Ilya Lichtenstein

An update on the WorkOS security incident: Shortly after our original bulletin, a security researcher contacted us and claimed responsibility. They told us they were evaluating ARTEX, an autonomous penetration testing framework, when their agent escaped its isolated testing environment and interacted with WorkOS unintentionally. We asked for technical evidence. The researcher provided request details, timestamps, and artifacts from the activity. Our security team and an independent forensic investigator matched that evidence against our logs, establishing with high confidence that this individual was responsible for the unauthorized activity we observed. The researcher has confirmed that all WorkOS data obtained by their agent has been deleted and was not shared with anyone else. Their explanation that the activity was unintended does not change how seriously we take the incident or our responsibility to our customers. Full report: workos.com/security/bulletin…

Security release pre-alert: We will release new versions of Node.js 22, 24, and 26 release lines on or shortly, after 2026-11-11 in order to address security vulnerabilities. The highest severity issue fixed in this release is HIGH. nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerabi…

I want to share some context on a security incident we discovered on October 30. First, the most important thing: WorkOS's production systems are secure. No customer platform data was accessed. This incident was isolated to internal GTM systems. The attack involved ARTEX, an autonomous AI agent framework used to carry out offensive security operations. It's a striking example of how quickly the capabilities of attackers are evolving. We've contained the incident, brought in independent experts to investigate, and are working through the details. Security is something we take extremely seriously, and I believe in being transparent when things go wrong. We'll continue to share updates as we learn more. Full details: workos.com/security/bulletin…

BREAKING: Europe is under a massive widespread cyber attack right now Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Estonia, Ireland the Netherlands and just now Finland are all experiencing disruptions to supermarket refrigeration systems causing food to go off. The attack is spreading...

What a disaster atlasum.net/blog/cve-2026-98…

Our investigators are observing never-seen-before laundering patterns with the stolen funds from the Binance exploit. Thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds. Rather than simply moving funds onward, they repeatedly circulate them among addresses, often sending funds back to addresses involved earlier in the sequence. Read more: chainalysis.com/blog/binance…

Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak. We will share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts are fully verified. The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B. We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far. Binance will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and the company’s funds. User funds are safe. We will also publish an updated Proof of Reserves once the remediation is complete. As an immediate precaution, Binance has: - temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while security checks are completed; - revoked the affected address authorisation; - engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence partners to trace and recover funds. Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this issue safely and thoroughly. We are working closely with our law enforcement partners to confirm the identity of these criminals and bring them to justice. Please rely only on official Binance channels for updates. Please feel free to contact Binance Customer Support if you have any further questions. binance.com/en/support/annou…

We're impacted by an ongoing security incident. If you use our RUM product, please remove the embed code from your website.

Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse. We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures. It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding. A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent. Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it. [Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]

This is insane. We cannot allow AI agents to go into your bank account and act independently without your authorization. But that is what’s happening right now. Left unchecked, AI could endanger the entire global financial system — including your bank account. Pause AI NOW!

as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better. security leaders, never let a crisis go to waste: please go to your boards and ask for help right now. not for ai, for the basics. (we need to hold on for ~18 months.)

The actual prompt for this was "let's look for pre-auth RCEs in PHP". I'm sharing this so people know this stuff is real and to take agent-assisted scanning seriously. I kicked if off using Claude Mythos 5.1 (in stock Claude Code) but it uses a skill to drive a harness we built over the last few months. I don't know if the harness is amazing, but it certainly has a scary track record so far. It's setup to do an agent guided tree search across a codebase, and runs in microvm sandboxes that all have the full source code for the target, as well as the source for any transitive dependencies. When I built the harness I basically just fed Claude a bunch of Project Zero blog posts describing how they did research and had it build a harness that ran like that, but on our tech stack. The first phase is just setup and can run with any model, it just does that fetching and assembles the kit environment, and gets a target up and running alongside the source code. Then we just do some basic suspend/resume stuff over to the hunt phase, where one agent supervises the tree, and the first node kicks off. Each node is context-aware and aware of the work of all the others. I think I ran this with parallelism 4? So 4 running at any one time. The supervisor can shape the tree and boost nodes or prune. Any node can add more below it with targeted instructions. A typical run looks like the first node doing a codebase review or building and running a fuzzer or something, all depending on the target. Then based on whatever it finds, it'll queue 4-5 children that go look into those areas. The main system guidance is to validate everything 3 times in clean VMs, and we typically require full exploit chains/POCs. Here's what this run looked like. We're doing this with a bunch of other open source projects now and companies. We're doing a lot of this for free, even with private companies, across critical infrastructure. We're directly partnered with Anthropic, and can do this even if you don't have direct access to a frontier model yourself.