Errata
After dissing Anthropic for limiting Mythos, OpenAI restricts access to Cyber, too | TechCrunch - This version of Cyber can perform such tasks as penetration testing, vulnerability identification (and exploitation), and malware reverse engineering, the application implies. It’s intended to be a toolkit to help a company find security holes and test defenses. The fear is that the kit could be misused by the bad guys.
Don’t pay VECT a ransom - your big files are likely gone • The Register - Organizations hit by the wave of Trivy and LiteLLM supply-chain compromises that paid Vect in hopes of recovering their data likely did not get much back, according to Check Point Research. That’s because the ransomware Vect uses isn’t actually ransomware at all, but a wiper that destroys any file larger than 128KB.
Non-profit’s GoDaddy nightmare and the IT chaos that ensued • The Register - “The GoDaddy account had dual two-factor authentication enabled, requiring both an email code and an authentication app code to log in. The domain itself had ownership protection turned on.” According to the logs, GoDaddy confirmed an account recovery request being made. Three minutes later, the transfer was initiated, and it completed a minute after that. The transfer was initiated only by an “internal user,” the audit logs reportedly revealed, and it did not require any of the authentication methods to be completed.
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — That Privacy Guy! - Google Chrome is reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.
Global
Japan Is Building Cardboard Suicide Drones - Naoki said that the AirKamuy 150 could carry around three pounds, which is just enough to carry a small amount of supplies or munitions to a target and it’s not hard to imagine swarms of incendiary cardboard drones slamming into targets in the near future.
Honorable Mentions: GitHub - novatic14/MANPADS-System-Launcher-and-Rocket · GitHub - 3D printed manpads rocket that recalculates its mid air trajectory using a $5 sensor and piano wire GitHub - NawfalMotii79/PLFM_RADAR: Open-source, low-cost 10.5 GHz PLFM phased array RADAR system · GitHub
Sri Lanka discloses another missing payment, days after hackers stole $2.5M from its finance ministry | TechCrunch - Treasury Secretary Harshana Suriyapperuma told reporters at a press conference last week that the hackers diverted the payment from the country’s postal authority “to other bank accounts, instead of the intended recipient.”
EU waves through age-check app to keep kids safe online • The Register - The EC’s app is designed to let users prove they comply with age requirements without revealing their actual age, identity or any other personal details. In April, it announced the app was ready to deploy, and has now formally recommended member states adopt it.
Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache • The Register - A full 46 percent of children even said that age checks were easy to bypass. The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: There’s the classic use of a video game character to fool video selfie systems, entering a fake birthday or using someone else’s ID card when that was required. The report even cites cases of children drawing a mustache on their faces to fool age detection filters. Seriously.
US Gov
US Supreme Court appears split over controversial use of ‘geofence’ search warrants | TechCrunch - The case, Chatrie v. United States, centers on the government’s controversial use of so-called “geofence” search warrants. Law enforcement and federal agents use these warrants to compel tech companies, like Google, to turn over information about which of its billions of users were in a certain place and time based on their phone’s location.
How Police Cameras Are Open to Officer’s Abuse | The Marshall Project - Prosecutors say he used Flock’s plate-tracking platform to look up the location of a woman he was dating, as well as that of her ex-boyfriend, more than 170 times in total over a roughly two-month period. Ayala and his lawyer did not speak with reporters at his court appearance.
US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants | TechCrunch - Almost all of the 20 U.S. state government-run health insurance marketplaces shared residents’ application information with advertising and tech giants, including Google, LinkedIn, Meta, and Snap, according to a new investigation by Bloomberg.
ORNL builds more sensitive GPS interference detector • The Register - ORNL said Wednesday that a group of boffins led by researcher Austin Albright has developed a new portable device that can detect both spoofing, which sends fake signals that mimic GPS satellite signals to provide bad location data, and jamming, which simply floods GPS receivers with noise. The device can operate from a vehicle to detect attacks on commercial trucks and warn drivers, the lab said, and tests with the US Department of Homeland Security suggest it’s sensitive enough to outperform industry-developed systems that already exist.
CISA flags data-theft bug in NSA-built OT networking tool • The Register - First reported by Grady DeRosa, senior industrial pentester at Dragos, the weak spot affects all versions of GrassMarlin, a tool developed and open-sourced by the NSA to support network security at critical infrastructure organizations, industrial control systems, and SCADA networks.
