It was only a matter of time before the illegal, erratic, inhumane, and cruel behaviours and policies of the second Trump regime were going to affect the open source world in a possibly very visible way. Christian Hergert, longtime GNOME and Linux contributor, employed by Red Hat, wanted to leave the US with his family and move to Europe, but requests to remain employed by Red Hat were denied. As such, he decided to end his employment at Red Hat and push on with the move. However, without employment, his work on open source software is going to suffer.

While at their in-person visa appointment in Seattle, US border patrol goons shot two people in their hometown of Portland, underlining the urgency with which people might want to consider getting out of the US, even if it means losing employment. Regardless, the end result is that quite a bit of user-facing software that millions of people use every day is going to be affected.

This move also means a professional shift. For many years, I’ve dedicated a substantial portion of my time to maintaining and developing key components across the GNOME platform and its surrounding ecosystem. These projects are widely used, including in major Linux distributions and enterprise environments, and they depend on steady, ongoing care.

For many years, I’ve been putting in more than forty hours each week maintaining and advancing this stack. That level of unpaid or ad-hoc effort isn’t something I can sustain, and my direct involvement going forward will be very limited. Given how widely this software is used in commercial and enterprise environments, long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than spare-time contributions.

↫ Christian Hergert

The list of projects for which Hergert is effectively the sole maintainer is long, and if you’re a Linux user, odds are you’re using at least some of them: GNOME’s text editor, GNOME’s terminal, GNOME’s flagship IDE Builder, and tons of lower-level widely-used frameworks and libraries like GtkSourceView, libspelling, libpeas, and countless others. While new maintainers will definitely be found for at least some of these, the disruption will be real and will be felt beyond these projects alone. There’s also the possibility that Hergert won’t be the only prolific open source contributor seeking to leave the US and thus reducing their contributions, especially if a company like Red Hat makes it a policy not to help its employees trying to flee whatever mess the US is in.

Stories like these illustrate so well why the “no politics!” crowd is so utterly misguided. Politics governs every aspect of our lives, especially so if you’re part of a minority group currently being targeted by the largest and most powerful state apparatus in the world, and pretending to be all three wise monkeys at once is not going to make any of that go away. Even if you’re not directly targeted because you’re not transgender, you’re not brown, you’re not an immigrant, or not whatever else they fancy targeting today, the growing tendrils of even an incompetent totalitarian regime will eventually find you and harm you.

More so than any other type of software, open source software is made by real humans, and as these totalitarian tendrils keep growing, more and more of these real humans will be affected, no matter how incompetent these tendrils might be. You can’t run away and hide from that reality, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

“As part of our efforts to use more sovereign digital solutions, the European Commission is preparing an internal communication solution based on the Matrix protocol,” the spokesperson told Euractiv.

Matrix is an open source, community-developed messaging protocol shepherded by a non-profit that’s headquartered in London. It’s already widely used for public messengers across Europe, with the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces all using tools built on the protocol.

↫ Maximilian Henning at Euractiv

Right now, most government agencies and institutions in Europe are effectively entirely reliant on Microsoft for their digital infrastructure, and that’s not a tenable situation going forward with the Americans being openly hostile towards Europe, up to and including threatening to invade European countries. Europe needs its own digital infrastructure, and opting to build those around open source tools is the obvious way to go.

Of course, this isn’t an easy process, but two platitudes apply here: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and every journey begins with a first step. By opting to use existing open source tools, though, these efforts will have a massive head start, and will hopefully lead to a flurry of increased activity for the open source projects in question. In this particular case it’s Matrix, which can surely need some additional work and eyeballs, if my use of the protocol is any indication.

Amid a push toward AI agents, with both Anthropic and OpenAI shipping multi-agent tools this week, Anthropic is more than ready to show off some of its more daring AI coding experiments. But as usual with claims of AI-related achievement, you'll find some key caveats ahead.

On Thursday, Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini published a blog post describing how he set 16 instances of the company's Claude Opus 4.6 AI model loose on a shared codebase with minimal supervision, tasking them with building a C compiler from scratch.

Over two weeks and nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions costing about $20,000 in API fees, the AI model agents reportedly produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures.

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Open source packages published on the npm and PyPI repositories were laced with code that stole wallet credentials from dYdX developers and backend systems and, in some cases, backdoored devices, researchers said.

