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Georgia man charged for robbing NBA, NFL players through stolen Apple account details

Georgia man Kwamaine Jerell Ford charged with phishing NBA and NFL players' Apple accounts, making over 2,000 fraudulent transactions, and sex trafficking counts.

Kwamaine Jerell Ford, 34, was arrested and pleaded not guilty to dozens of counts including wire fraud, computer fraud, aggravated identity theft, access device fraud, and sex trafficking. He posed as an adult film actress offering explicit videos, then as Apple customer support to harvest usernames, passwords, and MFA codes from professional athletes, gaining access to their credit and debit cards and making more than 2,000 transactions including fund transfers and DoorDash orders. Prosecutors say he ran the scheme while on probation for a similar 2019 phishing offense in which he spent nearly $325,000 of stolen funds, and also coerced a woman into sex with players, filmed encounters without consent, and hacked one athlete's home security cameras. He was held without bail.

The Record · 9d agoPolicy & legal in the wild

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 · 7d agoAI industry

Canadian Start-up smartARM Uses AI to Create Intuitive Bionic Prosthetics

Toronto startup smartARM built a bionic prosthetic arm using Meta's DINOv2 vision model and AI glasses to automatically select grips for objects.

Toronto-based smartARM developed a vision-first bionic arm that uses a palm-embedded camera and Meta's open-source DINOv2 model to recognize objects from a few reference photos and automatically select suitable grips. It integrates Meta AI Glasses and the Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit for additional egocentric context, letting users add new objects via a phone app. The arm adapts to new objects almost instantly instead of the weeks previously required, and is used by former NFL player Shaquem Griffin.

Meta Newsroomupdated · 10h agofirst · 11h agoAI industry 2 sources

Iranian hackers use CHOSEN BRICK Windows malware to spy on targets

Iranian state-linked hackers use CHOSEN BRICK Windows malware, spread via Telegram and WhatsApp social engineering, to spy on dissidents and journalists worldwide.

US, UK, and Dutch cyber agencies with the FBI issued a joint advisory on Iranian state-linked hackers deploying a Windows malware strain called CHOSEN BRICK against dissidents, activists, and journalists, primarily in the US, UK, and Netherlands. Attacks begin with messages on WhatsApp or Telegram impersonating trusted contacts or technical support, tricking victims into running malicious files disguised as apps such as Pictory, RunwayML, Norton Antivirus, Telegram, and KeePass. The malware persists via Registry Run keys, adds Microsoft Defender exclusions, and uses a per-victim Telegram bot for command-and-control while stealing email, Telegram and WhatsApp data, screenshots, and audio. Stolen data is exfiltrated via Telegram or cloud services like VultrObjects and StorjShare, and sometimes appears on pro-Iranian leak sites, increasing physical risk for dissidents abroad.

BleepingComputer · 7h agoThreat actor in the wild 6 sources

San Francisco 49ers Ransomware

Ransomware attackers hit the San Francisco 49ers, adding the NFL franchise to the growing list of sports organizations targeted.

Infosecurity Magazine reports a ransomware attack on the San Francisco 49ers. The headline confirms the NFL organization was targeted by ransomware operators. The article text was unavailable, so the responsible gang, encryption scope, and extortion details are unconfirmed. The incident reflects continued ransomware pressure on sports and entertainment organizations.

Infosecurity Magazine · 29d agoRansomware in the wild

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

Group of bipartisan lawmakers ask US government to ban several hack-for-hire firms

Bipartisan US lawmakers urged the Commerce Department to add hack-for-hire firms BellTroX, CyberRoot, and Appin/Sunkissed Organic Farms to the entity list.

Senators Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Pat Harrigan asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to place three Indian firms on the entity list, which would bar US businesses from transacting with them. The letter says BellTroX, CyberRoot, and Sunkissed Organic Farms (formerly Appin) have conducted cyberattacks and targeted espionage against Americans for over a decade, allegedly at the behest of the Qatari government, and used foreign courts to censor reporting on their activities. Appin previously secured a global takedown order against Reuters that was later lifted, and has been linked to hacks of FIFA officials tied to Qatar's 2022 World Cup plans.

TechCrunch · Security · 7d agoPolicy & legal1

Hackers Frequently Target Healthcare and Finance Orgs

A new Huntress survey indicates threat actors frequently target healthcare organizations and banks because of the highly personal data they hold.

Huntress published survey findings indicating that healthcare organizations and banks are frequent targets for threat actors. The piece attributes this to the highly personal information these sectors handle. The article is framed around cyberattack readiness rather than a specific incident.

Huntress · 15d agoIndustry

Engineered Persuasion: Evaluating Personalized Pretexts in LLM-Generated Spear Phishing

A study of 180 US workers found each LLM phishing personalization level raised click-intention odds by 28%, but credibility depends on context fit.

