Weekly Threat & Lab Roundup: Microsoft Defender Zero-Days, Qualcomm BootROM Write-What-Where, Fox Tempest Malware Signing Service, and GitHub Supply Chain Siege

This week the theme is trust erosion — in the tools that protect us, the chips that boot our devices, the certificates that vouch for software, and the platforms that host our code. Microsoft Defender, the very security product meant to protect Windows endpoints, has two actively exploited zero-days: one that grants SYSTEM and another that kills antimalware. Qualcomm’s BootROM — the immutable root of trust in billions of devices — has a write-what-where condition that turns a phone repair into a persistence attack. Fox Tempest operated a malware-signing-as-a-service that generated over a thousand fraudulent code-signing certificates, enabling ransomware operators to dress their payloads in legitimate Microsoft signatures. And GitHub is under coordinated assault from multiple directions: Megalodon hijacks repositories through malicious workflows, TeamPCP poisons VSCode extensions, and Socket discovers malicious postinstall hooks across 700+ repositories. Meanwhile in the lab, OpenClaw got a feature-heavy upgrade, Obsidian CLI integration landed, the package tracker got a rewrite, and the homelab held steady with new Proxmox snapshots. ...

Weekly Threat & Lab Roundup: FIRESTARTER Backdoor, ASP.NET Auth Forged, and the Week's Defenses

The threat landscape this week shifted from last week’s Windows Defender zero-days to infrastructure-level attacks: a state-sponsored backdoor surviving firewall patches, an emergency Microsoft patch for ASP.NET Core, and an iOS flaw that let law enforcement recover “deleted” Signal messages. Meanwhile in the lab, Momentum Fusion went live, Nextcloud got hardened, and the Obsidian knowledge base doubled in size. Cisco FIRESTARTER: A Backdoor That Survives Reboots (and Patches) Cisco Talos published a detailed technical analysis of UAT-4356, the same state-sponsored actor behind 2024’s ArcaneDoor campaign, now targeting Cisco Firepower devices with a custom backdoor dubbed FIRESTARTER. ...