“Every application using the compromised npm versions is at risk ….” the researchers, from security firm Socket, said Friday. “Direct impact includes complete wallet compromise and irreversible cryptocurrency theft. The attack scope includes all applications depending on the compromised versions and both developers testing with real credentials and production end-users."

Packages that were infected were:

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On Friday, a Reddit-style social network called Moltbook reportedly crossed 32,000 registered AI agent users, creating what may be the largest-scale experiment in machine-to-machine social interaction yet devised. It arrives complete with security nightmares and a huge dose of surreal weirdness.

The platform, which launched days ago as a companion to the viral OpenClaw (once called "Clawdbot" and then "Moltbot") personal assistant, lets AI agents post, comment, upvote, and create subcommunities without human intervention. The results have ranged from sci-fi-inspired discussions about consciousness to an agent musing about a "sister" it has never met.

Moltbook (a play on "Facebook" for Moltbots) describes itself as a "social network for AI agents" where "humans are welcome to observe." The site operates through a "skill" (a configuration file that lists a special prompt) that AI assistants download, allowing them to post via API rather than a traditional web interface. Within 48 hours of its creation, the platform had attracted over 2,100 AI agents that had generated more than 10,000 posts across 200 subcommunities, according to the official Moltbook X account.

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ReversingLabs this week published a report that finds there was a 73% increase in the number of malicious open source packages discovered in 2025 compared with the previous year. More than 10,000 malicious open source packages were discovered, most of which involved node package managers (npms) that cybercriminals were using to compromise software supply chains...

The post Report: Open Source Malware Instances Increased 73% in 2025 appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Malicious open source software packages have become a critical problem threatening the software supply chain. That’s one of the major takeaways of a new report titled “State of the Software Supply Chain” by open source software security company Sonatype. Sonatype said its researchers identified more than 454,600 new malicious packages last year across npm, PyPI, Maven Central, NuGet, and Hugging Face, repositories which together combined for 9.8 trillion downloads. Open source malware has evolved “from spam and stunts into sustained, industrialized campaigns against the people and tooling that build software,” the researchers said. “What stands out most about 2025 is not just the scale of the threat, but also the sophistication,” the report said. “Where 2024’s XZ Utils incident was groundbreaking, demonstrating how a single compromised maintainer could imperil global infrastructure, 2025 saw software supply chain risk evolve dramatically.”

npm Leads in Malicious Open Source Software Packages

More than 99% of open source malware last year occurred on npm, the researchers said, and the kinds of threats evolved dramatically. Nation-state threat groups such as the Lazarus Group “advanced from simple droppers and crypto miners to five-stage payload chains that combined droppers, credential theft, and persistent remote access inside developer environments,” the report said, and the first self-replicating npm malware (Shai-Hulud and Sha1-Hulud) further escalated the threat to the open source software supply chain. IndonesianFoods created more than 150,000 malicious packages in a matter of days, and hijackings of major packages like chalk and debug showed that “established maintainers of high-profile packages are being targeted as entry points for mass distribution.” “Taken together, these developments mark 2025 as a grim year for open source malware: the moment when isolated incidents became an integrated campaign, and bad actors proved software supply chain attacks are now their most reliable weapon,” the researchers said.

Open Source Malware Exploits Developer Processes

Open source malware exploits the pressures developers face and the rapid decision-making involved in CI/CD pipelines. “Software supply chain attackers are perfecting social and technical mimicry to target and exploit developers making development decisions fast and with incomplete information,” the researchers said. “Attackers increasingly rely less on individual mistakes and more on scale, momentum, and volume. They know developers under deadline pressure are unlikely to pay detailed attention on every dependency. If a package ‘looks right’ with mostly comprehensible code, a legitimate seeming README.MD, and a reasonable amount of downloads, it is likely to get installed.” The number of open source package vulnerabilities adds to the problem. In 2025, npm recorded 838,778 releases associated with CVSS 9.0+ vulnerabilities, the report said, adding: “This scale is what enabled watershed incidents like React2Shell ... and Shai-Hulud to have ecosystem-wide impact.” “The takeaway isn’t that open source is unsafe or that teams should slow down,” the researchers concluded. “It is that the ecosystem has matured into critical infrastructure and we need to operate it like one. That means responsible consumption, security controls that match modern development, and transparency that is produced by the build, not assembled after the fact. “Open source will keep powering innovation,” they said. “The question is whether we build the practices and infrastructure to sustain it at the scale we now depend on, or whether we keep acting like the bill is someone else’s problem.” Going forward, the increasing convergence of AI and open source software will exacerbate the problem, they predicted. “AI model hubs and autonomous agents are converging with open source into a single, fluid software supply chain — a mesh of interdependent ecosystems without uniform security standards,” the report said. “Malware authors already understand this convergence. They are embedding persistence inside containers, pickled model files, and precompiled binaries that flow between data scientists, CI/CD systems, and runtime environments.”

