The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency finally got a new nominee for director, with President Donald Trump on Monday nominating Michael LoSapio, chief information security officer at Palantir.

CISA has been without a Senate-confirmed director for the entirety of Trump’s second term, after his first pick, Sean Plankey, languished in the Senate before withdrawing in April.

LoSapio could face some obstacles of his own, with Palantir far from a popular company with the Democrats set to take over Congress. Democrats have scrutinized the company over its work with the Department of Homeland Security, even as Palantir has denied aiding mass surveillance of immigrants.

As of late last month, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., was also still waiting for CISA to release a public version of a report on telecommunications cybersecurity, and he had placed one of several Senate holds on Plankey pending the receipt of that report.

Republicans will still control the Senate until January, however, and a lame-duck session began Monday.

Some CISA watchers were convinced that the agency’s acting director, Nick Andersen, was likely to continue holding the role. He was running out of days to hold the “acting” position under the law, but putting forward a nominee could pause the clock on that deadline.

The administration was thought to be looking for someone from a high-profile tech company to fill the CISA director position, a bill LoSapio fits.

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It's FOSS reports: Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed... They have announced that Asahi is moving all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward, all Asahi Linux code will be under strong copyleft licenses only. Asahi Linux compares their dilemma to the 1990s, when "permissively licenced projects were viewed by tech companies as free real estate to pilfer and exploit," adding that "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it... The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community." In short, they argue that for Asahi Linux, using the permissive MIT license "is no longer viable." Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors. As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. It's FOSS explains that "Under the GPL, anyone who distributes a modified version has to release the source under the same license. You can't legally build a closed, paid Apple Silicon distro on top of GPL code. And if a product's source has to be public, the copying is easier to spot." And their article also points out that before AI, bad actors attempting code laundering "usually meant manually rewriting code line by line, renaming variables and stuff, and shuffling functions around until it no longer looked like the original. LLMs made it much more easy and cheaper of course." In case you did not know, Asahi Linux forbids AI generated code contribution... As far as I can tell, this is the first time a major open source project has moved to copyleft specifically because of AI-assisted code laundering. Projects have relicensed before, but usually to stop cloud providers from reselling their work as a service. This one is specifically about AI... The move has drawn criticism, particularly from the BSD side, which was one of the main reasons Asahi chose MIT in the first place. OpenBSD's Apple Silicon support relies on Asahi's m1n1 bootloader.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"AlmaLinux OS charted a new path in 2023 when Red Hat restricted source code access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux," remembers Linux Magazine. "Rather than pursue 1:1 compatibility with RHEL like other Enterprise Linux alternatives, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation chose application binary interface (ABI) compatibility, which guarantees that applications and kernel modules that work on RHEL will work on AlmaLinux OS." No longer constrained by the 1:1 promise, AlmaLinux can offer new features, or add back deprecated ones, while still remaining a stable, drop-in replacement for RHEL... The release of AlmaLinux OS 10.2 in May 2026 reveals just how far AlmaLinux has come.... When RHEL 10 increased the x86-64-v2 architecture baseline to x86-64-v3, many older server platforms (and some new ones) were left in the lurch. These older servers couldn't support the modern CPU feature sets in x86-64-v3, including AVX2 CPU instructions. AlmaLinux recognized that many community members employed older hardware that relied on x86-64-v2. While x86-64-v3 is enabled by default in AlmaLinux OS 10 and AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10, an additional x86-64-v2 build is also available. The x86-64-v2 build works best for environments that rely on standard OS packages or that can rebuild any additional packages required by x86-64-v2. For users with older hardware, the additional x86-64-v2 build allows continued use of current hardware, saving money and keeping servers from the landfill. AlmaLinux OS 10 is actively supported through 2030 with security support through 2035, significantly extending the life of older hardware.... Many legacy applications and containerized workloads still run on i686, a 32-bit computer processor architecture belonging to the Intel x86 family, including software that only ships as i686, CI pipelines that require a specific 32-bit glibc, and seemingly normal looking containers that require a 32-bit environment. RHEL 10 completely removed 32-bit application support and multilib libraries after deprecating support in earlier releases... AlmaLinux OS 10.2 has added package repos and official container images for 32-bit x86 (but not a 32-bit kernel or installer)... NVIDIA GPUs, ubiquitous in modern computing, have been a pain point for Linux users. Getting the closed-source NVIDIA drivers has required extra steps and manual installation. When NVIDIA released an open source version of their graphics driver, AlmaLinux integrated the drivers, along with the associated CUDA components, into the AlmaLinux repository starting with AlmaLinux OS 9 and 10. AlmaLinux also signs the open source drivers, allowing secure boot with the NVIDIA drivers they ship. Unlike RHEL users, AlmaLinux users now have native support, allowing them to skip manual installation. AlmaLinux users can now enjoy a fully integrated NVIDIA experience. In addition, "Thanks to ABI compatibility, AlmaLinux can sometimes deliver patches more quickly than RHEL," the article points out. And it lists other points where AlmaLinux OS 10.2 diverges from RHEL 10: Re-enabling frame pointers disabled by default in RHEL and CentOS Stream to provide system-wide, real-time tracing and profiling to diagnose and optimize code. Enabling both kernel and userspace components that allow installation of AlmaLinux on a Btrfs filesystem Adding SPICE support dropped in RHEL 9, allowing users to interact with a virtual machine's desktop remotely instead of just from the host server. Restoring support for older storage and network drivers disabled upstream, including Adaptec, Dell PERC, HP, Mellanox, QLogic, Emulex, LSI, and Broadcom.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The government needs to invest in digital forensics to keep pace with incidents and threats in cyberspace, the principal cyber adviser for the Department of the Air Force said Thursday.

“In order to detect, help us hunt and find where the incident started… the digital forensics, I believe we need to do, and focus, and invest in that world,” said Wanda Jones-Heath, speaking at the Datadog Threat Response Forum, produced by FedScoop.

The forensics role is vital even though “they’re after the fact,” she said.

“They go and look what happened weeks and months after the incident has occurred, and so I think we need to figure out: ‘How do we keep pace with incidents as they are occurring?’” Jones-Heath said. “Once we identify it, then you start looking at the forensics of what happened, who did it, where they are, where it originated from and then how you partition the areas that are still under fire while you continue to operate in that environment.” 

Jeffrey Hunt, global operations branch chief for the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, which provides digital forensic investigations, said at the same event that the divide between operations and security on getting visibility into networks about threats is an issue that needs to be addressed early.

