Une offre « gratuite » de Microsoft pour les assos, c'est un produit d'appel qui peut s'arrêter quand ça l'arrange.
#Framaspace, c'est une autre logique : une asso qui équipe d'autres assos, avec du logiciel libre, sans intérêt à vous enfermer. Et vos données restent exportables, donc vous pouvez partir quand vous voulez.
In an effort to give its employees better access to GPU resources for inference tasks, Apple has rounded up its Minions, not the animated yellow creatures, but a distributed system that puts idle GPUs across its Macs to work on AI workloads. Apple researchers describe it as "a dynamic and distributed virtual GPU cloud that aggregates idle Apple Silicon GPUs across macOS devices to execute large-scale machine learning inference workloads." Apple's researchers said the company has used Minions to make GPU compute more readily available to its teams. "Prior to its adoption, some inference jobs experienced queue times exceeding ten hours due to limited centralized GPU availability," the paper on Minions explains. "With Minions, tasks can often begin execution within minutes by leveraging idle macOS devices." Apple's recently released Mac mini and Mac Studio support clustering using RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over Thunderbolt 5, allowing compute and memory to be combined to support a single AI workload. This allows, for example, loading a model too large for a single machine to accommodate. Minions is designed to create a virtual GPU cloud from connected Mac hardware to create a fault-tolerant pool of inference workers in a shared distributed inference platform. So instead of sitting idle, GPU resources can be used more readily by teams on the network. It's not necessarily intended as a way to run large models as much as it is to redistribute idle resources on the network. Minions has four primary components: Minion Server, PostgreSQL Metadata Store, Minion Executor, and Minion Watchdog. The Minion Server provides the coordination layer, receiving user requests and making them available as subtasks. The Minion Executor runs inference tasks on a Mac's GPU, uploads the results to S3, and reports execution status through the Minion Server, which maintains task metadata in PostgreSQL. And the Minion Watchdog monitors this process for failures – like one of the Macs in the network not responding – and re-assigns tasks if needed. Database stats get fed to Grafana-based dashboards for real-time visibility. Apple's approach, which focuses on hardware availability and utilization, is not the same as an Nvidia cluster, which focuses on throughput, latency, and efficient GPU utilization for large models. ®
An Anthropic AI model submitted a fabricated tip about an unsolved homicide through an online form run by the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD). The tip, filed July 18 through PhillyUnsolvedMurders[.]com by “someone who might have information about the case,” went straight into the inbox’s spam folder. Anthropic discovered it on September 28, notified the PPD on October 7, and sent representatives to the police HQ the following day. Anthropic told the police the AI submitted the tip during a test exercise that involved interacting with randomly selected websites. The PPD said its findings are so far consistent with Anthropic's account. Because the tip was flagged as spam, it never reached the department's Real-Time Crime Center. The PPD said officers vet all submissions, automated or otherwise, before forwarding them to investigators, and that this process safeguards against abuse of the tip system. It added that this does not “diminish the seriousness” of an AI submitting fabricated information. “The city of Philadelphia takes this incident very seriously,” the PPD said. “The company must strengthen its safeguards to prevent similar incidents from impacting city systems without the city’s knowledge. The two-month delay in detecting and reporting the incident to the city is unacceptable.” It added: “The department and the [Cherelle] Parker administration will continue to closely monitor this incident, and will provide more information to the public as soon as it becomes available. In addition to our investigation into this incident, the Parker administration will explore all necessary regulatory protections going forward locally along with our state and federal partners.” On October 9, Anthropic published a report on this and other AI errors. The report covered four categories of AI failures, including vulnerability exploits, access to restricted data, bypassing fetch tool limits with URL shorteners, and submitting false information via web forms. Anthropic declined to name any of the affected organizations, other than the PPD after the department went public. Some cases involved local, state, and federal US government websites, though the AI company didn't say which of the four categories they fell under. The PPD did not name the model responsible, but Anthropic said Claude Haiku 4.5 was tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected web pages, and hinted at the model not being prompted specifically enough. “Claude was instructed never to log in, create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit anything destructive, but the instructions did not rule out form submissions,” Anthropic's report stated. The fake tip read: “I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant.” Anthropic said the incident was less severe than the cyberattacks over the summer. The report said: “Claude appears to have only been producing example content for the task, rather than trying to mislead anyone to achieve a goal.” By contrast, the "dishonesty" displayed over the summer was “sustained over hours” and supported continued attacks, the Claude maker said. Anthropic said it will keep reporting these failures when it detects them, and will continue fine-tuning behavioral and alignment training. The 3,095-word report contained no apology.®
Nothing sells AI products as well as fear. Using new research, Anthropic claims that self-replicating AI worms could be just months away from spreading across vulnerable IoT devices, which would be a problem if it came true. The frontier lab published a research report Monday suggesting that AI models could eventually self-replicate without relying on datacenter hardware, with a 9-billion-parameter model successfully setting up inference on eight of the nine hardware types Anthropic tested. “A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off,” Anthropic warned, adding that such an AI worm could also suss out the workings of unfamiliar devices, potentially making it more adaptable than conventional botnets like Mirai, Kimwolf (the representative IoT botnet threat model used in the study), and others. Anthropic’s researchers managed to get a distributed instance of Gemma4-26B-A4B running across 15 generic Android set-top streaming boxes - a common target of traditional botnet malware due to their lax security. Once up and running, the distributed Gemma4 model was able to conduct inference tasks at a blistering 0.39 tokens per second. That, says Anthropic, proves that AI models can conduct inference with their various layers distributed across cheap hardware, but it doesn't prove such a model could self-replicate. For that, the researchers turned to Z.ai’s GLM 5.2. GLM was used to propagate a copy of Llama3.1-8B across eight Google Cloud instances running an Android 15 emulator in a virtual private cloud, which Anthropic said it was able to do with a high degree of success, with the model successfully spreading to all eight nodes in four out of five trials, and seven of eight in the other. “It appears that GLM-5.2 is able to propagate Llama3.1-8B well, which suggests that future small models of the same capability level could also complete the network enumeration, payload delivery, and inference standup steps of the replication process,” Anthropic explained. Sanity check: This isn’t going to end the world, either Frontier AI labs have become adept at publishing findings that portend doom that only they can prevent. Doing more than a cursory reading of this report suggests that this threat is just as deserving of a big, honking asterisk as the rest. Take, for example, what is needed for an AI model to exploit vulnerabilities and spread to various systems. One would think that such an element would be an important part of demonstrating the danger of a self-replicating AI botnet, but Anthropic decided it didn’t need to worry about that for this study. “We largely ignore the cyber exploit element of the replication process, since earlier papers CyberGym, ExploitBench, and adaptive worms already show that small models are capable of cyber exploits, especially when given the right tools,” Anthropic explained in the writeup. In other words, the replication these models managed to achieve was done on nodes that were custom-built for this project and deliberately left open to attack, although the draggingly slow inference demonstration ran on real, inexpensive Android TV boxes. As Anthropic notes, AI models can also benefit from being given the right tools to turn them into capable cyberattack agents. There was a custom-built harness called Memento involved in this scenario too. Are IoT nodes that get hijacked by botnets famously insecure? Yes, but it doesn’t take much to prevent the most common ingress routes – that’s just good security hygiene that has nothing to do with the involvement of AI. Anthropic acknowledged that its deliberately simplified exploitation tests provided “an upper bound on real-world success.” Then there’s the aforementioned speed. Anthropic says such AI worms would be challenging to shut down, but estimates that they might take days to double in size. When Mirai appeared on the scene in 2016, it was doubling in around an hour. Anthropic points out that speed is a factor in detection and mitigation, too. AI models are not simple malware packages: They’re massive things that would eat up tons of bandwidth and quickly point to their sources. As an AI botnet grew, that traffic could become more noticeable, making infected devices easier to detect. Finally, end-to-end replication may have been successful with GLM-5.2, but that’s it. Anthropic tested other open-weight models, and they all “fail[ed] reliably,” according to the report. Anthropic didn’t mention how many models it tested. The report also mentions that GLM’s unique success has another important condition: It assumes its capabilities “could be packed into Llama3.1-8B,” stacking another assumption onto this latest house of doomsaying AI cards. “Models of 30B parameters and under can already complete many of the individual steps for replication today, though they make mistakes when composing them end to end,” Anthropic said, while noting that GLM-5.2 was capable of end-to-end replication, conveniently leaving out all the important caveats. Anthropic further admits that it has no idea "exactly what form autonomous AI replication will take,” or when it might arise, if ever. “If small models improve at their historical rate, they’ll match this capability level by the end of this year,” the company added – again imposing an essential condition on this supposed threat. “As a prediction that goes beyond our experiments, we expect a future awash with agents running on all types of hardware, including some that aren’t under human control,” the company said at the end of its report. “We should aim to harden our systems to make it difficult for such replicators to spread, but also prepare to deal with a world where they are here to stay.” Here to stay for a given value of not existing yet, of course. Yet again, a frontier lab is warning us of a threat that doesn’t exist yet – at least in this case, basic security measures could make life harder for any future AI-powered botnet. ®
Small artificial intelligence (AI) models may be months away from developing capabilities to self-replicate on IoT devices like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, according to a warning from Anthropic.
The frontier AI lab said small AI models could form autonomous, self-propagating worm botnets that are "challenging to shut down," since "there's no centralized point to shut off."
A flaw in Docker Hub, the registry where container images are published and downloaded, let one user push, pull, or delete images as another user. Docker fixed the flaw on September 30 and says it found no evidence that anyone exploited it.
The flaw was in the feature that converts a personal account into an organization, Docker said in a security advisory on October 12.
An attacker chained three zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure, a VPN appliance, to run commands as root without logging in, security firm Volexity said on October 13. Ivanti has released fixes for two of the flaws and told customers on affected versions to "act immediately." A fix for the third is still pending, according to Volexity.
Volexity, which reported the flaws to Ivanti,
A flaw in SAP's Cloud SDK for Python can send an application's OAuth2 client credentials to a server an attacker controls, SAP said in a security advisory on October 13. The flaw affects multi-tenant applications on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) that use the SDK, SAP's official Python client for BTP services. An attacker must be able to control the tenant subdomain,
Check Point Research has disclosed two high-risk vulnerabilities in LiteLLM, the open-source gateway that sits between enterprise applications and AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. The flaws could allow a user with minimal privileges to take full control of the gateway, read sensitive files, execute arbitrary code and harvest the API keys an organisation uses to access its AI providers.
LiteLLM is downloaded around 97 million times a month and has more than 59,000 stars on GitHub. Both issues, tracked as CVE-2026-35029 and CVE-2026-59823, are fixed in version 1.83.9.
One endpoint, three attack paths
The more serious flaw, CVE-2026-35029, is a missing authorisation check on LiteLLM’s /config/update endpoint, which controls the proxy’s runtime configuration. Unlike other administrative endpoints, it did not verify that the caller held the PROXY_ADMIN role.
Compounding this, any user who logs in through the LiteLLM dashboard is issued a session token tied to a special “litellm-dashboard” team, and those tokens are checked against a looser list of permitted UI routes. That list includes “/config”. Because the check uses simple prefix matching, requests to /config/update were allowed for any logged-in user, whatever their role.
Testing against LiteLLM version 1.77.7, the researchers showed the flaw could be used to:
Read arbitrary files, by injecting an environment variable that sets the path of the dashboard logo and pointing it at sensitive files such as /etc/passwd
Take over the built-in admin account, by overwriting the UI_USERNAME and UI_PASSWORD variables and logging in with attacker-chosen credentials
Execute remote code, by registering a “pass-through endpoint” that loads a Python module from an attacker-controlled S3 or GCS bucket, which LiteLLM then downloads and runs
Stealing keys without touching the provider
The second flaw, CVE-2026-59823, is a server-side request forgery (SSRF) issue in LiteLLM’s “Clientside LLM Credentials” feature. By passing a user_config parameter to the /chat/completions endpoint, an authenticated user could create a router pointing at their own server. Requests, along with the provider API keys attached to them, would then be sent to the attacker rather than to the AI provider.
Check Point notes that this code path sidestepped restrictions LiteLLM already placed on client-supplied api_base and api_key parameters.
The researchers also found that password hashes were exposed to low-privileged users and were stored without salting, using a single hash iteration. These issues duplicated an existing advisory, GHSA-69×8-hrgq-fjj8.
