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Even limited voter rolls can be linked to identify people, research shows

Your voter data could be used against you. A foreign intelligence service that wished to identify the family members of deployed military personnel could do so by cross-referencing public voter record data and social media posts.…

Information security agencies from the nations of the Five Eyes security alliance have co-authored guidance on the use of agentic AI that warns the technology will likely misbehave and amplifies organizations’ existing frailties, and therefore recommend slow and careful adoption of the tech. The agencies delivered that position last Friday in a guide titled Careful adoption of agentic AI services [PDF] that opens with the observation that “Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly operate across critical infrastructure and defense sectors and support mission-critical capabilities,” making it “crucial for defenders to implement security controls to protect national security and critical infrastructure from agentic AI-specific risks.” The thrust of the document is that implementing agentic AI will require use of many components, tools, and external data sources, creating an “interconnected attack surface that malicious actors can exploit.” “Consequently, every individual component in an agentic AI system widens the attack surface, exposing the system to additional avenues of exploitation,” the document warns. To illustrate the risks agentic AI poses, the document offers the example of an AI agent empowered to install software patches that is thoughtlessly given broad write access permissions, with the following unpleasant results: Here’s another nasty agentic mess the document uses as a warning: An organization deploys agentic AI to autonomously manage procurement approvals and vendor communications, and gives the agent access to financial systems, email and contract repositories; This user only considers permissions for the agent when deploying it; Over time, other agents rely on the procurement agent’s outputs and implicitly trust its actions; A malicious actor compromises a low-risk tool integrated into the agent’s workflow and inherits the agent’s over-generous privileges; The attacker uses that privileged access to modify contracts and approve unauthorized payments, and evades detection by creating faked audit logs that don’t trip alerts. Australia’s Signals Directorate and Cyber Security Centre (ASD’s ACSC) contributed to the document, working with the USA’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and National Security Agency (NSA), the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (Cyber Centre), the New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NZ) and the United Kingdom National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-UK). The document contains more scary stories, then lists 23 different risks and over 100 individual best practices to address them. Much of the advice targets developers who deploy AI, but the authors also urge vendors to ensure they test their wares thoroughly and ensure their products “fail-safe by default requiring agents to stop and escalate issues to human reviewers in uncertain scenarios.” The document also urges security practitioners and researchers to spend more time contemplating AI. “Threat intelligence for agentic AI systems is still evolving, which can introduce significant security gaps,” the document warns, because resources like the Open Web Application Security Project and MITRE ATLAS currently focus on LLMs. “As a result, some attack vectors unique to agentic AI may not be fully captured or addressed.” Given the huge to-do list for anyone creating agentic AI, or contemplating its use, the document argues for very cautious adoption. “Organisations should therefore approach adoption with security in mind, recognizing that increased autonomy amplifies the impact of design flaws, misconfigurations and incomplete oversight,” the document concludes. “Deploy agentic AI incrementally, beginning with clearly defined low-risk tasks and continuously assess it against evolving threat models.” “Strong governance, explicit accountability, rigorous monitoring and human oversight are not optional safeguards but essential prerequisites. Until security practices, evaluation methods and standards mature, organisations should assume that agentic AI systems may behave unexpectedly and plan deployments accordingly, prioritizing resilience, reversibility and risk containment over efficiency gains.” ®

Prioritize resilience over productivity, say CISA, NCSC and their friends from Oz, NZ, Canada

Information security agencies from the nations of the Five Eyes security alliance have co-authored guidance on the use of agentic AI that warns the technology will likely misbehave and amplifies organizations’ existing frailties, and therefore recommend slow and careful adoption of the tech.…