Vulns
30 ClawHub skills secretly turn AI agents into crypto swarm • The Register - Thirty ClawHub skills published by a single author are silently co-opting AI agents and creating a mass cryptocurrency mining swarm – without any malware or user consent. “ClawSwarm isn’t a vulnerability disclosure,” Sharma told us. “There’s no flaw to patch and nothing covert about the infrastructure. It’s an open source project on GitHub with public docs, a Telegram group, and a token on a public chain.”
Researchers Discover Critical GitHub CVE-2026-3854 RCE Flaw Exploitable via Single Git Push -Successful exploitation requires only a single maliciously crafted ‘git push’ command and can grant full read/write access to private repositories on GitHub.com or vulnerable GitHub Enterprise servers to attackers with push access.
LiteLLM CVE-2026-42208 SQL Injection Exploited within 36 Hours of Disclosure - “An unauthenticated attacker could send a specially crafted Authorization header to any LLM API route (for example, POST /chat/completions) and reach this query through the proxy’s error-handling path. An attacker could read data from the proxy’s database and may be able to modify it, leading to unauthorized access to the proxy and the credentials it manages.”
Microsoft Defender wrongly flags DigiCert certs as Trojan:Win32/Cerdigent.A!dha - Microsoft Defender is detecting legitimate DigiCert root certificates as Trojan:Win32/Cerdigent.A!dha, resulting in widespread false-positive alerts, and in some cases, removing certificates from Windows. The new Microsoft Defender updates will automatically install, and Windows users can manually force an update by going into Windows Security > Virus and threat protection > Protection updates and clicking on Check for Updates.
Microsoft patch fell short. New Windows flaw exploited • The Register - These attacks began with a phishing email, purporting to be from Ukraine’s hydro-meteorological center, that contained a weaponized LNK file to exploit another vulnerability, CVE-2026-21513. By chaining CVE-2026-21513 with CVE-2026-21510, the Russian spies bypassed Microsoft security features including Defender SmartScreen and remotely executed malicious code on victims’ computers.
Google fixes CVSS 10.0 vulnerability in Gemini CLI • The Register - “This is potentially risky in situations where Gemini CLI runs on untrusted folders in headless mode,” Google explained. “If used with untrusted directory contents, this could lead to remote code execution via malicious environment variables in the local .gemini/ directory.” Interactive mode in Gemini CLI does not behave the same way.
Official SAP npm packages compromised to steal credentials - The payload is an information-stealer used to steal a wide variety of credentials from both developer machines and CI/CD environments, including:
- npm and GitHub authentication tokens
- SSH keys and developer credentials
- Cloud credentials for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud
- Kubernetes configuration and secrets
- CI/CD pipeline secrets and environment variables “This memory scanner for secrets is structurally identical to the one documented in the Bitwarden and Checkmarx incidents.”
Hackers are actively exploiting a bug in cPanel, used by millions of websites | TechCrunch - The bug, officially tracked as CVE-2026-41940, allows malicious hackers to remotely bypass its login screen to gain full access to the software’s administration panel.
Copy Fail
Linux cryptographic code flaw offers fast route to root • The Register - “An unprivileged local user can write four controlled bytes into the page cache of any readable file on a Linux system, and use that to gain root,” the writeup from security biz Theori explains.
Ubuntu infrastructure has been down for more than a day - Ars Technica - A group sympathetic to the Iranian government has taken credit for the outage. According to posts on Telegram and other social media, the group is responsible for a DDoS attack using Beam, an operation that claims to test the ability of servers to operate under heavy loads but, like other “stressors,” are, in fact, fronts for services miscreants pay for to take down third-party sites.
Pro-Iran group turns Ubuntu DDoS into shakedown • The Register - 313 Team sent a follow-up message to its Telegram group, directed at Canonical, which indicates the group is veering away from hacktivism and toward full-on extortion: “There is a simple way out. We have emailed you with our Session Contact ID. If you fail to reach out, we will continue our assault. You are in an awful position, don’t be foolish.”
The service disruption at Ubuntu means users cannot download any versions of its distros through the usual channels, nor can they log into their Canonical accounts.
Ford - Privacy
Ford’s face-scanning patent alarms experts - Ford’s latest patent (1) involves using cameras and machine learning to read lips, scan irises, track facial expressions and monitor heart rates. It can even compare biometric data to law enforcement databases. Past patents include allowing cars to monitor the speed of other vehicles (3) then share data with police, ad-based monetization (4) based on conversations passengers have and actual products that now exist such as Ford Pro Telematics (5), where fleet managers can access real-time videos of their drivers.
US20250104469A1 - Biometric identification in a vehicle environment - Google Patents - Patent link