Welcome to Kernel Panic, a weekly newsletter by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess from inside the new world of privacy and digital security. To receive this newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up…
We talk to chatbots as if those conversations are private. But are they? Most people are confused. A survey commissioned by DuckDuckGo and published in August asked 1,944 American adults about chatbot privacy, and more…
Within North Korea’s sprawling hacking operations—often designed to earn money for the highly sanctioned and repressive regime—TraderTraitor has stood out in recent years for its sophistication and targeting of crypto and decentralized finance companies. Last…
The AI software-development platform Cursor, which is owned by SpaceX, had a malicious Anthropic Claude Code extension for Windows, macOS, and Linux live in its integrated development environment extension marketplace for roughly 11 hours on…
“Admins describe what should be true of their devices, and Smplify keeps it true. If a device drifts from that intent, because a setting changed or an update was missed, the platform notices and brings…
In a fitting sign of the times, the hacker’s carefully laid plans were foiled by an AI agent. It was September 25, 2026, and Alex, a professional online poker player, was using his Claude AI…
“Start with the cracks the attackers left showing,” he advised: The sender supposedly came from “nthropic,” the email carried GoTo Webinar branding, the registration spoofed a Zoom meeting page, and the login pages were from…
Attorneys for 15 Minnesota residents facing federal conspiracy charges have obtained evidence of a sweeping, possibly unconstitutional spying operation carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement against left-wing social movements in Minnesota and beyond. The…
Two permission groups, named “Executive Leadership” and “AI Access,” appear to list people given exceptions to DHS’s web filter, which blocks some websites for employees. They contain the same 13 people, including former DHS head…
Defenders across the world face the burden of responding to yet another botched code-execution vulnerability, this time in boot-time firmware used by most of the world’s server vendors and data centers. The vulnerability, with a…
