Security News
Latest Updates

Stay informed with the latest security trends and insights...

Latest Articles

Explore the most recent articles on security topics.

1. Security News – 2025-12-13

Sat Dec 13 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

The Hacker News

Cybersecurity news and insights

Fake OSINT and GPT Utility GitHub Repos Spread PyStoreRAT Malware Payloads - December 12, 2025

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign that’s leveraging GitHub-hosted Python repositories to distribute a previously undocumented JavaScript-based Remote Access Trojan (RAT) dubbed PyStoreRAT. “These repositories, often themed as development utilities or OSINT tools, contain only a few lines of code responsible for silently downloading a remote HTA file and executing

New Advanced Phishing Kits Use AI and MFA Bypass Tactics to Steal Credentials at Scale - December 12, 2025

Cybersecurity researchers have documented four new phishing kits named BlackForce, GhostFrame, InboxPrime AI, and Spiderman that are capable of facilitating credential theft at scale. BlackForce, first detected in August 2025, is designed to steal credentials and perform Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) attacks to capture one-time passwords (OTPs) and bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA). The kit

SecurityWeek

Latest cybersecurity news

Gladinet CentreStack Flaw Exploited to Hack Organizations - December 12, 2025

Threat actors have hacked at least nine organizations by exploiting the recently patched Gladinet CentreStack flaw.

The post Gladinet CentreStack Flaw Exploited to Hack Organizations appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Fieldtex Data Breach Impacts 238,000 - December 12, 2025

The Akira ransomware group took credit for the Fieldtex Products hack in November, claiming to have stolen 14 Gb of data.

The post Fieldtex Data Breach Impacts 238,000 appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Recent GeoServer Vulnerability Exploited in Attacks - December 12, 2025

Because user input is not sufficiently sanitized, attackers could exploit the flaw to define external entities within an XML request.

The post Recent GeoServer Vulnerability Exploited in Attacks appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Schneier on Security

Security news and analysis by Bruce Schneier

Building Trustworthy AI Agents - December 12, 2025

The promise of personal AI assistants rests on a dangerous assumption: that we can trust systems we haven’t made trustworthy. We can’t. And today’s versions are failing us in predictable ways: pushing us to do things against our own best interests, gaslighting us with doubt about things we are or that we know, and being unable to distinguish between who we are and who we have been. They struggle with incomplete, inaccurate, and partial context: with no standard way to move toward accuracy, no mechanism to correct sources of error, and no accountability when wrong information leads to bad decisions...

SecurityWeek

Latest cybersecurity news

MITRE Releases 2025 List of Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Vulnerabilities - December 12, 2025

XSS remains the top software weakness, followed by SQL injection and CSRF. Buffer overflow issues and improper access control make it to top 25.

The post MITRE Releases 2025 List of Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Vulnerabilities appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Trail of Bits Blog

Security research and insights from Trail of Bits

Catching malicious package releases using a transparency log - December 12, 2025

We’re getting Sigstore’s rekor-monitor ready for production use, making it easier for developers to detect tampering and unauthorized uses of their identities in the Rekor transparency log. This work, funded by the OpenSSF, includes support for the new Rekor v2 log, certificate validation, and integration with The Update Framework (TUF).

For package maintainers that publish attestations signed using Sigstore (as supported by PyPI and npm), monitoring the Rekor log can help them quickly become aware of a compromise of their release process by notifying them of new signing events related to the package they maintain.

Transparency logs like Rekor provide a critical security function: they create append-only, tamper-evident records that are easy to monitor. But having entries in a log doesn’t mean that they’re trustworthy by default. A compromised identity could be used to sign metadata, with the malicious entry recorded in the log. By improving rekor-monitor, we’re making it easy for everyone to actively monitor for unexpected log entries.

Why transparency logs matter

Imagine you’re adding a dependency to your Go project. You run go get, the dependency is downloaded, and its digest is calculated and added to your go.sum file to ensure that future downloads have the same digest, trusting that first download as the source of truth. But what if the download was compromised?

