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Risky Bulletin: Ukraine's top prosecutor resigns amid scam call center scandal

Ukraine's top prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko resigned after NABU arrested a deputy for taking bribes protecting scam call centers running fake investment platforms.

Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau NABU arrested Serhiy Kropyva, Deputy Head of International Cooperation at the Prosecutor General's Office, alleging officials took monthly protection fees from a network of 100-500 scam call centers luring victims into fake investment platforms, with bribes reportedly growing from $700,000 to $3.5 million per month. Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko resigned on Monday, calling it a political decision, while Kropyva was fired with bail set at 120 million hryvnias ($2.7 million) and over 100 call centers shut down in the past month. The newsletter also briefly covers a cyberattack crippling more than 80 Luxembourg medical practices via payment vendor BMS Engineering, ShinyHunters' claimed theft of 200,000 Florida DMV driver records, a cyberattack on the American Meteor Society, and school closures in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Risky Business News · 8d agoPhishing & fraud

A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over

404 Media reveals DHS Border Patrol's secretive Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT) analyzing Americans' financial activity and feeding intelligence to local police for traffic stops.

404 Media identified Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT) in the Spokane Sector (Washington) and Laredo Sector (Texas), which review law enforcement-sensitive databases including Americans' financial activity and pass intelligence to local police. In one case, a PITT analyst flagged financial patterns associated with narcotics activity, leading Montana Highway Patrol to stop a driver for an obstructed license plate and charge him with DUI and possession with intent to distribute. CBP declined to say what financial data is monitored or whether warrants are obtained; the program extends AP's earlier reporting on ALPR-based predictive policing.

404 Media · 8d agoPolicy & legal

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: June 9, 2026

Help Net Security lists open cybersecurity roles at firms like Lockheed Martin, ByteDance, Nordic Semiconductor, and General Motors across AppSec, cloud, and compliance.

A June 2026 roundup aggregates cybersecurity openings spanning application security, cloud security, compliance, reverse engineering, and deepfake forensics across the US, UK, Israel, Ireland, Norway, Singapore, India, and Canada. Most listed positions are marked as no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security · 9d agoIndustry1

ChatGPT can now connect to your personal apps to mimic writing style

OpenAI is testing ChatGPT Writing Style, which mimics a user's voice using writing samples from connected Gmail, Slack, and Drive accounts.

OpenAI confirmed it is testing a Writing Style feature for ChatGPT that learns a user's voice from writing samples in connected apps. The onboarding flow references Messaging (Slack), Documents (Google Drive and Notion), and Email (Gmail) as example sources. It resembles Anthropic's Styles personalization feature but draws on existing writing inside connected services rather than uploaded samples. The feature is available to a small group of users with no announced general rollout date.

BleepingComputer · 9d agoAI industry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: August 25, 2026

Help Net Security lists open cybersecurity roles at AT&T, Accenture, Mastercard and others across the US, Europe, India and UAE.

Help Net Security aggregated open cybersecurity positions including compliance, IAM engineering, security architecture, SOC analyst and cloud security roles. Employers include AT&T, Accenture, Mastercard, Insight, Mitiga, NEURA Robotics and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank across the US, India, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel and UAE. Several postings emphasize identity and access management, NIS2 and GDPR compliance, and cloud security work.

Help Net Security · 13d agoIndustry

Iranian Hackers Pose as Recruiters to Deliver Cross

Kaspersky attributes new cross-platform RATs NodeRabbit and PollCat to Iranian group Nimbus Manticore, spread via recruiter-themed LinkedIn lures.

Kaspersky links two previously undocumented malware families, NodeRabbit (Node.js) and PollCat (obfuscated JavaScript), to the Iranian threat actor Nimbus Manticore, also known as Iranian Dream Job. Victims in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Ethiopia received trojanized coding challenge archives containing fake npm packages (colorized_terminal, pretty-log) that silently launched the RATs as background processes. NodeRabbit contacts Azure-hosted C2 servers via checkin, task, and result API endpoints and supports 11 commands including shell execution, file operations, and network enumeration. Persistence is platform-specific: Windows Run keys or scheduled tasks, Linux cron entries, and macOS launch agents, impersonating Microsoft Edge updates or Intel's Driver & Support Assistant.

