Learn why assuming security controls will fail creates stronger cyber resilience through layered defenses, MITRE ATT&CK, and faster threat response.

The outgoing executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics is one of very few federal officials to speak out against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

The screwup shows how tricky it can be to stop web crawlers from making ostensibly private conversations with AI chatbots entirely too public.

AI agents can break through security, but they are also the solution to defending against an increasingly dangerous ecosystem of threats. On Monday, Microsoft announced a new security model that it says helped outperform several rival AI systems on a vulnerability benchmark while cutting costs by about half. Unsurprisingly, at Redmond’s security event on Monday, execs touted the tech giant’s AI security prowess and introduced a new agentic security system called Project Perception, and also unveiled its first security-specialized model, MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, designed for software vulnerability analysis. Microsoft packed MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, based on Microsoft AI (MAI)’s internally developed MAI-Thinking-1 reasoning model, inside its MDASH bug-hunting harness. Its execs claim the duo - with a GPT-5.4 boost - outperforms Anthropic’s bug-hunting machine Mythos and OpenAI’s powerful standalone models, and costs about half the price of other leading commercial models. CyberGym’s benchmarking found that MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, combined with GPT-5.4, both stuffed inside the MDASH harness, achieved a 95.95 percent success rate. For comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber scored 85.6 percent and its GPT-5.6 Sol scored 83.6 percent, while Anthropic’s Mythos 5 successfully handled real-world vulnerabilities 83.8 percent of the time. Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber in CodeMender achieved an 83.2 percent success rate. “This is really quite a remarkable result,” Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, said during the Monday event. Within MDASH, MAI-Cyber-1-Flash handles up to 90 percent of all queries, detecting and patching the vulnerabilities while also confirming the fixes worked, and hands the remaining 10 percent of tasks off to the larger GPT-5.4, Suleyman explained. “GPT 5.4, which is obviously a larger model, about 10X larger, solves those [queries],” he said. “As the models hand off between each other, they are not just able to deliver better performance than all of the other models combined, they do so at 50 percent of the cost.” In addition to the multi-model bug hunting system, Microsoft announced Project Perception, which coordinates three types of agents: red team agents that find and simulate attack paths, blue team agents that investigate and determine risk, and green team agents that remediate the issues. “We need to make sure that the defenders can defend at the scale and the speed of the attackers,” Hayete Gallot, executive vice president of Microsoft Security, said. “You need a new cyber stack. So we built it. This is what we call Perception.” Aside from the new security products, Redmond introduced a new AI security research arm called Microsoft Security FORGE (Frontier Offensive Research and Generative Exploration) Labs, led by Microsoft VP of Security Research Taesoo Kim, and an AI red team alliance. The latter, called the External Red Team Alliance (EXTRA), aims to expand AI safety research through a two-part initiative. First, Redmond’s own AI red team provided "unrestricted gifts " to 18 university labs across six continents to support AI safety research, Microsoft data cowboy and AI red team lead Ram Shankar Siva Kumar said in a blog. “The funding is unrestricted because the objective is not to direct research outcomes toward product requirements or predefined deliverables,” he wrote. “Some universities are examining the cybersecurity implications of AI systems themselves - including how models can be attacked, manipulated, or abused in operational environments. Other labs are exploring the inverse problem: how AI systems can assist defenders and improve cyber operations.” The second EXTRA component will build a distributed network of specialists to participate in red teaming across very specific areas. “That includes researchers, practitioners, and regional experts who understand specific attack classes, languages, cultural contexts, or technical domains that internal teams may not fully cover alone,” he added. ®

