ZeroHour

Search: “georgia”

18 stories

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

A Georgia Cop Used Flock to Track 2 Other Cops: His Ex and Her Friend

A Georgia police officer used Flock license plate reader cameras to surveil his ex-partner and another officer after their affair ended.

Internal investigation records show a Georgia officer used the Flock license plate reader network to track the movements of a fellow police officer with whom he had an affair, along with a man whose vehicle frequently appeared near hers. The unauthorized personal use of police surveillance infrastructure surfaced through an internal affairs review. The case highlights oversight gaps around law enforcement access to mass surveillance data.

WIRED · Security · 20d agoPolicy & legal

Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

US extradited Russian national Sergei Filimonov over a bank-account takeover scheme using spoofed bank domains that defrauded two banks of $6.3 million.

US authorities extradited 36-year-old Russian national Sergei Anatolyevich Filimonov from the Republic of Georgia on charges including bank and wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft. He and unnamed co-conspirators allegedly ran spoofed bank domains, bought sponsored links to lure victims, and harvested over 5,000 victim login credentials starting in November 2023, causing unauthorized transfers of about $5.58 million and $735,000 from two banks in 2024. The FBI previously identified at least 19 US victims linked to the credential-storage domain, with roughly $28 million in attempted losses including $14.6 million confirmed. Filimonov faces up to 175 years in prison, pleaded not guilty on September 4, and remains detained in the Northern District of Georgia.

CyberScoop · 8d agoPolicy & legal

Agility’s new humanoid robot will stop, squat to avoid harming human coworkers

Agility Robotics unveils Digit 5 humanoid robot that autonomously stops, moves, or squats to avoid harming nearby human coworkers.

Agility Robotics announced Digit 5, its first humanoid robot designed to work safely near humans without isolation barriers, using a safe motion system that reacts to detected human presence by moving away, standing still, or squatting. Early access begins in H1 2027 with general availability by end of 2027. Previous Digit versions have logged over 65,000 working hours, with customers including GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.

Ars Technica · AI · 1d agoAI industry

Can LLMs Engineer Their Own Agent Harness? ByteDance Seed’s HarnessDev Says Only 34 of 64 Changes Generalize

ByteDance Seed's HarnessDev benchmark finds LLM-built agent harnesses trail human engineering on code and search, with only 34 of 64 revisions generalizing.

Researchers from ByteDance Seed, SUTD, Georgia Tech, M-A-P, and TokenWave.AI introduce HarnessDev, a benchmark that evaluates the runnable agent harness an LLM writes rather than its answers, using Creation and Evolution stages across SWE-bench Pro, Terminal-Bench 2.1, MLE-bench, EQ-Bench3, and BrowseComp (2,207 instances). Six creator models including Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Qwen 3.7 Max, and Seed 2.0 Pro were tested; Opus 4.8 posted the best average of 67.8 versus an 86.2 human-engineered reference. Self-built harnesses beat references on writing and ML experimentation but lag badly on code and search, and quality proved executor-specific: Opus 4.8 fell from 69.3 to 33.0 on SWE-bench Pro when the executor was switched to Gemini. Evolution gains were small and noisy: of 64 adjacent changes, feedback and held-out scores agreed only 34 times (53.1%), and much generated state and memory code never executed.

MarkTechPostupdated · 13h agofirst · 5d agoAI research 19 sources

The EPA Is Planning to Scrap Public Review Rules for Data Center Pollution

The EPA plans to eliminate mandatory public review of air-pollution permits for AI data centers and their power plants, reducing community input.

The EPA proposes scrapping a federal requirement that states notify the public and accept comments before approving air-pollution permits for industrial facilities, including AI data centers and their power plants. A related proposal would let developers begin construction before permits are approved. Nearly 200 advocacy groups and more than a dozen states oppose the changes; critics cite health risks, rising utility bills, housing displacement, and disproportionate impacts on Black communities in the rural South, while the EPA argues the changes speed permitting. The proposal is expected to be finalized within the next year.

Expanding AI access and cyber defense for federal, state, local, and tribal governments

OpenAI and GSA agreed to provide ChatGPT to federal, state, local, and tribal governments with $0 licenses, 50% off usage, and cyber-defense access.