But Hunt said combining the teams into one big unit is a “disaster” that doesn’t work.

“It means that you at least want to have sort of a liaison relationship where somebody from security is in the room as part of the planning team from the beginning of where your operational plan starts,” he said.

Another recommendation Jones-Heath made is changing how cyber exercises are conducted. The goal is not to be in “reactive mode” when an incident happens and knowing what to do with the “data is poisoned.” 

“They’re not designed typically of how we would operate if we have engagement,” she said. “So we have to change the lens to be more outside of the box — let the cyber team actually be engaged on the offensive and defensive side.”

“We have to get over the fact that it could never happen,” she continued. “So sharing that intel about what the adversary is doing, real world, may convince those who are not in our community to let us be a part of the exercise, show them and demonstrate what the adversary is actually doing, so that if we are in formation and you get disconnected. You know exactly what to do.

The post Air Force cyber official: need to invest in digital forensics appeared first on CyberScoop.

Democrats’ big win on Election Day, which saw them take control of both the House and Senate, has ramifications for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, artificial intelligence, surveillance policy and much more.

Here’s what lawmakers and cybersecurity experts have to say about the short-term and long-term prospects on Capitol Hill.

Leadership plans ahead

Maggie Hassan, D-N.H. is in line to take the gavel on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, with Sen. Gary Peters, Mich., retiring.

“Our government’s number one job is to keep people safe, and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee must work to ensure that our country remains safe, secure and free from all kinds of threats,” Hassan said in a statement to CyberScoop. “That work involves protecting against terrorism and fentanyl trafficking, but it also includes guarding against emerging threats like artificial intelligence security risks and strengthening our cybersecurity.”

“The Trump-Vance administration has undermined our security on these fronts, including by diverting resources away from combatting fentanyl trafficking and gutting CISA,” she continued. “We need to reverse these cuts, confront these challenges and put public safety first.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is poised to return once again as chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Democrats are taking over at a “pivotal time for CISA,” with it looking to add staff after cutting back by nearly one-third.

“First and foremost, we will aim to work with CISA to expedite its critical re-staffing effort and to ensure it has the expertise necessary to support stakeholders as they defend against the scale and velocity of AI-enabled cyber-attacks,” he said in a statement to CyberScoop. “Advances in AI can help defenders, but it will also accelerate the consequences of deferred investments in security and CISA must be well-positioned to help critical infrastructure owners and operators rapidly improve their cybersecurity posture.”

“We will prioritize getting resources straight into the hands for defenders — by extending the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program and improving support of under-resourced sectors, especially water,” he continued. “We will work to ensure CISA re-establishes its cross-sector coordination capacity, which was diminished when the Trump administration- terminated CIPAC, by making sure the Anchor-CI is eventually up and running and meets the needs of stakeholders. Finally, we will make sure CISA is well-positioned to support the secure development and deployment of AI.”

What happens in the lame-duck session

Before the GOP relinquishes control of the House and Senate to Democrats, though, there’s a lame-duck session ahead. 

Long-term renewal of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015) is a bipartisan and industry priority, with it set to expire Dec. 11. Current Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., has been the biggest obstacle to reauthorization, but he could get “rolled” by GOP leadership on an extension, said Michael Garcia, a former government cyber official and vice president of the cybersecurity practice at Monument Advocacy. Possible vehicles for CISA 2015 to hitch a ride include an omnibus funding bill or the annual defense policy bill.

The Department of Homeland Security, and its subagency CISA, are currently operating on a continuing resolution that’s also set to expire Dec. 11, where lawmakers could temporarily extend CISA 2015 if a long-term solution can’t be reached in the lame duck. Another continuing resolution before Dec. 11 in lieu of an omnibus spending bill is an option for the lame duck. Both a CR and omnibus spending bill would theoretically include DHS funding, although the agency’s funding has been made more difficult in the past by the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement within the department.

Republicans have talked about wanting to get the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act done in the lame duck. Besides the possibilities of CISA 2015 being included in the bill, Nicholas Leiserson, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Security and Technology, said the Senate version of the legislation has a pair of very noteworthy cyber provisions: a “very broad” authorization for contractor-owned, contractor-operated offensive cyber operations, and a requirement that every artificial intelligence product sold to the Defense Department have an AI bill of materials.   

Additional leadership shuffle

While Paul is losing his gavel, he’s shown he can be a disruptive force on passing cybersecurity legislation through the Senate in the minority. That makes what he does next possibly determinative for cyber bills, Leiserson and Garcia said. “If he leaves HSGAC, let a thousand cyber bills flourish!” Garia quipped on social media. Paul could opt to become the top Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee instead of HSGAC.

Nebraska Sen. James Lankford would take over for Paul as top HSGAC Republican in that scenario, and an industry source said he’s viewed as a supporter of CISA 2015.

On Senate Intelligence, the panel’s leadership goes to a lawmaker who has placed a big emphasis on cybersecurity in his congressional career: Mark Warner, D-Va. 

On the House side, while Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., moves to the minority on the Homeland Security panel, he has proven willing to collaborate with Democrats on cybersecurity issues. Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., is poised to take the gavel of the panel’s cybersecurity subcommittee, and Rep. Vince Fong, R-of California looks set to become the subcommittee’s top Republican and has his own history of bipartisanship. Fong would replace current subcommittee chair Andy Ogles, the far-right Tennessee Republican who lost in the primaries.

One thing to watch in the House, Leiserson said, is how the House looks to tackle AI — through existing committees, a select committee or some other structure. Democrats haven’t put forward a unified front on AI guardrails yet.

With AI models uncovering as many vulnerabilities as they are, “highly capable frontier models are going to drive a lot of discussion” about AI and cybersecurity, said Craig Albright, the Business Software Alliance’s senior vice president for U.S. government relations.

Appropriations, oversight, legislation

If the NDAA or a CISA 2015 extension don’t pass in the lame duck, they’d be priorities in 2027, too.

“CISA 2015 has to happen, and if we can’t get it done, then we can’t move to the next thing,”  said Henry Young, BSA’s policy director. “Once we get it done, there’s an open question about which of these priorities that we’ve talked about gets to be number one. Is it post-quantum cryptography? Is it government IT modernization? Is it frontier AI cybersecurity systems? We don’t know that yet, and we can’t know until we pass this law.”

