InfoWorld

A malicious version of Anthropic’s Claude Code extension distributed through the Cursor marketplace attempted to install a persistent Secure Shell (SSH) backdoor on developers’ machines, potentially giving attackers remote access to systems holding source code, credentials and other sensitive information. “Between about 2:27am PT and 1:35pm PT today, a maliciously modified version of Anthropic’s …

The modern web is a miracle of engineering, but its history is littered with brilliant concepts that flamed out in execution. For every innovation that stuck the landing, there is a promising technology that fell on its face. Each of these failures offers an object lesson for us as software developers. New tech is kind of a compulsion. We love to gaze at the shiny new frameworks on the horizon, b…

Same question, a different answer Earlier this year, in Are AI certifications worth the investment? , I argued that AI certifications ranked among the highest-return investments an IT professional could make. Much of that case still holds. But the ground has shifted since I wrote that piece in February, and a responsible update has to say so plainly. Two of the six flagship credentials I recommen…

Just about every CTO at a growth-stage company that I know is carrying an infrastructure problem they are quietly deciding not to look at. The system works, so the problem stays out of sight right up until something drags it into the open. That “something,” in our particular case, was a large UK-based bank. The new customer arrived with the expectation of five times our usual traffic. For a nasce…

GitHub is expanding Copilot beyond code generation and developer assistance, launching a redesigned Copilot app and a new Projects capability that enables teams to coordinate multiple AI agents, share context from tools and repositories, and manage software development workflows from a single platform. The updates to GitHub Copilot , announced at the company’s annual GitHub Universe conference, c…

A trillion-parameter AI model that its developer says could help attackers carry out real cyberattacks is now free to download, modify and run outside the developer’s control. Mistral AI released the open weights of Mistral Large 4, which it calls “Le Chonk,” on Thursday, weeks after putting the multimodal model into public preview. The Paris-based company said it had monitored cybersecurity-rela…

People have discovered AI agents running on cloud-based platforms, and suddenly, those agents are the answer to every bit of financial and operational friction in their lives. Move money from one bank account to another to chase a better interest rate. Pay bills automatically. Analyze spending patterns. Optimize subscriptions. Question fees. Move funds before a payment clears. Find the cheaper se…

If you’ve experimented with Rust , you already know how simple it is to get a basic toolchain in place, with the simple rustup command-line tool. The same tool works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, building a consistent environment that’s ready for you to pick up your favorite coding editor and start work. It’s a simple enough tool, and one that’s done much to help popularize a new programming lang…

A threat actor dubbed Gheist is turning compromised GitHub accounts into credential-harvesting platforms. By planting malicious GitHub Actions workflows in private repositories, attackers can expose repository and environment secrets, then retrieve them through GitHub APIs before deleting evidence of the activity. Tracked since September 15 by Wiz Research, the campaign has left more than 13,500 …

Oracle on Tuesday said it has partnered with Snowflake to make the latter’s AI Data Cloud available as a native service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The partnership, announced at Oracle’s ongoing AI World conference, aims to help enterprises reduce data movement between the two platforms and the associated costs while accelerating analytics and AI workloads, the companies said in a joint…

Last week I wrote about how coding agents are better developers than humans . I’ll stand by that — the current agents can write code better, faster, longer, and with far less complaining than we humans can. But that doesn’t make humans unnecessary — quite the contrary. Humans still play a vital role in the process of building software. Here are eight reasons we can use to fend off the robots when…

While many organizations are in early AI agent rollouts, research suggests that more will scale to greater numbers of agents and assistants in the coming year. An August 2026 report states that 66% of enterprises are likely to invest in digital workers in the next 12 months. It reports that the top requirements for these agents include demonstrated accuracy, clear explanations around decisions, a…

A security research firm reported Monday that it had identified breaches of 42 third-party GitHub repositories in which attackers had deployed payload blobs large enough “to evade the GitHub search and API paths normally used to find this kind of compromise.” The report from JFrog Security Research said the victimized repositories contained execution hooks for AI coding assistants and IDEs, along…

The experimental just-in-time compiler, or JIT, for CPython will be removed after its maintainers missed deadlines for its formalization set by the Python Steering Council. According to reporting at LWN.net , the move comes after the council formally paused work on the JIT in June 2026 until it approved a Python Enhancement Proposal, or PEP, that described how the JIT could become a properly supp…

OpenAI has launched GPT-6.1 Terra, a new reasoning model that it says delivers near-frontier performance on visual reasoning, professional task execution, and computer-use benchmarks without the premium price tag. Replacing GPT-5.6 Terra, the model is aimed at organizations seeking better accuracy and automation capabilities for large-scale operational workloads. Claiming it to be a step up from …