In what they call the first-ever real-world agent-to-agent exploitation method, Pillar Security researchers say they discovered an exploit in the repository behind Google's Agent Development Kit for Python that could allow attackers to compromise supply chains. In other words, now we know that one AI agent can be used to control and compromise another one that has more privileges. The security snafu existed in google/adk-python, an open source Python toolkit with more than 90 million downloads used to build and deploy AI agents. Google has since fixed the underlying issue in the repository but deemed the exploit non-rewardable because it involved social engineering. Even so, it illustrates the risks of using AI agents in CI/CD workflows for triage, pull request (PR) reviews, and discussions. It also shows how one AI agent could attack another in a production environment, according to Pillar’s Dan Lisichkin, who found and reported the vulnerability. “Our world is changing quickly, and new attack surfaces are not yet reflected in threat models because these attacks never could exist in the first place in the ‘pre-agent’ world,” Lisichkin said in a technical write-up published on Monday. He will also discuss the findings during a poster talk at DEF CON's AI Village on Friday, August 7 at 1600 PDT. “CISOs and security practitioners should start considering these scenarios, threat-modeling them, and calculating worst-case implications and blast radius,” Lisichkin wrote. The issue stems from the way that the repo ran two classes of automated AI agents with different privilege levels that unintentionally share a trust boundary. One is a low-privilege, public-facing AI agent activated whenever a user opens a pull request (PR) or issue, and a second is a high-privilege, maintainer-only agent. Pillar’s team found that the low-privilege, public-facing agent could be manipulated via prompt injection into triggering a maintainer-only agent that can execute malicious actions. “Because workflows that explain how these agents work behind the scenes are also public, any person could have connected the dots that one agent should be able - at least theoretically - to 'call' the other,” Lisichkin told The Register. "When it comes to building the attack, you just need to know English to build the prompt injection (or just ask an AI to do it for you)." There is one caveat: an attacker would first likely need to make legitimate contributions to the repository to build trust among the maintainers before moving on to prompt injection. But assuming someone was willing to put in the time, here’s how the attack would play out. First, an external user - this would be the attacker - creates a new PR. Lisichkin calls this PR A, and it combines a real fix with malicious code, such as a modified package.json or malicious dependency. Then, a public-facing agent tied to a high-privilege collaborator personal access token (PAT) reads the attacker’s PR text and marks the PR for review. This level of trust - the collaborator PAT - allows the attacker-generated text to trigger a gated workflow. Once the PR A triage happens, the attacker opens a second PR - PR B - with the prompt injection, and the triage agent emits the trusted @gemini-cli handoff. This triggers the privileged-agent workflow and executes the malicious action. “Strung together, they manufacture a complete, believable ‘a human asked for a review, gemini ran it, gemini approved’ trail on the poisoned PR, none of which ever happened,” Lisichkin wrote. Google did not respond to The Register’s inquiries, but Lisichkin confirmed that the underlying issue was fixed. Still, his findings, Google said, “did not meet the bar” for a bug-bounty payout. “This report demonstrates exfiltration of a GitHub token with a 'pull-requests: write' permission, which enables tampering with a PR but still requires a maintainer to take an action to merge the malicious PR as PRs are not automatically merged after a bot review,” Google explained. “We don't reward vulnerability reports that require social engineering to enable a supply chain security compromise,” the rationale continued. “Nonetheless, we have taken an action to harden the repository so we will be recognizing this report with credit.” Lisichkin told us the research shows agent isolation is not enough. "Agents should have their own identity, which mandates what resources they are allowed to access and in what they are allowed to interact with these resources," he said. "In this case, if Google had just given a bot identity to the initial triaging agent, most of the attack could have been prevented. Security teams need to start modeling agent identity and agent resource access within their threat models."®

