OpenAI has revealed GPT-6 Cyber, a new artificial intelligence model that has discovered 81 previously unknown high-severity Firefox vulnerabilities and developed working exploits for 948 distinct Linux kernel flaws. The company announced the model on Thursday, saying it significantly improves on earlier AI models in finding software vulnerabilities, validating their impact, and helping developers create fixes. During security testing, GPT-6 Cyber discovered 81 previously unknown high-severity vulnerabilities in Firefox and helped develop patches, many of which Mozilla has already released. In separate Linux kernel research, the model identified 2,308 potential security flaws, successfully reproduced 1,724 vulnerabilities, and developed local privilege escalation exploits for 948 distinct vulnerabilities that could allow an unprivileged user to gain root access.
Cybersecurity professionals are being targeted with infected security projects on GitHub that deploy a backdoor and information stealer malware. The campaign started about two years ago and initially targeted crypto wallet users, but recently the threat actor switched focus and published malicious repositories for automating scans, security testing, and log analysis. Researchers at cybersecurity company Dr. Web found that more than 2,000 Windows systems have been compromised so far. One malicious repository they found is a fake script advertised as a lightweight solution to parse, clean, and format output from the Fscan network scanner. Previous lures included blockchain games, bots, and cheat tools, typically targeting blockchain and game enthusiasts. Dr. Web's investigation found malicious code embedded in Visual Studio project files, Python scripts, and Go source files, hidden behind long stretches of whitespace, an old technique that still proves effective.
QNAP urges users to update Plex Media Server to the latest version available in the QNAP App Center, as hackers are exploiting the Plex2Shell vulnerability chain. The vendor said it had received multiple reports of suspected compromises involving customers’ network-attached storage (NAS) devices. "QNAP has received reports from some users that Plex Media Server on their NAS appears to have been compromised through [Plex2Shell] vulnerabilities, and QNAP Technical Support is assisting the affected users,” the company says in an advisory today. Plex2Shell is a chain of four vulnerabilities in the Plex Media Server, tracked as CVE-2026-96652, CVE-2026-96654, CVE-2026-96655, and CVE-2026-96656. Security researcher Zach Main discovered and reported the flaws to Plex on July 27. Exploitation started shortly after the full technical details became public on October 16.
Veeam warned customers about boot failures affecting Software Appliance virtual machines (VMs) on hosts with AMD EPYC processors. The company's Software Appliance VMs are pre-configured, Linux-based virtual machines that let admins run the Veeam Backup & Replication backup software suite on Linux devices without manually installing dependencies or configuring the software. To comply with corporate and government security frameworks, the underlying Linux kernel runs integrated health and cryptographic checks (such as jitterentropy health tests) in FIPS mode during early boot. However, as the company explained in a Wednesday advisory, these VMs will fail to boot and will crash with a kernel panic after failing an early-boot FIPS-mode jitterentropy check on some AMD EPYC processors. "A Veeam Software Appliance (Linux-based Veeam Backup & Replication) virtual machine running on a host with an AMD EPYC processor intermittently fails to boot after a reboot, including a reboot that follows an update that installs a new kernel," it said.
Threat actors are attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security flaw impacting OpenSSH that can enable sign-ins to accounts that have no password set, according to Previdian. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-123158 (CVSS score: 8.1) and codenamed SSHole (or *sshole), impacts Linux systems that run OpenSSH on the musl C library with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) disabled,
In April 2026, BleepingComputer reported that Canadian authorities arrested three men for operating an “SMS blaster,” a device that pretends to be a cell tower to send phishing texts to nearby phones. It’s a close cousin of the IMSI catcher, the fake-tower device used for surveillance. Both work by tricking phones into connecting to the strongest signal and sharing information before anything is authenticated. One of the main things a fake tower can collect this way is your IMSI, the identifier tied to your SIM, but it’s far from the only thing your phone gives away. Your phone has several radios that connect to different kinds of signals and share different information. The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios share hardware addresses, which modern phones randomize or rotate to reduce tracking.
