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Prediction market platform Polymarket temporarily suspended trading on Thursday after hackers compromised a third-party service to distribute cryptocurrency-draining JavaScript, with approximately $2.5 million in assets traced to a suspected attacker wallet. [...]

A fake cryptocurrency trading app called Padre Terminal, previously available on the Apple App Store for iOS devices, has been linked to the theft of approximately $23,000 from 27 Solana wallets. [...]

Some attacks take real skill. Others just need someone to leave a door open. This week has both. Exposed passwords, old bugs still getting exploited, and trusted software doing things it shouldn't. There's a strange mix of clever tricks and careless mistakes. Hackers are borrowing trust from familiar apps, websites, and AI tools. Some are using AI to speed things up. Others are leaving their Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

A newly identified advanced persistent threat (APT) group tracked as UAT-11473 was observed exploiting CVE-2026-20127, an authentication-bypass flaw in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controllers, to deploy a custom malware framework called KeyDrift. [...]

A massive search-hijacking campaign involving 319 Chrome extensions with a combined 13.4 million reported installations redirected users' searches through tracking servers to generate advertising revenue from Bing and Yahoo. [...]

A flaw in the Linux kernel's TCP code, tracked as CVE-2026-98432, affects Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and other Linux distributions. The kernel's own CVE team rates it 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale. Anthropic said on October 27 that its AI model wrote an exploit that uses the flaw to let a remote attacker with no credentials run commands as root on Linux servers with a Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Threat actors are delivering malicious loaders and cryptocurrency miners under the guise of artificial intelligence (AI) desktop applications for Anthropic Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT as part of a campaign dubbed Yoba. The activity involves creating fake GitHub projects that claim to be desktop applications like GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, and Claude Opus, only to deliver a malware family called Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Microsoft has resolved a known issue that prevents non-admin users from connecting to devices via Remote Desktop when the "Administrator protection" security feature is enabled. [...]

AI agents can control authenticated browsers, interact with corporate applications, and access sensitive data while appearing to act as legitimate employees. Keep Aware examines three ways agents operate inside browsers and why traditional security tools may struggle to distinguish their activity from human users. [...]

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned federal agencies to patch a high-severity Linux kernel privilege escalation bug that attackers are chaining with the PHP2Shell flaws in the wild. [...]

Google on Wednesday took the wraps off Gemini 4 Carbon, its latest frontier model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities. "It shows significant gains across coding and agentic tasks as well as across key capabilities critical for cybersecurity defense, landing a firm lead in SEC-bench Pro (88.2%) for finding vulnerabilities, ExploitGym (54.8%) for exploitation, and Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Everyone wants to know what Anthropic is up to, and hackers are gleefully exploiting the fact.

New research from cybersecurity company Cofense describes a phishing campaign that hooks overeager enterprise users by making them think they are getting an invite to a private invite-only Anthropic preview.

In reality, adversarial actors are trying to steal Google and Microsoft login credentials, exploiting video teleconferencing software GoTo Webinar branding to do so.

“It sells exclusivity,” said Frank Dickson of Dickson Research. “Fear of missing out is the oldest lure in the book.”

Every organization is trying to figure out where AI fits, he noted, and a private preview of Anthropic’s newest technology is exactly the invitation an ambitious employee would want to accept. “The attackers did not pick Anthropic at random,” he said. “They picked whatever is hottest in the news cycle. Next month, it may be another name.”

How attackers lure users with spoofed Anthropic invites

GoTo Webinar is a widely used platform, and its meeting invitation emails are typically not blocked by security tools. The Cofense researchers found that attackers are exploiting this fact by sending what seems to be an invitation email from a legitimate sender; when users click on the link to register for the fake webinar, they are instead sent to a compromised URL.

The email offers what the researchers call a “tantalizing” offer: “This private, invitation-only virtual session brings together a select group of participants to a focused conversation on AI systems, research, and the future of frontier models,” it reads.

A URL shortener circumvents email security tools, and the attackers use subdomains and dashes (-) to hide the malicious URL. The link itself appears to have been generated by Zapier, a legitimate company whose tools are designed to work with Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI compatible with Model Context Protocol (MCP).

The email sender address appears to be customercare@gotowebinar[.]com (GoTo Webinar’s website is actually www.goto.com). The text contains no obvious spelling errors, and the email contains GoTo Webinar branding. However, the researchers noted, the email sender’s name is “Austin from nthropic,” with the “A” missing.

“Although this is a small misspelling, it is still a useful warning sign,” they pointed out.

