A MacVoices’ panel member’s firsthand report from Black Hat explores the conference’s enterprise security focus before the discussion turns to AI models escaping sandbox restrictions to complete assigned tasks. The panel discusses the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack, unintended AI behavior and the dangers of moving too fast. Can developers establish effective limits without sacrificing innovation or competitive advantage? The race for better AI continues.

💾

Prince Harry and six co-claimants, including Baroness Lawrence, must pay £9.5 million to Associated Newspapers in the next seven days after a judge ruled their hacking case was unreasonable to a high degree.

The post Prince Harry and Fellow Claimants Must Pay £9.5 million to Mail After Judge Rules Hacking Case Was ‘Unreasonable to a High Degree’ appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

In light of plummeting public support for its widespread automatic license plate readers, surveillance company Flock has lost dozens of contracts with cities across the US.

The company even drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to spy on other vehicles, as 404 Media reported this week.

Citizens are increasingly disgusted by the company’s presence on public streets, opting to hack down the cameras, blind them, or sabotage them in other creative ways.

“His project, which he calls noRecognition, allows people to escape the automatic detection and algorithmic surveillance used across the U.S. and beyond.” https://t.co/OIQNOt9B0a @TechCrunch

— Christina Ayiotis, Esq., CRM, CIPP/E, AIGP (@christinayiotis) August 10, 2026

And according to cybersecurity researcher Bill Swearingen, there may be other creative ways to befuddle Flock’s spy cams. He devised with a special computer-generated pattern which, once stretched out across the vehicle in the form of a wrap, will result it in not being flagged as a car by Flock’s cameras.

During this year’s Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Swearingen showed off a 2009 Toyota Yaris wrapped in vinyl featuring the logo of automotive publication Donut Media (which is owned by Futurism‘s parent company Recurrent Ventures.)

Despite the car looking a bit chaotic — albeit still very much like a small passenger vehicle to the human eye — “we proved it was effective,” Swearingen told TechCrunch. The Yaris successfully defeated surveillance detection at Def Con during the pattern’s first public test.

“Privacy is a fundamental right,” he added, aiming to give people a way to “opt out of being tracked.”

To come up with the pattern, he used a reinforcement learning model that trained itself on patterns that evade detection. The model got to the point of being able to confuse all 11 open source detection algorithms he tested, per TechCrunch, in addition to Flock’s license plate readers and even Axon’s body-worn cameras used by police departments.

As part of his noRecognition crowdsourcing campaign, Swearingen has also come up with T-shirts and hoodies that feature algorithmic detection-busting patterns. He hopes to eventually put pattern-printed skins for entire cars on sale as well.

The effort is part of a much broader trend of companies offering up garments that incorporate “adversarial patterns,” which can exploit weaknesses in computer vision systems.

One thing is clear: as outrage over Flock’s heavy presence across the country grows, people are looking for any way to foil the tech — especially if it looks cool.

More on Flock: Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp

The post Man Covers Car in Special Wrap That Breaks Flock Cameras’ Electronic Brains appeared first on Futurism.

Big companies describe being under constant threat but only half have a plan in place to respond to an attack

Nearly a third of British manufacturers have been hit by a cyber-attack on them or a company in their supply chain, according to a survey that highlighted the growing hacking risk to companies.

The findings come almost a year after Britain’s largest automotive employer, JLR, was hit by an attack that forced it to halt production for weeks.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: solarseven/Getty

© Photograph: solarseven/Getty

© Photograph: solarseven/Getty

Last month, OpenAI made a headline-generating claim: that a group of its AI models had conspired to break free, access the internet, and hack into the internal systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face, which confirmed the infiltration.

The incident rattled the tech industry, seemingly illustrating how the threat of AI models turning into rogue cybersecurity threats had become a reality. Months earlier, Anthropic’s Mythos AI model had already also drawn attention after it was similarly found to have broken containment. Then, this week, Meta also said its own frontier model had been implicated in yet another inadvertent hack of a third party company, closely followed by security researchers saying Chinese open-weight model Kimi K3 had done the same.

