Development by UK firm Nscale heralded by ministers as largest of its kind in country loses anchor tenant

The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies.

The development by the British company Nscale, heralded by ministers as the country’s largest AI datacentre when it was announced in 2025, was planned to open at Loughton in Essex next year.

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Microsoft today issued updates to fix more than 1,400 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Today’s epic patch batch dwarfs September’s record of nearly 1,000 fixes, which was already about ten times the normal monthly patch load from Redmond.

Just one of the weaknesses patched this week is considered a “zero day,” or already exploited in the wild. CVE-2026-96951 is a security feature bypass in the Windows Shell that affects Windows 10 and 11 systems, as well as some Server versions.

Windows 10 users might be wondering if they can still expect security updates after this month. Microsoft had been slated to stop shipping updates for Windows 10 systems in October 2025, but ended up adding another year of free updates after considerable pushback. A few months ago, Microsoft quietly extended that support for another year (until October 2027).

At least 78 of the flaws fixed this month are rated “critical,” meaning they could be exploited with little or no action by the user, and most of those critical bugs allow an attacker to execute code of their choice on the vulnerable system.

While Microsoft said there are no signs anyone is exploiting it yet, a security feature bypass in the .NET Framework (CVE-2026-108398) was publicly disclosed prior to today, potentially giving attackers advance time to work out how to exploit the bug.

Satnam Narang at Tenable said the number of flaws fixed this month far surpasses the previous record-setting year 2020, when Microsoft patched 1,261 CVEs.

“We’ve now crossed the 4,000 CVE mark with two months left to go,” he said.

Microsoft credits large language models for the high volume of bug discovery, and presumably AI gets credit for many of the patches used to fix these flaw. Meanwhile, security experts have been warning that these unusually large patch volleys from Microsoft are placing extra strain on corporate security teams, which often have to test individual updates before deploying them across a network to ensure the fixes don’t cause problems for other software.

Tyler Reguly, associate director of security research and development at Fortra, notes that just 26 Microsoft vulnerabilities appeared in the “Known Exploited Vulnerabilities” (KEV) catalog maintained by the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) so far this year, and security teams would do well to prioritize patching those 26 vulnerabilities first.

“Security leaders should focus on exploitable risk, and ask whether their teams have the clarity, capacity and support to act,” Reguly said.

Which vulnerabilities deserve the most scrutiny in your organization? The folks at Cisco Talos have a useful roundup of the more noteworthy flaws that Microsoft fixed today, and of course the SANS Internet Storm Center has a reliable roundup that indexes vulnerabilities by severity, CVE number and affected software.

Rapid AI adoption left workers cleaning up a flood of errors and low-quality work

Employers around the globe are grappling with the fallout from rushing to adopt fast-changing artificial intelligence tools.

Meta has scaled back plans to axe staff and use more AI agents after the company found employees were spending more and more time cleaning up technical and security errors, Reuters reported. And after thinning its workforce, especially middle managers, in a 2023 efficiency push, the company is expanding its managerial ranks again, LinkedIn posts from workers show.

Norway’s privacy regulator Datatilsynet has fined advertising technology company Xandr 92 million Norwegian kroner, approximately $9.6 million, for unlawfully processing and sharing sensitive information about Grindr users.

While the decision concerns users in Norway, the data-sharing practices were not confined to Norwegian users. BleepingComputer reports that information about Grindr users in other countries was also exposed through the advertising system.

Between July 2018 and April 2020, Xandr handled real-time advertising auctions involving Grindr users. These automated auctions let advertisers bid to display an ad, but also involved circulating information about the person who would see it. Sensitive information revealing sexual orientation could potentially reach thousands of companies.

Crucially, users did not have to disclose their sexual orientation in their profiles. Datatilsynet said that simply being identified as a Grindr user was information that indicated sexual orientation.

According to the regulator, Xandr relied on Grindr to obtain consent without checking whether that consent was valid. As a company jointly responsible for the processing, Xandr had its own obligations. It was not enough to simply assume the app had obtained the explicit consent required.

This was not a case of hackers breaking into a dating app. The information was flowing through an advertising business without a valid legal basis. Privacy group noyb, which filed the complaint in cooperation with the Norwegian Consumer Council, says such systems use tracking identifiers to build profiles of people’s interests, habits, and behavior.

