Cyber security

Seemingly as an accident, overnight several new Linux kernel vulnerability reports were posted to the public Linux kernel mailing list rather than the private security mailing list. The vulnerabilities have yet to be patched on mainline but at least in some cases there are patches undergoing testing or queued in "-next" branches. The CVSS scores are as high as 9.0...

Article URL: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-111943 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50192900 Points: 115 # Comments: 30

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Two bugs found with AI are behind major issues today for 4chan, DeviantArt, Wikipedia, and the blog where the bar around the corner posts pictures of people's dogs. The "critical vulnerabilities" were discovered in the PHP programming language, which underpins much of the internet, including any site built on WordPress. But it's far bigger than that. Some Dutch and Finnish government agencies took their sites down as a precaution. The NSA Cybersecurity account on X recommended that organizations take their systems offline if "an immediate update is not feasible," as did the UK's National Cyber Security Center. Even Pokémon Home and Pokémon C … Read the full story at The Verge.

GitLab released fixes on October 21 for a flaw that lets an attacker run code on a self-managed server without logging in, and it affects every version of the software going back to 7.0, released in 2014. The fix matters even for administrators who patched nine days earlier: the October 12 update covered only versions 19.2 and later, and the new fixed versions sit one patch above it, so an

The PHP security team released emergency security patches for two critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) tracked collectively as PHP2Shell. [...]

Article URL: https://safedep.io/litellm-pypi-compromise-credential-stealer-backdoor/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50181114 Points: 13 # Comments: 2

The PHP project has published PHP versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 to address two critical vulnerabilities that could allow unauthenticated remote code execution. Who is at risk: all PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed. We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs. The vulnerabilities: RCE via OOM corruption, CVE-2026-109618 (GHSA-w8hw-w9fx-j79w): out-of-memory handling can interrupt PHP while internal request data is only partially initialized. Request cleanup may then treat the invalid data as valid. RCE via stale global state, CVE-2026-109619 (GHSA-6wmf-4rv5-p3rp): request-owned internal state can survive after its backing memory has been freed. A later request handled by the same worker may use that stale state before normal initialization resets it. PHP versions older than 8.1 will not receive updates from the project, though the project has provided some patches for PHP 7.4, PHP 8.0, and PHP 8.1 to assist in creating backports. According to the announcement, Linux distributions…

CISA strongly urges organizations to immediately patch the recently disclosed critical vulnerabilities in PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. These vulnerabilities, known as “php2shell,” allow for unauthenticated remote code execution in PHP and affect all PHP installations serving web requests. Organizations should immediately update to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, or 8.2.35 to fix these vulnerabilities. While CISA has not observed exploitation of these vulnerabilities as of the time of publication, they pose a risk to organizations if left unpatched. CISA urges organizations to take the following actions: Identify and inventory systems running any version of PHP across your organization. PHP is often a component of other software and prevalence may not be directly observable. Apply the patch immediately, prioritizing internet-facing systems. Organizations that cannot update immediately, or that continue to use PHP 8.1 or earlier unsupported versions, should take PHP-based systems offline until they can be patched or updated. A web application firewall may provide some protection until systems are updated or patched. Review the official PHP security advisory for guidance on p…

This PHP issue sounds like a pretty huge problem. | Illustration by Carlo Cadenas / The Verge Security patches for the PHP programming language, widely used to build websites and web apps, are expected to roll out today, with the goal of fixing two critical vulnerabilities that could wreak havoc on the internet if left unchecked. In an advisory published on Tuesday, PHP developers said the vulnerabilities have a severity rating of 9.2 out of a possible 10, with some cybersecurity agencies encouraging websites to temporarily take their systems offline if they're unable to apply the fix immediately. The security patch is expected to drop today at 10AM ET - though the developers say they may release it earlier if the vulnerability deta … Read the full story at The Verge.

LiteLLM on Wednesday disclosed that threat actors compromised "multiple independent security controls" to push a malicious version of the Python package containing a credential stealer and a backdoor. On October 21, 2026, LiteLLM's release pipeline was compromised to push 1.107.0 to the Docker Hub registry and the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository. The incident took place around 4:00 a.m.

