Software Security

Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way.

In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached 100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was integrating social media into his political campaign: Barack Obama. His campaign’s use of social media was so bracingly innovative, so impactful, that it was viewed by journalist David Talbot and others as the strategy that enabled the first term Senator to win the White House...

Generative AI demands infrastructure that’s not only powerful but repeatable, auditable, and scalable. From chat bots and content generation to intelligent automation agents, organizations are deploying AI at scale. But with this innovation comes complexity. In short, deploying generative AI isn’t just about models, it’s about managing the infrastructure and operations behind them reliably. The Red Hat Certified Collection, amazon.ai, addresses this problem by bringing infrastructure-as-code principles to AI and operational monitoring.The problem: Manual AI management doesn’t scaleEve

As organizations continue to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud, customers are looking for ways to enhance safeguards for sensitive workloads, especially those in highly regulated industries. As such, confidential computing has become an increasingly prominent way to protect workloads by providing an isolated, hardware-encrypted environment based on a zero-trust security model. To help address this need, we are pleased to announce the general availability of confidential containers on Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift, expected to be delivered in the coming weeks. This feature give

The next three in this series on online events highlighting interesting uses of AI in cybersecurity are online: #4, #5, and #6. Well worth watching.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 3.2. This release includes the general availability of Istio’s ambient mode—a new way of deploying service mesh without sidecars that significantly lowers the resource costs of using service mesh. This provides a low overhead solution for zero trust networking with lightweight pod-to-pod mTLS encryption and authorization policies based on workload identities, with the ability to add more advanced features as required.Based on the Istio, Envoy, and Kiali projects, this release updates the version of Istio

Microsoft this week pushed security updates to fix more than 60 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including at least one zero-day bug that is already being exploited. Microsoft also fixed a glitch that prevented some Windows 10 users from taking advantage of an extra year of security updates, which is nice because the zero-day flaw and other critical weaknesses affect all versions of Windows, including Windows 10.

Affected products this month include the Windows OS, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Visual Studio, GitHub Copilot, and Azure Monitor Agent. The zero-day threat concerns a memory corruption bug deep in the Windows innards called CVE-2025-62215. Despite the flaw’s zero-day status, Microsoft has assigned it an “important” rating rather than critical, because exploiting it requires an attacker to already have access to the target’s device.

“These types of vulnerabilities are often exploited as part of a more complex attack chain,” said Johannes Ullrich, dean of research for the SANS Technology Institute. “However, exploiting this specific vulnerability is likely to be relatively straightforward, given the existence of prior similar vulnerabilities.”

Ben McCarthy, lead cybersecurity engineer at Immersive, called attention to CVE-2025-60274, a critical weakness in a core Windows graphic component (GDI+) that is used by a massive number of applications, including Microsoft Office, web servers processing images, and countless third-party applications.

“The patch for this should be an organization’s highest priority,” McCarthy said. “While Microsoft assesses this as ‘Exploitation Less Likely,’ a 9.8-rated flaw in a ubiquitous library like GDI+ is a critical risk.”

Microsoft patched a critical bug in Office — CVE-2025-62199 — that can lead to remote code execution on a Windows system. Alex Vovk, CEO and co-founder of Action1, said this Office flaw is a high priority because it is low complexity, needs no privileges, and can be exploited just by viewing a booby-trapped message in the Preview Pane.

Many of the more concerning bugs addressed by Microsoft this month affect Windows 10, an operating system that Microsoft officially ceased supporting with patches last month. As that deadline rolled around, however, Microsoft began offering Windows 10 users an extra year of free updates, so long as they register their PC to an active Microsoft account.

Judging from the comments on last month’s Patch Tuesday post, that registration worked for a lot of Windows 10 users, but some readers reported the option for an extra year of updates was never offered. Nick Carroll, cyber incident response manager at Nightwing, notes that Microsoft has recently released an out-of-band update to address issues when trying to enroll in the Windows 10 Consumer Extended Security Update program.

“If you plan to participate in the program, make sure you update and install KB5071959 to address the enrollment issues,” Carroll said. “After that is installed, users should be able to install other updates such as today’s KB5068781 which is the latest update to Windows 10.”

