GitHub ghost accounts and exposed PATs scrape corporate orgs through the API, with select cases cloning private repos.
Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
Microsoft expects more Windows security updates from AI-discovered flaws
Microsoft says Windows users should expect to see an increase in security updates as the company increasingly relies on artificial intelligence to discover vulnerabilities in its codebase.
In a blog post published today, Microsoft said advances in AI have significantly accelerated vulnerability discovery, allowing engineers to identify more security issues before they can be exploited in zero-day attacks.
“The pace of vulnerability discovery is changing with advances in AI making it possible to find more issues, faster, across more code, with new mechanisms that can accelerate both discovery and analysis,” Microsoft said.
OpenMandriva Linux says contributor tried to sabotage the project
The OpenMandriva Linux project announced that it was the target of an attempted act of internal sabotage after a dispute among contributors.
The attempted destructive action extended from wiping GitHub repositories to pushing an empty package that could have damaged users’ systems.
OpenMandriva is an independent, community-run Linux distribution, forked from Mandriva Linux in 2012 and maintained by the OpenMandriva Association.
Plain language AI workflow tool could cut cloud energy use and costs dramatically
Agentic workflows are artificial intelligence-powered software systems that chain together multiple models and external tools to tackle complicated tasks, like analyzing a video and answering questions about it. But the way these highly fragmented systems are designed and deployed often causes inefficiencies that can lead to wasted computation, energy and cost.
To improve efficiency, researchers from MIT and Microsoft developed an intelligent system that streamlines the process of designing agentic workflows and automatically optimizes how those workflows are implemented. With this new method, a developer can describe what they want the agentic workflow to do in plain language, without needing to specify all the details of their application in advance.
The system automatically figures out the best models and tools to use, as well as the ideal hardware configuration and computational resource allocation when the workflow is executed by a cloud provider. It adjusts those configurations on the fly based on each user’s priorities, such as minimizing costs or maximizing speed.
New physics-based machine-learning method speeds search for 2D quantum materials
Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed a new computational approach to help identify two-dimensional materials that may host unusual quantum behavior. The work, published in Science Advances, focuses on materials with “flat bands,” electronic states where electrons have very little kinetic energy. In these materials, interactions between electrons can become much more important, creating conditions linked to phenomena such as magnetism, unconventional superconductivity and topological electronic behavior.
Finding real materials with flat bands from large datasets is difficult. Conventional searches often rely on density functional theory calculations, which can reveal a material’s electronic structure but are time-consuming when applied across thousands of possible candidates.
The Manchester team took a different route. They developed a physics-informed scoring system that captures two signatures of flat-band behavior, low band dispersion and a strong peak in the density of states, then trained a model to estimate that score directly from atomic structure.
NASA’s Lucy finds a wobbling peanut-shaped asteroid with signs of ancient water
A bizarre wobbling asteroid revealed by NASA’s Lucy mission is exposing hidden clues about ancient water, cosmic collisions, and the origins of the solar system. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft discovered that asteroid Donaldjohanson is a wobbling, peanut-shaped relic born from a violent collision and slowly reshaped by the subtle force of sunlight. It also carries traces of ancient water, making it an important clue to the solar system’s mysterious past.
Even relatively small asteroids can have surprisingly eventful histories. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft recently revealed that asteroid Donaldjohanson is a wobbling, peanut-shaped object that has been shaped by collisions, sunlight, and even a brief encounter with liquid water long ago.
The asteroid formed about 155 million years ago when fragments from a violent collision gradually came together. Since then, a subtle but persistent force generated by sunlight has altered its rotation, while traces of ancient water remain preserved in its rocky surface.
Hidden metastases reveal clues to colorectal cancer recurrence
Researchers identified a six-gene signature in microscopic colorectal cancer (CRC) liver metastases that may help predict recurrence after treatment. The findings suggest these tiny, often undetectable tumor deposits could serve as a tissue-based marker of residual cancer cells, recurrence risk and chemotherapy resistance.
Published today in Cancer Cell, the comprehensive spatial analyses of CRC metastases used advanced genomic technologies to uncover insights into how micrometastases evolve, evade the immune system and persist after treatment.
The study was co-led by Dipen Maru, M.D., professor of Anatomical Pathology; Scott Kopetz, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology and associate vice president for Translational Integration; Linghua Wang, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Genomic Medicine, executive director and head of the Center for Cellular Language Intelligence, associate member of the James P. Allison Institute, and focus area co-lead with the Institute for Data Science in Oncology; together with co-first authors Yang Liu, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow of Genomic Medicine, and Akshaya Jadhav, M.D., research scientist in Translational Molecular Pathology.