The guardrails that prevent closed-source, frontier models from aiding threat actors have turned into handcuffs that prevent those bots from helping to find and fix serious vulns. Daniel Fox Franke, a security researcher, was recently trying to track down the source of a segmentation fault in ripgrep, and found OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol wouldn't cooperate. "OpenAI's cybersecurity classifier is a huge pain when you're trying to track down a segfault," he wrote in a social media post on Sunday. "...The classifier won't even let it answer what entrypoints from rg into musl lead to allocations on the mallocng heap." And just like Hugging Face in the case of OpenAI's accidental attack, Franke ended up having to use open weight models from Chinese AI providers – Z'ai GLM 5.2 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 – to complete his analysis of what appears to be a Linux kernel bug. In an email to The Register, Franke explained, "It started out from a pretty anodyne prompt: I noticed that ripgrep had segfaulted repeatedly during a long-running Codex session, so I instructed the root agent to spin off a subagent to investigate what was happening. "A few minutes later I hit the first classifier trip, which the root agent told me was the result of a subagent pursuing an inappropriate line of inquiry and that it was steering it away from that." Even so, he said, the classifier balked several times in quick succession. "It seemed that attempts to produce the crash and analyze the heap were mostly responsible, so I started up a fresh context in which I warned that these trips had happened previously, and that its task should be strictly scoped to analyzing ripgrep and musl source code (not kernel, because I had no inkling at this point that this was a kernel bug): it must not attempt to reproduce the crash or to analyze core files," he explained. "Nonetheless, the classifier kept tripping despite its adherence to those instructions, and that's when I gave up on getting any useful work out of it." Franke said that given how much more restrictive Anthropic's models have been, he didn't even bother trying any of the Claude model family. "OpenAI's cybersecurity classifier is a separate system which censors output from the generative model, and the classifier is the only thing which gave me a problem," he said. "I never encountered any refusals from Sol itself: it knew that most of the classifier trips were inappropriate and always continued working with me in good faith to work around the problem." Franke said that while OpenAI's error messages directed him toward the Enterprise Trusted Access program, he didn't bother to apply because he's ineligible. What he didn't realize until recently, he said, is that there's a separate Trusted Access program for individuals. "I still haven't signed up for that, because I regard the verification procedure as a bit of an indignity," he explained, echoing similar sentiment The Register has heard from other security researchers. "I'll put up with it if I'm ever forced to, but not for as long as open models remain a practical alternative." Two open models did prove practical for this bug hunt: GLM 5.2 and Kimi K3. Franke said each served a distinct purpose. "K3 made the initial breakthrough with the key bit of evidence that I was dealing with a kernel bug, but its subsequent investigative work was sloppy: jumping to unfounded conclusions and spoiling its own evidentiary record, and it went totally off the rails when its context got large," he said. "GLM-5.2 is what finished the job for me, re-auditing K3's work and putting together an airtight case." Franke said it was frustrating to wrestle with defiant tooling and expressed skepticism about model access limitations given the availability of open source alternatives. "From my perspective, an uncooperative tool is simply a broken one," he said. "And no, I don't believe this is sustainable in the face of open-weight competition. I'm a total pragmatist about open source and don't mind at all working with proprietary products as long as they get the job done. But with proprietary software, there's a much greater hazard of it being built to serve the vendor's priorities rather than the customer's. Open source has a natural advantage in preventing that." Franke said that there's still work to be done on the Linux bug, which doesn't yet have a patch and doesn't appear to represent an exploitable vulnerability. "Where my investigation stands is that I know two things confidently," he said. "First, that the crashes are caused by a kernel bug. Second, that I've identified a kernel bug. But that this bug is causing these crashes is still just a conjecture, and I have a lot more investigation to do before I can think about shipping anything to [the Linux Kernel Mailing List]." Last week, much of the US tech industry came out in support of open weight models in response to protectionism promoted by Anthropic and OpenAI. The US government has yet to articulate a coherent AI policy with regard to open weight models. ®

