PacketHunters delivers technical cybersecurity threat analysis, offering deep dives into attacks, indicators, tactics, and methods behind real-world security incidents.
31.000 incidents, 22.000 confirmed breaches. Everyone is talking about vulnerability exploitation overtaking credential theft. The number that should keep CISOs awake is somewhere else – and Verizon’s own breach history quietly confirms it.
Two breaches. Eight months. Same group. ShinyHunters tore through Instructure again: 3.65 TB, 275 million records, 9,000 institutions. Device Code Flow plus a phone call. Passkeys don’t help. Here’s the playbook and the defenses.
[email protected] sent the phishing email. DKIM, SPF, DMARC all green. The attacker never spoofed anything โ they got Robinhood to deliver the payload for them. Here is the chain, the code, and why your awareness training is now obsolete.
A โฌ5 gadget. A postcard. 24 hours of real-time tracking on a โฌ500 million NATO frigate. The trust model wasn’t hacked โ it was never there. Full technical breakdown and defensive tools inside.
Between December 2025 and February 2026, one attacker breached nine Mexican government organizations using a dual-AI workflow: Claude Code for live exploitation, GPT-4.1 for post-exploitation reconnaissance at scale. 75% of remote command execution was AI-generated. RCE on a federal server in 40 minutes. This is the PacketHunters breakdown, including defensive scripts and what the forgery system built afterward means for your incident response assumptions.
Smart contract exploits are declining. Human-layer attacks are not. In 2025, phishing led all crypto attack categories by incident count. We reconstructed three anonymized breach patterns (an exchange, a DeFi protocol, a Web3 startup) and built detection scripts around the OSINT surface each one exposed before the attack landed.
Your job postings just told an attacker which VPN you run. Your engineers’ LinkedIn certs identified your EDR. Certificate transparency logs exposed your internal subdomains. This is the recon phase โ and it happens entirely before anyone touches your network.
Before a phishing email is written, your company has already been profiled. Names, roles, email patterns, VPN portals, cloud providers โ all gathered through open sources in under 20 minutes. In this PacketHunters breakdown, we map real organizational exposure using OSINT and Python, and show why phishing defense starts long before the first malicious link is sent.
AI agents behave like users but are governed with static credentials and fragmented visibility. A technical analysis of identity drift, phishing risk, and why current IAM models are inadequate.
Zombie identities are accounts and tokens that simulate real users long after their purpose is gone. This technical deep dive explains how they emerge in code, why they break recovery, and how attackers abuse them.
