Windows named pipes provide fast interprocess communication, but weak access controls can expose privileged services to untrusted processes. ThreatLocker explains how endpoint verification, command authorization, strict input validation, and narrowly scoped privileges can help secure named-pipe communication.
Malware is abusing car infotainment updates to install proxy software, turning Android head units into nodes for the BADBOX network. Kaspersky researchers found something in June 2026 that made them stop and look twice: an Android app with no interface at all, installed like any ordinary app but making zero effort to disguise itself as legitimate. Their report documents the first known malware infection targeting car head units, the Android-based infotainment and control systems built into many modern vehicles, spread through the vehicle’s own official update mechanism. Head units run Android for practical reasons, since manufacturers can build on existing source code and add their own custom system apps during production. That flexibility cuts both ways. Because head units are just Android devices under the hood, most apps built for smartphones can technically run on them too, including malware, even though something like a banking trojan would be wasted effort on a device nobody uses for mobile banking. Kaspersky researchers found something unusual in June 2026: an Android app with no visible interface that was installed like a normal app but did not try to look legitimate. Their report describes what they say is the first known malware infection targeting car head units, Android-based systems used for infotainment and vehicle controls, delivered through the car’s official update system. “We identified new Android malware: a multi-stage downloader whose ultimate purpose is ad fraud and creation of a proxy botnet.” reads the report published by Kaspersky. “The malware spread through the built-in updaters of Android-based automotive head unit firmware. This is the first documented case of malware found on a car head unit with an infection chain specific to that type of device.” Car head units often use Android because it is flexible and lets manufacturers add their own software. But this also creates a security risk. Since these systems are basically Android devices, many apps designed for smartphones can also run on them, including malware. The infection chain here starts inside TWCore, a completely legitimate system app responsible for analytics and firmware updates on DoFun head units. An MQTT message broker sends TWCore instructions about which APK files to download and install, and a specific configuration flag called installNotExists controls whether the app checks if something is already installed before pushing it. “TWCore only checks whether an app is already installed on the device when installNotExists = false The APK file is downloaded to <TWCore external cache dir>/push/apk/ for installation.” which means setting that flag the other way turns a routine update channel into a silent installation pipeline for anything the attackers want to push. What gets installed through that channel is a small dropper called JarService, carrying zero user interface and doing nothing but decrypting and loading the next stage. That stage is a loader that phones home to a command server, reports basic device details, and receives a download link for the actual payload, a third-stage module researchers found could be pulled in at least seven different versions simply by trying different version numbers in the download URL. That third stage turns out to be a clicker and reverse proxy component, checking in with its server every 90 minutes by default and waiting for new instructions. “In this stage, the malware sends a POST request to /cpc/api/task every 90 minutes by default, containing information about the infected device (display resolution, device model, the SSID of the connected Wi-Fi network, MAC address, and so on) along with the Trojan’s configuration version.” continues the report. “If the configuration is outdated, the C2 server returns an updated configuration containing new C2 addresses and new paths for sending HTTP requests.” The command system behind the malware is more powerful than you might expect from something running silently on a car’s dashboard. Researchers found nine commands, including ones that can change the clipboard, send HTTP requests, load web pages, and run JavaScript. In practice, attackers mainly used two: one to download and run new code, and another to send web requests. The extra module they deployed, called “zhima,” was a reverse proxy. This means the main goal was not to attack or control the car. Instead, the attackers wanted to use infected cars’ internet connections as part of a larger proxy network. Tracing the malware’s naming conventions and infrastructure led researchers to attribute the campaign, with high confidence, to MoYu Group, an actor connected to the BADBOX botnet that’s been