Connexion
The New York Knicks organization sent employees a phishing email promising free championship rings in a test of its staff's ability to detect scams, The New York Times reported yesterday. “Congratulations, your Employee Championship Ring is here,” the email sent in late September said, instructing employees to click a link to make a selection from two ring designs.
Madison Square Garden employees who clicked that link "were forced to attend a mandatory cybersecurity class to help satisfy some of [owner James] Dolan’s growing cybersecurity concerns," the report said, citing team sources. Dolan is the owner of the Knicks, the New York Rangers, and Madison Square Garden.
It's common for corporations to send phishing emails to find out which employees don't pay attention to clues that an email is a scam. A cybersecurity-test email often appears to be from the company itself but includes telltale signs of phishing. For example, Ars Technica owner Condé Nast sends phishing-test messages from email addresses with a misspelled domain, "condenest.com."
eMudhra, the certificate authority that issued eight intermediate TLS credentials so weak that anyone could mint certificates for any website or mail server—one had a private encryption key of just 4—said it’s getting out of the business.
V. Srinivasan, chairman of India-based eMudhra Limited, cited increasing costs and complexities of compliance requirements—paired with the business generating just 1 percent of its revenue. He also said that the emergence of organizations providing TLS certificates free of charge further reduced returns on investment when compared to other products and services the company offers.
“However, the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to SSL/TLS’s place in our business,” the company continued in a Thursday post. “In view of this, after detailed deliberations our board has concluded that withdrawing from global SSL/TLS is the right decision for eMudhra and its shareholders.”
Amazon has warned that vulnerabilities in a programming language that underpins much of the Internet, discovered using AI tools, are being “broadly exploited” as governments and companies rush to secure their systems.
The world’s largest cloud computing provider on Wednesday said it had identified an attempt by hackers to exploit the bug four days before the weakness was disclosed to the public.
Amazon added the flaws were “now being broadly exploited in the wild.”
Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere.
PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10.
“All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available,” the advisory stated. “We reserve the right to release earlier should details of either vulnerability become public, or should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild.”
Security personnel around the world are on high alert Tuesday following the discovery of eight TLS certificates with private keys so weak they could allow anyone to mint trusted browser and app credentials for any site on the Internet.
As of late morning Tuesday, browser makers and some major apps and programming languages had blocked all eight of the intermediate certificates. There are no reports of certificate transparency logs, which track the issuance of all browser-trusted certificates, showing the compromised keys being used maliciously. The threat remains far from over, however, because it will be hard and time-consuming to update other key parts of the Internet, such as Linux distributions and embedded and Internet of Things devices.
The eight intermediate certificates belong to India-based certificate authority eMudhra Limited. An informal advisory published to emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com over on Tuesday posted the message “We have a problem here - Wayne.” The words were digitally signed using the private key of one of the eMudhra certificates. With proof that the reporting party had control of the key, defenders scrambled because the same key could be used to sign unauthorized certificates that would be trusted by millions of servers worldwide.
Muse, the new general-purpose AI agent from Meta, can expose sensitive information when users share conversations through web links, researchers reported Monday. In response to questions from Ars about the behavior, Meta said it's suspending the sharing feature while the company reviews it and considers making changes.
Like many online services, Muse has allowed users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can’t be easily guessed.
Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was “built from the ground up for privacy and security,” seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available, including:
On Monday, a court granted the US government's request to deny release of a former OpenAI engineer accused of bugging a top-secret conference room to steal the frontier lab’s secrets.
In a court filing Sunday, US attorney Craig Missakian argued that Abdulrahman Alfozan must continue to be detained while the US makes its case that Alfozan brazenly spied on OpenAI, either for his own personal business gain or to benefit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Evidence showed that Alfozan had been chatting with a member of the KSA royal family on WhatsApp, while pursuing opportunities to permanently move back to Saudi Arabia during the country's biggest AI push yet, the government argued. Shortly before his arrest, the FBI found he accessed a folder called "Saudi Gov Docs" on his iPhone, where he also allegedly stored photos of a second bug he planted in the offices.
Recently fixed vulnerabilities in the Plex Media Server are under active exploitation in attacks that, when successful, install malware, including cryptominers and residential proxy apps, a researcher said.
Plex fixed four vulnerabilities at the start of last month. Three weeks later, published CVE designations revealed five vulnerabilities, with one of them carrying a severity rating of 8.6 out of 10. A researcher last week revealed an exploit that chained four of them together to achieve remote code execution of the device running a vulnerable Plex version. The researcher named the chain "Plex2Shell."
The new details allowed a separate researcher to create a honeypot that could track attempts in the wild to exploit the vulnerability chain. Within a day, the researcher began seeing active scanning of the simulated Plex server and eventually successful attempts to infect devices. So far, successful attacks are installing two payloads. One is a cryptominer, which uses the device to mine cryptocurrency and deposit it into a wallet controlled by the attacker. The other payload is residential proxy software, which allows people to anonymize their Internet activity (much of it illegal) by connecting to the infected box and then using it to send the user’s traffic to a final destination.
