Security

Advanced Protection, which launched last year as an option for people who need stronger security safeguards, will now automatically lock down a device if it detects repeated authentication failures within settings menus and apps.

On Friday, OpenAI said its “misaligned models” review after the Hugging Face hack would take months, but has mostly found mundane research activity. Then it mentioned 53 incidents of the bots uploading “user-provided” images (anonymized content from personal accounts that haven’t opted out or organizations that opt in) to image-hosting sites.

Bitget says $351.6 million in crypto was stolen by hackers on Thursday, and reportedly suspects the breach may be linked to North Korea. Meanwhile, Protos reports three other DeFi projects that posted about being hacked on Thursday, with losses totaling $7 million at Duelbits, $2.3 million at Meter, and $1.8 million at Payy Network.

The desktop version of the browser now offers an opt-in toggle to automatically enable the built-in VPN whenever you connect to a public or unsecured Wi-Fi network. Sounds like an easy way to make public Wi-Fi Russian roulette a little safer to play. It’s rolling out today in the US and France.

A new “Copy code” button is rolling out to Gmail inboxes on Android and iOS that previews authentication codes below the subject line, letting you copy them with a single tap without opening the email. It isn’t available on web, but it should make mobile logins less tedious.

According to The Washington Post, the spy agency is set to undergo its largest restructuring in over a decade. Army general and NSA director Joshua M. Rudd is leading the effort. According to the Post:

Now you can move both passwords and passkeys between Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with more password managers to come. It works at the OS level, so there’s no unencrypted text file for you to deal with on the import / export.

After OpenAI confirmed that its AI agents hijacked a German wiki as a way to communicate, Reuters reports similar incidents have occurred across at least 10 other websites. Reuters says most of the sites OpenAI agents swarmed were “obscure,” including “communally edited wikis, online text storage sites, and a pair of link shorteners run by two universities.”

As previously announced, Google has halved the release cycle for its web browser with today’s stable release of Chrome 153 on desktop, Android, and iOS. Chrome 154 Beta is now ready for testing, ahead of its stable release on September 22nd.

Did you know there’s a website you can check to see if Flock customers (like policing and surveillance agencies) have searched for your license plate number? Have I Been Flocked? warns users that its data is incomplete, but developer Cris van Pelt told Business Insider that visits to the database have “exploded.”

You may recall Apollo is majorly involved in AI infrastructure financing; it even is one of the “compute is an asset class” consortium. Sounds like the hackers stole a bunch of the usual things, like employees’ social security numbers. If they stole interesting things, like internal data on the AI deals Apollo has been making, that wasn’t disclosed in the breach notification. If you know anything about the hack, hit me up on Signal: lopatto.46.

Andy Burnham exchanged messages with somebody posing as White House chief of staff Susie Wiles (whose phone was hacked last year) before becoming suspicious that the contact was an impersonation, Politico reports. The incident has since been reported to the White House, and the undisclosed message contents are reportedly “of no significance.”

You’re not alone — Apple told TechCrunch that it sent the notifications on Thursday to users in 110 countries who it suspects have been targeted by mercenary spyware. Apple has a new support page with guidance on how targets can best protect their devices against such attacks, which have “historically been associated with state actors.”

The group says that while changes like more limited data retention is welcomed, the devil is in the details. “Transforming an exceptionally dangerous mass surveillance system into one that is fully protective of civil rights and civil liberties is a difficult, if not impossible task,” it writes.