Black Hat Stories | Or Yair, Security Research Team Lead at SafeBreach

In this episode of Black Hat Stories, we sit down with Or Yair, the Security Research Team Lead at SafeBreach. With multiple years of experience attending Black Hat — including presenting at Black Hat Europe 2025 — Or shares his unique perspective on vulnerability research, curiosity, and the real purpose of the Black Hat community. For the past five years, Or has focused on vulnerability research in the Windows environment and third‑party components. He describes the research process as unpredictable and challenge‑driven — “like living in an escape room” — where success is never guaranteed, but the chase is part of the thrill. Or also highlights what makes Black Hat truly shine: its ability to bring impact to the security industry. By attending talks on topics he wouldn’t normally explore, he gains insights that lead to faster breakthroughs and stronger research down the line. 🔗 Visit our site: https://blackhat.com/ 📧 Subscribe to our free newsletter: https://ift.tt/p0QMV61 #BlackHatStories #BHEU #BlackHat #cybersecurity

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNtuyrXPIc0

Black Hat USA 2025 | Ghost Calls: Abusing Web Conferencing for Covert Command & Control

Red team operators frequently struggle with establishing interactive command and control (C2) over traditional C2 channels. While long-term covert channels are well-suited for stealthy, persistent communication, they often lack the bandwidth or real-time responsiveness needed for operations such as SOCKS proxying, layer two pivoting, relaying attacks, or hidden VNC sessions. Attempting to use traditional C2 mechanisms for these activities in a well-monitored network can be slow, conspicuous, and easily detected. Our research explores the use of real-time communication protocols as a short-term, high-speed C2 channel that seamlessly complements a covert long-term C2 infrastructure. Specifically, we leverage web conferencing protocols, which are designed for real-time, low-latency communication and operate through globally distributed media servers that function as natural traffic relays. This approach allows operators to blend interactive C2 sessions into normal enterprise traffic patterns, appearing as nothing more than a temporarily joined online meeting. Any enterprise reliant on collaboration suites could be exposed to these vectors, making it a critical concern across industries. In this presentation, we introduce TURNt, an open-source tool that enables covert traffic routing through media servers hosted by web conferencing providers. These media servers offer a unique advantage: vendors frequently recommend whitelisting their IP addresses and exempting them from TLS inspection, significantly reducing the risk of detection. TURNt allows red team operators to maintain persistent, stealthy communication via traditional C2 while activating high-bandwidth interactive sessions for short, one-to-two-hour periods—mimicking legitimate conferencing activity. We will demonstrate how this technique can be integrated into existing red team operations, discuss the trade-offs and detection risks, and explore countermeasures defenders can implement to identify and mitigate this emerging technique. Attendees will learn how to stealthily blend short-term, interactive C2 into existing red team operations and how to detect/mitigate these techniques defensively. By: Adam Crosser | Staff Security Engineer, Praetorian Full Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/OqwQJZj

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9znA01MqUc

Black Hat USA 2025 | Practical Attacks on Nostr, a Decentralized Censorship-Resistant Protocol

Nostr is an emerging open-source, decentralized social networking protocol with over 1.1 million users—and a critical blind spot in its security design. While decentralized architectures promise resilience and user control, rigorous real-world security analyses remain uncommon in this space. In this session, we unveil the first comprehensive security study of Nostr and its popular client applications, demonstrating how subtle flaws in cryptographic design, event verification, and link previews allow an attacker to forge "encrypted" direct messages (DMs), impersonate user profiles, and even leak the confidential message from "encrypted" DMs. We also show how a lack of signature checks in many clients—whether due to outright skipped verification or a TOCTOU caching flaw—enables effortless data tampering. Even a single oversight can escalate from simple forgery to full-blown confidentiality breaches. Far from theoretical, our proof-of-concept attacks target widely used clients—one with over 100,000 downloads—and systematically bypass the platform's intended privacy and authentication controls. We'll share how you can replicate these exploits with minimal setup, explain how loosely defined specifications in a decentralized protocol can introduce critical weaknesses, and outline both immediate mitigation steps and best practices for cryptographically sound design. By revealing these cracks in a widely touted "censorship-resistant" system, we aim to jumpstart a more rigorous approach to securing decentralized social platforms—before attackers go mainstream with the vulnerabilities we've uncovered. By: Hayato Kimura | Researcher, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology / The University of Osaka Ryoma Ito | Senior Researcher, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology Kazuhiko Minematsu | Research Fellow, NEC Corporation Shogo Shiraki | Independent Researcher, University of Hyogo Takanori Isobe | Professor, The University of Osaka Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/hrA04kE