Chris Goettl at Ivanti notes that in addition to Microsoft updates today, third-party updates from Adobe and Mozilla have already been released. Also, an update for Google Chrome is expected soon, which means Edge will also be in need of its own update.

The SANS Internet Storm Center has a clickable breakdown of each individual fix from Microsoft, indexed by severity and CVSS score. Enterprise Windows admins involved in testing patches before rolling them out should keep an eye on askwoody.com, which often has the skinny on any updates gone awry.

As always, please don’t neglect to back up your data (if not your entire system) at regular intervals, and feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience problems installing any of these fixes.

[Author’s note: This post was intended to appear on the homepage on Tuesday, Nov. 11. I’m still not sure how it happened, but somehow this story failed to publish that day. My apologies for the oversight.]

Short-finned pilot wales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) eat at lot of squid:

To figure out a short-finned pilot whale’s caloric intake, Gough says, the team had to combine data from a variety of sources, including movement data from short-lasting tags, daily feeding rates from satellite tags, body measurements collected via aerial drones, and sifting through the stomachs of unfortunate whales that ended up stranded on land.

Once the team pulled all this data together, they estimated that a typical whale will eat between 82 and 202 squid a day. To meet their energy needs, a whale will have to consume an average of 140 squid a day. Annually, that’s about 74,000 squid per whale. For all the whales in the area, that amounts to about 88,000 tons of squid eaten every year...

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• My coauthor Nathan E. Sanders and I are speaking at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC at noon ET on November 17, 2025. The event is hosted by the POPVOX Foundation and the topic is “AI and Congress: Practical Steps to Govern and Prepare.”
• I’m speaking on “Integrity and Trustworthy AI” at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, USA, on Friday, November 21, 2025, at 2:00 PM CT. The event is cohosted by the college and The Twin Cities IEEE Computer Society...

As AI capabilities grow, we must delineate the roles that should remain exclusively human. The line seems to be between fact-based decisions and judgment-based decisions.

For example, in a medical context, if an AI was demonstrably better at reading a test result and diagnosing cancer than a human, you would take the AI in a second. You want the more accurate tool. But justice is harder because justice is inherently a human quality in a way that “Is this tumor cancerous?” is not. That’s a fact-based question. “What’s the right thing to do here?” is a human-based question...

We’ve been dedicated to advancing Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes in line with the rapid evolution of Kubernetes security. With version 4.9, we’re introducing key integrations and updates designed to help streamline your workflows. To that end, we’ve improved our ability to integrate with other tools and services, enhanced visibility into operations, and begun the work of bringing virtual machines (VMs) into our scope of reporting and scanning. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Integration with ServiceNowA significant highlight of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security 4.9 is

Wikipedia cracks down on AI scraping, citing server strain and lost traffic. See why publishers are fighting back and turning to bot management.

Google is suing more than two dozen unnamed individuals allegedly involved in peddling a popular China-based mobile phishing service that helps scammers impersonate hundreds of trusted brands, blast out text message lures, and convert phished payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google.

In a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York on November 12, Google sued to unmask and disrupt 25 “John Doe” defendants allegedly linked to the sale of Lighthouse, a sophisticated phishing kit that makes it simple for even novices to steal payment card data from mobile users. Google said Lighthouse has harmed more than a million victims across 120 countries.

A component of the Chinese phishing kit Lighthouse made to target customers of The Toll Roads, which refers to several state routes through Orange County, Calif.

Lighthouse is one of several prolific phishing-as-a-service operations known as the “Smishing Triad,” and collectively they are responsible for sending millions of text messages that spoof the U.S. Postal Service to supposedly collect some outstanding delivery fee, or that pretend to be a local toll road operator warning of a delinquent toll fee. More recently, Lighthouse has been used to spoof e-commerce websites, financial institutions and brokerage firms.

Regardless of the text message lure used or brand used, the basic scam remains the same: After the visitor enters their payment information, the phishing site will automatically attempt to enroll the card as a mobile wallet from Apple or Google. The phishing site then tells the visitor that their bank is going to verify the transaction by sending a one-time code that needs to be entered into the payment page before the transaction can be completed.

If the recipient provides that one-time code, the scammers can link the victim’s card data to a mobile wallet on a device that they control. Researchers say the fraudsters usually load several stolen wallets onto each mobile device, and wait 7-10 days after that enrollment before selling the phones or using them for fraud.

