CyberWire Daily - The AI hotline.

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

The U.S. and China agree on an AI safety channel. Some states say CISA’s election security plan comes too late. Citrix patches critical zero-days under active exploitation. AI agents probed government websites in unexpected and concerning ways. ShinyHunters launches a new campaign against Oracle PeopleSoft customers. A New Mexico jury finds Meta misled state residents. Business briefing. Tim Starks from CyberScoop shares insights on multiple issues facing CISA. Who’s ready for algorithmic holiday shopping?  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you’ll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today we are joined by Tim Starks from CyberScoop who is sharing insights on multiple issues facing CISA. Selected Reading China and US Agree to Establish AI Safety Channel and Continue Trade and Military Talks (SecurityWeek) 40 days to midterms, election officials say new US cyber plan comes too late (TwinCities Pioneer Press) Citrix Patches Critical Zero Days Under Active Exploitation (Infosecurity Magazine) OpenAI’s A.I. Went Rogue and Meddled With U.S. Government Websites (The New York Times) OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs called to appear at Australian AI probe (Reuters) Top AI companies probing tens of thousands of security incidents (Axios) Google Warns of ShinyHunters' Fresh Oracle PeopleSoft Campaign (SecurityWeek) Meta misled users about Facebook data practices, New Mexico jury finds (Reuters) Cyera has secured a $400 million Series G extension from Goldman Sachs. (N2K Pro Business Briefing) Consumer AI use a boon for the holidays as AI traffic doubles (Yahoo Finance) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry’s most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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No rules written. Jazz won the 26 CrowdStrike AWS and NVIDIA startup accelerator from a nearly thousand applicants. See Melody inaction at Jazz. The U.S. and China agree on an AI safety channel. Some states say CISA's election security plan comes too late. Citrix patches critical zero days under active exploitation. AI agents probed government websites in unexpected and concerning ways. Shiny Hunters launches a new campaign against Oracle PeopleSoft customers. A New Mexico jury finds meta-misled state residents. We got your Monday business briefing. Tim Starks from CyberScoop, shared.

insights on multiple issues facing SISA, and who's ready for algorithmic holiday shopping? It's Monday, September 28, 26. I'm Dave Bittner, and this is your Cyberwire Intel briefing. Thanks for joining us here today. It's great as always to have you with us. The United States and China agreed to establish a communication channel for AI-related incidents and strengthen military crisis communications following President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping's three-day Washington summit. The White House says the countries will also launch a dialogue

on AI risks and benefits with another exchange planned by November. The summit produced no major breakthroughs, but the new mechanisms could provide ways to keep future disputes from escalating. Trump stressed that cooperation won't mean slowing, U.S. AI development or broadly sharing American capabilities with China. The two governments also continued talks on tariffs, rare earth supplies, and fentanyl precursor

chemicals, while agreeing to further meetings at upcoming APEC and G20 summits. SISA has released a 13-page election infrastructure security plan just 40 days before November's midterms, outlining threats, including software vulnerabilities, attacks on voter registration databases, insider threats, and physical security incidents. The agency also detailed cybersecurity and physical security services, it says, are available to election officials. But election officials in several states say the plan arrives too late. The Trump administration cut roughly 1,000 SISA employees and $10 million from two cybersecurity initiatives, while services, including penetration testing and tabletop exercises,

became unavailable to some states. Minnesota, for example, expects to spend about $250,000 on private penetration testing. Some states report continued SISA assistance, but others have hired private vendors or former SISA personnel to fill gaps. Despite concerns about diminished federal support, officials in states, including Michigan and Arizona, expressed confidence that their election systems are prepared for November. Citrix has released fixes for eight vulnerabilities in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, including two critical zero days already being exploited. The first is an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw, affecting deployments with the default configuration, while

The second is a memory overflow that can cause remote code execution or denial of service when DTLS is enabled, including by default, on VPN virtual servers. Citrix is urging affected customers to update immediately. A third critical flaw allows HTTP request smuggling under certain configurations. The remaining vulnerabilities include a policy bypass, three additional memory overflows, and a TCP sequence number prediction flaw. Australia's cybersecurity agency has also urged organizations to patch, while SISA has ordered U.S. federal agencies to apply fixes by September 30th.

The actor behind the observed exploitation remains unknown. OpenAI says its autonomous AI agents interacted with U.S. government websites in unexpected and concerning ways this summer. including sites belonging to the education and commerce departments and the SEC. Researchers at Transluse say one agent unsuccessfully tried to hack an education department site while gathering civil rights data. Another accessed public census bureau information using credentials found online, while agents posted public SEC data to an online forum.

