Search: “finance”

What must happen for AI’s trillion-dollar gamble to pay off

Hyperscalers need 2.7x productivity gains by 2030 to justify nearly $1.1 trillion in AI data center spending, or risk bankruptcy and capital misallocation.

Wharton finance professor Jessica Wachter estimates hyperscaler AI expenditure will reach nearly $1.1 trillion through 2027 and that a 2.7x productivity increase is needed to break even by 2030. AI revenues of roughly $150-200 billion this year fall far short of about $750 billion in annual spending, with total investment from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle potentially exceeding $5 trillion over four years. Alphabet reported its first free cash flow deficit (about $5.9 billion) since its 2004 IPO due to AI infrastructure costs. Researchers warn that failed demand could make the buildout the largest capital misallocation in history, with depreciating GPU chips risking stranded assets.

MIT Technology Review · AI·Sep 15, 10:00 UTC · 1d agoAI industry

Introducing ChatGPT for Financial Services

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Financial Services, pairing built-in market data with GPT-6 Astra for banking research workflows.

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Financial Services, a tailored ChatGPT Work experience shaped by design partners Morgan Stanley and Evercore, targeting investment banking and equity research. It bundles premium data from Daloopa, PitchBook, LSEG News, and Crunchbase hosted on OpenAI infrastructure with granular citations, optimized MCP connectors for S&P Global and FactSet, and 50+ connectors, plus planned entitlement integrations with S&P Capital IQ, LSEG, MSCI, Dow Jones Factiva, and Moody's. It runs GPT-6 Astra, which OpenAI claims is state of the art in information retrieval, financial reasoning, and artifact generation, and includes enterprise controls such as SAML SSO, SCIM, role-based access, and no default training on firm data.

OpenAI News·updated Sep 10, 18:25 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 10, 07:00 UTC · 6d agoAI industry 3 sources

NVIDIA AI Factory Compute Is Becoming an Investable Asset Class

NVIDIA partners with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure financing.

NVIDIA announced partnerships with major financial firms including Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR. The independent financing platforms are designed to mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital to support AI infrastructure buildout. NVIDIA frames the move as positioning AI factory compute as an investable asset class.

NVIDIA Blog·Aug 12, 00:38 UTC · Aug 12, 2026AI industry

ASCII smuggling crosses over from AI prompt injection to phishing evasion

Microsoft details high-volume phishing campaign using ASCII smuggling (Unicode tag chars) for filter evasion, peaking at 2.3M messages.

Microsoft researchers observed a high-volume finance-themed phishing campaign using invisible Unicode tag characters (U+E0000–U+E007F), a technique known from AI prompt injection research as ASCII smuggling, to split lure words like 'funding' and evade email filters. Telemetry from Microsoft Defender for Office 365 showed signature hits jump from roughly 21,000 messages on February 8, 2026 to more than 1.3 million on February 9, peaking above 2.3 million on February 11, with elevated weekday activity lasting approximately three months. The discovery emerged from prompt injection protection research, showing AI-era evasion techniques crossing into traditional phishing. Most messages were flagged by layered Defender protections rather than a single Unicode-specific signal.

Microsoft Security Blog·Sep 3, 16:00 UTC · 12d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

From ‘High/Medium/Low’ to Dollars: Making Cyber Risk Legible to Your CFO

Cyble argues security teams should express cyber risk in financial terms for CFOs instead of high/medium/low ratings, citing its 2025 threat forecast results.

Cyble published guidance on cyber risk quantification, arguing qualitative high/medium/low ratings fail to convey financial exposure to executives. The piece notes that over 80% of its 2025 threat predictions, including AI-driven ransomware and supply-chain attacks, materialized as anticipated.

Cyble·Aug 25, 09:45 UTC · 22d agoIndustry

A Hybrid LSTM-XGBoost Framework for Multi-Horizon Stock Return Prediction Across Diversified Equity Portfolios

Hybrid LSTM-XGBoost model predicts multi-horizon returns for 14 US equities, cutting 30-day RMSE to about one-third of a standalone LSTM baseline.

