Biz & IT

In comedy of errors, men accused of wiping gov databases turned to an AI tool

AI, Biz & IT, contractors, courts, data theft / Mike M. / December 4, 2025

Two sibling contractors convicted a decade ago for hacking into US State Department systems have once again been charged, this time for a comically hamfisted attempt to steal and destroy government records just minutes after being fired from their contractor jobs.

The Department of Justice on Thursday said that Muneeb Akhter and Sohaib Akhter, both 34, of Alexandria, Virginia, deleted databases and documents maintained and belonging to three government agencies. The brothers were federal contractors working for an undisclosed company in Washington, DC, that provides software and services to 45 US agencies. Prosecutors said the men coordinated the crimes and began carrying them out just minutes after being fired.

Using AI to cover up an alleged crime—what could go wrong?

On February 18 at roughly 4: 55 pm, the men were fired from the company, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday. Five minutes later, they allegedly began trying to access their employer’s system and access federal government databases. By then, access to one of the brothers’ accounts had already been terminated. The other brother, however, allegedly accessed a government agency’s database stored on the employer’s server and issued commands to prevent other users from connecting or making changes to the database. Then, prosecutors said, he issued a command to delete 96 databases, many of which contained sensitive investigative files and records related to Freedom of Information Act matters.

Despite their brazen attempt to steal and destroy information from multiple government agencies, the men lacked knowledge of the database commands needed to cover up their alleged crimes. So they allegedly did what many amateurs do: turned to an AI chat tool.

One minute after deleting Department of Homeland Security information, Muneep Akhter allegedly asked an AI tool “how do i clear system logs from SQL servers after deleting databases.” Shortly afterward, he queried the tool “how do you clear all event and application logs from Microsoft windows server 2012,” prosecutors said.

The indictment provides enough details of the databases wiped and information stolen to indicate that the brothers’ attempts to cover their tracks failed. It’s unclear whether the apparent failure was due to the AI tool providing inadequate instructions or the men failing to follow them correctly. Prosecutors say they also obtained records of discussions between the men in the hours or days following, in which they discussed removing incriminating evidence from their homes. Three days later, the men allegedly wiped their employer-issued laptops by reinstalling the operating system.

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Maximum-severity vulnerability threatens 6% of all websites

Biz & IT, exploits, react server components, Security, vulnerabilities / Rejus Almole / December 3, 2025

“I usually don’t say this, but patch right freakin’ now,” one researcher wrote. “The React CVE listing (CVE-2025-55182) is a perfect 10.”

React versions 19.0.1, 19.1.2, or 19.2.1 contain the vulnerable code. Third-party components known to be affected include:

Vite RSC plugin
Parcel RSC plugin
React Router RSC preview
RedwoodSDK
Waku
Next.js

According to Wiz and fellow security firm Aikido, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-55182, resides in Flight, a protocol found in the React Server Components. Next.js has assigned the designation CVE-2025-66478 to track the vulnerability in its package.

The vulnerability stems from unsafe deserialization, the coding process of converting strings, byte streams, and other “serialized” formats into objects or data structures in code. Hackers can exploit the insecure deserialization using payloads that execute malicious code on the server. Patched React versions include stricter validation and hardened deserialization behavior.

“When a server receives a specially crafted, malformed payload, it fails to validate the structure correctly,” Wiz explained. “This allows attacker-controlled data to influence server-side execution logic, resulting in the execution of privileged JavaScript code.”

The company added:

In our experimentation, exploitation of this vulnerability had high fidelity, with a near 100% success rate and can be leveraged to a full remote code execution. The attack vector is unauthenticated and remote, requiring only a specially crafted HTTP request to the target server. It affects the default configuration of popular frameworks.

Both companies are advising admins and developers to upgrade React and any dependencies that rely on it. Users of any of the Remote-enabled frameworks and plugins mentioned above should check with the maintainers for guidance. Aikido also suggests admins and developers scan their codebases and repositories for any use of React with this link.

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Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

agentic AI, AI, AI adoption, AI agents, AI infrastructure, AI spending, azure, Biz & IT, Cloud Computing, copilot, enterprise AI, foundry, generative ai, machine learning, microsoft, Microsoft Copilot, simulated reasoning, SR models / Kris Guyer / December 3, 2025

Microsoft has lowered sales growth targets for its AI agent products after many salespeople missed their quotas in the fiscal year ending in June, according to a report Wednesday from The Information. The adjustment is reportedly unusual for Microsoft, and it comes after the company missed a number of ambitious sales goals for its AI offerings.

