Discover 2025’s top identity trends from Auth0. Learn how AI reshapes logins, trust, and security.
Category: security
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.
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.
Windows KB5064489 emergency update fixes Azure VM launch issues
Microsoft has released an emergency update to fix a bug that prevents Azure virtual machines from launching when the Trusted Launch setting is disabled and Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) is enabled.
The bug impacted Windows Server 2025 and Windows 11 24H2 and was introduced during the July Patch Tuesday security updates.
“This update addresses an issue that prevented some virtual machines (VMs) from starting when Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) was enabled,” explains Microsoft.
A chaos-modulated metasurface for physical-layer secure communications
With so many people using devices that can be connected to the internet, reliably securing wireless communications and protecting the data they are exchanging is of growing importance. While computer scientists have devised increasingly advanced security measures over the past decades, the most effective techniques rely on complex algorithms and intensive computations, which can consume a lot of energy.
Researchers at Peking University, Southeast University, University of Sannio and other institutes recently introduced a new approach for securing communications both effectively and energy-efficiently, which relies on a reconfigurable metasurface with properties that are modulated by chaotic patterns.
This approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Communications, is based on an idea conceived by the senior authors Vincenzo Galdi, Lianlin Li and Tie Jun Cui, who oversaw the project. The idea was then realized at Peking University and Southeast University by junior authors JiaWen Xu Menglin Wei and Lei Zhang.
The Dawn of Tesla’s Robotaxi Network & Automated Transportation
Tesla’s launch of a robo-taxi network marks the beginning of a significant transportation disruption that will transform mobility, economy, geopolitics, and urban landscapes with the widespread adoption of electric autonomous vehicles ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.
Transportation Revolution.
🚗 Q: How will Tesla’s Robotaxi network impact transportation? A: Tesla’s Robotaxi network in Austin, Texas marks the ignition point for transportation disruption, with multiple companies competing to provide taxi rides without human drivers, potentially capturing 80–90% market share in 10–15 years.
🛢️ Q: What industries will be disrupted by autonomous electric vehicles? A: Autonomous electric vehicles will disrupt the oil and agriculture industries, as vehicles are the number one users of crude oil, and corn is the top agricultural product in the US, used to produce ethanol for gasoline.
🌆 Q: How will urban planning change with the rise of autonomous vehicles? A: Cities will repurpose parking spaces for retail, living areas, and solar panels, transforming urban planning and enabling new forms of transportation, including drones and aircraft.
Environmental Impact.
Google reveals details on Android’s Advanced Protection for Chrome
Google is sharing more information on how Chrome operates when Android mobile users enable Advanced Protection, highlighting strong security improvements.
The tech giant recently extended its Advanced Protection Program to the device level with the release of Android 16, aimed at offering a robust, holistic security posture for high-risk individuals likely to be targeted by sophisticated spyware attacks.
Starting Android 16, Advanced Protection can be activated from the settings, strengthening security measures across the board, including on Google apps such as Chrome, Messages, and Phone.
OpenAI co-founder Sutskever sets up new AI company devoted to ‘safe superintelligence’
(AP) — Ilya Sutskever, one of the founders of OpenAI who was involved in a failed effort to push out CEO Sam Altman, said he’s starting a safety-focused artificial intelligence company.
Sutskever, a respected AI researcher who left the ChatGPT maker last month, said in a social media post Wednesday that he’s created Safe Superintelligence Inc. with two co-founders. The company’s only goal and focus is safely developing “superintelligence” — a reference to AI systems that are smarter than humans.
The company vowed not to be distracted by “management overhead or product cycles,” and under its business model, work on safety and security would be “insulated from short-term commercial pressures,” Sutskever and his co-founders Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy said in a prepared statement.