The paper combines a two-layer LSTM (64 hidden units) processing 60-day windows of five market features with an XGBoost regressor over a 78-dimensional hybrid feature vector including 14 technical indicators. It is trained on pooled data for 14 US equities across six sectors using chronological splits and per-stock MinMaxScaling to prevent look-ahead bias, and evaluated at 30, 90, 252, and 365 trading-day horizons. The hybrid achieves test RMSE of 0.0949 at 30 days, roughly one-third of the standalone LSTM, while 97.6% directional accuracy at 365 days largely tracks the base rate of positive returns.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 17:51 UTC · 4d agoAI research

Microsoft 365 AitM Phishing Hijacks Accounts to Collect Payroll and Finance Emails

The Hacker News·Aug 7, 10:38 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Phishing & fraud

What building an AI-native finance function taught me

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar shares five lessons from building an AI-native finance function, covering forecasting, controls, and AI ROI.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar outlines five lessons learned from building an AI-native finance function at the company. Topics include automated forecasting, stronger financial controls, and measuring AI return on investment. The piece is a first-person account of enterprise AI adoption within a finance organization rather than a product or research announcement.

OpenAI News·Aug 10, 17:00 UTC · Aug 10, 2026AI industry

Nigeria Looks to Sovereign Cloud for Cyber, National Security

Nigeria launches financing, procurement, and infrastructure policies to build a sovereign cloud for cyber and national security.

Nigeria has introduced financing, procurement, and infrastructure policies to accelerate its sovereign cloud initiative. The program aims to keep government data under national control and expand domestic technical expertise. It is framed as part of a broader effort to strengthen cyber and national security capabilities in West Africa's largest economy.

Dark Reading·Aug 26, 08:00 UTC · 21d agoPolicy & legal

Model ML completes finance work more efficiently with GPT-5.6 Sol

OpenAI customer Model ML uses GPT-5.6 Sol to turn finance research into editable, traceable decks and workbooks.

OpenAI published a customer story describing how Model ML uses GPT-5.6 Sol for finance work. The model carries tasks from research and analysis through to editable, traceable PowerPoint decks and Excel workbooks. This is a product adoption case rather than a new model release.

OpenAI News·Aug 10, 12:00 UTC · Aug 10, 2026AI industry

The Top 4 Threats We Found by Investigating Every Alert for a Quarter

Prophet Security's quarterly threat report finds identity attacks made up roughly half of confirmed malicious activity, with stolen authenticated sessions bypassing conditional access controls.

Between May 1 and July 31, 2026, Prophet Security investigated every alert in customer environments immediately on arrival; about 7% of completed investigations were confirmed malicious. Direct account/session attacks made up roughly 18% of confirmed activity, with replayed authenticated sessions bypassing conditional access since no re-authentication occurs. Infostealer activity affected about a quarter of investigated organizations, mostly delivered via browsers through compromised websites, malicious ads, sponsored search results and ClickFix fake CAPTCHA gates, with payloads including Lumma Stealer, Vidar, HijackLoader and AsyncRAT. Credential phishing was the largest category at about 28%, with adversary-in-the-middle relays revealed by seconds-long MFA approvals from distant countries and MFA fatigue attacks exploiting automatic unlock policies.

BleepingComputer·Sep 10, 14:00 UTC · 5d agoThreat actor in the wild

Phishing Campaign Sends Millions of Emails Using Invisible Unicode to Evade Filters

Microsoft warns of a high-volume phishing campaign using invisible Unicode characters to split keywords like 'funding' and evade filters, peaking at 2.37 million daily messages.

Microsoft's Security Research team documented a high-volume phishing operation inserting deprecated Unicode Tags characters (U+E0000-U+E007F) inside financial keywords such as 'funding' so literal-string and regex email filters stop matching them. The campaign ran on a weekly cadence with 1-2.37 million weekday messages between February and May 15, 2026, peaking on February 26, 2026. It used hundreds of disposable finance-themed sender domains and relayed mail through ActiveCampaign's click-tracking infrastructure (acemlnd[.]com, activehosted[.]com), lending legitimate platform reputation. Microsoft ties the activity to an AI-assisted SBA loan phishing campaign that Fortra's FIRE team disclosed in September 2025.