Now AI is making fake vulnerabilities and polluting the ecosystem. A batch of critical- and high-rated SQLite CVEs that appeared in the NVD with CISA-supplied enrichment last week turned out to be technically bogus, according to security researchers, and their path into widely used databases exposes weaknesses in the CVE pipeline. Software supply chain security outfit JFrog reported last week that six supposed SQLite vulnerabilities published in a larger batch by a new, obscure GitHub repository were all complete garbage. Running the advisories through an AI checker suggested they were likely AI generated, JFrog said, and, upon testing, it found that none of the six SQLite reports, which carried CVSS scores ranging from 9.8 to 7.5, described a reproducible vulnerability. One, an alleged use-after-free vulnerability in the open source database that Red Hat initially assigned a maximum 10.0 CVSS score to before lowering it, relied on a function that didn't exist in the affected SQLite version. Another UAF vulnerability with a 9.1 CVSS score cited source lines that weren't even related to the supposed flaw. When JFrog tested the accompanying proof-of-concept, it executed a valid query with no memory leaks or errors. The other four SQLite CVEs from the repo that JFrog tested were similarly fake. The other 49 CVEs in the questionable GitHub repo claimed to be security vulnerabilities in the open-source RAW image processing library libraw and Arduino audio decoding library ESP32-audioI2S. While JFrog didn't test those as extensively, it said all are just as fake as the rest, aside from one which “contained a real bug wrapped in unverified CVE metadata.” A message posted to Openwall’s OSS-Security mailing list on Friday indicated that MITRE had rejected the whole repo’s worth of vaporous vulnerabilities, but the whole thing should serve as an important lesson, poster and Oracle Solaris engineer Alan Coopersmith pointed out. “MITRE and most other CNAs which assign CVEs for code they don't produce themselves operate on the honor system, and trust CVE requesters to have verified the information they provide,” Coopersmith noted in the OSS-Security post. “The CNA is often not in a position of being able to verify the report themselves.” As JFrog points out, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which manages the US National Vulnerability Database (NVD), used to provide a reliable backstop by manually reviewing and enriching CVE records after they entered the database. That process slowed dramatically in 2024 after a surge in vulnerability submissions, coupled with operational challenges, left the agency with a growing backlog of records it was unable to process. By late 2024, the backlog had grown to more than 17,000 unprocessed CVEs, despite NIST's plan to clear it by the end of fiscal year 2024 with contractor help. It continued to grow, reaching more than 27,000 by the end of 2025, according to a Department of Commerce Inspector General report published in May 2026. To make matters worse, the DoC IG concluded that NIST had been wasting money allocated to fixing the backlog due to a “lack of strategic planning and decisive action” that has led to the stack of unresolved issues continuing to grow. In other words, the pipeline has no mandatory checkpoint at which every claimed vulnerability must be independently reproduced. “Because no step in today's system actually requires a proof-of-concept or bug reproduction, a plausible-sounding fake advisory can slide right through the pipeline and end up in GitHub Security Advisories, downstream databases, and enterprise scanners,” JFrog said. “This incident demonstrates a systemic issue with automated vulnerability ingestion.” What that means for security professionals, aside from having to deal with polluted vulnerability databases, is that bad advisories could waste time better spent chasing real issues. Because reputable databases can ingest unverified records, JFrog recommended several checks before defenders act on a newly published CVE. First off, if the vendor hasn’t corroborated the issue (SQLite maintainers don’t list the fake CVEs, for instance) it’s probably not legitimate. A lack of commit hash or pull request in the reference fields of a repo is also indicative of AI slop, as is suspicious metadata (i.e., missing CPE product definitions). Lastly, if the code references don’t appear to match real functions or point to parts of the code that don’t involve the supposed issue, that’s a good sign it’s just an AI hallucination. JFrog reported its findings to the GitHub Security Advisory team, Red Hat, and NVD, all of whom the company told us have flagged or removed the CVEs. GitHub hasn't yet, JFrog told us. We reached out to GitHub to inquire why the repo is still up, but didn’t hear back. As for why someone might do this, JFrog speculates that it could be an attempt for someone to boost their research experience with fake reports, or to influence what automated CVE identification tools flag as actual vulnerabilities. In both cases, JFrog told us, that's just speculation. Either way, these 54 apparently bogus CVEs, JFrog security researcher Afek Berger said, are just one example of a problem they expect to see more often. "Generative AI has lowered the effort required to produce a plausible-looking advisory to close to zero, while the effort required to verify one, review the source code, build the affected version, reproduce the PoC, is unchanged," Berger told us in an email. "That asymmetry means that even well-resourced defenders and maintainers cannot manually validate every incoming report … this is a challenge the whole industry is facing in the AI era." ®