How damaged the agency CISA is by Trump administration’s budget cuts is something Democrats are expected to scrutinize closely. Another top budget issue is what to do with the expired State and Local Cybersecurity Grants Program housed at DHS, since even if it’s reauthorized, it will require appropriators taking steps to invest in it.

Democrats could take a look at a variety of other Trump administration changes at DHS and CISA, on topics like election security, the Cyber Safety Review Board, the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative and more. 

More broadly, Leiserson said an area of Democratic cyber oversight is likely to be the Department of Government Efficiency that cut cyber personnel at agencies at and beyond CISA, and “particularly the integrity of systems that DOGE touched when they were given very high privileged access to federal systems.”

If the White House puts forward a permanent nominee for director of CISA, Democrats would be poised to vet that person. They also would have a say in who leads the Office of the National Cyber Director, should the incumbent, Sean Cairncross, depart.

So far, Democrats haven’t put forward a unified posture on expired surveillance authorities known as Section 702, although both Warner and incoming House Intelligence Chairman Jim Himes, D-Conn., have fought in the past for its renewal. The surveillance program is operating similarly still due to a court order, but that order only lasts through next spring.

The post What Democratic control of Congress means for cybersecurity appeared first on CyberScoop.

Google said today it worked with industry partners to dismantle a botnet made up of more than 1.3 million Android TV set-top boxes that ship with malicious software which secretly rents the user’s Internet connection out to strangers and conducts advertising fraud. Experts involved in the takedown say the action is likely to sever the botnet’s access to more than 10 million additional compromised systems, including other Internet of Things (IoT) products such as Android-based healthcare devices and karaoke machines.

A report from the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said Google has severed ties with Videostrong Technology Co., a TV box manufacturer in China that GTIG and other industry experts concluded was responsible for including malware that enrolled more than 1.3 million set-top boxes in a botnet dubbed “XCPE” (named after one of the malware’s core code components).

The report said the XCPE botnet loaded the user’s device with software that makes their Internet address available for resale by multiple “residential proxy” services, which allow customers to rent Internet addresses as a way to anonymize their web traffic or spoof their true location. As detailed in several stories here over the past year, residential proxy services are a major source of unwanted and often malicious traffic, including account takeover activity, advertising fraud, and mass content scraping for AI projects.

“Videostrong monetized the backdoor by selling access to criminal affiliates and loading those affiliates’ malware modules onto infected devices,” the GTIG post reads, noting that Google took legal action to take down the domains and servers Videostrong used to control the botnet and install additional malware. “A device manufacturer intentionally infecting their users with malware is an unacceptable breach of trust, and represents a serious risk to those users. Without users’ knowledge or consent, infected devices were offered as a distribution mechanism for a wide array of criminal actors.”

The report notes that while TV boxes made up the the majority of the botnet, the same XCPE malware was found in other Android-based IoT products, including telehealth devices, karaoke machines, and even digital signage systems.

Google said it requires all Android device makers to pass compatibility and security tests to ensure their products don’t harm users, but that Videostrong nevertheless found a way to load their malicious software immediately after a user boots up one of these devices for the first time (Google says it has since addressed that weakness).

The GTIG report calls out a number of residential proxy providers whose software development kits were routinely downloaded by devices infected by the XCPE botnet. Those include AppSalt, also known as Honeygain, which was developed by the Vilnius, Lithuania-based Oxylabs. In October 2026, Oxylabs and Honeygain were reorganized as independent platforms under an umbrella entity called Source, which received $130 million in funding from private equity firm Warburg Pincus that reportedly valued the business at $3.6 billion.

Another provider linked to the botnet was NetNut, a once sprawling residential proxy company operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies. In July 2026, the FBI worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, saying the company was responsible for operating a separate botnet called Popa that enslaved TV boxes as residential proxies. Other proxy providers named in the GTIG report include EarnFM, Traffmonetizer, Jaguar, LINKFOG, BMW/IPWeb and GaGaNode.

Google’s announcement credits a number of industry partners, including Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy providers. In January 2026, Synthient published research into the rapid spread of the Kimwolf botnet, which at the time was hammering networks worldwide with record-smashing DDoS attacks. Synthient documented how Kimwolf infected millions of Android set-top boxes virtually overnight, using a widespread vulnerability in these residential proxy services to compromise other Android-based devices inside the local networks of unsuspecting TV box users.

Synthient’s research caused dozens of residential proxy providers to patch their networks, which helped to fragment the Kimwolf botnet into much smaller pieces that made its incessant and disruptive DDoS attacks far easier for network operators to manage. It also attracted the attention of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a trade group representing the major Hollywood studios, which partnered with Synthient to purchase and tear apart a number of popular Android TV set-top boxes — including some that were being infected by Kimwolf and other IoT botnets.

In a report published today, Synthient examined a popular, pre-infected TV box sold under the brand MECOOL by a publicly traded company in China called Skyworth Technology, concluding that MECOOL also bundled the malware from Videostrong Technology Co. and likewise installed AppSalt/Honeygain and other proxy components.

Synthient founder Ben Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity that Videostrong’s malware also distributed software for the proxy service Grass. In our November 2025 story, “Is Your Android TV Streaming Box Part of a Botnet?” we quoted a researcher from Censys who found the popular Superbox TV streaming device bundled Grass’s residential proxy software. We also quoted the Grass founder, who denied any affiliation with the TV box maker.

That November 2025 story noted that Superbox and similar Android TV set-top boxes gain new customers primarily by engaging influencers on Tiktok and other social networks who praise the product’s ability to offer hundreds of (pirated) pay TV streaming services for a one-time fee.

Likewise, Synthient’s report observes that the MECOOL set-top boxes exploded in popularity after the product was mentioned in 2023 by the Youtube channel Linus Tech Tips, which has an audience of nearly 17 million subscribers [Linus Tech Tips said in a statement shared with Synthient that it has since updated the video to explicitly frame the product as a scam and have removed all associated affiliate links].

The GTIG report estimates the XCPE botnet takedown should sever access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices, noting that the various proxy and ad fraud affiliates of Videostrong “each have diversified distribution channels for their modules beyond XCPE.”

Synthient’s Brundage echoed that conclusion, calling the 1.3 million number “highly conservative.”

“The scale of affected devices is likely way higher,” he said. “This is probably the largest operation against backdoored TV boxes that we’ve seen.”

