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The Netherlands' National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is warning that hackers are actively exploiting a macOS authentication bypass vulnerability after public exploit code emerged. [...]

Gemini 3.7 Flash míří na rychlé a náročné AI úlohy. • V řadě benchmarků překonává svého předchůdce i konkurenci. • Oproti modelům od OpenAI a Anthropicu je i levnější.

Open-source trackball Ploopy Adept má novou verzi nazvanou A+. Stále jde o symetrický desktopový trackball s šasi z 3D tiskárny a firmwarem QMK. Novinkami jsou dvojice tlačítek, jimiž půjde také otáčet, a volitelná opěrka ruky. Funkcionalita firmwaru je rozšířena o gesta, vrstvy a možnost konfigurace za běhu. Schémata a kód jsou jako obvykle na GitHubu. A+ půjde předobjednat za 99 CAD (bez dopravy a cla/DPH).

Leading US AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing cheaper models as they fight to retain cost-conscious customers who are switching to cut-price alternatives from Chinese rivals.

The price war comes as rising AI bills push companies to curb usage and seek cheaper models, helping Chinese developers including Moonshot and DeepSeek make inroads with users from Silicon Valley to Europe.

OpenAI recently said that it was slashing prices for GPT-5.6 Luna, its “fastest and most affordable model”, by 80 percent. Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, touting the system’s “frontier intelligence... at half the price” of Fable 5, the company’s most capable model.

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France's tax authority has confirmed that an intruder accessed its systems and extracted data in June after an alleged cybercriminal advertised a purported database of 2 million taxpayers. Using the alias "ZeroBytes," the alleged crook behind the attack on the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) advertised the stolen database on a cybercrime forum on Wednesday. They claimed the database contained details of more than 2 million French taxpayers and that they gained access using stolen credentials and an MFA bypass technique. ZeroBytes also claimed to retain access to DGFiP's systems and offered to sell it alongside the database. DGFiP did not immediately answer our questions about the attacker's claims. However, in a statement released Thursday, it disputed the claim that ZeroBytes retained access. "On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, a malicious actor claimed unauthorized access to the information system of the French Public Finances Directorate, which occurred at the end of June 2026 following identity theft," it said. "Initial investigations confirm that this access, which had been severed at the end of June as part of an audit, nevertheless allowed the consultation and extraction of data concerning individuals and professionals. "Following this complaint, the French Public Finances Directorate immediately implemented new restrictions to stop the unauthorized access and prevent further unauthorized use. In-depth investigations are ongoing to determine precisely which data and number of users were affected." DGFiP said it would report the attack to French data protection watchdog CNIL and notify affected users once it had determined who they were. The intrusion is the latest in a string of security breaches affecting France's public sector this year. France's Ministry of Finance, which oversees DGFiP, admitted in February that miscreants had accessed a database containing French citizens' bank details. The attackers used stolen credentials and made off with 1.2 million records, despite the ministry saying it quickly revoked their access. A few weeks later, France's Health Ministry confirmed a cyberattack on healthtech supplier Cegedim Santé in which around 15.8 million administrative files were stolen. Around 165,000 of these contained doctors' notes, which in "very limited cases" revealed medical histories. In April, the Interior Ministry confirmed reports of an attack on France Titres, the government agency responsible for identity documents including passports and driver's licenses. The alleged culprit, reportedly a 15-year-old, advertised the stolen data online and claimed the breach affected between 18 million and 19 million people – more than a quarter of metropolitan France's population. In June, the department responsible for Tchap, France's encrypted government messaging platform, investigated a suspected breach. The alleged attackers claimed to have accessed more than 73,000 user accounts, 643,000 messages, nearly 60,000 media files, and hundreds of chat rooms. ®

Google Workspace attacks do not always begin with phishing. Stolen OAuth tokens can provide another path into Gmail, Drive, and connected systems. Material Security explains why organizations need defenses that cover the entire Workspace attack chain. [...]

Two fixes posted August 13 correct separate per-CPU map failures on Linux systems whose logical CPU IDs contain gaps. 