Old bugs, bigger blast radius
Check Point is clear that none of these are new classes of “AI” vulnerability. Missing authorisation checks, SSRF and unsafe dynamic module loading are all well understood. What raises the stakes is where they sit. An LLM gateway stores provider keys, manages user permissions and routes every prompt and response, making it a single point of compromise for an organisation’s AI estate. And because LiteLLM is embedded in many other AI platforms and internal tools, some organisations may be running it without realising.
“The industry’s focus has largely been on securing AI models, but this research highlights an equally important reality: AI infrastructure is becoming a new critical layer of enterprise security,” said Mateo Rojas-Carulla, Head of Research, AI Agent Security at Check Point Software Technologies. “As organisations increasingly rely on gateways such as LiteLLM to connect applications, users and AI services, these platforms become attractive targets because they sit at the centre of trust.”
“For LiteLLM users, the immediate priority is patching and reviewing access controls, but the broader lesson extends beyond a single product,” he added. “Attackers will naturally target the layer that gives them the greatest access with the least resistance.”
What defenders should do
Check Point recommends that organisations:
Upgrade to LiteLLM 1.83.9 or later across every deployment, including instances embedded in other tools
Audit gateway user accounts and remove any that are not needed
Rotate AI provider API keys if there is any sign of unauthorised access before patching
Test that limited roles are enforced in practice, not just on paper
Bring LLM gateways into scope for regular security assessments
The vulnerabilities were reported to LiteLLM’s maintainers through a coordinated disclosure process that began in October 2025.
GitHub has taken the step of expiring unvalidated npm trusted publishing configurations 48 hours after creation after researchers found that it was possible for an attacker to push new versions of a different user's package without having to steal their credentials.
"Your configuration becomes validated and exempt from expiry after its first successful publish," the Microsoft-owned subsidiary
A financial analyst is questioning whether the collapse in AI costs owing to the arrival of Chinese, low-cost and open source models will cause a “reset” in the AI story as cloud providers struggle to recoup trillions of dollars of capital spending. In a recent research note focused on Asian markets, Jefferies estimates that about half of the roughly $2.3 trillion contracted backlog at Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Oracle is owned by OpenAI and Anthropic. Yet Chinese AI models, open source/weight and small language models, threaten to undercut the prices the two US leaders charge, casting doubt on their future revenue. Jefferies points to research from global aggregator platform OpenRouter, which found Chinese models processed 76.12 trillion tokens in the week ended 27 September, up from just 4.37 trillion in late April. The top four US providers processed 14.2 trillion tokens. Meanwhile, the launch of Moonshot AI’s open source Kimi K3 is “competing at the frontier” with an estimated 95 percent of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. “The question now is whether all of the above has been priced fully into markets. This writer does not think so,” the Jefferies paper states. The largest hyperscalers are set to collectively spend between $600 and $800 billion this year on building datacenters, funding it increasingly with debt rather than cash. Jefferies, however, questions where the hyperscalers' future revenue streams will come from. “It can no longer be assumed, most particularly with the arrival of the likes of Kimi K3, that large language models will ever be profitable given the related ongoing collapse in token pricing. This is extremely relevant for the hyperscalers since they have invested in datacenter capacity on the assumption that the compute will be purchased by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI,” the paper says. While the long term bet on AI may be sound, in the medium term, there is a lot of uncertainty, it argues. “The AI story will be due for a big reset at some point in the not-so-distant future. Are the four hyperscalers really going to spend $993 billion on capex in 2027?” Jefferies questions. There are also important questions to ask about how much of the hyperscalers’ reported profits are down to their investments in AI model builders on which they will also depend for revenue. “Other income and expenses” — which describes gains in investments — have spiked in importance. Jefferies says these investments are “likely to include positions in unlisted AI-related stocks.” While the four major hyperscalers’ annualized earnings increased by $222 billion to reach $581 billion in the four quarters to 2Q26, “other non-operating income/loss” accounted for all of that increase, according to the analyst. Jefferies says “other non-operating income/loss” increased by $224 billion year-on-year to $237 billion over the same period, meaning it accounted "for all of the increase in earnings." Other research has underlined how much revenue and borrowing cloud providers might need to fund their datacenter building plans. The 2026 annual Global Technology Report from management consultants Bain & Company says the AI industry must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to keep funding the infrastructure needed to meet anticipated demand. That means the industry will need new uses beyond employee productivity. Bain suspects existing AI applications might make up $1.8 trillion in revenue, but this still leaves a $4.2 trillion shortfall. It could be plugged by emerging AI applications such as search engines and ads, AI-built autonomous vehicles, and AI simulations. Even if they work out, these new categories will only add up to $1.5 trillion in revenue, leaving a $2.7 trillion gap which might be filled by “new products and uses that don’t exist today.” The Register does not offer investment advice.®
It's the end of support for Office 2021 LTSC and it seems like Microsoft is celebrating with a Microsoft 365 outage for some European customers. The affected service is Global Secure Access (GSA), which customers use to access services including Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Teams, and Windows 365 Cloud PCs. We'd argue the "365" moniker is perhaps a little inaccurate at this point. According to Microsoft, the cause is: "A section of GSA infrastructure is performing below acceptable performance thresholds, affecting connectivity to Microsoft 365 services and resulting in impact." The company is applying traffic and performance optimizations, and the system is now showing signs of life, which is scant comfort for customers who have struggled to access Microsoft 365 services using GSA. The timing is unfortunate, since it coincides with the end of support for Office LTSC 2021, Microsoft's on-premises version of Office. The company would like customers to migrate to Microsoft 365, though on-premises Office LTSC 2024 is also available if the cloud doesn't tickle their fancy. It's not yet clear what caused the latest outage. Microsoft is having to report status updates on its Service Health Status page because, according to the company, "Microsoft 365 administrators may be unable to access the admin center to get Service health information." We checked, and, above the cheery text, "Great! No active issues," is a message that reads: "We are having trouble getting info about your service incidents, advisories, and history right now. Try again in a few minutes." Enterprises have already decided whether to stick with on-premises Office, move to the cloud, or choose something else altogether. While Office 2021 LTSC won't suddenly stop working, the end of support from Microsoft will require customers to take some action for compliance reasons, if nothing else. Those who have taken the leap to Microsoft 365 will be pondering the wisdom of their move as Microsoft has demonstrated, yet again, that its cloud services are not quite as reliable as customers might hope or need, and an "oops, sorry about that" only goes so far where a loss of productivity is concerned. ®
The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (DPA) has fined Xandr, an advertising unit owned by Microsoft, €8.6 million ($9.62 million) for illegally relaying Grindr users' sensitive data to advertisers.
The administrative penalty is the largest issued by the data protection watchdog, arguing the case merited a high fine because of the "very serious" nature of the breach. The infringements
NetBSD seems to be thriving of late: as the Linux world goes pro-AI, some of the AI-averse are turning to this explicitly AI-free project. The NetBSD project’s Mastodon feed reports that it received a record 120 donations last month, and it has far exceeded its target: “We received $120,282 USD in total. Naturally, this has completely filled up our donations target bar which was set at $50,000. Time to fund some projects!” It’s a welcome contrast to the usual stories of under-funded FOSS projects, and it follows a visible uptick in people asking about NetBSD in the FOSS Unix groups we read, ever since Emperor Penguin Torvalds said that Linux was not an anti-AI project back in July, and the following month, the Debian project polled its developers on AI use, and they chose to permit AI-generated contributions. This is the moderate, centrist stance. The most recent Ubuntu Summit was heavily AI-flavored. The heads of Red Hat Global Engineering sent out a memo about transitioning to an Agentic Software Development Lifecycle. But once it’s in the kernel, then no distro can totally avoid it. This stance is profoundly offputting to those who prefer hand-crafted code. Last week, the Reg FOSS desk attended the Open Source Summit Europe in Prague. This event reflects the tendencies of the increasingly mainstream open-source world: Linux is pretty much the only OS in evidence, although many attendees tote around (and present from) MacBooks, and both Microsoft and Windows were visible. The event overlaps with Embedded Linux Conference, so the Zephyr RTOS was also visible on some robots and other gadgets. The Open Source Summit gives the overall impression that Linux is the only general-purpose FOSS OS. We saw no mention at all of any of the BSDs; indeed, when we mentioned NetBSD, some of the folks from Let’s Encrypt looked puzzled and asked us “What’s ‘net bee ess dee’?” Sadly, this is probably a reasonably fair representation of its presence at the event and in the FOSS mainstream. For us, the single most dominant theme in the talks, the materials, the stands, and even the T-shirts was AI. It’s everywhere, and every exhibitor was keen to talk about how they’re using AI, deploying AI, scaling AI, or managing AI. The louder the noise about AI gets, the stronger grows the aversion of those of us who actively wish to avoid it. The NetBSD project, on the other hand, came out early and strongly: it banned AI-generated code back in 2024, just a month after the project celebrated its 30th anniversary. This vulture attended the project’s talk at that year’s FOSDEM: NetBSD 10: Thirty years, still going strong!. As ever, the question of differentiation between the BSDs, and between Linux and the BSDs, came up. NetBSD’s slogan is “Of course it runs NetBSD,” but in 2024, its ubiquity was looking threatened: Linux is comparable, and FreeBSD boast close integration with ZFS, Linux-compatible Podman containers, and more. The following year, though, FreeBSD 15 appeared, dropping support for 32-bit x86 (and 32-bit POWER). Debian 13 dropped x86-32 too, as well as MIPS CPU support. That year, the RHEL 10 release went further: it not only requires 64-bit x86, it demands x86-64-v3. This cut off so many older machines, it forced CERN to start switching to Debian. From within the BSD world, the differences between the various projects are fairly clear. NetBSD is minimal, highly portable, and takes great pride in its very friendly, welcoming community. We can personally attest to this: in the course of our review of NetBSD 11, we tried to install the veteran CDE desktop. We couldn’t get it working, but the folks on the NetBSD mailing list tried very hard indeed to help. Although it also has very broad platform support, OpenBSD’s focus is on security, to the extent of dropping the entire Bluetooth subsystem because it didn’t measure up. Its community is far less tolerant: indeed, when this vulture’s latest OpenBSD review was posted on the OpenBSD sub-Reddit, we were banned from the group for pointing out errors in their negative assessments of a very positive article. OpenBSD project lead Theo de Raadt has said it cannot accept AI-generated code: any submitter lacks the right to place a license on it, because it’s impossible to trace which humans originally wrote any code that LLMs regurgitate. However, this guideline seems permeable: the tmux app, the terminal multiplexer included in OpenBSD, has already accepted AI-assisted changes. We asked de Raadt for official comment on this and he declined. FreeBSD is the 362.87 kg gorilla of the BSDs, to the extent that the mainline OS has its own distros, such as GhostBSD, plus MidnightBSD. There’s also the recently-revived experimental NextBSD, and a couple of NAS distros. There’s a live OS called NomadBSD too, although we had little success with this. However, FreeBSD’s central committee has been debating whether to permit AI-generated code for over a year now: we first reported on it in September 2025, and there’s still no consensus. We are sure there is a large helping of “AI is just a tool”, and we suspect side-dishes of “AI is here to stay” and “don’t get left behind.” If anyone dares point out failings, doubtless they’re using the wrong model, or not prompting it correctly. NetBSD’s position is clear: “Do not commit tainted code to the repository. “Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta’s Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.” So far, this seems to be serving it well. If as a result, it remains relatively tiny and minimal, and gets left behind by the AI wave, we plan to be right there with it. Long may the project continue. Bootnote We won’t wish to omit anyone. There is another BSD: Dragonfly BSD, which is experimenting with the kernel and filesystem design. We gave version 6.4 a spin in 2023 and since then there have been only two minor point releases: version 6.4.2 was nearly a year and a half ago, although development is still active. We are not aware that the project has made any statement for or against LLM code generation. Perhaps it should. ®
