Tuesday, October 27, 2026
System Engineer
bleepingcomputer
No commentsTuesday, October 27, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsTuesday, October 27, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsTo address a vulnerability in Google's Brotli compression technology that could allow attackers to corrupt process memory, Microsoft is urging .NET users to update "as soon as possible" after releasing an out-of-band (OOB) security update.
It released new versions for .NET 8, 9, 10, and .NET 11 to patch against the Brotli bug, following similar updates from Node.js, Python, and other projects.
Senior program manager Rahul Bhandari said in the October 25 release that the buffer overflow vulnerability in Brotli, tracked as CVE-2026-111497 and rated 8.1 under CVSS v3.1 in Microsoft's advisory, could allow an unauthenticated attacker to read or corrupt process memory, potentially resulting in information disclosure, denial of service, or elevation of privilege.
Microsoft’s own advisory for the vulnerability, which some are referring to as Broccoli2Shell or Node2Shell, confirms that while experts have cobbled working exploits together, there is nothing to suggest that criminals are using them in successful attacks.
However, its exploitability assessment reads: “Exploitation More Likely.”
Broccoli2Shell was first disclosed on October 21 by the Node.js team, which released fixes for ten vulnerabilities, the most serious of which was CVE-2026-111497.
Node.js credited Khai Tran and Sylvie Mayer of OpenAI’s Codex Security with the discovery, but failed to mention why it was only recognized as a security flaw and disclosed properly in October, despite the underlying bug having been fixed in Brotli's source code in February.
OpenAI filled in the gap with a Xeet: “This root cause issue was actually fixed in the Brotli source code in February, but it wasn’t known at the time that it gave rise to a security vulnerability, and there was no more recent release of Brotli.
“Since Brotli is built into other software, any software which includes this library needs to take the update too, followed by the users of that software.”
Attackers can exploit vulnerable systems by providing them with malicious Brotli-compressed data via a specially crafted request.
The vulnerability went slightly under the radar due to the disclosure timing closely aligning with that of PHP2Shell, although fixing the critical flaw should be a priority due to the range of technologies that are affected.
In addition to .NET, Node.js, and Python, Bun, Envoy, and Istio have all released patches, and JFrog has worked up an exploit affecting FFmpeg using a specially crafted JPEG XL image, extending the exploit path beyond HTTP.
It said that FFmpeg reaches Brotli through libjxl, which it uses to decompress metadata stored in brob boxes within the image format.
The same researchers said the vulnerability affects Apache Arrow too, with attackers able to cause a denial of service.
Merav Bar, threat researcher at Wiz, added that cloud users are exposed extensively, noting that 91 percent of cloud environments rely on components vulnerable to the Brotli flaw and that 82 percent of cloud environments have publicly exposed Node.js instances.
She said: “Cloud environments are particularly exposed due to the widespread use of Brotli-enabled components across containerized applications, Kubernetes clusters, API gateways, reverse proxies, serverless workloads, and cloud-hosted web services.”
“Successful exploitation could enable attackers to compromise application workloads, access sensitive information, disrupt service availability, or execute malicious code within affected containers or runtime environments,” Bar added.
In an advisory published through its Patch the Planet initiative, OpenAI recommended blocking untrusted Brotli-compressed data where practical until patches can be applied. It also advised maintainers to rebuild affected deployments and restart services to ensure the fixes take effect. ®
Monday, October 26, 2026System EngineerosnewsNo commentsWhen thinking about impressive technical achievements in retro games, most people will first point to graphical milestones set by action games like Doom or Quake. Rightfully so, but at least I am personally far more impressed by the early examples of the city builder genre. Simulating whole economies on a large scale with a fraction of today’s power seems impossible if modern builder games even struggle on modern machines.
Of course this didn’t stop developers in the past to develop and run city builder games on significantly weaker hardware. The original SimCity for example lists Intel’s 386SX as the CPU in it’s system requirements. A CPU which at the time of it’s launch ran at magnificent 16 MHz.
↫ Lars Thießen
What’s even more impressive are some of the other systems the origin al SimCity was ported to, which had even more limited hardware than a 386SX. The Super Nintendo got a SimCity port, which even included fun extras like a Mario statue and Bowser taking up the mantle of the Godzilla disaster, and additional systems the PC version didn’t have. Hell, they even worked on a port to the NES, but it was cancelled and thought lost, until a relatively complete and working copy was discovered in 2017. Even this NES version contained features not available in the PC version.
Hardware limitations really did breed a lot of innovation back in those days, and sometimes I wonder if programmers and developers could benefit from tasking themselves with working within such limitations today, if only to become a bit more prudent with resources.
