AI Sec Watch

The Pentagon's chief technology officer reported disagreement with AI company Anthropic regarding autonomous warfare (military systems that can make decisions and take actions with minimal human control). The military is working on procedures to allow varying degrees of autonomy based on the level of risk involved in different situations.

Anthropic used Claude Opus 4.6 (a large language model, or LLM, which is an AI trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate language) to find 22 security vulnerabilities in Firefox, including 14 classified as high-severity. The AI model discovered these bugs by scanning nearly 6,000 C++ files in just two weeks, demonstrating that AI can be effective at identifying security flaws in complex software.

The Trump administration released a cybersecurity strategy that emphasizes offensive cyber operations (proactive attacks on adversary networks rather than waiting to respond to attacks), deregulation of industry rules, and AI adoption. The strategy outlines six pillars including disrupting adversaries, reducing regulations, modernizing government networks with zero-trust architecture (a security model that doesn't automatically trust any user or device), and securing critical infrastructure like power grids and hospitals.

WeKnora, an AI database query tool, has a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE, where an attacker can run commands on a system they don't own) vulnerability caused by incomplete validation in its SQL injection protection system. The validation framework fails to check PostgreSQL array expressions and row expressions, allowing attackers to hide dangerous functions inside these expressions and bypass all seven security phases, leading to arbitrary code execution on the database server.

WeKnora has a broken access control vulnerability (a security flaw where the application fails to properly check permissions) that lets any logged-in user from one tenant (a separate customer or organization) read sensitive data from other tenants' databases, including API keys (credentials for accessing external services), model configurations, and private messages. The problem happens because three database tables (messages, embeddings, models) are allowed to be queried but don't have automatic tenant filtering applied to them.

WeKnora has a vulnerability where a malicious MCP server (a remote tool provider that integrates with AI clients) can hijack legitimate tools by exploiting how tool names are generated. An attacker registers a fake tool with the same name as a real one (like `tavily_extract`), which overwrites the legitimate version in the tool registry (the list of available tools). The attacker can then trick the LLM into executing their malicious tool and leak sensitive information like system prompts through prompt injection (hiding instructions in tool outputs that the AI treats as commands).

WeKnora has a broken access control vulnerability (BOLA, or broken object-level authorization, where an attacker can access resources they shouldn't by manipulating object IDs) in its tenant management system that allows any authenticated user to read, modify, or delete any tenant without permission checks. Since anyone can register an account, attackers can exploit this to take over or destroy other organizations' accounts and access their sensitive data like API keys.

Palantir's stock rallied 15% this week after the U.S. attacked Iran, because the company relies on government spending for about 60% of its revenue and works heavily with military and intelligence agencies. Wall Street showed little concern about the U.S. government blacklisting Anthropic (an AI company that had partnered with Palantir on defense projects), as analysts noted there are alternative AI models available and that replacing Anthropic's systems will take time but is manageable.

Flowise incorrectly whitelisted the NVIDIA NIM router (`/api/v1/nvidia-nim/*`) in its authentication middleware, allowing anyone to access sensitive endpoints without logging in. This lets attackers steal NVIDIA API tokens, manipulate Docker containers, and cause denial of service attacks without needing valid credentials.