MainaDan @danmaina

BREAKING: A hacker is attempting to breach the US Federal Election Commission's systems and that agency has had to 'temporarily shut down' its web-facing services as a result, according to an email seen by Reuters reut.rs/4imQyUu

This is honestly shocking. Three months ago, Hong Wang was awarded the Fields Medal for resolving the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions. Today, OpenAI released a proposed proof of the conjecture in ALL dimensions. And that’s not all. It also announced a proposed existence proof for quantum chromodynamics and a proposed refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis. Experts say that, if confirmed, these would be Nobel prize and Turing award level discoveries respectively. A journalist just asked me: “What remains for humans to do?” I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that more and more problem solving will be automated. But humans will remain crucial in determining the direction of discovery. Deciding which problems are worth solving. Because the value of a discovery depends on our needs, our priorities and the kind of world we want to build. There will be a shift from problem solving to problem setting. I also think there will be huge individual differences. People with strong critical thinking skills, creativity and imagination will be supercharged by AI. People without those skills risk surrendering to it. I’m particularly concerned for children, who may never develop these skills. I think epistemic literacy - how to distinguish information from knowledge - is the single most important skill we should be teaching.

Everyday is zero-day these days

Announcing three major scientific discoveries, one each in mathematics (harmonic analysis), computer science (complexity theory), and physics (quantum field theory). AI starting to help us improve our understanding of the universe! openai.com/index/building…

‼️Microsoft Authenticator Flaw Lets Malicious Android Apps Steal Account Tokens With Zero Permissions Details: cybersecuritynews.com/microsoft-auth… Microsoft patched high-severity flaw CVE-2026-80097 (CVSS 8.6) in Authenticator for Android, allowing malicious apps with no declared permissions to steal work account access tokens due to improper authentication in its broker component. Microsoft classified the flaw as a local elevation-of-privilege vulnerability. The issue affected Android devices with Microsoft Authenticator installed and a signed-in work account. #cybersecuritynews

x.com/i/article/2114…

AI model Claude bypassed a paywall and accessed publicly available US state of Georgia aggregate voter counts without human authorization, Anthropic said in a statement reut.rs/4Aeysvx

Good Morning from Meru 📸 Nanyuki Kwetu

Kenya Leads in AI paid subscriptions globally according to a report by DataReportal

October has been an absolute nightmare for software > Railway - customer secrets exposure > LiteLLM - malicious PyPI + Docker releases > Zeabur - infrastructure breached > OpenCode - AI API keys exposed > OVHcloud CLI - official binaries backdoored > Rank Math PRO - malware in official plugin > TeamUpdraft - customer data compromised > ConnectWise - cloud backup identities compromised > Tensorlake - npm package infected > SubQuery - backdoored npm package > GhostAction - GitHub repos with malicious workflows > PHP - critical RCE vulnerabilities > Node.js - security vulnerabilities patched > eMudhra - certificate authority keys compromised > Tailscale - eMudhra incident At this point, the biggest security risk might not be the code we write, but the code we trust...

Security called me at 6:12 AM today. "Patch every PHP server immediately." I asked what happened. "Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required." Cool. How many PHP servers do we have? According to inventory: 12 According to reality: Nobody knows. We found one running WordPress. Three running old internal tools. One under someone's desk. Two inside vendor appliances. A forgotten employee directory from 2016. And a server named: PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH Naturally, that one runs payroll exports. Then we found a PHP 5.6 box. I asked who owned it. The documentation said: BRIAN. Brian left in 2019. We called Brian. He said: "Oh wow, that's still running?" Excellent. By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call. CEO: "Can hackers actually get in?" Security: "Potentially yes." CEO: "Without a password?" Security: "Yes." CEO: "Then why do WE need passwords?" Not the lesson. Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue. Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers. Finance asked for a cost comparison. At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline. Marketing refused. "Our campaign is live." So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover. We finally patched everything we could find. Then our scanner discovered another PHP server. Hostname: TEMP-PHP-2014 Uptime: 4,512 days. Nobody knows what it does. Nobody owns it. Nobody can shut it down. But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels. Security has classified it as critical infrastructure. It is running PHP 5.4. The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees. The emergency patch took four hours. Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven. The internet isn't held together with code. It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.

So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.

The China state-aligned threat actor Storm-0940 used the agentic AI penetration testing framework ARTEX to automate attacks targeting hundreds of organizations globally across a broad range of industries. Microsoft Threat Intelligence assesses that Storm-0940 was responsible for the recently disclosed ConnectWise supply chain compromise of a multitenant application. msft.it/6018aakEE Our investigation found that Storm-0940's use of ARTEX accelerated the speed of compromised application abuse to authenticate to target environments through applications that had already been granted access, allowing the threat actor to operate without requiring an interactive user sign-in. AI-accelerated follow-on activity included reconnaissance, application credential changes, and attempts to modify privileges that could enable expanded or persistent access. Read our blog for a detailed analysis and indicators of compromise (IOCs), along with Microsoft Defender detections, protection recommendations, and guidance on investigating service principal sign-ins and unexpected application credential or privilege changes.

OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites. Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors. Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact. This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare. openai.com/index/coordina…

PHP 8.4.27 released - 89 fixes in 30 components, including security fixes (CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619). Changelog + downloads: php-net.pro/news/php-8-4-2…

Over the past two months, we have been leading a coalition to mitigate one of the most severe bugs in open source software found in recent memory, php2shell, found as part of our Patch the Planet initiative. x.com/i/article/2112…

all software will be open source and there's nothing companies can do about it

@IAMRAPCHA Most seems to forget that president Barack Obama was 47 when he was sworn in on January 20, 2009 (born August 4, 1961), making him one of the youngest U.S. presidents to take office!

@WillieOeba 🤭🤭🤭🙈🙈🙈

@darline_maiga @beth_kasinga Mnaujinga sana kwa hii app!