Étienne Hourdebaigt
@ehourdebaigt.net
210 followers 880 following 62 posts
Organizer @nsec.io, Hacker, CTFs, Privacy, Research, Social Tech, Serial Expat 🗺️🧭
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Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
NOW: US court permanently bans Pegasus spyware maker from hacking WhatsApp.

NSO Group can't help their customers hack WhatsApp etc. ether. Must delete exploits & R&D.

Bad news for NSO. Huge competitive disadvantage for the notorious company.

Big additional win for WhatsApp 1 /
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
@reconmtl.bsky.social has uploaded the majority of the 2025 talks, including my talk on LSA. You can check it out at the below link if you'd like.

Thank you again to the organizers and everyone else who helps put on the conference. I look forward to coming back!
youtu.be/G2CfMWXLU1U?...
Recon 2025 - The Finer Details of LSA Credential Recovery
YouTube video by Recon Conference
youtu.be
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
📑 Paper: "Rain: Transiently Leaking Data from Public Clouds Using Old Vulnerabilities"

Researchers just proved that Spectre + L1TF, long assumed "mitigated", can leak TLS keys from other VMs in real-world clouds (Google Cloud, AWS).

Full preprint paper: download.vusec.net/papers/rain_...
download.vusec.net
💰 Google VRP paid $150K for this vulnerability: their highest cloud bounty ever!

The researchers showed how you can combine two primitives and how to make it work in a real cloud setup with a huge amount of noise.

While this applies to old CPUs, it is a major concern for public clouds!
A malicious VM uses a "half-Spectre" gadget in the hypervisor to load sensitive data into L1 cache → L1TF on a sibling core leaks it → TLS keys stolen in ~15 hours (even with cache flushing/core scheduling).

A good read to learn more about L1TF aka Foreshadow vuln: www.redhat.com/en/blog/unde...
Understanding L1 Terminal Fault aka Foreshadow: What you need to know
L1 Terminal Fault/Foreshadow explained in ~three minutesFor a more detailed technical view of L1 Terminal Fault, please see this deeper dive with Jon Masters.How we got here: a brief history of modern...
www.redhat.com
📑 Paper: "Rain: Transiently Leaking Data from Public Clouds Using Old Vulnerabilities"

Researchers just proved that Spectre + L1TF, long assumed "mitigated", can leak TLS keys from other VMs in real-world clouds (Google Cloud, AWS).

Full preprint paper: download.vusec.net/papers/rain_...
download.vusec.net
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
NEW: turns out the EU helped finance a bunch of spyware companies with..public money.

Extremely bad look.

Group of MEPs calls for action.👇

apache.be/2025/10/01/e...
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
BREAK: Dutch chips company ASML buys an 11 percent stake in French AI company Mistral - in the biggest tech sovereignty deal in a while.

www.asml.com/en/news/pres...
ASML, Mistral AI enter strategic partnership
www.asml.com
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
NorthSec @nsec.io · Sep 2
📸 𝗟𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗵𝗼𝘁𝗼𝘀 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗱𝗲 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗦𝗲𝗰 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲𝘀! • 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗦𝗲𝗰 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 𝗣𝗵𝗼𝘁𝗼𝘀 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗢𝘂𝘁!

Revivez les meilleurs moments de NorthSec avec notre album photo officiel! ⚓️

photos.app.goo.gl/bMCHe366jdP1...
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
More testing of LLMs for journalism, this time on identifying image location, date, and source.
By @aisvarya17.bsky.social and @klaudia.bsky.social with some of my own commentary.
www.cjr.org/tow_center/w... @columjournreview.bsky.social
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
The US House of Judiciary Committee has invited former EU Commissioner, Thierry Breton, to testify at a hearing next week that's set to attack the European digital rulebook as a threat to US free speech and innovation
www.euractiv.com/section/tech...
Former Commissioner Thierry Breton invited to MAGA DSA hearing - Euractiv
Hearing will also target the EU's Digital Markets Act and similar UK laws – with UK far right politician Nigel Farage listed as a confirmed witness
www.euractiv.com
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
NorthSec @nsec.io · Aug 9
🔧 Nous publions notre outil CLI interne pour gérer nos défis CTF as-code. Si vous organisez un CTF, jetez-y un coup d'oeil!

We're open-sourcing our internal CLI tool to manage CTF challenges as-code. If you're a CTF organizer, check it out!
github.com/nsec/ctf-scr...
GitHub - nsec/ctf-script: CLI tool to manage CTF challenges as code.
CLI tool to manage CTF challenges as code. Contribute to nsec/ctf-script development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
Germ DM brings novel privacy features to users. Created by former large tech engineers, it combines the AT Protocol (for authenticating users via BlueSky) and the Message Layer Security, a new standard designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

techcrunch.com/2025/07/30/g...
Germ brings end-to-end encrypted messages to Bluesky | TechCrunch
Germ's new app lets users send end-to-end encrypted messages on Bluesky. TechCrunch speaks with the Germ founders to hear why they came up with the idea.
techcrunch.com
This is great progress towards "more instant messaging interoperability" (MIMI), a future standard for interoperable E2EE messengers that lies on the Message Layer Security standard.

WhatsApp and others have been moving in that direction since the EU's Digital Markets Acts took effect last year.
Using modern cryptograhic technique called "coutinuous group key agreement" , the new standard enables users to send E2E encrypted messages to **groups** (and easily adding/removing people from conversations) while making no compromises on confidentiality.

blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/m...
Messaging Layer Security is now an internet standard | The Mozilla Blog
Today, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is releasing the standard for Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, a novel standard of communication
blog.mozilla.org
Germ DM brings novel privacy features to users. Created by former large tech engineers, it combines the AT Protocol (for authenticating users via BlueSky) and the Message Layer Security, a new standard designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

techcrunch.com/2025/07/30/g...
Germ brings end-to-end encrypted messages to Bluesky | TechCrunch
Germ's new app lets users send end-to-end encrypted messages on Bluesky. TechCrunch speaks with the Germ founders to hear why they came up with the idea.
techcrunch.com
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
📚 A good book to add to your summer reading list: "From Day Zero to Zero Day" by Eugene Lim. Released last month, it dives into vulnerability research! (1/5) 🧵

nostarch.com/zero-day

#vulnerability #research
From Day Zero to Zero Day
Find vulnerabilities before anyone else does.
nostarch.com
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
🤖 New research paper from ETH Zurich and LogicStar AI quantifies what we've observed: flagship LLMs fail catastrophically at secure code generation. The BaxBench benchmarks evaluated 392 backend development tasks across multiple frameworks. baxbench.com (1/8) 🧵
BaxBench: Can LLMs Generate Secure and Correct Backends?
We introduce a novel benchmark to evaluate LLMs on secure and correct code generation, showing that even flagship LLMs are not ready for coding automation, frequently generating insecure or incorrect ...
baxbench.com
Reposted by Étienne Hourdebaigt
🧵 This is concerning: new research shows AI agents can become insider threats when their objectives are blocked. They’re blackmailing executives, leaking sensitive data, and using sophisticated social engineering tactics against their own organizations! anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats
New research on simulated blackmail, industrial espionage, and other misaligned behaviors in LLMs
anthropic.com