News

The ongoing saga of Microsoft versus Nightmare Eclipse (aka Chaotic Eclipse), the disgruntled bug hunter with a deep understanding of Windows and an even deeper grudge against Microsoft, reached a fever pitch, with the researcher, who has thus far released six Windows zero-days, promising a “bone shattering” drop on July 14. Microsoft, for its part, finally responded to the security researcher and their weaponized Windows flaws with a blog post on (un)coordinated vulnerability disclosure about the now-public bugs: RedSun, UnDefend, BlueHammer, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma. Redmond says that none of these were reported via its official channels prior to being made public. Attackers began hammering three of the six - BlueHammer, RedSun, and UnDefend - soon after Nightmare published working proof-of-concept exploit code for each on now-banned GitHub (owned by Microsoft) and GitLab accounts. YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma still don’t have fixes, and Microsoft has deemed “exploitation more likely” for YellowKey, aka CVE-2026-45585, citing a working POC. “We remain firmly opposed to these actions, and any disclosure outside proper coordination that could harm our customers and the digital ecosystem,” Microsoft wrote in a Wednesday blog, and then seemingly threatened legal action against Nightmare: “Uncoordinated disclosures that put proof-of-concept code for unpatched vulnerabilities into the hands of bad actors are never justifiable and have real-world consequences. Our security teams across the company work tirelessly tracking threat actors who look for weaknesses just like these to attack Microsoft and our customers. Our Digital Crimes Unit will continue bringing cases against these actors and those that enable their criminal activity – coordinating as needed with law enforcement around the world.” Microsoft did not respond to The Register’s questions, including whether its legal team planned to sue Nightmare, whether the zero-day researcher is a current or former employee, and whether Microsoft axed Nightmare’s MSRC account, meaning that the bug hunter can’t disclose vulnerabilities to the Windows giant. Nightmare, in their latest anti-Microsoft missive, claims Microsoft did just that. “When I actively asked you to communicate with me, you refused, humiliated me and made sure to insult me in front of people,” they wrote on Saturday. “You defame me in public with your CVE-2026-45585 advisory even though you literally deleted the Microsoft account I used to report bugs to you with and I got zero pennies from doing so and I still happily did like an idiot.” Nightmare also noted that “Microsoft still has chains in my hands,” preventing them from releasing “documents” yet, or anytime in June, and then warned: “Mark this date July 14th, I will make sure your bones are shattered that day.” Regardless of what does or does not happen on July 14, Nightmare has already caused chaos - and real enterprise-level damage, as systems engineer Muhammad Qasim Shahzad said on LinkedIn. “One person caused more enterprise-level damage in six weeks than most APT groups cause in a year,” Shahzad wrote. “The gap between disclosure and weaponization is now measured in hours, not days. Your patching window is shrinking fast.” Zero Day Initiative’s bug hunter-in-chief Dustin Childs, who previously spent about seven years working for Microsoft security and has decades of experience on both sides of the coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) process, told The Register that Microsoft could have handled this better. And he wondered what happened between the two parties to get to this point. “CVD is a two-way street,” he said. “The vendor has some responsibility as well, so to go out publicly stating this person violated CVD without showing any of the correspondence seems bold.” Microsoft could also improve its communications to customers on “what the real risks from these bugs are and how they can defend themselves,” Childs added. “That clear direction seems to be missing.” Microsoft's 'dumpster fire' Luta Security founder and CEO Katie Moussouris, who pioneered Microsoft’s bug bounty program despite execs vowing never to pay researchers for bugs, said Redmond’s response to Nightmare sends “mixed messages.” “It confusingly claims their program ‘ensures researchers are compensated and publicly acknowledged’ in a statement answering a researcher who says he got neither,” Moussouris told The Register. “The language choices are also not deescalating. Microsoft invoked the outdated term ‘responsible disclosure,’ which I retired years ago at Microsoft because it was subjective and judgy.” This phrase, Moussouris added, “got in the way of coordination” when the two sides disagreed about how to best protect end users. “The mention of the Digital Crimes Unit in a post discussing vulnerability disclosure makes the post vaguely threatening, which seems intentional, but then they wrap up the post saying they welcome reports regardless of disclosure history,” she said. “No one except the parties involved can know for sure what happened between this researcher and Microsoft. Whatever the facts, it's hard to imagine why Microsoft would not try to deescalate, if for no other reason than avoiding the chilling effect on other researchers.” Security sleuth Kevin Beaumont, in his blog on the ongoing Microsoft-Nightmare Eclipse saga, called it a "dumpster fire of [Microsoft’s] own making.” Beaumont also used to work at Microsoft, and he noted that the Windows company previously hired a hacker called SandboxEscaper after she published zero-day POC exploits for Microsoft products - something that Redmond’s blog now describes as criminal. “If Microsoft’s tactic is to try to criminalise not following often arbitrary ‘responsible disclosure’ frameworks, good luck defending that in court - because there’s a whole clown car of prior decision making within Microsoft and facts which would emerge in that process,” Beaumont said. To be clear: neither Beaumont nor the researchers that The Reg spoke to support Nightmare’s zero-day antics. Childs called the “July 14” post “troubling” and Moussouris said the date plus “incendiary language … doesn't help organizations trying to make sense of the technical risk.” 