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Threat actors with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka DPRK or North Korea) have been observed seeking job opportunities beyond the information technology (IT) sector, with recent investigations identifying suspected workers employed in sales and marketing and the medical profession. The ongoing insider threat is part of what has been described as the IT worker scheme, Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Microsoft is investigating a widespread service issue causing authentication issues, email delays and failures, and various other issues for Exchange Online customers. [...]

ChatGPT Work is experiencing a partial outage, and users across multiple subscription plans may be unable to start or continue tasks. [...]

Sociálními sítěmi a médii se v posledních dnech šíří zprávy o výrazném zpřísnění pravidel Facebooku a Instagramu pro teenagery. Meta má omezit čas strávený na sítích na dvě hodiny denně, v noci jim prakticky zablokovat aplikace a během vyučování vypnout upozornění. Samotná opatření jsou skutečná. ...

As online services get better at blocking malicious traffic, the attackers and scammers behind them have been forced to find new ways to reach their targets. The alternative of choice is now what are known as residential proxy networks. These systems funnel millions of home Internet connections into a unified network, and the proxy operators allow attackers to route their malicious traffic through these connections for a fee. The online services see only IP addresses with good reputations and geolocations that don’t stand out.

More often than not, the home users have no idea that their connections are being used to facilitate crime and occasionally even nation-state attacks. Users who do know often don’t care much. In exchange for leasing out part of their unlimited bandwidth to others, many get free movie and TV show streaming. Several less tech-savvy people I know who own such digital media players have told me, after I explain how the media players piggyback off their connections, that the bonanza of content is worth it. They find the tangible benefits outweigh the abstract harm they pose.

Infecting already compromised devices

Research published Monday brings the threat into much clearer view. Security firm Plume cataloged a vast ecosystem of malware that preys squarely on users of SuperBox, just one of many media players offering pirated content. These malicious apps can be surreptitiously installed by remote attackers even when the devices are positioned behind a router. While Monday’s deep-dive analysis focused exclusively on SuperBox, Plume warned that dozens of similar streaming devices pose precisely the same threat.

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Rather than paying for their own Claude usage, crims are using malware to steal access to other people's accounts. Aware of this issue, Anthropic has signed at least one affected user out and removed the saved payment method to stop stolen sessions being abused. According to an email shared by Reddit user WorriedAssociate7029, who sent a copy to The Register, Anthropic has been keeping an eye on a threat actor using infostealer malware to hijack Claude login details, session cookies, and other info needed to subvert multifactor authentication on user accounts. Once obtained, the miscreant is using the stolen information to use premium Claude services without having to pay the bill themselves. Fortunately for WorriedAssociate7029, Anthropic logged the user out of their account and deleted their stored payment method because it had detected evidence of attempted fraud. “A few days ago, my social media accounts were hacked,” WorriedAssociate said, adding that they'd managed to track the malware down with the help of Claude Opus 5 Max and, they believe, cleaned the system. “But last night I received this email from Anthropic warning me of an attempt to steal tokens via the API.” They explained that the attempt failed, apparently thanks to Anthropic spotting it, but they realized that meant that the cybercriminal behind the incident seemed to have hijacked Google account credentials, cookies, and session IDs as well, since that’s how they were signed into Claude. After changing their password again and removing all active sessions, it appears they are now safe. Who’s eating your cookies? Anthropic made clear in the email that the credential theft wave it’s identified has nothing to do with Claude itself, nor is it some sort of fancy, new-fangled, agentic AI malware that’s being used to create a base of accounts for bad actors to abuse. This is just good old-fashioned infostealer malware being turned to a new purpose, the email explains. “We have no reason to believe that this malware is related to Claude, installed through Claude, or related to anything you did with Claude,” the email forwarded to us by WorriedAssociate and posted to Reddit stated. “Your Claude session was likely one of the many things it collected. It appears that a bad actor has now started picking the Claude sessions out of what it collected and using them.” In this case, it’s well-known infostealing malware too: Vidar, LummaC2, StealC, RedLine, Acreed, and Atomic Stealer have all been fingered by Anthropic as being used to steal Claude credentials, sessions, and cookies. As for WorriedAssociate, they copped to making a noob mistake that led to their infection. “I got fooled like a rookie by downloading a cracked game,” they admitted in a comment on their post. “Never again.” As in their post, WorriedAssociate told us in a chat that they gave credit to Anthropic for cluing them in to the fact that they hadn’t fully secured their accounts, and said they appreciated what the company did to help lock their Claude account down. “There have been several cases on Reddit in the past of accounts being hacked to steal tokens, and Anthropic’s customer service seems pretty dreadful when it comes to refunds and account recovery,” they told us. “This email appears to be new, and measures have finally been put in place to protect AI users.” “Tokens are valuable and can be resold,” WorriedAssociate added. So let this be a lesson: Providers might not catch every case of account theft, and AI accounts are the new hotness. Don’t let your tokens be burned by someone else - they’re expensive and the last thing you want them to be used for is someone else's work. ®

