Risky Bulletin: Linux patches PwnEscape KVM vulnerability

0:03A serious vulnerability lets attackers escape kernel-based virtual machines, open code users become collateral damage in a distillation attack, supply chain incidents hit AOMIQual. and Intel will discontinue SGX. This is the Risky Bulletin, prepared by Katalin Kimpanu and read by me, Claire Aird. Today is the 19th of October, and this podcast episode is brought to you by Sondera. In today's top story, the Linux kernel team has patched a vulnerability that lets guests escape kernel-based virtual machines and run code on the underlying operating system. The so-called Pwn Escape bug occurs because the Linux networking stack allows VM guests to modify IP packets after they've been validated as safe by the kernel.

0:55From there, malicious guests could read host memory and modify it for code execution. Pwn Escape impacts KVM running on x86 CPU architectures, which is the most common setup for shared cloud environments. The bug was found by Pwn.ai. In other news, a threat actor compromised OpenCode user accounts to carry out distillation attacks against AI Frontier Labs over the weekend. The attack has impacted roughly 1.4 % of users of the OpenCode console, open-source AI coding agent. Some users have reported losing hundreds and even thousands of US dollars to unauthorized account usage charges. Open Code has notified all affected users.

1:40A Russian national in German police custody is allegedly behind the 2024 ransomware attack that crippled UK blood testing company Synovus. 28-year-old Vladimir Kay was arrested in Japan in May and extradited to Germany this month. He's being investigated for hacking a German logistics company while a member of the Cheelin ransomware group. British police are also investigating him for the Synovus hack and a death linked to the attack. A threat actor is using a compromised ConnectWise cloud application to hack into enterprise networks. According to security firm Huntress, the attacker compromised the Microsoft API key for the ConnectWise cloud backup app, which was formerly known as Skykick.

2:26The hacker then used the app to gain access to Microsoft 365 environments. A cyber attack has hit Romania's central depository, the agency that manages the country's stock market transactions. The attack targeted its online user portal. Officials said the hackers accessed a database containing the personal information of all registered users, including names, contact information, national ID card details and bank account numbers. The depository says the attackers didn't alter any data. A cyber attack has disrupted the Bankruptcy Noticing Centre, a platform used by U.S. courts to produce bankruptcy notices.

3:08The platform is managed by BAE Systems. The Bankruptcy Noticing Centre website and other websites managed by BAE remained offline on Monday morning. Hackers have stolen the data of 7 million students from California's Department of Education. The department says the hack targeted the file transfer platform of the Education Testing Service. The ETS develops and administers standardised tests and is managed by an external non-profit organisation. The hackers used a compromised account to access the server between May and September. Stolen data includes students' personal, educational and disability information.

3:50Hackers have stolen more than 11 million customer records from Burger King Japan. The files were taken from a server that manages the company's smartphone apps. The stolen data includes names, birthdates, contact details and gender. An employee of the South Korean National Health Insurance Service was fired in July for selling patient data. The employee made hundreds of thousands of US dollars over two years. The agency has yet to notify any of the affected individuals. India's Cybersecurity Agency says AI agents accessed sensitive and confidential data from Indian websites. The intrusions took place during AI model testing and the AI companies notified India's Cybersecurity Agency of the incidents.

4:38The agency didn't name the compromised sites or the AI providers. Hackers have backdoored the service of backup provider Aomi Technology in a novel supply chain attack. According to Google, hackers replaced backup software on the company's servers in short bursts of 5 to 10 minutes before switching back to legitimate versions. The repeated tampering bursts occurred between May and July. Users who downloaded Aomi backup software during these bursts were infected with the Crossroad Downloader and Shiny Road Backdoor. Hackers have breached Russian virtual private server provider FirstVDS. The hackers exploited a vulnerability in the VM Manager virtualization management platform.