'David and Goliath dynamic' Moussouris did add that this latest missive, taken in context with the earlier blog posts, “paint[s] a picture of someone who believes they have been pushed to this extreme. It is the sound of someone who believes every legitimate channel was closed to them: GitHub account deleted, payments withheld, credit stripped, then publicly accused of violating CVD after Microsoft cut off their ability to coordinate. The researcher's grievances are serious and specific.” Ultimately, “the bugs are Microsoft's,” Moussouris said. “They wrote the code and they own the risk to customers. Often researchers who previously work with a vendor respond in the extreme only when they feel there is no other choice. The power they hold is not at all proportionate to the vendor. This is a David and Goliath dynamic we don't like to see play out, especially since it’s users who lose when coordination negotiations fail." While it’s a very extreme - perhaps the most extreme - example of coordinated disclosure gone wrong, it’s not an isolated problem. Researchers have been complaining about CVD, and specifically Redmond’s bug disclosure habits, for years. “While some companies have improved, Microsoft has not,” Childs said. “If anything, they are seen as difficult to work with, especially if your bug is Moderate instead of Critical. I’ve had researchers tell me that they stopped looking at Microsoft altogether because they were too difficult to work with.” Plus, these types of disagreements between researchers and bug bounty programs will likely increase, as AI-assisted bug reports become the norm and vulnerabilities skyrocket. “We as an industry need to take a breath, remember there are real people involved, and that poor interactions could lead to real customer risk,” Childs said. “Real-world impact is lost far too often when disclosure goes wrong.” ®

It's 8 pm. Do you know where your agents are? Snowflake plans to buy Natoma, a startup that has made a gateway for managing AI agent permissions across enterprise applications, so users can focus on getting work done without wondering if their agents have violated security policies. During Snowflake's first-quarter fiscal 2027 earnings call, company CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said Natoma is a critical piece of the company's broader strategy around what he called the "agentic control plane," where AI agents can take actions across business systems while still operating within the organization’s security controls. "With Natoma, users can do things like send emails, summarize Slack conversations, check calendars, and open Jira tickets without ever leaving Snowflake Intelligence or Coco," Ramaswamy said during the call, referring to two of Snowflake's AI products. “The important point is not just convenience. It is control. These actions happen from a governed environment with enterprise security, permissions, observability, and policy enforcement built in.” Natoma’s software acts as a gateway for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, connectors that allow AI agents to interact with external software tools. The platform enforces identity verification, access policies, and audit controls at the level of individual tool calls, tracking who requested an action, what permissions they hold, and whether the system should allow the action to proceed. “The reason MCP and Natoma are a big deal is they now bring the entirety of SaaS application context into these products, and so I've done deep research reports, for example, that can now look for information from Snowflake, from the web, from Google Docs, also from Slack, and synthesize that into something that is astoundingly meaningful,” Ramaswamy said. “And these also let you take action instantly. You can flag somebody, you can compose emails and send it, and you can take actions on the underlying applications, and that's the promise.” In a blog post, Natoma's four founders — Pratyus Patnaik, Will Potter, Zachary Hart, and Paresh Bhaya — said Natoma brings the secure connectivity, identity, and governance layer that helps Snowflake experiences extend safely into the applications their teams already use. "We started Natoma in 2024 with a simple belief: AI agents would fundamentally change how work gets done inside enterprises, but they would only reach production if organizations could trust and control how those agents access data, use tools, and take action," they wrote. "Snowflake sees the same future we’ve been building for at Natoma: enterprises need a trusted control plane for the agentic era. They need AI grounded in their own data, governed by their own policies, and connected to the full complexity of their technology stacks." Financial terms of the acquisition were not announced. If it passes customary regulatory and closing conditions, the deal would bring 20 employees to Snowflake. This is Snowflake's sixth acquisition