Sunday, October 25, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsSunday, October 25, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsBuilding a UK datacenter spans three government departments: one handles datacenter policy, another telecoms, and a third energy.
MPs this week explored what Prime Minister Andy Burnham's summer reshuffle means for businesses navigating Whitehall.
Liz Lloyd, parliamentary under-secretary of state, sits across two departments with a portfolio of responsibilities as long as a weekly shopping list. She explained to MPs this week that, following the decision to get rid of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), liaison with the tech industry on datacenter construction fell to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST).
Lloyd, who works across BIST and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), went on to explain that digital infrastructure sits within DCMS.
Speaking to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Lloyd acknowledged that some departmental responsibilities overlapped.
"In terms of sector responsibilities, that is clear that technology, sorry, that telecom sits with DCMS and datacenters with BIST. When you're actually in an industry or you're trying to run a business, that that that is clear," the junior minister said.
Any business trying to build a datacenter might also want to know how to get power to it. As far as The Register can figure out, that would be the Department for Energy and Net Zero. Planning permission rests with local government, although the overall policy lies with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. It may be clear, but it is hardly simple.
The problem is real, though. Earlier this month, Microsoft pulled out of plans for Britain's largest AI supercomputer because of difficulties securing power for the facility.
Elsewhere in the hearing, Lloyd was asked about the government's early 2025 claim that modernizing aging technology and digitizing processes could deliver £45 billion in productivity savings.
Asked if the government stood by the figure, the junior minister said: "The £45 billion figure was an estimate of long-term productivity gains. It wasn't a kind of one-off figure for savings… it was never a figure that was a target or a cashable savings figure."
When the figure was publicized under the Starmer government in January 2025, the press release was headed "Archaic tech sees public sector miss £45 billion annual savings." It continued: "Taxpayer funded services from the NHS to local councils are missing out on £45 billion in productivity savings because they are too often dependent on old and outdated technology."
It claimed the government would "tackle these issues" using "digital tools, AI and common sense to overhaul public sector technology." ®
Sunday, October 25, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsThe UK Space Agency asked for names for its Active Debris Removal Mission, and, of course, the Register readership didn't disappoint.
The Active Debris Removal Mission, led by ClearSpace UK and intended to remove a pair of UK-registered satellites from Low Earth Orbit (thus demonstrating Blighty's prowess when it comes to orbital litter picking), needs a name.
Let's face it, Active Debris Removal Mission hardly rolls off the tongue and, while engineers have long found ways to make meaning from acronyms (this writer has always been rather fond of PICNIC – Problem In Chair, Not In Computer), the UK Space Agency decided it needed a proper name.
What could possibly go wrong? After all, it's not as if the great British public has form when it comes to picking interesting names (as the infamous Boaty McBoatface debacle demonstrated).
SpaceyMcSpaceFace and Binny McBinFace therefore took an early lead in voting (for our American readers, a bin is a word for a trash can).
Other suggestions included a reference to the long-running British game show, 3-2-1, with "Dusty Bin". Dusty Bin was the show's booby prize, and it's good to know that some people are at least as old as this writer.
Another, clearly inspired by our own PARIS and LOHAN, was SHART – Satellite Harvesting And Re-entry Tug, and there was the delightful Project TIDY (Targeted Intervention for Debris in the Yard), which sounds a little too much like it might win.
We at The Register tend to steer clear of politics if possible, but "Prime Binister" tickled our fancy. As did a tribute to the UK's most famous second-place candidate: Baron Binface.
For readers unaware, a candidate named Count Binface, presenting as an intergalactic space warrior with a dustbin for a head, stood in the Clacton by-election in 2026. The candidate came second after almost ten thousand voters decided they preferred a novelty candidate to the incumbent, Nigel Farage.
Farage won by a substantial margin. However, Binface (and McBinface) have secured the popular vote for a satellite clean-up mission. At least as far as Register readers are concerned.
We asked Count Binface for thoughts on the mission, and will update this piece should a response be forthcoming. ®
Saturday, October 24, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsAn independent evaluation of OpenAI's internal misalignment monitoring system revealed that the system was not fit for purpose during a period when the company's bots were breaking into model-hosting platform Hugging Face. The safeguards weren't nearly strong enough.
"The METR and Redwood employees discovered a number of novel vulnerabilities in the asynchronous internal misalignment monitoring system as it existed on and before July 21st," said evaluation partners METR and Redwood Research in a report released on Thursday.
