💻 Myth busted: macOS logs 33% more threats than Windows

For years, the idea that Mac users can skip antivirus software was treated as gospel. Apple's marketing built an empire on the message that macOS simply doesn't get infected. Well, new global data from Kaspersky is here to ruin that comfortable story: over the past year, 12% of macOS users reported a malware infection, compared to just 9% on Windows. That's a third more threats hitting the platform everyone assumed was bulletproof.

⚠️ The dangerous side effect of feeling invincible

Here's the twist: it's not that Macs are inherently weaker. It's that confidence breeds carelessness. Only 35% of Mac owners run dedicated security software, versus 42% of Windows users. The habit gap shows up everywhere else too. On macOS, just 51% avoid opening suspicious emails or links compared to 62% of Windows users, complex passwords are used by 45% versus 52%, and multifactor authentication trails at 46% against 51%. Only in a few privacy-related practices, like reviewing privacy settings or checking whether leaked credentials are exposed, do Mac users come out slightly ahead.

📊 And the attack numbers back it up

It's not just malware. During the last year, macOS users reported more phishing incidents (12% vs 9%), more online scams and fraudulent investment schemes (16% vs 13%), more privacy violations (11% vs 8%) and a noticeably higher rate of personal data theft: 12% compared to 7% on Windows.

😎 Criminals stopped caring which OS you use

The threat landscape has fundamentally shifted. Cybercriminals no longer build attacks around a specific operating system. Instead, they lean on phishing and supply chain attacks, techniques that hit anyone regardless of whether they're typing on a MacBook or a Windows laptop. The old argument that Macs were safe simply because fewer people used them died the moment attackers realized Mac users pay real money and guard it poorly.

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#MacSecurity #MalwareTrends #PhishingAlert #CyberHygiene #PrivacyMatters

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🔴 Your LG smart TV is watching, listening and mapping your home

Smart TVs have quietly become one of the biggest privacy blind spots in the average household, and a new investigation shows just how far LG has taken things. Researchers led by Gamers Nexus, working alongside Level1Techs, spent weeks putting an LG OLED G5 under the microscope with packet-capturing tools like Wireshark. What they found reads like something out of a surveillance manual.

🎙 Recording with the screen "off"

The most alarming discovery came right away. The television kept listening through its microphone even in standby mode, while the screen looked completely dark. With the network disconnected, that audio was stored locally. The moment connectivity came back, everything got uploaded. In other words, unplugging the cable doesn't erase what was captured, it just postpones the upload.

⚠️ Scanning every device in your house

But the TV wasn't satisfied with watching its owner. It actively scanned the local network, fingerprinting smartphones, smartwatches and other gadgets, and even cataloged nearby Wi-Fi networks along with their signal strength. All of this flows back to LG Ad Solutions, the company's advertising division, which openly brags about holding data from 216 million smart TVs worldwide, 49 million of them in the United States.

🖥 "We control the screen"

That's LG's own pitch to advertisers, promoting the ability to dominate the living room using data harvested from a television people paid thousands of dollars for. The company has publicly insisted its sets "do not collect, record or store ambient conversations," a statement that sits very awkwardly next to the researchers' findings.

📷 The ACR problem and where these screens live

Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR, takes what makes the practice worse: it snapshots the screen and samples audio to identify exactly what you're watching, even when the TV is used purely as an HDMI monitor. A compromised set could therefore capture sound from calls or presentations routed through that cable. And these panels aren't confined to living rooms: they hang in hospitals, waiting rooms, boardrooms and hotels, which raises uncomfortable questions about patient and corporate confidentiality.

🛡 How to protect yourself

If you own an LG smart TV, the researchers' advice is blunt: take it off the network entirely. Pull the Ethernet cable out physically, disable Wi-Fi in the TV's settings, and don't count on an external streaming box like an Apple TV as a fix, because the TV keeps spying on its own regardless. If you have several sets and can't isolate them all, block LG's telemetry domains at the router or firewall level, though the device may still log data locally. And as a universal habit, switch off ACR and personalized advertising in any smart TV's privacy menu, mute the microphone where possible, and assume every "smart" screen in your home phones home by default.

