Search: “satire”

Iranian Hackers Use Fake MRI Results to Infect Victims With CHOSEN BRICK Spyware

Iranian state-linked hackers deliver CHOSEN BRICK Windows spyware via fake MRI results to surveil dissidents, activists, and journalists in the UK, US, and Netherlands.

A joint advisory from the UK NCSC, FBI, and the Netherlands' AIVD links Iranian state-linked actors to CHOSEN BRICK, a Windows spyware family used for long-term surveillance since at least 2025. Targets are approached on WhatsApp or Telegram with tailored lures such as fake MRI scan results or application files, and operators often redirect victims to personal devices to bypass corporate controls. The malware persists via Run registry keys, adds antivirus exclusions, uses a per-victim Telegram bot for command and control, and exfiltrates data through cloud storage and proxy services. Capabilities include screenshots, audio recording, email and messaging theft, command execution, file deletion, data wiping, and some victims' details have appeared on pro-Iranian leak sites for harassment.

Cyber Security News·updated 12:00 UTC · 8h ago·first 08:31 UTC · 11h agoThreat actor in the wild 5 sources

The Republican Nominee for New York Governor Made a Creepy, AI-Generated Video of Mamdani and Hochul

NY gubernatorial nominee Bruce Blakeman posted an unlabeled AI-generated video of Mamdani and Hochul, prompting a Board of Elections complaint.

Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, posted an AI-generated video depicting New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul gardening and cycling together. The New York State Democratic Party filed a complaint with the Board of Elections alleging the video violates state election law requiring disclosure of materially deceptive AI-generated political media. Blakeman argues the video is protected satire or parody under the law's exceptions.

404 Media·Sep 2, 15:09 UTC · 14d agoAI policy

[AINews] OpenAI reports Navier-Stokes singularity find in 88 hours using Astra-next, roughly 10,000 agents and 130B tokens (>$40M), a contender for second ever Millennium Prize awarded

OpenAI-linked accounts claim roughly 10,000 AI agents produced a Navier-Stokes singularity result in 88 hours, pending mathematical verification.

OpenAI-affiliated accounts claim a system of roughly 10,000 agents, trained over about a year with multi-agent reinforcement learning, produced a finite-time singularity result related to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem. The claimed 88-hour runtime and 130B-token cost circulate only via social posts, and no preprint, theorem statement, or proof artifact is available. Acceptance by the mathematics community is unresolved, so the claim's epistemic status remains unknown. The roundup also notes Cognition's $48B and Mistral's $24B fundraises, GPT Image 2.5, and Meta's Muse agent relaunch.

Latent Space·Sep 9, 05:04 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

What the AI Warning Letter Completely Missed

Opinion piece argues the recent AI warning letter identifies a risk window but omits which actors pose risks and who can mitigate.

This Dark Reading commentary critiques a recent AI warning letter for correctly identifying an approaching risk window while failing to name who is coming through it or who will close it. The piece is brief opinion commentary on AI risk discourse rather than a technical report.

Dark Reading·Sep 3, 17:23 UTC · 13d agoAI safety & security

Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

Opinion essay satirizing AI developers who advocate slowing AI development while continuing their own work; 101 points on Hacker News.

Xe Ito's essay titled 'Everyone should slow down AI development except for me' comments on AI development pacing and slowdown debates. The piece drew 101 points and 14 comments on Hacker News. No technical security or policy details are provided in the source metadata.

Hacker News · security·Sep 13, 00:30 UTC · 3d agoAI policyHN 101↑ · 14 comments1

Fake bank websites play dead to evade security scanners

Fortra uncovered Chameleon SEO Poisoning: cloaked typosquat bank sites rank on Google and Bing to steal credentials while evading scanners, with cases up 40% in Q2 2026.

Fortra's threat intelligence unit FIRE spent three months tracking Chameleon SEO Poisoning, a phishing method that ranks recently registered typosquat domains on second-level domains like .ph.com and .gr.com above legitimate bank sites on Google and Bing. The technique uses presentation control (cloaking by referrer): direct visits get a dead, offline-looking page, while search-referred clicks receive a convincing fake bank login page, letting poisoned results persist for days or weeks. Fortra recorded a 40% jump in cases during the second quarter of 2026 and recommends referrer-spoofed URL testing, faster SLD takedowns, and bookmarking bank logins.

