November 09, 2026

Presented By

It’s Monday! On this day in 2004, the Mozilla Foundation announced the worldwide availability of Firefox 1.0. This marked the first time a web browser sounded like a pilot from Top Gun…and helped popularize the now common problem of having 2,494 tabs open.

In today’s edition:

🔒 Source subject

👽 Alien (cyber)attack

💰 Contract accordingly

—Eoin Higgins, Billy Hurley, Caroline Nihill

SOFTWARE

Infrastructure culture

Red PHP coding language with broken window hole over it

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Adobe Stock

When OpenAI and a team of researchers discovered a devastating zero-day vulnerability in the open-source scripting language PHP—one that has existed since 2014—it raised questions about who maintains the systems and files that underpin the modern tech stack.

To Vlad Korsunsky, Tenable CTO, the crisis is a good example of the emergency presented by vulnerable open-source infrastructure, which is a basic component of the tech stack—and a dependency for nearly every enterprise, whether they know it or not.

“Open source is awesome, it powers innovation, it’s everywhere, and it allows you to use the community as a force multiplier,” Korsunsky said.

Easy does it. Many open-source products have only a single volunteer or group of people who act as maintainer and monitor. While that’s largely proven stable so far, AI tools have complicated that picture.

What’s the potential for finding more vulnerabilities?—EH

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CYBERSECURITY

Alien vs. zero day

A graphic featuring Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum from the 1996 sci-fi action movie, Independence Day

Morning Brew Inc., Photos: 20th Century Fox

When alien invaders park their spacecraft above the Earth’s major cities in the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day, humanity’s last hope becomes Jeff Goldblum and his Apple PowerBook 5300.

Satellite engineer David Levinson (played by Goldblum) and wingman Steven Hiller (Will Smith) dock their plane to the alien mothership, and Levinson delivers malicious code that shuts down the extraterrestrials’ defense shields across the globe. Talk about a Project Hail Mary.

After watching this interstellar cyberattack, an IT pro might have some questions.

When alien invaders forget that antivirus update.—BH

WORD OF THE WEEK

Cache: Caching allows for speedy data retrieval, as the request doesn’t need to access a storage layer. However, a typical cache only has so much capacity. Learn more.

IT STRATEGY

State your business

an illustration of the US Capitol building being unplugged

Anna Kim

The private sector knows all about moving fast and breaking things—but trying to bring tech’s innovative edge to the public sector, with its slower pace of adoption, can prove a roadblock for companies trying to sell to markets like state governments.

For most businesses, it could take three to six months to get through the process of winning a contract for a state agency—still shorter than federal procurement timelines, which can span between six to 18 months because of regulations. States have simpler procurement rules, shorter evaluation cycles, and other lower barriers for purchasing.

While all 50 states are unique with their own procurement rules and needs, experts like Quinn Anex-Ries, senior policy analyst for the equity and civic technology team at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said they are all looking to effectively procure software and other technologies safely and efficiently for agencies’ missions.

“There’s still the common need around modernizing basic government systems to keep up with changes in programmatic requirements or needs from constituents,” Anex-Ries said.

Is the public sector behind the commercial sector?—CN

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 6 out of 10. That’s the proportion of 1,000 global developers who said they’re asked to do more with fewer resources because of AI expectations, according to a survey from tech consultancy Adaptavist. (TechRadar)

Quote: “Voting is one of the few decisions we make purely for ourselves. So handing it to a chatbot is worrying.”—Abdiaziz Ahmed, technology policy strategist with the nonprofit Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, on AI giving voting advice (NPR)

Read: Community colleges are helping the world’s leading chipmakers train workers to run new plants in the US. (the Associated Press)

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Written by Eoin Higgins, Billy Hurley, and Caroline Nihill

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