Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

On a recent call, a security lead walked us through two rules his team enforces on every build. Both are sensible. Together, they left his developers with a red pipeline and no version of a library they were allowed to use. The first rule is a cooldown. A new open source release cannot enter the build until it has been public for a set number of days. The second rule blocks any library version with a known high or critical vulnerability.

Jansi is the small Java package that makes colored console output work everywhere, including the Windows terminals that never understood ANSI escape codes. You may not have heard of it, but if you build Java, you almost certainly have it on disk: the Apache Maven 3.9.16 distribution puts jansi-2.4.3.jar in its lib/ directory, and Maven's pom.xml declares it as a dependency.

Apache Axis 1.x is a SOAP engine whose last release came out in 2006. Twenty years later deps.dev counts 384 packages that still depend on 1.4, 83 of them directly, and that single version carries five published advisories. The worst of them turns the client-side service factory into a remote code execution primitive (tracked as CVE-2023-40743, NVD CVSS 9.8, critical).

This post is an unfortunate affirmation of our prior research into abandoned open-source packages, where we found that 11% of the most-downloaded packages have been abandoned and not actively maintained, becoming invisible vulnerabilities to your scanner. Today we share a zip-slip vulnerability we found in extract-zip (CVE-2026-19693), an npm package with over 20 million weekly downloads.

How to evaluate your options, price the status quo, and make a decision your executive team will actually approve. A note on the numbers. The salaries, headcounts, and costs in this guide are illustrative. They're drawn to be realistic so the math works the way it does in a real budget meeting - but they're examples, not benchmarks. Replace them with your own.

We discovered this new vulnerability as part of our abandoned-packages research. Despite what seems like a 2-year hiatus, fflate is one of the few popular npm packages that released a fix for the vulnerabilities we found merely using Sonnet-4.6, giving its 50M+ users a chance to upgrade to a safe version.

In a previous post we looked at the skills CLI by vercel-labs/skills and ways for a malicious skill to overwrite an existing trusted skill by using homoglyph names or abusing weird CLI behaviors. This post will delve into an OSC-8 escape injection we found in the skills add command, which lets a skill author write arbitrary text to the console and clickable links as if it's part of the CLI's output.

brace-expansion is a very popular npm package with over 38 billion all-time downloads (yeah, over 38,000,000,000) and used by tooling almost every JavaScript project relies on - eslint, glob, and npm itself. Despite being in the public eye for a while, we found a new Denial-of-Service vulnerability that could affect millions. This post walks through what the package does, existing issues that were fixed, and the new one we found - CVE-2026-13149.

Agent skills are the newest piece of plumbing quietly making its way onto developer machines. They're easy to install, they get to call into the user's tools on the agent's behalf, and once they're in place they tend to stay in place. While auditing the popular installer vercel-labs/skills, we saw several ways a bad actor can make the tool install something other than what the user thought they were installing.

Most internal AI initiatives fail the same way: someone builds a thing, sends a Slack announcement, runs a lunch-and-learn, and three months later the thing has two active users. The failure mode isn't the AI. It's the ask. Every new surface is a decision engineers have to make: remember to open it, remember to use it, remember to trust it. Seal's approach for our own R&D team was to eliminate the ask entirely. The AI goes where our engineers already are, at the moment they need it.