5:25Once inside, they deployed a script that collected passwords, access keys, configuration files and crypto wallet information. FirstVDS says the attack took place on the weekend and it's notified all affected customers. Pro-Ukrainian hacktivist group BlackSpark has disrupted a Russian school testing system and defaced it with anti-Putin messages. The The hacked platform, EduTest, was developed by Russia's Federal Service for the Supervision of Education and Science. Disruptions to tests were mostly reported in the Moscow region. The group previously hacked companies in Russia's oil sector. Hackers exploited a flaw in the pirate chain cryptocurrency to mint more than$10 million of new tokens.

6:11The newly minted crypto represented 20 % of the token's total supply, causing a 25 % drop in its exchange rate. The illegitimate crypto was quickly laundered out of the pirate chain network. Intel will discontinue its SGX trusted execution environment. Intel's Diamond Rapids Xeon platform will be the last to include SGX. Intel says it will focus its development on TDX's trusted execution environment, which is more widely used in cloud environments. Microsoft has added a new feature to Edge that silently downloads security updates in the background and applies them when the user is away and the browser is idle.

6:54A pop-up window will still alert users when a restart is about to happen. The restart to update on idle feature is disabled by default. GitHub has expanded its Malware Advisory's database to cover eight package repositories. The database previously only showed malware detections on NPM. The database now includes warnings for malicious packages on PyPI, Maven, RubyGems, NuGet, Go, RustCrates and PHP Composer. The Python Software Foundation has rolled out email reputation checks for all new PyPI accounts. The measure specifically targets disposable email providers. The foundation has also restored the ability to register PyPI accounts with Outlook and Hotmail domains.

7:44PyPI blocked the two domains in 2024 after they were used to mass register malicious accounts. The RubyGems portal has added security warnings to its package repository for gems with known security issues. Data is pulled hourly from sources including the GitHub Advisory Database and the Open Source Security Foundation's OSV Database. Alerts warn of malware detections and known vulnerabilities. More than 80 Romanian government institutions purchased Kaspersky security software after the government banned it in March 2023. According to Romanian journalists, the institutions included city halls, hospitals, schools and even a military and NATO research institute.

8:30Romania banned Kaspersky products after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, citing national security concerns. The Dutch Parliament is investigating why the country's police complied with a US government request to seize servers belonging to the Italian hacktivist collective Autistici Inventati. American authorities alleged the group facilitated left-wing and Antifa terrorist activities. The US designated Antifa a terrorist organization in 2025 and the Autistici Inventati group in August this year. No other countries have made similar designations. Almost 45 % of VK's server infrastructure went down on Sunday after Ukrainian drones hit the Russian tech giant's data centers near St.

9:19Petersburg. The attack caused the V-Contact social network to go offline for several hours. VK is the second Russian tech company to see a major outage following drone strikes on the country's data centres. Earlier this month, three Yandex data centres were also hit. Ukraine started striking data centres in response to Russia targeting Ukrainian ones last month. The National Police of Timor-Leste says foreign nationals arrested in cyber scam compounds have returned to their previous workplaces after being arrested and paying modest fines. Local police have arrested almost 450 people accused of cyber scam activities since July.

10:01Officials say local laws don't deter cyber criminals as sentences don't include prison time. Philippine authorities have detained four suspects for operating an SMS blaster from a rented car. The blaster sent spam messages to nearby phones. The detained suspects included two Filipinos and two Chinese nationals. The Chinese men allegedly paid the Filipinos$32 a day to drive around with the device. Authorities also found drugs, guns and SMS blaster components at an apartment rented by the Chinese men. InfoSteeler developers are adopting AI to aggregate stolen data into extremely detailed victim profiles.

10:45The profiles are intended to help the buyers of stolen data better understand their victims. According to security firm BuyZone, the Avengers and Beast dealers have already developed these AI profiling agents. A Chinese hacking group has been exploiting a zero-day in Beyond Trust's remote support service since August. The Armoury Castle Group used their access to the Beyond Trust devices to pivot to victims' internal networks. Google says the threat actor showed a deep understanding of Beyond Trust appliance internals during the intrusions. The group's been active since 2023 and is known to exploit vulnerabilities in edge appliances.

11:26And that is all for this podcast edition. Today's show was brought to you by our sponsor, Sondera. Find them at sondera.ai. Thanks for your company.