Despite their small size, mosquitoes are one of the deadliest creatures on Earth, and keeping them away from you is one of the best ways to stay safe. DEET has been the mainstay of insect repellents for decades, but what if there was a repellent you could grow yourself?

Researchers at Cardiff University found that the essential oil from catnip plants (Nepeta cataria) could be as effective as DEET at repelling mosquitoes when applied as a 6% lotion. The oil has been shown to be effective against many species of mosquitoes, ticks, and mites in previous research. You can look at the paper for details, but the catnip oil was obtained through steam distillation followed by some processing with hexane. The essential oil was then mixed with “water, glycerin, emulsifying wax, cetyl alcohol, cetyl stearyl alcohol, shea butter, glycerol monostearate, olive oil, coconut oil, sunflower oil, methyl paraben, propyl paraben and silicone oil.” We suspect that list will look familiar to anyone who’s read an ingredient label of most any store bought lotion, unless it was paraben free.

The Guardian’s coverage quotes one of the researchers, [Dr. Simon Scofield]: “We did not conduct any experiments to see if it is attractive to cats, but given that the active ingredient [nepetalactone] has well-known cat-attractive properties, I would expect they would quite like it,” he said. Depending on how your cats react, you may want to consider applying the lotion shortly before departing home.

If you want some more options in your mosquito defense, how about becoming a bug zapper, using drones and sonar, or genetically modifying mosquitoes to curb their numbers.

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[Ayush Paul] posts about extracting data from Claude agents while it accesses web data to fulfill user requests.

But it wasn’t that easy. [Ayush] discovered that Anthropic anticipated many of the attacks, and set up guardrails in an attempt to keep the agent from accessing arbitrary web sites. For Claude to access a website, the user has to specify it, it must be the results of a web search, or it must be referenced by a website previously specified by the user or returned in a search.

To convince the Claude agent to navigate a malicious site designed to extract data, Ayush formed a false warning that Cloudflare was blocking the agent for authentication purposes, and asked it to spell out the name of the agents owner by clicking a list of alphabetical links. Of course Claude trusts Cloudflare and wants to be helpful, so it cheerfully completed the task.

Once the agent is trapped in the false authentication loop, it can be interrogated for all sorts of information it knows about the owner: Ayush was able to convince it to disclose employer, and even data about the user that could be linked to security questions, like their home town.

Since Claude can be detected by the user agent (the field attached to web requests that tells the web server what sort of browser is requesting the page) custom information can be fed to the bot while users see a normal website; clicking a link looks completely normal, but asking an agent to summarize the site triggers fooling the bot into spilling the beans.

After reporting the issue, Ayush was told that Anthropic had already identified the issue internally, and eventually prevented the attack for now by preventing the agent from following links on external pages.

Grok sends entire codebases

Cereblab discovered that the Grok coding agent uploaded the entire content of the codebase it’s working with – and all Git history – to xAI servers, almost immediately. Even when told to never upload a file, the agent would reply “OK”, and then begin uploading the code bundle anyway.

If uploading your code to a remote server isn’t bad enough, and this could be extremely bad in some situations involving sensitive company code, including the entire Git history means that previously deleted files, like accidentally committed secrets or authentication credentials and tokens, were also leaked. Attempting to opt out by disabling options to improve the model by uploading code had no effect.

After gaining attention, Grok has added a privacy option to opt out of data retention. xAI has committed to deleting the retained uploaded code, but it is unclear if users will be told when their data has been removed. To actually prevent the agent from uploading local files to the xAI servers, even temporarily, a global flag “disable_codebase_upload” is required. Watch out, the privacy retention flags are only per-session!

Steam malware used to steal crypto

Court filings in Washington state this month revealed an attempt to steal cryptocurrency using malware uploaded to the Steam gaming platform. Publicly identified and taken off the store in 2025, the filing alleges the same individuals were behind multiple games containing crypto stealing trojans: “Dashverse”, “Lunara”, “PirateFi”, “BlockBlasters”, and “Lampy”.

PC World covered the initial discovery of the malware on Steam. While Steam, overall, seems to do a good job preventing malware titles, 2025 had several high-profile cases. Prosecutors say the malware netted approximately $200,000 in stolen cryptocurrency wallets as well as other stolen credentials including Steam accounts.

OpenSSL DoS in 11 Bytes

Okta posts about a denial of service in OpenSSL where a single pre-auth packet is able to cause an allocation of up to 16 megabytes of RAM.

The “11 bytes” headline is very catchy, but more important than the actual number of bytes is the general asymmetric behavior; an attacker can send a very small amount of data and achieve a disproportionately large result. The OpenSSL vulnerability only has local impacts, exhausting server memory rather than generating network traffic, but similar attacks in the network space can fuel denial of service storms when extremely small requests result in amplified results.

The bug is ultimately due to being insufficiently suspicious of remotely supplied content, in this case the pre-authentication fields in the connection message that define the length of the incoming client message. Since the memory is pre-allocated in the server, the client doesn’t need to actually transmit that much data – it simply needs to hold the connection open. Keeping the connection open isn’t even required for causing problems – repeatedly allocating large blocks of different sizes can lead to memory fragmentation where the memory allocator keeps grabbing larger and larger ranges of memory because there isn’t sufficient ram available in a contiguous chunk.924899

Fortunately this bug has already been addressed in OpenSSL 4.0.1 and backported to maintenance releases of previous versions.