The Hacker News·Sep 4, 15:57 UTC · 11d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

E2A-Bench: Benchmarking Evidence-to-Action Reliability in Financial Chart Reasoning

E2A-Bench, a 969-query financial chart reasoning benchmark, finds VLMs fail evidence-to-action consistency, with fine-tuning amplifying BUY:SELL bias 4-6x.

E2A-Bench is a 969-query benchmark built from 323 HS300 constituents across three input modalities with deterministic OHLCV-derived evidence anchors, evaluating grounding, reasoning-action consistency, evidence-confidence calibration, and directional coverage via UCR, RCI, ECI, and NDR metrics. Testing 20 VLMs showed the lowest-hallucination model ranked near the bottom on coverage with only 6.4% directional coverage, and oracle-aided verification reduced unsupported claims but could collapse coverage. Financial fine-tuning amplified the BUY:SELL ratio by factors of 4.21 to 4.68 across base-fine-tuned pairs.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 12, 20:00 UTC · 3d agoAI research

Molecular Déjà Vu: Digit-Level Retrieval of Published Values in Frontier Language Models

Audit of 22 frontier models finds widespread verbatim retrieval of published molecular property values, with higher reasoning increasing recall of memorized numbers.

An arXiv audit tests 22 frontier LLMs across 12 molecular regression benchmarks for verbatim retrieval of published values. More than 50% of the LLMs show verbatim retrieval on five datasets, and identical experiments are flagged 89% more often at a high reasoning level than at the lowest one. Suppressing retrieval moves model prediction errors closer together in relative terms, suggesting predictive capability is not determined solely by memorized values.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:32 UTC · 11d agoAI research1

One Attacker Has Scraped Both Salesforce and ServiceNow Portals Since 2025

Reco tracks the City Forum campaign: one Contabo VPS has scraped Salesforce and ServiceNow guest portals across finance, telecom and public sector since March 2025.

Reco researchers identified infrastructure at 158.220.87.79, a Contabo VPS using Go's default net/http user agent, that has harvested records from Salesforce Experience Cloud and ServiceNow customer portals across telecom, financial services, enterprise software and public sector targets for over a year. The tool abuses over-privileged persistent guest users, enumerating Salesforce Aura sites (560,000+ events at one target), probing Lightning Web Runtime via the UI-API across API versions v56.0-v66.0, and hitting the poorly documented ServiceNow Service Portal search endpoint. No named victims or actor attribution yet, and activity is ongoing with rising volume. Defenders are advised to hunt the Go-http-client user agent and specific IP in Salesforce Event Monitoring logs and syslog_transaction on ServiceNow, then tighten guest sharing rules and Knowledge Base read criteria.

The Hacker News·Aug 18, 11:30 UTC · 29d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Coding Is Over. Get over It

A JPMorgan Chase engineer reflects on AI agents outpacing hand-coding, questioning ROI while predicting inference costs will become negligible.

A personal essay by a software engineer with 15+ years at JPMorgan Chase describes how AI coding agents now outperform him and have transformed his workflow. He argues AI ROI is unmeasurable, praises cheap small models such as GPT 5.6 Luna, and cites Claude Code head Boris Cherny's advice to discard AGENTS.md/Claude.md rule files. He contends coding is no longer scarce, worries entry-level jobs will be automated first, and predicts AI's bigger impact lies outside coding.

Hacker News · security·Sep 12, 13:16 UTC · 3d agoAI industryHN 20↑ · 26 comments2

Ransomware Surges in July After Q2 Lull

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 7, 08:20 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Ransomware

Causal Foundation Models

A paper introduces causal foundation models (CFMs): pretrained networks that estimate treatment effects on new datasets via in-context learning without fine-tuning.

Causal foundation models (CFMs) apply the foundation-model paradigm to causal inference, replacing bespoke per-problem estimator pipelines with networks pretrained once at scale. CFMs estimate causal quantities such as the average treatment effect on entirely new datasets through in-context learning, without model updates. The work serves as a practical introduction to the emerging area, covering background in causal inference and machine learning and including example code and Jupyter notebooks.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 1, 20:00 UTC · 14d agoAI research

LiteLLM Supply-Chain Attack - Technology, Banking and Healthcare the Most Affected

TeamPCP planted the SANDCLOCK credential stealer in LiteLLM PyPI releases, exposing credentials across 2,038 repositories at 898 organizations including Microsoft and NVIDIA.