What you need is a way of verifying that the digest corresponds to the exact dependency you want to download. A central database that contains all artifacts and their digests seems useful: the go get command could query the database for the artifact, and see if the digests match. However, a normal database can be tampered with by internal or external malicious actors, meaning the problem of trust is still not solved: instead of trusting the first download of the artifact, now the user needs to trust the database.

This is where transparency logs come in: logs where entries can only be added (append-only), any changes to existing entries can be trivially detected (tamper-evident), and new entries can be easily monitored. This is how Go’s checksum database works: it stores the digests of all Go modules as entries in a transparency log, which is used as the source of truth for artifact digests. Users don’t need to trust the log, since it is continuously checked and monitored by independent parties.

In practice, this means that an attacker cannot modify an existing entry without the change being detectable by external parties (usually called “witnesses” in this context). Furthermore, if an attacker releases a malicious version of a Go module, the corresponding entry that is added to the log cannot be hidden, deleted or modified. This means module maintainers can continuously monitor the log for new entries containing their module name, and get immediate alerts if an unexpected version is added.

While a compromised release process usually leaves traces (such as GitHub releases, git tags, or CI/CD logs), these can be hidden or obfuscated. In addition, becoming aware of the compromise requires someone noticing these traces, which might take a long time. By proactively monitoring a transparency log, maintainers can very quickly be notified of compromises of their signing identity.

Transparency logs, such as Rekor and Go’s checksum database, are based on Merkle trees, a data structure that makes it easy to cryptographically verify that has not been tampered with. For a good visual introduction of how this works at the data structure level, see Transparent Logs for Skeptical Clients.

Monitoring a transparency log

Having an entry in a transparency log does not make it trustworthy by default. As we just discussed, an attacker might release a new (malicious) Go package and have its associated checksum added to the log. The log’s strength is not preventing unexpected/malicious data from being added, but rather being able to monitor the log for unexpected entries. If new entries are not monitored, the security benefits of using a log are greatly reduced.

This is why making it easy for users to monitor the log is important: people can immediately be alerted when something unexpected is added to the log and take immediate action. That’s why, thanks to funding by the OpenSSF, we’ve been working on getting Sigstore’s rekor-monitor ready for production use.

The Sigstore ecosystem uses Rekor to log entries related to, for example, the attestations for Python packages. Once an attestation is signed, a new entry is added to Rekor that contains information about the signing event: the CI/CD workflow that initiated it, the associated repository identity, and more. By having this information in Rekor, users can query the log and have certain guarantees that it has not been tampered with.

rekor-monitor allows users to monitor the log to ensure that existing entries have not been tampered with, and to monitor new entries for unexpected uses of their identity. For example, the maintainer of a Python package that uploads packages from their GitHub repository (via Trusted Publishing) can monitor the log for any new entries that use the repository’s identity. In case of compromise, the maintainer would get a notification that their identity was used to upload a package to PyPI, allowing them to react quickly to the compromise instead of relying on waiting for someone to notice the compromise.

As part of our work in rekor-monitor, we’ve added support for the new Rekor v2 log, implemented certificate validation against trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs) to allow users to better filter log entries, added support for fetching the log’s public keys using TUF, solved outstanding issues to make the system more reliable, and made the associated GitHub reusable workflow ready for use. This last item allows anyone to monitor the log via the provided reusable workflow, lowering the barrier of entry so that anyone with a GitHub repository can run their own monitor.

What’s next

A next step would be a hosted service that allows users to subscribe for alerts when a new entry containing relevant information (such as their identity) is added. This could work similarly to GopherWatch, where users can subscribe to notifications for when a new version of a Go module is uploaded.

A hosted service with a user-friendly frontend for rekor-monitor would reduce the barrier of entry even further: instead of setting up their own monitor, users can subscribe for notifications using a simple web form and get alerts for unexpected uses of their identity in the transparency log.

We would like to thank the Sigstore maintainers, particularly Hayden Blauzvern and Mihai Maruseac, for reviewing our work and for their invaluable feedback during the development process. Our development on this project is part of our ongoing work on the Sigstore ecosystem, as funded by OpenSSF, whose mission is to inspire and enable the community to secure the open source software we all depend on.