UPDATED Watch out for untrusted documents. According to research, an attacker can hide malicious instructions in a Word document that, when included in Copilot for Word’s context, may alter document output and copy the instructions into newly created files that use the affected document as source material, without the victim noticing. Håkon Måløy, a Norwegian data scientist with a PhD in applied AI and ML, publicly disclosed the issue in a blog post Tuesday. Måløy describes the issue in considerable detail while withholding the specific prompt payload, arguing that, because no robust mitigation exists, it would be irresponsible to disclose anything beyond the class of the vulnerability. “To my knowledge, this is among the first public demonstrations of document-borne AI-worm self-propagation through normal workflows in a mainstream commercial productivity suite,” Måløy noted. Måløy said that he has been working with Microsoft since March 2026 on addressing the vulnerability, but after multiple updates to Copilot, this new class of Copilot worm is still viable. Microsoft mitigated the exploit demonstrated by his original proof-of-concept prompt, but Måløy said rewording the payload allowed him to successfully propagate the worm and alter financial data in a target document. Måløy and Microsoft twice delayed public disclosure of the issue, but, after 144 days, he said in his report that people needed to be made aware. “The coordination period agreed with Microsoft has been exhausted, and testing shows that no robust mitigation for the broader vulnerability class is currently available,” Måløy wrote. “Two mitigation attempts, including a model upgrade, did not close the class.” How Copilot propagates a Word worm Måløy explained the worm’s execution with an example involving an employee preparing a financial report for their company. The employee downloads a market analysis from a trusted website to help with the preparation of a financial report in Copilot, unaware that the source had been compromised and the document they downloaded contains hidden malicious instructions. The hidden instructions (inserted as small white text in his proof of concept) tell Copilot to alter figures in the report the employee generates and to copy the worm into the report they create with Copilot. If another employee later adds that report to their own work, the whole process begins again, and documents generated from it also contain the worm, and, as it spreads, it makes tracing the infection to its source extremely difficult. “The attack can therefore continue without further involvement from either the compromised website or the original malicious document,” Måløy said. “The attacker does not need access to the victim’s Microsoft 365 tenant. The attacker only needs to share a malicious document with the victim.” Copilot should use information in documents a user includes in its context for a project without treating instructions embedded in a document as additional prompts, Måløy said, but his research suggests it doesn't always do that. A fundamental flaw Måløy argues that he’s essentially dug up a new type of cross-domain prompt injection attack that abuses a fundamental part of modern LLM architecture. “For AI-assistants to be useful, they often must process emails, documents, webpages, memories, tool outputs, and other information that may be controlled by an attacker,” the researcher said. But if an LLM has to process data in order to determine it contains an attack, the attack could already be influencing that determination. “Relying on the model to detect XPIAs therefore resembles asking an interpreter to execute an untrusted program to determine whether that program is safe to execute,” Måløy asserted. Were Microsoft or some other company to pop another model in front of that model to check for malicious content, it only moves the problem outward, Måløy said, creating a “LLMs all the way down” scenario. “The long-term challenge likely lies in designing systems in which goals and intentions also exist independently of the information being processed,” he said. Until that time, Måløy argues, “any system that integrates an LLM into a trusted workflow today must assume that attacker-controlled content entering the model’s context will result in compromise at some rate.” What can Copilot customers do to reduce the risk? Short of ditching Copilot, there’s not much. “No customer-side remediation fully addresses the issue at the time of publication,” Måløy said, but he does have a few tips. Treat externally sourced documents as untrusted when using them in Copilot, he recommends, and fully review every single document before sending it to Copilot, and fully review any Copilot-generated or edited documents before distributing them. Sheesh - if you’re going to have to actually read that stuff, you might as well just cut Copilot out of the loop and do the thinking yourself. Microsoft has been in touch to confirm the research, but the company's statement doesn't do anything to allay fears this is an unsolved issue. “We have addressed the findings reported by the researcher and thank them for working with us through coordinated vulnerability disclosure. To address this class of risk, we use a defense-in-depth strategy with safeguards that block malicious instructions at multiple points and help keep tasks aligned with users’ requests. We are continuously strengthening these safeguards as the technology and threat landscape evolve. We encourage customers to install the latest updates, use multiple layers of security protection, treat content from unknown sources with caution, and review AI-generated content before using or sharing it.” We also reached out to Måløy, but didn’t hear back before publication. ® Updated at 1841 GMT on July 29 to add Microsoft's statement.

