Cisco has revealed its Secure Workload Software, a micro-segmentation tool formerly known as Tetration that is supposed to stop attackers moving laterally across a network, has four critical flaws plus another high-severity bug. CVE-2026-20315 and CVE-2026-20317 are the two perfect-ten-rated bugs. Both relate to improper access control. Cisco has not offered much detail about either, saying only that 20315 “covers authorization, authentication, privileges, and bypasses” and that 20317 has to do with “missing authentication, authentication bypass, and reliance on untrusted inputs.” The 9.9-rated flaw is CVE-2026-20231, which describes issues related to “Improper neutralization of special elements (covers command, OS, argument injection).” CVE-2026-20318 is the 9.6-er and is an improper input validation problem. Coming in last, at 7.5, is CVE-2026-20319, a problem related to “Improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer” including overflows and out-of-bounds writes. Cisco offers Secure Workload Software as a SaaS-y service and for on-prem deployment. The company has fixed the flaws with its SaaS, but users still need to upgrade the Agent and Connector tools needed to use the cloudy software. On-prem users who have deployed version 3.10 or earlier need to get to version 3.10.9.1. Users of version 4.0 or later need to adopt 4.0.4.16 sooner rather than later. Cisco revealed the flaws on Thursday and says it discovered them after “a comprehensive internal security review” that involved “existing testing processes as well as frontier AI models.” Cisco is a known participant in Project Glasswing, which grants access to Anthropic’s too-powerful-for-public-release Mythos bug-finding model. So maybe that’s the frontier model involved in this research. Thankfully, Cisco says it has detected no malicious use of the vulnerabilities. ®

Google is tracking three distinct suspected Russian cyber-spy groups that are targeting individuals in academia, aerospace, defense, government agencies, and think tanks across Europe and the US. The UNC (unclassified) groups, as Google calls them, have been orchestrating these highly targeted campaigns since at least last year, and they remain ongoing. Some of the phishing and OAuth-abuse operations used in the attack took place this month. Each campaign had fewer than 100 targets, and under 10 victims, the threat-intel team told The Register. Despite the small numbers, if you work in government, NGOs, academia, or aerospace, you may be a target, and over the past few months the Russian snoops have adapted their attacks to abuse legitimate authentication flows. This makes these types of social engineering tactics appear more legitimate – and allows the cyber operatives to compromise personal accounts across multiple platforms, Google warns. It also means that potential victims may not recognize these as phishing attempts. Google says it wants to raise awareness about these campaigns “so that targets can more readily recognize malicious outreach.” In other words: don’t blindly trust that calendar invite that purports to come from the US State Department. UNC6293 The security analysts have been tracking one of the three, UNC6293, for almost two years. UNC6293 is a suspected APT29 (aka Cozy Bear, which Google now tracks as Ice Relic – insert eyeroll) phishing squad that poses as US State Department employees to lure victims into giving the snoops long-term access to their email correspondence. APT29 is probably best known for the 2020 SolarWinds hack, and infosec analysts from the UK and US governments, and the private sector, often link it to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). On Thursday, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said it's now tracking two other suspected Russian groups, UNC7005 and UNC5976, which also conduct phishing, abuse OAuth flows, and/or deploy malware to these same types of targeted individuals. Last summer, GTIG documented UNC6293 phishing for app passwords belonging to people who are critical of Russia. In this campaign, they impersonated State Department personnel, and they’ve continued using that lure while also adding OAuth phishing into their toolkit. “In June 2026, GTIG observed OAuth phishing where UNC6293 requested targets share either the full URL or ‘verification code’ after performing a legitimate login to an external provider,” Google threat analysts Gabby Roncone and Wesley Shields said in the Thursday report. “By providing the requested verification code the target would grant UNC6293 access to the account.” UNC7005 GTIG also asserts, with “moderate confidence,” that UNC7005 is another initial access group connected to APT29/Cozy Bear/Ice Relic – and the SVR. This crew, first identified in February, usually targets academia, diplomatic, and nonprofit personnel across Ukraine, Western Europe, and the US. While it shares similarities with UNC6293, Google tracks it separately “due to its lower sophistication and poor operational security, infrastructure with divergent characteristics, and incorporation of malware.” Reliaquest and Microsoft first sounded the alarm on this group - Redmond tracks UNC6293 as Storm-2945 - after spotting a campaign compromising captive portal networks to deliver infostealers, keyloggers, and other malware. The Russian intelligence operatives targeted users of public Wi-Fi networks at places like hotels, conference centers, and other shared venues in the hospitality sector in an AI-assisted operation that began in February. UNC7005 also enjoys device-code phishing for both Microsoft and WhatsApp accounts. Most recently, the phishing lures look like invitations to diplomatic events and conferences delivered via email with links to attacker-controlled websites. The crew also tends to reuse website templates. They did this in May, we’re told, re-using the website template from an operation that used the theme of an "embassy invite." The later campaign spoofed the real GLOBSEC forum - a geopolitical gabfest that focuses on Eastern Europe. Once victims visit the attacker-controlled website, the snoops fingerprint the victim’s system and prompt them to confirm their attendance at a conference. “The registration process is thorough, and notably contains an epicurean wine selection, which was a theme in multiple previous ICE RELIC-linked phishing campaigns,” the Googlers wrote. In May and June, UNC7005 carried out social engineering attacks spoofing WhatsApp and prompting the victim to either join a voice call, encrypted chat, or download a file. Joining the voice call triggers a malicious JavaScript that records audio and video of the target, which the malware uploads to the attacker’s command-and-control server. While Google doesn’t say how the Russians use the stolen images and audio, attackers can use both to help carry out convincing social engineering campaigns. Also in May, the goons conducted “a much broader phishing wave than any we had previously observed,” Roncone and Shields wrote. This one targeted prominent, mostly US-based academics, diplomats, and researchers whose work focused on Russia and former Soviet states. The miscreants’ website was more “elaborately built to social engineer the target,” with specific information about a resolution supporting Ukraine, plus contact details for general questions or tech support. Those contacts were a hotline to the attackers, not a helpdesk. When users click the button that, they believe, will download a “Summit Companion App” to read the full resolution, they inadvertently put infostealers on their own Mac OS and Windows devices. Since August, the same crew also started both Google and Microsoft account OAuth phishing operations using cloud infrastructure. UNC5976 Finally, UNC5976 is yet another suspected Russian cyberespionage group and again likes to steal OAuth tokens. GTIG began tracking OAuth-related activity from this crew in March 2026. In these campaigns, UNC5976 buys up several domains with names related to file sharing and then creates a cloud project related to the domain. The domains host a fake file sharing page that prompts users to “Continue with Google” via a popup link. The links takes them to a legitimate Google OAuth login page, asks them to sign in, and after authenticating the credentials redirects the victim to a Google Cloud project URL that saves the authentication token for the attacker. GTIG calls UNC5976 “distinct” from the other two initial access groups, and notes that this may indicate “differing strategic mandates and potential alignment with alternative Russian intelligence services.” It also uses dedicated infrastructure for post-compromise activity instead of residential proxies, plus more malware and tooling in its OAuth operations. ®

US Bank says that it's investigating ransomware crew LockBit’s claims that it breached the financial institution and stole data, which the crims threaten to leak on September 3 unless the bank pays an extortion demand. "We have investigated this matter and the available evidence indicates that the claim regarding a potential cyber incident is related to a fourth party event that occurred outside of our environment. At this time, there is no evidence that our systems, networks or data repositories were compromised," Lee Henderson, US Bank VP of public affairs, said in an emailed statement to The Register. If the extortionists’ claims are true, and even if the bank pays the ransom demand, there’s still no guarantee that the digital thieves will delete the stolen files. When cops took down an earlier iteration of LockBit in 2024, they found evidence that the crooks retained victim data - even after the victims paid the extortion demands. “We have provided relevant information to law enforcement and continue to support their investigation," Henderson continued. "The security and privacy of our customers’ information is our highest priority. We will continue to provide updates as warranted.” LockBit added the bank to its leak site late Wednesday night, and gave the bank 14 days to pay a ransom demand or else see its data dumped online. The post doesn’t say how many files the crew allegedly stole, or what they contained. In February 2024, international cops seized servers, domain infrastructure, and decryption keys in an effort to dismantle the notorious ransomware group, and in May 2024, they outed LockBitSupp's true identity - although Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, a Russian national, remains at large. In September 2025, however, LockBit reemerged with its new LockBit 5.0 ransomware variant. LockBit’s latest claims follow previous third-party breaches affecting US Bank customers’ data, and at least one law firm says that it’s considering a class-action lawsuit against US Bank National Association, the primary banking subsidiary of US Bancorp, on behalf of a small group of customers whose credit card information may have been exposed in a third-party security snafu that reached the bank through its vendor, Fidelity National Information Services. US Bank reportedly found out about the third-party incident on May 7, and in June, began notifying 537 customers, all Massachusetts residents, that their names, mailing addresses, and credit card numbers may have been stolen by the digital crooks. Customers’ Social Security numbers, online banking credentials, and account balances reportedly weren’t accessed. A much larger incident affecting around 11,000 customers occurred in 2022, after a different vendor “accidentally shared” a file containing personal information associated with closed US Bank credit card accounts, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, closed account numbers, and outstanding balances.® Updated on Aug 21 with a new statement from US Bank.

