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. ®

In the wake of OpenAI agents attacking Hugging Face, Nvidia has recruited a new posse of partners to promote open source models as the security solution the industry needs. The AI arms dealer announced the foundation, the Open Secure AI Alliance, in a blog post today, describing the mission of the group being “to ensure defenders everywhere have open, frontier tools they can trust and control.” Partners in the group are numerous, ranging from established tech giants like Microsoft, Red Hat, HPE, IBM, and Adobe to newer groups like Palantir, SpacexAI, Hugging Face, and The Linux Foundation. What all the founding members have in common, Nvidia said, is that they agree open source AI models are a fundamental part of modern cybersecurity, just like prior open source tech has been for the infosec space. “The United States and its partners now face a choice in AI security: whether the defenses that protect our infrastructure will sit inside a few opaque systems or be built on open models, harnesses and tools that any defender can study, adapt and deploy,” Nvidia said in the announcement. The claims in many ways echo the pleadings from tech industry heavyweights made in an open letter to US government regulators last week. That letter, signed by many of the same companies that are part of the founding OSAA cadre, essentially argues that regulators should ensure Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI don’t end up with total control of the US AI market, and that open-weight models should be given a seat at the table, too. The new alliance is arguing that, not only do open-weight models need to be allowed to proliferate in the US, but they also need to be considered a fundamental part of the security puzzle. For those unfamiliar with the Hugging Face incident, a group of autonomous OpenAI agents, operating in a sandbox and stripped of guardrails to test their full capability to solve cybersecurity puzzles, exploited a pair of zero-days to escape and gain access to the internet. For some reason, the bots thought the solution to the problems they were posed could be found in Hugging Face systems, so they broke in and accessed a bunch of private information and hijacked some credentials. When Hugging Face turned to closed-source US frontier AI lab bots to examine the incident and help figure out what happened, those tools declined to help because they thought the data Hugging Face was trying to examine was itself malicious. Hugging Face turned to Chinese-made GLM 5.2, hosted on its own infrastructure, to figure things out. “That incident showed a practical truth,” said Nvidia. “When defenders cannot inspect, adapt and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure, their ability to respond is constrained at exactly the moment speed matters most.” Only open-source AI models, which China leads development on, can fill that role, the OSAA argues, and it’s prepared to counter those who say open models are a threat: Just look at what happened last week and it's readily apparent that closed source models are dangerous too. The Alliance is pooling its efforts to give security pros access to essential open tools. Nvidia said that it’s participating by releasing its Object-Oriented Agent project on GitHub, HPE is contributing its SPIFFE/SPIRE zero-trust AI identity framework, Hugging Face has handed its Safetensors transparent AI model weight formatting to the PyTorch Foundation, and SpaceXAI has open-sourced Grok Build (though the reason behind that doesn’t appear to be entirely benevolent). In addition, IBM and Red Hat have released Lightwell, an automated open-source vulnerability remediation platform, while Microsoft has come out with MDASH, a multi-model agentic scanning harness to automate bug discovery and remediation. Those efforts, while not open source themselves, are still a sign that Alliance members “are building an open defense stack,” Nvidia said. The OSAA ended its announcement with another call for policymakers not simply ban open-source AI models, as doing so “would weaken defensive capacity and risk concentrating power, dependence, and vulnerability in a few closed providers,” the group said. Many providers, as we saw last week, are more concerned with protecting themselves than helping victims of autonomous cyber attacks respond quickly. Clement Delangue, cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face, said in a post on X that he spoke to OpenAI over the weekend about last week’s incident and asked the company to provide funding to support the development of better open-source AI cyber defenses. It’s not clear if the company plans to fulfill that request; it’s not a founding member of the Nvidia-led OSAA. Neither is Google or Anthropic, for that matter. We reached out to all three companies for their take on the new initiative, but didn’t hear back from any of them. ®

