Security & IT News

OpenAI’s chatbot tool ChatGPT ranked among the top 10 most impersonated brands in phishing attacks for the first time

Russian hackers from the TA488 group exploited a Zimbra webmail flaw triggered when emails were opened or previewed, stealing credentials and up to 90 days of messages from victims.

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian . Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a new metric: the Genie coefficient. There’s often a gap between one person’s request and another’s understanding. Most of the time, we bridge it using general knowledge. For example, if you ask a friend to get you coffee, they’ll pour a cup from the pot or buy one from a coffee shop. They won’t bring you a bag of raw beans or snatch a cup from a stranger and hand it to you. You never specified any of this. You never had to. One might think the fix is just to specify tasks, questions, and intent better. But in 1987, in their seminal book on AI, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores succinctly captured why that won’t work: “Q: Is there any water in the refrigerator? A: Yes. Q: Where? I don’t see it. A: In the cells of the eggplant.” In human language, wants and desires are always underspecified . It is impossible to list all the caveats, all the limitations, all the exceptions. So how does anyone communicate, if intent can’t be pinned down? Because a reasonable person can make a reasonable guess. Even though wants and desires are always underspecified, a competent person generally knows enough context to get it right or else knows to ask for clarification. Linguists call this pragmatics : Meaning lies in the words and the situation and also in all prior communication, shared culture, and innate human behavior. It doesn’t always work out, of course. Your friend might bring you a hot coffee when you wanted an iced coffee, or an Italian coffee when you wanted a Turkish coffee. The more dissimilar the two people are in age, culture, and background, the more likely the request will be misunderstood in some way. This situation has major implications for AI agents that are increasingly being given requests by humans and expected to fulfill them. They have enormous latitude to get it wrong. An AI agent asked for coffee might buy a coffee plantation or order a cup of coffee for delivery in three weeks. Its actions may be recognizable as “getting coffee,” but not remotely what you intended. They’ll think outside the box because they won’t have our conception of the box. When AI Gets Proactive For most of the last decade, when systems like Alexa or Siri misinterpreted a request, it was annoying, not dangerous. Beyond the AI model itself, what has changed is the harness: the ordinary code that wraps around an AI model, decides when and how to use the model, and controls access to tools like a browser, a low-level command line, or a financial API. Developments in harnesses have turned large-language models that just predict text into AI agents that take actions in the world, without nec

Someone installed a popular AI assistant on a rented server, switched off the setting that makes it ask permission before running risky commands, and pointed it at Thailand's Ministry of Finance, which runs the country's treasury and tax collection. The agent then worked through the ministry's network on its own, checking hosts for ways to gain root access, hunting through file systems, and

Dolphin X malware targets more than 300 apps and includes an AI Profiler that scores infected Windows PCs to help criminals identify high-value victims quickly.

The threat actors behind the Golden Chickens malware-as-a-service (MaaS) ecosystem have resurfaced with four new malware families, indicating that the operators are showing no signs of stopping despite extensive public disclosures into their inner workings. The malware families in question are: TinyEgg, ChonkyChicken, a modularized variant of ChonkyChicken, and a modified web browser credential

Comparitech’s analysis of incidents in the first half of 2026 finds that the emergence of The Gentlemen ransomware has resulted in surge in attacks against higher education

Eight security flaws in NodeBB went public on Wednesday, along with the code to exploit them. Aikido Security rates all eight as high severity and says its AI pentest agents found them in a six-hour review of the forum software's source code. Every version before 4.14.0 is affected. NodeBB has fixed them all, and administrators should be on 4.14.2. The simplest one takes a settings change. A

The Clop ransomware gang (also tracked as Cl0p) is targeting Internet-exposed PTC Windchill and FlexPLM instances in a new data theft extortion campaign. [...]

Redis shipped seven security releases on July 23 after researchers published authenticated RCE PoCs for stock Redis 6.2.22, 7.4.9, 8.6.4, and 8.8.0. All four chains require RESTORE. The Streams chains also need EVAL and XGROUP; the 8.8.0 chain needs EVAL and the bundled RedisBloom module. Redis says the underlying memory flaws may lead to remote code execution. Redis 6.2.23, 7.2.15, and 7.4.10

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a new campaign that involves the use of a malicious program that's dressed up as a Notepad++ plugin to compromise Windows systems. The activity has been attributed by the agency to a threat cluster it tracks as UAC-0099, a Russia-aligned group that has previously observed weaponizing security flaws in WinRAR software to

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. https://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

We spoke with several cybersecurity researchers, who look for unknown vulnerabilities and develop tools to exploit them, about how OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s guardrails affect their work.

A new Dolphin X remote access trojan claims to use an AI-powered profiling feature to score and rank infected users, helping cybercriminals identify which victims should be targeted first. [...]

Origin Energy has confirmed that an unauthorized party accessed and subsequently leaked customer data online, exposing sensitive personally identifiable information (PII), among others. [...]

A malvertising campaign on the Bing search service is pushing a fake Claude desktop app installer hosted on a legitimate Claude.ai domain to deliver the SectopRAT malware. [...]

Getting locked out of an account is no fun. Google has a few ways to help you regain access if you happen to forget your password or lose an authenticator, including recovery contacts and backup codes. Now, Google has a completely new option: your face . You can now give Google a video record of your face and sign into your account with a selfie, which sounds like something people are going to just love. You'll have to set this feature up ahead of time if you want the option of regaining account access with a selfie later on. To get started, verify your account type is supported. You won't be able to configure selfie sign-ins for Workspace accounts, child accounts, or any account enrolled in Google's Advanced Protection Program. Configuring selfie sign-in requires you to record a video, which Google will store on its servers. Google's selfie sign-in landing page includes the typical disclaimers about privacy and data access, promising that the company will keep the video encrypted and won't use it for any other purposes unless you opt in. Read full article Comments

The Series A was led by Battery Ventures, bringing AegisAI total funding to $49 million.

A Russian state-supported espionage group spent months reading Western mailboxes through a then-unknown flaw in Zimbra's webmail client. The payload goes after the last 90 days of email, the organization's entire email directory, the password saved in the browser and the codes kept for two-factor recovery. Opening the message was enough to start it. The NSA, CISA and partner agencies published

An updated government advisory warns that Iranian hackers are exploiting systems used by water and energy providers.