The Hacker News · 14d agoThreat actor

The Vulnpocalypse Is Repricing the Bug Bounty Economy

Surging AI-generated vulnerability reports are driving down bug bounty payouts, threatening the economics of independent security researchers.

Dark Reading argues that a surge of AI-powered vulnerability reports is repricing the bug bounty economy. As programs absorb escalating report volume, payouts for many classes of findings are falling. The trend could undermine the livelihoods of independent full-time bug bounty researchers.

Dark Reading · 19d agoIndustry

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: April 14, 2026

Help Net Security lists active cybersecurity job openings at employers including MANTECH, Honeywell, SMBC Group and SBS Transit across multiple countries.

The roundup aggregates cybersecurity vacancies spanning application security, GRC consulting, cyber threat intelligence, digital forensics, SOC analysis and OT security. Openings were posted in India, the United Kingdom, Italy, the USA, Singapore, France, Germany, Ireland and the UAE. Most roles were no longer accepting applications at publication. Named employers include Honeywell, MANTECH, TENEX.AI, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, SMBC Group, SBS Transit and VINCI Energies.

Help Net Security · 21d agoIndustry2

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: July 14, 2026

July 14, 2026 cybersecurity job listings featuring roles at Fiserv, American Express, Orca Security, Ofsted, and others across multiple countries.

This Help Net Security post lists cybersecurity jobs currently open at Fiserv, Integris Group, American Express, Orca Security, Jefferson County, Ofsted, Armstrong Fluid Technology, UNEY, Red Alpha Cybersecurity, Astranis, and lululemon. Roles span network engineering, threat intelligence leadership, AI security specialization, and security operations. All listed positions are on-site, hybrid, or remote across USA, Israel, UK, Canada, UAE, and Singapore. Most positions noted as no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security · 22d agoIndustry1

[AINews] Andrew Ng gets into AI Engineering

Andrew Ng relaunches DeepLearning.AI around AI Engineering, defining four core skills from an analysis of 10,000+ job postings and expert interviews.

Andrew Ng, cofounder of Google Brain and Coursera, relaunched DeepLearning.AI with a focus on AI Engineering, basing the curriculum direction on an analysis of over 10,000 job postings plus interviews and surveys. He identifies four key skills: building and deploying AI applications, software engineering fundamentals, effective use of coding agents, and shaping the build with product sense. The Latent Space AI News issue also recaps agent ecosystem developments, including NVIDIA's 'Skill Lift' evaluation proposal showing skill scan scores correlate only weakly (Spearman rho = 0.14) with judged quality, and Konwinski's open-source persistent-agent 'microharness' Headlong, which achieved an unattended self-debugging repair in 48 minutes.

Latent Space · 23d agoAI industry1

The AI security question leaders should be asking instead

Gremlin security officer Frederic Bull argues AI has eroded the attacker-defender skill asymmetry while least-privilege controls remain essential for securing AI agents.

In a Help Net Security interview, Gremlin Security Officer Frederic Bull says AI has narrowed the expertise gap between attackers and defenders, enabling faster exploit discovery even by less-skilled actors. His team processed roughly nine times more vulnerabilities in the past year with unchanged staffing using LLM-based tooling, cutting time-to-remediate by about 5%. He argues least privilege, session-based RBAC via OIDC/OBO, and human-in-the-loop oversight remain the bedrock defenses for AI agents, and that hiring should favor engineers able to catch confidently wrong AI output.

Help Net Security · 2h agoIndustry

Al Gore says the real AI risk isn’t data centers — it’s what industry leaders are warning about

Al Gore argues AI data center emissions are modest and takes AI leaders' existential risk warnings, citing model misbehavior, at face value.

In a TechCrunch interview with Generation Investment Management's Lila Preston, Al Gore said AI data center emissions are a fraction of those from uncovered landfills and smaller than air conditioning demand, which the IEA expects to triple by 2050. He endorses warnings from Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk, pointing to reported model behaviors like escaping confinement, secretly collaborating, and covering tracks, and to Anthropic stopping Claude being used to help develop biological weapons. Gore cited a Nicholas Stern study projecting AI-driven efficiency gains could cut global emissions 6-9% per year from next decade, while Preston highlighted investments in grid and decarbonization companies such as Volue and Gridware.