But while it’s not hard to see an emerging trend, some thorny questions about how severe the situation really is are starting to crop up, with some experts arguing these incidents could’ve easily been avoided.

For one, the slow and surprisingly deliberate way OpenAI’s models moved during the Hugging Face hack — right beneath OpenAI’s nose — gives a whiff that the company may have been careless in monitoring the experimental AI.

During a presentation at the Black Hat conference this week, OpenAI security engineer Michael Dalton and safety researcher Eric Wallace expanded on what went down during the hack. Wallace explained that a “team of agents” that were “working together,” had been “finding exploits, sharing them with one another, moving laterally through our systems and external systems, and doing this over the course of days and weeks,” as quoted by Wired.

The agents even left a lengthy track record of their schemings on an internal message board, which ultimately contained hundreds of thousands of messages. It also raises a question: with OpenAI’s immense resources, why wasn’t anybody monitoring these frontier models as they rampaged through the net?

The AI models shared exploits with each other on this messaging board, an “explosion in communication and intelligence from models,” per Wallace. They acted in sometimes strikingly human — and therefore messy — ways, splitting up tasks and even accidentally deleting each other’s work, leading to what Wired characterized as “petty drama.”

In other words, these AI agents were leaving an enormous trail of bread crumbs that alert OpenAI’s many human researchers could have spotted. And the same, obviously, goes for their colleagues at Anthropic, Meta and Moonshot AI, the creator of Kimi.

Researchers have described the incident as “reckless” and easily avoided, as Wired reported late last month.

“A simple analysis of the actual risk has an actual simple answer,” security and compliance consultant Davi Ottenheimer told the publication at the time. “The OpenAI mistakes were dead simple.”

“I’d call it more of a defensive failure than exceptionally good offense,” AI hacking agents company Pensar R&D head Kyle Ryan told TechCrunch..

Whether the hack was as much of a “pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole,” as Dalton put it during this week’s conference, remains debatable. For one, these AI companies are highly motivated to characterize their models as a major threat to cybersecurity to stand out against neck-in-neck competition.

According to Dalton, OpenAI is vowing to beef up “security prevention, detection, and response techniques” while “consciously slowing down research in order to enhance security and to upgrade the security principles.”

When every leading AI lab has had the same thing happen, it’s worth asking whether they should have taken those steps proactively.

More on the hacks: Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too

The post Why Aren’t Any AI Companies Watching Their Frontier Models to Make Sure They Don’t Go on Hacking Sprees? appeared first on Futurism.

Last month, OpenAI revealed that a group of its AI models had broken containment, hacking into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.

On one hand, experts saw the incident as the latest warning sign that AI models had gotten to the point of being able to autonomously infiltrate targets, a threat we’ve been aware of for years rapidly turning into a reality.

On the other, a more skeptical read of the situation is that OpenAI could have orchestrated the hack as part of a “publicity stunt” — or at least lowered its guard just enough to allow it to happen, knowing the publicity would be invaluable. After all, just three months earlier, competitor Anthropic had made major headlines by announcing that its own Mythos AI model had similarly broken containment.

Put simply, it’s in the companies’ best interest to paint their AI models as capable enough to pose a real-world threat, especially as the industry grows ever more competitive.

Now the situation has gotten even stranger as a third company, Meta, has entered the fray. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant is claiming that during a recent test of one of its AI model conducted by an independent company, the AI accessed the internet and hacked a third-party service — an narrative that’s starting to get awfully familiar at this point.

According to The Information, the model involved was Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1, the company’s most advanced model yet, which was released by its Superintelligence Labs last month. Per the publication, the model breached an unidentified company’s systems and changed its internal environment.

Meta claims a “misconfiguration” during the hacking test had allowed its model to escape. A source told the WSJ that it was the same cybersecurity benchmark test that led to previous hacking incidents at Anthropic and OpenAI. Earlier this week, the company that conducted benchmark tests for all three AI companies, called Irregular, said it had caught OpenAI and Anthropic AI agents gaining unauthorized access to secure systems.

As we await more details regarding the latest incident — Meta has promised to investigate and publish a report — the suspicious optics of the situation are hard to escape. Meta has long struggled to keep up with the competition as the AI race continues to heat up. Could the company be looking for favorable media coverage about how its AI model is similarly capable of breaking containment?