Conference-goers may want to think twice about connecting to public Wi-Fi after Microsoft disclosed that Russian foreign intelligence operatives (SVR) are compromising captive portal networks to deliver infostealers, keyloggers, and other malware. With the help of ReliaQuest's earlier work, Redmond fingered Storm-2945, a subdivision of the SVR's Midnight Blizzard (aka Nobellium), in an attack campaign targeting users of public Wi-Fi networks at places like hotels, conference centers, and other shared venues in the hospitality sector. Microsoft is still trying to determine how the hackers initially compromise captive-portal networks. The broader AI-assisted operation dates to February 2026, with traffic manipulation observed since early May. After gaining control of the network layer, Storm-2945 manipulates DNS and HTTP traffic to reroute users through attacker-controlled infrastructure, Microsoft said. The crew also abuses operating systems' connectivity checks to trigger malicious prompts and redirects. This gives the attackers an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) position. Such prompts adopt ClickFix-style methods, which in some cases try to convince public Wi-Fi users to install malware under the guise of OS updates, driver repairs, and web verification failures. Users who follow through on the instructions provided in the prompts may then find their device infected with malware. Microsoft calls the campaign "CaptiveCrunch." One of the malware strains it delivers is CornFlake. Described as "a full-featured Windows RAT" written in Go, CornFlake is the SVR's go-to persistent implant in these hospitality network attacks. After presenting users with a "convincing" fake Windows update progress window, it provides attackers with a wealth of capabilities once installed. These include: Keylogging Clipboard monitoring Screenshot capture Audio surveillance Video surveillance Browser credential theft File exfiltration USB drive monitoring Security posture sweep Remote shell Microsoft also said that CornFlake exposes a localhost HTTP API server to transform the malware into a modular platform, delivering additional payloads such as ChocoShell, a PowerShell-based infostealer. ChocoShell is delivered and executed entirely in-memory, Microsoft said. SVR uses it primarily to suck up victims' browser session cookies, saved passwords, SSO tokens, and Wi-Fi credentials. Microsoft neatly summarized the two: "Where CornFlake provides the operator with a persistent, long-running foothold on the device, ChocoShell is designed to extract the most operationally valuable credentials, giving the operator access to victim cloud environments." The attacks primarily target Windows machines, but Microsoft has also seen indications of ClickFix prompts tailored to Android devices, encouraging users to download and install an APK file. In addition to the malware element, "a portion" of SVR's CaptiveCrunch activity is devoted to device code phishing. Users sent to attacker-controlled landing pages may be instructed to enter a device code on a legitimate Microsoft authentication page, unwittingly authorizing the attacker's session. Device code phishing exploits a legitimate OAuth flow, typically reserved for devices that struggle to open browsers, such as smart TVs. In such scenarios, attackers request an authentication code from Microsoft, which they then send to phishing targets. In the CaptiveCrunch campaign, this looks like a fake landing page, served to the user thanks to the AitM component of the attack. Targets are then asked to copy the code, which was originally given to the attacker, open a legitimate Microsoft authentication window, enter the code, and choose which account they wish to authenticate. Choosing the account completes the authentication flow, but in turn authenticates the attacker into the chosen account. This gives the attacker a valid OAuth token for the victim's Microsoft 365 account, potentially granting access to cloud data permitted by the token until it expires or is revoked. Device code phishing is not a new or unique attack, but can be an effective route to bypassing MFA, especially when an attacker already controls the flow of traffic after a captive portal compromise. "This activity is consistent with previously reported device code phishing operations conducted by Midnight Blizzard since August 2024," Microsoft said. "The observed technique does not appear fundamentally novel; however, integrating device code phishing into captive portal and traffic manipulation operations might increase the likelihood that users perceive the authentication request as legitimate." The main takeaway, in Microsoft's book, is to stop trusting public Wi-Fi so much. It did not discourage using hospitality networks' Wi-Fi services altogether, but said favoring personal hotspots and satellite internet connections over public networks is a safer bet. The majority of Redmond's advice could be brought under the user education umbrella: Don't trust public networks; teach users not to download updates over public networks or via prompts; educate users about what ClickFix attacks look like. That sort of stuff. But organizations have a role to play too. Among other technical implementations, passwordless authentication can thwart many phishing techniques, although device code phishing may bypass even passkeys. The best response would be for an employer to disable the device code authentication flow altogether, wherever possible, preventing staffers from surrendering their workplace cloud access to attackers. ®

AI is shifting enterprise traffic from human-initiated to machine-generated workflows. Discover why Cisco SD-WAN must evolve to provide the visibility, policy enforcement, and performance assurance needed to support AI operations at scale.

