Regulators say the e-commerce giant forced more than a million advertisers to pay more than they should have. The company denies the claims.

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As enterprises race to bolt AI onto every business process, security leaders are being forced to answer a harder question than "should we adopt it" — it's "who's accountable when it goes wrong." To unpack this, The Cyber Express sat down with Harsha Reddy, Head of Information Security at Veterinary Emergency Group (VEG).

With nearly two decades in security leadership — including senior roles at Lixil and American Standard before joining VEG — Harsha brings a practitioner's view of where AI is genuinely changing the CISO's job, and where it's mostly just hype and shadow adoption.

Watch the Full Interview:

Harsha Reddy Explains Why AI Will Replace Tasks, Not Defenders

Harsha pushes back on the narrative that AI will hollow out security teams, pointing to Gartner research showing that while most fields are projected to lose jobs to AI, cybersecurity is expected to gain them. In his view, the technology is mainly absorbing the "toil" — log review, alert triage, evidence gathering — that keeps analysts from actually defending.

Also listen to S1 Episode: Awareness and Education at Young Age is the Answer to Cybersecurity Skill Gap

“It's the analyst who refuses to use AI that will get replaced by an analyst who uses it,” he says.

On adoption, Reddy points to a 2024 Microsoft-LinkedIn survey in which most executives called AI critical to their business, yet a majority had no formal plan and most had employees already bringing in their own tools. That gap, he argues, is why so many organizations are now dealing with AI-related data leaks. "Many organizations started onboarding AI like software when they should be onboarding it like staff." His fix isn't more restrictions — blocking AI just pushes it into the shadows — but guardrails, an internal AI enablement committee, and measuring actual business value instead of token consumption.

The conversation also digs into deepfake-driven fraud, why training employees to spot deepfakes is “a losing bet” at machine speed, and how he decides when to greenlight a new AI tool versus telling a business unit “not yet.”

The conversation closes with our newly introduced rapid-fire round "Express Shots" — Claude vs. ChatGPT, passkeys vs. passwords, and Reddy's prediction for the biggest cybersecurity threat of 2030.

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This is good:

Post-quantum cryptography is now one pip-install away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency, we implemented support for ML-KEM, the NIST-standard key-establishment primitive, and ML-DSA, the NIST-standard digital-signature primitive, in pyca/cryptography.

Remember, the reason to do this now is because there’s no emergency. And because you will make your systems crypto agile, which is always a good idea.

WordPress has released security updates to address the wp2shell vulnerability, a critical flaw that allowed attackers to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on vulnerable sites using a single anonymous web request.   Unlike many previous attacks, this issue did not require plugins, authentication, or third-party code, making affected core installations particularly vulnerable. Security patches were released in WordPress 6.9.5 and 7.0.2. 

wp2shell Vulnerability Exposed Core WordPress Sites 

Tracked as CVE-2026-63030, the wp2shell vulnerability is described in the official WordPress release notes as a "REST API batch-route confusion and SQL injection" issue that can result in remote code execution. The flaw originates from the REST API batch endpoint located at /wp-json/batch/v1, or its legacy query-string alias ?rest_route=/batch/v1, allowing exploitation through a single anonymous web request.  The vulnerability was discovered by Adam Kues of Assetnote, an attack surface management division of Searchlight Cyber, through the WordPress HackerOne programme.   To provide defenders time to update their systems, Searchlight Cyber intentionally withheld technical exploitation details, stating, "Given the egregious nature of the flaw and to ensure defenders have adequate time, we are refraining from disclosing technical specifics at this juncture." 

Second SQL Injection Flaw Patched 

The same security release also fixed CVE-2026-60137, another critical SQL injection vulnerability. WordPress credited researchers TF1T, dtro, and haongo for reporting the issue. Unlike the wp2shell vulnerability, this flaw predates the latest release and was backported to WordPress 6.8.6. The wp2shell vulnerability only affects versions 6.9.0 to 6.9.4 and 7.0.0 to 7.0.1.  Severity ratings differ across security advisories. While WordPress classifies CVE-2026-63030 as "high severity," the corresponding GitHub Security Advisory (GHSA-ff9f-jf42-662q) labels it as Critical with a CVSS score of 7.5. Regardless of classification, both vulnerabilities require immediate patching because the wp2shell vulnerability can be exploited without authentication. 

