Security through obscurity is dead, and AI delivered the fatal blow
It was never a sound strategy for protecting sensitive assets and systems, but many organizations leaned on it due to lack of resources or complacency.Now it’s obsolete. Software vendors and independent researchers alike are now using AI agents to find bugs – some very obscure and decades old – across products and open source code, leading to record-breaking numbers of security disclosures and patches, and a massive backlog for project maintainers. “When you look at all of the components patched by Adobe and Microsoft yesterday, you see components no one has talked about in years,” Childs said.
- ▪It was never a sound strategy for protecting sensitive assets and systems, but many organizations leaned on it due to lack of resources or complacency.Now it’s obsolete.
- ▪Software vendors and independent researchers alike are now using AI agents to find bugs – some very obscure and decades old – across products and open source code, leading to record-breaking numbers of security disclosures and patches, and
- ▪“When you look at all of the components patched by Adobe and Microsoft yesterday, you see components no one has talked about in years,” Childs said.
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/13/security-through-obscurity-is-dead-and-ai-delivered-the-fatal-blow/5296000 |
| Publication time | Sun, 13 Sep 2026 13:21:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-13T11:21:50.700Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-13T11:21:50.700Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | fZHvEVCF1Mh_ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); security Security through obscurity is dead, and AI delivered the fatal blow RIP, you won't be mourned Jessica Lyons Jessica Lyons Cybersecurity Editor Published sun 13 Sep 2026 // 12:21 UTC READ MORE AI more likely to kill animals if it saves fuel or money 1 day ago Higher prices can't crimp server sales as AI drives demand 1 day ago Union body tells UK government workers must get a say before AI clocks in 2 days ago DeepSeek's new model sets a template for powerful LLMs that run lean 2…
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