Showing only posts in Ars Technica. Show all posts.

Apple changes full-disk access permissions to curb abuse from AI agents

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Apple says it is changing its macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from misusing them to access message histories. Friday's announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between …

Hacks of 2 federal agencies in a month have spilled a bonanza of sensitive data

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The Pentagon is informing more than 2 million current and former military members that their personnel records storing sensitive personal information were stolen over a monthslong compromise of one of its networks. The breach is the second one in recent months to expose sensitive government information. The records, according …

Attackers have been exploiting critical Zimbra flaw to steal emails

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Hackers have been exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite in an attempt to obtain email backups and authentication credentials of vulnerable organzations, Microsoft has warned. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-73570, lets attackers remotely issue operating system commands without authentication. Zimbra maintainer Synacor issued a patch on …

Cloudflare plans to issue quantum-safe TLS certificates

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Cloudflare said Tuesday it plans to issue quantum-proof TLS certificates, making it one of the first authorities to issue such certificates, which use a form of cryptography that is widely believed to withstand attacks from quantum computers. The Internet infrastructure provider said it will use an open source platform …

Your uncle’s frozen Mac says it’s infected after viewing a Google ad. Now what?

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Researchers say they recently found Google ads delivering a sophisticated tech support scam that freezes the screens of both Windows and Mac devices and displays messages urgently instructing them to phone a bogus call center. The ads were displayed all over the web, including on high-traffic maps, weather, real-estate …

There's a new way to break RSA that's faster than anything we've seen before

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The world has known for decades that the RSA cryptosystem ’s days are numbered. Once quantum computing becomes practical (estimates for that range from 3 to 20 or more years), the foundational security it provides will crumble. New research has revealed a novel method that uses classical computing to …

Microsoft disrupts AI-assisted platform that compromised 12,000 accounts

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Microsoft said Tuesday that it led an industry-wide disruption of a subscription-based scam platform that used an AI chatbot to compromise 12,000 Microsoft accounts over a few-month span. Named EvilTokens, the platform was introduced over a Telegram channel in February and charged an initial $1,500 fee and …

Muse, Meta's extraordinarily privileged AI assistant, has a serious 0-day

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Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to hype the security of its new AI assistant Muse, claiming it is “built from the ground up for privacy and security.” A zero-day vulnerability that gives locally run apps and terminal commands complete control of the agent …

An undercover Google analyst infiltrated a notorious supply-chain hacking gang

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Before two of its alleged members were arrested and charged in Australia last month, the hacker group known as TeamPCP carried out a hacking spree unlike any other in history. It tainted hundreds of open-source programs with its malware, stole developer accounts to perpetuate that software supply-chain hacking, and …

LLMs respond differently to harmful prompts when AI watermarking is used

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In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text, an approach Google created and released as open source. It uses a secret key that subtly changes the process …

Nonprofit that tracks meteors taken down by "critical blow" from a cyberattack

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The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack. “We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static …

4 groups caught using the same Chrome and Windows exploit kit

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A nearly identical exploit kit that targets critical vulnerabilities in both Chromium-based browsers and older versions of Windows is being actively used by at least four hacking groups, some of which have ties to the Chinese government. Researchers from security firm Proofpoint said Wednesday that BlueMoon, the name they …

Four groups caught using the same Chrome and Windows exploit kit

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A nearly identical exploit kit that targets critical vulnerabilities in both Chromium-based browsers and older versions of Windows is being actively used by at least four hacking groups, some of which have ties to the Chinese government. Researchers from security firm Proofpoint said Wednesday that BlueMoon, the name they …

Why this month's Microsoft patch release is a doozy

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Microsoft’s patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold. It was only two months ago that Microsoft patched a then-record 570 vulnerabilities. Then, last month, Microsoft patched some 620 of them. Google …

OpenAI agents discussed ways to escape their sandbox on public wiki

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Self-identifying OpenAI agents posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki that discussed ways for other agents to bypass security sandbox restrictions during what was likely internal testing designed to gauge the agents’ hacking abilities, researchers said Friday. In all, agents with 3,700 distinct self-given names posted the …

Once popular for attacking AI, ASCII smuggling is embraced by spammers

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A clever technique used to hide malicious prompts in attacks on AI agents has been adopted by spammers to evade filters on email platforms that are designed to flag unwanted messages used in mass campaigns. The technique is broadly known as ASCII smuggling. It gained attention two years ago …

Confused about which VPN is right, US senator asks the NSA for guidance

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A prominent US senator is asking the National Security Agency to provide guidance to the general public on best practices for using virtual private networks to secure their communications from spying by foreign adversaries. VPNs funnel all of a user’s Internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a …

I rented a car, and within hours, my driver's license was for sale

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Not long ago, I rented an SUV from a well-known car rental company. Within hours of an employee scanning my driver's license, a high-resolution scan of my ID was available for sale on the dark web. An exposé published Tuesday by KrebsOnSecurity reports that my license was one of …

BGP hijack infecting networks caused by a comedy of errors that’s not funny at all

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Hackers carried out a supply chain attack that installed malware on networks using an unusual technique: hijacking a chunk of Internet space where cloud management software used by hosting providers, data centers, and other large infrastructure companies is updated. In a well-coordinated operation, the unknown attackers exploited weaknesses in …

Think twice before installing this device promising free movies

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As online services get better at blocking malicious traffic, the attackers and scammers behind them have been forced to find new ways to reach their targets. The alternative of choice is now what are known as residential proxy networks. These systems funnel millions of home Internet connections into a …

Authorities arrest 2 alleged members of prolific hacking group TeamPCP

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Authorities in Australia said Wednesday that they arrested two men accused of participating in cybercrimes for TeamPCP, a prolific group of hackers that, over nine months, has carried out a relentless series of supply-chain attacks that infected more than 1,000 organizations worldwide. In a statement, the Australian Federal …

Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks

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Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or …

How OpenAI let a mob of LLM agents game a test and ransack Hugging Face

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The OpenAI agents involved in last month’s incursion into Hugging Face were trained so heavily on winning a competition that they pursued a relentless campaign to cheat, a new report documented. In the process, and without authorization, they created an improvised message board to hatch a plan that …

Inaudible sounds used to fingerprint browsers catch AliExpress red-handed

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Chinese retailer AliExpress has been caught fingerprinting visitors after one of the metrics—an outdated technique that measures inaudible sounds it sends to browsers—impeded a researcher's ability to use his bluetooth headphones. Researcher Matthew Callaghan said he stumbled on the stealthy tracking by mistake. After loading the AliExpress …

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