An experiment in which AI models were asked to break into simulated networks showed the hacking skills of DeepSeek and GLM to be not far behind OpenAI’s most advanced cyber model, which isn’t public.

‘Notify when left behind’ is making its way to Android – but to limited devices for now.

Another competitive model developed outside of China could change the open-weight landscape.

Under Apple’s new policy, the company will scan publicly shared iCloud links for harmful content – and possibly ban violators.

Some WordPress sites can still be attacked while they install the fix for an actively exploited flaw, according to Umut Bayram, the Picus Security researcher who found it. The update that installs the fix still unpacks its files using the site's old, unpatched code, so an attacker who strikes at the right moment can run code on the server. The researcher advises blocking web access to the

Threat actors are attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security flaw impacting OpenSSH that can enable sign-ins to accounts that have no password set, according to Previdian. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-123158 (CVSS score: 8.1) and codenamed SSHole (or *sshole), impacts Linux systems that run OpenSSH on the musl C library with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) disabled,

OpenAI on Thursday unveiled GPT‑6 Cyber, which it described as a major step forward in security research that brings together stronger cybersecurity capabilities with a step-change improvement in model alignment. The new model is "more capable at finding and fixing vulnerabilities, and far more reliable staying within the boundaries researchers set," OpenAI said. It has classified the model as

DigiCert has admitted that a botched server migration left an internal system exposed to the internet for more than a year, allowing an unauthorized user to access customer data, including passports, driver's licenses, and other identity documents. The certificate authority has begun notifying affected customers but has yet to disclose how many people had their information exposed. In an email seen by The Register, DigiCert confirmed the compromised information included names, business email addresses, phone numbers, and business addresses. Some records may also have contained passports, driver's licenses, utility bills, or other identification documents. "We are completing a review of identification documents to determine the specific individuals involved," DigiCert told those affected, adding that it would notify those people once the review was complete. DigiCert's incident report traces the blunder back to February 2025, when an internal business system was moved from a VPN-protected network to a different availability zone. That change also opened the system up to the public internet, where it sat for more than 16 months without DigiCert realizing. The archive used the same account management platform as DigiCert's customer-facing products, including a self-registration feature that was never supposed to be available on the internal system. This allowed outsiders to create accounts without multifactor authentication and, thanks to a separate permissions flaw, use them to browse archived customer records. DigiCert found the unauthorized accounts on June 18, 2026, but initially dismissed them as harmless because they weren't assigned to an application. A security researcher raised the alarm about the account creation issue three days later, but it took until July 2 for DigiCert to shut it down. Unfortunately, someone had already been poking around. It wasn't until October 12 that DigiCert began investigating whether customer information had actually been accessed. On October 19, it confirmed that an unauthorized account had accessed a subset of archived records between June 27 and July 2. DigiCert described the affected records as a "small proportion" of its archive but hasn't disclosed how many customers or individuals were caught up in the breach. The company did not respond to The Register’s questions at the time of publication. DigiCert's postmortem makes for uncomfortable reading. The server move didn't get a proper security review, monitoring failed to pick up suspicious activity, and the access controls weren't much use against self-registered accounts. The company has since switched off self-registration, tightened network access, and added monitoring that might have come in handy a few months earlier. Certificate authority operations, CertCentral, and DigiCert ONE were unaffected, the company said, adding that customer credentials and issued certificates remain secure. It also found no evidence that the unauthorized account had been used to issue, revoke, or validate certificates. That’s good news for anyone worried about their certificates, but less so for those who handed DigiCert a copy of their passport. ®

A fix for CVE-2026-83844, a remote code execution flaw in Windows Paint, is now in the Microsoft Store. Paint gets this fix only through a Store update, not through Windows updates. The fixed build, 11.2609.401.0, was the newest Paint build in all ten countries The Hacker News checked today. The flaw is an out-of-bounds read that could let an attacker run code over a network. Microsoft rates