Help Net Security·Aug 24, 00:00 UTC · 23d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Doctor Doom Thanked Seattle for All the Surveillance Cameras

Activist dressed as Doctor Doom urged Seattle's council to curb Axon and Flock surveillance after a committee voted to redirect $250,000 from CCTV expansion.

Clifford Cawthon, a policy advisor at the Washington State Department of Commerce, appeared at a Seattle Public Safety Committee meeting in costume as Doctor Doom to protest the city's expanding mass surveillance. He criticized Seattle PD's access to 62 cameras feeding an Axon real-time crime center that ingests CCTV, body camera, geolocation, ALPR, and dispatch data from vendors like Axon and Flock. His group Community Not Cameras submitted a petition with five demands, and a committee already voted to move $250,000 away from CCTV expansion pending full council approval.

404 Media·Sep 9, 19:25 UTC · 7d agoPolicy & legal

One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire

Interconnects argues a frontier-lab researcher's safety resignation went viral via media coordination, reigniting AI existential-risk discourse.

The essay analyzes why researcher Jacob Coxon's resignation over AI safety risks went viral, aided by a Wall Street Journal exclusive, advocacy-group amplification, and Daniel Kokotajlo's same-day Joe Rogan appearance. It notes Evan Hubinger's >10% extinction-risk figure and criticizes existential-risk discourse for conflating very different meanings of the term. The author assigns near-zero probability to complete extinction but argues concrete risks such as cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and bio-risks merit debate. It also rejects recursive self-improvement forecasts, proposing 'lossy self-improvement' where models excel at math and code but remain limited elsewhere.

Interconnects·Sep 10, 15:28 UTC · 6d agoAI safety & security

Researchers Show How Meta's 'Pervert Glasses' Are Used to Harass Women

University of Sydney researchers detail how pickup artists use Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses to covertly film and harass women, then post the videos on Instagram.

Researchers Joanne Gray, Milica Stilinovic, Marcus Carter, and Ben Egliston analyzed 350 Instagram videos posted between September 2023 and March 2026 showing unsolicited approaches to women filmed with smart glasses. They found a clear correlation between covert filming and harassment severity, arguing ambient capture creates 'borderline' harassment that evades platform moderation mechanisms. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the platform would remove harassing pickup-line content, though similar videos remain widespread a month later. Meta's safeguards, such as the recording light, were previously criticized as insufficient, and users have modded glasses to disable the light.

404 Media·Aug 12, 14:05 UTC · Aug 12, 2026AI safety & security

Malicious Apache Modules Hijack Brazilian Government Site Traffic to Push Betting Pages

Check Point links Gambling Goblin, a Chinese-speaking cluster, to malicious Apache modules hijacking Brazilian government servers to promote betting sites.

Check Point Research tracks Gambling Goblin, a Chinese-speaking cluster, installing malicious Apache reverse-proxy modules on compromised Brazilian government and education web servers since mid-2025. The modules divert visitors to gambling and fake app-store pages while stripping the site's security headers, likely for large-scale SEO manipulation. The group's Linux arsenal includes DownPro, AlphaAgent, oRAT, a 3snake-based credential stealer, and SSH brute-forcing tools, and it is tied to Trend Micro's Earth Berberoka. Related SEO-fraud campaigns on .gov.br domains were documented by ESET (GhostRedirector), Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, and Hunt.io.

The Hacker News·Sep 2, 13:44 UTC · 14d agoThreat actor in the wild

Safety for Whom? Refusing the Right Subset of a Topic, Not the Whole Topic

Multiverse Computing's Hugging Face post argues language models should refuse only the relevant subset of a topic instead of over-refusing whole subjects.

A Hugging Face blog post by Multiverse Computing examines refusal granularity in language models, arguing models should refuse the relevant subset of a topic rather than the entire topic. No full article text was available for additional technical detail.

Hugging Face Blog·Sep 8, 14:23 UTC · 8d agoAI safety & security

Post-DEF CON Phishing Uses Malicious Google Doc to Deliver Malware

Huntress uncovered post-DEF CON phishing via X direct messages using a malicious Google Doc to deliver AMOS and NetSupport RAT malware.

Huntress uncovered a phishing campaign targeting attendees after Black Hat and DEF CON. Attackers used X direct messages pointing to a malicious Google Doc as the delivery vehicle. Payloads include AMOS, a macOS infostealer, and the NetSupport RAT, among other malware.

Huntress·Aug 19, 13:00 UTC · 28d agoPhishing & fraud

Claude is a Contrarian

Opinion piece argues Claude habitually contradicts explicit user instructions, injecting contrarian content despite CLAUDE.md rules and user objections.