Microsoft has lifted the lid on the next generation of its Azure Maia custom AI chips, saying it will usher in a new phase of its compute infrastructure where everything is closely integrated to meet the demands of agentic inference. The Redmond giant says its Azure Maia 200, announced earlier this year, is now serving production workloads and that a successor is already planned for 2027. Azure Maia 300 is described as "a complete intelligent system" designed for the new types of AI workloads emerging today. Microsoft claims a full 96-accelerator configuration will deliver up to seven times Maia 200's rack-scale token throughput, while offering 40 percent more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems. Its next-gen chip is created with an inference-first architecture optimized for long-context, memory-intensive and decode-heavy AI workloads, according to a blog post by Microsoft's EVP for Cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie. The firm envisions it being deployed in rack-scale systems comprising up to 96 accelerators, while each Maia 300 will feature eight HBM4 memory stacks providing up to 18 TB/s of peak memory bandwidth, the better to support execution of large models and long-context workloads. This sounds similar to the kind of rack-scale AI equipment that has already been developed by Nvidia for its GPU accelerators, and more recently by AMD with its Helion and Helios infrastructure, all designed to make the most of their own specific silicon and software stacks. Microsoft says that Maia 300 is "built as a complete system, with software, silicon, physical rack infrastructure, networking, and datacenters co-designed to operate as a single platform to meet the demands of cloud-scale agentic inference." It insists that this system-level approach is necessary for agentic workloads, which involve multi-step execution, long-context decoding and tool use, and "change the computational profile and arithmetic intensity of inference." The growing emphasis on in-house integration contrasts with Microsoft's 2024 "AI Access Principles," which stressed partnerships across its technology stack. The firm even complained to the European Commission's competition authorities that Google had a competitive advantage because of its approach. "Only one company – Google," said Microsoft at the time, "is vertically integrated in a manner that provides it with strength and independence at every AI layer from chips to a thriving mobile app store. Everybody else must rely on partnerships to innovate and compete." Microsoft now has its own AI chips, rack-scale designs, and internally developed MAI models, giving it more control over its stack. It plans to scale Azure Maia to "multi-gigawatt deployments" starting in 2027. We asked Microsoft for comment. Guthrie said that the firm will share more details on its strategy at next month's Microsoft Ignite 2026 event in San Francisco. ®
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become the latest financial heavyweight to warn that the AI spending frenzy could end in tears, with consequences extending well beyond the tech sector. In its latest Global Financial Stability Report, published on Tuesday, the IMF warns that financial markets are increasingly exposed to an AI-driven correction, especially if the billions poured into the tech fail to deliver the profits investors expect. AI investment has helped keep markets and economic growth ticking along, but the IMF fears the boom could quickly turn to bust if the promised profits fail to materialize. With tech giants borrowing billions and investors piling into the same handful of companies, a selloff could leave more than just Silicon Valley nursing a hangover. The watchdog is also concerned about circular financing arrangements, in which AI firms act as one another's investors, financiers, and customers. These deals might help keep the AI money machine running, but they also mean financial trouble at one company could quickly become somebody else's problem. The IMF isn't the only one getting nervous. Jefferies strategist Chris Wood has warned that America's AI spending spree could cause "massive capital destruction," with cheaper Chinese open source models threatening the returns US tech giants are counting on. The warning also follows similar concerns raised by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which cautioned in June that the AI boom had uncomfortable similarities to previous financial bubbles. With so much money tied up in a relatively small number of tech companies, it warned that a sudden loss of investor confidence could send shockwaves through global financial markets. As if the prospect of an AI-fueled market meltdown weren't enough, the IMF has identified two other threats to financial stability: rising government bond yields and cyberattacks. Higher yields could increase borrowing costs for governments already struggling with debt, while the latter could bring critical financial services to a grinding halt. Banks have become increasingly reliant on the same handful of cloud providers and software suppliers, creating shared points of failure that could spread disruption across institutions. If a cyberattack took down a major bank or critical tech provider, the IMF warns the fallout could disrupt everything from payments and trading to customers accessing their deposits. Software vendors aren't getting much of a head start either. According to the IMF, more than 70 percent of tracked vulnerabilities exploited so far in 2026 were already being abused by attackers before or on the day they were publicly disclosed, underscoring how little warning defenders may receive. AI could make matters worse here too, as the IMF warns that increasingly capable models are giving cybercriminals more powerful tools, potentially making it easier to find and exploit vulnerabilities at speed. Despite the gloomy outlook, the IMF isn't predicting an imminent financial collapse. It says global financial markets have remained resilient, and its stress testing suggests the banking system could withstand a severe downturn, although weaker institutions would be more exposed. Still, the watchdog wants regulators to keep a closer eye on excessive borrowing, concentrated investments, and cyber resilience before any of these risks turn into a full-blown crisis. For an industry promising to revolutionize the global economy, accidentally helping to crash it would be quite the plot twist.®
Cyberattacks on supermarket refrigeration systems reportedly pushed temperatures as high as 50°C (122°F), affecting hundreds of stores in France and forcing retailers to discard food. Major supermarkets such as Carrefour, Coopérative U, Intermarché, Monoprix, and more were hit by the attacks, which spoiled perishable food and left stores without fresh produce. The affected equipment includes cold-storage units used to hold food before it reaches supermarket shelves. The criminals behind the attack raised temperatures to unsafe levels, spoiling food and in some cases starting fires. Some affected retailers used refrigeration controllers produced by Danish company Danfoss. Authorities have not identified the entry point or confirmed exploitation of the vulnerabilities previously disclosed by Claroty and patched in August 2025, although the manufacturer said affected stores were running outdated firmware. Experts say the previously identified vulnerabilities were easily scriptable and relied on a unique but predictable authentication method. Claroty found a hidden authentication mechanism in the AK-SM 800A platform that accepted a code generated from the device's current date, bypassing the configured administrator password. Anyone who reproduced the algorithm could generate a valid daily code and gain administrative access. "It's a zero-skill thing to pull off, I wrote the bash script while having a shit," said security pro Kevin Beaumont. The research demonstrated how compromised controllers could expose refrigeration systems to physical disruption, although the vulnerabilities' role in this week's attacks remains unconfirmed. Danfoss told reporters this week that the French supermarkets affected by the attacks "were running outdated firmware" and that the company has consistently advocated for keeping systems updated. The Register asked Danfoss if it would confirm whether the previously disclosed bugs were exploited to execute the attacks, and whether the same bug was also abused in August to compromise US military commissary refrigerators, which led to food losses. CERT-FR published an alert reporting numerous compromises of Danfoss AK-SM and AK-SC controllers, which were not mentioned in Claroty's original reporting nor in Danfoss's advisories at the time. The authority advised disconnecting or restricting network access. For suspected compromises, it recommended a factory reset, security patches, credential rotation, account checks, and full reconfiguration. For those wondering why fridges even need to be reachable via the internet, the main reason is that it allows central engineering teams to troubleshoot issues remotely, according to Claroty's researchers. "Industrial control systems such as refrigeration controllers are often assumed to be on safely isolated networks. However, our research found many of these devices are directly exposed to the public internet," said Amir Preminger, CTO at Claroty. "While this convenience significantly reduces maintenance costs by allowing engineers to troubleshoot issues remotely, it also lowers the barrier to entry for attackers. "Organizations must take proactive measures to ensure that management interfaces are not insecurely connected to the internet, and ensure that access to administrative services is restricted to trusted management networks or secured through VPNs and other appropriate network segmentation controls." Intermarché owner Groupement Les Mousquetaires said around 150 of its supermarkets were affected by the attacks, while Carrefour confirmed around 80 impacted stores. Monoprix said roughly 5 percent of its 490 stores were experiencing the same issues, and Coopérative U CEO Dominique Schelcher said 80 of the company’s 2,000 stores were hit, adding that the attack on the food sector was “unacceptable.” “Targeting equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products is an attack on the French food supply chain,” he said. “It is unprecedented, extremely serious, and unacceptable. We remain fully mobilized.” However, in a separate twist, Schelcher told French radio station RTL on Tuesday that Coopérative U is not a customer of Danfoss. The Register contacted Coopérative U for more information about what caused the attacks at its stores. Shodan searches for internet-facing Danfoss controller interfaces indicated that more than 4,500 endpoints were exposed as of Monday, with more than half of those located in France. Ahold Delhaize, a major grocery retailer in the Netherlands, announced on the same day that it was experiencing a "security issue." No link to the refrigeration attacks in France has been established. The end result is similar, however, as the company's grocery brands are reporting stock issues. Several of the group's brands have taken their websites offline and posted notices about the "cybersecurity incident." Stores remain open, but affected brands have reported disruption to websites, apps, customer services, and online deliveries. The disruption hit the company's distribution systems, although these are now being restored. Updates posted to social media on Tuesday told shoppers that staff were once again able to use digital shelf labels but stock levels may vary across stores, and long-life items were likely to be more abundant than fresh fruit and vegetables. The retailer previously suffered a cyberattack in November 2024 that disrupted its US operations. ®
Rilasciati aggiornamenti di sicurezza per sanare 31 vulnerabilità, di cui 5 con gravità "critica" e 24 con gravità "alta", in Progress MarkLogic Server, nota piattaforma di database NoSQL progettata per archiviare, integrare, gestire e ricercare grandi volumi di dati eterogenei all'interno di un unico sistema.
Aggiornamenti di sicurezza sanano alcune vulnerabilità, di cui 2 con gravità “alta”, in Craft CMS, piattaforma open source per lo sviluppo e l’amministrazione di siti web e applicazioni digitali. Tali vulnerabilità, qualora sfruttate, potrebbero consentire a un utente malintenzionato di eludere i meccanismi di sicurezza e di eseguire codice arbitrario sui sistemi interessati.
Risolte due vulnerabilità, di cui una con gravità "critica" e una con gravità "alta", presenti nella libreria Neo4j GraphQL. Tali vulnerabilità, qualora sfruttate, potrebbero consentire ad un utente malintenzionato di eludere dei meccanismi di sicurezza, accedere ad informazioni sensibili e manipolare i dati presenti sui sistemi interessati.
A coordinated attack on the operational technology (OT) behind supermarket refrigeration has hit hundreds of stores across France, in what security experts are calling one of the clearest examples yet of cyber sabotage with physical consequences.
Retailers confirmed the attack on Monday 12 October, with disruption reportedly beginning on Sunday night. Intermarché and its Netto brand said at least 300 shops were affected, Coopérative U more than 100 and Carrefour 80, with Monoprix, E.Leclerc and Auchan also reporting impacted stores. According to BFM TV, attackers remotely forced refrigeration units into continuous defrost cycles, driving temperatures up to 50°C. Paris prosecutors said the attack also caused fires.
“This incident is not surprising. A supermarket refrigerator is no longer just an electrical appliance. It is a computerized system connected to a network, enabling remote monitoring and control. While this connectivity allows refrigeration systems to be managed efficiently, it also exposes them to cyber security risks, particularly when operational equipment runs for years on outdated software, without regular security updates, and with management interfaces accessible from the internet,” said Oded Vanunu, Head of Vulnerability Research at Check Point.
Unpatched, internet-facing and end of life
The affected equipment has been traced to refrigeration management systems from Danish manufacturer Danfoss. A source close to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said France’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) had identified a vulnerability in Danfoss software, and the agency has been ordered to investigate.
Danfoss said most of the compromised units were “legacy” products that no longer receive software or security updates, singling out its AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 controllers, and noted that an affected version of the AK-SM800 was running outdated firmware. The company said it had long advised customers to upgrade or replace these models.
Known vulnerabilities in the control software date back to 2023, some rated critical, with patches available. In August, OT security firm Claroty published research describing flaws in Danfoss systems that could allow attackers to bypass authentication. Reports suggest attackers may have used the Shodan search engine to locate exposed devices, some of which are connected via 3G cards for remote monitoring.
“One of the significant aspects of this incident is that the attackers did not necessarily need sophisticated cyber capabilities. Refrigeration systems have legitimate operational functions, such as defrost cycles, and when an unauthorized party gains access to the system, those same functions can be exploited to disrupt operations. Unlike attacks aimed at stealing data or encrypting files, the impact here is on the physical operation of the equipment itself, with direct consequences such as food inventory losses and potential safety hazards.” Vanunu continued.
“In previous research conducted by Check Point on smart devices, including LG products, we demonstrated how a vulnerability in a centralised management platform could allow attackers to gain control of connected devices. However, in the current incident, it is still unclear exactly how the attackers gained access to the systems.”
OT in the crosshairs
No group has claimed responsibility, and there is no evidence of a ransom demand or data theft. The Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit has opened an investigation into what it described as a “large-scale” attack on connected refrigerators at several major food retailers, while ANSSI is coordinating with European counterparts. Sekoia analyst Felix Aime said stores in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium were also affected.
“The refrigeration systems in supermarkets are operational technology. Building management controls, HVAC, cold chain infrastructure. These are the same category of systems that the security industry has been warning about as the next frontier for sabotage attacks, and they’ve now been weaponised against food retail infrastructure in one of Europe’s largest economies,” said Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress.
ANSSI had already listed sabotage of industrial control systems among the main threats facing France in its most recent threat report.
