online certification cohorts starting in August, each led by a senior practitioner applying QCon talk frameworks to participants' own work: architecture with Luca Mezzalira, engineering leadership with Michelle Brush, and AI security and privacy with Katharine Jarmul. By Artenisa Chatziou

Why we built Veridexa Many document analysis workflows still rely primarily on OCR OCR is useful for extracting text, but it cannot answer one important question: Does this document show signs of fraud or manipulation? That question led us to build Veridexa. The problem Organizations receive thousands of digital documents every day: Passports National IDs Academic certificates Bank statements Employment documents Invoices Reading the text is only one part of the process. The difficult part is detecting manipulation, inconsistencies, forgery, or suspicious evidence before making a decision. Our approach Instead of relying on OCR alone, Veridexa combines multiple evidence sources into a single fraud assessment. The platform analyzes: OCR extraction Metadata Image forensics Security features Document structure Cross-evidence consistency The result is an explainable decision instead of a simple confidence score. Explainable decisions Every analysis ends with one of three outcomes: ACCEPT MANUAL REVIEW REJECT Each decision is accompanied by supporting evidence so reviewers understand why the system reached that conclusion. Public benchmark We also believe AI systems should be transparent. For that reason Veridexa publishes a public benchmark together with methodology and performance reporting instead of asking users to trust marketing claims. API-first Try the public demo, explore the benchmark, or integrate the API. Feedback from developers and security professionals is always welcome. https://veridexa.io Developers can integrate Veridexa into their own applications using our API while organizations can use the web platform without writing code. We'd love your feedback We're continuing to improve the platform and would genuinely appreciate feedback from the developer community. Website: https://veridexa.io

Hugging Face is urging users to rotate any access tokens stored on the platform and review account activity.

A new toolkit for attorneys in Massachusetts targets the technologies police use—and conceal—to build criminal cases, from facial recognition to AI-written police reports.

A first-of-its-kind analysis found more than one in eight apps built for US service members carried foreign code—some from firms in nations the Pentagon designates as adversaries.

Removing EXIF GPS protects one privacy boundary. It does not prove that an uploaded JPEG contains only a JPEG. A useful hostile fixture is a valid image followed by bytes for another format. Many decoders stop at JPEG’s end marker and display the picture successfully, while downstream scanners, content sniffers, or accidental downloads may interpret the trailing payload differently. Build a fixture set rather than trusting extensions: clean.jpg valid JPEG exif-gps.jpg valid JPEG with location jpeg-plus-zip.jpg JPEG followed by ZIP bytes jpeg-plus-html.jpg JPEG followed by HTML truncated.jpg missing end marker oversized-dimensions.jpg small file, dangerous decode cost My upload gate has independent layers: Store the original in a non-public quarantine location. Enforce byte-size and decoded-dimension limits. Decode with a maintained image library. Re-encode pixels into a new file, discarding metadata and trailing bytes. Verify the output’s signature, dimensions, and complete parse. Publish only the derived object under a server-generated name. A boundary check can detect bytes after the end marker, but re-encoding is the stronger transformation because it creates a new representation from decoded pixels. Keep the original inaccessible and delete it according to a tested lifecycle. assert ( outputSize <= limit ); assert ( decoded . width * decoded . height <= pixelBudget ); assert ( parseConsumesEntireFile ( output )); assert ( noLocationMetadata ( output )); The OWASP File Upload Cheat Sheet recommends defense in depth: allowlisted types, generated filenames, size limits, storage separation, and content validation. No single MIME header or metadata scrubber replaces that chain. The important privacy lesson is broader than EXIF: inspect every representation that survives the upload pipeline, and publish only a constrained derivative.