OpenAI on Thursday unveiled GPT‑6 Cyber, which it described as a major step forward in security research that brings together stronger cybersecurity capabilities with a step-change improvement in model alignment. The new model is "more capable at finding and fixing vulnerabilities, and far more reliable staying within the boundaries researchers set," OpenAI said. It has classified the model as
Blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis says a recent attack on its systems and internal tools has exposed credentials and live tokens for all customers. Chainalysis provides blockchain analysis tools to trace cryptocurrency transactions and investigate crimes such as fraud, ransomware, and money laundering. Its customer list includes law enforcement, government agencies, financial institutions, insurance companies, and cryptocurrency businesses worldwide. This follows the company's disclosure last Friday that attackers using AI tools accessed customers' names, email addresses, user IDs, and organizational role labels using what it described as "offensive agentic techniques." While it initially said the impact was limited and the breach affected only non-sensitive identity metadata, later updates revealed that usernames and password hashes for all customers were exposed in an "on-path attack" (more commonly known as a Man-in-the-Middle or MITM attack).
D-Link shared mitigation measures for multiple unpatched security flaws affecting DGS-3130 series managed Gigabit stackable switches. These switch models provide multi-gigabit uplinks, allowing enterprise network administrators to eliminate data bottlenecks, and are designed primarily for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and metro Ethernet deployments. While D-Link didn't share details on these flaws and has yet to publicly disclose the CVE IDs for easier tracking, it said Spectrum Community Solutions network engineer Giresh Kumar Enugu found the bugs in the D-Link Discovery Protocol (DDP) authentication, access control, and information handling. Successful exploitation could allow attackers to obtain sensitive device data, make unauthorized credential/configuration changes, leak SNMP communities, or cause service disruptions and device resets.
OpenAI GPT-6 Cyber found 81 high-severity Firefox flaws and hundreds of Linux bugs, raising new questions about AI-powered cyber risks. OpenAI has introduced GPT-6 Cyber, a model built for security research that it says finds and fixes vulnerabilities better and stays within the limits researchers set far more reliably. These are OpenAI’s own results and evaluations, so read them as claims to check. “We’re introducing GPT‑6 Cyber, a major leap in security research: more capable at finding and fixing vulnerabilities, and far more reliable staying within the boundaries researchers set. GPT‑6 Cyber delivers major gains on key cybersecurity benchmarks over GPT‑5.6 Cyber, including a 51% relative improvement on ExploitGym and a step function improvement when tested on staying within scope.” reads the announcement. “It is already helping to secure real-world software, uncovering and validating thousands of exploits in security-critical codebases such as Linux and Firefox.” GPT-6 Cyber outperformed previous models in tests measuring its ability to exploit vulnerabilities. It scored 48.5%, compared with 32.1% for GPT-5.6 Cyber, and outperformed GPT-6 Astra in most cybersecurity tasks. It also found more flaws during web penetration tests, identifying 40.3% of vulnerabilities versus 32% for Astra. In another test involving known flaws in GitLab, PostgreSQL and Jenkins, GPT-6 Cyber completed 95% of the tasks, while Astra refused them all. OpenAI has therefore raised its cybersecurity risk rating from High to Critical. The real-world numbers are bigger. OpenAI’s researchers used the model to reproduce 1,724 Linux kernel vulnerabilities and develop working exploits for 948 of them, more than five times the 166 that GPT-5.6 Sol managed with the same research setup. Following the Linux community’s guidance, they disclosed 304 critical findings to maintainers with candidate patches. “Developing exploits for 948 Linux kernel vulnerabilities. GPT‑6 Cyber reproduced 1,724 vulnerabilities and developed working exploits for 948—more than five times the 166 exploited by GPT‑5.6 Sol using the same research harness. Following the Linux community’s guidance, we disclosed 304 critical findings to maintainers with candidate patches and are in the process of getting other vulnerabilities fixed.” continues the announcement. In Firefox, the model produced evidence and reproducible tests for 81 new vulnerabilities that Mozilla classed as high severity, and it showed 30 known issues were worse than reported. Mozilla began landing fixes soon after getting the reports. A Mozilla engineer said Firefox entered 2026 as one