Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: When Dependency Cooldowns and CVE Policies Deadlock the Build

On a recent call, a security lead walked us through two rules his team enforces on every build. Both are sensible. Together, they left his developers with a red pipeline and no version of a library they were allowed to use. The first rule is a cooldown. A new open source release cannot enter the build until it has been public for a set number of days. The second rule blocks any library version with a known high or critical vulnerability.

AI found the flaws. You don't need 1,000 contractors to fix them.

On October 14, 2026, Bank of America's CEO said the bank brought in 1,000 contractors to patch software flaws surfaced by frontier AI models, including Anthropic's Mythos. "We put on 1,000 contractors to help us do the patching work in the second quarter," Brian Moynihan told CNBC. Those contractors work on top of the 3,000 people the bank already has in that area (ITPro, The Next Web). That is what the new normal looks like.

Lost in Translation: A Native Heap Overflow in Unmaintained Jansi (CVE-2026-8484)

Jansi is the small Java package that makes colored console output work everywhere, including the Windows terminals that never understood ANSI escape codes. You may not have heard of it, but if you build Java, you almost certainly have it on disk: the Apache Maven 3.9.16 distribution puts jansi-2.4.3.jar in its lib/ directory, and Maven's pom.xml declares it as a dependency.

No Fixed Address: Log4Shell-Style JNDI Injection in Apache Axis 1.x

Apache Axis 1.x is a SOAP engine whose last release came out in 2006. Twenty years later deps.dev counts 384 packages that still depend on 1.4, 83 of them directly, and that single version carries five published advisories. The worst of them turns the client-side service factory into a remote code execution primitive (tracked as CVE-2023-40743, NVD CVSS 9.8, critical).

The risk of using abandoned packages in the age of LLMs

This post is an unfortunate affirmation of our prior research into abandoned open-source packages, where we found that 11% of the most-downloaded packages have been abandoned and not actively maintained, becoming invisible vulnerabilities to your scanner. Today we share a zip-slip vulnerability we found in extract-zip (CVE-2026-19693), an npm package with over 20 million weekly downloads.

The 2026 Buyer's Guide to Open Source Vulnerability Remediation

How to evaluate your options, price the status quo, and make a decision your executive team will actually approve. A note on the numbers. The salaries, headcounts, and costs in this guide are illustrative. They're drawn to be realistic so the math works the way it does in a real budget meeting - but they're examples, not benchmarks. Replace them with your own.

Bad Things Also Come in Small Packages: A 38-byte DoS in fflate (CVE-2026-45820)

We discovered this new vulnerability as part of our abandoned-packages research. Despite what seems like a 2-year hiatus, fflate is one of the few popular npm packages that released a fix for the vulnerabilities we found merely using Sonnet-4.6, giving its 50M+ users a chance to upgrade to a safe version.

Don't trust your eyes - ANSI escape injection in the skills CLI by vercel-labs

In a previous post we looked at the skills CLI by vercel-labs/skills and ways for a malicious skill to overwrite an existing trusted skill by using homoglyph names or abusing weird CLI behaviors. This post will delve into an OSC-8 escape injection we found in the skills add command, which lets a skill author write arbitrary text to the console and clickable links as if it's part of the CLI's output.

Brace Yourself: Denial-of-Service in a Billion-Download Dependency

brace-expansion is a very popular npm package with over 38 billion all-time downloads (yeah, over 38,000,000,000) and used by tooling almost every JavaScript project relies on - eslint, glob, and npm itself. Despite being in the public eye for a while, we found a new Denial-of-Service vulnerability that could affect millions. This post walks through what the package does, existing issues that were fixed, and the new one we found - CVE-2026-13149.

Looks Can Be Deceiving: Silent Overwrite of Agent Skills

Agent skills are the newest piece of plumbing quietly making its way onto developer machines. They're easy to install, they get to call into the user's tools on the agent's behalf, and once they're in place they tend to stay in place. While auditing the popular installer vercel-labs/skills, we saw several ways a bad actor can make the tool install something other than what the user thought they were installing.