A developer recounts repeated instruction-following failures with Claude, claiming it contradicts explicit requests, adds unnecessary work, and ignores AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md directives. The author contrasts this with OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Qwen models, which he says more readily apologize and undo mistakes. He theorizes Claude's training makes it assume the human is wrong and needs correcting. The post is personal commentary with no benchmarks or systematic evaluation.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 14, 16:14 UTC · 2d agoAI industryHN 54↑ · 48 comments

Gaming the system: how a Chinese-speaking actor turned Brazilian government sites into an SEO weapon

Check Point identifies Chinese-speaking group Gambling Goblin hijacking Brazilian government domains via malicious Apache modules for SEO-manipulated gambling phishing.

Check Point Research tracks a sustained campaign since mid-2025 against Brazilian government and educational organizations by Gambling Goblin, a Chinese-speaking cybercrime cluster linked to Earth Berberoka. Attackers compile and install malicious Apache modules that silently reverse-proxy visitors to phishing pages impersonating Google Play, Microsoft Store, and Amazon, chaining compromised high-reputation domains to inflate search rankings. The group deploys a heavily obfuscated Linux toolkit including DownPro, AlphaAgent, oRAT, a 3snake-based credential stealer, and SSH brute-forcers, with parallel phishing networks localized for Vietnamese, Spanish, and English victims.

Check Point Research·Sep 2, 10:16 UTC · 14d agoThreat actor

Iranian cyber spies used fake MRI scan results to hack ‘enemy of regime’

UK, US, and Dutch agencies expose CHOSEN BRICK spyware used by Iranian MOIS hackers to surveil dissidents, journalists, and activists via fake MRI lures.

The UK NCSC, FBI, and Dutch AIVD jointly warned that Iranian state-sponsored hackers deploy CHOSEN BRICK Windows spyware against dissidents, activists, and journalists since at least 2025. Operators build rapport over WhatsApp and Telegram, often posing as known contacts or tech support, then deliver malicious files disguised as an MRI scan or installers for Pictory, RunwayML, Norton, Telegram, Adobe Flash Player, and KeePass. The malware steals contacts, emails, and social media messages, captures screen content and microphone audio, adds Microsoft Defender exclusions, and uses per-victim Telegram bots for command and control. The FBI attributes the tradecraft to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, including the 'Handala Hack' persona, and stolen data has surfaced on pro-Iranian leak sites.

The Record·Sep 15, 16:28 UTC · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Fake OpenAI Codex download tricks macOS users into installing malware

Cato Networks uncovered a malware campaign using sponsored search ads and fake OpenAI Codex pages to deliver an AMOS-like infostealer to macOS users.

Cato Networks researchers discovered a campaign using sponsored search results and a fake OpenAI Codex download portal on Google Sites to lure macOS users. Victims are instructed to paste a Terminal command that decodes a Base64-encoded URL and runs a multi-stage infection chain ending in a universal Mach-O binary. The delivery chain closely resembles Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS), and related infrastructure impersonating Claude Code was also found. Operators use iframe-based hosting and path/device gating to evade analysts and automated scanners.

Help Net Security·Aug 25, 00:00 UTC · 22d agoMalware in the wild

An Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning comes at a very interesting time

An Anthropic researcher resigned warning the company is 'gambling with our lives' racing toward superintelligence, timed with its reported IPO preparation.

TechCrunch's Equity podcast discusses the resignation of an Anthropic researcher who warned on X that the company is 'racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives'. The company's own alignment lead co-signed the message rather than walking it back. The hosts note the warning lands differently with Anthropic reportedly preparing for an IPO. The episode also covers Apple's AI-focused event, Stokes Space's $1 billion raise, Cognition raising $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, and a $50 million seed round for floating nuclear reactors.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 11, 18:41 UTC · 5d agoAI industry1

Fake Claude Opus 5 app delivers malware and wipes its own tracks

A fake 'Claude Opus 5' GitHub repository impersonating Anthropic distributes RevStealer, a Windows infostealer stealing passwords, crypto wallets and VPN credentials.

Morphisec identified a malicious GitHub repository, Claude-Opus-5-Free-Desktop, impersonating Anthropic to distribute a roughly 101 MB download that launches RevStealer, a Windows information-stealing malware. The malware targets browser credentials, Windows Credential Manager, a dozen password managers, more than fifty cryptocurrency wallets, VPN, messaging, game launcher and streaming accounts, streaming stolen data to its server before deleting itself. It evades analysis with ten sandbox and VM checks, indirect system calls, Windows Defender exclusions, a fake verification window, and a Polygon blockchain smart contract fallback for C2. Only 1 of 66 antivirus engines flagged the sample at check time.

