AI Sec Watch

BBVA, a global bank founded in 1857, is partnering with OpenAI to integrate AI (artificial intelligence) throughout its entire organization as part of its transformation strategy called 'The Eight.' Over 100,000 BBVA employees now use ChatGPT Enterprise to improve customer experiences, help with decision-making, automate operations, and speed up software development across the bank.

OpenAI is acquiring Ona, a company that specializes in secure cloud execution and orchestration (technology for running and managing code in cloud environments safely). This acquisition will allow Codex (OpenAI's AI tool used by 5 million people weekly) to work on longer tasks that span hours or days by running in persistent cloud environments instead of being limited to a single device or session. The integration will let organizations deploy AI agents (autonomous programs that perform tasks) securely within their own cloud infrastructure while maintaining control over security, data access, and activity logging.

OpenAI is supporting the European Commission's Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content to help people understand where online content comes from and whether it was created or edited by AI. The company is implementing provenance standards (technical methods for tracking content origin and history) by adding C2PA metadata (embedded information that travels with images to show their source and creation details) to its DALL-E 3 image tool, combining this with SynthID watermarks (invisible digital markers), and offering a public verification tool at openai.com/verify so people can check if images contain provenance signals.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has updated patching requirements for federal agencies to address AI-related security threats. Agencies must now fix the most critical vulnerabilities (flaws in software that attackers can exploit) within three days, while less severe issues can be addressed later.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a new directive requiring federal agencies to patch critical software vulnerabilities (bugs) in as little as three days, driven by concerns that AI models can now discover and exploit security flaws faster than humans can fix them. The directive uses a prioritization system based on four factors, including whether a vulnerability is publicly exposed and can be automatically exploited, to determine how urgently each bug must be addressed.

Organizations are struggling to patch vulnerabilities fast enough, with only 26% of actively exploited vulnerabilities fully fixed while attackers have reduced their exploitation time to hours or days. CISA issued Binding Operational Directive 26-04, which tells federal agencies to prioritize patching based on four factors (public exposure, known exploitation, automatable attacks, and post-exploitation impact) rather than just severity scores (CVSS, a 0-10 rating of how severe a vulnerability is), recognizing that AI is accelerating both vulnerability discovery and exploitation. Vulnerabilities meeting three or more of these risk factors must be patched within three days, while lower-risk ones can follow longer timelines.

OpenAI and Oracle are partnering to let Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI, Oracle's cloud computing platform) customers use their existing Oracle Cloud Universal Credits (UCM, pre-purchased cloud service allowances) to pay for access to OpenAI's AI models and Codex (a code-generation AI tool). This partnership simplifies how enterprises can adopt advanced AI by letting them use their established purchasing processes and cloud budgets instead of creating separate purchasing agreements.

Insurance companies are responding differently to the growing use of AI in businesses: some are refusing to cover AI-related risks entirely, while others are developing frameworks to manage those risks. The article raises the question of which AI risks companies can actually handle and control.

A vulnerability in Claude Code Action allowed attackers to run arbitrary code on GitHub Actions runners and steal secrets by creating a pull request with a malicious `.mcp.json` file (a configuration file that tells the system which external tools to enable). The problem occurred because the action automatically checked out the attacker's code, read the malicious configuration file, and unconditionally enabled all project MCP servers (integrations with external tools) without validation.