“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — Philip Howard, Common Good.
1. Brett Goldstein:
The National Security Agency told organizations that if they couldn’t fix their websites immediately, they should take them offline. Not patch carefully. Not watch for suspicious activity. Pull the plug, according to the NSA’s Oct. 21 advisory.
The flaws were in PHP, the programming language behind most of the world’s websites, and they would let anyone run commands on a server without a password. Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and the Czech Republic temporarily took down some government sites.
How serious was it? The prime minister of Japan went on X.com to tell her country to get ready to patch. I have spent two decades in this business, including at the Pentagon and now at Vanderbilt University, where my lab specializes in cybersecurity. I have never seen a head of government issue a patch notice like this. It won’t be the last.
Here is what should worry you: This was pretty much the best-case scenario. The flaws were found with the help of artificial-intelligence models, including OpenAI’s, and handled the way we would want. They were reported quietly in August to PHP’s maintainers, who spent two months working with OpenAI and outside security researchers on a fix before releasing it publicly. OpenAI says that, to its knowledge, AI found these flaws before attackers did.
That is luck, not a system. Even this time, Amazon spotted someone trying to exploit the flaws four days before they were made public. Within days, attackers were using them to break into systems in the U.S., Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
The frontier AI labs aren’t the only ones in this game. Open-weight models, which anyone can download and run on his own hardware and strip of their safety controls, trail the closed frontier by mere months. The gap is closing fast. Open models have real virtues; defenders against cyberattacks use them too. But a defender has to find every flaw. An attacker needs to exploit only one.
That swiftly closing gap is thanks in large part to China. DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen and a growing field of Chinese labs are shipping powerful open models that are among the most downloaded in the world. Each release is free and a little more capable than the last. And each can be run without permission by anyone anywhere.
When an open model can do what OpenAI’s did here, there will be no disclosure report, no August-to-October runway, no fix released by the PHP Foundation. There will just be someone pointing a model at the internet and asking it what it can break.
Finding a bug like this used to take a rare kind of mind and months of work. Soon it will take a prompt. Pick a target and press go. (Sources: vanderbilt.edu, wsj.com, nsa.gov, x.com, amazon.com, cybersecuritydive.com. Bolded text mine.)
2. Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang admitted he had an affair with a woman identified in a series of reports as a suspected Chinese spy, plunging the chip colossus into a crisis like none before in its three-decade history. Huang disclosed the romantic relationship in a memo to employees on Sunday, saying the Nvidia board was launching an investigation. He had previously said there was nothing inappropriate about his relationship with the woman, who worked for a Singapore-based customer. The incident threatens to further roil an AI market shaken by concerns about a slowdown in data center spending. Nvidia makes chips that are crucial to AI computing equipment and is one of the world’s most valuable businesses. Turmoil within the company risks reverberating through the broader industry. (Source: bloomberg.com, nvidianews.nvidia.com)