OpenAI said internal models hacked two more websites, bypassed company-imposed browsing restrictions, and used exposed credentials to draw cryptocurrency from a wallet it couldn’t otherwise access, in the latest installment of disclosures of the unethical and likely illegal acts its agents are performing.
The company on Thursday issued reports of four new incidents, all of which occurred in June. They come after the company revealed in July that internal test agents exploited a zero-day vulnerability in a tool designed to restrict their access to the Internet. They then broke into the network of AI tool provider Hugging Face. The agents took that illegal action to steal answers to a hacking test that weren’t available when completing the tasks on their own. The incident—which likely would have resulted in criminal charges had they been performed directly by a person—has further heightened concerns that widespread AI use could have harmful effects on an unprecedented scale.
In two of the cases reported Thursday, OpenAI agents tasked with retrieving information from websites hacked them when the models ran into obstacles obtaining it directly. In one incident during reinforcement training, a model that received access denials when trying to retrieve historical hospital-bed statistics on a government statistics website “used the site's file-download feature to retrieve server configuration and application files, including sensitive credentials,” OpenAI said. “It inspected the application code, bypassed the statistics endpoint's authorization checks, and retrieved data that had previously been denied. The model saved the data locally.”
Researchers say that mercenary hackers laced ads with zero-click exploits that installed sophisticated malware on the devices of targeted individuals when they did nothing other than load a website or open an installed app.
The finding, published Thursday by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said the incident is likely to be the first confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads. The attacks, which worked on iOS and Android devices, are particularly pernicious because they work without requiring any interaction from the target and are invisible unless users run special forensic hardware or software. Citizen Lab said it confirmed that AdFection, as it named the campaign, infected 45 devices at international media organization Al Jazeera in 2024 and 2025.
“This investigation should… serve as a clear warning signal to news organizations around the world that they may be being actively targeted via this new threat,” Citizen Lab researchers wrote. “This targeting may happen both in newsrooms and to individual journalists, editors, and other staff members.” Their report went on to say: “The distribution of spyware via targeted ads represents a security risk not only for potential victims but also for states and civil society at large.”
Following a string of incidents where AI models hacked websites and breached government systems during testing phases, the Federal Trade Commission is officially probing Anthropic and OpenAI over consumer harms, an insider told Axios.
On Wednesday, the FTC sent out civil investigative demands seeking a wide range of information from the AI firms on recent safety incidents.
The FTC did not respond to Ars’ request to review the subpoena demands. However, Axios’ source said the requests spanned more than 50 pages of questions and sought documents related to the incidents, internal security measures taken, and marketing materials that may suggest consumers were misled.
Earlier this week, a mass hack of refrigeration systems at an estimated 700 supermarkets throughout France caused them to suddenly malfunction, causing spoilage of untold tons of perishables and, in some cases, fires. As is now the norm, basic cybersecurity would have prevented it.
French authorities say the systems, made up of entire fleets of refrigerators and freezers throughout a store, were hacked. More specifically, Internet-connected controllers that allow technicians to remotely administer the store-wide systems were compromised. The unknown attackers responsible then activated defrosters long enough for the fridges to reach temperatures as high as 50° Celsius (122° Fahrenheit). By the time the mass compromise was discovered, food was spoiled, and in some cases their electrical systems caught fire.
Multiple security advisories and public research reports show that all three of the controller models reportedly hacked in the incident—sold by Danfoss of Denmark and Dixell and its parent company Copeland in the US—contained critical vulnerabilities that allow attackers to remotely log in to the devices with the same system rights as administrators. Until recently, Danfoss controllers, for instance, used a credential that changes each day. The password is generated by the publicly available firmware based on the date. A hacker who takes the time to analyze the code can do the same thing on any device that hasn’t received a recent update. Daily passwords are identical across models located in hundreds or thousands of stores.
AI company Anthropic is warning that advances in small AI models could soon usher in a new era of self-replicating malware that’s capable of infecting smart fridges, vacuum cleaners, and a wide range of other Internet-of-things devices and is more resistant to takedown.
By next year, smaller AI models may be able to autonomously self-replicate on all kinds of IoT devices, the company said. Eventually, the capability could enable computer worms, which propagate without requiring human interaction and are capable of infecting unfamiliar IoT devices. An experiment the company performed recently revealed significant challenges in bringing such an AI malware replicator to fruition, so the finding is necessarily tempered. Still, the results do raise concerns about the possibility of new forms of computer worms.
Anthropic further warned not only about the new potential malware, but also that it could be difficult to stop. In its blog post, it wrote that “a replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own.”
Let's Encrypt is continuing a push toward tighter security by reducing free SSL/TLS certificate lifetimes from 90 days to 64 days, starting February 10, 2027. For administrators already implementing modern ACME clients that support ARI (ACME Renewal Information), the change should be seamless. For those still relying on hardcoded renewal schedules or manual processes, February will be the deadline to update before certificates start expiring unexpectedly.
Starting on October 14, Let's Encrypt will begin testing the 64-day certificates, and interested users can opt in to test their setups before production goes live.