OpenAI for Government and the U.S. General Services Administration announced a 27-month agreement (October 1, 2026 through December 31, 2028) waiving the $15 per-user monthly license fee and cutting usage costs 50% for federal, state, local, and tribal agencies. More than one million government employees already have ChatGPT access, with eligibility extending across a roughly 23 million-person U.S. public-sector workforce. Every verified government entity is approved for Daybreak Blue cyber-defender access at 50% off, with Daybreak Red available for vulnerability research, exploit validation, and red teaming at standard pricing. The deal builds on the $1 billion Daybreak for Frontline Defenders commitment announced the prior week.

OpenAI Newsupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoAI industry 3 sources1

Where the backlash against Flock Safety is having the biggest impact

More than 90 cities ended Flock Safety contracts in August as Texas and Florida restrict license plate reader use amid privacy protests.

Over 90 cities and counties terminated Flock Safety contracts in August, per Secure Justice, which has tracked more than 200 municipal terminations since 2021. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott barred state agencies from funding Flock cameras on Aug. 28 after a report that a state agency secretly diverted $30 million; Florida's transportation department banned ALPRs on state highways and Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized the technology. Los Angeles chose not to renew its LAPD contract over data-ownership terms, and Atlanta's mayor ordered a 30-day review of the roughly 5,000 ALPR cameras in the metro area. Several Flock-related police abuse cases, including a Texas officer indicted on 100 felony counts, have fueled the backlash.

The Record · 8d agoPolicy & legal

In most cities, nobody owns the whole network

Former Waco CIO argues cellular-connected water controllers sit outside scanned networks, and accountability plus operating-budget funding—not technology—block segmentation.

Writing as Waco, Texas's former CIO, the author describes July water-sector intrusions that CISA linked to over 100 compromised systems, typically controllers on public cellular links absent from asset lists. The FBI and EPA reported incidents at utilities in at least seven states since July 27, and a Clayton County, Georgia pump station failure triggered a boil-water advisory. He argues accountability and funding—using mechanisms like the Texas Water Development Board's new cybersecurity scoring criteria—are the binding constraints, citing Waco's 43-day segmentation of five treatment plants with operating funds.

CyberScoop · 8d agoIndustry in the wild

Axis Robotics Releases AXIS: A Browser-Based Data Engine With 207 Robot Manipulation Tasks and 50,129 Trajectories

Axis Robotics and academic partners released AXIS, a browser-based teleoperation system yielding 207 manipulation tasks and 50,129 trajectories that lifts pi0.5 to 88.8 on LIBERO-Plus.

A team from Axis Robotics, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, and NTU introduced AXIS, a browser-based data engine where contributors teleoperate a simulated Franka Research 3 in a MuJoCo WebAssembly frontend while GPU backends handle task generation, training, and evaluation. The released snapshot holds 207 tasks, 50,129 episodes, and 60K+ task or scene variants from more than 70,000 community contributors. Continual pretraining of pi0.5 on AXIS data raises LIBERO-Plus performance from 83.9 to 88.8, versus 57.5 for a volume-matched RoboCasa365 control; the 2.36 TB dataset is gated for non-commercial academic use.

MarkTechPost · 9d agoAI research

New CISO appointments 2026

Companies including Mistral AI, Trellix, Marriott, and ANZ appointed new CISOs in July-September 2026 amid high security-leadership turnover.

CSO Online's rolling column tracks senior security appointments, noting many companies are hiring a CSO/CISO for the first time. Notable moves include Thomas Coudray leaving Ledger to become Mistral AI's CISO, David Soto joining Trellix from Amazon, and Daniel Dubowski becoming Marriott International's SVP and CISO. Other appointments span ANZ, Gigamon, Axonius, Tricentis, Remitly, Allied Universal, and the State of California.

CSO Online · 9d agoIndustry

ICE Wants to Know Everyone Who Bought a Certain Green Beanie From REI in the Last 2 Years

DHS subpoenaed REI for all Minneapolis-area customers who bought a specific green beanie since 2024, part of an investigation into 39 ICE protest defendants.

Court filings allege Homeland Security Investigations agents subpoenaed REI in March for transaction records of all persons in the greater Minneapolis–St. Paul area who purchased a specific dark green beanie since 2024. The subpoena was one of 92 sent in a federal case against 39 people, including journalists, who attended an ICE protest at a church. Companies responded differently: T-Mobile handed over six months of a defendant's call and text logs, Google refused a request for YouTube viewers, Reddit withdrew after a First Amendment objection, and Meta pushed back on at least one summons. The 1509 customs summonses require no judicial oversight, and the total number issued under the Trump administration is unknown.

WIRED · Security · 12d agoPolicy & legal