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👥 One username, hundreds of accounts: meet nexfil

When it comes to open-source intelligence, one of the most common starting points is a simple username. People tend to reuse the same alias across dozens of platforms, which makes it a surprisingly powerful pivot for mapping someone's digital footprint. That's exactly where nexfil shines: a high-speed username lookup tool written in Rust, built for speed above everything else.

🚀 Built for raw speed

Traditional username enumeration tools check platforms one by one and can take ages to finish. Nexfil takes a different approach, relying on multiprocessing and finely tuned requests to verify a given username across more than 350 services about ten times faster than the usual alternatives.

Instead of waiting minutes for results, you get them in a fraction of the time, which makes a real difference during live investigations.

✅ Simple on purpose

Nexfil deliberately avoids bloat. There are no unnecessary extras, no confusing menus, just a clean and efficient workflow: give it a username and it reports where that alias exists. This makes it ideal for quickly checking the online presence of a person or a company during the early stages of an OSINT investigation, without wasting time on features you will never use.

🔎 Don't make it easy for others to find you

Since this technique is so easy to execute, it is worth taking precautions on the defensive side too. Using unique usernames for each service breaks the chain that links your accounts together. Avoid reusing your gaming alias on professional platforms like LinkedIn or GitHub, and keep your accounts set to private whenever possible. It is also worth periodically searching your own nicknames to see what a stranger could find, because reducing cross-platform correlation is one of the simplest yet most effective privacy measures available.

🐱 Check this awesome tool at GitHub

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#OSINT #UsernameSearch #PrivacyTools #Reconnaissance #DigitalFootprint

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❤️Support Privacy Not A Crime: Donate securely with crypto

We have some important news for our community. We have decided to abandon donations through Telegram, and the reason is simple: The @tribute platform collects a huge amount of data along the way. Defending privacy while using tools that harvest your information simply doesn't make sense, so we're switching to a way of contributing that actually matches our values.

💵 Donate with cryptocurrency, without middlemen

From now on, you can support the channel with Bitcoin, Ethereum or TRON. Crypto donations let you contribute without exposing your identity, without intermediaries and without third parties building a profile out of your generosity.

Any amount, no matter how small, helps us keep the channel updated, ad-free and fully independent.

🚩 Where your support goes

Every contribution goes straight into keeping this project alive: researching new threats, publishing weekly news, reviewing open-source security tools and spreading awareness about surveillance and digital rights. By donating, you're not just supporting a channel, you're taking an active part in the defense of the right to privacy.

Thank you for being here, for sharing our articles and for believing in this cause. Together we are stronger.

☕️ Buy us a coffee

🗽 Remember, privacy is not a crime, privacy is defended.

📱 Your phone can be hacked by a single call without you even answering

Most people believe that ignoring unknown numbers keeps them safe. The WeWorm attack proved the opposite: just an incoming call was enough to turn a smartphone into the next link in a digital infection chain.

🪱 A worm that spreads itself

Researchers at Calif built WeWorm as a laboratory zero-click worm targeting WeChat, the messaging giant whose ecosystem reaches 1.44 billion monthly users across Weixin and WeChat. Even without answering the call, the victim's account was taken over, and then the compromised account automatically started calling its own contacts to repeat the attack. The demonstration worked between Android and iOS devices with zero interaction from the owners.

🔴 Where the flaw lives

At the heart of WeWorm sits a memory corruption bug in the VoIP stack of WeChat, the component that handles voice calls. There is one catch: the attacker must already be in the victim's friends list. But after the first compromise, that condition stops mattering, because the hijacked account can call its trusted contacts and continue the chain on its own.