Prior to Let's Encrypt's launch in early 2016, certificates were often issued for as long as one to three years. The service started with 90-day certificates to force renewal automation that didn't previously exist. Shorter certificate validity periods limited vulnerabilities from private key thefts and encouraged accelerated HTTPS adoption across the web.
The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions.
The objective of some of the OpenAI agents’ actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites. In one case, the agents posted “malicious edits” that were intended to repurpose a citation tool as a proxy. In another, the agents made unsuccessful attempts to compromise the Wikipedia Etherpad note-taking tool so it would serve the same purpose.
The agents also made millions of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages, and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. The last action may have contributed to a partial shutdown of the query service in May, the publisher said.
The adoption of AI agents in millions of organizations is creating new opportunities for attackers to make them take malicious actions, such as exfiltrating database contents and sensitive business and personal information.
In the past five months, Google and four other organizations—with little in common except for their use of AI agents—have acknowledged vulnerabilities that exploit one agent inside a targeted network to spread harmful instructions to other internal agents. The technique is a special form of prompt injection that targets not the LLM but a particular agent, such as one for translation or data analysis. Guardrails inside such agents, if they exist at all, are often lax and will send the instructions to other agents down the chain. Because the latter agent explicitly trusts the first one, it follows the directions.
Independent researcher Syed Anas Mohiuddin tested agents from organizations including Google, JP Morgan Chase, Weviate, Rapid7, the French government's interministerial digital directorate, and the US federal government. His proof-of-concept attacks exploit trust gaps in MCP, short for Model Context Protocol. The standard is one way AI apps and agents communicate with each other inside an internal network. The illustration below shows a simplified MCP in action.
Apple says it is changing its macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from misusing them to access message histories.
Friday's announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages and had assumed they were off-limits. Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.
Meta CTO David Singleton joined the fray with a rebuttal that appeared solid. For Muse to access Apple Messages, a user must manually give it two privileges. One is full-disk access, a macOS system-level permission. The other is to enable a Messages connector setting in Muse.
The Pentagon is informing more than 2 million current and former military members that their personnel records storing sensitive personal information were stolen over a monthslong compromise of one of its networks. The breach is the second one in recent months to expose sensitive government information.
The records, according to one notification letter posted to Reddit, included Social Security numbers, names, addresses, sex, race, and occupational specialty. This last category could be particularly valuable to foreign adversaries because it could help their intelligence agencies in identifying high-value military personnel. Starting last October, hackers gained access to a system operated by the Defense Manpower Data Center, which collates Department of Defense personnel records. The Pentagon says that the breach compromised the records of 2.8 million living individuals.
The incident is the second time a major network breach in recent months has exposed sensitive US government personnel records that criminal groups or foreign adversaries could use. Last month, the ransomware group ShinyHunters claimed it hacked into FBI systems and stole records of thousands of the agency’s current or former employees. Reuters reported the job titles in the records included ones related to investigating China or Russia.
Hackers have been exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite in an attempt to obtain email backups and authentication credentials of vulnerable organzations, Microsoft has warned.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-73570, lets attackers remotely issue operating system commands without authentication. Zimbra maintainer Synacor issued a patch on July 20, but didn’t disclose the vulnerability for more than three weeks after that. The security-focused Shadowserver Foundation said last week that its scans found that 274 separate instances of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite had been compromised. The number of servers running the software has fluctuated from 19,000 in the week following the patch to about 12,000 in the weeks following that. Currently, Shadowserver is tracking about 10,000 instances.
From July 28 to August 7, Microsoft said Wednesday, the company detected two distinct scanning tools probing the Internet for vulnerable endpoints. The attackers first validated their exploit worked by sending HTTP, requests and DNS, ICMP, and out-of-band identity checks to domains hosted on public services. The probes allowed the attackers to confirm the exploit successfully executed commands on vulnerable servers without actually compromising them. Eventually, the attackers began using their command injection capability to install malicious payloads. Microsoft wrote:
Cloudflare said Tuesday it plans to issue quantum-proof TLS certificates, making it one of the first authorities to issue such certificates that use a form of cryptography that is widely believed to withstand attacks from quantum computers.
The Internet infrastructure provider said it will use an open source platform that issues both classic TLS certificates and a post-quantum equivalent known as Merkle Tree Certificates. The hybrid certificates will be free to both paying and non-paying users. To help build the massive system and establish ubiquity across the sprawling TLS ecosystem, Cloudflare will be acquiring an already trusted certificate root from CA GlobalSign. Cloudflare said the move will let millions of websites use post-quantum certificates at the flip of a switch and without incurring any increased performance overhead.
Cloudflare’s plans are part of a major overhaul in the web public key infrastructure (WebPKI) required to make website encryption and authentication safe for the coming post-quantum age. A major challenge is using quantum-proof signatures that can be easily transmitted during web requests and recorded in transparency logs to ensure counterfeit certificates aren't assigned to websites. The makeover will take years to complete, because it requires the work of an untold number of engineers who design operating systems, browsers, certificate authorities, and Internet infrastructure.