Update, Nov. 5, 11:07 a.m. ET: In a statement shared post-publication, Oxylabs said that while its system is built so that a device can’t be used as a proxy exit node unless they receive a signal that it has consented, the developer faked these signals.

“We have been conducting regular audits of the applications provided by our partners,” the statement reads. “However, following this incident, we will improve the application and application’s build fingerprinting logic to better detect cases where the SDK is running on an unapproved build of an originally authorized application.”

The statement said Oxylabs has no record of any company called Videostrong Technology Co., but it did find between is suppliers the domain “com.abc[.]nexus,” mentioned in the GTIG report as an external malware loader.

“As soon as we saw that, we suspended the relationship and sent them a formal legal inquiry,” the statement reads. “This supplier accounts for less than 1% of our IP address pool. We had a signed contract with them, they assured our QA team that users had given consent, and we saw the consent flow ourselves.”

Further reading:
Plume Security Labs white paper on the XCPE botnet (PDF)
Black Lotus Labs writeup on LinkedIn
TrendAI’s analysis
Synthient’s list of affected devices, broken down by model number

The clock is running out on Nick Andersen’s time to serve as acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, but there appear to be efforts afoot to keep him in the role for longer, with no permanent nominee in sight.

There’s broad support for the idea of Andersen retaining the position one way or another, which he’s held since February of this year. Since then, Sean Plankey withdrew his nomination for the Senate-confirmed position in April, and in June, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said a likely replacement nominee had met with the president and was coming soon. Four months later, no nominee has materialized.

“We proudly support the work Acting CISA Director Nick Andersen has done in his role,” a DHS spokesperson said in response to questions about keeping Andersen on board and what became of that potential nominee. DHS referred CyberScoop to the White House for any further comment, but the White House didn’t respond to inquiries.

The easiest way to keep Andersen in the acting role would be to select a nominee, thus pausing his 210-day limit on serving as acting director, said Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation.

But “my gut reaction is that there’s just no appetite at the White House to say the four-letter ‘CISA’ to the president,” given his past animosity toward the agency, Montgomery said. “The way to keep Andersen in play is to nominate somebody. I think that stops the clock. But I don’t even think they can get the president to nominate Bugs Bunny. To me, that’s troubling.”  

Other top agency positions have received Senate confirmation under Mullin, Montgomery observed.

Multiple sources told CyberScoop they’ve been told that the administration has been working to keep Andersen in the job, possibly by shifting his title to “senior official performing the duties of” CISA director.

Some would like to see Andersen receive the job full-time, but sources say that when the search to replace Plankey began, the administration was looking for someone with a high pre-existing profile, such as a role at a big-name tech company.

On Capitol Hill, the leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee offered at least some  degree of support for Andersen.

“Acting Director Andersen is doing an excellent job preparing CISA to meet today’s threats, and we have a great working relationship. He has shown exceptional leadership at the agency, which is especially important in an increasingly complex threat environment as adversaries and criminals use AI to expand their capabilities and make attacks on our networks and critical infrastructure harder to defend against,” said Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y. “I appreciate our partnership and would gladly support his nomination.”

“Acting Director Andersen has provided some much-needed stability to CISA following a year of chaos and incompetent leadership,” said the panel’s top Democrat, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi. “While we may have our differences, I appreciate his dedication to the mission: securing government networks and the critical infrastructure ordinary Americans rely on every day. I am also concerned that any unnecessary changes to CISA’s leadership could once again destabilize CISA, which would make America less safe. It is in the best interest of CISA’s mission to have an empowered leader who has earned the trust of the agency’s workforce and its stakeholders.”

One industry source also said Andersen was a popular leader.

“Frankly, from everything [I’ve heard], people broadly support Nick, and he’s doing well at CISA,” the source said. “I don’t get the sense that anyone in the White House wants to make the effort to nominate a CISA director, which is a missed opportunity. With limited time remaining in this Congress, the administration would be wise to push his nomination through the Senate and put Nick on firmer footing.”

Andersen has made a tangible difference at an agency that has seen dramatic budget and personnel cuts, said John Zangardi, a former chief information officer at DHS.

“The organization is actually getting much better under Nick,” said Zangardi, chair of the Northern Virginia Technology Council Cyber Summit and Cyber50 Awards. “Like if you were there a year ago, it was pretty stark. … So morale has kind of gone back up, and I think Nick has been very instrumental in that. And I think he’s important in keeping that continuity going.”

One of the notions of having a Senate-confirmed nominee is for the prospective leader to be well-vetted by an outside body. On the other hand, it can also lead to nominees being stalled as senators press other agendas, something that Plankey ran into on multiple occasions.

But having a Senate-confirmed nominee at the agency also helps CISA compete for its priorities within the interagency process and at the White House, Montgomery said. Absent that, keeping Andersen in the position in some capacity is the next-best option, he said.

Montgomery also said Andersen has been making longer-term plans at the agency. Most recently, it released a strategy meant to carry CISA through 2030.

Andersen “strikes me as someone who knows he’s got more than a month left in his job,” Montgomery said. “He’s thinking hard about it, and he’s starting to think three to six months out, which is a lot for this administration.”

The post Could Nick Andersen’s leadership outlast the clock on his acting role? appeared first on CyberScoop.

Cisco open sourced Project Quarry, a rule language for detecting AI agent attacks that only emerge across sequences of benign actions.

The post Cisco Open Sources Quarry to Catch AI Agent Attacks Hidden in Harmless Steps appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Even OpenAI is admitting there is a lot of AI slop in the security space. 

An executive for the frontier AI company said Tuesday that AI-generated vulnerability reports are overwhelming open-source maintainers, leading some to stop accepting submissions as the workload exceeds their capacity to review them.

Michael Aiello, OpenAI’s cyber executive in residence, described the problem during a question-and-answer session Tuesday at the DataTribe Challenge in Washington, D.C., when he was asked how he viewed OpenAI’s Patch the Planet program versus open-source maintainers banning AI-based submissions because of concerns about quality and clarity. 

“It’s an ecosystem problem where that [maintainer] is just not going to respond to hundreds and hundreds of AI-submitted vulnerabilities,” Aiello said. 

He contrasted the volume against his company’s own program, which partners with security research organizations to identify vulnerabilities, develop fixes and help bring them into the affected projects. According to the company’s website, 661 patches have been developed and tested, with 458 of them accepted by maintainers for inclusion in the projects they oversee. 

