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Anthropic and the Pentagon

OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existential risks posed by a new technology powerful enough that the Pentagon claims it is essential to national security. At issue is Anthropic’s insistence that the US Department of Defense (DoD) could not use its models to facilitate “mass surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons,” provisions the defense secretary Pete Hegseth …

March 6, 2026
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Claude Used to Hack Mexican Government

An unknown hacker used Anthropic’s LLM to hack the Mexican government:

The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday.

[…]

Claude initially warned the unknown user of malicious intent during their conversation about the Mexican government, but eventually complied with the attacker’s requests and executed thousands of commands on government computer networks, the researchers said…

March 6, 2026
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Israel Hacked Traffic Cameras in Iran

Multiple news outlets are reporting on Israel’s hacking of Iranian traffic cameras and how they assisted with the killing of that country’s leadership.
The New York Times has an article on the intelligence operation more generally.

March 5, 2026
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Hacked App Part of US/Israeli Propaganda Campaign Against Iran

Wired has the story:

Shortly after the first set of explosions, Iranians received bursts of notifications on their phones. They came not from the government advising caution, but from an apparently hacked prayer-timing app called BadeSaba Calendar that has been downloaded more than 5 million times from the Google Play Store.

The messages arrived in quick succession over a period of 30 minutes, starting with the phrase ‘Help has arrived’ at 9:52 am Tehran time, shortly after the first set of explosions. No party has claimed responsibility for the hacks…

March 5, 2026
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Manipulating AI Summarization Features

Microsoft is reporting:

Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters….

These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated…

March 4, 2026
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On Moltbook

The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network:

Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.

“Despite some of the hype, Moltbook is not the Facebook for AI agents, nor is it a place where humans are excluded,” says Cobus Greyling at Kore.ai, a firm developing agent-based systems for business customers. “Humans are involved at every step of the process. From setup to prompting to publishing, nothing happens without explicit human direction.”…

March 3, 2026
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LLM-Assisted Deanonymization

Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization:

We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision ­ and scales to tens of thousands of candidates.

While it has been known that individuals can be uniquely identified by surprisingly few attributes, this was often practically limited. Data is often only available in unstructured form and deanonymization used to require human investigators to search and reason based on clues. We show that from a handful of comments, LLMs can infer where you live, what you do, and your interests—then search for you on the web. In our new research, we show that this is not only possible but increasingly practical…

March 2, 2026
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CVE-2025-64328 exploitation impacts 900 Sangoma FreePBX instances

About 900 Sangoma FreePBX systems were infected with web shells after attackers exploited a command injection flaw. Hundreds of Sangoma FreePBX instances are still infected with web shells following attacks that began in December 2025. Sangoma FreePBX is an open-source, web-based platform for managing Asterisk-powered VoIP phone systems. Maintained by Sangoma Technologies, it allows businesses […]

March 1, 2026
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Microsoft warns of RAT delivered through trojanized gaming utilities

Attackers spread trojanized gaming tools to deliver a stealthy RAT using PowerShell, LOLBins, and Defender evasion tactics. Threat actors are tricking users into running trojanized gaming utilities shared through browsers and chat platforms to deploy a remote access trojan. “Microsoft Defender researchers uncovered a campaign that lured users into running trojanized gaming utilities (Xeno.exe or […]

February 28, 2026
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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing in Peru

Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says “giant squid,” but they can’t possibly mean that.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Blog …

February 28, 2026
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