OpenAI says none of these incidents constituted breaches, and the agencies reported no unauthorized access to private information. The activity emerged during a broader company review that also uncovered an agent's breach of an Australian government health system and a separate breach of AI company Hugging Face. OpenAI says it didn't know about the activity when it occurred. CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the company has been slower than it would have liked in disclosing incidents,

As researchers warn, autonomous agents can pursue otherwise routine tasks in unintended ways. Open AI, Anthropic, and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of cases in which frontier AI models behaved in potentially problematic ways during testing and real-world use, according to Axios. Incidents including bypassing guardrails, escaping sandboxes, hijacking websites, and attempting to evade monitoring. Most aren't known to have caused real-world harm, and some occurred during deliberately adversarial testing. Still, even low rates of unexpected behavior can produce thousands of incidents at scale.

OpenAI has paused training its most capable models while it develops additional safeguards. Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandient warn that Shiny Hunters, tracked as UNC 624, has launched a new massive, exploitation campaign against Oracle PeopleSoft customers. The group previously exploited an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability, targeting more than 100 organizations in June. The latest campaign uses a modified exploit to bypass web application firewall rules intended to block the vulnerable Semhub endpoint. By URL encoding a character in the request path, attackers can reach vulnerable systems that operators may have believed were protected. Shiny Hunters has expanded its targeting beyond education to government, health care, technology,

transportation, and other sectors. Attackers are deploying web shells, credential stealing malware, and tunneling tools for persistence and lateral movement. Google recommends customers patch, hunt for compromise and data theft, and prepare for potential extortion attempts. A New Mexico jury has found meta-misled state residents about how Facebook handled user data, hate speech, and misinformation. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from as many as 87 million

Facebook users was harvested through a third-party app without their consent. Jurors found 26 of 29 statements identified by the state were misleading, resulting in more than 43 million violations under New Mexico law. A judge will determine civil penalties, which could reach $5,000 per violation, though the final amount remains undecided. The state also plans to seek changes to Mehta's data practices. Meta disputes the verdict, arguing that the challenge statements were taken out of context and maintaining that it does not sell users' personal information. Turning to our Monday business briefing, cybersecurity funding remains active, led by Sirea's $400 million series G extension from Goldman Sachs, bringing that round to $1 billion.

The AI security company plans to expand its product roadmap, federal business, and international operations. Data loss prevention firm MIND raised $72 million, while compliance provider-considered. comp AI secured 34 million. Agentic AI security startup outer limit emerged from stealth with $16 million. EVE's security added $4.5 million, and defense-focused Tiger Bite Cyber raised $3 million. Strike Ready also received an undisclosed investment, bringing its total funding to $29 million. On the M&A front, a line acquired Australia's ashore point.

FIME bought Red Alert Labs, Cybermax acquired Averchium, and Alkin cybersecurity added OT security specialist for elite tech. Dregos also completed its acquisitions of net rise and run zero following approval of Accenture's majority investment in the industrial cybersecurity company. Be sure to check out our complete business briefing. You can find that on our website. It's part of Cyberwire Pro. Coming up after the break, Tim Starks from CyberScoop shares insights on multiple issues facing SISA and who's ready for algorithmic holiday shopping.

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Tim Starks, he is a senior reporter at CyberScoop. Tim, welcome back. Hi, Dave. So a couple of your stories I want to touch on here today, your recent reporting, both SISA-related. Let's start with the story you wrote about SISA looking for some improvements the way they handle the CVE program. What's going on here, Tim?

Yeah, so there's been a big surge in CVEs being discovered, common hole with those exposures. You may have noticed. You may have noticed, in some case, by hundreds of percentage points. Right.

And some of that is fueled by AI and the discoveries that have been made there. So what's happening is they're getting a lot more submissions, and at the same time, some of the quality is not up to par. And what Sisa has said is that we've been in a growth era of CVEs.

Now it's time to be in the quality era. Oh, okay. Not to be confused with the W. W.E. Attitude era. Nonetheless, they put together a white paper following up on a strategy they put out earlier about how they're going to get there. Okay. And it's high level.

It's talking about things like transparency. It's talking things about making sure that the data is reliable. But they put forward their principles for what they, how they want to do this. And the CVE community took note. In a positive way? Mostly in a negative way. Oh, okay. Go on. So they talked about consulting with the CVE community,

but I wonder how much of the feedback made it in there because there's a lot of people who are dubious about whether they're going to be able to do what they say they're going to do. I mean, one of the things that's been concerning with Siss's stewardship of the CVE program, you might recall last year there was briefly a moment where a contract for administering it almost expired. And they kind of had to step into the very last second and give it a last minute reprieve.