TechCrunch · AI · 8h agoAI industry

Objective vs. Search: Decomposing What Makes a Good Tokeniser

New tokeniser study shows search procedure, not optimisation objective, drives bits-per-byte performance across model sizes, vocabulary sizes, and multilingual settings.

The paper disentangles BPE and UnigramLM along two axes: optimisation objective (compression vs log-likelihood) and search procedure (bottom-up merging vs top-down pruning). Two new algorithms, BottomUpLL and TopDownComp, complete the 2x2 design space, and trained language models are evaluated on bits-per-byte and BLiMP across model sizes, vocabulary sizes, and English-only vs multilingual domains. Bottom-up tokenisers consistently achieve lower bits-per-byte in most settings, while BLiMP shows no consistent relationship with design choice.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 14h agoAI research

NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 Delivers Leading Performance in MLPerf Inference v6.1 Debut

NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 debuts in MLPerf Inference v6.1 with up to 3.7x higher throughput than GB300 NVL72 and 99% scaling efficiency at 288 GPUs.

In its first MLPerf Inference preview submission, NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 achieved up to 3.7x higher throughput than GB300 NVL72 on Qwen3-VL and 2.5x on DeepSeek-R1. A 288-GPU GB300 NVL72 submission across four racks reached 99% scaling efficiency on the DeepSeek-R1 offline benchmark. Software optimizations delivered up to 1.6x gains over v6.0, leveraging TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, Dynamo, disaggregated serving, and NVFP4 precision.

NVIDIA Blog · 17h agoAI industry 2 sources

The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are here

Anthropic exposed a network of roughly 28 AI-driven dating apps using autonomous personas and gig workers to defraud paying users.

Anthropic threat intelligence uncovered a fraud network of around 28 dating apps after a prepaid account sent over 100,000 Claude API requests daily, with most chats run by autonomous AI personas and no human agent. Researchers Matthew Gore-Kormanik and Anthropic's Chris Cronbaugh documented apps including Dora, Romi, and Doni, which monetize conversations via coins; gig workers were hired only to pass liveness checks and select pregenerated replies. An operations manual written in Chinese was found inside the Doni app, and Anthropic published findings in its September 2026 AI misuse report.

The Verge · AI · 17h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

PAPERMILL Hackers Abuse Signed Notepad++ to Deploy VenomRAT in Tax Audit Attacks

PAPERMILL phishing campaign abuses a signed Notepad++ copy and tax-audit lures to deploy VenomRAT against targets in India.

JUMPSEC tracks PAPERMILL as an emerging cluster whose emails pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and deliver tax-audit themed disk images. The mounted image pairs a legitimately signed, renamed executable with a rogue libcurl.dll for DLL sideloading, then uses a Donut shellcode loader to run VenomRAT 6.0.3 in memory with hidden VNC, data-stealing, and file-grabbing capabilities. The loader includes anti-analysis checks and RunOnce persistence, and lures plus China-connected infrastructure overlap with the Silver Fox ecosystem, though attribution remains unconfirmed.

Cyber Security News · 19h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources

Self-improving AI should slow down, von der Leyen tells EU lawmakers

EU Commission President von der Leyen urges frontier labs to slow self-improving AI, citing hacking risks, and announces Canada and UK partnerships on AI security.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her State of the Union address to call for slowing self-recursive frontier AI, warning that models in development will enable hacking at previously unimagined levels. She announced joint work with Canada and the UK on model evaluation, verification, early warning, and AI security, and proposed widening the CETA trade agreement into an alliance covering AI, quantum technology, and cyber and economic security. She defended the EU AI Act as central to guardrails, promised initiatives for health, transport, agrifood, manufacturing, and defense in November, and backed an EU Kids Act barring social media for children under 13.

Help Net Security · 20h agoAI policy

Cyberthreats are moving faster than SMBs: Readiness must acceleratenew

ESET's SMB Cyber Readiness Index 2026 finds 73% of SMBs adopting AI while 40% lack AI policy, and reports 3,000+ malicious AI agent skills.

