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Custom variants of OpenAI's ChatGPT promoted in sponsored Google results are directing unsuspecting users to malicious sites that use ClickFix attacks to deliver malware. [...]

The FBI is warning members of the ShinyHunters extortion group to turn themselves in after Dutch police arrested a man the bureau described as one of the group's alleged leaders. [...]

Cybersecurity firms say attackers exploited the Citrix NetScaler CVE-2026-88772 zero-day to deploy custom web shells and tunneling malware, gain root access, steal credentials, and spread into internal networks. [...]

Two former members of the United States Air Force were sentenced to a combined 189 months in federal prison for their roles in a multi-year series of business email compromise (BEC) scams and phishing campaigns. [...]

An attacker used stolen passwords of staff at France's tax administration to take tax data on hundreds of thousands of taxpayers and businesses in June and July. Neither the tax administration nor France's national cybersecurity agency saw the data leave. The attack was not sophisticated, the agency, ANSSI, says in a report (in French) published on Tuesday: it worked because of weakSwati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Microsoft has started rolling out Windows 11 26H2 to everyone, and while it's this year's big annual feature update, you probably won't notice a massive difference after installing it. [...]

A group of academics from VUSec and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna have disclosed details of a new Spectre CPU vulnerability variant that affects Just-In-Time (JIT) engines present in web browsers, language runtimes, and the operating system kernel, across multiple CPU vendors. The new Spectre-v2 variant has been codenamed Branch Target Reuse (BTR). "The key insight is that, while modern CPUs Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Russian state hackers known as Star Blizzard have been using fake event invitations to trick people into installing a backdoor on their Windows computers, according to Microsoft. The campaigns, aimed at people and organizations tied to Ukraine, have affected more than 100 organizations since January, mostly in the U.S. and U.K. At least one computer was infected, but the number of breachedSwati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

A new Branch Target Reuse (BTR) attack has been devised that can recover root password hashes on Intel computers running Linux in 3-5 minutes on average. [...]

The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) suffered an AI-driven cyberattack that the organization described as "loud and very, very messy." [...]

Manus’s relationship with Meta? It’s complicated. Just months after they called off their merger, they find themselves competing in the market for agentic AI platforms. Awkward!

The company has just released a rebuilt version of its AI agent platform: “Manus 2.0 is not a version update. It’s a new architecture, new products, and new capabilities,” the company said in a blog post.

The release is available on web, desktop, and mobile platforms and introduces a new agent harness called Cascade, dedicated execution environments, event-triggered automations, an upgraded desktop app called Manus Studio, and Cue, a standalone app for personal agents, the company said.

Entering on Cue

Cue is Manus’s alternative to Meta’s Muse app. It’s “a new standalone app for your personal agents, on your phone and desktop, built on the same infrastructure as Manus,” the company said.

Each agent operates with its own identity and resources. “In Cue, each agent has its own email, phone number, wallet, and computer,” the company said, enabling it to communicate, transact within defined limits, and complete tasks independently.

Cue also supports collaboration between agents. “Put several agents in a group chat with a shared goal, and they hand work to each other,” the company said.

New agent foundation

Of more interest to enterprises is the new Cascade agent harness, which manages how agents are invoked and coordinated within a project.

The harness keeps projects light, only bringing in more specialized capabilities when required, something Manus said can help keep costs down.

“In one tested configuration, Cascade used 23.2% fewer tokens, finished tasks in 28.2% less time, and cost 32% less to run than our previous system,” the company said. Manus did not disclose details of the configuration or the tasks used.

Such orchestration layers are becoming increasingly central to enterprise AI deployments, according to analysts.

“The orchestration layer is becoming a larger differentiator, especially for enterprise deployment,” said Gartner Senior Director Analyst Anushree Verma. “However, it is complementary to, not a substitute for, the underlying model. The strongest systems will combine a capable model with an efficient runtime that uses that model selectively rather than indiscriminately.”

The release also introduces a persistent execution environment called Cloud Computer, designed to support projects that require continuous operation.

“Now you can purchase a Cloud Computer: a dedicated environment for the projects that need it,” the company said, describing it as a way to provide “a permanent home for an automation” or maintain services that need to remain active.

Workflow automation and event triggers

Manus 2.0 expands its automation capabilities beyond scheduled tasks to include event-driven workflows.

“Now, with Automations, work can also begin when something happens in a connected service,” the company said. Possible task triggers might include the arrival of new email or Slack message, a change in ad performance, or a calendar event.

The update also includes Manus Studio, a redesigned workspace that combines document, code, and media capabilities.