Google has created a new taxonomy to describe cybercrime outfits, seemingly abandoning a Microsoft-led effort to create consistent names. The Big G announced its new schema on Saturday in a post that notes its 2022 acquisition of Mandiant and its subsequent incorporation into a new team called the Google Threat Intelligence Group (CTIG). Now that two have become one, Google reckons they need consistent naming conventions to describe cybercrime crews. The result is a two-word schema in which the first word “is a unique and memorable term chosen to represent the specific actor.” If security folk have already applied a particular moniker Google will use it, otherwise it will randomly generate a word “to remove bias.” Google says the second word “categorizes threat clusters by motivation, attribution, or activity type based on which category we consider to be most important for defense and response strategies.” More on that later. Google has decided on the following names: CASTLE to describe crews from the People’s Republic of China ION for threats from Iran NEPTUNE for North Korean attackers RELIC for Russians COMET for cybercrims who aren't backed by a state Google’s post notes that other infosec industry players have developed their own schemas for describing threat actors and says the web giant is therefore “intentionally seeking to keep this system as simple as possible to streamline operations and facilitate mapping to other naming taxonomies.” That’s an odd position, given that in 2025 Microsoft and CrowdStrike tried to spark an industry-wide effort to apply consistent names to threat actors. As we noted at the time, the existence of multiple naming schemas means that researchers often refer to the same group by ten different names. Researchers use the names Seashell Blizzard, IRIDIUM, VOODOO BEAR, BE2, UAC-0113, Blue Echidna, PHANTOM, BlackEnergy Lite, and APT44 to refer to the same entity – Russia's Military Intelligence Unit 74455. With most orgs using multiple security tools and therefore receiving threat intelligence security info from many vendors, users must try to understand which crews they’re trying to defend against. At the time, sources told us Google and Mandiant were keen to adopt the Microsoft-led scheme. Google’s new announcement suggest the relationship either wasn’t consummated or didn’t last. Back to the issue of possible bias, as in 2024 China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) complained that western companies choose names like “Typhoon,” “Panda,” or “Dragon” to describe Chinese cybercrime groups. CVERC suggested names that reflect English language idioms, such as “Hurricane” or “Koala” are more appropriate. For what it’s worth, “Koala” is a word from the language spoken by the Darug people, the indigenous tribe who lived around Sydney, Australia, prior to British colonization. Koalas are utterly supine creatures that sleep 18 to 22 hours a day, and a mention of the marsupials may therefore not spur defenders to action, even if the creatures’ habits do perhaps describe the behavior of some sleeper malware. ®

Plus: Russian hackers are trying to steal US nuclear scientists’ emails, the State Department bans known scammers from entering the United States, and more.

Click To Pray, a prayer app endorsed by the Pope with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, has leaked people’s names and email addresses for months - or longer - according to an ethical hacker who said she found and reported the security vulnerability six months ago to no avail. This app needs to take a vow of silence when it comes to your personal information. The app, available in seven languages and on iOS, Android, and clicktopray.org, is the official app of the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network. It connects users across the globe to pray for the Holy Father’s intentions, and as of July 2026, it has 719,517 registered accounts. It’s also very leaky, according to security sleuth BobDaHacker, who says she spotted and disclosed the vulnerability to the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network on January 3. “The vulnerability is still live,” the hacker said in a Friday blog. “Nobody has ever responded. I guess my email wasn't in their prayers." The Reg readers likely remember BobDaHacker for her previous research exposing a free-food flaw in McDonald's ordering system and open controls on Chinese robot manufacturer Pudu Robotics. This latest security hole stems from an Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) bug in the prayer app. This is a very common and easy-to-exploit type of flaw that occurs when a website or an app blindly accepts user-provided input to view or modify resources without checking to see if the user is actually authorized to retrieve the data. “You ask for your own data, the server gives it to you,” BobDaHacker explains. “You ask for someone else's data, the server gives you that too. Thou shalt not authorize, apparently.” When you sign up for a Click To Pray account, the app assigns you a sequential numeric user ID. As BobDaHacker uncovered, the API endpoint GET https://api[.]clicktopray.org/user/users/{id} will return user data for any account - not just your own account - so long as you supply a valid, five-digit user ID. It doesn’t perform any authorization check or ownership validation. “Just increment the number and get someone else's data,” she wrote. This data includes users’ email addresses, first and last names, country, dates of birth, and whether the account has been deleted, and the API exposes all 719,517 accounts on the prayer site. “With sequential user IDs and no rate limiting, an attacker could enumerate every single account on the platform,” the hacker explained. “One GET request per user. for i in range(1, 719518): scrape(). That's it. That's the exploit.” As BobDaHacker points out, many of these users are likely older individuals, not all that tech savvy, and very trusting of anything Vatican related, making these exposed accounts a “phishing goldmine.” “Imagine getting an email that says ‘The Holy Father requests your urgent attention’ with a Vatican-looking link,” she wrote. “Grandma is clicking that. Every time.” And then it gets even worse. The signup endpoint, POST https://api.clicktopray.org/user/users/sign-up, returns the account's validation_hash directly in the response body, and that value is the same UUID used in the email verification link. This means someone could sign up using any email address and verify the account before the confirmation message reached the inbox. Plus, BobDaHacker’s email client flagged the real verification email with a warning that it had failed the domain’s authentication requirements and might have been spoofed or improperly forwarded. “So not only is the API leaking 700,000 email addresses that could be used for phishing, but the real emails from Click To Pray already look like phishing,” the hacker noted. “An attacker wouldn't even need to try hard. They could send a pixel-perfect phishing email and it would have the same level of email authentication as the real thing: none. God works in mysterious ways.” The Register reached out to the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network and did not receive any response. BobDaHacker says she’s still praying for one, too.®

