Tech Talks With Kinsoft

A deep-dive on CVE-2026-72898, the unauthenticated SQL injection zero-day exploited against Metabase Cloud in early August 2026.

Two corrections to our roundup of 17 August, made on air. A CVE has since been assigned - CVE-2026-72898, added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue on 11 August and rated 10.0 under both CVSS v3.1 and v4.0. And LexisNexis has explicitly ruled out any connection between its service outage and this flaw: the similarly-named Nexis Metabase API is an unrelated product, and LexisNexis is not a Metabase Cloud customer.

The timeline. 2 Aug: attacker active in Kilo Code's instance for about four hours. 3 Aug: broader attack on Metabase Cloud; Metabase detects, blocks and patches the same day. 6 Aug: public advisory; Framework notified, and notifies its own customers. 8 Aug: a researcher publishes a proof-of-concept lab. 10 Aug: CVE assigned; public exploits go open-source; Checkly and Wiz publish. 11 Aug: added to CISA KEV with a 14 August deadline; a second Metabase advisory covers further flaws; ShinyHunters lists Metabase on its leak site.

The vulnerability. An unauthenticated POST to /api/session/reset_password. Four individually correct behaviours chain together: Clojure's merge not stripping attacker-supplied keys when authentication fails; JSON keywordisation; HoneySQL's raw keyword, a deliberate feature that bypasses parameterisation; and a lookup that compiles the result into unparameterised SQL. The result is blind SQL injection against the application database, leading to a forged administrator session. As Checkly put it, no password was stolen. The patch is a three-line type check.

Exposure. Dataminr's 8 August scan found roughly 11,000 probable self-hosted instances, 4,309 likely vulnerable, and over 97% of fingerprinted hosts on an affected branch unpatched.

Five victims disclosed, all Metabase Cloud tenants, all of whom published their own post-mortems: Framework Computer (names, emails, login IPs, addresses, phone numbers; VAT and EIN for business customers), Tally (emails and hashed passwords), n8n (136 records, plus a separately-discovered 2023 plaintext password bug), Kilo Code and Anaconda (names, emails, billing addresses, user prompts, later Slack access tokens), and Checkly (26 minutes of read-only warehouse queries exposing plaintext credentials hard-coded into check configurations). Metabase has never said how many tenants were affected.

Attribution: unconfirmed. ShinyHunters listed Metabase on 11 August, but Dataminr assessed the listing as a placeholder with no scope named. Metabase has named nobody. Treat it as a claim.

Check your own instance. In application or ingress logs, look for a POST to /api/session/reset_password returning HTTP 400 immediately followed by a GET to /api/user/current returning HTTP 200. That pattern indicates likely compromise.

Five lessons. One: your BI tool is a production system holding a key ring - audit what it stores and scope those service accounts to read-only. Two: internet-facing auth endpoints on internal tools are an unforced error. Three: using the managed version is not the same as not being affected. Four: rotate sessions and downstream credentials, not just passwords - there was no malware, and both survive a patch. Five: use the secrets store, not free-text config fields.

Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.

Sources: NVD and CVE.org; CISA KEV; Metabase advisories GHSA-vwf4-m7j8-wcjf and GHSA-r495-55cx-fjh7; Wiz; Bishop Fox; Dataminr; BleepingComputer; and disclosures by Checkly, n8n, Kilo Code, Framework and Tally.

On 11 August 2026, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank accepted a proposed $8 million penalty over a March 2023 cyber attack on Service One Alliance Bank. The court documents contain a sentence worth reading twice: at the time the attack began, 1,598 customer accounts were protected by the password 123456.

The timeline. 2020: penetration testing identifies security weaknesses in the Alliance Bank environment. Not remediated. October 2022: a threat actor attempts brute-force login attacks and fails; the board is told the bank is at a critical point of needing further investment in resourcing and capability. No substantive review is undertaken. March 2023: an unidentified attacker brute-forces approximately 257 customer accounts. 10 August 2026: APRA files an Originating Application in the Federal Court. 11 August 2026: APRA announces publicly and Bendigo lodges an ASX announcement accepting the proposed penalty.

The numbers - all official, from APRA, the Federal Court filing and Bendigo's ASX announcement, none of them threat-actor claims: 257 accounts accessed; 286 unauthorised transactions; 87 customers affected by a transaction; approximately $490,000 misappropriated; about $140,000 unrecoverable; all customers fully reimbursed; 1,598 accounts using 123456; an $8m proposed penalty; and about $2.6m in additional legal costs.

The three named control weaknesses: password settings permitting very weak passwords; multiple accounts protected by identical passwords; and system design that enabled the attacker to identify valid customer IDs - account enumeration.