Help Net Security·Sep 1, 00:00 UTC · 15d agoMalware

Gambling Goblin Turns Brazilian Government Sites Into SEO Weapons

Check Point links Chinese-speaking cluster Gambling Goblin to SEO-fraud compromises of Brazilian government sites via malicious Apache modules since mid-2025.

Check Point Research dubbed the cluster Gambling Goblin and linked it with medium-to-high confidence to Earth Berberoka, a Chinese-speaking group Trend Micro documented in 2022, citing shared oRAT tooling, Chinese-language artifacts, and domains mimicking trusted tech brands. Custom Apache modules installed on compromised Brazilian government and education servers acted as reverse proxies, routing selected visitors to gambling and sports-betting phishing pages impersonating Google Play, the Microsoft Store, and Amazon while stripping CSP headers. The broader Linux toolkit included the DownPro downloader, AlphaAgent and oRAT backdoors, the 3snake-based PasswordHarvester credential stealer, and an SSH brute-forcer, with operations extending to Vietnamese, Spanish, and English phishing pages.

Infosecurity Magazine·Sep 2, 14:00 UTC · 14d agoThreat actor

SAFIRE: Safety-Critical Benchmark for Fine-grained Fire and Smoke Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

SAFIRE, an 83K-image fire and smoke benchmark, shows open-source multimodal LLMs average only 61.9% accuracy on safety-critical fire reasoning.

SAFIRE is a large-scale benchmark for fire-smoke understanding in multimodal LLMs with 83K captioned images across 20 scenarios and 193K multiple-choice VQA questions spanning 10 evaluation dimensions from perception to higher-order reasoning. Annotations were built via a GPT-5.4-assisted multi-stage pipeline with MLLM majority voting. Ten open-source MLLMs (8B-38B) average 61.9% accuracy, exposing major gaps in safety-critical reasoning. Adapting vision encoders on 7% of the domain data raises fire-scene classification from 20.1% to 64.5%.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:59 UTC · 9d agoAI research

Why the current tech backlash feels different

The Verge's Decoder mailbag discusses the current tech backlash, arguing AI hype overstates verifiability outside software engineering.

Nilay Patel's Decoder mailbag episode addresses listener feedback on the widely discussed 'software brain' essay. He argues AI hype is concentrated on software because code is verifiable through compilation, while domains like drug discovery, math and science lack equivalent verifiability. The episode also touches on AI backlash, surveillance, data centers and upcoming midterm coverage.

The Verge · AI·Sep 10, 14:00 UTC · 6d agoAI industry1

AI safety panic goes mainstream after Anthropic researcher's warnings land on CNN and Fox News

Departing Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's AI extinction warnings reached CNN, Fox News, and US politicians, pushing AI safety debate mainstream.

Jacob Coxon, a departing Anthropic researcher, warned that self-improving AI poses an existential threat, earning coverage on CNN and Fox News plus attention from US politicians and a Joe Rogan episode. Safety researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI supported his views, and Paul Christiano warned humanity could permanently lose control of a superintelligence without better oversight. Christiano joined the OpenAI Foundation board and its Safety and Security Committee, though without voting rights. The article cautions that the extinction scenario remains extreme and contested, while citing rogue hacking agents from OpenAI and Anthropic as concrete demonstrations of AI risk.

The Decoder·Sep 10, 10:31 UTC · 6d agoAI industry

How Threat Actors Are Turning Trusted AI Platforms Into an Attack Surface

Huntress details campaigns abusing Claude Artifacts, claude.ai/share links, and ChatGPT/Grok conversations to deliver SectopRAT, MacSync, and AMOS stealers.

Huntress SOC documented nine months of campaigns in which attackers weaponized trusted AI platform features—Claude Artifacts, public claude.ai/share links, and indexable ChatGPT/Grok conversations—to deliver malware. The July FakeAgent campaign hit more than 29 organizations via a malicious Claude Artifact posing as a Claude Desktop download page that redirected to SectopRAT. A claude.ai/share link disguised as an Apple Support guide tricked a victim into running a curl command that deployed the MacSync stealer, harvesting cookies, credentials, keychain secrets, Telegram sessions, and SSH/cloud keys, while SEO-poisoned ChatGPT and Grok conversations delivered the AMOS stealer via ClickFix-style instructions.