However, Aiello said those involved with Daybreak often coordinate with maintainers, as opposed to just sending a message into GitHub and hoping for the best. 

He further described the broader burden on maintainers, who are often tasked with running through hundreds of AI-generated reports to determine validity, the security implications and evaluate the proposed fix.

“In most cases, they’re likely real bugs of some degree,” he said. “It’s, ‘Are they critical bugs?’ And are they bugs worth the time of the maintainers?…The result is they’ve just stopped taking” submissions.

Aiello further laid out advice for those that do create vulnerability disclosures for open-source maintainers, including more work in establishing the quality of the finding, writing an understandable report and allocating resources to coordinate disclosure once a report is filed.

“Make sure they’re really high quality, make sure it’s consumable and readable by a single person, and then spend your own resources coordinating vulnerability disclosure,” he said. “You need to now coordinate the vulnerability disclosure across the whole ecosystem, which is itself another project.”

Aiello used OpenAI’s work on the recent PHP vulnerabilities as an example of that coordination. He said a partner research organization discovered the flaw, and OpenAI worked with the PHP Foundation to validate it, develop a fix and coordinate its release.

“You have to work with response partners, and you have to work with the operators to actually issue the patch,” he said.

The process involved coordinating with a broad group of organizations, extending the work from technical review through patch release. Aiello acknowledged difficulties in carrying out the entire process.

“Now, did it go perfectly? No,” he said. “We’re learning as we do this over time.”

The post Before you file that AI bug report, OpenAI has some advice appeared first on CyberScoop.

Anthropic said its AI systems could drastically reshape the software and cybersecurity sectors in the “near term,” while also laying out a litany of cybersecurity and regulatory risks facing the company as it prepares to go public.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its initial public offering, the company said its technology could transform entire industries and the economy. Already, cybersecurity-focused models by Anthropic and rival OpenAI can find and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities at an alarming speed.

But the company also acknowledged serious risks its models, including Claude, pose to itself, its users and the world. Hacks by bad actors using Claude or AI agents could cause financial, legal or physical damage, spark lawsuits and affect Anthropic’s ability to insure against future losses. 

Anthropic expects bad actors, including foreign governments, to increase their efforts to access its latest frontier models as their cybersecurity capabilities improve. That creates persistent risk, since its models could be used in cyberattacks carried out by foreign governments and cybercriminal groups.

“Any successful attempt to misuse, or any perceived misuse of, our models, platform, and applications for a cyberattack or for any other malicious purpose could result in exposure to liability, disruption of our customer or other commercial relationships, or damage to our reputation,” Anthropic said in its filing.

That potential legal and regulatory risk extends to independent security researchers and others who have “used, and may in the future use, our models to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in the systems of other companies, including other AI developers, at times in connection with authorized bug bounty programs.”

Anthropic cited the rise of AI-enabled cybersecurity incidents in the U.S., the U.K. and other countries, saying they could result in more adversarial regulatory environments around the world. European laws, for example, require detailed breach reports within a strict time frame, which could be difficult for Anthropic to meet.

Federal intervention could also disrupt AI development and release timelines. Anthropic cited the Department of Commerce placing export controls on its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, and confirmed that the Federal Trade Commission issued it a civil investigative demand earlier this month for more information on the safety and security of its products, as well as its consumer, data and privacy protection policies.

AI development will be guided by more than ethics

Anthropic has developed a public reputation as an ethics-first AI company,  most notably in disputes with the Department of Defense over how its models are used in wartime. But the IPO filing states the company must “balance safety considerations against commercial objectives, competitive pressures, and stakeholder expectations.”

The company also said it is “actively” improving security infrastructure and controls. It also has acknowledged it has moved forward on projects with “known limitations or gaps in our defenses” and may do so again.

“There can be no assurance, however, that the safeguards or access regimes we adopt will prove adequate, that we will correctly identify which capabilities require restriction, or that constraints we impose will not be circumvented,” the document stated.

AI agents can create new and “distinct” cybersecurity attack surfaces because they interact with so many other tools, databases, APIs and other third-party systems. That creates  feedback loops between a model and other systems, which can be compromised or manipulated to feed malicious instructions to the agent.

Anthropic suggested the problems could be so pronounced that it may have difficulty obtaining insurance for some cybersecurity incidents and data breaches related to its models.  

Andrew Yoon, head of research at the nonprofit CivAI, told CyberScoop that both the document and Anthropic’s overall record show a company that has consistently put profit considerations over building safer AI.

“I think in general they’re not meeting the moment here,” Yoon said. “Despite all of these risks that they flagged, they’re moving ahead pretty much as fast as humanly possible, and their justification for this is ‘You can’t do safety from second place.’”

Yoon said Anthropic has not only pushed its own frontier research toward dangerous and harmful capabilities like hacking, “they are pushing very aggressively ahead” and in some cases influencing competitors to follow suit. Anthropic’s release of its Mythos and Fable models earlier this year caused OpenAI to shift “its entire corporate strategy” to match the capabilities of Anthropic models in coding, science, and general intelligence by building models at breakneck speed.

“They have pretty directly caused the industry to speed up toward this mad, frenzied race and yet they’re saying ‘Oh, our models are too powerful,’ ”….it just doesn’t add up to me,” said Yoon.

But Yoon said it’s not clear that building AI systems to carry out dangerous, complex activities like hacking or bioweapons is necessary to be competitive in the global marketplace. He pointed to the wide assortment of Chinese-developed, open-weight AI models that are widely used around the world, but are not powerful enough to chain together complex exploits or develop new viruses.  

“This is not an accident, this is not the models generalizing from regular programming capabilities…the labs are intentionally training them on hacking as well,” said Yoon. “This is because they want to offer better defensive capabilities, they want to be able to sell offensive products to the government…and they do pretty cavalier testing with [the models] inside the labs.”

The post All the security risks Anthropic is worried about before its IPO  appeared first on CyberScoop.

Alarm bells ratcheted up yet again about an AI-discovered vulnerability that could — if exploited in the wild — destabilize vast stretches of the internet. 

The critical defect — CVE-2026-111497 — affects the Google-developed Brotli decompression library that’s bundled into many components, applications and cloud services riding on open-source software. The buffer overflow vulnerability, which OpenAI Codex Security discovered and Node.js disclosed in a Oct. 21 security advisory, can trigger system crashes and remote code execution. 