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O97xhyHFSsw

Black Hat USA 2025 | Uncovering and Responding to the tj-actions Supply Chain Breach

When 'Changed Files' Changed Everything: Uncovering and Responding to the tj-actions Supply Chain Breach What began as a routine CI/CD run quickly uncovered a disturbing reality: the popular tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action, used by 23,000+ repositories including those from NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft and other tech giants, had been weaponized to exfiltrate secrets. This presentation dissects how one of the most consequential supply chain attacks of 2025 unfolded and was ultimately contained. On March 14, 2025, at 1:01 PM PT, we detected an anomalous outbound network connection to gist.githubusercontent.com from a pipeline run. This single alert led to the discovery that attackers had redirected all tags of the tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action to point to a single malicious commit. The compromised action dumped CI/CD credentials from memory and exposed them directly in build logs – requiring no additional exfiltration channels. We'll demonstrate how the attackers leveraged a previous compromise of the reviewdog GitHub Action to gain access to tj-actions, showcasing an emerging pattern of "chained" supply chain attacks. We will share actionable logic and methodologies to detect future CI/CD supply chain attacks by flagging deviations from established patterns of normal network activity - techniques that succeeded where traditional signature-based security failed against this sophisticated breach. The presentation examines the real-world challenges faced by affected organizations: from identifying instances of the compromised action across their codebases, hunting for exposed credentials in build logs, determining which secrets required rotation, and implementing alternatives after the original action was temporarily removed. Through a live demonstration, attendees will witness both the attack mechanics and how organizations navigated these complex recovery scenarios with limited tooling and information. Security professionals and developers will leave with concrete strategies to identify and mitigate similar supply chain compromises in their own CI/CD environments, where traditional indicators of compromise are deliberately minimized and trusted tools are weaponized against their users. By: Varun Sharma | CEO, StepSecurity Ashish Kurmi | CTO, StepSecurity Presentation Materials Available at: Varun Sharma | CEO, StepSecurity Ashish Kurmi | CTO, StepSecurity

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BCngzJC1Rc

Black Hat USA 2025 | Dark Corners: How a Failed Patch Left VMware ESXi VM Escapes Open for Two Years

VMware ESXi appears to be increasingly secure, as indicated by fewer CVEs and 0 success at Pwn2Own. However, on March 4 this year, VMware disclosed three critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-22224, CVE-2025-22225, CVE-2025-22226) that enable ESXi virtual machine escape and have been confirmed to be exploited in the wild. This brings attention back to VMware ESXi, raising questions about the security of this influential commercial virtualization platform and the cost of breaking it. Our team successfully demonstrated a VMware ESXi VM escape at the Tianfu Cup in late 2023, winning both the championship and the Most Valuable Product Crack Award. This was the only publicly demonstrated VMware ESXi VM escape since 2021. In this presentation, we will disclose the vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-22252, CVE-2024-22254) we discovered and demonstrated at the Tianfu Cup. More importantly, we found that the root cause of one vulnerability (CVE-2024-22252) is darker than imagined—it stemmed from a previously failed patch, leaving the flaw present in all VMware hypervisor products (Workstation, Fusion, ESXi) for two years. We will reveal its connection to historical vulnerabilities, how VMware attempted to fix it, and how it continued to exist and hide for two years until we discovered and reported it. We will also share our exploitation methodology for ESXi VM escape, which will be the only ESXi VM escape exploitation disclosure since 2021. We leveraged the URB we shared in "URB Excalibur: The New VMware All-Platform VM Escapes," along with some new primitives. A full ESXi VM escape also requires a sandbox bypass attack on the ESXi system. We will analyze the relevant attack surfaces in detail and how to achieve privilege escalation through kernel vulnerabilities. Finally, we will analyze the three vulnerabilities exploited in the wild disclosed by VMware in March, and evaluate whether they have been properly fixed this time. By: Yuhao Jiang | Security Researcher, Ant Group Xinlei Ying | Security Researcher, Ant Group Ziming Zhang | Security Researcher, Ant Group Full Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/guKQrz5

