Come To Think of It...

Self-hosted video conferencing sells on a simple promise: your calls and chat history stay in your LAN, not in somebody else's datacenter, so the cloud vendor can't build a business model out of your meeting recordings. TrueConf is the on-prem answer to that promise, and the flaws CISA put in the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on August 20 show what the default install actually looks like. TrueConf Server listens on TCP port 4307, open by default, and anyone who can reach it doesn't need a password, a username, or an invite to a meeting. An unauthenticated remote attacker can call an undocumented function and run arbitrary scripts on the server (CVE-2026-72529, CVSS 9.3). The script lands in an "isolated environment," the sort of thing that's supposed to make a security team feel a little better. Then it breaks out, and the attacker runs arbitrary code with NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM on the host (CVE-2026-72530). The isolation was decorative. The sandbox was...

A named pipe is how two processes on the same Windows machine talk to each other — fast, built into the OS, and the default choice when a privileged service needs to chat with its desktop client. And because both ends live on the same box, most of the code written against it treats the channel as internal, as trusted. That one assumption is what quietly turns a local pipe into a backdoor to LocalSystem. Red teams have known about it for years. The token-impersonation trick, where a low-privilege connection lets a pipe server act under a client's security context, is the exact same technique meterpreter's GetSystem and PowerUp reach for when they're trying to escalate. A successful pipe connection only proves the client was allowed to open the pipe. It does not prove the client is the application you intended, that the connecting user is authorized, or that the command is safe. Local is not a security boundary. The pipe is one. This week's ThreatLocker piece on BleepingC...

Microsoft's June Patch Tuesday was a record-breaker. Nearly 200 CVEs across Windows OS and supported software, nearly three dozen rated "critical," and exploit code for at least three of those weaknesses already sitting on GitHub. But the headline isn't just the numbers — it's what Microsoft and the security community are saying about why the numbers are climbing. \n\n Microsoft's engineers and the wider security community are increasingly leaning on AI tools to find bugs. "Some surveys put AI usage among security professionals generally at 90%, so it's unsurprising that this volume of patches may become the norm," said Satnam Narang, a senior research engineer at Tenable. Pandora's proverbial box is open: as better models get better at pattern-matching through massive codebases, the yield of discovered vulnerabilities goes up. That means more patches, more maintenance windows, and more sysadmins refreshing Windows Update on a Tuesday mornin...

It’s a subtle but significant admission of defeat from Microsoft. At Build 2026, they didn't just announce a new feature; they announced a surrender to the reality of modern developer workflows. By releasing 'Coreutils for Windows'—built on the Rust-based uutils project—they are effectively admitting that the native Windows command-line experience has been a friction point for far too long. The technical implementation is actually quite clever, if a bit unorthodox. Instead of a massive overhaul of the kernel or even just another layer of WSL, they've bundled the functionality into a single coreutils.exe binary and used NTFS hardlinks to create individual command wrappers like ls.exe , cat.exe , and rm.exe . This gives the illusion of a native toolkit while maintaining a single, maintainable executable. It’s a pragmatic patch for a decade-old problem: the cognitive load of switching between ls and dir , or grep and findstr . While some might see this as just anot...

Microsoft is testing a feature in Windows 11 that briefly maxes out the CPU clock whenever you open the Start menu, launch an app, or right-click for a context menu. Internally they're calling it the "Low Latency Profile," and early benchmarks from Windows Central show it cuts Start menu and context menu launch times by up to 70%, with in-box apps like Edge and Outlook opening about 40% faster. The mechanism is almost boringly simple: when a high-priority UI action triggers, the CPU spikes to maximum frequency for 1 to 3 seconds, finishes the work fast, and drops back to idle. This is the "race to sleep" pattern — burn a little more power right now to get back to a low-power state sooner — and it's been standard practice in processor design for years. The twist isn't the feature. It's that people got mad about it. When news of the Low Latency Profile started circulating, a segment of Windows users accused Microsoft of "cheating" — leaning...