In the test, a Pixel 10a called an iPhone 17e and gained control of WeChat while the phone was still ringing. The captured iPhone then called a second Pixel 10a and repeated the whole process. The entire exploit took mere seconds.

Answering the call did not save the device, and rejecting it only stopped that specific attempt, since the attacker could simply ring again.

🦈 What the attacker actually gets

The exploit hands over full control of the WeChat account: reading and sending messages, making calls, acting on behalf of the owner. WeWorm alone does not seize the entire phone, though Calif sees full device takeover as a plausible scenario if chained with other Android or iOS bugs, something never confirmed in the demo.

🤖 AI accelerated everything

Neural networks played a starring role here. Calif says AI helped uncover the flaw, the remote code execution exploit was ready in about two days, and a full working worm took roughly another week. The team learned of the issue on July 23 and had the cross-platform demonstration done by August 11.

🛡 Patched, but lessons remain

Tencent got word on July 24. Versions 8.0.77 for Android and 8.0.76 for iOS, released on August 21, neutralize the attack, and by August 28 Calif confirmed a server-side block covering all users. So far, there are no signs of WeWorm spreading in the wild.

And that is the uncomfortable part. Attacks like this ignore old habits: it does not matter whether you pick up or not. Keep WeChat updated at all times, install updates the day they ship, think twice before adding unfamiliar contacts to your list, and turn on any extra account protection the app offers. Silence is no longer a defense.

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🎤 Your repositories finally speak human: Meet Git-Friend

Every developer knows the feeling: you land on a GitHub repository that could solve exactly the problem you have, only to spend the next hour drowning in undocumented code and a README written three years ago by someone who quit the project. That frustration is precisely what a new open-source assistant called Git-Friend was built to eliminate.

❓ What it actually does

Git-Friend is an AI-powered GitHub companion built with React, TypeScript and Firebase. Instead of forcing you to scroll endlessly through commits and folders, it puts three practical helpers in one place: a smart AI chat that resolves Git and GitHub doubts on the fly, a README generator capable of turning a neglected project into clean, professional documentation, and Gitmoji support to keep your commit history readable and consistent.

🤝 Who benefits the most

For open-source contributors, it lowers the barrier of making a project approachable to newcomers. For team leads, it standardizes documentation and commit conventions across a whole organization. And if you are just starting out with Git, having an assistant explain best practices in plain language beats copying commands from Stack Overflow without understanding them. The project is completely free and welcome to contributions, so anyone can raise an issue, get assigned and improve the tool.

🔹 Give it a spin

The code is fully available on GitHub, so you can clone it, run it locally with your own API keys and start exploring repositories in a friendlier way. Sometimes the best security and productivity tips come from the simplest tools, and this one fits right in.

🐱 Check it at GitHub

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#GitFriend #GitHub #OpenSource #AI #DevTools

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🦠 A trojanized HAProxy wiretap uncovered in South Korea

A previously undocumented Linux toolkit, dubbed Ted, has been found compiled directly into the HAProxy load balancers of two South Korean organizations, where it intercepted web traffic and served altered pages to selected visitors. According to researchers at Rapid7, the implant points to a targeted and highly stealthy operation.

7️⃣ How the compromise works

Ted is not a HAProxy vulnerability. Installing it requires code execution on the target host and the ability to swap the running binary for a trojanized build, compiled directly into the victim's own installation, in this case version 2.8.12. This deep integration lets the implant abuse the load balancer's native filter API, internal memory pools, event scheduler, and process management infrastructure to intercept traffic, while legitimate load balancing keeps working normally.

The real danger lies in the position this software occupies: the load balancer is the SSL/TLS termination point, which means it decrypts every HTTPS connection before forwarding traffic to backend servers. Once the backdoor was live, the attackers could read, modify, and log every decrypted session passing through it without ever touching a backend server.