SecurityWeek

Latest cybersecurity news

Microsoft Bug Bounty Program Expanded to Third-Party Code - December 12, 2025

All critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft, third-party, and open source code are eligible for rewards if they impact Microsoft services.

The post Microsoft Bug Bounty Program Expanded to Third-Party Code appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Notepad++ Patches Updater Flaw After Reports of Traffic Hijacking - December 12, 2025

Notepad++ found a vulnerability in the way the software updater authenticates update files. 

The post Notepad++ Patches Updater Flaw After Reports of Traffic Hijacking appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The Hacker News

Cybersecurity news and insights

Securing GenAI in the Browser: Policy, Isolation, and Data Controls That Actually Work - December 12, 2025

The browser has become the main interface to GenAI for most enterprises: from web-based LLMs and copilots, to GenAI‑powered extensions and agentic browsers like ChatGPT Atlas. Employees are leveraging the power of GenAI to draft emails, summarize documents, work on code, and analyze data, often by copying/pasting sensitive information directly into prompts or uploading files.  Traditional

New React RSC Vulnerabilities Enable DoS and Source Code Exposure - December 12, 2025

The React team has released fixes for two new types of flaws in React Server Components (RSC) that, if successfully exploited, could result in denial-of-service (DoS) or source code exposure. The team said the issues were found by the security community while attempting to exploit the patches released for CVE-2025-55182 (CVSS score: 10.0), a critical bug in RSC that has since been weaponized in

React2Shell Exploitation Escalates into Large-Scale Global Attacks, Forcing Emergency Mitigation - December 12, 2025

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has urged federal agencies to patch the recent React2Shell vulnerability by December 12, 2025, amid reports of widespread exploitation. The critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-55182 (CVSS score: 10.0), affects the React Server Components (RSC) Flight protocol. The underlying cause of the issue is an unsafe deserialization

SecurityWeek

Latest cybersecurity news

$320,000 Paid Out at Zeroday.Cloud for Open Source Software Exploits - December 12, 2025

Participants earned rewards at the hacking competition for Grafana, Linux Kernel, Redis, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL vulnerabilities.

The post $320,000 Paid Out at Zeroday.Cloud for Open Source Software Exploits appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The Hacker News

Cybersecurity news and insights

CISA Flags Actively Exploited GeoServer XXE Flaw in Updated KEV Catalog - December 12, 2025

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a high-severity security flaw impacting OSGeo GeoServer to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-58360 (CVSS score: 8.2), an unauthenticated XML External Entity (XXE) flaw that affects all versions prior to

SecurityWeek

Latest cybersecurity news

Trump Signs Executive Order to Block State AI Regulations - December 12, 2025

Members of Congress from both parties have pushed for more regulations on AI, saying there is not enough oversight for the powerful technology.

The post Trump Signs Executive Order to Block State AI Regulations appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Schneier on Security

Security news and analysis by Bruce Schneier

AIs Exploiting Smart Contracts - December 11, 2025

I have long maintained that smart contracts are a dumb idea: that a human process is actually a security feature.

Here’s some interesting research on training AIs to automatically exploit smart contracts:

AI models are increasingly good at cyber tasks, as we’ve written about before. But what is the economic impact of these capabilities? In a recent MATS and Anthropic Fellows project, our scholars investigated this question by evaluating AI agents’ ability to exploit smart contracts on Smart CONtracts Exploitation benchmark (SCONE-bench)­a new benchmark they built comprising 405 contracts that were actually exploited between 2020 and 2025. On contracts exploited after the latest knowledge cutoffs (June 2025 for Opus 4.5 and March 2025 for other models), Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-5 developed exploits collectively worth $4.6 million, establishing a concrete lower bound for the economic harm these capabilities could enable. Going beyond retrospective analysis, we evaluated both Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 in simulation against 2,849 recently deployed contracts without any known vulnerabilities. Both agents uncovered two novel zero-day vulnerabilities and produced exploits worth $3,694, with GPT-5 doing so at an API cost of $3,476. This demonstrates as a proof-of-concept that profitable, real-world autonomous exploitation is technically feasible, a finding that underscores the need for proactive adoption of AI for defense...

