Attackers are targeting CI/CD pipelines and developer tools instead of application code, requiring total SDLC visibility and strict security controls The post Connecting the Dots: Securing the Overlooked Corners of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) Supply Chain appeared first on Unit 42.
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of trojanized npm packages that masquerade as working calendar and streak utilities but are engineered to stealthily deliver an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Linux implant dubbed RedC2 4.0. "When the module loads, it locates the bundled binary, marks it executable, and launches it as a detached background process," TrendAI, Trend Micro's
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.
More than 9,300 Amazon Web Services (AWS) access keys publicly exposed between August 2022 and August 2026 are still active and valid. Truffle Security has been tracking this exposure for the past four years and says that 817 of the exposed keys were linked to companies, 526 of them being AWS root keys. According to the researchers, 242 of the keys are associated with Identity and Access Management (IAM) users with the AdministratorAccess policy. This role has full permissions to create, modify, delete, and view virtually all AWS services and resources within an account. They note that each key of the 768 live keys in the two sets “full control of a company's AWS account.” The company found 431,875 AWS secrets across code repositories, Git history, datasets, Docker images, registries, and CI logs and extracted 64,024 unique AWS keys that corresponded to 50,654 AWS accounts after removing duplicates.
Microsoft says ongoing issues causing games to crash or fail to launch after installing the August 2026 Windows updates may be caused by peripherals with RGB lighting. As Microsoft explained when it confirmed it's investigating on Wednesday, this known issue affects games like ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2. "Following the release of Windows updates on August 11, 2026 (KB5121003) and later, Microsoft received reports of issues involving inability to run games as expected," Microsoft said on the Windows release health dashboard. On impacted PCs, users are also experiencing gaming freezes, "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION" errors, and even unexpected system restarts. In a Thursday update, Microsoft said the gaming issues may be caused by drivers or components installed by RGB devices on affected Windows systems.
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 started rolling out a Classic Outlook theme for users of Outlook on the web and the New Outlook for Windows. This new Outlook theme is rolling out as part of a targeted release beginning mid-August and expected to complete by the end of September. The theme will become generally available worldwide between late September and late October. "When enabled, the setting applies coordinated changes across the Outlook experience, including visual styling, layout, typography, icons, and selected interactions," Microsoft said in a Microsoft 365 Message Center update. Once rolled out, the feature will not override any existing administrator configurations and will not automatically migrate users from classic Outlook to the new Outlook. Microsoft also added that the new user interface style will be enabled by default for some users, but they can toggle it off to switch to the standard theme from Settings > General > Appearance.
Cisco patched nine critical flaws, including six rated CVSS 10.0, found during internal testing. None are known to be exploited. Cisco released another batch of security fixes for its Crosswork platforms and Secure Workload software, part of what it’s calling an ongoing internal security review, and the CVSS scores in this round are unusually severe. “As part of Cisco’s ongoing commitment to proactive security and product quality, the Cisco Crosswork engineering team has conducted a comprehensive internal security review. This review resulted in a software hardening release that addresses multiple internally discovered vulnerabilities.” reads the advisory. “These vulnerabilities were found during internal testing and are not known to be actively exploited. To assist customers in patching and to streamline the disclosure process, Cisco has grouped these issues by their underlying vulnerability class – Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) – and assigned a single Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Identifier (CVE ID) to each CWE grouping.” Four vulnerabilities affect Crosswork Data Gateway, Crosswork Network Controller, and Crosswork Planning, all impacting these products regardless of how they’re configured: CVE-2026-20030 (CVSS score: 10.0) – an SQL injection vulnerability that lets an attacker manipulate database queries directly. CVE-2026-20357 (CVSS score: 10.0) – a missing authentication for critical function vulnerability, meaning a sensitive operation can be triggered without ever proving who you are. CVE-2026-20358 (CVSS score: 10.0) – an external control of file system vulnerability, letting an outside actor influence which files the system reads or writes. CVE-2026-20359 (CVSS score: 9.9) – an insufficiently protected credentials vulnerability, where stored login material isn’t locked down the way it should be. Seeing three CVSS 10.0 vulnerabilities in a single Cisco advisory is unusual. The four flaws affect Crosswork 7.2.1 and earlier, and Cisco fixed them in version 7.2.1-SP. Five more vulnerabilities got patched in Cisco Secure Workload, spanning both its cloud SaaS and on-premises deployments: CVE-2026-20231 (CVSS score: 9.9) – a set of improper neutralization of special elements vulnerabilities covering command, operating system, and argument injection, essentially several different ways to smuggle unintended commands into the system. CVE-2026-20315 (CVSS score: 10.0) – a set of improper access control vulnerabilities spanning authorization, authentication, privileges, and bypasses, a broad category that generally means the system doesn’t reliably enforce who’s allowed to do what. CVE-2026-20317 (CVSS score: 10.0) – a set of improper authentication vulnerabilities covering missing authentication, authentication bypass, and reliance on untrusted inputs, another maximum-severity cluster centered on identity verification failing outright. CVE-2026-20318 (CVSS score: 9.6) – a set of improper input validation vulnerabilities spanning input validation, path traversal, and external path control, the kind of flaw that lets crafted input reach files or directories it was never meant to touch. CVE-2026-20319 (CVSS score: 7.5) – a set of improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer vulnerabilities spanning buffer overflows and out-of-bounds writes, lower severity than the rest but still a genuine memory-safety problem. The networking giant addressed five vulnerabilities in Secure Workload Release 3.10.9.1 for the 3.10 branch and earlier, and 4.0.4.16 for the 4.0 branch. The company found these vulnerabilities during internal testing; it is not aware of attacks in the wild exploiting this issue. “The Cisco PSIRT is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerabilities that are described in this advisory.” conctinues the advisory. “Cisco says it found the vulnerabilities through internal security testing that also used advanced AI models.” Nobody’s reported active attacks against any of these nine flaws yet, and Cisco’s own review process caught them before an outside researcher or attacker did. If your organization runs Crosswork or Secure Workload in any configuration, this isn’t a patch to schedule for next month’s maintenance window. Perfect CVSS scores tend to attract attention fast once a vulnerability’s technical details start circulating, and Cisco’s internal discovery only buys you a head start if you actually use it. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Cisco)
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) ordered U.S. federal agencies to prioritize patching two actively exploited vulnerabilities in the TrueConf Server self-hosted communications platform. TrueConf Server is designed for secure corporate messaging and video conferencing and, unlike cloud-based software like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, it operates inside an organization's local network (LAN). The most severe is a critical missing authentication security flaw (tracked as CVE-2026-72529) that allows attackers without privileges to remotely execute arbitrary scripts on unpatched servers. "A remote unauthenticated attacker connecting to TrueConf Server over 4307/TCP can invoke an undocumented critical function and execute an arbitrary script on the server," the TrueConf security team explains.
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