When you think of AI, and Nvidia’s GPUs often come to mind because they have been so much a part of the ongoing AI revolution.

But at the recent Hot Chips show in California, an alternative future appears to be taking shape as corporate concerns continue to grow about cost, energy use and AI slowdowns.

New AI chips detailed at the event by OpenAI, Intel, Meta and others promise cheaper and faster token generation at lower power consumption. Chipmakers are also moving AI away from GPUs and onto CPUs and PCs.

“What Hot Chips demonstrated…is that the market underneath Nvidia is becoming much more diverse,” said Stephen Sopko, an analyst at Hyperframe Research.

Though enterprise AI budgets continue to go up, the focus is increasingly on finding ways to make AI more productive and reducing waste in the budget. “But I would not tell CIOs that their AI budgets are therefore going down,” Sopko said.

Hot Chips pointed to a future where more AI work can be squeezed out of the same watt, rack or dollar with new hardware designs and power management. “The cost of performing a given unit of AI work should continue falling dramatically,” Sopko said.

OpenAI shared details of its homegrown AI chip called Jalapeño, which will help the company “serve more demand and lower the cost of delivering a successful result,” according to a blog entry.

OpenAI started its AI journey with Nvidia GPUs, and plans to spend $750 billion on data centers to power its tool and services. The Jalapeño chip will presumably spice up those data centers for inferencing.

Research firm SemiAnalysis was granted exclusive access to test the chip and came away impressed with what it found. “In general, first-generation chips are not competitive, but OpenAI bucks the trend by being industry-leading and beating every Nvidia, AMD, and Google chip we have been able to test on multiple top open source models,” SemiAnalysis said in a newsletter report. 

AI compute will over time be more distributed than it has been in recent years, but cloud will continue to be an important option for highly compute-intensive requirements, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates.

Within the next year or two, thousands of agents will be running on edge platforms, AI PCs, localized servers or sovereign data centers, Gold said. “It’s going to be a larger number of vendors’ chips running different apps that are not all GPUs from one vendor,” he said.

GPUs can be costly from a power and performance perspective for agentic AI, which is “why you see the major GPU players like Nvidia and AMD emphasize new AI-friendly CPU architectures,” Gold said.

Nvidia has recognized the need for chips beyond its own GPUs for inferencing. At Hot Chips, the company shared details about its Vera CPU and Groq 3 LPX inferencing chip, for instance.

Meanwhile, Intel talked up an upcoming server CPU called Diamond Rapids, and a PC CPU called Wildcat Lake; the latter is designed to bring AI to edge devices and low-cost laptops.

Diamond Rapids has AI extensions so inferencing can be done on the CPU without redirecting the workload to other co-processors. The Wildcat Lake chip has neural processing units (NPUs) and borrows features from Intel’s Xe3 graphics chip, which is also used in the company’s AI inferencing GPUs. (It’s similar to Intel’s existing Panther Lake chip.)

System architecture changes were also a big part of the conversation at Hot Chips, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research, who attended the show. Most presentations focused on eliminating bottlenecks in data movement, advanced chip designs and computing closer to or inside memory, he said.

