The Treasury Department proposed a rule that would restrict American investment in AI and other sensitive technologies in China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and Cuba, per The Hill. The rule implements the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security (COINS) Act, which Congress passed in December 2025 as part of the annual defense authorization law. It extends the Outbound Investment Security Program, Treasury's screen on U.S. money flowing into rival countries' technology sectors, to hypersonic systems and high performance computing and supercomputing. Some deals would be barred outright, while others would require advance notice to Treasury. Treasury dropped Venezuela from the country list and will take public comments through Dec. 7.
Read at The Hill ↗
Amazon's network of decoy servers logged the first attempt to exploit the PHP2Shell flaws in PHP, a widely used web programming language, on Oct. 17, while details were still under embargo, SiliconANGLE reported. That traffic came from a commercial anonymization network. CJ Moses, chief information security officer of Amazon Integrated Security, wrote that it is unclear how the attacker learned of the exploit early. Amazon suspects more than one actor and wants incident investigations to reach back at least to that date. The company said seven- and 30-day deadlines for fixing critical internet facing flaws assume attackers will wait, and that patching should be measured in hours. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote that attempts seen by his network passed into the millions after disclosure, though none has been tied to a confirmed break-in.
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AI safety nonprofits METR and Redwood Research found several new weaknesses in OpenAI's internal monitoring of its AI agentsAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise., among them a flaw that would have let agents hide hundreds of recent actions from oversight, per Reuters. Each group sent one researcher, who worked from July 21 to Aug. 11 with access to OpenAI's internal code, documentation and some technical staff, using company devices that stayed on site. The evaluators also flagged a potential way for OpenAI's Codex coding agents to slip past their security limits and exercise every permission their users hold. OpenAI told them it has patched every flaw affecting its production safeguards, which the nonprofits said they had not verified. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pledged in September to give independent evaluators "employee-like access," CNBC reported.
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OpenAI's security team asked three safety researchers to unlock their personal phones last month on suspicion that they had leaked internal model designs to an outside AI safety researcher, The Wall Street Journal reported. Officers found that some had turned on disappearing messages in Signal chats with that person. A week later, the three were called to simultaneous 2 p.m. meetings and fired. "I was told that there was a breach of trust because I interacted with a third party through unsanctioned channels," said Tomek Korbak, one of the three. The researchers had denied any part in a leak to The Information about OpenAI's model designs, as reported by TechCrunch in AIPD's October 9th edition.
Read at WSJ ↗
America's largest banks are preparing for the "day after" an AI-driven catastrophe while also working to prevent one, Axios reported. The plans cover protecting accounts, reassuring customers and keeping operations running through a large-scale attack, and scenario planning is already required of critical infrastructure providers, including in the financial sector. Major banks took part in early testing of Anthropic's Mythos, the company's most cyber-capable model, in a joint effort with AI firms to understand and prepare for cyberattacks. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, speaking in Chicago earlier this month, warned that AI agents may not act properly on a user's behalf. "You can't stop it. You just have to, like, manage the hell out of it," Dimon said.
Read at Axios ↗
Hackers aligned with the Chinese state broke into ConnectWise's cloud backup service and stole credentials that link the IT management company to its corporate customers, Microsoft researchers said, per TechCrunch. With those credentials, the hackers could sign in to customers' Microsoft hosted environments as authorized users and read email and other files. Microsoft said the group used AI agents to break into about 2,250 organizations at a pace of almost 3,000 attempted sign-ins per minute, leaving defenders little time to respond. It attributed the speed to ARTEX, an open source AIOpen-weight modelAn AI model whose trained parameters are published so anyone can download, run and modify it, as opposed to one reachable only through the developer's API. The main policy tension is that open weights spread capability widely and cannot be recalled once released. framework built to stress-test cyber defenses. ConnectWise paused access to its cloud backup system and said it was working to restore service.
Read at TechCrunch ↗