TLDR: A wave of supply chain incidents is dominating the week — malware in official CPU-Z and HW Monitor downloads, a hijacked Smart Slider 3 Pro update hitting 900,000 sites, and a malicious Axios npm package attributed to North Korean actors. Amazon has responded to two production outages caused by its own AI coding agents by requiring senior sign-off before junior and mid-level engineers can push AI-assisted code. Meanwhile, device code phishing via OAuth is compromising hundreds of Microsoft 365 orgs daily, and Chrome 136 ships a hardware-bound session credential feature that makes stolen cookies useless.
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<h2>Official CPU-Z and HW Monitor downloads served malware</h2>
The official CPUID download page for HW Monitor 1.53/1.6.3 and CPU-Z was caught serving malware-laced installers. The payload is a RAT with HVNC, PowerShell reverse shell, and DPAPI-based credential theft. The CPU-Z variant is the more dangerous of the two — it likely compromises the system on install rather than requiring the program to run. Windows Defender catches both, but anyone who disabled or excluded it is exposed. If you or your team downloaded either tool recently, treat the machine as compromised.
<h2>Amazon requires senior approval for AI-assisted code</h2>
After two production outages caused by Kiro and Amazon Q Developer acting without sufficient guardrails, Amazon now requires senior engineer sign-off before junior and mid-level engineers can push AI-generated code. This is the most concrete enterprise policy response to AI coding risk I’ve seen from a major tech company. The same newsletter also cites an Anthropic RCT finding junior developers who used AI scored 17% lower on comprehension tests than those who didn’t — which makes the policy look less like overcaution and more like a reasonable response to real data.
<h2>Device code phishing is bypassing MFA at scale</h2>
A phishing-as-a-service operation called EvilToken has been running since at least late February, hitting over 340 organizations and peaking at hundreds of new compromises daily. The attack abuses OAuth 2.0 device code flow — the same mechanism used to sign into smart TVs. Attackers generate device codes dynamically at the final redirect stage, extending the usable window past the normal 15-minute expiry. Redirect chains run through Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda, and redirect services from Cisco and Trend Micro, so email filters largely pass them through. Once a victim authenticates, the attacker captures a valid OAuth token and MFA is irrelevant. The most direct fix is blocking device code flow via Conditional Access for any users who don’t actually need it, which is most of them.
<h2>Chrome 136 ships hardware-bound session credentials</h2>
Google has shipped Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) in Chrome 136 for Windows. The feature ties authentication sessions to a device’s TPM, so short-lived cookies are only issued after the device proves it still holds the private key. An attacker who exfiltrates cookies gets nothing usable remotely. The protocol is an open W3C standard developed with Microsoft and Okta, and early Okta testing showed a measurable drop in session theft. Backend adoption requires adding registration and refresh endpoints. macOS support is planned for a future release.
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<h2>Also notable</h2>
<ul>
<li>Bun v1.3.12: Ships native headless browser automation via Bun.WebView, terminal Markdown rendering, an in-process cron scheduler, 2.3x faster URLPattern, cgroup-aware parallelism on Linux, and over 120 bug fixes.</li>
<li>Smart Slider 3 Pro supply chain attack: Hackers hijacked the update distribution for version 3.5.1.35, pushing backdoors and hidden admin accounts to WordPress and Joomla sites; over 900,000 sites use the plugin — upgrade to 3.5.1.36 or roll back to a pre-April 5 backup immediately.</li>
<li>Go compiler memory safety bugs: A security researcher found two bugs in Go up to 1.26.1 that break memory safety guarantees using only safe Go code — no unsafe package, no CGO. Both stem from the compiler prematurely treating “probably safe” as “proved safe” in optimization passes.</li>
<li>Claude Code <a href="http://CLAUDE.md" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">CLAUDE.md</a> injection: LayerX researchers demonstrated that malicious instructions in a repository’s <a href="http://CLAUDE.md" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">CLAUDE.md</a> file silently propagate to every developer who clones the project, with no deep security knowledge required to exploit it. Reported to Anthropic via HackerOne; closed without resolution.</li>
