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India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) says defenders should endevor to patch or mitigate exploited n-day vulnerabilities within 12 hours as the cybercrime landscape continues its AI-ification. The organization's recommended half-day window applies only to bugs that affect internet-facing or "crown jewel" systems and are known to be exploited. In these cases, CERT-In told defenders to "patch, mitigate, or remove exposure within 12 hours where feasible." For other flaws, such as a standard critical vulnerability (CVSS 9.0 or higher) affecting an internal system, or a known exploited bug affecting an internal system, defenders can enjoy a much more leisurely 24-hour window. The revised suggestions come as part of a new guide released by CERT-In this week to help infosec pros better protect against AI-assisted cyberattacks. "AI-assisted cyber exploitation reduces the time required for adversaries to identify, weaponize, and exploit vulnerabilities, exposed services, weak identities, insecure APIs, and misconfigured systems," CERT-In's report reads. "As organizations become increasingly dependent on interconnected digital infrastructure, cloud ecosystems, software supply chains, operational technologies, and AI-enabled platforms, the potential impact of AI-enabled cyber threats continues to increase across sectors." CERT-In's report follows a trail of news stories in 2026 that all suggest AI is becoming an increasingly important part of cybersecurity for both attackers and defenders. The field of agentic AI has especially matured rapidly in the past year. Consumer-grade tools like OpenClaw have made it easier for non-technical users to experiment with autonomous tech, raising its profile and awareness of its capabilities. Agents are equipped with all the necessary permissions to make significant system changes, but as global intelligence agencies recently highlighted, their behavior can at times be unexpected, and they're also prone to mischief. Security pros are starting to see the potential for AI agents in their workflows, but for attackers, the technology represents an opportunity to hasten all parts of their process, from recon and exploitation to privilege escalation and data theft. CERT-In cited agentic AI as one of the core concerns behind the report's recommendations, and because of the disparate supply chains on which organizations are increasingly reliant, any vulnerability can lead to cascading damage on interconnected systems. Beyond agentic AI, the launches of frontier models such as Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5, two certified cyber workhorses, threaten to empower attackers further with capabilities to uncover and exploit critical vulnerabilities at pace. A 12-hour window: Is it feasible? Any cybersecurity practitioner will attest to the onerous nature of the patching process, and how it's not as easy as clicking "Update," which is why a 12-hour patch window might seem initially unrealistic to some. Urgent warnings and demands for immediate patching are routinely delivered alongside critical vulnerability disclosures, but these fail to account for the downtime required to apply patches, or the testing required to prove that by applying them, everything else won't break. Microsoft has had its fair share of these cases, for example, and many readers will have borne the brunt. CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog is another prominent resource that sets patching deadlines, albeit only for federal agencies, but these are typically set at two to three weeks, or a number of days for the most serious vulnerabilities. The cybersecurity pros who spoke to The Register, weighing in on the CERT-In recommendations, agreed that 12 hours is far too short a window to properly test and deploy a patch, although they said the organization was on to something with its approach. Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress, said that CERT-In’s recommendation to "patch, mitigate, or remove exposure within 12 hours where feasible" was solid advice, largely because of the caveat that it doesn’t necessitate a full patch within that time. "By explicitly encouraging temporary mitigations, such as isolation, access restriction, or disablement until a patch is ready, this turns the patching deadline into a highly feasible and necessary containment strategy," Agha told The Register. "And this corroborates the guidance we dispense at Huntress for critical threats: we often advise our community to deploy temporary mitigations to 'get them out of trouble' as soon as humanly possible, and then come up with a more coordinated strategy for patching that respects the business's need to function in its enterprises." Agha added that AI-assisted cyberattacks are seen every day in the wild, compressing the time taken to exploit vulnerabilities, meaning defenders must adapt to this new reality. In the pre-AI days, a 12-hour window to mitigate or patch a known exploited vulnerability was seen as excessively tight, but increased availability of advanced tooling and automation is reshaping the demands of vulnerability management. "Defenders must fundamentally reshape their operations to focus on quicker mitigations – prior to AI, at Huntress, we have seen vulnerabilities exploited within a handful of hours, let alone a full 12 hours," said Agha. He said the 12-hour guideline is less about an arbitrary clock, more about "forcing a necessary readjustment in how organizations drive their security approaches to be beyond compliance and move to a continuous defensive posture. "And this will involve the enterprise functions of the business being a part of the security posture – not just IT, thank you very much – as the consequences of AI-driven exploitation mean faster, higher impact cascading negatives on a targeted business; much better to proactively defend than reactively recover." ®

A security researcher found a foolproof way to guarantee tech conferences accept his speaker submissions: hack their systems. CVE-2026-41241 is a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in pretalx, a popular open source tool that conference organizers use to manage speaker submissions and schedules, that could allow attackers to effectively take over an organizer's session. Any user controlling searchable fields – including submission titles, speaker display names, and user names or email addresses – could inject arbitrary HTML or JavaScript. When an organizer's search query matched the malicious record, the payload would execute in the organizer interface. "Once triggered, the injected script executed in the context of the pretalx organiser interface and could read the page's [Cross-Site Request Forgery] CSRF token, submit authenticated requests on the victim's behalf (including requests modifying data due to access to the CSRF token), or exfiltrate data visible to the victim," according to pretalx's security advisory. Project maintainers patched the flaw in April, and it has been fixed in pretalx 2026.1.0. Elad Meged, founding engineer and security researcher at AI penetration-testing and offensive-security startup Novee, found and disclosed the flaw when he was preparing conference speaker submissions. He noticed the exact same call for proposals (CFP) submission form appearing underneath all of these different hacker conferences and academic symposiums' logos. 