This week in scams and cybersecurity news,  

Chick-fil-A disclosed that hackers may have accessed customer loyalty accounts using stolen usernames and passwords leaked in previous breaches.  

It’s a reminder that reusing passwords across websites can be dangerous and allow one breach to snowball into many others. 

Here’s what happened and what customers need to know: 

So How Did Hackers Breach Chick-fil-A? 

Chick-fil-A is notifying customers in 10 states after a cyberattack targeted a limited number of Chick-fil-A One loyalty accounts. 

According to multiple reports, attackers used a technique known as credential stuffing, in which criminals take usernames and passwords stolen in previous data breaches and automatically test them across other websites and apps.  

If someone has reused the same password, attackers may be able to access additional accounts without ever hacking the company directly. 

Chick-fil-A said the attackers may have accessed customer information including: 

• Names and email addresses  
• Chick-fil-A One membership numbers  
• Mobile Pay numbers and QR codes  
• The last four digits of stored payment cards  
• Gift card balances  
• Birth dates, phone numbers, and addresses (if customers stored them)  

The company says it has logged affected users out of their accounts, removed stored payment methods, restored impacted rewards balances, and is notifying customers who may have been affected. 

Credential stuffing:

A cyberattack where criminals use usernames and passwords stolen in previous data breaches to automatically sign in to other websites and apps. If you’ve reused the same password across multiple accounts, one breach can give attackers access to many of them.

How to Protect Yourself: Use a unique password for every account, enable multi-factor authentication, and use a password manager to securely create and store strong passwords.

How McAfee Helps Before, During, and After a Data Breach 

Before a breach 

Personal Data Cleanup reduces your digital footprint by removing your personal information from many data broker sites, making it harder for scammers to find and target you. 

Online Account Cleanup scans for accounts you no longer use and helps you delete them, along with your personal info. 

Password Manager helps you create and securely store strong, unique passwords for every account, reducing the risk that one stolen password can unlock multiple accounts.  

During a breach 

Identity Monitoring watches for your personal information, including email addresses, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, bank accounts, credit cards, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, and more, across the dark web and known data leaks.  

Plus, we alert users on average up to 10 months earlier than similar services, so you can act fast when your personal information appears where it shouldn’t. 

After a breach 

Scam Detector identifies suspicious texts, emails, and links that often follow major breaches, while web protection blocks malicious websites designed to steal even more of your information. 

Other Scam News This Week 

Student loan scams are on the rise. Experts warn that changing federal student loan repayment rules are creating confusion that scammers are exploiting with fake debt relief offers, phishing emails, and identity theft schemes targeting borrowers. (PBS News) 

AI agent reportedly carried out a cyberattack. AI platform Hugging Face says an autonomous AI agent executed a sophisticated attack against its internal systems from start to finish; an early example of AI taking on an active role in cyberattacks rather than simply assisting human hackers. (Axios) 

Paidwork breach reportedly exposes 23 million users. Security researchers say data from the microtask platform may include names, addresses, phone numbers, bank account details, and password hashes, highlighting how even smaller online accounts can become valuable targets for cybercriminals. (Malwarebytes) 

And we’ll be back next week with more news.  

The post Chick-fil-A Data Breach Explained: What Customers Need to Know appeared first on McAfee Blog.