The arXiv paper evaluates how personalized pretexts in LLM-generated spear phishing affect perceived credibility, using 180 US working adults across 1,436 evaluations of emails with four cumulative personalization levels, from workplace context to shared-project details. Convincingness rose 2.40 points per level in sensitivity analysis and click-intention odds increased 28% per level, while non-clickers shifted toward deleting rather than reporting. Qualitative coding showed details matching the recipient's role and routines supported credibility, whereas incorrect, vague, or channel-inappropriate details raised suspicion. The authors argue personalization effectiveness depends on pretext fit, with implications for workplace security training.

arXiv cs.CR · 13d agoResearch

US military disabled ad tracking on troops’ devices following reports of targeted attacks

US DoD disabled ad tracking on troops' devices after foreign adversaries targeted service members using commercially bought location data.

Per letters shared with Senator Ron Wyden, the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command disabled advertising IDs on iPhones, Android devices, and Windows computers across the federal military enterprise. The protections rolled out earlier in 2026, with the Air Force implementing changes in July, to prevent adversaries from exploiting app-derived location data sold through data brokers. Wyden warned that personal devices brought onto military bases could still expose troops and facilities, and noted the intelligence community and FBI buy such data without warrants.

TechCrunch · Security · 12d agoPolicy & legal

LongAgent: History-Guided Agentic Search for Longitudinal Outcome Prediction

LongAgent autonomously searches variable sets and temporal windows to predict longitudinal medical outcomes, beating the strongest non-agent baseline on synthetic data.

The paper proposes LongAgent, an agent-based method that searches over combinations of variable sets, temporal windows and aggregation functions for outcome prediction on heterogeneous medical longitudinal data. It uses a history memory of previous searches and numerical evidence to guide exploration. On synthetic data it achieves mean RMSE 1.7376, improving over the best non-agent baseline by 0.0151 (95% CI [0.0045, 0.0260]; p=0.0273), and performs comparably to the best baseline on a real clinical dataset.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research

Quantifying the Engagement Trap: Impact of Short-form Video Recommender Systems on Users with ADHD

A 302-participant study finds engagement-optimized short-form video recommenders cause disproportionate time blindness and distress for users with ADHD.

Researchers ran a stratified Prolific study with 302 participants comparing short-form video recommendation experiences with and without ADHD. Participants with ADHD reported significantly higher time blindness, post-usage regret, and emotional distress despite perceiving recommendations as similarly relevant. The paper proposes neurodiversity-aware, human-centered design interventions to mitigate these algorithmic harms.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

Get closer to the game with Gemini and Pixel

Google's Gemini and Pixel partner with five global football clubs to add AI-powered features to the matchday fan experience.

Google announced partnerships between its Gemini AI and Pixel smartphone lines and five global football clubs. The collaboration aims to elevate the fan matchday experience through AI and smartphone technology. The announcement is primarily a consumer marketing effort rather than a security-relevant development.

Google · AI · Aug 17, 2026AI industry

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 · 16d agoAI safety & security

NOAH: Learning the Full Patient Journey. A Longitudinal Multimodal Time-Aware Model for Representation and Forecasting

Researchers introduce NOAH, a time-aware generative transformer trained on 559 million MIMIC clinical events to forecast multimodal patient trajectories.

NOAH is a task-agnostic, time-aware generative transformer trained on over 559 million clinical events from 431,000 hospital visits by 299,000 patients across the MIMIC dataset family. It uses bidirectional time integration and a variational latent space to model the stochastic evolution of patient states, natively processing medical images, time-series signals, categorical events, and structured or unstructured clinical records. The model supports autoregressive forecasting with optional time control, zero-shot classification, and counterfactual intervention simulation, with strong probing performance across clinical outcomes, 15 ICD chapters, and 29 comorbidities.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research1

HypoEvolve: Genetic Algorithms Enable Multi-Agent LLMs to Discover Scientific Hypotheses

HypoEvolve couples a generational genetic algorithm with specialized LLM agents to generate drug-repurposing hypotheses, beating six baselines on DepMap selectivity (0.171 vs 0.115).

HypoEvolve coordinates specialized LLM agents through a generational genetic algorithm in which scientific judgments and new proposals reshape a hypothesis population. Evaluation centers on drug repurposing, linking mechanistic explanations to target-level biological claims assessed via external measures adapted from DepMap and Open Targets. Across 34 cancer types, HypoEvolve scores highest against six baselines on both measures, with DepMap selectivity of 0.171 versus 0.115 for the strongest baseline, and gains generalize to held-out cancer types.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research1

Lawmakers call on Treasury to sanction hackers-for-hire

Bipartisan US lawmakers asked Treasury to sanction three India-based hack-for-hire firms accused of long-running espionage against Americans.