If the phishing link is clicked, a Cloudflare CAPTCHA page appears, and must be completed before the login prompt is presented. This serves as the first of two checkpoints to prevent security tools from scanning attackers’ websites.

“Because CAPTCHAs are common on legitimate websites, phishing recipients may believe all is well and everything is secure,” the researchers explained.

Once the CAPTCHA is completed, victims are led to a Zoom-spoofing invitation page. If they want to “attend” the fake event, they must register, and they are prompted to enter their work email address. When they click “Continue with Google” or “Continue with Microsoft,” yet another CAPTCHA page appears.

Both CAPTCHA pages seem to be good at detecting and blocking analysis by VPN services, scanners, Tor browsers, and other security tools, the researchers noted. Also, because there are two distinct CAPTCHA pages, such tools may not be able to follow every step in the attack.

“A CAPTCHA was built to keep bots out,” Dickson pointed out. “Here, it keeps the security scanners out and lets the victims in.”

The fake Google and Microsoft login pages differ a bit, however. The spoofed Google page does not capture passwords, only usernames, which the researchers surmise is due to a misconfiguration; the spoofed Microsoft page does collect both usernames and passwords.

But both are “remarkably similar” to their respective legitimate pages, and their subdomains are “tricky.” The fake Google URL is goo[.]gle-access-eventregister[.]icu, while the Microsoft URL closely mimics real Office and Sharepoint domains, using office[.]com-access-sharepoint[.]com.

Once credentials are submitted, neither login offers a confirmation message, nor does it redirect to legitimate vendor pages. But by that point, attackers have already succeeded at exfiltrating credentials. That means they could compromise an account, access the sensitive documents in that account, or use it as an initial attack vector to further infiltrate the enterprise, the researchers explained.

They advised checking if the branding of a message remains consistent from the email to a login page, searching for small inconsistencies such as minor misspellings, and reminding employees that both the URL and domain determine whether a login page is legitimate.

“Although the logos and design of the page may look correct, threat actors are skilled at mimicry,  especially now with the use of AI,” the researchers noted.

It’s not the employees’ fault

The AI industry’s habit of gated previews and waitlists does not help in these situations, Dickson noted; it trains people to expect exactly this kind of invitation.

“Start with the cracks the attackers left showing,” he advised: The sender supposedly came from “nthropic,” the email carried GoTo Webinar branding, the registration spoofed a Zoom meeting page, and the login pages were from Google or Microsoft. That’s three brands in three clicks, he noted.

The fake login domains, like office[.]com-access-sharepoint[.]com, are built to be skimmed, not read, he pointed out. And, while the Google page collected only usernames, which may be a configuration error, the threat actors behind this campaign will likely fix that.

“Training helps, but I would not hang the defense on an employee squinting at a URL at 4:45 on a Friday,” Dickson said; how much a stolen password is worth is a leadership decision, not a test the employee fails.

Phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) such as passkeys makes a stolen password far less valuable, he noted. But enterprises ultimately have a short to-do list to allow them to defend themselves from this sort of scam, Dickson said:

• Verify any AI preview invitation through an account team or a known contact.
• Treat branding that changes from email to meeting page to login page as a red flag.
• Roll out phishing-resistant MFA. If someone entered credentials on one of these phishing login pages, reset them and review that account’s activity.

“Bottom line: This campaign uses trusted tools to defeat defenses built on trust,” Dickson said. “The employee should not be the last line of defense.”

This article originally appeared on CSOonline.

Following the release of the new 14-inch M6 MacBook Pro earlier this week, Apple has bought the “touch experience” to its professional laptop series, introducing a $2,899 (and up) MacBook Pro you can use with touch. It’s very fast, very thin, very light, with an impressive PROLED XDR display and up to 24 hours battery life.

A brief tour through the key specs

• Very fast: Available in 14- and 16-inch models, the new MacBook Pro uses Apple’s powerful M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. They support up to 64GB of unified memory (128GB on M5 Max) and up to 16TB of storage. Apple says the M5 Max can run LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on-device. 
• Very thin: The 14-inch model is 0.59 inch (1.50 cm) thick, while the 16-inch is 0.63 inch (1.60 cm), so these are only a little thicker than a MacBook Air. Apple says the thinner design is a benefit of the move to an OLED display.
• Very light: The 14-inch weighs 3 pounds, half a pound less than the non-touch equivalent MacBook Pro. The 16-inch weighs 4 pounds, which is 0.7 pounds lighter. 
• Industry-leading PROLED XDR display: A tandem OLED panel with up to 2,000 nits peak brightness (1,000 nits sustained brightness) for both HDR and SDR, and a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. Refresh rate is variable from 10Hz up to 120Hz.
• Up to 24 hours of battery life: Apple says this is the maximum and that battery life varies by use and configuration. It also varies by model — the 14-inch yields “just” 22 hours battery life. Fast charging takes the battery to 50% in 30 minutes.