of the most hardened codebases in the world, and the model still found new flaws. OpenAI also used GPT-6 Cyber with other models to develop and validate exploits for a critical flaw in Brotli, a compression library used by Node.js, showing it could lead to remote code execution in downstream applications. Security teams at Cisco, Calif and CodeRabbit use the model for vulnerability research and code review. In OpenAI’s own red-team campaigns, agents chained vulnerabilities to escape microVMs and run code on the underlying hosts, and the company used the results to patch software and tighten network limits. Power like that makes scope control the key question. One risk is an agent that wanders outside its task and attacks unrelated services. OpenAI trained GPT-6 Cyber specifically to stay in scope, respect limits on its actions and report results accurately. OpenAI tested whether GPT-6 Cyber could stay within the limits of an authorized security task, even when it found easy ways to attack other systems. The model avoided unauthorized actions in 99.93% of cases, compared with 94.49% for GPT-5.6 Cyber. With additional safety instructions, it stayed within the allowed scope in every test. “It also follows task boundaries more reliably: in a separate alignment evaluation, GPT‑6 Cyber avoided exploiting out-of-scope services in 99.93% of tests without its deployment prompt, and 100% with this prompt.” states the AI company. “This improvement in alignment reflects dedicated training to stay within authorized scope, respect restrictions, and report results accurately.” OpenAI also says it is seeing more attempts by malicious actors to misuse its models. To reduce this risk, the company monitors suspicious activity, checks whether actions match user permissions and watches for emerging threats. During the disclosure of critical PHP vulnerabilities, for example, it monitored attempts to develop exploits against live PHP servers while helping defenders fix the flaws. Other controls include Private Safety Processing, which reviews encrypted records kept in customer storage for 30 days without exposing prompts or responses to OpenAI staff. API customers on Zero Data Retention generally must use it. Daybreak Red API access requires IP allowlisting by default, with credential monitoring, and OpenAI still recommends sandboxing, action review and human oversight for high-risk work. Critical infrastructure gets special attention. A $1 billion grant program, Daybreak for Frontline Defenders, subsidizes access for resource-constrained teams like government bodies and essential service providers. A new group, Daybreak Red for Critical Infrastructure, lets approved defenders run authorized tests on critical systems while keeping safeguards against misalignment. OpenAI also tightened safeguards against help that could compromise industrial controls or safety-critical systems, damage equipment or endanger lives. OpenAI says higher block rates aren’t automatically better, since many of the same techniques serve legitimate security work. Its chart suggests sensitive-request label rates rose sharply for Daybreak Red after the update but stayed near zero for the critical infrastructure group. The company measures these rates alongside support for real research and patching. Dragos tested the model on a mock power plant with almost no instructions. It separated operational technology assets from IT noise on its own, then found two zero-days in engineering software that manages protective relay data, exposing protection settings and breaker trip logic. Dragos’s Rob T. Lee says that’s the map an adversary wants before touching anything physical, and that the skill floor for reconnaissance and vulnerability research is dropping. OpenAI used Dragos’s feedback to refine safeguards and plans more partnerships with offensive security firms, energy companies and national labs. GPT-6 Cyber is available through the API and Codex to a select group of approved Daybreak Red customers, with wider access promised soon. GPT-5.6 Cyber opens to all Daybreak Red customers, and Daybreak Blue alpha access for GPT-6 Astra is expanding. Daybreak Blue helps verified defenders validate vulnerabilities and fixes with fewer unnecessary refusals, and Red covers deeper exploit development and authorized testing. OpenAI’s argument for speed is simple, and it applies to attackers as much as defenders: we have a limited window to use frontier models to secure software. “Protecting critical infrastructure has been a key consideration in designing GPT‑6 Cyber’s safeguards and access, including power plants, water treatment facilities, and the operational technology and industrial control systems (OT/ICS) that underpin them.” concludes the announcement. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, OpenAI)
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