DOSSIER 002 · FIELD NOTES
Written by J. Middler · Newest first
Blog
A former pentester, an AI pentest suite and 8.2 million stolen records
South Korean police have arrested seven people over breaches at more than 90 organisations, and say the leader used the ARTEX AI pentest framework in most of the attacks. Here's what's been reported and what I'd fix first.
Token spraying: what Huntress saw in a Microsoft 365 campaign
Huntress tracked attackers replaying stolen Microsoft 365 sign-in tokens to compromise 97 accounts at 79 organisations. Here's what they did after getting in and what I'd check in your own tenant.
tstack: Theo's agent skills for Claude Code and Codex
Theo has published the agent skills he uses every day as an MIT-licensed repo. Here's what's in it and why I think the PR-focused ones are worth a look.
What Google Cloud's London outage says about multi-zone plans
A power fault in one europe-west2 zone on 20 October knocked out Google Cloud services across the London region for just over six hours, and took Revolut down with it. Here's what Google's preliminary report says and what I'd take from it.
OpenAI's training sandbox escape and what it says about isolation
A model in training used a DNS resolver misconfiguration to reach the live internet. OpenAI paused frontier training, had its own agents red-team the containment, and resumed on 1 October.
What I starred on GitHub this week
Six repos I starred this week: agent harnesses, an agent protocol, an ICS honeypot and a 1 GB Palm OS archive.
A record week for CVEs, and what the numbers don't tell you
5,460 CVEs were published in the week of 12 to 18 October 2026, a new weekly record and about 70% up on the week before.
Epic v Apple: what the Federal Court's orders mean for iPhones in Australia
Justice Beach has made the relief orders in Epic v Apple. From 1 March 2027 Apple has to allow other app stores, direct downloads and other payment methods for Australian users, and Fortnite can come back now.
The PHP RCE fixes are out. Patch internet-facing PHP now
PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 fix CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. Updating is the only complete fix.
What ASD's AI considerations within the Essentials mean for teams running agents
ASD's new guide applies the ASD Essentials series to AI. It treats AI as an asset, accepts that prompt injection cannot be completely prevented, and puts the weight on identity, least privilege, approval and logging for agents.
AI agents are working through online shops, Australian ones included
NorForge found 20+ exposed Cairn panels, including one crew running over 1,100 agent attacks against e-commerce sites.
Cua Bots for macOS and where the security boundary really sits
Cua's macOS bots sample gives each computer-use agent its own Space, memory, routines and approval rules. Its README is unusually clear that those rules are instructions, not enforcement, which is the right way to think about desktop agents.
Two critical PHP RCE bugs land overnight. Plan your patch window now
PHP ships emergency fixes for CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 at 14:00 UTC on 21 October, after details leaked early.
What I'd steal from how the Claude Code team does code review
Claude writes about 90% of Claude Code, so the team rebuilt code review around human time. The three-round cap on agent review loops is the rule I'd copy first, along with risk tiers set by the change and approvals that cover one commit.
LayerFS, a versioned filesystem for AI agents
LayerFS gives every agent its own writable fork of a project without copying files, and records each tool call as a commit you can trace back to the agent. 1.0 is planned for 21 October, so for now it's a developer preview.
The NIST P-256 seed was lrand48 and a 1997 timestamp
Anthropic says Claude worked out where the NSA-supplied NIST curve seeds came from. They weren't hashes of a secret phrase but output from the C library's lrand48, seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997 and 1998. It's not a break, and there's nothing to patch.
Conpot 1.0 and cheap OT visibility for Australian critical infrastructure
Conpot, the open source ICS/SCADA honeypot, shipped 1.0.0 after eight years on 0.6.0. Here's what it emulates now and how I'd use it as a low-cost detection aid for OT and SOCI-regulated teams.
10 coolest examples of what to build for the Duo
Ten clever apps and experiments builders have shared for Apple's foldable iPhone Duo, and what they get right about the hinge.
Duo Sketch, a two-dial drawing toy for the iPhone Duo
I built an open source two-dial drawing toy where folding the iPhone Duo shut and opening it again shakes the drawing clean.
Fold Fortune, a fortune toy that answers when you open the iPhone Duo
I built an open source fortune toy for the iPhone Duo where you ask on the outer screen and the answer unfolds when you open the phone.
What hermes-cyber-au could change for Australian cyber teams
hermes-cyber-au is now code on main, an open source Hermes Agent distribution that gives every Australian security team the same starting point on threat intel, information sharing, ASD guidance and reporting.
Hingeling, a pixel-art pocket pet that lives in the iPhone Duo's fold
I'm building Hingeling, an open source pocket pet for the iPhone Duo that naps when you close the phone and puts on a show when you half fold it.
Proa renders HTML for people and Markdown for agents from one Rust component
A look at Proa, an Apache 2.0 Rust web framework from Proa Labs with typed components, streaming SSR, small JavaScript islands and a Markdown render target.
Cloudflare's Void gives vibe-coded apps somewhere to live
Cloudflare has open-sourced Void, a self-hosted platform for staff-built apps, and it fixes where those apps run but not what they do.
The four god-tier coding agent orchestrators
A closer look at bb, Cloudroom, Paseo and Tern, the four tools at the top of zqkrq's orchestrator tier list.
Bower: only the security events you meant to send, with Australian PII removed first
A self-hosted gateway that picks approved security events from custom apps, strips Australian identifiers and secrets on the host, and proves they arrived in Microsoft Sentinel.
Community CTI, threat intelligence for organisations without a security team
An early-stage platform that watches public threat sources for an organisation's domains and explains what it finds in plain English.
crownguard: find your crown jewels and explain the risk to leadership
A guided self-assessment for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and AWS that runs entirely in your browser and produces a branded PDF report.
Currawong: planning a memory-safe email gateway for Australian organisations
An open-source email security gateway in Rust that will sit in front of Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or Exchange and keep mail data in Australia. It's a skeleton for now.
Junction: one Rust binary for Microsoft's public APIs
Junction turns Microsoft's published API specs into a single versioned operation registry you can search, check and call from a CLI, a TUI or an MCP server.
Kestrel: infrastructure monitoring in Rust, with mTLS from the start
A small agent and a single server that aim to replace Zabbix and Nagios with something quick to install and safe to put on the internet.
Snapper: a cross-platform screenshot tool in Rust
A free screenshot and annotation app for Windows, macOS and Linux that keeps Greenshot's simplicity, adds ShareX's power features and can redact secrets before an image leaves your machine.
ThreatSieve: threat intel that shows its working
A Cloudflare-hosted intelligence pipeline and analyst workspace that only gives a verdict when the evidence backs it.