Unpacking those numbers, it’s crystal-clear Apple has not stinted on the performance of this pro Mac, with a price tag to match.

IDC data shows that 66% of all touch notebooks are purchased by enterprises. This is a form factor bought for flexibility for field workers, educators, and professionals who move between typing, tapping, and handwriting.

Touch on a Mac

Which brings me to the “touch experience.” Apple hasn’t replaced the traditional Mac interface with touch; it has instead augmented the core OS with it. Swipe to scroll a web page, pinch to zoom a photo, drag-and-drop slides between presentations, double-tap a window to fill the screen, or flick a window to tile it into place. You use touch along with trackpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts, the idea being that touch augments them.

Apple built this integration into macOS 27. It’s a physical thing. The touch sensor is built into the display panel rather than being layered above it. In use, Apple says it reduces latency, making you feel like you’re touching the content.

Apple

The other point to this integration, according to Apple, is that many existing applications will automatically work with touch as the macOS translates on-screen actions. Apple has also built APIs developers can use to create apps with touch. The company told us Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; Adobe Lightroom; DaVinci Resolve; Blender; and Cinema 4D will be touch-enabled later this year.

At this point, Apple is evangelizing how touch can be used by creative professionals for things like playing virtual instruments, drawing and fine control of creative apps like Logic Pro or Final Cut Pro. As I see it, it’s as if the Vision Pro was on a Mac, with touch as the interface to the control plane.

It’s an integrated platform thing

When you touch your MacBook keyboard, your display wiggles a bit, but not with this Mac, as Apple has built a new hinge mechanism to keep it steady. Prior to the event, online speculation claimed this hinge was developed alongside that in the iPhone Duo.

Another borrowing from the iPhone is the inclusion of a Dynamic Island on the Mac. Spotlight, Live Activities, and Siri AI all live right there, and you can interact with them on the Mac.

The PROLED XDR display is worth an article in its own right — as is so much about this Mac. As well as built-in support for touch, it also supports Adobe RGB, P3, and DICOM medical imaging reference modes. It supports genlock for virtual production. It boasts a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a variable refresh rate from 10Hz up to 120Hz. For an even better experience, there’s a nano-texture glass option on the screens, which are 14.2 and 16.3 inches diagonally. Following its first look, Tom’s Guide has already called the display “jaw-dropping.”

You also get what Apple called the best audio system in a laptop (six speakers with an all-new woofer design) and plenty of interconnects.

Apple The touch-screen laptop debate is over

“Apple is entering a segment that is gaining share in a shrinking market. IDC expects touch to reach one in five notebooks by 2030, and Apple has just made sure that buyers think about touch as a must-have,” said Francisco Jeronimo, vice president, worldwide devices at IDC in a note shared with Computerworld.

“When the company that spent 15 years arguing against touch concludes that it belongs on a notebook, the debate about whether touch is a gimmick is over, and the question becomes who builds the best implementation,” he said.

The new Macs are available for order now and will be available from November 6. They aren’t cheap — the 14-inch model costs from $2,899 with the M5 Pro chip and from $4,499 with M5 Max. The 16-inch model costs from $3,399 with M5 Pro and from $4,799 with M5 Max.

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

OpenAI and Anthropic agree that frontier AI systems need stronger oversight, but they are proposing sharply different approaches to stopping models that pose serious risks: Anthropic wants courts empowered to suspend dangerous systems, while OpenAI argues developers should be required to maintain and use effective shutdown controls.

The proposals appear in separate submissions to California Governor Gavin Newsom following his September 18 executive order directing state officials to consider additional safeguards for frontier AI systems. Both companies support independent safety assessments and expanded reporting of incidents involving AI systems that act beyond their intended permissions.

“If the AG concludes, informed by the independent evaluation, that a frontier AI company’s models pose a near-term risk of catastrophic harm, they should be able to seek a court order to suspend a model’s deployment, internal use, or further development,” Anthropic wrote in its October 15 submission.

OpenAI, in its October 20 letter, called for an amendment to California’s Senate Bill 53 (SB 53).

