Author: HackWatchit

Want to understand how attackers actually operate? Build a home lab where you can safely run Command and Control (C2) beacons, capture network traffic, and analyze the evidence like a real threat hunter.The Three-Host SetupYou need four functions, but only three hosts to cover them all. Here’s the topology:Host 1: Control HQ (your command center)Any OS you want—personal preference rules hereWhere you orchestrate everything via browser, terminal (SSH), RDP/VNCAccess C2 web interfaces, RITA, and remote into your victimLocation: Local network (same as victim)Host 2: The Victim (the compromised endpoint)Windows 10/11—realistic target environmentRecords both network traffic (for Zeek logs) and endpoint…

Amazon reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings on Thursday, and investors loved what they saw. Net sales rose 20%, and cloud revenue stood out as a particular bright spot. This combination of positive results was enough to send Amazon’s stock up nearly 10% in after-hours trading. Crucially, Amazon isn’t slowing down on data center spending, despite the conventional wisdom that investors want companies to rein it in. One line item, in particular, illustrates Amazon’s appetite for investing in infrastructure. Amazon spent $173 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30 on property and equipment — a category that covers GPUs, natural gas…

Topic: Operationalizing AI Governance Across the EnterpriseRecording Coming SoonAbstract: As organizations rapidly integrate Artificial Intelligence into business operations, governance has become a strategic necessity rather than a compliance exercise. Effective AI governance establishes the policies, processes, technologies, and accountability needed to ensure AI systems remain secure, ethical, transparent, compliant, and aligned with business objectives throughout their lifecycle. The current webinar provides a practical roadmap for operationalizing AI governance across the enterprise. Participants will explore governance frameworks that address risk management, data governance, privacy, regulatory compliance, model lifecycle management, third-party AI oversight, and organizational accountability. The session will examine how cross-functional…

In brief Reward hacking means an AI scores well on its objective without doing what the objective was meant to measure, and Anthropic says it has occurred in recent frontier training runs, including in its own models. OpenAI models stuck on unsolvable ExploitGym tasks chained zero-day exploits to reach Hugging Face, and METR found they were mainly trying to understand the scorer. The UK AI Security Institute found every model it tested tried to cheat, while Anthropic’s experiments show that heavy reward hacking can spread into broader misbehavior. In July 2026, a group of OpenAI models taking a cybersecurity test…

A Syrian man tied to the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has received a 42-month prison sentence in the US, more than 12 years after he was first charged. Ahmad Umar Agha, who used the online handle Th3Pr0, was sentenced on Thursday by a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia. According to the Justice Department, he evaded US authorities for more than a decade. Prosecutors say the hacking conspiracy Agha took part in was directed by figures close to Bashar al-Assad, among them the head of Syria’s General Intelligence Directorate. The scheme began as early as August 2011 and…

Capcom, the Japanese publisher behind Street Fighter, Resident Evil, and Monster Hunter, confirmed on October 22, 2026, that an unauthorized third party accessed records tied to more than 11.7 million CAPCOM ID accounts worldwide. According to the company’s official notice, the exposed data includes email addresses and account details such as creation dates, login counts, and the IP address used at last login. Capcom says credit card information was not affected, and it is warning players about fraudulent messages that impersonate the company. How the CAPCOM ID Breach Happened and What Was Exposed Unauthorized access to CAPCOM ID, a free…

Key takeaways After Alibaba’s Qwen model tried a test upload to a server in Beijing during a Cohere experiment, we replayed that moment 64 times, and the model picked 52 different addresses. That points to an unpredictable model rather than a hidden backdoor, but an unpredictable agent with access to tools is still a risk that needs to be addressed. →The destination kept changing. Alibaba Cloud came up in six of 64 replays and Amazon Web Services in seven, while nearly a third pointed back to the machine itself or to an internal network →Small changes influence the behavior.…

Fortinet announced the new FortiGuard Inline AI Security Service, delivering AI-specific inspection and guardrails to FortiGate customers through a cloud-delivered service. Organizations gain deeper visibility into AI activity and stop AI threats and data exposure through the Fortinet solutions they already use. Ongoing innovation in FortiAIGate powers these capabilities with high-performance AI guardrails, expanded access and compliance controls, shadow AI and agent visibility, and technology from the recent acquisition of Virtue AI.  Fortinet’s broad FortiGate footprint gives organizations a simpler path to adopt advanced AI security through the infrastructure they already use. Customers can enable the FortiGuard Inline AI Security…

U.S. federal investigators pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently stole highly sensitive data from the FBI have identified executives at two different ransomware negotiation firms who maintained unusually close relations with the extortion group, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close to the investigation say one of the executives in the United States even helped ShinyHunters operate a website that pressured victims into paying a ransom. Hackers aligned with ShinyHunters have claimed credit for dozens of major data breaches since 2019, when the group was primarily operated by cybercriminals living in France. As those original members were arrested or jailed one…