Immediate Updates Recommended 

Powering around 40% of websites, WordPress responded by enabling forced automatic updates for affected versions, including WordPress 7.1 beta2, to secure pre-release installations. As of 17 July, there were no confirmed reports of active exploitation. However, security researchers warned that because WordPress is open source and patch-related code changes became publicly available immediately, proof-of-concept exploits could emerge within hours.  Administrators should verify that every internet-facing WordPress installation has successfully received the update, as some hosting environments disable automatic updates or lock websites to specific versions. Site owners can also check exposure using the public tool available at wp2shell.com. If immediate patching is not possible, temporarily blocking both REST API batch endpoints at the Web Application Firewall (WAF) level can reduce risk, although this should not replace installing the official update.  Security teams managing multiple WordPress websites should also monitor for spikes in anonymous web request traffic targeting batch endpoints, as the wp2shell vulnerability demonstrates how overlooked core features can introduce severe security risks. 

A newly disclosed security flaw, CVE-2026-42533, has revealed a critical Pre-Auth nginx vulnerability that could allow attackers to achieve reliable RCE (remote code execution) without authentication. The issue affects nginx versions 0.9.6 through 1.30.3 (stable) and 1.31.2 (mainline), while patched releases include 1.30.4 and 1.31.3. Affected NGINX Plus versions include R33-R36 (fixed in R36 P7) and 37.0.0.1-37.0.2.1 (fixed in 37.0.3.1).  According to the disclosure, the vulnerability stems from a missing save-and-restore mechanism for PCRE capture state within nginx's two-pass script evaluation engine. The flaw enables attackers to trigger a heap buffer overflow with attacker-controlled content and length, while also exposing heap pointers through an information leak that can defeat Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). Chaining both primitives enables reliable Pre-Auth nginx RCE. 

CVE-2026-42533 Impacts Multiple Configurations 

The advisory warns that deployments using map directives with regex patterns alongside regex capture sources, including location, server_name, rewrite, or if blocks, may be vulnerable. The issue depends on evaluation order, where regex capture references, such as $1 or named groups, are processed before a regex map variable.  Affected directives include proxy_set_header, proxy_method, proxy_pass, fastcgi_param, uwsgi_param, scgi_param, grpc_set_header, return, add_header, rewrite, set, root, alias, and access_log, among others. Both HTTP and stream modules are affected, and the vulnerable capture and map variables do not need to exist within the same directive. 

Technical Root Cause

The researcher explained that nginx evaluates expressions in two stages: a length calculation (LEN) pass followed by a value (VALUE) pass. During execution, regex map evaluation overwrites shared capture data stored in the request object. As a result, the LEN pass and VALUE pass can calculate different capture sizes, causing either a heap overflow or an information leak depending on the relative capture lengths.  The disclosure states that attackers can control both the overflow size and leaked data using ordinary HTTP requests, including request URIs, headers, and bodies. No credentials, client certificates, or unusual configuration beyond the vulnerable pattern are required.  Testing reportedly achieved 10 out of 10 successful exploitations on Ubuntu 24.04 using glibc 2.39 with ASLR enabled.

Mitigation and Disclosure

The researcher said recent fixes for CVE-2026-42945, CVE-2026-9256, CVE-2026-42055, and CVE-2026-48142 do not address CVE-2026-42533. Administrators are advised to upgrade immediately to nginx 1.30.4, 1.31.3, or the corresponding patched NGINX Plus releases.  Until systems are updated, defenders should audit configurations that combine regex captures with regex map variables in the same evaluation path. The researcher also released a static configuration scanner that identifies vulnerable configurations without exploiting them.  The initial report was submitted to F5 SIRT on May 17, 2026, with follow-up analyses covering additional variants, including cross-directive triggering and named capture clobbering. While a proof-of-concept exploit exists, the researcher said it will be withheld until users have sufficient time to apply patches, citing concerns over rapid exploitation following previous nginx vulnerability disclosures.