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There is no formula for predicting the future. No formula for dealing with change. No formula for living a good life, for success, for great art, for writing a great book, or for producing a great film. Every time we reach one of those, even when following a formula, we have to break the pattern […]

A critical vulnerability in the popular Node.js sandboxing library vm2 allows escaping the sandbox and executing arbitrary code on the host system. [...]

Cybersecurity vendor Arctic Wolf has laid off 250 workers in a restructuring that it says is designed to position the company to invest more in AI through its superintelligence platform and agentic Security Operations Center (SOC), a company spokesperson told The Register. “We recently made an organizational restructuring to better align the company’s structure and investments with our long‑term strategy,” a spokesperson said. “While these decisions are difficult, they position Arctic Wolf to operate more efficiently, continue investing in our Superintelligence platform and Agentic SOC, and deliver strong value to customers. We remain confident in our direction and momentum.” The layoffs appear to represent less than 10 percent of the total workforce. Arctic Wolf is a privately held company and does not publish a current headcount, but in December 2024, the company said it employed more than 2,600 workers, according to a press release it issued at the time. According to the website PitchBook, Arctic Wolf has 3,323 employees. The job cuts appeared to fall across several categories including sales, product development, and marketing. Some had been with the company for four years or more in revenue-generating roles such as sales engineer. One senior systems engineer with experience in datacenter infrastructure and cyber threat detection said on LinkedIn he was let go after more than a year with the company. “Wow! I was not expecting to have such a swing in posts this week from super positive to negative. Today I was laid off by Arctic Wolf due to restructuring,” wrote one sales engineer the day after he wrote a post about the success they had experienced last year. Alongside its five global SOCs, Arctic Wolf has offices in Waterloo, Ontario; San Antonio, Texas; Eden Prairie, Minnesota; Bengaluru, India, and other locations worldwide. Arctic Wolf operates in crowded endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed detection and response (MDR) markets alongside CrowdStrike, Rapid7, and SentinelOne. It also competes for channel partners and customers with the likes of Huntress and Blackpoint Cyber. The company has bet on its Aurora Superintelligence Platform that combines security data, a “Swarm of Experts” AI agents and humans in the loop to protect customers' systems. ®

Cisco patched a Crosswork Network Controller and Network Services Orchestrator denial-of-service vulnerability that requires manually rebooting targeted systems for recovery. [...]

You can't trust anyone these days! Get together with seven of your colleagues, and there’s a decent chance one of the eight will say they’ve either sold company login details in the past year or know someone who has, says UK fraud prevention outfit Cifas. That 13 percent figure is shocking. Just as strikingly, Cifas found a similar 13 percent of employees overall believed selling access to company systems was justifiable, though the org’s Workplace Fraud Trends report did not spell out those justifications. Regardless, Cifas says it suggests that there’s a worrying shift happening among attitudes toward insider-enabled fraud that should trouble leadership. Then again, leadership might not be too worried based on the data. Cifas doesn’t give a precise number for the share of rank-and-file employees who feel selling credentials is justified, but it does call attention to how leadership feels, and the more power they have, the more they seem to think it’s okay to sell their access. Thirty-two percent of managers, 36 percent of directors, and 43 percent of C-suite executives said it was justifiable to sell their login details. Even more shockingly, a full 81 percent of business owners felt the exact same way. As for why, that’s not entirely clear, though Cifas told us it’s heard various excuses in the past. Financial challenges, the belief it would be a harmless one-off, confidence they wouldn’t get caught, and disgruntlement were among the reasons cited for selling credentials. If you’re wondering who to keep an eye on, Cifas suggests looking at IT and telecoms professionals, who showed the highest tolerance for fraud-related behavior across multiple scenarios covered in the study. Those scenarios included the aforementioned selling of login details, as well as secretly moonlighting for a competitor, using fraudulent references on job applications, expense fraud, and the like. Selling access to company systems was one of the less common types of fraud covered in the survey, but the 13 percent figure reflects respondents who said they had done it or knew someone who had - meaning that, in a company of 1,000 people, around 130 might report direct or indirect exposure to the behavior. The fact that leadership respondents and IT and telecoms professionals showed higher tolerance for such activity makes the findings more concerning, even if the survey focused specifically on selling login details, in some cases to a former colleague. This data is specific to the UK, mind you, but there’s no reason to assume a relaxed attitude toward such a critical cybersecurity weakness is confined to the Isles - that’s just as likely as the person buying those credentials keeping it to themselves. When asked if Cifas had comparable data from prior years to compare this to, the organization described its findings as revealing “a worrying shift in attitudes toward insider-enabled fraud.” However, the firm said that this is the first year it compiled this report, so it doesn’t have comparable data. Nonetheless, Cifas Director of Learning Rachael Tiffen said in a press release that the point is that organizations need to be aware of how many employees might be willing to sell access to company systems. “These findings show how vital it is for organisations to build fraud‑aware cultures, where employees at all levels understand their responsibilities and the consequences of their actions,” Tiffen said. Be sure to pay them well, too. ®

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ServiceNow has unveiled updates to its workflow management platform advancing its redefinition of itself as the “AI control tower for business reinvention” at its Knowledge customer event this week.