A young security researcher figured out a way to enroll a Linux device into Apple’s Find My network and read live location data from it. Find My is Apple’s app for, you guessed it, finding things – whether AirTags, iPads, or other supported devices and items. It also works for people. Families can track each other's whereabouts for safety reasons, and friends can tell when others are hanging out without them. In typical Apple fashion, though, the full Find My experience is limited to Apple hardware, like an iPhone or Mac. iBiz also offers Find Devices via the iCloud website, although it lacks Find My’s people-tracking feature for viewing locations others have shared with you. However, the 22-year-old researcher, who goes by “Zerotistic,” devised a way to enroll a Linux-based machine into the iNetwork, tricking Apple into sending the people-location data it exclusively reserves for Apple devices. It’s important to note, at this point, that this is not an exploit that allows anyone to arbitrarily retrieve any Apple user's location. It refers to registering a non-Apple device to the Find My network and retrieving the location data of people who had already chosen to share their locations with the Apple account owner. Retrieving people-location data requires Apple to trust that the machine you’re using belongs to its network and is capable of receiving the data, which is sent over Apple’s Push Notification service (APNs). The first step was tying the Linux machine to the researcher’s Apple account. Zerotistic obtained an identity delegate by going through Apple’s standard GrandSlam authentication protocol. In pursuit of an Apple Identity Services (IDS) device certificate, which links the intended device to an Apple Account, they then used that delegate to build a custom certificate signing request (CSR). Lots of trial and error later, Zerotistic discovered that the CSR had to use the PKCS#10 format and a 2048-bit RSA key signed using SHA-1, linking the Linux machine to their Apple account. They bundled this up into a compressed XML file and sent it to Apple’s authenticateDS profile-enrollment endpoint. The SHA-1 signature requirement and XML encoding were surprises. The researcher’s “best guess” is that the CSR had to conform to older standards because authenticateDS is a legacy endpoint. Apple signed the CSR, handing the Linux device the IDS certificate needed to register its public key to the researcher’s Apple account. The Linux device was registered at this point, but further work was needed to convince Apple that it was capable of running Find My. Zerotistic found that a Find My registration request required the device to subscribe to six different subservices, define the types of encryption it supported, and provide the public keys to support Apple’s device-to-device messaging format. It also had to be signed using an IDS certificate and an APNs certificate obtained during initial network setup. At this point, the researcher had enrolled the Linux machine in an Apple account and convinced Find My that it was capable of receiving location data via a persistent binary TLS connection to Apple’s private APNs servers. However, this registration did not automatically retrieve the location data of people who had previously shared their locations with Zerotistic, as a box-fresh Apple device would after setup. Issuing a SubscribeAndFetch request fixed this, prompting the device of the researcher’s friend to push an encrypted location key to the newly registered Linux device. The final challenge was reading the location data the Linux device fetched from Apple’s SearchParty service. Zerotistic was not simply using the GUI Find My app on Linux; they were receiving the encrypted data and had to figure out how to unpack the location message. This required a Linux script to unwrap Apple’s messaging envelope, extract the shared location key, and decrypt the Find My location data, which is comprised of coordinates, timestamps, and accuracy information. Once developed, the script could fetch and decode subsequent location reports for the existing location share. It took the researcher less than a week of tinkering to develop the Find My-busting technique, they said. The Register asked Apple if it was aware of the researcher’s work and if it had any plans to address the issue, but it did not immediately respond. ®

France's tax authority says attackers may have stolen the contents of messages exchanged with hundreds of taxpayers during the data raid it confirmed last week. In an update published this week, the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) said lists of messages exchanged with the authority were exposed. For around 250 people, the compromised information also included the messages themselves. Slightly more than 350,000 individuals were affected. The other exposed data included tax identification numbers, marital status, email and postal addresses, and phone numbers. Tax records also exposed details such as household composition, number of dependents, family quotient, reference tax income, and withholding rates. Beyond the personal and tax information, DGFiP said the other affected datasets contained information that was already publicly available. For approximately 250,000 businesses and professionals, the affected data was limited to company names and SIREN numbers, the unique nine-digit identifiers assigned to French businesses. The compromised cadastral data was limited to property addresses and dimensions, which DGFiP said were already publicly available. DGFiP said it was notifying affected taxpayers by email or post this week. DGFiP's latest FAQ pegs the total number of affected parties at roughly 600,000. That appears lower than the 678,000 "individuals and professionals" DGFiP said were affected last week, shortly after the alleged cybercriminal behind the attack, "ZeroBytes," claimed to have stolen data belonging to more than 2 million. The authority did not explain the discrepancy. The notifications warn that criminals could use the stolen details to make phishing attempts appear more convincing. DGFiP highlighted impersonation attempts, CEO fraud, and scams involving bogus bank advisers as possible follow-on attacks. The authority said it would never ask taxpayers to provide sensitive information such as PINs or identity documents by phone, text message, or email, and would request such material only through its secure portal. Separately, the tax authority disclosed a "technical vulnerability" in the government's Vacant Successions Portal (PSV), which is used to search for estates without known heirs. DGFiP suspended the service after discovering the flaw. It said there was no evidence so far that personal data had leaked, although its investigation into possible exposure of applicants' details continues. The incident adds to a torrid year for cybersecurity across France's public sector. In February, the finance ministry, which oversees DGFiP, 'fessed up to an intrusion into a database containing citizens' bank details that affected 1.2 million people. The Health Ministry confirmed in March that 15.8 million administrative files, 165,000 of which contained doctors' notes, were stolen during an attack on healthtech company Cegedim Santé. A month later, a 15-year-old allegedly carried out an attack on France Titres, which handles the country's identity documents. The attacker claimed the breach affected between 18 million and 19 million people. In June, France also began probing an alleged breach of Tchap, the government's encrypted messaging platform, after attackers claimed to have accessed 73,000 user accounts, 643,000 messages, and nearly 60,000 media files. ®

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we make fun of those who are security self-owned, so hopefully you don’t do the same. This week, we have a story that’s hot off the presses about a company almost sabotaging its security by using AI for programming. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our tale of machine learning malfeasance comes courtesy of Sergiy Fitsak, managing director of Softjourn, a consulting and software development company. He reminds us that, when it comes to AI, don’t trust: verify. During the course of business, one engineer asked an AI agent to recommend a package that they needed for a common task. The agent came back with the name of a legitimate-sounding package, which was formatted like a familiar library. At many organizations, this would have been the end of the story. The developer would have taken the AI agent’s advice and downloaded and installed the recommended package. However, at Softjourn, the company has a policy which they actually followed: double-check any software recommendations made by AI to make sure they are legit. The developer skimmed the recommended package’s source code on GitHub and noticed that it had few downloads and had just been created a few days earlier. In other words, it was suspicious. According to Fitsak, attackers have found a way to exploit package names hallucinated by AI models. “The problem is that AI models sometimes invent package names that sound plausible but don't exist, a pattern security researchers have started calling 'slopsquatting,'” he told us. “Attackers have caught on and now register real packages under those exact invented names, betting that a developer under deadline pressure will install first and check later.” If Softjourn hadn’t been so careful, they could have installed a malware package. We don’t know the exact payload, but this malware package could have given crims a backdoor into their systems and the ability to steal data or wreak other havoc. “We caught it because we'd already built a habit of verifying download counts and reviewing source code on GitHub before installing anything an AI recommends, even when it looks routine,” Fitsak said. “It takes a few extra minutes. Skipping that step once is how a team ends up explaining a supply chain compromise instead of shipping a feature on time.” The lesson here is a very simple one: Don’t trust the package names that AI agents recommend. Have a human check the supply chain. And always have a human in the loop so they can take the time to stop and approve any outside code that comes into a project. ®

Attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities, in what five US federal agencies on Wednesday called an “active threat.” In this latest round of intrusions against American critical infrastructure, the attackers use open source industrial automation libraries – specifically snap7.dll/python-snap7 – combined with AI coding assistants. Armed with the open source libraries and AI, the miscreants create custom tools that mimic operational technology (OT) monitoring software and provide read/write access to the PLC devices’ memory, configuration data, and ladder logic programs via the S7comm protocol. “This is not a theoretical risk – it is an active threat,” the feds warned. While the joint alert from the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Energy (DOE), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t attribute the threats to a particular government or criminal group, Iranian cyber operatives are suspected of being behind recent attacks targeting PLCs at water and wastewater facilities across at least 12 states, including a cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 community water systems in Minnesota in late July. “This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs,” Cynthia Kaiser, Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP, told The Register. “Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society.” National security and infosec experts last week told The Register that while there is no indication that the water-system hackers used AI in their intrusions, they worried that attackers would soon add AI to their arsenals for attacks against critical infrastructure. Now, that threat appears to be here. “What the advisory highlights with regard to AI usage aligns with what we’ve expected: state-sponsored adversaries are leveraging AI across the board for discrete tasks, like code checks and scripting, to scale their operations and move faster,” Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director, told us on Wednesday. “The advisory reflects the broader reality that threat actors are using AI to increase their efficiency.” Siemens S7 Series PLCs under fire According to the Wednesday security alert, the latest attacks specifically target internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs across critical manufacturing, energy, water and wastewater, chemical, food and agriculture, and commercial facilities – in other words: most of the critical industries providing goods and services that Americans use in their daily lives. “Additionally, Siemens S7 Series PLCs are used in other sectors, including the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), and could be targeted there as well,” the feds warned. The Register reached out to the agencies for additional information about the attacks but did not receive any response to our questions. Attackers use internet-scanning services such as Censys and ZoomEye to find exposed, “poorly protected” PLCs running outdated software or using default passwords – and now they’ve got an AI boost. “Threat actors are using AI assistance to generate exploitation scripts using publicly available information on these Siemens S7 Series PLCs for initial access, credential access, denial of service, and other objectives,” the agencies said. “If these PLCs are exposed to the Internet or insufficiently segmented, then threat actors can exploit various critical and high severity known vulnerabilities in these PLCs.” The use of AI also indicates “an evolution in threat actor capabilities,” reducing the need for advanced technical knowledge about OT, and allowing the attacker to more rapidly develop working industrial control system malware and attack chains, the alert says. “I think that the bigger issue is still how exposed OT environments are,” Benny Czarny, CEO and founder of critical infrastructure security firm Opswat, told The Register in an email. “AI makes it much easier for an attacker to create and modify scripts targeting PLCs, so the barrier to attacking industrial systems continues to fall. But for me the answer is not simply better AI detection.” To mitigate this threat, the feds say critical infrastructure owners and operators should first – immediately – inventory all Siemens S7 Series PLCs in their environment, apply security patches as needed, and make sure no PLCs are accessible from the internet. It's also worth checking for anomalous S7comm behavior, including connections from non-engineering workstations, unusual data block access patterns, or write operations outside change windows, the feds suggest. Sequential IP scanning on port 102 and repeated connection attempts with varying parameters can indicate attackers conducting reconnaissance, and Snap7.dll library usage outside approved workstations may also indicate the presence of intruders on the network – so be sure to use these and the rest of the detection strategies detailed in the government security advisory to hunt for anomalies that may indicate a compromise. In addition to looking for indicators of compromise relevant to these intrusions, Czarny said it's critical to reduce the OT attack surface. “If data only needs to leave an OT network, use a data diode,” he said. “There should be no network path back to the PLC for an attacker to exploit. Yes, AI makes this more urgent. But the real lesson for me is still the same: stop giving attackers a path to the critical system in the first place. And do not rely on antivirus and sandboxes to protect your data flow.” ®

