Search: “FamousSparrow”

New York Seizes 12 Celebrity Deepfake Websites

Manhattan DA seized 12 deepfake sites that turned ~1,200 people's photos into non-consensual intimate imagery, the largest such seizure.

The New York District Attorney seized 12 websites hosting AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery of roughly 1,200 people, including politicians, actors, athletes, and influencers, calling it the largest seizure of such sites in history. DA Alvin Bragg cited New York's 2023 law criminalizing sexually explicit deepfakes. The action follows federal seizures of two deepfake domains in June and the 2025 shutdown of MrDeepfakes, and precedes a 15-year sentence in the first Take It Down Act conviction.

404 Media·Sep 14, 17:26 UTC · 2d agoPolicy & legal 2 sources

FamousSparrow Deploys New SparroWocky Backdoor Against Latin American Governments

China-aligned APT FamousSparrow deployed a new modular backdoor, SparroWocky, against government entities across eight Latin American countries since August 2025, ESET reports.

ESET reports that China-aligned threat actor FamousSparrow replaced its SparrowDoor implant with SparroWocky, a distinct modular C++ backdoor active against governments in Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. Around 90% of the group's targets from mid-2025 into 2026 were in Latin America, which ESET links to regional competition over US influence. The backdoor arrives via a three-component DLL side-loading chain, persists through a Windows service (ProcAuditManager) or Run keys (SnapCart), captures screenshots, and exfiltrates RC4-encrypted data over TLS C2 on ports 443 and 8080. It supports in-memory Beacon Object File execution, API hashing, and SilentMoonwalk-style call-stack spoofing; IOCs for three C2 servers were released.

GBHackers·updated 11:20 UTC · 2h ago·first 11:04 UTC · 2h agoThreat actor in the wild 4 sourcesCVE-2021-26855

Behind the Blog: Rare Books and Baseball Brain

404 Media·Aug 7, 15:43 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Industry

Risky Bulletin: Expired cards can be used for new transactions

Researchers show expired Visa contactless cards can be revived via NFC man-in-the-middle relay to run fraudulent transactions; roundup also covers major breaches.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers built an NFC man-in-the-middle rig that updates a card's expiration date in transit and relays the modified payment to POS terminals, reviving expired contactless cards; Visa terminals and the backends of all five banks studied failed to catch the manipulation. The same roundup reports Iranian hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, Lazarus breached South Korea's Presidential Office as part of a campaign exceeding 100 victims, and French telecom SFR suffered a breach affecting over 2.1 million customers.

Risky Business News·Aug 24, 04:40 UTC · 24d agoResearch1

SilkParasite-Linked Malware Infrastructure Traced Back Four Years Across Central Asia

Hunt.io links SpiceRAT C2 servers to China-nexus SilkParasite espionage targeting Central Asian governments, with related infrastructure active since 2022.

Hunt.io and researcher Guy Yasur traced a cluster of SpiceRAT command-and-control servers active from late 2025 to August 2026 to infrastructure linked to the China-nexus SilkParasite espionage operation. Shared parent domains, a certificate resembling an Uzbek railway entity, and a cloned RTX Corporation homepage appearing on 13 servers connect SpiceRAT systems to NodeEdgeRAT and NomadRAT infrastructure. Passive DNS records show related subdomains as early as mid-2022, suggesting the infrastructure has existed for at least four years. Hostnames impersonate government, energy and telecom targets across Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Cyber Security News·updated 13:12 UTC · 50m ago·first 12:26 UTC · 1h agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sources

Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party

Meta filed a patent for AI glasses that identify people via facial recognition and auto-generate highlight reels of events like dinner parties.

A newly published Meta patent describes smartglasses that use facial recognition to detect people in frame, capture video clips of their actions, and compile highlight reels. The filing signals Meta's continued, controversial push to combine facial recognition with its AI glasses line. The patent was published Thursday and offers granular detail on Meta's product plans, though it does not confirm a shipping feature.

404 Media·Aug 14, 14:17 UTC · Aug 14, 2026AI industry

SilkParasite Espionage Campaign Targets Central Asian Governments with Five New RATs

Bitdefender reports SilkParasite, a China-nexus espionage cluster targeting Central Asian governments with seven RATs, five newly documented, delivered via spearphished RAR archives.

Bitdefender Labs assesses with medium confidence that SilkParasite, first discovered in late 2025, is a China-nexus cluster targeting government bodies in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Georgia. Attacks use password-protected RAR archives with malicious Office documents, macro-triggered DLL sideloading, and checks for running Kaspersky AV before execution. The arsenal spans seven RAT families in .NET, C++, Go, and JavaScript with plugin architectures and diverse C2 channels including Google Drive and HTTP cookie/ETag headers; roughly 65 DriveSilkRAT infections were observed, mostly in Asia. Ties to China include BLOODALCHEMY (a Deed RAT/ShadowPad descendant) and an improved SpiceRAT used by SneakyChef, with traces of AI-assisted development in the tooling and lures.

