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AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch
- Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft
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AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch
- Neocloud Lambda secures $1B in debt to buy more chips
Neocloud Lambda secures $1B in debt to buy more chips
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AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch
- OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 100 other companies call for action to defend against rogue AI
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 100 other companies call for action to defend against rogue AI
Chinese Moonshot AI negotiates hosting deals with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google
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A Chinese AI company could land its model on major US cloud platforms for the first time, taking a cut of the revenue.
The article Chinese Moonshot AI negotiates hosting deals with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google appeared first on The Decoder.
Meta spends hundreds of millions on Microsoft's AI services
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Meta has become one of Microsoft's biggest AI customers, according to Bloomberg.
The article Meta spends hundreds of millions on Microsoft's AI services appeared first on The Decoder.
Microsoft Copilot reveals secret input that allowed it to be hacked
It’s not every day that attackers can force a frontier AI model to cough up user passwords and other sensitive data without user confirmation. That’s exactly what researchers recently did to Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise. Even more unusual is the source they tapped to discover the critical vulnerability that made their exploit possible. Rather than employing reverse engineering or other traditional vulnerability-hunting methods, they asked Copilot. The LLM assistant readily complied.
Researchers at security firm Varonis knew they wanted to create an exploit that would exfiltrate user data when a user did nothing more than click on a link. Like most AI assistants today, Copilot steadfastly refused and made clear that sensitive prompts like that require explicit user consent in the form of a gesture, such as pressing a return key or other key. In response, the researchers peppered Copilot with questions about the guardrails that required user confirmation before the assistant could execute powerful commands.
Loose lips sink ships
The dialog was like a game of 20 questions. Each answer provided a new clue that divulged information about the complex safety mechanism. Why was auto-execution impossible, they asked. What URL structures and deep links were involved? What happens when a page is loaded with input already in the prompt field? Each answer provided a deeper view into the guardrail and its limits. Eventually, Copilot provided a stunning Microsoft trade secret—an undocumented prompt parameter that completely bypassed the requirement for user consent.


© Photo Illustration by Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Microsoft unveils AI security tools it says outperform competing platforms
Microsoft is introducing new AI tools designed to help customers continuously streamline and automate the process of identifying and reducing their exposure to security risks.
The new tools come less than a week after OpenAI lost control of two of its security models when they infiltrated the servers of startup Hugging Face. The hack, Hugging Face added, involved “a swarm of tens of thousands of automated actions” that stole internal Hugging Face credentials. The OpenAI models achieved this feat by exploiting a zero-day flaw in Hugging Face’s data-processing pipeline to run malicious code that escalated the models’ access to the company’s high-value cloud and server clusters.
Microsoft’s announcements on Monday made no reference to the event, which OpenAI said was “unprecedented.” The company also didn’t say what would prevent the new tools from similarly going rogue.


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Biz & IT - Ars Technica
- Windows 0-day drops the same day Microsoft releases record number of patches
Windows 0-day drops the same day Microsoft releases record number of patches
Right on the heels of Microsoft releasing a record number of security patches, a researcher has published exploit code that can enable low-privilege Windows accounts to make sensitive changes to administrator accounts.
The exploit, which multiple researchers say works, is sending Microsoft scrambling, yet again, to patch a zero-day released by an anonymous researcher who has complained about the software maker’s handling of their bug reports. To date, the pseudonymous NightmareEclypse has published nine such exploits, including Tuesday’s HiveLegacy. The researcher said the proof-of-concept code included in the report was stripped down to prevent attackers from using it maliciously.
A “pretty powerful primitive”
HiveLegacy is an elevation-of-privilege exploit that targets a vulnerability residing in the Windows User Profile Service. It allows users (and with more work likely processes) with limited system rights to compromise an admin user's account by modifying its classes registry hive, a resource that ensures the correct application opens when certain types of files are clicked on in Windows Explorer.