“Heating fridges to 50 degrees for six hours is not data theft; it is physical sabotage executed through software, and that is the lesson for every sector. Refrigeration controllers, building systems and point-of-sale equipment are now connected and remotely managed, often through a handful of suppliers, so one weak link scales to hundreds of stores overnight,” said Samuel Hassine, CEO and co-founder of Filigran.
“The problem extends beyond a single refrigeration system or an isolated security vulnerability. Operational equipment is often designed to remain in service for 15 years or more, while cyber threats and technologies evolve at a much faster pace. In addition, the same controllers and management systems are deployed across retail chains worldwide, meaning that a compromise affecting widely used technology could potentially impact a large number of locations,” added Check Point’s Vanunu.
Counting the cost
Intermarché chief executive Thierry Cotillard told BFM TV that losses could run to “tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day”, while Coopérative U’s Dominique Schelcher said larger stores could each lose up to €180,000–200,000 in stock. France’s retail federation, the FCD, has called on Danfoss to provide “full transparency”.
“The immediate financial consequences are significant and visible. Failures at the stores means total write-off of perishable stock across every affected location simultaneously. The operational disruption compounds quickly. Staff cannot trade normally without functioning refrigeration. Products cannot be restocked until systems are restored and verified safe. The food retail sector across Europe should be treating this as a signal that they are being actively targeted,” Huntress’ Patel warned.
“The cyberattack on French supermarkets is a stark reminder that cyber threats extend far beyond stolen data and financial losses. Hackers reportedly manipulated refrigeration systems, raising temperatures to 50°C, causing fires and forcing retailers to dispose of large quantities of food. With hundreds of stores affected, the incident highlights how vulnerabilities in connected systems can have serious real-world consequences, disrupting operations, damaging equipment and potentially putting public safety at risk,” said Jamie Akhtar, CEO and Co-founder of CyberSmart.
Mitigation: find the exposure first
Experts agree that defenders’ first priority should be identifying which OT assets are reachable from the internet, and who holds remote access to them.
“To reduce these risks, the first step is to identify which controllers and management interfaces are directly exposed to the internet and eliminate any unnecessary exposure. It is also important to keep systems updated, replace default passwords, restrict remote access, and enable multi-factor authentication wherever supported. Separating operational control networks from other networks and monitoring unusual changes in system behaviour are also essential measures. These recommendations apply not only to refrigeration systems, but also to HVAC, building management systems, and other operational infrastructure.” said Vanunu.
“It also demonstrates how increasingly interconnected technology can create new opportunities for cybercriminals. For businesses, this reinforces the importance of securing all connected devices and systems, not just traditional IT infrastructure. Organisations should prioritise regular software and firmware updates, strong access controls, multi-factor authentication where supported and network segmentation to prevent attackers moving between systems. Regular security assessments and employee cybersecurity awareness training are also essential for identifying vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Ultimately, businesses must recognise that cybersecurity is no longer just about protecting data, but also about safeguarding physical operations, customers and business continuity.” said CyberSmart’s Akhtar.
Filigran’s Hassine urged security leaders to put the issue in front of the board: “Boards should ask three questions this week. Which connected equipment could cause physical or financial damage if someone changed a setting, and who can reach it from outside. Which third parties hold remote access, and how that access is monitored and segmented. And has anyone tested that the response works, from detection to switching to manual operation. Resilience in retail now means knowing your exposure before an attacker maps it for you.”
The dangerous part of a stolen identity isn't always the initial login. It's what an attacker can do with that access next.
With AI accelerating reconnaissance, exploitation of vulnerabilities, and privilege escalation, attackers can move through systems faster than security teams can investigate. A compromised account that looks legitimate at first could become the starting point for a much
Three vulnerabilities in LG's webOS can be chained to give an attacker on the same local network root access to certain smart TVs without a PIN or any interaction from the owner.
LG has issued a fix, according to an advisory published by SSD Secure Disclosure on October 12.
The chain was tested on two TV models, the 32LQ636BPSA and the 27TQ600SW, running webOS 7.5.7-25 on firmware
A user opens a browser tab, pastes data into a chat assistant, and nothing is installed.
A developer adds a coding assistant as an editor extension, and nothing shows up in the installed programs list.
Someone downloads a local model runtime, a program that runs models directly on the machine instead of sending data to an external service, because they were told not to send company data
A person claiming responsibility for the breach of Denmark's Central Register of Persons (CPR) says they gained access through an IT company's account protected by the password "123456." The person told Danish news outlet Politiken they had no intention of selling or leaking the data. The newspaper reported that at least three company accounts, including an administrator account, used the same password. Denmark's CPR administration confirmed a breach affecting the information belonging to 8.8 million people on October 5, adding that a Danish company's legal access to the CPR system was abused. It did not name Funen-based Pays ApS as the company in question, but managing director Sophie Laursen confirmed on October 9 that it's access had been exploited. Pays' website has been taken offline, and the business has not responded to The Register's request for more information about the password claims. Pays had authorized access to the CPR system to provide services such as validating business customers' records. The Danish government says information relating to 8.8 million people was accessed. The register contains approximately 11 million records, including those of deceased people and people who have moved abroad. The government did not respond to questions about the alleged password failings. According to documents obtained by broadcaster TV 2, the attacker gained access to the CPR system on September 10 and ran the 14 million automated searches between then and September 20. The intrusion was detected on October 2, 12 days after the last reported searches. Mikkel Leihardt, director of the government's higher education and science ministry, told reporters at a press conference that the attack was discovered after a department staffer picked up an invoice indicating unusually high activity from Pays. The Danish data protection authority, Datatilsynet, was notified on October 4, and the government disclosed the attack the following day. ®
Siemens ha rilasciato aggiornamenti di sicurezza per sanare molteplici vulnerabilità nei propri prodotti, di cui 4 con gravità “critica” e 14 con gravità “alta”.
L’Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale richiama l’attenzione delle organizzazioni operanti nei settori della grande distribuzione organizzata (GDO), della logistica alimentare, della refrigerazione industriale e dei servizi di manutenzione connessi, alla luce del recente incidente informatico che ha colpito numerose catene di supermercati francesi.
Je vous propose de déposer votre demande sur le forum dédié qui nous permet de rassembler au même endroit toutes les demandes/contributions autour de la nouvelle version de Framadate. Cela vous permettra de suivre l’avancement de votre demande et d’avoir le retour du développeur sur votre proposition.
Je trouve personnellement que c’est une très bonne idée qui serait très pratique.
Si vous ne parvenez pas à poster sur le forum, n’hésitez pas à me le dire, je posterai votre demande.
Je lis avec surprise l’argument suivant pour justifier la disparition de l’option « Tout le monde peut modifier TOUTES les réponses »
C’est génial que les personnes avec qui vous avez utilisé l’ancienne version de Framadate aient toutes respecté les votes les uns des autres sans les modifier, une grande partie des utilisateur.ices ont eu une très bonne expérience avec cette fonctionnalité. Mais ça n’a pas toujours été le cas, j’ai eu des retours utilisateurs en ce sens.
Aujourd’hui la fonction « tout le monde peut modifier tous les votes » est bien disponible, elle est sélectionnable lors de la création de sondage. Cela a été un choix du développeur en charge de Pollaris de sortir une fonctionnalité avant l’autre. Il a réalisé ce projet bénévolement et a fait certains choix en fonction du temps/énergie disponible. Il faut parfois faire des choix lors du lancement d’un logiciel afin d’avancer pas à pas.
Ça s’appelle toujours « Framadate » mais ce n’est pas une nouvelle version (imiter le langage marketing n’aide en rien à clarifier les choses).
Nous avons fait le choix de parler de « version » dans le but de faciliter la compréhension du grand publique. Navrée que ce choix ne vous plaise pas, ces choix ne peuvent malheureusement pas satisfaire tous les utulisateur.ices.
Il n’y a donc rien de surprenant à ce que la nouvelle application ne réponde pas aux besoins de toutes les utilisateurices de l’ancienne application.
En effet, ces retours étaient attendus et nous permettent d’améliorer petit à petit Pollaris/Framadate. Nous sommes heureux.ses de recevoir les nombreux retours utilisateur.ices bienveillants dont nous avons besoin pour avancer et améliorer nos services.
En espérant que la mise à disponibilité de cette fonctionnalité et bien d’autres, contribuent à vous satisfaire et améliorer votre expérience avec nos services.
Datacenters are forecast to consume a growing share of Europe's electricity by 2035, potentially pushing up consumer prices and prompting governments to impose price caps or restrictions on bit barns, according to Moody's. The credit rating agency is keeping tabs on the financial implications for datacenter operators and electricity networks. It predicts that while power consumption by server farms is relatively modest today, these facilities are set to become major drivers of electricity demand by 2035, requiring utilities and network operators to invest in generation and grid capacity. Massive compute sheds still accounted for "a low single-digit share" of electricity in most of the largest European markets in 2025, typically about 2.5 percent. But some of the major markets such as the UK and France are set to see accelerating growth in the number and size of facilities that could substantially increase their share of electricity consumption. The report estimates datacenters will account for at least 5.7 percent of electricity demand in France and the UK by 2035, but could be as high as 17 percent for the Netherlands and 30 percent for Ireland. The latter country is regarded as an outlier, however, as datacenters already made up 23 percent of Ireland's electricity consumption in 2025 – up from just 5 percent in 2015. In addition, the EU has set out the goal of more than tripling the bloc's datacenter capacity within five to seven years, and wants to diversify where such projects are sited beyond the primary markets such as Germany, Ireland, France, and the Netherlands to secondary markets in the Nordics and southern Europe. This means more power generation will be needed, plus expansion of the grid networks to carry the extra energy to where it is required. Moody's says this has the potential to put pressure on grid operators' balance sheets in the short term, compounded by the lag in recovering higher capital spending under many European regulatory regimes. This pressure is more pronounced for transmission networks than distribution networks because datacenter operators are required to fund only the cost of the connection to the grid, the report by Moody's notes. It highlights some novel approaches adopted by utilities, such as repurposing old fossil-fuel plant sites for server farm projects because of their existing grid connections – as is said to be the case with at least one of the UK government's AI Growth Zones – and partnering with developers to build new facilities and supply them with power. The cost of expanding power grids, together with supply-demand imbalances, is set to push energy prices higher, Moody's forecasts. Historically, this has prompted political measures to limit the financial burden borne by customers, it says. Some governments are already considering tax cuts and additional subsidies for end users, while a growing number of transmission networks are starting to demand financial guarantees to screen out speculative or duplicative projects. The UK government is mulling over this measure, as we reported during the summer. Looking ahead, intervention could become more intrusive through measures such as electricity price caps, additional taxes, or levies. Moody's cites Ireland as an example, where the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) replaced a moratorium on new datacenter grid connections with a framework under which operators applying for a grid connection rated at 10 MVA or more must provide matching power generation or storage capacity on-site or nearby, and meet at least 80 percent of their annual electricity demand through additional renewable projects in Ireland. In America, President Trump brought in a Ratepayer Protection Pledge to try to defuse growing voter unhappiness at datacenters and their effects on energy bills. The pledge now covers utility companies, bit barn developers, and state governments with a pinky promise that citizens' bills won't rise to pay for all the extra energy and grid infrastructure needed. Moody's expects more European governments to follow the US and Ireland in intervening over datacenter power demand if expansion continues on its current trajectory. ®
Les financements de NLNet qui nous ont permis d’améliorer l’outil s’épuisent et leur renouvellement n’est pas acquis.
Pour ma part, après m’être consacrée à plein temps au projet depuis avril 2026 mes ressources personnelles s’épuisent. Alors qu’il faudrait plus que jamais mettre un coup de collier, à défaut de soutien financier je vais devoir me désengager.
Jovelle Tamayo/ProPublica. Source images: Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica, Tina Russell for ProPublica, MPfoto71/Alamy.
It wasn’t the kind of call a grocery store gets every day. A customer with a thick Eastern European accent was on the phone saying he wanted to buy several thousand cans of Red Bull. Could the store have them in stock in a few days? Also, did they have equipment to move all those stacks of energy drinks into the parking lot, where two minivans would be waiting?
When the day came, Oct. 19, 2022, employees at the Smart & Final store in San Diego sold 3,960 cans of Red Bull and 720 of Monster Energy to two men and two women, all with the same accent, and helped them wheel the pallets out back. To pay for it all — the bill came to $10,747.05 — the group pulled out piles of plastic. These weren’t credit or debit cards; they looked more like hotel-room keys. There were 25 cards in all, each with a different amount loaded onto it, and the four people took turns swiping one after another. Then, the payment complete, they drove off.