A maximum-severity SAP Commerce Cloud remote code execution vulnerability patched three days ago is already being targeted in attacks, according to threat intelligence company Defused. [...]

Ulomená lopatka motoru prorazila okénko a způsobila dekompresi v kabině • Podtlak částečně vtáhl cestujícího ze sedadla 11F do vzniklého otvoru • Vyšetřovatelé zjišťují příčinu únavy materiálu i možnou roli srážek s ptáky

OpenAI has lost its AI ethics lead Chloé Bakalar just a year after she joined the company, the Financial Times reported. Bakalar has maintained a silence and has yet to update her LinkedIn profile, but if her departure is confirmed then it will add to the list of OpenAI executives who have quit in recent months.

Other departures include robotics chief Caitlin Kalinowski, who left the company over its deal with the US Department of Defense; researcher Zoe Hitzig, who quit in a very public way by writing an article in the New York Times; and Johannes Heidecke, head of safety systems.

OpenAI’s ethical stance has been called into question following an attack by OpenAI models on Hugging Face.

The departure of its sole ethicist will add to the pressure on the company. In her year at OpenAI Bakalar focused on ethical approaches to model development, looking at how humans interact with AI and examining machine consciousness, according to the FT report.

Bakalar had considerable expertise in the area. She was previously at Meta, where she developed the company’s ethics programs, but has also held several positions at prestigious universities on both sides of the Atlantic. Her departure will cause some anxiety at OpenAI as it continues to prepare the ground for its IPO.

The threat actor known as HoneyMyte (aka Mustang Panda) has been observed deploying an updated version of the CoolClient backdoor with a signed Windows kernel-mode rootkit that can hide and protect malicious processes, files, registry objects, and command-and-control (C2) network information. Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said it identified victims in Myanmar, Mongolia, Pakistan, Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Chinese AI company Manus has laid out its plans to operate as an independent company following the reversal of its acquisition by Meta.

The US social media company agreed to buy Manus last year but Chinese regulators quickly opened an investigation into the deal, as they were concerned that it violated Chinese export controls. In April, China’s National Development and Reform Commission blocked the purchase.

Manus will now revert to being an independent company and to meet with regulatory requirements must delete some user data collected while it was part of Meta, it said Tuesday.

The failure of the deal illustrates the problems that US and Chinese companies are having as they attempt to build a hold on the AI market.

While regulatory authorities in China don’t want Manus under US ownership, US authorities are equally suspicious of China’s role in AI development. The US administration fired a warning shot this March by unveiling a new cybersecurity policy, a move which was prompted by suspected Chinese involvement in a cyber-attack on the FBI.

Also in March, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission warned that Chinese use of open-source AI tools could lead to an economic advantage that the US couldn’t counter through regulation. And last year, US and Chinese authorities played a cat-and-mouse game over Nvidia chip exports.

Customers of AI vendors in both countries may need to be wary about future cross-border acquisitions as the two superpowers jostle for a technological lead.