announcement since June 2025, when it said it would buy PostgreSQL provider Crunchy Data for what a source told CNBC was $250 million. In November 2025, Snowflake announced that it would buy database migration outfit Datometry and data discovery platform Select Star. No sale price was provided for either transaction. In January, Snowflake said that it would buy Observe, an AI-powered observability platform, for $1 billion. The next month, Snowflake said that it planned to buy TensorStax, an AI-powered data pipeline planner. The Natoma deal was announced the same day that Snowflake signed a five-year, $6 billion agreement with AWS centered on Graviton-powered compute and AI infrastructure for its growing agentic AI ambitions. During the earnings call, Ramaswamy said that the acquisition pushes Snowflake's agentic control plane beyond data and development workflows into everyday applications where work actually happens. He said that Natoma's integration would allow Snowflake's Cortex Code, also known as “Coco,” and Snowflake Intelligence products to become a single interface for daily tasks including querying enterprise data, updating CRM records, searching across file storage, and managing communications. "These actions happen from a governed environment with enterprise security, permissions, observability, and policy enforcement built in," Ramaswamy said. Mayank Upadhyay, chief security and trust officer and VP of engineering at Snowflake, wrote in a blog post announcing the Natoma deal that the tool summarizes his unread emails, searches across Slack and Google Drive when he cannot remember where something was shared, and surfaces what he needs without switching between applications. He described the Natoma acquisition as a continuation of work Snowflake started earlier in the year with AI guardrails and prompt injection protection, building toward what he said was a portfolio for a more secure enterprise AI.®

Windows Server 2016 might be long in the tooth but that isn't about to stop Microsoft breaking stuff. The May 12 security update introduced another bug for administrators to worry about. According to Microsoft, if the server hostname is exactly 15 characters long (like, for example, THEY-NEVER-TEST), domain controller discovery might fail. In the notes for the glitch, Microsoft wrote: "When the hostname is 15 characters long, DCLocator calls (for example, using nltest /dsgetdc: /pdc) will return ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER, preventing applications and administrative tools from locating a domain controller." In other words, anything that depends on a domain controller lookup might stop working. As an example, Microsoft gave Distributed File System (DFS) Namespace management, which would certainly be inconvenient. DFS Namespaces is a Windows Server role that allows admins to group shared folders across different servers into a single namespace. A single path can lead to files located on multiple servers. Unless, of course, the domain controller lookup is broken. Microsoft lists no workaround for affected users, though changing the server hostname to something other than 15 characters would presumably avoid the trigger. "The issue is under investigation, and additional information will be shared as soon as it becomes available," it said. Microsoft still officially supports Windows Server 2016. Mainstream support ended in 2022, but extended support will continue until January 12, 2027. Microsoft is offering up to three more years of support via the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program after that. Earlier this year, Esben Dochy of Lansweeper told The Register that the operating system accounted for just 2.2 percent of all Windows devices it tracks, but 20.3 percent of all servers. That figure is unlikely to have dropped dramatically in the months since, so there is a fair chance that an administrator with a 15-character hostname could be affected. In addition to the Windows Server 2016 problems, the May 2026 security update has failed during installation on some Windows 11 devices when the EFI System Partition is insufficient in size. It is reassuring to know Microsoft's talent for breakage shows no bias toward any particular vintage. ®

Carnival Corporation - the world's largest cruise operator - has confirmed a digital heist, a month after hacking crew ShinyHunters claimed to have stolen millions of customers' records. The breach, Carnival confirmed, stemmed from an April 14 social engineering attack on an employee, though the company declined to comment on the scale or name ShinyHunters. However, a company filing with the Maine attorney general's office puts the number of affected individuals at just under six million, down from the 8.7 million records previously listed by Have I Been Pwned. Carnival previously acknowledged the phishing attack at the time, but it did not say whether any data had been accessed or stolen. ShinyHunters claimed it lifted terabytes' worth of Carnival records and hinted at a breakdown in negotiations, likely related to the criminal outfit's extortion demands. "The company failed to reach an agreement with us despite our incredible patience," ShinyHunters wrote on its data leak site, adding: "They don't care." Following a "thorough and time-consuming analysis of the impacted data," Carnival confirmed that names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and state identification numbers were all included in the breach. As is often the case in data theft incidents, individuals will be affected to different degrees, depending on what information they shared with the company. Carnival began sending notifications directly to affected individuals on Wednesday. Those communications include details about how recipients can redeem two years of free credit monitoring services, as is common in US breach notifications, via TransUnion. It closed its message with a promise to improve: "In addition to the comprehensive security measures the company had in place prior to the incident, it has taken steps to further safeguard its systems, including enhancing its security and monitoring controls. "The company will continue to advance its IT security and data privacy controls to stay ahead of an ever-evolving threat landscape." ®