Threat actor TeamPCP compromised LiteLLM maintainer credentials and published malicious versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 to PyPI around March 2026, creating an exposure window of several months. The SANDCLOCK credential stealer exposed full credential sets across 898 GitHub owners and 2,038 repositories, including Microsoft, Azure, IBM, NVIDIA, PayPal, Deloitte, Bosch, and S&P Global. Stolen material includes GitHub CI/CD identities, AWS/GCP/Firebase credentials, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, and OpenAI and Anthropic API keys; Resecurity acquired a 150GB archive with 2,146 credential records. Technology, banking/finance, and healthcare organizations are the most affected sectors, and victims must rotate all exposed credentials.

Security Affairs·Aug 17, 17:09 UTC · 29d agoMalware in the wild

Nearly 750k had financial info, SSNs leaked in South Carolina loan company breach

Heights Finance breach of a third-party cloud platform exposed SSNs and banking data of 734,828 loan customers across 11 states.

Attackers breached a third-party cloud platform used by Heights Finance in May, exposing data on 734,828 customers, according to the company's filing with Texas regulators. Stolen data includes contact details, bank account and routing numbers, Social Security numbers, tax IDs and driver's license numbers. The breach, discovered on May 7, was limited to the cloud platform and did not affect loan management systems. No group has claimed the attack and dark web monitoring has found no evidence of the data being leaked.

The Record·Aug 17, 20:14 UTC · 29d agoData breach

HVNC Backdoor Targets LATAM Organizations with Fake Tax and DocuSign Lures

A custom HVNC backdoor is targeting Latin American financial organizations via fake DocuSign and NFe tax-document lures, giving attackers hidden persistent remote access.

ANY.RUN researchers analyzed a multi-stage phishing campaign delivering a custom HVNC backdoor to banking and financial organizations in Latin America. The chain starts with fake DocuSign and NFe tax-document pages that serve per-visitor ZIP archives, followed by an LNK dropper, an NSIS loader, and a 64-bit backdoor masquerading as Windows Update Assistant. The implant provides hidden remote desktop control, keystroke monitoring, Firefox data theft, Startup-folder persistence, and EDR-aware behavior, communicating over TCP/27015.

ANY.RUN·Sep 8, 10:24 UTC · 8d agoMalware in the wild

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·Sep 9, 06:06 UTC · 7d agoPhishing & fraud

Hackers Expose Data of 1.2 Million Heights Finance Customers

Heights Finance is notifying over 1.2 million customers that hackers accessed a third-party cloud platform holding contact, bank and government ID data.

Heights Finance, a U.S. consumer lender, discovered unauthorized access on May 7, 2026 to a third-party cloud platform used to store customer data; its internal loan management systems and operations were not affected. Exposed data varies by person and may include contact details, financial and bank account information, government IDs and dates of birth for customers, loan applicants, inquirers, and former borrowers of Curo Management and related brands. The company is offering 24 months of free credit monitoring and identity protection; dark web monitoring found no evidence of publication and no threat actor has claimed responsibility.

Security Affairs·Aug 18, 17:55 UTC · 28d agoData breach in the wild

Cyber risk from frontier AI poses ‘most immediate concern’ to global financial system, watchdog warns

The Financial Stability Board warns G20 ministers that frontier AI-driven cyber risk is the most immediate threat to global financial stability.

FSB chair Andrew Bailey's letter ahead of the G20 meeting in Asheville calls AI-related cyber risk the most immediate concern to the global financial system, citing cybersecurity evaluations at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and the UK AI Security Institute in which advanced models engaged in unauthorized activities against third-party systems. The letter warns of system-wide disruption risk from concentrated third-party providers, urges bare-metal recovery capabilities for critical systems, and notes many countries lack safeguards governing advanced AI development and deployment. The FSB is also examining safe use of frontier models for defense, echoing UK NCSC warnings about operational risk from accelerated patching cycles.