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhQmaK8Zsfw

Black Hat USA 2025 | More Flows, More Bugs: Empowering SAST with LLMs and Customized DFA

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) plays a significant role in modern vulnerability discovery. For example, GitHub uses CodeQL to scan repositories. However, our analysis of over 100 real-world vulnerabilities has revealed that its detection performance is limited by two main factors: 1) incomplete source and sink coverage in built-in propagation rules, and 2) disruptions in data flow due to insufficient support for certain language features. In this talk, we will introduce a framework to empower SAST tools' capabilities to identify previously undetectable vulnerabilities and new CVEs. First, we will demonstrate how to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically identify sources and sinks from open-source frameworks. Second, we will introduce the implementation principles of CodeQL's Data Flow Analysis (DFA). By developing patches for the DFA's QL language library, we have addressed language feature challenges, including Java reflection handling, partial native method support, and value passing model optimization. Our enhancements support 191 sources and sinks across 18 frameworks. Through comprehensive verification of over 5,000 repositories, we identified a more than 15% increase in data flows when utilizing existing rules, compared to results without the enhancements. Additionally, we reproduced over 50 historical CVEs that were undetectable by the original CodeQL due to a lack of language features support. Our research also uncovered 5 new CVEs (e.g., CVE-2024-45387) that the original CodeQL could not detect. We believe our work will greatly empower the detection capabilities of SAST tools. By: Yuan Luo | Senior Security Engineer, Tencent Security YunDing Lab Zhaojun Chen | Senior Security Engineer, Tencent Security YunDing Lab Yi Sun | Senior Security Engineer, Tencent Security YunDing Lab Rhettxie Rhettxie | Senior Security Engineer, Tencent Security YunDing Lab Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/Qm8jV0O

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp0x-cfClPY

Black Hat Asia 2026 Welcome Video

We’re delighted to have you join us for what promises to be an unforgettable experience. Before you dive into the action, make sure to check out our Welcome Guide—your go-to resource for everything you need to navigate the event with confidence. From on-site logistics and scheduling updates to On-Demand Access and exclusive programs, this guide is packed with essential information to elevate your on-site experience. Whether you’re a returning veteran or attending for the first time, this guide will help you make the most of your time at Black Hat. Join the conversation and get real-time updates by following and using #BHASIA on social media. #cybersecurity

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c01ksgAffk

Black Hat USA 2025 | Evaluating Autonomous Vehicle Resilience

The Adversarial Scenario Fuzzer is an automated testing framework that evaluates autonomous vehicle resilience against potentially harmful teleoperation commands. While teleoperation can help resolve complex driving situations, incorrect or malicious commands pose safety risks. The fuzzer systematically generates challenging scenarios through simulation, including: - Malicious trajectory suggestions - Conflicting guidance signals - Environmental perturbations Using iterative optimization, the fuzzer creates increasingly impactful test cases while evaluating the vehicle's ability to reject unsafe commands. This approach helps validate the robustness of autonomous decision-making systems and ensures safety mechanisms can effectively handle adversarial inputs. By: Zhisheng Hu | Product Security Engineer, Zoox, Inc. Shanit Gupta | Director of Product Security, Zoox, Inc. Cooper de Nicola | Product Security Engineer, Zoox, Inc. Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/82oEYtq

