#AI & #DataScience @TrustInsights, ninja, @mktgovercoffee cohost, keynote speaker, #IBMChampion. Promo acct only, find me under bluer skies. 🇺🇸🇰🇷🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈

Boston, MA
Joined February 2007
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Today is a great day to check every device and system you own/operate and update the software.
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Christopher S. Penn retweeted
Crazy 72 hours in security. Three major incidents dropped back-to-back: eMudhra, PingCAP (TiDB Cloud), and PHP. Here is the short version of what happened and who got hit. 1. eMudhra (Trusted CA compromise) eMudhra generated 8 intermediate CA certificates in April 2025 (cross-signed by Sectigo). A bug in their HSM key-wrapping test script created a second set of P-384 keys where the private keys were single-byte numbers under 256. Operators picked the wrong key labels and signed them into real CA certs. One of the intermediate CA private keys was literally the number 4. The other seven: 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237. Three weeks later (May 2025), their CRL signatures started failing because the CRL signer was using the real keys instead of the weak ones. Instead of asking why the keys didn't match, someone switched the CRL signer to the weak keys and closed the ticket. • Browsers are safe: Chrome, Firefox, Apple, and Microsoft already blocked them, and zero rogue certs hit CT logs. • Servers are not: curl, Python (certifi), Go binaries, and Docker base images don't check CRLs. Update ca-certificates, certifi, and Go (1.27.3 / 1.26.10). • 10-second check on any server: curl dv-g3b-emudhra.we-have-a-pro… (TLS error = safe. 200 OK = still vulnerable.) 2. PingCAP / TiDB Cloud (10.6 TB breach) Attackers found GCP and Azure credentials committed inside PingCAP's own repos. They set up a replication feed of TiDB Cloud's production control plane and exported the entire database every 6 hours for 22 straight days. 88 full exports, zero alerts. 200 GB is already out on torrents. Beyond the 413 private repos and 20.6M customer SQL queries logged from their web SQL Editor, PingCAP engineers were pasting customer secrets into Jira tickets. Who is affected in the leaked records: • Live credentials exposed in support tickets: - Pinterest: AWS keys for their pingcap-logs S3 bucket - CardX / Silverlake (NPCI-linked env): AWS admin key in a backup log with full access to 258 external S3 buckets - DeBank: 38 presigned S3 URLs - An unnamed AI/dev platform: a 314 MB slow-query log attached to a ticket containing 8,027 live customer secrets (an AWS root key, a GitHub admin PAT over 1,701 repos, 7,485 AWS STS tokens, and 192 OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini keys) • Tenants with infra metadata, VPC CIDRs, app-server IPs, or contract pricing exposed: - Tech: Atlassian, Databricks, Airbnb, Baidu, LINE, Nylas, Persona, PatSnap - E-comm & Travel: Booking.com, Shopee, Flipkart, Mercari, ZOZO, AEON, Delhivery, Klook - Gaming: Capcom, Square Enix, Konami, Bandai Namco, Cygames, Colopl, DMM - Finance: PayPay, SoftBank, SBI, SB Payment Service, Fujitsu, TOPPAN, Bank of China, China Life - Crypto: Bitget (said only public trade logs were on it and they already left), Pionex, DigiPlus, NFTscan, Chainbase • Developer profiles leaked (from a purchased reo.dev table in PingCAP's BigQuery): - 24,900 personal emails + GitHub/LinkedIn profiles of engineers at Tencent (3,327), Huawei (2,726), ByteDance (2,475), AIG (2,140), Mastercard, Flipkart, and bKash. If you use TiDB Cloud: rotate your console API keys, DB passwords, and anything you ever pasted into a support ticket. 3. PHP "PHP2Shell" (CVE-2026-109618 & CVE-2026-109619) Two CVSS 9.2 pre-auth RCEs leaked yesterday ahead of today's 14:00 UTC patch. Public writeups trace it to a heap Use-After-Free in PHP's native C multipart/form-data session upload-progress handler (ext/session/session.c). Because C-level multipart parsing runs before line 1 of index.php: • App auth, Laravel/WordPress middleware, and file_uploads = Off do not stop it. • Only PHP 8.2–8.5 get official patches today (59% of PHP servers on Shodan are on EOL <= 8.1). • Until you patch php-fpm: lock php_admin_flag[session.upload_progress.enabled] = off and block unexpected multipart requests at Nginx/Apache/Cloudflare.
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Honest is internal, factual is external, and truthful is both. You can be honest and wrong. You can be factual and misleading. You cannot be truthful without being both honest and factual.
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Christopher S. Penn retweeted
What advice would @cspenn give a new PR practitioner in their career in the age of AI? He has lots! almosttimely.substack.com/p/…
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Christopher S. Penn retweeted
I often get asked what young people need to know to succeed in PR today. @cspenn spotted the question when I put it to my LinkedIn network and has devoted his latest Almost Timely News to answering it. Read the full piece via link in comments
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Christopher S. Penn retweeted
With Fable 5.1 out today, we've also reset 5-hour and weekly limits for all users.
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Compare these two sets of messages. Positive: You belong You are welcome here You are one of us You are not to blame You are part of the solution You are one of the good guys You are an equal You have a voice Negative: You do not belong here You are not welcome here You are not one of us You are to blame You are part of the problem You are one of the bad guys You are lesser You do not have a voice When we discuss things like radicalization, these are the two sets of messages that enable it. If your side - whatever your beliefs - is transmitting the negative messages, then don’t be surprised when people flock to the positive messages, even if the group or organization behind them is abhorrent. If you want to win or win back that audience, you have to figure out how to pivot your messaging from negative to positive.
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