Researchers haven’t observed any active exploitation of the defect in real networks, but concerns are mounting. Multiple vendors and software packages, including Microsoft and Python, that rely on vulnerable versions of Brotli have rushed emergency patches out to address the risk of exploitation in their respective systems.

Wiz researchers warned that “91% of cloud environments have resources vulnerable to CVE-2026-111497 and 82% of cloud environments have publicly exposed Node.js instances.”

The attack surface is “extremely broad and vast, but much of the impact of exploitation depends entirely on its implementation and how it is used within that piece of software,” said Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr.

Christiaan Beek, vice president at Rapid7 Intelligence, said the Brotli vulnerability is especially concerning because it’s effectively hiding out in the open, as are many open-source software libraries.

“Most businesses have no idea how deeply components like Brotli are embedded in their technology. A vulnerability in a compression library sounds almost boring until you realize it could affect applications your business depends on every day,” he said. “That’s the uncomfortable reality of modern software: a small component can create a very large business risk.”

The defect, dubbed “Node2Shell” or “Broccoli2Shell,” is the latest in a series of vulnerabilities that have provoked an emergency response. Defenders and researchers were on heightened alert last week over a pair of critical PHP vulnerabilities dubbed “PHP2Shell” that also have yet to be exploited in the wild as of Monday afternoon.

These cyclical and increasingly recurring so-called emergencies are putting organizations and defenders at a significant disadvantage. 

“After being part of numerous channels and message threads full of defenders trying to discern what’s real and what’s BS over the past several months — and especially the past week — I can say unequivocally that the human cost of these events is real, pronounced, and will have downstream impacts far beyond what the community can immediately predict,” Caitlin Condon, vice president of research at VulnCheck, told CyberScoop.

“None of this — high-profile vulnerability disclosures, the overblown exploitability assumptions, the community arguments, the race to weaponize — is new,” she added. 

“What’s changed now is that AI is pumping out complex — and often not clearly explained — finds at a much higher rate, exponentially increasing noise levels and making it much more difficult both to debunk overhyped vulnerability discoveries and to determine which vulnerabilities are broadly exploitable in real-world production configurations.” 

Researchers acknowledge the additional stress defenders and organizations are in because of this always-in-emergency mode.

“We’ve reached a point where everything seems to be an emergency. And when everything is critical, businesses risk losing sight of what actually matters,” Beek said. “The real cost isn’t just patching. It’s the constant disruption to operations, the diversion of resources, and the difficult decisions about which business systems deserve immediate attention.”

Experts also consider this the new normal as more high-impact vulnerabilities with far-reaching potential consequences are found. 

“We suspect in the very near future, defenders may lose the ability to tell what is a true emergency versus a loud and prevalent vulnerability in a ubiquitous product or library,” Knott said. 

Experts advise organizations to focus on their specific risk, weighing the Brotli vulnerability’s potential impact in their environment. 

“Attackers don’t care about CVSS scores,” Beek said. “They care about what they can compromise, disrupt, or monetize and that’s exactly how we should prioritize our defenses.”

The post Experts temper emergency-level alarms over critical Brotli defect appeared first on CyberScoop.

Tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, the bugs could potentially lead to unauthenticated remote code execution.

The post PHP2Shell: Mass Exploitation Looms for Leaked Critical PHP Flaws appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Members of Congress are pressing the Trump administration to expand the federal government’s role in securing artificial intelligence, wanting new safety standards and regulations, independent testing of models and more “aggressive” use of AI for defensive cybersecurity purposes.

In a letter, Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said that multiple incidents of frontier AI models escaping sandbox protections and breaching real companies, organizations and governments necessitate a stronger federal role in regulating the technology.

Recent revelations that hundreds, and possibly “tens of thousands,” of such incidents may have occurred for months without OpenAI’s staff detecting them makes the need for federal intervention even more urgent, the senators argued.

“These incidents come as AI systems are becoming dramatically more capable at discovering software vulnerabilities, writing and executing code, using digital tools, and operating autonomously,” the senators wrote.

The letter, addressed to Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence and new White House “AI czar” and Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, urges the federal government “to bring its full capacities to bear on this challenge, building a coordinated national response around standards, testing, auditing, and defensive AI.”

The Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), housed within the Department of Commerce, has become the Trump administration’s main body for evaluating and testing AI models. In the letter, the senators are seeking to expand the center’s resources and mandate.

Under the Trump administration, testing of frontier models has been voluntary and focused on evaluating model capabilities, not restricting them. The administration has since said it has reached a safety testing framework with OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies to govern safety testing, but has not made the agreement public.

The senators call for CAISSI to spearhead the development of “technically grounded and measurable standards and risk management frameworks for advanced AI safety and security.” Those standards would address potential risks like cyberattacks, automated attacks on critical infrastructure and other threats.

“The standards should also address the security of the environments in which advanced AI systems are developed, trained, tested, and used internally, including protections against agents escaping testing environments, gaining unauthorized access to external systems, or taking actions beyond their intended permissions,” the senators wrote.

The letter argues the center and federal technology hubs like the National Institute of Standards and Technology should hire additional expertise in AI, cybersecurity, model evaluation and national security.

It also calls for a much broader community of independent and third-party testers. Currently, that testing is done almost entirely by AI companies and hand-selected auditors, like Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), Redwood Research and others.

Last month, Chris Painter, president of METR, told Congress that the firm’s investigation of the Hugging Face hacking incident was at the invitation of OpenAI, which tightly controls which organizations and testers get access to its unreleased models. While they are permitted to publicize some findings, such as those that relate to potentially catastrophic risks to humanity, researchers are otherwise restricted from discussing other parts of their investigation through nondisclosure agreements.

Additionally, Painter suggested that frontier companies are relying too heavily on their own technology, rather than technical controls, to monitor and restrain their models in testing.

“Because of the scale and speed at which AI agents are deployed, companies depend on AI monitoring and controls instead of human supervision, to prevent unwanted agent behavior,” Painter said. “That is, monitoring of AI is now in large part done by other AI systems.”

The senators call for CAISSI, national laboratories and the Department of Energy to become federal testing sites. There, the government would evaluate AI models for advanced cyber capabilities, biological or chemical threats, threats to critical infrastructure, sandbox evasion techniques and other autonomous rule-breaking behavior. They also want testing opened to universities, independent research organizations and “qualified third-party evaluators,” including private sector companies.

Other federal bodies, like the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Science Foundation can help develop new standards and testbeds for AI tools used in defensive cybersecurity that can then be shared across government and with the public.

