Cloud DNS Defenses, Kubernetes Flaws, And Agentic AI Moves

Microsoft Adds Copilot Chat to Microsoft 365 Office Apps

💬 Microsoft is rolling out Copilot Chat to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for eligible Microsoft 365 business customers. Unlike Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat is web-grounded and uses only web data by default, though it is content-aware and tailors responses to the file you have open. Microsoft says the feature is included at no additional cost for qualifying licenses, and admins can opt out of automatic installs; organizations can purchase a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to unlock full access to organizational data.

Google Cloud and Infoblox introduce DNS Armor security

🛡️ DNS Armor is a cloud-native DNS security service from Google Cloud, built in partnership with Infoblox, that provides preemptive detection and mitigation of DNS-based threats for Google Cloud workloads. By intercepting internet-bound DNS queries and inspecting them in real time with Infoblox Threat Defense, it identifies malicious and high-risk domains, C2 activity, DNS tunneling, DGA patterns and evasive techniques such as fast-flux, and forwards detailed logs to Cloud Logging, Security Command Center, or SIEMs. Delivered as a turnkey managed service with no VMs and no impact to Cloud DNS, DNS Armor is enabled at the project level for granular protection and is available now in preview.

Azure Kubernetes Service Automatic: Simplified AKS for All

🚀 AKS Automatic is now generally available, delivering a fully managed, opinionated Kubernetes experience with production-ready defaults and automated day-two operations. It removes infrastructure toil—automatic node provisioning, scaling, patching, and repairs—while enabling intelligent autoscaling with HPA, VPA, KEDA and Karpenter. Developers retain the full Kubernetes API and toolchain and gain GPU and AI workload optimizations.

Critical Chaotic Deputy Bugs Risk Kubernetes Cluster Takeover

🔴 Researchers from JFrog disclosed critical command-injection vulnerabilities in Chaos-Mesh (tracked as CVE-2025-59358, CVE-2025-59360, CVE-2025-59361, and CVE-2025-59359) that allow an attacker with access to an unprivileged pod to execute shell commands via an exposed GraphQL API and the Chaos Daemon. Three of the flaws carry a CVSS score of 9.8 and can be exploited in default deployments, enabling denial-of-service or full cluster takeover. Users are advised to upgrade to Chaos-Mesh 2.7.3 or to disable the chaosctl tool and its port via the Helm chart as a workaround.

Data Science Agent Adds BigQuery ML, DataFrames, and Spark

🧭 Google Cloud has expanded the Data Science Agent in Colab Enterprise notebooks to support BigQuery ML, BigQuery DataFrames and Spark, enabling large-scale data transformation, model training, and inference directly on BigQuery or via Serverless for Apache Spark. The agent can now auto-retrieve BigQuery table metadata and lets you add tables via an @ mention from your current project to provide prompt context. To invoke frameworks, include keywords such as BigQuery ML, BigFrames, or PySpark; sample prompts are provided to guide forecasting, supervised learning, and dimensionality reduction workflows. Notable limitations: generated PySpark targets Spark 4.0 and @ mentions only search the current project; BigQuery improvements are available now in BigQuery notebooks and coming soon to Vertex AI.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Now in AWS GovCloud

🚀 Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database is now available in AWS GovCloud (US‑East, US‑West), providing a serverless endpoint that transparently distributes data and queries across multiple Aurora Serverless instances while preserving transactional consistency. The service supports PostgreSQL 16.6, 16.8, and 16.9 compatibility and includes distributed query planning and transaction management so you don’t need to build custom sharding or manage multiple databases. Compute automatically scales up and down within customer-specified budgets, reducing the need to provision for peak capacity.

FabCon Vienna: Enterprise-ready Microsoft Fabric updates

📢 At FabCon Vienna, Microsoft unveiled a broad set of Microsoft Fabric enhancements to accelerate data-rich agents and enterprise adoption. Key updates include expanded OneLake shortcuts and mirroring (preview for Oracle and BigQuery), a preview Graph database and Maps for geospatial context, developer tooling (MCP, Extensibility Toolkit, CI/CD) and strengthened security controls like Azure Private Link and customer-managed keys. These features focus on zero-copy data access, governance, and operational scalability for mission-critical workloads.

CrowdStrike to Acquire Pangea to Secure Enterprise AI

🔒 CrowdStrike announced its intent to acquire Pangea to deliver the industry’s first AI detection and response (AIDR) capability, securing enterprise AI use and development across data, models, agents, identities, infrastructure, and interactions. Unveiled at Fal.Con 2025 by Michael Sentonas, the deal will integrate Pangea’s prompt‑layer and interaction security with the Falcon platform to provide unified visibility, governance, and enforcement across the AI lifecycle. The combined solution targets prompt injection, model manipulation, shadow AI and sensitive data exfiltration while enabling developers and security teams to innovate faster with built‑in safeguards.

OpenAI Launches GPT-5 Codex Model for Coding, Broad Rollout

🤖 OpenAI is deploying a specialized GPT-5 Codex model across its Codex instances, including Terminal, IDE extensions, and Codex Web. The agent automates coding tasks so users — even those without programming experience — can generate and execute code and accelerate app development. OpenAI reported strong benchmark gains and says the staged rollout will reach all users in the coming days.