The AI Control Tower product itself, introduced at last year’s event, gets new integrations with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and other LLM providers to extend governance and observability of enterprise infrastructure, adding to its existing links with OpenAI and Anthropic. The integrations also span applications such as SAP, Oracle, and Workday. In addition, Control Tower can now discover non-human identities and connected devices to bring OT and IoT under the same governance as AI agents and cloud services.

All this ties in to the ServiceNow Action Fabric, which opens the platform to any AI agent, whether built on ServiceNow or from another source, via a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, the company said.

And thanks to the recent acquisition of Traceloop, Control Tower now provides more extensive observability into agent behavior at runtime. Five new risk frameworks aligned with NIST and EU Act standards offer compliance controls.

Autonomous workforce

To expand the reach of what ServiceNow calls the Autonomous Workforce, a group of specialist AI agents announced in February that began with a single L1 IT service desk agent, it has added “AI teammates” that work alongside humans in CRM, IT, employee services, and security and risk management.

The autonomous IT cohort includes an AIOps agent that detects anomalies, correlates events, and triggers remediation, and a specialist for site reliability engineering (SRE) that performs incident triage and postmortem documentation. Other new agents assist with asset lifecycle management and portfolio planning.

Autonomous CRM offers specialist agents for sales qualification and quoting, order fulfillment, managing invoice disputes, and service and renewal, and in the world of employee services, AI specialists act as digital employees with role-specific skills in HR, workplace services, legal, finance, procurement, supplier management, and health and safety.

To round out the offerings, ServiceNow announced Autonomous Security & Risk, designed to span the entire threat landscape from finding and remediating vulnerabilities through examining third party vendor risk.

Employee experience

ServiceNow EmployeeWorks, the previously announced “conversational front door for the enterprise”, is now generally available. In addition, ServiceNow announced Otto, an AI assistant that unifies Now Assist, Moveworks, and AI Experience, and operates across the enterprise.

“Rather than living inside a single application, ServiceNow Otto sits across the entire enterprise, understanding intent, routing work to the right agent, and executing it to completion,” the company said. “Employees, customers, and support teams talk, chat, search, browse, analyze, and build. ServiceNow Otto is designed to handle the rest, adapting to each employee’s role and location without requiring them to know which system handles their request. Actions are governed by AI Control Tower, which can log each AI interaction, enforce enterprise policies, and provide explainability for every decision.”

Otto is already available in EmployeeWorks and the AI Control Tower, and will be rolled out in all other products “in the year ahead.”

According to Nenshad Bardoliwalla, ServiceNow’s group VP of AI products, all this means that “together with a new commercial model that bundles everything customers need to deploy AI quickly, we’ve made it clear the era of sidecar AI is over.”

What technology analyst Carmi Levy finds most interesting in these announcements is how quickly we’re seeing AI-enabled workflows extend beyond their initial entry point in IT.

“What was once the exclusive domain of senior IT leaders and planners is now filtering across all operational areas of the typical organization, including CRM, HR, IT operations, security and risk,” he said. “AI is also deeply embedded in the average worker’s desktop and is rewriting their work experiences in the process. Likewise, it puts highly autonomous tools in the hands of organizations intent on improving productivity, sharpening customer responsiveness, and driving operational efficiencies.”

Stephen Elliot, group VP at IDC, added, “The agentic focus is critical as the company continues to expand its specialist agent library. Customers can adopt these across core workflows to realize business value and increase productivity. The recent commercial pricing model complements the agentic capabilities. It meets customers where they are in their AI maturity journey enabling a pragmatic approach to adoption.”

But, he added, “Customers should consider the combination of workflows, AI, data, governance, and security as they deploy AI capabilities. No one model can do it all.”

Indeed, he said, “We are hearing from some CIOs that they are pausing some AI use cases because of the security and governance risks.”

Charles Betz, VP principal analyst at Forrester, said that ServiceNow is on the right track, especially with its continued focus on data. “The data governance, provenance, and currency issues are not trivial. Agents reasoning at machine speed over a stale graph are going to produce wrong outputs, and it’ll be data-quality-based hallucination,” he said. In addition, “documenting decision traces within the AI domain is super important.”

