AI Sec Watch

This is an erratum (correction notice) for an academic survey paper about adversarial machine learning in IoT security (the practice of deliberately fooling AI systems used to protect internet-connected devices). The notice appears in ACM Computing Surveys journal, Volume 58, Issue 10, published in July 2026.

OpenAI has acquired TBPN, a media platform that covers AI news and hosts conversations with influential figures in tech and business. The acquisition aims to help OpenAI communicate more effectively about AI's impact on society while keeping TBPN's editorial independence intact.

OpenAI has introduced more flexible pricing for Codex, a code-generation AI tool that helps developers write software faster. Teams can now add Codex-only seats with pay-as-you-go pricing (meaning you only pay for what you use based on tokens, the small units of text the AI processes) instead of paying a fixed fee per person, and ChatGPT Business pricing has been lowered from $25 to $20 per seat annually. The company is also offering $100 in credits per new Codex-only user (up to $500 per team) to help teams try out the tool.

AI is making software development faster and easier, creating a future where custom applications can be written and deleted on demand, but this also means AI tools are getting better at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in code. Both attackers and defenders are using AI for cybersecurity, creating an 'arms race' where attackers can automatically discover and exploit flaws while defenders can use similar AI tools to find and patch vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them.

Variance, a company building a compliance investigation platform that uses AI agents (autonomous AI systems that can perform tasks independently), has raised $21.5 million in new funding, bringing its total funding to $26 million. The funding will be used to grow the platform's capabilities.

Model Context Protocol (MCP, a system that connects AI agents to data sources) has become popular in businesses but faces security risks like prompt injection (tricking an AI by hiding instructions in its input), token theft, and data leaks. While progress has been made with features like OAuth support and an official MCP Registry, companies need tools to implement proper access controls, authorization checks, and detailed logging to protect sensitive data.

The lodash library has a code injection vulnerability in its `_.template` function (a tool that generates reusable text templates with dynamic values). Attackers can inject malicious code through the `options.imports` parameter, either by passing untrusted input as key names or by exploiting prototype pollution (a technique where attackers modify the default object properties that all objects inherit from). This allows arbitrary code to run when a template is compiled.

Lodash versions 4.17.23 and earlier have a vulnerability in the `_.unset` and `_.omit` functions that allows prototype pollution (modifying built-in object templates like Object.prototype that affect all objects). An attacker can bypass the previous security fix by using array-wrapped path segments to delete properties from these core prototypes, though they cannot change how those prototypes work.

ONNX's `save_external_data` method contains a TOCTOU vulnerability (time-of-check-time-of-use, a gap between checking if a file exists and using it) that allows attackers to overwrite arbitrary files by creating symlinks (shortcuts to other files) between those two operations. The code also has a potential path validation bypass on Windows systems that may allow absolute paths to be used.