Researchers tested 31 million patterns to disrupt surveillance AI, with promising results but significant gaps between simulation and real-world use. The Kansas City-based cybersecurity researcher Bill Swearingen spent the past year doing something that sounds almost too simple to work: printing patterns, watching cameras fail to detect them, and repeating. TechCrunch reports that after roughly 31 million tests, he can now generate patterns on demand that block license plate readers and surveillance cameras from recognizing whatever the pattern covers, whether that’s a person or a vehicle. The project is called noRecognition, and the core idea isn’t stealth in the traditional sense. The camera still records everything just fine. What breaks is the detection layer sitting on top of the footage, the software that flags license plates, tracks faces, or spots “activity of interest” across thousands of hours of video. Swearingen’s patterns don’t hide you from the lens; they make the algorithm looking through that lens shrug and move on. Swearingen, co-founder of the SecKC meetup, said his project started for personal reasons. He became concerned about the growing number of surveillance cameras in his town and the possibility of being tracked while attending a protest. What started as a simple experiment later became a reinforcement learning system. He taught the model to create patterns, learn from failures and keep improving. Over time, it learned how to avoid detection by several camera systems. Every time a pattern failed and got detected, the system adjusted and tried again, eventually learning to defeat multiple detection algorithms simultaneously rather than just one at a time. The research dashboard behind the project, published at sandbox.norecognition.org, goes considerably deeper into the numbers than the headline claim suggests, and it’s refreshingly upfront about what’s proven versus what isn’t. The team states its overall objective plainly as “one pattern that defeats every detector,” and by their own account that goal remains only partially met. Their strongest validated result against a detector extracted directly from a real deployed surveillance camera sits at 61.7% non-detection across held-out test subjects, a solid number, but nowhere near total, and still a digital simulation rather than a real-world fabric test. That distinction matters more than it might seem. Most of the dashboard’s headline figures are explicitly labeled as digital, simulated results, meaning the pattern was tested against a virtual camera and printed ink model rather than an actual garment photographed by an actual camera in the field. The gap between “works in simulation” and “works when Donut Media wraps a real 2009 Toyota Yaris in it,” which is the physical test Swearingen ran live at DEF CON, is exactly the gap this kind of research has to close before anyone should treat it as a reliable, everyday privacy tool. “On Friday at the Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Swearingen ran his first real-world test. With help from Donut Media, the test involved covering a 2009 Toyota Yaris with one of Swearingen’s newest patterns to see if the car would be invisible to detection by a Flock camera.” reports TechCrunch. “We proved it was effective,” said Swearingen, though the wheels were a challenge. The video of the demo will be out in the next few weeks, said Donut Media.” That DEF CON demo is where things got concrete. Swearingen covered a car in one of his newest patterns and tested it against a Flock Safety camera, the kind widely deployed for automated license plate reading across the US. He said the test proved effective, though the vehicle’s wheels turned out to be a persistent weak point, curved surfaces apparently don’t cooperate with flat printed patterns the way a car door does. Source Tech Crunch – A photo of a 2009 Toyota Yaris at the Def Con conference in Las Vegas, covered in a pattern made by Bill Swearingen, as part of a test to see if it can defeat surveillance camera detection. Image Credits:Bill Swearingen / Donut Media Swearingen is not publishing his best patterns because he does not want camera makers to easily find and block them. Instead, he is using crowdfunding to develop and sell printed products such as T-shirts and hoodies, with vehicle wraps possibly coming later. It is still unclear whether the project will become a practical privacy tool for everyday users or remain mainly a DEF CON demonstration. Its real effectiveness will depend on how well the patterns work on real clothing, in different weather and camera conditions. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Surveillance camera)