Says it passed audits and made just a minor mystery error

Amazon's Threat Intelligence team on Wednesday said it detected an attempt to exploit the newly disclosed PHP2Shell vulnerabilities on October 17, 2026, against its MadPot honeypot service, as the flaws come under broad exploitation in the wild following the release of the patches. "The exploit attempt originated from an IP address associated with a commercial anonymization network," CJ Moses,

arXiv:2610.29869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coding agents that run long enough must compact their context, summarizing the conversation, discarding the original, and carrying the summary forward as memory. We show that in popular open-source coding agents this step is an exploitable trust boundary. Harnesses that flatten the typed conversation into a single plain string, marking each message with a text label such as [User]:, destroy message provenance in code, before the summarizer runs. An attacker who controls anything the agent reads can forge a user turn that survives compaction as a genuine instruction. Across five flattening harnesses (pi, opencode, Cline, Aider, OpenHands) the forged approval launders into the agent's memory 87-100% of the time, up to a ~908,000-token context window; across four role-typed harnesses (Codex, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Continue) the identical attack succeeds 0% of the time. We follow the attack to executed consequences. A laundered standing approval drives real tool-running agents to execute attacker-controlled curl | sh in a sandbox, and end to end in the live pi TUI at ~50% against a 0% paired clean arm. The same channel reliably steers an …

'Coordinated vulnerability disclosure, unless there's evidence of active exploits in the wild,' Chainguard CEO tells The Reg

Article URL: https://foxio.io/blog/header-accordions-qpack-amplification-attacks-against-http-3-servers Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50188612 Points: 9 # Comments: 1

Article URL: https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/2026-143-aws/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187708 Points: 95 # Comments: 23

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North Korean hackers are using a post-quantum cryptographic mechanism to secure malicious payload delivery in new operations that combine old and new malware. [...]

From AI-discovered PHP vulnerabilities to flaws in Node.js and popular AI tool LiteLLM, cybersecurity teams have plenty to worry about this week.

Article URL: https://docs.gitlab.com/releases/patches/patch-release-gitlab-19-5-1-released/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50185869 Points: 100 # Comments: 22

Article URL: https://elk.zone/m.webtoo.ls/@elise@katze.sh/117479383721672027 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50185814 Points: 34 # Comments: 9

Plus a RAT for good measure - get threat hunting now

The popular LiteLLM Python package has been compromised as part of a software supply chain attack that delivered a credential stealer and a backdoor, according to reports from SafeDep, Socket, StepSecurity, and Upwind. The compromise affects LiteLLM 1.107.0, distributed through PyPI wheels and Docker images. The Python package has since been quarantined on Python Package Index (PyPI), and the

This is the kind of security issue that was found and prevented by AI, but is also a high risk because of AI.

The Node.js project has released a number of security updates to fix, among other vulnerabilities, a remote-code-execution bug affecting programs that use Brotli compression. And, in case any programmers who use compiled languages thought they could relax, the musl libc project has also announced a new vulnerability: an out-of-bounds write that could potentially lead to remote code execution, although that has not been demonstrated.

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Article URL: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/21/todays-php-security-release-and-how-were-strengthening-php-security/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50182987 Points: 243 # Comments: 123

Cloudflare has deployed default web application firewall (WAF) protections for newly disclosed PHP vulnerabilities before public disclosure. The rules use request and response signals to stop exploit attempts and prevent exposed data from reaching attackers.

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Law enforcement agencies have disrupted nearly 11,000 cybercriminal networks and arrested more than 1,400 people in Operation Serengeti III, which targeted business email compromise, ransomware, and online scams. [...]

arXiv:2610.28794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Software supply chain attacks continue to be on the rise, exploiting the trust that helps open source ecosystems thrive. Recent incidents like the Shai-Hulud worm and the Axios compromise demonstrate that a single malicious package can have wide reaching and devastating impacts overnight. These high profile attacks can be traced back to the same culprit: package registries. Although they are a useful convenience to pull prebuilt packages from, is such a commonly exploited component of the software supply chain worth the risk? In this paper, we investigate whether removing the registry from the developer workflow by building packages directly from source can serve as a malware prevention strategy - effectively removing an entire attack surface. Our hypothesis is that malicious packages avoid attributing a source to minimize visibility, while benign packages seek exposure and therefore link to their repositories. We evaluate this through three research questions: how effective is building from source at avoiding malware, how feasible is it to build from source in the current state of the supply chain, and how the building from source st…