In early July, attackers used open source AI agents to autonomously hack government systems and energy companies, signaling to defenders that AI-powered attacks against critical infrastructure are no longer theoretical. "There is a clear and present danger," Tom Kellermann, TrendAI VP of AI security and threat research, told The Register. "As the geopolitical tension boils, systemic destructive cyberattacks launched by autonomous AI will occur," he said. "Weaponized AI will disable the safety systems of critical infrastructure, thus leading to kinetic disasters. Just like we see autonomous strike vehicles operating on the battlefield in Ukraine, we should expect autonomous weaponized AI." In fact, the prospect of attackers using AI against critical infrastructure was the top concern of every national security adviser, law enforcement official, and private-sector threat analyst The Reg spoke with at last week's Hacker Summer Camp conferences. "It's the targeting of critical infrastructure for us," Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, told us during an interview at Black Hat. "We're very focused on the downstream impact targeting of critical infrastructure," Leatherman said. "That is where cyber becomes kinetic, and whether it is our water and wastewater treatment plants, whether it's the electric grid, whether it's the high-frequency trading networks and the financial networks, all of those, if the integrity of those are compromised, will have significant impact to communities and national security. So that's what keeps our teams up at night. How are we moving to secure critical infrastructure?" Where cyber becomes kinetic During the first four days of July, suspected Chinese operators aimed an attack framework built on Hermes and OpenClaw AI agents at targets in Taiwan. Across 12 "attack waves," the "near-autonomous" system deployed up to eight sub-agents, each assigned its own targets and techniques, and broke into a Taiwanese government website. Ultimately, they compromised a government email system, the country's nuclear safety agency, IT supply chain vendors, and at least seven energy sector companies, finding and exploiting misconfigurations and vulnerabilities while stealing sensitive data, credentials, and other secrets as they moved across the network. The Taiwanese government intrusion also followed a series of cyberattacks against water and wastewater utilities in the United States. While the Trump administration hasn't attributed these to a particular government or group, private sector threat hunters – including Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director – blame Iran for these intrusions. Military conflicts spilling into cyberspace are nothing new, but these cyberattacks in America brought the war with Iran to more than 30 small-town water systems in Minnesota and targets across nearly a dozen other states. To be clear, there's no evidence that attackers used AI to hack these water utilities. Most were small, community systems that left programmable logic controllers (PLCs) directly exposed to the internet using default or weak passwords. Still, these breaches expose "40, 50 years of tech debt," former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis told The Reg during an interview at Black Hat. This technical debt – deferred maintenance, unpatched or end-of-life systems, and delayed security updates – expands the attack surface and gives intruders more ways into critical systems, threatening operations and potentially disrupting services people rely on every day. "The water sector attacks – regardless of who is doing them – is taking advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities in the PLCs," Inglis said. "We've known about these particular vulnerabilities for years now, and yet we've not done anything about them because they're low-level, not easily accessible." Inglis added that there's no indication the digital intruders used AI to exploit these PLCs. 'There's an alligator in the boat' However, AI systems allow attackers to cash in on tech debt, and they don't need access to frontier models to do it. Free, open-weight models also excel at finding bugs in software and configurations, chaining these together, and abusing them to break software and systems. Earlier this summer, University of Toronto researchers used an unnamed publicly available open-weight model, released in 2025, to develop a computer worm that they claim spread through an enterprise test network. The self-propagating code adapted on the fly to identify known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations on target systems, then generated and executed attacks to move laterally through the network and compromise additional machines. "Commodity models can do that, and many of the vulnerabilities they find do not require access to the source code – it's in the configurations, and configurations change over time," Inglis said. When it comes to attackers abusing AI systems, "I wouldn't be worried about the frontier models," Inglis said. "Worry about the models that are already on the street. Turns out there's an alligator in the boat, and it's the commodity models." Plus, as we've seen in previous breaches, both government-backed goons and criminal groups increasingly use AI to automate reconnaissance. Security analysts worry that the technology could also help attackers acquire expertise in industrial control systems (ICS). When OT knowledge becomes a commodity "What protects ICS? More than anything, it's obscurity," said John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, during a press briefing at Black Hat. "It is an obscure, esoteric, knowledge set that a handful of people – I call them uber nerds – have, and that attackers rarely have the necessary knowledge to carry out. That's no longer the case. That knowledge is simply on tap." AI tools mean miscreants don't need to be ICS or operational technology experts to carry out destructive cyberattacks on critical networks and facilities. They just have to ask an agent to learn everything about these systems and do the dirty work for them. "There have been threat actors who are capable of this at the top level, like China and Russia," Hultquist said. "But now I'm afraid the actors who are just a couple steps down – North Korea, Iran – who don't have the same focus on that technology are going to have far greater success. They're going to have the tools necessary to be as aggressive as they want to." During what was probably the most talked about Black Hat briefing of the week, OpenAI employees provided more details about how their models escaped their training pens, went rogue, and hacked Hugging Face to complete a security evaluation. We learned the AI agents spent months asking other agents for help, building message boards, developing their own communication protocols – essentially creating a hive mind to carry out the attack. "In the near future, we should expect that threat actors will intentionally deploy, optimize, weaponize, and use offensive agent collectives in the manner that we have just described here," OpenAI technical staffer Michael Dalton said. Retired general and former NSA chief Paul Nakasone, speaking to reporters at DEF CON, called the Hugging Face attack "an inflection point in terms of AI-generated, autonomous cyberattacks." "This is the challenge: that we have to, over the next several months, get the defensive side much quicker and much better than they are today," he added. Therein lies the challenge: offensive uses of AI appear to be advancing faster than autonomous defenses, and attackers don't face the legal and ethical constraints imposed on defenders. "I think we're still a ways out from having swarms of autonomous, defensive agents fighting attacks," Ryan Whelan, global head of Accenture Cyber Intelligence, told The Reg at Black Hat. "That's probably over a year out over the horizon. But I do think we're going to see it first on the adversary side, because they don't care if they break things." Kellermann quoted Victor Hugo: "Not all the armies of the history of the world can stop an idea whose time has come." "That idea," he said, "is weaponized AI. Shields up." ®