<li>Adobe Reader zero-day: Actively exploited since at least December 2025 via malicious PDFs that execute obfuscated JavaScript on open, enabling data theft and potential RCE. No patch exists yet — block HTTP/HTTPS traffic with “Adobe Synchronizer” in the User-Agent header as a stopgap.</li>
<li>ChipSoft ransomware: Dutch EHR vendor ChipSoft was hit by ransomware, taking down Zorgportaal, HiX Mobile, and Zorgplatform; multiple Dutch hospitals reported outages.</li>
<li>Kubernetes AI Conformance program: Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Kubermatic launched a formal conformance program covering DRA, all-or-nothing scheduling via Kueue, custom-metric autoscaling, and standardized GPU/TPU observability. GKE and AKS are already adopting it.</li>
<li>Apache Iceberg v3 on Databricks: Now in public preview with Row Lineage, Deletion Vectors (up to 10x faster deletes), and a native VARIANT type for semi-structured data — available on Databricks Runtime 18.0+ with Unity Catalog.</li>
<li>Salesforce distributed queue for AI workloads: Agentforce built a fair-share round-robin dispatcher with a three-tier priority queue under shared LLM rate limits (300 RPM), achieving 5x throughput and enabling customers to process over 10,000 leads daily.</li>
<li>Vercel agentic infrastructure: Over 30% of Vercel deployments are now initiated by coding agents, up 1,000% in six months, with Claude Code driving 75% of that growth.</li>
<li>MCP Dev Summit: The gateway pattern is now the dominant architectural consensus for MCP deployments, adopted by Amazon, Uber, Docker, and Kong. Uber reported 1,800 AI-written code changes per week via its internal Minion agent. MCP has surpassed 97 million SDK downloads per month.</li>
<li>LangChain Deep Agents Deploy: MIT-licensed open alternative to Claude Managed Agents, storing memory in open formats (<a href="http://AGENTS.md" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">AGENTS.md</a> and skills files) and exposing 30+ endpoints including MCP, A2A, and human-in-the-loop out of the box.</li>
<li>Pinterest Spark OOM fix: A 96% reduction in out-of-memory failures achieved by automatically retrying tasks with adjusted memory configurations rather than requiring manual intervention.</li>
<li>Redpanda Connect Oracle CDC: v4.83.0 ships a native Oracle CDC connector using LogMiner — no JVM, no Kafka Connect cluster, no external offset storage, runs as a single Go binary.</li>
<li>AWS Agent Registry: Now in preview across five regions; indexes agents, MCP servers, and tools with semantic search, IAM/OAuth access control, and CloudTrail logging. Framework and provider agnostic.</li>
<li>VENOM phishing platform: Targets C-suite executives with Unicode QR codes and double Base64-encoded URLs to evade scanning, then uses real-time AiTM proxies to capture credentials, MFA codes, and session tokens. Standard MFA is not sufficient defense.</li>
<li>Uber Hive federation: Migrated 16,000+ datasets totaling 10+ PB to a decentralized domain-specific architecture with zero downtime, reclaiming over 1 PB of HDFS space in the process.</li>
<li>Istio wildcard ServiceEntry: Now supports DYNAMIC_DNS resolution for wildcard egress domains without a dedicated egress gateway, eliminating the extra network hop and EnvoyFilter complexity.</li>
<li><a href="http://rubygems.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">rubygems.org</a> security hardening: Switched YAML parsing to AST-based deserialization to eliminate an entire class of insecure deserialization attacks, and added Have I Been Pwned checks at login — 1,166 compromised accounts detected and blocked since launch.</li>
</ul>

Server-side development, system design, API patterns, and distributed architecture.

Backend Digest

A security-heavy week dominated by supply chain attacks: malware in official CPU-Z and HW Monitor downloads, a hijacked Smart Slider 3 Pro update affecting 900,000 sites, and a malicious Axios npm package linked to North Korean actors. Amazon has introduced a policy requiring senior engineer approval before junior and mid-level engineers can push AI-generated code, following two production outages caused by Kiro and Amazon Q Developer. Device code phishing via OAuth (EvilToken) is compromising hundreds of Microsoft 365 organizations daily by bypassing MFA. Chrome 136 ships hardware-bound session credentials (DBSC) tied to TPM, rendering stolen cookies useless. Additional notable items include Go compiler memory safety bugs, a Claude Code CLAUDE.md injection vulnerability, an Adobe Reader zero-day, Bun v1.3.12 with headless browser automation, MCP gateway pattern adoption by Amazon/Uber/Docker, and Uber processing 1,800 AI-written code changes per week.

Supply chain attacks pile up, Amazon gates AI-generated code from junior engineers