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The FBI built a small town to simulate cyberattacks

A fake hotel and power company inside the FBI’s Kinetic Cyber Range training facility.
There’s also a fake power company to jack up prices thanks to the fake data center. | Image: FBI

Last year, the FBI opened a Cyber Range in Huntsville, Alabama, for simulating cyberattacks. Think of it sort of like the famous Hogan's Alley, but for modern digital crime training. It's a massive 22,000-square-foot replica of an entire town, complete with a convenience store, gas station, hospital, and even fully furnished houses.

It's a training facility where the bureau can re-create real-world scenarios for training and research purposes. All of the various buildings and facilities are hooked up the way they would be in a real town. There's even a small data center with over 200 servers that can be hacked, infected with malware, and st …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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State Attorneys General Are Investigating OpenAI

OpenAI said that a coalition of states had opened an investigation over a wide range of its practices, including its handling of user data, safety of minors and advertising activities.
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Amazon security research reportedly led to the White House’s Anthropic Fable ban

Anthropic logo on an orange and grey background.

According to the The Wall Street Journal, the export control directive that led to Anthropic cutting off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was triggered in part by cybersecurity research from Amazon and conversations between CEO Andy Jassy and the White House. According to the report, the paper from Amazon claims that, through a series of prompts, it was able to get Fable 5 to serve up information that could be used in cyberattacks. Amazon has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Shortly after Jassy shared the company's findings with the government, it made the call to block its use by foreign nationals. Complicating this issue is that man …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Arch Linux Malware Incident: Malicious Commits Found in 1,579 Packages

More than 1,500 user-contributed packages in the Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" were infected with malware, reports Phoronix: The last message in the thread over this security incident is noting that Arch Linux developers have deleted all the malicious commits they are aware of. Cited was this list that puts the number of malware-affected packages at 1,579... Even at 1,579 packages listed, that final updated noted, it's a "list containing many (but not all) of the affected packages". Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader couchslug for sharing the report.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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PhishLumos maps phishing infrastructure and finds 190,000 URLs in six months

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have created a new paradigm for identifying online phishing campaigns. Their new system, PhishLumos, is triggered when links show signs of concealing information and looks for clues in the "infrastructure" of the website to uncover the whole campaign of which the site is only a tiny part. Real-world testing showed detection that was eight days faster than an expert's, with 190,000 URLs detected over six months.

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PeopleSoft 0-day affecting hundreds of organizations steals gigabytes of data

One of the world’s most active ransomware groups exploited a critical vulnerability in Oracle’s PeopleSoft software suite and used it to target about 100 customers and extort at least one of them to pay up in exchange for not leaking stolen data, researchers said.

The group, tracked as ShinyHunters, had been exploiting the PeopleSoft vulnerability for more than two weeks before Oracle flagged it. CVE-2026-35273, as the vulnerability is tracked, carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10, making the former zero-day one of the year’s most critical vulnerabilities to be exploited.

Google’s Mandiant security team said it’s an SSRF (server-side request forgery), a vulnerability that allows attackers to send requests from a susceptible server to systems used by the targeted organization. Oracle said the SSRF is remotely exploitable, and the company has issued a stopgap mitigation but has yet to fully patch the flaw. Google has confirmed that victims are receiving extortion demands.

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Microsoft Surface Flaw Allowed Unprotected Devices To Be Bricked By a Single Packet

Longtime Slashdot reader Dotnaught shares a report from The Register: For the past 90 days, Microsoft has been quietly patching a firmware flaw in Surface devices that allowed the hardware to be bricked with a single packet, though only for those who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot. And the company's Copilot AI software inadvertently helped identify the faulty firmware. According to Jack Darcy, a security researcher based in Australia, his instance of Microsoft Copilot stumbled across the bug after being asked to adjust the screen backlighting on a Surface device. The Copilot-conjured Python script ended up rendering the researcher's laptop inoperable by overwriting the embedded controller firmware. "Copilot autonomously created and executed four progressively aggressive Python scripts during a probe for backlight control values that sent raw SSAM ioctl commands (SSAM_CDEV_REQUEST = 0xC028A501) directly to the SAM microcontroller through the SAM software path," Darcy explained to The Register. [...] "We appreciate the work of Jack Darcy and The Register for reporting this issue under a coordinated vulnerability disclosure," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "Our investigation found that a deprecated UEFI interface could trigger a boot loop on some devices. To trigger this loop, the user must have administrator privileges and have already disabled the Secure Boot security feature. We have released updates to address the issue for most impacted devices." That means managed devices are not at risk. But those using Linux, or Windows users who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot for gaming, or who use custom Windows drivers, or who have USB boot enabled, may still be vulnerable if their systems haven't received the update. We're uncertain about the range of Surface devices affected. Our source said it appears to be all of them (Surface Laptops 3-6, Surface Book 1-3) except for Surface Go models. ARM variants, however, have not been tested. The report notes that Microsoft is planning to move the Surface stack to a more secure architecture based on Rust code. "Our most recent Surface for Business hardware features a major architectural shift in terms of improved reliability and security that spans our embedded controller, UEFI, but also some of our drivers," said David Abzarian, chief architect for Microsoft Surface. "We're investing in the most secure foundation for a PC by building our embedded controller firmware from the ground up in Rust (as part of leveraging and contributing to the Open Device Partnership (ODP)) in addition to a rewrite of the UEFI DXE Core in Rust; these projects are known as Secure EC and Project Patina respectively." "We're also not only shipping some of our drivers written in Rust, but also helping co-develop the framework Windows Drivers in Rust (WDR) to help enable a broad set of partners in the Windows ecosystem to capitalize on these benefits. I will also note that all of these efforts are open-source promoting one of our key security principles around transparency."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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