Levy agreed. “ServiceNow’s offerings reflect a keen understanding of where AI can drive optimal benefit throughout all areas of the business, what those workflows might look like, and how the tools and supports need to evolve,” he said.

This story originally appeared on CIO.com.

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Disc Soft Limited, the maker of DAEMON Tools Lite, confirmed that the software had been trojanized in a supply chain attack and released a new, malware-free version. [...]

Linux has long carried a reputation for resilience, bolstered by open-source reviews, hardened kernels, and transparent development pipelines. While that trust is well-founded, attackers have shifted their focus to a more vulnerable target: the surrounding software supply chain.

Researchers at Rapid7 say that they have spotted what they believe was an Iranian intelligence cyber unit masquerading as the Chaos ransomware gang to hide a state-sponsored espionage operation. The intrusion was spotted earlier this year, and investigators say breadcrumbs left behind give them "medium confidence" in saying it was the work of MuddyWater, which has been linked to intrusions affecting Western government and banking networks in recent months. Attackers began with a Microsoft Teams phishing campaign, which is not uncommon. They also encouraged targets to share their screens. Again, it was nothing too out of the ordinary. However, what must have required some expert persuasion work was that they convinced these individuals to enter their credentials into local text files, and even modify MFA settings to allow attacker-controlled devices to complete authentication. Rapid7 researchers Alexandra Blia and Ivan Feigl wrote: "While connected, the [threat actor (TA)] executed basic discovery commands, accessed files related to the victim's VPN configuration, and instructed users to enter their credentials into locally-created text files. "In at least one instance, the TA also deployed a remote management tool (AnyDesk) to further facilitate access." From there, browser artifacts suggested that attackers lifted credentials through phishing pages. At least one mimicked a Microsoft Quick Assist page. Armed with valid credentials, the attackers then executed various commands via RDP, which downloaded payloads using curl. These payloads included a backdoor malware dubbed Darkcomp, a malicious Microsoft WebView2 loader to disguise traffic, and an encrypted configuration file that sent instructions to Darkcomp. Then it was a case of performing lateral movement by using additional compromised accounts and scooping up sensitive data along the way. The attackers used the same accounts to send emails internally notifying organization leaders about the intrusion and data theft, and included an onion link leading to Chaos ransomware’s data leak site (DLS), where a corresponding entry appeared with all data redacted and hidden behind a countdown timer. Follow-up emails aimed to build the illusion of a genuine ransomware attack, although the illusion was short-lived. The attackers instructed recipients to look for a file containing "access credentials" they could use to begin ransom negotiations. Unlike the plaintext credential files the attackers had socially engineered the original targets into creating, this file did not actually exist. There was no way to contact the attackers, whereas in a typical scenario the intruders would be looking for a payout. There was also no file encryption, which is inconsistent with Chaos affiliates' typical way of working. "Despite these inconsistencies in the initial proof-of-compromise, the TA later published the stolen data on its DLS in line with modern extortion tactics," Blia and Feigl wrote. "The leaked data was assessed to be legitimate." If not for financial gain, then what? MuddyWater – if that is indeed the group behind this – did not extort the organizations in question, nor did they deploy a ransomware payload, but they did pose as an established ransomware group. Rapid7 believes the group did this as an extension of its false-flag operations to provide a plausible front for cyberespionage activity, or preposition work to underpin potential destructive cyberattacks. It wouldn't be the first time MuddyWater or Iranian intelligence (MOIS) was found LARPing as a ransomware crew. Both have previously been linked to an attack on an Israeli hospital, allegedly carried out by a Qilin affiliate. "Following the subsequent public attribution of that incident to the MOIS, it is plausible that the group adopted alternative ransomware branding, in this case Chaos, in an effort to reduce attribution risk and maintain a degree of plausible deniability," said the researchers. The unique benefits of masquerading as ransomware crooks include muddying attribution for attacks by leaving behind ransomware breadcrumbs, as well as redirecting defensive efforts toward locating signs of ransomware deployment instead of the backdoors that underpin espionage activity. ®

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Richard Hughes oznámil, že po společnostech Red Hat a Framework a organizacích OSFF a Linux Foundation, službu Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) umožňující aktualizovat firmware zařízení na počítačích s Linuxem, nově sponzorují také společnosti Dell a Lenovo. Do dnešního dne bylo díky LVFS provedeno více než 145 milionů aktualizací firmwarů od více než 100 různých výrobců na milionech linuxových zařízení.

Google ve svém cloudu nabízí firmám novou ochranu Fraud Defence, která má lépe odlišit, kdo přistupuje na jejich webové stránky. Jestli jde o lidi, boty nebo sofistikované AI agenty. Jedním z pilířů nové ochrany je přepracovaný systém reCaptcha, který na webu a v aplikacích slouží k ověření ...