🧍‍♂️ Why it stays invisible

Evasion was baked into Ted's design from the ground up. Commands from the attacker's infrastructure arrived disguised as requests for a specific image path, terminating at the load balancer without ever reaching a backend server. The implant then decremented HAProxy's live connection counters, effectively erasing the connection from the load balancer's own statistics. As a result, nothing showed up in monitoring dashboards, backend logs, or load balancer statistics.

Before serving a manipulated page, the implant filtered requests using several criteria, including User-Agent, URL, referrer patterns, and client IP addresses, delivering malicious content only to chosen visitors in a watering-hole style loop. It also manipulated HTTP headers to hide any evidence of the tampered page from the visitors themselves.

⭕️ Attribution and the wider toolkit

Rapid7 Labs attributed the framework with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors, placing the two victims in South Korea's automotive and media sectors. Keep in mind that attribution at this confidence level should be treated as indicative rather than definitive. Beyond the backdoor itself, the campaign included trojanized versions of crond, agetty, atd, sshd, and polkitd.

The trojanized SSH daemon worked as a keylogger for harvesting passwords, while a companion remote access trojan, curlRAT, enabled data exfiltration, remote command execution, and script injection from internal servers. Evidence suggests the attackers may have gained their initial foothold through an exposed Groupware portal, a popular Korean enterprise collaboration platform.

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#CyberSecurity #TedBackdoor #HAProxy #ThreatIntelligence #Espionage

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🕵️‍♂️ Signal & Shadow: A complete OSINT architecture built in the open

Most OSINT resources online are scattered blog posts or abandoned tool lists. Signal & Shadow, created by Derek Bowler, takes a different approach: it treats open-source intelligence as a full investigative discipline, with structured methodology, verified reporting and a reference library that covers nearly every investigative domain you can think of.

📡 The Signal: Verified dispatches with real findings

The heart of the project is The Signal, an investigative newsletter with a published verification standard behind it. A recent example shows the depth of its work: France 24 geolocated a contested wedding-strike site in Iran, and the analysis measures a 135-metre gap between the strike location and its likely target, a discrepancy that CENTCOM's own statement leaves unaddressed. This is not opinion; it is geolocation, measurement and corroboration applied to contested footage, the kind of analysis often reserved for state agencies.

📚 The OSINT Card Library: Pick the card that matches your problem

The reference card library is organized by domain rather than alphabetically, which mirrors how real investigators work. Each card maps to a real investigative question across domains including Maritime, Aviation, SOCMINT, Financial Intelligence, Geospatial & Satellite, TELCO, Dark Web, Legal & Court Records, Corporate Intelligence, HUMINT, MEDINT, OPSEC and Geopolitical Risk. Practical examples show how deep it goes: one card cross-references Global Forest Watch loss alerts against IBAMA fines and Trase data to attribute illegal deforestation to named landowners and exporters.

🟠 Methodology, AI and hands-on tools, not just theory

Beyond the cards, the site offers step-by-step OSINT guides, methodology frameworks, and tutorials on AI techniques for investigations, plus integrated capstones such as verifying crisis footage end-to-end using geolocation, chronolocation, source verification and satellite corroboration in a single workflow. There is also a practical toolkit: an Admiralty Grader for source reliability, a Chronolocation Calculator, a Geolocation Verifier, a Hash Generator, and an OSINT Source Index. Free tier access gets you started, while the full archive unlocks everything.

🛡 How to apply this safely yourself

Anyone doing OSINT, even passively reading, should protect their footprint. Use browser isolation (a dedicated profile or virtual machine), connect through a reputable VPN, and never log into personal accounts from the same session used for research. Prefer services with strong privacy policies, avoid clicking raw links to unknown sites, keep signed copies (hashes) of evidence you collect, and always verify a source's provenance before sharing its claims.

