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Category: finance – Page 2

Massive surge of NFC relay malware steals Europeans’ credit cards

Near-Field Communication (NFC) relay malware has grown massively popular in Eastern Europe, with researchers discovering over 760 malicious Android apps using the technique to steal people’s payment card information in the past few months.

Contrary to the traditional banking trojans that use overlays to steal banking credentials or remote access tools to perform fraudulent transactions, NFC malware abuses Android’s Host Card Emulation (HCE) to emulate or steal contactless credit card and payment data.

They capture EMV fields, respond to APDU commands from a POS terminal with attacker-controlled replies, or forward terminal requests to a remote server, which crafts the proper APDU responses to enable payments at the terminal without the physical cardholder present.

This Chip Computes With Light, Breaking the 10 GHz Barrier for AI

Researchers have developed an optical computing system that performs feature extraction for quantitative trading with unprecedentedly low latency. Many advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems, including those used in surgical robotics and high-speed financial trading, rely on processing lar

Beyond electronics: Optical system performs feature extraction with unprecedented low latency

Many modern artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as surgical robotics and real-time financial trading, depend on the ability to quickly extract key features from streams of raw data. This process is currently bottlenecked by traditional digital processors. The physical limits of conventional electronics prevent the reduction in latency and the gains in throughput required in emerging data-intensive services.

The answer to this might lie in harnessing the power of light. Optical computing—or using light to perform demanding computations—has the potential to greatly accelerate feature extraction. In particular, optical diffraction operators, which are plate-like structures that perform calculations as light propagates through them, are highly promising due to their and capacity for parallel processing.

However, pushing these systems to operating speeds beyond 10 GHz in practice remains a technical challenge. This is mainly due to the difficulty of maintaining the stable, coherent light needed for optical computations.

Smishing Triad Linked to 194,000 Malicious Domains in Global Phishing Operation

In a report published earlier this week, Fortra said phishing kits associated with the Smishing Triad are being used to increasingly target brokerage accounts to obtain banking credentials and authentication codes, with attacks targeting these accounts witnessing a fivefold jump in the second quarter of 2025 compared to the same period last year.

“Once compromised, attackers manipulate stock market prices using ‘ramp and dump’ tactics,” security researcher Alexis Ober said. “These methods leave almost no paper trail, further heightening the financial risks that arise from this threat.”

The adversarial collective is said to have evolved from a dedicated phishing kit purveyor into a “highly active community” that brings together disparate threat actors, each of whom plays a crucial role in the phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) ecosystem.

Statistical mechanics method helps machines better understand complex systems

A study by University of Hawaiʻi researchers is advancing how we learn the laws that govern complex systems—from predator-prey relationships to traffic patterns in cities to how populations grow and shift—using artificial intelligence (AI) and physics.

The research, published in Physical Review Research, introduces a new method based on to improve the discovery of equations directly from noisy real-world data. Statistical mechanics is a branch of physics that explains how collective behavior emerges from individual particles, such as how the random motion of gas molecules leads to predictable changes in pressure and temperature.

In this new work, statistical mechanics is used to understand how different mathematical models “compete” when trying to explain a system. This matters because many scientific fields rely on understanding how systems change over time, whether tracking disease spread, analyzing or predicting the stock market. But real-world data is often messy, and traditional AI models can be unreliable when the data gets noisy or incomplete.

AGI is still a decade away

Reinforcement learning is terrible — but everything else is worse.

Karpathy’s sharpest takes yet on AGI, RL, and the future of learning.

Andrej Karpathy’s vision of AGI isn’t a bang — it’s a gradient descent through human history.

Karpathy on AGI & Superintelligence.

* AGI won’t be a sudden singularity — it will blend into centuries of steady progress (~2% GDP growth).

* Superintelligence is uncertain and likely gradual, not an instant “explosion.”

Continue reading “AGI is still a decade away” | >

Cyber defense innovation could significantly boost 5G network security

A framework for building tighter security into 5G wireless communications has been created by a Ph.D. student working with the University of Portsmouth’s Artificial Intelligence and Data Center.

With its greater network capacity and ability to rapidly transmit huge amounts of information from one device to another, 5G is a critical component of intelligent systems and services—including those for health care and financial services.

However, the dynamic nature of 5G networks, the high volumes of data shared and the ever changing types of information transmitted means that these networks are extremely vulnerable to cyber threats and increasing risks of attack.

Astaroth Banking Trojan Abuses GitHub to Remain Operational After Takedowns

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign that delivers the Astaroth banking trojan that employs GitHub as a backbone for its operations to stay resilient in the face of infrastructure takedowns.

“Instead of relying solely on traditional command-and-control (C2) servers that can be taken down, these attackers are leveraging GitHub repositories to host malware configurations,” McAfee Labs researchers Harshil Patel and Prabudh Chakravorty said in a report.

“When law enforcement or security researchers shut down their C2 infrastructure, Astaroth simply pulls fresh configurations from GitHub and keeps running.”

Research highlights solutions to critical gaps in dementia and childhood cancer care

In the United States, significant numbers of adults with dementia require long-term care services. For example, around 750,000 people who live in nursing homes have a diagnosis of dementia. However, transportation insecurity for this population has not received sufficient attention. Although long-term care facilities provide basic medical services, residents with dementia often need external, preventative, and follow-up care such as specialist visits, diagnostics, and dental or vision services. Without reliable nonemergency medical transportation, these needs may go unmet.

To demonstrate the extent of this problem, Postdoctoral Research Scientist Soojeong Han, Ph.D., and her colleagues reviewed existing literature on non-emergency medical for individuals with living in long-term care (LTC) facilities. The study, “Transportation Services in Society for Individuals Living With Dementia in Long-Term Care Facilities: A Scoping Review,” was published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.

Their review found only five publications that mentioned this topic, and even then, only briefly. Across these studies, caregivers, health care professionals, and people with dementia consistently described nonemergency medical transportation as a critical need. Reported barriers included financial strain, rural-urban disparities, lack of continuity among transportation vendors, and dementia-specific challenges such as , stigma, and the need for caregiver accompaniment.

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