GitLab patched a critical GraphQL flaw that let unauthenticated attackers remotely modify or delete public projects on self-managed servers. GitLab pushed out an emergency patch this week to address a critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-19478 (CVSS score of 9.4), that could let an attacker with zero credentials remotely modify or delete public projects and user data. “GitLab has remediated an issue that under certain conditions could allow an unauthenticated user to remotely modify or delete public projects and user data via a GraphQL directive.” reads the advisory. GitLab issued an emergency patch on August 17, five days after its regular update. The vulnerability impacts only self-managed installations, users should upgrade to versions 19.2.4, 19.1.6, 19.0.8, and 18.11.11. There’s a gap worth flagging for anyone still sitting on an older release. The available patches don’t cover the 18.2 through 18.10 branches, even though those versions technically fall inside the affected range. If you’re running anything in that window, staying put isn’t really an option; you’ll need to upgrade to a patched branch entirely rather than waiting for a fix that isn’t coming for your current one. hiimguardian reported the flaw through the company HackerOne bug bounty program. A second, less severe issue shipped in the same release. CVE-2026-19650 (CVSS score of 7.1), involves a cross-site request forgery weakness in how GitLab’s GraphQL handles multiplex queries, letting an unauthenticated attacker trigger mutations through GET requests due to improper validation. Unlike the critical flaw, this one needs a victim to actually interact with something, so it’s a real risk but a considerably narrower one. There’s no evidence either bug has been exploited in the wild yet, and no public proof-of-concept code has surfaced as of publication. That’s the good news. The less comforting part is GitLab’s own disclosure policy: full technical details typically go public on the company’s issue tracker 90 days after the patching release, which puts a working understanding of exactly how this bug functions squarely in mid-November, plenty of time for someone motivated enough to reverse-engineer the patch diff themselves before then. This is not the first serious GitLab issue in recent months. Last month, researchers released working exploit code for another remote-code-execution flaw affecting self-managed servers. Organizations running GitLab on their own infrastructure should therefore treat this patch as a priority, especially given the critical severity and the fact that the vulnerability requires no authentication or user interaction. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, GitLab)
Varonis Threat Labs has disclosed three vulnerabilities in Microsoft Copilot Personal that it said could allow a single click on a crafted link to silently pull data from connected apps and other information available to the victim's Copilot session. The flaws, which the researchers collectively named CoSnitch, turn in part on an undocumented URL parameter that the assistant itself surfaced
Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new typosquatting campaign targeting RubyGems users with a Windows-based information stealer. OpenSourceMalware, which discovered the activity on August 15, 2026, is tracking the threat under the moniker StubMaker. The complete list of packages published as part of the campaign is below - ubnuler ubnlder ri18nr reaker rakier orakw joxn
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a critical flaw impacting Ray to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. Ray is an open-source, Python-native distributed computing framework designed to scale artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads. As of writing, the GitHub project has more than
SafePal says a breach exposed personal data of 39,798 customers, but not wallet credentials, private keys, seed phrases, or payment information. SafePal disclosed a data breach affecting about 39,798 customers after hackers exploited a vulnerability in its order-tracking plugin. The flaw exposed information linked to orders placed between March 2, 2025, and April 11, 2026, including names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and order details. “Recently, the team identified an authorization flaw in the order-tracking function for a plug-in associated with customer order information. Under certain conditions, the flaw allowed unauthorized access to another customer’s order information.” reads the notice published by the company. “We are extremely sorry to inform the community that order information for customers who placed orders between March 2, 2025 and April 11, 2026. Information including name, email address, shipping address, phone number, and purchase details, was accessed externally without authorization due to the flaw. The affected data involves approximately 39,798 customers.” SafePal is a Singapore-based company focused on cryptocurrency security. It develops hardware and software wallets that let users securely store and manage digital assets. Its products include hardware wallets, a mobile app and browser-based tools supporting multiple blockchains and cryptocurrencies. The disclosure came as a threat actor began advertising the stolen data on a cybercrime forum, claiming the same number of affected customers. SafePal confirmed the security breach incident, while warning users about the exposure of their personal and order-related information. The company said all affected customers were notified individually by email on August 16 and urged them to check their status. The exposed order data could enable more convincing phishing attempts, including fake support calls, emails, refund offers, firmware updates or malicious websites designed to steal additional information. SafePal stressed that seed phrases, private keys and wallet passwords were not exposed, so customers do not need to move their assets solely because of the breach. However, anyone