The system, since improved according to OpenAI, was intended to monitor AI agent behavior. But as described by METR and Redwood Research, its monitoring capability was incomplete and could be bypassed by the agents it was supposed to monitor.
Bypassing the system wasn't always necessary because it wasn't always operative. Monitoring was suspended, for example, during compaction events. Compaction is a process by which AI models condense the data in their context window to make room for further input. And between May and July 2026, about 10 percent of eligible internal Codex traffic went unmonitored during compaction, according to the report.
That gap was theoretically large enough to allow AI agents to postpone monitoring indefinitely: agents could further suppress monitoring by continuing to take actions without returning control to the user.
"At the time of the exercise, the monitoring system triggered when agents returned control to the user, so during the time period when compaction events were not being monitored, agents could indefinitely postpone being monitored by simply continuing to take actions," the report explains.
This is not to say that OpenAI agents necessarily did so – the actions they did take, against Hugging Face and other organizations, have now been well documented. But OpenAI's internal monitoring system could easily have missed any misbehavior, were the company's AI agents inclined to conceal their activities – by acting during compaction – or simply to operate in system blind spots.
The report continues in this vein, citing not only monitoring gaps but poorly constructed software – dare we say vibe-coded? – that gave OpenAI agents the means to evade the shoddy monitoring.
"We found a way Codex agents could in principle bypass Codex sandboxing and Auto-Review, allowing them to take any action that the host user could take," the report says. "We also discovered an exploit agents could use that would prevent hundreds of recent actions (including the actions involved in the exploit itself) from being monitored."
The details of this exploit were redacted by OpenAI, but to summarize: the monitoring system that missed some traffic could be avoided by agents that were constrained by a non-working sandbox and had access to an exploit to evade monitoring.
But that's not all. The evaluators found that AI agents could craft inputs that caused monitoring to fail, that there were two client-controllable headers capable of disabling the monitoring of new agents, and that there were two unmonitored agentic tools that were thought to be read-only but could be exploited to take arbitrary action in the sandbox – which as noted above leaked like a sieve.
In conclusion, METR and Redwood Research propose that the agent monitoring systems used by AI companies actually work and are robust enough to "withstand deliberate, strategic, and sustained attacks from highly capable internal agents at scale." ®
Saturday, October 24, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsSaturday, October 24, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsFriday, October 23, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsFriday, October 23, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsFriday, October 23, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsGitLab on Wednesday patched a maximum-severity flaw that could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on self-managed servers under certain conditions. Affected software releases date back a full 12 years - so upgrade to a fixed version now.
The integer overflow bug, tracked as CVE-2026-110264, affects regular-expression compilation in GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), including versions dating back to GitLab 7.0, released in June 2014.
The flaw, “under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server due to integer overflow when compiling a specially crafted regular expression,” the vendor said in its release notes.
GitLab released fixes in versions 19.5.1, 19.4.3, and 19.3.6, and backported the patch to versions 19.2.9, 19.1.9, 19.0.10, and 18.11.13. The vendor “strongly recommends” that all organizations running vulnerable software upgrade to a fixed version “as soon as possible.”
GitLab-managed infrastructure, including GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated, remains patched, and the vendor also released two threat detections (here and here) for customers with self-managed instances.
Bug hunter Johan Carlsson reported the vulnerability through GitLab’s HackerOne bug bounty program.
“For organizations running self-managed GitLab infrastructure, the potential impact is severe,” warned threat-detection firm SOC Prime. “GitLab repositories frequently contain source code, CI/CD configuration, deployment secrets, access tokens, infrastructure definitions, and connections to production environments. Server-level compromise could therefore create opportunities for credential theft, repository manipulation, supply chain attacks, persistence, or lateral movement.”
While there’s no indication - yet - of any in-the-wild exploitation attempts, we’d expect criminals to start scanning for vulnerable instances soon.
The ongoing PHP chaos may have given defenders a short head-start on this one, but considering the perfect 10 CVSS severity rating and GitLab’s reach into the enterprise - it claims 50 million registered users and more than 50 percent of the Fortune 100 - that’s not going to last long.
Last month, attackers started battering another max-severity flaw in the same GitLab CE and EE products just days after the vendor issued a patch, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and private researchers.®
Friday, October 23, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsThursday, October 22, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsThursday, October 22, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsNvidia hopes to capitalize on European sovereign AI demand by unloading a slew of new open weights models spanning chatbots, healthcare, and robotics.
The major model devs have the resources to build highly capable models from scratch. But most enterprises don't, and have instead been forced to fine tune open weights models from the likes of Mistral or H Company using their own datasets.