Google called the scale of the Lighthouse phishing attacks “staggering.” A May 2025 report from Silent Push found the domains used by the Smishing Triad are rotated frequently, with approximately 25,000 phishing domains active during any 8-day period.

Google’s lawsuit alleges the purveyors of Lighthouse violated the company’s trademarks by including Google’s logos on countless phishing websites. The complaint says Lighthouse offers over 600 templates for phishing websites of more than 400 entities, and that Google’s logos were featured on at least a quarter of those templates.

Google is also pursuing Lighthouse under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, saying the Lighthouse phishing enterprise encompasses several connected threat actor groups that work together to design and implement complex criminal schemes targeting the general public.

According to Google, those threat actor teams include a “developer group” that supplies the phishing software and templates; a “data broker group” that provides a list of targets; a “spammer group” that provides the tools to send fraudulent text messages in volume; a “theft group,” in charge of monetizing the phished information; and an “administrative group,” which runs their Telegram support channels and discussion groups designed to facilitate collaboration and recruit new members.

“While different members of the Enterprise may play different roles in the Schemes, they all collaborate to execute phishing attacks that rely on the Lighthouse software,” Google’s complaint alleges. “None of the Enterprise’s Schemes can generate revenue without collaboration and cooperation among the members of the Enterprise. All of the threat actor groups are connected to one another through historical and current business ties, including through their use of Lighthouse and the online community supporting its use, which exists on both YouTube and Telegram channels.”

Silent Push’s May report observed that the Smishing Triad boasts it has “300+ front desk staff worldwide” involved in Lighthouse, staff that is mainly used to support various aspects of the group’s fraud and cash-out schemes.

An image shared by an SMS phishing group shows a panel of mobile phones responsible for mass-sending phishing messages. These panels require a live operator because the one-time codes being shared by phishing victims must be used quickly as they generally expire within a few minutes.

Google alleges that in addition to blasting out text messages spoofing known brands, Lighthouse makes it easy for customers to mass-create fake e-commerce websites that are advertised using Google Ads accounts (and paid for with stolen credit cards). These phony merchants collect payment card information at checkout, and then prompt the customer to expect and share a one-time code sent from their financial institution.

Once again, that one-time code is being sent by the bank because the fake e-commerce site has just attempted to enroll the victim’s payment card data in a mobile wallet. By the time a victim understands they will likely never receive the item they just purchased from the fake e-commerce shop, the scammers have already run through hundreds of dollars in fraudulent charges, often at high-end electronics stores or jewelers.

Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company, and he’s been tracking Chinese SMS phishing groups for several years. Merrill said many Lighthouse customers are now using the phishing kit to erect fake e-commerce websites that are advertised on Google and Meta platforms.

“You find this shop by searching for a particular product online or whatever, and you think you’re getting a good deal,” Merrill said. “But of course you never receive the product, and they will phish that one-time code at checkout.”

Merrill said some of the phishing templates include payment buttons for services like PayPal, and that victims who choose to pay through PayPal can also see their PayPal accounts hijacked.

A fake e-commerce site from the Smishing Triad spoofing PayPal on a mobile device.

“The main advantage of the fake e-commerce site is that it doesn’t require them to send out message lures,” Merrill said, noting that the fake vendor sites have more staying power than traditional phishing sites because it takes far longer for them to be flagged for fraud.

Merrill said Google’s legal action may temporarily disrupt the Lighthouse operators, and could make it easier for U.S. federal authorities to bring criminal charges against the group. But he said the Chinese mobile phishing market is so lucrative right now that it’s difficult to imagine a popular phishing service voluntarily turning out the lights.

Merrill said Google’s lawsuit also can help lay the groundwork for future disruptive actions against Lighthouse and other phishing-as-a-service entities that are operating almost entirely on Chinese networks. According to Silent Push, a majority of the phishing sites created with these kits are sitting at two Chinese hosting companies: Tencent (AS132203) and Alibaba (AS45102).

“Once Google has a default judgment against the Lighthouse guys in court, theoretically they could use that to go to Alibaba and Tencent and say, ‘These guys have been found guilty, here are their domains and IP addresses, we want you to shut these down or we’ll include you in the case.'”

