A walkthrough of the well-documented Windows UAC bypass that uses “eventvwr.exe”’s auto-elevate manifest plus a writable HKCU registry handler for the “mscfile” shell verb. Writing a single REG_SZ value under “HKCUSoftwareClassesmscfileshellopencommand and launching “eventvwr.exe” via “ShellExecuteEx” with the “runas” verb causes Windows to silently spawn the attacker’s payload at High integrity — no consent prompt. S12 reproduces the technique in a small C++ tool, demonstrates near-universal AV evasion on Kleenscan, and discusses the detection footprint.
Gogs Authenticated RCE via git rebase –exec Argument Injection (Unpatched)
Rapid7’s Jonah Burgess has disclosed a critical (CVSS 9.4) authenticated argument-injection RCE in the self-hosted Gogs Git server. Any authenticated user can create a branch named “–exec=
Writing Sync, Popping Cron: A Novel SQLite-Injection-to-Cron RCE on Synology BeeStation (CVE-2024-50629/50630/50631)
A deep technical write-up of the Synology BeeStation pre-auth-to-RCE chain disclosed by DEVCORE at Pwn2Own Ireland 2024 (CVE-2024-50629 CRLF injection, CVE-2024-50630 auth bypass via webapi-to-syncd domain-socket trust, CVE-2024-50631 SQL injection in update_settings) plus an N-day variant by Kiddo that swaps DEVCORE’s PHP-based RCE for a novel “ATTACH DATABASE” primitive against “/etc/cron.d/pwn.task”, exploiting cron’s line-skip tolerance to embed a working reverse-shell crontab inside an otherwise-binary SQLite file.
Calif’s AI Audit of FreeBSD: 15 Kernel Bugs (3 RCEs, 5 LPEs, 1 bhyve Escape) and Three Public CVE Writeups
Calif’s AI-assisted security team published a write-up of their FreeBSD kernel engagement: “15 bugs total” — 3 RCEs, 5 LPEs, 1 bhyve guest-to-host escape, plus memory disclosures and DoS — reported privately to FreeBSD with public PoCs released for three: CVE-2026-45250 (setcred sizeof confusion → stack overflow), CVE-2026-45253 (ptrace PT_SC_REMOTE missing bounds check → sysent OOB), and CVE-2026-45251 (procdesc UAF → arbitrary kernel-pointer writes via TAILQ_REMOVE on stale pd_selinfo). The exploits and writeups were generated by AI (OpenAI / Anthropic) and verified by humans before release. The remaining twelve bugs stay private until FreeBSD ships fixes.
CVE-2025-61622: PyFory Insecure Pickle Deserialization to Remote Code Execution
CVE-2025-61622 is an unauthenticated remote code execution in PyFory (formerly PyFury) 0.12.0–0.12.2 reachable through the library’s fallback path for unregistered types: “handle_unsupported_read()” instantiates a bare “pickle.Unpickler” with no “find_class” override and calls “.load()” on the attacker’s buffer, executing whatever “__reduce__” tuple they crafted. The attacker doesn’t even need PyFory installed — a stock “cloudpickle” payload pushed over a TCP socket is enough. Fixed in 0.12.3 by removing the pickle fallback entirely.
Visual Studio Extensions Revisited: Building, Publishing, and Hunting Malicious VSIXs
MDSec returns to the Visual Studio extension ecosystem three years after their VS Code work. A modern “VisualStudio.Extensibility” extension that fetches and runs an arbitrary .NET assembly via reflection — built from the stock template, published on the Marketplace under the “MSAzure” publisher with no security checks — takes a renamed “Microsoft” publisher around an hour to land. The second half of the post is a five-stage triage pipeline (Acquisition → Unpacking → Decompilation → LLM Triage → Agent Investigation) over the 8,566 analysable VSIX packages currently on the Marketplace, surfacing a backdoor-shaped “vs-publisher-1477920/FVsEx” extension that exfiltrates host info to “qweq.xyz” and dispatches commands to “cmd.exe”.
Reverse Engineering for Beginners: Defeating an XOR Crackme on Windows x64
A step-by-step walkthrough of reverse-engineering a Windows x64 crackme that XORs its input against a hard-coded 10-byte key before comparing it to an embedded array. Using x64dbg, we follow the password byte into RAX, find the XOR site at “0x40171E”, recover the key (“U V W X Y Z Q R S T”) from RBP-relative stack slots, then XOR the comparison array back through that key to recover the original password — “strongpass”. Source code is reproduced verbatim from the author’s GitHub.
CVE-2026-20182: Unauthenticated vHub Bypass in the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller
CVE-2026-20182 (CVSS 10.0, CWE-287) is a critical authentication bypass in the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller’s vdaemon DTLS service (UDP 12346). By presenting “device_type = 2” (vHub) during the CHALLENGE_ACK phase, an unauthenticated remote attacker hits a fall-through in “vbond_proc_challenge_ack()” that unconditionally sets “authenticated = 1” — from there it’s a short hop to “MSG_VMANAGE_TO_PEER” SSH-key injection into “/home/vmanage-admin/.ssh/authorized_keys” and full NETCONF control of the SD-WAN fabric. Discovered by Rapid7’s Stephen Fewer and Jonah Burgess; a Metasploit module ships with this post. Cisco has fixed it — upgrade now.
CVE-2026-40369: Arbitrary Kernel Address Increment via NtQuerySystemInformation
CVE-2026-40369 is a Windows kernel bug in “nt!ExpGetProcessInformation” that lets any unprivileged process — including one inside Chrome’s renderer sandbox — increment three DWORDs at an attacker-chosen kernel address per syscall, with no race condition, no heap spray, and 100% determinism. This deep dive walks Ori Nimron’s full exploit chain: KASLR via the prefetch side-channel, arbitrary kernel “read” via “CmpLayerVersions” type confusion (built on the Windows UTF-8 conversion path), token-privilege bitmask increment to grant SeDebugPrivilege, code injection into a SYSTEM process, and a clean restore of “CmpLayerVersionCount” at the end. Rewritten from the canonical pwn2nimron.com writeup with all original IDA decompilations and the PoC reproduced verbatim.
Ghidra Basics: Reverse-Engineering Cobalt Strike Shellcode and Extracting the C2 Server
A practical walkthrough of using Ghidra and x32dbg to disassemble a Cobalt Strike beacon shellcode, identify the PUSH/CALL EBP hash-then-dispatch pattern, resolve API hashes such as “0x726774c” (LoadLibraryA), “0xa779563a” (InternetOpenA) and “0xc69f8957” (InternetConnectA), recognise ROR13 as the hashing algorithm, and extract the C2 IP “195.211.98[.]91” from the decoded calls. Original rewrite of Matthew’s tutorial on embeeresearch.io with all 56 original screenshots preserved.










