The AI-powered inrush of software vulnerability reports over the last year has shined a light on how many critical pieces of open-source software are chronically underfunded. The latest victim is PHP, the scripting language powering about 71% of websites, making the news due to a critical remote code execution vulnerability. The PHP Foundation, which develops and oversees the language, reportedly counts only one full-time person and 14 "mostly part-time" contractors. That's bad enough, but the real problem goes far deeper thanks to the internet's lazy development practices and systems administration.

In an interview with Reuters, the PHP Foundation's Executive Director Elizabeth Barron spells it out clearly: she's the only full-time person on staff, and works with the contractors' help. Pertaining to the software itself, the team's job is to develop and maintain the PHP core, including taking care of security fixes. The core team accepts contributions from the world at large, in an arrangement not too dissimilar to Linux kernel development — except that project is far better-manned, with many full-time contributors and company-employed developers.

Naturally, the PHP foundation collaborates with other companies and many cybersecurity firms, but the dev team was stretched thin even before the increase in security vulnerabilities with the help of countless AI agents. Barron does note that there was no reported exploitation of PHP2Shell before the security fix came out.

But the lack of a higher funding level likely led to the "structural failure" to address the underlying vulnerability in a timely manner, as the out-of-memory condition (OOM) that eventually led to the 2026 exploits was originally discovered in 2024. Given how widespread PHP is, and how many third-party extensions there are, the work on fixing the OOM problem "stalled and restarted repeatedly over months." It didn't help that the Chainguard security firm broke the PHP2Shell embargo too early by accident.

Even still, the team is thankful for the money it has, as "without the Foundation’s funding it would have been impossible to have multiple people work on this issue full time, eventually through weekends and around the clock to coordinate and communicate with other involved parties." One would hope that this latest incident releases the purse strings of more companies that make their living off of PHP.

And yet, this failing is far larger than just bugs in the core language, which, notably, were only one point update away. In theory, any server running the current 8.x brand of the software should be upgraded in minutes with the released patches, but reality was far different, as websites went down for hours or days out of fear of exploitation.

The real problem reared its ugly head: nearly 73% of PHP installations were running versions well past their end-of-life (EOL) date, meaning that obtaining fixes is now far harder. Many professionals who worked with the language, including yours truly, had spent decades warning of this reckoning, even considering many Linux distributions were backporting fixes.

Many of these servers were still running PHP 7, a version that was completely EOL'd four years ago, with many years of advance warning, and that originally came out in late 2015, almost eleven years back. If that doesn't sound silly enough, let it sink in that around 7.7% of PHP sites were still running version 5.x, which first saw the light of day 22 years ago in 2005, and saw the final sunset in 2018. It's safe to say that everyone had plenty of time to prepare.

To further illustrate the ridiculousness of collective complacency: the jump from PHP 5 to 7 and then from 7 to 8 required changing sections of website code, but the vast majority of said changes are simple to find and apply, and even before AI, there were already automated code-patching tools around. A couple years ago I mapped them all out for a PHP 5-to-8 codebase conversion myself.

Most of the alterations were about dropping support for ancient functions and libraries, which themselves had had long-standing warnings of incoming deprecation. Not a lot of core language features underwent modification, and a lot of convenient syntax was added to help clarify fiddly, error-prone code, too. That the overall situation got to this point beggars belief and illustrates how complacency, laziness, and cost-cutting are a far bigger force than a cadre of AI bots digging for flaws.

Reverse engineer and cybersecurity bounty hunter log4j recently found they were getting “weirdly targeted ads” on their Samsung TV and discovered privacy breaches. As they live-tweeted their discoveries, they found increasingly concerning code in the Tizen operating system, including detailed user telemetry from packet logging, audio categorization, screenshots, cross-device identification for ad tracking, and more, all designed to extract as much user information as possible to improve targeted ads.

log4j posted on X that they were concerned with how specific the ads on their 2025 Samsung TV were. They decided to reverse-engineer the Tizen OS on their TV to see what it was doing—they “discovered PRIVACY HORROR,” log4j states, marking the start of subsequent posts sharing more concerning findings.