Last week I was reviewing the staking engine of a protocol before its mainnet launch. Deep in a 1,400-line contract, I found what looked like a serious bug. The reward math multiplied three values before dividing: uint256 delta = (lot.amount * rBase * midpointRate) / (RAY * RAY); Multiply-before-divide. If that intermediate product overflows uint256 , the whole epoch settlement reverts — and since every stake , withdraw , and setStake runs it, the post's funds get permanently frozen . That's a High-severity, fund-locking DoS. I had the finding half-written. lot.amount can reach 10M tokens ( 1e25 ). rBase grows with elapsed time. midpointRate can hit RAY . Multiply those and you blow past 2^256 ... I was ready to send it. Then I did the one thing that separates a real audit from false-positive spam: I checked the actual constants before writing the claim. uint256 private constant RAY = 1e18; // I'd assumed 1e27 RAY was 1e18 , not the 1e27 I'd been carrying in my head. And the interest rate had a hard cap — MAX_RATE_MAX_RAY = 5e18 , enforced even against a fully-captured timelock. I ran the numbers with the real values: For that multiplication to overflow, the protocol would need to go 2.3 × 10¹⁵ years without a single state update. Not reachable. The bug didn't exist. I deleted the finding. Why this matters more than the bug would have If I'd sent that report, here's what happens: the team's engineer clones the repo, plugs in the real constants, and realizes in ten minutes that I flagged an overflow that can't happen. Every other finding in my report now gets read with a raised eyebrow. My credibility — the entire product — is gone. This is the dirty secret of automated smart-contract auditing: the bottleneck isn't finding issues. It's not drowning the real ones in false positives. Anyone can run a scanner and paste 40 "criticals." A team that has to triage 40 flags to find the 2 that matter will — correctly — stop trusting you. The bar I hold: zero false positives o

The security officer said no. Not "maybe with some modifications." Not "let us review the data handling policy." No. Cloud-hosted AI code review was not going to happen in their environment. The codebase contained classified material. The network was air-gapped. No data leaves the building. End of conversation. This was a defence contractor. Their development team was writing code that couldn't touch any external API, any cloud service, any SaaS platform. But they were also writing 200,000+ lines of code per year with a team that was struggling to maintain review quality across twelve engineers, the exact problem that AI code review solves. The challenge: deploy AI code review capability that runs entirely on-premise, in an air-gapped network, with no external connectivity, while meeting the security and compliance requirements of a classified computing environment. This is the guide we wish existed when we started that project. It covers hardware requirements, model selection, inference server setup, CI/CD integration and the security architecture that made it pass the compliance review. Why air-gapped AI code review is different from everything else Most AI code review guides assume cloud connectivity. The model runs on the provider's infrastructure. The code is sent via API. The review comes back. The security question is about data handling policies, encryption in transit and vendor trust. In an air-gapped environment, none of that applies. The model runs on hardware you control. The code never leaves your network. There is no vendor to trust because there is no vendor in the loop. This sounds simpler from a security perspective. In some ways it is. In other ways it's significantly more complex because you're now responsible for the entire stack, model selection, quantisation, inference hardware, deployment, monitoring, updating and maintaining the system that in a cloud deployment is someone else's problem. Hardware requirements The hardware question is the fir

Prisma and Drizzle connect as the postgres role and bypass Supabase RLS entirely, so your policies never protect ORM queries. Here's the fix. TL;DR: No. Prisma and Drizzle open their own direct Postgres connection and log in as the postgres role, which owns your tables and carries BYPASSRLS — so Row Level Security is skipped on every ORM query. Point your app's connection at a dedicated, non-owner NOBYPASSRLS role (and keep the auth check in your code), not at postgres . If you built your Supabase project assuming RLS is a safety net on the data itself, adding an ORM quietly punches a hole straight through it. Your policies are still there. They just never run for the ORM's connection. Here's the mechanism, the myth to unlearn, and three fixes in order of how much you should reach for them. Does Prisma respect Supabase RLS? No. RLS is not a global property of the database — Postgres enforces it per role, per statement . A policy only bites for a role that is (a) not the table's owner, (b) has no BYPASSRLS attribute, and (c) is not a superuser. The Supabase JS client satisfies all three because it reaches Postgres through PostgREST, which runs your query as the unprivileged anon or authenticated role. Prisma and Drizzle satisfy none of them: they read DATABASE_URL and open a raw SQL connection as postgres , which owns virtually every table you migrated and holds BYPASSRLS . Either fact alone is enough for Postgres to skip your policies. So the same query that returns one tenant's rows through supabase-js returns every tenant's rows through Prisma. That is not a bug in your policy — it's the connection role. Two doors into the same database There are two completely different paths to your data, and they authenticate as different roles. The supabase-js path (RLS enforced). supabase-js talks HTTP to PostgREST, not to Postgres directly. PostgREST connects as authenticator , validates the request JWT, and does a SET ROLE into anon or authenticated for the statement. Those

