ZeroHour
DashboardNewsCVEsExploitsIncidentsAIBriefAnalyticsEntitiesWatchlistIOCsAsk the feedSourcesFeeds & APIKiosk mode

Search: “ByteDance”

151 stories

Searchkeywordsmart Sortlatesthotimportancerelevance
DomainAllCyberAIWindow24h3d7d30dAllIn the wildImportant onlyShow duplicates
CategoryAllPolicy & legal 63Threat actor 18Exploit / PoC 15Vulnerability 14Malware 10Industry 9Data breach 9Phishing & fraud 3Model release 3Ransomware 3AI safety & security 2Research 1AI research 1
SeverityAllcritical 43high 20medium 16low 64info 8

TikTok Agrees to $400 Million Settlement in U.S. Child Privacy Lawsuit

TikTok agrees to pay $400 million to settle a DOJ child-privacy lawsuit alleging COPPA violations including collecting data from children under 13.

The DOJ announced that ByteDance-owned TikTok will pay $400 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit alleging massive-scale invasions of children's privacy. TikTok pays $300 million immediately and $100 million upon vacating the prior Musical.ly consent decree. The complaint alleged children under 13 could create accounts, data was collected in Kids Mode, and parental deletion requests went unheeded. DOJ called it one of the largest recoveries ever under COPPA, following TikTok's 2023 €345 million GDPR fine.

The Hacker News · 25d agoPolicy & legal

The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are herenew

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 · 44m agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

The Worst Spam Emails: Inside iLands' AI Agent Hustle

Autonomous AI agents from startup iLands spam freelancers with deceptive persona emails offering paid research services, prompting FTC and Amazon SES abuse reports.

AI startup iLands, founded by ex-ByteDance-affiliated entrepreneur Kaixin Tang, operates autonomous agents such as the persona "Leo Ashford" that send unsolicited emails to creators and freelancers offering research services for around $25. A Tedium writer received over a dozen of these messages in three days via the iLands.app domain, sent through Amazon SES with no unsubscribe option, using debunk-style hooks like falsely correcting a 404 error myth. The agents target professional authors and freelancers, and the author recommends reporting the campaign to the FTC and Amazon's email-abuse address.

Hacker News · AI · 4d agoAI safety & security in the wildHN 44↑ · 19 comments1

GPT-6 Astra, Looped Transformers, and Hidden Reasoning

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, its strongest model to date, with standout 3D rendering and computer-use performance and 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3.

Sebastian Raschka reviews OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, calling it the best model he has used, with disproportionate gains in 3D rendering, animation, and computer use through the Codex/ChatGPT harness. The model scores 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 versus 7.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol and leads the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, though gains on independent aggregate indices are more incremental. The article also explains looped transformer/recurrent depth architecture rumors, speculation that Astra hides its chain-of-thought reasoning, and recent research insights on the topic.

Hacker News · AI · 7d agoModel releaseHN 84↑ · 12 comments2

ChatGPT Images 2.5: Faster, more precise, but not the same for everyone

OpenAI released GPT-Image-2.5 (Flare and Sunburst variants), cutting image generation latency up to 50% and improving multi-round edit consistency.

OpenAI launched GPT-Image-2.5 in two API variants: Flare, the faster default with higher quality than GPT-Image-2 at up to 50% lower latency, and Sunburst, built for precise multi-round edits. Both cost $8 per million input and $30 per million output tokens, with new xhigh and max quality tiers; a max-tier 1024x1024 image runs roughly $0.21. Testing found edit consistency strong in ChatGPT Work but inconsistent in Chat, and OpenAI has not documented how ChatGPT routes users between the models.

The Decoder · 7d agoModel release

[AINews] Muse Spark 1.3 matches GPT-5.6-Sol, confirming Meta Superintelligence as the newest Frontier Lab, >90% discount for training

Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 reportedly ranks as the world's #3 model, matching frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic with planned open weights.

The Latent Space AI News roundup leads with Muse Spark 1.3, promised in Zuckerberg's letter, which ranks #3 worldwide per AAII, is slated for open weights, and uses a pricing model over 90% cheaper when users opt in to training. The issue also covers the rumored Gemini 3.8 Flash launch and analysis arguing OpenAI's rumored looped-transformer 'Astra' architecture is a modest tweak rather than a breakthrough. Additional coverage includes ByteDance Seed's HarnessDev harness-evaluation benchmark, a retrieval-invoked actual-use evaluation method, Stanford's revamped agent engineering curricula, and Photon 2.1 adding TTS models and NVIDIA B200 support.

Latent Space · 13d agoModel release1

TikTok Settles U.S. Child Privacy Case for $400 Million

TikTok will pay $400 million to settle U.S. DOJ/FTC claims that it violated COPPA by collecting data from children under 13.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced a $400 million settlement with TikTok and ByteDance resolving a 2024 lawsuit over violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). TikTok will pay $300 million immediately and $100 million upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree against its predecessor Musical.ly; it is one of the largest recoveries ever obtained in a COPPA case. The DOJ and FTC, filing in California, alleged TikTok knowingly allowed children under 13 to create accounts and illegally collected data via Kids Mode. TikTok was previously fined €345 million by Ireland's Data Protection Commission in 2023 for GDPR breaches involving children's data.

Security Affairs · 23d agoPolicy & legal

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 · 23d agoResearch1