At GTC Berlin, Nvidia unveiled its latest additions to its open weights model library with refreshed Nemotron Retriever embedding and Alpamayo autonomous vehicle models.
While by no means the sexiest subclass of models out there, embedding models are some of the more useful ones for enterprise apps. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG), a technology we've explored extensively in the past, relies heavily on the embeddings generated by these models for applications like AI-augmented search.
At a high level, RAG works by cutting up documentation in chunks, then converting those into vectors called embeddings. The embeddings are then ranked based on their relevance to the user's query before they're fed into an LLM's context.
Nvidia's latest embedding and reranking models, based on Nemotron 3.5, support embeddings of both images and text across 34 languages. This time around, the models are being offered in sizes ranging from one to eight billion parameters, with NVFP4-quantized versions for those running on new Blackwell-based accelerators. That's small enough to run on something like a DGX Spark with plenty of room to spare for other models.
Always take vendor claims with the usual grain of salt, but among competing embedding models, Nvidia boasts that at BF16-precision, its new 8 billion parameter embedding and reranking models are now the top-ranked dense models on the ViDoRe V3.1 benchmarks.
However, not all documents are easily converted into embeddings. PDFs are notoriously difficult for embedding models to make sense of. They're often scanned from printed source material and formatted for consumption, which means scraping text and parsing charts. For this, Nvidia has also launched a refreshed Nemotron Parse model that's been trained specifically to extract information from PDF documents.
Nvidia claims the model can process roughly 10.5 pages a second when running the one billion-parameter model on a single H100.
Alongside the new embedding models, Nvidia is also rolling out access to Alpamayo 2 Edge, a more compact version of its autonomous driving model based on which promises real-time processing of streaming video and sensor data when running on the company's DRIVE AGX Thor platform.
The models come just a week after the GPU giant launched its Nemotron 3.5 Super vision language (VL) model and teased Nemotron 3.5 Bolt, a 74 billion-parameter mixture of experts (MoE) model designed to fit in as little as 24 GB of video memory. That model, Nvidia says, will be available for download starting Friday.
While open models provide enterprises and governments a path toward sovereign AI, Nvidia's models are somewhat unique in how they're released. Most open weights models are a sort of black box. Anyone can download them, but the data and processes used to arrive at those weights is a mystery. This isn't the case with many of Nvidia's models: Alongside their weights, Nvidia routinely releases the training data and the recipes used to turn it into the final model.
This means customers can not only inspect the model at a low level, but build a fully custom model based on Nvidia's Nemotron architecture, rather than trying to modify the weights after the fact through fine tuning. We should note that Nvidia is not the only one to do this. The Allen Institute has employed a similar strategy with its OLMo models for this very reason. ®
Thursday, October 22, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsUnknown crims compromised LiteLLM's release process on Wednesday, distributing a malicious version (1.107.0) containing malware designed to steal cloud and AI credentials and a remote access trojan (RAT) capable of executing arbitrary code on infected machines through PyPI and Docker registries.
PyPI quarantined the trojanized version of the popular open source AI gateway within hours, and the Docker image (litellm/litellm:1.107.0) was removed from both Docker Hub and GHCR soon after - but anyone who ran the compromised package on any platform should assume their secrets have been stolen.
“Check for /tmp/.pc_once_* (the exfil has already fired if this file exists) and /tmp/remote_code_loader.lock (the C2 daemon ran or is still running if this file exists),” advised Aikido Security malware hunter Ilyas Makari. “The same applies to anyone who ran the official Docker image litellm/litellm:1.107.0, or pulled it via the latest, main-latest, or main-stable tags.”
The most recent safe version is v1.106.2.
While it’s too early to tell the scale of this latest LiteLLM supply chain attack – an earlier LiteLLM compromise in March potentially exposed more than 2,500 organizations and 434,000 CI/CD pipelines worldwide, according to CloudSEK – make sure to take these measures seriously, and check environments for any indicators of compromise.
Aikido, Google’s Wiz cloud security biz, and supply-chain security provider Socket have all published extensive threat-hunting and mitigation instructions for LiteLLM users and security teams, so give those a read stat.
LiteLLM, developed by BerriAI, provides a common interface for LLM providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini, and receives about 23 million weekly downloads. This means a compromised installation can run alongside LLM provider API keys, cloud identities, and database connection strings - and expose a ton of valuable credentials, secrets, and other sensitive data to whoever uploaded the malicious package.
“Teams using 1.107.0 should stop deploying it and investigate environments where Python ran after installation, including proxy containers and CI runners,” Socket researchers said on Wednesday.