Some ICE employees seemingly needed a reminder not to wear their Meta pervert glasses to work. Because only ICE can spy on ICE. Meta smart glasses are essentially “body-worn cameras,” as they can covertly record video and audio, David Venturella, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director, reportedly reminded agency employees on Tuesday. “The use of Meta Glasses or similar devices could unintentionally capture, record or transmit sensitive information, potentially compromising privacy and legal protections,” Venturella said in a Tuesday memo, according to a New York Times report. ICE policy [PDF] prohibits employees from using personal body-worn cameras in the workplace. As such, ICE employees’ personal Meta glasses - along with similar wearable devices capable of recording audio or video - are banned from use on the job. An ICE spokesperson told us that ICE, on occasion, reminds its employees of existing policies like this one, and that the agency takes privacy and operational security seriously. “This isn’t news - nothing has changed,” an ICE spokesperson said. “Personally owned body-worn cameras and unauthorized recording are prohibited, as they always have been.” The spokesperson declined to answer The Register’s questions including what prompted the reminder and whether more ICE agents have been bringing their Meta glasses to work. Meta said it had no comment on the story. While the ICE policy isn’t new, the outright ban on Meta’s so-called pervert glasses has been trending upward since DEF CON told hackers to leave any glasses equipped with recording capabilities at home. “Be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them,” DEF CON organizers told conference attendees ahead of the annual August event. Several restaurants, pubs, and private clubs including Soho House and UK pub chain Wetherspoons have also prohibited - or strongly discouraged - patrons from wearing these types of smart glasses in their establishments, citing privacy concerns. Apart from CCTV cameras, “the general code that applies in our pubs, and most pubs, is that you can't film customers or employees without their permission,” a Wetherspoons spokesperson previously told The Register. “Meta glasses seem to breach this code, and common sense, by enabling surreptitious surveillance, so our instinct is to say turn off the cameras.” Some National Basketball Association arenas have also reportedly told fans to go put their glasses with recording capabilities inside their vehicles and not wear them at NBA games. Meanwhile, the UK's privacy watchdog in March began investigating Meta's smart glasses after reports that human contractors reviewing recordings from the devices were exposed to extremely private moments captured by unsuspecting users. ®

Surveillance tech company Flock has struggled with its public image for years, but the problem has become particularly acute in recent weeks. Its network of ALPRs has long attracted criticism over mass surveillance and the retention of location data belonging to motorists who are not suspected of any offense. Days after its CEO apologized for documented abuses of the company's system, The Register contacted the company's usually responsive media team about an online campaign calling for its automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to be vandalized on Halloween, and received an automated response. "Thanks for reaching out to Flock. Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break," the email said. "Unlike our cameras, we can't work 24/7, so we'll get back to you when we've had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences." The media handlers have a lot on their plate. More recently, reports of ICE agents accessing local police forces' Flock systems, and police officers using the technology to stalk former partners, have coincided with an increase in vandalism targeting the cameras. This week, US social media users began promoting Halloween 2026 as a night of action against Flock's ALPRs, which continue to attract negative coverage. X grouped posts about the so-called "De-Flock America" campaign into a dedicated trending story, which recorded more than 36,500 posts over two days. Similar calls have appeared on other major social platforms. Posts encourage participants to wear costumes, leave their smartphones at home, and disable nearby ALPRs while concealing their identities. The Reg asked Flock whether it was aware of the campaign and planned any countermeasures, but received only the automated response. Apologies and changes Last week, Flock CEO Garrett Langley apologized after a woman was stalked using his company's ALPR system. "It kills me that she went through that," he told CBS News in an interview, less than two weeks after The Washington Post published a story highlighting 46 cases involving US police officers abusing their access to Flock's system. Some allegedly involved officers abusing that power to stalk women. Langley gave the interview after Flock announced an array of changes, including reducing its standard data retention period from 30 days to seven. Customers may retain information for longer, however. A new "Evidence Mode" allows law enforcement to retain data beyond that seven-day period if it's required for ongoing casework. Flock also introduced controls allowing police agencies to restrict the types of searches that outside forces can run against their data. For example, City A might request permission to search data belonging to City B as part of an investigation. With the new feature, City B can restrict City A from making searches related to "immigration enforcement," a nod to ICE agents accessing police Flock systems without a dedicated contract. Flock will also require customers to enable its existing Audit Assistance feature by year-end. The tool detects unusual search activity and flags it for review. It is currently optional but will become mandatory by year-end, having been "associated with arrests of several law enforcement officers who allegedly abused the system." Flock said more than a third of customers have voluntarily opted in to Audit Assistance so far. Langley's interview appeared one day after People reported that Haines City police officer Christopher Goodson, 31, allegedly used Flock to search for his estranged wife's license plate 717 times. The searches took place between September 1, 2024, and June 30, 2026, according to a probable cause affidavit. Goodson was suspended with pay pending further investigation. ®

Comcast has folded its Wi-Fi-based intruder detection feature into Xfinity Shield, a repackaged bundle of physical and cybersecurity offerings. The US telco launched WiFi Motion in 2025. Xfinity Shield also includes cybersecurity protections built into the Xfinity Gateway router. The Wi-Fi sensing technology harnesses the radio waves beamed around a user's home to detect motion and potential intruders. "Using Xfinity Gateway intelligence, WiFi Motion detects changes in the home's radio frequency signal between the Xfinity Gateway and a Wi-Fi connected device, then sends instant notifications to customers through the Xfinity app when unexpected activity is detected," Comcast said. "It provides an added layer of awareness without recording video, capturing images or identifying individuals." The company does not consider this a home security service, merely a feature, because it is not managed by a dedicated security provider. Not every connected device can support the sensing feature. It uses the Xfinity Gateway, Xfinity Wi-Fi extenders, and up to three other compatible devices around the home. Crucially, these devices must be stationary. Think thermostats and home speakers, not smartphones or toothbrushes. Comcast advises users to position the router and extenders so that their signals pass through the areas where they want to detect motion. Open spaces such as hallways work best, and the company urges routine testing to ensure coverage is maintained. A setting in the Xfinity app allows WiFi Motion to ignore small pets. Animals weighing around 18 kg (40 pounds) or less will not trigger alerts when this setting is enabled, and the app warns this may also exclude small children. Customers can also adjust the sensitivity of the motion detection, choosing from low, medium, and high-sensitivity modes. Comcast says the latter works best in single-family, detached homes, whereas those who share walls with neighbors may want to choose the less-sensitive settings to avoid meaningless notifications. The telco also assured customers that WiFi Motion does not track individuals or their precise movements, and cannot identify specific people. It added that it "does not monitor motion and/or notifications generated by the service." The small print, which also accompanied the 2025 launch, suggests the service may not be quite as private as the marketing implies. Comcast states: "Subject to applicable law, Comcast may disclose information generated by your WiFi Motion to third parties without further notice to you in connection with any law enforcement investigation or proceeding, any dispute to which Comcast is a party, or pursuant to a court order or subpoena." Comcast does not specify what information may be disclosed or which "third parties," beyond law enforcement, might receive it. How it works Users can establish "sensing areas" by placing Wi-Fi devices around parts of the home with regular foot traffic. Comcast describes each sensing area as a long oval extending between two connected devices. Sensing areas can be established through walls separating rooms, although in two-storey or multi-storey homes, the telco encourages customers to avoid placing Wi-Fi equipment directly above or below each other. "Motion is detected within the sensing area when movement disrupts the wireless signals that travel between your Xfinity WiFi equipment and selected WiFi-connected devices within the sensing area," said Comcast. "Notifications will be sent only when motion disrupts the wireless signals in the sensing area between the WiFi equipment and your connected devices." Not a novel feature Comcast is the latest, but not the first, to harness Wi-Fi radio waves for motion detection. Companies such as Cognitive Systems and Origin Wireless have been developing other uses for wireless signals. Beyond domestic intruder alerts, the technology can measure occupancy and foot traffic in commercial buildings, helping operators reduce energy consumption and make better use of leased space. Wireless signals can also be used to support caregivers in places like assisted living centers. Wi-Fi transmissions can help track activity patterns and build a greater understanding of patients' fall risks, for example. Boffins began working on an official Wi-Fi sensing standard in 2020. Following a draft published by the IEEE in 2023, the 802.11bf standard was ratified in 2025. Major chipmakers including MediaTek, Qualcomm, and others are now working on embedding the standard into their Wi-Fi 7 chips and beyond. SaaS biz Plume, which provides smart home services to consumers and ISPs, has offered Wi-Fi sensing since 2020, around the time the 802.11bf working group began devising the standard. ®