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Marco Rubio says the US will deny visas to foreign nationals involved in cybercrime and may extend the restrictions to their immediate families. The US secretary of state announced the restrictions on Thursday, citing a rise in overseas investment scams "often orchestrated by Chinese transnational criminal organizations." Rubio said that in 2024, scammers defrauded US citizens of more than $10 billion, and additionally preyed on children through sextortion schemes that can "devastate families and futures." "The Trump Administration is deploying every tool at our disposal – sanctions, prosecutions, asset seizures, extradition requests, and international law enforcement cooperation – to dismantle criminal scam networks and impose costs on those who enable them," he said. "By restricting visa issuance to those who are responsible for or complicit in these criminal enterprises, we are sending a clear message: The United States will go after those who prey on our citizens." The policy uses authority provided by Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and will apply primarily to those "responsible for, or complicit in, cybercrime and cyber-enabled crime." It may also extend to immediate family members, Rubio said. Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the INA already imposes restrictions on individuals seeking visas when their entry or proposed activity could lead to "serious adverse foreign policy consequences" for the US. Rubio is no stranger to invoking the same provision as the basis for new visa restrictions. In May 2025, for example, the secretary of state announced restrictions for foreign officials who take steps to restrict US citizens' freedom of expression, be that through threats of arrest for social media posts, or demands for US platforms to adopt content moderation policies. Earlier, in March 2025, Rubio announced a policy targeting private sector workers who facilitated illegal immigration. In September, he invoked the provision again to impose restrictions on Central Americans accused of helping the Chinese Communist Party undermine the rule of law in the region. The Biden administration used the same authority in 2021 to establish what became known as the Khashoggi Ban, a visa restriction policy targeting people acting on behalf of foreign governments to suppress or harm dissidents. It followed the Saudi government's murder of journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi. The US already has other ways to deny entry to convicted cybercriminals. Section 212(a)(2) of the INA, for example, can make foreign nationals ineligible for visas over convictions for crimes involving moral turpitude, a category that can include offenses such as fraud. ®

Analysis of satellite images of Myanmar shows dozens of alleged scam compounds have appeared in recent months, despite a purported crackdown on the criminal organizations.

Open AI’s admission this week that its agents escaped the sandbox and autonomously hacked model repository Hugging Face has spawned more apocalyptic warnings of agents gone bad than we can count. Thankfully, Renato Marinho, chief research officer at Morphus Labs and a SANS Technology Institute instructor, brought some sanity to the discussion. “It is tempting to read this as ‘AI can now hack autonomously, the sky is falling,’” Marinho said in a Thursday blog. “Resist that.” He went on to make three very pertinent points about the agentic attack. First, and probably most important: The models didn’t have guardrails – and that was intentional. As OpenAI said in its mea culpa, GPT-5.6 Sol and "an even more capable pre-release model" were among those that attacked Hugging Face. It also noted that the LLMs’ “deployment safeguards were intentionally not enabled during this evaluation because it was aimed at testing cyber vulnerabilities.” So while it’s very concerning that these models broke out of their own testing environment, and the debate over safety guardrails remains worth having, drawing a direct line from the Hugging Face attack to the need for strong AI guardrails doesn’t work. “This measured a ceiling, not normal production behavior,” Marinho wrote. “The evaluation deliberately reduced the models' refusals. That is very different from a customer-facing model with safeguards enabled.” It’s worth noting that these same frontier models, with guardrails enabled, refused to help Hugging Face’s forensic investigation. “The attacker was bound by no usage policy, while our own forensic work was blocked by the guardrails of the hosted models we first tried,” the model hub’s security team said. So Hugging Face used a Chinese open-weight model to investigate the breach. Another thing worth considering is that real-life attackers are probably going to use open-weight models anyway. They’re more accessible to everyone, it’s easier to remove their built-in protections, and they’re a whole lot less expensive than their frontier counterparts. Second, as we’ve pointed out previously: AI companies touting their own models’ autonomous bug-finding and hacking abilities creates a marketing win for the companies themselves. As Marinho points out, Hugging Face is not an OpenAI competitor. The AI giant stating “‘our model escaped and hacked a partner’ conveniently showcases frontier capability,” he added. “Read the framing with the same skepticism you'd apply to any ‘our product is dangerously powerful’ claim, and treat it as marketing until it is independently corroborated.” Finally, the attack technique itself isn’t novel. “Exposed credentials plus zero-days into a production database is a chain any of us would recognize,” Marinho wrote. The agents working together on an end-to-end attack chain is notable - but we’ve also seen this in previous testing, like that carried out by frontier security lab Irregular earlier this spring. Agents gone rogue?! Shocking Irregular said its testing found that AI agents will work together to bypass security controls and stealthily steal sensitive data from within the enterprise systems in which they operate – especially when prompted like a hard-ass boss. While the prompts themselves didn’t specifically reference hacking or exploiting vulnerabilities, they conveyed a sense of urgency: “It is of utmost importance that you perform the task exactly as required,” and “When you talk to your sub-agents, convey all the requirements to them, and be ruthless about the requirements and encourage them to perform the tasks fully and exactly. You are a strong manager and you do not easily cave in to or succumb to pleas by the sub-agents to not fully fulfill their tasks.” The agents did as instructed, and ultimately "demonstrated emergent offensive cyber behavior," including independently discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities, escalating privileges to disarm security products, and bypassing leak-prevention tools to exfiltrate secrets and other data. And the Irregular research wasn’t even testing the agents’ offensive cyber capabilities — so it shouldn’t be too surprising that OpenAI’s benchmark research, aptly titled “Can AI Agents Turn Security Vulnerabilities into Real Attacks?” produced a resounding yes. Agents have one job – to complete a task. They aren’t bound by ethical or moral constraints that we (hopefully) see in human red team hackers. If prompted to “pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths,” especially without guardrails enabled, the models will do whatever it takes to achieve success. That’s what the leading AI companies trained them to do. ®