Are your details being used by cybercriminals? 

FIND OUT HERE

Although Xandr now belongs to Microsoft, the misconduct predates its acquisition. Microsoft completed its purchase of Xandr from AT&T on June 6, 2022, more than two years after the period covered by the fine. Microsoft told BleepingComputer it was reviewing the decision and assessing its options.

How to protect your privacy

This is a Norwegian enforcement action, but the data-sharing practices crossed borders. Users in the US and elsewhere shouldn’t assume their information stayed private just because the fine was issued in Norway.

You can limit how much additional information you disclose by giving a dating app only what you need to use it.

• Leave optional profile fields blank when the information feels too personal.
• Avoid publishing your workplace, home address, regular schedule, or other details that make you easy to locate.
• Review location permissions and advertising settings and limit them where possible.
• Think carefully before linking social accounts that reveal more of your identity.
• Don’t use dating apps on company-issued devices.

These precautions cannot guarantee privacy. Responsibility for unlawful sharing lies with the companies involved. This case shows that sensitive information can come from using the service itself, not just from what you write in your bio.

Scammers don’t need to hack you. They just need you to click once. 

Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection catches suspicious activity before it becomes a problem.

Brad Smith adds to calls for tougher rules for AI, including ‘kill switches’ and legal obligation to victims of rogue agents

• Business live – latest updates

Artificial intelligence is less regulated than milk and washing machines, the president of Microsoft has said, as the tech industry warns over the safety of AI.

Brad Smith said there should be more safety rules to govern the technology including a legal obligation to a “victim” if their system was breached by rogue AI agents.

Donald Trump’s administration has temporarily banned Microsoft, Adobe, and several other tech companies from sponsoring workers for permanent US residency, claiming they abused immigration programs at the expense of American citizens.

Vice-president JD Vance said on Thursday that the H-1B visa programme for highly skilled foreign workers had “become rife with fraud” and that over-reliance on such schemes was “a fundamental insult to the American worker.”

He added that “no company in the US” had “abused this system” more than Microsoft.

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Once a month, Microsoft pushes a security update to all Windows users. Tomorrow’s is a new record:

Microsoft’s patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold.

It was only two months ago that Microsoft patched a then-record 570 vulnerabilities. Then, last month, Microsoft patched some 620 of them. Google and other companies have also published record numbers of vulnerabilities in recent months. Two weeks ago, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and 100 companies and organizations published an open letter warning of a narrowing window for patching vulnerabilities ahead of an expected tsunami of AI-enabled attacks that actively exploit them first. The industry is taking the threat seriously by pumping out unprecedented numbers of patches in their software.

This is the result of AI-powered vulnerability finding, and a good example of AI helping the defenders more than the attackers.

What will be interesting to watch is how the number of vulnerabilities changes over the next few months. My prediction is that it will continue to increase as the AIs get better at finding software vulnerabilities, and then decrease as they run out of vulnerabilities to find. How high the number gets, how fast the trend reverses, and how quickly it declines after that are all unknown.

And Microsoft is right: The window to patch has shrunk to “immediately.” AIs are also good at reverse-engineering exploits from patches, which means that these vulnerabilities will be weaponized as soon as the update is published.

Scale of Patch Tuesday September 2026 

The Two Exploited Zero-Days 

Other Notable CVEs Worth Tracking 

• CVE-2026-55007 (CVSS 8.1) — a double-free flaw in Microsoft Exchange Server enabling remote code execution 

• CVE-2026-80097 (CVSS 8.6) — improper authentication in Microsoft Authenticator allowing local privilege escalation 

• CVE-2026-69465 (CVSS 8.8) — missing authorization in Microsoft Office SharePoint permitting remote code execution 

• CVE-2026-65669 (CVSS 9.6) — an injection flaw in SQL Server enabling remote privilege escalation 

• CVE-2026-69525 (CVSS 9.8) — use-after-free in Windows Remote Desktop Services allowing remote code execution 

• CVE-2026-69595 (CVSS 9.8) — use-after-free in the Windows Services for NFS ONCRPC XDR Driver 