SecurityWeek

Latest cybersecurity news

Virtual Event Today: Cyber AI & Automation Summit Day 2 - December 11, 2025

Day two of the Cyber AI & Automation Summit kicks off at 11AM ET. If you weren't able to attend yesterday, all Day One sessions are already available on-demand.

The post Virtual Event Today: Cyber AI & Automation Summit Day 2 appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The Hacker News

Cybersecurity news and insights

This week’s cyber stories show how fast the online world can turn risky. Hackers are sneaking malware into movie downloads, browser add-ons, and even software updates people trust. Tech giants and governments are racing to plug new holes while arguing over privacy and control. And researchers keep uncovering just how much of our digital life is still wide open. The new Threatsday Bulletin

NANOREMOTE Malware Uses Google Drive API for Hidden Control on Windows Systems - December 11, 2025

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new fully-featured Windows backdoor called NANOREMOTE that uses the Google Drive API for command-and-control (C2) purposes. According to a report from Elastic Security Labs, the malware shares code similarities with another implant codenamed FINALDRAFT (aka Squidoor) that employs Microsoft Graph API for C2. FINALDRAFT is attributed to a

Trail of Bits Blog

Security research and insights from Trail of Bits

Introducing mrva, a terminal-first approach to CodeQL multi-repo variant analysis - December 11, 2025

In 2023 GitHub introduced CodeQL multi-repository variant analysis (MRVA). This functionality lets you run queries across thousands of projects using pre-built databases and drastically reduces the time needed to find security bugs at scale. There’s just one problem: it’s largely built on VS Code and I’m a Vim user and a terminal junkie. That’s why I built mrva, a composable, terminal-first alternative that runs entirely on your machine and outputs results wherever stdout leads you.

In this post I will cover installing and using mrva, compare its feature set to GitHub’s MRVA functionality, and discuss a few interesting implementation details I discovered while working on it. Here is a quick example of what you’ll see at the end of your mrva journey:

Figure 1: Pretty-printing CodeQL SARIF results
Figure 1: Pretty-printing CodeQL SARIF results

Installing and running mrva

First, install mrva from PyPI:

$ python -m pip install mrva

Or, use your favorite Python package installer like pipx or uv.

Running mrva can be broken down into roughly three steps:

  1. Download pre-built CodeQL databases from the GitHub API (mrva download).
  2. Analyze the databases with CodeQL queries or packs (mrva analyze).
  3. Output the results to the terminal (mrva pprint).

Let’s run the tool with Trail of Bits’ public CodeQL queries. Start by downloading the top 1,000 Go project databases:

$ mkdir databases
$ mrva download --token YOUR_GH_PAT --language go databases/ top --limit 1000
2025-09-04 13:25:10,614 INFO mrva.main Starting command download
2025-09-04 13:25:14,798 INFO httpx HTTP Request: GET https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=language%3Ago&sort=stars&order=desc&per_page=100 "HTTP/1.1 200 OK"
...

You can also use the $GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable to more securely specify your personal access token. Additionally, there are other strategies for downloading CodeQL databases, such as by GitHub organization (download org) or a single repository (download repo). From here, let’s clone the queries and run the multi-repo variant analysis:

$ git clone https://github.com/trailofbits/codeql-queries.git
$ mrva analyze databases/ codeql-queries/go/src/crypto/ -- --rerun --threads=0
2025-09-04 14:03:03,765 INFO mrva.main Starting command analyze
2025-09-04 14:03:03,766 INFO mrva.commands.analyze Analyzing mrva directory created at 1757007357
2025-09-04 14:03:03,766 INFO mrva.commands.analyze Found 916 analyzable repositories, discarded 84
2025-09-04 14:03:03,766 INFO mrva.commands.analyze Running CodeQL analysis on mrva-go-ollama-ollama
...