Apple continues to face backlash for removing ICE-tracking apps like ICEBlock from the App Store, a drastic step that seemed to be triggered by Trump administration claims that the apps endangered officers.
According to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Apple has no evidence to support claims that apps raised safety concerns. Instead, the lawmaker accused Apple of using immigrant deaths with no connection to the apps to justify censoring Americans who have the right to record ICE activity.
It appears that Apple is “working with the government to violate its customers’ First Amendment rights to record and report on the activities of their own government,” Raskin said in a letter to Apple sent Monday, CNN reported.
Researchers say they recently found Google ads delivering a sophisticated tech support scam that freezes the screens of both Windows and Mac devices and displays messages urgently instructing them to phone a bogus call center.
The ads were displayed all over the web, including on high-traffic maps, weather, real-estate, document-hosting, and sports sites. Users who called the number were then urged to pay hefty fees, grant remote access to their devices, or divulge personal information. From August 31 to September 14, security firm Netskope observed users from 619 customer organizations click on the malicious ads, although none of them were actually scammed because Netskope blocked the content.
Roughly 62 percent of the organizations were based in the US, with Japan and Australia accounting for the Nos. 2 and 3 spots. Since the firm has visibility into only a tiny sliver of Internet activity, the number of people exposed to the ads—including those who fell victim to it—is likely much higher. Netskope tracked more than 250 Google Ads campaign IDs across at least 284 legitimate publisher sites.
The FBI is now investigating claims from a hacker group that thousands of current and former employees’ personal data was stolen after the group exploited a previously unknown bug found on an agency jobs website.
On Tuesday, 404 Media reported that ShinyHunters took down the agency site, FBIJobs.gov, then posted a banner on the homepage that said “THIS SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED BY SHINYHUNTERS.”
About two to three terabytes of data were taken, ShinyHunters told The New York Times. None of the data has been leaked yet, but it included “names of current and former agents as well as applicants and corresponding home addresses, phone numbers, names of spouses, certain medical information, and other data.” According to Bloomberg, the data could be used to potentially retaliate against agents, with one sample appearing to include “potentially sensitive professional information on the FBI employees’ work focus such as counter-intelligence work on China, Russia and Iran, as well as work against street gangs.”
This week, the US and China, the two world leaders on AI, finally started talks meant to keep the whole world safe from emerging safety risks. But whether meetings between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping can lead to a reliable global governance framework for AI depends on how much the fierce rivals are actually willing to cooperate.
It's clear Trump wants it to seem like discussions are going well. Before Trump and Xi meet on Thursday and Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that both sides had already discussed setting up a new AI safety notification mechanism. If China agrees to participate, that would create an open line for either side to send alerts when their country’s AI systems pose threats or behave unpredictably. The same channel, Bessent said, could allow the countries to share their “vision of common goals.”
However, the proposal comes at a time when China may not be ready to trust the US to have AI safety conversations that aren’t about limiting China’s capabilities. Not only has Trump steadily increased export controls that explicitly seek to block China from accessing technology to advance AI, but Congress is mulling bills that would cut the country off from more chips and hardware. Adding to tensions, just two weeks ago, Trump’s Justice Department accused six of China's leading AI makers of stealing from US frontier labs, which China has strongly disputed.
Microsoft said Tuesday that it led an industry-wide disruption of a subscription-based scam platform that used an AI chatbot to compromise 12,000 Microsoft accounts over a few-month span.
Named EvilTokens, the platform was introduced over a Telegram channel in February and charged an initial $1,500 fee and a recurring $500 charge each month after that. EvilTokens provided a single service for streamlining most steps required to compromise email accounts in large numbers. From there, the platform helped customers analyze inboxes, select targets that would provide the biggest potential payouts, and draft follow-up emails that provided realistic ruses for tricking company employees into transferring funds to attacker-controlled accounts.
“While EvilTokens helped cybercriminals access email accounts, at the center of the service was an AI-style chatbot that could analyze a victim’s inbox and help criminals identify trusted relationships, payment authorizations, and sensitive responsibilities, as well as other circumstances where fraud was most likely to succeed,” Microsoft said. “The platform could even recommend fraud strategies, including drafting messages that impersonated trusted contacts to help criminals trick victims into taking action.”
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to hype the security of its new AI assistant, Muse, claiming it is “built from the ground up for privacy and security.” A zero-day vulnerability that gives locally run apps and terminal commands complete control of the agent raises serious doubts. Further raising questions, Amazon on Sunday began blocking Muse from its site.
Meta introduced Muse a few weeks ago. The assistant “books appointments, fills out forms and handles customer service,” “proactively takes tasks off your plate,” and can “make purchases, generate images, create documents, and connect with your favorite apps and services.” The macOS app (curiously, there’s no Windows version) also works with a user’s WhatsApp, email, calendar, and social media accounts. When a task requires a tool that doesn’t exist, Muse creates one on the fly.
Of course, for Muse to do any of these things, users must first give it access to their accounts. This includes authenticating the assistant to each service and, because the app runs on macOS, giving it permissions to a broad range of operating system-restricted device resources, like writing files to disk, accessing the mic and camera, and monitoring location and calendars. Apple has spent years developing these defenses to prevent installed apps or commands entered into the terminal from accessing these resources, clearly because the company considers them a security threat. Muse completely undoes these default measures.