Britain's cyber agency is warning that AI-fuelled bug hunting is about to flush out years of buried flaws, leaving defenders scrambling to keep up. In a blog post on Friday, Ollie Whitehouse, CTO of the UK's National Cyber Security Center, said organizations should brace for a looming "patch wave," driven by a backlog of weaknesses now being exposed faster than many teams can realistically fix them. "All organizations have 'technical debt'; a backlog of technical issues – that is both expensive and time-consuming – as a result of prioritising short-term gains over building resilient products," Whitehouse wrote.  "Artificial Intelligence, when used by sufficiently-skilled and knowledgeable individuals, is showing the ability to exploit this technical debt at scale and at pace across the technology ecosystem," he added. The result, according to NCSC, is likely to be a "forced correction" as those weaknesses are uncovered and addressed in bulk. That warning lands just as vendors roll out tools built to do exactly that. Models like Anthropic's Claude Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber promise to find and fix bugs before attackers do, but the same capability also lowers the barrier to finding them in the first place. "We are expecting an influx of updates to address vulnerabilities across all severities, and expect a number to be critical," Whitehouse wrote. The cyber agency is urging teams to get ahead of the incoming flood by shrinking their exposed footprint. "All organizations must take steps to identify and minimise their internet-facing (and other externally-exposed) attack surfaces as soon as is possible," Whitehouse said, adding that defenders should "prioritise technologies on your perimeter and then work inwards." Even then, patching alone will not be enough; Whitehouse notes that unsupported or end-of-life systems may need to be replaced altogether. "Prepare to patch quickly, more often, and at scale," is the message from the NCSC. In practice, that means a lot more fixes landing at once, and a lot less time to get them done. ®

Britain's cyber agency says the bill for years of technical shortcuts is coming due, and it's arriving all at once

Britain's cyber agency is warning that AI-fuelled bug hunting is about to flush out years of buried flaws, leaving defenders scrambling to keep up.…

CISA has added a critical cPanel bug to its known-exploited list, confirming that attackers are already poking holes in one of the internet's most widely used hosting stacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, carries a near-worst-case CVSS score of 9.8 and affects all supported versions of cPanel and Web[Host Manager (WHM) released after version 11.40, along with WP Squared, a WordPress management layer built on top of the same platform. In plain terms, a successful exploit can hand over full control of the server. The US government's cybersecurity agency added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on Thursday, confirming attackers are not waiting around. By the time cPanel shipped a patch on Tuesday, exploitation was already underway. Hosting provider KnownHost has been more explicit about what that looked like in practice, warning customers it had seen successful exploitation attempts before any fix was available. In a Reddit post, the company's CEO, Daniel Pearson, said the provider had "seen execution attempts as early as 2/23/2026" and urged users to restrict access and assume systems could already be compromised if left unpatched. Another hosting provider, Namecheap, says it temporarily blocked access to cPanel and WHM, effectively slamming the door shut until fixes were ready. It has since begun rolling out updates. There are also early signs of what those attackers are up to once they get in. A small business owner posting on Reddit said their company had been hit by ransomware after running what they described as a fairly standard cPanel setup, adding that their hosting provider appeared to be struggling under the weight of the incident. The attackers, they said, demanded $7,000 to unlock systems. The claim is anecdotal, but if it holds up, it suggests this bug is already being used by criminals to lock up systems, not just lurk quietly or skim data in the background. It's not yet known how many organizations have been impacted by the vulnerability, but security firm Rapid7 used Shodan to identify roughly 1.5 million internet-exposed cPanel instances.  cPanel underpins hosting for tens of millions of sites, many run by small outfits that rely on providers to handle security. For them, "patch now" often means "wait and hope," which is not a great place to be when a near-max severity bug is already being weaponized. ®

Exploitation was underway before patches landed, at least one victim reports ransomware demand

CISA has added a critical cPanel bug to its known-exploited list, confirming that attackers are already poking holes in one of the internet's most widely used hosting stacks.…

OpenAI is lining up a limited release of its new GPT-5.5-Cyber model to a handpicked circle of "cyber defenders," just weeks after taking a swipe at Anthropic for doing almost exactly the same thing. CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X that the rollout will begin "in the next few days," with access restricted to a group he described as trusted defenders working to secure critical systems.  "We will work with the entire ecosystem and the government to figure out trusted access for cyber," he wrote, adding that the goal is to "rapidly help secure companies and infrastructure." GPT-5.5-Cyber is built to spot flaws before anyone else abuses them. OpenAI says it can pentest, find bugs, exploit them, and tear apart malware, but as we have already seen, tools that break systems rarely stay in the right hands for long. OpenAI's announcement comes just weeks after Anthropic rolled out its own cyber-focused model, Claude Mythos, to roughly 50 organizations under tight controls, saying it would never be made publicly available – and Altman was not impressed.  As reported by TechCrunch, he took aim at what he framed as exclusivity dressed up as caution during an appearance on the Core Memory podcast.  "There are people in the world who, for a long time, have wanted to keep AI in the hands of a smaller group of people," he said. "You can justify that in a lot of different ways." He went further, likening the approach to selling fear. "We have built a bomb, we are about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million." Now OpenAI is, if not building the same shelter, at least checking IDs at the door. Independent testing suggests the model is not just marketing fluff. The UK's AI Security Institute said this week that GPT-5.5-Cyber is "one of the strongest models we have tested on our cyber tasks," and noted it is only the second system to complete one of its multi-step attack simulations end to end.  It may be pitched as protection, but when the tools can both break and fix systems, the difference often comes down to who gets there first. ®