The regulatory angle. This is not an OAIC or Notifiable Data Breaches matter, because no bulk personal information was taken. The regulator is APRA and the instrument is the Banking Executive Accountability Regime. All four admitted failures are governance failures: inadequate authentication controls, no systematic testing programme, accountable persons' responsibilities not covering the Alliance Bank IT system, and inadequate information security governance.

Attribution: none. APRA and the court documents describe an unidentified threat actor. No group claimed it, no data was published, no ransomware was involved.

Five lessons. One: a penetration test you don't remediate is worse than no penetration test - it is a dated written record that you were told. Two: treat a failed attack as a real incident; October 2022 was a rehearsal nobody reviewed. Three: password policy isn't solved because you assume it is - go and measure it, and make MFA default rather than optional. Four: account enumeration is a vulnerability, not a UX detail - identical responses and identical timing, whether or not the account exists. Five: outsourced, white-labelled or subsidiary IT still carries your accountability, so put a person's name, not a team's, against every system your customers touch.

The penalty is roughly 16 times the amount stolen. It isn't for the loss; it's for the three years between the finding and the fix.

Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.

Sources: APRA media release, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank admits breaching its BEAR obligations, 11 August 2026; APRA Originating Application, Federal Court of Australia, stamped and redacted, 10 August 2026; Bendigo and Adelaide Bank ASX announcement, 11 August 2026; Information Age (Australian Computer Society), 12 August 2026; Cyber Daily, 11 August 2026; FST Media; Lawyerly; Mortgage Professional Australia.

Your Monday roundup of the technology and security stories that mattered to Australian businesses in the week of 10-16 August 2026.

Nvidia's $500bn financing platforms (10 Aug). MOUs with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilise third-party capital for AI compute. Why an MOU is not a contract, and the reported - but not company-confirmed - 25% loan backstop.

The AI price war (11-14 Aug). Gemini 3.7 Flash three weeks after 3.6 at half the price; GPT-5.6 Luna cut ~80%; Claude Opus 5 at $5/$25 with the Sonnet 5 price rise cancelled; DeepSeek raising prices sharply. What to do about your existing vendor agreement - and why introductory pricing that expires at end-2026 isn't a 2027 budget line.

The near-autonomous AI agent attack on Taiwan (12 Aug). Open-source agent frameworks, guardrails bypassed by claiming authorised pen-testing, and an operation that expanded its own scope. Plus OpenAI's Daybreak Blue and Red tiers, and 51 US House Democrats asking questions.

The chip money wave (10-13 Aug). TSMC's record July (+44.7% YoY), Intel's upsized $20bn raise, Cisco's $9.3bn of AI infrastructure orders, Applied Materials' record quarter - and why beating expectations still moved three of these share prices down.

IBM and OpenAI (13 Aug), Gemini past 1bn users, and Anthropic watermarking Claude output worldwide - the first clearly visible case of EU AI Act compliance being exported globally by default.

Security round. August Patch Tuesday (~400 CVEs, one exploited zero-day, CVE-2026-68820, attributed to Lazarus a day later); VMware vCenter CVE-2026-59310 exploited five days after disclosure with 361 victims in 47 countries; SAP Commerce Cloud CVE-2026-58231 exploited three days after patch day; Cisco ASA/FTD CVE-2026-20349; Adobe Commerce CVE-2026-71362 exploited within hours; unpatched GeoServer and Windows Defender ShieldBreak zero-days with no CVE at all; and macOS Screen Sharing CVE-2026-65400 being used to plant Monero miners on internet-exposed Macs.

Incidents: the Ceva Logistics breach rippling to Steam, ING, Bol, De Bijenkorf and Ajax; and ransomware taking out doors and HVAC - not clinical systems - at Manitoba's largest hospital.

Coming up: Wednesday, the Bendigo Bank cyber penalty. Friday, the Metabase zero-day in full.

Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.

Sources: Nvidia newsroom, CNBC, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, Reuters, VentureBeat, Financial Times, Dream Group research, CyberScoop, The Register, CNN, OpenAI, The Hill, TSMC and Intel investor relations, Cisco, Applied Materials, IBM newsroom, Ars Technica, Axios, SecurityWeek, BleepingComputer, The Hacker News, Zero Day Initiative, Tenable, Rapid7, CISA, Onapsis, Dutch NCSC, The Record, CBC.

At the start of August 2026, attackers exploited an authentication bypass in N-able's N-central remote monitoring and management platform to obtain full administrative control of the console - and then used the product's own legitimate remote access feature to reach the machines it manages. The vendor shipped a fix. It was not enough.