Exposed Interfaces on Car Chargers

Saiflow has a report on a range of exposures via the electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

In CVE-2026-9039 Saiflow exposes the risks in some CCS2 EV charging stations. As part of the standard, communication is established between the charging station and the operator network, which is typically strongly secured via TLS and VPN use. A second connection, however, is established over the charging plug between the charging station and the vehicle; the vehicle is assigned an IPv6 address for communicating with the charger for various charging protocols.

The XCharge C6 charging station exposes SSH and basic telnet network services on all network interfaces, including the interface connected to the vehicle. To make it even worse, they allow root login, with password “root”, giving full admin access to the charging station.

Once inside the charging station, an attacker has access to the network connection from the charging station to the company network, as well as root control over the charging station itself, with the possibility of damaging the charger, changing the power output levels, or getting free charging. If a future vulnerability was found in the management interface of the vehicle, a compromised charger could be used to attack future connected vehicles.

The main lessons for vendors seem to be ones we’re familiar with already: never leave default credentials, especially not “root” and “root” in a product, and be aware of what networks you expose services on. Good lessons for all of us; let those who have never left a Raspberry Pi with default credentials on a network cast the first stone.

Hugging Face Breach

In news that has likely been impossible to avoid, Axios reports on a compromise of the Hugging Face platform by an OpenAI model. The reports around the incident echo the frequently weird boastful statements from OpenAI, who state “We consider this to be an unprecedented cyber incident” and they “are responding accordingly”, despite being the originators of and cause of said incident.

Multiple vulnerabilities in the Hugging Face API were combined to accomplish the breach, including an unknown vulnerability in the package registry system. OpenAI says that safeguards on their model had been disabled for the test, which seems irresponsible given the outcome. Under almost any normal situation, conducting an unsolicited test of the security of a company because safeguards were ignored is considered illegal hacking, not fodder for a pre-IPO press release and humble-brag.

Linux Kernel Discloses 442 Vulnerabilities

Possibly feeling that Microsoft has all the press for a record-breaking Patch Tuesday last week, the Linux kernel developers have announced 442 CVEs related to the kernel.

With this many vulnerabilities in one report, it’s nearly impossible to isolate at a glance which ones are truly impactful and which are simply incorrect behavior. While CVE entries have been created, none have been assigned severity scores yet.

It appears the majority of the vulnerabilities were found with Sashiko, an agent developed by the Linux Foundation and trained on the Linux kernel for finding vulnerabilities in new submissions.

LG to Ban Residential Proxy Apps

After recent negative press (some of which we covered here) about the prevalence of residential proxy apps on the LG platform, Krebs on Security now reports that LG is banning the behavior from apps on the platform.

This comes after Spur reported that 42% of apps on the platform contained libraries to enable always-on residential proxies, which allow access to the network the television is connected to. Residential proxies can be used as a pivot point to attack companies and bypass geographic IP restrictions, commit ad fraud, or access the internal home networks of users.

Iran Attacking Industrial Logic Controllers

CISA, the US cyber security agency, has issued a warning that Iranian based attackers are targeting industrial control systems made by Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, and Siemens.

These sort of controllers are found in manufacturing, waste processing, water treatment, and other industrial processes, and attackers have been able to upload custom control logic, overriding “safe operating parameters” according to the report. Most of us will never be responsible for these systems, but they impact our lives all the time.

Cisco Releases Open-Weight Vulnerability-Finding Models

Finally, Cisco has released a set of open-weight models to aid in searching a codebase for known vulnerabilities. The Antares models are open-weight models designed to run fully locally and search a code base for vulnerabilities related to lists of known CVE issues. Cisco has published the models on Hugging Face.

Are you using AI tooling for security scans or research? How is it going?

hackaday.com/2026/07/24/this-w…

The lossy compression algorithm used by JPEG was useful for those on the early Internet not only because it enabled pictures to be shared easier, but because it allows a low-resolution version of the image to load first. This meant that users could make out the gist of an image before it finished downloading. This was a great feature for those on slow connections, but it hides some other capabilities of this image format as well.

Rather than effectively splitting up the image into chunks, each with successive amounts of detail, [maurycyz]’s project shows that this can be exploited to load more than one picture. The first is loaded into this lower-resolution area, with a second unrelated picture showing up once the higher-resolution information is available. Essentially this makes a one-way .gif of sorts. Though this method is only capable of loading about nine frames, which is not enough for much animation. Further limiting things is that there’s no way to encode timing data, so on fast computers with fast connections the animation could load faster than a user could see.

Still, it’s an interesting quirk of this older image standard, one which still is in widespread use today. And it’s also true that it’s hard to say in what ways various technologies will be used in the future. JPEG images have also been the subject of some artistic projects that might not have been possible without the JPEG standard itself, and even as other formats have tried to supplant it, it still maintains its firm grip on the images on the Internet. More JPEG, please!

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