The Register

Latest in long-running pwning of Cisco kit found in mystery Fed agency

A US federal agency was successfully targeted by a previously unknown backdoor malware called Firestarter, according to CISA cybersnoops and their UK counterparts – neither of which disclosed the agency's name.…

One way to deal with bug hunting LLMs: ditch the old drivers

One tactic to deal with LLM-powered vulnerability detection is simple – just speed up the removal of old code. If it's gone, it no longer matters if it's buggy.…

We gotta get boring to get graduated

Grafanacon  The founder of the Open Telemetry project says its maintainers may need to turn to AI tools to get some elements robust enough for the project as a whole to graduate.…

Windows giant offers buyouts to eligible staffers willing to walk

Microsoft has committed to improving the quality and reliability of Windows, and a step on the path to that goal is… encouraging a chunk of its US staff to leave the company.…

Chipzilla hopes agents, robots, and edge devices make CPUs cool again... now it has to build the chips

Intel is betting on AI to reverse its fortunes, wagering that inference and agentic workloads will restore the CPU to the center of compute - even as its chip manufacturing struggles persist.…

After flubbing the Metaverse, Zuck embraces the Neoverse

Meta plans to deploy tens of millions of Amazon Web Services' Graviton 5 CPU cores as part of a multi-year collaboration that will make the social network among the largest-ever consumers of the cloud giant’s homegrown silicon.…

Ailing scaling blamed by Windows-maker for unreadable missives

Microsoft's update to harden Remote Desktop against phishing attacks has arrived. When users open a Remote Desktop (.rdp) file, they should now see a warning listing all requested connection settings - or they would if it was displaying correctly.…

OpenAI's first security hire, Ari Herbert-Voss, thinks more automated bug finding will improve security without costing jobs

Black Hat Asia  Open source models can find bugs as effectively as Anthropic's Mythos, according to Ari Herbert-Voss, CEO of AI-powered security startup RunSybil and OpenAI's first security hire.…

Oval Office resident rants about Blighty's Digital Services Tax with threats that don’t quite add up

Donald Trump has threatened to whack the UK with a "big tariff" if it doesn't scrap its tax on large US tech firms, reviving a long-running spat over who gets to skim the proceeds from Silicon Valley's global empire.…

Nothing says 'We want honest opinions' like a 36,000-letter mailshot with no awkward questions allowed

Members of the UK government’s People’s Panel on Digital ID will spend two weekends in Birmingham and three evenings on Zoom discussing how Britain should build a national digital identity system, earning £550 plus expenses for their trouble.…

Missed flights and more means something has got to give at the border

Greece is taking a flexible approach to introducing the European Union's biometric Entry/Exit System (EES), after some British passport holders missed flights home following the system's implementation on 10 April.…

Computer glitch spawns duplicate jackpots, disgruntled punters, and one very bad career choice

A computer glitch in a Spanish betting shop triggered a chain of events that ended with the store manager being kidnapped and held for €50,000 ($58,000) in ransom, allegedly by one of the shop's own employees.…

Won't somebody think of the children not being hit by a load of building materials?

On Call  Delivering excellent tech support can sometimes require heavy lifting, a feat The Register celebrates each Friday with a new instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of hoisting glitchy tech back to full function.…

FAST16 could be the first cyberweapon, and its effects could be with us today

Black Hat Asia  Infosec outfit SentinelOne found malware that tries to induce errors in engineering and physics simulation software and therefore represents an attempt at sabotage, and suggests it was created years before the Stuxnet worm that aimed to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges.…

Demonstrated in China, probably applicable elsewhere

Black Hat Asia  Developers of rented internet of things infrastructure – stuff like public EV chargers and shared e-bikes – are prioritizing user convenience over security, and leaving themselves exposed to wide-scale denial of service attacks on their services.…

Two teams, similar diagnosis: Ceramic electrolytes still refusing to cooperate

With more capacity and faster charging, solid-state batteries could be the next big thing in energy. And good news: researchers may have pinned down one major reason these batteries still fail before they can reach widespread commercial use.…

System changes and bugs overlapped to create the impression of general decline

Claude users who complained about the AI service producing lower-quality responses over the past month weren’t imagining it.…

Legit-looking website, camera-on interviews, jokes about backdoors ... it worked

EXCLUSIVE  It all started with a LinkedIn message, as so many employment scams do these days.…

Rising refusal rate from Acceptable Use Classifier leaves customers paying for nothing

Anthropic's release last week of Opus 4.7 came with stronger safeguards to prevent misuse. Unfortunately, these safeguards have also managed to thwart legitimate use.…

Keeping it simple for the developers can lead to very complex headaches later

PWNED  Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we celebrate the people who’ve taught us how not to secure a server. If you’ve ever tied your own shoelaces together, then tripped over them, or attempted to dive into a swimming pool but hit your head on the diving board, we’ll be talking about your cyber equivalent.…