A browser extension that can run scripts on claude.ai could make Claude Desktop run code on a person's computer, researchers at Forever Security, an endpoint security company, showed in a test. The attack needs Dispatch, a Claude feature that lets people send tasks from their phone to Claude Desktop. The flaw that makes this possible can still be exploited, the researchers said earlier this

An update on Athena, and some unsolicited predictions on what's coming next On Saturday, Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier. I agree with him. Go read it if you haven't. I've spent the summer looking at what these models find, and the gap he describes between what they can do and what the rest of us are ready for is the one I've been staring at since May. The hardest piece of his

The UK government is paving the way for rules requiring essential service operators and digital providers to guard against losing control of AI agents and report incidents when safeguards fail. An amendment to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which is passing through Parliament, would give ministers powers to regulate the deployment and reporting of agentic AI in certain organizations. The new clause was introduced during the bill's third reading in the House of Lords this week. In an explanatory note, ministers outlined plans for safeguards, notification of affected organizations, preservation of evidence, and government-led incident reviews. The measures would require consultation and parliamentary approval through secondary legislation. The move follows a series of incidents. Last month, OpenAI revealed that its agents repeatedly strayed beyond their intended scope, prompting the company to notify more than 100 organizations about the issues. That came after July's incident, in which an OpenAI agent accessed the internet and breached machine learning platform Hugging Face. The episode, and the potential for more damage from poorly designed AI agent deployments, have prompted MPs to question whether UK law can deal with such threats. Speaking to The Register, Stuart Davey, a partner at law firm Pinsent Masons, described the clause as "quite novel." Rather than directly imposing new duties, it would allow ministers to introduce rules and investigatory powers covering regulated organizations. Davey said that could include powers "to look where there has been such an AI agentic compromise or issue, and do some things... appoint inspectors, enter and search premises, seize and retain documents." Under the proposals, the minister could confer certain powers on regulators, requiring action from targeted organizations. Potentially affected organizations include gas and electricity suppliers, managed service providers, and cloud providers deploying AI agents for customers. Foundation model developers would not automatically fall within scope simply because they build the underlying technology. "Where there's a security or operational compromise in relation to a relevant network or information system, that would seem to capture those managed service providers or cloud computing providers who are using AI, and there's that loss of control," said Davey. He advised cloud and managed service providers to track whether the proposed measures become law. Evin McMullen, CEO and co-founder of AI identity and control infrastructure company AmanTrue, said the amendment recognizes loss of oversight or control as a security risk but does not itself impose new duties. "The amendment allows future regulations to introduce investigatory and enforcement powers where an incident involves an AI agent, targeting organizations running essential digital services," he said. "The deployer of an AI agent chooses its permissions, connects it to systems, and gives it access to data. When something goes wrong, the deployer is the party that will be expected to explain what happened. "Accountability stays with the organization that put the agent into the system, and ultimately with executives and the board. Whether model builders are captured will depend on how the regulations are written and whether a builder sits in a regulated category or a regulated supply chain." ®

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Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis has revealed that its ongoing investigation into the agentic cyber attack targeting its systems also exposed names, usernames, password hashes and live tokens for all users. "While we investigated, we removed access to Reactor and Data Solutions," the company said. "At this time we continue to have no evidence that any investigations data has been accessed