The tester theorizes that Samsung TVs are so sluggish because they do a lot of post-processing of user data, including audio, screenshots, and AID (a cross-device tracking ID for ads), plus computer vision processing and models running on the TV. The hacker even found a region-specific convolutional neural network (an AI) that tracks user behavior, citing examples like what videos the user watches, which ads are skipped, and video progress. Log4j also found behavior for TVs without microphones, stating it will find connected devices with microphones, such as a soundbar or a connected Bluetooth device, to record audio.

Hugging Face engineer ngxson commented that they would test the microphone behavior using their Flipper Zero and found that the TV opened the microphone for five seconds, then stopped. ngxson waited for another microphone response but found none hours later. However, ngxson explained that their Tizen TV was already rooted and had multiple settings disabled, so an unmodified TV may behave differently.

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The hacker used OpenAI tools to hack the TV, but the company eventually banned them for cyber abuse, as stated in an email they received. log4j defended themselves, saying they never used OpenAI’s tools to exploit or find vulnerabilities, only for local reverse engineering, and that they didn't breach the terms of use. In a comment below their post about the ban, log4j said it seemed OpenAI banned their account because of a primitive classifier.

However, Samsung TVs and Tizen aren’t the only culprits in reportedly breaching user privacy; other brands like LG have also been accused of spying on customers. Many owners have also reported their TVs slowing down despite no new features or heavy apps running, suspecting it is mainly bloatware, but it could also be the spying behavior Log4j found. The hacker is also working on a comprehensive write-up of their findings, including how others could do it themselves.

At the end of the post series, they jokingly say they “finally found a company that truly listens to its customers.”

The FCC recently imposed a new rule allowing it to ban devices based on the internal chips instead of basing bans on individual products or brands, thus closing the loophole of rebranded products with parts from Chinese manufacturers on US export restriction lists. Using this new rule, the FCC has banned two devices from being sold and marketed in the US for the first time: a dashboard camera and a wireless video transmitter. As reported by The Verge, these devices were banned due to the HiSilicon Smart Vision SoC (System on a Chip) they contain, which features built-in detection algorithms for faces. HiSilicon is a subsidiary of Huawei, and the firm and its subsidiaries are on the FCC’s Covered List of entities that pose a risk to US national security.

The Hi3516CV610 UHD Smart Vision is an SoC for surveillance and camera products. The SoC is meant to be used for things like vehicle dashcams and wireless CCTV systems; fully equipped with WiFi, Ethernet, video encoding chips, an Arm Cortex-A7, and an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for AI features. The NPU is what the FCC is concerned about, explaining that it is a device that contains logic-bearing “smart” components produced by entities on the Covered List.

On the SoC’s data sheet, the Intelligent Video Engine (IVE) uses the NPU that runs a built-in dedicated multimodal large model and transformer feature acceleration. The transformer feature acceleration allows the AI model to understand the relationship between objects from one video frame to another, keeping “attention” between related objects: pets, faces, human figures, and parcels, as the data sheet advertises. For consumers, this potentially means the AI in a surveillance camera can understand whether it is your pet that is escaping, or an unknown person is stealing your parcel after understanding that it was placed by a courier worker.

However, the FCC believes the logic-bearing AI in the SoC can do something much more nefarious, surveying US citizens and logging faces for foreign surveillance. Huawei already had a previous AI chip scandal, using shell companies to deceive TSMC into producing AI chips for them, going against the US’ request for TSMC to halt supplies to a list of Chinese customers; among other Huawei scandals leading to other product bans in the US.

A new report claims that major U.S. banks have now detected AI agents accessing customer accounts, and that some are even attempting to make transactions. Axios reports that it’s hard to differentiate between an actual human and an unauthorized bot, which is why some institutions, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo, are blocking the technology and changing their terms of service to account for this.

While an AI agent or AI assistant can access an account with a user’s permission and through the use of their login credentials, this often goes against bank policy that requires users to maintain control of their account and not share it with anyone else. One of the fears that executives have is when an AI agent with login access takes unauthorized steps, like spending money or moving funds around without the explicit instructions of the account owner. There have even been situations where an AI agent called the bank directly and took actions independent of direct user command. Even though it wasn’t explicitly told to do that transaction, it considered it a crucial step to accomplish the task assigned to it.

