James Patterson

Penetration testing has long run on expert time, with specialists spending days probing a network or web application by hand. Manual engagements stretch across weeks, expert consultants run into thousands of dollars a day, and results vary with the tester. Automation promises to narrow those gaps. A growing set of projects now hands the work to AI agents that plan and execute on their own. DarkMoon, an open-source platform, sits in that group. It runs a security assessment end to end and delivers an evidence-backed report at the finish.

Many serious security bugs in web applications sit across several files at once. Request data enters through a controller, moves through data objects and service layers, and turns dangerous only when it reaches a sensitive operation such as a database query or a file action. A scanner that reads one file at a time can miss that path entirely.

Plenty of developers now keep several coding agents close at hand, reaching for Claude Code on one task and Codex or Cursor on the next. Each tool arrives with its own command line, its own handling of credentials, and its own way of running shell commands against a working directory. That spread leaves teams with a governance gap around where agent actions land and how much they cost. Omnigent, an open-source project, sits one level above those tools as a meta-harness.

Developers on Apple silicon Macs have run Linux containers through software built around a single shared virtual machine for years. Apple’s open-source Container project gives each Linux workload its own lightweight virtual machine.

Bill Bygroves is a respected evangelical minister based in Liverpool. He has pastored Bridge Chapel in Liverpool and has preached at various churches and conferences across the UK. For many years he has been chaplain at Liverpool FC having previously played for the club.

Running a large language model against a live cloud account to hunt for security holes comes with an obvious hazard. An agent that holds real credentials and a mandate to poke around can delete a bucket, flip a permission, or leak a secret on its way to a finding. Cynative, an open-source security research agent, answers that hazard by refusing to write anything by default, and by checking that refusal on every single call it makes.

Teams that want their group chats off commercial platforms have a growing menu of self-hosted options. Chatto joined that group when its developer released the code under an open-source license and posted binaries for anyone to run on their own hardware. The software aims at the same ground as the large team messaging services, and it keeps message data on infrastructure the operator controls.

The wine region in northern Portugal is beautiful in autumn, especially when staying on board on this handsome and revamped 1950s boat

Out-of-band vulnerabilities surface when an application quietly reaches out to an external system during an attack, and capturing that traffic calls for infrastructure that many researchers assemble on their own. A new open-source project from Microsoft supplies that infrastructure in a package meant to run inside a private environment.

James Patterson recalls experiencing the Sept. 11 attacks from Washington, D.C., and honors victims, responders and friends lost that day.