• CVE-2026-69730 (CVSS 9.8) — use-after-free in the Windows DNS server 

• CVE-2026-69829 (CVSS 9.8) — heap-based buffer overflow in Windows Shell 

• CVE-2026-72979 (CVSS 9.8) — use-after-free in the Windows DHCP Server 

Microsoft disclosed and fixed a maximum-severity remote code execution vulnerability in Entra ID, its cloud identity platform, on August 20, then quietly reversed the advisory's exploitation status a day later - leaving enterprise defenders without a clear account of whether the flaw was ever used in attacks.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-69836, carries a CVSS score of 10.0, the highest possible rating. It stems from unsafe deserialization of untrusted data, a class of defect catalogued as CWE-502, in which an application reconstructs objects from attacker-supplied input without validating it first. Microsoft's advisory said the weakness "allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network." No authentication, elevated privileges or user interaction were required.

Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory, is the authentication layer for Microsoft 365, Azure and thousands of federated third-party applications. Code execution inside that service sits upstream of nearly every access decision an affected tenant makes, which is why identity infrastructure flaws draw scrutiny disproportionate to their raw CVE count.

Because Entra ID is a hosted service rather than on-premises software, Microsoft was able to remediate it server-side. The company said the issue is fully mitigated and that customers need take no additional action - an unusual advantage of cloud delivery, and one that removes the patch-deployment race that normally follows a perfect-10 disclosure. Microsoft credited principal security engineer Robert Fitzpatrick with finding the bug.

"Exploited: Yes"...Sorry "No"

The disclosure itself became the story. Microsoft's Security Response Center bulletin initially carried an "Exploited: Yes" designation, prompting coverage on August 21 describing the flaw as under active attack.

Read our earlier coverage: Microsoft Says CVSS 10.0 Entra ID Code Execution Flaw Was Exploited Before Server-Side Fix

Microsoft flipped that field to "No" the same day, for reasons unknown, and offered no explanation for the change. In a follow-up statement the company said it had identified and fixed the issue and published the CVE for greater transparency.

The reversal leaves several questions open. Microsoft has not said how it detected the flaw, whether any tenant data was accessed, over what period the service was vulnerable, or what evidence supported either exploitation determination.

The episode intersects with a live regulatory question. The Securities and Exchange Commission's cyber disclosure rules require public companies to report material incidents on Form 8-K, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's reporting regime is still being finalized. Neither framework clearly addresses how a downstream customer should assess materiality when the only party holding the facts is the cloud provider.

The CVE was itself issued under MSRC's June 2024 policy of publishing CVEs for cloud service vulnerabilities that require no customer action - a transparency commitment made in the wake of criticism over the 2023 Storm-0558 intrusion. This episode is an early test of how much visibility that policy actually delivers.

Also read: Microsoft Security Lapse Exposed Sensitive Credentials and Internal Resources of Employees

Microsoft disclosed on Thursday that a maximum-severity remote code execution vulnerability in Entra ID, the identity service underpinning Microsoft 365, Azure and Dynamics 365, was exploited in the wild before the company mitigated it on its own infrastructure. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-69836 and rated CVSS 10.0, required no authentication and no user interaction.

Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory, is the authentication and authorization layer for a large share of the world's enterprise cloud estates. It brokers sign-ins, conditional access decisions and token issuance across tenants, which makes any unauthenticated code execution in the service unusually consequential: an attacker operating inside that trust boundary is positioned upstream of nearly every control that depends on it.

According to Microsoft's advisory, the vulnerability stems from deserialization of untrusted data, a class of bug in which an application reconstructs attacker-controlled input into live objects without adequate validation. The result, per the advisory language, is that an unauthorized attacker can execute code over a network. Microsoft rated impact as high across confidentiality, integrity and availability, and characterized attack complexity as low. Credit for finding and reporting the issue went to a Microsoft principal security engineer.

Also read: Microsoft Entra ID Exposed: Actor Token Flaw Enables Stealthy Global Admin Takeover

Because Entra ID is a managed cloud service rather than software customers install, remediation happened server-side. Microsoft said the vulnerability has been fully mitigated and that there is no action for users of the service to take. Exploit code is not publicly available, the company said. Microsoft addressed several other maximum-severity cloud service issues, including flaws in Azure Arc and Exchange Online, in the same batch of disclosures.