You've got a Next.js app on one domain and your API on another. The login works, the dashboard fills up, everything looks fine. Then one day you open the Network tab and there it is: your access token, in plain text, in a request header the browser sent all by itself. At that point every line of JavaScript on the page can read it. Not just your code. The analytics snippet you added last week, the twelve transitive dependencies you've never opened, whatever an XSS bug manages to slip in. And you never really decided this. It just happened, because calling the API straight from the component was the path of least resistance, and nothing complained. The browser is not a trusted client The version that gets you here looks completely reasonable: // ❌ a Client Component talking to your API ' use client ' ; export function Profile () { useEffect (() => { fetch ( ' https://api.example.com/me ' , { headers : { authorization : `Bearer ${ token } ` }, }) . then (( r ) => r . json ()) . then ( setProfile ); }, []); } Look at what that actually signed you up for. The token is in JavaScript, so the protection an HttpOnly cookie would have given you is simply gone. The call is cross-origin, so you're now on the hook for CORS: preflight requests, an allowed-origins list to maintain, Access-Control-Allow-Credentials , and the quiet worry that you've opened it wider than you should. And because the request leaves from the browser, anyone with devtools can read your API's base URL, its routes, and how it expects to be authenticated. That's a decent map of your backend, handed out to every visitor. What makes this hard to catch is that none of it breaks. It works in the demo, it works in production, it reviews clean. It just sits there as a liability until the day it stops being quiet. The browser talks to your server. Your server talks to your API. The Backend-for-Frontend pattern draws one line: the browser only ever talks to your Next.js server. The Next.js server talks to your API.

Jurig (Sundanese: ghost ) — an autonomous AI agent that haunts your binaries. .-. ██ ██ ██ ██████ ██ ██████ (o o) ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ | u | ██ ██ ██ ██████ ██ ██ ███ | | ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ '~-~' █████ ██████ ██ ██ ██ ██████ autonomous reverse-engineering agent · android · binary · frida Point it at an APK, XAPK, or native binary and it plans, decompiles, searches, hooks, captures traffic, and writes you a report — by itself. In one live run it took a real Android loan app, auto-extracted the XAPK, decompiled 13,367 classes , grepped the sources, and surfaced a hardcoded AES key with a zero IV plus the full API endpoint map — then asked me whether it should go dynamic with Frida. This post is the build story: the architecture, the design bets, and the three bugs that genuinely fought back. Repo: https://github.com/ReverserID/JURIG Why build another agent? Existing "AI reverse engineering" is mostly a pile of MCP servers you wire into a chat client. That's fine, but I wanted something opinionated: Autonomous , not chat — it drives a real toolchain end to end. A single portable binary — no Python venv soup, no MCP daemons. Multi-model — my Claude subscription, OpenRouter, local Ollama, Kimi, Qwen. A TUI that feels like a hacker tool , not a log dump. So: Go. Charmbracelet for the TUI (Bubble Tea + Lipgloss + Glamour). And a hard rule — no MCP . Every capability is a native Go function that shells out to a portable RE binary, or does the work in pure Go. Architecture ┌─ agent loop ─┐ plan → ask scope → recon → locate → dynamic → report │ │ │ LLM router │ anthropic · openai-compat (openrouter/ollama/kimi/qwen) · claude-cli │ │ │ 25+ tools │ jadx · apktool · radare2 · ghidra · frida · adb · proxy │ │ + secret_scan · url_extract · manifest · elf/pe_info · search_code │ │ │ TUI │ animated ghost header · code cards · model picker · NET panel └──────────────┘ One wire format, many providers The whole thing speaks the Anthropic Messages protocol internally. A router a

