Security and Integrity Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 14, 2026

• Security Week ☛ Authorities Disrupt SocksEscort Proxy Service Powered by AVrecon Botnet

  Law enforcement agencies in the US and Europe targeted the cybercrime service that has impacted 360,000 devices since 2020.

• TechRadar ☛ Major SocksEscort proxy network powered by Linux malware taken down by FBI and other police forces

  An international law enforcement crackdown called “Operation Lightning” took down SocksEscort, a malicious residential proxy network which counted thousands of devices and defrauded people out of millions of dollars.

  A malicious residential proxy is a service that routes internet traffic through real home devices and IP addresses that were previously infected by malware. Attackers use these proxies to hide their true location and appear like normal users online, which helps them evade security systems and engage in different malicious activities such as credential stuffing, ad fraud, account takeover, and more.

• Security Week ☛ Chrome 146 Update Patches Two Exploited Zero-Days

  The flaws can be exploited to manipulate data and bypass security restrictions, potentially leading to code execution.

• SANS ☛ SmartApeSG campaign uses ClickFix page to push Remcos RAT, (Sat, Mar 14th)

• LWN ☛ Security updates for Friday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, kernel, and multipart), Fedora (dnf5, dr_libs, easyrpg-player, libmaxminddb, python3.12, strongswan, task, and udisks2), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, gnutls, ImageMagick, kernel, libvpx, mingw-libpng, nginx:1.26, python3.11, and uek-kernel), Red Hat (delve, git-lfs, mingw-libpng, osbuild-composer, and rhc-worker-playbook), SUSE (cjson, curl, dnsdist, libsoup2, postgresql16, postgresql17, postgresql18, python-lxml_html_clean, python-pypdf2, python36, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet9, dotnet10, freetype, golang-github-go-git-go-git, golang-golang-x-net, openssh, python-cryptography, sudo, and util-linux).

• Techstrong Group Inc ☛ The Cyber Resilience Act and Cloud Native: Understanding the Impact

  How the EU Cyber Resilience Act will impact Kubernetes, containers and cloud native supply chains ahead of the 2027 enforcement deadline.

• OpenSSF (Linux Foundation) ☛ Securing Agentic Hey Hi (AI) in Practice: From OpenSSF Guidance to Real-World Implementation

  Agentic Hey Hi (AI) systems and AI-driven software workflows are evolving quickly, with more people building on top of them. With that shift comes new questions around trust, control, provenance, and secure interaction between models, tools, and users. Traditional cybersecurity models are being pushed to their limits, and the security stakes have never been higher.

• Security Week ☛ Google Paid Out $17 Million in Bug Bounty Rewards in 2025

  Google paid over $3.7 million for Chrome vulnerabilities, and more than $3.5 million for cloud security defects.

• Security Week ☛ In Other News: N8n Flaw Exploited, Slopoly Malware, Interpol Cybercrime Crackdown

  Other noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: Telus Digital data breach, vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux AppArmor allow root privileges, US defense contractor behind Coruna exploits.

• Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

  • SANS ☛ A React-based phishing page with credential exfiltration via EmailJS, (Fri, Mar 13th)

    On Wednesday, a phishing message made its way into our handler inbox that contained a fairly typical low-quality lure, but turned out to be quite interesting in the end nonetheless. That is because the accompanying credential stealing web page was dynamically constructed using React and used a legitimate e-mail service for credential collection.

  • WhichUK ☛ Contactless £100 cap ending – how to protect yourself from fraud

    Banks no longer need to demand your Pin for bigger contactless payments

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ The FBI is looking for victimized Steam users who downloaded games with hidden malware — Investigation underway into multiple infected titles from 2024 to 2026

    Several games on Steam that were secretly carrying malware now seem to be under active investigation by the FBI. The department is looking for victim information tied to these games; anyone who installed and played an infected game and was harmed is being urged to step forward and share more info to help with the investigation.