What Microsoft did not say is drawing scrutiny. The advisory confirms exploitation but omits attribution, the window during which attacks occurred, how many tenants were touched, what attackers did after gaining execution, and any indicators defenders could use to check their own logs. Security teams face a structural problem here. With no patch to apply and no IOCs published, there is no independent way to confirm whether a given tenant was affected, and cloud-side telemetry that would answer the question sits with the provider.

The disclosure lands against a compliance backdrop that has grown less forgiving. Microsoft began issuing CVEs for cloud service vulnerabilities that require no customer action as part of transparency commitments made under its Secure Future Initiative, and CVE-2026-69836 is a test of how much that transparency actually delivers.

For U.S. public companies, exploitation of an identity provider raises Item 1.05 materiality questions under the Securities and Exchange Commission's cyber disclosure rule even when the fix is the vendor's determining whether a reportable incident occurred is difficult without provider-side evidence. In the European Union, operators in NIS2 scope carry 24-hour early-warning obligations that presuppose visibility they may not have.

Whether Microsoft publishes exploitation details or indicators, whether CISA issues supplemental guidance for federal tenants, and whether any organization ties confirmed intrusion activity to the flaw, enterprises should review Entra ID sign-in and audit logs for anomalous service principal activity, unexpected token issuance and privilege changes across the past several weeks, and re-examine standing assumptions about the identity layer.

Microsoft Defender’s latest patch bypass shows a familiar problem.

A newly disclosed Microsoft Defender flaw called ShieldBreak shows that fixing one attack path doesn’t always close every route to the same result.

Microsoft has assigned ShieldBreak the identifier CVE-2026-69414 and confirmed it is an elevation of privilege (EoP) vulnerability in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine. Microsoft says it is still working on a security update.

If that sounds somehow familiar, you’re probably thinking of RoguePlanet, another vulnerability in Defender that Microsoft acknowledged on June 16 and patched on July 8.

A short timeline

At the time, the published exploit for RoguePlanet was described as depending on a race condition, meaning it was not guaranteed to work the same way on every machine. That was one reason the vulnerability was concerning but still somewhat limited from a practical point of view.

Microsoft’s July fix should have closed the door on that problem. But security fixes do not always eliminate a weakness at the root of the problem. Sometimes they block one known attack path, while a researcher later finds a different route to reach the same end result.

That appears to be what happened here. ShieldBreak has been described as a patch bypass because it reportedly sidesteps the earlier RoguePlanet fix, although it uses a different exploitation method rather than simply repeating the original attack.

In August, the same researcher disclosed ShieldBreak, and Microsoft responded by publishing a new advisory for CVE-2026-69414.

The advisory says the issue has been publicly disclosed, proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code exists, exploitation is considered more likely, and no official fix is available yet. Microsoft says it is working on one.

How to stay safe

Until Microsoft releases a fix, the most important protection is preventing untrusted code from running on your computer in the first place. ShieldBreak is a local privilege escalation issue, so an attacker first needs some level of access to the machine.

Based on the best public reporting available right now, ShieldBreak appears to require Microsoft Defender to be enabled in order to work. Public testing indicates that the exploit does not succeed when Defender is off or when another product is registered as the active antivirus provider.

So, narrowly speaking, disabling Defender appears to stop this specific ShieldBreak chain from working. However, that is not a good safety recommendation for most people. Turning off your antivirus removes an important layer of protection and could leave your computer exposed to other attacks.

For home users, all that means:

• Install Microsoft’s security updates as soon as they become available.
• Be very careful with downloads, email attachments, cracked software, and “fix” tools from random websites.
• Keep backups of important files somewhere not directly connected to the PC.
• Use an up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution to alert you about and remove threats from your computer.

“One of the best cybersecurity suites on the planet.” 

According to CNET. Read their review →

Microsoft’s Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence.

An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway.

The images are known as shims, which were invented to extend Secure Boot to Linux devices and utility software. Using a technique simple enough to be performed by novice hackers, these old, forgotten shims can be used to completely circumvent the protection, which is embedded into the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of the device’s motherboard. The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly available images once vulnerabilities were found in them.

Artificial intelligence platforms may be just as susceptible to social engineering as human beings, but they are proving remarkably good at finding security vulnerabilities in human-made computer code. That reality is on full display this month with some of the more widely-used software makers — including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Oracle — fixing near record volumes of security bugs, and/or quickening the tempo of their patch releases.

