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“I am used to being harassed online. But this was different,” she added. “It was as if someone had entered my home, my bedroom, my bathroom. I felt so unsafe and traumatized.”

Oueiss is one of several high-profile female journalists and activists who have allegedly been targeted and harassed by authoritarian regimes in the Middle East through hack-and-leak attacks using the Pegasus spyware, created by Israeli surveillance technology company NSO Group. The spyware transforms a phone into a surveillance device, activating microphones and cameras and exporting files without a user knowing.

A trio of researchers at Cornell University has found that it is possible to hide malware code inside of AI neural networks. Zhi Wang, Chaoge Liu and Xiang Cui have posted a paper describing their experiments with injecting code into neural networks on the arXiv preprint server.

As grows ever more complex, so do attempts by criminals to break into machines running new technology for their own purposes, such as destroying data or encrypting it and demanding payment from users for its return. In this new study, the team has found a new way to infect certain kinds of computer systems running artificial intelligence applications.

AI systems do their work by processing data in ways similar to the . But such networks, the research trio found, are vulnerable to infiltration by foreign code.