New FBI Warning—Disable Local Admin Accounts As Attacks Continue
The FBI has issued a new warning to disable local admin accounts as ongoing data-stealing attacks continue. Here’s what you need to know.
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Mastering 2025: The stakes are high in battling cyber threats
It’s a company’s worst nightmare. Critical systems or customer data are suddenly inaccessible, held hostage by ransomware demanding cryptocurrency payments to unlock the paralyzed infrastructure, Business Report writes in its latest cover package. Seems unlikely? Think again, cybersecurity experts say. Profit-driven cybercriminals as well as nation-state adversaries increasingly possess the capability to shut down supply…
War Game Pits China Against Taiwan in All-Out Cyberwar
At Black Hat and DEF CON, cybersecurity experts were asked to game out how Taiwan could protect its communications and power infrastructure in case of invasion by China.
New Podcast Alert: The Globe-Spanning, Multi-Newsroom Hunt for Mr. Deepfakes
Mr. Deepfakes was the biggest website in the world for sharing AI-generated abuse imagery, swapping tips and tricks for more realistic results, and posting endless, fake, nonconsensual videos of everyone from celebrities to everyday people. In a new podcast by the CBC, I got to tell the tale of how deepfakes started, what targets go…
Behind the Blog: Ancient Civilizations and Modern-Day Driving
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss learning from civilizations past and learning to drive. JASON: I mentioned this on a podcast a few weeks ago, but I have been falling asleep lately to…
Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn
An erotic roleplay chatbot and AI image creation platform called Secret Desires left millions of user-uploaded photos exposed and available to the public. The databases included nearly two million photos and videos, including many photos of completely random people with very little digital footprint. The exposed data shows how many people use AI roleplay apps…
Pete Hegseth Says the Pentagon’s New Chatbot Will Make America ‘More Lethal’
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the rollout of GenAI.mil today in a video posted to X. To hear Hegseth tell it, the website is “the future of American warfare.” In practice, based on what we know so far from press releases and Hegseth’s posturing, GenAI.mil appears to be a custom chatbot interface for Google…
Podcast: The Physical Politics of the Internet with Britt Paris
As you scroll around the web, how often to you think about the physical infrastructure—the miles of cables, acres of land—that makes up the internet? This is where real power lies, and there are ways to imagine it differently, as serving the people who use these utilities instead of big tech execs. This week, I’m…
Locking it down: A new technique to prevent LLM jailbreaks
Following on from our preview, here’s the full rundown on LLM salting: a novel countermeasure against LLM jailbreaks, developed by AI researchers at Sophos X-Ops
Scientists Discover Vast Ancient Trade Network That Rewrites History with Parrot DNA
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Colorful feathers found in an ancient tomb on Peru’s coast once belonged to parrots captured deep in the Amazon rainforest, reports a study published on Tuesday in Nature Communications. The discovery…