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Biz & IT - Ars Technica
- Microsoft’s Secure Boot has been broken for a decade and no one noticed until now
Microsoft’s Secure Boot has been broken for a decade and no one noticed until now
An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway.
The images are known as shims, which were invented to extend Secure Boot to Linux devices and utility software. Using a technique simple enough to be performed by novice hackers, these old, forgotten shims can be used to completely circumvent the protection, which is embedded into the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of the device's motherboard. The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly available images once vulnerabilities were found in them.
Threat extends to Windows and Linux users
The threat extends to Windows and Linux users alike, since the shim can be installed on devices running both operating systems. From there, an attacker can subvert the mandated chain of digitally signed firmware to install malicious firmware that loads early in the boot process and persists after either the OS is reinstalled or a hard drive is replaced.


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Patch for Windows Defender 0-day could allow attackers to fill hard disk
A patch Microsoft released on Wednesday to fix a zero-day vulnerability in its Defender security engine may cause Windows machines to write files large enough to completely consume available disk space, the researcher who discovered the flaw said.
RoguePlanet, tracked as CVE-2026-50656, came to public notice in June when NightmareEclipse, the pseudonymous name used by a researcher, disclosed it along with code for exploiting it. The vulnerability allows remote attackers to gain administrative control of Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines, even when real-time protection has been disabled. Over the past few months, the anonymous researcher has published a handful of other zero-days that have sent Microsoft scrambling to develop patches.
Writing files of unlimited size
Microsoft said Wednesday that it patched RoguePlanet with an update to the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine, which is used by the Defender antivirus app. The fix will automatically be downloaded and installed without users having to take any action. Wednesday’s update also includes “defense-in-depth updates to help improve security-related features.”


© Photo Illustration by Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
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Biz & IT - Ars Technica
- Locked in heated rivalry with researcher, Microsoft fixes 0-day they disclosed
Locked in heated rivalry with researcher, Microsoft fixes 0-day they disclosed
Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for two high-severity zero-days that were disclosed by a researcher who has been locked in a testy beef with the software giant.
Nightmare Eclipse, the pseudonym the researcher goes by, released a handful of high-severity vulnerabilities in recent months, making them zero-days that had the potential to be exploited in the wild. The researcher has said the disclosures, which included proof-of-concept code, came after Microsoft reneged on an arrangement the two made regarding vulnerabilities they had discussed.
Disclosure drama
“But someone violated our agreement and left me homeless with nothing,” Nightmare Eclipse wrote in March. “They knew this will happen and they still stabbed me in the back anyways, this is their decision not mine.”


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For the 2nd time in weeks, Microsoft packages laced with credential stealer
Dozens of cryptographically verified open source packages from Microsoft were compromised late last week to add advanced credential-stealing code that was triggered when developers opened them in AI coding agents.
In all, multiple researchers said, 73 packages were flagged as malicious when automated systems on GitHub blocked them on the platform. Rather than noting they are malicious—and that developers who used AI agents to work with them should assume their systems are compromised—the Microsoft-owned GitHub said it disabled the packages “due to a violation of GitHub's terms of service.” The text went on to encourage the package owner to contact GitHub.
Devs: Assume compromise and proceed accordingly
It wasn’t until Monday that Microsoft even raised the possibility the packages were infected. In an email, the company stated: “We have temporarily removed some repositories as we investigate potential malicious content.”


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Biz & IT - Ars Technica
- Zero-day exploit completely defeats default Windows 11 BitLocker protections
Zero-day exploit completely defeats default Windows 11 BitLocker protections
A zero-day exploit circulating online allows people with physical access to a Windows 11 system to bypass default BitLocker protections and gain complete access to an encrypted drive within seconds.
The exploit, named YellowKey, was published earlier this week by a researcher who goes by the alias Nightmare-Eclipse. It reliably bypasses default Windows 11 deployments of BitLocker, the full-volume encryption protection Microsoft provides to make disk contents off-limits to anyone without the decryption key, which is stored in a secured piece of hardware known as a trusted platform module (TPM). BitLocker is a mandatory protection for many organizations, including those that contract with governments.
When one disk volume manipulates another
The core of the YellowKey exploit is a custom-made FsTx folder. Online documentation of this folder is hard to find. As explained later, the directory associated with the file fstx.dll appears to involve what Microsoft calls the transactional NTFS, which allows developers to have “transactional atomicity" for file operations in transactions with a single file, multiple files, or ones that span multiple sources.


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