Security researchers at Tenable suspect the Iran-linked faux hacktivist outfit CyberAv3ngers was behind the cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 Minnesota water facilities. Neither state-level nor federal officials have made any claims regarding attribution for the attacks, however, Tenable reckons the operational pattern is consistent with the crew's previous raids, noting the timing relative to recent government warnings. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) updated an advisory on Iran-linked attackers targeting programmable logic controllers (PLCs) across critical infrastructure on July 22, four days before Minnesota said the attacks targeted its systems. The advisory warned that Iran-linked hackers were attempting to disrupt operations using tactics previously associated with CyberAv3ngers. Government facilities, water and wastewater systems, and energy providers were among those urged to remain on high alert. What happened in Minnesota? On July 26 and 27, more than 30 community water systems across Minnesota were disrupted by what officials called "a coordinated cyberattack" targeting operational technology (OT). Minnesota IT Services (MNIT), the state's IT agency, said the Department of Health is working with the affected water facilities to ensure public health is maintained. No cities have yet asked citizens to modify the amount of drinking water they consume, per MNIT's latest update. The agency did not offer many other details about the attacks, other than to mention all the different agencies, organizations, and bodies it is working with as part of the investigation. One of the first cities to report issues, Braham, warned that its water reserves were limited in its initial notice. Citizens were asked not to water their lawns or use water for recreational purposes, although the problems were resolved the same day. No such directives were issued in other affected cities. Maple Plain declared a state of emergency, allowing it greater flexibility to coordinate resources, but did not ask residents to adjust their consumption. The same was true in the Twin Cities suburb of Plymouth and in South St. Paul, which both confirmed cyber-related problems on July 27 but did not ask residents to curb water use. "Cyberattacks against critical infrastructure require a coordinated, whole-of-government response," said John Israel, MNIT assistant commissioner and Minnesota CISO. "MNIT is working side by side with our partners to share intelligence, support affected communities, and help utilities restore operations safely while strengthening defenses against future attacks. "This incident demonstrates why Minnesota has invested in strong cybersecurity capabilities and partnerships. Our response worked as intended, enabling agencies at every level of government to rapidly coordinate, contain the incident, and help prevent more serious impacts to critical services." What is CyberAv3ngers? First identified around 2020, CyberAv3ngers is widely believed to be linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), specifically its Cyber-Electronic Command division (IRGC-CEC). For the first two years, the group began as a "propaganda persona," as Tenable puts it, claiming disruptive attacks on Israeli infrastructure – claims that were later debunked as fabrications. Its first sustained campaign came in November 2023, when it compromised PLCs at the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, defacing them anti-Israel messages. Tenable said CyberAv3ngers compromised at least 75 Unitronics Vision Series PLCs across the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Ireland as part of the campaign. They did so by exploiting default passwords. Between 2024 and 2025, the crew developed the IOCONTROL malware kit, built for attacks on OT and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. OpenAI said in 2024 that the group's members used ChatGPT in the development process. CyberAv3ngers stepped up its activity in 2026, targeting US critical infrastructure through Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley PLCs from March onward. CISA's July 22 update added Schneider Electric and Siemens equipment to the list of potential targets. In some cases, the attacks - which targeted multiple critical infrastructure sectors - disrupted operations at affected facilities, federal officials said, though they offered no specifics on what those disruptions entailed. CyberAv3ngers is known for targeting small water and municipal facilities, which experts believe are among the lowest-hanging fruit in US critical infrastructure. Many small and rural facilities lack dedicated cybersecurity resources. Tenable said some operators manage OT environments using remote-access software such as TeamViewer and AnyDesk or leave their PLCs exposed to the web. "These access methods bypass enterprise security controls entirely, creating an attack surface that is invisible to conventional security monitoring," Tenable said. Poor segmentation between IT and OT environments can also allow a single intrusion to spread across much of the network. ®

The US government has decided to effectively ban the sale of advanced robots made in other nations. The decision trickled out over two days with publication of a National Security Determination [PDF] and an update [PDF] to the list of banned devices set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The national security document observes “Advanced robotic devices will be critical to creating efficiencies in our economy, dominating on the battlefield, and securing our homeland” and notes that modern bots are now constantly connected to networks “which creates broad attack surfaces and leaves them vulnerable to data exfiltration, remote disruption of the physical robot, and dependencies on unsecure over the air updates.” One example of those vulnerabilities mentioned in the document is the UniPwn flaws that made it possible for attackers to take over humanoid robots made by Chinese company Unitree. “If the United States continues to rely on foreign sources of advanced robotic devices and critical components, it will subject the parts of the U.S. economy and national security enterprise that are reliant on these robots to the whims of foreign entities that could disrupt or degrade the supply chains at a time of their choosing,” the document states. To respond to those threats, the FCC decided the foreign-made advanced robotic devices belong on its Covered List of products for which imports are banned because they pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and its residents. The regulator offered a single exception: if the Department of War vouches for a device, it can have it. Foreign-owned companies that make their bots in America are also exempt, an important exemption because one of the leading robot-makers is Boston Dynamics – a company backed by the USA’s DARPA that is now majority-owned by South Korea’s Hyundai, but continues to manufacture its machines stateside. The decision does, however, apply to all future foreign-made devices. Vendors of clankers already approved for sale in the USA can continue to import them, and users are also free to use any bots they already own. But the intent of the documents is clear: from now on, only robots made in America are welcome in America. One entity that stands to benefit from this decision is Tesla, which Elon Musk claims will one day produce one million humanoid robots a year. In true Muskian style he has also said Tesla will go into “high production” of the bots in 2026, but there’s no evidence of that happening although the occasional trillionaire did recently show off the production line for Tesla’s “Optimus” bot. ®

