Radar · 2025-05
May 2025
A Chrome query-string leak is added to CISA's KEV catalogue then withdrawn, an unpatched file-upload flaw hits a WordPress plugin with 100,000 installs, Drupal's two-factor module is patched for CSRF and a reset-path bypass, Node.js ships security releases for all active lines and Australia's statutory privacy tort commences 10 June.
What's on our radar this month: releases, advisories and standards across the stack we run and the platforms we integrate with.
AI platform and models
Sections- notable MCP
Claude connects to remote MCP servers — claude.com
On 1 May 2025 Anthropic shipped Integrations, letting Claude connect to remote MCP servers across web and desktop rather than only local ones, with ten launch partners including Atlassian, Zapier, Asana, Sentry, Linear and PayPal. The same announcement introduced multi-source research runs and web search for paid plans.
This is the month MCP became a network-exposed, OAuth-authorised endpoint story. Anyone planning to let an assistant read or write CMS content should treat those servers like any other public API — TLS, authorisation, allowlisting and egress control, decided before the integration ships.
- notable Bedrock
Bedrock Guardrails gains cross-region inference — aws.amazon.com
From 14 May 2025 Amazon Bedrock Guardrails can optionally route guardrail evaluation across AWS regions to absorb traffic bursts and improve resilience, at no additional routing cost. The announcement describes the resilience benefit but does not enumerate which regions participate.
For workloads in Sydney or Melbourne under data-residency expectations, this is a setting that can quietly move prompt and response content offshore — leave it off for regulated workloads unless the decision is documented, and check the region list in the docs rather than assuming.
- fyi Anthropic
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 — anthropic.com
On 22 May Anthropic launched its next model generation. Both are hybrid models offering near-instant responses or extended thinking, can use tools during reasoning, and are available via the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI. Sonnet 4 is positioned as the general workhorse upgrade over Sonnet 3.7.
If you build on Claude via Bedrock, review model availability in your regions and plan migration testing from 3.x models.
Security and edge
Sections- critical Chrome
Chrome flaw leaks cross-origin query strings — thehackernews.com
CVE-2025-4664, reported 15 May 2025, lets a Link response header override referrer policy so that full query strings leak cross-origin — CVSS 4.3. Google shipped a fix in Chrome 136.0.7103.113 on 14 May and said an exploit existed in the wild; CISA added it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue on 15 May.
Much of the mitigation is an edge job: set a strict referrer policy as a response header at the CDN rather than relying on per-page markup, and audit any flow that carries OAuth codes, reset tokens or session identifiers in query strings.
Update, June 2025: On 5 June 2025 CISA said CVE-2025-4664 had not been exploited and removed it from the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue.
- notable TLS
Let's Encrypt to drop TLS Client Authentication from its certificates — letsencrypt.org
Let's Encrypt announced on 14 May that it will remove the TLS Client Authentication extended key usage from its certificates, driven by Chrome's root-program requirement to split client and server authentication into separate PKIs by June 2026. Standard website TLS is unaffected; only mutual TLS and device-authentication setups that rely on Let's Encrypt certificates for client auth need another issuer.
Identify any non-web uses of Let's Encrypt certificates — mutual TLS, device authentication or similar — and plan a migration to another CA ahead of the 2026 cutover.
- notable Chrome
Chrome to distrust Chunghwa Telecom and Netlock certificates from August — blog.google
On 30 May the Chrome Root Program announced that Chrome 139 will stop trusting new TLS certificates chaining to Chunghwa Telecom and Netlock roots, citing patterns of compliance failures and unmet improvement commitments. Certificates logged on or before 31 July 2025 keep working; anything issued after that date triggers a full-page warning.
Check certificate issuers across your estate now, and treat this as a reminder that root program trust can be withdrawn — automated issuance makes switching CAs a configuration change rather than a crisis.
Standards and compliance
Sections- critical Cyber Security Act
Mandatory ransomware payment reporting begins — homeaffairs.gov.au
From 30 May 2025 entities carrying on business in Australia with annual turnover for the previous financial year of more than $3 million, plus responsible entities for critical infrastructure assets, must report ransomware payments within 72 hours of making one or becoming aware one was made on their behalf. The obligation comes from the Cyber Security Act 2024, with the Cyber Security (Ransomware Payment Reporting) Rules 2025 registered on 3 March 2025; Commonwealth and state bodies are excluded, not-for-profits are not expressly exempt.
Any customer above the turnover threshold now runs a statutory 72-hour clock from the moment a payment happens — incident runbooks need a named reporting owner, the reporting channel identified in advance, and legal and incident-response retainers briefed on the deadline.