This analysis may take quite some time depending on your database corpus size, query count, query complexity, and machine hardware. You can filter the databases being analyzed by passing the --select or --ignore flag to analyze. Any flags passed after -- will be sent directly to the CodeQL binary. Note that, instead of having mrva parallelize multiple CodeQL analyses, we instead recommend passing --threads=0 and letting CodeQL handle parallelization. This helps avoid CPU thrashing between the parent and child processes. Once the analysis is done, you can print the results:

$ mrva pprint databases/
2025-09-05 10:01:34,630 INFO mrva.main Starting command pprint
2025-09-05 10:01:34,631 INFO mrva.commands.pprint pprinting mrva directory created at 1757007357
2025-09-05 10:01:34,631 INFO mrva.commands.pprint Found 916 analyzable repositories, discarded 84
tob/go/msg-not-hashed-sig-verify: Message must be hashed before signing/verifying operation

 builtin/credential/aws/pkcs7/verify.go (ln: 156:156 col: 12:31)
 https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/main/builtin/credential/aws/pkcs7/verify.go#L156-L156

 155 if maxHashLen := dsaKey.Q.BitLen() / 8; maxHashLen < len(signed) {
 156 signed = signed[:maxHashLen]
 157 }

 builtin/credential/aws/pkcs7/verify.go (ln: 158:158 col: 25:31)
 https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/main/builtin/credential/aws/pkcs7/verify.go#L158-L158

 157 }
 158 if !dsa.Verify(dsaKey, signed, dsaSig.R, dsaSig.S) {
 159 return errors.New("x509: DSA verification failure")
...

This finding is a false positive because the message is indeed being truncated, but updating the query’s list of barriers is beyond the scope of this post. Like previous commands, pprint also takes a number of flags that can affect its output. Run it with --help to see what is available.

A quick side note: pprint is also capable of pretty-printing SARIF results from non-mrva CodeQL analyses. That is, it solves one of my first and biggest gripes with CodeQL: why can’t I get the output of database analyze in a human readable form? It’s especially useful if you run analyze with the --sarif-add-file-contents flag. Outputting CSV and SARIF is great for machines, but often I just want to see the results then and there in the terminal. mrva solves this problem.

Comparing mrva with GitHub tooling

mrva takes a lot of inspiration from GitHub’s CodeQL VS Code extension. GitHub also provides an unofficial CLI extension by the same name. However, as we’ll see, this extension replicates many of the same cloud-first workflows as the VS Code extension rather than running everything locally. Here is a summary of these three implementations:

mrva gh-mrva vscode-codeql
Requires a GitHub controller repository
Runs on GitHub Actions
Supports self-hosted runners
Runs on your local machine
Easily modify CodeQL analysis parameters
View findings locally
AST viewer
Use GitHub search to create target lists
Custom target lists
Export/download results ✅ (SARIF) ✅ (SARIF) ✅ (Gist or Markdown)

As you can see, the primary benefits of mrva are the ability to run analyses and view findings locally. This gives the user more control over analysis options and ownership of their findings data. Everything is just a file on disk—where you take it from there is up to you.

Interesting implementation details

After working on a new project I generally like to share a few interesting implementation details I learned along the way. This can help demystify a completed task, provide useful crumbs for others to go in a different direction, or simply highlight something unusual. There were three details I found particularly interesting while working on this project:

  1. The GitHub CodeQL database API
  2. Useful database analyze flags
  3. Different kinds of CodeQL queries

CodeQL database API

Even though mrva runs its analyses locally, it depends heavily on GitHub’s pre-built CodeQL databases. Building CodeQL databases can be time consuming and error-prone, which is why it’s so great that GitHub provides this API. Many of the largest open-source repositories automatically build and provide a corresponding database. Whether your target repositories are public or private, configure code scanning to enable this functionality.

From Trail of Bits’ perspective, this is helpful when we’re on a client audit because we can easily download a single repository’s database (mrva download repo) or an entire GitHub organization’s (mrva download org). We can then run our custom CodeQL queries against these databases without having to waste time building them ourselves. This functionality is also useful for testing experimental queries against a large corpus of open-source code. Providing a CodeQL database API allows us to move faster and more accurately, and provides security researchers with a testing playground.

