Archive for August 29, 2026

Around 8.7 Million travellers’ info stolen at 3 UK airports

Posted in Commentary with tags , on August 29, 2026 by itnerd

Around 8.7 million travellers who signed up for WiFi, car parking services and lounges in airports run by Manchester Airports Group (MAG) had their data stolen, including email addresses and phone numbers, postcodes and vehicle registration details. MAG operates airports in Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands, and declined the demand to pay ransom.

Denis Calderone, CTO, Suzu Labs:

The 8.7 million number is attention-grabbing, but it deserves some context. MAG has confirmed that the vast majority of those records are email addresses collected through airport WiFi sign-ups. A much smaller subset includes phone numbers, vehicle registrations, and postcodes from customers who actually completed parking or lounge bookings. No payment data, no passwords, no passport information. So despite this affecting airports, which is obviously a sensitive subject, the actual data sensitivity for most affected individuals is relatively low.

What’s more interesting to us from a technical standpoint is the attack path. MAG told The Register that attackers compromised one of their internal systems and then went on to steal files from a database hosted by a third party. That’s a pivot upstream into a data provider, not downstream into operational systems. What remains unclear is whether the data was exfiltrated directly from that third-party environment or whether it was pulled back through MAG’s network first. That distinction matters for understanding where detection controls failed and who was responsible for monitoring the egress.

The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority has a Cyber Assessment Framework for Aviation, developed with the NCSC, that mandates strict separation between IT systems and operational technology. We don’t know whether MAG was formally operating under that framework at the time of this incident, but I would be very interested to find out. Because the segmentation appears to have held here. Flight operations, baggage handling, terminal systems, etc., all were unaffected. The lateral movement went upstream toward a data provider, not downstream toward the systems that keep planes in the air.

Seemant Sehgal, CEO and Founder, BreachLock:

“This data was initially collected because passengers needed a login, and somewhere along the way, the sensitivity of what was accumulating in that database stopped getting the same scrutiny as the network itself. Vehicle registration details, postcodes, and contact information across three major airports are a profiling dataset, and whoever held it for ransom understood its value better than the organization storing it did.”

This is why I use a VPN when I use public WiFi. In short, public WiFi cannot be trusted. You have to assume the same in order to keep safe.

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PaperCut zero-day: “Boring” print servers become domain-wide threats

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 29, 2026 by itnerd

PaperCut’s urgent zero-day advisory is raising concerns well beyond the vulnerability itself, particularly given how many PaperCut servers are exposed to the internet and the potential for unauthenticated SYSTEM-level access. I have SMEs who are weighing in on the real-world exposure, why traditional vulnerability scanning can miss an actively exploited zero-day, and why defenders need to focus on containment, outbound controls and hunting for compromise – not just patching.

John Strand, Owner, Black Hills Information Security https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-strand-a1b4b62

“This is yet another example where the people who most need to see this vulnerability disclosure probably aren’t going to be the people who actually see it. Any sane computer security or IT professional would not have a PaperCut server directly exposed to the internet for anyone to access. But I just ran a quick check, and there are more than 100,000 PaperCut servers exposed directly to the internet right now. That’s the problem. We’re going to end up preaching to the choir until it’s far too late and these servers start getting compromised.”

Jacob Warner, Director of IT, Xcape, Inc. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-warner-n1377

“Boring infrastructure with credential-free remote code execution and self-erasing payloads is how a print server becomes a domain-wide incident. When an unauthenticated request becomes SYSTEM on your print server, the resulting administrative compromise transforms routine utility services into elevated beachheads for lateral movement across enterprise environments. Because the attacker cleans up after themselves, security teams must patch now and assume the logs will not tell them if they were late to respond. Traditional vulnerability scanners often miss active zero-day exploitation until vendor signatures catch up. Defenders should patch or isolate today, close all Internet exposure, and image affected machines before remediation, as the attacker’s cleanup routine may have already deleted the logs that would have confirmed exposure.

“Unauthenticated remote code execution on print management software grants immediate elevated privileges, escalating utility software into a full domain threat. Self-erasing payloads and automated log deletion mean security teams cannot rely solely on post-incident forensic artifacts to detect compromise. Immediate containment requires closing all Internet exposure, imaging affected application servers prior to remediation, and applying vendor patches immediately.

“Boring utility servers make the best targets because nobody expects the print spooler to hand over domain administrator rights.”

Seemant Sehgal, Founder & CEO, BreachLock https://www.linkedin.com/in/s-sehgal

“Pre-authentication RCE means the attacker needs nothing from you. No credentials, no foothold, no prior access, before they own the application and can run arbitrary Java on your infrastructure. The first question every team should be answering right now is whether their PaperCut instance is reachable from the internet, because if it is, that answer is more urgent than any patch timeline. Vulnerability scanners will tell you the CVE exists, but they will not tell you whether an attacker already walked through it and what the impact would be if they did.”