If Google can bring that kind of legal pressure consistently over time, Merrill said, they might succeed in increasing costs for the phishers and more frequently disrupting their operations.

“If you take all of these Chinese phishing kit developers, I have to believe it’s tens of thousands of Chinese-speaking people involved,” he said. “The Lighthouse guys will probably burn down their Telegram channels and disappear for a while. They might call it something else or redevelop their service entirely. But I don’t believe for a minute they’re going to close up shop and leave forever.”

The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch (May 24, 2004)

From the vantage point of today, it’s surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn’t know whether the cryptography they sold was any good. The customers didn’t know whether the crypto they bought was any good. Everyone pretended to know, thought they knew, or knew better than to even try to know.

The Business of Secrets is the self-published memoirs of Fred Kinch. He was founder and vice president of—mostly sales—at a US cryptographic hardware company called Datotek, from company’s founding in 1969 until 1982. It’s mostly a disjointed collection of stories about the difficulties of selling to governments worldwide, along with descriptions of the highs and (mostly) lows of foreign airlines, foreign hotels, and foreign travel in general. But it’s also about encryption...

The software supply chain has evolved dramatically in recent years. Today's applications integrate countless components—from open source libraries and container images to AI models and training datasets. Each element represents a potential security risk that organizations must understand, verify, and continuously monitor. As supply chain attacks increase in frequency and sophistication, enterprises need comprehensive solutions that provide both artifact integrity and deep visibility into their software dependencies.Red Hat's latest releases of Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer 1.3 and Red Hat

Former DoJ attorney John Carlin writes about hackback, which he defines thus: “A hack back is a type of cyber response that incorporates a counterattack designed to proactively engage with, disable, or collect evidence about an attacker. Although hack backs can take on various forms, they are—­by definition­—not passive defensive measures.”

His conclusion:

As the law currently stands, specific forms of purely defense measures are authorized so long as they affect only the victim’s system or data.

At the other end of the spectrum, offensive measures that involve accessing or otherwise causing damage or loss to the hacker’s systems are likely prohibited, absent government oversight or authorization. And even then parties should proceed with caution in light of the heightened risks of misattribution, collateral damage, and retaliation...

Are you excited to try out post-quantum cryptography in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but you haven't yet upgraded to RHEL 10? Our efforts to ensure that you're ready to make the switch, and to prepare your organization for "Q-Day", now start with RHEL 9.7. By getting started now, you can proactively begin strengthening your security posture and preparing for a seamless transition to RHEL 10.RHEL 9 was released in 2022 and was an important step forward from a security perspective. It was the first version of RHEL that received FIPS 140-3 certification, matching current security requirement

This is why AIs are not ready to be personal assistants:

A new attack called ‘CometJacking’ exploits URL parameters to pass to Perplexity’s Comet AI browser hidden instructions that allow access to sensitive data from connected services, like email and calendar.

In a realistic scenario, no credentials or user interaction are required and a threat actor can leverage the attack by simply exposing a maliciously crafted URL to targeted users.

[…]

CometJacking is a prompt-injection attack where the query string processed by the Comet AI browser contains malicious instructions added using the ‘collection’ parameter of the URL...

The age of quantum computing is on the horizon, and with its immense processing power comes a significant threat to the cryptographic foundations of our digital world. In this article, we'll explore the emerging support for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in Red Hat OpenShift 4.20, focusing on how it enhances the core components of the Kubernetes control plane: the apiserver, kubelet, scheduler, and controller-manager. Missing is etcd, using an older version of Go.The quantum threatToday's widely used public-key cryptosystems, such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), form the foundat

Encryption can protect data at rest and data in transit, but does nothing for data in use. What we have are secure enclaves. I’ve written about this before:

Almost all cloud services have to perform some computation on our data. Even the simplest storage provider has code to copy bytes from an internal storage system and deliver them to the user. End-to-end encryption is sufficient in such a narrow context. But often we want our cloud providers to be able to perform computation on our raw data: search, analysis, AI model training or fine-tuning, and more. Without expensive, esoteric techniques, such as secure multiparty computation protocols or homomorphic encryption techniques that can perform calculations on encrypted data, cloud servers require access to the unencrypted data to do anything useful...

The 2025 OWASP Top 10 list is here! Discover what changed, the two new categories, and how to secure your applications against emerging threats.