documented previously by other researchers. A thread inside the second-stage loader carried the internal name “mosdk-host-loader,” which pointed toward malware previously found on TV set-top boxes tied to the same group, and overlapping network infrastructure independently spotted by a separate research team around the same time backed up the connection. The command system behind the malware is more powerful than you might expect from something running silently on a car’s dashboard. Researchers found nine commands, including ones that can change the clipboard, send HTTP requests, load web pages, and run JavaScript. In practice, attackers mainly used two: one to download and run new code, and another to send web requests. The extra module they deployed, called “zhima,” was a reverse proxy. This means the main goal was not to attack or control the car. Instead, the attackers wanted to use infected cars’ internet connections as part of a larger proxy network. There is also a strange detail in the network’s infrastructure. The proxy service’s admin panel allows people to create accounts if they have a valid invite code. Its copyright text and login page also look similar to those used by at least two commercial residential-proxy services. This suggests the network may be linked to a business-like proxy service, while also using infected cars to provide internet connections. BADBOX has survived several takedown attempts by researchers and law enforcement. This campaign shows why: the people behind it keep changing how they spread the malware and are moving into new types of devices. Cars are now joining smart TVs and set-top boxes as devices that can be quietly added to a botnet. As cars become more like computers, they also need the same kind of security protection. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Android Car)
UMass Amherst researchers showed expired Visa contactless cards can make real purchases by exploiting an unsigned expiry field in Visa’s EMV kernel. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst demonstrated at USENIX Security 2026 in Baltimore that expired Visa contactless credit cards can complete real purchases, including transactions at live retail and grocery merchants, by exploiting a gap in how the payment protocol handles expiration dates. The paper is titled “Zombie Cards Back Online: Reviving Expired Credit Cards for Contactless Payments,” and the name is accurate. Raja Hasnain Anwar, Gerard DeCunha, and Muhammad Taqi Raza built the attack around a structural weakness in EMV, the contactless payment protocol used by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. “A central source of fragility is that the EMV contactless protocol is a selectively authenticated transaction flow. Many data objects are exchanged in plaintext between the card and terminal [2], and only a subset is later bound to cryptographic verification via Offline Data Authentication (ODA) and issuer-verified cryptograms.” reads the paper. “In consequence, an adversary who obtains a man-in-the-middle position on the NFC channel can tamper with decision-critical fields that are consumed by the terminal but are not end-to-end integrity protected. Prior NFC attacks [10–12, 44], including relay-based manin-the-middle techniques, exploit this gap by manipulating transaction-relevant objects in transit while leaving cryptographic checks intact.” The attack exploits a specific design decision in Visa’s Kernel 3, the software layer that implements the EMV protocol for Visa transactions. A Visa contactless transaction presents the expiration date twice: once in a field the payment terminal reads (tag 5F24, the Application Expiration Date) and once in a field the issuing bank reads (tag 57, Track 2 Equivalent Data). These two representations should be tied together by a cryptographic signature, but in Visa’s implementation they aren’t. The relay attack changes only the expiry date that the payment terminal sees, replacing it with a future date while leaving the data sent to the bank unchanged. The card’s digital signature remains valid because it does not cover the expiry date. As a result, the bank receives a transaction that appears legitimate and passes its normal security checks. In simple terms, an attacker can change the expiry date between the card and the terminal without breaking the card’s cryptographic protection. The relay itself is two NFC-capable Android phones running custom software over Wi-Fi: one emulates a card, one emulates a terminal. Each communication round trip added roughly 20 milliseconds for relay alone and about 50 milliseconds with the date modification, keeping the per-transaction average around 415 milliseconds, within Visa’s 500-millisecond command limit. None of the test hardware used EMV’s optional Relay Resistance Protocol, which would have detected the added latency by bounding permissible response times. Mastercard, American Express, and Discover all blocked the attack. Mastercard’s terminal