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An agentic coding tool tasked with cloning and setting up a seemingly benign GitHub repository could execute a malicious payload that remains invisible to security scanners, AI agents, and human reviewers. [...]

OpenAI on Friday released three versions of GPT-5.6, called Sol, Terra, and Luna, as a limited preview to a small number of companies as part of an ongoing engagement with the U.S. government. While Sol is the latest flagship model and the most powerful, Terra strikes a balance between efficiency and power, and Luna is fine-tuned for speed and affordability. "GPT‑5.6 Sol launches with our mostRavie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Microsoft is continuing its push to bring generative AI (genAI) into Excel, with new Microsoft 365 Copilot skills designed to automate common processes and a “plan” mode to provide more control over Copilot’s outputs when handling financial data.

Microsoft made Microsoft 365 Copilot generally available in Excel in late 2024 and since then has added several capabilities, including agentic tools, a Copilot function within Excel, and Python support for advanced data analysis.  

On Thursday, Microsoft unveiled a skills feature that lets users define processes Copilot can perform in Excel — such as building a discounted cash flow, Microsoft suggested, preparing a variance analysis, or refreshing a monthly reporting model.  

“Instead of starting from scratch each time, a skill guides Copilot through the steps, applying the right structure and formatting, and helping produce an output that is easier to review, reuse, and trust,” Brian Jones, vice president for Excel at Microsoft, said in a blog post.

Users can access a library of pre-built finance skills or create their own custom skills and save them as a SKILL.md in OneDrive, where the Copilot assistant can access them. Microsoft’s partners are also building their own skills, including finance software vendors such as LSEG, Ramp and Velixo — these are “coming soon,” Microsoft said. Custom skills are available today via the Insider channel and generally available next month.

A new “plan” feature is aimed at giving users greater oversight of the AI assistant’s proposed actions before it starts interacting with spreadsheet data. The Copilot assistant can now draft a list of planned interactions — such as changing a formula — and, before it gets to work, ask the user to “approve, edit, or answer clarifying questions,” said Jones.

After it has completed the list of actions, the Copilot assistant will post a link to any changes in the chat window. Edits made by the AI assistant will then appear alongside other those from human users in the Show Changes pane.

Copilot can connect to third-party platforms now, pulling in data from sources such as Moody’s, CB Insights, Morningstar, and PitchBook.

The features will roll out “progressively” for customers, Microsoft said, and are available to paid Microsoft 365 Copilot users. Microsoft offers two payment options: $30 per user each month for larger customers, or the Microsoft 365 Copilot Business plan, which costs $21 per user a month for organizations with fewer than 300 employees.

The FBI and CISA are warning that a phishing campaign targeting Signal users tied to Russian intelligence services has evolved to steal Signal Backup Recovery Keys, allowing attackers to access victims' historical messages. [...]

A process with a stable workload shouldn't keep growing its resident memory. When it does, the first question isn't how much RAM is available. It's where the allocations stopped being released. On Linux, that answer isn't always obvious because the kernel, allocator, and application all influence what memory usage looks like from the outside.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is giving federal agencies until Sunday to patch a vulnerability in Cisco Unified Communications Manager Server that is being actively exploited. [...]

The FBI and CISA have updated their March warning about Russian intelligence phishing Signal accounts, and the operators have added a step: they now coax targets into handing over their Signal Backup Recovery Key. Hand it over once, and the attacker can restore the account's backup, read the private and group message history, and take over the account. Worse, the key keeps working. Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

A newly discovered cyber attack campaign has been observed delivering a previously undocumented malware family called SharkLoader that acts as a loader for deploying Cobalt Strike Beacon on compromised hosts. Kaspersky, which is tracking the activity under the moniker StrikeShark, said the campaign has targeted a diplomatic organization in Indonesia, government organizations in Taiwan, Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Polymarket says it will fully reimburse customers who lost an estimated $3 million after hackers injected a malicious script into the platform's frontend following a breach at a third-party vendor. [...]

Threat actors are creating OpenAI tenants that impersonate legitimate companies and inviting employees to join them, in what appears to be a ploy to trick targets into submitting sensitive company information in chats and projects. [...]

A Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) actor has been linked to a new custom backdoor called TinyRCT as part of cyber attacks aimed at government entities and critical infrastructure in Southeast Asia. The activity, particularly aimed at state-owned enterprises in the energy and government sectors, has been attributed to a threat actor called CL-STA-1062, which Palo Alto Networks Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

US authorities are getting decidedly twitchy about frontier AI models. Just a couple of weeks after ordering Anthropic to prevent foreign companies from getting hold of its latest release, Mythos/Fable 5, it’s been putting the squeeze on another AI company..

Now, the Trump administration is asking OpenAI to hold back on the general release of GPT-5.6, according to a report from Bloomberg.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly told employees that the government is asking that the model be released only to a short list of trusted partners, initially 20, before being more widely disseminated.

Altman reportedly told staffers that the administration was getting nervous about the capabilities of the latest AI tools. It didn’t go as far as forbidding access to foreign users but it’s clear that the White House is looking to act as the power of the new models becomes more apparent.