The Hacker News·Aug 20, 05:47 UTC · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild

Cliff Stoll’s DEF CON Talk

Schneier on Security posts about Cliff Stoll's DEF CON talk; the visible text provides no substantive details about its content.

Schneier on Security published a brief post referencing Cliff Stoll's talk at DEF CON. The available text consists almost entirely of standard blog navigation, author biography, and archive listings, with no concrete details about the talk itself. As a general security-community item, it carries no direct risk impact for defenders.

Schneier on Security·updated Sep 11, 18:06 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 11, 11:09 UTC · 6d agoIndustry 2 sources1

Cyber Security News

Microsoft's September Patch Tuesday fixes nearly 1,000 vulnerabilities; CISA warns two of the flaws are being actively exploited.

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday release addresses close to 1,000 vulnerabilities, with CISA warning that two of the bugs are being actively exploited. The Record's homepage digest also lists briefs including a US offer of $10 million for information on an Iranian hacker accused of attacking critical infrastructure and a leak of health data on more than 9.5 million people from the Aesto record system. Additional briefs cover a Russian suspect's extradition to the US for bank account takeovers, US-British coordination on scam center takedowns, G7 guidance on quantum cyber threats, a large DDoS attack on Norwegian public services, and Slovenian casinos reopening after a cyberattack.

The Record·Sep 9, 20:23 UTC · 7d agoVulnerability in the wild

12 celebrity deepfake websites seized by Manhattan DA

Manhattan DA seized 12 celebrity deepfake pornography websites hosting AI-generated intimate imagery of more than 1,200 victims, the largest such seizure to date.

The Manhattan District Attorney's Office seized 12 deepfake sites hosting AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery of over 1,200 people, including politicians, actors, musicians and social justice advocates; at least one site let users generate their own deepfakes. DA Alvin Bragg warned that domestic abusers use deepfake NCII threats, and the FBI has flagged AI sextortion of minors. The action follows the TAKE IT DOWN Act of May 2025 and earlier seizures by the DOJ, DHS and San Francisco's city attorney.

Malwarebytes Labs·11:20 UTC · 2h agoAI safety & security

Get ready for the game with new football features in Search

Google Search adds a Live Game Feed, deeper football stats, and Yahoo Fantasy/Sleeper integration with AI Mode for personalized fantasy insights.

Google rolled out football features in Search, including a Live Game Feed with play-by-play updates and AI-powered insights, available on mobile in the U.S. in English. New carousels show league-wide scores and expanded player stats such as sacks, fumbles, and yards after catch. Users can link Yahoo Fantasy or Sleeper accounts to receive start/sit and waiver-wire recommendations through AI Mode. Collegiate team support and broader global availability are planned later this month.

Google · AI·Sep 9, 16:00 UTC · 7d agoAI industry

The longitude problem: In the AI era, detection is won on facts, not guesses

Opinion piece argues defenders should beat AI-era attackers by carrying verified ground truth about approvers, domains, and vendors instead of relying on inference.

CSO Online contributor Alan LeFort, CEO of StrongestLayer, uses the historical longitude problem to argue that AI-era detection should rely on carried facts—authoritative records of payment approvers, owned domains, and legitimate vendors—rather than probabilistic inference that both attackers and defenders can now perform with comparable reasoning models. He illustrates with a CFO wire-fraud example defeated by checking the approver of record and the reply-to domain against ground truth. The piece stresses that ground truth decays and must be continuously maintained, like chronometers kept wound on every ship.

CSO Online·Sep 10, 10:00 UTC · 7d agoIndustry

Multi-Grid Post-Training for Long-Form Multi-Shot Video Generation

MovieGrid arranges long videos on spatial grids during post-training, generating 6.05x more shots than temporal packing with state-of-the-art cross-shot consistency.

MovieGrid is a multi-grid post-training paradigm that decomposes long videos into temporally ordered chunks arranged on a spatial grid for joint modeling, enabling cross-chunk information exchange. The authors build the Multi-Grid Long Video (MGLV) dataset from 1,000 long-form videos, producing 54K grid videos paired with character-aware story prompts. Under the same token budget, MovieGrid generates 6.05x more shots than Temporal Packing in a 1,616-frame video. It achieves state-of-the-art intra-shot consistency of 0.9131 versus 0.8086 for HoloCine and inter-shot consistency of 0.5914 versus 0.5384 for StoryMem.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 5, 20:00 UTC · 11d agoAI research

Sexually Explicit Deepfake Sites Target 100-Plus Politicians in Europe

Deepfake pornography sites have targeted nearly 150 European politicians, overwhelmingly women MPs, per new research on 160 abusive domains.