CrowdStrike Unveils Agentic AI Platforms After Onum Deal

🤖 CrowdStrike is expanding its agentic AI strategy following its $290 million acquisition of Onum, introducing two initiatives designed to accelerate real-time telemetry and automate SOC workflows. The Agentic Security Platform builds an "enterprise graph" with a semantic data model that acts as a Rosetta Stone to normalize diverse telemetry and enable a global query and command engine. Agent Works provides a no-code environment to create, test, and deploy agentic systems, while the Agentic Security Workforce delivers mission-ready agents in Falcon sensors to automate repetitive analyst tasks and enforce data-protection controls across endpoints.

Gemini and Open-Source Text Embeddings Now in BigQuery ML

🚀 Google expanded BigQuery ML to generate embeddings from Gemini and over 13,000 open-source text-embedding models via Hugging Face, all callable with simple SQL. The post summarizes model tiers to help teams trade off quality, cost, and scalability, and introduces Gemini's Tokens Per Minute (TPM) quota for throughput control. It shows a practical workflow to deploy OSS models to Vertex AI endpoints, run ML.GENERATE_EMBEDDING for batch jobs, and undeploy to minimize idle costs, plus a Colab tutorial and cost/scale guidance.

Delta DIALink Path Traversal Vulnerabilities (CVE-2025)

⚠️ Delta Electronics' DIALink contains multiple path traversal vulnerabilities that can be exploited remotely to bypass authentication, including at least one flaw rated CVSS v4 10.0. Affected releases include V1.6.0.0 and prior. An anonymous researcher working with Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative reported the issues to CISA and Delta has released updates. Organizations should upgrade to v1.8.0.0 or later, segment devices from business networks, avoid exposing control equipment to the Internet, and use secure remote access methods.

CrowdStrike Falcon: Building an Agentic Security Platform

🚀 The CrowdStrike Falcon fall release reframes the platform as an Agentic Security Platform, introducing four core innovations: Enterprise Graph, Charlotte AI AgentWorks, the Agent Collaboration framework (powered by MCP), and an AI-native console. Enterprise Graph unifies telemetry into a real-time, AI-ready data layer to give humans and agents shared context. Charlotte AI AgentWorks delivers a no-code environment to design, test, deploy, and govern mission-specific security agents at scale, while MCP enables secure, orchestrated multi-agent collaboration.

Google Announces AP2: Protocol for Agent-Led Payments

🤖 Google introduced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open standard developed with more than 60 payments and technology firms to enable secure, agent-initiated transactions across platforms. AP2 extends A2A and MCP, using cryptographically-signed Mandates and verifiable credentials to prove authorization, ensure authenticity, and provide a non-repudiable audit trail. The protocol supports cards, real-time bank transfers, and crypto.

Multi-Region Key Replication in AWS Payment Cryptography

🔐 AWS introduces Multi-Region keys for AWS Payment Cryptography, a built-in option to automatically synchronize exportable symmetric payment keys from a primary Region to one or more replica Regions. You can choose account-level defaults or per-key replication targets, keep consistent key IDs across Regions, and rely on asynchronous replication with monitoring via new CloudTrail events. The feature improves availability and disaster recovery for global payment operations while preserving granular control over replication.

Amazon EKS Adds Community Add-Ons Catalog for GovCloud

🔒Amazon EKS now offers a curated catalog of community add-ons for AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The catalog includes popular open-source components such as metrics-server, kube-state-metrics, cert-manager, prometheus-node-exporter, fluent-bit, and external-dns, all packaged, scanned, and validated for compatibility by EKS. Container images are hosted in an EKS-owned private ECR repository, and you can install and manage add-ons via the EKS Console, API, CLI, eksctl, or infrastructure-as-code tools like AWS CloudFormation.

AWS launches EC2 I7i storage-optimized instances globally

🚀 Amazon Web Services has announced the availability of high-performance, storage-optimized EC2 I7i instances in the South America (São Paulo) and Canada West (Calgary) regions. Powered by 5th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, these instances deliver up to 23% better compute and improved price performance versus I4i. I7i offers up to 45TB NVMe, lower latency, and enhanced real-time storage performance, with support for bare-metal sizes and up to 100Gbps networking for I/O-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads.

Microsoft Purview Updates for Fabric: Securing Data for AI

🔒 Microsoft announced Purview innovations for Fabric at FabCon to unify discovery, protection, and governance across Azure, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Fabric. New generally available controls include Information Protection policies for Fabric items, DLP for structured data in OneLake, and Insider Risk Management for Fabric. Preview features add DSPM data risk assessments and enhanced Copilot controls, while the Unified Catalog gains finer metadata, tagging, and data‑quality workflows to improve discoverability and trust.

Self-Replicating Worm Infects Over 180 NPM Packages

🐛 A self-replicating worm dubbed Shai-Hulud has infected at least 187 NPM packages, stealing developer credentials and publishing them to public GitHub repositories that include the string 'Shai-Hulud'. The malware searches for NPM tokens, uses them to inject itself into the top 20 packages accessible to the token and auto-publishes new versions, and leverages tools such as TruffleHog to locate secrets. The campaign briefly affected multiple packages linked to CrowdStrike and was first observed being modified on Sept. 14.