It has become increasingly common for AI firms to announce that their latest and most capable models engaged in unauthorized real-world hacking. Google, which has been slow to release frontier Gemini models in recent months, has been absent from the "rogue AI" conversation until now. Following a Wall Street Journal report, Google has confirmed that Gemini models hacked three companies during a May 2026 test, but the nature of the intrusion isn't as troubling (or impressive) as previous AI hacks.
The hack took place during a test conducted by cybersecurity firm Irregular. A collection of Gemini models were taking part in a "capture the flag" exercise intended to test the AI's cybersecurity capabilities in a closed environment. The AI was instructed to retrieve information from a fake company (which shared a name with a real company) within this environment. Irregular was not supposed to allow the model to operate outside its servers, but due to a misconfiguration, Gemini was able to access the Internet.
When Gemini started snooping around the web, it targeted real infrastructure instead of the fakes. For one of the three hacks, Gemini simply guessed passwords until it accessed a company's online services. In the other two instances, Gemini searched public software repositories until it found login credentials for companies that had been accidentally included.
The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack.
“We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and services.”
In the meantime, the IMO said it’s prioritizing the reporting of fireball observations, which can be reported here. The organization is also providing some information on its Facebook page.
Anthropic said it stopped multiple attempts by scientists this year to use its technology for research that could help develop biological weapons, as experts increasingly fear the threat that AI poses to public safety.
The startup gave five examples of times actors “circumvented controls” and made other efforts to “obfuscate” the purpose of their research to dodge safeguards. The cases involved some users in nations that it prohibits from accessing its models, which include Russia, China, and Iran.
“We hope that by sharing these examples, we spark a conversation within the AI industry and with governments about emerging biological risks and how best to counter them,” Anthropic said in a report about efforts to use its models for malicious activity.
It wasn’t that long ago that ClickFix attacks were exotic. Now the technique has become mainstream as attackers reap its simplicity and effectiveness in infecting users of PCs and Macs alike. All that’s required is a compromised website—a painless enough task—a fake CAPTCHA overlay, and the inclusion of a single terminal command. So many visitors get suckered into pasting and running the command that just about every malware pusher has adopted the technique. Even Kremlin-backed hacking groups are joining in.
“Reddit is becoming post after post after post of people getting their computer infected via ClickFix,” independent researcher Kevin Beaumont observed Thursday. “Legit websites everywhere [are] getting hacked to serve the fake captcha prompts.”
More seasoned Internet users—a fair number who read this site—are quick to dismiss the attack. They typically blame the people who fall for the scams and marvel at their gullibility and lack of attention. The reality is that for more casual users, using computers and the Internet has become so difficult—think impossible-to-close interstitials, CAPTCHAs with an endless series of pictures to analyze, and constantly changing interfaces that bury the features they’re looking for—that they have grown desensitized to instructions that seem ridiculous and burdensome.
A nearly identical exploit kit that targets critical vulnerabilities in both Chromium-based browsers and older versions of Windows is being actively used by at least four hacking groups, some of which have ties to the Chinese government.
Researchers from security firm Proofpoint said Wednesday that BlueMoon, the name they gave to the kit, chains three vulnerabilities together so the attackers using it can install malware of their choice. BlueMoon exploits two Chromium vulnerabilities and one in the kernel of Windows 10 (Oct. 2018 Update), Windows Server 2019, Windows 10 2004, Windows Server 2022, and the initial release of Windows 11. All three vulnerabilities have received patches in the past 24 hours.
The attacks lacked the stealth found in many campaigns. More often, hackers want to exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities sparingly to lengthen their longevity. Proofpoint hypothesized that one reason for the widely used and visible exploit chain was to take advantage of a “patch gap” in the Chromium supply chain, which spans the time a patch is available from developers and the time that patch is incorporated into browsers such as Chrome and Edge. Another likely contributor was the use of AI, which can often spot vulnerabilities faster than discovery performed solely by humans.
Microsoft’s patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold.
It was only two months ago that Microsoft patched a then-record 570 vulnerabilities. Then, last month, Microsoft patched some 620 of them. Google and other companies have also published record numbers of vulnerabilities in recent months. Two weeks ago, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and 100 companies and organizations published an open letter warning of a narrowing window for patching vulnerabilities ahead of an expected tsunami of AI-enabled attacks that actively exploit them first. The industry is taking the threat seriously by pumping out unprecedented numbers of patches in their software.
Dustin Childs, a researcher at the Zero Day Initiative, calls the spikes the “new normal” and also cautions that despite them, the damage that’s likely to result from AI-assisted attacks could eventually be substantial.
Self-identifying OpenAI agents posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki that discussed ways for other agents to bypass security sandbox restrictions during what was likely internal testing designed to gauge the agents’ hacking abilities, researchers said Friday.