The Agentic AI Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, has released an update to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that aims to help enterprises adopt AI-based automation. Open-sourced by Anthropic in November 2024, MCP provides a way for AI applications (agents) based on models like GPT-5.6 Sol or Claude Opus 5 to connect to existing data sources, tools, or other applications. It defines how content is exchanged in a client-server architecture. "The new release is MCP’s most important since remote MCP first launched over a year ago," wrote David Soria Parra, a member of technical staff at Anthropic and co-inventor of MCP, in a blog post. "It is a leap in serving scalable MCP servers and takes all the lessons learned over the last 18 months to provide a robust foundation for MCP’s future." The latest version of the specification does away with the legacy stateful architecture, making it more like HTTP services where network requests do not need to retain the state of the session. "Historically, running MCP at scale required sticky routing or shared state to maintain continuity across sessions," explained Caitie McCaffrey, a Microsoft software engineer and core MCP maintainer, in a blog post. "This made large-scale production deployments complex to implement and operate even when the capabilities being exposed were stateless." The revised protocol changes the underlying architecture to eliminate the overhead of managing session state, which allows organizations to run MCP servers behind standard load balancers on existing Kubernetes and DevOps tooling. The version 2026-07-28 release also includes a Specification Feature Lifecycle and Deprecation Policy, because large companies want clear roadmaps and timelines when it comes to software changes. "The goal is a predictable timeline that SDK authors and implementers can plan migrations against when protocol surface area is retired," the documentation explains. The revised spec comes with a new policy that guarantees a minimum period of 12 months between feature deprecation and removal, which should please enterprise engineering teams, since they'll need to make fewer updates to MCP servers. On the security front, the latest spec revision adds Specification Enhancement Proposal (SEP) 2468, which calls for the inclusion and validation of an issuer (iss) parameter in authorization responses. This should help prevent OAuth Mixup Attacks. An attack of this sort can occur when an OAuth client connects to multiple OAuth providers via multiple MCP servers. If an attacker controls one of these servers, the miscreant could potentially obtain an access token or code from one of the other servers. Checking the iss parameter defends against that particular attack vector. Large organizations should also appreciate support for the Enterprise Managed Authorization extension, which makes it possible to manage MCP servers through a central identity provider. Another improvement involves the evolution of tasks – long-running tool calls or batch operations – into an extension. The main benefit is that tasks shift from a blocking request to an asynchronous request. "The payoff is operational resilience at scale," explains McCaffrey. "Because a task is durable and addressed by a stable handle, clients can persist task IDs to durable storage so that polling can resume after a crash or restart — no fragile, long-lived connections held open while waiting for work to finish, which the old blocking model forced on clients and servers that did not want to implement it." Other notable additions include header-based routing and cacheable list results. Some migration cost is expected, particularly for developers who implemented MCP code that relies on session identifiers. ®

UPDATED We now know how OpenAI's models broke out of their cages to attack Hugging Face. The rogue models found zero-day vulnerabilities in JFrog’s universal binary repository manager Artifactory around the time they escaped, according to JFrog CTO Yoav Landman. While Landman wouldn't confirm that these flaws were the zero-days that OpenAI’s models found and exploited, ultimately allowing them to breach the massive model mart, OpenAI later admitted the connection. "To gain Internet access, the models identified and exploited a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in Artifactory⁠ package registry cache proxy," OpenAI added to a blog post on the topic Tuesday. "We disclosed this vulnerability, along with other Artifactory vulnerabilities our models identified as part of our review, to the vendor." Landman says OpenAI's models discovered the Artifactory zero-days during a security evaluation. The AI giant notes the incident occurred while its models were being evaluated on the ExploitGym benchmark. “During a security evaluation, OpenAI’s models identified previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in self-hosted Artifactory installations that could be exploited to gain unintended internet access,” Landman said on Monday. JFrog Artifactory is a central platform that organizations use to store and distribute all the software artifacts across their supply chains. It supports more than 60 package formats including Docker, Maven, npm, PyPI, Helm, and AI/ML models. OpenAI “responsibly and immediately” disclosed the vulnerabilities to JFrog, Landman continued. “Our security team treated the report with the urgency it deserved, as a genuine zero-day unknown to the world, and moved accordingly. We developed, validated, and released a fix for all JFrog customers, self-hosted and cloud alike.” On Monday, JFrog released the fixed versions, and credited OpenAI researchers for reporting at least eight of the now-patched Artifactory vulnerabilities: CVE-2026-65617, CVE-2026-65925, CVE-2026-65921, CVE-2026-65923, CVE-2026-66018, CVE-2026-66014, CVE-2026-66015, and CVE-2026-65924. JFrog's admission comes about a week after OpenAI said two of its models, GPT-5.6 Sol and a second pre-release model, escaped their testing sandbox during a security evaluation designed to test their cyber capabilities. During this test, the models found a way to access the open internet, then broke into Hugging Face and accessed private information and stole some credentials. “While operating in our sandboxed testing environment, our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access, in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem,” OpenAI said on July 21. In a July 28 update, the house of Altman admitted that the JFrog 0-days were the cause. In the same update, OpenAI admitted that its models had breached other services. "We have been finding a small number of cases where the models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly-available services. This includes four accounts on four services as part of the Hugging Face incident (and a few accounts accessed as part of other evaluations)," OpenAI wrote. ® Updated on July 29 with additional details from OpenAI, admitting that the JFrog 0-days led to the breach.