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we cover high-security hijinks that are at least partially the victim’s fault. This week, we have a trio of tales that involve incredibly unprofessional behavior, inappropriate use of corporate resources, and outright theft, all dealt with by IT. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our trilogy of tech exposure comes courtesy of Zach Lewis, the current CIO and CISO at the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis. Before his current role, Lewis worked for various other companies in IT roles and he has some tea to spill. At one job, Lewis was working as a sysadmin when the CEO asked for help recovering photos he had accidentally deleted from a company file share. The files were accessible to anyone at the organization, and Lewis searched archived copies in Google Picasa to restore them. Unfortunately, the pictures the CEO was missing included many that were very much NSFW. “So I was called in to sit down with him and look at it. And we're just like I restore everything. We start clicking images to make sure everything's there, just doing a random subset check,” Lewis said. “And, uh, just some pornography comes up and he's sitting right next to me. I mean, right next to me, he's just like, oh yeah, that's just some of my porn.” When he was done restoring the photos, Lewis left the room. It was clear the boss had no shame and no problem with IT seeing his explicit images or with storing them where any employee could download them. They were even mixed in with official photos and family pictures. However, knowing this was bad policy and could probably lead to a lawsuit, Lewis approached human resources and told them about the problem. The HR representative instructed him to delete all the smut from the network, even though it belonged to the big boss. He did that, and fortunately, did not face any repercussions at work for deleting the big man’s cheeky pictures. He wore a top hat In another instance, Lewis was asked to look at a coworker’s computer when the employee thought he had gotten a virus on his laptop. However, the colleague cautioned IT not to look through his files. After a little while, Lewis noticed a folder filled with other subfolders that were festooned with adult images, both of naked women and of the employee himself without clothes on. All of the photos had appropriately descriptive file names too. Perhaps most embarrassing of all for the coworker is that Lewis saw his semi-naked pictures. To be fair, he was dressed in the images, as he was wearing a top hat – but nothing else. The problem, Lewis notes, is that employees treat their work computers as if they are home computers and do not think about the implications of having personal images on something that belongs to a corporation. He suggests setting a firm policy against this kind of thing and educating workers about the policy. When workers inevitably violate the policy, it’s time for a gentle reminder. “A policy is just, you know, paper, right? It's hard to enforce that,” Lewis said. “You can talk to the user in this instance. In this most recent instance with this guy in the top hat, it was ‘hey, these are company resources’ when I gave the computer back to him.” Kids’ YouTube upload exposed a potential thief In another gig, Lewis worked at a university. When one athletics coach quit, he was supposed to leave his school-issued iPad on his desk. But when the IT department came to collect the equipment, this tablet was missing. No one could find the missing iPad, but a month later, someone uploaded a new video to the school’s YouTube channel. The video featured a different coach's kids and appeared to have been uploaded from his house. Apparently, the other coach had allegedly snatched the iPad off of the first coach’s desk and given it to his kids. The kids then used the iPad to film a funny home video and upload it to YouTube, not realizing that it was connected to the school’s official YouTube account. Lewis notified HR, who called the apparent thief in. At first, he denied that the children in the video were his offspring. However, the HR agent then showed him a photo of him and his kids on social media together and he admitted, okay, he was their dad. The coach then said he didn’t know how the iPad got into his house. But he grabbed it and returned it to IT. There are a lot of problems with the iPad situation from a security perspective. First, the iPad that wasn’t turned over clearly was not locked to the point where someone else couldn’t get into it. It had access to the school’s YouTube account, so any thief could add their own content to it and it may have even had PII (personally identifiable information) about some student athletes. Bottom line: make sure departing employees hand over equipment directly to IT. Don’t let them just leave equipment on a desk. And make sure even tablets require biometric access. ®