Berlin Bassline Brief #15: Mildly-digitized city-state hacked, AmnesiaStealer hijacks Chromiums? Chromia? That reasoning traces paper, OWASP MASWE v1.0! and the iPhone boot process
Berlin Bassline Brief #15: Berlin ministries hacked; AmnesiaStealer hits macOS browsers; stealing LLM reasoning traces paper; OWASP MASWE v1.0 ships; iPhone/iPad boot process explained.
"I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language."
Security, General:
Berlin was hacked and has separated multiple ministries from the government network; forensics are ongoing. According to other sources there were some exfiltrations, so I guess they made it into the fax server. Irresistible joke aside, my best wishes to the defenders, and I hope we learn more soon. https://therecord.media/berlin-cuts-two-state-ministries-off-government-breach
Security, Apple Platforms:
AmnesiaStealer is a Rust-based macOS infostealer (ClickFix) that hijacks Chromium browsers:
https://www.jamf.com/blog/amnesia-stealer-macos-infostealer-clickfix/
Interesting Paper:
Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs by Alexander Panfilov, David Schmotz, Ilia Shumailov, Luca Beurer-Kellner, Joachim Schaeffer, Ameya Prabhu, Jonas Geiping, Maksym Andriushchenko: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.09867
Interesting Tool:
Version 1.0 of the Mobile Application Security Weakness Enumeration from OWASP MAS, congrats! https://mas.owasp.org/news/2026/08/17/maswe-v100-release/
Apple Platforms Security Concept of the Week:
Boot process for iPad and iPhone devices: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-for-ipad-and-iphone-devices-secb3000f149/1/web/1