Exclusive: Researcher Finds Vulnerability in Software Used for Data Centers

Charge Robotics chief technology officer Max Justicz said he used a specialized OpenAI model to find a vulnerability in a popular open-source software that would allow someone to hack into major datacenters. Justicz said he alerted Canonical, the British company that maintains the software Ubuntu, of the vulnerability in late September. The company planned to release the patch for the bug this Wednesday, he said.

The discovery is the latest in recent months by researchers who’ve used advanced AI models to identify weaknesses in long-standing code, particularly after OpenAI launched its Patch the Planet bug-fixing initiative in June and Anthropic launched the similar Cyber Mission in October.

Justicz, who says he does security research as a hobby, said he used a version of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol meant for cybersecurity researchers and found a bug in apt, the system that handles software downloads for the Ubuntu operating system. By tapping into the fiber cables connected to datacenters, malicious actors could run their own code on its servers and hijack websites, he warned.

Justicz says he is not aware of any attempts to exploit the vulnerability. The flaw he found in apt joins recent discoveries including a flaw in a popular web-hosting software that affected 70% of the world’s websites, and a vulnerability found by Anthropic researchers in the Linux code Ubuntu uses.