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An anonymous security researcher called “Nightmare Eclipse” has been publishing a series of significant security exploits against Microsoft Windows—including one that breaks BitLocker. Microsoft has threatened legal action against the researcher. Lots of recriminations are being traded back and forth.
It’s nasty, but it requires physical access to the computer:
The exploit, named YellowKey, was published earlier this week by a researcher who goes by the alias Nightmare-Eclipse. It reliably bypasses default Windows 11 deployments of BitLocker, the full-volume encryption protection Microsoft provides to make disk contents off-limits to anyone without the decryption key, which is stored in a secured piece of hardware known as a trusted platform module (TPM). BitLocker is a mandatory protection for many organizations, including those that contract with governments.
Slashdot thread. And here’s Nightmare-Eclipse’s GitHub account.
DarkSword is a sophisticated piece of malware—probably government designed—that targets iOS.
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new iOS full-chain exploit that leveraged multiple zero-day vulnerabilities to fully compromise devices. Based on toolmarks in recovered payloads, we believe the exploit chain to be called DarkSword. Since at least November 2025, GTIG has observed multiple commercial surveillance vendors and suspected state-sponsored actors utilizing DarkSword in distinct campaigns. These threat actors have deployed the exploit chain against targets in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, and Ukraine.
DarkSword supports iOS versions 18.4 through 18.7 and utilizes six different vulnerabilities to deploy final-stage payloads. GTIG has identified three distinct malware families deployed following a successful DarkSword compromise: GHOSTBLADE, GHOSTKNIFE, and GHOSTSABER. The proliferation of this single exploit chain across disparate threat actors mirrors the previously discovered Coruna iOS exploit kit. Notably, UNC6353, a suspected Russian espionage group previously observed using Coruna, has recently incorporated DarkSword into their watering hole campaigns.
A week after it was identified, a version of it leaked onto the internet, where it is being used more broadly.
This news is a month old. Your devices are safe, assuming you patch regularly.
That’s a lot. No, it’s an extraordinary number:
Since February, the Firefox team has been working around the clock using frontier AI models to find and fix latent security vulnerabilities in the browser. We wrote previously about our collaboration with Anthropic to scan Firefox with Opus 4.6, which led to fixes for 22 security-sensitive bugs in Firefox 148.
As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation.
As these capabilities reach the hands of more defenders, many other teams are now experiencing the same vertigo we did when the findings first came into focus. For a hardened target, just one such bug would have been red-alert in 2025, and so many at once makes you stop to wonder whether it’s even possible to keep up.
Our experience is a hopeful one for teams who shake off the vertigo and get to work. You may need to reprioritize everything else to bring relentless and single-minded focus to the task, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are extremely proud of how our team rose to meet this challenge, and others will too. Our work isn’t finished, but we’ve turned the corner and can glimpse a future much better than just keeping up. Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.
They’re right. Assuming the defenders can patch, and push those patches out to users quickly, this technology favors the defenders.
News article.
The title of the post is”What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works,” and I agree:
In the latest OpenSSL security release> on January 27, 2026, twelve new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning unknown to the maintainers at time of disclosure) were announced. Our AI system is responsible for the original discovery of all twelve, each found and responsibly disclosed to the OpenSSL team during the fall and winter of 2025. Of those, 10 were assigned CVE-2025 identifiers and 2 received CVE-2026 identifiers. Adding the 10 to the three we already found in the Fall 2025 release, AISLE is credited for surfacing 13 of 14 OpenSSL CVEs assigned in 2025, and 15 total across both releases. This is a historically unusual concentration for any single research team, let alone an AI-driven one.
These weren’t trivial findings either. They included CVE-2025-15467, a stack buffer overflow in CMS message parsing that’s potentially remotely exploitable without valid key material, and exploits for which have been quickly developed online. OpenSSL rated it HIGH severity; NIST‘s CVSS v3 score is 9.8 out of 10 (CRITICAL, an extremely rare severity rating for such projects). Three of the bugs had been present since 1998-2000, for over a quarter century having been missed by intense machine and human effort alike. One predated OpenSSL itself, inherited from Eric Young’s original SSLeay implementation in the 1990s. All of this in a codebase that has been fuzzed for millions of CPU-hours and audited extensively for over two decades by teams including Google’s.
In five of the twelve cases, our AI system directly proposed the patches that were accepted into the official release.
AI vulnerability finding is changing cybersecurity, faster than expected. This capability will be used by both offense and defense.
More.
This is amazing:
Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to find bugs at scale. But what stood out in early testing is how quickly Opus 4.6 found vulnerabilities out of the box without task-specific tooling, custom scaffolding, or specialized prompting. Even more interesting is how it found them. Fuzzers work by throwing massive amounts of random inputs at code to see what breaks. Opus 4.6 reads and reasons about code the way a human researcher would—looking at past fixes to find similar bugs that weren’t addressed, spotting patterns that tend to cause problems, or understanding a piece of logic well enough to know exactly what input would break it. When we pointed Opus 4.6 at some of the most well-tested codebases (projects that have had fuzzers running against them for years, accumulating millions of hours of CPU time), Opus 4.6 found high-severity vulnerabilities, some that had gone undetected for decades.
The details of how Claude Opus 4.6 found these zero-days is the interesting part—read the whole blog post.
News article.
A zero-day vulnerability in WinRAR is being exploited by at least two Russian criminal groups:
The vulnerability seemed to have super Windows powers. It abused alternate data streams, a Windows feature that allows different ways of representing the same file path. The exploit abused that feature to trigger a previously unknown path traversal flaw that caused WinRAR to plant malicious executables in attacker-chosen file paths %TEMP% and %LOCALAPPDATA%, which Windows normally makes off-limits because of their ability to execute code.
More details in the article.
Chinese hackers are exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint to steal data worldwide:
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-53770, carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10. It gives unauthenticated remote access to SharePoint Servers exposed to the Internet. Starting Friday, researchers began warning of active exploitation of the vulnerability, which affects SharePoint Servers that infrastructure customers run in-house. Microsoft’s cloud-hosted SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 are not affected.
Here’s Microsoft on patching instructions. Patching isn’t enough, as attackers have used the vulnerability to steal authentication credentials. It’s an absolute mess. CISA has more information. Also these four links. Two Slashdot threads.
This is an unfolding security mess, and quite the hacking coup.
Zero-day vulnerabilities are more commonly used, according to the Five Eyes:
Key Findings
In 2023, malicious cyber actors exploited more zero-day vulnerabilities to compromise enterprise networks compared to 2022, allowing them to conduct cyber operations against higher-priority targets. In 2023, the majority of the most frequently exploited vulnerabilities were initially exploited as a zero-day, which is an increase from 2022, when less than half of the top exploited vulnerabilities were exploited as a zero-day.
Malicious cyber actors continue to have the most success exploiting vulnerabilities within two years after public disclosure of the vulnerability. The utility of these vulnerabilities declines over time as more systems are patched or replaced. Malicious cyber actors find less utility from zero-day exploits when international cybersecurity efforts reduce the lifespan of zero-day vulnerabilities.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.