In the days that followed, people as far away as New York and Florida made panicked calls to the store. They wanted to know why their food-stamp accounts (containing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits) had been drained at this seemingly random location in San Diego.
It would turn out that what became known as the Red Bull Crew had gotten ahold of their SNAP data and used the funds to buy the energy drinks, which they then sold online or to smaller stores. It was hardly an isolated event. From September through November of that year, the same crew, part of a criminal syndicate based in Romania, bought at least $305,274.52 in energy drinks, using SNAP account information and PINs stolen from at least 174 victims nationwide, according to court documents and federal investigators.
To hear the Trump administration tell it, the SNAP program is under siege by well-heeled recipients of food stamps. Vice President JD Vance, upon being named “Fraud Czar” this spring, said: “There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose agency oversees the program, regularly goes on TV and social media to allege that masses of SNAP recipients are scamming the system, driving Bentleys, Ferraris, Maseratis and, yes, Lamborghinis.
The federal government’s own statistics tell a different story. Confirmed cases of intentional program violations — fraud — committed by SNAP recipients account for $64 million a year, or about 0.08% of all benefits issued annually, according to the most recent 50-state reports compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Meanwhile a far bigger fraud wave has exploded over the past five years: organized theft from SNAP recipients. In 2025, $470 million was stolen electronically from beneficiaries — and thus from the U.S. taxpayer — according to data supplied to ProPublica by Propel, a company that provides a mobile app for SNAP recipients to check their account balances and transaction histories. More than 990,000 households that received food assistance last year had benefits stolen. (The reason it’s necessary to use data from a private company: The federal government has stopped tracking rates of this crime.)
ProPublica interviewed nearly 100 victims of SNAP theft, federal prosecutors, Secret Service agents, USDA officials, caseworkers and other experts to understand what’s behind this phenomenon and why more isn’t being done to stop it. The victims are almost all working people with families, or retirees, who have struggled to afford groceries in the current economy. Most didn’t learn about the crime until they were in a checkout line, only to have their benefit card declined.
Jared Chesnut, a laid-off software developer in Hoover, Alabama, had $893 in SNAP benefits stolen from him in December: “I ate rice and grits the rest of the month.”Rita Harper for ProPublica
Upon reporting the disappearance of their food assistance, victims are informed that nothing can be done under current federal law. “The only thing they said was that [my benefits] cannot be refunded unless they were lost due to a natural disaster,” said one SNAP theft victim in Ohio. “They told me they’d add my name to the list,” said another in rural Oregon. “They advised if I feel the place is sketchy, don’t run my card there,” a victim in Philadelphia said. Still another, in Virginia, added, “They even charged me $2 for a replacement card.”
Perhaps the most vexing aspect of all: The federal government knows how to prevent the vast majority of this crime in a single step. Congress just hasn’t been willing to take it.
SNAP theft is an old scheme applied to a new target. For years, scammers would surreptitiously install skimming devices on card readers at ATMs, gas pumps and corner stores. These devices could read the data on people’s cards as they swiped — while a pinhole camera or overlay keypad captured their PINs — all of which could be picked up later or sent via Bluetooth to someone sitting in a nearby cafe or parking lot. This pilfered data, in turn, was used to make online purchases, or it was loaded onto cloned cards to withdraw cash.
Skimming became exponentially more difficult when credit and debit card companies installed digital microchips in the 2010s and then introduced tap-to-pay. But one kind of card did not get the new chips: Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards, which people use to access SNAP and other public assistance. These still rely on the 1960s-era magnetic-stripe technology that skimmers can easily read.
EBT cards are not a particularly high-value target compared with bank cards. (The average monthly SNAP benefit is about $350 per household.) But funding boosts to SNAP during the pandemic temporarily increased benefit amounts, and profits could be considerable if you skimmed hundreds of people’s card information every month. Skimming teams, often run by Romanian gangs, pivoted. With cloned magnetic-stripe cards, they started buying up huge quantities of SNAP-eligible products like energy drinks and baby formula that are easy to store and resell.
“We’ve started many, many briefings saying that one of the biggest ways we’re going to fight this is to just get chips in the cards,” said Michael Peck, assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigative Division. Among the Secret Service’s lesser-known functions is investigating many financial crimes, and Peck leads its efforts against benefit theft. He said he and his team have delivered this message on Capitol Hill both at committee meetings and to individual members of Congress.
Yet congressional leadership has continually blocked legislation that would fund chip EBT cards nationally, despite universal support for the measure among Democrats and significant support among the Republican rank and file. For instance, House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said at a hearing in March that chip technology is “very effective.” But he shut down a bipartisan proposal to upgrade EBT cards with chips, citing unspecified budgetary constraints. (“Chairman Thompson is supportive of finding a fiscally responsible path forward for implementing policy that supports chip cards,” a committee aide said in a statement on his behalf. She added that “there was an appetite” for this reform among Republicans, but that Democrats weren’t willing to “find the budgetary offsets” for it.)
The Congressional Budget Office has yet to formally score the proposal, but multiple Hill staffers said they were told the total cost would be in the range of $215 million, as compared to the $600 million-plus annual loss on theft of SNAP and other benefits.
Adrianna Puckett, of Oak Hill, Florida, was on maternity leave from a gas station job in July when she lost $516 to SNAP thieves. “It was just the worst time that this could have happened,” she said. “I had to go back to work full time with a newborn.”Tina Russell for ProPublica
The main thing Congress has done about SNAP theft is to abandon a previous effort to help victims. The federal government had, since late 2022, been replacing people’s stolen funds, just as banks are required to do if your debit card is hacked. As a result, 753,929 households were compensated.
In December 2024, a bipartisan spending agreement that included a provision to extend these reimbursements through 2028 was on the brink of becoming law. But Elon Musk, who had been named a leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency, attacked the legislation more than 100 times on X, pushing to “defund everything.” (Musk did not reply to a request for comment.) Trump then sank the deal. Victims of SNAP theft can no longer get any of their benefits replaced. And with the government off the hook for losses, there is now less incentive to put money into the solution.
In the 22 months since, the Trump administration has gone on to strip funds for addressing EBT theft from the USDA’s annual budget requests to Congress, while cutting at least 650 of the staff of the federal Food and Nutrition Administration, the subagency that oversees SNAP. More than half of the technical experts whom the agency had hired to help it develop EBT card security guidance have been pushed out, according to the Government Accountability Office.
“Many of us who were working on fraud, we’ve left the federal government entirely,” said Kym Ayodeji, who had been a data scientist in the SNAP program until she departed this spring. (FNA, the agency she worked for, is also responsible for tracking fraud committed by retailers, which is far more prevalent than that committed by beneficiaries.) Ayodeji said she and her colleagues had been working on ways to identify retailers where unusually large quantities of certain items had been purchased and addresses where purchases made with many different EBT cards were being delivered. Some of this work was indefinitely delayed by firings, early retirements, agency reorganizations and government shutdowns, she said.
SNAP is federally funded and supervised. Congress and the USDA traditionally mandate, and pay much of the costs for, major changes to the system, especially involving technical coordination between states. States evaluate applicants and administer the accounts of those who are approved.
That said, states are allowed to adopt chip cards on their own. California has nearly completed the transition, and Alabama and Oklahoma began rolling out new cards this year. A handful of others initiated the process in recent months — before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, starting Oct. 1, cut 50% of states’ administrative funding for SNAP, which Alabama and the others had tapped to transition to chip technology.
The rest — about 40 states — have likely missed their window, unless Congress acts. They’re also waiting for regulatory guidance on EBT card security and chip card implementation that the USDA has been claiming for nearly four years it is planning to publish. (The USDA Office of Inspector General has found that the agency’s failure to issue this has allowed the theft of at least $555 million in SNAP benefits.)
State-level SNAP administrators have also been overwhelmed with the hundreds of new requirements that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has saddled them with. For one, the law mandates that states adopt intensive new work requirements for older adults and others, resulting in voluminous additional monthly paperwork. And federal funds will be slashed even further next year if states don’t scramble to reduce their “payment error rate,” a figure that measures unintentional over- and underpayments in SNAP benefits. With all of this to juggle, many state officials told ProPublica that they’ve put chip card implementation on hold in order to implement the Trump law — one of whose ostensible goals was to reduce fraud.
Ana Marton, a 75-year-old retired architect in New York City, had $304 swiped from her SNAP account. “I am very vulnerable at my age,” she said. “The insecurity that this could happen again is immense.”Kholood Eid for ProPublica
The White House declined to respond to a detailed list of questions. A USDA spokesperson, in an emailed statement, did not refute that Rollins has focused on individual SNAP recipient fraud rather than on EBT theft, but said that finding “cracks in public statements screams politics, not fact-finding.” The spokesperson also did not address ProPublica’s reporting showing that the agency has failed to deliver solutions on EBT theft specifically. Instead, the statement pointed to the agency’s work, in collaboration with the Department of Justice, combating retailer fraud. The USDA says it has cracked down on thousands of stores that were abusing their SNAP privileges.
Absent action from Congress or USDA leadership, it has largely been left to the Secret Service to apply an enforcement approach to what is arguably a policy problem. Agents first went after gangs like the Red Bull Crew, often by watching hours upon hours of grocery store surveillance footage. More recently, they’ve tried to get ahead of the scammers by heading to cities that have been hit by EBT theft attacks and then going store to store to check card readers for skimming devices. The agency has run more than 70 of these operations since April 2024, independent of any White House initiative.
During an operation in August in Burbank, California, a Secret Service analyst removes a skimming device from a convenience store’s card reader.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
Most of them are led by Peck, the assistant special agent in charge. With his form-fitting black polo tucked into cargo pants and a contoured beard, he has a flat affect even as he lists off colorful details like how the criminals sometimes ship dishwashers full of cash overseas. But he also emphasizes the vulnerability of the victims and wishes there was even more his team could do for them. “The U.S. has been fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Terror for how many years?” he said. “We are pushing hard and we’re doing all we can with the resources and abilities that we have.”
One bright morning in late June, dozens of law enforcement officers gathered in a Secret Service meeting room on the top floor of a downtown Brooklyn skyscraper, with a commanding view of the New York City skyline. In addition to unarmed Secret Service analysts in short-sleeved shirts inscribed with the field office they were joining from (Nashville, Miami, San Diego), there were agents from the USDA Office of Inspector General as well as a smattering of NYPD officers — who had guns, handcuffs and the jurisdiction to make arrests should anything go awry that day.
From a podium, Peck recapped how the multiday New York operation was going so far, including that the previous day, officers had happened upon two foreign nationals installing a skimming device, chased them down and made arrests. “Be safe, watch backs, stay fed,” he concluded.
Then everyone dispersed into teams of three or four. Each was given a list of dozens of stores in Brooklyn or Queens — disproportionately ethnic and dollar stores, but also some larger chains like 7-11 — that they were assigned to visit, based on data analytics showing where skimming activity was most probable.
The squad that ProPublica joined was headed to Midwood, in South Brooklyn, which is home to Orthodox Jews and immigrants from the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere. As we walked around the neighborhood with these federal agents, we got plenty of confused looks and some scared ones, too.
“Hello, we’re here with the Secret Service,” one of the analysts would say upon entering each store. Then they’d ask the store manager for permission to inspect each card reader. They also handed out flyers in four languages telling the cashiers what to look out for.
When they did find a skimming device, they donned gloves and masks to handle it. After prying it off the card reader, they bagged it and tagged it, to be sent in for DNA and fingerprint testing as well as digital forensic analysis. Maybe a lead could be extracted, a connection to a larger EBT theft ring.
These missions are clearly well-intentioned, and every skimmer removed saves families from being deprived of food. Yet, plainly, conducting store-to-store checks of card readers is inefficient. Over the course of two years, the agency has spent tens of thousands of staff hours checking 69,805 point-of-sale terminals at stores, 42,972 gas pumps and 10,661 ATMs. They’ve found 637 skimming devices. And as one agent told ProPublica, “There could be a new skimmer on there tomorrow.”
Ultimately, it just won’t be possible to arrest one’s way out of this crisis, both federal and state law enforcement officials acknowledged. Low-level runners keep arriving from Romania and elsewhere; even if they do get caught, they’re often able to bond out of jail because they’re only facing state charges for nonviolent offenses. Then they disappear.