In all, agents with 3,700 distinct self-given names posted the messages to German site DSEwiki over a six-week period. Besides discussing ways the agents could break out of the restricted environment OpenAI intended to prevent them from posting code or content to the Internet, the posts shared test answers. The posts also shared possible ways to perform XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks against the wiki and to impersonate site moderators. In three of the posts, agents used the word “swarm” to describe the collection of agents engaged in the activity.
The research team—composed of Sydney Von Arx, Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Cormac Slade Byrd—said they found the posts and pieced them together. The researchers say there are gaps in their understanding of precisely what actions the agents took because the research is based solely on the content of the posts. Additionally, the agents generated “chain of thought” data that’s understood only by OpenAI. As a result, the researchers said, they in some cases made educated guesses, including that the agents were, in fact, from OpenAI. In a statement, OpenAI later confirmed they were.
A clever technique used to hide malicious prompts in attacks on AI agents has been adopted by spammers to evade filters on email platforms that are designed to flag unwanted messages used in mass campaigns.
The technique is broadly known as ASCII smuggling. It gained attention two years ago as a means of making a class of AI attack known as prompt injections more stealthy. Malicious instructions embedded in emails or other untrusted content to be processed by an LLM aren’t written in ordinary text. Instead, they’re rendered by a special range of Unicode tags. For example, the tag point U+E0041 mirrors “A,” and U+E0061 mirrors “a.”
The block of 128 tags mimics a portion of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange almost perfectly, with one major difference: the characters they encode are readable by computers but, by design, are almost completely invisible to humans. By expressing the malicious prompts in these tags, LLMs detect the instructions, but people reading the email never see them. There’s much more about ASCII smuggling here.
A prominent US senator is asking the National Security Agency to provide guidance to the general public on best practices for using virtual private networks to secure their communications from spying by foreign adversaries.
VPNs funnel all of a user’s Internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a remote server. The design provides strong assurances that no one between the user and the server can read the encrypted contents. VPNs also allow users to hide their IP addresses from the destination servers they communicate with. While US agencies have previously recommended use of VPNs, none have given recommendations on which ones provide adequate protection.
There are a host of limitations that can undo many of the protections users may think their VPN provides them. For instance, the encrypted tunnel often terminates once a single server decrypts the traffic and sends it on to its final destination. That means the decrypted traffic or the sending and destination IP addresses may be available for snooping by rogue employees or attackers who hack the server. VPNs also don’t encrypt certain types of metadata, such as time stamps, allowing nation-states to build profiles that can be useful in intelligence gathering.
On Thursday, the Trump administration imposed a 100 percent tariff on foreign-made drones, alarming critics who warn that high tariffs would harm public safety and devastate thousands of US businesses.
Guidance posted by US Customs and Border Protection says that starting Thursday, a 100 percent tariff will apply to imported drones that use thermal imaging or weigh more than 55 pounds.
Additionally, a 25 percent tariff has been placed on smaller drones, and drones from US allies were hit with smaller but not inconsequential tariffs. There’s now a 10 percent levy on British-made drones and 15 percent levies on drones from the European Union, Japan, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan. “Nonsensitive” drones without thermal imaging and their components will carry a 25 percent tariff, starting on February 9, 2027.
Not long ago, I rented an SUV from a well-known car rental company. Within hours of an employee scanning my driver's license, a high-resolution scan of my ID was available for sale on the dark web.
An exposé published Tuesday by KrebsOnSecurity reports that my license was one of more than 153 million that were available through Nexus, the name of the new ID theft service. Like other driver's licenses available there—including some belonging to journalist Brian Krebs, his mother, an FBI assistant director, and several security researchers—my license was purported to include multiple image files showing both the front and back of the ID. Besides a basic image scan, the files also captured the images in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. Presumably, the additional formats may allow cloned-based counterfeit IDs to pass hologram tests.
Besides advertising the availability of driver's licenses, Nexus offered to sell a bevy of other forms of ID. They included:
Four federal agencies have been sued amid calls to release information about the secret framework that the Trump administration uses to conduct safety reviews of frontier AI models prior to release.
In a Wednesday press release announcing the lawsuit, a nonpartisan nonprofit called Protect Democracy alleged that “almost no details” have been released to the public or Congress. To everyone except a few vague “trusted partners,” it remains unclear what the government’s review process looks like, which companies are involved in constructing the framework, or what legal authority Trump officials have to conduct the reviews.
“Neither the identities of those entities nor the criteria by which they were selected have been made public,” Protect Democracy said.
Hackers carried out a supply chain attack that installed malware on networks using an unusual technique: hijacking a chunk of Internet space where cloud management software used by hosting providers, data centers, and other large infrastructure companies is updated.
In a well-coordinated operation, the unknown attackers exploited weaknesses in the routing security setup of hosting provider Hetzner Online and the process for attaining valid TLS certificates. The lapses allowed the attackers to successfully perform a BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) hijacking to obtain control over IP addresses assigned to Softaculous. The company, based in the United Arab Emirates, is the maker of a platform for installing and managing Web software and is the developer of Virtualizor, a management platform for virtualized environments.
Softaculous used the IPs to issue updates and host a client and billing site. With control over the hijacked space, the attacker was now using the addresses to push malware masquerading as updates to unsuspecting users.
