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A hacker broke into John Deere and SharkNinja with an army of AI agents

19 October 2026 at 15:58

A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated on their own, according to findings from the AI security firm Norforge. Though Norforge doesn't name the targets, Reuters reports that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins.

Concerns over AI-powered cybersecurity breaches have grown as the technology grows more advanced, with hackers using the tools to carry out large-scale attacks. At the same time, rogue AI agents are carrying out attacks of their own after escaping from testing environments.

Researchers at Norforge uncovered the attacks through exposed work on Cai …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Received β€” 15 October 2026 ⏭ The Verge - All Posts

Friends don’t let friends feed their data to AI agents

15 October 2026 at 18:21
Muse mascot with red eyes

There's a growing trend in the consumer tech world: gadgets designed to spy on everything and everyone around you, regardless of whether or not anyone else actually consented to it. Now, with the advent of "AI personal assistants" like Meta's Muse, you're being cheerfully asked not just to give up your own data, but also the information of your friends, family, the person you went on a Hinge date with five years ago - and virtually anyone else you've ever come in contact with.

Since Muse was released last month, the agent has already been downloaded millions of times and hit No. 1 on Apple's App Store. With the help of its creepy virtual av …

Read the full story at The Verge.

An Israeli firm is sending spyware through online ads, researchers say

15 October 2026 at 16:10
A laptop surrounded by green and pink message boxes that say β€œwarning.”

An Israeli ad tech firm worked with spyware companies to infect devices, including at Al Jazeera, by simply showing users an online ad, according to a joint investigation by security researchers at Citizen Lab and Confiant. It's the first time researchers have found technical evidence of a zero-click attack - a form of hacking that requires no action by users - delivered through targeted advertising, as reported earlier by NBC News.

The ad firm, called Discover-Tech, presents itself as a typical online advertising agency, but researchers say it actually provides a pipeline for hacking groups to plant malicious ads across the web. It operat …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Your secrets aren’t safe with this cute robot toy β€” they’re on Chinese servers ready to be hacked

15 October 2026 at 13:00
Holding an Eiliko robot toy between my thumb and forefinger in front of my workbench.
Eiliko. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

There's a new digital pet in town - a cute little marshmallow of a robot that can change its cartoony expressions to match your mood. But if you or your kids talk to "Eiliko" over Wi-Fi, it'll phone home to China. Its AI companion can store literally everything you tell it on Chinese servers, where hackers can easily gain access or even hijack its personality. And the company that made it, Energize Lab, doesn't seem to care.

I bought an Eiliko from Amazon on August 29th. During a 10-minute conversation on August 30th, I asked the little bot: "Do you ever tell anybody else what I'm saying?"

"Your secrets are safe with me," it replied.

With …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft and Japan took down a cybercrime network behind over a billion scam messages

14 October 2026 at 22:03
A smartphone sits on top of a surface with red tape reading β€œDANGER.” Where one strip intersects the phone, it continues inside the phone’s screen.

We've all gotten a scam text about a nonexistent parking ticket or a fake package delivery, but hopefully you'll start seeing fewer of them. Microsoft says it helped dismantle a marketplace for scammers sending phishing messages like those around the world. Through an investigation with Japan's National Police Agency, it tracked scam activity back to a marketplace called YAM Store and a pair of phishing kits, CoGUI and Iron Man:

Since January 2026, YAM Store, CoGUI and Iron Man have collectively enabled more than one billion malicious messages targeting over 75,000 organizations worldwide, including more than 750 million messages geared to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Received β€” 12 October 2026 ⏭ The Verge - All Posts

The Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots

12 October 2026 at 17:43
Person’s hands holding a phone screen with a trippy spiral background.

Multiple Ukrainian drone strikes over the last week have taken Russian data centers offline and reportedly caused online bot traffic to plummet - but in reality it's probably not the kind of bot activity most people associate with Russia.

A chart citing Cloudflare data has been circulating around social media platforms, showing a sharp decline in bot traffic following attacks on Yandex servers - a technology company often described as "Russia's Google." While many people are inferring that the chart refers to bot farms that push disinformation, conspiracy theories, and other harmful content across online platforms, reputed troll farm expose …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Received β€” 9 October 2026 ⏭ The Verge - All Posts

Anthropic launches free AI security scans for open-source projects

8 October 2026 at 23:53
A robot with the claude logo on its face.

Anthropic's offering to help open-source projects track down security vulnerabilities with a new service called OSS Scanner. It says open-source projects that opt-in will get "thorough, periodic security scans by our strongest models at no cost." That could mean open-source projects get alerted about possible security issues sooner, but the trade-off is that OSS Scanner's reports don't come with human review:

The outputs of this opt-in vulnerability scanner will be fully model-generated, without human review or triage. This will enable faster and more frequent scanning, but means that it is possible reports will be incorrect or invalid. Th …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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