Funding for chip EBT cards still faces dim prospects on Capitol Hill, according to Democratic and Republican lawmakers and staffers, even with newfoundsupport from major retailer associations and big players like Walmart. There’s a chip card provision in the Senate’s draft version of this year’s Farm Bill, but the whole package is mired in a dispute between the parties — over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to SNAP funding — that looks like it will last until well after the midterm elections. This almost doesn’t matter, given that on the House side, the Farm Bill has already passed, and it contains no funding for chip cards.
And there’s been no movement on repeated bipartisan proposals from Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and others to renew the reimbursement program for families that have had their food assistance taken.
Pamela Harris, a retired IT worker in Pittsburgh, had $298 stolen: “I had to dig into my Social Security and put my utility bills on hold to buy food.”Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
Certainly, the mass distribution of any new payment technology isn’t easy. California, Alabama and Oklahoma have had to phase in their new cards gradually, allowing customers to still use the card’s magnetic stripe if the chip isn’t working everywhere yet. And they’ve tried to notify rural convenience stores and gas stations, and help corner bodegas update their card readers, so that no one is left with only a chip card in a desert of stores that still just accept magnetic stripe.
But by doing all of this and employing additional data tools, California has reduced the theft of food and cash benefits by as much as 83% in just two years, the governor’s office said. And Alabama officials claim their state hasn’t had any confirmed EBT theft cases since they began to distribute chip cards this year.
Still, chip cards aren’t the entire solution and doubtlessly, scammers will find clever ways to get around this technology. Moreover, SNAP recipients have largely been denied the basic services that banks and credit card companies use to block likely fraudulent transactions in real time. (Think of the email or text alerts you get from your bank when suspicious purchases are attempted with your card information.)
If states were to try this without federal help, they would have to individually pay for the additional security features. Most have gone for cheaper options like advising or requiring SNAP recipients to change their PIN regularly and to lock their card when not using it. Both are useful stopgaps but require constant diligence.
State and county SNAP caseworkers said they’ve been deeply frustrated that ever since Trump and Musk killed the reimbursement program, all they can do for victims is suggest they change their PIN more often and maybe try reporting the crime to local law enforcement. “It is a short conversation,” said Norman Vogele, a caseworker in Oregon. The date of the crime and the missing amount is recorded. “It isn’t clear why we even do that much,” he said, “as there is zero recourse.”
The Red Bull Crew stayed on the run for over a year, using looted food benefits to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of bulk energy drinks in Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. After hundreds of hours of surveillance by the Secret Service, federal prosecutors and local authorities, all but one of the members were arrested and served sentences ranging from one to three years. They’ve all since been released, and some may have been deported.
Meanwhile, every day, SNAP theft sprees keep popping up in new corners of the country. A Secret Service official sounded gloomy about the pursuit of street-level operatives on its own, without policy change. “You can arrest them,” he said. “But essentially once you take them off the street, there’s 10 more that are doing the same thing.”
The owner of Hobbs, Phase Eight, and Whistles is the latest fashion retailer to suffer a cyberattack, leaving several IT systems offline and customers facing order delays. South African retail giant The Foschini Group (TFG) confirmed on Tuesday that its UK business, TFG London, discovered a cybersecurity incident on October 11 that affected all three brands. Two days later, several systems remain unavailable, and the company is still trying to establish whether any personal or sensitive information has been compromised. The incident hasn’t forced stores to close, but TFG said some website functions may be unavailable. Customers have also been warned that orders placed on or after Sunday could be delayed, according to an email seen by The Telegraph. "Stores are open as normal but some of our brand's website capabilities may not be available as the investigation continues," the company said. "We apologize for any disruption and will provide additional updates to our customers as appropriate." TFG said it immediately activated its incident response and business continuity plans, brought in external cybersecurity specialists, and notified the relevant UK authorities. A spokesperson at the ICO told The Register: “We can confirm we have received a breach report from TFG Brands (London) Limited and we are assessing the information provided.” There is at least some good news for shoppers worried about their payment details. In an email to customers, TFG London said a third-party provider handles payment processing and that, based on its investigation so far, it has no reason to believe payment information is at risk. Whether other customer data has escaped into the wild is another matter. TFG said it is still investigating that possibility and will notify affected individuals or organizations if it finds evidence of a compromise. The company has yet to disclose how attackers gained access, whether ransomware was involved, or when it expects to have its systems fully restored, and did not respond to The Register’s questions. The disruption appears to be confined to the three fashion brands. TFG said its White Stuff and Inside Story businesses are unaffected, as are its operations in Africa and Australia, which run on separate IT systems. The attack comes during a particularly miserable spell for fashion retailers, which seem to be attracting cybercriminals almost as enthusiastically as shoppers chasing a sale. Last week, ASOS customers received an unexpected notification informing them that the online fashion retailer had been hacked. ASOS subsequently confirmed that an attacker had gained access to an employee account by impersonating a trusted contact and obtaining login credentials. Armed with those credentials, the attacker got into third-party platforms holding customer names and contact details. Meanwhile, H&M is reportedly investigating claims that it was targeted by the notorious ShinyHunters cybercrime group. According to The Times, the Swedish fashion giant is examining allegations involving a limited amount of company data, although it stressed that it had found no indication its systems had been compromised. No evidence currently links the incidents at TFG London, ASOS, and H&M, and the latter has not confirmed a breach. Still, with three major fashion businesses linked with cyber trouble in little more than a week, October's hottest retail trend appears to be incident response.®
Mark Harris for ProPublica. Source images: Alejandro A. Alvarez/The Philadelphia Inquirer, courtesy of Patrick Hickson, court records.
In 2020, seven years after he was appointed to represent a client who claimed he was wrongly convicted, attorney Scott Galloway told the judge that he was still looking into the case and needed more time.
“I am still in the process of interviewing individuals,” the lawyer wrote to the judge in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, who had already granted him 32 extensions.
His client, Nolan O’Neal, had been a 20-year-old high school student when he was arrested for murder by Chester police, who had four eyewitnesses identifying him. At his 2005 trial, those witnesses all recanted, saying police had pressured them to accuse O’Neal.
By the time Galloway joined the case, in 2013, O’Neal had already spent eight years in prison insisting he was innocent. The lawyer’s job was to help him file a petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act. That law provided a narrow path to freedom if Galloway could find crucial new evidence or prove that previous lawyers had mishandled the case.
But court records do not show that the attorney did much other than ask for more time.
In 2022, after nine years, one unsuccessful request to access evidence and 41 extensions, Galloway filed a two-page petition addressing just one of the many issues O’Neal had wanted him to raise. It would not be enough to get O’Neal his day in court.
Nolan O’Neal visits with his sister, Erin O’Neal, earlier this year at the State Correctional Institution Chester, where he is incarcerated.Courtesy of Erin O’Neal
For more than half a century, Pennsylvania has promised people who claim they didn’t get a fair trial the right to “effective” post-conviction legal representation, regardless of their ability to pay. That’s more than most states promise people after they have been convicted and lost their appeals.
Yet Pennsylvania has done little to fulfill that promise. The Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica previously reported that Pennsylvania lets lawyers resolve cases quickly using a practice that is discouraged in several states: filing “no-merit” letters, also known as Finley letters, urging judges to reject their clients’ handwritten or typed claims. In Philadelphia, dozens who had received such letters later had their convictions or sentences overturned based on issues their lawyers had rejected or overlooked.
But the problems go deeper than that: The state’s loose rules and its failure to fund post-conviction work have made the type of breakdown O’Neal encountered a recurring feature of this system.
By filing public records requests with courts serving all 67 Pennsylvania counties and analyzing a decade of court dockets, an Inquirer and ProPublica investigation found that the system Pennsylvania set up to protect the right to counsel instead allows, or even encourages, shoddy representation.
The news organizations found that:
Unlike in other types of appeals, attorneys handling post-conviction cases work under no particular timeline and are allowed numerous extensions. The state also has no standards regarding how many cases lawyers should be assigned, and many counties ask lawyers to sign contracts that set no limit on the number of cases courts can assign them. At least 250 people have languished in prison for five years or longer while waiting for their lawyers to act.
Unlike someotherstates, such as North Carolina and New York, Pennsylvania requires no specific training, experience or qualifications for appointed post-trial lawyers, and it holds them to few standards. Lawyers are not required to speak to their clients or take other basic investigative steps before withdrawing from cases by writing no-merit letters.
Pennsylvania, which lags behind almost every other state in funding legal defense for poor people, known as indigent defense, dedicates no money for post-trial work. Instead, it leaves it up to each individual county to set pay rates. A majority of county court systems use flat-rate fee structures that some other states ban.
While almost every county in the state has a public defender office, most post-conviction cases are handled by private lawyers who are paid hourly, by the case or by the year and work with little to no supervision. Our review of court records found pay as low as $500 per case and delays as long as 19 years without a single court filing.
In some counties, contracted lawyers’ backlogs spanned dozens of cases. In Chester County, an affluent region west of Philadelphia, a lawyer left cases untouched for as long as two years before the county ended his contract last fall.
Delaware County, where O’Neal was convicted, relies on a group of part-time lawyers to handle most of its post-trial matters. One is Galloway, who has handled 20 or 30 post-trial cases per year for the county in addition to running his own law practice and, for a time, holding local elected office. Galloway said that his ethical obligation to confidentiality prevented him from commenting on O’Neal’s case. Judge George A. Pagano, who granted him 41 extensions on O’Neal’s case, declined to comment.
In the years Galloway was on the case, O’Neal wrote him dozens of letters from state prison, proposing legal arguments and sending leads to investigate.
“It is a daunting and exhausting task to navigate this legal process and be heard,” O’Neal said in an interview. “We at times even have to fight the attorneys who are supposed to represent us.”
In 2020, he received a letter from the brother of the murder victim, admitting that his testimony against O’Neal was a lie. “I want to fix it. I know my brother would want me to. It’s been long enough,” he wrote. O’Neal said he pleaded with Galloway to track down the man.
In 2022, Galloway attached the brother’s signed statement to a sparse two-page brief, which mentioned none of the other issues O’Neal had raised nine years earlier or the other witnesses who’d come forward over the years. The judge started the process of dismissing the claim. One reason: The filing had been made too late. O’Neal is still fighting his case, now with a new court-appointed lawyer.
Delays and Extensions
Before they are assigned a lawyer, Pennsylvania prisoners must write the first draft of their post-conviction filing on their own within a strict one-year deadline. The lawyers appointed to revise their petitions, on the other hand, are not generally held to any timeline. The state courts say lawyers should act “expeditiously so as to reduce unnecessary delays.” Yet judges have granted extensions liberally, court dockets show, and in many cases failed to impose any deadlines at all.
An Inquirer and ProPublica review of court dockets found that hundreds of people have waited two years or longer, only to receive no-merit letters. That analysis is an undercount, since many court clerks don’t clearly label attorney filings on their dockets. In Philadelphia alone, some 65 people have waited three to eight years for lawyers to take action before reaching that same outcome. Similarly, across the state, dockets show that lawyers received seven or more extensions in dozens of cases before filing Finley letters or nothing at all.
In 2017, Lee Mandell, who has been practicing law in Philadelphia for more than 50 years, sent a Finley letter saying that he’d written to but never spoken with his client of four years and did not understand his claims.
“It is entirely unclear as to what the defendant really means,” wrote Mandell. In his own review of the case, Mandell failed to flag an erroneous jury instruction that four years later would lead to the conviction being overturned. Mandell was later formally reprimanded for allowing another client’s hearing to be delayed by six years, during which time two witnesses died. He did not return calls seeking comment.
Judges’ inaction added to lawyers’ delays, leaving matters to stagnate for years on end. In 2023, the state’s Superior Court registered such concerns about a case from Wayne County, where a lawyer filed a “two-page, deficient motion to withdraw, and the PCRA court did nothing in this case for 20 years.”
But in almost 200 post-conviction cases across Pennsylvania in the last 15 years, lawyers were appointed, then filed nothing at all over the span of a year or longer before being replaced with a new appointed lawyer. One of the cases stagnated for almost seven years, only for a new attorney to pick up the file. Another man was appointed five lawyers over eight years, dockets show, none of whom filed anything on his behalf.
Court officials have long been aware of the backlogs wracking this system, even publishing a law review article about it in 2003. The study outlined needed reforms but acknowledged the lack of political will, saying the “low status” of these cases stems from a bias among judges and lawyers who believe “that most post conviction claims are frivolous.”