One hypothetical example of this is when a user tells an AI agent to purchase an item but gives it a credit card with no available limit. The AI agent could then have accessed the user’s bank account to move some funds from whatever account it sees that has available funds to then effect the transaction, even if the user did not explicitly tell them that they could use the money in that said account. This is just one example where an AI agent’s transaction could go wrong, which is why several U.S. banks are now restricting third-party AI agents from accessing their platforms. Nevertheless, they still recognize that their customers might want to use tools like AI agents to monitor their finances. This is why some institutions have given or are moving towards read-only access for AI agents, which is something that they’ve been doing for years already.

The move comes against a background of burgeoning AI agent use, coupled with the risk that agents can and often do act beyond their remit, making mistakes or performing tasks without instruction, often with disastrous results. An unsupervised AI agent recently deleted a TV show's entire edit weeks before broadcast, forcing the program off air. AI agents are notorious for deleting databases and directories, making it a small leap to imagine they cause some havoc with unfettered access to a bank account.

Financial institutions have deep experience when it comes to employing new technology while ensuring that their critical infrastructure remains safe — something that AI labs lack, according to a former OpenAI safety employee. Despite that, banks are still concerned about the speed at which AI technology is developing, fearing that the technology’s capabilities might outrun their ability to control it, which is why they’re preparing for worst-case scenarios and even planning for “day after” scenarios after a catastrophic AI event.

A Hacker News user who shared news about the recent PHP vulnerabilities revealed by ChatGPT Sol before an embargo, which they claimed to be unaware of, has taken to the platform to apologize for the post. According to petecooper, they shared the CVEs because they wanted to alert others who follow the four-week PHP release cycle about the importance and urgency of the matter, but they weren’t aware of the news blackout that went with the two identified vulnerabilities.

The user said they have "No connection or affiliation to any of the organisations involved." Noting, "I am a self-employed consultant for my day job, and a solo founder of a mental health non-profit on the side." Petecooper's original post about the vulnerability was among the first to break the NDA, though they claim they were unaware.

“I posted here about the then-upcoming PHP RCEs related to CVE-2026-109618 & CVE-2026-109619. I appreciate this has had considerable knock-on effects with the schedule for co-ordinated disclosure, and created additional workload. I am truly sorry. I take full responsibility for my actions,” petecooper wrote on the platform. “It was not remotely my intention to cause any of the subsequent side effects. At the time of posting, I didn’t know about any embargo. My contact had told me there was no embargo, and her contact had told her the same thing.”

CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 are two critical vulnerabilities, both scored at 9.2. It seemed that the PHP Foundation planned for a controlled public release, allowing affected websites and applications to be patched before the vulnerabilities became widely known. Unfortunately, it seemed that some recipients of the warning failed to share the embargo that came alongside the CVEs, spreading the news earlier than expected.

It should be noted that petecooper apparently wasn’t the only one who leaked the news early. Multiple leaks had already been circulating on social media and other platforms, which forced the PHP Foundation to move its announcement up by one day. Despite that, the organization mentioned that Chainguard broke the embargo by more than six hours. Dan Lorenc, the co-founder and CEO of Chainguard, defended the move on LinkedIn, saying that he made the call after talking to several other researchers and immediately notified the group after releasing the fix publicly, and not just his customers.

The vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 were bugs in the PHP runtime itself that were discovered using AI tools, not attacks by rogue AI. Still, the abilities of this technology could make it easier for both security researchers and bad actors to find vulnerabilities that could have been lurking in widely used code for years, if not decades. This makes it a race to find and deploy a fix before they can be exploited.

China-state-aligned actor Storm-0940 used ARTEX, an open-source agentic AI penetration testing framework, in its large-scale ConnectWise supply chain attack, Microsoft wrote in its Security blog. After unauthorized access to the multi-tenant application, the group attempted sign-ins at more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, with stolen ConnectWise app credentials that authenticated as the apps with no interactive user sign-in. Some of the group’s attacks reached privileged access less than three hours after initial targeting.

Automated password guessing, or password spraying, also targeted 327 accounts across eight organizations with more than 151,000 failed logons and no successes. The use of ARTEX, “a system of LLM-driven agents that run an autonomous penetration test,” sped up scanning and reconnaissance, password spraying, and OAuth application abuse. The agents can work around the clock “with little needed human interaction,” at a pace that “leaves defenders with little time to detect and respond.” It’s uncertain how the ConnectWise credentials were stolen or how many tenants were actually compromised.

