Publications

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ERNW White Paper 71

Analysis of Anti-Virus Software Quarantine Files

Anti-virus software (AV software) is a type of computer software that tries to identify malicious software and to prevent it from running. Since anti-virus software may wrongfully identify harmless files as malicious (false positives), AV software makes use of quarantining files. If a file is put into quarantine by an AV software, the AV software removes the original suspected malicious file and stores a modified obfuscated version in another location.

In this paper, the quarantine files of different AV software solutions were analyzed. The encryption and obfuscation methods were documented (including encryption keys) and parsers created using Kaitai Struct.



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Talks and Conferences arround the world


February 17, 2026

Vulnerability Disclosure: JWT Authentication Bypass in OpenID Connect Authenticator for Tomcat

During a customer project we identified an issue with the validation of JWT tokens that allowed us to bypass the authentication by using unsigned tokens with arbitrary payloads. During analysis we found out that this is caused by a vulnerability within the library OpenID Connect Authenticator for Tomcat.

February 11, 2026

One More Thing: Introducing the New macOS 26 Tahoe Hardening Guide

After seven years, we’re publishing a new macOS hardening guide. Fully updated, modernized, and now publicly available on GitHub as Markdown and on our website as PDF. The previous guide, written for macOS Mojave (10.14), reflected a very different macOS security model. At the time, hardening often meant working around the operating system, manually enforcing […]

February 04, 2026

Capture Bumble Bluetooth Traffic with Wireshark

When conducting pentests of Bluetooth devices or whilst working on Bluetooth related research, we often use Bumble. In this Blogpost I will present a solution to capture a live stream of Bumble Bluetooth traffic in Wireshark.

January 27, 2026

Incident Response in GCP: Out of Scope – Ouf of Mind

We are regularly offering a GCP Incident Response and Analysis training. In this training, we analyze resources in GCP cloud together with our trainees that were successfully compromised by attackers, e.g., GCE instances and Cloud Build projects. Therefore, we need tooling that quickly detects misconfiguration of resources that helped the attacker during the compromise. During […]

December 28, 2025

Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: Full Disclosure of Airoha RACE Vulnerabilities

About six months ago we released a security advisory on this blog about vulnerabilities in Airoha-based Bluetooth headphones and earbuds. Back then, we didn’t release all technical details to give vendors more time to release updates and users time to patch their devices. Around the time of the initial partial disclosure in the beginning of […]

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