- notable ASD
ASD and international partners publish SIEM and SOAR implementation guidance — cyber.gov.au
On 27 May 2025 ASD's ACSC published a guidance suite on implementing SIEM and SOAR platforms, with executive and practitioner documents plus priority-log ingestion guidance. CISA's same-day alert records the suite as a joint release with ASD's ACSC and other international and US partners. The practitioner guidance is meant to be read alongside the existing Best practices for event logging and threat detection.
Teams evaluating or tuning SIEM/SOAR tooling should benchmark plans against the practitioner guidance, particularly on log ingestion priorities.
- notable Privacy Act
Statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy commences 10 June — oaic.gov.au
The new cause of action introduced by the Privacy Act reforms commences on 10 June 2025, letting individuals sue over serious invasions of privacy by intrusion upon seclusion or misuse of information. It reaches more broadly than the Privacy Act's usual scope, including entities that are not APP entities.
Review how your organisation collects, uses and discloses personal information — including tracking and analytics behaviour on public websites — with the new tort in mind.
CMS and platforms
Sections- notable Drupal
Drupal two-factor module patched for CSRF and a reset-path bypass — drupal.org
Two advisories landed on 7 May 2025 for the miniOrange two-factor authentication module. The first is critical at 18 out of 25 — certain routes were not protected against cross-site request forgery. The second, rated 13, is an access bypass: the module did not invoke second-factor verification on the password-reset path. Both are fixed in 5.2.0 and 8.x-4.7.
An attacker with access to a password-reset link could skip the second factor entirely — update immediately if the module is installed, and review reset-flow logs rather than assuming the gap was never used.
- notable WordPress
Unpatched file-upload flaw hits a WordPress plugin with 100,000 installs — thehackernews.com
CVE-2025-47577, reported 29 May 2025 and rated 10.0, is an unauthenticated arbitrary file upload in TI WooCommerce Wishlist affecting every version through 2.9.2 — with no patch available at disclosure. Exploitation requires a companion plugin also installed with its integration enabled. The plugin has more than 100,000 installations.
An unpatched maximum-severity flaw is a remove-it-or-virtual-patch-it decision, not a wait-for-the-update one — sweep the estate for the plugin pair and block the upload path at the edge if it cannot come out.
- fyi WordPress
WordPress forms a dedicated AI team — wordpress.org
In late May the WordPress project announced a core AI team, with initial contributors from Automattic, Google and 10up, to coordinate AI efforts across the ecosystem and avoid fragmentation as AI plugins proliferate. Like the Performance team, it will take a plugin-first approach before proposing anything for core.
Nothing to do while the team is organising rather than shipping. The thing to watch is the plugin-first sequencing, because it tells you where AI features will appear first — in canonical plugins a client can be advised to install or avoid, not in core where they would arrive with an upgrade whether anyone wanted them or not.
Supply chain, CI/CD and IaC
Sections- critical npm
rand-user-agent npm package compromised with a remote access trojan — bleepingcomputer.com
Malicious versions (1.0.110, 2.0.83 and 2.0.84) of rand-user-agent, an npm package averaging 45,000 weekly downloads, were published in early May carrying obfuscated code that installed a remote access trojan. The attacker used a stale publish token that lacked two-factor authentication, and the malicious code never appeared in the GitHub repository — only in the npm artefacts.
Check lockfiles for the affected versions, and prefer dependencies whose maintainers enforce two-factor authentication and publish provenance attestations.
Languages, runtimes and frameworks
Sections- notable Node.js
Node.js security releases for all active lines — nodejs.org
Security releases on 14 May (20.19.2, 22.15.1, 23.11.1 and 24.0.2) fix several vulnerabilities including CVE-2025-23166, and Node 20's HTTP parser was upgraded to close a header-termination inconsistency usable for request smuggling past proxy-based access controls. Node.js 18 receives no fix, having reached end of life on 30 April.
Patch Node.js across build and runtime environments; if anything still runs Node 18, treat these unpatched issues as added urgency to migrate.
Static site and web tooling
Sections- notable Astro
Astro 5.8 raises the minimum Node.js version — astro.build
Astro 5.8, released 19 May, requires Node.js 20.3.0 or 22 and newer now that Node 18 is end of life, temporarily accepting only the final 18.20.8 release. Builds running on default Node 18 images on some hosting platforms will need their runtime version overridden.
Move Astro build environments and CI runners to Node.js 22 before upgrading; support for Node 18.20.8 will be removed entirely in a future release.
- notable Remix
Remix 3 will be rebuilt without React — remix.run
In a 28 May post the Remix team announced that Remix 3 is a ground-up reimagining that drops React entirely in favour of the project's own component model, with no critical dependencies. Everything that made Remix v2 useful already lives in React Router v7 framework mode, which the team positions as the stable, long-term supported path.
Teams on Remix v2 should plan around React Router v7 framework mode rather than waiting for Remix 3, which is a different framework in all but name; treat Remix 3 as a new technology evaluation, not an upgrade.
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