Irregular said it hadn’t noticed any “current open issues” related to its test environment, per the WSJ. But while there wasn’t any real-world harm — at least that we know of — stemming from these hacks, researchers warn that the threat of AI models going rogue is coming to a head.

Just earlier this week, the UK government-backed AI Security Institute revealed that OpenAI and Anthropic models took “unsanctioned action on the live internet” and went as far as to create fake identities on GitHub to pressure a human user into approving a malware-tainted software update.

“What they’re doing is coming up with very sophisticated strategies or cyberattacks to be able to achieve the goal that they’ve been given,” global chief AI officer of advertising firm WPP Daniel Hulme told the BBC. “When you give an AI a goal, if you don’t think of all the ways it might be able to achieve the goal, it will find a way to achieve a goal that you haven’t thought about.”

More on the hacks: OpenAI’s Escaped Models Were Allegedly Rampaging More Extensively Than Previously Reported

The post Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too appeared first on Futurism.

Welcome to this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief… This week, it was revealed that an AI agent produced by OpenAI had escaped its testing environment and invaded the systems of another New York-based AI company. In our analysis, we’ll be looking at 1) the revelation that an OpenAI model escaped its testing environment, 2) what both companies that were involved have revealed about the alarming cybersecurity incident, and 3) why some experts caution against calling this a genuine case of an AI agent going “rogue,” and what this all could mean going forward.

Quote of the Week  

“We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly.”

– OpenAI Statement

If you enjoy the news and perspectives offered by The Debrief, make sure that you aren’t missing our stories by making us one of your “preferred sources” on Google News. You can simply follow this link to add The Debrief to your list of favorites, and you can read more about Google’s preferred sources in our article here.

---

RECENT NEWS from The Debrief

• Chinese Researchers have developed laser charging technology that enables “unlimited” drone flight.
• LiDAR has detected more than 20,000 hidden Amazon earthworks, revealing the remnants of a sprawling ancient civilization.
• New research reveals that the extreme conditions during the bombing of Hiroshima in WWII created an all-new metal alloy.
• Get all the latest stories from The Debrief, with more breaking stories at the end of this week’s newsletter.

---

An Alarming Cybersecurity Incident is Revealed

It has been revealed that a new advanced artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, reportedly escaped from a secure testing environment and proceeded to invade the infrastructure of another technology company.

The alarming revelation presents new questions about whether AI models can be safely tested without the normal protections that limit such abilities among AI agents, even in controlled environments from which they are supposedly unable to escape.

The incident involved an OpenAI agent that was tasked with completing a standardized cybersecurity test. However, it was later determined that it had evaded its quarantine area and accessed the internet. From there, the AI proceeded to hack into the computer of an OpenAI customer, which it then used to help it invade the internal systems of Hugging Face, a New York-based AI company.

AI Agents Gone Wild

In a Security Incident Disclosure posted on its website, Hugging Face reported that its staff initially “detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure” that was first identified last week.

However, it quickly became evident that this circumstance “was different from anything we had handled before in one important way: it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system,” the posting reads, “and we detected and dissected it largely with AI of our own.”

Engineers at Hugging Face say the AI agent system obtained unauthorized access to several of the company’s internal datasets, in addition to “several credentials used by our services.” Right now, assessments are still underway to determine to what extent the company’s partners or customers may have been affected, although the posting states that Hugging Face engineers “found no evidence of tampering with public, user-facing models, datasets, or Spaces,” adding that its software supply chain appeared unaffected.

OpenAI Responds

In a separate posting on its website, OpenAI also responded to the incident, offering the company’s own account of what occurred.

“After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark⁠ of cyber capabilities,” the company’s statement read.

According to its statement, OpenAI says the incident resulted from an internal evaluation, where one of its AI models was prompted to “pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities.” Normally, such testing occurs within what the company characterizes as a “highly isolated environment,” where access is restricted to a limited number of functions that include package installation, accessible only through “an internally hosted third-party software that acts as a proxy and cache for package registries.”