AI agents are specialized implementations of AI language models designed to perform multistep tasks autonomously rather than simply responding to single prompts. So-called “agentic” features have been central to Microsoft’s 2025 sales pitch: At its Build conference in May, the company declared that it has entered “the era of AI agents.”

The company has promised customers that agents could automate complex tasks, such as generating dashboards from sales data or writing customer reports. At its Ignite conference in November, Microsoft announced new features like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, along with tools for building and deploying agents through Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio. But as the year draws to a close, that promise has proven harder to deliver than the company expected.

According to The Information, one US Azure sales unit set quotas for salespeople to increase customer spending on a product called Foundry, which helps customers develop AI applications, by 50 percent. Less than a fifth of salespeople in that unit met their Foundry sales growth targets. In July, Microsoft lowered those targets to roughly 25 percent growth for the current fiscal year. In another US Azure unit, most salespeople failed to meet an earlier quota to double Foundry sales, and Microsoft cut their quotas to 50 percent for the current fiscal year.

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OpenAI CEO declares “code red” as Gemini gains 200 million users in 3 months

AI, AI assistants, AI competition, Biz & IT, chatbots, chatgpt, Gemini, Gemini 3, Google, Google Gemini, GPT-5, large language models, machine learning, Marc Benioff, openai, sam altman, simulated reasoning, SR model, Sundar Pichai, vibemark, vibemarking / Kris Guyer / December 2, 2025

In addition to buzz about Gemini on social media, Google is quickly catching up to ChatGPT in user numbers. ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly users, according to OpenAI, while Google’s Gemini app has grown from 450 million monthly active users in July to 650 million in October, according to Business Insider.

Financial stakes run high

Not everyone views OpenAI’s “code red” as a genuine alarm. Reuters columnist Robert Cyran wrote on Tuesday that OpenAI’s announcement added “to the impression that OpenAI is trying to do too much at once with technology that still requires a great deal of development and funding.” On the same day Altman’s memo circulated, OpenAI announced an ownership stake in a Thrive Capital venture and a collaboration with Accenture. “The only thing bigger than the company’s attention deficit is its appetite for capital,” Cyran wrote.

In fact, OpenAI faces an unusual competitive disadvantage: Unlike Google, which subsidizes its AI ventures through search advertising revenue, OpenAI does not turn a profit and relies on fundraising to survive. According to The Information, the company, now valued at around $500 billion, has committed more than $1 trillion in financial obligations to cloud computing providers and chipmakers that supply the computing power needed to train and run its AI models.

But the tech industry never stands still, and things can change quickly. Altman’s memo also reportedly stated that OpenAI plans to release a new simulated reasoning model next week that may beat Gemini 3 in internal evaluations. In AI, the back-and-forth cycle of one-upmanship is expected to continue as long as the dollars keep flowing.

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HP plans to save millions by laying off thousands, ramping up AI use

AI, AI layoffs, Biz & IT, HP, layoffs / Tim Belzer / November 26, 2025

HP Inc. said that it will lay off 4,000 to 6,000 employees in favor of AI deployments, claiming it will help save $1 billion in annualized gross run rate by the end of its fiscal 2028.

HP expects to complete the layoffs by the end of that fiscal year. The reductions will largely hit product development, internal operations, and customer support, HP CEO Enrique Lores said during an earnings call on Tuesday.

Using AI, HP will “accelerate product innovation, improve customer satisfaction, and boost productivity,” Lores said.

In its fiscal 2025 earnings report released yesterday, HP said:

Structural cost savings represent gross reductions in costs driven by operational efficiency, digital transformation, and portfolio optimization. These initiatives include but are not limited to workforce reductions, platform simplification, programs consolidation and productivity measures undertaken by HP, which HP expects to be sustainable in the longer-term.

AI blamed for tech layoffs

HP’s announcement comes as workers everywhere try to decipher how AI will impact their future job statuses and job opportunities. Some industries, such as customer support, are expected to be more disrupted than others. But we’ve already seen many tech layoffs tied to AI.

Salesforce, for example, announced in October that it had let go of 4,000 customer support employees, with CEO Marc Benioff saying that AI meant “I need less heads.” In September, US senators accused Amazon of blaming its dismissal of “tens of thousands” of employees on the “adoption of generative AI tools” and then replacing the workers with over 10,000 foreign H-1B employees. Last month, Amazon announced it would lay off about 14,000 people to focus on its most promising projects, including generative AI. Last year, Intuit said it would lay off 1,800 people and replace them with AI-focused workers. Klarna and Duolingo have also replaced significant numbers of workers with AI. And in January, Meta announced plans to lay off 5 percent of its workforce as it looks to streamline operations and build its AI business.