arXiv:2610.28802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How much does an agent harness affect vulnerability discovery, and does its value depend on the model? We study 24 model-runner configurations using an open-source harness on a production codebase whose vulnerabilities were non-public at scan time. The pipeline combines static screening, LLM investigation, model self-revalidation, root-cause mapping, independent source review, and isolated proof-of-concept confirmation. Across 265 confirmed security root causes, the largest two-run configuration covers 60.4%, while 14.3% are found by exactly one model. No single configuration covers all observed findings. In a four-model context experiment, moving from a minimal prompt to an engineered prompt with a CodeQL-derived call graph raises criticality-weighted yield by 20-86% for smaller and mid-tier models, compared with 2% for the frontier model. This comparison changes both prompt and context. Separating those effects shows that the engineered prompt improves yield for all four models, while adding CodeQL context beyond that prompt improves yield only for the smallest model. A held-out CyberGym subset shows the same direction of target-rec…

arXiv:2610.28810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence in recent years has brought a parallel rise in prompt injection and jailbreak attacks. By embedding malicious instructions, these exploits manipulate language models to bypass intended behavior and operational boundaries. In traditional chatbots, such attacks are confined to a single session because state memory is not preserved across conversations. However, persistent memory features in modern conversational interfaces enable cross-session attack propagation, establishing a threat vector known as memory injection. This work explores this emerging vulnerability in leading LLM-as-a-service platforms, highlighting its real-world severity and the need for countermeasures. While existing literature focuses on violations tailored to specific platform features, we present a general threat model. We demonstrate that all NIST attack goals are collectively achievable across ChatGPT Instant 5.3, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Gemini 3 Flash under this model. We also show that memory injections can exploit multiple attack vectors, including personal memories, projects, skills, organization i…

arXiv:2610.29178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Before an AI agent takes a consequential action, such as paying, messaging or changing code, several monitors check it. Their verdicts are combined by aggregating scores or by counting approvals, whatever inputs the monitors share. Monitors that share a base model or a poisoned input, however, may fail together. We borrow the fail-prone systems of distributed computing: lists of monitor sets that may fail together. A rule is safe if it executes no bad action and live if it blocks no good one. We measured twelve small open-weights monitors on payment approval under two pre-registered protocols. Without pre-registration, we also measured three closed frontier models (Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra, Gemini 4 Argon) and the open DeepSeek-V3.2. Every reliable fooling of a monitor into approving a fraud came through an evidence source and reached only that source's readers. Fooling it into blocking a correct payment depended on injection resistance, a monitor's refusal to follow instructions planted in its data. Small models and DeepSeek obeyed such notes. The three closed models ignored them in all but one case, and Opus also resisted persua…

arXiv:2610.29566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Malicious actors frequently obfuscate their code to hinder investigative reverse engineering efforts. Among the most formidable techniques is virtual machine (VM) obfuscation: programs are translated into bytecode for a custom VM, often with a randomized virtual instruction set and distributed alongside a corresponding interpreter. Manual analysis and deobfuscation scale poorly due to the complexity of VM obfuscation and the diversification techniques that render each VM and interpreter unique. Existing methods primarily focus on simplifying execution traces and identifying virtual execution boundaries. However, comparatively little attention has been given to recovering higher-level program semantics from VM-obfuscated code. To address this gap, we propose VMSpec, a novel decompiler-based approach that automates the construction of VM processor specifications, enabling existing, well-known decompilers to analyze the VM-obfuscated code. We evaluate our prototype of VMSpec on 147 programs from an established obfuscation benchmark, comprising hash functions, standard algorithms, and randomized functions, obfuscated with different config…

arXiv:2610.29886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instruction-data selectors choose which instruction-following records are used for fine-tuning, improving alignment quality, raising training efficiency, and filtering out harmful records. A selector's choices thus directly affect the fine-tuned model's safety, yet despite their widespread use, the security of these selectors remains under-studied. We conduct the first systematic study of adaptive supplier-side attacks against utility-oriented instruction-data selectors and introduce utility-hijacking. Utility-hijacking shapes harmful records to remain compatible with a selector while preserving their malicious payload, causing top-k selection to concentrate rather than filter the poison. Achieving both is non-trivial, because optimizing a record for score tends to wash out its payload, while bluntly preserving the payload makes the record look low-value. Our generate-and-rerank procedure generates, per instruction, many payload-bearing candidates and submits only the highest-scoring survivor. Evaluated across three payloads (over-refusal, false-fact injection, and insecure code), six selectors, and victim models from Qwen2.5-7B to Qw…