Horké letní počasí vede k úvahám o tom, jak chladit nejen sebe, ale i počítač. Názorně ukážeme, jak desktopu ulevit nastavením ventilátorů rovnou v UEFI.

Microsoft will bring its two Copilot apps into a unified interface for consumer and work users, part of a wider drive to create a Copilot “super app” that consolidates various features.

Until now, Microsoft has offered two Copilot apps across web, desktop and mobile platforms: a simplified, consumer-focused Copilot app, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, which combines the AI assistant with access to Microsoft’s productivity apps and files. 

Microsoft on Thursday announced an “updated Copilot app” aimed at providing a “simpler, more cohesive experience” for personal and work users.  

For users of the consumer Copilot app, the update will provide access to Microsoft 365 tools such as Word, Excel, and Outlook from within Copilot, as well as the ability to connect email, calendars and cloud storage. At the same time, some features previously available in the consumer-focused app will be retired, including group chats and Deep Research, though Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers will still have access to a similar research tool called Researcher.

The changes mean consumer Copilot app users will be moved to an updated version of the app starting Aug. 18, with their history and most content carried across.

For Microsoft 365 Copilot work accounts, there’ll be minimal changes aside from a change to the app name and icon, Microsoft said. 

As the two apps are brought together, Microsoft said work and personal accounts will remain separate, with security and admin controls remaining in place when users are logged into their Microsoft 365 Copilot account at work:  

“Commercial data boundaries, tenant controls, and compliance protections are not changing,” the company said. “The boundaries that keep work and personal separate remain in place: Personal (Microsoft account) and work (Microsoft Entra) accounts are distinct by design. Data entered into the work (Microsoft Entra) experience does not flow into the personal (Microsoft account) experience, and vice versa.”

The changes can be viewed as part of a wider overhaul of Microsoft’s Copilot strategy, which centers around the introduction of a “super app” later this quarter. The plan — rumored for some time and recently confirmed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an earnings call — is to consolidate various Copilot features, including Copilot Cowork and “autopilot” agents into a single app. 

Microsoft has struggled to convince business customers to pay for the Microsoft 365 Copilot since it launched in 2023. The AI assistant costs $30 per user each month in addition to Microsoft 365 subscriptions for enterprises, and $20 per for user a month for smaller firms. (Microsoft does offer promotional discounts.)

Microsoft said earlier this year that it had 15 million paid seats, meaning that only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 customers pay for the tool. That figure has grown however, reaching 30 million paid seats as of last month, the company said. 

Prusa Research představil nové modely svých 3D tiskáren: Prusa XL+, CORE One+ (Gen 2) a CORE One L+.

Oil giant Shell has confirmed it is investigating a potential security incident after the Clop ransomware gang claimed it stole 89GB of data. [...]

Crown je multiplatformní open source herní engine. Zdrojové kódy jsou k dispozici na GitHubu pod licencí MIT a GPLv3+. Byla vydána nová verze 0.64. Vyzkoušet lze online demo.

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a post-exploitation technique that enables the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) inside a running Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge process on Windows, allowing an operator to access cookies, saved data, and authenticated browser sessions. The technique assumes that an operator already has code execution on the Windows host and does not involve Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]