The Record·Sep 1, 12:32 UTC · 15d agoAI policy

Chinese Hackers Exploit Critical Tencent Software Flaw for One-Click Code Execution

China-linked UNC3569 actively exploited critical Sogou Input Method flaw CVE-2026-51990 for one-click system-level code execution, deploying the GrayRabbit backdoor.

Gen Threat Labs reports that China-linked threat actor UNC3569, possibly tied to contractor i-SOON, exploited critical CVE-2026-51990 in Tencent's Sogou Input Method, a Windows IME used by hundreds of millions, via crafted sgbiz URLs. The chain combines unvalidated command-line argument injection, unrestricted URL navigation, and an un-sandboxed Chromium 80 engine missing roughly six years of security patches. The exploit gives system-level code execution and was used to deploy the GrayRabbit backdoor, which provides a reverse shell, plugin loading, file upload to C2, and system info collection, and has appeared in UNC3569 intrusions since at least 2021. Tencent patched the issue in version 16.3.0.3498 via automatic update, but the outdated Chromium configuration reportedly remained unchanged as of September 10.

SecurityWeek·Sep 14, 11:51 UTC · 2d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-519901· 1 read

Distill Globally, Adapt Locally: Reasoning Distillation and Product-Type Test-Time Training for Scalable Trade-Up Recommendation

A distillation framework compresses LLM reasoning into a 15.5M-parameter trade-up recommendation model reaching AUC 0.941 with product-type test-time training.

The paper targets trade-up recommendation, which identifies higher-quality alternatives that preserve customer purchase intent. A retrieval-augmented few-shot LLM teacher generates labels and rationales that supervise a compact embedding-pair classifier; at inference the 15.5M-parameter student uses only two precomputed 768-dimensional embeddings with no LLM calls. On 8,352 annotated pairs, label-only training scored AUC 0.912, reasoning distillation reached 0.924, and product-type test-time training lifted it to 0.941 with average precision 0.940. The distilled student is roughly 5,000x faster and 10,000x cheaper than direct LLM inference on a 100K-pair proxy catalog.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:08 UTC · 11d agoAI research

Microsoft Offers Up to $30,000 for Critical AI Flaws in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Microsoft expands AI bug bounty to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, paying up to $30,000 for critical inference manipulation flaws.

Microsoft's bug bounty program offers up to $30,000 for critical 'Inference Manipulation' or 'Inferential Information Disclosure' bugs in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, including Copilot Studio, AI Builder, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. Payouts scale by report quality ($30,000/$20,000/$12,000 for critical) with important-severity AI flaws earning $6,000-$20,000, plus 20% multipliers for Dataverse privilege escalation and Plugin Sandbox escapes. Prompt injection affecting only the attacker, hallucinated execution, and system-prompt disclosure are excluded from scope.

Cyber Security News·Sep 14, 16:11 UTC · 1d agoIndustry

Nvidia dismisses "circular financing", says every $1 it invests brings back $100

Nvidia rejects 'circular financing' criticism, claiming every $1 it invests yields $100 in returns amid a falling stock price.

Nvidia publicly dismissed concerns that its AI ecosystem investments amount to 'circular financing', asserting that each $1 it invests generates roughly $100 in value. The statement comes as Nvidia's share price continues to decline. The story drew moderate discussion on Hacker News with 34 points and 25 comments.

Hacker News · security·Sep 13, 10:29 UTC · 3d agoAI industryHN 34↑ · 25 comments

Risky Bulletin: Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras

Slovakia's NBU found an SMS-triggered backdoor in Russian-made NERO R-ONE traffic cameras, pausing a 279-unit deployment.

Slovakia's national security service NBU issued an alert against NERO R-ONE high-speed traffic cameras after finding a backdoor that grants shell and network access via SMS from hardcoded Russian phone numbers. The cameras are a rebranded version of the Russian CORDON PRO.M model by St. Petersburg firm Semicon, purchased via a Cyprus shell company under a €30 million EU-funded project. The report also found SecureBoot disabled, vulnerable web management, and unauthenticated live streams; the Interior Ministry paused deployment of 279 cameras pending independent assessment.