Welcome to Friday and therefore to a fresh edition of On Call, The Register's weekly tale of tech support trials and tribulations that readers kindly share. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mason," who told us he once worked at a hospital doing tech support for its research labs. "One of the labs was for a doctor who was one of the world's top organ transplant researchers" Mason told On Call. The doctor was also a voracious consumer of – ahem – adult entertainment, a habit that saw his PC and other machines around the lab often come down with a nasty case of malware. Mason got to clean that up, sometimes multiple times in a single week. The doctor's foibles were widely known around the hospital, as was the fact that his activities violated several workplace policies. Mason pointed this out to his boss every time he cleaned up a fresh malware outbreak but such was the doctor's status that management never intervened. And then the hospital was hit by a nasty cyber-worm that did a lot of damage. During the cleanup, Mason's colleagues found logs that showed the doctor's PC was the source of the infection, and that he had been indulging in his online hobby at the time the worm arrived. Mason assumed this would be the moment at which the doctor would finally be held accountable and face disciplinary action. Instead the doctor made a bargain with the IT department to henceforth use only a designated PC when pursuing – ahem – personal and/or intimate matters. And he would only use office PCs for actual work. The hospital's tech team rescued a PC from its e-waste pile for this job. "Get this thing going and deliver it to Doctor Pervert," Mason's boss ordered. By this stage, Mason had had enough. He escalated his protests, telling his boss that indulging this doctor was unprofessional, likely exposed the hospital to lawsuits, wasted IT department resources, and was just wrong. "What do you want to hear?" his boss replied. "The CIO told me do this or get another job." After Mason prepped that PC, he only needed to clean up malware about once a year – after the poor machine was so overrun with malware that it no longer served the doctor's purposes. Mason left the hospital while this PC was still in place. "You'll be shocked, no doubt, to learn that years later the doctor's graduate students filed a lawsuit," he told On Call. "And that the separate fun-time computer was one of the pieces of evidence that the hospital knew about his – ahem – proclivities and not just ignored them but facilitated them." Have you been asked to cover up revolting behavior? Or ignore policy? Click here to share your story with On Call. It's our policy to tell a great tech support story week, so we appreciate every contribution. ®

A backdoor has been found hiding in the web server that runs Control Web Panel (CWP), a free panel for managing Linux hosting servers, researchers at QiAnXin's XLab said this week. The backdoored web server executes commands that attackers send via web requests, and those requests never appear in its access logs. Installing it takes root access, so the attackers must already control the server.

Two flaws in Barracuda's Email Security Gateway, an email-filtering appliance, can be chained to run commands on it as root, its highest level of access, with no login required. The company released patches on Monday, and the security firm watchTowr detailed the attack chain on Thursday. One flaw, CVE-2026-116606, is an authorization bypass. An unauthenticated attacker can use it to restore a

Nation-state actors and criminals likely exploited the PHP2SHELL vulnerability before its disclosure, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. “These vulnerabilities, like the PHP vulnerabilities that were disclosed the other day, had been in the wild for years,” Prince said on the company’s third quarter earnings call. “We're going back through our logs looking for any evidence that hackers or nation-state actors or others had been using them in the past. I know that we're going to find examples of that.” That was just one of the warnings he offered on the call, among them that some of Cloudflare’s customers believe AI agents are “a bane to their business and want to keep them away.” To explain why, Prince hypothesized that he could use an agent to find him a restaurant to eat at after he finishes his day of investor relations duties. “It might go and scour the internet and look at 1,000 different restaurants' websites, pull down 1,000 different menus, and then I might choose to only go to one of those,” he said. “The problem is that 999 of those restaurants have now had a cost that is just been applied to them, but they are not getting any benefit.” The CEO admitted that web searches have always driven some low-value traffic but feels the volume of agentic activity – which Cloudflare has previously predicted will be one thousand times greater than clicks from humans – means the problem is now at a different scale. Prince also had bad news for Kubernetes aficionados, because he thinks containers might become another casualty of the agentic age. The CEO allowed that containers are “a significant improvement over bare metal or even virtual machines,” and said they fueled the growth of hyperscale clouds and mobile applications. But he thinks containers are already cooked. “The container-based architecture of the hyperscalers and neoclouds just can't keep up in a cost-effective way with the new agentic paradigms of today,” he argued, again citing the 1000:1 ratio of bot:human traffic Cloudflare expects to see online any year now. That’s a Cloudflare-centric view, because Prince pitched the company’s serverless “Workers” service as an alternative to containers. The company also offers products that can either block agents, ameliorate the cost and traffic impacts of agentic activity, or allow organizations to monetize traffic generated by AI. Prince said demand for those products is growing fast, claiming that since July 1st, “approximately five percent” of the web opted in to Cloudflare’s content protection products. The CEO said Meta is already a customer, and said Zuck’s new “Muse” agents will benefit Cloudflare by creating more agentic traffic that third parties want to tame. He also pointed to year-on-year revenue growth of 39 percent, which saw quarterly revenue reach a record $782.5 million. And he thinks there are better days ahead, due to the terrible state of security. “It may seem like the sky is falling with the number of new security vulnerabilities that have been reported over the last few weeks,” Prince said. “I wish I could tell you we were through the worst, but we're not.” He thinks Cloudflare can profit from security misery because the extent of its activities and client base mean it is “among the first to receive quiet disclosure of new vulnerabilities” and remediates them before disclosure. Investors thought this all made sense, and in after-hours trading sent Cloudflare shares up by around 15 percent, meaning it recovered and then improved on losses that it incurred earlier after major US indices dropped around four percent as investors who worry tech stocks are overvalued. ®

