Ghostcommit is a proof of concept that shows how AI assistants used to review software code can be tricked by hidden instructions embedded in images.
The academic ASSET Research Group showed that an attacker can place instructions inside an image file, point to it in an AGENTS.md file, and get an AI coding agent to follow those instructions during a later task.
A pull request is basically a formal “please review and add my changes” request that a developer sends before changes are added to the main version of a software project. Human reviewers and, increasingly, AI coding tools may review the changes before they’re accepted.
Read more…
Source: MalwareBytes Labs
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Spectre vulnerabilities cannot be mitigated by software alone
February 19, 2019
A team of Google researchers has demonstrated the Spectre vulnerabilities present in many of today’s processors cannot be completely mitigated by applying software fixes, as has been assumed. Variants of the Spectre flaw discovered last year, which involves information leaking via ‘speculative execution’ or functions performed early to speed up computation, are not just software glitches ...
- APT Adversaries Up the Ante on Speed, Target Telecom
February 19, 2019
Despite law-enforcement wins in the form of several high-profile arrests and indictments during 2018, nation-state adversaries have upped their games when it comes to speed. That’s according to CrowdStrike’s 2019 Global Threat Report, which found that when analyzing how long it takes to go from initial compromise to the attacker’s first lateral movement within the network, Russian-speaking APTs (such ...
- North Korea Turns Against New Targets?!
February 19, 2019
Over the past few weeks, we have been monitoring suspicious activity directed against Russian-based companies that exposed a predator-prey relationship that we had not seen before. For the first time we were observing what seemed to be a coordinated North Korean attack against Russian entities. While attributing attacks to a certain threat group or another is ...
- Hackers Use Compromised Banks as Starting Points for Phishing Attacks
February 19, 2019
Cybercriminals attacking banks and financial organizations use their foothold in a compromised infrastructure to gain access to similar targets in other regions or countries. In a report released today and shared with BleepingComputer, international security company Group-IB specialized in preventing cyber attacks describes a so called cross-border domino-effect that can lead to spreading an infection beyond the initial ...
- When Cyberattacks Pack a Physical Punch
February 18, 2019
Physical security goes hand in hand with cyberdefense. What happens when – as we see all too often – the physical side is overlooked? More than one in 10 data breaches now involve “physical actions,” according to a recent report. These include leveraging physical devices to aid an attack, but also hacks that involve breaking into hardware ...
- Cisco’s warning: Patch this default Network Assurance Engine password bug
February 13, 2019
Cisco is urging customers to install an update that fixes a high-severity issue affecting its Network Assurance Engine (NAE) for managing data-center networks. The bug, tracked as CVE-2019-1688, could allow an attacker to use a flaw in the password-management system of NAE to knock out an NAE server and cause a denial of service. NAE is an ...

