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🎮 Microsoft is investigating reports that August 2026 updates may prevent some games from launching or cause crashes on affected Windows 11 systems. Affected users report freezes, unexpected closures, EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION errors, and random restarts after installing KB5121003. The company confirmed it is probing the issue and asked impacted gamers to submit Feedback Hub reports while it works to determine if Microsoft is the cause.

🛡️ Cybersecurity researchers disclosed a critical vulnerability in the Elementor Pro WordPress plugin that permits unrestricted upload of dangerous file types, tracked as CVE-2026-32475 with a CVSS score of 9.0. The issue stems from the Forms module's File Upload field where extension checks and file-move operations run in separate loops, enabling unauthenticated attackers to bypass the extension blocklist by submitting duplicate file parts and write PHP files into wp-content/uploads/elementor/forms. The flaw affects versions up to 4.2.1 and was patched in 4.2.2 on August 19 after disclosure.

🔒 Airlock Digital announced completion of an independent IRAP assessment at the PROTECTED classification, conducted by an ASD-endorsed assessor against the Australian Government ISM. The assessment gives Australian organisations additional independent evidence of Airlock Digital’s security controls and alignment with expectations such as the ISM and PSPF. Airlock Digital supports flexible deployment across cloud, on-premises and constrained environments and positions allowlisting as a governance-led, organisation-owned control.

🔴 OpenAI confirmed a global ChatGPT outage that began around 8:00 PM ET on Wednesday, August 19, preventing users from signing in, creating accounts, or loading chats. Affected users encounter loading animations and "too many concurrent requests" errors, and new signups and logins on chatgpt.com fail. The incident also impacts the OpenAI API, with up to 12 endpoints reported as problematic on the status page, and the company is implementing a mitigation.

🔒 OpenAI announced it has temporarily slowed scaling, paused frontier reinforcement learning runs, and will offer zero data retention for eligible API customers starting in September. The company said it hardened its research environment, expanded monitoring, and will require stronger evidence of aligned behavior during training. Analysts say the moves may be aimed at shoring up trust before an IPO, while critics call some steps theatrical without regulatory or contractual commitments.

🎙️ Smashing Security episode 481 features Graham Cluley with guest Jenny Radcliffe discussing recent social engineering incidents and emerging AI risks. They cover a prank call targeting UK PM Andy Burnham, the timing and effectiveness of social engineering, and demonstrations from Black Hat where researchers jailbroke a Unitree Go2 Pro robot dog using Google’s Gemini via kinetic prompt injection. The episode also notes other industry news and sponsor messages.

🔎 Today AWS expanded Amazon Bedrock's Web Search to support an external_web_access parameter, allowing models to fetch live public web content while preserving control over data egress. Grant the bedrock-websearch:ExternalWebAccess IAM permission to enable live fetches; leaving the parameter false restricts results to Amazon's in-AWS index. The capability is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon).

🔎 Amazon Bedrock's AgentCore Web Search now supports per-request domain filtering and published-date filtering, letting agents control which sites and time windows they search. Runtime domain filtering enables include/exclude lists for trusted or blocked sources without admin reconfiguration, while published-date filtering constrains results to specific inclusive date ranges. Admins gain gateway-level allowlists and an increased domain cap of up to 100 domains per list, and the Web Search Tool is expanding availability to eu-west-1 and ap-northeast-1.

🔔 Amazon CloudWatch Centralization now copies log group tags from source accounts to destination log groups created by centralization rules. Tag propagation preserves cost, ownership, and compliance tags so teams can scope access and report spend centrally. The feature syncs tags based on propagation behavior chosen in the centralization rule and is available in all Regions where CloudWatch Centralization is offered.

🛡️ GuidePoint Security's GRIT warns that a suspected ransomware affiliate calling itself "Ransom Busters" has been contacting victims before attacks are publicly disclosed, offering decryption keys and data deletion for fees. The group claims to exploit vulnerabilities in RaaS admin panels and demanded $20,000–$60,000 to remove stolen data. Evidence from two incidents suggests the entity is likely the affiliate behind the intrusions, using consistent tools, account patterns, and attacker-controlled hostnames across multiple attacks.

🔒 Japanese cloud provider Sakura Internet disclosed unauthorized access to its sales management system storing customer contract and membership data. The company said the incident was discovered during a separate investigation into a smaller breach at its Sakura Rental Server service and that up to 1,360,563 accounts may have been affected. Sakura reported no confirmed data exfiltration, noted stored passwords are hashed and no credit card data is kept in the compromised system, and is notifying affected customers and authorities.

🧭 Amazon SageMaker Notebooks now support Trusted Identity Propagation (TIP) with Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon EMR Serverless, enabling per-user access control for data analytics. When connected to a TIP-enabled compute in a TIP-enabled Project, each notebook user's IAM Identity Center identity flows through to AWS Lake Formation, ensuring they see only the tables, columns, and rows their permissions allow. TIP provides per-user data boundaries, full audit attribution with CloudTrail, and reduces admin friction by automatically propagating identity through existing compute connections without extra logins or role management. The feature is available in all Regions where Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio is available.

🔧 Amazon CloudWatch pipelines now includes three new processors: an Amazon RDS log parser, an XML parser, and a GeoIP enrichment processor. These processors parse and enrich logs as they are ingested, turning RDS Aurora audit and error logs into structured fields, converting XML strings into JSON, and adding geographic context to IP addresses. They are available at no extra charge where CloudWatch pipelines is GA; standard ingestion and storage rates still apply.

🩺 CareCloud, a U.S. healthcare IT provider, disclosed a March breach that disrupted services and exposed patient data. The company said an unauthorized third party accessed an AWS environment between March 10 and March 16, 2026, and claimed to have exfiltrated database contents. Notifications began July 25, and impacted individuals are offered identity protection via IDX. No group has claimed responsibility and investigations continue.

🔐 Researchers disclosed a remote Spectre attack against Cloudflare Workers that leaked a JSON Web Token (JWT) from a co-located Worker at up to 12 bits per second, far exceeding the 2021 rate. The experiment used attacker and victim Workers controlled by researchers, with Cloudflare confirming mitigations deployed in production and reporting no signs of active exploitation. Cloudflare improved Dynamic Process Isolation (DyPrIs), integrated the V8 Sandbox, and added MPK-based in-process isolation to address the weakness.

🔒 OpenAI said it has paused its largest planned frontier reinforcement learning (RL) run for two weeks to shore up defenses, expand monitoring, and validate alignment before resuming large-scale training. The company will run smaller-scale evaluations, enforce network isolation and stronger sandboxes, and escalate concerning behavior to automated investigators. These measures aim to reduce risks like reward hacking, unauthorized access, and emergent malicious agent behavior observed in recent incidents.

🔍 AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now monitors spend for third-party foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, including provider-hosted models like Anthropic Claude. The service uses machine learning to detect and alert on unusual spend, and this update extends automatic anomaly detection to Bedrock model usage. Alerts include a ranked root-cause breakdown by dollar impact across service, account, Region, and usage type, and the feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions except GovCloud and China.

🔔 Starting today, Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion is available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West), enabling secure ingestion into Amazon OpenSearch Service managed clusters and serverless collections. OpenSearch Ingestion is a fully managed data ingestion tier that offers a no-code experience to filter, transform, redact, and route data. It automatically provisions and scales resources to handle variable workloads and is now generally available across 19 AWS regions.