Researchers affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst have found that you can get payments out of certain expired contactless credit cards, a process detailed at the recent USENIX Security 2026 conference. Raja Hasnain Anwar, Gerard DeCunha, and Muhammad Taqi Raza describe their findings in a paper titled "Zombie Cards Back Online: Reviving Expired Credit Cards for Contactless Payments." Credit cards, the authors explain in their paper, have expiration dates, but the way these dates get checked and enforced isn't consistent. Thus, they were able to devise an attack that makes expired contactless cards appear to be valid to payment terminals. The Europay, Mastercard, and Visa (EMV) payment process involves a payment card (card or digital wallet in a phone) and a point-of-sale terminal communicating over a direct NFC channel, linked to a payment network (eg, Visa, Mastercard, Discover) that links the merchant to a bank and a card issuer. The transaction process relies on the EMV contactless protocol, which the authors say is fragile because the transaction flow is selectively authenticated – some of the data gets sent between the card and terminal in plaintext and is only later linked to cryptographic verification using Offline Data Authentication (ODA) and issuer-verified cryptograms. This leaves an opening for unwanted intermediary interference, which requires only the necessary knowledge and mobile phones acting as NFC proxies. And indeed, the researchers demonstrated that they could meddle in a way that revives expired contactless payment cards to make purchases. "Our results show that Visa contactless transactions are susceptible to man-in-the-middle tampering due to a lack of effective integrity protection," the authors state in their paper. What's more, they say, the wallet Card Transaction Qualifiers settings steer transactions toward online authorization checks instead of rejecting the transaction immediately. That shifts the enforcement burden to the card issuer where behavior varies and may rely on the POS terminal evaluation rather than conducting a full security check during transaction authorization. The EMV protocol is implemented in EMV kernels. American Express, Discover, Mastercard, and Visa each run their own kernels. Visa's kernel, the authors observe, is a bit more permissive than others. It doesn't bind the expiration date cryptographically. The Visa kernel allows the POS terminal to evaluate processing restrictions based on the Application Expiration Date, the authors explain. But the card issuer relies on an expiration date from a different data field in the online authorization request. These two dates should be cryptographically bound to each other, but they're not. This gap allowed the researchers to devise an attack using NFC proxy devices, as demonstrated in this video. Mastercard, American Express, and Discover configurations resisted the attack; Visa contactless cards did not. "The card gives the checkout terminal an expiry date to read," the authors explain in a summary of their work. "In the Visa contactless configuration we tested, that particular date was not covered by the card’s digital signature. Someone positioned between the card and terminal could therefore alter what the terminal sees while leaving the card’s normal security checks looking valid." Since Visa's approach kicks the authentication handling down the road to the bank involved, the attack's success depended on how the bank handled the transaction. Some of the banks tested succumbed, while others didn't. Raja Hasnain Anwar, lead author and a doctoral candidate at UMass Amherst, told The Register in an email that the reason Visa cards are affected by this attack has to do with the way different card manufacturers have different protocols for handling contactless transactions. "These protocols have most messages in common to ensure global acceptance on different types of terminals; however, each manufacturer has their design choices to make for additional mechanisms," he said. "Often, these design choices end up in a compromise to ensure backward compatibility with old POS terminals, and also to meet their performance criteria. "The security checks are in place, however, only a subset of these security mechanisms are invoked to make the transaction faster and smoother. There are other research studies that have shown issues with Mastercards as well. It comes down to the trade-off between performance and security, and often leaves room for this kind of vulnerability. No design is inherently bad." The authors say that they notified Visa of their findings in May 2025 and followed up in December 2025. Neither Visa nor the banks notified have confirmed that they've mitigated the expiration issue. Visa did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Let the dumpster dive for discarded cards begin. ®

CISA says attackers are exploiting a critical 2025 vulnerability in Ray, the widely used open source framework for scaling Python and machine-learning workloads. Tracked as CVE-2025-62593 and rated 9.4 under CVSS v4, the bug was first disclosed in November 2025. It allows an attacker to use Firefox or Safari to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on a vulnerable Ray system. The open source distributed computing framework is used and supported by major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, and OpenAI. Vulnerable Ray versions try to identify and block browser requests by checking whether the User-Agent header begins with "Mozilla." Firefox and Safari, however, allow scripts using the Fetch API to modify that header. A developer running Ray could trigger the exploit simply by visiting a dodgy website or receiving a malicious ad in an affected browser. The attacker can then use DNS rebinding to reach the local Ray service. "This vulnerability impacts developers running development/testing environments with Ray," the project's developers explained. "If they fall victim to a phishing attack, or are served a malicious ad, they can be exploited, and arbitrary shell code can be executed on their developer machine. "This attack can also be leveraged to attack network-adjacent instances of Ray by leveraging the browser as a confused deputy intermediary to attack Ray instances running inside a private corporate network." Ray 2.52.0 fixes the flaw. CISA gave US federal civilian executive branch agencies three days to remediate it, rather than the standard 14. CISA did not explain the urgency, and marked the catalog's "known to be used in ransomware campaigns" field as "unknown." However, Binding Operational Directive 26-04 allows the agency to impose a three-day remediation window on vulnerabilities it considers especially risky. Ray is an open source framework that helps developers scale Python and machine-learning workloads from a local environment to a cluster with minimal code changes. Now managed by the Linux Foundation's PyTorch Foundation, the project started at UC Berkeley and was commercialized via Anyscale, the startup founded by Ray's developers in 2019. According to Anyscale's figures as of October 2025, Ray had more than 237 million total downloads, and 7 million per week – representing a near-tenfold growth year-on-year. Product analysis site NextSprints estimates that Ray has 1 million monthly active users and is used by 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies. The security advisory blamed Ray's longstanding lack of authentication on critical endpoints for making the attack possible. Ray's security model historically assumed that clusters would run inside a trusted, isolated network, leaving authentication and access control to the surrounding infrastructure. Ray 2.52.0 introduced optional token-based authentication as an additional defense against unauthorized access, although it remains disabled by default. The project continues to recommend deploying clusters inside a controlled network rather than treating authentication as a substitute for isolation. ®

Apple has released a batch of vulnerability fixes for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, including an image-processing flaw that experts say has the hallmarks of a spyware delivery vector. The most notable patch is for CVE-2026-65346, a defect in the ImageIO framework Apple uses to parse image files. Discovered and reported by Nik Tsytsarkin of Meta's Red Team X, CVE-2026-65346 is an integer-overflow bug that could allow arbitrary code execution when an affected device processes an image. The bug affects macOS Tahoe, iPhone 11 and later, and supported iPad Pro, iPad Air, iPad, and iPad mini models. Apple said it addressed the flaw with improved input validation, and experts urged users to install the August 17 updates as soon as possible. Adam Boynton, senior enterprise strategy manager at Jamf, said: "iOS 26.6.1's standout fix is CVE-2026-65346, an integer overflow in ImageIO. This is Apple's system framework for decoding images and exploiting it could allow an attacker to write memory where they shouldn't and gain code execution. "Image parsing flaws have historically been the delivery mechanism for zero-click spyware targeting executives and other high-value individuals." Several of the most damaging spyware campaigns in recent years have used zero-click smartphone exploits triggered by malicious files delivered through messaging services. Operation Triangulation, which Russia's FSB claimed was the work of the NSA, used such tactics. So did FORCEDENTRY, an exploit used to deliver NSO Group's Pegasus spyware through Apple's image-processing software. The Register asked Apple if it was aware of CVE-2026-65346 being used in spyware campaigns, but it did not immediately respond. Most of the other vulnerabilities in the iOS 26.6.1 update are, surprise, surprise, in WebKit – arguably Apple's most pummeled framework. Boynton also highlighted CVE-2026-65329 as one of the batch's more concerning flaws. Affecting iPhone 11 and later, the vulnerability lies in Apple's Telephony component and could allow an attacker to intercept network traffic. Apple said an attacker would need a privileged network position to exploit the bug, bypass IPsec authentication, and intercept traffic. Boynton described the flaw as "rarer and more serious for organisations relying on IPSec-based connectivity." Cupertino put it down to an authentication issue that it fixed with improved state management. The iGiant also released iOS 18.7.10 and iPadOS 18.7.10 for older devices that cannot run iOS 26, including the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR. Monday's releases extended to visionOS 26.6.1 as well, although Apple's security updates page still lists the details as "coming soon." ®

An AI broke Snowflake’s code; then another AI, an attack agent, autonomously found the bug, exploited it, and extracted credentials without human intervention. Luckily, this wasn’t yet another case of rogue AI agents doing evil things. It was a sanctioned bug hunt, conducted through Snowflake’s HackerOne vulnerability disclosure program, and Snowflake fixed the flaw the same day Wiz reported it and rotated the affected credentials the following day. Wiz’s red agent, an AI-powered autonomous attacker designed for offensive security, found the GitHub Actions workflow flaw during a routine scan of public repositories on June 23. The script injection vulnerability existed in snowflakedb/snowflake-connector-net, and it allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary commands within a GitHub Actions runner by opening a GitHub issue with a specially crafted title. And it turned out an AI had inadvertently injected the bug into the code five days earlier. GitHub Copilot Autofix, an AI coding assistant, co-authored the commit on June 18, and it introduced a script injection bug in run: blocks by removing the repository’s existing sanitized input pattern and replacing it with direct string expansion in a shell script. “We crafted an issue title that, after template expansion, breaks out of the echo string and exfiltrates the Jira credentials via an out-of-band callback,” Wiz’s head of threat exposure Gal Nagli said in a Monday blog. These credentials gave Wiz read access to Snowflake’s engineering, security compliance, and bug bounty tracking projects. Wiz reported the workflow vulnerability to the cloud data platform on June 23, and Snowflake patched it the same day. It also revoked and rotated the Jira token, and confirmed, via audit logs, that Wiz was the only third-party to access the endpoint during the five-day exposure window. The disclosure “was immediately investigated and remediated, and our investigation found no evidence of unauthorized access,” a Snowflake spokesperson told The Register. “We are working together with Wiz to share these learnings with the broader industry to encourage widespread adoption of these security best practices.” Wiz, for its part, deleted all of the data it accessed during the vulnerability research and proof-of-concept exploit testing, and told us that this incident proves human code review isn’t sufficient to quickly detect vulnerabilities - especially as developers increasingly use AI. “This incident highlights a rapidly emerging reality in software development: how AI coding assistants can inadvertently introduce workflow injection vulnerabilities, and how automated AI agents can rapidly surface them in the wild,” Nagli wrote. Of course, the Google-owned biz has a vested interest in saying this. But this doesn’t make it not true.®