Georgia and Michigan are the latest US states to report cyberattacks on water systems, as the FBI investigates incidents across at least seven states. Iran-backed hackers are the leading suspects, although the bureau has not publicly attributed the campaign. Officials in both states told journalists over the weekend that water facilities had detected activity consistent with the attacks on more than 30 Minnesota sites last week. Neither state reported operational disruption. Nine Michigan water systems reported hostile cyber activity to the state's Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. Department communications director Dale George said the state received "a small number" of reports consistent with the activity seen in Minnesota, but no public health consequences followed. "All systems continued to operate safely, issues were addressed by local operators, and there are no known impacts that posed a public health concern," said George. Georgia also confirmed to ABC News that it was affected, but said the damage was limited. Neither Georgia nor Michigan has published any form of public-facing notification about the cyberattacks. The three states are among at least seven affected by the intrusions, according to an FBI advisory posted last week. The bureau did not name a culprit or mention Iran. "Since 27 July 2026, Water and Wastewater Sector (WWS) utility companies in at least seven states have reported incidents to the FBI, and some of that activity degraded water operations," it stated in its advisory. The FBI said it had so far observed the activity only against Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers (PLCs), although it warned organizations deploying other manufacturers' devices to follow the same hardening advice. A broader CISA advisory, updated on July 22, warned that Schneider Electric, Siemens, and potentially other PLC brands were also being targeted by Iran-affiliated actors. Security researchers at Tenable were among the first to publicly suspect Iran's involvement, citing similarities with previous attacks by the IRGC-linked CyberAv3ngers group. Minnesota was the first state to confirm it was hit by the attacks, which took place over July 26-27. The state's IT department (MNIT), said more than 30 community water systems were targeted, but still has not officially attributed the attacks. According to WIRED, a restricted WaterISAC notice shared with water utilities said the Minnesota activity aligned with an earlier Iran-affiliated campaign. WaterISAC told WIRED that it had not assessed attribution "at any time" and publicly stated that it had not supplied the leaked document to the publication. President Trump also rejected the Iran link, offering no evidence for his alternative explanation. He told reporters following a cabinet meeting on Friday that "they blame it on Iran. I don't think so. I blame it on Minnesota because they're grossly incompetent." He added: "I think the governor is behind it. I don't think there was an Iranian cyberattack." Tim Walz, Minnesota's Democratic governor, suggested Iran was indeed behind the attacks, and highlighted Trump's funding cuts leaving sites such as water facilities more vulnerable to cyberattacks. "Trump knows exactly who is responsible for this attack, and knows that other states were hit too," he said. "This is what modern warfare looks like, and it further illustrates there's no plan to win a war in Iran. "DOGE took an axe to CISA and left the US exposed to cyberattacks. Thankfully, our experts in Minnesota were able to identify the vulnerability quickly and work with local communities to stop it." ®

The UK government's corporate finance adviser has admitted that an employee left an internal file containing the names and work email addresses of dozens of officials publicly accessible for around 40 hours. The breach, first reported by The Guardian, was disclosed in UK Government Investments' (UKGI) annual report, which says it occurred during the 2025-26 financial year after a member of staff "did not follow established information security policies." The exposed document contained "high-level management information" alongside the names and work email addresses of 51 government officials. UKGI, the Treasury-owned outfit that advises ministers on everything from corporate rescues to billion-dollar share sales, said it voluntarily reported the incident to the UK's Information Commissioner's Office even though it did not meet the threshold for mandatory notification. It also informed its Audit and Risk Committee and commissioned an external review of the breach. The report offers little else in the way of detail. UKGI doesn't say when the exposure occurred, where the file was hosted, whether anyone accessed or downloaded it, or which departments employed the affected officials. It also doesn't identify the external firm that reviewed the incident or disclose the recommendations it made. The review concluded that UKGI's response was appropriate and recommended further improvements to its security controls and incident preparedness. According to the report, "the overwhelming majority" of those recommendations have either already been implemented or are due to be introduced in the coming months. The mishap comes in a year when UKGI had its fingerprints on some of Whitehall's biggest commercial deals, from finally offloading the government's remaining NatWest shares to advising on small modular reactor financing and supporting the Eutelsat capital raise and Royal Mail takeover. The Register has asked UKGI for further details, including what information the file contained beyond names and email addresses, where it was publicly accessible, whether there is any evidence it was accessed while exposed, and what additional safeguards have since been introduced. Whether this was merely embarrassing or exposed officials to a meaningful risk depends on details UKGI has yet to disclose. An ICO spokesperson said: “We can confirm UK Government Investments Ltd reported an incident and we are assessing the information provided.” ®

Internal documents show ICE's DNA collection has skyrocketed in the second Trump administration. Now hundreds of thousands of people never convicted of a crime are in an FBI criminal database forever.