🌐 Check the official website

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#OSINT #DigitalForensics #Investigation #OSINTEducation #Privacy

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🧿 Farming aura and digital footprint: What happens when a kid becomes a meme overnight

The so-called "aura battles" are sweeping social feeds everywhere: challenges, poses and quick moments recorded on a phone that can turn a minor into the protagonist of the night. What starts as an innocent clip filmed for a couple of classmates can end up traveling far beyond its original context, landing in front of millions of strangers who were never meant to see it.

❤️ The problem runs deeper than a viral video

Once a clip spreads outside its original circle, pulling it back is nearly impossible. Strangers can stitch footage together, link profiles across platforms or spot personal details hiding in plain sight: a school badge, a street sign, a schedule glowing on a nearby screen. Memes rarely stay harmless either, because ridicule, harassment and messages from unknown adults can quickly follow a single viral moment.

🟥 A permanent puzzle assembled clip by clip

Every recorded moment adds another piece to a footprint that never truly fades. Enough scattered fragments let someone map daily routines, build a fake identity or approach the child posing as a friend. And unlike an adult's trail, a minor's footprint grows silently for years before anyone measures how much of it is already out there.

🔘 The takeaway

The aura lasts a few seconds. The digital footprint lasts much longer, sometimes a lifetime. That's exactly why privacy, secure accounts and digital education matter more than ever in a world where any kid can become a meme overnight without ever choosing it.

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#AuraFarming #DigitalFootprint #ChildPrivacy #OnlineSafety #DigitalEducation

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🤖 Strix: An AI pentester shaking things up on GitHub

Automated security testing just got a serious upgrade. Strix, an open-source AI-powered penetration testing tool, has been trending lately and quickly climbed past 50,000 stars on GitHub. Instead of sitting down and manually walking through an application step by step, you hand it over to a team of AI agents that behave like real attackers: probing the app, hunting for bugs, and figuring out whether those bugs are actually exploitable.

⏏️ Beyond simple scanner alerts

This is where Strix stands apart from typical static scanners. It doesn't just report "SQL Injection found here." The agents actively attempt to run the exploit themselves, validate the finding, and then deliver a full report including the vulnerability, a Proof-of-Concept, and clear reproduction steps. That validation stage matters a lot, because one of the biggest headaches in security work is drowning in false positives.

🛡 Why this matters for defenders

By thinking like an attacker rather than just pattern-matching signatures, Strix helps teams prioritize what's truly dangerous. Findings come backed with working evidence, so developers can go straight to fixing the real problems instead of chasing ghosts.

7️⃣ How to protect yourself and your projects

Tools like this are powerful, but they complement rather than replace good practices. Keep your dependencies updated, enforce input validation and parameterized queries to prevent injection attacks, adopt secure coding reviews, and run regular pentests as part of your development cycle. If you use automated testing agents, always do so only on systems you own or have explicit permission to test, unauthorized testing is illegal in most jurisdictions.

🐱 Check it for free at GitHub

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#CyberSecurity #PenetrationTesting #OpenSource #AIAgents #Vulnerabilities

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🇺🇸 How the CIA recruits influencers step one in your browser history.

Chase Hughes spent two decades building behavior profiling and influence systems for military and intelligence work.

🤩 We've been told that some of our followers work for Europol.

We're really happy to have followers like this, especially on a channel as small as ours.

🏦 Thank you for following us!

👮‍♂️ Police could access automatic lifelong person search

A single photograph might be enough to unearth a person's entire digital footprint. Law enforcement agencies are increasingly leveraging facial recognition technology paired with vast public data aggregators to conduct comprehensive background investigations instantly. What was once a manual, time-consuming process of piecing together digital breadcrumbs can now be triggered by just one image of a face.

🧫 How the technology works

The core of this capability lies in the integration of advanced facial recognition algorithms with Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) databases. Companies like Clearview AI have scraped billions of images from social media platforms, news sites, and other public corners of the internet to build massive biometric databases. When a photo is submitted, the system matches the facial geometry against these repositories.