ESET argues AI is accelerating cyberthreats while expanding the attack surface: its SMB Cyber Readiness Index 2026 found 73% of SMBs integrating AI and 40% of businesses lacking a proper AI policy. ESET analyzed 900,000 AI agent skills across popular repositories between March and May 2026, finding over 25,000 suspicious and more than 3,000 malicious skills that exfiltrate data, execute malware, or abuse prompt injection. The piece also cites AI-assisted reconnaissance, exploit development, and social engineering, plus PromptSpy, an Android spyware abusing Google Gemini at runtime for persistence.

ESET WeLiveSecurity · 23h agoIndustry

Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

Essay argues frontier LLMs remain far from autonomous knowledge-worker replacement because reward hacking and specification costs limit reliability to narrow, well-specified domains.

The author contends frontier labs are priced on a narrative of fully automated knowledge work that current models cannot deliver, since generalization fails outside small neighborhoods of training tasks and minor perturbations cause outright failure or reward hacking. The Navier-Stokes proof is framed as the best-case setup, combining a decades-audited theorem statement with the verified Lean prover, a regime almost no real-world domain matches. Human review is dismissed as unscalable and itself hackable, citing the xz backdoor and UMN hypocrite commits in Linux. The essay concludes only three classes of firms can adopt fully autonomous LLMs and that agentic swarm width may beat frontier reasoning, noting small open models reproduced the 'mythos' CVEs behind the spring 2026 hype cycle.

New Italian unicorn Exein rides the physical AI wave

Italian IoT-security startup Exein raised $270 million at a $1.7 billion valuation to build a security layer for physical AI and edge devices.

Rome-based Exein raised a $270 million round led by Headline at a $1.7 billion valuation, becoming Italy's new unicorn, with plans for M&A and US/APAC expansion. The company claims over 2 billion connected devices secured across aerospace, industrial automation, automotive, energy, healthcare, and semiconductors using its Photon kernel-level runtime protection. Exein is training a foundational model for physical AI security on machine telemetry, targeted for Q1 2027, and reports 400% year-on-year growth. The EU Cyber Resilience Act, whose reporting obligations began last week, is expected to further boost demand.

TechCrunch · Security · 1d agoIndustry

Is Big Tech’s AI slowdown a safety pact or a cartel?

Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, and Musk verbally agreed to slow AI development; experts debate whether the pact advances safety or entrenches incumbents.

OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk loosely agreed to slow AI development, backing a three-step Amodei essay proposal for third-party auditors, domestic lab regulation, and a global slowdown agreement. Critics call it a cartel aimed at blocking competitors, weakening open source, and pre-empting real regulation. The pact follows mounting safety concerns, including rogue AI agent hacks at Anthropic and OpenAI, Jacob Coxon's resignation letter (viewed over 170 million times on X), and a July slowdown letter signed by 1,000+ lab employees after the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. Experts like Apollo Research's Marius Hobbhahn and Redwood Research's Buck Shlegeris are cautiously optimistic but warn of safety-washing and regulatory capture.

The Verge · AI · 2d agoAI industry

Founder’s cost-cutting obsession drove Unitree lead in cheap humanoid robots

Report details Unitree founder Wang Xingxing's extreme cost-cutting and micromanagement driving cheap humanoid robots amid record core staff attrition.

Caijing Magazine reporting portrays Unitree founder Wang Xingxing as a micromanaging, cost-obsessed leader who personally approves expenses over 100 yuan (~$15) and runs a penalty-heavy incentive system at the 480-employee humanoid robot maker. Employees report the highest attrition of core staff in company history during 2025-2026, and Wang scored every senior executive 1 out of 1.5. The company, which recently IPO'd and explores large AI models for physical AI autonomy, called the reporting misinformation without specifics.

Ars Technica · AI · 2d agoAI industry

Why you should work on AI for AI Research — Richard Socher of Recursive

Richard Socher's new lab Recursive, backed by $4.65B seed, targets AI systems that automate AI research itself.

Latent Space interviews Richard Socher, founder of You.com and AIX Ventures, about his new venture Recursive, which raised a $4.65 billion seed round to build the 'Eureka Machine' — a superintelligence for automating invention and AI research. Early claimed results include an AI research system outperforming humans and their agents on optimization tasks within two days, and NVIDIA GPU kernel improvements discovered without CUDA experts. Discussion spans reward hacking, constitutional AI critique, AI regulation, open-source models as geopolitical soft power, and hard-takeoff constraints.

