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Security Vulnerability in a Voting System

It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools.

Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia (one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners) in the recent May 2026 primary.

Notably, I never touched a voting machine, exploited a network, examined source code, or accessed anything non-public.

After pointing a coding agent to the original vulnerability paper, I supplied it with two data sources highlighted in the paper: the early-voting list for each county, and the β€œCVR” (cast-vote record) file, containing every ballot and its selections (but not the voters’ names or other identifying information). The CVR file is available upon request, precisely because a public, ballot-level record is what makes election results independently verifiable.

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The Frontier AI Vulnerability Burst: Industrializing Autonomous Zero-Day Discovery in Open-Source Software

Frontier AI is reshaping vulnerability discovery. Learn how our NOVA system found 14,000+ unknown vulnerabilities across the open-source software supply chain.

The post The Frontier AI Vulnerability Burst: Industrializing Autonomous Zero-Day Discovery in Open-Source Software appeared first on Unit 42.

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Chinese-Speaking Threat Actor Harnesses AI Models for Autonomous Cyberattacks

Unit 42 details a Chinese speaking threat actor combining autonomous AI scanning across seven vulnerabilities with manual exploitation. Read more.

The post Chinese-Speaking Threat Actor Harnesses AI Models for Autonomous Cyberattacks appeared first on Unit 42.

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Long-Lived Vulnerability in Microsoft Secure Boot

Microsoft’s Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence.

An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway.

The images are known as shims, which were invented to extend Secure Boot to Linux devices and utility software. Using a technique simple enough to be performed by novice hackers, these old, forgotten shims can be used to completely circumvent the protection, which is embedded into the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of the device’s motherboard. The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly available images once vulnerabilities were found in them.

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Three Steps to the Terminal: A Siemens ROX II Zero-Day Trilogy

A technical analysis of three chained zero-day vulnerabilities in Siemens ROX II OT switches that allow privilege escalation and persistent root access.

The post Three Steps to the Terminal: A Siemens ROX II Zero-Day Trilogy appeared first on Unit 42.

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