Once a match is found, it can unlock a cascade of associated information: social media profiles, employment history, property records, and even family connections.

InquiryIQ and similar platforms take this further by aggregating data from government records, business filings, and consumer databases. Put simply, a law enforcement officer with a smartphone and a target photo can generate a detailed dossier in seconds. Addresses, vehicle registrations, and sometimes even real-time location data if linked to other surveillance networks become accessible almost immediately.

⚠️ Privacy implications and risks

The ability to perform such searches raises profound concerns about civil liberties and the right to anonymity. In many jurisdictions, individuals have no realistic way to opt out of these databases once their images are scraped. Just because your data is "public" doesn't mean you consented to mass surveillance. Then there's the risk of false positives, where algorithmic errors lead to mistaken identities, potentially resulting in wrongful detention or harassment.

The potential for abuse extends well beyond legitimate law enforcement too. Authoritarian regimes or malicious actors could exploit these tools to track dissidents, journalists, or private citizens without any oversight. Add to that the lack of transparency regarding who accesses these databases and for what purpose, and you're looking at a significant accountability gap.

👀 How to protect yourself

Completely removing your digital footprint is nearly impossible, but you can still reduce your exposure. Start by adjusting privacy settings on all platforms to restrict who can see your photos and profile information. Be careful about posting high-resolution images of your face publicly. Some data brokers allow users to request removal from their databases – tedious work, yes, but it does shrink the pool of available data.

Certain clothing patterns, makeup techniques, or accessories like specific glasses or masks can also confuse facial recognition algorithms. And here's a rule of thumb: assume any image captured in public spaces could be stored and analyzed. Finally, consider supporting organizations pushing to regulate facial recognition technology and enforce stricter data protection laws. Small efforts add up when it comes to preserving privacy rights.

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📰 Weekly Cybersecurity News Roundup

The CIA has declassified reports showing they discussed scenarios of attacks using civilian planes years before September 11. Meanwhile, Anthropic shared details about cyber operations where a person picks the target, then the AI handles reconnaissance, hacking, and code rewriting on its own.

📰 We've put together the week's most interesting cybersecurity news in one spot so you don't miss anything.

🌐 Global developments

🔹 The CIA opened up presidential briefing documents from the late 1990s. They show intelligence agencies talked about attacks inside the U.S. using civilian airplanes well before 2001.

🔹 The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights urged AI developers to build strong safeguards and clear red lines, saying that relying on companies to be careful on their own is not enough.

🔹 AI hype is spreading beyond tech into bond markets. Big tech companies' bonds are now priced in ways that don't follow normal market rules anymore.

🔹 China figured out how to make their own AI accelerators, but they hit a wall with HBM memory shortages. Huawei had to boost Ascend chip prices by almost 50%.

🔹 A ChatGPT algorithm update changed how Reddit looked overnight, and mentions of the platform dropped 86% in just one day.

🛡 Cybersecurity focus

🔹 Anthropic described a new type of cyber operation: humans choose the target, Claude does the reconnaissance, breaks into systems, and rewrites code when it finds something.

🔹 Passport data, flight seat assignments, and baggage information for 220 million travelers were exposed through a Vietnam-linked database using a default password. The database was hosted on Viettel-assigned IPs in Hanoi, and researchers couldn't confirm which Vietnamese organization operated it. Singapore Airlines helped coordinate the response after the discovery.

🔹 Berlin said no to a ransom payment, and 5.8 TB of government files ended up online, including info on critical infrastructure.

🔹 The U.S. went after Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese marketplace where fraud call centers bought websites, fake identities, and money laundering services.

🔹 After the Leipzig attack, Germany is speeding up work on its national cyber dome, a single system built to fight drones, cyberattacks, and sabotage together.

🗣 Share in the comments how your week went and which news surprised you the most.

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#CyberSecurity #AI #Threats #Privacy #Security

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