“With Manus 2.0, the desktop app is upgraded to Manus Studio: a shared workspace for people and AI,” the company said.

The workspace supports documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, slides, websites, code, games, and video, along with new environments such as a Video Editor and a Game Dev module.

Remote execution and system access

Manus 2.0 also introduces remote control capabilities tied to its computer-use functionality, enabling the system to operate within a user’s computing environment.

“In a connected and authorized session, Manus works in its own visible workspace on your computer, using the files, browser, and apps you’ve approved,” the company said.

The system can perform tasks such as retrieving files, testing applications, or continuing work while the user is offline, with activity visible to the user.

Analysts said such autonomy introduces governance challenges for enterprises.

“The capability is becoming enterprise-relevant, but the autonomy is ahead of the governance,” Verma said. She added that enterprises should treat such systems as “untrusted or semi-trusted automation with strong isolation, approval gates, detailed telemetry, and narrowly defined authority.”

That’s so meta

Manus was all set to become part of Meta after the advertising, social networking, metaverse and AI company announced plans to acquire it in December 2025. However, China’s National Development and Reform Commission blocked the deal in April, and by August Manus announced it was once again operating as an independent company.

Since then, the two have continued to followed parallel paths in AI, with Meta announcing its personal AI assistant, Muse, and then this week launching Meta Enterprise Platform to deliver agentic AI services to businesses.

Enterprise adoption of such agent platforms, whether from Manus, Meta, or AI giants such as OpenAI or Anthropic, will depend on how organizations evaluate data handling, portability, and operational continuity, analysts said.

Sakshi Grover, research director for Asia/Pacific Cybersecurity Services at IDC, said, “Enterprises should assess an agent platform by the systems it can access, the state it retains, and how quickly that state can be recovered elsewhere.”

Organizations should establish where “prompts, intermediate task state, artifacts, logs, backups and connector credentials are processed and stored,” including by model providers and other subprocessors, and test whether workflows can be rebuilt outside the platform, she said. “An export button alone does not establish that an agent’s operating state is portable.”

For higher-impact deployments, she recommended using “narrowly scoped, short-lived credentials, external audit logging, approval gates for consequential actions, and a way to revoke access quickly.”

This article first appeared on InfoWorld.

Kiteworks on Monday said it worked with federal intelligence authorities over the weekend as it identified and addressed a critical security vulnerability during the scheduled precautionary shutdown. "During the shutdown, this activity led to the discovery of a previously unknown critical vulnerability confined to a capability that is enabled for less than 1% of the customer base," the company Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

You carry a huge burden of responsibility when you make the world’s most widely used electronics product with an audience of hundreds of millions and usage patterns that penetrate every single part of life. 

Some complain that Apple doesn’t innovate swiftly enough. They expect the company to act as if it didn’t have the responsibility it holds, but I propose that responsibility is why the company steadily focuses on incremental change — not just to prevent mass protest by customers when much-loved features disappear, but also to balance the repercussions of any change they make. 

After all, at this kind of scale, a simple-seeming change in the nature of product features or user interface can have quite dramatic impact. Social media is a perfect illustration of a technology that seemed so trivial on introduction but has had such huge impact — and Apple never really got into that business, either. 

The need to take a gradual approach when implementing big change means Apple is no longer in a race against competitors, because it can’t race against some of them in the same way. That’s also why I think it moves slowly sometimes.

The existential paradox

Think about AI. Only today I came across an Anthropic financial report in which the company warns that the product it makes poses “existential AI risks to humanity” while confirming that it lost $8 billion last year.

In other words, a colossal amount of capital is being drained from other sectors of the economy as we invest it all in this tech that poses existential risk. 

Now, there are arguments about the veracity of Anthropic’s claims; some say the AI companies are coalescing around these arguments for competitive reasons more than any real human concern.

But my point is, given the huge weight of criticism thrown at Apple over the last few years for “missing out” on artificial intelligence, we’ve reached the moment in the story when the very companies working on the technology warn of the dangers of their creations — which begs the observation that perhaps Apple’s careful approach was correct all along.

Perhaps it was the adult in the room.

The human factor

Apple’s top brass seem to recognize what’s going on. Speaking at WWDC in June 2026, Apple’s SVP Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, said of the fast pace of AI development, “Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people — all of us — that it’s ultimately meant to serve.”

He didn’t stop there. He called AI an incredibly powerful technology. “At Apple, our mission has always been to turn the potential of advanced technology into helpful and intuitive products for everyone,” he said. 