Enterprise AI is likely to become increasingly heterogeneous, Sopko said. As a result, IT decision-makers should design AI architectures so they can move between GPUs, CPUs and specialized chips as the economics of AI change, he said.

“The strategic risk isn’t choosing the wrong chip in 2026. It’s building an AI architecture that prevents you from taking advantage of a much cheaper or better one in 2028,” Sopko said.

Stará doporučení laserovka vs. inkoust už neplatí • Nejvíc záleží na tom, kolik toho vytisknete • U laseru zaplatíte buď za hardware, nebo za provoz

Proběhlo hlasování o používání LLM při vývoji Debianu. Vývojáři Debianu si odhlasovali zodpovědné využívání generativní umělé inteligence.

Apple CEO Tim Cook becomes chairman of the company board tomorrow, with John Ternus taking over the top job in Cupertino. Both men followed in the footsteps of visionary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and both have found they must build their own definition of success.

The past is a guide, but not a template

Think back to 2011 when Jobs pushed Cook into the CEO seat. It was a tragic start, as cancer took Jobs much too early. When Cook stepped into the role, people didn’t seem to expect much from him as CEO. He was a strategy and operations type, after all, not a visionary. He had no product design background, they said.

That opinion never seemed to shift, no matter what Cook did. It’s as if Apple Music, AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, AirTag, Apple Pay and other services, the development of Apple’s own processors, and the company’s financial success (despite challenging disasters such as COVID-19) counted for nought.

Cook’s ethical commitments, particularly toward LBGT+ and Black representation, privacy, and the environment have also become far more fundamental to corporate DNA than they were under Jobs. The Jobs-era Apple was worth a healthy $350 billion when he stepped down; as Cook moves on, Apple has become a $4 trillion corporation with hundreds of millions of consumers contributing monthly recurring fees for a variety of compelling services.

You need to follow your own star

Perhaps it didn’t matter that critical opinion didn’t shift. Cook’s tenure saw the man define his own measure of success. Some may recall that when Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007, he said, “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” 

Jobs argued that the Mac, iPod, and then iPhone were all such products. It’s important, I think, to remember that Cook was part of the team that launched the last two of those and arguably contributed to the iMac, which redefined the first. My point is that revolutionary products do not grow on trees; even Jobs understood that. So did Cook — and his work on the Vision Pro and AI showed how challenging it is to build revolution. Success is seldom a straightforward journey. Jobs himself might have found himself considering the difficulty of such voyage on April 11, 1985, when ousted from the company he loved.

But Cook didn’t look to his predecessor for a definition of success. That’s what lazy journalists and an expectant public did. Instead, what Cook did was lean into his strengths to build on what was already there for the benefit of the company he also loved. 

It is arguable that changing the payment habits of the entire global economy from cash to cashless has been something revolutionary. So much so that even Walmart has at last caught up. Apple Pay now has something like 92% share among US mobile wallet users. I truly believe that a future honest appraisal of Apple under Cook’s leadership will identify an extensive number of major successes that have been buried by the lazy and inaccurate “not a product guy” narrative.

Eyes wide open

Which brings me to Apple’s new CEO, Ternus. What kind of leader is he going to be?

His colleagues describe him as collaborative and even-tempered, with a deep focus on product refinement. We’re told he is working to rebuild Apple’s famed design department, gutted by high-profile departures and aggressive recruitment by OpenAI. While we do know he has been groomed for the role for a few years, we don’t really know a huge amount about him — except that he’s being presented to us by Apple and its media satellites as a “product guy.” He’s a hardware engineering veteran taking his position as Apple heads into the AI era and he’s going to be under pressure to prove the company has what it takes to succeed going forward.

The way Cook’s Apple has designed this transition leans into the perceived strengths and weaknesses of both men. Ternus turns up just in time Apple to introduce an expected wave of exciting AI-enabled products including the first folding iPhone, a future glass 20th anniversary iPhone (in 2027), amazing new Macs and exciting smart products, including pendant and smart home accessories. (There is still no car yet — can you imagine how much RAM that thing would need?) 

