#ctf-baltic

#ctf-baltic

I've always had what I would consider a hacker mindset, a curiosity to take things apart, understand them, and use that knowledge to solve problems. That mindset took me on a circuitous route into the cybersecurity industry; after being kicked out of high school for hacking computer systems, I worked a range of jobs, managing office supply companies by day and cracking Wi-Fi networks by night until I started a Digital Forensics degree which led me to the world of security research.

The most dangerous assumption in quality engineering right now is that you can validate an autonomous testing agent the same way you validated a deterministic application. When your systems can reason, adapt, and make decisions on their own, that linear validation model collapses.

AI systems are becoming part of everyday life in business, healthcare, finance, and many other areas. As these systems handle more important tasks, the security risks they face grow larger. AI red teaming tools help organizations test their AI systems by simulating attacks and finding weaknesses before real threats can exploit them. These tools work by challenging AI models in different ways to see how they respond under pressure.

Rhyne's attack involved unauthorized remote desktop sessions, deletion of network administrator accounts, and changing of passwords, showcasing significant security vulnerabilities.

The US Department of Justice, working with the cybercrime-fighting agency within the US Department of Defense known as the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, announced that it had dismantled four massive botnets in a single operation, removing the command-and-control servers used to commandeer the hacker-run armies of compromised devices known by the names JackSkid, Mossad, Aisuru, and Kimwolf.

Atos Researchers identified a new variant of the popular ClickFix technique, where attackers convince the user to execute a malicious command on their own device through the Win + R shortcut. In this variation, a "net use" command is used to map a network drive from an external server, after which a ".cmd" batch file hosted on that drive is executed.

The average e-crime breakout time - the period between initial access and lateral movement onto another system - dropped to 29 minutes, a 65% increase in speed from 2024. One such intrusion undertaken by Luna Moth targeting a law firm moved from initial access to data exfiltration in four minutes.

Tianfu Cup was launched as an alternative to the Zero Day Initiative's Pwn2Own competition, which regularly pays out more than $1 million to white hat hackers who demonstrate critical vulnerabilities in consumer and enterprise hardware and software, industrial control systems, and automotive products. Tianfu Cup made headlines in 2021, when participants earned a total of $1.9 million for exploits targeting Windows, Ubuntu, iOS, Microsoft Exchange, Chrome, Safari, Adobe Reader, Asus routers, and various virtualization products.

That changed last week when the US Department of Justice published a sentencing memorandum [PDF] that frames Williams' conduct as a betrayal of his employer and the US government, and the cause of significant harm to US national security. Williams "made it possible for the Russian Broker to arm its clients with powerful cyber exploits that could be used against any manner of victim, civilian or military around the world," the DoJ said.

Hoang: My background sits at the intersection of enterprise IT, data protection, and cybersecurity. I've spent much of my career working with CIOs and CISOs on resilience - how organizations protect, recover, and govern their most critical data in the face of cyber threats, outages, and operational risk. Today, as CIO at Commvault, I see security not as a standalone function, but as a core business capability.