Storm-0940, active since 2021, is a “China-state aligned actor” with “no known industry aliases,” and its name follows the convention for a developing actor. Industries targeted this time include aerospace and defense, semiconductor, government, and think tanks, with 14 listed in total. The activity “did not result from a compromise of or a vulnerability” in Microsoft’s systems, products, or services.

At its peak on Oct. 11, the password spray engaged in 2,900 attempts, all failures, per minute, at more than 111,000 for that day, with 48 accounts logging more than 1,000 failures each. Almost 98% of this activity was locked out. However, with control of the identities of multiple ConnectWise cloud apps, the attacking AI agents signed in to customer tenants from the same IP range using those apps’ credentials, with more than 200 sign-ins in under four minutes using four application credentials. Operations taken within some tenants include Graph and directory operations, reconnaissance, app credential changes, plus changes to identities, groups, and privileged roles.

In one tenant on Oct. 15, Huntress, a security firm, saw an app add itself to the top administrator role, the behavior behind the Microsoft Defender alert “Application self-assigned Global Administrator role.” Actions included planting new secrets set to expire in 2028. It confirmed unauthorized sign-ins for 162 tenants by Oct. 16 and, a day later, almost 1,000 Entra tenants with sign-in activity from the attacking IP, with more than 300 succeeding. The attack’s sweep through tenants in sorted order, a few seconds apart, indicated “a script working from a target list.”

What differs from many traditional attacks is the use of the open-source pentest framework that, Microsoft says, can use any AI model. Threat actors in multiple regions are using the technology, and public reporting this month tied it to breaches at South Korean financial institutions. CrowdStrike said the suspect in those separate attacks was likely based in China and allegedly used ARTEX with Anthropic’s Claude Code. ARTEX’s developer, who goes by the handle “Autumn-27,” said on GitHub that the ARTEX project “will no longer be updated” and would become closed source, Reuters reported.

ConnectWise noted the unauthorized access and suspended Cloud Backup (formerly SkyKick) as well as SaaS Security and Cloud Management as a precaution. It has started a phased restoration with recovery expected to take several days and has no indicators to date that partner backup data was compromised. Microsoft notes that an affected app, or even a successful sign-in, doesn’t necessarily mean data was accessed or taken, and advises customers to keep affected app connections disabled until formal restoration instructions are issued, and to review activity from this month where logs allow.

Most everyone in the tech space has been living in interesting times, but this week isn't done yet, and it's already quite special for systems administrators worldwide. They already had to deal with the critical PHP RCE vulnerability, but they also have to update untold amounts of machines and software, thanks to eight insecure intermediate CA certificates that can allow attackers to impersonate any domain and/or pretend their malware is from a legitimate source.

An attacker anywhere in the path of your network traffic, like, say, in a company or government network, public Wi-Fi, your ISP, or one of any number of government entities, can intercept your connection and pretend that they're any website, like apple.com, amazon.com, or bankofamerica.com. If not updated, your operating system and installed software would be none the wiser. Additionally, with the code signing certificates, an application you download can be shown as completely legitimate from, say, Microsoft or Google.

The way that software checks a certificate is legitimate is by verifying its "chain." For example, a website like tomshardware.com has a certificate, issued and signed by an intermediate Certification Authority (or CA, a certificate-selling company), and whose certificate, in turn, is trusted and signed by root certificates — whose exceedingly precious keys are kept offline in safes. In this week's event, Indian CA firm eMudhra issued six TLS and two code-signing intermediate certificates with easily guessable keys.

Your operating system and potentially tens of different applications on your machine all keep a list of which root certificates and CAs are trusted. Browsers also keep a list of those not to trust, called a revocation list. These lists are updated periodically as screw-ups happen, just like the one that took place this week. And now they all need to be updated again, by revoking the eight CAs, removing the one affected root certificate, or just hard-coding a rejection of all eight affected keys.

There's a silver lining: recent versions of Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and Safari all enforce a feature called Certificate Transparency that consults a public read-only log of certificate issuances, and blocks any that aren't mentioned. Google reports that no certificates signed by the six affected intermediate CAs were logged, so if regular web browsing is all you did, you should be safe — but still check all your software for updates nonetheless.

The problem here is the sheer amount of machines and software that needs updating: PCs, servers, operating systems, phones, tablets, routers, web browsers, web browsers wrapped in apps, virtual servers, virtual machines, Docker and other containers, programming languages like Python, Go, Node.js, Rust, standalone download utilities like curl, and probably tens or hundreds of other categories. Additionally, we discussed things that are expected and likely to get updates. Old routers, smart and IoT appliances, and old computers could eventually present a problem.

