Eternal Black October ⇥ todayintabs.com

Rusty Foster, of the excellent Today in Tabs newsletter you should probably be reading:

Neat! There’s a remote-exploitable kernel memory race condition in the Linux IPv4 TCP code. A bunch of other linux kernel vulnerabilities were accidentally posted to a public mailing list before patches were ready for them. The official Claude Code extension for VS Code on Cursor has been dropping “a persistent SSH backdoor across macOS, Linux, and Windows.” The Department of Homeland Security was hacked. Fanfiction site AO3 was hacked. Polymarket was hacked. Binance was hacked. I’ve been writing for about an hour now so chances are very good that several more things have been hacked that I don’t know about yet.

Any of these would probably have been the worst computer security incident in any average month in the last 25 years. But this is not even a complete list, it’s just a haphazard roundup of what came across my feeds. In fact, if you have any professional contact with tech, you’ll have noticed that I didn’t even mention the worst one yet.

The security incidents listed above — plus the foreshadowed PHP2Shell one — all have different explanations. The Binance theft, for example, appears to have been the fault of a uniquely criminal nation state, while several vulnerabilities have either been found or surfaced and made operational with the use of artificial intelligence tools. Even so, this feels less like a coincidence and more like a preview of the next several years in ebbs and flows.