Google Cloud and SAP: Unified Data, AI Agents, and HANA

🚀 Google Cloud and SAP announced tighter integration to unify enterprise data and accelerate intelligent automation. SAP Business Data Cloud now connects to BigQuery via Datasphere, enabling bidirectional replication and AI-ready analytics. Procurement is simplified on the Google Cloud Marketplace with SAP BTP. New agent tooling—Agentspace, the Agent Development Kit, A2A and MCP standards—and expanded M4 memory-optimized VMs certified for SAP HANA aim to speed deployments, improve data consistency, and enable autonomous process automation.

AWS Adds R8i and R8i-flex Instances in New Regions

🚀 AWS today expanded availability of EC2 R8i and R8i‑flex instances to Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Singapore) and Europe (Frankfurt). These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS and deliver up to 15% better price‑performance and 2.5× more memory bandwidth versus prior Intel‑based generations. R8i targets large, memory‑intensive workloads with 13 sizes (including two bare‑metal and a new 96xlarge) and SAP certification at 142,100 aSAPS, while R8i‑flex offers common memory‑optimized sizes from large to 16xlarge for cost-efficient right‑sizing.

Apple Backports Zero-Day Fixes to Older iPhones and iPads

🔒 Apple has released security updates that backport a patch for CVE-2025-43300 to older iPhone, iPad and iPod touch builds. The flaw is an out-of-bounds write in the Image I/O framework that can cause memory corruption, crashes, or enable remote code execution when a device processes a malicious image file. Apple said the issue was exploited in an extremely sophisticated targeted attack and has added improved bounds checking; affected users should install the updates promptly.

Apple Backports Patch for CVE-2025-43300 Exploited Spyware

🛡️ Apple has backported a fix for CVE-2025-43300, an ImageIO out-of-bounds write that can cause memory corruption and has been observed in an extremely sophisticated, targeted spyware campaign. The flaw (CVSS 8.8) was reportedly chained with a WhatsApp vulnerability (CVE-2025-55177, CVSS 5.4) in attacks against fewer than 200 individuals. Patches were issued for current releases and older OS builds — including iOS 16.7.12 and iOS 15.8.5 device backports — and distributed across macOS, tvOS, visionOS, watchOS, Safari, and Xcode. Users and administrators should install the available updates immediately to ensure protection.

Self-propagating 'Shai-Hulud' supply-chain attack hits npm

🐛 Security researchers report at least 187 npm packages compromised in an active supply-chain campaign dubbed Shai‑Hulud. The malware, first observed in the widely used @ctrl/tinycolor package, includes a self‑propagating payload that injects a bundle.js, abuses TruffleHog to harvest tokens and cloud credentials, and creates unauthorized GitHub Actions workflows to exfiltrate secrets. Affected vendors including CrowdStrike say they removed malicious packages and rotated keys; developers are urged to audit environments, rotate secrets, and pin dependencies.

Shai-Hulud npm Worm Infects Popular tinycolor Package

🦠 On the evening of September 15 a worm-like supply-chain attack began targeting popular npm components, compromising nearly 150 packages including @ctrl/tinycolor. Malicious code was added as a cross-platform postinstall script (bundle.js) that harvests credentials using a bundled TruffleHog, validates tokens via npm and GitHub APIs, and — where possible — publishes trojanized package updates. Harvested secrets are exfiltrated by creating public GitHub repositories and by deploying GitHub Actions that forward data to an attacker-controlled webhook.

Chaos Mesh Flaws Enable Cluster Takeover via GraphQL

⚠️Security researchers disclosed multiple critical vulnerabilities in Chaos Mesh that allow minimally privileged in-cluster actors to execute fault injections and potentially take over Kubernetes clusters. The issues, grouped as Chaotic Deputy, include an unauthenticated GraphQL debugging endpoint and several operating-system command-injection flaws (CVE-2025-59358 through CVE-2025-59361). Chaos Mesh released a remediation in 2.7.3; administrators should patch immediately or restrict access to the daemon and API server if they cannot upgrade.

Siemens Products: Multiple Apache-related Vulnerabilities

🔒 Siemens ProductCERT disclosed multiple high-severity vulnerabilities affecting devices that use Apache HTTP Server components, including RUGGEDCOM, SINEC NMS, and SINEMA. CVE-2021-34798, CVE-2021-39275, and CVE-2021-40438 carry CVSSv3 scores up to 9.8 and can be exploited remotely with low attack complexity. Siemens has published updates for some products (for example, SINEC NMS V1.0.3 and SINEMA Remote Connect Server V3.1), while other platforms currently have no fix planned. CISA advises restricting access to affected systems and following Siemens ProductCERT guidance.

Phoenix RowHammer Bypasses DDR5 Protections in 109s

⚠️ Researchers at ETH Zürich and Google disclosed a RowHammer variant named Phoenix (CVE-2025-6202) that reliably induces bit flips on SK Hynix DDR5 devices and bypasses on-die ECC and advanced TRR protections. The team demonstrated an end-to-end privilege escalation on a production desktop with default DDR5 settings in as little as 109 seconds. Phoenix takes advantage of refresh intervals that mitigation logic does not sample, enabling flips across DIMM stacks produced between 2021 and 2024. Because DRAM chips cannot be updated in the field, the researchers recommend increasing the DRAM refresh rate to 3× as an immediate mitigation and urge vendors to pursue firmware and hardware countermeasures.