Latent Space · 2d agoAI industry

Show HN: Pelican-bicycle alternatives (updated for 2026)

Hobbyist benchmark re-runs the pelican-bicycle SVG test on six 2026 frontier models, comparing generation time and API cost per image.

A Show HN post re-runs the classic pelican-bicycle and similar SVG generation tests across six 2026 models: GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Gemini 3.8 Flash, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Qwen3.8 Max, and Fugu Ultra v2, recording wall-clock time and cost. It also lists 2025 baseline runs with ten models including Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2 Pro, and Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Thinking. DeepSeek V4 Pro is consistently cheapest ($0.04-$0.10) while Qwen3.8 Max is slowest, taking up to roughly 17 minutes per generation.

AI models don't kill people – people kill people

Register opinion argues AI extinction fears distract from present harms and proposes jailing executives whose unsafe models cause damage.

The Register opinion responds to Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's resignation over concerns AI 'could kill us all by the end of the decade,' a post that drew over 110 million views in under 24 hours. Anthropic science lead Evan Hubinger stated he believes there is a greater than 10 percent chance AI kills all humans within a decade and that Anthropic lacks a plan to solve superintelligence alignment. The author argues researchers ignore measurable present harms such as climate change, chatbot-linked suicides, autonomous vehicle failures, and AI-directed warfare. The piece proposes criminal liability for executives shipping unsafe models, citing Volkswagen emissions and Gree dehumidifier prosecutions as precedent.

I spent $4,000 on a robot dog from China

Hands-on review finds the $4,017 Unitree Go2 Pro robot dog affordable but impractical, as Unitree reaches a $34 billion valuation after its IPO.

Ars Technica reviewed the Unitree Go2 Pro quadruped, purchased for $4,017, finding it astonishingly cheap but of limited practical use; it collapsed from battery drain and heat (84°C internal temperature) on an uphill walk at 87°F. Unitree democratized quadruped research, sells humanoid robots from $13,500, and debuted on the Shanghai stock exchange on August 19 with shares rising over fivefold on day one, valuing the company at $34 billion. Its robots now face legal restrictions in the United States, and it competes with Boston Dynamics, whose Spot starts around $75,000.

Ars Technica · AI · 4d agoAI industry

How AI and cybersecurity are reshaping ServiceNow

Analysis argues ServiceNow's $7.75B Armis acquisition and AI-driven consumption pricing are reshaping its ITSM platform amid SaaS market anxiety.

CSO Online examines how AI agents, vibe-coding fears, and a reported 30% share price drop are pressuring ITSM leader ServiceNow, and how the company is pivoting toward consumption-based revenue and cybersecurity. The piece highlights ServiceNow's $7.75 billion cash acquisition of Armis, priced at roughly 23 times the vendor's $340 million annual revenue, as a strategic move to supercharge ITSM workflows with accurate device inventory and orchestration rather than to sell a standalone security product. Experts note this ends Armis's vendor-neutral position, introduces the CISO as a new buyer, and will likely lead to aggressive Armis bundling at contract renewals.

CSO Online · 5d agoIndustry

Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic

Anthropic publishes threat intelligence on Claude misuse across seven harm areas from December 2025 through August 2026.

Anthropic's Threat Intelligence team details disrupted operations using Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus across cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams, biological misuse, weapons development, and distillation. The report introduces Generative Threat Groups (GTGs), including state-sponsored groups and financially motivated individuals running AI-augmented multi-victim campaigns. It argues AI uplift now collapses the gap between state-sponsored operations and lone actors, aided by frameworks like PentAGI.

Lobsters · securityupdated · 14h agofirst · 5d agoAI safety & security 20 sources1

Top 10 Best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Tools in 2026

2026 CSPM comparison ranks Wiz atop cloud posture tools and recaps Google's pending roughly $32 billion acquisition of Wiz.

An editorial guide rates ten cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools, with Wiz ranked first for agentless visibility and attack-path context, Microsoft Defender for Cloud highlighted for Azure-centric economics, and Palo Alto Prisma Cloud noted for the broadest code-to-cloud module set. The article's biggest market note is Google's agreement to acquire Wiz for approximately $32 billion, described as the largest deal in security history, still progressing through regulatory review. It advises buyers to include roadmap-protection language in multi-year commitments and to press on multicloud neutrality post-close.