Analyze flags

While I was working on mrva, another group of features I found useful was the wide variety of flags that can be passed to database analyze, especially regarding SARIF output. One in particular stood out: --sarif-add-file-contents. This flag includes the file contents in the SARIF output so you can cross-reference a finding’s file location with the actual lines of code. This was critical for implementing the mrva pprint functionality and avoiding having to independently manage a source code checkout for code lookups.

Additionally, the --sarif-add-snippets flag provides two lines of context instead of the entire file. This can be beneficial if SARIF file size is a concern. Another useful flag in certain situations is --no-group-results. This flag provides one result per message instead of per unique location. It can be helpful when you’re trying to understand the number of results that coalesce on a single location or the different types of queries that may end up on a single line of code. This flag and others can be passed directly to CodeQL when running an mrva analysis by specifying it after double dashes like so:

$ mrva analyze <db_dir> <queries> -- --no-group-results ...

CodeQL query kinds

When working with CodeQL, you will quickly find two common kinds of queries: alert queries (@kind problem) and path queries (@kind path-problem). Alert queries use basic select statements for querying code, like you might expect to see in a SQL query. Path queries are used for data flow or taint tracking analysis. Path results form a series of code locations that progress from source to sink and represent a path through the control flow or data flow graph. To that end, these two types of queries also have different representations in the SARIF output. For example, alert queries use a result’s location property, while path queries use the codeFlows property. Despite their infrequent usage, CodeQL also supports other kinds of queries.

You can also create diagnostic queries (@kind diagnostic) and summary queries (@kind metric). As their names suggest, these kinds of queries are helpful for producing telemetry and logging information. Perhaps the most interesting kind of query is graph queries (@kind graph). This kind of query is used in the printAST.ql functionality, which will output a code file’s abstract syntax tree (AST) when run alongside other queries. I’ve found this functionality to be invaluable when debugging my own custom queries. mrva currently has experimental support for printing AST information, and we have an issue for tracking improvements to this functionality.

I suspect there are many more interesting types of analyses that could be done with graph queries, and it’s something I’m excited to dig into in the future. For example, CodeQL can also output Directed Graph Markup Language (DGML) or Graphviz DOT language when running graph queries. This could provide a great way to visualize data flow or control flow graphs when examining code.

Running at scale, locally

As a Vim user with VS Code envy, I set out to build mrva to provide flexibility for those of us living in the terminal. I’m also in the fortunate position that Trail of Bits provides us with hefty laptops that can quickly chew through static analysis jobs, so running complex queries against thousands of projects is doable locally. A terminal-first approach also enables running headless and/or scheduled multi-repo variant analyses if you’d like to, for example, incorporate automated bug finding into your research. Finally, we often have sensitive data privacy needs that require us to run jobs locally and not send data to the cloud.

I’ve heard it said that writing CodeQL queries requires a PhD in program analysis. Now, I’m not a doctor, but there are times when I’m working on a query and it feels that way. However, CodeQL is one of those tools where the deeper you dig, the more you will find, almost to limitless depth. For this reason, I’ve really enjoyed learning more about CodeQL and I’m looking forward to going deeper in the future. Despite my apprehension toward VS Code, none of this would be possible without GitHub and Microsoft, so I appreciate their investment in this tooling. The CodeQL database API, rich standard library of queries, and, of course, the tool itself make all of this possible.

If you’d like to read more about our CodeQL work, then check out our CodeQL blog posts, public queries, and Testing Handbook chapter.

Contact us if you’re interested in custom CodeQL work for your project.

The Hacker News

Cybersecurity news and insights

WIRTE Leverages AshenLoader Sideloading to Install the AshTag Espionage Backdoor - December 11, 2025

An advanced persistent threat (APT) known as WIRTE has been attributed to attacks targeting government and diplomatic entities across the Middle East with a previously undocumented malware suite dubbed AshTag since 2020. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 is tracking the activity cluster under the name Ashen Lepus. Artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal platform show that the threat actor has trained its

Google Security Blog

Security insights from Google

HTTPS certificate industry phasing out less secure domain validation methods - December 10, 2025

Secure connections are the backbone of the modern web, but a certificate is only as trustworthy as the validation process and issuance practices behind it. Recently, the Chrome Root Program and the CA/Browser Forum have taken decisive steps toward a more secure internet by adopting new security requirements for HTTPS certificate issuers.

