Iran APT Sabotages US PLCs: CISA Warns of Physical Risk

The US government discloses an Iranian APT compromising internet-exposed PLCs in water and energy facilities, disabling safety logic to cause potential… The escalation is assessed as a direct response to geopolitical tensions among Iran, the United States, and Israel. The shift from public defacement in 2023 to silent sabotage of industrial control systems marks an operational turning point with potentially physical consequences. The actors gain initial access by exploiting PLCs and OT devices directly exposed on the internet. The advisory identifies five specific ports: 44818, 2222, 102, 502 for industrial protocols, plus port 22 for SSH modems. This exposure, typical of architectures that assume “security by obscurity,” eliminates any intermediary: the attacker interacts directly with the controller.

DNS Poisoning Tactics Expand to Hospitality Wi-Fi

Photo by Misha Feshchak on Unsplash

Adversaries have been compromising public Wi-Fi gateways at hotels, conference centers, and other shared venues to hijack the accounts of traveling corporate employees. Once they control the Wi-Fi gateway, they quietly redirect users to attacker-controlled infrastructure to steal credentials, in activity ongoing since at least June 2026.ReliaQuest assesses this tradecraft is similar to that of “APT28” (also known as “Fancy Bear” and “Forest Blizzard”), a Russian military intelligence group that was previously linked to similar router-based campaigns compromising Microsoft 365 accounts.Organizations can close the primary exposure with one control: enforce always-on, full-tunnel VPN on corporate devices. This routes all traffic—including DNS—through the corporate network before it ever reaches the hotel gateway, effectively stopping the attack.

There Are Thousands of Inventions the Government Doesn’t Want You to See. A Shady Law Is Hiding Them.

A Cold War-era law called the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 allows U.S. government agencies to suppress patents deemed threats to national security, fueling decades of conspiracy theories about hidden world-changing inventions like the legendary “water engine.”The Invention Secrecy Act lacks clear accountability measures and vaguely defines what constitutes “national security,” making it theoretically possible for the government to suppress inventions to protect corporate interests, though no credible evidence proves this has occurred.In fiscal year 2025 alone, over 6,500 patents were subjected to secrecy orders under the act—more than half the total suppressed during all of World War II—raising questions about whether the government is applying the law too broadly.

Microsoft’s Secure Boot has been broken for a decade and no one noticed until now

An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway. The images are known as shims, which were invented to extend Secure Boot to Linux devices and utility software. Using a technique simple enough to be performed by novice hackers, these old, forgotten shims can be used to completely circumvent the protection, which is embedded into the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of the device’s motherboard. The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly available images once vulnerabilities were found in them.

Microsoft Confirms Windows GDID Device Identifier That Cannot Be Disabled, Documented in FBI Case Filing

Microsoft has confirmed the existence of a persistent Windows device identifier called GDID, first publicly detailed in an FBI federal complaint against an alleged hacker. Microsoft has publicly acknowledged the existence of the Global Device Identifier (GDID), a device-specific ID assigned to Windows installations, in a federal complaint filed by US prosecutors against an alleged member of the Scattered Spider hacking group. The ID is generated when Windows is set up with a Microsoft Account, persists through Windows updates, and cannot be disabled without affecting Windows activation and Microsoft Store apps.

Nearly a million passports and photo IDs were left unprotected on the public internet

Cannabis Club Systems, also known as Nefos Solutions, left passports and photo IDs potentially exposed on the public web.Nearly a million passports and photo IDs were left unprotected on the public internetThis should be a wakeup call for data security.

Source: theverge.com

US offers $10 million for info on group behind Signal and WhatsApp hacking spree

Federal authorities are offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of a Russian state cyber group that has compromised thousands of Signal and WhatsApp accounts belonging to investigative reporters and US government employees.

Source: arstechnica.com

Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 7

Photo by Lianhao Qu on Unsplash

In December 2014, Der Spiegel published one of the most significant articles in the Snowden archive, exposing the scale of NSA and GCHQ efforts to break encryption and compromise encrypted communications. The article was accompanied by 44 supporting documents. One of those documents contains a previously unreported redaction failure that we believe is the most significant in any Snowden publication to date.

Source: libroot.org

Hackers steal Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine data in Europe, companies say

U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said on Wednesday that documents related to development of their COVID-19 vaccine had been ‘unlawfully accessed’ in a cyberattack on Europe’s medicines regulator. The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which assesses medicines and vaccines for the European Union, said hours earlier it had been targeted in a cyberattack. It gave no further details.

iPhone zero-click Wi-Fi exploit is one of the most breathtaking hacks ever

Earlier this year, Apple patched one of the most breathtaking iPhone vulnerabilities ever: a memory corruption bug in the iOS kernel that gave attackers remote access to the entire device—over Wi-Fi, with no user interaction required at all. Oh, and exploits were wormable—meaning radio-proximity exploits could spread from one nearby device to another, once again, with no user interaction needed. This Wi-Fi packet of death exploit was devised by Ian Beer, a researcher at Project Zero, Google’s vulnerability research arm.