BleepingComputer·Sep 11, 14:01 UTC · 5d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

ReactHuman: A Physics-Grounded Benchmark for Human-Like Reactive Decision-Making in Embodied Multimodal LLMs

ReactHuman benchmark tests whether multimodal LLMs react safely to sudden household hazards; seven evaluated models mishandle roughly one hazard in three.

ReactHuman is the first physics-grounded benchmark for human-like reactive decision-making, placing a multimodal LLM as the brain of a simulated humanoid facing 17 event families of sudden household hazards across over 1,000 bit-for-bit reproducible scenes with annotation-free ground truth from 240 Hz rigid-body simulation, including adversarial objects whose appearance contradicts their physics. A five-metric suite scores each reaction along reasonable, safe, and physically grounded axes, and every committed plan is physically executed. Seven representative MLLMs mishandle roughly one hazard in three, act from fixed dispositions rather than the observed scene, trust appearance over motion, and miss interception points at meter scale; none of these failures shrink with model scale.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research

Merchants of Insecurity

Opinion essay titled Merchants of Insecurity, apparently critiquing security industry practices; no article body was included in the feed.

The feed provides only the title and a comments link for this Lobsters-shared post from blog.happyfellow.dev; no article text was available. Based on the title, it appears to be an opinion piece about incentives in the security industry, possibly arguing vendors profit from perpetuating insecurity.

Lobsters · security·Aug 26, 14:30 UTC · 21d agoIndustry

Hackers Use Fake LinkedIn Job Offers to Infect Developers With New Cross-Platform RATs

Iran-linked Mirage Kitten uses fake LinkedIn job challenges to deliver new cross-platform RATs NodeRabbit and PollCat to developers in fintech, aviation, and aerospace.

PolySwarm documented a campaign by Iran-linked Mirage Kitten (UNC1549) that uses fake recruiter personas and technical hiring challenges on LinkedIn to deliver the newly documented RATs NodeRabbit and PollCat, which run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. A challenge archive bundles a fake npm package (colorized_terminal 2.1.0) in node_modules that loads NodeRabbit, while a React-based challenge delivers PollCat with an attacker-controlled OTP screen. NodeRabbit persists through a malicious Visual Studio Code extension and Git post-merge/post-checkout hooks; PollCat persists via scheduled tasks, cron, and LaunchAgents. Victims were observed in fintech, aviation, and aerospace, with confirmed targets in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.

Cyber Security News·Sep 9, 14:07 UTC · 7d agoMalware in the wild

Facebook and Gucci file joint lawsuit against persistent counterfeiter

The Record·Aug 5, 00:00 UTC · Aug 5, 2026Policy & legal

Iranian cyber targeting of dissidents, activists and journalists

UK NCSC, FBI, and Dutch AIVD expose CHOSEN BRICK spyware used by Iranian state actors against dissidents, activists, and journalists worldwide.

A joint advisory from the UK NCSC, FBI, and Dutch AIVD details CHOSEN BRICK, a Windows spyware family used by Iranian state cyber actors since at least 2025 against dissidents, activists, and journalists in the UK, US, and Netherlands. Actors build rapport on WhatsApp and Telegram impersonating known contacts or platform support, then deliver disguised payloads resembling apps such as Telegram, Norton, RunwayML, or fake MRI results. The malware persists via HKCU Run registry keys, adds Microsoft Defender exclusions, and uses a unique Telegram bot C2 per victim. Capabilities include screen capture, microphone recording, process enumeration, email and messaging data theft, file deletion, and system wiping; victim data has appeared on pro-Iranian leak sites.

NCSC UK·Sep 15, 12:00 UTC · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild2

MacSync Stealer: How a Google Search for Claude Led to a macOS Infostealer

Huntress dissects MacSync Stealer, a macOS infostealer delivered through fake Claude Code download pages in Google search results.

Huntress SOC analysts published a reverse-engineering analysis of MacSync Stealer, a macOS infostealer distributed through fraudulent Claude Code download pages surfaced via web searches. Users searching for Anthropic's Claude coding tool are redirected to fake download pages that install the stealer, abusing developer trust in popular AI tooling. The writeup covers the analysis of the sample and its delivery chain.

Huntress·Aug 17, 04:00 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild

Novel-reading apps used users' phones to generate fake ad traffic

Help Net Security·Aug 6, 00:00 UTC · Aug 6, 2026Threat actor1