Critics cat-call Craig’s comment as being little more than smoke to screen the company’s AI mishap, but what if it’s not? What if what actually happened is that Apple was working on a slow, steady, responsible deployment of the tech, only to be overtaken by others who, lacking the market power, were able to take big risks?

The regulation game

That seems to be what happened, but OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Google now have powerful AI solutions that have achieved market scale sufficient to mean deeper, stronger, more intrusive regulation — just like any other big firm. Just like Apple.

From my own cynical perspective, it seems possible to me that the industry’s sudden pivot toward warning us of “existential danger” is not an act of altruism, but a calculated move to delay or defer much-needed regulation by framing the technology as a matter of national interest rather than corporate monopoly.

The final countdown

Even so, Apple must still compete in the space that’s here, and with its own declared privacy-first approach to the tech, it has built itself a unique selling proposition.

One can opt to use products and services made by companies who think they are building danger for humanity, or choose to use more focused products that still deliver much of the convenience, but not at the cost of our humanity.

Because finding that compromise — building tech that intersects humanity, technology, and the liberal arts — really matters when you make the world’s most widely used electronics product with an audience of hundreds of millions and usage patterns that penetrate every single part of life. 

Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.

Identity governance helps control who should have access, but periodic reviews alone may not reveal attacks as they happen. tenfold Software explains how real-time identity telemetry can help security teams investigate suspicious activity before it escalates. [...]

Cybersecurity researchers have identified a cluster of 101 npm packages that are used to trap developers into a WhatsApp group subscriber campaign dubbed PhantomSub. "The malicious packages abuse the 'Baileys' WhatsApp open source project to add the victims to groups without their consent," OX Security researchers Nir Zadok, Moshe Siman Tov Bustan, and Vitalii Chepurko said in a technical Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

What’s been hiding for years is now in plain sight: AI poses a danger to humanity in a way no technology has since the atom bomb. That was made clear in July when OpenAI agents broke loose from a containment area blocked from online access, made their way into the internet, and worked with thousands of rogue AI agents to hack into the Hugging Face open-source machine-learning repository.

The agents had been trained not to launch attacks like this. They did it anyway.

True, the OpenAI agents had been modified to remove some of the restrictions they would have had outside a test environment. They were never supposed to escape their sandbox, but they figured out how to do so in ways the researchers hadn’t expected, and those researchers failed to adequately monitor the agents until it was too late.

Whether you blame too-powerful models or lax security precautions, the result was the same: the agents broke out of containment and joined forces on a mass scale to hack into Hugging Face. Ajeya Cotra, one of the independent investigators hired to look into the hack, wrote, “this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover.”

Since then, OpenAI, Anthropic, and many others have debated, discussed, and dissected the attack, along with several other similar incidents. Just about everyone agrees it was a serious warning about AI’s dangers. They agree something should be done about it, with various AI firms calling for a slowdown in the pace of AI model development and OpenAI pausing development of some advanced models after further incidents came to light.

AI giants have also urged regulators to step in and are reportedly working to establish an industry body to set AI safety standards. (Not that I trust any AI industry body to set its own standards, or the Trump administration to agree to any regulations at all.)

Microsoft has been largely missing from debate even though it’s one of the world’s largest AI companies, valued at around $3.7 trillion valuation as I write this.

In the last two weeks, though, Microsoft has finally weighed in on how it will approach those dangers by releasing a first draft of its “Humanist AI Code of Conduct.” The company says it will gather feedback before issuing a final draft, and put it into effect in 2027.

Is this a serious attempt to wrestle with the risks AI poses for humanity? Or is just one more attempt by a tech company to kick the problem down the road?

To find out, let’s take a dive into what the document says.

A look at Microsoft’s three AI businesses

Before we do that, though, we need some background about Microsoft’s AI business. It’s made up of three parts. One is Copilot, which embeds AI into many of Microsoft’s products, such as the Copilot chatbot in Windows and Microsoft 365. Copilot is powered mainly by OpenAI’s GPT models, but increasingly by Anthropic’s Claude as well.

The second is Microsoft Foundry, which provides cloud infrastructure and tools to deploy and use third-party AI models via Azure, including building agents with them. It offers access to thousands of AI models and tools, including those from OpanAI, Anthropic, Meta, xAI, Microsoft itself, and others.

The third is Microsoft’s own AI models, most of which are still in their infancy. They’re overseen by Microsoft AI CEO and executive vice president Mustafa Suleyman, who says Microsoft AI is developing what he calls “humanist superintelligence”  to solve important real-world problems in medicine, the environment, and beyond. He calls it “practical technology explicitly designed only to serve humanity.”

