News and Tech Update

There is a ritual I’ve watched play out in more incident retros than I can count. Someone pulls up the architecture diagram — the one in Confluence, the one that hasn’t been touched since the last audit — and starts tracing boxes. Load balancer. VPC. RDS instance. EKS cluster. Everyone nods because the diagram is comforting. It’s also increasingly a lie of omission. It doesn’t show the GitHub Action that has write access to three cloud accounts. It doesn’t show the OIDC federation between your CI runner and your production IAM role. It doesn’t show the third-party SaaS chatbot holding a long-lived OAuth token that your sales team connected to Salesforce 18 months ago and forgot about. It doesn’t show any of the things that actually decide whether an attacker gets from “found a bug in a support ticket” to “exfiltrated your customer database.” That’s because the diagram was never wrong, exactly. It was just answering a question nobody asks anymore. Modern systems don’t fail — or get br...

Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.129, and the headline change isn’t a new feature so much as a new foundation. The update introduces the agent host, a dedicated process that runs AI coding agents like Copilot, Claude, and Codex outside the editor itself, using a new open protocol called the Agent Host Protocol (AHP). That distinction matters more than it sounds. Until now, agent sessions in VS Code lived inside the extension host, tied to the lifecycle of a single window. Close the window, and the session’s context went with it. The Agent Host Protocol is an open, agent-agnostic protocol between a host and its clients that uses JSON-RPC for communication and immutable state with pure reducers for synchronized session data. In practice, that means an agent session becomes something closer to a resource on a server than a temporary artifact of one editor window. The host owns agent sessions independently of the clients that display and control them, which gives VS...

AI coding assistants have become an essential part of developers’ work, automating many of the repetitive tasks – think boilerplate coding and scaffolding – that in the past ate up a lot of their time. More jobs can now get done faster. That said, such agents also represent a significant security risk, making developers – who were already targets of cybercriminals – even more attractive. In recent weeks, cybersecurity researchers have reported on such threats as “ HalluSquatting ” and “ GhostApproval ,” which target developers and their AI tools. That’s in part because the adoption of AI coding agents is outpacing the development of security tools to protect them. Cyberhaven Lab researchers noted in May that adoption of AI coding agents was growing faster than the use of any other AI tool, jumping 357% between February 2025 and this year. They also are the highest-risk category. “When a developer pastes a code block into a coding assistant, or when an agentic coding tool browses a ...

A developer pulls a package from a reliable repo. It is signed, has provenance, and has been scanned. And then…it contains malware. That is no longer hypothetical. When the Miasma worm tore through the @redhat-cloud-services npm namespace in June, its malicious releases carried real SLSA provenance, because they were built in Red Hat’s own GitHub Actions workflows and published with legitimate OIDC tokens minted for those runs. To a registry scanner, the poisoned versions were indistinguishable from a routine update. The closest analogy is a deepfake. On a video call, a synthetic face can pass at first glance, and you only catch it when something underneath gives it away. Software supply chain attacks have reached the same point, with one difference that makes them worse: A deepfake at least gives you something to catch. Miasma’s packages offered nothing at the level scanners look. The provenance was genuine; every signal a scanner checked was real, just worn by the wrong ...

When a certificate expires, it can take down a production system, and teams usually only find out after something goes wrong. These issues are hard to catch because they rarely trigger alerts. Expired certificates often remain unnoticed in a config file or an old key until they cause trouble. Enterprise apps are no longer single, self-contained programs. Today, a typical app includes many services, APIs, mobile clients, and new cloud workloads are added all the time. Instead of asking, “Are we secure enough?” it is better to ask whether security was built in from the beginning or added later. Most teams still add it later, which often ends up costing more. According to IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data breach is $4.45 million, and credential and identity failures are a common cause.​ The Cryptographic Foundation Most Teams Overlook Much of this depends on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but many teams do not fully understan...

Harness today extended the reach of its core continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform to enable DevOps teams to build and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) agents. At the core of that capability are five additions to the Harness portfolio, including an AI Asset Catalog that automatically discovers every agent, skill, and plugin that exists within repositories and, just as importantly, who within the organization owns them. There is also a Harness AI Evals tool that measures the quality of an AI agent by creating gates that automatically catch regressions whenever an agent or model changes. Additionally, an Agent Deployments offering extends the canary releases, approvals, and Open Policy Agent (OPA) guardrails that Harness already applies to Kubernetes deployments to managed agent runtimes like Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Google’s Agent Runtime. AI Configs, meanwhile, provides access to a feature management tool to manage prompts and model changes at runtime. ...