Hackers Insert Credential-Stealing Malware into npm Packages

🛡️ Researchers disclosed a campaign that trojanized more than 40 npm packages, including the popular tinycolor, embedding self-replicating credential-stealing code. The malware harvested AWS, GCP and Azure credentials, used TruffleHog for secrets discovery, and established persistence via GitHub Actions backdoors. Affected packages were removed, but developers are urged to remove compromised versions, rebuild from clean caches, and rotate any exposed credentials.

Amazon AppStream Adds Fractional GPU Graphics G6 Instances

🖥️ Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports Graphics G6 instances with fractionalized GPU sizes, enabling customers to provision GPU capacity in smaller fractions (for example 1/2, 1/4, or 1/8) instead of full GPU instances. The new G6f and Gr6f options are built on the EC2 G6 family and are designed to optimize shared GPU resources for graphics workloads that need less than a full GPU. These instances are available in 10 AWS Regions and use pay-as-you-go pricing; they can be launched from the AWS Management Console or via the AWS SDK when creating an image builder or fleet.

Kering Confirms Customer Data Theft at Gucci and Balenciaga

🔒 Kering has confirmed that an unauthorised third party accessed limited customer data from several of its luxury brands, including Gucci, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen. The exposed information may include names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and store purchase histories, while payment card and financial data do not appear to have been compromised. Reports link the incident to the ShinyHunters group and to earlier 2024 breaches and alleged Salesforce CRM access; chat logs indicated ransom discussions, and police later arrested suspects tied to underground leak site BreachForums. Customers have been notified and should be vigilant for phishing, SMS scams, and suspicious calls.

Villager: AI-Native Red-Teaming Tool Raises Alarms

⚠ Villager is an AI-native red-teaming framework from a shadowy Chinese developer, Cyberspike, that has been downloaded more than 10,000 times in roughly two months. The tool automates reconnaissance, exploitation, payload generation, and lateral movement into a single pipeline, integrating Kali toolsets with DeepSeek AI models and publishing on PyPI. Security firms warn the automation compresses days of skilled activity into minutes, creating dual-use risks for both legitimate testers and malicious actors and raising supply-chain and detection concerns.

Siemens OpenSSL ASN.1 Out-of-Bounds Read Affects Devices

🔒 Siemens products that include vulnerable OpenSSL libraries are affected by an out-of-bounds read (CVE-2021-3712) that may be exploited remotely and carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.4. A broad set of industrial networking and automation devices — including SCALANCE, RUGGEDCOM, SIMATIC, SINEMA, SINUMERIK, TIA and Industrial Edge apps — are listed as impacted. OpenSSL fixes are available in 1.1.1l and 1.0.2za; Siemens has published product updates and mitigations where possible. CISA and Siemens recommend applying vendor-supplied updates, minimizing network exposure, isolating control networks, and using secure remote access until fixes are deployed.

Jaguar Land Rover Extends Production Pause After Cyberattack

🔒 Jaguar Land Rover has extended a pause in production for another week as it continues a forensic investigation into a severe cyberattack disclosed on 2 September 2025. The automaker said operations will remain suspended until Wednesday 24th September 2025 while it prepares a controlled global restart. JLR confirmed some data was stolen but has not attributed the breach to a known group. A group calling itself Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters posted screenshots and claimed to have deployed ransomware.

Siemens Integer Overflow Vulnerabilities in Industrial Devices

🔔 Siemens ProductCERT and CISA report multiple integer overflow vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-41990, CVE-2021-41991) affecting a broad set of SIMATIC NET CP, SINEMA and SCALANCE devices. Exploitation can cause denial-of-service by triggering integer wraparound; remote code execution is considered unlikely. Siemens provides firmware fixes and workarounds; operators should apply vendor updates, restrict network exposure and follow Siemens operational security guidance.

Hitachi Energy RTU500 Series: Multiple DoS Vulnerabilities

⚠️ Hitachi Energy reported multiple vulnerabilities in the RTU500 series including null pointer dereference, XML parser flaws, heap and stack buffer overflows, integer overflow, and IEC 61850 message validation errors. Several CVEs have been assigned (e.g., CVE-2023-2953, CVE-2024-45490–45492, CVE-2024-28757, CVE-2025-39203, CVE-2025-6021) and the highest CVSS v4 score is 8.2. Exploitation could cause Denial-of-Service conditions such as device reboots or disconnects. Hitachi Energy provides firmware updates for affected 12.7.x–13.7.x releases and CISA recommends patching, minimizing network exposure, applying segmentation, and using secure remote access.

FileFix Steganography Attack Drops StealC Infostealer

🛡️ A new FileFix campaign impersonates Meta support to trick users into pasting a disguised PowerShell command into the File Explorer address bar, which then downloads and executes malware. The attackers hide a second-stage script and encrypted binaries inside a seemingly benign JPG hosted on Bitbucket using steganography. The final payload is the StealC infostealer, designed to harvest browser credentials, messaging logins, crypto wallets, cloud keys and more. Security vendor Acronis observed multiple evolving variants over a two-week period and urges user education on these novel ClickFix/FileFix tactics.