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Both major AI labs’ models broke containment, escaped onto the internet, and hacked other companies. If a human had done that, the law would likely be against them. But a bot?

Created by legendary hardware hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang, the badges for this year’s famed security conference aim to push the boundaries of security and transparency.

A memo obtained by WIRED, issued by the water utilities information sharing group WaterISAC, links dozens of cyberattacks against Minnesota water utilities to Tehran.

The screenshot may look convincing, but it doesn’t necessarily prove that the payment, booking or conversation is genuine

A leading name in home and business physical security, Brinks Home, recently said it identified unauthorized access to a portion of its IT systems, an intrusion ShinyHunters claims it carried out to steal millions of records from the security provider's Salesforce instance. Brinks Home hasn’t named the intruder or identified the affected system, but said the responsible party has threatened to leak information it claims to have taken. “Brinks Home is working diligently to determine what information was involved and who may be affected,” the company statement said. “If the Company determines that personal information has been affected, it will notify those individuals as required and as appropriate.” An FAQ page for the incident said that Brinks Home products and services weren’t affected, as far as the company knows at this point, so alarms and other security tools should be working without issue. While Brinks may not have been very forthcoming with information, and lacks any sort of official way for media to communicate with it outside of sending a LinkedIn message it didn’t answer, the party that’s claimed responsibility has gone public with some details, and it’s none other than ShinyHunters with another claimed Salesforce breach. According to leak site monitoring outfit Ransomware.live, ShinyHunters claimed to have obtained more than 4.9 million Salesforce records from Brinks Home “containing some PII.” The group threatened this week to leak the data along with causing “several annoying digital problems” if Brinks Home didn’t reach out by Thursday, July 30, to negotiate a ransom payment. It’s not clear if Brinks Home has contacted ShinyHunters; Brinks Home didn’t respond to messages, and contacts The Register has for ShinyHunters appear to have changed, causing message and email rejections. ShinyHunters has been a prolific Salesforce intruder of late, with the group claiming earlier this year to have stolen data from around 100 high-profile companies’ Salesforce instances. Salesforce has previously warned that an unnamed known threat actor group was actively scanning for public-facing Salesforce instances and abusing misconfigured guest accounts to break in. Brinks Home is no longer part of the larger Brinks brand, with The Brinks Company telling us it sold the home security arm in 2010. Brinks Home’s parent company, Monitronics, has filed for bankruptcy twice since 2019; for customers’ sake, we hope its physical security services are better than its financial management and infosec. ®