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India’s Computer Emergency Response Team has warned the nation’s financial services industry of a “significant escalation” in attacks by what it describes as an “AI-assisted financial threat actor” that has re-targeted victims after they flubbed remediation efforts. CERT-IN first detected the attacks in October and issued advisory in which it warned digital lending platforms, fintech entities, payment service providers, and wallet operators that attackers were targeting internet-facing applications, exposed APIs and privileged endpoints. If the attackers found a way in, they tried to use payment APIs to steal money. On Thursday, the CERT published an update in which it said it continues to hear of successful attacks, including from outfits that tried to remediate their systems after earlier incidents. “The same entities have been deliberately re-targeted, including after incomplete remediation and attacks have been timed to coincide with holidays, weekends and other low-monitoring windows to delay detection and response,” the CERT warned. CERT-IN has decided the attackers need a name and chose “CRAFTY FALCON.” The security org has also revealed that the crew uses AI-enhanced tools including the ARTEX pen-testing tool, the Cairn attack search engine, and the CyberStrikeAI framework – all of which have been linked to users who appear to speak Chinese. CRAFTY FALCON’s tactics see it go looking for internet-exposed environments used for testing or development, where it finds artefacts such as shared credentials, tokens, or network paths that help it move into production systems. If it gets in, the crew re-writes victims’ applications so they do things like make unauthorized API calls. Victims’ defenses assume that only legitimate apps would call those APIs, so activity conducted by the re-written apps aren’t flagged as an attack. Even if victims suspect an attack, they have a lot to cope with because CERT-IN says CRAFTY FALCON creates many “functionally identical variants refined in rapid succession; a pattern consistent with AI-generated code and iterative AI-assisted development.” The crew also quickly exploits newly discovered vulnerabilities to keep its attacks fresh. Once it gets a toehold, the criminal crew makes tiny payments of about $0.01 to test if its attacks work. If those transfers work, CRAFTY FALCON makes larger payments. When the target is a cryptocurrency exchange or virtual digital asset service provider, the crew steals wallet keys and empties cryptocurrency wallets. Vendors of observability tools will be warming up their Indian sales teams today, because CERT-IN’s advice to Indian businesses includes improving their ability to log events, monitor for anomalies in real time, and send alerts. It also urged keeping test environments off the internet, and restricting access to cloud resources because CRAFTY FALCON is fond of using them to run its attacks. CERT-IN also warns that the attacks are “active and escalating” and therefore worthy of 24x7 monitoring. Interestingly, the CERT’s advisory mentions attacks on “entities” across banking, financial services, and insurance, but only names the kind of businesses mentioned above as having reported attacks. The Register points this out because India is home to literally thousands of banks, many of them small operations that sometimes lack basic infosec protections. CRAFTY FALCON therefore has a target-rich environment in India should it choose to expand its activities. ®