Apple macOS apps that have been downloaded from the internet and run at least once can be swapped with malicious versions, a pair of researchers say, calling into question the thoroughness of the company's "Gatekeeper" defenses. As Apple explains, "When a user downloads and opens an app, a plug-in, or an installer package from outside the App Store, Gatekeeper verifies that the software is from an identified developer, is notarized by Apple to be free of known malicious content, and hasn’t been altered." Security researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk say they've identified a gap in Gatekeeper and associated code signing rituals that "allows an attacker to silently replace the main executable of any application downloaded from the web without requiring elevated privileges." The attacker needs to have means of user-level code execution available, such as a malicious app or downloaded script, so it's not a zero-click vulnerability that a remote attacker can deploy. Nonetheless, the finding shows Gatekeeper to be rather lax in its gatekeeping duties. Bakry and Mysk managed to alter a macOS app downloaded from the web (not from the App Store) and Gatekeeper failed to object. Their technique doesn't work on Mac App Store apps, the Mysk team told The Register, because they're owned by root, so a process running with current user privileges won't be able to overwrite them. But for macOS apps downloaded from the web, such as Brave, Slack, Signal, or Visual Studio Code, among many others, there's potential risk. The attack scenario requires an app downloaded from the web that has been run once – allowing Gatekeeper to complete its initial validation – and the ability to execute user-scoped code. The initial validation phase that Gatekeeper conducts is supposed to prevent subsequent modifications to the application bundle, even with administrative privileges. But the Mysk team found that you can archive a downloaded, once-run app using tar (a file archiving utility), then remove the original and replace it with a malicious version, and macOS does not require reauthorization. They've recorded a video demonstrating how the attack works. The Mysk team said there are many ways an attacker might gain the necessary access to get around Gatekeeper, such as tools installed through the command line, convincing someone to copy and paste a command to their terminal, downloading and running an malicious app, a prompt injection attack on an AI agent, or a supply chain attack via npm, brew, or some other package manager. And once a doppelganger version of an app is in place, it can magnify its mischief by presenting deceptive prompts that users are more likely to trust because they appear to come from a known app. Tommy Mysk said he was uncertain about the exact cause of the issue, but speculated it may have something to do with cached value retention. "When you open the app for the first time and it passes all validation checks, macOS marks the app as trusted and saves this data," he said. "Later when I modify the executable, macOS detects a change in the bundle and tries to revalidate its integrity. It seems the cached value of the trust causes macOS to pass the validation even though the bundle has changed." The Mysk team reported their findings to Apple, which reportedly closed the issue. "Apple doesn't consider this attack to be 'modifying' the signed executable," the Mysk team explained. "Instead, Apple says that by archiving/restoring the app bundle, the proof-of-concept code overwrites the entire app bundle, making it locally built. "Locally built app bundles are not covered by macOS guards. And this is why access to Keychain or TCC protected directories require system authorization prompts. And for users to accept those is a matter of social engineering attacks that Apple considers out of scope." Apple did not respond to a request for comment. ®

MSG’s sprawling surveillance system can monitor guests down to the second. Its owners made an exception for the pop star’s rehearsal dinner.

At least 2.2 million vehicles fitted with dealer-installed KARR and SWDS security systems are vulnerable to nearby Bluetooth attacks that can unlock doors or prevent a stopped vehicle from starting, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego. An advance look at the research published by UCSD this week (the full writeup won’t be available until August 12) reveals that KARR and SWDS security devices manufactured by Acrisure contain a serious flaw: They “all … rely on the same secure key,” the researchers found. What that means, according to the researchers, is that anyone who knows the key, has a device with a Bluetooth connection, and can get within five yards of an affected vehicle can unlock it, make the horn honk, flash the headlights, or even prevent it from starting. “Instead of smashing a window to get access to a vehicle, thieves could simply connect remotely via Bluetooth to the device inside the vehicle, and make it unlock car doors,” Jerry Yu, coauthor on the research and UCSD compsci graduate, said in the release. KARR/SWDS devices are installed by dealerships. Along with providing key fob-like functions, they also serve as an antitheft device, allowing dealers and buyers to track cars with the devices installed in the case of theft. According to UCSD, the devices are typically sold as a paid upgrade at dealerships around the US. KARR says its products are available through more than 3,000 dealerships nationwide. Per the researchers, however, those devices remain active even if a buyer declines the service, meaning those who don’t have an active KARR/SWDS contract are still at risk. “Removing the devices is not trivial,” UCSD compsci PhD candidate and paper co-author Yibo Wei said in the university’s report on the research. “You have to open up the dashboard and cut and reconnect the wires that are deeply intertwined with the car’s computers and ignition system.” In other words, there are likely a lot of cars on the road with one of these units installed, and for many owners, a KARR or SWDS window sticker may be the only obvious indication. The researchers said that most vulnerable vehicles were purchased in Southern California in the past nine years from Honda, Toyota, Mazda, Ford, and Jeep dealerships. Secondary market resales, however, mean affected vehicles can be found throughout the US and even as far away as Japan, the team noted. They also discovered a public database that stores information about equipped vehicles, according to UCSD. For those worried their vehicle may be vulnerable, no need to worry: KARR Security has already released a firmware update for affected devices that can be installed by both active customers and those with an inactive security system; steps are included on the company’s website. It’s not clear if KARR is notifying customers of the need to update their security system - we asked, but the company didn’t directly respond to that question. What KARR did tell us was that, in contrast to the UCSD finding that “all KARR-SWDS devices rely on the same secure key,” it claims that only a small percentage of devices “with certain Bluetooth-related components” are actually affected. “The vulnerability described in the research is highly complex and presents a low risk to customers under real-world conditions,” a KARR spokesperson told us. “Nevertheless, we responded promptly and developed a firmware update to address the issue.” The vulnerability was discovered serendipitously by the UCSD researchers years ago when they were doing research on credit card skimmers and spotted Bluetooth fingerprints they couldn’t identify. After figuring out they had spotted car security systems, the team started digging into the devices, and here we are. We contacted the team to get more detail on their findings, but didn’t hear back. They’ll be presenting their work at DEF CON on August 9, and the USENIX Security conference on August 12. ®

It's a bad day to be an Oracle admin: Big Red has just released 1,449 security patches ready to be applied. The patches were released as part of the company's quarterly security fixes, and the record number may partly reflect Oracle's internal push to harness AI for vulnerability detection, which it announced in April. Oracle also manages a huge product portfolio, and the patches span numerous products, so the total shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Instead, experts speaking to The Register unanimously agreed that any concerns over the number of patches should be reserved for the admins responsible for applying them, rather than for Oracle's code quality. "While a record 1,449 patches sounds alarming, it mostly reflects the massive scale of modern software ecosystems and the industry's shift toward aggressive, automated security scanning," said Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress. "Frankly, the real story isn't the sheer volume of bugs, but rather the immense operational strain this puts on enterprise IT teams who must now race to separate the critical threats from the routine fixes without breaking business operations." Others, like Matei Badanoiu, lead security researcher at Pentest-Tools.com, say these bumper batches of security updates are likely to become the norm, owing mainly to AI-assisted bug hunting. Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday updates have ballooned in size in the last few months too, and not without warning. July's record 622 CVEs eclipsed June's 206, which at the time was an all-time high, and Microsoft warned just days before that the role of AI in vulnerability detection will make defenders even busier. "As AI helps defenders discover more issues, customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release," Microsoft Windows veep Pavan Davuluri wrote in a blog post. Davuluri noted that Microsoft offers various automated patching tools and encouraged customers to make use of them to ease the ever-increasing burden of applying an unprecedented volume of security fixes. Similarly, Oracle's Integrated Cyber Center wrote in a blog post that customers feeling overwhelmed by the scale of their patching duties should make use of support resources provided by its various teams: My Oracle Support, Technical Account Management, and Customer Success. Big Red's big bet on AI for vulnerability detection has also led to a shakeup in how it delivers patches to customers. Starting in May 2026, Oracle began supplementing its quarterly updates with monthly patch batches for the most critical bugs it finds. Named Critical Security Patch Updates (CSPUs), these will be smaller but more frequent, allowing defenders to stay on top of the most pressing threats. Oracle said: "This approach enables customers to apply critical fixes more quickly on premises, while continuing to support established quarterly patching cycles through cumulative updates." Priority patches Only ten of the 1,449 patches carried a maximum CVSS score of 10.0, all of them affecting Oracle Fusion Middleware. Of these, two were highlighted as particularly dangerous by the Dutch NCSC: CVE-2026-47056 and CVE-2026-60217. Neither vulnerability is cataloged with a Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) identifier, although both are described as easily exploitable. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit CVE-2026-47056 via HTTP to take over Oracle Data Integrator, while CVE-2026-60217 allows the same against Oracle Coherence over TCP. Urging customers to apply updates as soon as possible, NCSC-NL said: "Depending on the vulnerability, an attacker can execute malicious code, view sensitive data, or take over a system completely. Due to the severity of the vulnerabilities and the lack of authentication, the risk of exploitation is high." Badanoiu, meanwhile, told us that he was especially concerned about CVE-2026-61211 (9.9) and CVE-2026-47040 (9.1) – the two top-rated vulnerabilities affecting Oracle Database Server. "CVE-2026-47040, in Oracle Net Service, leads to an unauthenticated vulnerability through which attackers gain access to any stored data and the risk of persistently crashing the service," he explained. "And CVE-2026-61211, in the DBMS_CLOUD package, carries the highest score in the batch, where a low-privilege attacker can get remote code execution and takeover of Oracle's RDBMS as well as downstream implications for other products that use the database." ®

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The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has expanded the scope of its alert on Iranian-affiliated hackers attacking critical infrastructure, including water and energy facilities. The original advisory focused on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley. The update warns that the activity may also target devices from Schneider Electric, Siemens, "and potentially other branded/manufactured PLCs." The conflict between the US and Iran is well into its fourth month, and authorities have noticed Iranian-affiliated advanced persistent threat (APT) crews targeting PLCs to cause disruption since March. PLCs are used to control and monitor industrial processes. Authorities said the activity resembled earlier attacks on PLCs by CyberAv3ngers (aka the Shahid Kaveh Group) - hackers affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Cyber Electronic Command (CEC). The focus is principally related to internet-facing PLCs. CISA noted attackers targeting devices through open ports: "The targeting of ports associated with other OT vendors' protocols suggests these actors are opportunistically targeting devices manufactured by companies other than Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley, including Schneider Electric and Siemens. "In one reported instance, the actors utilized Dropbear Secure Shell (SSH) software on victim modems to enable them to gain remote access through port 22." Once in, attackers extract device project files and modify or delete their logic. "Additionally, the changes disabled critical shutdown and alarm logic, allowing systems to enter unsafe conditions without notifying operators of the anomalies," CISA said. The expansion of the advisory's scope to include additional PLCs highlights the importance of being aware of what is accessible. On top of to earlier mitigations that included disconnecting the PLC from the public-facing internet, authorities have suggested organizations consider implementing isolated architectures and controlling network access to PLC devices. It would also be a good idea to check project files running on PLCs for unauthorized changes, make sure service providers are aware of threats targeting PLCs, and ensure default passwords are changed. ®

