Imagine you're abroad, you try to pay your taxes online, and you can't get in. Your friend at home can. The whole country has put up a border around its websites. That was Latvia in October 2026. And a few thousand kilometres away, Japan's prime minister told every business: patch your website tonight, or switch it off.
Today one question: when the patch itself can be poisoned, who do you still trust?
In this episode:
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When a country goes into lockdown: Tokyo and Riga (
02:55) โ Japan's "Black October": more than 20 major Japanese companies disclosed attacks, according to the Financial Times. Rail company JR East lost about 1.67 million customer email addresses, car-sharing service Times Car leaked data from about 6.6 million member accounts including driving-licence images, a ransomware attack on a SoftBank cloud unit hit 495 companies and local governments, and on the 24th the internet company GMO disclosed unauthorised trades in customers' foreign-exchange accounts. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told businesses to patch or go offline. Latvia's CERT.LV took another route: it restricted access to state websites from abroad while keeping them open at home.
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The poisoned official update: LiteLLM (
11:20) โ LiteLLM is the switchboard that connects a company's apps to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others, so it holds the keys to all of them. An official release, version 1.107.0, shipped with a credential stealer inside, slipped in through a look-alike repository in the packaging process. It was live for about two hours and was downloaded tens of thousands of times. Most CEOs don't even know whether their company uses it.
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Altman and Clinton: the vulnerability tsunami (
20:05) โ Sam Altman, speaking at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, said in essence that he no longer thinks we will be able to patch all the bugs (paraphrased on air). Two days later Anthropic's Jason Clinton wrote that things will get a lot worse for the next 18 months. Two rivals, one message: AI finds the flaws in human-written code faster than companies can fix them.
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The thread (
25:55) โ Black October isn't one bad week. Discovery runs at machine speed, repair runs at meeting speed. Ask your IT this week: do we know which AI tools and packages we run, and who checks an "official" update before it goes in?
Corrections to the recording:
โข 24 hours after the PHP fix, about 99.28% of roughly two million visible PHP servers still showed an unpatched version, according to OX Security, not "90%".
โข The poisoned LiteLLM release was downloaded tens of thousands of times in its roughly two-hour window, not "hundreds of thousands".
โข Jason Clinton is Anthropic's deputy Chief Information Security Officer (deputy CISO).
Sources: Financial Times, JR East, Times Car, SoftBank, GMO, Sanae Takaichi on X (21 Oct 2026), CERT.LV, LiteLLM incident post, Wiz, BleepingComputer, GitGuardian, Stanford GSB, Jason D. Clinton on X (22 Oct 2026), OX Security. Disclosure: Malcolm is an Anthropic Claude Ambassador.
The full hour on the vulnerability tsunami: The AI Cookbook Show #136 (out now) and #137 (Thursday).
๐ฑ Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904
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