Meanwhile, The plaintiffs say they would sooner drop the suit than submit to harassment and fraud from Musk’s online supporters. However, xAI’s lawyers claim that since deepfakes will remain under seal, there is “nothing inherently stigmatizing” about naming people in them.
Google launched a new Android feature this week aimed at stemming a wave of AI-powered impersonation scams that help fraudsters spoof a familiar number and clone a person’s voice. Packaged with Google Dialer and shipping on phones running Android 12 or later, it pings the caller’s device for a silent cryptographic handshake. If the call is fake, Android will flag it and remove the contact photo from the screen, but only if both ends are on Google Dialer, which takes the iPhone out of the picture.
WIRED also reported this week that the Manhattan Institute — the same right-wing think tank that crafted the broken policing and anti-DEI efforts of the Trump administration in the 1990s — is now shopping for model legislation to turn minor protest-related crimes into felonies under a new doctrine it calls “civic terrorism.”
Researchers have detailed a clever new browser side-channel attack called FROST that fingerprints other tabs and sometimes apps on your device by measuring how long it takes to read from a sandboxed file on your SSD. The attack runs entirely in JavaScript and feeds time traces through a neural network trained on the I/O signatures of common software. There is no evidence yet that anyone is using it in the forest.
and that’s not all. Each week, we round up security and privacy news that we haven’t covered in depth ourselves. Click on the titles to read the full stories and stay safe out there.
Supplements known as peptides — chains of amino acids that promise to help people who snort, swallow or inject them achieve everything from weight loss to skin rejuvenation — have become their own largely unregulated pharmaceutical subindustry. So it turns out that their growth is being fueled by cryptocurrencies, often sent directly to the Chinese laboratories that sell these mysterious panaceas.
Crypto-tracing firm Chainalysis this week published an analysis of crypto flows to Peptide sellers, a gray market that the company now measures at more than $100 million per year and growing. Chainalysis specifically found that some of the same Chinese laboratories that were previously selling fentanyl precursors have now turned to manufacturing and selling peptides. Chainalysis believes the change was made to capitalize on the wave of “luxmaxing” publicity on social media that has boosted sales of the peptide – and to avoid the risk of law enforcement action on opioid manufacturers.
AI can do all kinds of things: code an app, touch up your photos, or even hack President Barack Obama’s Instagram account, if you ask it. Since Meta announced in March that its account support would become increasingly automated with AI, including tasks like updating your passwords, hackers found they could exploit the tool to reset passwords and even take over the accounts of high-profile users and celebrities. According to 404 Media report, the victims include Chief Master Sergeant Obama of the US Space Force and the makeup chain Sephora. Meta says the issue has now been fixed and affected accounts have been secured. But the wave of acquisitions shows the risks of flipping security functions onto AI — especially at companies like Meta, which has publicly touted its all-in approach to AI adoption across the company.
When AI firm Anthropic introduced its powerful Mythos tool to a select group of organizations for testing, it raised eyebrows by including the US National Security Agency on that early access list. After all, Mythos is reportedly able to find previously hidden, hackable vulnerabilities in software with alarming speed, raising fears that it could be used for automated mass surveillance and cyberattacks. But the NSA also has a defensive mission, and early reports have suggested the agency could use Anthropic’s tools to find bugs in popular software used by Americans — such as Microsoft — with the goal of better securing it. Yet the Financial Times now reports that Anthropic is helping the NSA take its use of Mythos a step further, deploying Anthropic’s own engineers to the agency to help it learn how to use AI tools – including for offensive hacking. The FT could not confirm that Mythos is being used in an active hacking operation. But given the increasing use of AI for state-sponsored hacking, it would be surprising if the US is not getting involved in the field of modern automated cyber intrusions.
US President Donald Trump has selected Bill Pulte to temporarily serve as director of national intelligence. Pulte replaces Tulsi Gabbard, who recently resigned from the role, citing her husband’s health issues. Trump has said he is considering others for the permanent job, but the confirmation process could take several months.
As acting director, Pulte will be responsible for the entire US intelligence community, coordinating 18 different agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA.
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