Researcher Benjamin Shultz analyzed roughly 160 deepfake abuse domains and found at least 138 women MPs from 22 EU countries appeared or were mentioned, versus nine male MPs — making women MPs 33 times more likely to be targeted. Sites host database-like profiles with names, photos, personal details, and links to 'nudifier' creation tools. The findings, published by German think tank Agora Digitale Transformation, show politicians from Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and France most affected, with senior politicians targeted more often. The UK and EU are planning bans on nudify services, while the US Take It Down Act has taken major deepfake sites offline.

WIRED · Security·Sep 14, 11:00 UTC · 3d agoAI safety & security1

Simulation: the new Scaling Law — Joon Sung Park, Simile AI

Simile AI raised a $2B Series B from GreenOaks and Index Ventures to scale human-behavior simulation for Fortune 100 clients like CVS.

Simile AI, co-founded by Generative Agents researcher Joon Sung Park, announced a $2 billion Series B backed by GreenOaks and Index Ventures, with Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy among backers. The company runs tens of millions of simulations for Fortune 100 clients including CVS, reporting 85-99% accuracy versus human focus groups and digital twins of 1,000 real people at 85% behavioral accuracy. The long-term ambition is foundation models of human behavior, post-trained on interviews, transaction data, and randomized controlled trials, potentially simulating all 8 billion people.

Latent Space·Aug 21, 23:37 UTC · 26d agoAI industry

Network Abuses Leveraging High-Profile Events: Suspicious Domain Registrations and Other Scams

Unit 42 found scammers surge deceptive domain registrations around major events like the 2024 Paris Olympics to run phishing and counterfeit merchandise scams.

Unit 42 analyzed newly registered domains (over 200,000 detected daily from zone files, WHOIS, and passive DNS) containing event-specific keywords, using the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics as a case study. Threat actors register lookalike domains to sell counterfeit merchandise, push fraudulent services, and run phishing, as previously seen with COVID-19-themed and fake ChatGPT tool scams. The article recommends monitoring domain registrations, DNS and URL traffic trends, textual patterns, and verdict change requests to catch event-themed abuse early.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 12:46 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Phishing & fraud in the wild

Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft for infringement

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, seeking destruction of datasets and models trained on their journalism.

The Seattle Times and Newsday allege OpenAI used their journalism as training data without permission and that its chatbots reproduce passages of their reporting, seeking destruction of copies of their works, training datasets, and AI models that incorporate them. Microsoft is named as co-defendant because Copilot is built on OpenAI technology. The suit follows similar actions by The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, Encyclopedia Britannica, and nearly 400 local newspapers.

The Verge · AI·Sep 6, 23:36 UTC · 10d agoAI policy1

Chess.com Leak Exposes 7.3 Million Users — Evidence Points to Scraping

A free 15.5 GB leak exposed 7.3 million Chess.com user records; analysis suggests large-scale scraping via find-friends rather than a server breach.

A 15.5 GB dump containing 7,337,395 Chess.com records appeared on leak forums posted by user V0idix at no cost. Ransomnews confirmed the data is genuine by validating embedded v1 UUID timestamps against registration dates, but found daily-batch collection over nine days and ~7.4% duplicate records, pointing to scraping. The schema includes emails, ratings, subscription tiers and internal Google Ad Manager audience segments not exposed in the public API, and contains no passwords or payment data. Chess.com reported a similar 828,000-record 2023 leak from find-friends abuse and said then that it was not a breach.

Security Affairs·Aug 14, 08:24 UTC · Aug 14, 2026Data breach in the wild

The Guardrails Debate: Security Researcher Changes His Mind

A security researcher revises his stance on AI guardrails, arguing defenders need more help as attackers ignore safety rules.

Dark Reading publishes an opinion piece in which a security researcher changes his mind about AI guardrails. He acknowledges guardrails are critical, citing recent high-profile incidents, but argues defenders need more support because attackers do not play by the same rules. The piece contributes to the ongoing debate on defensive AI controls rather than reporting a new incident.

Dark Reading·Aug 31, 20:09 UTC · 16d agoAI safety & security

Manhattan DA takes down 12 AI deepfake porn sites

Manhattan DA seized domains of 12 AI deepfake porn sites hosting non-consensual videos of more than 1,200 people; investigation continues.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the seizure of domain names for 12 deepfake pornography sites that hosted AI-generated sexual videos of more than 1,200 real people, many of them celebrities. Bragg cited domestic violence cases where partners threatened to release deepfake images, and declined to say whether arrests or charges would follow. The DA's office will monitor for attempts to revive the sites on new domains.

The Record·Sep 15, 12:42 UTC · 2d agoPolicy & legal1