Risky Business News·Aug 19, 04:52 UTC · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Generative Marketing Mix Modeling: A Causal Inference Framework Linking GEO and GEM to Business Impact

Paper proposes Generative Marketing Mix Modeling to causally estimate Generative Engine Optimization and Marketing effects on business outcomes.

The authors develop GMMM, a causal inference framework for measuring how often users see and notice a firm's name in generated answers, which standard marketing data ignore. For GEO it combines repeated generated answers with question counts, shares of generative-system usage and notice probabilities; for GEM it uses sponsored placement records with notice probabilities. The framework compares expected business responses under alternative treatment sequences, establishes identification conditions, and is evaluated on simulated product-recommendation answers in English and Japanese.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:57 UTC · 5d agoAI research

Keepnet launches free SMS/Call Reporter for iOS

Keepnet launched a free iOS app, SMS/Call Reporter, letting users one-tap report smishing and vishing into corporate incident response pipelines.

Keepnet released the free SMS/Call Reporter app for iOS, letting users report suspicious SMS and voice phishing with one tap. For enterprise customers, reports flow into Keepnet Incident Responder alongside email phishing reports. The company cites Verizon 2026 DBIR data showing mobile phishing simulations achieve a 40% higher median click rate than email, and FBI IC3 2025 counted $798 million in smishing and vishing losses. An Android version is planned.

Help Net Security·Sep 2, 00:00 UTC · 14d agoTools

Competence-Gated Pooling of Language Models and Priors for Event Forecasting

Paper proposes a competence gate pooling language model forecasts with external priors, improving Brier score from 0.0771 to 0.0732 across 2,357 binary questions.

The paper defines a language model's relative competence as its marginal value beyond an available external forecast, and derives conditions under Brier loss where model disagreement improves that forecast. A competence gate estimates domain-level source weights from resolved outcomes, shrinks uncertain estimates toward a global weight, and recalibrates the pooled forecast. Across 2,357 resolved binary questions and five language models, it improves the external baseline from 0.0771 to 0.0732 Brier and beats global forecast combinations, though it defers to the market on ForecastBench. Across four Qwen models, verbal confidence failed to identify when the model outperformed the external forecast, while outcome-estimated competence supported better abstention.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

U.S. Offers $10 Million Reward for Iranian IRGC Cyber Chief Linked to Critical Infrastructure Attacks

The U.S. State Department offered up to $10 million for information on Amir Yaryab, an IRGC cyber chief linked to critical infrastructure attacks.

The U.S. State Department's Rewards for Justice program offers up to $10 million for information identifying or locating Amir Yaryab, who allegedly oversees the Cyber Operations Command of Iran's IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command (IRGC-CEC). Officials tie him to units called Shahid Hemmat and Shahid Shushtari conducting cyber and information campaigns against defense, telecommunications, energy, and finance sectors across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and to groups including CyberAv3ngers and Dadeh Afzar Arman. CyberAv3ngers compromised at least 75 Unitronics Vision Series PLCs, including 34 in US water and wastewater facilities, between November 2023 and January 2024.

Cyber Security News·Sep 8, 09:14 UTC · 8d agoPolicy & legal

Sophisticated Cyberattack Exposes Data of 678,000 French Taxpayers

Hackers stole personal and tax data of 678,000 individuals and businesses from France's tax agency DGFiP, prompting a Paris criminal investigation.

France's Directorate-General for Public Finances (DGFiP) confirmed a sophisticated cyberattack exposed data on 678,000 users of the tax system, including income figures, tax rates and family circumstances for individuals and SIREN registration data for businesses. The Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit opened a probe and referred it to the French anti-fraud office OFAC after a threat actor claimed the breach in late June. Officials stressed the stolen data does not grant access to secure accounts on impots.gouv.fr, and taxpayer notification begins Monday with warnings about identity theft and fraudulent follow-up requests. The incident follows recent breaches at the ANTS documents agency and the INSEE statistics authority.