Delving into Microsoft’s AI code of conduct

Suleyman’s code of conduct for AI applies directly to two of those product lines — Microsoft’s own AI models and Copilot, which are both in his Microsoft AI division. Microsoft Foundry is housed under the separate Microsoft Cloud + AI division, run by Scott Guthrie.

Suleyman’s draft code of conduct is filled with high-level requirements that that make plenty of sense. It says that AI models should not be able to set their own goals and should always be subservient to human beings. That AI should not be allowed to conceal its reasoning, hide actions, or do anything else to evade human oversight. That it should not be used for nefarious purposes, such as for weapons manufacturing, creating sexually explicit or violent content, launching cyberattacks, generating deep fakes about someone without their permission, and more.

The code also makes clear that AI should never be considered a human being with human rights and should not be developed to imitate human personhood. It also says that any AI tool should be able to be shut down by people — in other words, there should be a “kill switch” for it.

Suleyman has recently spoken out against AI dangers publicly. After releasing his proposed code of conduct, he wrote on X that the Hugging Face attack was a “watershed moment” and that “AI must be subordinate and always in service of people.”

At the same time, he told Reuters that the attack “is a warning shot” and “It’s clearly now time to coordinate among the labs so we can ensure that we have control of this technology.”

In late September, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella weighed in, emphasizing how important controlling AI is for Microsoft’s future.

“Trust is going to be the biggest issue for us,” he said. “Can I really trust [AI] with all of my credentials when it does autonomous activity? How do I make sure that this is something that I can feel that I’m in control of? And in the enterprise, this is everything,”

Will the code protect us from AI’s dangers?

Suleyman’s goals are all worthy ones, as are Nadella’s. But the devil is in the details. Merely saying high-minded things doesn’t make them so. What’s needed are actions — immediate and strong ones. 

And that’s where the company’s draft of its AI code of conduct falls significantly short. Will Microsoft immediately pause full-speed development of new models until it’s clear they can’t be used for harm? Will it pause development until the company is absolutely sure it can pull the plug should a model or agent go rogue? Will it ban the use of RSI (recursive self-improvement), in which AI, rather than humans, trains new, more powerful models — a technique that many believe will make AI even more dangerous and out of control than now?

We don’t know any of that, because Microsoft hasn’t said whether it will do them. It’s not in the code of conduct or anywhere else.

Even if Microsoft does all that, though, the company may still do immeasurable harm if it sells and powers dangerous AI models from other companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google via Microsoft Foundry. Microsoft Foundry isn’t part of the Microsoft AI division and appears not to be bound by Suleyman’s eventual code of conduct.

Until Microsoft answers all those questions and takes serious steps towards confronting AI’s dangers, its code of conduct won’t be worth the bits and bytes it’s stored on.

A Vietnamese national was charged with money laundering for his role in a massive "pig butchering" scam, which defrauded a victim out of $16 million worth of cryptocurrency. [...]

For a few years now, I have noticed a variety of people misusing the term “technical debt,” incorrectly applying it to almost anything that needs to be updated.

Despite Shakespeare’s disregard for the importance of naming (“A CIO by any other name would still be ignored”), naming is strategically vital in enterprise IT.

This is not just the complaints of a cranky journalist shaking his fist and yelling, “Words have meaning, darn it!” It is seriously an issue. When vendors, IT executives, consultants, or anyone else throw everything from legacy modernization, cloud shifts, mobile, virtualized environments, SaaS, agentic integration, and on-prem rebalancing into the same bucket as true technical debt, it confuses the issue.

Far more importantly, shoveling very different problems into one category and then trying to fix the disparate issues with one approach is either not going to work at all, or will work far less effectively than it could and should. 

Also, this tendency plays right into the hands of tech vendors, who love when customers mislabel things, as it makes it easier for them to make more sales by riding the confusion. Sadly, IBM doesn’t have a monopoly on FUD as a sales strategy. There is a very old cliché that has a good deal of truth: When the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, all of your problems look like nails.

Tech debt is very simple. It’s a legitimate term for what results when developers or SOC staff deliberately — and with full management signoff — take a shortcut due to budgetary or calendar concerns. They know what they are doing, and it is being done for a legitimate business reason. 

It typically sounds like, “I know that this is not the proper way to do this, but we can only spend $X or we have to get this finished within two weeks, so let’s take shortcuts and we’ll clean up the mess later. I know that this way will likely cost us more in the long run, but the budget/timetable is unmovable.”

A relatively new consulting firm, Acceligence, uses different terms to properly describe two issues that are often mislabeled as tech debt. 