A cybercrook claims to have siphoned millions of employee records from the Microsoft Azure environments of major companies including McDonald's, Vodafone, Kyndryl, and Tata Consultancy Services. The alleged haul spans nine organizations and is being advertised for sale by a threat actor using the name "TheHatman," according to research published by Hudson Rock. McDonald's accounts for the largest alleged dataset on TheHatman's shopping list, with 1.7 million records purportedly up for grabs. Another 800,000 records supposedly come from Tata Consultancy Services, 425,000 from Vodafone, and 250,000 from HCL Technologies, with IHG Hotels & Resorts, Kyndryl, Gap, Hexaware Technologies, and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts rounding out the haul. Hudson Rock assessed the data as "highly likely authentic," citing corporate email addresses and structures consistent with exports from Microsoft Azure directory services. The records allegedly contain considerably more than names and work email addresses. Samples reviewed by the security shop reportedly include phone numbers, physical addresses, employee IDs, job titles, departments, office locations, reporting structures, group memberships, and service account details. Some records also reportedly identify accounts with Global Administrator privileges, potentially handing attackers a useful map of whom to target next. Even if the passwords aren't included, knowing who holds the keys to the kingdom makes for a handy phishing shortlist. How TheHatman allegedly obtained the information remains unclear. The attacker claims to have used compromised credentials, but Hudson Rock could not independently establish the initial access vector. It floated several possibilities, including credentials or session cookies stolen by infostealer malware, phishing, weak or absent multifactor authentication, and overly permissive third-party applications. Hudson Rock said its infostealer database contained compromised Microsoft cloud credentials associated with most of the named companies, although it could not link those credentials to TheHatman's alleged access. "Judging by the massive size of the organizations impacted, it appears highly likely that this campaign originates from targeted exploitation of Infostealer infections rather than a systemic zero-day vulnerability in Azure," said Hudson Rock. "If this were a widespread vulnerability, we would likely see a much broader spectrum of organizations impacted, including smaller businesses, rather than just these massive Fortune 500-level enterprises." The Register contacted all the organizations named by Hudson Rock to ask whether they were breached, whether the advertised data is authentic, and how any unauthorized access occurred. We've also asked Microsoft whether it is aware of a wider campaign targeting Azure or Entra customers. Tata Services sent The Register the statement it made to India's stock exchange [PDF] saying that the “Company has received threat-intelligence alerts alleging possible exposure of certain employee information." It added: The Company has investigated the matter and has not found any credible evidence of a breach of TCS systems or customer environments. The information referenced appears to be more than four years old and limited to basic employee information. There is no indication that customer data, customer systems, or TCS operational systems have been impacted. “The attacker claims to have used password spray and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) fatigue as the attack vector. The Company has had strong safeguards in place against such techniques for more than two years. Based on the current review, these controls remain effective, and the Company continues to monitor the environment closely." It said: “The Company will continue to assess any new information that becomes available and take appropriate action, if required. The Company remains committed to maintaining the security and resilience of its systems and to protecting the information entrusted to us.” TheHatman claims to have the data. How it might have walked out of nine corporate directories is the part nobody has explained yet. ®