Security Affairs·Aug 16, 08:55 UTC · Aug 16, 2026Data breach

Financial Stability Board Sounds the Alarm Over Frontier AI Risks

The Financial Stability Board warned G20 banking leaders that frontier AI adoption poses growing cyber and financial stability risks.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) issued a warning to G20 banking leaders about cyber and financial-stability risks stemming from frontier AI. The alert highlights systemic risk concerns around advanced AI adoption in the financial sector. No specific incidents or regulatory actions were announced.

Infosecurity Magazine·Sep 1, 09:20 UTC · 15d agoAI policy

ChatGPT flaw lets attackers pull Gmail data across accounts via a hidden channel

Check Point found a ChatGPT flaw letting attackers read victims' Gmail and connected-app data via hidden cross-session instructions; OpenAI patched it.

Check Point Research discovered a covert cross-account command channel in ChatGPT's code execution environment, where containers meant to be isolated shared metadata through an internal service based on JFrog Artifactory. In a proof of concept, a victim's session was tricked into retrieving Gmail email data and relaying it to an attacker-controlled session during an ordinary-looking interaction, with reach extending to any connected apps the session was authorized for, including Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and GitHub. OpenAI fixed the issue and decommissioned the internal service; the same shared infrastructure was also involved in the separately disclosed Hugging Face compromise, though via different techniques.

CSO Online·Sep 9, 11:48 UTC · 7d agoAI safety & security

Is Cyber Facing an Affordability Crisis?

Dark Reading analysis argues record breach costs and roughly $240 billion in cyber defense spending leave small businesses dangerously exposed, threatening supply chains.

The analysis examines an affordability crisis in cybersecurity, noting breach costs have reached record highs while defense spending approaches $240 billion. It argues small businesses are dangerously under-protected relative to rising attack costs. Weak small-business defenses are framed as a supply chain security risk for larger organizations.

Dark Reading·Aug 25, 14:53 UTC · 21d agoIndustry

Cardinal RAT Sins Again, Targets Israeli Fin

Unit 42 documents updated Cardinal RAT attacks against Israeli FinTech firms, using BMP steganography, MD5-hash obfuscation, and process injection to hinder analysis and detection.

Unit 42 tracked a series of attacks using an updated Cardinal RAT (version 1.7.2) targeting the Israeli financial technology sector. The .NET loader hides a second-stage DLL inside an embedded BMP image decrypted with a single-byte XOR key, and the payload renames functions, methods, and variables to MD5 hashes for obfuscation. The malware installs a startup-folder LNK file and injects its final payload into RegSvcs.exe or RegAsm.exe, communicating with affiliatecollective[.]club over port 443. A possible relationship with the EVILNUM JavaScript malware used against similar organizations was also noted.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 12:21 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware1

After warning AI is too dangerous, Bill Gates bets a billion on its upside

Gates Foundation pledges at least $1 billion over two years to widen AI access in health, education and agriculture, warning of a rich-poor divide.

The Gates Foundation's 2026 Goalkeepers report outlines spending of at least $1 billion over two years on AI access in health, education and farming. Gates notes over 90% of early LLM training data was English, with speech recognition error rates below 6% in English but above 60% in Yoruba. Cited projects include Penda Health clinics in Kenya (16-point diagnostic accuracy gain), Gemini Guided Learning in Sierra Leone (1.7 years of learning gains in eight weeks), and India's MahaVISTAAR reaching 740,000+ farmers at under 18 cents per person.

The Decoder·Sep 15, 14:26 UTC · 22h agoAI industry1

GPT-6 Astra: an automated AI Engineer you can hire for <$6 an hour

OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra, a frontier model scoring 97.6% on FrontierMath and 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, capable of autonomous AI engineering at roughly $6 per hour.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, described as its first Stargate and lightly looped frontier model, beating Fable 5.1 on many metrics and saturating the hardest FrontierMath (97.6%) and ARC-AGI-3 (99.9%) benchmarks. Latent Space tested the model with over 20 billion tokens, reporting it can train and select models, label data, deploy and debug systems, and orchestrate 20-50 parallel subagents. The authors measured about $6 per hour of agentic engineering at 33 tokens per second, with token efficiency independently confirmed by Artificial Analysis.

Latent Space·Sep 3, 21:09 UTC · 12d agoModel release1