Plus: Russian cyberspies turn to infrastructure hacking, DHS repeatedly fails to realize it’d been hacked, a breach exposes an AI music generator’s scraping ways, and more.
The White House recently announced the Gold Eagle Initiative, a new federal program designed to use AI to centralize, prioritize, and accelerate vulnerability patching across critical infrastructure, government agencies, and tech partners. Operating out of CMU's Software Engineering Institute, it essentially acts as an AI-driven clearinghouse to fix security flaws before threat actors can exploit them.
Because let's face it, our current bug reporting and patching systems are absolute speed demons. It only takes a lifetime 🤦🏻♂️ or two to get a critical vulnerability acknowledged and fixed, so why change anything?
Btw, my candid opinion about the status of current vulnerability reporting is painfully slow, so we desperately need a framework that actually moves at the speed of the threat landscape. I think this initiative is genuinely a good idea and a step in the right direction, though the announcement is still light on the exact technical implementation.
I’m personally eager to see what will happen in practice, but it is definitely an impressive concept. What are your thoughts on this? Will an AI-coordinated pipeline actually help scale response times, or is it just going to generate massive noise and triage fatigue for overworked infosec teams?
The City Attorney’s Office sent the tech giants cease-and-desist letters this week telling them to stop profiting from 13 “face-swap” apps that are overwhelmingly used to target women and girls.
RFC 8628's device authorization grant lets a TV or CLI "poll" for login on a second screen. On Google's implementation, the entire session was transferable across browsers, the authorization server never checked that the client_id and scope in the consent URL matched the ones the device_code was issued for, and prompt=none turned the whole thing into a one-click, invisible account takeover.
Since WIRED reported on Meta’s NameTag face recognition system, company executives have made confusing and conflicting remarks about its very existence.
ESET researchers discovered 11 vulnerable UEFI shim bootloaders signed by Microsoft that allow attackers to bypass UEFI Secure Boot by exploiting decade-old vulnerabilities
"Build a smart home", they said. "It'll make life so much better", they said. Well, life wasn't very bloody good at 23:00 the other night after travelling 33 hours from Paris only to find the IoT doorlock batteries dead and the 9V "jump start" procedure completely failing! Eventually, the locksmith arrived and opened an old-school physical lock on another door in an alarmingly short time. So, lessons:
Battery-powered locks suck and will eventually lock you out of your house
Don't trust a fallback mechanism as rudimentary as "hold a 9V battery on some terminals"
Always have an old school manual backup approach, AKA "a key"
As I say in the video, we do have other doors that have keys, and if it weren't for the complacency we developed, we would have had one of these accessible. But alas, we didn't. The path forward is to take a deep dive into Ubiquiti's Access ecosystem, which I've flagged in the past, and by pure coincidence, I already had a meeting lined up with them to discuss just this. So, the hardware is on the way, and I'll have something entirely new to play with in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence.
Nearly 60 of the bugs quashed in July’s Patch Tuesday earned a “critical” severity rating, meaning miscreants or malware could use them to seize remote control over a Windows device with little or no help from the user. Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws, including two that are already being exploited in the wild.
Two of the zero-day weaknesses allow an attacker to elevate their user rights on a Windows system, as do approximately 250 other elevation of privilege flaws fixed this month; they include CVE-2026-56155 — an Active Directory Federation Services bug — and CVE-2026-56164, a Microsoft Sharepoint vulnerability.
CVE-2026-50661 is a security feature bypass in Windows BitLocker that could allow attackers to gain access to encrypted data if they have physical access to the device. Microsoft said this bug has been detailed publicly, but that it is not aware of any active exploitation.
In a blog post on July 9, Microsoft Executive Vice President Pavan Davuluri wrote that Windows users will notice “a higher volume of security updates included in each security release” as a result of AI aiding in the discovery of vulnerabilities.
“The pace of vulnerability discovery is changing with advances in AI making it possible to find more issues, faster, across more code, with new mechanisms that can accelerate both discovery and analysis,” Davuluri wrote.
Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, called attention to CVE-2026-48561, a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Copilot (with a 9.6 CVSS threat score) that allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over the network. Microsoft says an attacker could exploit this bug by hosting a malicious website that causes Microsoft Edge for Android to automatically send crafted prompts to Copilot when a user visits the site.
As AI advances the state of vulnerability discovery and remediation, it is also making it easier for attackers to quickly devise working exploits for known software flaws. Microsoft has long labeled security bugs using its “exploitability index,” which is Redmond’s best guess as to how likely it is that attackers will be able to figure out a reliable way to exploit a given vulnerability.
But Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, argues that Microsoft’s exploitability index needs to do a better job of shifting with the machine speed of discovery. For example, Microsoft originally gave this month’s SharePoint zero-day an exploitability rating of “less likely,” although the flaw was added to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list on July 1.
“Anthropic’s Red Team’s own findings for known vulnerabilities (n-days) revealed how fragile this system has become, with its Mythos Preview model being able to produce proof-of-concept exploits for 13 of 14 vulnerabilities that were rated ‘Exploitation Less Likely’ or ‘Exploitation Unlikely,'” Narang said. “What this means is that our way of looking at Patch Tuesday has changed, because the exploitability index is centered around humans, not AI tools, and as these tools continue to improve, defense needs to improve alongside it.”
Chris Goettl at Ivanti observed that the record patch numbers from Microsoft come as a number of other major software makers are increasing their patch cadence, including Adobe which announced today it is moving to twice-monthly security bulletins published on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month (Adobe also cited AI for accelerating their patch cycles). Cisco, Mozilla and Oracle also are shipping updates more frequently, while Google’s patch batches in June 2026 totaled more than 900 security fixes, Goettl noted.
Backing up your Windows system and/or data is always a good idea before applying operating system updates. Given the volume of patches addressed this month it may be wise for end users to wait a few days before applying these fixes. It’s not uncommon for security patches to introduce system stability issues, and those chances probably increase quite a bit with the gigantic patch count released today.
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