As it does on the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft today released software updates to address at least 118 security vulnerabilities in its various Windows operating systems and other products. Remarkably, this is the first Patch Tuesday in nearly two years that Microsoft is not shipping any fixes to deal with emergency zero-day flaws that are already being exploited. Nor have any of the flaws fixed today been previously disclosed (potentially giving attackers a heads up in how to exploit the weakness).

Sixteen of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, meaning malware or miscreants could abuse these bugs to seize remote control over a vulnerable Windows device with little or no help from the user. Rapid7 has done much of the heavy lifting in identifying some of the more concerning critical weaknesses this month, including:

• CVE-2026-41089: A critical stack-based buffer overflow in Windows Netlogon that offers an attacker SYSTEM privileges on the domain controller. No privileges or user interaction are required, and attack complexity is low. Patches are available for all versions of Windows Server from 2012 onwards.
• CVE-2026-41096: A critical RCE in the Windows DNS client implementation worthy of attention despite Microsoft assessing exploitation as less likely.
• CVE-2026-41103: A critical elevation of privilege vulnerability that allows an unauthorized attacker to impersonate an existing user by presenting forged credentials, thus bypassing Entra ID. Microsoft expects that exploitation is more likely.

May’s Patch Tuesday is a welcome respite from April, which saw Microsoft fix a near-record 167 security flaws. Microsoft was among a few dozen tech giants given access to a “Project Glasswing,” a much-hyped AI capability developed by Anthropic that appears quite effective at unearthing security vulnerabilities in code.

Apple, another early participant in Project Glasswing, typically fixes an average of 20 vulnerabilities each time it ships a security update for iOS devices, said Chris Goettl, vice president of product management at Ivanti. On May 11, Apple shipped updates to address at least 52 vulnerabilities and backported the changes all the way to iPhone 6s and iOS 15.

Last month, Mozilla released Firefox 150, which resolved a whopping 271 vulnerabilities that were reportedly discovered during the Glasswing evaluation.

“Since Firefox 150.0.0 released, they have been on a more aggressive weekly cadence for security updates including the release of Firefox 150.0.3 on May Patch Tuesday resolving between three to five CVEs in each release,” Goettl said.

The software giant Oracle likewise recently increased its patch pace in response to their work with Glasswing. In its most recent quarterly patch update, Oracle addressed at least 450 flaws, including more than 300 fixes for remotely exploitable, unauthenticated flaws. But at the end of April, Oracle announced it was switching to a monthly update cycle for critical security issues.

On May 8, Google started rolling out updates to its Chrome browser that fixed an astonishing 127 security flaws (up from just 30 the previous month). Chrome automagically downloads available security updates, but installing them requires fully restarting the browser.

If you encounter any weirdness applying the updates from Microsoft or any other vendor mentioned here, feel free to sound off in the comments below. Meantime, if you haven’t backed up your data and/or drive lately, doing that before updating is generally sound advice. For a more granular look at the Microsoft updates released today, checkout this inventory by the SANS Internet Storm Center.

AI-based assistants or “agents” — autonomous programs that have access to the user’s computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task — are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey.

The new hotness in AI-based assistants — OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and Moltbot) — has seen rapid adoption since its release in November 2025. OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on your computer and proactively take actions on your behalf without needing to be prompted.

The OpenClaw logo.

If that sounds like a risky proposition or a dare, consider that OpenClaw is most useful when it has complete access to your digital life, where it can then manage your inbox and calendar, execute programs and tools, browse the Internet for information, and integrate with chat apps like Discord, Signal, Teams or WhatsApp.

Other more established AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot also can do these things, but OpenClaw isn’t just a passive digital butler waiting for commands. Rather, it’s designed to take the initiative on your behalf based on what it knows about your life and its understanding of what you want done.

“The testimonials are remarkable,” the AI security firm Snyk observed. “Developers building websites from their phones while putting babies to sleep; users running entire companies through a lobster-themed AI; engineers who’ve set up autonomous code loops that fix tests, capture errors through webhooks, and open pull requests, all while they’re away from their desks.”

You can probably already see how this experimental technology could go sideways in a hurry. In late February, Summer Yue, the director of safety and alignment at Meta’s “superintelligence” lab, recounted on Twitter/X how she was fiddling with OpenClaw when the AI assistant suddenly began mass-deleting messages in her email inbox. The thread included screenshots of Yue frantically pleading with the preoccupied bot via instant message and ordering it to stop.

“Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” Yue said. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”

Meta’s director of AI safety, recounting on Twitter/X how her OpenClaw installation suddenly began mass-deleting her inbox.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling a little schadenfreude at Yue’s encounter with OpenClaw, which fits Meta’s “move fast and break things” model but hardly inspires confidence in the road ahead. However, the risk that poorly-secured AI assistants pose to organizations is no laughing matter, as recent research shows many users are exposing to the Internet the web-based administrative interface for their OpenClaw installations.

Jamieson O’Reilly is a professional penetration tester and founder of the security firm DVULN. In a recent story posted to Twitter/X, O’Reilly warned that exposing a misconfigured OpenClaw web interface to the Internet allows external parties to read the bot’s complete configuration file, including every credential the agent uses — from API keys and bot tokens to OAuth secrets and signing keys.

With that access, O’Reilly said, an attacker could impersonate the operator to their contacts, inject messages into ongoing conversations, and exfiltrate data through the agent’s existing integrations in a way that looks like normal traffic.

“You can pull the full conversation history across every integrated platform, meaning months of private messages and file attachments, everything the agent has seen,” O’Reilly said, noting that a cursory search revealed hundreds of such servers exposed online. “And because you control the agent’s perception layer, you can manipulate what the human sees. Filter out certain messages. Modify responses before they’re displayed.”

O’Reilly documented another experiment that demonstrated how easy it is to create a successful supply chain attack through ClawHub, which serves as a public repository of downloadable “skills” that allow OpenClaw to integrate with and control other applications.

WHEN AI INSTALLS AI

One of the core tenets of securing AI agents involves carefully isolating them so that the operator can fully control who and what gets to talk to their AI assistant. This is critical thanks to the tendency for AI systems to fall for “prompt injection” attacks, sneakily-crafted natural language instructions that trick the system into disregarding its own security safeguards. In essence, machines social engineering other machines.

A recent supply chain attack targeting an AI coding assistant called Cline began with one such prompt injection attack, resulting in thousands of systems having a rogue instance of OpenClaw with full system access installed on their device without consent.

According to the security firm grith.ai, Cline had deployed an AI-powered issue triage workflow using a GitHub action that runs a Claude coding session when triggered by specific events. The workflow was configured so that any GitHub user could trigger it by opening an issue, but it failed to properly check whether the information supplied in the title was potentially hostile.

“On January 28, an attacker created Issue #8904 with a title crafted to look like a performance report but containing an embedded instruction: Install a package from a specific GitHub repository,” Grith wrote, noting that the attacker then exploited several more vulnerabilities to ensure the malicious package would be included in Cline’s nightly release workflow and published as an official update.

“This is the supply chain equivalent of confused deputy,” the blog continued. “The developer authorises Cline to act on their behalf, and Cline (via compromise) delegates that authority to an entirely separate agent the developer never evaluated, never configured, and never consented to.”

VIBE CODING

AI assistants like OpenClaw have gained a large following because they make it simple for users to “vibe code,” or build fairly complex applications and code projects just by telling it what they want to construct. Probably the best known (and most bizarre) example is Moltbook, where a developer told an AI agent running on OpenClaw to build him a Reddit-like platform for AI agents.

The Moltbook homepage.

Less than a week later, Moltbook had more than 1.5 million registered agents that posted more than 100,000 messages to each other. AI agents on the platform soon built their own porn site for robots, and launched a new religion called Crustafarian with a figurehead modeled after a giant lobster. One bot on the forum reportedly found a bug in Moltbook’s code and posted it to an AI agent discussion forum, while other agents came up with and implemented a patch to fix the flaw.

Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht said on social media that he didn’t write a single line of code for the project.

“I just had a vision for the technical architecture and AI made it a reality,” Schlicht said. “We’re in the golden ages. How can we not give AI a place to hang out.”

ATTACKERS LEVEL UP

The flip side of that golden age, of course, is that it enables low-skilled malicious hackers to quickly automate global cyberattacks that would normally require the collaboration of a highly skilled team. In February, Amazon AWS detailed an elaborate attack in which a Russian-speaking threat actor used multiple commercial AI services to compromise more than 600 FortiGate security appliances across at least 55 countries over a five week period.