Denis Calderon, Principal & CTO, Suzu Labs https://www.linkedin.com/in/deniscalderone

“PaperCut’s Application Server runs as SYSTEM on Windows, manages configurations for every endpoint in the org, and has a web-accessible console that is often exposed to the Internet. It’s “just printing”, but in this case, its important to treat it like any other management plane that holds implicit trust within your network.

“I ran a Shodan query this morning and found over 1,000 of these servers exposed to the public internet on their default management ports. A lot of them look like schools. That makes sense. PaperCut is heavily deployed in education for managing student print quotas, and students need to access the system from their own devices, so the web interface ends up internet-facing almost by necessity. The first confirmed victim to report this exploitation to PaperCut was a university. These servers are findable in seconds, they require zero credentials to exploit, and the attacker gets SYSTEM-level code execution. Unfortunately, even a well managed vulnerability scanning program wouldn’t have flagged this since it was an 0day, and you can’t see vulnerabilities that haven’t been discovered yet. That’s the fundamental limitation. The exposure itself was the risk, long before anyone knew the specific flaw.

“So, needless to say, get the PaperCut Emergency Patch Release 2 implemented immediately.  It covers v24, v25, and v26. I wish I could advise a holistic architectural fix like removing the admin interface off the internet, but it’s unclear from the current reporting whether that alone would have stopped this. The auth bypass operates below the URL routing layer, so even user-facing endpoints may have been sufficient for the attacker to reach the vulnerable components. What is clear is that a restrictive egress policy would have stopped this. Huntress’s proven exploit chain required SMB to traverse outbound from the victim to an attacker-controlled share. That can and should be controlled and stopped at the perimeter. If your PaperCut server can initiate outbound SMB to the internet, fix that today. And then hunt. Keep in mind that this malware deletes server.log, derby.log, and its own class files after execution. If your server was internet-exposed yesterday, patch or no patch, you need to be hunting today. Preserve those logs before you restart anything, look for the indicators Huntress published, and assume compromise until you can prove otherwise.”

If you use PaperCut, consider this a today problem. Patch now and keep watching this advisory as I am sure that this is not the last that we’ve heard of this issue.

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OpenAI, Microsoft and 100+ firms warn of AI hackers on cyber attacks

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 29, 2026 by itnerd

More than 100 companies came together to make an open plea for collective action on cyber defense against AI-enabled cyber attacks. Signed by organizations including Accenture, Capital One, Anthropic, CloudFlare, Deutsche Telekom, Fifth Third Bank, General Motors, Microsoft, Red Hat, SAP, TransUnion and Zurich Insurance, the letter says these attacks “will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable. The companies and public services our communities depend on—from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet—are at risk.”

John Strand, Owner, Black Hills Information Security:

“I think the sentiment behind what they’re doing here is fine, but I don’t think it moves the needle in any discernible way. A lot of this is motherhood and apple pie. They’re essentially telling organizations to spend more money on defensive security, which happens to directly support the marketing initiatives of many of the companies signing onto this. At a certain point, it starts to feel like infosec marketing theater.

“The one recommendation that actually has some teeth to it is the call for greater open exchange of detects and IOCs. But I would have liked to see these companies go much further. Many of them make billions of dollars from the security community. Why not create open initiatives where organizations can access threat intelligence feeds for free? Why not provide some of these security services at no cost to municipalities and other organizations that simply cannot afford them?

“Some companies already do this, and they deserve credit for it. But if the industry is going to collectively call for organizations to improve their security, it also needs to recognize the reality on the ground. A huge number of these organizations are understaffed, underfunded, and under attack. Many of the companies signing these initiatives have the resources and expertise to directly help them.

“Calling for better security is easy. Actually helping the organizations that can’t afford it would mean a hell of a lot more.”

Seemant Sehgal, CEO and Founder, BreachLock:

“There’s real value in this coalition, but there’s also a conflict of interest here. The companies asking governments to fund AI defensive tools are the same ones that would get paid to supply them, and some of them build the frontier models making the offensive side harder. That doesn’t make the warning wrong, but the recommended response isn’t neutral. The real question is whether hospitals, water utilities, and local governments get unrestricted funding to spend on what they actually need, or subsidized access to specific vendor products. Those are very different outcomes.”

Ryan McCurdy, VP, Liquibase (): 


“The warning is right, but using AI to defend against AI isn’t enough.

“AI is accelerating both sides of the equation: attackers can find weaknesses and execute attacks faster, while developers and AI agents are creating legitimate software and database changes faster than ever. Security teams have now got to determine whether a change is authorized, safe, and expected, and do it at a speed that humans simply can’t keep up with.

“That’s why governance has to move closer to the change itself. Organizations need to know what changed, whether it was authorized, and whether it meets policy before it reaches a critical system and data. And when something does get through, teams need the visibility to understand what happened, what’s impacted and how to recover quickly.