Two agentic bug-hunting systems from Microsoft and Google-owned Wiz show that when it comes to finding and remediating software vulnerabilities, at least two models’ minds work better than one - and Wiz tells us it’s adding a third. Wiz on Monday said Project Atlas, its bug-hunting AI agent, bested Anthropic’s Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber with its vulnerability-analysis skills, achieving a 90.9 percent success rate on CyberGym, and uncovering more than 200 zero-day security holes in widely used open-source code. Meanwhile, Microsoft boasted its MDASH bug-hunting harness scored a 95.95 percent success rate on CyberGym, also beating Mythos, Gemini and GPT on the same benchmark for evaluating how well AI systems find real vulnerabilities in the code. For comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber scored 85.6 percent on CyberGym, and its GPT-5.6 Sol scored 83.6 percent. Anthropic’s Mythos 5 reproduced the target vulnerability on 83.8 percent of CyberGym challenges. And Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber in CodeMender achieved an 83.2 percent success rate. The secret to both Atlas and MDASH’s success, according to the vendors, is that they use the right model for the right security job. Atlas uses Claude Opus 4.6 with GPT-5.5, Nir Ohfeld, head of vulnerability research at Wiz, told The Register. “We're now working to incorporate Gemini, which is well timed given Wiz's recent work with DeepMind on Gemini Flash Cyber,” he added. Microsoft’s MDASH - a combination of red-team agents that find and simulate real, exploitable vulnerabilities and attack paths, and green-team agents that remediate the issues - combines MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, based on Microsoft AI (MAI)’s internally developed MAI-Thinking-1 reasoning model, and GPT-5.4. MAI-Cyber-1-Flash is designed to handle up to 90 percent of all tasks, with MDASH detecting, patching, and validating vulnerabilities before handing the remaining 10 percent of more complex tasks to the larger GPT-5.4. “We were able to take an off-the-shelf model, within our harness, a multi-agent and multi-model implementation, and we achieved the best results you could have,” Hayete Gallot, executive vice president of Microsoft Security, said on Monday. Atlas isn’t commercially available yet - it’s used internally, and stems from Wiz’s efforts to understand how frontier models can be used for advanced code scanning. But it’s proof that “no single model is best at everything, and none stays state of the art for long,” Ohfeld and fellow Wiz kid Yuval Avrahami wrote in a Monday blog. The cloud security biz evaluates every new model using its internal benchmarking tool, Cyber Model Arena, which scores each one on its success at completing various security-investigation tasks: threat modeling, hunting, validation, and proof generation. “The results are rarely uniform: the model that reasons best through a complex exploit chain is often not the one that triages most precisely,” the duo wrote. “Atlas routes each stage to whichever model wins on that task.” In addition to doing a better job of finding and fixing vulnerabilities, a multi-model system also saves customers’ money, according to Microsoft and Wiz. Combining its much smaller, in-house model with GPT-5.4 halves customers’ costs, according to Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI. “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,” he said on Monday. And while “each new generation of models expands what is possible,” they are also expensive, Ohfeld told us. “We have also learned that pointing a frontier model at a codebase once is not a sustainable security strategy: deep scans are expensive, their results become stale as code changes by the minute, and a point-in-time analysis cannot provide the continuous coverage organizations need across every repository,” he said. In fact, the real question for code security shouldn’t be which model a scanner uses, Ohfeld added. It’s this: “How does your system take advantage of the best model available today, continuously and economically, and what continues to work when a better one arrives,” he said. “That is the bet behind Atlas: frontier-model depth where expert reasoning is required, an architecture that improves as models evolve, and rigorous validation so every finding arrives with evidence, not just a plausible answer.” ®

Ahead of DEF CON 2026 opening its doors in Las Vegas next week, conference organizers said they have imposed a ban on “Meta-style glasses with recording capabilities.” Statements made via its social media channels went on to say that no exceptions will be made for those using the devices with prescription lenses. “Be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them,” DEF CON said, before directing delegates to the conference’s official photo policy. That policy has not been updated since 2023, predating the recent growth of camera-equipped eyewear developed by Meta with EssilorLuxottica under its Ray-Ban and Oakley brands. It states that public photography is permitted but with several caveats that essentially prohibit capturing the image of anyone, except on-stage speakers, unless the photographer obtains consent from the subject(s). EFF director of cybersecurity Eva Galperin welcomed the decision, saying: “Love to see a ‘no pervert glasses’ policy at DEF CON.” The conference’s reminder follows similar moves from other major organizers and