who has shared a seed phrase or private key with an attacker should consider the wallet compromised, create a new one using a trusted device or official app, and immediately transfer the remaining funds. The crypto firm said the breach did not expose seed phrases, private keys, wallet passwords or other wallet credentials. Bank details, payment card numbers and government IDs were also not involved. The company pointed out it does not collect or store such information and found no evidence that the incident compromised access to customer wallets or funds. “However, if you have already shared or entered your seed phrase or private key in response to a suspicious message, website, phone call, or letter, treat that wallet as compromised.” continyes the notice. “Create a new wallet using a trusted SafePal device or official SafePal application, and move your remaining assets to the new wallet immediately. Lastly, contact SafePal through our official support channel.” SafePal said it has fixed the vulnerability and added further security measures, with an independent security firm reviewing the fix and order-processing systems. The company also reduced data retention to 90 days, contacted affected customers and logistics partners, and opened a dedicated support channel. The firm identified more than 30 fraudulent websites and phishing links and removed them. It will continue monitoring scams, investigating potential risks and sharing updates through its official channels. SafePal urges customers who suffered financial losses linked to the breach to contact the company, which is working with specialists to trace stolen on-chain assets. “For more FAQs and details, we will keep updating the dedicated webpage for this incident.” concludes the notice. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, SafePal)
GitHub is down for some users as a widespread outage is causing errors across the website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and several other services. GitHub confirmed the outage at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026, when it said it was investigating reports of performance problems affecting some of its services. The problems quickly spread across several parts of GitHub that developers rely on, including API Requests, Actions, Webhooks, Issues, and Pull Requests. According to GitHub's status page, the company is seeing error rates of around 20% across its web experience and API traffic. GitHub says archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing error rates of approximately 50%. Likewise, authentication-related services are also having problems, with SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync affected by the incident.
Author: Len Noe, Solutions Architect, BeyondTrust Every mature Active Directory environment has a component that quietly holds more power than the people running it usually admit: the Certification Authority (CA). The thing your entire estate has agreed to believe. When it signs a certificate, every machine, service, and authentication flow downstream treats that signature as truth. That is an enormous amount of trust concentrated in one system, and most organizations manage it like a utility installed once and never thought about again. Certighost, tracked as CVE-2026-54121, is a reminder of what happens when that trust is misplaced. Researchers published a working proof-of-concept on July 24, 2026, demonstrating that a low-privileged Active Directory user (holding nothing more than a standard domain account) can coerce an Enterprise CA into issuing a valid authentication certificate for a Domain Controller, then use that certificate to become the Domain Controller.
A seller claims 1.7M McDonald’s employee records were stolen from Azure. An 8,000-row sample appears genuine, but its age and full size remain unconfirmed. A seller on a data-trading forum posted an 8,000-row sample this week claiming it came from McDonald’s own Azure tenant, part of a supposed 1.7 million-record employee directory obtained using stolen credentials. Ransomnews’s technical breakdown found the sample holds up as genuine on every test that can be run against it. What it can’t confirm, notably, is exactly how old the data is or whether the full 1.7 million figure is real. “The listing is a straightforward private sale, posted at 4:08 AM forum time under the title “McDonalds 1.7M+ Azure Internal Employee Dump”. The seller, an account called TheHatman, writes that the data was “downloaded directly from Azure Tenant using compromised credentials” and that it contains “employee accounts, service accounts, and other tenant account records”. No price is named. Buyers are invited to make offers.” reads the report published by Ransomnews. “To evidence the claim, the seller attached a free 8,000-record sample. That file is the entire basis for what follows. Ransomnews analysed it offline. We did not access, probe or authenticate against any McDonald’s system, and we have redacted the sample’s download location from the screenshot below because it still resolves to real people’s contact details.” The file’s structure gives away exactly what it is before you even read a single row. Column names like FacsimileTelephoneNumber and PhysicalDeliveryOfficeName aren’t something anyone invents; they’re the exact property names Microsoft’s