“The recent incidents make clear that the security infrastructure surrounding advanced AI must advance as quickly as the technology itself,” the senators wrote. “The United States has an opportunity to lead both sides of this challenge: building the standards, testing, and auditing infrastructure needed for increasingly powerful AI, while harnessing those same capabilities to make American networks harder to attack.”

You can read the full letter here.

The post Senators press Trump admin to rally federal government around AI safety, security  appeared first on CyberScoop.

OSS Scanner sends unreviewed, model-generated vulnerability reports to open source maintainers that opt in.

The post Anthropic Fast-Tracks AI Bug Reports to OSS Maintainers, Taps 11 Firms for OT Security appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Anthropic announced a new program Thursday that will combine its AI tools with outside cybersecurity companies to find and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and open-source software.

Advertised as part of a new, “long-term commitment” to cybersecurity, the critical infrastructure defense program will pair Claude models, Anthropic engineers and threat research with the expertise of cybersecurity companies, including Accenture, Booz Allen, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, Dragos, Hitachi, Insane Cyber, Nozomi Networks, Palo Alto Networks, PwC, and Rockwell Automation.

“Defenders of critical infrastructure and the [open-source software] community have decades of security experience but have faced severe resource shortages that are exacerbated by this moment,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post. “We are recognizing their expertise in these domains and offering our support.”

Anthropic said it has offered frontier models and technical support to more than half the states in the U.S., as well as large operators of critical infrastructure to scan and patch code or assist in incident response and red teaming activities.

“Critical infrastructure is hard to defend in many ways that AI cannot fix, but we believe that frontier models can help find and repair weaknesses before those weaknesses are used to cut off power or make water unsafe, the company wrote. “Our first step is to work with a small cohort of providers to learn which strategies are most effective and practical.”

The company said it has engaged in similar work with maintainers of large open-source software projects, and some organizations asked for everything the model had found in their software, even unreviewed findings.

That spurred Anthropic to create a new opt-in scanning service for open source software, where organizations can get free, periodic scans of their projects with a proof of concept, explanation and suggested patching options. Anthropic noted that under this program, organizations will receive their reports faster but they may contain inaccuracies.

The long-term goal is to automate most triage and patching and develop new security architectures and coding standards.

As AI models have developed increasingly powerful cybersecurity capabilities, such as finding and exploiting known vulnerabilities, frontier AI companies have worried that bad actors could gain access to the tools faster than legitimate organizations. Anthropic and OpenAI have since both started programs funneling their tech to businesses and governments, free of charge, for defensive cybersecurity.

The post Anthropic rolls out program for ‘long-term commitment’ to secure critical infrastructure, open source software appeared first on CyberScoop.

Federal government contractors that handle sensitive information could soon face a “sea change” in rules about how they protect that information and report when it has been part of a breach.

Pending federal regulations on the handling of “controlled unclassified information,” or CUI, a category of sensitive data that falls short of classified — including people’s personal information such as Social Security numbers, information that could expose vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and more — could arrive as soon as the end of this year, but likely no later than the end of President Donald Trump’s term, attorneys who specialize in federal procurement rules said. The changes are part of a larger overhaul of federal contracting rules.

As currently written, the proposed CUI rules mandate that unauthorized access of such data, including as a result of a cyberattack, would have to be reported to the federal government within 72 hours of discovery. The rules are a companion for most federal agencies to existing  Defense Department rules that cover the same subject. The 72-hour notice also is deliberately aligned with forthcoming rules from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for critical infrastructure owners and operators to report major cyber incidents under the Cybersecurity Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA).

The CUI rules require contractors to adhere to minimum electronic security standards for protecting that sensitive information. Experts said the rules could expose contractors who fail to comply with cybersecurity guidelines to penalties under the False Claims Act, a lever that the federal government has been using increasingly since 2022 to punish contractors over lackluster cyber safeguards.

It’s “going to be a sea change for a lot of companies,” said Trayce Howard, a government contracts partner at Wiley Rein. 

“If it’s finalized in the form that it’s in now, it will be a fairly significant change for federal contractors,” said Ryan Burnette, a partner at Covington focused on government contracts and technology.

Susan Cassidy, another partner at Covington who advises government contractors, said the proposed regulation is part of a journey that began as far back as an executive order in 2010, when officials realized they couldn’t have sufficient, consistent requirements for protecting CUI given that so many agencies used different terminology for it: “sensitive but unclassified,” “for official use only,” and more.

The proposed rule is intended to “make it easier for contractors to comply with one set of standards, rather than many different types of standards” for the protection of CUI and the reporting on CUI incidents such as breaches, she said.

One industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity was candid about the difficulties CUI poses.

“CUI can be painful for many industry stakeholders because it’s not always clear what constitutes CUI,” the source said. “Many contractors will say they don’t necessarily know exactly what CUI is, despite their best efforts. Information from agencies isn’t always clearly marked as CUI.”

The reporting requirements

An earlier draft of the rule gave industry groups more heartburn: It had an 8-hour standard for reporting CUI incidents, rather than 72, and it required reporting of suspected incidents as well.

Still, a number of industry groups objected to the 72-hour standard, despite it being part of a much-sought after attempt to align federal breach reporting notification standards under CIRCIA.

The Aerospace Industries Association, for instance, said in filed comments that it “reiterates concerns with these compressed timelines which will be difficult and costly for industry to comply with,” in reference to the 72-hour standard. “AIA recommends extending these timelines to 30 calendar days to accommodate improved reporting while reducing compliance costs.”

The industry source said that “72 hours is largely a policy decision, based on extensive public-private deliberation,” rather than one based on any study of what’s best.

Another point of discussion about the reporting rule as written is where contractors report incidents.

“While the 72-hour reporting window is a significant improvement over the 8-hour window in the January 2025 proposal, the June 2026 rulemaking still appears to require reporting to agency -specific points of contact … rather than to a single centralized hub,” the Chamber of Commerce wrote in its comments.

Cassidy said “it will be interesting to see how centralized reporting into CISA, which is the other place where civilian agencies go, is handled, and whether there’s coordination with DOD or whether or not we still see two separate streams going through.”

The standards

The other major aspect of the proposed rule is that contractors handling CUI would have to abide by certain cybersecurity standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology known as SP 800-171, which Howard and her Wiley coauthors said would be imposed “on a broader group of contractors than ever before.” Some contractors might also have to meet other cybersecurity requirements, too.