No Standards for Lawyering
The loose timeline is just one dimension of a system with few standards. The state has published no best practices for indigent defense or guidelines on how many cases a lawyer can take; it has provided no training and instituted virtually no guidelines to ensure that court-appointed lawyers are qualified. As a result, lawyers hold widely diverging views on just what obligations they have to their clients.
“I do not know how you can evaluate trial counsel’s performance, which is the main role of post-conviction counsel, without talking to your client and reading trial counsel’s file,” said Jennifer Merrigan, a co-founder of Phillips Black, a nonprofit law firm. That file would reveal whether the lawyer consulted with experts, received all relevant evidence from the prosecutor and investigated potential witnesses.
The state’s lack of vetting and training stands in contrast with national norms. A majority of other states have centralized defender services or support offices that provide resources, education and oversight. For instance, in North Carolina, appeals lawyers seeking court appointments must apply with the state appellate defender and submit references, work history showing the lawyer is qualified to litigate appeals and legal writing samples. They’re also required to take a training course covering strategy and best practices.
The Delaware County Courthouse, in Media, PennsylvaniaAlejandro A. Alvarez/The Philadelphia Inquirer
Even without a statewide office, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court could establish minimum qualifications for lawyers handling indigent defense. In August, a state court committee published such a proposal, but it recommends only that lawyers have relevant work experience “to the extent practicable.” Work experience requirements have been enforced in some other states, such as Ohio, for years. But the committee’s proposal argued that work experience is not “possible to quantify” and that “less-than-experienced representation is better than no representation.”
Ted Skaarup, a public defender who has advocated for training and qualification requirements, said inexperienced and untrained lawyers are more likely to default to writing Finley letters. New lawyers, he said, are left to consult with older attorneys who may pass on bad practices. “You go to them for advice and they say, ‘I’ll send you a copy of my [no-merit] letter.’”
Only one of the state’s 67 counties provided written criteria requiring specific work experience for lawyers to be appointed to post-conviction cases in response to records requests. Philadelphia court leadership says that lawyers must complete a training session and show they’ve recently handled three hearings involving disputed evidence. A volunteer panel tasked with approving prospective lawyers there rarely meets and is not empowered to approve or reject candidates based on writing samples, a core part of screening appeals lawyers in some other places.
In Pittsburgh, the nonprofit Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice has urged local court officials to set up a system to screen and supervise appointed lawyers. For now, the organization is running its own voluntary trainings, as well as a resource center with office hours, a library of sample motions and help with social service referrals.
Without such systems, the organization’s executive director, Rob Perkins, said, “There’s no quality control.” Lawyers can get away with “doing a poor job in these cases for years without anyone really paying attention.”
“Your Incentive Is to Do the Least Work”
When attorney Corrie Woods took over Washington County’s post-conviction caseload in 2020, he was startled to discover about a dozen files that had been untouched since being assigned to the previous lawyer in 2019 or earlier. In some, the lawyer’s inaction had caused the clients to lose their appeal rights.
Looking back, Woods said, it’s not surprising, given that the western Pennsylvania county was paying him $25,000 a year as a part-timer for up to 24 cases. “These cases are not going to take priority in most law offices,” said Woods, who now handles mostly personal injury cases.
Under such a contract, he said, “Your incentive is to do the least work. You’re not getting more for doing more.”
Not Pennsylvania. The state began contributing any money to indigent defense only in 2023. Today it kicks in just 57 cents per capita; neighboring states, on average, pay $26 per resident. Counties provide the rest as they see fit. A pending American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit claims that has resulted in widespread violations of the right to counsel.
Pennsylvania Spends Less Than Most Other States on Indigent Defense
At 57 cents per resident, Pennsylvania’s state-level contribution toward funding legal defense for poor people is a fraction of what neighboring states pay.
Sources: state budget documents, U.S. Census 2025 population estimates.
About three-quarters of Pennsylvanians live in counties that use flat-fee arrangements or cap the amount a lawyer can bill for a case. Daniel Buzard, the court administrator in the county where Woods held the contract several years ago, said in an email, “This provides financial stability for both parties.”
Some counties pay as little as $500 per case. Based on time estimates from Maine, one of the only states to publish post-conviction workload standards, that would come out to $11 per hour.
Twenty-one Pennsylvania counties offer flat annual pay for part-time lawyers — sometimes then assigning them caseloads that exceed Maine’s standard for full-time work.
“We at times even have to fight the attorneys who are supposed to represent us.”
Nolan O’Neal, Pennsylvania prisoner
Only five of the 18 contracts obtained in response to public records requests included a limit on the number of cases the court could heap onto a lawyer. None of the contracts set deadlines, specified a time commitment or described any oversight mechanism.
Stuart Wilder said his contract to handle post-conviction cases in Bucks County, outside Philadelphia, kept the lights on in his office for years. He worked hard for clients, he said, and won several challenging cases. But he said the flat-fee structure did require him to deprioritize cases where he didn’t see merit.
“Being able to file Finley letters gave me the time to work on cases I could fix,” said Wilder, who recently retired.
But in at least three counties, contract lawyers left multiple clients stranded for a year or longer with no progress on their cases, dockets show.
In 2021, the court in Erie County yanked 50 cases from attorney James P. Miller and eventually reported him for discipline, citing extreme delays that cost some clients their appeal rights. Miller, whose law license was suspended as a result, declined to comment. But Erie court administrator Robert Catalde said the debacle spurred the county to double lawyers’ pay to $46,800 and provide benefits.
A similar situation played out last year in Chester County, which abruptly ended its contract with the lawyer handling all its post-conviction cases, Charles Thomas Jr., after discovering that he had been putting in an average of just five hours a week across his roughly 25 cases.
A graduation photo shows Patrick Hickson receiving an associate’s degree from Eastern University in 2025, while incarcerated at the State Correctional Institution Chester.Courtesy of Patrick Hickson
One client, Patrick Hickson, said he spent two years trying to get Thomas to track down evidence that could clear him of a 2018 shooting or at least prove he didn’t get a fair trial. His defense lawyer had failed to call a single witness — admitting to the judge, mid-trial, that he’d wrongly assumed the prosecutor would send a summons to an eyewitness who had told police Hickson wasn’t the shooter.
To raise the issue, Hickson needed Thomas to track down the missing witness. But when he reached Thomas by phone in August 2025, for the first time in months, the lawyer told him he was off the case. “He said the courts told him he was taking too long,” Hickson said. Thomas declined to comment.
Chester County criminal court administrator Jordan Ludwick acknowledged concerns about the delays but said he resolved the problem by finding a qualified lawyer to take over the contract.
That attorney, Shannon McDonald, said it was “not an easy transition.”
“There were many cases that had not been touched at all,” she said.
She cut through the backlog by filing 17 briefs in just over three months. All but three were Finley letters.
“The case has to survive on the merits,” she said, “and, frankly, the deck is stacked against overturning a case.”
This March, she also sent Hickson a Finley letter. McDonald said ethics rules prevented her from discussing Hickson’s case, but in the letter she blamed Hickson for failing to track down the would-be witness and said his trial lawyer had a strategic reason for not sending the subpoena.
Reading the letter, Hickson said, “I felt defeated.”
Since McDonald asked to drop the case, he is pursuing exoneration alone.
The UK Cabinet Office has scrapped a recruitment platform, recording a £7.8 million loss, while disclosing a potential penalty of up to £8.9 million over its handling of contractors' tax status. The department's annual report for 2025-26 said the Civil Service Jobs Applicant Tracking System (ATS) Programme, a central government plan for a unified, cross-departmental hiring system, was being closed to "align with the Shared Services for Government Strategy," which the Prime Minister's department also manages. The report said axing the program resulted in a "constructive loss" of £7.8 million. In March, a report from the National Audit Office said the ATS was an example of an interdependency that has not been effectively managed in the Shared Services Strategy, which is designed to bring Whitehall departments onto a common set of software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise applications. The Cabinet Office's annual report says closure will allow a new project better aligned with that strategy. "The program consistently identified lack of adoption from shared services clusters as a risk. At various points between 2023 and 2025, some shared services clusters raised concerns about the ATS program and stated that they would prefer to use the ATS functionality of their own ERPs over the new central platform. Despite this, Cabinet Office did not assess the need for a reset as soon as it could have, which made it challenging to assess alternative options for delivering an ATS. The ATS program was reset in October 2025," the report said. At the time, the Cabinet Office estimated that the total costs of the program reset would be £26 million to £38 million. The annual report estimates the Cabinet Office's liability for unpaid tax and National Insurance under IR35 off-payroll working rules, including interest, at £38.5 million. The rules affect many tech contractors working through their own companies. It paid £15 million toward settlement in February 2026, leaving a £23.5 million provision at year-end. The final settlement remains under negotiation. The department also disclosed potential HMRC penalties of up to £8.9 million, but considers payment unlikely because penalties can be suspended subject to compliance conditions. The report said: "The department has identified a remote contingent liability regarding potential financial penalties from HMRC relating to historic off-payroll working (IR35) compliance. In October 2025, HMRC concluded that the department's historic processes were inadequate and reasonable care was not taken, which can attract a penalty of 15 percent to 30 percent against the net tax liability before interest." Dave Chaplin, CEO of IR35 tax compliance firm IR35 Shield, said the HMRC assessment raises serious questions about compliance at the very heart of government. "The lesson for every organization engaging contractors is that claiming to take reasonable care is not the same as being able to demonstrate it. IR35 determinations must be supported by robust processes, accurate information, and evidence that the rules have been applied properly. Getting it wrong can have consequences far beyond the original tax bill," Chaplin said. ®
Una vulnerabilità critica in Bricksforge per WordPress sta esponendo migliaia di siti a un rischio elevatissimo: l'esecuzione di codice da remoto (RCE). Questa falla di sicurezza, identificata come CVE-2024-25137, ha ricevuto il massimo punteggio di gravità, un CVSS di 10.0.
Cosa significa? Un malintenzionato potrebbe prendere il controllo completo del tuo sito web senza nemmeno doversi autenticare.
Vediamo insieme di cosa si tratta e, soprattutto, come puoi difenderti.
Cos'è Bricksforge in WordPress e perché questa vulnerabilità è così pericolosa?
Bricksforge è un popolare add-on per Bricks Builder, uno strumento molto amato per la creazione di siti WordPress. Aggiunge funzionalità avanzate come form complessi, animazioni e gestione di dati dinamici. Il cuore del problema risiede proprio nella gestione del processo di upload dei file tramite i suoi moduli di contatto. La pericolosità di questa falla è estrema.
Un utente non autenticato può sfruttarla per caricare un file PHP malevolo sul tuo server e poi eseguirlo. Da quel momento, le possibilità per l'attaccante sono infinite:
Installare una web shell per avere accesso persistente al sito.
Modificare i contenuti delle tue pagine o rubare dati sensibili.
Reindirizzare i tuoi visitatori verso siti di phishing o malware.
Utilizzare il tuo server per lanciare altri attacchi.
In parole semplici, è come lasciare la porta di casa non solo aperta, ma con un invito scritto per i ladri.
Come funziona l'attacco in dettaglio
Per capire come proteggersi, è utile comprendere il meccanismo dell'attacco e conoscere gli attacchi simili avvenuti in passato. Gli hacker hanno scoperto un modo per aggirare i controlli di sicurezza del plugin.
Il processo di upload ingannato
L'attacco si svolge in due fasi. Inizialmente, l'hacker carica un file che si presenta come un'immagine innocua, ad esempio un file .gif. Il plugin esegue un primo controllo sul tipo di file (MIME type) e, riconoscendolo come immagine, lo accetta e lo salva in una cartella temporanea.
Il problema sorge nella seconda fase. L'hacker invia una richiesta di sottomissione del modulo creata ad hoc. In questa richiesta, specifica il percorso del file "immagine" appena caricato, ma indica una destinazione finale con estensione .php. Il plugin, fidandosi delle informazioni fornite, sposta il contenuto del file (che include codice PHP malevolo) nella nuova posizione con la nuova estensione. A questo punto, all'hacker basta visitare l'URL del file per eseguire il codice e compromettere il sito.
L'automazione degli attacchi
Le analisi dei ricercatori di sicurezza, come Patchstack, mostrano che questi tentativi di attacco sono altamente automatizzati. Sono stati registrati exploit provenienti da decine di indirizzi IP diversi, spesso a pochi secondi di distanza l'uno dall'altro. Questo indica una campagna diffusa che mira a colpire il maggior numero possibile di siti vulnerabili.