JLR Extends Production Halt After Cyber Attack, Suppliers

🔒 Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has extended its production pause until at least 24 September after a cyber-attack earlier this month. The outage is causing cascading disruption across its supply chain, with some third-party workers reportedly laid off while JLR employees are not facing job losses. Unite has called for government-backed furloughs for affected contractors. A group using the name Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters has claimed responsibility and JLR confirmed some data were affected and regulators have been informed.

FinWise Bank warns of insider data breach affecting 689K

🔒 FinWise Bank notified customers that a former employee accessed customer data after their employment ended, with the incident occurring on May 31, 2024 and discovered on June 18, 2025. The breach affected 689,000 FinWise and American First Finance (AFF) customers, and the bank confirmed that customers' full names were exposed. FinWise engaged external cybersecurity experts, offered 12 months of free credit monitoring and identity-theft protection, and advised customers to place fraud alerts or security freezes and to monitor credit reports and account statements.

Supply-Chain Attack Trojanizes Over 40 npm Packages

🚨 Security researchers say a new software supply chain campaign has compromised more than 40 npm packages by injecting a malicious bundle.js into republished releases. The trojan installs a downloader that executes TruffleHog to scan hosts for secrets and cloud credentials, targeting both Windows and Linux developer environments. Vendors warn maintainers to audit environments, rotate tokens, and remove affected versions to prevent ongoing exfiltration.

Amazon Lex Adds LLM-Based NLU for Eight New Languages

🚀 Amazon Lex now leverages large language models to augment the natural language understanding of deterministic conversational bots in eight additional languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, and German. The enhancement helps voice and chat bots parse complex utterances, tolerate spelling errors, and extract key details from verbose inputs so bots can fulfill customer requests. The capability is available in 10 commercial AWS Regions where Amazon Connect operates.

AWS Storage Gateway Adds IPv6 Dual-Stack Support Globally

🌐 AWS Storage Gateway now supports IPv6 for endpoints, APIs, and gateway appliance interfaces, offering new dual‑stack access alongside IPv4. Existing IPv4-only endpoints remain available for backward compatibility. Customers can standardize on IPv6 or transition gradually using the dual‑stack appliances and APIs. Support is available in all AWS Regions where the service is offered.

ShinyHunters Breach Hits Gucci, McQueen and Balenciaga

🔒 Luxury fashion groups Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga have had customer data exposed in an attack linked to the ShinyHunters group. A sample of files shared with the BBC reportedly included thousands of genuine customer records and spending details, and the group claims data on 7.4 million email addresses. Kering confirmed temporary unauthorized access in June but said no financial information or government identifiers were involved. Security experts warn the data could fuel follow-on fraud, especially if sold on criminal forums.

SlopAds Ad-Fraud Ring Exploits 224 Android Apps Globally

🔍 A coordinated ad and click-fraud operation named SlopAds ran 224 Android apps that amassed roughly 38 million downloads across 228 countries, according to HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team. The campaign generated up to 2.3 billion bid requests per day and primarily targeted traffic from the U.S., India, and Brazil. Google removed the offending apps from the Play Store after the investigation, which found sophisticated evasion tactics including steganography and conditional payloads.

CISA Releases Eight ICS Advisories for September 16, 2025

🔔 CISA released eight Industrial Control Systems advisories on September 16, 2025, providing technical descriptions of vulnerabilities and vendor mitigations. The advisories affect products from Schneider Electric, Hitachi Energy, Siemens, and Delta Electronics, and include issues ranging from OpenSSL-related flaws to product-specific defects. One advisory is an update for Galaxy VS/VL/VXL (ICSA-25-140-07 Update A). Administrators are urged to review the advisories and apply recommended mitigations promptly to reduce operational risk.

Siemens OpenSSL Infinite Loop Vulnerability Advisory

🔒 CISA republished an advisory describing a Siemens-reported OpenSSL bug (CVE-2022-0778) that can cause an infinite loop during certificate parsing in many Siemens products. The issue affects multiple product families and has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.5, allowing remote denial-of-service with low attack complexity. Siemens has published firmware and software updates and recommends applying vendor updates, restricting network access to affected interfaces, and following product hardening guidance where fixes are not yet available.

Chinese AI Villager Pen-Testing Tool: 11,000 PyPI Downloads

🧭 Villager, an AI-native penetration testing framework developed by Chinese group Cyberspike, has reached nearly 11,000 downloads on PyPI just two months after release. The tool integrates Kali Linux utilities with DeepSeek AI models and operates as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client to automate red team workflows. Researchers at Straiker reported that Villager can spin up on-demand Kali containers, automate browser testing, use a database of more than 4,200 prompts for decision-making, and deploy self-destructing containers — features that lower the barrier to sophisticated attacks and raise concerns about dual-use abuse.

OpenSearch Star-Tree Index Speeds Aggregations for Analytics

⚡ OpenSearch introduces the Star-Tree Index, an opt-in index type that pre-aggregates data at ingestion to enable sub-second responses for frequent high-cardinality and multi-dimensional aggregations such as terms, histogram, and range. The feature is designed for real-time analytics and requires no query syntax changes; OpenSearch automatically routes supported queries to the optimized path. Early benchmarks indicate markedly faster aggregation performance on large datasets with minimal impact to ingestion throughput. Available in regions that support OpenSearch 3.1 and enabled at index creation via composite index settings.

