CramHacks Chronicles #89: Weekly Cybersecurity Newsletter!

Hello, and Happy Monday!

Several people reached out last week to tell me the newsletter said “Happy Monday.”

Story time: On the week’s most dreaded day, Friday, I found myself surrounded by coworkers greeting one-another with a “Happy Friday.”

I thought to myself, What is so good about Friday? The room went dark. Project ideas flashed before my eyes. Open issues taunted me. I realized that nothing could be worse than the weekend that soon plagued the team. That’s when it hit me, Monday is the day we should be celebrating, not this Friday thing.

From that point on, I declared that every day would be a Monday. So Happy Monday!

The healthier? version is that Mondays tend to suck, so let’s just call them Happy to trick our brain.

Newsletter

OPA Gatekeeper provider for GitHub Artifact Attestations
Now in public preview, GitHub has released an open-source external data provider for OPA Gatekeeper to enable policy evaluation based on an image's signed SLSA build provenance.

Google Cloud donates A2A to Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation has announced the Agent2Agent project with partners: AWS, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow.

👋 MCP is everywhere, but I’ve seen very little buzz about A2A. That said, MCP is pretty barebones and full of security issues. Will A2A be the “next-gen MCP?”

The Open Source Endowment Foundation, a US nonprofit corporation
The world’s first open source endowment whose core team consists of Konstantin Vinogradov, Chad Whitacre, Maxim Konovalov, Jonathan Starr, Amy Parker, and Vlad-Stefan Harbuz. Konstantin has a blog post What Open Source can learn from universities to fix its funding which discusses why they chose an endowment model.

Monkey-Patched PyPI Packages Steal Solana Private Keys 
Socket’s Kirill Boychenko shares why a malicious package was created, with no intention for anyone to use it directly. A package was created with a malicious __init__.py, but the objective was actually for people to install one of the five other packages created, which depend-on the malicious one. Therefore, during installation of the package, the transitive dependency would be introduced, and the malicious setup script executed, monkey-patching critical constructors that generate Solana Private Keys.

👋 Cryptocurrencies have been under siege by supply chain attacks since the beginning, but Socket is uncovering some very cool vectors. Arguably the most sophisticated attacks in the space (that are known).

Introducing Kingfisher: Real-Time Secret Detection and Validation
MongoDB released Kingfisher, an open-source project that is “a blazingly fast secret‑scanning and validation tool built in Rust.”

👋 I haven’t tested this or spoke to anyone that has, but it does seem “blazingly fast” based on the metrics. I also see it supports secrets validation and writing custom rules. Seems promising tbh.

What We Wish We Knew About Container Security
Duffie Cooley and Jed Salazar discuss container isolation, and the illusion of separation despite a shared kernel. By leveraging lightweight virtual machines, containers can be isolated even at the kernel level, with additional overhead being minimal thanks to advancements in the space.

👋 Jed Salazar is the field CTO at Edara, a company I’ve been following since Ariadne Conill announced their launch. When apple/container was released, Edara published an explainer for VM-per-container which mentions how they (and now Apple) leverage a dedicated VM per container. Side note, I’m really excited about Edara and you probably should be too.

Introducing: GitHub Device Code Phishing
Praetorian’s John Stawinski, Mason Davis, and Matt Jackoski detail how they abuse GitHub’s OAuth2 device flow during engagements. Device flow is when GitHub provides a token on one device, and you enter that token in an authenticated session on another device to grant access. Once granted, the device is now authorized to retrieve an OAuth token on behalf of the user. Pwned.

👋 People always think social engineering requires someone to provide their username and password, but that’s definitely not the case. It’s much easier to trick a user to provide a pin, especially when you direct them to legitimate URLs.

Cloudflare Containers are available in public beta
👋 This is for paid customers only. Besides the obvious use cases, the article suggests that people want to execute LLM-generated code in a sandboxed container. As are most AI things, this is a bit terrifying. But imagine building a barebones container, having a webpage with nothing but a prompt, and users being able to prompt there way to building an entire webapp, via prompts, all within that container 😎. I have no idea why you’d want to do this, but it sounds cool.

Python - Tarfile Realpath Overflow Vulnerability
Four CVEs have been assigned to Tarfile and SCA tools are going to go nuts with false positives. The vulnerabilities affect TarFile.extractall() and TarFile.extract(), primarily when setting filter="data", or filter="tar". However, filter=”data” became the default in Python version 3.14.

Until Next Time! 👋

Hey, you made it to the bottom – thanks for sticking around!

Questions, ideas, or want to chat? Slide into my inbox! 💌

Don’t hesitate to forward if someone could benefit from this.

See you next Monday!
-Kyle

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