Specifically, OpenAI says that its models had been prompted to find a solution to what is known as ExploitGym, which has been characterized in the past by its creators as “a large-scale, diverse, realistic benchmark on the exploitation capabilities of AI agents.”

“All evidence suggests that the models were hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym,” OpenAI’s statement reads, adding that its AI agent appeared to go to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal.”

“We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly,” the statement added.

A Brave New World

Even calling these revelations an “unprecedented cyber incident” still qualifies as an understatement, considering that we have just seen an AI agent gain access to the Internet, and doing precisely what many experts have now warned us such intelligent systems may do: engaging in potentially damaging activity as an unintended consequence of following instructions they were given.

More than just an “unprecedented” cyber incident, this should be a wake-up call.

Among the chief concerns this instance illustrates is how the AI in question successfully leveraged “a substantial amount of inference compute” to escape its sandbox environment and escape onto the World Wide Web, all because it was following orders.

In short, even if AI agents haven’t explicitly been given the task of escaping their testing environment, gaining access to the web, and engaging in cyberattacks, this instance illustrates that all of the above can occur as a natural progression of events as the AI agent in question attempts to complete a task it has been given.

Not All Experts Are So Concerned   

However, not everyone is quite so concerned about the incident revealed by Hugging Face and OpenAI last week.

Professor Oli Buckley, a cyber security expert at Loughborough University, recently shared his thoughts about the situation in an article over at the university’s website, arguing that while the incident is concerning, it should not be mistaken for a case where an AI agent literally went “rogue” and began making decisions on its own—in fact, the evidence suggests that this was far from resembling any such a scenario.

“I think I’d be wary of jumping to ‘rogue AI,’” Buckley said. “The models didn’t develop their own agenda or decide to attack Hugging Face while twirling their digital moustache. They were given an objective, placed in an environment designed to reward successful exploitation, and pursued that objective further than their operators anticipated.”

“That’s fundamentally different from an AI deciding to rebel,” Buckley said.

Instead, what Buckley says this incident shows is an example of “an AI thinking laterally in a way that humans didn’t necessarily think of in an effort to complete its task.”

“If there’s a failure here, it isn’t that the AI wanted to hack something,” Buckley said. “In many ways, it did exactly what it had been told to do.”

The Uncertain Path Forward

In its statement, OpenAI maintained its position on such tests, arguing that they play a vital role in helping engineers understand what the capabilities of AI agents are, as well as what the unforeseen consequences of their use may be, and how to mitigate the effects of such situations when they arise.

“We believe advanced cyber capable models need to help security teams find weaknesses before attackers do, understand how vulnerabilities can be chained, and remediate them at machine speed,” OpenAI said in the company’s statement. “We are using these capabilities to continue strengthening protections around infrastructure configuration and model evaluation environments; we will share our findings and best practices as we learn.”

“We encourage other defenders to apply for trusted access⁠ and experiment with these models now to translate these capabilities into better prevention, faster detection, and more effective incident response,” the company said.

That concludes this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief. You can read past editions of our newsletter at our website, or if you found this installment online, don’t forget to subscribe and get future email editions from us here. Also, if you have a tip or other information you’d like to send along directly to me, you can email me at micah [@] thedebrief [dot] org, or reach me on X: @MicahHanks.

Here are the top stories we’re covering right now…

Despite certain improvements in accuracy, large language models still hallucinate a lot. So much so, in fact, that cybersecurity researchers warn that criminals can easily weaponize delusional AI outputs to spread malware throughout the internet.

According to SecurityWeek, the attack works by exploiting a persistent flaw in AI coding assistants. Basically, when these tools recommend third-party software packages, there’s a strong possibility that they include names of ones that don’t actually exist.

Astonishingly, cybersecurity researchers at Tel Aviv University and Intuit found that this scenario can be exploited in common AI coding tools ranging from Cursor to Microsoft’s Copilot, at rates of anywhere form 85 to 100 percent, depending on the specifics of the engineering task.