As for the technical details, eMudhra issued six intermediate CA certificates and two intermediate code-signing certs with rather unadvisable private keys. The private key is the secret half of the two parts of a certificate, and for some reason, those of the aforementioned certs were only 1 byte long — thus a number from 0 to 255, trivial to brute-force in a split second. How the heck that happened is still under investigation.

OpenAI announced in a press release on Oct. 21 that researchers working under its “Patch the Planet” cybersecurity initiative used its AI model GPT-5.6 Sol to uncover critical security vulnerabilities in PHP (an open-source programming language that runs an estimated 70% of the internet). After the discovery, the company says it coordinated a coalition of researchers, PHP maintainers, security providers, and government cybersecurity agencies to fix the issues over two months. The company attributed the lengthy timeline to the task's complexity, which required major changes to the PHP engine.

The PHP Foundation has released patched versions PHP 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, and 8.5.12 to fix the vulnerabilities. PHP 8.1 and older versions will not receive official fixes. The coordinated release was originally scheduled for Oct. 22, but was brought forward to Oct. 21 following premature disclosures on Oct. 20, which led to public outcry.

OpenAI says every site using PHP can now safely upgrade its version to stay secure. The company highlights the incident — which it considers one of the biggest cybersecurity discoveries of 2026, given PHP’s ubiquity — as an example of the Defender's Window concept in action. OpenAI introduced the concept after its models hacked Hugging Face; it describes a critical, narrow timeframe during which organizations can use advanced frontier AI models to find, patch, and strengthen their cybersecurity defenses before those same AI-driven attack capabilities become widely available to malicious threat actors.

Operating as part of the Patch the Planet program, researchers from Calif, a California-based cybersecurity firm and the program's founding partner, began auditing PHP with OpenAI tools on July 30, 2026, at the PHP Foundation's request. The Foundation had known about the underlying flaw since 2024 but couldn't identify an exploitation method or a fix. Calif researcher Ryan A. first identified the exploitable vulnerability on Aug. 11, followed by OpenAI researchers that same day. Subsequently, another cybersecurity firm, Wiz, independently identified an additional vulnerability.

The two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, involve flaws in how PHP manages computer memory and handles errors. The first occurs when PHP runs out of allocated memory while processing a request, potentially leaving behind incomplete internal data that the engine may later mistakenly treat as valid. The second involves a related problem in which a fatal error leaves PHP pointing to memory that has already been freed, allowing subsequent requests to access or corrupt it. Under certain conditions, attackers can exploit these weaknesses remotely — without needing login credentials — to execute malicious code on affected servers, potentially taking control of websites.

Using AI, the researchers also demonstrated that the flaws could expose sensitive information stored in server memory, including passwords, authentication tokens, and API keys. Most concerning, the vulnerabilities exist in PHP's core engine, meaning websites can be affected even if their application code has no security flaws. Both vulnerabilities received a critical severity score of 9.2 out of 10.

OpenAI says human developers and security teams examined the underlying code but couldn't fully resolve the flaws, allowing them to persist for two years after discovery. Meanwhile, AI-wielding researchers demonstrated practical ways to exploit it within two weeks. Conversely, one could argue that the flaws would never have been exploitable without AI, making them effectively harmless.

However, OpenAI is challenging this view with its Defender's Window concept. The company argues that powerful, revolutionary technology will inevitably be used by bad actors. It therefore maintains that it is a collective responsibility to act proactively to address any potential exploitable flaws. Anthropic's Claude Mythos recently identified 'thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities' in 'every major operating system and every major web browser.’

A computer, found hidden behind a fridge in a Japanese hotel room, was responsible for sending around 480,000 phishing emails, Hackread reports. The computer was placed there by a Chinese couple who lived locally, and the pair have now been arrested for both the hidden phishing PC and a separate slew of purchases that were made using stolen credit card details. Ye Jiafeng, 39, and his wife, Shen Qi, 39, now face multiple charges including fraudulent obstruction of business and trespass as well as computer fraud.