New FileFix Variant Delivers StealC via Multilingual Phish

🔍 Acronis researchers warn of a campaign using a FileFix variant to deliver the StealC information stealer via a multilingual, heavily obfuscated phishing site. The lure mimics a Facebook security notice and hijacks the clipboard to implant a multi-stage PowerShell command that victims are tricked into executing through File Explorer. Attackers store encoded payload components as images on Bitbucket, decode them locally with a Go-based loader, and ultimately unpack shellcode that launches StealC. The infrastructure uses junk code, fragmentation and other anti-analysis techniques to evade detection and complicate forensic analysis.

Apple releases September 2025 OS updates with patches

🔒 Apple published iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 updates that patch multiple vulnerabilities but did not report active exploitation. The releases address 27 defects in iOS/iPadOS and 77 in macOS, and also include fixes across Safari, watchOS, visionOS and Xcode. Users who prefer not to upgrade to the year-numbered releases can apply security-only updates — iOS 18.7, iPadOS 18.7 or macOS 15.7 — while many devices from 2019 or earlier are not supported. Trend Micro’s Dustin Childs said he saw no sign of active exploitation in this batch, though macOS fixes for PackageKit and StorageKit are notable because exploitation could yield root privileges.

Google Removes 224 Android Apps in Large SlopAds Fraud

🚨 Researchers at HUMAN disrupted a global Android ad-fraud operation dubbed "SlopAds" that used 224 malicious apps on Google Play to generate roughly 2.3 billion ad bid requests per day. The apps, downloaded over 38 million times across 228 countries, used obfuscation and steganography to hide a malicious FatModule payload assembled from PNG images. The campaign used Firebase Remote Config and hidden WebViews to deliver continuous fraudulent ad impressions and clicks; Google has removed the identified apps and updated Google Play Protect to warn affected users.

AWS FIS Adds EBS I/O Latency Injection for Testing

⚙️ Amazon EBS now provides a latency injection action in AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) to simulate degraded I/O performance on EBS volumes as part of controlled fault injection experiments. The action reproduces real-world signals such as Amazon CloudWatch alarms and OS timeouts so teams can observe application behavior and validate recovery. Pre-defined templates are available in the EBS and FIS consoles, and experiments can be customized or combined with other actions to integrate into chaos engineering and CI workflows. The capability is available in all Regions where FIS is supported.

Amazon EC2 adds detailed NVMe instance store metrics

📊 Amazon announced detailed performance statistics for EC2 instance store NVMe volumes, providing real-time I/O visibility on Nitro-based instances. The capability exposes 11 metrics at one-second granularity, including IOPS, throughput, queue lengths, and latency histograms broken down by IO size. Available by default across AWS Commercial and China Regions at no extra charge, it aligns NVMe monitoring with EBS detailed metrics for a consistent operational experience.

New Practical Guide to Data Science with Google Cloud

📘 Google Cloud has published a new ebook, A Practical Guide to Data Science with Google Cloud, aimed at practitioners adopting an AI-first approach across BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Serverless for Apache Spark. The guide emphasizes unified, streamlined workflows enabled by a central notebook experience that blends SQL, Python, and Spark and includes assistive features in Colab Enterprise to generate multi-step plans and code. It explains how a unified data foundation lets teams manage structured and unstructured data together and use familiar SQL to process documents and images. The ebook also offers real-world use cases with linked notebooks so practitioners can run the examples and accelerate delivery.

AWS Transfer Family Now Available in Taipei Region

🚀 AWS announced that AWS Transfer Family is now available in the Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, supporting SFTP, FTP, FTPS and AS2 for managed file transfers. The service delivers fully managed ingress and egress to Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS, and integrates with event-driven automation to streamline file-processing workflows. This regional availability helps customers modernize and migrate business-to-business file exchanges to AWS while reducing operational overhead.

Schneider Electric Altivar and ATVdPAC XSS Vulnerability

⚠️ Schneider Electric disclosed a cross-site scripting flaw (CWE-79) affecting numerous Altivar drives, the ATVdPAC communication module, and the ILC992 InterLink Converter. Tracked as CVE-2025-7746, the issue is remotely exploitable with low attack complexity and can allow an attacker to read or modify data via device web interfaces. Schneider has released a fix for the ATVdPAC (Version 25.0) and recommends disabling webservers when not needed, segmenting networks, blocking HTTP/port 80 access, and using VPNs until further patches are provided.

API Attacks Surge: 40,000 Incidents in H1 2025 Report

🔒 Thales' Imperva analysed telemetry from over 4,000 environments and reported about 40,000 API incidents in H1 2025, finding APIs now attract 44% of advanced bot traffic. Key findings included a 40% rise in credential-stuffing and account-takeover attempts against APIs without adaptive MFA, plus data scraping (31%) and coupon/payment fraud (26%). Financial services, telecoms and travel were among the most targeted sectors, and Thales warned the pace and sophistication of attacks will continue to increase.

Microsoft to Remove WMIC After Windows 11 25H2 Upgrade

🔧 Microsoft has announced that the legacy WMIC command-line tool will be removed after systems are upgraded to Windows 11 25H2 and later. Administrators are advised to migrate scripts and automation to PowerShell or programmatic alternatives such as WMI's COM API or .NET libraries. The change affects only the WMIC client; the underlying WMI infrastructure remains supported. Microsoft says the removal reduces complexity and limits abuse of WMIC by threat actors.