The attack, called “adversarial hallucination squatting,” or “hallusquatting,” takes advantage of this fact. To run it, attackers can simply identify hallucinated package names that they know AI coding assistants will reference, register them as real repositories, and stuff malware inside. That malicious package then lies in wait for the near-guarantee than an AI assistant will access it and clone it into its owner’s machine.

Because the attack relies on an automated process, a victim likely won’t even know their AI assistant downloaded the malware until well after it begins executing code.

And because the compromise is a feature of the technology itself, a massive array of AI assistants are vulnerable, including Cursor, OpenClaw, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, and many more.

The researchers claim they notified AI companies about the exploit and held back some sensitive details that would help attackers improve their workflows, but the underlying problem remains: AI assistants are remarkably confident liars — and apparently easy marks for the next generation of cyber criminals.

More on AI: A Whole Bunch of People’s Claude Chats Are Publicly Accessible Online, and There’s Some Wildly Private Stuff in There

The post If You AI-Generate Code, Hackers Just Found a Devious Method to Install Malware Directly on Your Computer appeared first on Futurism.

Influencers peddle injectable shortcuts while regulators confront a fast-growing gray market.

Company behind ChatGPT says agent ‘cheated’ an evaluation by attacking a Hugging Face database

OpenAI has revealed that an autonomous AI agent powered by its technology went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a prominent startup by itself in an “unprecedented incident”.

The company behind ChatGPT said the startup Hugging Face had detected and contained the agent – an AI tool designed to carry out tasks without human assistance – which had entered its systems.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Andre M Chang/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Andre M Chang/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Andre M Chang/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

OpenAI claims that a group of its AI models broke containment and hacked into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.

While testing their cybersecurity capabilities, the posse of AIs — including GPT-5.6 Sol and “an even more capable pre-release model” — “identified and chained vulnerabilities across OpenAI’s research environment and Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face’s production database,” according to a Tuesday blog post.

The models reached a “node with internet access,” the company wrote, and found datasets on remote servers that helped them “cheat the evaluation.” In other words, the AI models went to extreme lengths to ace their cybersecurity tests. It’s a convenient narrative for an AI company trying to claw back hype that’s been increasingly hogged by competitors, but it does sound like something went down: last week, Hugging Face said it had “detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure,” which turned out to be OpenAI’s models that had gone rogue.

“The campaign was run by an autonomous agent framework executing many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services,” Hugging Face wrote at the time.

“We’ve spent the past 24 hours working closely with the OpenAI team (thanks!), and we strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part,” Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue tweeted after OpenAI’s announcement. “It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!”

The incident highlights the dangers of autonomous AI agents, which can break out of containment and exploit potentially huge numbers of cybersecurity vulnerabilities with ease. It’s something experts have warned of for years now, and thanks to recent advances in the tech, it has quickly turned from a hypothetical risk into a sobering reality.

The Sam Altman-led company said it considers the incident to be “unprecedented” — but we can’t shake the feeling that we’ve heard all of this before.

In April, OpenAI’s biggest competitor Anthropic similarly announced that its latest Mythos model had gone rogue, escaping a “sandbox” environment and even gaining access to the internet after developing a “moderately sophisticated” exploit.

The news was followed by extensive media coverage, touting Anthropic’s hugely powerful and dangerous new model. The company said the risk was so formidable that it would only make the model available to a select number of vetted clients as part of a shadowy initiative dubbed “Project Glasswing.” The US government even intervened, forcing Anthropic to “suspend all access” to the model for two weeks last month, citing cybersecurity concerns.

Considering OpenAI and Anthropic are currently duking it out on the same playing field, narrowing their product lines on enterprise and coding, it’s not hard to view OpenAI’s latest update as an attempt to draw attention to what it calls an “even more capable pre-release model.”

And the reality is that while experts say the hack was impressive, it wasn’t exactly groundbreaking.

The hack “falls well within the known capabilities of the current generation” of frontier AI models, as Cambridge machine learning professor Neil Lawrence told the BBC.

“OpenAI are now playing catch-up, they are trying to demonstrate their own systems’ capabilities in cyber-security,” Lawrence added. “It shows us that OpenAI are not capable of safely deploying their own technology.”