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Crypto hoarders dump tokens as shares tumble

Bitcoin, Biz & IT, crypto, ether, syndication / Paul Patrick / November 26, 2025

“It was inevitable,” said Jake Ostrovskis, head of OTC trading at Wintermute, referring to the sell-off in digital asset treasury stocks. “It got to the point where there’s too many of them.”

Several companies have begun selling their crypto stockpiles in an effort to fund share buybacks and shore up their stock prices, in effect putting the crypto treasury model into reverse.

North Carolina-based ether holder FG Nexus sold about $41.5 million of its tokens recently to fund its share buyback program. Its market cap is $104 million, while the crypto it holds is worth $116 million. Florida-based life sciences company turned ether buyer ETHZilla recently sold about $40 million worth of its tokens, also to fund its share buyback program.

Sequans Communications, a French semiconductor company, sold about $100 million of its bitcoin this month in order to service its debt, in a sign of how some companies that borrowed to fund crypto purchases are now struggling. Sequans’ market capitalization is $87 million, while the bitcoin it holds is worth $198 million.

Georges Karam, chief executive of Sequans, said the sale was a “tactical decision aimed at unlocking shareholder value given current market conditions.”

While bitcoin and ether sellers can find buyers, companies with more niche tokens will find it more difficult to raise money from their holdings, according to Morgan McCarthy. “When you’ve got a medical device company buying some long-tail asset in crypto, a niche in a niche market, it is not going to end well,” he said, adding that 95 percent of digital asset treasuries “will go to zero.”

Strategy, meanwhile, has doubled down and bought even more bitcoin as the price of the token has fallen to $87,000, from $115,000 a month ago. The firm also faces the looming possibility of being cut from some major equity indices, which could heap even more selling pressure on the stock.

But Saylor has brushed off any concerns. “Volatility is Satoshi’s gift to the faithful,” he said this week, referring to the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin.

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UK government will buy tech to boost AI sector in $130M growth push

AI, Biz & IT, Financial Times, syndication / Rejus Almole / November 24, 2025

“Our particular strengths as a country lie in areas like life sciences, financial services, the defense sector, and the creative sector. And where we will really lead the world is where we can use the power of AI in those sectors,” Kendall told the Financial Times.

The plans came as part of a wider AI package designed to upgrade Britain’s tech infrastructure and convince entrepreneurs and investors that Labour is backing the sector ahead of next week’s Budget, which is expected to raise taxes on the wealthy.

The UK has sought to attract investment from US AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

The government has signed several “strategic partnerships” with American groups in a bid to attract foreign investment in UK AI infrastructure and talent, in exchange for adopting their technology in the public sector.

Sue Daley, of lobby group TechUK, said the plan showed “real ambition” but warned: “Advanced market commitments of this kind must be designed carefully to avoid unintentionally distorting competition.”

The government also announced that James Wise, a venture capitalist at Balderton, would chair the government’s 500 million pound sovereign AI unit, which has been set up to back AI startups alongside the British Business Bank.

Additional reporting by Ivan Levingston.

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Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key.

Biz & IT, election systems, encryption keys, iacr, international associate for cryptological research, Security / Tim Belzer / November 22, 2025

One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.

The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. Helios encrypts each vote in a way that assures each ballot is secret. Other cryptography used by Helios allows each voter to confirm their ballot was counted fairly.

An “honest but unfortunate human mistake”

Per the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding to cook the results, each trustee holds a third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results.

“Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share,” the IACR said. “As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.”

To prevent a similar incident, the IACR will adopt a new mechanism for managing private keys. Instead of requiring all three chunks of private key material, elections will now require only two. Moti Yung, the trustee who was unable to provide his third of the key material, has resigned. He’s being replaced by Michel Abdalla.

The IACR is a nonprofit scientific organization providing research in cryptology and related fields. Cryptology is the science and practice of designing computation and communication systems that remain secure in the presence of adversaries. The associate is holding a new election that started Friday and runs through December 20.

Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key. Read More »

How to know if your Asus router is one of thousands hacked by China-state hackers

ASUS, Biz & IT, consumer routers, hacking, Security, state sponsored hacking / Mike M. / November 21, 2025

Thousands of Asus routers have been hacked and are under the control of a suspected China-state group that has yet to reveal its intentions for the mass compromise, researchers said.

The hacking spree is either primarily or exclusively targeting seven models of Asus routers, all of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, meaning they no longer receive security patches, researchers from SecurityScorecard said. So far, it’s unclear what the attackers do after gaining control of the devices. SecurityScorecard has named the operation WrtHug.

Staying off the radar

SecurityScorecard said it suspects the compromised devices are being used similarly to those found in ORB (operational relay box) networks, which hackers primarily use to conduct espionage to conceal their identity.