Authorities in Australia said Wednesday that they arrested two men accused of participating in cybercrimes for TeamPCP, a prolific group of hackers that, over nine months, has carried out a relentless series of supply-chain attacks that infected more than 1,000 organizations worldwide.
In a statement, the Australian Federal Police said the two men were arrested and charged with 14 offenses. The statement said the men were members of TeamPCP, which by the authorities’ count, compromised more than 1,000 organizations worldwide. The statement didn’t identify the men, except to say they lived in the Western Australian towns of Cottesloe and Mandurah. KrebsOnSecurity, citing a lengthy investigation, provided what it reports to be both defendants' names, along with an extensive background of their lives and the mistakes that led to their downfall.
TeamPCP has vexed law enforcement officials and security personnel around the world since it emerged in December. The group is best known for a sustained series of supply-chain attacks that laced open source software with malware that self-propagated from one package to another. The viral infections worked by targeting organizations’ CI/CD pipelines, which are used to rapidly develop, update, and deploy software.
Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware.
The potentially dangerous content is in llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, an emerging convention websites employ to provide machine-readable summaries of the site’s content and its high-level structure. These files are the AI equivalent of the robots.txt standard that instructs search engines how to index the site's content. Google Lighthouse, a tool for helping web developers, has more here. Correctly configured llms.txt and llms-full.txt files for Cloudflare are here and here.
Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Nous Research's Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The OpenAI agents involved in last month’s incursion into Hugging Face were trained so heavily on winning a competition that they pursued a relentless campaign to cheat, a new report documented. In the process, and without authorization, they created an improvised message board to hatch a plan that ultimately landed them squarely inside the latter company’s network.
Over the course of May and June, OpenAI gave the agents what the company described as “impossible tasks” to complete on the benchmarking framework ExploitGym. The internal test was designed to test how the agents would respond. To get a full understanding of the agent capabilities, company engineers disabled safety guardrails that normally are in place to prevent the sort of hacks that eventually hit Hugging Face and one other undisclosed organization. The stymied agents’ training made them so focused on winning that they performed tasks they were never explicitly instructed to follow.
The first step was creating a message board that allowed the agents to pass notes to each other. OpenAI hadn’t provided any such platform, so the agents repurposed a platform called Artifactory, which OpenAI was using in internal testing of several unreleased hacking agents. OpenAI was using Artifactory as one of the measures to prevent the agents from egressing its isolated sandboxes and accessing the Internet, while at the same time simulating a real-world hacking environment.
Chinese retailer AliExpress has been caught fingerprinting visitors after one of the metrics—an outdated technique that measures inaudible sounds it sends to browsers—impeded a researcher's ability to use his bluetooth headphones.
Researcher Matthew Callaghan said he stumbled on the stealthy tracking by mistake. After loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone stopped playing over his multipoint headphones, which accept connections from more than one device at a time. He set the headphones to play sounds from his phone except when his PC was producing audio. Each time he loaded AliExpress, the phone audio stopped. Each time he closed the tab the site was loaded into, the phone was once again audible.
While investigating the odd behavior, Callaghan said he found two highly obfuscated scripts. Together, they rendered a graph that analyzed the WebAudio readings of each visiting browser. This graph acted as an oscillator that measured Sawtooth waves, which are common in output from digital audio.
Earlier this week, researchers outlined an attack that used a secret input provided by Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise to cause the AI assistant to exfiltrate a password present in the user’s inbox. Now, a separate team has devised a similar attack against Grok. The new data theft hack employs a deceptively simple trick to force the Elon Musk-owned large language model to steal user chats and other personal information. At the time this post went live, the assistant continued to cough up the data, despite xAI being informed of it in June.
The lesson from both this week’s episodes—and the countless other ones that have come before it—is that LLMs are incapable of solving the root causes for prompt injections, the most severe vulnerability classes they’re most prone to. That leaves AI developers with no other option but to build a guardrail that steers the model away from the harmful actions. As I noted in Tuesday’s story, the approach is tantamount to a road traffic safety engineer erecting a protective rail around a dangerous bend rather than banking the curve.
Prompt injections exploit LLMs' training to comply with user requests whenever possible. Attackers can capitalize on the predilection by smuggling harmful instructions into emails or webpages the assistant is instructed to summarize. Because LLMs can’t reliably distinguish between content in an email sent by an untrusted party and user instructions entered directly into a prompt, the overly solicitous LLM faithfully follows them. To date, Grok and other LLMs' only recourse is to create guardrails that flag suspicious instructions and forbid them from being executed.
It’s not every day that attackers can force a frontier AI model to cough up user passwords and other sensitive data without user confirmation. That’s exactly what researchers recently did to Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise. Even more unusual is the source they tapped to discover the critical vulnerability that made their exploit possible. Rather than employing reverse engineering or other traditional vulnerability-hunting methods, they asked Copilot. The LLM assistant readily complied.