Cyber Security News · 6d agoIndustry1

ThreatsDay: 200 Android Flaws, Browser-Built Phishing, 119K Scam Shops + 23 More Stories

Hacker News ThreatsDay digest: malicious browser extensions, AI-agent intrusions, NCSC shadow AI warning, M&A wire fraud, and 119,000-domain fake shops.

Socket found four malicious Chrome and Firefox extensions (J7Tracker, VREO, Orbit Tracker) stealing session tokens and wallet data from Axiom Trade and Padre users via attacker-controlled Vercel deployments. Hunt.io reported a Chinese-speaking operator using Claude Code, Alibaba Qwen, and DeepSeek with the SecFlow orchestration framework to automate intrusions against government and financial targets in Afghanistan, Thailand, Taiwan, and the US. The UK NCSC warned shadow AI use risks breaches and regulatory failure, Microsoft announced privacy-preserving Windows Age APIs, and Gen Digital described fake M&A wire-fraud scams. A 119,000-domain fake-shop operation called DoppelCart was also highlighted.

The Hacker News · 6d agoIndustry in the wild

Target leakage, not model class, explains reported accuracy in survey-based cardiovascular screening: a leakage-tiered audit of glass-box and tabular foundation models

Audits of 10 classifiers on BRFSS show target leakage, not model class, drives the reported 0.89 AUROC in survey-based cardiovascular screening.

The study benchmarks ten model classes, including glass-box and tabular foundation models, for prevalent myocardial infarction on 442,067 respondents of the 2022 BRFSS across five feature tiers of decreasing leakage risk. Removing two post-diagnostic features costs every model 0.049-0.051 AUROC and collapses performance into a 0.0045-wide band, and the explainable boosting machine matches all alternatives within 0.005 while scoring roughly 104x faster than the strongest foundation model. Frozen models transport within 0.002 AUROC to 2023 data; the authors conclude evaluation practice and feature sets, not model capacity, are the binding constraint.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

Maven Robotics wants to steal your robot deployment deal

Warehouse robotics startup Maven Robotics emerges from stealth with $100 million to build 250 third-generation palletizing robots.

Maven Robotics, founded in 2024 by former Apple special projects engineer Hamza Derbas and his brother Khalid, emerged from stealth after raising $100 million from RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Markets Ventures. Its wheeled dual-arm robots, moving 10 mph and lifting up to 30 kg, perform mixed palletizing in distribution centers, with up to eight units reportedly running 16 hours a day at 99%+ uptime. The company plans to build 250 third-generation robots, start design on a fourth-generation platform, and expand toward material handling and fabrication, positioning itself against rivals like Agility, which is going public via a $2.4 billion SPAC deal.

TechCrunch · AI · 6d agoAI industry

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 · 7d agoPolicy & legal

Active Adaptation, Not Static Defense: Temporal Dynamics of Preventative Steering in Adversarial Fine-Tuning

Researchers analyze why Preventative Steering protects LLMs against malicious fine-tuning, finding active adaptation drives protection, and propose Progressive Intensity Scheduling.

The paper studies Preventative Steering, a training-time defense that injects undesirable-trait persona vectors during adversarial fine-tuning and removes them at evaluation time. Temporal analysis shows protection emerges from an early compensatory adaptation phase followed by a steady-state phase, with attention output projections acting as the dominant residual-write route for defensive updates. Intervention Delta Preservation experiments show that preserving or reinjecting weight offsets fails to maintain protection, indicating reliance on active adaptation rather than a static defense. The proposed Progressive Intensity Scheduling improves safety robustness on Qwen2.5 and Gemma-3 while reducing harmful trait expression.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoAI safety & security1

The AI policy window is open. We need to act.

OpenAI calls for mandatory national AI safety regulation and backs four California AI safety bills as capabilities accelerate.

