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An update on Athena, and some unsolicited predictions on what's coming next On Saturday, Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier . I agree with him. Go read it if you haven't. I've spent the summer looking at what these models find, and the gap he describes between what they can do and what the rest of us are ready for is the one I've been staring at since May. The hardest piece of his plan is the one that asks governments to coordinate. They're in a difficult spot: regulate too little and a US company accidentally builds the weapon, regulate too much and it gets built somewhere else, and open source isn't governable either way. Where governments can act is on consumption: not what the models can do, but what happens to what they find. Who gets a vulnerability first, how fast a fix reaches the people running the code, whether the operators who can't move on an attacker's timeline get a head start. That's what Gold Eagle is. It matters...

Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis has revealed that its ongoing investigation into the agentic cyber attack targeting its systems also exposed names, usernames, password hashes and live tokens for all users. "While we investigated, we removed access to Reactor and Data Solutions," the company said. "At this time we continue to have no evidence that any investigations data has been accessed or Chainalysis attribution data has been manipulated." Chainalysis said it has implemented additional proactive monitoring systems to detect unusual activity, adding it took the Know Your Transaction (KYT) user interface and API offline, alongside other address screening products and the login page. Previously, Chainalysis said it was probing what it described as an "ongoing multi-front cyber attack," leading to the discovery of an "on-path attack" that exposed a subset of customer passwords. The company said the attack vector has since been addres...

A backdoor has been found hiding in the web server that runs Control Web Panel (CWP), a free panel for managing Linux hosting servers, researchers at QiAnXin's XLab said this week. The backdoored web server executes commands that attackers send via web requests, and those requests never appear in its access logs. Installing it takes root access, so the attackers must already control the server. The researchers, who named the backdoor cwpdoor , captured its installer, a shell script posing as a version update, on June 29. The installer handles only two versions of that web server, cwpsrv 1.15.10 and 1.24.0. The researchers do not yet know how attackers get the root access the installer needs. On September 30, an archive holding a copy of the backdoor was uploaded to VirusTotal from Brazil. The researchers say this indicates that "real victims already exist in the wild." They give no count of infected servers. The backdoor is cwpsrv itself, rebuilt with extra code...

Two flaws in Barracuda's Email Security Gateway , an email-filtering appliance, can be chained to run commands on it as root, its highest level of access, with no login required. The company released patches on Monday, and the security firm watchTowr detailed the attack chain on Thursday. One flaw, CVE-2026-116606 , is an authorization bypass. An unauthenticated attacker can use it to restore a crafted configuration backup and change the appliance's global settings. The other, CVE-2026-111560 , is a command injection. It runs commands as root but normally needs an administrator account, and on the Email Security Gateway the bypass gives an attacker that access. Chained, the two let an attacker reach root with no login. Affected Products and Fixes The authorization bypass affects only the Email Security Gateway. The command injection reaches five other products, but on those it still needs an administrator account. Mandiant, which assigned the two CVE records, rates...

Attackers can log in to accounts that have no password, such as SSH key-only accounts, on some Alpine Linux servers running the standard openssh-server package. They need network access to the server, an account name, and a password between 257 and 1,024 bytes long. OpenSSH, which rates the flaw critical, released version 10.6p2 today to block it. Alpine has published fixed packages for every release back to 3.16. The attack works when the OpenSSH server (sshd) checks passwords without the Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) interface, password logins are enabled, and at least one other account on the machine has a password. Alpine's openssh-server package is built without PAM, and password logins are on by default. The flaw comes from how sshd works with musl, the C library that Alpine is built on. Non-Linux systems, Linux systems built on glibc, and systems that check passwords through PAM are not affected, said Damien Miller of the OpenSSH project. He told anyone run...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched vulnerability that could be exploited to bypass Lockdown Mode protections in OpenAI ChatGPT. Lockdown Mode was introduced by the artificial intelligence (AI) company in June 2026 as an optional setting to minimize data exfiltration risks arising from prompt injections. "The flaw could enable silent chat data theft, phishing, and malware delivery, including zero-click data exfiltration in the ChatGPT desktop application," Eli Smadja, head of research at Check Point, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The problem stems from HTML page previews inside ChatGPT code blocks, which allow HTML content to be rendered directly within the application. Given that executing user-supplied HTML and JavaScript can introduce security risks of its own, the content is placed inside a sandbox so that it cannot access data from the app, such as cookies and local storage. The sandbox also prevents the rendere...

How much damage can someone do without breaking much? Quite a lot, it seems. A stolen login can open doors across several systems. A trusted setting can be used to lock people out. Even a simple file copy can reach places it shouldn't. And while new tools are helping find security holes faster, some important systems are still taking months, sometimes over a year, to get patched. Not exactly a great match. The stranger part is how little some attacks now need. Ransom demands without encrypted files. Fake websites that look real enough to steal money. AI tools picking up dangerous instructions while trying to help. Even the attackers are making mistakes in their own code. This week's stories are a reminder that the biggest problems don't always come from clever tricks. Sometimes the easy way works just fine. Here's what else happened. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.