The malicious version was uploaded at 11:39 UTC, and according to Wiz kids Benjamin Read and Rami McCarthy, the payload originates with malicious commits made on github.com/Berri-AI/litellm, which is a hyphenated variant of the legitimate BerriAI organization.
Miscreants used this repo to inject the three malicious files into the LiteLLM release pipeline. These, according to Makari, include cook.pth, which causes the second file, cook.py, to run automatically every time Python is invoked on the machine, without any additional user action.
Meanwhile, cook.py contains the infostealer, and the third file, sitecustomize.py, is the RAT. Python also executes the RAT at interpreter startup, and this file spawns a background daemon that polls the attacker's infrastructure every hour for new commands to execute.
Upon executing, the infostealer harvests a ton of sensitive data across 16 modules targeting browsers, cloud providers, and AI services, according to Read and McCarthy.
It steals browser credentials and cookies from Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari, along with AWS credentials from ~/.aws/, environment variables, and EC2/ECS instance metadata (IMDS). It also collects users’ Google Cloud Platform service account keys and application default credentials, along with Microsoft Azure tokens from the CLI cache.
And then it also swipes API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and other LLM providers, plus SSH private keys, GPG keys, and shell history files.
The malware then encrypts all of this stolen data using AES-256-CBC, wraps the encryption key with an RSA-4096 public key, and sends the encrypted data via HTTP POST to an attacker-controlled domain: http://www[.]litellm[.]dev/healthcheck.
BerriAI did not respond to The Register’s inquiries. This is an emerging story, and we will continue to update it as we learn more details.®
Thursday, October 22, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsWednesday, October 21, 2026System EngineerosnewsNo commentsEarly 2025, I wrote about how I think macOS’ UNIX certification was basically a lie. It required so many convoluted and cumbersome changes to macOS that literally nobody applies to their system that it the certification had kind of become a farce. At the end of the article I wondered for how much longer Apple would be playing this little charade to hammer macOS through a meaningless UNIX-shaped hole, and it turns out the answer was “about 18 months”.
When you go to the Open Group’s website and the list of certified UNIX operating systems, macOS is no longer listed. For the past few weeks, it was still listed if you drilled down specifically to the UNIX 03 certification, but that, too, has now been removed. Assuming macOS 27 doesn’t return in the near future with a brand new certification, we can safely say that Apple got tired of paying a few employees to get its desktop operating system certified.
With one more operating system gone from the list, there’s now only one UNIX operating systems left: AIX. While the registry also lists HP-UX, z/OS, and UnixWare/OpenServer, those either only conform to really old UNIX certifications (from the ’90s), or simply aren’t developed anymore (HP sunset HP-UX at the end of last year). Only one operating system version conforms to the latest version of the certification, UNIX 07, and that’s AIX 7.2 TL5 “and later”, which possibly includes AIX 7.3, the most recent version of AIX.
Not that any of this really matters.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsWednesday, October 21, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsWednesday, October 21, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsTuesday, October 20, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsTuesday, October 20, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsTuesday, October 20, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsMonday, October 19, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsMonday, October 19, 2026System EngineerosnewsNo commentsOnly a few day ago I linked to a massive collection of original Palm OS development resources, and today we can take a look at what it was like to put all of those resources into practice: the original source code for the Palm OS port of Lemmings. With these resources combined, there’s no excuse to not building any Palm OS applications. I’d really like a modern email client, a Fediverse client, and a slightly more modern browser surely wouldn’t hurt.
Get on it!
Monday, October 19, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsSunday, October 18, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsSunday, October 18, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsSaturday, October 17, 2026System EngineerosnewsNo commentsThis repository contains approximately 1 GB of historical Palm OS development material, collected over many years of working with the platform.
The archive includes a mixture of publicly distributed development resources, personal development material, technical references, and historical artifacts.
↫ Aaron Ardiri
An incredible resource for anyone wishing to dive into Palm OS programming and development in this day and age.
Saturday, October 17, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsSaturday, October 17, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsSaturday, October 17, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsFriday, October 16, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsFriday, October 16, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsFriday, October 16, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsFriday, October 16, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsThursday, October 15, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsThursday, October 15, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsThursday, October 15, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsWednesday, October 14, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsWednesday, October 14, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsWednesday, October 14, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsTuesday, October 13, 2026System EngineerregisterNo commentsTuesday, October 13, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsTuesday, October 13, 2026System EngineerbleepingcomputerNo commentsMonday, October 12, 2026System EngineerregisterNo comments