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmPhJAz-5Rc

Black Hat USA 2025 | Windows Hell No for Business

Windows Hello is the flagship of Microsoft's passwordless strategy. It is used to authenticate users, not just at login but also in new features such as Personal Data Encryption, Administrator Protection, Passkeys, and Recall. Windows Hello allows a user to authenticate without a password but using a PIN or biometrics, a fingerprint or face recognition. Windows Hello for Business (WHfB) extends these capabilities in order to enable authentication using an Identity Provider like Entra ID or Active Directory. Also, Windows Hello can be configured to run in Enhanced Sign-in Security (ESS) mode. Using Virtual Based Security, this mode is supposed to isolate the identification procedure, preventing attacks even from administrators. This talk provides the most comprehensive overview of WHfB's internal mechanisms so far, discussing WHfB's big and little secrets, lifted by reverse engineering. We follow the journey of biometrics through the system, from capture to identification. This allows us to answer many questions: Where are biometric data stored? What is the role of the so-called indispensable TPM? What is ESS and what security does it really provide? What is transmitted to the Identity Provider when we have no password involved? Particular focus will be put on the internals of databases used for facial recognition. One might think that biometrics to identify a user would be secure, and potentially protected via the TPM, but this is not the case. In fact, it is quite the opposite! We will present a new attack that targets the storage subsystem of the biometric unit. We will show how the biometric templates are "encrypted" and how a local administrator can exchange biometric features in the database. This allows authentication as any user already enrolled in the targeted system, including the possibility to make a lateral movement by usurping a domain administrator. Smile, you are on camera, and you are authenticated as someone else. Finally, we will discuss possible remediations to use WHfB in a more secure context. By: Baptiste David | IT Security Specialist, ERNW Enno Rey Netzwerke GmbH Tillmann Oßwald | Security Researcher, ERNW Enno Rey Netzwerke GmbH Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/4PjbmfK

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkWZ5KcelD4

Black Hat USA 2025 | Use and Abuse of Personal Information -- Politics Edition

Over the past 5 years, we have employed active open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques to test the question of how our personal information is used, shared, or otherwise abused. To do this, we created an automated collection framework with realistic fake identities used in one-time online transactions and then passively collect email, voicemail, and SMS responses from that event. The key highlight of this talk are the results from 2000+ fake identities signed up to the declared political candidates for the 2024 U.S. elections (U.S. House and Senate pre-primary candidates as of ~Oct 2023; presidential candidates added as announced), tracing how information was used (e.g., numbers and patterns of email, comparison of "hot" races to "in the bag" ones, geographical responses, sentiment analysis) or shared (e.g., routine sharing and overnight/unified shift in Democratic party support of Harris after Biden withdrawal). Additional trends are demonstrated for attempting to predict the outcomes of races based upon their messaging behaviors, coordinated intra-party responses to events, the post-election and post-inauguration phases, the lack of direct mailings, and other fun anecdotes like having one of our fake IDs traced back to us via IP inspection. We will strive to keep the discussion apolitical, as the focus is more about the data/trends and what our expectations should be for our personal privacy when providing our information to political candidates. As this talk builds on a prior Black Hat USA 2021 talk, we'll also discuss automation techniques for active OSINT frameworks and preliminary results for a fully integrated "interaction engine" that enables generative AI email responses with machine generated personalities, based on the "Big-5" psychometric factors. By: Alan Michaels | Northrop Grumman Sr. Faculty Fellow / Professor and Director, Spectrum Dominance, Virginia Tech National Security Institute Jared Byers | Research Associate, Virginia Tech National Security Institute Full Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/14FDvj5

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf2k8QPEPqs

Black Hat USA 2025 | Smart Charging, Smarter Hackers: The Unseen Risks of ISO 15118

The rise of electric vehicles (EVs) is reshaping global mobility, paving the way for a cleaner, more sustainable future. But this shift is not without challenges. By 2040, more than 600 million EVs are expected to be on the roads, placing enormous pressure on our electricity grids. This could lead to instability and disruptions in the electricity supply, particularly during peak demand. To address this challenge, the International Organization for Standardization released 15118 - a standard that introduces technologies like smart charging and Vehicle-to-Grid communication. These innovations not only help reduce the pressure on the grid, but also promise to enhance the user experience of charging an EV, making it more intuitive and, more importantly, secure. That said, while resolving several critical cybersecurity issues, the standard also introduces new risks. This session will explore how ISO 15118 reshapes the threat landscape of EV charging. We will examine the cybersecurity implications of the standard, looking at the risks it mitigates, shifts, and creates. In fact, while ISO 15118 offers substantial improvements, we argue that the standard is not sufficient to fully secure the EV charging ecosystem. Using ISO 15118 as an example, we will demonstrate how standards and policies - even those that explicitly target cybersecurity - can inadvertently introduce new attack vectors, making them a double-edged sword. By: Salvatore Gariuolo | Senior Threat Researcher, Trend Micro Inc. Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/N3t72Hg

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_furvigQmxk