Radar · 2025-11
November 2025
Shai-Hulud returns in a second and larger npm worm wave, four Drupal core security advisories land on a single day, ASD warns of ongoing BADCANDY implants on Cisco IOS XE devices, PHP 8.5 ships and the OWASP Top 10:2025 puts supply chain failures at number three.
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
New Model Context Protocol specification published — modelcontextprotocol.io
The MCP project published specification version 2025-11-25 on the protocol's first anniversary. It adds experimental tasks for tracking long-running server work, protocol extensions, and related authorisation and elicitation changes aimed at production deployments.
If you run MCP servers or clients, review the changelog and plan upgrades while SDKs roll out support for the new version.
- notable AI security
First reported AI-orchestrated espionage campaign disrupted — anthropic.com
On 13 November 2025 Anthropic disclosed that a Chinese state-sponsored group jailbroke Claude Code and used it to run what it describes as the first documented large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention, detected in mid-September. The AI performed 80 to 90 per cent of campaign tasks — reconnaissance, exploit writing, credential harvesting, exfiltration — against roughly thirty targets across tech, finance, chemicals and government, with humans making only a handful of decisions per campaign. A small number of intrusions succeeded before the accounts were banned.
Defensive assumptions built around human attacker tempo need review — rate limiting, WAF tuning and anomaly-detection thresholds all encode expectations about how fast an adversary moves, and this campaign moved at machine speed.
- fyi Anthropic
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.5 — anthropic.com
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 on 24 November, with claimed gains in coding, agent workflows and long-horizon tasks. It is available via the Claude API and on all three major cloud platforms. Together with Sonnet 4.5 (29 September) and Haiku 4.5 (15 October) it completes the 4.5 model family — three launches in about two months.
No action. The cadence is what to record: three model launches in two months means a model version pinned in a client artefact ages within a quarter, which is the argument for naming the capability and a review date in a proposal rather than the model itself.
Security and edge
Sections- critical ACSC
ASD warns of ongoing BADCANDY implants on Cisco IOS XE devices — thehackernews.com
On 31 October 2025 the ASD warned that attackers are still installing the BADCANDY web shell on Cisco IOS XE devices unpatched against the 2023 vulnerability CVE-2023-20198, stating that as at late October more than 150 devices remained compromised in Australia. The implant does not survive a reboot, but ASD notes that removing it does not undo whatever else an attacker did with the access — so a reboot should not be read as remediation.
Patch and audit any Cisco IOS XE devices in your network path, assume credential compromise on affected devices, and rotate accordingly.
- notable Firefox
Firefox 145 halves how many users fingerprinting can identify — mozilla.org
Firefox 145, released 11 November, ships a new round of anti-fingerprinting protections that hide hardware details such as core count, touch support and dock or taskbar size from websites, and strengthen font protections, cutting the share of uniquely identifiable users by roughly half. The protections apply first in private browsing and strict tracking protection mode, with a wider default rollout to follow.
Audit analytics, personalisation and fraud tooling for reliance on device signals such as core count or touch capability — expect less entropy from Firefox users.
- fyi auDA
auDA opens public consultation on the .au licensing rules — auda.org.au
auDA's external Policy Advisory Panel opened public consultation on the .au Licensing Rules Review on 24 November. auDA reviews the licensing rules periodically, and this round runs until 31 March 2026, with virtual town hall sessions along the way, and the panel is due to recommend changes to the auDA board by mid-2026.
If your organisation holds .au domains, review the consultation materials and consider a submission — eligibility and licensing changes flow directly from this process.
Update, August 2026: auDA's board approved the panel's final recommendations in principle at its August 2026 meeting. Draft changes to the .au Licensing Rules will go to public consultation.
Standards and compliance
Sections- fyi OWASP
OWASP Top 10:2025 release candidate puts supply chain failures at number three — owasp.org
In early November OWASP published the release candidate of the Top 10:2025, its first refresh since 2021, with community comment open until 20 November. Broken Access Control stays first and now absorbs SSRF, Security Misconfiguration rises to second, and two new categories arrive: Software Supply Chain Failures at third — expanded from 2021's Vulnerable and Outdated Components — and Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions at tenth.
The Top 10 anchors pen-test scopes, procurement requirements and secure-coding standards, so re-map your controls to the 2025 categories — supply chain at number three squarely covers the npm and CI/CD hardening work of the past year.
- fyi Privacy Act
OAIC launches a data-breach dashboard as human error climbs — oaic.gov.au
On 4 November 2025 the OAIC published notifiable data breach statistics for January to June 2025 — 532 notifications, down ten per cent on the record July to December 2024 half, with malicious or criminal attacks behind 59 per cent and human error rising sharply to 37 per cent; health, finance and Australian Government agencies led the sectors. Alongside the numbers it launched an interactive dashboard covering breach data back to the scheme's February 2018 commencement, updated twice-yearly.
Benchmark your sector on the dashboard and re-check breach-response plans — the human-error trend says training and process, not just tooling, is where notifications are coming from.