Jacob Krell, Senior Director: Secure AI Solutions & Cybersecurity, Suzu Labs:

More than 100 technology and cybersecurity companies signed an open letter this week, organized by OpenAI, calling for a “defenders’ window” to strengthen cyber defenses against increasingly capable AI-enabled attacks. The letter asks governments to fund cybersecurity improvements for hospitals, water utilities, and other critical infrastructure, while frontier AI developers provide model access, funding, training, and hands-on support. However, some of its most prominent signatories are also helping shorten that window.

OpenAI published this initiative weeks after its own models escaped intended isolation during a capability evaluation and compromised Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft are co-signatories while simultaneously advancing frontier-model capabilities that expand what attackers can automate. The same capability race creating the urgency behind this letter is steadily compressing the window it asks defenders to use.

This is also part of a broader push this summer to put AI-powered cyber defense into critical infrastructure. In July, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre outlined Cyber Shield, including autonomous vulnerability discovery and eventually fully automated vulnerability mitigation. That’s happening against a baseline where the UK’s National Audit Office found that departments lacked fully funded remediation plans for roughly half of their vulnerable legacy systems. The White House’s Gold Eagle initiative similarly proposes using frontier AI to accelerate vulnerability discovery and remediation across government and critical infrastructure.

Then Minnesota demonstrated what the actual bottleneck looks like. More than thirty community water systems were targeted in a coordinated cyberattack in late July. Federal authorities subsequently warned about attacks targeting internet-facing Rockwell Automation programmable logic controllers. In Braham, a community of roughly 1,700 people, compromised operating controls took the city’s well and water-treatment plant offline until operators restored service.

None of that required frontier AI.

Critical-infrastructure operators are struggling to inventory what’s connected to the internet, eliminate insecure remote access, hire dedicated security staff, and remediate vulnerabilities they already know about. Offering increasingly sophisticated AI defensive capabilities without fixing those fundamentals is like giving someone a Tesla when what they need is a road.

The letter acknowledges that these organizations need funding and hands-on support. But it contains no funding amounts, delivery deadlines, or firm financial commitments from its more than 100 signatories. If the companies warning that the defenders’ window is closing want to materially extend it, the commitment needs a dollar figure and a delivery date, not another page of corporate logos.

Donald McFarlane, Advisory Board Member, Xcape, Inc.:

There is a little bit of “industry identifies an emergency; government buys industry’s solution” in this proposal. If the companies signing this letter believe that AI creates an urgent new systemic risk, I would expect them to put substantial skin in the game rather than simply asking taxpayers to fund another generation of security products: including through private partnerships for collective defense.

Before we spend public money putting AI on top of insecure infrastructure, I want to know that we have paid for the basics: remove PLCs from the public internet, secure remote access, segment networks, maintain backups, and make sure somebody actually owns the security of the system.

AI makes attacks faster and cheaper, but it does not repeal the fundamentals of cybersecurity. We should not use a new technology problem as an excuse to avoid fixing old, well-understood weaknesses.

Given this, now is a good time to look at the use of AI in your organization given that AI can’t be entirely trusted.

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ServiceNow’s CVSS 10.0 trio shows how one platform patch cycle becomes everyone’s third-party risk problem

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 29, 2026 by itnerd

Four flaws hand just been disclosed in ServiceNow’s AI Platform, three of them scored a maximum CVSS 10.0: a code injection bug in the GraphQL Composite Data API (CVE-2026-18885), a privilege escalation flaw in the system configuration image upload processor (CVE-2026-18886), and a SQL injection through a dynamic schema ORDER BY clause (CVE-2026-74820), plus a lower-severity sandbox escape in the Now Platform (CVE-2026-6876, CVSS 8.7). ServiceNow patched its own hosted instances on August 27, but self-hosted customers must apply the fix themselves, leaving the responsibility for closing three maximum-severity holes with the customer rather than the vendor.

Jason Brown, Director of Counter Fraud Operations, iCOUNTER had this to say:

“Three maximum severity bugs in one disclosure is a lot, but the detail I’d focus on is the split between hosted and self hosted customers. ServiceNow’s hosted instances were already updated as part of the August 27 advisory. Everyone running ServiceNow on their own infrastructure now has to go find, schedule, and apply that patch themselves, and in a lot of organizations that process takes weeks, not days. During those weeks, an unauthenticated attacker with a working exploit for the GraphQL Composite Data API code injection bug or the SQL injection flaw has a real shot at systems that sit next to HR records, vendor onboarding, and finance approvals. I spent years chasing fraud operators who specifically target that lag between disclosure and patch adoption, because they know it’s where the easy access is. My advice to any security team running ServiceNow self hosted right now is simple: don’t wait for your normal patch cycle, treat this one as urgent and confirm it’s applied this week.”

Needless to say, if you use ServiceNow, it’s time to patch all the things. And maybe at the same time take a look at how ServiceNow is used in your organization.

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