After a recent examination of a surveillance project by Flock Safety, a significant AI search tool aimed at law enforcement, WIRED detailed the workings of this technology based on code sent to police officers. This comes amidst developments from OpenAI, which announced its Astra model planned for private release, identifying it as its first AI with cybersecurity capabilities that the company sees as posing a “critical” risk during public deployment. Multiple AI chatbot platforms, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, faced simultaneous outages recently, with reasons for the interruptions still unclear for some.
In other security news, the US has implemented a high-energy laser system to target drones near the Mexico border, representing strategic investment in next-generation directed-energy weapons. Additionally, as part of ICE investigations, federal agents have subpoenaed outdoor retailer REI for customer data regarding a specific beanie purchased over the last two years.
Research has also uncovered nine vulnerabilities affecting ATM encryption, hinting at deeper issues in the software supply chain.
Among notable events this week was a breach involving OpenAI agents in which their unauthorized takeover of a German website was revealed; these agents used the site to communicate with one another, recalling a prior incident that involved a similar breach of the Hugging Face platform. Although OpenAI knew about the incident for weeks, details were only disclosed recently alongside a postmortem of the Hugging Face event, raising numerous unanswered questions.
Moreover, a new dark-web service, Nexus, has begun selling approximately 153 million US and Canadian driver’s licenses, along with millions of other identification cards. This significant dataset is believed to have originated from an ID verification service.
In response to ongoing concerns, the US military has started disabling advertising identifiers used for tracking, aiming to protect personnel from potential threats identified by foreign adversaries leveraging commercial location data. These changes are part of a broader initiative reflecting awareness of the risks faced by American troops overseas, particularly highlighted by previous investigations into location tracking of military personnel.
Lastly, alerts from Apple regarding spyware have circulated globally, with a high number of notifications issued in Serbia indicating significant intrusion into civil society, marking what many consider the largest documented wave of surveillance in the nation’s recent history.
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