These initiatives, driven by Ballots SC-080, SC-090, and SC-091, will sunset 11 legacy methods for Domain Control Validation. By retiring these outdated practices, which rely on weaker verification signals like physical mail, phone calls, or emails, we are closing potential loopholes for attackers and pushing the ecosystem toward automated, cryptographically verifiable security.

To allow affected website operators to transition smoothly, the deprecation will be phased in, with its full security value realized by March 2028.

This effort is a key part of our public roadmap, “Moving Forward, Together,” launched in 2022. Our vision is to improve security by modernizing infrastructure and promoting agility through automation. While "Moving Forward, Together" sets the aspirational direction, the recent updates to the TLS Baseline Requirements turn that vision into policy. This builds on our momentum from earlier this year, including the successful advocacy for the adoption of other security enhancing initiatives as industry-wide standards.

What’s Domain Control Validation?

Domain Control Validation is a security-critical process designed to ensure certificates are only issued to the legitimate domain operator. This prevents unauthorized entities from obtaining a certificate for a domain they do not control. Without this check, an attacker could obtain a valid certificate for a legitimate website and use it to impersonate that site or intercept web traffic.

Before issuing a certificate, a Certification Authority (CA) must verify that the requestor legitimately controls the domain. Most modern validation relies on “challenge-response” mechanisms, for example, a CA might provide a random value for the requestor to place in a specific location, like a DNS TXT record, which the CA then verifies.

Historically, other methods validated control through indirect means, such as looking up contact information in WHOIS records or sending an email to a domain contact. These methods have been proven vulnerable (example) and the recent efforts retire these weaker checks in favor of robust, automated alternatives.

Raising the floor of security

The recently passed CA/Browser Forum Server Certificate Working Group Ballots introduce a phased sunset of the following Domain Control Validation methods. Alternative existing methods offer stronger security assurances against attackers trying to obtain fraudulent certificates – and the alternative methods are getting stronger over time, too.

Sunsetted methods relying on email:

Sunsetted methods relying on phone:

Sunsetted method relying on a reverse lookup:

For everyday users, these changes are invisible - and that’s the point. But, behind the scenes, they make it harder for attackers to trick a CA into issuing a certificate for a domain they don’t control. This reduces the risk that stale or indirect signals, (like outdated WHOIS data, complex phone and email ecosystems, or inherited infrastructure) can be abused. These changes push the ecosystem toward standardized (e.g., ACME), modern, and auditable Domain Control Validation methods. They increase agility and resilience by encouraging site owners to transition to modern Domain Control Validation methods, creating opportunities for faster and more efficient certificate lifecycle management through automation.

These initiatives remove weak links in how trust is established on the internet. That leads to a safer browsing experience for everyone, not just users of a single browser, platform, or website.

Schneier on Security

Security news and analysis by Bruce Schneier

FBI Warns of Fake Video Scams - December 10, 2025

The FBI is warning of AI-assisted fake kidnapping scams:

Criminal actors typically will contact their victims through text message claiming they have kidnapped their loved one and demand a ransom be paid for their release. Oftentimes, the criminal actor will express significant claims of violence towards the loved one if the ransom is not paid immediately. The criminal actor will then send what appears to be a genuine photo or video of the victim’s loved one, which upon close inspection often reveals inaccuracies when compared to confirmed photos of the loved one. Examples of these inaccuracies include missing tattoos or scars and inaccurate body proportions. Criminal actors will sometimes purposefully send these photos using timed message features to limit the amount of time victims have to analyze the images...

View All Security News

Upcoming Events

Check out the upcoming security conferences and webinars.

Security Tools

Discover the latest tools and resources for enhancing security.