News & Commentary

When You Just Ask the AI to Snitch on Itself 🤖

This one’s equal parts funny, terrifying, and downright amusing.

Researchers at Varonis Threat Labs found something called CoSnitch (which is hilarious). They were able to trick a Microsoft Copilot instance into just…telling them about its architecture, thus showing security weaknesses. Innocent-sounding follow-up questions about URL structures and how it handles prompts, and Copilot is ready to hand over its own blueprint. 💀

This led to the researchers finding an undocumented ?autorun=1 parameter that automatically executes embedded prompts when it’s tacked onto a query — guardrails and all. So now you've got a malicious link like copilot[.]microsoft[.]com/?q=<prompt>&autorun=1 that runs unauthorized actions inside their already-authenticated session the moment a victim clicks it. And from there, attackers could exfiltrate data from Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, or even Copilot’s own memory; poison memory for future manipulation; or just do some good ol’ fashioned reconnaissance and disinformation.

This hit Copilot Personal specifically (enterprise customers were unaffected), and Microsoft's already shipped a fix as of August 18, 2026, tracked as CVE-2026-24301 with a CVSS of 8.8. Varonis reported it back in December 2025, so this was a good long responsible-disclosure runway before the public writeup. So far, there’s been no signs it was exploited in the wild.

The line from researcher Lior Adar is the one I keep coming back to:

That's the mental model to build your defenses around going forward.

(((By the way, if you’d like to try tricking AI into telling you stuff, we made a game for that.)))

GitLab Has a Zero-Click Problem ⚠️

Buckle up, folks. This one’s rough. But patched. So there’s that. 😅

GitLab just patched CVE-2026-19478, a critical code-injection bug (with a CVSS score of 9.4 no less) housed in their GraphQL functionality. This was a zero-click vulnerability that required zero authorization, zero credentials, and zero user interaction to exploit. An attacker could just show up and manipulate or delete data on publicly accessible projects.

If you're running GitLab CE or EE on 18.2 through 18.10, or on 19.x before 19.0.8 / 19.1.6 / 19.2.4, beware: You're in the blast radius. GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated customers are fine since those were already patched behind the scenes.

But here’s the part that makes our lives harder as defenders. GitLab sat on the technical details for 90 days after shipping the patch. The good news is that gave folks time to update, but it also put detection engineers behind. As one researcher put it, you can’t write a reliable signature for attack mechanics no one’s actually disclosed.

The takeaway: Patch your self-hosted GitLab instances now, don't wait for the technical writeup. If you can't patch immediately, get those instances behind a VPN or WAF and start watching your /api/graphql logs for anything weird.

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Email being clipped?

Here’s some actually helpful advice: You can view the email in your browser: https://johnhammond.beehiiv.com/p/cybersecurity-shenanigans-027.

(And as always, thanks for nothing, Clippy. 💙)

Just Hacking Training News 🤓

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