AI finds Linux kernel exploits & PHP2Shell and AI-driven security - Hacker News (Nov 5, 2026)
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Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Prezi: Create AI presentations fast - https://try.prezi.com/automated_daily - Discover the Future of AI Audio with ElevenLabs - https://try.elevenlabs.io/tad - Effortless AI design for presentations, websites, and more with Gamma - https://try.gamma.app/tad Today's topics: AI finds Linux kernel exploits - OpenAI built an autonomous AI security pipeline that found, reproduced, exploited and patched Linux kernel vulnerabilities. One run produced 948 working privilege escalation exploits for about $1.2 million in API costs. PHP2Shell and AI-driven security - IEEE Spectrum says the patched PHP2Shell vulnerability shows how AI tools turn old bugs into code execution exploits. The article argues that AI is exposing technical debt in legacy software and calls for AI-assisted auditing and formal verification. Kimi K3.1 Pro open-weight model - Moonshot AI released Kimi K3.1 Pro, an open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model with a 1-million-token context window. It targets agentic coding, long-context reasoning and image understanding. OpenAI Images 2.6 adds GIFs - OpenAI's Images 2.6 update for ChatGPT, Codex and the API makes image generation faster and editing more consistent. It also adds GIF animation and SVG export. Go 1.27 ships JSON v2 - Go 1.27 adds the encoding/json/v2 and jsontext standard library packages. They fix long-standing correctness and security problems and add true streaming JSON performance. Guerrilla bike lanes in San Francisco - Anonymous activists installed protected bike lane posts near Golden Gate Park after two cyclists were killed. San Francisco now plans to make the street safety changes official, a rare win for tactical urbanism. Why LEDs stopped attracting insects - LED bulbs attract far fewer insects than incandescent lights because they emit little ultraviolet light. That changes how insects navigate, affects predators like geckos and may reduce the spread of some diseases. - PHP2Shell Shows How AI Is Reshaping Cybersecurity - Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K3.1 Pro Multimodal Agentic Model - OpenAI Details Autonomous Linux Vulnerability Discovery Pipeline - Go Releases New JSON API in the Standard Library - OpenAI Launches Images 2.6 With Faster Editing and GIFs - San Francisco Turns Guerrilla Bike Lanes Permanent - Ricursive Unveils Ripple-65B Preview Open-Weight AI Model - Why Insects Swarm Less Around LED Lights Episode Transcript AI finds Linux kernel exploits Let's start with that headline. OpenAI says it has built an autonomous security research pipeline that discovers, validates, exploits and even patches Linux kernel vulnerabilities, all inside a controlled environment. In a single campaign, the system flagged more than two thousand candidate issues and reproduced most of them. It produced 948 working local privilege escalation exploits, meaning an unprivileged user could become root. The bill was roughly 1.2 million dollars in API credits. Human researchers reviewed the findings before passing them to kernel maintainers, and the system also suggested candidate fixes. OpenAI's main argument is that finding bugs is no longer the hard part. The real bottlenecks are now deciding which bugs matter most, confirming them and getting patches shipped. The company also says the work turned up new Linux exploitation techniques, which makes a strong case for defense in depth and faster hardening. PHP2Shell and AI-driven security That ties directly into a story we've been following. IEEE Spectrum now argues that the PHP2Shell vulnerability is an early warning of how AI is changing cybersecurity. The new detail is how the flaw was found. For years it looked like a harmless out-of-memory crash, until researchers used AI tools to work out how to turn it into arbitrary code...
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