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Hubble Images of 3I/ATLAS During Its Rare Alignment with the Sun-Earth Axis on January 22, 2026

Good news. The rare cosmic alignment between the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS, the Earth and the Sun, was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on January 22, 2026.

A new set of six 170 second exposures, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 13:10:30 and 13:43:33 UTC on January 22, 2026, were just posted here. The exposures display brightness maps of the glowing halo surrounding 3I/ATLAS. The glow is elongated by about 100,000 kilometers in the direction of the Sun, a length scale which is about ten times larger than the Earth’s diameter.

In a new paper that I published with Mauro Barbieri here, we alerted astronomers to this “full Moon phase” of 3I/ATLAS when observers from Earth will see it from the direction of the Sun to within an extremely small misalignment angle of just 0.012 radians. This rare alignment resulted in a brightness surge whose magnitude and growth rate are dictated by the composition and structure of the particles shed by jets of 3I/ATLAS. No new data other than the Hubble images was made public as of yet.

New ClickFix attacks abuse Windows App-V scripts to push malware

A new malicious campaign mixes the ClickFix method with fake CAPTCHA and a signed Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) script to ultimately deliver the Amatera infostealing malware.

The Microsoft App-V script acts as a living-off-the-land binary that proxies the execution of PowerShell through a trusted Microsoft component to disguise the malicious activity.

Microsoft Application Virtualization is an enterprise Windows feature that allows applications to be packaged and run in isolated virtual environments without being actually installed on the system.

Microsoft patches actively exploited Office zero-day vulnerability

Microsoft has released emergency out-of-band security updates to patch a high-severity Microsoft Office zero-day vulnerability exploited in attacks.

The security feature bypass vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026–21509, affects multiple Office versions, including Microsoft Office 2016, Microsoft Office 2019, Microsoft Office LTSC 2021, Microsoft Office LTSC 2024, and Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise (the company’s cloud-based subscription service).

However, as noted in today’s advisory, security updates for Microsoft Office 2016 and 2019 are not yet available and will be released as soon as possible.

Cloudflare misconfiguration behind recent BGP route leak

Cloudflare has shared more details about a recent 25-minute Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route leak affecting IPv6 traffic, which caused measurable congestion, packet loss, and approximately 12 Gbps of dropped traffic.

The BGP system helps route data across different networks called autonomous systems (AS) that send it to destination through smaller networks on the internet.

The incident was caused by an accidental policy misconfiguration on a router and affected external networks beyond Cloudflare customers.

EU launches investigation into X over Grok-generated sexual images

The European Commission announced today that it has launched formal proceedings under the Digital Services Act to investigate whether X properly assessed risks before deploying its Grok artificial intelligence tool, following its use to generate sexually explicit images.

The commission noted that these potential risks “seem to have materialised,” seeing that the AI-powered tool was used to create “manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material.”

“Sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation,” said EU tech commissioner Henna Virkkunen. “With this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations under the DSA, or whether it treated rights of European citizens — including those of women and children — as collateral damage of its service.”

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