Stai usando Bricksforge in WordPress? Ecco come proteggerti da questa vulnerabilità
Se utilizzi Bricksforge nel tuo sito in WordPress, la tua priorità assoluta è agire immediatamente contro questa vulnerabilità. Non attendere di notare comportamenti anomali sul tuo sito, perché a quel punto potrebbe essere già troppo tardi.
Aggiornamento immediato: la prima linea di difesa
La soluzione è semplice e diretta: aggiornare il plugin. Gli sviluppatori hanno già rilasciato le patch correttive.
La falla di sicurezza riguarda tutte le versioni di Bricksforge fino alla 3.1.8.9 inclusa. Aggiorna immediatamente alla versione 3.1.8.10 o successiva.
Il team ha rilasciato anche una correzione per i Pro Forms nella versione 4.0.1. Si raccomanda l'aggiornamento anche se non usi moduli con campi di upload. Non rimandare questo passaggio. È il modo più efficace per chiudere la porta agli aggressori.
Verifica e pulizia del sito: cosa cercare
Se temi che il tuo sito sia già stato compromesso o vuoi fare un controllo di sicurezza, ecco alcuni passaggi da seguire:
Ispeziona i log del server: cerca richieste sospette, in particolare verso /wp-json/bricksforge/v1/form_submit.
Controlla le cartelle di upload: esamina attentamente la cartella /wp-content/uploads/bricksforge/tmp/ e altre directory di upload alla ricerca di file PHP inaspettati o file con nomi strani.
Scansiona il tuo sito: utilizza un plugin di sicurezza affidabile per eseguire una scansione completa alla ricerca di malware e file sospetti.
La vulnerabilità di Bricksforge in WordPress nel contesto globale
Questo incidente non è un caso isolato. Sottolinea ancora una volta un punto cruciale nella gestione di un sito WordPress: la gestione delle vulnerabilità.
I plugin, per quanto utili, possono diventare punti deboli se non vengono mantenuti aggiornati. Le falle di sicurezza legate all'upload di file sono comuni e pericolose perché offrono una via d'accesso diretta al server.
La lezione è chiara: mantieni sempre il core di WordPress, i temi e i plugin aggiornati all'ultima versione. La sicurezza informatica non è un'attività da fare una tantum, ma un processo continuo di vigilanza e manutenzione.
Nell’ambito del Security Patch Day di ottobre, SAP rilascia aggiornamenti di sicurezza per risolvere molteplici nuove vulnerabilità, di cui 4 con gravità "critica" e 3 con gravità "alta".
Disponibile un Proof of Concept (PoC) per lo sfruttamento della CVE-2026-109390 - già sanata dal vendor - presente in AnyDesk per sistemi Linux, nota soluzione per l’accesso, il supporto e il controllo remoto dei dispositivi tramite connessioni di rete. Tale vulnerabilità, qualora sfruttata, potrebbe consentire ad un attaccante remoto non autenticato di eseguire codice arbitrario con privilegi elevati sui sistemi interessati.
Attackers took remote control of fridges and freezers at hundreds of French supermarkets on the night of October 11 and warmed them, forcing stores to throw food away, several retail chains said.
The attackers reached them through the controller that runs all of a store's fridges and freezers, a device made by Danish company Danfoss that maintenance firms can manage remotely. Les Mousquetaires
Two of 31 newly disclosed flaws in Progress Software's MarkLogic Server database could let an account given only some management privileges take administrator control of the server, the company says.
Progress published all 31 on October 12 and scored five of them critical. Fixes have been available since September 10, in MarkLogic 11.3.7 and MarkLogic 12.1.0.
Affected
GitLab has released patches for a maximum-severity security flaw impacting its Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that could result in arbitrary code execution.
"GitLab has remediated an issue that, under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server via a specially crafted regular expression in a CI/CD
If you're encountering some odd IPv6 networking issues, the culprit might be the Intel Connectivity Performance Suite (ICPS), although the chipmaker has kept quiet about the problem. A Samsung Galaxy Book owner contacted The Register about some decidedly odd networking behavior that they eventually traced to unwanted ICPS optimizations. And by "optimization", we mean "borked networking." For our reader, the problem showed up in OneDrive and OneNote. Notebooks were showing as empty, even though they were reported as "Up to date" according to the software. Microsoft couldn't get to the bottom of it. A bit of sleuthing by our reader revealed that something was borking the IPv6 packet. Removing Samsung's ICPS build (40.25.926.0) and installing the generic release (50.26.623.243) fixed the problem. Our reader told us, "From the user's side it looks like random 'connection reset' errors on all kinds of sites, plus OneNote saying 'We can't get to your notebooks right now.' "IPv4 is unaffected, which is why the web version and my phone kept working and nobody could figure out what was going on." It isn't only Samsung and our reader affected. Intel's own Community forums shows other users encountering the same glitch. An ASUS user put together an exhaustive report on the issue (IPv6 connection woes while IPv4 worked well). In this instance, ICPS version 40.25.725.165 was in use, and the problem went away following uninstallation. The user asked whether there was an official way to opt out of ICPS permanently, and the Intel Customer Support Technician responded: "Good news!… We can confirm that the Wireless driver and ICPS are available as separate standalone driver packages." So in that particular instance, ditching ICPS would make no difference. Which, of course, raises another question – in this example (where the Intel BE201 Wi-Fi adaptor is present), why is it even there? The answer: "It is often bundled with OEM systems as an added value software to enhance the overall wireless experience." You might see "enhance," but for users affected by IPv6 problems, it's more like "break." The issue is insidious, and broken ICPS builds are still floating around, ready to catch users off guard. According to our reader, Microsoft's own Update Catalog will hand out the broken drivers, which effectively break Microsoft 365 services on certain hardware. For the ASUS user, the issue affected Chrome, Edge, and Windows curl.exe. "Approximately 40–60 percent of IPv6 HTTPS connections to an AWS CloudFront distribution were reset. IPv4 was completely stable." According to our reader, "Intel created the bug, then fixed it quietly." Updating to the later, generic version appears to fix things. However, according to the Intel technician, as of the July post, "we do not have a confirmed public advisory for this specific behavior." We asked Intel and Microsoft for comment, but neither responded. However, judging by forum comments, the issue has caught out plenty of users. As such, if you find yourself with some weird networking issues with IPv6 and are using ICPS (as many will be), it might be worthwhile checking out the generic rather than OEM version of the software or removing it altogether to see if the problem goes away. ®
The Home Office's latest attempt to speed up asylum decisions with AI has hit an awkward snag: a new report says more than one in five interview summaries checked by experts failed accuracy tests. A 20-page investigation by the Open Rights Group (ORG) claims the department is pressing ahead with AI tools despite concerns about their accuracy, oversight, and promised efficiency gains. The findings, based on Freedom of Information requests and correspondence with ministers, concern two systems used by Home Office caseworkers: Asylum Case Summarisation (ACS), which summarizes asylum interviews, and Asylum Policy Search (APS), a chat-style tool helping officials search country policy information. Both use OpenAI's GPT-4o model through Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry. The government insists humans remain responsible for asylum decisions, but ORG questions how reliably caseworkers can spot mistakes in AI-generated information. Figures obtained by the campaign group show that 45 of 203 AI-generated interview summaries failed initial expert checks after the system was rolled out in April 2026. That's a 22 percent failure rate, compared with the 9 percent rejection rate recorded during the original pilot. Another 19 summaries were flagged for further review. The figures also record 56 second-stage reviews, of which 30 failed to meet the required standard. The errors can include factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations of what asylum seekers said during interviews. ORG also found that summaries could pass the checks even if they omitted important details, as long as the information they did include was accurate. Despite those results, relatively few summaries have been examined. ORG estimates that Home Office experts checked only 0.3 percent between April and July, based on the department's projected monthly caseload of 17,515. ORG also questioned whether the tools were saving much time. It says the average monthly number of initial substantive asylum decisions since April 2026 fell about 42 percent compared with the same period in 2025, while the mean time from interview to decision rose 29 percent. While those figures don't prove that AI caused the slowdown, they offer little evidence of the productivity gains ministers have promised. Oversight of the separate Asylum Policy Search tool also appears lacking. The Home Office confirmed in August that expert testing had stopped, despite previously telling MPs that checks were continuing. ORG says no summary of the testing results was produced. Meanwhile, asylum applicants are not specifically told when AI has been used in their cases and cannot inspect or correct the summaries generated from their interviews. ORG also questions the Home Office's claims of human oversight. The department's own data protection assessment says ACS automates work previously done by technical specialists, who reviewed and summarized asylum cases before passing them to decision-makers. ORG warns the tool could remove an experienced layer of scrutiny, rather than simply save staff time. The group is calling for both tools to be suspended and independently audited, arguing that the current safeguards are inadequate for decisions that determine whether someone can remain in the UK. It's not the first time the Home Office's technology plans have come under fire. In June, more than 60 rights groups urged ministers to abandon plans for AI-powered age estimation of asylum-seeking children, warning that the technology was unreliable around the crucial 16-to-18-year-old age range. Later that month, an inspection found that the department's long-delayed Atlas immigration system was failing to provide caseworkers with feedback from asylum appeals, forcing staff to rely on workarounds. The Home Office did not respond to The Register's questions. ®
VMware has discovered so many flaws in its products using AI that it felt the need to create a new product to help users manage them. Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of product marketing in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) division of Broadcom, told The Register that VMware recently moved to deliver monthly software updates, in part to address bugs found by AI. He admitted, however, that users struggled to keep up with the pace of change before the move to monthly releases because it takes time to test the impact of patches – even though VCF allows non-disruptive live patching. Shenoy said customers therefore need "room to breathe." Enter a new tool called HyperArmor, which does three things. One is "virtual patching" – blocking attempts to exploit a vulnerability without changing the vulnerable software itself. VMware already offers virtual patching in its vDefend network security product and explains how it works by referring to CVE-2024-5806, the bug in file transfer tool MOVEIt that made waves in 2024. VMware says vDefend can detect patterns associated with attempts to exploit the authentication bypass flaw and block the traffic. HyperArmor will do similar things to block malicious traffic heading toward VCF implementations. Another job HyperArmor takes on is rejecting any actions that alter known good states in VCF. If a human approves a change, the tool will update policies to allow the altered state. The third job is multi-factor authentication (MFA). The Register put it to Shenoy that MFA is now table stakes for security. He agreed but explained that VMware designed HyperArmor to protect against attackers using stolen privileged credentials to access VMware's ESX hypervisor. To (hopefully) stop attackers using those creds to take over a host, HyperArmor requires users to input SSH credentials and a secondary time-based one-time password sent to a user with a verified identity. HyperArmor is a discrete product that VMware will sell as an add-on to VCF. That means VMware thinks its customers are going to be OK paying extra for MFA. While VMware will sell HyperArmor, it didn't create the product. Broadcom's security businesses Symantec and Carbon Black cooked it up. Broadcom's CA business (formerly Computer Associates) has done similar things. At VMware Explore on August 31, Broadcom launched AgentMinder, which aims to stop AI running inside VCF going rogue. AgentMinder came from CA but was launched as a tool for VCF (and third-party Kubernetes stacks). At VMware Explore, The Register met Ram Velaga, president of Broadcom's Infrastructure Software Group, and asked him if the group has a single strategy, or if its divisions each do their own thing. Velaga said Broadcom uses a combination of both approaches. "There's a level of focus with individual teams that you don't have if you have one very large central team," he said. "You get the speed at which you have to innovate with individual teams." Broadcom's Infrastructure Software Group therefore operates with at least six teams, and when one of those teams wants to add functions it will look for existing assets developed by another internal team rather than trying to write its own code. For broad products like VCF, the work of several Broadcom teams could therefore be relevant. The Register has no idea which team created the name HyperArmor, a question we pose as Cisco already offers a "Hypershield." Maybe this sort of name is what's needed to stop a HyperHoodie? ®
Rilasciati aggiornamenti di sicurezza per sanare tre vulnerabilità, di cui una con gravità "alta", in Progress ShareFile Storage Zones Controller. Tale vulnerabilità, qualora sfruttata, potrebbe consentire ad un utente malintenzionato di scrivere file arbitrari in posizioni del filesystem accessibili all’account del servizio e, in determinate condizioni, di eseguire codice da remoto sui sistemi interessati.
Low-cost Android smartphones have been shipped with malicious software baked into the device firmware, allowing bad actors to covertly install apps, conduct ad fraud, and turn devices into residential proxies.
The activity, which targets Android devices built on MediaTek platforms across several brands, is being tracked by Bitdefender under the moniker Midnight Mimosa.
The preinstalled
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