Introduction Linux is the backbone of modern infrastructure. From cloud servers and firewalls to SIEM platforms and security tools, Linux runs silently behind most enterprise environments. For a Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst, understanding Linux is not optional — it is a core skill. One of the most critical security mechanisms in Linux is its file permission and ownership model. Attackers abuse permissions to execute malware, hide persistence, escalate privileges, and erase evidence. SOC analysts rely on permission analysis to detect anomalies, investigate incidents, and build accurate timelines. Become a Medium member This article covers Linux File Permissions and Ownership in deep detail from a SOC analyst’s perspective. It is designed to take you from absolute beginner to security-aware professional, with real-world examples, attack scenarios, and investigation insights. Why Linux File Permissions Matter in SOC In SOC operations, analysts constantly deal with: Authentication logs System logs Application logs Scripts and binaries Configuration files Evidence files during incident response Every one of these objects is protected by Linux permissions. From a SOC perspective: Incorrect permissions = security risk Permission changes = potential indicator of compromise Executable permissions = possible malware Ownership changes = possible log tampering Understanding permissions allows SOC analysts to: Detect unauthorized access Identify privilege escalation Spot malware execution Preserve forensic evidence Reconstruct attacker activity Understanding Linux File Permission Basics Linux follows a Discretionary Access Control (DAC) model. This means: The owner of a file controls who can access it Permissions define what actions are allowed Every file and directory in Linux has: A type Permissions An owner (user) A group These attributes decide: Who can read the file Who can modify it Who can execute it Viewing Permissions Using ls -l The most common command to i

I Built an Open-Source Lab to Learn the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications Over the past few months, I've been exploring the security challenges around Large Language Models. While there are plenty of articles explaining prompt injection, system prompt leakage, insecure tool usage, and other LLM vulnerabilities, I kept asking myself one question: Where can someone actually practice exploiting these vulnerabilities? That's what led me to build LLMVault . LLMVault is an open-source, intentionally vulnerable platform that helps developers and security professionals learn the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications (2025) through hands-on labs instead of theory. Each lab simulates a vulnerable AI application inspired by real-world LLM attack scenarios. Instead of reading about prompt injection, you'll exploit it yourself, capture flags, understand why it worked, and then review the recommended mitigation. The objective is to bridge the gap between theory and practical AI security. Why I built LLMVault When learning web security, platforms like DVWA, WebGoat, and Juice Shop made learning practical. For AI security, I couldn't find a similar project that was: Open source Self-hosted Free to use Designed around the OWASP LLM Top 10 Built as a hands-on learning environment So I decided to build one. What is LLMVault? LLMVault is a deliberately vulnerable AI application where every challenge demonstrates a real-world LLM security issue. Instead of simply reading about prompt injection or system prompt leakage, you exploit vulnerable AI assistants, capture flags, and learn why the attack works. Each challenge also includes defensive guidance so you understand how to prevent the same issue in production. Features 🛡️ OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications (2025) 💥 CTF-style challenges 🔍 Realistic AI attack scenarios 📚 Defensive explanations 🐳 Docker support 🔑 No API keys required 💻 Fully offline 🧩 Extensible challenge framework Getting Started Clone the repository: git clone https://github

Written by Marlowe Finch, archival bloodhound at Bitcoin Institute. Bitcoin has been decentralized and trustless since block zero. No CEO, no committee, no kill switch, no single person who can rewrite the rules. That's the pitch. It's why the whitepaper still gets quoted like scripture. Block 74638 does not agree with the pitch. What actually shipped in that block On August 15, 2010, a transaction landed in the Bitcoin blockchain with two outputs. Each one paid out 92,233,720,368.54277039 BTC . Combined: over 184 billion BTC — roughly nine thousand times the 21 million BTC that will ever exist, created in a single transaction. The validation code, CheckTransaction() , checked that each individual output was non-negative. It never checked whether the sum of the outputs overflowed. Two values chosen just under INT64_MAX, added together, wrapped around to a negative number in signed 64-bit arithmetic. A 0.5 BTC input, compared against that negative sum, satisfied the "input covers output" check. The transaction validated. The block got mined. Every rule the network was running said this was fine. That's CVE-2010-5139. It is also, by any dollar value you want to apply, the most expensive missing bounds-check ever shipped to production. So who hand-builds a transaction engineered to overflow a signed 64-bit integer, and what does a currency with a hard 21-million-coin cap do when someone mints nine thousand times that in one block? The archive's full account of the incident lays it out block by block . The receipts 18:08 UTC, August 15 — Jeff Garzik opens a BitcoinTalk thread titled "Strange block 74638", pastes the raw block dump, and closes with one question: "92233720368.54277039 BTC? Is that UINT64_MAX, I wonder?" 20:38 UTC — Satoshi Nakamoto, to the bitcoin-list mailing list, network-wide: "*** WARNING *** We are investigating a problem. DO NOT TRUST ANY TRANSACTIONS THAT HAPPENED AFTER 15.08.2010 17:05 UTC (block 74638) until the issue is resolved." 20:39 UTC — Ga