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AI has gotten good at finding bugs, not so good at swatting them

2 weeks 4 days ago
Discovery is getting cheaper. Validation and patching aren’t

What good is finding a hole if you can't fix it? Anthropic last week talked up Claude Code's improved ability to find software vulnerabilities and propose patches. But security researchers say that's not enough.…

Thomas Claburn

Meta AI Security Researcher Said an OpenClaw Agent Ran Amok on Her Inbox

2 weeks 4 days ago
Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop. "I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller "toy" inbox where it performed well enough to earn her trust, so she let it loose on the real thing. She believes the larger volume of data triggered compaction -- a process where the context window grows too large and the agent begins summarizing and compressing its running instructions, potentially dropping ones the user considers critical. The agent may have reverted to its earlier toy-inbox behavior and skipped her last prompt telling it not to act. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent designed to run as a personal assistant on local hardware.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash

New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain's Electricity Use, Regulator Says

2 weeks 4 days ago
The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand. The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts. Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are "critical for decarbonisation and economic growth." Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash

CrowdStrike Says Attackers Are Moving Through Networks in Under 30 Minutes

2 weeks 4 days ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems. The average breakout time -- how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems -- dropped to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% increase in speed from the year prior. "The fastest breakout time a year ago was 51 seconds. This year it's 27 seconds," Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. Defenders are falling behind because attackers are refining their techniques, using social engineering to access high-privilege systems faster and move through victims' cloud infrastructure undetected.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Patch these 4 critical, make-me-root SolarWinds bugs ASAP

2 weeks 4 days ago
SolarWinds + file transfer software = what attackers' dreams are made of

If you run SolarWinds’ Serv-U, you should patch promptly. Four critical vulnerabilities in the file transfer software can allow attackers to execute code as root.…

Jessica Lyons