own PowerShell directory tools return when an administrator exports a user list from Entra ID, the modern name for Azure Active Directory. Whoever produced this file ran a standard Microsoft export command and saved the output, nothing more exotic than that. Every one of the 50 email domains found in the sample is genuinely McDonald’s-controlled, spanning corporate staff, restaurant crew accounts, franchisee logins, and vendor guest access across more than thirty countries. Three rows even carry the tenant’s own built-in Microsoft address, mcdonaldscorp.onmicrosoft.com, something that’s invisible from outside the organization and simply isn’t guessable or scrapeable. Add in 233 rows with the exact kind of garbled text encoding that happens when someone forgets to specify UTF-8 during an export, plus 85 job titles cut off at precisely 30 characters mid-word, the unmistakable fingerprint of a fixed-width HR system field bleeding into the directory, and you get a picture consistent with a real export rather than something assembled from public sources. “The file is broken in the ways real exports are broken. 233 rows contain mangled characters: Königswinter appears as “Königswinter”, München as “München”, and Ukrainian job titles are rendered as unreadable strings of Cyrillic run through the wrong character set. This is what happens when somebody runs Export-Csv without specifying UTF-8 encoding.” continues the report. “It’s a mistake, and it is not the kind of mistake anybody makes on purpose. A fabricated dataset doesn’t come with authentic encoding damage.” One detail actually reaches outside the file entirely. A restaurant entry for “556 Upton” on Upton By-Pass in Wirral, complete with phone number, matches a real, publicly listed McDonald’s location down to the digit. That’s a small anchor, but it’s the kind of anchor fabricated data doesn’t usually survive contact with. What the sample genuinely can’t settle is timing. There isn’t a single date field anywhere in the schema, no creation date, no last login, nothing to age a row by. “We can say with confidence that the data came out of McDonald’s directory. We cannot say from the file alone when it came out.” The best clue available is McDonald’s own market footprint: no Russian records at all, consistent with the company’s 2022 exit, and no Kazakh ones either, which points to sometime in 2023 or later, a wide window rather than a firm date. The 1.7 million headline number also isn’t something 8,000 rows can verify. That sample is under half a percent of the claim, and while nothing in it looks implausible given McDonald’s global workforce size, plausible isn’t the same thing as confirmed. A seller running a volume trade across multiple companies has every incentive to round the number up in the listing title. This McDonald’s post wasn’t an isolated event either. The same account, going by TheHatman, posted nine listings in total over sixteen days, claiming roughly 3.6 million records combined across McDonald’s, Vodafone, Gap, two hotel chains, and four major IT outsourcing firms including Kyndryl and Tata Consultancy Services. Every listing uses an identical 19-column schema and nearly identical wording, the kind of consistency you get from one person running the same export script against whatever tenant they currently hold a working login for, not from someone fabricating nine separate datasets by hand. That pattern points toward something fairly mundane and fairly common: infostealer malware harvesting saved credentials at scale, feeding a resale market that lets one operator walk into tenant after tenant using logins nobody bothered to protect with multi-factor authentication. Reading an entire company directory doesn’t require a sophisticated intrusion; it requires one working account in a tenant that hasn’t restricted user enumeration, which is Entra ID’s default setting unless an administrator has explicitly locked it down. For anyone at McDonald’s or one of the other eight listed companies, the real risk here isn’t account takeover, since there are no passwords or hashes in the sample at all. It’s social engineering: full names, job titles, direct phone numbers, and internal email formats are more than enough to make a fake helpdesk call or a fraudulent invoice sound completely legitimate. Treat unsolicited contact that already knows your role and your location with more suspicion than usual, because that’s precisely the kind of detail this file was built to hand someone. “For individuals named in the data, there is no action that removes the exposure.” concludes the report.”The realistic response is scepticism about unsolicited contact that arrives already knowing your role and your store, and a refusal to act on instructions that arrive by phone or email without out-of-band confirmation.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, McDonald’s)
GitLab has released security updates to address a critical vulnerability impacting its Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that, under certain conditions, could allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely modify or delete public projects and user data. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-19478, has been rated Critical by GitLab and assigned a CVSS score of 9.4. Released on
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