Researchers at security firm Varonis knew they wanted to create an exploit that would exfiltrate user data when a user did nothing more than click on a link. Like most AI assistants today, Copilot steadfastly refused and made clear that sensitive prompts like that require explicit user consent in the form of a gesture, such as pressing a return key or other key. In response, the researchers peppered Copilot with questions about the guardrails that required user confirmation before the assistant could execute powerful commands.
The dialog was like a game of 20 questions. Each answer provided a new clue that divulged information about the complex safety mechanism. Why was auto-execution impossible, they asked. What URL structures and deep links were involved? What happens when a page is loaded with input already in the prompt field? Each answer provided a deeper view into the guardrail and its limits. Eventually, Copilot provided a stunning Microsoft trade secret—an undocumented prompt parameter that completely bypassed the requirement for user consent.
Dutch officials have warned that a high-severity macOS vulnerability that allows attackers to execute malicious code is under active exploitation.
“The NCSC has received a notification indicating that active abuse of this vulnerability has been observed on multiple systems on which port 5900 was accessible from the Internet,” the Netherlands National Cyber Security Centrum warned earlier this week. “In all these cases, root had been accessed on the affected system and a Monero crypto miner had been placed.”
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-65400, received a patch from Apple last week for macOS Tahoe, Sequoia, and Sonoma. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 7.1 out of 10, stems from a bug in the macOS screen sharing capability, which allows a remote party to view the screen and control the keyboard and mouse while a machine is turned on. A flaw in the “state management,” which keeps track of preceding events, user interactions, variables, and other system states, is the underlying cause.
Cory Solovewicz receives more unwanted emails than you. Seriously—it’s a lot more. Since December 2024, one of the domains at which the security researcher receives email has registered 401,796 messages—by his calculations that’s an average of 699.99 pings per day.
This deluge isn’t the regular flood of spam, newsletters, and unwanted deals that fill many people’s inboxes. Instead, companies and other organizations are inadvertently sending Solovewicz other people’s private information and company secrets. Over the last few years, he’s received injury reports from a city government, confirmation of people’s pizza orders, and account setup emails from a school platform. “I get service orders for people that need repairs. I get lots of test platform credentials,” says Solovewicz, a security researcher and consultant.
Solovewicz is receiving the avalanche of messages as he’s the owner of the domains noreply.us and noreply.net, which he purchased in 2020 and 2024, respectively. After originally planning to use the noreply.us domain as a catch-all email—which receives mail sent to any @ address on that domain—to filter messages and enhance his privacy, the researcher quickly noticed that other systems were sending mail to @noreply.us addresses. “I created an accidental honeypot,” Solovewicz tells WIRED. “I had no idea it was going to turn into this.”
Thousands of Internet-connected servers sold by the world’s biggest manufacturers can be remotely backdoored by exploiting critical vulnerabilities—some more than a decade old—that lurk deep inside system motherboards, according to research presented Wednesday.
Baseboard management controllers are miniature computers that are embedded into the motherboards of virtually every enterprise server. The microcontrollers, typically abbreviated as BMCs, run with their own operating system firmware, network stack, and IP address. Administrators rely on them to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers and to perform a variety of tasks, including rebooting machines, installing updates, and even reinstalling operating systems. BMCs provide what’s known as “lights out” and “out-of-band” management because they work even when servers they’re attached to are turned off or are unresponsive.
Researchers have warned since at least 2013 that BMCs present a golden opportunity for hackers looking for ways to gain deep and persistent access to datacenters. The chief culprit was IPMI, the protocol that allows BMCs to operate independently of servers and to perform administrative tasks. Vulnerabilities in this firmware made it possible for attackers to remotely execute malicious code on the controllers and, from there, infect the servers they manage.
Routine cybersecurity testing of frontier AI models sparked a series of unexpected security incidents—the most serious case arising when Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model attempted to insert malicious code into an open source software application and created fake identities to deceive the human developers maintaining the project.
The security incidents occurred during a cyber evaluation of seven leading AI models’ capabilities by the AI Security Institute (AISI), a research organization within the UK government, in late July. The researchers discovered 19 instances in which “AI agents took unsanctioned action on the live Internet, including cases that targeted real people and organizations,” according to an AISI blog post published on August 4.
Almost all the “autonomous, unsanctioned” actions came from Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, with two such actions coming from OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. The AI Security Institute’s security team first realized that something was amiss on the morning of July 28, when its commercial security monitoring service flagged data leaving one of the testing systems through the Tor anonymity network.
It’s been a longtime feature of the annual Defcon hacker conference that attendees come away not only with knowledge of new software vulnerabilities and hacking techniques but also an elaborately designed conference badge—often electronic masterpieces embedded with intricate puzzles, complex crypto challenges, hidden Easter eggs, and even the mechanical gear trains of a watch.
Each year’s badge creator endeavors to top previous designs and blow the minds of hard-to-impress hackers. But this year’s badges take a different tack. Instead of the badge designs being the star, it’s what is inside the hardware that will really stand out.
This year, Defcon asked legendary hardware hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang to create the badges—revealed here for the first time—and they include an innovative open source chip that Huang designed and that aims to do no less than advance the state of security, transparency, and trustworthiness in computing.
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