arXiv:2610.28987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persistent memory is a largely undefended surface for injection and poisoning, and the same risk limits memory sharing among agents. We present PerMIT, a memory architecture with provable integrity guarantees under an explicit trust assumption: only user-typed inputs and values confirmed at a gate are trusted. PerMIT mediates the release and use of untrusted environment-derived values through a finite memory interface, while preserving agent-driven multi-turn planning and tool choice. Over this finite interface, we prove two integrity theorems that are also machine-checked in Lean 4, which together ensure that environment-derived memory reaches a sensitive action only if confirmed at the gate and influences the agent's behavior only through what the gate displays. Every attack in our threat model thereby reduces to a single auditable decision, which a human, an LLM verifier, or both can make in practice. On Trojan Hippo, PerMIT records zero observed attack success with self-verification and lightweight verifiers. Because each confirmation is a logged verdict on exact content, endorsements accumulate across users, and sufficiently en…

arXiv:2610.29196v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable end-to-end visual grounding via language prompts and generative decoding, demonstrating largely improved zero-shot and open-vocabulary detection capabilities. As a result, VLMs are rapidly being deployed at the edge in safety-critical real-world systems. However, the physical adversarial robustness of edge VLMs has not been systematically studied, and the fundamental differences in output with modern object detectors create methodological challenges for fair evaluation. To compare the two families directly, we evaluate every selected representative model on one outcome: whether an adversarial patch worn on a person evades detection of the model. We report this by introducing a unified metric, conditional attack success rate (cASR), counted only on images the model still localizes under a matched gray occluder, and partition every failure into omission (no box), substitution (a box on the patch), and displacement (a box on neither). We benchmark the physical adversarial vulnerability of compact grounding VLMs against a range of object detectors, and find that the VLMs can be…

arXiv:2505.06335v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) has the potential for simultaneous global learning amongst a large number of parallel agents, enabling emerging AI systems to be trained across demographically diverse data. Central to this being efficient is the ability for FL to perform sparse gradient updates and remote direct memory access at the central server. Most of the research in FL security focuses on protecting data privacy at the edge client or in the communication channels between the client and server. Client-facing attacks on the server are less well investigated as the assumption is that a large collective of clients offer resilience. Here, for the first time, we show that by attacking clients that lead to repetitive clustered memory updates in the server, we can remote initiate a rowhammer attack to corrupt the server memory with induced bit-flips. A reinforcement learning (RL) attacker without backdoor access to the server can learn how to maximize server repetitive clustered memory updates by manipulating the clients' sensor observation. We demonstrate the feasibility of our attack using FL systems with sparse updates, tasked for a…

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Article URL: https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/commit/169234499088fc2c414644a67efaed3d64ae2e3b Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189232 Points: 268 # Comments: 70

Article URL: https://eliastaylor.com/noexploit/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50188948 Points: 10 # Comments: 1

Chrome is getting new scam protections that use Gemini to detect deceptive websites and warn users when they copy suspicious commands from ClickFix attacks. [...]

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Article URL: https://danielmangum.com/posts/mcu-emudhra-intermediate-ca-compromise/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50183280 Points: 24 # Comments: 10

https://patchtheplanet.org/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50181175 Points: 68 # Comments: 32

Google on Tuesday said it's rolling out improved safeguards in its Chrome browser to secure users against ClickFix attacks when Enhanced Protection is enabled. ClickFix is a popular social engineering technique in which bad actors trick users into copying and pasting malicious code directly into their computer's operating system, thereby bypassing conventional security controls. As part of

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bubblewrap, emacs, gimp:2.8, glibc, jackson-databind, kernel, kernel-rt, librabbitmq, openexr, openssh, postgresql:16, postgresql:18, python3, resteasy, wireshark, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (ca-certificates, firefox-esr, git-lfs, and libssh), Fedora (aom, assimp, bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, freerdp, ghostscript, gopass, gopass-jsonapi, ImageMagick, libpng12, libpng15, nebula, perl-GD-SecurityImage, perl-Net-IDN-Encode, perl-Net-Whois-Raw, rust-backtrace, rust-object, rust-object0.37, rust-object0.38, rust-object0.39, rust-ruzstd, and xen), Gentoo (ca-certificates), Mageia (x11-server, x11-server-wayland, tigervnc), Oracle (bubblewrap, ca-certificates, emacs, fetchmail, gimp:2.8, hostapd, jackson-databind, librabbitmq, lrzsz, openexr, openssh, openssl, postgresql:18, python-urllib3, python3, python3.12-urllib3, resteasy, webkit2gtk3, wireshark, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Red Hat (.NET 8.0, dogtag-pki, flatpak-builder, ghostscript, glycin-loaders, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, gvfs, jackson-core, jackson-databind, librsvg2, multiple packages, pki-core, pki-core:10.6, sudo, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwa…