networks

Attackers turned admin access into a route downstream, while N-able tells N-central customers to patch – again

N-able has confirmed attackers exploiting an N-central zero-day made it into customer networks, as the vendor pushes out a second mandatory hotfix just days after the first.

The security shop published an update on Thursday detailing what happened after attackers exploited CVE-2026-18577, the critical N-central flaw that can hand an unauthenticated attacker administrative access to the remote monitoring and management platform.

According to N-able, attackers exploited vulnerable N-central servers remotely, then used the platform’s Take Control feature to connect to systems inside the environments being managed through them.

Once there, they registered a new Cloudflare Tunnel service to keep their foothold even after being booted from the N-central server – behavior that Huntress had already observed in the wild.

N-able has now confirmed that its own investigation found the same activity, and says a “limited number” of customers were affected. It hasn’t said how many customers that means, how many downstream systems attackers reached, or what they did once they had established persistent access. 

N-Able didn’t answer these questions when asked by The Register, instead providing a statement saying it is “proactively expanding protections in response to ongoing monitoring of threat actors as they evolve their attack techniques.”

The firm’s limited disclosure comes alongside Hotfix 2, version 2026.3.1.10, which N-able says customers running N-central on-premises must install immediately – including those that already installed the first emergency fix released on August 2.

“This is not a duplicate of our previous communication,” N-able warned. “Hotfix 2 is required, even if you already applied the earlier hotfix.”

The company says the new update supersedes Hotfix 1 and adds further hardening measures as it monitors threat actors and watches them “evolve their attack techniques.”

Exactly what prompted the second round of defenses isn’t clear. N-able hasn’t said whether attackers found a way around Hotfix 1, and its latest description says the exploited vulnerability affected N-central servers running versions prior to 2026.3.1.7, the first hotfix. Hosted N-central environments have already received the latest mitigations, according to the vendor.

N-able first became aware of the attacks on July 31, after its Adlumin managed detection and response service picked up suspicious activity at a customer. Further digging uncovered a zero-day being actively exploited against an N-central server.

CVE-2026-18577 was subsequently disclosed, and the first hotfix was released on August 2. CISA added the bug to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and gave US federal agencies until August 6 to fix it – an unusually short three-day deadline reserved for vulnerabilities the agency considers an urgent risk.

N-central is particularly attractive territory for attackers because managed service providers use the software to administer large numbers of customer systems from one place. Compromising the management platform can therefore provide a route into machines belonging to the MSP’s customers rather than leaving attackers stuck on the original server.

Huntress previously described successful exploitation as giving an attacker the same level of N-central access normally reserved for trusted network operations and engineering staff. Its investigation found attackers using that access to launch remote-control sessions against managed endpoints.

N-able has now published 10 IP addresses it says were used in the attacks and released a service template that customers can use to hunt for known indicators of compromise on Windows endpoints.

The company is warning customers not to take a clean scan as an all-clear, however, saying the tool only checks for indicators identified so far and that more may emerge as its investigation continues.

For anyone running N-central on-premises, the immediate instruction is pretty straightforward: install Hotfix 2, even if Hotfix 1 is already in place. ®

I mean, they’ve been around forever.

SSDs are faster than flash drives, durable and ludicrously capacious

Max Miller for Engadget

The rising cost of SSDs makes flash drives a more practical choice

Max Miller for Engadget

For a while now we’ve been mocking the Trump White House’s plans for an “AI framework” that would have the frontier AI labs hand over their top models for an initial review. After all, this was more or less the exact same plan that the Biden admin worked out in 2023, but it was done in a thoughtful and careful manner. And it caused a bunch of the VC bros in Silicon Valley to come out in support of fascism, while claiming it was a necessary defense against Biden’s attack on supposedly open innovation. Of course, all of that was bullshit, and that’s made even more clear by every step the Trump White House has taken to reinvent a similar “voluntary” AI review plan, but dumber.

Indeed, Trump’s AI framework is so dumb… that they’re keeping it a secret.

The White House does not plan to publicly release its new framework for evaluating advanced AI models, three sources familiar with the discussions told Axios.

Ah, transparency at work. It’s also wreaking havoc on the rest of the AI ecosystem that wasn’t invited to the White House to get the details.

The Trump administration invited staffers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and other leading AI companies to the White House on Tuesday to share an overview of its new AI oversight framework, the people said. AI developers will have the ability to voluntarily submit new models to the federal government up to 30 days ahead of their public release. The White House will then vet their cyber capabilities according to a classified benchmarking system and share the AI models with federal agencies and trusted corporate partners.

The White House isn’t sharing more information about its testing criteria or which AI models will be covered by the framework, though open models will reportedly be excluded, according to Axios. That has left smaller AI startups, safety advocates, and third-party researchers in the dark about crucial aspects of how the federal government is addressing the cyber risks posed by advanced AI systems. Some argue that the secretive process will give an advantage to larger companies.

Advertisement

Considering that the likes of Andreessen Horowitz (investors in OpenAI) claimed they had to support Donald Trump over Joe Biden because they would support anyone who agreed with their “little tech agenda,” I’m curious how they can possibly square that with the fact that this new framework is significantly worse than the Biden framework, specifically for the “little tech” companies that a16z has used as a shield to defend their support for authoritarian politics?

Of course, the other reason why the White House is probably keeping the framework a secret is because it would show how incompetent they are. All the reporting so far suggests the entire process has been a clusterfuck, which is much more about which companies get to set up which regulatory moats to protect their own business models, rather than what’s best for either innovation or the American public.

At Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and Meta, executives grew increasingly concerned that Anthropic and OpenAI would win over the White House with their arguments for tighter restrictions, according to two of the people. That would potentially cement the A.I. start-ups’ positions as market leaders,

Other A.I. labs were at risk of falling permanently behind, the people added. And because several of the companies make their own open-source models or supply hardware to businesses that use open-source technology, they worried the restrictions could harm them.

Over private texts, phone calls and video conferences, executives quietly built an argument that open-source models were good for the world and for American innovation, according to three of the people familiar with the talks.

Advertisement

But, of course, that’s just the way things work when you have a White House that makes decisions entirely based on transactional motives, rather than anything involving principles.

As we discussed last week, so much of this is all about whose vision of the AI world wins out — whether a handful of giant companies get to lock in the regulatory moat they’ve built for themselves, or an actually competitive market lets people make their own decisions and keep control over their own experiences. Maybe that’s the real reason nobody’s allowed to see the rulebook: because it would reveal who the administration agreed to let write the rules.

Filed Under: ai, ai framework, competition, donald trump, joe biden, open weights, voluntary testing

Companies: a16z, anthropic, google, nvidia, openai

A New Mexico court has ordered Meta to pay $567 million for failing to warn the public about the dangers its social media platforms posed to children. The judgment is in addition to the $375 million the Instagram and Facebook parent company was ordered to pay in March as part of the trial’s first phase.

In a ruling late Thursday, Judge Bryan Biedcheid wrote that New Mexico teens are in the midst of a mental health crisis and found that “Meta’s platforms are a significant contributing cause to the crisis.” The $567 million will fund awareness and prevention, screening and assessment, and referral programs, with the bulk — $420 million — going to treatment.

Biedscheid’s ruling called Facebook’s platforms a “public nuisance” and compared Meta to a factory, with advertising and other content displayed on the platforms as its product and “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated.”

The court ordered Meta to implement private-by-default settings for its users under 18 and to limit their Friends to users who are also under 18. Accounts belonging to under-18s shall not show up in search or appear in recommendations, according to the order.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said Thursday’s verdict is a victory for parents worried about the effects social media is having on their children.

“This case has always been about protecting children, standing up for families, and making sure that one of the world’s largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence,” Torrez said in a statement.

Meta said in a statement that it disagreed with the ruling and would appeal it.

“We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”

This isn’t the only legal scrutiny Meta has faced over how it handles underage users on its platform. In March, a California jury found both Instagram owner Meta and Google’s parent company Alphabet liable in a lawsuit brought by a 20-year-old woman who alleged that YouTube and Instagram were designed to be addictive to children.

Social media platforms have introduced specific settings and tools for their youngest users, such as Instagram’s teen accounts, but many of these were launched relatively recently, in just the past few years.

Steven Musil

Night Editor / News

Steven Musil is a senior news editor at CNET News. He’s been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late ’70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers and had a brief stint at MacWeek.

See full bio

Advertisement

security

Timer interrupts reopen branch predictor poisoning window, with a working Zen 2 exploit to prove it

Two MIT researchers will present a new speculative execution attack at DEF CON 34 that uses precisely timed interrupts to bypass defenses against Spectre v2.

Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) shared their paper [PDF] with The Register ahead of publication. Their attack targets mitigations designed to neutralize potentially hostile branch predictor states before sensitive code runs.

Such neutralization is an important defense against Spectre-style attacks. Depending on the mitigation, the processor or operating system isolates, clears, or safely retrains relevant predictor state when entering privileged code or shortly before a protected branch executes.

Different chipmakers deploy neutralization mitigations slightly differently. Intel’s eIBRS sanitizes branch predictors upon context switch, while AMD’s Safe RET, introduced after the Inception attack Trujillo co-authored in 2023, focuses on the point immediately before a protected branch is executed. Trujillo and Yan refer to these as entry neutralization and in-place neutralization respectively.

Crucially, the two classes share the same underlying assumption that attackers cannot alter branch predictor states within what’s known as a “post-neutralization window” – the period between state neutralization and the branch predictor being used.

The defense here relies on the assumption that everything between the point of neutralization and the usage by a victim branch is safe. Trujillo and Yan’s attack shows how attackers can re-poison the branch predictor during the post-neutralization window.

The researchers call the new class of attack TONTOU, for Time-of-Neutralization to Time-of-Use. They demonstrated that an attacker can exploit the post-neutralization window to re-poison branch predictor state on recent AMD and Intel processors.

To do this, they developed an attack primitive called “interrupt injection.” An unprivileged program schedules high-frequency timer interrupts in the hope that one will land during the often tiny post-neutralization window.

Being able to trigger interrupts during the post-neutralization window allows attackers to divert control flow so that an interrupt handler executes after the sanitization phase and before the victim branch is used. 

The interrupt handler can then re-poison predictor structures such as the return stack buffer (RSB) or branch history buffer (BHB), causing a protected branch to speculatively jump to a disclosure gadget that leaks kernel data through a side channel.

Practical attacks

The researchers said that their tests showed the TONTOU attacks worked on both Intel and AMD-based Linux systems.

They tested TONTOU on Intel Cascade Lake Refresh and Arrow Lake processors and AMD Zen 2 and Zen 4 chips. The researchers built a complete end-to-end exploit only for Zen 2, largely because the Intel attack requires specific software conditions.

Speculative side-channel attacks remain difficult to pull off, and you’re more likely to fall victim to ransomware than Spectre in the real world.

Another serious caveat is that each end-to-end attempt took about 18 minutes, and you can see a sped-up version via the video Trujillo posted to YouTube.

Trujillo and Yan identified the exact point at which they needed to inject their interruptions to poison the RSB, and through a series of attacks broke Linux’s kernel address space layout randomization (KASLR), which allowed them to locate specific secrets such as etc/shadow, which contains the root password hash.

Across ten total runs, the researchers were able to break KASLR every time, although they were only able to successfully locate and leak the contents of etc/shadow in five of these.

“It’s definitely not a simple attack, but we show that it’s practical with our end-to-end exploit on AMD Zen 2,” Trujillo told The Register. 

“Our demonstration does not assume anything special from the system: we use a stock Linux kernel version, no inserted modules, and all default mitigations. Any time you’d execute unprivileged code with timer availability on a system while sharing the kernel with a victim, this attack would be an issue.

“For example, multi-tenant container platforms would fall in this category, allowing ordinary user space programs to leak memory from the shared kernel.”

The researchers hope that their work will inspire further investigations into interrupt injections and TONTOU attacks, and to help develop more robust mitigations against Spectre-style exploits.

They engaged Intel, Arm, and AMD after gathering their results, but only the latter committed to address the issue via kernel patches.

Intel told the pair that it won’t be working up any other mitigations since real-world exploits are subject to too many factors, such as the availability of disclosure gadgets, although it awarded a prize from its bug bounty program in the hundreds of dollars.

Arm said TONTOU’s interrupt injections fall under “passive leakage,” which it does not “actively protect against.” ®

from the here-goes dept

When Erica Schwartz was first nominated for Director of the CDC, you could almost hear both a gasp of surprise and a collective sigh of relief from healthcare providers throughout the country. Schwartz is well qualified for the role, after all, and many took her nomination as a sign that the White House was attempting to rein in RFK Jr. Then came Schwartz’s confirmation hearings. While there was some good in Schwartz’s performance during those hearings, there was a lot of bad. The kind of bad that suddenly has a whole bunch of people who were previously sighing in relief suddenly nervous, and even pulling their endorsements. The biggest issue was Schwartz not affirming that she would refuse Kennedy’s influence and desires in favor of good science.

Well, Schwartz is now the confirmed Director of the CDC, so it seems what she did to ruin her reputation with a whole lot of people didn’t matter in the end.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Schwartz’s testimony came when senators repeatedly asked her what she would do if (or when) she’s put in the same position as Monarez. Schwartz responded as if it hadn’t happened and would never happen. “I do not believe that the president or the secretary would ever do what you just mentioned,” she told Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at one point, prompting him to reply: “Really?”

While senators expressed their disappointment with her responses, health experts dropped their endorsements.

And if you want to get really, really pissed off, allow me to tell you how Bill Cassidy was a key and potentially deciding vote when it came to Schwartz’s confirmation. Cassidy has the ear of other reasonable GOP senators in these hearings and in Senate generally when it comes to health-related concerns. And it may start to sound familiar when I tell you that Cassidy first indicated he was very troubled by Schwartz’s response in her confirmation hearings, but had been assured privately afterwards that his concerns were unfounded.

Critical to Schwartz’s confirmation was support from self-proclaimed vaccine advocate Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who also cast a critical vote to confirm Kennedy as health secretary. While Cassidy called Schwartz’s performance in the confirmation hearing “disappointing,” he later said he had been reassured. He said he had spoken with her more after the hearing as well as with her former colleagues. “I’m confident that she knows what she is doing,” he said, according to Stat News.

If I dialed the clock back to 2025 and replaced Schwartz’s name with Kennedy’s, it’d be the exact same story.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that Schwartz’s qualifications rule the day and she can resist Kennedy’s nonsense and make good, scientifically sound decisions and hires. But so long as Kennedy is at the helm, I have my doubts.

Filed Under: bernie sanders, bill cassidy, cdc, erica schwartz, health & human services, rfk jr.

IT Search’s David Shanahan explores how modern technologies are impacting the age-old recruitment process.

Artificial intelligence has impacted almost every job known to man. Not just in how the work is engaged with and carried out, but even in how roles are discovered and applied for in the first place. And it isn’t just employees using AI shortcuts, employers too are frequently turning to advanced tech to ease a heavy workload. 

“AI is now being used across every stage of the recruitment process”, explained David Shanahan, a director at Irish recruitment agency IT Search, which is a member of the Vertical Markets Group.

He said, “Candidates are using it to tailor CVs, create cover letters, prepare for interviews and process job applications at scale. Employers are using AI to write job descriptions, support sourcing outreach and screen and rank applications.”

Shanahan finds currently he is hearing more negatives than positives about the use of AI in the recruitment process, from clients and candidates, but it is important to remember that “AI is simply a tool”.

He said, “When used correctly, it can improve productivity, reduce administration and help both candidates and employers. Used poorly, it can create more noise, more applications and make it harder to assess genuine capability. The issue is not the technology itself but how it is used.”

Noting AI’s value in research, for summarising information, administrative tasks and data analysis, for Shanahan, the goal should be ensuring AI supports decision-making rather than replacing it. This is possible when employers establish clear guidelines around acceptable use, maintain human oversight and review outputs for accuracy and bias.

He said, “Transparency is essential. If employers are using AI for candidate screening, assessments or interview tools, candidates should be informed. Equally, candidates should feel comfortable raising concerns if they believe AI is having a negative impact on the process. 

“Clear expectations create trust and help ensure everyone understands how decisions are being made.”

A true test

As with any technology that moves from experimentation to mass implementation and popularity, there are going to be right and wrong ways of engaging. For Shanahan, the issue is not solely the use of AI by candidates during the application process.

Rather it is when AI masks a candidate’s true level of knowledge, judgement or experience. 

He explained, “There is nothing necessarily wrong with candidates using AI, the issue is when it ends up misrepresenting their experience. Employers should focus less on whether AI was used and more on how candidates approach problem solving, judgment and how this experience can be used in real-world environments.”

He has also noticed the increased use of AI tools by applicants in live interviews, which for hiring managers is becoming more and more frustrating. Products such as  Cluely, LockedIn AI and InterviewCoder can analyse questions in real time and provide responses during the interview, however, he is of the opinion that face to face interviews will always be preferable.

He added, “Rather than attempting to eliminate AI altogether, consider introducing a clear AI transparency policy that details whether AI is permitted during assessments, whether AI can be used for interview preparation, whether AI assistance during live interviews is prohibited and how authenticity and individual capability will be assessed.

For an employer or recruiter, one of the simplest measures would be to move away from questions based on a single ‘correct’ answer and instead focus on areas that require real judgement and critical thinking.  

“Rather than relying solely on question-and-answer interviews, ask candidates to solve problems in real time. People who genuinely understand a subject can explain their thinking, adapt when new information is introduced and justify their decisions. 

Concerned employers can also ask candidates to share their entire desktop rather than a single application or browser window, as many AI interview products are browser extensions, overlays or separate desktop applications.

Ultimately, it is often about finding a balance between embracing new technologies and respecting the processes and people that are already in place.

Shanahan said, “The real objective is to design hiring processes that consistently reveal a person’s genuine capability, regardless of whether AI is used. Recruitment is ultimately about people, judgement and relationships. The organisations that gain the greatest advantage from AI will be those that successfully combine technology with human insight.”

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

If your wireless charger is slow, the problem might be your case.

Avoid cases that don’t play nice with wireless power

Max Miller for Engadget

Pick an induction-friendly case

Max Miller for Engadget