Altman's crew now doing the same gatekeeping it recently mocked

OpenAI is lining up a limited release of its new GPT-5.5-Cyber model to a handpicked circle of "cyber defenders," just weeks after taking a swipe at Anthropic for doing almost exactly the same thing.…

Canonical says its web infrastructure is under attack after a pro-Iran hacktivist group instructed its members to target the open source giant. "I can confirm that Canonical's web infrastructure is under a sustained, cross-border Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack" a Canonical spokesperson told The Register.  "Our teams are working to restore full availability to all affected services. We will provide updates in our official channels as soon as we are able to." Known best for managing the development of Ubuntu, the distro's main website is down at the time of writing, and has been for several hours. The hacktivist group The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq, aka 313 Team claimed responsibility for the 503 errors Ubuntu's website was returning on Thursday evening, announcing via its Telegram channel that the attack was scheduled to persist for four hours. More than 12 hours later, the attack continues to disrupt Ubuntu's main website and many of its subdomains, although some, including its Archive and Discourse pages, remain up and running. 313 Team sent a follow-up message to its Telegram group, directed at Canonical, which indicates the group is veering away from hacktivism and toward full-on extortion: "There is a simple way out. We have emailed you with our Session Contact ID. If you fail to reach out, we will continue our assault. You are in an awful position, don't be foolish." The service disruption at Ubuntu means users cannot download any versions of its distros through the usual channels, nor can they log into their Canonical accounts. Canonical promised to provide regular updates when it has new information to share. 313 Team has claimed responsibility for similar DDoS attacks on the likes of eBay's Japan and US divisions, as well as BlueSky in just the past month alone. Why the group is targeting London-based Canonical remains unclear and no reason was given via its Telegram channel. It is presumably because Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distros. ®

313 Team tells Canonical: pay up or the packets keep coming

Canonical says its web infrastructure is under attack after a pro-Iran hacktivist group instructed its members to target the open source giant.…

The Home Office has increased the annual value and overall duration of its new passport production contract, increasing it to a total of £576 million as it starts a third round of engagement with suppliers. The department’s first engagement notice for the Provision of Passport Manufacturing and Personalisation Services contract last July included an estimated total value of £360 million including VAT over 10 years or £36 million a year. The version published on 24 April increases the total value to £576 million including VAT over 12 years or £48 million a year. The Home Office has also pushed back the contract’s start date from September 2027 to August 2028, as well as postponing the publication of the full tender notice from June to November this year. The latest version says that HM Passport Office issues about eight million passports annually, up from seven million in the first notice, although this would not fully account for the increased annual value. The Home Office’s current passport production contract with Thales (which bought the winning bidder Gemalto) started in April 2018, with an estimated value of £262 million over 11.5 years or £22.8 million a year. It ends on 30 September 2029. As well as physical production of passports and other travel documents, the new supplier will have to personalize them with data including biometrics. It may also need to produce digital travel credentials and make provision “for crypto technologies and contingency solutions.” Potential suppliers will have the chance to ask questions after completing a non-disclosure agreement at an online event on 18 May. The Home Office disclosed that it will pay IBM £5.88 million including VAT for software licenses and support services to operate and maintain its biometric systems between 1 May 2026 and 30 April 2028. The department is awarding the contract directly without competition "as the required software and support services are proprietary to IBM and embedded within existing live systems, with no reasonable alternative supplier without disproportionate technical difficulties." ®

Start date pushed back a year, annual cost up a third, and UK's now handing out eight million passports a year

The Home Office has increased the annual value and overall duration of its new passport production contract, increasing it to a total of £576 million as it starts a third round of engagement with suppliers.…