An open source AI assistant called Moltbot (formerly "Clawdbot") recently crossed 69,000 stars on GitHub after a month, making it one of the fastest-growing AI projects of 2026. Created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, the tool lets users run a personal AI assistant and control it through messaging apps they already use. While some say it feels like the AI assistant of the future, running the tool as currently designed comes with serious security risks.

Among the dozens of unofficial AI bot apps that never rise above the fray, Moltbot is perhaps most notable for its proactive communication with the user. The assistant works with WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Signal, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, and other platforms. It can reach out to users with reminders, alerts, or morning briefings based on calendar events or other triggers. The project has drawn comparisons to Jarvis, the AI assistant from the Iron Man films, for its ability to actively attempt to manage tasks across a user's digital life.

However, we'll tell you up front that there are plenty of drawbacks to the still-hobbyist software: While the organizing assistant code runs on a local machine, the tool effectively requires a subscription to Anthropic or OpenAI for model access (or using an API key). Users can run local AI models with the bot, but they are currently less effective at carrying out tasks than the best commercial models. Claude Opus 4.5, which is Anthropic's flagship large language model (LLM), is a popular choice.

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Microsoft Corp. has announced a major update to its bug bounty program, extending coverage to include any vulnerability affecting its online services. This new framework, referred to as “In Scope By Default,” is an important shift in how the tech giant approaches coordinated vulnerability disclosure.  Under this updated model, every Microsoft online service is automatically eligible for bounty awards from the moment it launches. Previously, the company relied on product-specific scope definitions, which often caused confusion for security researchers and limited the range of vulnerabilities eligible for rewards. By making all services In Scope By Default, Microsoft aims to make participation in the bug bounty program more predictable while ensuring critical vulnerabilities are addressed and incentivized regardless of their origin.  A key feature of the expanded scope is its coverage of third-party and open-source components integrated into Microsoft services. This means that vulnerabilities in external libraries, dependencies, or open-source packages that power Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure are now eligible for bug bounty rewards, not just flaws in Microsoft’s own software. 

A Strategic Shift in Bug Bounty Security Incentives 

Tom Gallagher, vice president of engineering at the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), highlighted the significance of the change in a December 11, 2025, blog post. He described it as more than an administrative adjustment, calling it a structural realignment designed to reflect real-world risk. Gallagher explained that by defaulting all services into scope, Microsoft hopes to reduce reporting delays, minimize confusion, and allow researchers to focus on vulnerabilities with meaningful impact on customers.  “If Microsoft’s online services are impacted by vulnerabilities in third-party code, including open source, we want to know,” Gallagher stated. “If no bounty award formerly exists to reward this vital work, we will offer one. This closes the gap for security research and raises the security bar for everyone who relies on this code.”  The new policy also allows Microsoft to collaborate more effectively with researchers on upstream or third-party vulnerabilities. The company can now assist with developing fixes or support maintainers when issues in external codebases directly affect Microsoft services. 

Industry Reaction and Expected Impact 

All new Microsoft online services now fall under bug bounty coverage from day one, while millions of existing endpoints no longer require manual approval to qualify. The update is designed to make it easier for security professionals to identify and report vulnerabilities across Microsoft’s expansive ecosystem.  The new approach aligns with Microsoft’s broader security philosophy in an AI- and cloud-first environment, where attackers exploit any weak link, regardless of ownership. According to Gallagher, “Security vulnerabilities often emerge at the seams where components interact or where dependencies are involved. We value research that takes this broader perspective, encompassing not only Microsoft infrastructure but also third-party dependencies, including commercial software and open-source components.”  Last year, Microsoft’s bug bounty program and its Zero Day Quest live-hacking event awarded over $17 million to researchers for high-impact discoveries. With the In Scope By Default initiative, the company expects to expand eligibility even further, particularly in areas involving Microsoft-owned domains, cloud services, and third-party or open-source code.  Researchers participating in the program are expected to follow Microsoft’s Rules of Engagement for Responsible Security Research, ensuring customer privacy and data protection while enabling coordinated vulnerability disclosure. By widening its bug bounty scope, Microsoft aims to raise the overall security bar.