One company's inventive campaign for an unreleased product has become a contest between Anthropic and OpenAI to see which can shout the loudest about its own failures. Readers who tuned in earlier today saw the latest episode in the drama – or sitcom – as Anthropic tried to outdo OpenAI's appropriation of the Mythos marketing playbook and made itself the punchline. Since first teasing Mythos in April, Anthropic has marketed the model through fear – declaring its cybersecurity models too dangerous for public release and offering access only to a select few trusted organizations via Project Glasswing. To its credit, the strategy has paid off. Anthropic has closely associated the Mythos name with cybersecurity, which may explain why OpenAI appeared to borrow its competitor's proven PR strategy last week. OpenAI agents exploited a zero-day to escape their sandbox, leading to the autonomous cyberattack on Hugging Face. The episode duly secured sensational headlines playing on the long-held fear that AI will one day go rogue and take over the world. Anthropic responded this week by lathering on even more clown makeup, squandering an opportunity in the process. The Claude maker sent its models into a testing environment to capture a flag. Their prompts said they had no internet access, but because of what Anthropic called "a misunderstanding" with evaluation partner Irregular, the connection was live. Anthropic's models then followed OpenAI's script: they reached the public internet and attacked systems belonging to outside organizations. This time, three were affected rather than one, the company admitted. In one scenario, Mythos 5 persuaded developers to download a poisoned PyPI package. It was installed on 15 machines, including one at a cybersecurity company that routinely scans such packages for malware. In Anthropic's words: "When that company's scanner installed the package, Claude's hidden code executed. We believe the company's security scanner treated PyPI packages as safe to install, and as a result, Claude was able to exfiltrate the company’s credentials to a collection point it had set up. Claude then used these credentials to access further infrastructure from this company." Worse still, the first of the three incidents occurred in April. Anthropic discovered them only months later, during a retrospective manual review prompted by OpenAI's disclosure. Had it not gone looking, they might never have been discovered, let alone disclosed. There are some caveats. Opus 4.7, the oldest model tested, attacked production systems despite apparently recognizing what it was doing. Mythos 5 recognized that accessing the internet violated its instructions, then reasoned its way into continuing anyway. It was also responsible for publishing the poisoned PyPI package. Only an unnamed research model stopped itself from attacking external organizations. Anthropic also said the models were not running with the production safeguards and monitoring that would normally surround a deployment. Most damningly, Anthropic ran Mythos 5 – the model it had deemed too dangerous for public release – without safeguards in an environment that unexpectedly had internet access. Following OpenAI's admission that it failed so badly in its responsibility to control its technology, Anthropic could have easily spun the story in its favor. You don't have to be fictional tapdancing political PR antihero Malcolm Tucker to see how Anthropic could have used the episode to make its case as the safer, more trustworthy AI company. Instead, realizing its own marketing playbook was being used to help a competitor, it went head-to-head with OpenAI, willingly admitted that it made similar sandbox-based blunders, and disclosed that the results were even more calamitous. Three companies hacked, not just one. So, while the AI biz has attempted to eclipse OpenAI's "rogue agent" story with its own, what's left behind is a new reputation for irresponsible handling of technology. Failed superheroes The incident does not instill a great deal of trust in either Anthropic or OpenAi to safeguard the world from its AI. Dr Ilia Kolochenko, founder of ImmuniWeb and practising cybersecurity and data protection lawyer, likened the two companies to failed superheroes. "While making conclusions would be a bit premature at this point in time, the incidents certainly do not increase confidence in the AI vendor's ability to safely deploy AI, let alone to assure their customers that the so-called frontier models are safe to use," he told The Register. "It is akin to hiring a superhero to protect you but being afraid that the superhero may suddenly go rogue and kill you and your family. Nobody needs such a superhero." Likewise, security pro Jake Williams, VP at HunterStrategy and IANS faculty member, said: "I'm not going to mince words: the major AI labs are negligent in protecting the public from their agents. "We need government regulation now or at the very least a private cause of action with guaranteed punitive damages for agents damaging others." By trying to reclaim a marketing trope that served it well, Anthropic has invited scrutiny of its own safety record and accusations that it is chasing attention above all else. Other experts we spoke to shared the concern that both companies are mishandling their agents, with potentially greater consequences as the systems become more capable. The common thread is recklessness, which Anthropic and OpenAI seem oddly eager to advertise. ®

Discover how to apply Zero Trust principles to secure AI adoption, manage agentic risk, and mitigate the threats of frontier AI models.

A week after suspending online banking, CAF Bank still has no timetable for restoring access to its 14,000 UK charity customers. The bank updated customers on Thursday about the outage, which has disrupted payments to staff and suppliers. Little had changed. In a message seen by The Register, CAF Bank said it was not yet able to restore the service safely. As it had earlier in the week, the bank said it detected attempted fraud on some accounts and acted quickly to stop it. Its investigation uncovered a previously unknown vulnerability in the connection between its systems and third-party software. CAF Bank said its technical team was working around the clock with suppliers and external experts on a fix. The Register understands that no timetable has been set for restoring online banking. Earlier this week, CAF Bank CEO Alison Taylor apologized for the disruption. "The core bank is not affected. We are acutely aware of the impact this has on our customers and want this to be fixed as soon as possible, but we cannot restore access to the online service until we are assured the issue is safely resolved," she said. Since The Register first reported the story earlier this week, the BBC has spoken to charities struggling to make essential payments, including payroll. Kevan Hodges, chief executive of Down's syndrome charity 21 Together, told the BBC the outage was "appalling." "People are concerned that wages won't get paid because of this, and that's just stressful when they have bills to pay. My team have wasted days trying to get through to [CAF Bank], but all in vain," he said. Bali Rodgers, chief executive of Safer Communities Alliance, told the BBC the grassroots organizations it represents were slowly losing trust in the bank. CAF Bank also came under fire last year after the introduction of a new banking platform left customers unable to log in or make transactions. The bank later apologized but has not disclosed how much it spent on the system. CAF Bank held £1.45 billion ($1.93 billion) in customer deposits at the end of its 2024/25 financial year. ®