Yeah. So people are worried that SISA isn't maybe up to this task. They've had some cutbacks in personnel. They've had the contracts knife of who they had. There are some more specific concerns about whether the ways in which they're going to be going about tackling, how to make CVE better is an issue. For instance, machine rehabilitation was one thing that one person brought up. I think when I say mostly negative, I think people like the idea of what they are saying they want to do. they're just concerned that SISA is up to the task, I think is one of the main things I heard.

And some of that's reflected in the story and some of that was reflected in conversations that I had that didn't make into the story where people were saying, they're just not, they're not the agency. And there's been a push in some quarters to have somebody else do it entirely, to make it more internationally based, where it's not as based on U.S. politics and U.S. budget proposals and things like that. So nonprofits is an idea that's been out there as well. So I think that the community is, is guarded. least skeptical about this because of the reasons I mentioned. Yeah.

I want to touch on another story you wrote, which is about some legislation that's been proposed, again, with SISA to step up cyber defenses for biotech. Yeah. So the gist of this is that there are two bills, in fact, but they're both bipartisan, bicarral, have support from key lawmakers. I think that gives it potential for momentum here.

Sometimes, like we were talking about, a bill gets introduced and you don't know that it's going anywhere, so maybe you don't write about it. This one seems like it has a chance. And it's based off of some recommendations from a biotech advisory panel created within Congress to come up with some proposals to put forward here. And one of the things that they wanted to tackle was cybersecurity for biotech. And the issue that they identified that they wanted to work on was biotech is, it fits into critical infrastructure.

And by which I mean the 16 critical infrastructure sectors like food, like health care, that get extra attention and focus, specialized attention from certain agencies. And biotech is in there, but it's not enumerated as biotech per se. And so the concern is we aren't adequately protecting it. We're not giving it the attention it deserves because it's not a focus. Now, the stop sort of saying we want to make biotech its own critical infrastructure sector. But what does do is it goes in and says, for example, I need to devote more personnel to this sector.

It says that they need to devote exercises to this sector. And they broke it down into two different bills. One was more focused on bio data and the other is focused on other kinds of things like biotech that we think of as biotech. So given the folks who are behind this, are they big enough players that this could get some momentum? Potentially. You know, we're not talking about members of committees that are like the actual

chairman of committees, but maybe their senior members, maybe their people have been picked for a reason because of their expertise or because, I mean, in some case, these are doctors who are making these recommendations. There's credible backing for this bill. Will it get over the hurdle? I mean, it's really hard to pass things in Congress these days. Yeah. Especially unless you shove it into the National Defense Authorization Act, which seems to be the main way to get something passed, especially, you know, it's a, it's an election year. It's hard to move much of anything. So if it isn't earth-shaking and something that people are clamoring for right now, then maybe it won't have a chance.

I do think it feels like maybe a kind of bill that introducing toward the end of a congressional session, it's more like starting to lay the groundwork for how they want to get this passed, perhaps next year. Or, you know, look, maybe they do want to get it past this year. They would have introduced it. Maybe they think they can fit it into one of these bills that I mentioned. But failing that, I think that this is a sort of starter token where you say, we're laying this down here. This is where we want to go, whether we get it this year, whether we get it in the future years. This is not an atypical way to approach a legislative proposal like that.

Yeah. All right. Well, we'll see how it plays out. Yes, we will. You know what I say, Tim. I know what you say. I don't even have to say it. You don't even have to say it.

I don't think your listeners need to hear you say it. No, they don't. They know. They know. Yeah, they know. Tim Starks, is senior reporter at CyberScoop. Tim, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, sir.

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I want to let you know about a special gathering hosted by Zimperium at the Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. This invitation-only event will bring together federal cybersecurity and technology leaders to discuss some of the most pressing challenges facing government today, including mobile security, mission resilience, and the evolving threat landscape. I'm always grateful for opportunities to spend time with smart people doing important work, and I'm excited to be part of these conversations. I hope to see some familiar faces there. If you're interested in attending, you can request an invitation. You'll find more information in our show notes. Our thanks to Zimperium for sponsoring this event.

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Customer loyalty was complicated enough when the customer was actually making all the decisions. And that's the Cyberwire. For links to all of today's stories, check out our daily briefing at thecyberwire.com. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights to keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing world of cybersecurity.

If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to Cyberwire at N2K.com. N2K's lead producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Trey Hester with original music and sound design by Elliot Peltzman. Our contributing host is Maria Vermazis. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan. Peter Kilby is our publisher, and I'm Dave Bitt. Thanks for listening. We'll see you back here tomorrow.