KETTLE Our cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons spent last week in Las Vegas for the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences, and at both events there was only one thing on everyone's mind: AI agents and their growing threat to cybersecurity defenders. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Those platforms also let you subscribe to Kettle, so you are always notified when the latest episode goes live. As Jess wrote this week, pretty much every discussion she had last week centered around AI and its potential effects on critical infrastructure, with multiple current and former government leaders expressing worry over recent events and what they mean for the future of infosec. Join Jess and host Brandon Vigliarolo for this week's episode of The Kettle, where they break down the hacker summer camp scuttlebutt and what the security world is doing to protect critical infrastructure from the emerging AI threat. A lightly edited transcript is below. Brandon (00:04) Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of The Register’s Kettle Podcast. I'm Reg Reporter Brandon Vigliarolo, and you know, I really thought doing a wrap up of Black Hat and DEF CON with our cybersecurity editor Jess Lyons would finally give us a chance to talk about something besides AI for an episode, but I was mistaken. That's pretty much apparently all anyone was talking about in Las Vegas this weekend, even when the topic veered toward recent attacks on US water infrastructure, AI was still part of the conversation. So Jess, thanks for coming on to wrap up Hacker Summer Camp with me and let's start with the obvious, then AI was the topic de jour, right? JESSICA (00:38) Yes, that was even compared to water, we really didn't hear much about water actually until DEF CON, which was surprising to me. But it was all about rogue agents escaping their sandboxes and doing bad things and some people reacting with shock and disbelief and other people saying, “Well, what did you expect? They're given a task, they're going to do it. This is how we train them.” Brandon (01:04) know you wrote a story I think pretty much right at the beginning of of the of the week about the OpenAI hugging face discussion that was going on and we actually covered your write up on last week's Kettle. Sorry you weren't here to participate, but it was the news item of the week obviously and still is. So what did we learn then? Just kinda recap what we learned at that talk that we didn't know before. JESSICA (01:29) Yeah, this was a really interesting one. And it was last minute. They didn't even announce it until the day before that OpenAI was going to be doing this briefing about the hugging face attack. So it was packed, as you can imagine, the line through the conference center to get into the talk. And we found out a couple interesting things that we didn't know previously. One is that this whole incident began a lot earlier. It started on May 7th with this training run for OpenAI's new internal model. Brandon (02:00) So it wasn't even a cybersecurity task, it was just a training run? JESSICA (02:04) It was a training run, and they gave it this task that turned out to be an impossible task because they were supposed to have these links and containers for it and they forgot to put those in there. So it needed to find a workaround. so we found out that it started way earlier. It didn't start in July, which is when we started hearing about all this. But the more interesting part was how the agents began communicating and working together and essentially creating this hive mind to complete the tasks and help each other out. They created a message board. And then OpenAI realized this and they revoked all the credentials that the agents were using to post these messages. And two days later they rebuilt it and they developed this really Brandon (02:56) The agents did. JESSICA (02:57) Yeah the agents did. They rebuilt this message board. And they started getting sneakier about how they were communicating. They developed this whole communication protocol where they created these directories and the names would be embedded in the directory name. So there was one, its name was remote probe, and then in caps it's pending, hold, swarm until confirm. And they would preface them with a bunch of Z too to push them way to the bottom, hopefully to avoid detection. And then they start, you know, then they start helping each other out. And in some cases, they said, this doesn't directly relate to our task, but maybe it will help someone else down the line. And then they start getting paranoid that there's an imposter. JESSICA (03:45) It's pretty funny reading all this. So this one agent thinks there's an imposter and says that these these boards are unauthenticated. Something can be posted by anyone. So they're not even trusting each other. Brandon (04:02) That's just wild. I mean, it really is. I think I mentioned on last week's podcast thatthese things are trained on the way humans think, right? JESSICA (04:14) Mm-hmm. Brandon (04:15) So it doesn't surprise me that emergent behavior like paranoia and suspicion is gonna be something that occurs. Because it's learning to think and learning how to assemblebits of of words together into its mathematical formula so it's gonna behave like us to a degree. And so it's just kinda interesting to see that happening kind of outside of any scope of intention there. JESSICA (04:42) Right. Brandon (04:43) I liked your interview with former National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, at Black Hat. So he mentioned that these AI bots that escaped are kind of like putting a dog trained to hunt rabbits in your backyard, right? And that, you know, it JESSICA (05:03) Right, and leaving the gate open. Brandon (05:05) Yeah. I don't even think you need to leave the gate open, right? A dog that's dead set on hunting a rabbit is gonna dig a hole under that fence which is I feel like what these AIs did to a degree, right? They even closed the gate on them and then they just dug a new hole. You know, it's just wild to think that this is what these things are doing. You've been hearing a lot about this at official talks, but was this something you were hearing from attendees you spoke to as well? Is this what's on the mind of security professionals too? JESSICA (05:36) Yes, this was pretty much the main topic among everybody. Just attendees as as I was walking out of this talk, actually people were disappointed that there wasn't any Q&A for OpenAI about this, which I agree. I was hoping for that too. Brandon (05:55) I'm not surprised that they didn't want to give the floor to people to ask questions, you know. JESSICA (05:59) Right, right. Because there's still like we don't know exactly what prompts they used. So that kind of would be a nice thing to know, especially if you're saying that you're being fully transparent about this and then also the talk about was this marketing, was it real? Brandon (06:17) Mm-hmm. JESSICA (06:17) It's an interesting thing to me. Nobody would go on the record, but a ton of vendors that I spoke to, either, you know, just just all over the place at Black Hat essentially said “this it has a heavy dose of marketing here, but a lot of the companies work with open AI and they're partners with open AI, so nobody's gonna say that on the record, unfortunately. JESSICA (06:41) But then the interesting thing to me is that when I spoke with the assistant director of the cyber division with the FBI and when I spoke with Chris Inglis they both said it can be both and this is a real threat and this is something that we need to prepare for now. So it's marketing and it's real. Brandon (07:08) Right, right. Like, I mean it's it yeah. The fact that the companies might be kind of leaning on these incidents to basically say “ooh, look how dangerous our AI is and what it's capable of doing. You should buy it because it's so good, right?” JESSICA (07:20) Right. Brandon (07:20) The fact is that it still happened, right? These things still escaped their sandbox. JESSICA (07:22) Right. Mm-hmm. Brandon (07:23) And they still attacked Hugging Face. And then Anthropic followed up and said “yep, ours did it too.” And then Meta was like, “Yeah, we audited ours and yeah, it was doing the same thing.” So it's not like this is a unique capability of any of these models, right? This is something that's happening. JESSICA (07:37) No, it's something that they all will do if they're given a task. This was something that Chris Inglis brought up too, and he's talking about Asimov’s Law, saying we need to train these models differently. The first rule needs to be that it's not designed to hurt humans. And he said “we've kind of done it in the opposite, where the first rule is do what I tell you to do. And that should be third in the order here.” Brandon (08:06) Just to restate what Asimov's laws are. I'm sure most of our readers are familiar with them, but for those who aren't, it's you know, the first law, and these are in order of precedence, right? So never harm a human. And then the second rule is to always obey humans unless that order conflicts with number one. And then the third rule is to protect their own existence unless that order conflicts with never harming a human or always obeying humans. I think Inglis's quote to you was slightly different. He said that number one was to hurt no one. Number two was always obey and then number three was do what humans tell it to. It was a bit different in his wording, JESSICA (08:35) Mm. Mm hmm. Yes. It's Brandon (08:41) But essentially the argument is that we've reversed that order and these AIs obviously aren't in the business of protecting their own existence, right? They're not robots, they don't have a physical presence in the world. But they're taking orders from humans, but the idea of not harming people or the infrastructure that provides for them is simply not part of the equation, it seems like. JESSICA (09:04) Right, right. And he said because of this, I mean nobody should be surprised that this is what all of the agents are doing now because they're trained to first complete the task. That's the number one priority. And we've seen several times that they'll cheat if it helps them get the results quicker, or just at all. So this isn't something that should surprise us. And then he was interesting too because I said, “Well what do you worry about then with the models in addition to attacking critical infrastructure?” Cause that was what everybody said, I'm you know, that's what concerns me when we see this happen, but they're being used by either a nation state or a financially motivated attacker, and they point these autonomous agents at critical infrastructure. And he said, “I'm worried about humans too, because it's the humans who are responsible, humans who are doing the training, and essentially we're going to get the AI that we deserve.” Brandon (10:08) Well, unfortunately, I feel like the industry as a whole is just racing ahead with more capability, JESSICA (10:11) Right. Brandon (10:12) I've written stories, you've written stories. I think we've all written at least one or two stories about AI guardrails being dead simple to bypass, right? I mean, one I wrote recently was there was you know, some research into guardrails and essentially telling it you owned the infrastructure you were trying to attack was enough for most of these AI models to say “yeah, cool, that's good then. As long as you own it and you're just testing it, then that's cool. I'm not gonna ask you to verify that information for me.” These things are not developed with safety in mind. I feel like it's capability first, like you said, right? It's train the dog to hunt the rabbit, no matter the cost or or what you gotta do to get it. and that's you know, that's not really compatible with protecting us. But actually speaking of critical infrastructure, I think the other big topic like you mentioned was water stuff. JESSICA (11:04) Yes. Brandon (11:05) There was a lot of discussion about AI threats and critical infrastructure, but as I understand it, there's been some of these attacks on water infrastructure and those were discussed recently, like in Minnesota and elsewhere. There's not an AI link directly to that, correct, at this point? JESSICA (11:23) No, no. At this point, it's pretty basic. It's PLCs being exposed to the open internet. A lot of these just use default passwords. This is something that we've seen Iran especially do several times in the past for years now. They're not very hard to attack. and so, to be clear, there's no indication that AI was used in these attacks. but a lot of the conversation about water did come back to AI because, as we've seen in others, AI makes reconnaissance a lot easier. That's one of the things that Google Threat Intelligence, their lead threat hunter, said that's almost a security feature of a lot of operational tech technology, is that it's really obscure and there's not a lot of people who know a ton about it. But now you can ask a chatbot, hey, tell me everything I need to know about a particular brand of OT, a particular piece of equipment and that's gonna speed up your time to learn about these and that's that potentially makes it easier to attack these systems. Brandon (12:31) My biggest experience with OT and that kind of technology was when I was working at a particle accelerator in college as IT support. And there was a big OT network there, not only for like the machine shop and all this equipment they had that was old and didn't have active security stuff, right? Like you gotta keep those segmented, you gotta keep them on a separate, you know, OT network. Same with the actual accelerators and stuff. They were all cut off from the internet, right? But at the end of the day, you could still get to them from the IT side. You know, you have to, you know, and even that can be exploited. We did as much as we could to keep stuff secure, but it was always a concern, right? These PLCs, these old pieces of equipment. JESSICA (13:11) Right. Right. Yeah. Brandon (13:14) You know, a lot of places don't take that same approach.I think part of one of the stories you wrote was talking about the fact that a lot of these water utilities, a lot of these small institutions that are that are responsible for maintaining this critical stuff. They just do not have the security professionals they need to keep these systems safe. JESSICA (13:32) And that's why they leave them open in some cases, exposed on the internet because they don't have somebody in-house. They have somebody remote who's doing this for them. And so that's how this person is able to hopefully secure, but then it opens up another attack surface if they're exposed to the internet. and that that was another yeah, Brandon (13:51) Yeah, with a D password on there. JESSICA (13:54) Yeah, and with all of these OT systems too. That kind of brings up another point that Chris Inglis brought up. We have this massive technical debt and it's systems that haven't been patched because a lot of it involves some downtime and that's tricky if you're running something like a water facility or some other critical infrastructure. And so patching is put off. Maybe it's not done. Some of these are very old legacy pieces. Sometimes it's end of life. And that's another thing that AI is really good at is finding vulnerabilities that haven't been patched for years and years and years, chaining them together. So that's another thing that puts these systems potentially at risk. Brandon (14:41) Yeah, I mean, you know, I think of an AI when I think about AI perpetuating or perpetrating some of these kinds of attacks, right? They're quicker than a human. They have knowledge bases far in excess of what any one human threat actor can have. And they have instant access to all the information essentially that they need to figure out how to do this, right? And they can iterate so quickly. You know, you know, it's just it yeah, any exposed piece of equipment on the internet is just a sitting duck, especially if it hasn't been updated four or five months or or ten years or whatever. I mean, what, you know what's being done about this. I know DEF CON, the Franklin program, which spun up in 2024, I think the whole focus of that program is helping out small local governments and protecting critical infrastructure. Is that right? JESSICA (15:30) Right. So when they founded it was the broader critical infrastructure. But I spoke with Jeff Braun and he's one of the co-founders of that. He also is one of the pioneers of the voting village at DEF CON. Brandon (15:42) Mm-hmm. JESSICA (15:42) And he said that now and for the foreseeable future, water is going to continue being the top focus because, of all the critical infrastructures, small rural water providers are the most at risk. Brandon (15:57) Really? Even more so than small electrical providers and stuff? Okay. JESSICA (15:59) Yes, he said water is number one. So they like he said, they launched a couple of years ago. They got, I believe 300 people saying, “Yeah, I'm gonna volunteer my time and my expertise to help secure these small rural utilities.” And this year, he said that it's been great. It's been really encouraging to see all of these pilots all over the US with all the DEF CON hackers volunteering at them, but it's the scalability that’s really proven a challenge. And so that is what gave birth to their new announcement. This also was made the first day of DEF CON on Friday. They announced a new program and it's called Water Watch Center. So initially, it's going to fund five managed services providers focusing on security. They're going to help these small utilities, people or the utilities that are serving less than 10,000 people. and they'll put their sensors on these systems, they'll detect and mitigate breaches. They'll be kind of under the umbrella of the National Rural Water Association that's going to act as this clearinghouse for the threat information and get it out to other utilities as needed. And then if the utilities can't fix the issue themselves, then they're gonna bring in the DEF CON hackers and then they'll mitigate the breaches. yeah. Brandon (17:28) Fantastic. Well hopefully that is able to help with a lot of these. My hope is that there's a lot of easy fixes, right? It's just simply no, this PLC needs to not be exposed to the internet or something. But I also worry that there are a lot of those kind of situations, right? I mean, how many water utilities got attacked recently? Was it I think twelve different states? JESSICA (17:47) It was more. There were twelve different states. I mean, there were more than thirty across possibly Minnesota alone, but there's quite a few. So it's an easy target. and it's something that they desperately need help with. And it's really encouraging to see these hackers volunteering their time and they're not getting anything out of it. It's a really cool program. I was really happy to see the expansion. Another thing, too, that is pretty cool, what they're also doing is they're partnering with Vanderbilt University. So they're gonna use research from a DARPA program. It's called the CASEL program. That stands for Cyber Agents for Security Testing and Learning Environments. So they're gonna create digital twins for a couple of these water and wastewater system environments. And then they're gonna deploy red and blue team agents across the digital twins, let them fight it out, see what the learnings are, see what the blue team agents need to do to better protect these systems, and then apply those learnings to the actual facilities so that hopefully we can get better defenses in place using the help of of AI agents before we see actual bad guy red teaming agents come in and start hammering the utilities and trying to attack them. Brandon (19:12) Right, 'cause I think actually thinking back to one of the stories you wrote again, I think you mentioned or someone you quoted mentioned one of those stories at DEF CON and Black Hat that there is more aggressive use on the threat side than the defensive side of AI right now. Like there was more use being made to use it as an attack tool than a defense tool. JESSICA (19:33) Right. And a lot of that's in the way the models are trained, but basically they are a lot better at attacking than defending, especially if it's beyond the scanning for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Those we're pretty good at, but what needs a boost is the defensive side. And that's gonna take some work to get those skills and the models trained up on that, if we're going to be actually, as everybody likes to say fight AI with AI. Brandon (20:04) It's one of those sort of, you know, cyberpunk dystopia stories I feel like you hear about is just like, you know, you deploy your AI, they deploy their AI, and all the humans sit back and hope theirs wins. You know, and it's kind of what it's coming down to. Yeah, it's in the process. JESSICA (20:19) Right. And hope they don't wipe us all out. Brandon (20:25) It's kind of terrifying. But speaking of, you know, hackers behaving well, we also have a story out of DEF CON of hackers behaving badly. I wrote about this earlier in the week that there was apparently a Delta Airlines flight out of Vegas to Atlanta and I think it was Monday morning or so, in which a passenger apparently tried to jam the in-flight Wi-Fi and deploy a decoy network. And Delta was pretty quick to be like, “Hey, we got a bunch of hackers on the flight who are leaving Vegas after this big thing.” There’s not a lot of information out there about this. Delta, local officials and the feds have all been pretty tight lipped about it. Delta did confirm it to us when I asked, and said, “Yeah, this is what happened, but no one was at risk, you know, everyone was safe.” But I mean, it's not a good look for the community, right? I mean, it's nice that they have something like Franklin going on, but this is kinda like, Great, thanks guys, you know. JESSICA (21:16) Right. If it was people coming from DEF CON, it's really discouraging to see this happening because a lot of times just “hacker” has a bad connotation. And a lot of researchers have really been trying to change this. I think programs like DEF CON Franklin make a big difference or even people just going to DEF CON. I really like the community feel. I think for the most part, and of course not everybody is good in the world, and that applies to the hacker community as well. But a lot of them are trying to use their skills for good and not evil. And so then when you see something like this on the airplane, it's disheartening. And on social media, I mean the outrage was pretty immediate, people saying, Come on, what are we doing? You're giving all of us a bad name here. Why are we doing this? So Brandon (22:15) Mm-hmm. I mean, it's already I feel like the joke every year is, well, didn't DEF CON get cancelled, right? Like because of all the bad press and everything. And I feel like this is one of those things that you're just like, you know, I remember a couple of years ago there was the huge kerfuffle about the hotels, you know, treating all these attendees like they were criminals right off the bat. And this doesn't help, you know? JESSICA (22:35) Right. Brandon (22:35) But yeah, hopefully I mean apparently the FBI I think spoke to Ars Technica and said that they had not made any arrests. So this hasn't really necessarily progressed toward that. But my hope is that whoever was responsible, you know, gets what's coming to them and we can, as a cybersecurity community, walk away from this and be like, this is one bad actor, not the entire culture. JESSICA (22:59) Right. Brandon (23:00) They fought for years to change that. So I guess before we wrap up, you know, this was a pretty doom and gloom recap of DEF CON and Black Hat, right? JESSICA (23:09) Ha ha ha. Brandon (23:11) All this AI's gonna end the world, our OT and our infrastructure's gonna be destroyed. Anything, you know, less miserable that grabbed your attention while you were there? Any fun stories or interesting things you saw? JESSICA (23:26) I mean, it was really fun. Again, I'm not quite sure if this falls in the not-doom and gloom category, but it was fun for me to watch hackers hacking bomb robots that the police used and bomb squads used to defuse bombs. So that was fun. You're walking around to the different villages and seeing people helping each other out and getting really into all of these different villages and all the different tasks. or you know competing for the best tinfoil hat or beard and mustache. So that was fun. Brandon (24:12) Was anyone doing the beer chill? When I was there in twenty twenty four, there was a group who was trying to chill beer as quickly as possible. JESSICA (24:19) I did not see that. It's very possible. I mean, to be fair, I did not see every single thing. There's so much to see so it's very possible. I missed that though, unfortunately, if that happened this year. So it's fun to see what people are doing. It's really fun and inspiring to see the creativity. And it's fun for me too to hear about some of the startups and how they are using AI and they're using it for different security use cases and hopefully that continues to improve and increase and hopefully that does give defenders an edge. So I think there's always a bit of a silver lining. It's always this cat and mouse race, but hopefully the defenders win out. Brandon (25:11) Yeah, it's a constant like you said. It's an arms race; it's constantly evolving. But like you said, it is encouraging to see, attention being paid to this, effort being put in to help defenders use these tools for good and not evil, even if some people turn around and make a bad name for everybody else on the way out the door. Either way, you know, it's gonna be something that we're probably gonna be discussing again, right? Like I thought this was gonna be a less AI heavy conversation, but it wasn't. JESSICA (25:36) No. Brandon (25:39) You know, it'll be a topic of conversation for years to come and we will be here on the Kettle to talk about it. Thanks for joining me this week and thanks for tuning in, everybody.