The scam began on 15 May, 2025, when Ye connected the computer to hotel Wi-Fi and then hid it behind a fridge. There it stayed, sending around 480,000 emails. When it was discovered, the machine had around 2.4 million email addresses, presumably just waiting to be phished. The emails claimed to be from credit card companies and sent unsuspecting recipients to fake websites in an attempt to capture their credit card information. It's believed that the computer was administered remotely, allowing it to remain in situ without any in-person maintenance required.

Ultimately, the computer would likely have remained in place if the recipient of one of the phishing emails hadn't reached out to the hotel. The hotel's IP address was found in metadata linked to the messages, and staff discovered the computer before reporting it to the police. Police are still investigating whether the two scammers were the brains of the operation or simply working for someone else.

While phishing was the couple's chosen scam this time around, it isn't their first foray into using technology to part victims from their cash. Ye and Shen are claimed to have used credit card details stored on a smartphone to buy items in Kobe. But that wasn't the only phone that they had — media reports claim that police found 74 of them at their home, and the couple had spent 10 million yen (around $63,000) of other people's money using stolen card details since 2024. It's unknown whether the phones found by police account for all of those that were used, or if there were others that have yet to be identified.

Phishing has long been a lucrative option for criminals around the globe, but it has also spawned a spin-off industry recently. A China-based phishing-as-a-service operation was dismantled by the FBI earlier this year. The service made it easier for criminals to create scam sites using AI and is believed to have been responsible for almost $2 billion in losses and 3.87 million stolen credit cards.

Modern computing systems and devices typically require pieces of crucial open-source software, typically maintained by unpaid or low-paid volunteers. Recently, a report collated a list of critical open-source projects, noting which of them are chronically underfunded and/or understaffed. The information is sobering: 11 out of 23 of the listed projects currently only have one or two maintainers, and funding is generally scarce and sometimes nonexistent.

The Data Drop's report on open-source maintainers identifies that having only one or two sets of eyes on critical pieces of software means that sooner or later something breaks — and it tends to do so in spectacular fashion, given its ubiquity. So, what happens when these projects, which are widely used across software, go underfunded or understaffed?

Lessons from the past

In 2014, the same year as Heartbleed, Shellshock made waves: a vulnerability in the Bash shell that's present in Linux, macOS, and Unix-type systems. The problem was traced back to a line of code present since 1989, displaying how even software that's thought to have all the bugs hammered out of it can still fall prey to attacks. A quick look at Bash's commit history shows it's almost exclusively maintained by Chet Ramey.

In 2016, ImageMagick was exploited, providing attackers with remote code execution. This library is used for image manipulation across a wide range of software, in webpages, mobile apps, and more. A 2020 analysis revealed that hundreds of security issues had been found over the years in its extensive codebase. Nearly every code contribution in the past couple of years has been done by an individual named Dirk Lemstra.

Contemporary examples include 2021's Log4Shell exploit, a critical vulnerability in the Apache Log4j logging library used in millions of servers. The libwebp image-handling library saw a zero-day vulnerability in 2023, and the xz compression library used across Linux and iOS was compromised in 2024.

Thankless work

Key points in the report mention specific repos, which might be under threat. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the low number of overall maintainers and the unpaid nature of the work make it unattractive to perform.

The main time-zone file used across Linux-based operating systems is maintained pro bono by Paul Eggert, a UCLA teacher. Core-js, a piece of support software that lets new JavaScript work in old browsers and is estimated by the author to be used in half of the busiest websites in the world, is handled by Denis Pushkarev. He once had to endure criticism from the community because he added a command-line message to the library's installer asking for help or a job.

The HarfBuzz library developed by Behdad Esfahbod is a cornerstone in ligatures and text shaping in Middle Eastern languages. In those writings, a letter changes shape and/or orientation according to what's around it. Esfahbod handles that vast majority of the project's code, and doesn't mention public or corporate funding.

Libjpeg-turbo handles JPEG images on Android, Firefox, LibreOffice, and every Chromium-based browser. It's kept ship-shape by D.R. Commander aka DRC, who occasionally is contracted for library-specific work, though at arguably modest values of "3-4 figures rather than 6 or 7." Libxml2, just like the label says, handles XML reading and writing across numerous applications and operating systems. Nick Wellnhofer, the original maintainer, stepped down in September 2025, after years of work with little income.

