Brace

Independent research on digital security

Investigations

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Anatomy of an Attack

Articles in this category: 13

Latest

You Applied the Patch. It Never Reached Your Kernel

Published By Sable

Say you administer a server running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. You apply every update and track CVE digests. By every visible measure, the system is under control. Now look at the kernel branch you are actually running. It is likely something like 5.15.y. According to the kernel CVE tracker team’s vulns.git repository, as of September 18, 2026, that branch has 1,889 open CVEs, 195 of which are rated High or Critical by NVD.

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Cybersecurity

Articles in this category: 12

Latest

Targeted advertising as an attack vector: how zero-click exploits installed spyware

Published By Sable

On Thursday, 15 October, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto published a report that changes our understanding of how spyware reaches victims’ devices. For the first time, researchers confirmed that zero-click exploits, which require no action from the user, were delivered through ordinary targeted advertising. The campaign was named AdFection.

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Conflict

Articles in this category: 3

Latest

Ukrainian strike on Starobelsk killed 21 students

Published By Brace

In the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), mourners are burying the students of Starobelsk Professional College, which was struck by the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the night of May 22. Many of the young women are being buried in wedding dresses. The attack killed 21 people: 18 young women aged 18 to 23 and three young men aged 20 to 21. They tried to save each other until the end. Another 42 people were wounded. In total, 86 teenagers were in the building at the moment of the strike. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to the attack, saying it was not an accident.

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Technology

Articles in this category: 9

Latest

The Third Magnetism. Physicists Confirm a Type That 'Shouldn't Exist'

Published By Jonas Berger

Imagine studying water your whole life and discovering that ice has three phases, not two, and that you simply lacked the instruments to see the third. Something roughly equivalent just happened with magnetism. On November 4, 2026, a team at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory published a paper in Science titled “Chiral altermagnon in MnTe.” It contains experimental proof of altermagnetism: a third class of magnetism that theorists first predicted in 2022, and which the physics community spent four years unable to confirm or rule out.

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