New Android malware PlayPraetor infects 11,000+ devices, targeting banking users via fake Play Store links.
Category: finance
Hackers breach Toptal GitHub account, publish malicious npm packages
Hackers compromised Toptal’s GitHub organization account and used their access to publish ten malicious packages on the Node Package Manager (NPM) index.
The packages included data-stealing code that collected GitHub authentication tokens and then wiped the victims’ systems.
Toptal is a freelance talent marketplace that connects companies with software developers, designers, and finance experts. The company also maintains internal developer tools and design systems, most notably Picasso, which they make available through GitHub and NPM.
Brave blocks Windows Recall from screenshotting your browsing activity
Brave Software says its privacy-focused browser will block Microsoft’s Windows Recall from capturing screenshots of Brave windows by default to protect users’ privacy.
Windows Recall is an opt-in Windows feature that takes screenshots of active windows every few seconds, analyzes them, and enables Windows 11 users to search for text within the snapshots using natural language. The goal is to make it easy for users to quickly find information about past activities in Windows.
However, the feature has sparked widespread criticism for potentially exposing sensitive data of Windows users, including passwords, emails, health records, and financial information.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns of an AI ‘fraud crisis’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the world may be on the precipice of a “fraud crisis” because of how artificial intelligence could enable bad actors to impersonate other people.
“A thing that terrifies me is apparently there are still some financial institutions that will accept a voice print as authentication for you to move a lot of money or do something else — you say a challenge phrase, and they just do it,” Altman said. “That is a crazy thing to still be doing… AI has fully defeated most of the ways that people authenticate currently, other than passwords.”
The comments were part of his wide-ranging interview about the economic and societal impacts of AI at the Federal Reserve on Tuesday. He also told the audience, which included, representatives of large US financial institutions, about the role he expects AI to play in the economy.
AI vision, reinvented: Vision-language models gain clearer sight through synthetic training data
In the race to develop AI that understands complex images like financial forecasts, medical diagrams and nutrition labels—essential for AI to operate independently in everyday settings—closed-source systems like ChatGPT and Claude currently set the pace. But no one outside their makers knows how those models were trained or what data they used, leaving open-source alternatives scrambling to catch up.
Now, researchers at Penn Engineering and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) have developed a new approach to train open-source models: using AI to create scientific figures, charts and tables that teach other AI systems how to interpret complex visual information.
Their tool, CoSyn (short for Code-Guided Synthesis), taps open-source AI models’ coding skills to render text-rich images and generate relevant questions and answers, giving other AI systems the data they need to learn how to “see” and understand scientific figures.