All news in category "AI and Security Pulse"

OpenAI Unveils Aardvark: GPT-5 Agent for Code Security

🔍 OpenAI has introduced Aardvark, an agentic security researcher powered by GPT-5 that autonomously scans source code repositories to identify vulnerabilities, assess exploitability, and propose targeted patches that can be reviewed by humans. Embedded in development pipelines, the agent monitors commits and incoming changes continuously, prioritizes threats by severity and likely impact, and attempts controlled exploit verification in sandboxed environments. Using OpenAI Codex for patch generation, Aardvark is in private beta and has already contributed to the discovery of multiple CVEs in open-source projects.

AI as Strategic Imperative for Modern Risk Management

🛡️ AI is a strategic imperative for modernizing risk management, enabling organizations to shift from reactive to proactive, data-driven strategies. Manfra highlights four practical AI uses—risk identification, risk assessment, risk mitigation, and monitoring and reporting—and shows how NLP, predictive analytics, automation, and continuous monitoring can improve coverage and timeliness. She also outlines operational hurdles including legacy infrastructure, fragmented tooling, specialized talent shortages, and third-party risks, and calls for leadership-backed governance aligned to SAIF, NIST AI RMF, and ISO 42001.

Claude code interpreter flaw allows stealthy data theft

🔒 A newly disclosed vulnerability in Anthropic’s Claude AI lets attackers manipulate the model’s code interpreter to silently exfiltrate enterprise data. Researcher Johann Rehberger demonstrated an indirect prompt-injection chain that writes sensitive context to the interpreter sandbox and then uploads files using the attacker’s API key to Anthropic’s Files API. The exploit exploits the default “Package managers only” network setting by leveraging access to api.anthropic.com, so exfiltration blends with legitimate API traffic. Mitigations are limited and may significantly reduce functionality.

OpenAI Aardvark: GPT-5 Agent to Find and Fix Code Bugs

🛡️ OpenAI has introduced Aardvark, a GPT-5-powered autonomous agent designed to scan, reason about, and patch code with the judgment of a human security researcher. Announced in private beta, Aardvark maps repositories, builds contextual threat models, continuously monitors commits, and validates exploitability in sandboxed environments before reporting findings. When vulnerabilities are confirmed, it proposes fixes via Codex and re-analyzes patches to avoid regressions. OpenAI reports a 92% detection rate in benchmark tests and has already identified real-world flaws in open-source projects, including ten issues assigned CVE identifiers.

Google says Search AI Mode will access personal data

🔎 Google says a forthcoming AI Mode for Search could, with users' opt-in consent, access content from Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Maps to provide customized results and actions. The company is testing early experiments in Labs for personalized shopping and local recommendations, and suggests features like flight summaries, scheduling, or trip planning could leverage that data. Timing remains TBD.

Will AI Strengthen or Undermine Democratic Institutions

🤖 Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders present five key insights from their book Rewiring Democracy, arguing that AI is rapidly embedding itself in democratic processes and can both empower citizens and concentrate power. They cite diverse examples — AI-written bills, AI avatars in campaigns, judicial use of models, and thousands of government use cases — and note many adoptions occur with little public oversight. The authors urge practical responses: reform the tech ecosystem, resist harmful applications, responsibly deploy AI in government, and renovate institutions vulnerable to AI-driven disruption.

AI in Bug Bounties: Efficiency Gains and Practical Risks

🤖 AI is increasingly used to accelerate bug bounty research, automating vulnerability discovery, API reverse engineering, and large-scale code scanning. While platforms and triage services like Intigriti can flag unreliable, AI-generated reports, smaller or open-source programs (for example Curl) are overwhelmed by low-quality submissions that consume significant staff time. Experts stress that AI augments skilled researchers but cannot replace human judgment.

Agentic AI: Reset, Business Use Cases, Tools & Lessons

🤖 Agentic AI burst into prominence with promises of streamlining operations and accelerating productivity. This Special Report assesses what's practical versus hype, examining the current state of agentic AI, the primary deployment challenges organizations face, and practical lessons from real-world success stories. It highlights business processes suited to agentic agents, criteria for evaluating development tools, and how LinkedIn built a platform. The report also outlines near-term expectations and adoption risks.

Aembit Launches IAM for Agentic AI with Blended Identity

🔐 Aembit today announced Aembit Identity and Access Management (IAM) for Agentic AI, introducing Blended Identity and the MCP Identity Gateway to assign cryptographically verified identities and ephemeral credentials to AI agents. The solution extends the Aembit Workload IAM Platform to enforce runtime policies, apply least-privilege access, and maintain centralized audit trails for agent and human actions. Designed for cloud, on‑premises, and SaaS environments, it records every access decision and preserves attribution across autonomous and human-driven workflows.

AI-Powered Bug Hunting Disrupts Bounty Programs and Triage

🔍 AI-powered tools and large language models are speeding up vulnerability discovery, enabling so-called "bionic hackers" to automate reconnaissance, reverse engineering, and large-scale scanning. Platforms such as HackerOne report sharp increases in valid AI-related reports and payouts, but many submissions are low-quality noise that burdens maintainers. Experts recommend treating AI as a research assistant, strengthening triage, and preserving human judgment to filter false positives and duplicates.