The six-day timeline. 1 Aug: N-able detects active exploitation of CVE-2026-18556 (CVSS 7.4 under v3.1, 8.2 under v4.0); all versions affected, hosted and on-premises. 2 Aug: hotfix 1, build 2026.3.1.7, plus a second advisory for CVE-2026-18577 - the residual bypass left by the incomplete fix (8.1 under v3.1, 8.2 under v4.0). 3 Aug: CISA adds 18577 to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue. 4 Aug: CISA adds 18556; N-able confirms attackers obtained administrative access. 6 Aug: hotfix 2, build 2026.3.1.10 - required even if hotfix 1 was already applied.

The patch-rate gap. Huntress observed 55.6% of reachable cloud N-central servers unpatched early on 3 August, falling to 13.6% overall by that afternoon - but 28.6% of reachable self-hosted servers were still unpatched. Hosted customers were fixed by the vendor; self-hosted ones had to fix themselves.

The attack chain. Unauthenticated bypass to full admin ("god mode"), then abuse of the built-in Take Control remote access feature - with sessions logged under the default legitimate "MSP Support" account, so the attack looks like ordinary support work. Then domain controller reconnaissance, and persistence via a Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared) registered as a Windows service plus a suspicious svchost.exe in a user's Documents folder.

No attribution - at all. Not formal, not suspected, not claimed. All ten published indicator IPs are Mullvad or NordVPN exit nodes. No ransomware was observed and no extortion claims have surfaced.

Hunting artefacts: ui_access_control.log for the indicator IPs and the mspsupport identity; the Take Control logs under ProgramData; Windows event IDs 4102, 8192 and 8193; and any cloudflared service you did not install.

Five durable lessons: give the management plane identity-provider-grade controls, including IP allow-listing and MFA on every operator account; recognise that the on-premises appliance is usually the one machine in your estate without EDR; understand that applying the vendor patch is not the same as being safe; treat remote control sessions as security events and review the out-of-hours ones weekly; and if you buy IT services, ask your provider precisely when they applied the August hotfixes.

Because when a database is breached you lose data. When your management plane is breached, you lose the ability to trust anything else you are looking at - including your logs and your patch reports.

Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.

Sources: N-able security advisories for CVE-2026-18556 and CVE-2026-18577 (1-6 August 2026); Huntress, "N-able vulnerability exploitation" (3 August 2026); BleepingComputer; Rapid7 Emergent Threat Response for CVE-2026-18577; Horizon3.ai attack research; CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue additions, 3 and 4 August 2026; The Hacker News; The Register.

In July 2026, someone accessed the system Victorian courts use to link participants to online hearings. Not the case management system - the joining list. Four years of it, across ten regional court locations, for the Magistrates' Court and the Children's Court.

This episode walks through what was confirmed, what was only claimed, and why a scheduling layer turned out to be more sensitive than the case files it pointed at.

What Court Services Victoria confirmed: the incident occurred in July 2026; the data spans 2022 to 2026; ten named regional locations including Bendigo, Castlemaine, Echuca, Kerang, Kyneton, Maryborough, Mildura, Ouyen, Robinvale and Swan Hill. Exposed fields include participant names, case titles and numbers, hearing dates, times and courtrooms, plus two things not on the public record - email addresses and a description of the person's role in the matter. The Case Management System, employee data and financial data were not accessed.

What was only claimed: the "more than 28,600 lines" figure comes from the threat actor, not from the organisation. CSV states it "is unable to verify the number of people and matters impacted". Lines are not people, and no affected-person count has been published.

The most sensitive claim, carefully sourced: the ABC reports it understands the leaked data includes the names of parties in family violence intervention order hearings and children's court cases. CSV has not confirmed this. CSV's own support page links to The Orange Door, Safe Steps and the Victims of Crime Helpline.

Also covered: why nobody has been individually notified, what CSV is offering instead (a public FAQ and a hotline on 03 9087 6116), and why your ability to notify people is a design decision you make years before a breach.

Four takeaways: find your scheduling layers; treat metadata and context as data; use retention as a blast-radius control; and know whether your clients sit under the OAIC or a state regulator - CSV is a Victorian public sector body, so this one sits with OVIC under the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic), not the OAIC.

And the uncomfortable closing question: CSV confirms this is a completely different system to its 2024 breach. What else in your organisation looks like the system you have not hardened yet?

Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.

Sources: Court Services Victoria, "Data Security Notification" and "CSV data security incident FAQs" (courts.vic.gov.au, 30 July 2026); Magistrates' Court of Victoria notification (mcv.vic.gov.au, 5 August 2026); Cyber Daily exclusive (30 July 2026); Lawyers Weekly (30 July 2026); ABC News (7 August 2026), summarised by DataBreaches.Net; Law360 Australia; Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic); Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner.