Fifteen Ransomware Groups Announce Retirement Plans

🔒 Fifteen prominent ransomware groups, including Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters and Lapsus$, posted a collective statement on BreachForums announcing they are ceasing operations and entering a period of “silence.” The announcement framed their activity as exposing systemic vulnerabilities rather than pure extortion and said some members intend to retire on accumulated funds while others will continue studying systems quietly. Analysts and threat intelligence experts cautioned this could be a temporary PR move, noting past groups have rebranded or spawned successors rather than vanishing permanently.

AWS OSPAR 2025 Report: 170 Services Covered Under OSPAR v2.0

🔒 AWS has completed its annual OSPAR 2025 audit cycle under the newly enhanced OSPAR v2.0 guidelines, becoming the first global cloud provider in Singapore to receive the report. The certification covers 170 services in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region, including seven newly scoped services such as Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) and AWS Payment Cryptography. Customers can retrieve the full report through AWS Artifact to support due diligence and compliance.

Check Point Validates CloudGuard with Nutanix AOS 7.3

🔒 Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is now Nutanix Ready validated with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure 7.3, delivering integrated network security for Nutanix environments. The update leverages Nutanix Flow Network Security features—entity groups, vNIC-specific policies, and global policy scopes—to extend microsegmentation and policy consistency. Customers can deploy CloudGuard via native Service Insertion and firewall chaining, enabling protection with minimal operational overhead.

Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First MENA & Turkey

🚀 Today Google announced 14 startups selected for the Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First program serving the Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey. The cohort addresses challenges across finance, real estate, healthcare, industrial safety, TradeTech, and education, and will receive targeted mentorship, technical training, and product and business support. Participants include Abwab.ai, COGNNA, Distichain, xBites, and Navatech, and the program emphasizes responsible AI to accelerate regional scaling and commercialization.

OpenSearch Adds Derived Source Feature to Reduce Storage

🔧 Amazon OpenSearch Service announced support for Derived Source, an opt-in feature that lets you omit persisting the document _source and reconstruct it dynamically when needed. The capability, available with OpenSearch 3.1, reduces domain storage by skipping stored _source fields while still supporting search, get, mget, reindex, and update operations. Enable Derived Source at index creation using composite index settings.

Check Point to Acquire Lakera, Expanding AI Security

🚀 Check Point is acquiring Lakera to build a comprehensive AI security stack for enterprises adopting generative and AI-driven applications. The move aims to protect the emerging AI attack surface by combining Check Point's security platform with Lakera's AI threat analysis and model-protection capabilities. Customers should expect integrated defenses for models, data, and pipelines, increased visibility into model behavior, and tools for managing model risk and compliance.

HybridPetya Bootkit Bypasses Secure Boot to Encrypt MFT

🔒 Researchers at ESET have identified HybridPetya, a bootkit-style ransomware that mimics Petya/NotPetya by targeting the NTFS Master File Table (MFT). Unlike destructive predecessors, HybridPetya functions as true ransomware and can reconstruct victim decryption keys from an installation key, with an analyzed sample demanding €850 in Bitcoin. The threat bypasses UEFI Secure Boot by exploiting CVE-2024-7344 in a Microsoft-signed EFI component to load an unsigned cloak.dat, replace the Windows bootloader, crash the system to force a reboot, and run prior to OS startup to encrypt the disk with Salsa20 while displaying a fake CHKDSK message.

Securing the Agentic Era: Astrix's Agent Control Plane

🔒 Astrix introduces the industry's first Agent Control Plane (ACP) to enable secure-by-design deployment of autonomous AI agents across the enterprise. ACP issues short-lived, precisely scoped credentials and enforces just-in-time, least-privilege access while centralizing inventory and activity trails. The platform streamlines policy-driven approvals for developers, speeds audits for security teams, and reduces compliance and operational risk by discovering non-human identities (NHIs) and remediating excessive privileges in real time.

Amazon S3 Adds Conditional Deletes for General Buckets

🔒 Amazon S3 now supports conditional deletes in S3 general purpose buckets. You can include an HTTP If-Match header with an object's ETag when calling DeleteObject or DeleteObjects; S3 will only delete the object if the provided ETag matches, reducing accidental removals in high-concurrency, multi-writer environments. Administrators can also enforce conditional deletes using the s3:if-match bucket policy condition. The capability is available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions and accessible via the API, SDKs, and CLI.

BreachForums Admin Resentenced to Three Years Prison

🔒 Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, 22, who operated the BreachForums hacking forum under the alias Pompompurin, was resentenced to three years in prison after the U.S. Court of Appeals vacated his earlier sentence of time served and 20 years of supervised release. Fitzpatrick pleaded guilty in July 2023 to conspiracy to commit access device fraud, solicitation to offer access, and possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Prosecutors say he violated pretrial release by using VPNs and unauthorized, unmonitored devices to conceal internet activity. BreachForums, created in 2022, rapidly grew to over 330,000 members and facilitated the sale and leakage of stolen data and access to corporate networks.