The two Chrome updates in June patched more bugs than the 23 updates before them. Now, Google is ramping up its patching schedule thanks to AI-assisted vulnerability discovery.

Note to privacy-conscious vandals: If you're going to destroy Flock license plate readers, make sure you also take out the other CCTV cameras in the area that could catch you in your crime. Otherwise, you'll end up like one unlucky Californian. Marcus Bee, 40, was arrested by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, accused of joining the ever-growing band of US citizens damaging the controversial cameras popping up across the country. A police report filed this week stated that Bee, of Pismo Beach, was arrested on suspicion of attacking at least three Flock cameras in Lockwood and Bradley. According to the deflock.org website, which maps Flock camera deployments, there are only three of the automated license plate readers (ALPRs) running in the two communities – one in Lockwood and two in Bradley, roughly 25 miles away. Police allege Bee caused thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to “public safety infrastructure.” Monterey County Sheriff’s Office added that Bee was caught after “his actions were captured by other surveillance cameras located nearby,” along with other investigative leads. "This arrest sends a clear message that anyone who intentionally damages public safety equipment will be identified, arrested, and held accountable," said Monterey County Sheriff Tina Nieto. "These cameras have become an invaluable investigative resource that helps us solve crimes, recover stolen vehicles and ag equipment, locate missing persons, and protect our communities. Any attempts to disable these systems will not prevent us from doing our job. “In this case, the suspect's own actions were captured on surveillance cameras, leading directly to his arrest. We will continue to aggressively investigate these crimes and seek prosecution against anyone who targets public safety infrastructure." Bee was jailed with bail set at $30,000. The case follows a similar one in Georgia last week, although local police were unable to identify the suspect(s) behind the two attacks, which involved setting two ALPRs on fire. The two attacks were timed fairly close together, although the phenomenon of inflicting criminal damage onto Flock cameras is something of a long-running trend. Several US police forces have been tasked with arresting alleged Flock vandals, including Jeffrey Scott Sovern, 41, who authorities believe was behind a spate of attacks on ALPR cameras in North Suffolk, Virginia, between April and October 2025. He said, at a hearing in June, that he believed the technology was unconstitutional. Flock cameras: A problem or simply misunderstood? The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office said Flock’s cameras “are an important investigative tool” used to help solve various types of crimes, including missing persons cases, car thefts, and violent crimes such as shootings and homicides where suspect vehicles are involved. Contrary to the opinions held by many, it went on to say, the cameras “are used exclusively to support legitimate criminal investigations,” not to support the US government’s anti-immigration efforts. Likewise, Flock has repeatedly denied offering contracts to agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), although reports suggest police were instead carrying out searches on ICE's behalf. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has also allegedly used Flock data in its own immigration investigations. Other critiques of the technology used by thousands of police departments across the US include problematic abuses, such as police officers using it to stalk romantic interests. The Institute of Justice is aware of at least 26 cases of this behavior, it reported earlier this month, with the majority taking place since 2024. Additionally, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) takes issue with the scale of data gathering by ALPRs. It claims that less than 1 percent of the cars scanned are connected to crime, yet they still have details added to a database, such as vehicle manufacturer, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and scratches. Flock CEO Garrett Langley claimed this week in an interview with The Drive that the company’s cameras were used to solve around 1 million crimes across the US last year. Responding to claims such as Sovern’s – that the cameras are unconstitutional, specifically that they violate Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights – Langley said there are no legal issues, and he doesn’t foresee any arising in the future. Flock’s spokespeople have repeatedly condemned the cases of camera vandalism, highlighting the risk of losing evidence that could be crucial to solving ongoing criminal cases. ®

If the generative AI giant had followed well-known security best practices, it’s likely that its AI agent would never have escaped to the open internet and hacked multiple companies.