🛡️ InfoSec Blue Team Briefing

Saturday, June 13, 2026

🎧 Audio Briefing

Download MP3

Cyber security developments for Saturday the 13th of June 2026 covering articles added to the BlueTeamSec community on infosec.pub. Today we have 18 articles to cover. All attribution is by the article authors. All article analysis is automated.

CISA have issued BOD 26-04, replacing their previous vulnerability directives with a risk-based remediation framework. Federal agencies will now prioritise patches based on asset exposure, exploit automation potential, and whether something's already in the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue rather than working through everything by severity score alone.

Acronis have written up Khmer Shadow, a campaign targeting Cambodian government ministries with custom malware that uses direct syscalls and unhooking techniques to evade detection. Despite the technical sophistication, the threat actors reuse infrastructure and payloads enough that their operational security is described as poor.

Black Lotus Labs have tracked expansion of the JDY botnet to over fifteen hundred compromised consumer routers and IoT devices. The botnet, linked to China-nexus actors including Volt Typhoon, is scanning and probing U.S. military infrastructure using domestic IP addresses to get around geofencing and reputation filters.

Binary Defense have analysed BlueRabbit, a modular backdoor attributed to an Iran-nexus actor that hit Israeli targets in March. The malware exfiltrates to object storage, then either encrypts files with a candy extension or wipes disks entirely, depending on tasking. It uses RabbitMQ for command and control and persists via a fake OneDrive scheduled task.

Sekoia have published a detailed retrospective on APT28's evolution over two decades. The report charts the group's shift from static, easily fingerprinted tools to a fragmented and increasingly stealthy operational model, which is useful background if you're tracking Russian state-sponsored tradecraft.

ESET report that Vietnam-aligned group OceanLotus has pivoted from external espionage to prioritised domestic targeting since mid-2024. The campaign focuses on infrastructure companies and stock trading platforms, deploying the SPECTRALVIPER backdoor via side-loading and appears aligned with Vietnam's anti-corruption investigations.

Two reports from ITOCHU Cyber & Intelligence cover a phishing campaign impersonating Booking.com to target hotel management companies. The emails deliver TonRAT, a remote access trojan written in JavaScript that runs on Node.js and uses the TON blockchain API for command and control. Attackers exploit the trust relationship between booking platforms and hotels rather than compromising the platforms themselves.

And there's an inaccessible article from WgpSec on recent phishing activity by APT-C-08, also known as Manlinghua. The source page returned a technical error, so we can't offer detail on this one.

NIST's National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence have released revision one of their Ransomware Risk Management Community Profile, now aligned with the updated Cybersecurity Framework. It's intended to help organisations of any size translate the framework into practical ransomware defence and mitigation steps.

TrustedSec have published an eleven-point hardening guide for Microsoft Intune environments. The focus is on locking down privileged access and preventing attackers from abusing legitimate features like remote device wipes once they've compromised an admin account. Worth reviewing if you're treating Intune as a Tier Zero asset.

A researcher has disclosed BUMSRAKETE, a local privilege escalation in FreeBSD versions 13 through 15 on several architectures. The vulnerability allows unprivileged users to modify the page cache of files and corrupt SUID binaries in memory to gain root. Immediate mitigation is to set a sysctl knob disabling extended page buffers.

And another disclosure from a researcher who's found GreatXML, a BitLocker bypass that exploits systems which have previously run Windows Defender Offline Scan. Proof-of-concept code is public.

SpecterOps have released part one of a series on Kerberos User-to-User authentication mechanics and the UnPAC-the-Hash attack. The technique combines certificate-based authentication with protocol abuse to recover plaintext NT hashes, which is advanced post-compromise tradecraft for Active Directory environments.

Synacktiv have developed DCOMIllusionist, a technique for fileless lateral movement that exploits .NET DCOM servers through deserialization attacks. It requires registry modification and authenticated access, but offers a way to achieve remote execution without dropping files.

And SpecterOps again, this time with research on weaponising the native AI features in SQL Server 2025. The work demonstrates how functions intended for external model registration and REST endpoint invocation can be repurposed for data exfiltration, NTLM coercion, and command-and-control communication. One to flag if you're managing SQL Server deployments with the AI features enabled.

A researcher has released NimSyscallPacker, a now-deprecated tool that packs C# assemblies, PE files, or shellcode into encrypted Nim binaries with built-in API unhooking and direct syscalls. It's framed as educational and red team tooling, but the capabilities are fairly self-explanatory.

And finally, Raphael Mudge has written up a modular component contract approach for building long-running Beacon Object Files in the Crystal Palace framework. The technique separates tradecraft definitions from implementation using dynamic linking and Windows synchronisation primitives, which offers flexibility for assembling C2 capabilities. Technical reading for offensive tooling developers.

That concludes today's briefing.

📰 Articles Covered