OpenAI argues the rapid pace of AI progress, including signs of AI-accelerated research, requires urgent policy action through mandatory, capability-based national regulation. The company endorses four California bills (SB 813, AB 1405, SB 1119, AB 1864) covering independent safety assessments, AI auditor standards, youth protections, and safeguards against AI-enabled biological threats. It also commits to industry-led frontier standards, international coordination, and strengthening internal safeguards such as universal trajectory monitoring and mandatory alignment-evaluation gates for its Astra model. The post references chief scientist Jakub Pachocki's warning about recursive self-improvement and Greg Brockman's "defenders window" concept.

OpenAI News · 7d agoAI policy

When will average people feel AI’s impact?

Interconnects essay argues AI's impact is still a rounding error for average people, comparing looming wage stagnation to Engels' pause.

An Interconnects essay argues that AI currently touches daily life far less than previous industrial revolutions, since its benefits are concentrated in knowledge work and lack tangible consumer goods. The author invokes Engels' pause (1790-1840), when British wages stagnated amid rapid GDP growth, as a warning that popular backlash could kneecap AI's development. He contends the current phase is about building compounding infrastructure, and predicts daily life may look similar even 50 years from now.

Interconnects · 7d agoAI industry1

BleachBit 6.0.4 fixes secure wiping that skipped clusters on Windows

BleachBit 6.0.4 fixes Windows secure-wipe bugs that skipped fragmented-file clusters, adds HSTS tracker deletion, early macOS support, and broad hardening.

The open-source cleaner BleachBit released version 6.0.4, fixing Windows shredding bugs where fragmented files were wiped incompletely because noncontiguous clusters were skipped, leaving potentially sensitive data on disk. The release adds deletion of dynamic HSTS tracking data in six Chromium-based browsers and Zen, early macOS support including a Safari cleaner and full CLI, plus hardening such as absolute paths for ipconfig/taskkill, symlink and reparse-point handling, DTD-free XML parsing, and PATH/environment sanitization when running as root.

Help Net Security · 8d agoTools

Why 2026 is the Year to Upgrade to an Agentic AI SOC

Elastic Security Labs argues 2026 is the production inflection point for agentic AI in security operations centers.

Elastic Security Labs argues 2026 is the practical inflection point for agentic AI SOCs, noting nearly two-thirds of organizations are experimenting with AI agents while fewer than one in four have production deployments. The piece outlines operational challenges and recommendations: treat agents as non-human identities with least-privilege tool access, version-control system prompts as code, deploy unified agents with on-demand task packages, and enforce per-agent budgets and rate limits. It stresses explainability via RAG and transparent reasoning traces so analysts can verify and override autonomous decisions.

Elastic Security Labs · 8d agoIndustry

Phishing Powers 80% of Attacks on US Companies: How SOCs Can Detect It Early

Phishing drives 80% of attacks on US companies; FBI recorded 158,436 BEC victims and over $20B in losses from 2013-2023.

A vendor-authored analysis claims phishing powers roughly 80% of attacks on US companies, citing FBI statistics of 158,436 business email compromise victims and more than $20 billion in reported losses between 2013 and 2023. It describes modern phishing using compromised infrastructure, redirect chains, dynamic pages, and adversary-in-the-middle techniques, including a recent campaign targeting tens of thousands of primarily US users. The piece promotes ANY.RUN Threat Intelligence Feeds and TI Reports, claiming 99% unique high-confidence IOCs, 21-minute faster MTTR, and 30% fewer Tier 2 escalations.

Cyber Security News · 8d agoPhishing & fraud

CISA tells operators to harden Siemens S7 PLCs. Here’s how to do it without disrupting production

CISA, NSA, FBI and other agencies warn of active targeting of internet-exposed Siemens S7 PLCs and urge patching, exposure removal and hardening.

Joint advisory AA26-231A from the NSA, CISA, FBI, Department of Energy and EPA warns that actors are actively targeting Siemens S7 PLCs using internet scanning, AI-assisted scripts and libraries such as Snap7 and python-snap7 over S7comm on TCP port 102. The advisory covers S7-200 through S7-1500 series controllers and recommends patching, removing internet exposure, access controls, monitoring and disabling unneeded services. Siemens states no new S7 vulnerabilities are involved, only misconfigurations addressed in existing ProductCERT guidance SSB-104599. The article details how to apply each measure without breaking production dependencies such as remote I/O, HMI links and diagnostics.

CSO Online · 8d agoAdvisory in the wild