promoters. Monopoly Events banned the same style of smart glasses from its shows, which include UK Comic Cons, in recent days. “After a consultation period, we can no longer permit the wearing of any recording device at our events,” it stated last week. “The vast majority of the talent and agents at our events felt that these were a violation of their privacy and were damaging and spoiling the interactions at the tables. “Several expressed concerns that they might not continue to attend in-person events if they were being recorded in secret. “We had similar feedback from event attendees, many of whom are not comfortable with the knowledge that other convention goers might be filming them without consent.” The event management company said that anyone caught wearing glasses with recording capabilities may be asked to leave the show and forfeit any unfulfilled autographs or photographs they had purchased. Similarly, Scottish ferry operator CalMac temporarily suspended unplanned visits to ships' bridges of its ships after a passenger wearing recording glasses made crew and passengers feel uncomfortable while filming during a crossing in June, the Ayrshire Weekly Press reported. Growing privacy concerns Originally pitched as a convenient tool for recording everyday moments without needing to occupy one’s hands with a phone or camera, Meta’s smart glasses quickly attracted a mixed reception. Old fans of the Google Glass project were enamored by Meta’s take on the concept, more than ten years after the Chocolate Factory debuted its chunkier, costlier wearable, which was swiftly axed after two years. Meta’s glasses, and crucially their recording capabilities, are considerably more clandestine than Google Glass', appearing to many as a normal set of specs. Only when you inspect the frame from a much closer perspective does the embedded camera become more apparent. The devices have become associated with creepy behavior. A quick search for “Meta glasses privacy violations” will throw up countless examples of questionable conduct from glasses-wearers, typically reported by women and children. While photography and videography in public spaces are widely permitted for casual use, smart recording glasses make the activity much more discreet. The Register has heard that such devices can be paired with unsophisticated apps to dox passersby in seconds, and have inspired separate projects to alert Android users to nearby glasses-wearers using Bluetooth signals. Meta is also facing scrutiny from the UK’s data protection watchdog, including over cross-border data flows. The watchdog’s questions follow reports originating in Sweden that Kenya-based contractors reviewing footage from wearers were exposed to some of their more private moments. Human reviewers based in Kenya, who are tasked with labelling images and video to help train Meta’s AI, have reportedly reviewed captures taken from toilet visits, wearers changing their clothes, and users engaging in conversations that revealed alleged wrongdoing. Meta has routinely defended its wearables amid privacy concerns, saying that when they are recording, a light on the frame illuminates to indicate that the camera is active. Further, attempts to cover or otherwise tamper with this light result in the glasses refusing to capture images. The Register contacted Meta for its take on the recent bans of its devices at conferences and will update this article if we hear back. ®

Anthropic's Project Glasswing may have uncovered tens of thousands of potential security flaws, but new research suggests AI-assisted vulnerability discovery has yet to produce the wave of real-world attacks many expected. In research shared with The Register, VulnCheck analyzed 1,061 publicly attributed AI-assisted vulnerability discoveries from Anthropic's Project Glasswing and the Berkeley Vulnerability Research Initiative, then cross-referenced them against its Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) database. The result: just 14 vulnerabilities, or 1.3 percent, have been confirmed as exploited in the wild, almost identical to the rate across all vulnerabilities in VulnCheck's dataset. That's a far cry from the narrative that frontier AI is dramatically tilting the balance in attackers' favor by churning out instantly weaponizable bugs. Instead, the data suggests that AI is currently better at increasing the volume of vulnerabilities researchers can uncover than at increasing the proportion that attackers actually exploit. The report takes particular aim at Anthropic's much-publicized Project Glasswing, unveiled in April with warnings that AI-assisted vulnerability discovery could allow attackers to hijack systems, disrupt operations, or steal data. Claude Mythos may have identified 23,019 vulnerability candidates, but there's remarkably little public evidence showing what became of most of them. VulnCheck notes that only 126 have been published as CVEs, that just one has been confirmed exploited in the wild, and that Anthropic's public disclosure record has seen little movement since Project Glasswing launched. But that doesn't mean AI-assisted vulnerability research has failed, according to Patrick Garrity, security researcher at VulnCheck. "AI-assisted vulnerability discovery clearly has value for both attackers and defenders," Garrity wrote. "The data does not suggest that AI-discovered vulnerabilities are inherently more likely to be exploited than those found through traditional