Your Monday roundup of the technology and security news that matters to Australian businesses, covering 3-9 August 2026.

In this episode:

Google's AI leadership shake-up (5 Aug). Demis Hassabis moves to Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes SVP of Google DeepMind reporting to Sundar Pichai, taking Gemini research and product. Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years to co-found a public benefit corporation with Sanjay Ghemawat, with Google as founding investor and cloud partner. The Gemini app is past 950 million monthly users; Gemma is past 900 million downloads.

Washington's unpublished frontier-AI framework (4 Aug). Under Executive Order 14409, an NSA-led group has built a process for up to 30 days of pre-release government access to frontier models - and reportedly will not publish it. Open-weight models are excluded. Why a shrinking public evidence base means you need your own evaluation set.

AMD and Palantir (3-4 Aug). AMD: revenue $11.5bn (+50%), Data Centre $6.7bn (+107%) and now 58% of the company, Q3 guided to about $13bn. Palantir: revenue $1.935bn (+93%), US commercial +149%, adjusted free cash flow $1.22bn, guidance raised to about $8.15bn. Two great quarters, two opposite market reactions, and what that says about capital intensity.

Microsoft's 10-K discloses $24.1bn of OpenAI revenue, plus $6bn of accounts receivable from a single customer as at 30 June. A prompt to run your own customer-concentration numbers.

Memory is being sold out to 2030. Samsung plans to cover 60-70% of its memory production capacity under five-year binding agreements with advance payments and floor prices; SK hynix has completed talks with around ten customers. What allocation-constrained supply means for your FY27 hardware budget.

Meta launches Muse Code (5 Aug), and Bending Spoons agrees to buy Airtable for a $1.285bn enterprise value (4 Aug).

Security round-up: the Metabase zero-day and the Framework, Tally and LexisNexis fallout; IBM Langflow and Apache Tomcat added to CISA KEV; and a preview of Friday's N-able N-central deep-dive.

Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.

Sources: Google blog, "The next chapter of our AI momentum" (5 Aug 2026); Axios and Tech Policy Press (4 Aug 2026); White House Executive Order 14409; AMD Q2 2026 results (4 Aug 2026); Palantir Q2 2026 results (3 Aug 2026); Microsoft FY2026 Form 10-K; The Korea Herald and StorageNewsletter (2-3 Aug 2026); TechCrunch, CNBC and the Wall Street Journal (5 Aug 2026); Bending Spoons investor newsroom (4 Aug 2026); BleepingComputer, TechCrunch and The Hacker News (6-8 Aug 2026); CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue (3-4 Aug 2026); Huntress (1-7 Aug 2026).

Over two days in late July, a coordinated attack disrupted water and wastewater operations across more than 30 Minnesota communities — Braham's well and treatment plant shut down entirely, Plymouth disconnected cellular-connected water towers and lift stations, Maple Plain declared a local state of emergency. Drinking water quality was never affected and no boil-water advisories were issued, but the mechanism matters more than the outcome. Four days earlier CISA had expanded its advisory on Iranian-affiliated PLC targeting to cover Schneider Electric and Siemens alongside Rockwell, documented PLC project file theft for the first time, and described an FBI-observed case where malicious Add-On Instructions disabled safety shutdowns and alarms while operator displays were manipulated to show normal conditions. The central Rockwell authentication bypass (CVSS 9.8) was disclosed in February 2021, added to CISA KEV in March 2026 — and Rockwell says it cannot be fully fixed by a software patch. Censys found 5,219 internet-exposed Rockwell/Allen-Bradley hosts globally, disproportionately on cellular carrier networks, which is exactly how a small utility connects a remote water tower. Attribution: suspected, NOT formally attributed — treat nation-state headlines as speculation. Five actions for Australian businesses: inventory your control equipment and its connectivity (especially cellular routers), assume it can't be patched, segment it off the corporate network and off the internet, know and practise your manual fallback, and build an independent way to verify reality that isn't the compromised control system's own screen. Context: the ASD told Australian critical infrastructure operators on 28 July to be ready to isolate systems for three months, and the SOCI Act's eleven sectors capture far more businesses than most owners realise.

Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.

Sources: Tenable Research Special Operations FAQ (28 July 2026, updated 31 July); Minnesota IT Services and municipal statements; StateScoop; SecurityWeek; CISA Advisory AA26-097A (updated 22 July 2026) and the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue; Censys internet exposure scanning (April 2026); Australian Signals Directorate critical infrastructure guidance (28 July 2026) via iTnews.