Wireshark is one of those tools Linux teams quietly depend on everywhere: SOC pipelines, packet capture nodes, incident response systems, and long-running forensic environments. That's what makes the newly disclosed vulnerabilities in Wireshark 4.6.5 more serious than a routine software update.

Backups don't fail because they're missing, they fail because attackers destroy them first. Acronis explains how ransomware targets backup systems before encryption, leaving no path to recovery. [...]

The mishaps around Apple Intelligence have gone beyond denting Apple’s reputation – they have also cost the company $250 million in damages over smarter Siri delays.

Think back to the original introduction of Apple Intelligence and you might recall a promotional video that explained how a new and smarter Siri would act as your contextually-smart AI companion, helping you get things done. Almost two years later, that smarter Siri still hasn’t shipped — and while Apple has made major changes in management, AI strategy, and approach, this contextual companion isn’t now expected until later this year.

Hopefully.

Apple Intelligence can be seen as a Maps-launch style debacle on the part of the company. (Apple even had to deny that the video presentation for those features shown at WWDC 2024 (no longer officially available) was made up.)

Apple Intelligence’s $250M punishment

The entire affair left some iPhone users unhappy, so they launched a class action lawsuit against the company for delaying introduction of the “more personalized Siri.” Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle the case last December – a figure that works out to between $25 and $95 per device, depending on how many iPhone customers submit claims. 

(Compensation is available to US customers who purchased an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max or the iPhone 16 family of devices between June 2024 and March 2025.)

The case against the company claimed it “Promoted AI capabilities that did not exist at the time, do not exist, and will not exist for two or more years.” 

To make matters worse, Apple pushed these new features after their introduction at WWDC — even linking a later iPhone update to its AI. Looking back now, this wasn’t a great idea since it made things much more embarrassing once Apple failed to deliver. That’s why the class action succeeded.

Don’t promise too much

The lesson here is that, in general, even a snake oil salesman needs to kill a couple of snakes before putting the essence in a bottle; in this case, the snake hadn’t yet been located. Apple has not admitted any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, saying it acted in “good faith” and “reasonably” thought it had complied with all applicable rules and regulations.

Apple now appears committed to a new partner-based strategy in which it builds the very best hardware on which to run AI, allowing users to choose whichever brand of AI they want to use on-device. At the same time, Apple is focused on building Apple Intelligence as a viable alternative. This will take time, but Apple will no doubt press ahead until it gets Apple Intelligence right.

In a statement, the company told 9to5Mac: “Since the launch of Apple Intelligence, we have introduced dozens of features across many languages that are integrated across Apple’s platforms, relevant to what users do every day, and built with privacy protections at every step.”

The plot thickens (intelligently)

That statement also stressed Apple’s continued focus on building those Apple Intelligence features. You could see that claim as an inevitable reaction to the criticism the company faces. I prefer to see it as confirmation that Apple has adopted the AI+ strategy, (best hardware and a choice of AI, including its own increasingly competitive Apple Intelligence brand). During last week’s earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook described the sheer importance of AI to its ecosystem.

“What truly sets Apple apart is how Apple Intelligence is woven into the core of our platforms, powered by Apple Silicon, and designed from the ground up to deliver intelligence that is fast, personal, and private,” he said. “This is not AI as a standalone feature, but AI as an essential intuitive part of the experience across our devices.”

More importantly, in the long run, Apple believes that by providing the best development platform it can also attract the AI developers and services it needs on which to build its future. I think this approach will succeed.

Still, as the class action settlement shows, the original introduction of Apple Intelligence may enter the history books as a classic case of hype over substance. Under internal and external pressure to regain the initiative in AI development, the company abandoned its usual conservative approach to making big claims, in which it tends to under-promise then over-deliver. Customers like nice surprises more than they enjoy empty promises; Apple usually knows that.

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I spend more time today than ever before interacting with terminal windows, which is something I don't think Past Me would have believed in the early '90s. Back then, poor MS-DOS was the staid whipping boy of the industry, and at least on the consumer side, graphical environments like Windows (and maybe even odder creatures like AmigaOS) seemed poised to stamp the command line into oblivion, leaving text interfaces behind as we all blasted into the ooey-GUI future.

As it turns out, though, the command line is still the best tool for some jobs—many jobs, in fact. I read a wise post some years ago (probably on Slashdot) arguing that a mouse-driven point-and-click interface essentially reduces the user to pointing at something on the screen and grunting, "DO! DO THAT!" at the computer. (The rise of right-click context menus adds the ability for the user to also grunt "MORE THINGS!" but doesn't otherwise add vocabulary.)

The command line, by contrast, gives the user the opportunity to precisely tell the computer what they want done, using words instead of one or two gestalts that the computer must interpret based on context.

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