The SQLite project provides a one-file database that's exceedingly easy to integrate into most software, instead of complicated, resource-heavy databases, while still retaining standard SQL language and accouterments. Thanks to its ease of use, it found its way into an astonishing number of applications. Examples include WhatsApp, Dropbox, Android, Windows, and all major browsers.

The project estimates that there are about a trillion instances of SQLite in use. Just four people keep this critical project together, and they've gone to the length of removing their names and photos from the project's page, as "there are a lot of crazy people in the world who might misuse that information." The project is funded by the offering paid support via the founder's company, though there's no word on effective income, especially when it presumably needs to feed four mouths.

Funding is there, but scarce

It's not all doom and gloom, though. Take curl (the software), for example. Almost every developer has used it, thanks to its URL-fetching abilities and extensive scripting options. The project was started by Daniel Stenberg, who is now paid to work full-time on it. The team has now grown to 11 and has received funding through Open Collective and Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency, among others.

Likely due to the lessons learned from their past respective debacles, both the Log4j and OpenSSL projects are likewise funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency, as are the FFmpeg video file handler and the OpenSSH secure shell software that's ubiquitous in Linux servers.

All things considered, it's easy to argue that the critical importance of all the aforementioned software merits sizable investments from industry players, especially those whose commercial products benefit the most from the community's efforts. Plus, even if the firms feel no moral obligation to contribute, in the day and age where AI agents are finding exploitable vulnerabilities in hours, donations to these open-source projects could also be considered investments.

Millions of dollars worth of gift cards were stolen and then used to buy high-value tech gear at retailers like Target, Sephora, and Lowe's after a Chinese crime ring gained access to an internal Staples system and then used it to issue more than 15,000 cards to itself. While the hack hasn't been made public to date, a 404 Media report notes that it actually took place back in 2023.

The outlet reviewed court records that show that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) was told about the hack in October of that year. The hack came to light after it led to a search warrant that was unsealed last week. And while the document doesn't specifically name Staples as the victim of the hack, 404 Media has confirmed that it was the company affected based on other information. Such information includes the fact that the victim company is headquartered in Massachusetts, that it uses Blackhawk Networks to fulfill gift card orders, and that the company uses an internal customer support system called Nexus. The report notes that a reference to Nexus can be found on a former Staples executive's LinkedIn profile.

While Staples was under the impression that Nexus could not be accessed from beyond its own network, hackers found that not to be the case. They then "performed multiple heap dump requests," a process that captures all of the data held in an app's memory. That information gave the hackers the tools they needed to hijack logged-in sessions of Staples customer service employees. From there, they were able to issue gift cards at will.

Once the gift cards had been issued, the crime group sent runners to physical retail stores to spend them before they were identified and canceled. Target found that 35 gift cards were used at a New Hampshire store, with high-value products from Apple, Bose, and Beats all bought. All 35 cards were used within a period of just a single hour, although not all of them were obtained via this hack.

In total, Target told investigators that 3,850 gift cards worth over $140,000 were used across 85 different stores in just two days. Sephora was hit for $58,600 worth of sales, while Lowe's saw $226,000 spent across online and in-store purchases. In total, 4,630 stolen gift cards were used with a value of around $425,000.

This hack was just the tip of the iceberg, too. Last April, a Department of Justice announcement confirmed that three Chinese nationals had been sentenced for their part in a gift card fraud conspiracy. Including the Staples hack, the crime group stole more than $100 million worth of gift cards.

Chinese organized crime groups often pop up on the radar of U.S.-based law enforcement. Earlier this year, a Chinese phishing service that was used to generate scam websites using AI was dismantled. The service was linked to almost $2 billion in losses.

When the IETF decided to allow Unicode characters in domain names, many techies saw the move as commendable, but also fraught with danger, as hundreds of unique characters can look similar or identical across multiple alphabets. This can be used for typosquatting attacks, wherein bad actors create functioning websites with deliberately misspelled web addresses that look identical to the real URL, thus launching attacks against unsuspecting visitors who land on the site due to search results generated when the user mistypes an address. The Chromium browser has the most advanced ruleset for finding and preventing mischievous domains masquerading as legitimate ones, but even the best code has odd edge cases, as a blog post from Have I Been Squatted (HIBS) explains in great detail.