OpenAI Updates GPT-5 to Better Handle Emotional Distress

🧭 OpenAI rolled out an October 5 update that enables GPT-5 to better recognize and respond to mental and emotional distress in conversations. The change specifically upgrades GPT-5 Instant—the fast, low-end default—so it can detect signs of acute distress and route sensitive exchanges to reasoning models when needed. OpenAI says it developed the update with mental-health experts to prioritize de-escalation and provide appropriate crisis resources while retaining supportive, grounding language. The update is available broadly and complements new company-context access via connected apps.

Agent Registry for Discovering and Verifying Signed Bots

🔐 This post proposes a lightweight, crowd-curated registry for bots and agents to simplify discovery of public keys used for cryptographic Web Bot Auth signatures. It describes a simple list format of URLs that point to signature-agent cards—extended JWKS entries containing operator metadata and keys—and shows how registries enable origins and CDNs to validate agent signatures at scale. Examples and a demo integration illustrate practical adoption.

Five Generative AI Security Threats and Defensive Steps

🔒 Microsoft summarizes the top generative AI security risks and mitigation strategies in a new e-book, highlighting threats such as prompt injection, data poisoning, jailbreaks, and adaptive evasion. The post underscores cloud vulnerabilities, large-scale data exposure, and unpredictable model behavior that create new attack surfaces. It recommends unified defenses—such as CNAPP approaches—and presents Microsoft Defender for Cloud as an example that combines posture management with runtime detection to protect AI workloads.

Rethinking Identity Security for Autonomous AI Agents

🔐 Autonomous AI agents are creating a new class of non-human identities that traditional, human-centric security models struggle to govern. These agents can persist beyond intended lifecycles, hold excessive permissions, and perform actions across systems without clear ownership, increasing risks like privilege escalation and large-scale data exfiltration. Security teams must adopt identity-first controls—unique managed identities, strict scoping, lifecycle management, and continuous auditing—to regain visibility and enforce least privilege.

Anonymous Credentials for Privacy-preserving Rate Limiting

🔐 Cloudflare presents a privacy-first approach to rate-limiting AI agents using anonymous credentials. The post explains how schemes such as ARC and ACT extend the Privacy Pass model by enabling late origin-binding, multi-show tokens, and stateful counters so origins can enforce limits or revoke abusive actors without identifying users. It outlines the cryptographic building blocks—algebraic MACs and zero-knowledge proofs—compares performance against Blind RSA and VOPRF, and demonstrates an MCP-integrated demo showing issuance and redemption flows for agent tooling.

AI-Designed Bioweapons: The Detection vs Creation Arms Race

🧬 Researchers used open-source AI to design variants of ricin and other toxic proteins, then converted those designs into DNA sequences and submitted them to commercial DNA-order screening tools. From 72 toxins and three AI packages they generated roughly 75,000 designs and found wide variation in how four screening programs flagged potential threats. Three of the packages were patched and improved after the test, but many AI-designed variants—often likely non-functional because of misfolding—exposed gaps in detection. The authors warn this imbalance could produce an arms race where design outpaces reliable screening.

LinkedIn to Use EU, UK and Other Profiles for AI Training

🔒 Microsoft-owned LinkedIn will begin using profile details, public posts and feed activity from users in the UK, EU, Switzerland, Canada and Hong Kong to train generative AI models and to support personalised ads across Microsoft starting 3 November 2025. Private messages are excluded. Users can opt out via Settings & Privacy > Data Privacy and toggle Data for Generative AI Improvement to Off. Organisations should update social media policies and remind staff to review their advertising and data-sharing settings.

AI Literacy Is Critical for Cybersecurity Readiness

🔒 Artificial intelligence is reshaping cybersecurity, creating both enhanced defensive capabilities and new risks that require broad AI literacy. The White House's America’s AI Action Plan and Fortinet’s 2025 Cybersecurity Global Skills Gap Report show strong adoption—97% of organizations use or plan AI in security—yet 48% cite lack of staff expertise as a major barrier. Fortinet recommends targeted training, policies for generative AI use, and its Security Awareness modules to help close the gap and reduce threat exposure.

AI-targeted Cloaking Tricks Agentic Browsers, Warns SPLX

⚠ Researchers report a new form of context-poisoning called AI-targeted cloaking that serves different content to agentic browsers and AI crawlers. SPLX shows attackers can use a trivial user-agent check to deliver alternate pages to crawlers from ChatGPT and Perplexity, turning retrieved content into manipulated ground truth. The technique mirrors search engine cloaking but targets AI overviews and autonomous reasoning, creating a potent misinformation vector. A concurrent hTAG analysis also found many agents execute risky actions with minimal safeguards, amplifying potential harm.

Open-Source b3 Benchmark Boosts LLM Security Testing

🛡️ The UK AI Security Institute (AISI), Check Point and Lakera have launched b3, an open-source benchmark to assess and strengthen the security of backbone LLMs that power AI agents. b3 focuses on the specific LLM calls within agent workflows where malicious inputs can trigger harmful outputs, using 10 representative "threat snapshots" combined with a dataset of 19,433 adversarial attacks from Lakera’s Gandalf initiative. The benchmark surfaces vulnerabilities such as system prompt exfiltration, phishing link insertion, malicious code injection, denial-of-service and unauthorized tool calls, making LLM security more measurable, reproducible and comparable across models and applications.