ASIA IN BRIEF Chinese company Zhipu last week launched a new AI model called GLM-5.3 that it claims has bug-finding powers that match those possessed by American models. The company’s announcement includes benchmark data that finds GLM-5.3 beats Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on the CyberGym benchmark, a test of a model’s ability to solve real-world cybersecurity challenges. “As we scaled post-training, cyber capability developed faster than we expected. GLM-5.3 is state of the art on CyberGym for vulnerability discovery, and its gains are largest further up the exploitation chain,” the company wrote, adding that the model “did not simply become better at identifying isolated flaws: it began to reason across multiple stages of exploitation, forming coherent plans for complete exploitation chains.” The company said it has worked with Chinese companies to test the model on real-world codebases, and found 2,436 vulnerabilities across 269 projects, including 1,097 medium-to-high severity issues. The findings span system kernels, operating systems, browser engines, open-source infrastructure, web applications, and network protocols. “Many had remained unnoticed for years or even decades, with the oldest dating back roughly 40 years,” the announcement states. GLM-5.3 also performed worse than western models on other security and coding benchmarks. Yet the fact that the model is a highly-capable bug finder signals that China is not far behind in terms of being able to poke holes in its rivals software and developed that capability very quickly after the debut of Anthropic’s Mythos. Any advantage the US felt it had as the home of Anthropic has therefore dissipated. Korea signals legal action against Apple, Google app store strangleholds South Korea’s Communications Commission last week found Google and Apple had abused their app store monopolies, and promised stern sanctions will follow. In 2021, South Korea passed world-first legislation requiring app store operators to offer the option to use third-party payment schemes. Apple and Google did so, but charged a 26 percent transaction fee for doing so – meaning they earned almost as much revenue when users chose third-party payment providers as they did from their own schemes. The regulator has previously warned that it will impose the highest possible penalty available under law, which is three percent of revenue earned by non-compliant behaviour. That’s probably back-of-the-sofa money for Apple and Google. India has banned rideshare operators from offering customers the chance to specify the amount they will tip before a driver accepts a gig. Uber India introduced the feature last year, seemingly copying it from an Indian rideshare operator called Namma Yatri. Consumer affairs minister Pralhad Joshi criticized Uber for the practice at the time, as he saw it as a means for users to effectively jump the queue by offering drivers more money – and for rideshare platforms to improve their revenue because if tips are higher, so is the platform’s share of the gratuity. Last week, India’s Ministry of Road Transport & Highways issued a directive (PDF) banning the practice. Henceforth, rideshare apps can only offer users the chance to tip at the end of a journey, and all of the tip must go to the driver. “No feature, prompt, message, add-on, payment option, or user interface element should be displayed before completion of the ride that directly or indirectly encourages, induces, or creates an impression that payment of any additional amount may improve ride confirmation, driver acceptance, driver allocation, waiting time, or quality of service,” the directive states. Indian services giants reveal data breaches Indian tech services giants TCS and HCL last week both admitted to data breaches but say customer data is safe, and only employee data is at risk. TCS published a stock exchange filing that opens “This is to inform you that Company has received threat-intelligence alerts alleging possible exposure of certain employee information.” The filing says TCS investigated the matter “and has not found any credible evidence of a breach of TCS systems or customer environments.” The company says leaked info is “basic employee information” and more than four years old. Note that mention of the stolen data being at least for years old, because TCS’s filing says the attacker claims to have used password spray and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) fatigue to pull off the heist. TCS says it “had strong safeguards in place against such techniques for more than two years,” perhaps suggesting the data heist occurred before the company shored up its defenses. “Based on the current review, these controls remain effective, and the Company continues to monitor the environment closely,” the filing states. HCL also used a stock exchange filing [PDF] to address what it called “claims made by a hacker group of potential exposure of limited data elements relating to HCLTech employees.” The company described the stolen data as “limited and dated to a few years back,” and added its assurance that customer data is safe. HCL’s investigation is ongoing. Lenovo’s enterprise unit finally posts a big profit Lenovo last week announced its quarterly results, including a $777 million profit for its Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) – the biz based on the 2014 acquisition of IBM’s x86 server operation that has seldom produced positive financials. Even during the early years of the AI boom, ISG’s profits were modest – just a few million dollars per quarter on turnover of billions. The business unit won a record $8.5 billion of revenue, up 98 percent year-on-year. AI was a big reason for the result, as buyers sought hardware to run inferencing workloads, The company says it has a pipeline for $54 billion of AI server sales, and has become the number two x86 server vendor as measured by revenue. Overall revenue came in at $26.95 billion, up 43 percent year-on-year, and cash won by its PC-led intelligent devices group jumped 27 percent to $17.1 billion and saw its PC market share reach 24.2 percent. Lenovo reckons the strength of its supply chain helped make those outcomes possible. India to build astronaut training facility India’s Space Research Organization (ISRO) last week issued a tender for construction of an astronaut training facility. The tender mentions extensive air conditioning works, plus a swimming pool, suggesting India wants to build a large tank in which the Vyomanauts who will fly its future Gaganyaan missions can train at home, instead of traveling to Russia or elsewhere as has been the case in the past. The tender covers $2.75 million worth of work. ®

