SANS Stormcast Wednesday, August 6th, 2025: Machinekeys and VIEWSTATEs; Perplexity Unethical Learning; SonicWall Updates

Stealing Machinekeys for fun and profit (or riding the SharePoint wave) Bojan explains in detail how .NET uses Machine Keys to protect the VIEWSTATE, and how to abuse the VIEWSTATE for code execution if the Machine Keys are lost. https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Stealing%20Machine%20Keys%20for%20fun%20and%20profit%20%28or%20riding%20the%20SharePoint%20wave%29/32174 Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives Perplexity will change its User Agent, or use different originating IP addresses, if it detects being blocked from scanning websites https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-undeclared-crawlers-to-evade-website-no-crawl-directives/ Gen 7 SonicWall Firewalls SSLVPN Recent Threat Activity Over the past 72 hours, there has been a notable increase in both internally and externally reported cyber incidents involving Gen 7 SonicWall firewalls where SSLVPN is enabled. https://www.sonicwall.com/support/notices/gen-7-sonicwall-firewalls-sslvpn-recent-threat-activity/250804095336430