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Mozilla has scrapped the cryptographic key behind Firefox and Thunderbird downloads for Linux after an unencrypted copy of it was committed by mistake to one of the company's own private code repositories. That key is how a user, or a Linux distribution packaging the browser, confirms a downloaded Firefox tarball came from Mozilla and was not tampered with. That decision carries a cost for anyone who checks what they download: files signed with the old key stop verifying once a user imports the revocation. That covers older Firefox and Thunderbird downloads, not just future ones. Nothing so far points to anyone outside the company getting hold of the key. The repository was private, the browser maker says a review of available audit records turned up no sign of unauthorized access, and everyone who could see it already had legitimate access anyway. Mozilla revoked it regardless. Most Firefox and Thunderbird users need to do nothing. Two groups do. Anyone who checks signatu...

Security researchers invented a cryptocurrency startup, advertised developer jobs, and hired three people they believe were North Korean operatives. Every virtual machine the company issued was recording. The onboarding paperwork is the part hiring teams can use. The first hire claimed to live in Pasadena, Texas, then sent a California driver's license and a New York bank account. The researchers said the image metadata showed it had been processed with Google Gemini. They also reported a SynthID watermark, the invisible marker Google embeds in images its AI tools create or edit. The second supplied a Texas license, a valid Social Security number, and a bank account in Kansas City. The third sent a New York license belonging to someone else, a genuine iPhone 15 photograph with the GPS coordinates stripped. A successful placement gives the operative a real employee account and real access to source code and internal systems. The July 31 joint alert says North Korean IT work...

Windows Plug and Play can be abused to fetch signed vendor software for an emulated USB device and execute privileged installation components that researchers chained to SYSTEM access on a fully updated Windows 11 machine. The same PnP path can be triggered over Remote Desktop without physical hardware when supported Plug and Play or low-level USB redirection is enabled; Microsoft says that redirection is not allowed by default. Security researchers Alejandro Hernando and Borja Martinez described the technique in " Plug And Pwn: Weaponizing Windows PnP Auto-Install ," research prepared for DEF CON 34. They built tooling to emulate arbitrary USB devices and said that, under the required conditions, an unprivileged user can turn the PnP installation path into SYSTEM code execution. Microsoft's own driver documentation describes the underlying selection step: Windows receives hardware and compatible IDs for a device and uses them to find a matching driver package. A...

A malicious tool server connected to an AI coding assistant can quietly walk off with SSH keys, environment secrets, source code, and customer data without ever sending one obviously harmful instruction. The trick can work even after a blunt version of the same theft is refused: split the request into fragments that each look routine, place them in channels the assistant already uses, and let the agent stitch them together and send the data back. The attack targets coding tools that connect to outside servers over the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard that lets AI assistants call external tools. A malicious MCP server can put one fragment in a tool description and another in a tool result; some setups also support server-initiated sampling. MCP does preserve structured tool and result boundaries. But ASSET Research Group's tests show agents can still combine instructions across them in the same working context, so no single fragment has to contain the whole mal...

Cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from South Korea and the U.S. warned of Gunra ransomware attacks targeting critical infrastructure sectors and organizations across the world. Targets of these attacks include healthcare and public health, financial services, government services and facilities, and professional and nonprofit services. "Gunra is another variant in the ongoing trend of ransomware attacks causing disruption and harm to U.S. and international organizations," CISA Acting Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity, Chris Butera, said. Attacks deploying the ransomware have leveraged security flaws in internet-facing Fortinet FortiOS and FortiProxy ( CVE-2024-55591  and CVE-2025-24472 ) appliances to obtain initial access, and then deploy the Gunra ransomware as part of a double extortion model that combines data exfiltration and data encryption for maximum impact. Victims who refuse to pay up within five to seven days have their data published ...