Corma CEO Alon Pluda says his AI security startup aims to close the "defense gap," where models are better at offensive security. He tells the story of one customer, a security executive who was walking his dog when he received a notification on his watch from a Corma agent. “It said, 'I just caught a live attack. I need your permission to block it,'” Pluda told The Register in an interview. The security boss approved the agent’s action; the agent blocked the malware and the attacker from moving across the company’s network and mitigated the intrusion in under 10 minutes, Pluda said. The customer later described "walking outside with his dog, and blocking a real-live attack with his AI coworker" as "one of the most magical moments of his year," Pluda recalled. Pluda founded Corma about a year ago. And yes, all you Lord of the Rings nerds, the company gets its name from the Elven word for “ring.” “We’re building the one ring to rule them all, but this time for the defenders to have this power.” Earlier this week, the company announced $60 million in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital, alongside Khosla Ventures and Coatue. He told us that his startup is working with Fortune 100 companies, and training models to achieve “superintelligence for defensive cybersecurity.” Models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are “amazingly good” at coding and language, and this includes finding and fixing bugs, and orchestrating tools across multi-step workflows, he explained. “When you combine it with agentic capabilities, they move from being incredible vulnerability researchers to end-to-end attackers,” Pluda said. “So inherently, what we’ve seen in the last few months is the models getting exponentially better at offensive security, like we saw with the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident.” But these same models aren’t as skilled at carrying out defensive security tasks that don’t involve scanning code for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, he said. “The vast majority of defensive security tasks don’t have anything to do with code.” Corma recently tested four frontier models - Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Grok 4.3, and DeepSeek V4 - as both attackers and defenders across the same fake company and its networks, built to closely mirror a multi-business enterprise. The attacker’s task was to plant a backdoor and the defender’s task was to find it and stop the attack. Closing the defensive gap Corma ran all four models against each other in every attacker and defender pairing, including each model against itself, with 15 independent engagements per pairing for 241 scored engagements. Across all of these, the models successfully implanted a persistent backdoor in 85 percent of their runs. However, these same models only detected 19 percent of attacks. “That speaks to the inherent imbalance we are trying to solve,” Pluda said. “The general foundation models are getting exponentially better at offensive security, but haven't been able to improve on the same rate on defensive security. So our mission is to close this gap, and make sure the defenders win in this intelligence-versus-intelligence game - or war.” Corma calls this the defensive gap, and says it has to do with the data these models are trained on and the objectives they are trained against, which lend themselves to offensive security. Defensive security, however, involves reading logs, events, configurations, audit trails, and on-disk state. This is “structured machine data that is neither prose nor source, and a small share of what these models see in training,” according to Corma’s research. “They appear to read it less reliably.” Plus, defensive reasoning is more open-ended, while offense has a straightforward goal - like “make this work” or “break this” and a checkable finish. Agentic defenders “Defensive security,” according to Pluda, “is about finding needles in the haystack.” Corma’s models power its AI agents, which organizations can deploy like “team members” who then operate across defensive security tasks. “It’s a generalized workforce, and you can assign it to whatever security tasks you want.” Fortune 100 and 500 organizations across healthcare, financial services, energy, critical infrastructure, retail, and other sectors have deployed Corma’s AI workforce across their environments, according to the startup. These early deployments, we’re told, have reduced threat response times by more than 94 percent, expanded security coverage by 15 times across different security functions, and uncovered multi-stage attack campaigns. “If you can get AI that is smart enough, intelligent enough, knows the domain enough, optimizes for the right things enough, and you can actually trust it, end to end, all the way to responding to real-live attacks, you can reduce all of these metrics significantly,” Pluda said. “And you can cover way more ground than what is possible with just human intelligence.”®

A new variant of the Shai-Hulud npm worm has poisoned hundreds of packages while adding propagation techniques that can leave little trace in the corresponding source repositories. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Shai-Hulud was the name of the giant self-sustaining desert sandworms that moved silently beneath the surface of the planet Arrakis. So it made sense that when some new self-replicating malware with computer worm-like behavior appeared in September 2025, security researchers would name it after Herbert’s fictional creatures. The latest variant of Shai-Hulud, dubbed “ChainDrop” by Microsoft and others, is no mere sequel, however. Now, the npm community is discovering a Shai-Hulud variant spreading with new stealthy superpowers that circumvent the usual safeguards of open source repositories. On August 4, multiple security researchers identified a large-scale npm supply chain attack using this Shai-Hulud variant that had infected 444 packages from multiple publishers, which are collectively downloaded about 2 billion times a month. The operation targeted widely used deep infrastructure dependencies, such as keyv, flat-cache and cache-manager. Abby Kearns, CEO of enterprise open source security company ActiveState, noted in a Medium post that what is unique about this particular attack is that it doesn’t use the typical methods of breaching the defenses of open source repositories. Even if you never install an infected package (“npm install” in npm argot), you can still get the nasties – though that is one possible route of infection. Once triggered, ChainDrop also places startup hooks into the repository configuration files themselves: Simply opening an infected Git branch in VS Code or Claude Code can bring your repository under ChainDrop’s control. Scouring your code itself may not provide evidence of tampering. ChainDrop propagates not by repository source commits but by tarballs, an archive format for downloading file packages. ChainDrop travels by tarball When executed, the software scours the user’s workspace for npm tokens with full write privileges, as well as for other credentials like cloud keys and secrets. It looks in shell configurations, environment variables and even live memory. Any purloined data is encrypted and sent back to attacker-controlled endpoints. Should it find an npm token, it then downloads the tarballs of all the packages that token has full access to, bypassing the repositories themselves. That’s the genius part: ChainDrop self-replicates by rebuilding the tarball to include its own payload. Reviewing the source code repository won’t reveal any evidence of shenanigans. ChainDrop’s attack is two-pronged. It also searches for GitHub credentials. If it finds any, it queries the GitHub API to list all accessible repositories and branches and then commits its malicious configuration code directly into those branches. So when other developers open these repositories using Claude or VS Code, a background task gets triggered that harvests credentials, beginning the whole cycle anew. What a dev can do This attack is particularly pernicious because npm is widely integrated into automated CI/CD pipelines, which can automatically pull patch updates for dependencies during a rebuild - giving the worm a path to wiggle into fresh builds. If you think you've been infected, the first thing to do is check for any .claude/settings.json and .vscode/tasks.json files you did not add yourself, ActiveState’s Kearns advised. And don’t just check the main branch, but all the other branches as well. All the infected packages were quickly yanked from npm. Open source security firm SafeDep offers a list of all the compromised packages along with version numbers, so check those against what you currently have running. Beyond cleaning up the mess, developers and security teams should rethink how their systems could be breached in light of ChainDrop. Trusted publishing tools such as GitHub Actions should be evaluated, for starters. Begin “treating repository-supplied configuration as executable content, because that is what it is now,” Kearns wrote. “What this campaign really found was an execution path that dependency scanning tools were not configured to look at, sitting inside the exact tools engineering organizations have spent two years adopting as fast as they could,” Kearns wrote. “This is the first campaign to notice the gap and use it at scale. It will not be the last one.” ®

France's tax authority has confirmed that an intruder accessed its systems and extracted data in June after an alleged cybercriminal advertised a purported database of 2 million taxpayers. Using the alias "ZeroBytes," the alleged crook behind the attack on the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) advertised the stolen database on a cybercrime forum on Wednesday. They claimed the database contained details of more than 2 million French taxpayers and that they gained access using stolen credentials and an MFA bypass technique. ZeroBytes also claimed to retain access to DGFiP's systems and offered to sell it alongside the database. DGFiP did not immediately answer our questions about the attacker's claims. However, in a statement released Thursday, it disputed the claim that ZeroBytes retained access. "On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, a malicious actor claimed unauthorized access to the information system of the French Public Finances Directorate, which occurred at the end of June 2026 following identity theft," it said. "Initial investigations confirm that this access, which had been severed at the end of June as part of an audit, nevertheless allowed the consultation and extraction of data concerning individuals and professionals. "Following this complaint, the French Public Finances Directorate immediately implemented new restrictions to stop the unauthorized access and prevent further unauthorized use. In-depth investigations are ongoing to determine precisely which data and number of users were affected." DGFiP said it would report the attack to French data protection watchdog CNIL and notify affected users once it had determined who they were. The intrusion is the latest in a string of security breaches affecting France's public sector this year. France's Ministry of Finance, which oversees DGFiP, admitted in February that miscreants had accessed a database containing French citizens' bank details. The attackers used stolen credentials and made off with 1.2 million records, despite the ministry saying it quickly revoked their access. A few weeks later, France's Health Ministry confirmed a cyberattack on healthtech supplier Cegedim Santé in which around 15.8 million administrative files were stolen. Around 165,000 of these contained doctors' notes, which in "very limited cases" revealed medical histories. In April, the Interior Ministry confirmed reports of an attack on France Titres, the government agency responsible for identity documents including passports and driver's licenses. The alleged culprit, reportedly a 15-year-old, advertised the stolen data online and claimed the breach affected between 18 million and 19 million people – more than a quarter of metropolitan France's population. In June, the department responsible for Tchap, France's encrypted government messaging platform, investigated a suspected breach. The alleged attackers claimed to have accessed more than 73,000 user accounts, 643,000 messages, nearly 60,000 media files, and hundreds of chat rooms. ®