checks consistency between the two expiry representations during record parsing and treats a mismatch as a card data error. American Express binds the expiration date into the data covered by offline authentication, so a modified value produces a hash mismatch. Discover’s kernel wraps the modified transaction objects into the verified transaction hash, and those also failed. Visa’s Kernel 3 does none of these things. The outcome also depended on the issuing bank. The researchers tested three banks with expired and replaced physical Visa cards and found three distinct policies, not a clean pass or fail split. Bank A accepted the modified transactions at $1.00, $100.00, and $500.00 in the lab, and completed purchases of $2.79 at a retail merchant and $3.19 at a grocery merchant on campus. Bank A also accepted transactions from both the expired original card and its replacement against the same account simultaneously, a separate finding that Anwar described as alarming. Bank B detected the modification but still accepted some transactions. A third bank tested on Discover’s kernel detected the edit and declined; however, it also showed the simultaneous-card problem without any modification at all. There is another finding that makes the issue more serious. Researchers changed the Consumer Device Cardholder Verification Method flag at five US banks, and the transactions worked at most of them. This flag controls how the terminal verifies the cardholder, and attackers can change it because the payment data can be modified while it travels between the card and the terminal. There is also another problem with Kernel 3. It sends the issuer a Terminal Verification Results value filled with zeros. This means the bank cannot tell whether the terminal checked the card’s expiry date or whether that check failed. The bank must therefore approve the transaction without seeing what the terminal actually detected. “Across all tests, the dominant factors that determine attack success or failure are: (i) the EMV kernel in use and whether expiry data fields are cryptographically bound to authenticated protocol outputs; (ii) issuer-side lifecycle enforcement, especially whether authorization is tied only to the active account and PAN or also to the specific card instrument and expiration date; and (iii) whether terminal-side validation results are visible to the issuer via TVR. In contrast, transaction amount1 , merchant category, and POS terminal brand did not independently determine the transaction outcome.” continues the paper. The researchers disclosed the findings to Visa in May 2025 and followed up in December 2025. The paper records that Visa acknowledged the report, said it passed initial triage, and indicated it was undergoing reproduction by Visa’s red team. No CVE has been assigned. Neither Visa nor any of the notified banks confirmed any mitigation as of the paper’s acceptance. The Register asked Visa for comment and received no response. The countermeasures the paper proposes sit at the kernel, terminal, and issuer layers: bind the expiry date cryptographically to an issuer-verifiable signature, require terminals to compare both expiry representations and make mismatches visible to the issuer, and have issuers authorize against the PAN-and-expiry combination rather than the PAN alone. For cardholders, the researchers recommend destroying the chip and magnetic stripe of expired cards rather than discarding them intact. Given that the attack requires only the expired physical card or sustained NFC proximity to it, that guidance is now slightly less hypothetical than it was before this paper. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Visa)
A previously unknown malware family dubbed SynkLoader is being distributed in Microsoft Teams phishing campaigns to steal credentials via a fake lock screen. The attacker impersonates the target company's IT help desk, a tactic Microsoft highlighted earlier this year as increasingly common in multi-stage attacks. Expel’s security researcher Marcus Hutchins explains that the attacks direct the victim to install a fake “PowerShell Cleaner” executable (.MSI) hosted in Microsoft Azure, making the download appear trustworthy. Analysis of the malware showed "compile dates and file timestamps indicating it was first compiled and distributed around July 28, 2026." The installer extracts a PowerShell script named cleaner.ps1 and a ZIP archive containing the Python framework, a malicious Python script, precompiled Python libraries, and several fake Microsoft runtime DLLs.
Using the same email, phone number, payment method, and other identifiers makes it easier for data brokers and attackers to profile your activity. Anonyome Labs explains how separate digital personas can reduce correlation and limit the impact of breaches, spam, and identity theft.
Microsoft has patched a maximum-severity vulnerability in the Entra ID identity and access management (IAM) platform that has been exploited in attacks.
Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) says a cybersecurity incident exposed the personal information of some current and former employees and job applicants, stemming from a flaw in third-party software. Clinical systems and patient records were not affected. (264)
GitLab flaw CVE-2026-19478 is now under active exploitation, allowing unauthenticated attackers to modify or delete public projects. WatchTowr researchers warn of active exploitation of critical GitLab flaw CVE-2026-19478 (CVSS score of 9.4). This week, GitLab pushed out an emergency patch to address this flaw, which 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. Organizations should urgently patch internet-facing GitLab servers. Until they can update, they should restrict unauthenticated access to /api/graphql, disable public repositories where possible, and check logs for requests containing @gl_introduced. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CVE-2026-19478)
Cl0p claims over 40 organizations fell victim to attacks exploiting a PTC Windchill and FlexPLM vulnerability. Cl0p is using a familiar strategy again: exploit one flaw in enterprise software to attack many companies, then publish the victims’ names if they refuse to pay. The group claims it has targeted more than 40 organizations through a vulnerability in PTC’s Windchill and FlexPLM platforms, which manufacturers and engineering companies use to manage product and design data. CVE-2026-12569 (CVSS score of 9.3) is a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in PTC Windchill PDMlink and PTC FlexPLM. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability through the deserialization of untrusted data. The flaw impacts all CPS versions and Windchill and FlexPLM releases prior to 11.0 M030. In June, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. German police reportedly warned organizations directly that attacks were coming, which tells you the exploitation window here wasn’t exactly subtle to security researchers watching it unfold. Cl0p group’s tooling for this campaign goes well beyond a basic web shell. Security firm ReliaQuest found the group deployed a custom implant built for full data theft on its own, no additional tools required to actually pull data out once inside. A class loader like that turns a single web shell into an open-ended backdoor, useful for lateral movement, ransomware deployment, or just quietly sitting there for months. “ReliaQuest identified the web shell as a fully equipped extortion platform: it maps sensitive vault data, decrypts every credential in the Windchill keystore, and includes a custom Java class loader that lets Clop execute any additional code inside the application process, extending the shell into an unlimited backdoor for follow-on activity such as lateral movement, ransomware, or persistence.” reads the report published by ReliaQuest. “The web shell gives attackers a direct path to credential theft and large-scale data exfiltration, with no additional tooling required. Unlike generic command shells, this implant decrypts credentials, delivers malware, and maps stored files for exfiltration.” Cl0p’s naming strategy followed its usual slow build. The group initially posted partial company names on its leak site, then switched to full names starting August 12, and the victim count has climbed steadily since. For each organization, the listing includes what type of data got stolen and roughly how much, ranging anywhere from a single gigabyte up to multiple terabytes depending on the target. The stolen data includes databases, project files, backups, engineering documents, blueprints, diagrams and corporate files, as well as images. The victim list reads like a cross-section of major manufacturing and industrial names: Shell, Philips, Fiserv, Zebra Technologies, Ingersoll Rand, Toast, Mindray, and Largan Precision, the company that supplies camera lenses for Apple’s devices. Researchers noticed that GE was on the list briefly before quietly disappearing from Cl0p’s site, a move that usually signals either a ransom payment or at least resumed negotiations behind closed doors. Shell, Philips, Fiserv, and GE have all publicly acknowledged awareness of the claims and said they’re investigating, though none has confirmed a significant breach so far. None of this is a new pattern for Cl0p specifically; it’s the same mass-exploitation-then-extortion model the group has run repeatedly against Oracle E-Business Suite, MOVEit, Cleo, and GoAnywhere over the past few years. What’s different this time is the target: enterprise PLM software sits deep inside manufacturing supply chains, holding the exact kind of engineering data that competitors and nation-states alike would pay real money to see. If your organization runs Windchill or FlexPLM and hasn’t checked for this specific CVE yet, that’s the item to move to the top of today’s list. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Cl0p )
Microsoft on Thursday warned of a maximum-severity security flaw in Entra ID that it said has been exploited in the wild, but noted that no customer action is required. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-69836 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a case of remote code execution impacting the tech giant's cloud-based identity and access management service. It was previously called Azure Active Directory
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