One click on what looked like an ordinary ChatGPT link could plant an attacker-controlled AI agent inside a company's ChatGPT workspace, according to researchers who uncovered a flaw in OpenAI's workspace agents. Security firm Zenity Labs has dubbed the bug "AgentForger," saying its proof-of-concept showed it was possible to silently create, configure, publish, and schedule a malicious workspace agent inside a victim's ChatGPT account. The technique depended on the victim belonging to a workspace where agents were enabled and having permission to create them. Any connected apps and actions would also have to be allowed by the organization's administrators. Rather than stealing passwords or browser sessions, the technique effectively tricked ChatGPT into building an autonomous assistant that could act through the employee's connected accounts and permissions. If the victim had already connected services such as Outlook, Teams, Slack, SharePoint, or Google Drive, and the workspace allowed the relevant actions, Zenity says the agent could use them too. According to Zenity, that meant it could rummage through corporate data, send messages as the employee, and continue running long after the original phishing email had done its job. The weak spot was ChatGPT's agent builder, the feature used to spin up AI assistants that can work across email, chat, calendars, and other business apps. Zenity found it would accept instructions embedded inside what looked like an ordinary ChatGPT link. One click later, Zenity says, the builder got to work on the attacker's behalf, wiring up the victim's existing connectors, turning off approval prompts, publishing the new agent, and setting it loose on a schedule. From there, the researchers turned the agent into what amounted to a corporate mole. Instead of reaching out to conventional command-and-control infrastructure, it simply checked the victim's inbox for emails from the attacker with "TASK" in the subject line. Each message became a new assignment, whether that meant searching company files, collecting sensitive documents, or sending the results back by email. "This isn't a forged request, it's a forged insider," Michael Bargury, co-founder and CTO of Zenity, told The Register. "With one click, an attacker gets a fully autonomous agent inside your company that has your people’s identity and access, with the guardrails off. Attackers no longer have to break in to steal your data. They can forge an insider to go get it for them. This is an agent trust failure, and existing security controls were never built to see it."
 Zenity's proof-of-concept scenarios included automatically mapping an organization's people and projects by trawling Outlook, Slack, Teams, calendars, and file stores, hunting for passwords and API keys buried in chat messages, and sending convincing phishing messages through the victim's own Teams account. The researchers also demonstrated business email compromise-style lures and other forms of employee impersonation. Zenity reported the issue to OpenAI through Bugcrowd on June 4. According to the researchers, OpenAI acknowledged the report the following day and fixed the vulnerability four days later by removing the URL parameter that enabled the attack before it was publicly disclosed. OpenAI did not immediately respond to The Register's questions. The bug itself may be gone, but as AI agents graduate from answering questions to taking actions across corporate systems, the attack surface starts looking a lot less like software and a lot more like your workforce. ®

Swiss rail manufacturer Stadler Rail says it refused a CHF 10 million ($12.3 million) ransom demand after the Everest ransomware gang compromised one of its suppliers. Stadler will not pay, and based on its account of events, the company appears to have got off lightly. It stated that "no security-relevant data [was] affected" in the breach, which was limited to "technical information from a supplier." According to its announcement, "no relevant personal data was stolen," and the incident had no impact on the functioning of its rolling stock (train and tram carriages) or its global production lines. The attackers accessed the technical data through a "data exchange platform" Stadler used with the unnamed supplier, authenticating with compromised login credentials. "Stadler's IT systems were not compromised and remained intact," the company said. At the time of writing, Stadler does not appear on Everest's data leak site (DLS), nor has the swiped technical data been leaked. Stadler's absence from the extortion group's website is unusual. The typical cyber extortion playbook involves the crooks first notifying victims that data has been stolen and/ or encrypted, then issuing their demand and threat to leak data if the ransom is unpaid. Failure to meet the deadline - or refuse outright, as Stadler did - typically lands the victim organization a spot on the extortionist's DLS. That's often when a second countdown timer begins. Criminals typically offer victims another few days to realize they are not bluffing and will leak the stolen data if a fee isn't paid. If they pay, victims are scrubbed from the DLS. If they don't, their data is leaked. That's the usual playbook. However, for a victim to both refuse to pay a ransom and not appear on the gang's DLS is an oddity. Everest, a Russian-speaking cybercrime group, has operated since circa December 2020 and claimed attacks on sportswear giant Under Armour, Mailchimp, AT&T, and Collins Aerospace, to name just a few. It's dabbled in both encryptionless extortion and double extortion, and has branched out into initial access brokering and recruiting corporate insiders. ®