“Another thing that will affect contractors is they’re going to have to flow down these requirements to their subcontractors,” she said. “So they’re going to have to identify what CUI am I giving to my subcontractors, and do some sort of oversight to make sure that their subcontractors are appropriately handling CUI.”

Howard and other experts predict that the rules could expand who might be subjected to False Claims Act punishments.

“I do think that this creates some significant False Claims at risk for contractors,” she said. This is going to encompass a whole new universe of contractors that may not be quite ready for that… contractors that have been working for civilian agencies exclusively have not been subject to this before.”

Final steps

The next steps aren’t 100 percent clear. Howard said a final rule could arrive by the end of the year. Cassidy said either an interim rule could take effect soon, or a final rule could be issued. Burnette said a final rule might be farther away, though the Trump administration has made it clear it wants everything finalized before the end of its term.

That means contractors need to get ready, he said.

“I think contractors should really be looking at this, preparing for it in certain ways, at least by recognizing at a high level, where this is headed and the types of activities and steps they need to be doing internally,” Burnette said. “Some of the minutia and the details, those are still subject to ironing out. But generally speaking, if you look at this rule compared to the rule that we saw early last year, they are much more similar than they are different. So we are starting to see  some crystallization here of the requirements, and we’re starting to get an idea what might change and what is most likely baked at this point.”

The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment.

The post Major rules for federal contractors handling sensitive data are nearing the finish line appeared first on CyberScoop.

- In 2022 Altair Engineering open sourced "OpenRadioss", an industry-leading finite element solver under the GNU AGPL License, reports Phoronix. - Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year - Siemens closes access to OpenRadioss. "Siemens didn't just end the project but they shutdown the GitHub repository that hosted the open-source code and removed other resources that had built around it," writes Phoronix, before announcing a new open-source community fork: Radioss has been an industry-leading solver for analyzing crashes, blasts, and other purposes. Altair creating OpenRadioss was a huge milestone for the technical computing industry. It also had other effects like for myself in finally being able to benchmark with this (Open)Radioss code for CPU performance testing compared to the expensive licensing on Radioss itself... Siemens argues the OpenRadioss closure is for consolidating efforts: "After four years of successful community-driven research, Siemens is entering a new chapter for the Radioss solver. To accelerate innovation and provide the robust support our global users require for production-grade simulation, we are consolidating our efforts." It was Brian Clemens. founder/VP Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation who launched the community fork of OpenRadioss — to be called OpenCourant. Its web site announces they'll be "carrying forward the OpenRadioss code base under the GNU AGPL, in the open, where it belongs." Phoronix writes in a follow-up: OpenCourant is based on the last publicly known open-source OpenRadioss snapshot before Siemens shut it down and removed access to the Git repository... OpenCourant continues with the OpenRadioss GNI AGPLv3 licensing and will be run as part of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. They have run into a small issue though with part of OpenRadioss consisting of binary dependencies and not having the very latest versions prior to Siemens' removal of the repository. Details on that via this discussion thread for anyone that happens to have recent OpenRadioss binaries. In other open source news, Kagi is ending their development work on the Orion Browser for Linux and Windows, reports the site Linuxiac — but Kagi "plans to open-source both versions so other developers or organizations can keep them going."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has temporarily stopped accepting product vulnerability reports through its Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program (OSS VRP).

The post Google Narrows Open Source Bug Bounty Amid Wave of Invalid Automated Reports appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Long-time Slashdot reader Andreas(R) announces Northstar, a "minimalist" web browser written entirely from scratch in C — now available in version 1.0.11: One window, one page, one process — about 160,000 lines of original C, small enough for one person to read and audit end-to-end. It carries no upstream browser engine: no Gecko, no WebKit, no Blink. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, and it runs on Linux, macOS and Windows... Compliance is not inherited from an upstream engine; it is measured, section by section, against the specification text... Private by construction. No telemetry, no update pings, and no AI assistant or AI-style web APIs. Safe browsing checks a top-level navigation's host against a local SHA-256 blocklist before it is fetched — the check never leaves your machine. Cookies, storage and the cache are partitioned by origin. It's logo reminds me of the old Netscape logo. (And I love the "Best viewed in..." GIF at the upper-right of its web site.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google's Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app," reports The Register. Though they also note "a big banner across the top of the F-Droid site" pointing to a site describing pending changes from Google that threaten the future of F-Droid... [D]evelopers who want their apps broadly distributed outside the official Google Play Store will need to register with Google and verify their identities. Google's Full Distribution option includes paying a one-time $25 fee, handing over a copy of a government-issued ID to verify one's identity, and conforming to Google's terms of service. Google also offers a free Limited Distribution option that doesn't require government ID verification but restricts distribution to 20 authorized devices, while apps from unverified developers can still be installed by users who enable Android's advanced installation flow. The potential death warrant hanging over its head hasn't stopped the F-Droid team from rolling out a bunch of new features for an app it says it intends to keep working on for years to come... The team also credited the EU's many Digital Markets Act decisions against Google for making the installation experience smoother for users. F-Droid can now use a unified installation service for its apps thanks to the availability of a pre-approval API that allows users to approve an installation when they request it, rather than waiting until the app has finished downloading. That, said the F-Droid team, "brings the F-Droid install experience on official Android devices much closer to what the built-in app store can provide." Additionally, F-Droid 2.0 can fetch and install app updates automatically, which it now does by default. All of those changes, however, won't matter much if Google pushes ahead undeterred with its plans to force registration onto non-Play Store developers. F-Droid's announcement on Thursday makes it seem that the team isn't going to go quietly. F-Droid has gone 10 years without a major update, notes Ars Technica — and spent over a year developing F-Droid 2.0: The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store much more responsive, and there's optional support for Android's Material theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow menus... Unlike the Play Store, F-Droid doesn't track your taps and installs to push ads and suggestions — it helps you find things and gets out of the way. F-Droid now includes a huge number of categories, drilling down to specialized niches like firewalls, password managers, and VPNs. You can see all these groups in the search tab. There are also higher-level categories listed on the main Discover page. When searching for apps, F-Droid will now be able to return results based on app descriptions rather than just names. "One of the goals of the rewrite was to lower the barrier for new contributors," F-Droid said in their announcement. "We are excited to begin rolling out F-Droid 2.0 to users over the coming weeks after 14 test releases." (And if you want the 2.0 release right now, it's available on the versions page.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.