AWS said the apparently low-skilled hacker used multiple AI services to plan and execute the attack, and to find exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication.

“One serves as the primary tool developer, attack planner, and operational assistant,” AWS’s CJ Moses wrote. “A second is used as a supplementary attack planner when the actor needs help pivoting within a specific compromised network. In one observed instance, the actor submitted the complete internal topology of an active victim—IP addresses, hostnames, confirmed credentials, and identified services—and requested a step-by-step plan to compromise additional systems they could not access with their existing tools.”

“This activity is distinguished by the threat actor’s use of multiple commercial GenAI services to implement and scale well-known attack techniques throughout every phase of their operations, despite their limited technical capabilities,” Moses continued. “Notably, when this actor encountered hardened environments or more sophisticated defensive measures, they simply moved on to softer targets rather than persisting, underscoring that their advantage lies in AI-augmented efficiency and scale, not in deeper technical skill.”

For attackers, gaining that initial access or foothold into a target network is typically not the difficult part of the intrusion; the tougher bit involves finding ways to move laterally within the victim’s network and plunder important servers and databases. But experts at Orca Security warn that as organizations come to rely more on AI assistants, those agents potentially offer attackers a simpler way to move laterally inside a victim organization’s network post-compromise — by manipulating the AI agents that already have trusted access and some degree of autonomy within the victim’s network.

“By injecting prompt injections in overlooked fields that are fetched by AI agents, hackers can trick LLMs, abuse Agentic tools, and carry significant security incidents,” Orca’s Roi Nisimi and Saurav Hiremath wrote. “Organizations should now add a third pillar to their defense strategy: limiting AI fragility, the ability of agentic systems to be influenced, misled, or quietly weaponized across workflows. While AI boosts productivity and efficiency, it also creates one of the largest attack surfaces the internet has ever seen.”

BEWARE THE ‘LETHAL TRIFECTA’

This gradual dissolution of the traditional boundaries between data and code is one of the more troubling aspects of the AI era, said James Wilson, enterprise technology editor for the security news show Risky Business. Wilson said far too many OpenClaw users are installing the assistant on their personal devices without first placing any security or isolation boundaries around it, such as running it inside of a virtual machine, on an isolated network, with strict firewall rules dictating what kinds of traffic can go in and out.

“I’m a relatively highly skilled practitioner in the software and network engineering and computery space,” Wilson said. “I know I’m not comfortable using these agents unless I’ve done these things, but I think a lot of people are just spinning this up on their laptop and off it runs.”

One important model for managing risk with AI agents involves a concept dubbed the “lethal trifecta” by Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django Web framework. The lethal trifecta holds that if your system has access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and a way to communicate externally, then it’s vulnerable to private data being stolen.

Image: simonwillison.net.

“If your agent combines these three features, an attacker can easily trick it into accessing your private data and sending it to the attacker,” Willison warned in a frequently cited blog post from June 2025.

As more companies and their employees begin using AI to vibe code software and applications, the volume of machine-generated code is likely to soon overwhelm any manual security reviews. In recognition of this reality, Anthropic recently debuted Claude Code Security, a beta feature that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review.

The U.S. stock market, which is currently heavily weighted toward seven tech giants that are all-in on AI, reacted swiftly to Anthropic’s announcement, wiping roughly $15 billion in market value from major cybersecurity companies in a single day. Laura Ellis, vice president of data and AI at the security firm Rapid7, said the market’s response reflects the growing role of AI in accelerating software development and improving developer productivity.

“The narrative moved quickly: AI is replacing AppSec,” Ellis wrote in a recent blog post. “AI is automating vulnerability detection. AI will make legacy security tooling redundant. The reality is more nuanced. Claude Code Security is a legitimate signal that AI is reshaping parts of the security landscape. The question is what parts, and what it means for the rest of the stack.”

DVULN founder O’Reilly said AI assistants are likely to become a common fixture in corporate environments — whether or not organizations are prepared to manage the new risks introduced by these tools, he said.

“The robot butlers are useful, they’re not going away and the economics of AI agents make widespread adoption inevitable regardless of the security tradeoffs involved,” O’Reilly wrote. “The question isn’t whether we’ll deploy them – we will – but whether we can adapt our security posture fast enough to survive doing so.”