The administration’s actions will undoubtedly cause some anxiety among AI companies, particularly in light of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s upcoming IPOs. There will be concerns that new software developments could be postponed or even halted. However, it should also be noted that the administration was already displeased with Anthropic over its moral stance on defense issues, so the action against Mythos should be placed in context.

Indeed, the government is trying to play down such fears. Bloomberg quoted a White House official as saying that the Trump administration continues to collaborate with frontier AI labs to develop shared approaches for addressing the challenges of scaling the technology.

Chinese tech giant Tencent is set to launch an AI assistant inside WeCom, its Slack-like collaboration tool for enterprises. The new tool, Dayuan, is built on the latest large language models from Chinese AI developer DeepSeek.

Tencent announced the news in a post on Chinese messaging platform Weibo by Tencent’s public relations manager Zhang Jun. Dayuan will automatically understand user requests and will respond according to the demands of the user, he wrote, according to a translation by Bloomberg. “At any time within WeCom, simply swipe left to summon Dayuan. It can intelligently recognize the interface you’re on, understand what you’re asking, and help you resolve issues more effectively,” he wrote, according to the report.

In addressing the Chinese enterprise market, Tencent has an advantage over other companies in the AI space because it has a vast reservoir of customers who use WeCom. Earlier this month, it announced a range of AI productivity agents to address the demand for more AI tools across enterprises.

Tencent has been intensifying its efforts in the AI space in an attempt to beat US competition. In April, it launched an updated version of its Hunyuan model to catch up with more established AI companies such as ByteDance, Alibaba and DeepSeek.

The launch of Dayuan with its vast supply of user data will provide a step-up for Tencent and will reinforce Chinese efforts to establish serious AI competition to US products.

Following a seven-month investigation, the European Commission has reached a preliminary decision that Amazon’s and Microsoft’s cloud platforms — AWS and Azure, respectively — should be classified as “gatekeepers” under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Reuters reports.

The DMA, also known as the Digital Markets Regulation, aims to limit the market power of dominant players. For cloud services, this would entail, among other things, requirements for increased interoperability and data portability, as well as restrictions on how these services might favor their own products and services.

The Commission pointed, among other things, to AWS and Azure’s large market shares, extensive investments, large customer bases, and high costs for customers who wish to switch providers.

If the decision is approved, the companies would be subject to the same type of regulations that apply to several of the largest technology platforms. Both Amazon and Microsoft were critical of the assessment. Amazon argued that the EU already regulates the cloud market through the Data Act, while Microsoft believes the EU is underestimating the growing competition from Google Cloud.

Amazon and Microsoft will have the opportunity to respond to the European Commission’s preliminary conclusions before a final decision is expected later this year.

Australia’s Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) has uncovered an attack on a critical infrastructure operator’s network. State-sponsored actors had compromised the network and were preparing to sabotage it, according to its director general, Mike Burgess.

Other countries face similar cyber-threats to critical infrastructure.

It’s impossible to exaggerate the danger that the country is facing from cyberattacks on its infrastructure, he said, presenting ASIO’s annual threat assessment this week. “We categorize them into ‘threats to life’ and ‘threats to our way of life,’” he said.

In this case, the hackers had gained access to login details and passwords for active users of the networks, including the IT professionals guarding it. ASIO had set up a specific team to deal with the issue of cyber sabotage.

Australia isn’t alone in facing threats from the same state actors, Burgess said. “We struggle to find a single country in our region that has not been compromised by this state’s cyber apparatus.”

This meant that Australia is facing a persistent threat in the future, one that could have consequences for the way that the critical infrastructure is deployed and managed. “The biggest challenge is the cumulative one: in a degraded security environment defined by concurrent, cascading, compounding threats, when resources are limited, how and what do you prioritize?” he said.

This article first appeared on CSO.

AI won't replace GRC analysts, but it can eliminate much of the repetitive work they do. Anecdotes walks through building an agent that continuously monitors controls, identifies evidence gaps, and opens remediation tasks. [...]

A flaw in the Linux kernel's traffic-control subsystem can let a local unprivileged user gain root on affected systems. CVE-2026-46331, nicknamed "pedit COW," is an out-of-bounds write in the packet-editing action (act_pedit) that corrupts shared page-cache memory. A public, working exploit appeared within a day of the CVE assignment on June 16. Red Hat rates the flaw as Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

A high-severity flaw in Amazon Q Developer let a malicious repository run commands and steal a developer's cloud credentials. The path was short: a developer opens the repo, trusts the workspace, and Amazon Q does the rest. Amazon has patched it. Tracked as CVE-2026-12957 (CVSS 8.5), the bug sat in how Amazon's AI coding assistant handled Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Wiz Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

AI is beginning to reshape how penetration testing workflows are organized. For years, the penetration tester’s workflow has been a labor-intensive ritual: scan, enumerate, research, exploit, and report. But new frameworks like Dark Moon are attempting to codify that intuition, turning the "human-in-the-loop" process into a machine-coordinated workflow. But is this a genuine evolution in how we secure Linux environments, or just a sophisticated wrapper around the same old tools?

SSH persistence usually does not look malicious at first. The login succeeds normally, the session opens cleanly, and the account already exists on the server, which is exactly why attackers continue using SSH keys after gaining a foothold on Linux systems.