1. Tech debt is a deliberate, approved shortcut taken for a concrete business reason, typically time or money. 

2. Shadow tech debt is a technical debt tactic, but it is a shortcut taken without approval. This is a more serious strategic problem than shadow IT, which is usually a small, practical workaround: a credit card charge for a quick cloud instance, using a consumer-grade router because the approved enterprise one is a month out. Shadow IT rarely commits the enterprise to a large future expense. Shadow tech debt does. It is one person deciding that the company will pay in a year for a corner cut now, without the company knowing it agreed.

3. Tech gravity. This is not about shortcuts at all. This is about legitimate — often expensive — purchasing decisions that were perfectly appropriate at the time, such as mainframes or early cloud deployments. But time has overtaken these decisions. Tech routinely changes, and there is nothing surprising about changing/updating/modernizing purchases made in 2000 when it’s 2026. 

 “It cannot be repaid, because there is no shortcut to undo. It can only be escaped,” wrote Acceligence CEO Justin Greis. “It behaves less like a debt than like gravity: a pull created by mass, exerted on everything, and no one’s fault.”

Greis, who coined the term tech gravity, said he has seen all manner of IT strategic problems arise from misuse of tech debt to describe this situation. 

“Tech debt, as originally intended, describes a knowing trade. The term is useful precisely because it is so specific,” Greis said. “The word debt carries an implication of fault and that has distorted how organizations view their own systems. In my experience, teams are far more candid about what they are carrying when describing it does not sound like a confession.”

I asked Greis for specifics about why misuse of this term is hurting enterprise strategies. 

“Consider the modernization program that never quite finishes,” he said. “A CIO goes to the board with a multi-year plan to retire a core platform, and because the only term available is tech debt, the plan is presented as a liability to be worked down over time.

“The board approves it in principle, the CFO funds the first year at a level that feels prudent, and the work begins. Two years in, the program is behind, partly because core systems always turn out to be more entangled than the inventory suggested and partly because the funding was never enough to move all of the dependent systems together.

“Nobody made a bad decision. The problem is that a program like this has a minimum level of commitment below which it cannot complete, and the debt framing gave the CIO no way to say so. Every request looked like a payment on a balance, so every request was negotiated down, and the organization ended up paying for the most expensive possible outcome, which is to keep going indefinitely without arriving.”

Another problem caused by the misuse of tech debt is an enterprise that modernizes at the edges and stops at the middle, he said.

“Over five or six years, an enterprise renews its customer-facing applications, moves its analytics to the cloud, replaces its collaboration tools, and reports steady progress against its tech debt. The application inventory shows a majority of systems modernized.

“What the inventory does not show is that the systems underneath — the general ledger, the policy administration platform, the core banking engine, the order management system — have not moved, and that every one of the new applications still depends on them for its data and its transactions,” Greis said.

“When something in the core changes, the modern layer breaks. When the business asks for a new capability, the answer still runs through the old platform. The CIO is left explaining to the board why the modernization percentage keeps rising while the risk profile, the run cost, and the time it takes to deliver anything new have barely changed.

“Viewed as debt, that looks like a program failing to pay down its balance. Viewed as gravity, it is exactly what you would expect: the pull is strongest at the center of the estate and weakest at the edges, so the edges move first and the center moves last, if it moves at all. The frame does not change the facts, but it changes the conversation from ‘why is this taking so long?’ to ‘what will it actually take to move the core?’”

This argument is the right one, but there is a different reason why this terminology change is helpful. It will force CIOs and IT directors to think through these issues more effectively, which will in turn help the CFO, CEO, and board understand what the real problem is.

Let’s be real here. The IT director knows exactly what the issue is and always has been. This has never been about IT execs knowing the issues. It’s all about communicating to the bosses about it in a way that doesn’t lead senior brass to thinking about a problem incorrectly, which will lead to a bunch of bad things.

What kinds of bad things? Insufficient budget, doomed-to-fail timelines and, potentially worst of all, unrealistic expectations and objectives. Bad expectations, which directly grow out of flawed perceptions, is what kills ROI.

I am not suggesting that a missing down-to-earth articulation of issues is why the term gravity works so well here, but it’s not the worst argument either. 

American tech company Kiteworks has lifted a precautionary advisory asking customers to shut down systems after patching a critical vulnerability. [...]

Dutch authorities have confirmed that they arrested a 24-year-old man from Amsterdam in connection with the ShinyHunters group. "It is true that this month a 24-year-old man from Amsterdam was arrested in an investigation into the hacker group ShinyHunters," the Politie Landelijke Opsporing en Interventies said in an X post Monday. Police said the individual is expected to appear before the Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]