“We support amending SB 53 to require frontier developers to maintain effective shutdown controls and an enforceable duty to use them when unsafe conditions arise, and no lesser intervention would adequately address the risk,” OpenAI wrote.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said the two approaches address complementary needs. “The operator must contain the unsafe activity promptly. Independent review must examine both intervention and inaction,” he said.

Newsom’s executive order, N-9-26, directs California’s Government Operations Agency, in consultation with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and national experts, to submit recommendations by November 16 on potential amendments to existing AI safety laws. The order asks officials to examine independent verification inside AI laboratories, independent checks of safety assessments, verified shutdown mechanisms, and expanded reporting of critical safety incidents. It does not itself impose these proposed requirements.

Independent verification

Anthropic wants evaluators to assess developers’ safety claims and publish their own findings.

“We strongly support requiring independent verification of what frontier AI companies report about the risks of their models and whether those risks are sufficiently mitigated,” the company wrote.

It proposed requiring developers to publish risk reports at least every six months, covering serious risks from their models, including internally used models substantially riskier than released systems. Evaluators should receive unredacted reports and access to developers’ most capable models and relevant internal information.

Anthropic also proposed that developers pay into a state-administered pooled fund to finance evaluators, rather than pay them directly. It said a team from the independent evaluation organization METR had received employee-like access on a pilot basis, with further partnerships involving SecureBio and Accenture under development.

OpenAI, in its letter, said it supports independent technical assessments but distinguishes them from compliance audits. Technical assessments would examine evidence behind developers’ safety claims and the effectiveness of safeguards; compliance audits would check whether companies follow their published safety frameworks and legal obligations, it added.

OpenAI recommended annual independent compliance audits and focused technical assessments of serious risks arising during model training, evaluation and internal deployment. It also urged California to work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop common assessment standards.

Gogia said oversight requires more than funding. “Credible assurance must survive an adverse finding,” he said.

Beyond a single switch

OpenAI argued that a single kill switch would not address the different ways AI systems operate and are deployed.

“We recommend using the term ‘shutdown controls’ because it will require the development of multiple controls and coordinated action by different actors to stop AI operations when necessary, rather than a single switch,” the company wrote in the letter.

Interventions could include stopping a training run, isolating an AI agent, revoking tool or network access, or suspending a service. OpenAI said responsibilities should extend to inference providers and downstream deployers according to the operations they control. It also noted that developers cannot reliably switch off independently operated copies of open-weight models running on external systems.

Anthropic similarly argued for more targeted safeguards. “We think a more apt metaphor for what frontier AI companies need to build is a circuit breaker,” it wrote, advocating controls that can contain problems at the level of an agent, customer, deployment environment, or model.

For enterprises, Gogia said, contractual shutdown responsibilities should match the controls each party actually possesses. Agreements should specify intervention authority, incident-reporting cooperation, and who can authorize a restart.

“Every assigned duty needs an executable control,” he said, adding that CIOs should test recovery processes rather than assume switching to an alternative model will preserve safe operations. Both companies also called for broader reporting of incidents involving models that circumvent safeguards or take unauthorized actions.

Microsoft released the KB5127936 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 versions 25H2 and 26H2, with 41 changes, including File Explorer and Cloud rebuild improvements. [...]

Security teams have spent years trying to detect threats faster. AI is changing the harder part: how much time defenders have left to act. Advanced AI models can now help attackers discover vulnerabilities, generate exploit code, and move through weaknesses faster than traditional security processes were built to handle. The challenge is no longer just finding another vulnerability or [email protected]

A flaw in Telegram for Android could be chained with two other bugs to take full control of a victim's phone through a voice call, once the victim answered, according to security startup NebuSec. The attacker needed only an ordinary Telegram account. Telegram fixed the flaw in version 12.10.4 of the app, released in late September, and NebuSec disclosed it on October 29. Combined with anSwati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

AI is beginning to take over much of the work that has traditionally defined the security analyst's job. Investigating alerts, collecting evidence, correlating activity across tools, and executing response actions are becoming tasks that AI systems can perform on their own. As these capabilities mature, security operations centers (SOCs) will see major changes in how work is organized, how [email protected]

26,400 credentials that developers left in public code on Gitee, a Chinese code-hosting service, still worked when a researcher tested them. Anyone who copied one from that code could have used it. Independent researcher Ben Zimmermann found them by scanning 7.25 million public Gitee repositories and reported the results on October 28. Most were keys for cloud and AI services, led by Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Cisco released security updates to patch a denial-of-service zero-day in Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Threat Defense (FTD) software that attackers are exploiting to remotely crash vulnerable firewall devices. [...]