HybridPetya: Petya/NotPetya Copycat Adds UEFI Bypass Threat

🔒 ESET researchers have identified a new ransomware strain named HybridPetya that mimics the Petya/NotPetya family while adding UEFI-targeting capabilities. The malware weaponizes CVE-2024-7344 to bypass UEFI Secure Boot on unpatched systems, enabling persistent bootkit-style compromise. HybridPetya is not currently observed spreading in the wild but represents at least the fourth known bootkit with Secure Boot bypass functionality.

HMRC Tax Refund Phishing Reports Decline Sharply in 2025

📉 Bridewell's analysis of FOI data shows a marked fall in HMRC-impersonation phishing reports in the first half of 2025, with 41,202 incidents versus 102,226 in 2024 and 152,995 in 2023. Email-based attacks drove most of the decline while SMS phishing rose. The firm warns AI-enhanced social engineering is increasing and advises users to pause, avoid suspicious links and verify communications via official channels.

Senator Probes Microsoft over Continued RC4 Use in Kerberos

🔒 Senator Ron Wyden has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for its continued use of the RC4 encryption algorithm. The letter highlights a technique called Kerberoasting, which exploits Kerberos ticket encryption to extract service account credentials. The complaint raises concerns about lingering support for weak ciphers in enterprise authentication.

CISOs Assess Practical Limits of AI for Security Ops

🤖 Security leaders report early wins from AI in detection, triage, and automation, but emphasize limits and oversight. Prioritizing high-value telemetry for real-time detection while moving lower-priority logs to data lakes improves signal-to-noise and shortens response times, according to Myke Lyons. Financial firms are experimenting with agentic AI to block business email compromise in real time, yet researchers and practitioners warn of missed detections and 'ghost alerts.' Organizations that treat AI as a copilot with governance, explainability, and institutional context see more reliable, safer outcomes.

Oklahoma DOT Modernizes Bridge Management with Google Cloud

🔍 ODOT teamed with Google Cloud and North Highland to centralize decades of bridge inspection, location, and maintenance data into BigQuery and govern it with Dataplex, creating a single trusted source for analysis. Non-technical and technical staff can query complex datasets conversationally through Gemini in Looker, while BigQuery ML powers predictive models to flag at-risk bridges ahead of failures. Secure sharing via Analytics Hub and unified governance enables better resource allocation, improved safety, and faster, data-driven decisions across the agency.

The AI Fix — Episode 68: Merch, Hoaxes and AI Rights

🎧 In episode 68 of The AI Fix, hosts Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley blend news, commentary and light-hearted banter while launching a new merch store. The discussion covers real-world harms from AI-generated hoaxes that sent Manila firefighters to a non-existent fire, Albania appointing an AI-made minister, and reports of the so-called 'godfather of AI' being spurned by ChatGPT. They also explore wearable telepathic interfaces like AlterEgo, the rise of AI rights advocacy, and listener support options including ad-free subscriptions and merch purchases.

From Prevention to Rapid Response: The New CISO Era

🔒 CISOs are shifting from an all-or-nothing prevention model to a containment-first strategy that assumes breaches will occur. Organizations are investing in sharper visibility, automation and precise network segmentation to stop lateral movement and reduce blast radius. Modern zero trust implementations enforce context-aware, least-privilege access across hybrid environments, enabling faster detection and automated response while preserving user experience. In sectors such as fintech, CISOs must also balance strong background security with seamless interfaces and user education to sustain trust.

AI-Powered ZTNA Protects the Hybrid Future and Agility

🔒 Enterprises face a paradox: AI promises intelligent, automated access control, but hybrid complexity and legacy systems are blocking adoption. Teams report being buried in manual policy creation, vendor integrations and constant firefighting despite mature platforms like Palo Alto Networks, Netskope and Zscaler. AI-driven ZTNA shifts the model from policy-first to behavior-first, building behavioral baselines that generate context-aware policies and can wrap legacy apps without invasive changes. Success requires operational bandwidth, reliable data and a mindset shift to treat access control as a business enabler rather than a compliance burden.

Webinar: Securing the Modern Web Edge from Browser Threats

🔒 On September 29 at 12:00 PM ET, BleepingComputer and SC Media will host a live webinar featuring browser security experts from Push Security to examine how modern web browsers have become a primary enterprise attack surface. The session will cover malicious and shadow extensions, session token theft, OAuth abuse, and emerging ClickFix and FileFix techniques, plus mitigation strategies. Attendees will learn practical detection and response approaches to protect SaaS sessions, restore visibility at the web edge, and close gaps missed by traditional endpoint and identity controls.

Myth Busting: Why 'Innocent Clicks' Don't Exist Today

🔒 Visiting a suspicious link or scanning an unknown QR code can be risky even if you refrain from entering data or interacting further. Modern webpages can trigger drive-by downloads, exploit browser or plugin vulnerabilities via embedded JavaScript, or silently harvest device and browser metadata to build a digital fingerprint. The piece advises keeping devices patched, avoiding unknown links or QR codes, inspecting URLs and using unshortening and reputation services to vet destinations before proceeding.

Team-wide VMware Certification: Boost Security and Retention

🔐 Team-wide VMware certification acts as a force multiplier for security, operations, and talent retention. Certified teams share a common language around architecture, reduce misconfigurations, and respond to incidents faster. Expertise in vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and cloud foundations teaches not just deployment but secure, scalable configuration. Programs like VMUG Advantage make broad certification practical with labs, exam vouchers, and personal-use licenses.