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This week on the Lock and Code podcast, we speak with Cory Doctor about enshittification and its dangerous impact online and off.

Instagram’s 17 million user data leak wasn’t a new breach - Hackread.com's in-depth analysis shows it was scraped in 2022, leaked in 2023, and falsely repackaged in 2026.

Database of 323,986 BreachForums users leaked online as forum admins claim the exposed data is partial and dates back to August 2025.

Plus: Iran shuts down its internet amid sweeping protests, an alleged scam boss gets extradited to China, and more.

The Iranian threat actor known as MuddyWater has been attributed to a spear-phishing campaign targeting diplomatic, maritime, financial, and telecom entities in the Middle East with a Rust-based implant codenamed RustyWater. "The campaign uses icon spoofing and malicious Word documents to deliver Rust based implants capable of asynchronous C2, anti-analysis, registry persistence, and modular

#Fickling's assessment Fickling started emitting AST nodes for builtins imports in order to match them during analysis (https://github.com/trailofbits/fickling/commit/9f309ab834797f280cb5143a2f6f987579fa7cdf). # Original report ### Summary Fickling works by Pickle bytecode --> AST --> Security analysis However while going from bytecode to AST, some import nodes are removed which blinds the security analysis fickling/fickling/fickle.py ```python def run(self, interpreter: Interpreter): module, attr = self.module, self.attr if module in ("__builtin__", "__builtins__", "builtins"): # no need to emit an import for builtins! pass else: alias = ast.alias(attr) interpreter.module_body.append(ast.ImportFrom(module=module, names=[alias], level=0)) interpreter.stack.append(ast.Name(attr, ast.Load())) def encode(self) -> bytes: return f"c{self.module}\n{self.attr}\n".encode() ``` Here we see that...

### Summary A critical vulnerability exists in the SM2 Public Key Encryption (PKE) implementation where the ephemeral nonce `k` is generated with severely reduced entropy. A unit mismatch error causes the nonce generation function to request only 32 bits of randomness instead of the expected 256 bits. This reduces the security of the encryption from a 128-bit level to a trivial 16-bit level, allowing a practical attack to recover the nonce `k` and decrypt any ciphertext **given only the public key and ciphertext**. ### Affected Versions - sm2 0.14.0-rc.0 (https://crates.io/crates/sm2/0.14.0-rc.0) - sm2 0.14.0-pre.0 (https://crates.io/crates/sm2/0.14.0-pre.0) This vulnerability is introduced in commit: [Commit 4781762](https://github.com/RustCrypto/elliptic-curves/commit/4781762f23ff22ab34763410f648128055c93731) on Sep 6, 2024, which is over a year ago. ### Details The root cause of this vulnerability is a unit mismatch in the `encrypt` function located in `sm2/src/pke/encrypt...

#Fickling's assessment `ctypes`, `importlib`, `runpy`, `code` and `multiprocessing` were added the list of unsafe imports (https://github.com/trailofbits/fickling/commit/9a2b3f89bd0598b528d62c10a64c1986fcb09f66, https://github.com/trailofbits/fickling/commit/eb299b453342f1931c787bcb3bc33f3a03a173f9, https://github.com/trailofbits/fickling/commit/29d5545e74b07766892c1f0461b801afccee4f91, https://github.com/trailofbits/fickling/commit/b793563e60a5e039c5837b09d7f4f6b92e6040d1, https://github.com/trailofbits/fickling/commit/b793563e60a5e039c5837b09d7f4f6b92e6040d1). # Original report ## Summary The `unsafe_imports()` method in Fickling's static analyzer fails to flag several high-risk Python modules that can be used for arbitrary code execution. Malicious pickles importing these modules will not be detected as unsafe, allowing attackers to bypass Fickling's primary static safety checks. ## Details In `fickling/fickle.py` lines 866-884, the `unsafe_imports()` method checks imported m...

# Fickling's assessment `pydoc` and `ctypes` were added to the list of unsafe imports (https://github.com/trailofbits/fickling/commit/b793563e60a5e039c5837b09d7f4f6b92e6040d1). # Original report ### Summary Both ctypes and pydoc modules arent explictly blocked. Even other existing pickle scanning tools (like picklescan) do not block pydoc.locate. Chaining these two together can achieve RCE while the scanner still reports the file as LIKELY_SAFE ### Details Import: GLOBAL pydoc locate (Allowed). Resolution: Call locate('ctypes.windll.kernel32.WinExec'). Execution: Call the result with (b'calc.exe', 1). To bypass the unused variable check an exception object is used, on the assumption that Exception would not be blocked in the future as it is a benign builtin ### PoC ```python import os GLOBAL = b'c' STRING = b'S' BININT = b'K' TUPLE1 = b'\x85' TUPLE2 = b'\x86' EMPTY_TUPLE = b')' REDUCE = b'R' PUT = b'p' GET = b'g' POP = b'0' E...

# Fickling's assessment `cProfile` was added to the list of unsafe imports (https://github.com/trailofbits/fickling/commit/dc8ae12966edee27a78fe05c5745171a2b138d43). # Original report ## Description ### Summary Fickling versions up to and including 0.1.6 do not treat Python's `cProfile` module as unsafe. Because of this, a malicious pickle that uses `cProfile.run()` is classified as SUSPICIOUS instead of OVERTLY_MALICIOUS. If a user relies on Fickling's output to decide whether a pickle is safe to deserialize, this misclassification can lead them to execute attacker-controlled code on their system. This affects any workflow or product that uses Fickling as a security gate for pickle deserialization. ### Details The `cProfile` module is missing from fickling's block list of unsafe module imports in `fickling/analysis.py`. This is the same root cause as CVE-2025-67748 (pty) and CVE-2025-67747 (marshal/types). Incriminated source code: - File: `fickling/analysis.py` - Class: `U...