Hours of San Francisco Police Division drone video footage exposed on the open net illustrates a brand new period of extremely granular—and consequential—city surveillance. In the meantime, the San Francisco Metropolis Legal professional’s Workplace despatched cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google this week demanding that the tech giants delete 13 AI nudifying “face-swap” apps from their app shops that are nearly completely used to goal girls and women.
Since WIRED first reported in June about Meta’s NameTag face-recognition system, firm executives have made opaque and conflicting feedback about whether or not the function even exists. We took a step again to lay out both the claims and the facts about the very actual system.
In a speech on Thursday, President Donald Trump continued to push unsubstantiated and thoroughly debunked claims about interference in the 2020 US election. He even promised huge revelations in a trove of paperwork posted to the White Home web site, however the information did not show his assertions—and in some circumstances truly contradicted Trump’s claims.
As adoption of AI instruments quickly expands and their capabilities improve, the tech large Anthropic continued a push to get US states to regulate AI. Talking about AI transparency necessities in California and New York from final 12 months, Anthropic’s head of US state and native authorities relations, Cesar Fernandez, informed WIRED this week, “The transparency-focused security payments of 2025 had been a very essential begin, however as the capabilities of AI programs proceed to advance rapidly—the coverage responses want to match.”
And there’s extra. Every week, we spherical up the safety and privateness information we didn’t cowl in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to learn the full tales. And keep secure on the market.
The astrology-themed interval tracker Stardust sends customers’ reproductive well being details—contraception kind, being pregnant standing, moods, and signs as particular as tender breasts and abdomen cramps—to a knowledge agency not named in its privateness coverage, according to the BBC, which first reported a Mozilla Basis audit of six well-liked trackers produced in partnership with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Heart.
Stardust scored 2 out of 10, the worst of the group. Mozilla researcher Shoshana Wodinsky discovered the app pings third-party trackers from the second it opens, before a consumer enters something; the prompt she logged a symptom, the details went to analytics agency RudderStack alongside a persistent consumer ID, with no in-app manner to shut the sharing off. RudderStack is constructed to route knowledge onward to locations Mozilla could not observe. Stardust additionally palms Fb an advert identifier that ties in-app conduct to the platform’s present profiles. The corporate told TechCrunch it has by no means obtained a authorized demand for consumer knowledge.
Euki, a nonprofit-run tracker, earned a perfect 10: no account required, well being knowledge by no means leaves the cellphone, and customers can set a PIN, schedule computerized deletion, or pull up a decoy display if somebody forces the cellphone open. Its one gentle spot is an in-app browser for instructional pages that hundreds the traditional net trackers, however it additionally resets identifiers between visits.
Russia’s FSB has lengthy had a repute for extremely subtle cyberespionage, leaving disruptive cyberattacks to its fellow hackers in the nation’s GRU army intelligence company. However sanctions from the EU and UK this week, together with an advisory from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, the FBI, and the NSA, pinned a cyberattack in opposition to the Polish electrical grid on Heart 16 of the FSB, a uncommon instance of the Kremlin company finishing up a cyberattack that almost induced outages in the nation’s electrical and water utilities. The assault, which the Polish authorities has stated got here “very shut” to inflicting a blackout, was initially attributed by cybersecurity corporations Dragos and ESET to Sandworm, also called Unit 74455 of the GRU, a extra traditional suspect in infrastructure hacking given its energetic function in Russia’s long-running cyberwar in opposition to Ukraine. However the Polish laptop emergency response group at the time disputed that discovering and tied the assault to the FSB, a conclusion now supported by a large consensus of Western governments. The incident means that the FSB could also be taking on a few of the reckless, extremely aggressive tendencies—and focusing on—of its GRU coworkers.
For years, the Russian cybersecurity agency Kaspersky has been alleged to have ties to the Russian authorities, together with by US officers who banned use of the firm’s merchandise inside the US authorities and ultimately by all American clients. But overt proof of these connections has been scarce. Now Reuters stories that Denis Obrezko, a Russian man dealing with hacking fees in Boston and an alleged member of a hacker group referred to as Void Blizzard or Laundry Bear, spent two years working at Kaspersky. His stint at the firm happened simply before he joined one other cybersecurity firm, Yutek-NN, the place he allegedly took half in the group’s hacking marketing campaign that stole knowledge and communications from quite a few NATO governments and at the very least 11 US firms, in accordance to US prosecutors. Prior to Kaspersky, Obrevko additionally allegedly labored at the FSB, neatly bookending his time at the firm with obvious work for Russia’s intelligence providers.
Obrevko has pleaded not responsible to the hacking fees. Kaspersky responded in an announcement to Reuters that “the offenses charged can’t be associated to the particular person’s function or obligations throughout the employment at Kaspersky.”
In an incident that may induce anxiousness in anybody chargeable for assessing suspicious community exercise, DHS officers dominated—twice—that indicators of a hacker breach in its data-sharing Homeland Safety Info Community platform had been false positives once they had been, in reality, indicators of a really actual intrusion. HSIN, used for sharing unclassified knowledge between state, native, and federal companies, in addition to overseas companions, was breached by hackers two months in the past, in accordance to reporting from Nextgov/FCW. Analysts at the Federal Emergency Administration Company noticed indicators of hacker exercise in mid-Might—altering information and code, hijacking a official net server, and deleting logs of their conduct—however the findings had been dismissed as a false optimistic.
In the weeks that adopted, the hackers returned, had been once more detected, and had been once more dismissed as a mirage. It’s not clear why the indicators of the breach had been misjudged, however the incidents could signify federal analysts’ rising challenges in detecting “dwelling off the land” hacking methods that use official options of networks to entry goal property on a community fairly than planting extra simply noticed malware. Whereas the HSIN homes solely unclassified knowledge, the information is “extremely delicate,” Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Mark Warner stated in an announcement following the report of the breach, and “its publicity dangers nationwide safety.”
The AI music startup Suno scraped tens of millions of songs, lyrics, and podcasts from YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius, and a string of stock-audio libraries to prepare its fashions, in accordance to 404 Media, which reviewed inner knowledge supplied by a hacker who breached the firm. The intrusion additionally uncovered account information for lots of of hundreds of consumers, together with emails, cellphone numbers, and Stripe fee data.
Dataset notes in supply code apparently from 2023 and 2024 tally 113,879 hours of YouTube Music audio alone, plus tens of hundreds extra from Pond5, Deezer, and different libraries—many years of music in complete. Different information present Suno routing its YouTube scraping by Shiny Information proxies and utilizing PodcastIndex to goal roughly 1 million hours of podcasts. The hacker, who goes by ellie.191, says they broke in by compromising an worker with the Shai-Hulud worm.
The information seemingly corroborate the file business’s central allegation that Suno pulled songs instantly from YouTube. The corporate, which argues that its coaching qualifies as truthful use and settled with Warner Music Group final November, stated the breach concerned outdated code and no delicate private information—although clients whose knowledge appeared in a pattern shared with 404 Media stated they had been by no means notified.
Disclaimer: This article is sourced from external platforms. OverBeta has not independently verified the information. Readers are advised to verify details before relying on them.