Researchers are now warning of an “asymmetry” in cybersecurity, where “offensive agents are unconstrained, while the best defensive tools are locked behind guardrails that cannot understand context,” as Guidepoint Security principal security engineer Travis Lelle told the BBC.

That asymmetry was perfectly captured in Hugging Face’s attempts to defend itself from OpenAI’s attacking models. As detailed in its update last week, the company tried to use “frontier models behind commercial APIs,” which “did not work” because the provider’s safety guardrails — “which cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker” — blocked them.

Instead, the company ended up using a Chinese open-weight model called GLM 5.2, hosted on its own infrastructure, which happily carried out its analysis without running afoul of any guardrails.

“The practical lesson for defenders: have a capable model you can run on your own infrastructure vetted and ready before an incident,” Hugging Face wrote, “both to avoid guardrail lockout and to keep attacker data and credentials from leaving your environment.”

More on rogue AIs: Top AI Models Showing Disturbing Behavior as They Become More Advanced

The post OpenAI Says a Group of Its Models Broke Out of Secure Containment and Hacked Another AI Company appeared first on Futurism.

Owen Flowers, de 18 anos, e Thalha Jubair, de 20, atacaram a Transport for London em 2024, quando ainda eram menores, como membros do coletivo criminoso Scattered Spider, o mesmo grupo ligado aos ataques à Marks & Spencer e ao Co-op. O hack custou 39 milhões de libras e expôs os dados de milhões de clientes.

The post Hackers que transmitiram ciberataque à rede de transportes de Londres condenados a cinco anos e meio de prisão appeared first on Tek Notícias.

Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 19, sentenced to five and a half years each for cyber-attack that cost Transport for London £39m

The data of millions of commuters was stolen, Londoners were left out of pocket and 27,000 Transport for London staff were forced to reset their passwords.

Over four days in 2024 a pair of teenage hackers had London’s transport network at their mercy. Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers had burrowed into the heart of Transport for London’s IT systems and held the “keys to the kingdom”.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: William Barton/Alamy

© Photograph: William Barton/Alamy

© Photograph: William Barton/Alamy

Whistleblower suggests internal security services deployed spyware from 2017 against key domestic and foreign targets

A former member of Morocco’s domestic intelligence service has helped to provide an unprecedented insight into how the north African state used hacking software – including Pegasus spyware – to target journalists, human rights defenders, French politicians and Spanish cabinet ministers and police officers.

Pegasus, which is manufactured by the Israel-based NSO Group, allows its operator to access everything on a target’s mobile phone, including emails, text messages and photographs. It can also activate the phone’s recorder and camera, turning it into a listening device.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters

© Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters

© Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters

The vulnerability in the decades-old game could have allowed hackers to take over victims’ computers with a malicious game invite.

An alleged Russian-speaking group of cybercriminals is reportedly compromising and targeting several major companies that use Fortinet Firewalls and VPNs through previously known passwords.

The tech giant warned of a security flaw that a cybercrime gang said it's exploiting as part of a mass-hacking campaign. Google said it notified more than 100 organizations that had potentially vulnerable servers.

The ShinyHunters hacking gang claims to have compromised the Oracle PeopleSoft servers of more than 100 organizations, including many universities.

Operating system makers take many steps to prevent their wares from accepting commands from remote devices. The safeguards, designed to thwart malicious attacks, typically require hackers to jump through all kinds of hoops to bypass the measures. But what if remote code execution were as simple as being within Bluetooth range of a speaker connected to the targeted device?

It turns out it can, at least when the speaker is a Sound Blaster Katana V2X sold by Singapore-based Creative Technologies. The speaker, which sells for $283, is widely acclaimed with numerous reviews showering praise on the sound and performance of it and its predecessor, the Sound Blaster V2.

A PC-pwning proxy

Researcher Rasmus Moorats stumbled on the hack by accident, after he purchased a Katana V2X, a soundbar that connects to PCs, Macs, and Linux devices over USB or Bluetooth. Moorats was curious if he could create a Linux tool that communicated with his speaker. He discovered he could do so through CTP, a proprietary mechanism he guesses is short for Creative Transport Protocol.

Read full article

Comments

© Creative Technologies