Sens. Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Pat Harrigan urged Treasury to add Sunkissed Organic Farms (formerly Appin), BellTroX, and CyberRoot to the Entity List. The letter says the mercenary groups conducted targeted espionage against US citizens, businesses, and lawyers for over fifteen years, allegedly including work for Qatar's government such as targeting opponents of Qatar's World Cup bid and Kristi Rogers, wife of Senate candidate Mike Rogers. Adding the firms to the Entity List would restrict their access to American software, cybersecurity tools, and cloud infrastructure. The lawmakers also accuse the groups of lawfare campaigns to censor investigative reporting on their hacking activities.

CyberScoop · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild

Anatomical Grounding and Leakage-Aware Multimodal Contrastive Learning for Alzheimer's Disease Classification from Structural MRI

Study of label leakage and anatomical grounding in multimodal MRI models for Alzheimer's staging shows cognitive-score fusion accuracy of 87.3% is leakage-driven.

The authors train a ResNet18 slice-based encoder with a one-layer Transformer on 1,075 ADNI-1 T1 MRI scans, using FastSurfer segmentations and YOLOv8 localization (mAP_50 above 0.96) as anatomical reference. Grad-CAM shows the image-only classifier often attends to skull and background rather than disease-relevant structures. A CLIP-style image-tabular contrastive framework organized along a label-leakage spectrum yields 87.3% three-way accuracy with cognitive scores versus 73.0% with regional volumes, and cropping to the medial temporal lobe raises image-only accuracy from 58.7% to 65.1%. Results come from single runs on a small balanced test set with reported confidence intervals.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research1

House passes bill to equip local law enforcement with scam-fighting tools

The U.S. House passed the GUARD Act, letting local law enforcement use federal grants to investigate financial scams and trace stolen cryptocurrency.

The bipartisan GUARD Act (Reps. Zachary Nunn, Scott Fitzgerald, Josh Gottheimer) passed the House, allowing existing DOJ grant funds to be used for fraud analysts, victim-support training, blockchain tracing software, and financial-information sharing with law enforcement. It addresses scams like pig butchering, often run by transnational criminal groups overseas; Americans lost a record $11.4 billion to crypto-related fraud in 2025, including $8.6 billion in investment fraud. Senators Katie Britt and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a Senate companion in July 2025, and the House also passed a bill retroactively eliminating the 'scam tax' on stolen funds for 2021-2025 victims.

The Record · 8h agoPolicy & legal

Large Language Models Develop Belief State Geometry In-Context

Probing six open-source LLMs on HMM-generated data shows belief states are linearly decodable (R² 0.83–0.99), suggesting in-context learning approximates Bayesian prediction.

Researchers prompted six open-source LLMs with data from 40 hidden Markov models selected for non-trivial belief structure and probed residual-stream activations for belief states (posteriors over hidden states). Belief states were linearly decodable with peak R² values of 0.83–0.99 across HMM/LLM combinations, spanning early to late layers. Patching and steering the probe-identified subspace preserved downstream prediction quality while control interventions degraded performance substantially, establishing functional relevance. The results provide representation-level evidence that in-context learning approximates optimal Bayesian prediction over a context-inferred generative model.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research1

NOAH: Learning the Full Patient Journey. A Longitudinal Multimodal Time-Aware Model for Representation and Forecasting

Researchers introduce NOAH, a generative time-aware transformer trained on 559 million MIMIC clinical events to model and forecast patient trajectories.

NOAH is a task-agnostic, time-aware generative transformer designed to represent and forecast the full multimodal patient journey across medical images, time-series signals, categorical events, and clinical text. It was trained on over 559 million clinical events from 431,000 hospital visits covering 299,000 patients in the MIMIC dataset family. The architecture combines bidirectional time integration with a variational latent space to capture continuous patient state evolution and clinical stochasticity. NOAH supports autoregressive forecasting with time control, zero-shot classification, and counterfactual intervention simulation, with evaluations on 15 ICD chapters, 29 comorbidities, and time-to-event prediction.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research2

Fake Recruiter Scams Target Corporate Credentials on Mobile

RecruitTrap phishing campaigns use mobile-optimized fake recruiter pages to steal corporate credentials from enterprise targets.

RecruitTrap campaigns impersonate recruiters and direct victims to phishing pages optimized for mobile devices. The goal is harvesting corporate credentials from enterprise targets. The mobile-focused design suggests deliberate targeting of smartphone users, where phishing cues are harder to scrutinize.

Infosecurity Magazine · 22d agoPhishing & fraud