'One codebase serving them all' While the events are unique, with different parent companies and organizers, "underneath, it is one codebase serving them all," Meged said in research published on Wednesday and shared in advance with The Register. Meged then used the flaw to auto-apply for 40 conferences - and got accepted to present his proposed talk, "Securing Modern Web Apps," at every single one of them. While Meged did submit real entries, he did not submit a live exploit payload into the conference systems. The Novee team validated all of their findings on a local instance. They didn't do any testing on pretalx.com or a third-party-hosted instance. "The goal was to validate the vulnerable workflow in the exact real-world setup while avoiding unnecessary harm," Meged told The Register. "So, we used realistic, normal-looking talk submissions and then validated exploitability through controlled, version-specific testing." Some of the events that use pretalx-based CFP infrastructure include OffensiveCon, TROOPERS, FOSDEM, HEXACON, and Recon, he told us, stressing that this does not mean any of these conferences were actively exploited or compromised. For any conferences that used pretalx for talk submissions, but weren't accepting submissions at the time, Meged followed up with them via responsible disclosure. And yes, Meged admits that he could have had more fun with the talk title, but he wanted to make it "intentionally boring and plausible," to blend in with other proposals. "I agree something outrageous would have been funnier, but it would also have been less responsible," he said. Human led, AI agent assist Meged described the research as "human-led vulnerability research, agent-assisted at internet scale." Once they understood the type of vulnerability, any "capable web security researcher" could reproduce the exploit, he said, adding "this would not require nation-state-level skill." Scaling the attack, reliably reproducing it, and adjusting the attack chain to each real-world pretalx deployment, however, benefited from an agentic AI assist – and this wasn't "a one-off script or a prank CFP submission," he told us. "Different pretalx versions, deployment choices, and enabled features can change the behavior," Meged said. "Something that works on one instance may fail on another or require a different validation path." Plus, some conferences use hosted infrastructure, while others run their own self-hosted instances. So the security shop built an agentic fingerprinting and validation system to scan the internet for public-facing, vulnerable systems, learn as much as possible about the version and configuration, and find the best way to exploit them. 'This type of work does not scale manually' "This type of work does not scale manually," Meged said. "A human can find the core idea, understand the primitive, and make the responsible disclosure decisions. But mapping internet-wide exposure, fingerprinting many deployments, comparing versions, modeling behavior, adjusting validation logic, and organizing disclosure steps is exactly where AI agents become useful. The agents helped with discovery, fingerprinting, version comparison, environment modeling, controlled validation, note-taking, and disclosure workflow management." After finding and fingerprinting public pretalx deployments, and identifying version-specific behavior, the agents selected the best non-destructive validation path for each one. While there's no indication that attackers found and exploited the security issue before Novee's team, it's serious in that it could have granted organizer-level access to the conference call-for-proposal and scheduling system - these typically contain speaker identities, submissions, acceptance decisions, and private communications between conference organizers and speakers. Gaining access to this type of information could have allowed for targeted phishing or other trust-based attacks impersonating a well-known industry event. "With organizer-level access, an attacker could potentially read or modify submissions, interfere with the review process, impersonate conference staff, alter CFP data, or communicate with speakers and submitters from a trusted conference context," Meged said. "The most realistic abuse case is targeted phishing or lateral movement through trust. If a speaker, sponsor, reviewer, or attendee receives a link or request from what appears to be a legitimate conference system, they are much more likely to trust it," he added. "So the story is not just: Someone could get a fake talk accepted. The bigger risk is that a trusted conference platform could become a launchpad for attacks against the entire event ecosystem." Tobias Kunze, a developer who created pretalx, told The Register that Meged reported 11 security findings on April 14, he assessed all of these and classed one as a serious vulnerability and five as non-vulnerability bugs – but with fixes – and five more as non-critical or intended behavior. "Contact with Elad was very positive and professional," Kunze told us. "We discussed the severity and impact of his findings, and it was as good a report as a small open source project like pretalx can hope to receive." ®

Crims found the soft spot in the company's security. MyPillow, the US-based bedding brand founded by election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, has been listed by Play ransomware extortionists as an alleged victim. The pillow shop first appeared on Play’s name-and-shame data leak site on Monday, with the gang threatening to leak stolen data by Friday if MyPillow execs don’t pay the ransom demand. While the extortionists didn’t specify how many gigabytes of data they allegedly stole from MyPillow, they claim it includes “private and personal confidential data, client documents, budget, payroll, IDs, taxes, finance information” and more, according to the dark-web post seen by The Register and shared on social media by threat-intel firm FalconFeeds. MyPillow did not immediately respond to The Register’s inquiries. We will update this story if we receive any response. As of May 2025, the FBI said Play ransomware operators had allegedly exploited about 900 organizations, and the crew’s ransomware variant consistently ranks among the top five targeting critical infrastructure. Play previously stole around 65,000 Swiss government files after breaching its IT supplier Xplain in 2023. A year later, the group hacked Microchip Technology. The American semiconductor manufacturer told regulators that the ransomware attack disrupted some of its business operations and cost it $21.4 million in expenses related to the security incident. North Korean government goons have also used Play ransomware in their intrusions. Cisco Talos' incident responders previously told The Register that Play was one of the crews that used so-called "EDR killers" to disable endpoint security products in their ransomware infections. MyPillow is probably best known for its founder and CEO's politics. Lindell is a major proponent of President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and is now running for Minnesota governor. ®