Using "аррӏө.com" as an example — which is in fact not identical to the real "apple.com" — the researchers show how specific combinations of characters can still evade multiple layers of protection, thanks to the particular circumstances surrounding the use of specific Cyrillic characters. This alphabet has lookalikes for many Latin letters. For example, а → a, е → e, о → o, р → p, and с → c. We forgive you if you can't spot the differences.

Trying to sneak the one homoglyph into the middle of standard Latin ones triggers Chromium's safeguards and makes the browser display the domain name in its Punycode format. For example, using the Cyrillic "а" with "pple.com" would show up as "xn--pple-43d.com". With few exceptions, domain names with non-Latin characters ending in .com only pass the check if they're all from the same alphabet.

Having said that, opting to try "аррӏе.com," using all Cyrillic lookalikes, would also go bust. Chromium keeps a list of 29 Cyrillic characters that routinely masquerade as their Latin counterparts, and composing a domain name using only characters from that list is a no-no.

So how does "аррӏө.com" pass? Allow us to illustrate with bigger text below. Note how the right-hand Cyrillic character is actually an oval with a line across it.

[e] ≠ [ө]

As you can surmise by now, the "ө" character is not in that special list of 29. While a more recent release of Chromium can and probably will add it, this reveals the difficulty of the problem: since there's no one-size-fits-all solution for detecting typo-squatting, even the best set of rules will sooner or later end up on the wrong side of a corner case.

It takes many watchful eyes to play Unicode Pokémon and catch'em' all, especially given the character set continually evolves and now counts nearly 173,000 entries — though only a subset of those are eligible to be used as domain names or TLDs in practice.

Chromium is reportedly the best browser at detecting domain lookalikes, as a 2020 study showed that it caught 64.1% of the attempts, with Firefox and Safari trailing behind. As a reminder, Chromium underpins the Chrome, Edge, and Brave browsers.

Besides many other rules and per-alphabet verifications, Chromium keeps a list of over 8,000 popular domains bound to be typo-squatted, and runs stronger checks against 836 of them. Domain registries, likewise, make reasonable efforts to prevent typo-squatting, like having strict rules about what characters can go into which TLDs, but that's not nearly enough to fully solve the problem.

All things considered, HIBS recommends that companies afraid of impersonation try to register any lookalike domains and try to encourage passkey use by users. Passkeys are always tied to a specific domain, so a user wouldn't be able to log in to a sneaky website with them.

The FBI has dismantled a major North Korean laptop farm operation in the U.S. with the help of CrowdStrike, which assisted in the identification and disruption of these networks. According to The New York Times, the agency shut down over 40 laptop farms in Texas, resulting in the seizure of over 200 devices. No arrests have been made so far, as the authorities wanted to take down the operations as soon as possible and did not wait for prosecutors to file charges against those involved, although they also warned that they could face criminal penalties if they continue to be involved with remote fraud.

North Korea has been using fake remote workers to earn income despite the economic sanctions placed against the hermit kingdom. It has been reported that it earns around $500 million a year under this scheme, which affects both startups and Fortune 500 companies. Amazon’s IT department actually caught one North Korean infiltrator after it noticed a 110ms keyboard input lag, betraying their distant location.

The U.S. has been clamping down on this scheme since last year, after it shut down 29 North Korean laptop farms across 16 states that were facilitating the employment of North Korean IT workers across over a hundred U.S. companies. Four U.S. citizens and a Ukrainian national were convicted over scams like this in November 2025, with the Justice Department unsealing indictments against two U.S. citizens and 10 China-based North Koreans recently. Prosecutors said that the last group defrauded more than $3 million from 70 companies over a span of six years from 2019, and that the identities of two more individuals involved in the case remain under seal.

Despite the number of networks that U.S. authorities have been able to shut down since last year, CrowdStrike’s Adam Meyers, who’s in charge of the company’s counter adversary operations, says that this scheme is “increasing both in prevalence and complexity.” He noted that it’s difficult to know how truly widespread the problem is and that even though CrowdStrike has identified an average of two new cases daily last month, it was most probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Facilitators are the one crucial aspect that North Korea’s operations rely on. These are people based in the United States who help bypass security measures by hosting the work laptops that companies send to the fraudulent North Korean IT workers to make it appear as if they’re based in the country. While the job looks like easy money from that start, it would eventually become more complicated as the operation progresses. “They get kind of hooked on it initially, and then more gets asked of them, and they’re kind of in too deep at that point,” Meyers told the publication.