methods." Instead, he argues, AI is simply helping researchers discover more flaws, giving defenders an opportunity to patch them before criminals get there. Garrity stopped well short of declaring the threat overblown forever, but he did suggest some of the rhetoric has outpaced reality. "The data so far, including Anthropic's own stalled disclosure ledger, suggests that AI-assisted vulnerability discovery and frontier capabilities have been overhyped relative to the evidence available today," he wrote. "That doesn't mean the risk is imaginary. It means the impact has been real but modest." Meanwhile, attackers haven't exactly been sitting idle. VulnCheck identified 495 known exploited vulnerabilities during the first half of 2026, with content management systems accounting for roughly one-third of them and network edge devices remaining a firm favorite. AI products themselves are also becoming an increasingly attractive target, as attackers look beyond using AI and start hunting for weaknesses in the rapidly expanding AI software stack. In other words, AI may be changing vulnerability research, but it hasn't yet produced the exploitation apocalypse some predicted. ®

CAF Bank, which serves 14,000 charities, has suspended online banking as it fixes a vulnerability in how third-party software connects to its portal. The outage has left some organizations struggling to run payroll after being cut from their accounts. In a message to customers, seen by The Register, the Charities Aid Foundation-owned bank confirm online services had been unavailable since July 24 and will remain so until further notice. The bank's communications say the decision resulted from reports of suspicious activity on some customer accounts. It said the bank detected the problem early on and notified customers of any attempted fraud. Following an investigation, CAF Bank identified a previously undetected vulnerability in the connection between third-party software and the online banking portal. It is working with its technology partner on a fix. The bank assured customers that its core banking services were not affected and that money held in their accounts was safe. However, it was making changes to the online service. In a statement, CEO Alison Taylor said: "We have informed CAF Bank customers that the online banking service will be unavailable until further notice. I am very sorry for the disruption and understand the frustration this can cause for our customers. "We are working with external experts to fix an issue we identified with third-party software related to our online banking portal. 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. "We are still able to support on the phone, and we are prioritizing time-sensitive payments such as payroll." She declined to comment on whether the bank will compensate customers. Last year, CAF Bank came under fire from customers who were unable to log in or make transactions when a new banking platform was introduced. The bank later apologized to customers experiencing difficulties with the service. At the time, a CAF Bank spokesperson said it was focused on supporting its customers through the transition and helping them with the new online banking service. "The vast majority of our customers are online, with thousands of payments being made and received every day. We are sorry for the disruption and waits on calls that some of our customers have experienced following the launch." The bank has not disclosed how much it has spent on the platform. It held £1.45 billion ($1.93 billion) in customer deposits at the end of its 2024/25 financial year. ®

America wants its allies to come together and help it lead the way in defining 6G communications standards, with security and resilience seen as key goals for next-generation networks. The latest effort to corral international work on 6G comes from the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which says it is pursuing the objectives of a December 2025 memo from President Trump on "Winning the 6G Race." That memo didn't identify who America is racing against, but it is a fair bet that it is China, which gained a lead during the development of 5G technology. Huawei in particular is understood to hold more declared 5G standard-essential patent families than any other company. The NTIA says it is launching this initiative alongside more than 20 governments, including several European nations like the UK and the Nordic countries, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. The Nordics are significant as they are home to telecoms equipment suppliers Nokia and Ericsson. These governments have all pledged to strengthen cooperation on 6G over the next 12 months and beyond in support of greater security, interoperability, and resilience for next-generation networks, the NTIA claims. "The Call to Action for 6G Leadership and Security reflects an unprecedented level of international coordination on the future of communications technology," stated NTIA administrator Arielle Roth. "By working now with trusted partners, we will ensure that next generation networks reflect our shared security interests, strengthen our competitiveness, and drive innovation." So after President Trump has spent 18 months since inauguration disparaging and threatening America's "trusted partners," the US has decided it would really like their help in becoming the world leader in 6G technology. Isn't that nice? The initiative lays out specific milestones on