Tech News, October 13: Atlassian’s Unpatched Week, Google’s $180 Fitbit Edge, and DeepMind’s No-Degree Hiring Blitz

Today’s news mixes a critical Atlassian vulnerability that attackers are still scanning for a week after patches landed, Google’s new $179.99 mid-tier fitness tracker, a major enterprise AI partnership between HCLTech and Anthropic, and a DeepMind job posting that pairs $1.1 million in total comp with no degree requirement.

Atlassian’s critical flaw is still drawing attackers, a week after the patch

Atlassian disclosed CVE-2026-21589 on October 5: a CVSS 9.3 unauthenticated arbitrary file read affecting eight self-hosted Data Center products — Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, Crowd, Crucible, and Fisheye. The bug sits in a shared library, atlassian-plugins-webresource, which converts double-colon sequences (::) into forward slashes when resolving plugin resource paths. An attacker sends one crafted request and reads files from the application’s web root, including configuration files that sometimes hold database or application credentials in plaintext. Atlassian Cloud is not affected.

watchTowr published technical details and a proof-of-concept on October 6. Within about two hours, exploitation attempts were already hitting the honeypot network of threat-intelligence firm Previdian — attacks have continued since, and a public Nuclei scanning template now makes mass automated probing easy. As of October 8, Previdian had logged 190 attempts from 32 IP addresses across 10 countries, and a second report dated October 12 noted the flaw is still absent from CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The exposure surface is large: roughly 40,000 Atlassian Data Center instances were reachable on the public internet in early October, per Shodan and Censys data, and watchTowr counted just under 700,000 Confluence instances alone.

The worst-case chain is in Crowd-integrated Jira setups, where WEB-INF/classes/crowd.properties holds the application’s plaintext credentials. watchTowr demonstrated using those credentials against Crowd’s REST API to create a user and add it to the jira-administrators group — full admin access from a file read.

What matters: if you run any affected Data Center product exposed to the internet, patching is the immediate step — followed by rotating any credentials stored in web-root-adjacent configuration files and checking access logs for double-colon patterns in requests since early October. Fixed versions include Jira Software 9.12.40 / 10.3.26 / 11.3.12 and Confluence 9.2.26 / 10.2.19. (The Hacker News, SecurityWeek)

Google launches the Fitbit Edge: $179.99, between the Air and the Pixel Watch

Google opened preorders on October 12 for the Fitbit Edge, a new tracker priced at $179.99 that reaches stores on October 27. It fills the gap in a three-tier lineup: the screenless Fitbit Air at $100, the Edge with a display, and the Pixel Watch 5 at the top. The device pairs a 1.34-inch AMOLED screen with a seven-day battery (two days with always-on display enabled), built-in GPS that Google says is up to 40% more accurate than previous generations, and automatic recognition of up to 100 activity types. A Stephen Curry Special Edition is priced at $219.99.

Health features include Google’s Health Guardian, designed to spot long-term changes in health measurements — including indicators related to blood pressure and insulin resistance — and Google Health Coach, a Gemini-powered coaching tool that builds weekly routines from your fitness and health data. Health Coach requires a Google Health Premium subscription. Google claims sleep-stage detection is 15% more accurate than earlier generations, and the hardware is rated 5 ATM and IP68 with a user-replaceable battery.

What matters: Google is rebuilding the middle of its wearable lineup — a display-equipped band with week-long battery life for people who want tracking and notifications without a full smartwatch. The open question is how much of the pitch (Health Coach, Health Guardian) hides behind the Premium subscription. (TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal via Morningstar)

HCLTech signs a Global Premier Partnership with Anthropic

On October 12, HCLTech — India’s third-largest IT services firm — announced a Global Premier Partnership with Anthropic aimed at enterprise adoption of agentic AI, with stated emphasis on safety, cybersecurity, and governance. HCLTech will set up a dedicated Anthropic Business Unit with a Center of Excellence to build industry solutions and provide secure sandbox environments for enterprise Claude deployments through Frontier Deployed Engineers. Its teams will build offerings powered by Claude, Cowork, and Claude Code, and integrate them into its agentic software engineering platform, AI Force.

On the product side, HCLSoftware becomes an Anthropic ISV partner, embedding Claude capabilities and getting access to advanced models for products across cybersecurity, automation, and application development — the announcement names HCL BigFix and HCL AppScan, and mentions enabling Actian AI analyst.

What matters: this is the latest in Anthropic’s push into the enterprise channel through systems integrators — a pattern that puts Claude inside security and IT-operations tooling, not just chatbots. The company reported second-quarter results later the same day. (Reuters, PR Newswire)

DeepMind is hiring for “Polaris” at up to $1.1M — no degree required

Google DeepMind’s new Polaris team builds evaluation tasks that measure how well Gemini handles real software-engineering work. The Research Engineer role, based in Mountain View, involves hand-building detailed coding exams for the model — each task takes about a week from idea to final approval — plus work on improving Gemini’s training data and evaluations.

The listing drew attention on October 10 when Tamay Besiroglu, an Epoch AI co-founder now working on data at DeepMind, posted that the team wants exceptional problem-solvers with no degree requirement: total compensation from $550,000 to $1.1 million a year, with a base salary of $164,000 to $252,000. The job description asks for experience with software development and comfort using AI-assisted coding tools and LLM-based workflows; preferred qualifications include competitive programming or math competitions (IMO, USAMO, Putnam, IOI), hackathons, and experience designing evaluation frameworks or benchmark datasets. The team first called for applicants on September 25.

What matters: the most sought-after capability in AI labs right now is measuring what their own models can actually do — hand-built, high-fidelity evals rather than synthetic benchmarks. The pay reflects that scarcity. Note the pay figures come from Besiroglu’s post rather than the public listing, which he said understates total comp. (Times of India, NDTV)

Key takeaways

• Patch CVE-2026-21589 now if you run self-hosted Atlassian Data Center products — active scanning continues and CISA has not yet added it to its KEV catalog.
• The Fitbit Edge ($179.99, stores October 27) is Google’s attempt to own the middle of the wearables market between cheap bands and full smartwatches.
• HCLTech is betting its enterprise AI practice on Anthropic, embedding Claude into security and IT tooling.
• DeepMind will pay up to $1.1M in total comp for engineers who can hand-build coding evals for Gemini — degree optional.

References

• The Hacker News — Atlassian Data Center Flaw Draws Exploitation Attempts Within Two Hours of Public Details
• SecurityWeek — Attackers Target Critical Atlassian Vulnerability Within Hours of PoC Publication
• Dev.to — Atlassian CVE-2026-21589: critical no-login flaw in Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket Data Center
• TechCrunch — Fitbit Edge is Google’s middle ground between Fitbit Air and Pixel Watch
• Wall Street Journal via Morningstar — Google Launches Preorders for Fitbit Edge, Starting at $179.99
• Reuters — India’s HCLTech signs a pact with Anthropic, to set up business unit
• PR Newswire — HCLTech and Anthropic sign Global Premier Partnership
• Times of India — Google DeepMind is hiring AI engineers for its new team with salary of up to $1.1 million