- fyi DTA
DTA publishes the digital strategy's 2025 implementation plan — dta.gov.au
On 18 November 2025 the DTA released the Data and Digital Government Strategy's 2025 Implementation Plan, setting the year-ahead priorities across AI — including the AI Plan for the APS and the GovAI platform — data sharing, connected services around myGov and Digital ID, and cyber trust.
Agency teams and their vendors get the roadmap the next round of digital investment will be measured against — worth mapping proposals to its priority areas.
CMS and platforms
Sections- notable Drupal
Four Drupal core security advisories released on 12 November — drupal.org
Drupal's rescheduled 12 November security window delivered four moderately critical core advisories (SA-CORE-2025-005 to 008), covering denial of service, a deserialization gadget chain that is not directly exploitable, defacement and an information disclosure issue involving cached private files. Fixed releases are available for supported Drupal 10 and 11 branches.
Update Drupal core to the fixed release for your branch. Sites using custom file schemes or private files behind caching should review SA-CORE-2025-008 closely.
- notable WordPress
WordPress 6.9 reaches release candidate, final lands 2 December — wordpress.org
WordPress 6.9 moved through its release candidate phase in November, starting with RC1 on 11 November, ahead of the final release on 2 December. Plugin and theme authors are asked to finish compatibility testing and update their 'tested up to' versions.
Complete staging tests now and schedule production upgrades soon after release; avoid upgrading and deploying other changes in the same window.
- fyi Drupal
Drupal 11.3 and 10.6 minor releases due mid-December — drupal.org
The next Drupal minor releases, 11.3.0 and 10.6.0, are scheduled for mid-December under the core release cycle. Minor releases can deprecate APIs and change supported dependency versions, so contributed module compatibility is worth checking before the new year.
Review the release schedule and plan a January window to move onto the new minors once contributed modules catch up.
Supply chain, CI/CD and IaC
Sections- critical npm
Shai-Hulud returns in a second, larger npm worm wave — thehackernews.com
By 26 November a second Shai-Hulud wave had compromised more than 830 npm packages, including releases tied to Zapier, PostHog, AsyncAPI and Postman, and a mirrored Maven artefact. The malware steals developer credentials during preinstall, plants GitHub Actions backdoors and exfiltrates stolen secrets to public GitHub repositories, with more than 28,000 repositories affected.
Audit installs from the affected window, rotate npm, GitHub and cloud credentials, review GitHub Actions workflows for unauthorised additions, and enforce lockfile-only installs with lifecycle scripts disabled in CI.
- notable Terraform
Terraform Enterprise lets under-privileged users seed a state version — github.com
Security bulletin HCSEC-2025-34, published 21 November 2025 as CVE-2025-13432, describes Terraform Enterprise allowing state versions to be created without sufficient write access. An under-privileged user can seed a state version that a subsequent privileged apply then treats as legitimate. It is fixed in Terraform Enterprise 1.1.1 and 1.0.3. A separate bulletin the same day, HCSEC-2025-33, covers the Vault Terraform provider applying an insecure default for the LDAP authentication method.
Patch Terraform Enterprise and audit state-version history for entries created by accounts that should not have been able to write them. Separately, upgrade the Vault Terraform provider to v5.5.0 or later and check that LDAP auth mounts it manages set deny_null_bind to true.
Languages, runtimes and frameworks
Sections- notable PHP
PHP 8.5 released as PHP 8.1 security support ends on 31 December — php.net
PHP 8.5.0 arrived on 20 November with the pipe operator, a built-in URI extension and clone-with-properties, and is supported until 31 December 2029. PHP 8.1 receives its final security fixes on 31 December 2025, and PHP 8.3's active support ends the same day.
Migrate any remaining PHP 8.1 workloads before the end of December. Check CMS and framework compatibility matrices before jumping straight to 8.5.
- notable Symfony
Symfony 7.4 LTS and Symfony 8.0 released together — symfony.com
Symfony shipped 7.4 and 8.0 in late November with an identical feature set. Symfony 7.4 is the long-term support release, with bug fixes to November 2028 and security fixes to November 2029 on PHP 8.2 or newer, while 8.0 removes all deprecated code paths and requires PHP 8.4.
Teams on Symfony 6.4 or 7.x should target 7.4 and clear its deprecation notices — that is the supported path to a painless 8.x upgrade later.
- notable Go
Go 1.25.4 and 1.24.10 are minor November point releases — groups.google.com
Go 1.25.4 and 1.24.10, released 5 November 2025, are minor point releases. 1.25.4 includes fixes in
crypto/subtle,encoding/pem,net/urlandos; 1.24.10 coversencoding/pemandnet/url. The project did not label these as security fixes.Rebuild on the current point release in the normal cycle.
Static site and web tooling
Sections- fyi Astro
Astro 5.16 and Starlight 0.37 ship in November — astro.build
November's releases brought Astro 5.16 with experimental SVG optimisation, interactive CLI improvements and a collection of developer experience enhancements, plus Starlight 0.37 with opt-in Markdown processing for non-docs collections and better table whitespace handling.
Routine uptake in the normal cycle. Starlight's opt-in Markdown processing for non-docs collections is the one setting here that changes output rather than tooling.
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