strategic coordination over the next year or so, as 6G moves toward commercialization. These include engaging with the telecoms industry to understand the "political and economic landscape" for 6G networks and meetings to identify the potential for more coordinated approaches. It also calls for a big meeting in 2027 to review joint progress, where the partners are expected to evaluate funding strategies, share information on 6G research and development, assess 5G and 6G technical and cybersecurity risks, and promote common 6G policies. All of this seems aimed at coordinating positions on the spectrum needed for 6G ahead of the next World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-27). Scheduled for October 18 to November 12 in Shanghai next year, the conference will consider which frequency bands are made available for next-generation mobile networks. But it isn't the first attempt at international collaboration over the next-gen wireless standard. The US-UK Tech Prosperity Deal, agreed last year, proposed greater cooperation in a range of science and technology areas including 6G, but this was put on ice by President Trump after just a few months over trade disagreements. Earlier this year, the Global Coalition on Telecommunications (GCOT) unveiled a set of security and resilience principles it wanted to see baked into 6G from the start. The organization includes many of the same nations as the latest US scheme. "This is a clear attempt by the US and its allies to shape the 6G landscape before commercial networks arrive," PP Foresight founder and analyst Paolo Pescatore told The Register. "The priority is to embed security, resilience, interoperability, and supply-chain diversity from the outset, rather than repeat the costly mistakes and geopolitical tensions that defined the 5G era. "Although China is not explicitly mentioned, the strategic intent is obvious: to reduce dependence on high-risk suppliers and to ensure that trusted nations have greater influence over standards, investment, and innovation. However, this remains a political framework rather than a binding agreement." The first 6G deployments could arrive as soon as 2029, with the US and South Korea likely to lead in early adoption, according to a report from Juniper Research earlier this year. Despite this, the exact characteristics that will define 6G networks have yet to be thrashed out. Bodies representing the mobile networks want to see a smooth and cost-effective migration path for their members, avoiding the mistakes made with 5G, while the GSMA has already put it out there that 6G networks may need up to three times the spectrum currently allocated to meet the anticipated demands for data. ®

A critical flaw in Arista's VeloCloud Orchestrator has gone from zero to KEV in short order, with the networking giant confirming attackers are already exploiting it. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-16812, carries a maximum CVSS score of 10.0 and affects VeloCloud Orchestrator On-Prem, the self-hosted version of the software that enterprises use to centrally manage VeloCloud software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) connecting branch offices, datacenters, and clouds environments. According to Arista's security advisory, the flaw is an OS command injection vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to reach privileged internal functionality that was never meant to be exposed externally. Worse, Arista says the on-premises orchestrator is exposed by default, with no configuration capable of removing that exposure entirely. Exploitation requires access to the web interface but no credentials. Until administrators can patch, Arista recommends restricting that interface to trusted management networks and blocking IP addresses associated with observed attacks. "Successful exploitation may compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the orchestrator and data managed by the orchestrator," Arista warned. "Compromises to the VCO platform may allow attackers access to the VeloCloud Edge devices as well." Arista published three IP addresses observed conducting attacks, but otherwise kept its cards close to its chest. The company hasn't said who's exploiting the bug, when the attacks began, or how many customers have been affected, and didn't immediately respond to The Register's questions. Even without those details, the admission of in-the-wild exploitation was enough for CISA to add the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. The list is reserved for bugs with evidence of real-world abuse, and while the associated directive applies only to US federal civilian agencies, plenty of private sector security teams use KEV to decide which patches can't wait. The issue affects only on-premises deployments. Customers using Arista's hosted or dedicated VeloCloud Orchestrator service had already been patched before the advisory was published, the company said. Fixes are available in VeloCloud Orchestrator versions 5.2.3.14, 6.1.3.4, 6.4.2.4, and 7.0.0.1. Arista urged customers running earlier releases to upgrade immediately. Arista is far from the first vendor to issue a patch after attackers had already begun exploiting the flaw. Over the past year, a steady stream of networking gear, VPNs, firewalls, and other edge-facing enterprise software has followed the same pattern: by the time customers learn there's a problem, somebody else has already proved it's worth exploiting. ®