Not content with broken Windows updates, Microsoft has disclosed two problems with Defender for Endpoint on Linux – one that could disable the security service after a reboot, and another that prevents updates on FIPS-enabled Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and 9. The more serious problem affected versions 101.26042.0000 through 101.26042.0009 across all supported Linux operating systems. After an upgrade or reinstall followed by a reboot, "the Defender service might be disabled on some devices," according to Microsoft. "If you use Defender for Servers (Plan 1 or 2) with Defender for Cloud and have the MDE [Microsoft Defender Endpoint] integration enabled, automatic updates for the MDE.Linux extension are enabled by default, which means your machines could have received an affected version automatically," it explained. "If an affected version was installed, the issue might impact active protection on rebooted devices until remediation steps are taken." Microsoft did not specify what caused Defender to become disabled, but anything that could knock out endpoint protection will give administrators sweaty palms. A separate problem affected RHEL 8 and 9 systems running in FIPS mode: the 101.26042.x update could fail to install, leaving devices on their previous version. FIPS refers to US Federal Information Processing Standards, which in this context impose requirements on the cryptography used by government and other regulated systems. Although Microsoft's alert did not mention an available update, its release notes direct users affected by the disabled-service bug to build 101.26042.0011. The separate FIPS installation problem is fixed in version 101.26052.0011 and later. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Linux protects server workloads on-premises and in the cloud. According to Microsoft, "it helps you prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats with unified visibility through the Microsoft Defender portal." Other endpoint security platforms are available, but where an organization has gone all-in with Microsoft, the unified management offered by Defender for Endpoint on Linux can be difficult to resist. Microsoft has an unfortunate habit of shipping broken updates for its flagship operating system, Windows. An update that breaks software specifically designed to protect a device takes things to another level, particularly given the relentless rise in attacks and the need to both fend them off and monitor activity. Hence the appeal of unified visibility through the Microsoft Defender portal. However, an update that could leave Defender disabled after a reboot – while also refusing to install on some security-hardened systems – is less than ideal. ®

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. ®

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.®

Europol and its partners' investigators flagged 4,340 “horrific” URLs for removal over several weeks in June and July as part of an ongoing crackdown on The Com (short for community), a loosely knit network of online groups whose young members participate in a range of illicit activities. These range from hacking, swatting, and digital extortion to real-life shootings, stabbings, and other physical violence. Europol’s recent Referral Action Days, aimed at disrupting The Com’s online ecosystem and stopping the spread of its propaganda, is part of the larger Project Compass operation. Project Compass began in 2025, and its partner law-enforcement agencies span the US, UK, and EU member states. Investigators from Belgium, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden participated in the Referral Action Days during June and July. Various groups linked to The Com post content online to recruit members and groom young victims using social media, gaming platforms, and messaging apps. “The more extreme and harmful the content a user or group can produce or extort, the higher their status within the online community,” according to Europol. “These acts are often livestreamed on social media platforms, where online bystanders cheer them on, and later saved and disseminated.” The URLs flagged for removal during this latest push to disrupt The Com’s recruiting activities included “violent videos and images depicting self-harm, suicide, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), animal cruelty, and violent attacks,” the international cops said. This, the European cops say, includes so-called blood walls, which are paintings made with blood that display the extorter’s alias and group affiliation, and cut-signs, where the victims are forced to carve the extorter’s name into their bodies. It also includes videos of street attacks and arson, plus manuals on how to commit these violent attacks, along with instructions on grooming and extorting vulnerable minors, and conducting doxxing and swatting. Europol says its European Counter Terrorism Centre has received “hundreds” of requests from member states and others over the past two years to help investigate crimes linked to The Com. It describes the online network as a “global threat, particularly concerning minors as both victims and perpetrators.” Last year, both the UK and US issued similar warnings about a subset of The Com that recruits children and teens for contract shootings, kidnappings, and other real-life violent crimes. In July 2025, the FBI said that In Real Life (IRL) Com had become increasingly brazen in its swat-for-hire and violence-as-a-service solicitations. The FBI's alert followed a similar notice from the UK National Crime Agency about a "deeply concerning" trend of The Com recruiting teenage boys to commit a range of criminal acts, from cyber fraud and ransomware to child sexual abuse.®