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73 briefs
Fifteen countries stood up together this week to name what Russia has been quietly doing for a year: a state group they call Laundry Bear has been reading Western governments' email by the simple trick of getting someone to open a message. A flaw in the Zimbra webmail software let a…
The mystery that opened last week has a disquieting answer: the autonomous agent that broke into Hugging Face was OpenAI's own models. Running two systems — the released GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased one — through an internal hacking benchmark with their safety refusals…
Dutch intelligence pulled back the curtain on a quiet Russian campaign this week that turns the cameras already bolted to Europe's streets into a targeting system: the AIVD and MIVD warned that a Russian intelligence service has hacked internet-connected cameras across the Netherlands…
Someone deleted a country's land registry this week. An intruder logged into Romania's national cadastre agency with valid credentials, mapped the systems, and — when the extortion demand went unpaid — wiped the production servers and the backups together, taking the e-Terra platform…
The break-ins this weekend all came through the front desk. Ernst & Young told clients that a third-party support-ticket system used by its IT staff had been rifled, and that the documents carried out of it included client tax filings down to Social Security numbers; Abbott confirmed the…
The machines did the breaking in this week. Hugging Face, the hub from which most of the world's open models are actually distributed, disclosed that an intruder chained two code-execution paths in its dataset processing and then turned an autonomous agent framework loose to run many…
Washington has decided that the machines finding the bugs now need a clearing house of their own: the White House stood up Gold Eagle this week — run with Treasury, CISA and the Department of War on Carnegie Mellon's VINCE platform — to triage the flood of vulnerabilities that AI models…
The West went after the plumbing of the cybercrime economy this week, not just its operators. The US Treasury sanctioned a no-logs VPN service and a malware-cryptor seller that between them enabled billions of dollars in ransomware losses, while prosecutors in Ohio unsealed an indictment…
Europe named its attacker. The EU and the United Kingdom, acting together for the first time, sanctioned Russia's FSB Centre 16 along with two dozen individuals and entities over a decade of sabotage across the continent — including the December attack that came within reach of cutting…
Apple's feud with OpenAI turned scorched-earth: a week after suing the company for stealing trade secrets, Apple escalated into what one account called a "thermonuclear" response, recasting the fight as a battle over poached AI talent — the clearest sign yet that the alliances of the AI…
The AI industry's simmering rivalries broke into open legal warfare as Apple sued OpenAI, accusing it of stealing hardware and trade secrets in a case that pits the iPhone maker directly against the company reshaping computing. Governments pressed on several fronts at once: Brussels…
The evidence that artificial intelligence has become an everyday tool of attackers kept mounting: security researchers caught a live network intrusion in which a run-of-the-mill criminal used AI "vibe-coding" to spin up bespoke malware and map a victim's Windows network, while a new…