Congressional Democrats on the Joint Financial Committee launched a report this week pinpointing more than $20.9 billion in consumer losses stemming from id theft that got here out of 4 main breaches of knowledge dealer corporations. US senator Maggie Hassan launched the investigation in August after an investigation by The Markup and CalMatters, copublished by WIRED, discovered that some information brokers had been hiding opt-out tools from Google and different engines like google.
The US Division of Justice’s latest launch of three million paperwork associated to convicted intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein included grand jury subpoenas to Google that shed light on how federal investigators interact with tech companies and the way they reply to authorities requests for data.
The Mexican drug cartel CJNG could survive the killing of its longtime chief Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes partly due to its prolific use of technologies like drones, social media, and AI. In the meantime, the Mexican Navy introduced on Thursday that it had seized a semi-submersible vessel carrying practically 4 tons of cocaine as a part of a latest initiative to discourage drug trafficking within the Pacific Ocean. The trouble comes because the US has launched its personal purported marketing campaign towards maritime trafficking through a series of deadly attacks on boats in the Caribbean.
In the meantime, as AI assistant brokers like OpenClaw explode in recognition—and sow chaos across the internet—a brand new open supply challenge known as IronCurtain is using a unique design to secure and constrain agentic AI before it can go rogue.
And there’s extra. Every week, we spherical up the safety and privateness information we didn’t cowl in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to learn the complete tales. And keep protected on the market.
Setting an autonomous internet-enabled robotic unfastened in your own home ought to give anybody a second’s pause. When that robotic is a roving vacuum cleaner outfitted with a digital camera and microphone that could possibly be hijacked from wherever on the earth with nothing greater than its serial quantity, it turns into an precise privateness horror story.
One such robovac proprietor, Sammy Azdoufal, found that absurd safety vulnerability whereas making an attempt an experiment in piloting his DJI Romo robotic vacuum cleaner with a PS5 controller. He discovered that he might as a substitute management 6,700 of the robots in 24 international locations all over the world, with full entry to the ground plans they generated of their homeowners’ properties and their video and audio feeds. When The Verge contacted Azdoufal, he was capable of immediately entry a Romo owned by a staffer on the tech information outlet simply by realizing its 14-digit serial quantity. DJI has now fastened the vulnerability in response to Azdoufal basically live-tweeting his findings. However the story nonetheless raises severe questions in regards to the safety of different audio- or video-enabled internet-of-things devices—to not point out ones able to freely roaming your property.
Whereas the Division of Homeland has been vastly empowered below the Trump administration in its mission to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants, the group inside DHS that serves as the US’ major cyber defender, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, has been uncared for. Now its appearing director, Madhu Gottumukkala, has been changed as CISA seeks to search out new footing.
Even earlier than that information, CyberScoop this week reported on the crises which have plagued the company for your complete first 12 months since Trump’s inauguration: A 3rd of the workers has been laid off and whole divisions of the company have been closed. Nominations for a everlasting director have been blocked in Congress. Its capabilities have withered, and organizations that had sought out CISA for help and partnerships have regarded elsewhere. Gottumukkala has suffered his personal extra private scandals equivalent to ousting safety personnel after he failed a polygraph take a look at and sharing delicate contracts on ChatGPT. Now Nick Andersen, who has served as CISA’s government director for cybersecurity, will change Gottumukkala on the beleaguered company.
A researcher at King’s Faculty London pitted three common massive language fashions towards one another in simulated warfare sport situations and located that, 95 p.c of the time, at the very least one of many fashions opted to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. The researcher additionally found, when an AI mannequin deployed a tactical nuclear weapon, its AI opponent solely deescalated a fourth of the time. Not one of the firms behind the three fashions—OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic—responded to New Scientist’s request for remark.
AI’s position in war-fighting has lurched into the highlight this week. Anthropic and the Division of Battle are embroiled in a contract dispute over whether or not Anthropic’s AI fashions can be utilized to energy absolutely autonomous weapons and mass home surveillance. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, wrote in a statement that these kinds of use circumstances “can undermine, reasonably than defend, democratic values.” In flip, President Donald Trump has threatened to ban the use of Anthropic products, together with its Claude chatbot, inside the US authorities. In the meantime, lots of of Google and OpenAI workers have signed an open letter asking for his or her bosses to “put apart their variations and stand collectively to proceed to refuse the Division of Battle’s present calls for for permission to make use of our fashions for home mass surveillance and autonomously killing folks with out human oversight.”
A brand new app for Android telephones known as Close by Glasses lets customers scan for good glasses in your neighborhood, revealing the presence of the wearable devices, that are generally indistinguishable from regular glasses and let wearers report folks with out their data. The app scans for the distinctive Bluetooth signatures that the glasses emit, and sends customers a notification if it detects a close-by supply.
The developer instructed 404 Media that he was impressed to construct the app after studying about a number of incidents involving good glasses. Over the summer season, 404 Media reported {that a} Customs and Border Safety agent had donned a pair throughout an immigration raid, and this fall the outlet additionally reported that males had been utilizing good glasses to film massage parlor workers, seemingly with out their data or consent. In February, The New York Instances reported that one smart-glasses developer, Meta, had plans to combine face recognition into its glasses, spurring recent issues amongst privateness specialists.