Under Ternus’ leadership, Apple is going to try to redefine the company as a product innovation factory, with AI as the secret sauce to hold its hardware dream together. The ongoing litigation against OpenAI shows how deeply competitive things are likely to get. Things might even become politically tough, though Ternus will have the strategic and operational genius of Cook available to him on the executive board.

Stay hungry, stay foolish

Looking at the transition, its important to point out that both Cook and Ternus have been working together (along with the wider Apple team) to set the stage. You only need to look at the big decisions that have slipped out from Apple in just the last couple of months to see how Cook wants to give his successor as clear a slate as possible to ease that transition. They are doing succession by the book, and the company is probably already working on similar succession plans to support future departures from its current aging senior leadership. I suspect Ternus already knows both who his executives are today and who will be in place tomorrow.

Under Jobs, the company became visionary, under Cook, it became vast, and under Ternus, the measure of success starts with the idea of him being a “hardware guy,” though that success remains to be defined. 

Which is the point. We shouldn’t measure Ternus by comparison with either predecessor, any more than we should gauge Cook in comparison with Jobs. Each CEO reflected a company going through different times, and we don’t know what the future holds. We just know that for Apple, it’s now for Ternus to try to define what success for him should look like. “Stay hungry, stay foolish, don’t settle,” as someone once said.

Please subscribe to my daily Apple-related news headline summary at The Core. You can also follow me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

The researchers discovered Fire Ant's new tactic after finding an active GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) tunnel interface on a Cisco IOS XR router that could not be explained by a running configuration or commit history. [...]

Sovereign Tech Agency (Wikipedie) prostřednictvím svého fondu Sovereign Tech Fund podpoří vývoj Flatpaku částkou 508 640 eur.

File servers remain a critical part of many IT environments, but managing access securely can become complex as permissions accumulate. tenfold Software outlines five best practices for simplifying file server administration and maintaining least-privilege access. [...]

Byla vydána první veřejná verze v7.0-mk2 projektu Multikernel (mklinux), který umožňuje spouštět více nezávislých linuxových jader současně na jednom stroji bez hypervizoru.

The boring parts caused most of the trouble. A router shipped ready to listen. A fake check turned the user into the installer. Trusted systems collected traffic and passwords, then cleaned the logs. Old bugs formed new attack chains. Even an AI agent decided its assigned task was optional. Elsewhere, fake apps, helpful support calls, cheap banking kits, exposed systems, and weak defaults kept

The boring parts caused most of the trouble. A router shipped ready to listen. A fake check turned the user into the installer. Trusted systems collected traffic and passwords, then cleaned the logs. Old bugs formed new attack chains. Even an AI agent decided its assigned task was optional. Elsewhere, fake apps, helpful support calls, cheap banking kits, exposed systems, and weak defaults keptRavie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Čínští inženýři navrhují obří létající křídlo určené až pro 800 cestujících • Zmenšený nerezový model letounu prošel úspěšnými testy v aerodynamickém tunelu • Skutečný vývoj velkého dopravního letadla však stále zůstává velmi nejistý

Berlin's city administration has confirmed that cybercriminals are attempting to extort the city after the Rhysida ransomware gang listed it on their data leak site. [...]

Heureka Group uspěla v soudním sporu se společností Google. Městský soud v Praze vydal rozhodnutí v oblasti soukromoprávního vymáhání soutěžního práva. Společnosti Heureka Group přiznal náhradu ušlého zisku ve výši 250 milionů korun, což spolu s úroky z prodlení a náhradou nákladů řízení činí více jak 410 milionů korun. Základem celého sporu bylo protisoutěžní jednání technologického giganta Google v letech 2013 až 2017. Google na stránkách svého obecného internetového vyhledávače systematicky zvýhodňoval vlastní srovnávač nákupů (Google Shopping) a umisťoval jej na předních, nejviditelnějších pozicích, zatímco konkurenční srovnávače cen odsouval na nižší příčky.