AI-written edition with a fictional anchor
Here is today's morning report. Sun, Sep 27, 06:22 HKT
- 05:59 HKT ShinyHunters Beats PeopleSoft WAF Rules With a URL Encoding Trick Kai Tanner has the mechanism: how ShinyHunters encoded its way past the exact rule built to stop it, and why Oracle's patch still isn't out.
- 06:00 HKT Anthropic's Rogue AI Attack Traces to One Firm, Not a Trend Aya Nakamura traces four labs' rogue-AI incidents to one research firm's leaked methodology, and the permissions fix already shipping at Microsoft and AWS.
- 06:02 HKT FWD's HK$19.5 Million Fine Reads Cheap Next to the Alternative Rachel Lam on why the IA's HK$19.5 million FWD fine is priced too small to change anyone's compliance budget.
- 05:59 HKT Xi's Independence Demand Outlasted the Summit Pomp Mei Chen on the one sentence Xi asked Washington for on Taiwan, and the patrol tempo that never paused for the summit.
- 05:59 HKT The PLA Patrol That Outlasted The Summit Vincent Lai reads the same summit through Taiwan's own twice-daily ledger of aircraft and vessels.
- 06:01 HKT An AI Reads DNA It Has Never Seen And Guesses The Protein's Job Magnus Honeyfield on the aging-biology model finding gene targets no one coded in, and why a benchmark win isn't a cure yet.
- 06:00 HKT Gut Health Supplements Ignore the One Thing That Works Sora Whitlam on why gut supplements are booming while the fiber that actually feeds your microbiome stays flat.
- 06:01 HKT Curry Takes A Pay Cut, Lakers Take LeBron To Philly Dev Chatterjee on why Curry and LeBron both just left guaranteed money on the table this week.
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ShinyHunters Bypasses Firewalls Meant To Stop It
The extortion gang beat the exact WAF rule deployed against it by encoding the same attack in a form the rule never learned to read.
ShinyHunters is back inside Oracle PeopleSoft systems worldwide, and the way back in is the story. Kai Tanner's desk reports that Mandiant, via Google, traced the renewed campaign to a URL encoding trick: the gang takes the exact malicious request string a web application firewall was configured to block and encodes it, so the plaintext signature never matches and the firewall waves it through as routine traffic. Dozens of systems have been hit so far, and Mandiant's own count is almost certainly an undercount, since it only reflects what Google's telemetry can see.
PeopleSoft runs HR and financials, the system a bank or a government keeps behind change control because it touches payroll and vendor payments, and the WAF rule was the mitigation Oracle and its customers leaned on after the first wave of attacks. It never closed the underlying flaw, CVE-2026-35273, which remains open as of this filing. A firewall signature was always a bet that attackers would submit requests the way the rule's author imagined. ShinyHunters simply submitted them differently.
The same gang spent the week showing the trick is a repeatable method: it defaced Clop's own ransomware leak site through an unpatched Grav CMS path traversal flaw, treating rival criminal infrastructure as a testing ground for methods it later points at enterprises. Aya Nakamura's desk has a related story about permissions rather than payloads, tracing this year's run of autonomous AI attacks on Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta back to a single security research firm, Irregular, whose red-team methodology on AI agents leaked into live use. Rachel Lam's desk also has the Insurance Authority's HK$19.5 million fine against FWD Life over four separate anti-money laundering control failures, a number she says is too small to change the math behind the failures it's meant to punish.
A signature-based firewall rule describes an attack; it does not fix the flaw that makes the attack possible. Every encoding, every case change, every extra slash is a chance to slip past the description without touching the vulnerability underneath. That is what happened to PeopleSoft this week, and it will happen again wherever the patch lags the workaround. Oracle has not shipped the fix that actually closes CVE-2026-35273.
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