Have you read some of our @HuntressLabs blogs and thought to yourself, damn, this looks like fun? Do you love logs and investigating incidents ? Want to help protect the 99 percent? If it's a yasss across the board then I have good news for you, I'm hiring for 2 positions on our Tactical Response team! Check out the posting below and apply! job-boards.greenhouse.io/hun…

A fake accelerator tried to #hack us today. "Apex Accelerator" asked us to run their due diligence tool: npx @apexacc/cli. It dropped a hidden, encrypted malware loader disguised as an Apple app. We caught it and lost nothing. Here's what happened 🧵

Our long time friend and research partner, Julian Ferdinand Vögele (@JulianVoeg), brings us a deep analysis of Middle Eastern threat actors. He is taking us on a nice stroll, revealing a fragmented yet deeply interconnected cyber ecosystem shaped by hidden relationships, shared operational structures, and an increasingly industrialized approach to cyber power.

Our latest research shows how North Korean and Iranian hackers are increasingly launching hard-to-stop cyberattacks. And they’re using blockchains to do it. We call the attack tactic “Blockchain Dead Drops,” or BDDs. BDDs are getting more sophisticated, more prevalent, and therefore more dangerous. Read on:

My name is Chris Painter, and I'm the President of METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research). I know we've made a lot of new friends on the internet the last couple of days, so I thought I'd take this chance to re-up what we do and why. Our work is aimed at making sure that if AI really were autonomous, difficult to steer, and close to "going rogue," the public would find out. If evidence exists inside of an AI company that it’s close to losing control of AI, we want to make sure that information gets shared with the rest of the world, including governments and the public outside the company’s walls. This is what we've been focused on since 2022, and over the years we've worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Amazon, and others on piloting third-party assessments and investigations of this type. We don’t have some private room where we rubber stamp things as “safe” or not. We have had a track record of publishing results on AI that don't cleanly map onto the "doomer" or "accelerationist" labels, and we put in effort to hire people with competing views on AI. We’ve been cited for having found some of the strongest evidence that AI capabilities are improving rapidly (our work measuring AI “time horizons”) while also presenting some of the strongest evidence that, at various points, AI’s capability may be overstated (some might remember our study showing that early 2025 software engineers were actually being slowed when they thought they were being sped up). METR is funded by donations. We don't accept money from frontier AI companies. They haven't paid us for our work, and we don't accept donations from them or their employees. As we’ve shared previously, multiple frontier AI companies currently provide us with free access to their models in order to perform our evaluations, research, and engineering. Our funding intentionally comes from a wide range of donors, which we’ve shared on our website. Today, when an AI company works with any third-party evaluator or external testing organization (of which there are and should be many), it's entirely voluntary. This often involves NDAs and redactions. To counterbalance this, we have a principle that when we enter into a contract with a company, we try to retain the right to tell the public the terms of the contract we signed, and characterize the nature of redactions that the company chose to make. For example, the report from our independent investigation of the OpenAI-HuggingFace incident included that information. Public disclosure is also a big part of our COI policy (linked on our website). That’s not to say our reports are adequate as oversight. We’re just one organization (among many doing great work), working in a voluntary setup, trying to get good evidence to the public and the world about AI, letting the facts fall where they may.

Episode 14 | Do you have SKILLS.md? nitter.net/i/broadcasts/1nxnRBrep…

KREMLIN is a multi-stage credential theft toolkit targeting Brazilian banking users. New research from Elastic Security Labs (REF9334): go.es.io/4yfkg4R by @cyril_t_f and @andythevariable The infection chain combines JavaScript loaders, an optional PE injector, and a custom C++ installer. The installer downloads and installs a malicious browser extension for Chrome and Edge and/or deploys an embedded PULSAR or REMCOS RAT. This malicious extension is then used for web-browser data interception and exfiltration. KREMLIN resolves its C2 endpoints from Ethereum. Smart contracts store payload URLs and extension download locations as on-chain key-value pairs. The operators update endpoints by writing a new transaction. The extension installation bypasses Chromium's integrity system. The installer launches Chrome under a debugger, recovers the App-Bound OSCrypt key from process memory, extracts the seed from resources.pak, then regenerates the HMACs and encrypted SHA-256 hashes that Secure Preferences requires. The extension registers silently with developer mode forced on. Once active, it logs input fields, intercepts HTTP requests by configurable URL and method rules, injects attacker-controlled HTML, and exfiltrates intercepted data, cookies, and credentials over WebSocket and HTTP. Elastic Security Labs Threat Command registered the network canary domain that operates as a kill switch. We observed thousands of implants from Brazil attempting to check in to this domain. Once this domain was live, the KREMLIN loaders crash before trying to update or install the final payload, temporarily disrupting this campaign. The targeting is clear. Lure filenames impersonate PIX transfers, bank statements, and receipts from Banco do Brasil, Bradesco, Sicoob, Santander, C6 Bank, and PagBank. Ethereum transaction timestamps cluster in São Paulo working hours. Portuguese-language artifacts appear throughout the codebase.

KREMLIN is a multi-stage credential theft toolkit targeting Brazilian banking users. New research from Elastic Security Labs (REF9334): go.es.io/4yfkg4R by @cyril_t_f and @andythevariable The infection chain combines JavaScript loaders, an optional PE injector, and a custom C++ installer. The installer downloads and installs a malicious browser extension for Chrome and Edge and/or deploys an embedded PULSAR or REMCOS RAT. This malicious extension is then used for web-browser data interception and exfiltration. KREMLIN resolves its C2 endpoints from Ethereum. Smart contracts store payload URLs and extension download locations as on-chain key-value pairs. The operators update endpoints by writing a new transaction. The extension installation bypasses Chromium's integrity system. The installer launches Chrome under a debugger, recovers the App-Bound OSCrypt key from process memory, extracts the seed from resources.pak, then regenerates the HMACs and encrypted SHA-256 hashes that Secure Preferences requires. The extension registers silently with developer mode forced on. Once active, it logs input fields, intercepts HTTP requests by configurable URL and method rules, injects attacker-controlled HTML, and exfiltrates intercepted data, cookies, and credentials over WebSocket and HTTP. Elastic Security Labs Threat Command registered the network canary domain that operates as a kill switch. We observed thousands of implants from Brazil attempting to check in to this domain. Once this domain was live, the KREMLIN loaders crash before trying to update or install the final payload, temporarily disrupting this campaign. The targeting is clear. Lure filenames impersonate PIX transfers, bank statements, and receipts from Banco do Brasil, Bradesco, Sicoob, Santander, C6 Bank, and PagBank. Ethereum transaction timestamps cluster in São Paulo working hours. Portuguese-language artifacts appear throughout the codebase.