A Brisbane medical practice serving thousands of veterans lost Department of Veterans' Affairs ID numbers from a single email mailbox after a phishing attack — and then took twelve weeks to tell the patients. We walk the confirmed timeline (mailbox accessed in April, discovered 24 April with same-day containment and user alerts, OAIC notified 18 May, patients notified 16 July, ABC story 21 July), what GO2 Health has confirmed was taken, and what remains genuinely unknown — including the number of people affected, which the practice has not published. The lessons transfer to any Australian business: shared mailboxes are undesigned databases holding data your secured systems never see; auto-archiving capped this breach at twelve months and is the cheapest blast-radius control there is; the 30-day OAIC assessment clock governs telling the regulator, not telling people; a two-stage notification gets you vigilance without sacrificing accuracy; and identifiers you didn't issue — DVA, Medicare, concession cards — still need a documented replacement pathway you write before the incident, not during it. Context: the OAIC recorded 1,205 notified breaches last year, 716 from malicious or criminal activity, with health providers the most affected sector at 19%.

Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.

Sources: ABC News (Will Murray, 21 July 2026); Cyber Daily (22 July 2026); GO2 Health company statements; The Medical Republic (OAIC spokesperson on the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, 16 July 2026); OAIC Notifiable Data Breaches statistics.

Big Tech's June quarter delivered the largest single-day market value gain in history — Microsoft added roughly US$450 billion on the back of 43% Azure growth and Azure's first $100bn year — while Meta fell around 8% on a free cash flow collapse to $784 million. Add up the guidance and Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are committing roughly US$720-745 billion of capital expenditure in calendar 2026. Amazon's AWS backlog jumped from $364bn to $496bn in a quarter and Andy Jassy says there won't be enough capacity in 2026 or 2027. Also this week: SK hynix and Samsung post extraordinary memory results with Samsung tipping the chip crunch to run to 2028 — expect PC prices up as much as 8% this year, so lock FY27 hardware quotes now. Anthropic audits 141,006 evaluation runs after the OpenAI containment incident and finds three cases where its model reached the internet — neither affected organisation had detected it. EU AI Act transparency obligations (chatbot disclosure, deepfake labelling, and machine-readable AI content marking for new systems) took effect 2 August even though high-risk obligations slipped to December 2027 under the Digital Omnibus. Amgen files an 8-K over patient data taken from third-party cloud environments. Cisco Secure FMC static hard-coded credentials — CVSS 5.3 but rated High impact by Cisco because it chains with other FMC flaws — hit CISA KEV with a 1 August deadline. Plus: Australia's GovAI catalogue expands with onshore-hosting requirements, and the ASD tells critical infrastructure operators to be ready to isolate for three months.

Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.

Sources: CNBC, Reuters, Bloomberg and CFO Dive (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta earnings); Apple Newsroom (fiscal Q3 results, 30 July); SK hynix Newsroom and Reuters (memory results); TechCrunch (Anthropic evaluation audit, 30 July); Reuters (Altman in Washington, 29 July); Gibson Dunn and Holland & Knight (EU AI Act timing); SEC EDGAR Form 8-K and BleepingComputer (Amgen); Cisco advisory and the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue (Cisco FMC); iTnews (GovAI catalogue, ASD guidance).

Two SonicWall SMA1000 flaws — an unauthenticated SSRF rated a perfect 10.0 (CVE-2026-15409) and a path-traversal-to-root bug (CVE-2026-15410) — were exploited as zero-days from at least 22 June, three weeks before the 14 July patches. We walk through the tradecraft of actor UTA0533: in-memory Java implants injected into legitimate appliance processes, a webshell that plays dead for scanners, logs symlinked to /dev/null — plus stolen credentials, session databases and TOTP MFA seeds, and lateral movement into domain controllers from the appliance's own service account. Also covered: CISA's KEV listing and 3-day federal deadline under BOD 26-04, an INC ransomware affiliate reusing the chain within days, and the shipped admin:admin database and shared vendor-default identifier that amounted to a backdoor by default. Four actions: hunt (don't just patch), treat edge appliances as forensic crown jewels, keep MFA seeds off the gateway, and alert on domain logons from appliance IPs with no VPN session. No China attribution — treat any such headlines as unverified.

Visit www.kinsoft.com.au to talk through your security and IT needs.

Sources: Volexity "Proxying to Compromise" (17 Jul), Rapid7 blog (15 Jul), SonicWall advisory SNWLID-2026-0008, CISA KEV (14 Jul), Cybersecurity Dive (20 Jul), BleepingComputer.