cyberstan

Category: Blogs

  • Hunting Concurrency Bugs: How I Found a Race Condition in Python 3.12

    Hunting Concurrency Bugs: How I Found a Race Condition in Python 3.12

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    Summary In this post, I detail my discovery of a critical race condition and Use-After-Free (UAF) vulnerability in CPython’s perf_trampoline implementation that causes immediate Segmentation Faults in Python 3.12 and SystemErrors in 3.13+. Through stress testing and GDB analysis, I determined that the crash occurs when sys.deactivate_stack_trampoline() is called concurrently with active bytecode execution. The…

  • Technical Write-up: SQL Injection in Django ORM CVE-2025-64459

    Technical Write-up: SQL Injection in Django ORM CVE-2025-64459

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    Summary I discovered a critical SQL injection vulnerability in the Django ORM’s handling of Q objects (CVE-2025-64459). The internal WhereNode.as_sql method uses unsafe string formatting (%s) to inject the query connector (e.g., ‘AND’, ‘OR’) into the raw SQL query. An attacker can control this connector value via the _connector key when a Q object is…

  • The Quantum Threat: Confronting Cryptographic Extinction

    The Quantum Threat: Confronting Cryptographic Extinction

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    For decades, the digital world has been built on a bedrock of trust forged by mathematics. Public-key cryptography, the engine behind everything from secure online banking (TLS/SSL) to software updates and blockchain transactions, has been our silent guardian. We’ve trusted it to be an unbreakable shield, based on mathematical problems so difficult that all the…

  • Beyond the Phish: Deconstructing Weaponized Empathy in Social Engineering

    Beyond the Phish: Deconstructing Weaponized Empathy in Social Engineering

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    For years, the cybersecurity industry has characterized the “human element” as the weakest link, a passive vulnerability waiting to be patched through repetitive training. This perspective is dangerously outdated. A sophisticated threat actor doesn’t see a flaw to be patched; they see a complex, exploitable operating system with a rich set of psychological APIs. One…

  • Why Post-Encryption Coercion is the Real Ransomware Threat

    Why Post-Encryption Coercion is the Real Ransomware Threat

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    For years, the cybersecurity community has framed the ransomware defense around a simple premise: robust, tested backups are the silver bullet. The logic was sound—if an organization can restore its encrypted data, the leverage of the attacker’s decryption key is nullified. By 2024, however, this paradigm is dangerously obsolete. Sophisticated threat actors no longer view…

  • The Blind Spot in Our Defenses: Confronting the Threat of Adversarial AI

    The Blind Spot in Our Defenses: Confronting the Threat of Adversarial AI

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    For the past several years, the cybersecurity industry has championed Artificial Intelligence as the force multiplier for beleaguered security teams. We’ve integrated AI into everything from Next-Gen Antivirus (NGAV) to network anomaly detection, trusting it to be a faster, smarter sentinel. While this has undoubtedly raised the bar for defenders, it has also introduced a…