“Having this level of access may enable the threat actor to use any compromised router as they see fit,” SecurityScorecard said. “Our experience with ORB networks suggests compromised devices will commonly be used for covert operations and espionage, unlike DDoS attacks and other types of overt malicious activity typically observed from botnets.”

Compromised routers are concentrated in Taiwan, with smaller clusters in South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, central Europe, and the United States.

The Chinese government has been caught building massive ORB networks for years. In 2021, the French government warned national businesses and organizations that the APT31—one of China’s most active threat groups—was behind a massive attack campaign that used hacked routers to conduct reconnaissance. Last year, at least three similar China-operated campaigns came to light.

Russian-state hackers have been caught doing the same thing, although not as frequently. In 2018, Kremlin actors infected more than 500,000 small office and home routers with sophisticated malware tracked as VPNFilter. A Russian government group was also independently involved in an operation reported in one of the 2024 router hacks linked above.

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Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand

AI, AI chips, AI compute, AI development tools, AI GPU, AI infrastructure, alphabet, Amin Vahdat, API, Biz & IT, capital expenditures, Cloud Computing, datacenters, generative ai, Google, large language models, machine learning, Sundar Pichai, Tensor Processing Unit, TPU / Tim Belzer / November 21, 2025

While AI bubble talk fills the air these days, with fears of overinvestment that could pop at any time, something of a contradiction is brewing on the ground: Companies like Google and OpenAI can barely build infrastructure fast enough to fill their AI needs.

During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale “the next 1000x in 4-5 years.”

While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking “for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level,” he told employees during the meeting. “It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there.”

It’s unclear how much of this “demand” Google mentioned represents organic user interest in AI capabilities versus the company integrating AI features into existing services like Search, Gmail, and Workspace. But whether users are using the features voluntarily or not, Google isn’t the only tech company struggling to keep up with a growing user base of customers using AI services.

Major tech companies are in a race to build out data centers. Google competitor OpenAI is planning to build six massive data centers across the US through its Stargate partnership project with SoftBank and Oracle, committing over $400 billion in the next three years to reach nearly 7 gigawatts of capacity. The company faces similar constraints serving its 800 million weekly ChatGPT users, with even paid subscribers regularly hitting usage limits for features like video synthesis and simulated reasoning models.

“The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race,” Vahdat said at the meeting, according to CNBC’s viewing of the presentation. The infrastructure executive explained that Google’s challenge goes beyond simply outspending competitors. “We’re going to spend a lot,” he said, but noted the real objective is building infrastructure that is “more reliable, more performant and more scalable than what’s available anywhere else.”

Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand Read More »

HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs

Biz & IT, dell, HP, laptops, Tech / Tim Belzer / November 20, 2025

The OEMs disabling codec hardware also comes as associated costs for the international video compression standard are set to increase in January, as licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States. To put that into perspective, in Q3 2025, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops, and Dell sold 10,166,000 laptops and desktops, per Gartner.

Last year, NAS company Synology announced that it was ending support for HEVC, as well as H.264/AVC and VCI, transcoding on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for video codecs is widespread on end devices, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs.”

“This update reduces unnecessary resource usage on the server and significantly improves media processing efficiency. The optimization is particularly effective in high-user environments compared to traditional server-side processing,” the announcement said.

Despite the growing costs and complications with HEVC licenses and workarounds, breaking features that have been widely available for years will likely lead to confusion and frustration.

“This is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine, are part of a ‘Pro’ line (jabs at branding names are warranted – HEVC is used professionally), and more applications these days outside of Netflix and streaming TV are getting around to adopting HEVC,” a Redditor wrote.

HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs Read More »

Massive Cloudflare outage was triggered by file that suddenly doubled in size

Biz & IT, cloudflare, Matthew Prince, outage, Policy / Kris Guyer / November 19, 2025

Cloudflare’s proxy service has limits to prevent excessive memory consumption, with the bot management system having “a limit on the number of machine learning features that can be used at runtime.” This limit is 200, well above the actual number of features used.

“When the bad file with more than 200 features was propagated to our servers, this limit was hit—resulting in the system panicking” and outputting errors, Prince wrote.

Worst Cloudflare outage since 2019

The number of 5xx error HTTP status codes served by the Cloudflare network is normally “very low” but soared after the bad file spread across the network. “The spike, and subsequent fluctuations, show our system failing due to loading the incorrect feature file,” Prince wrote. “What’s notable is that our system would then recover for a period. This was very unusual behavior for an internal error.”

This unusual behavior was explained by the fact “that the file was being generated every five minutes by a query running on a ClickHouse database cluster, which was being gradually updated to improve permissions management,” Prince wrote. “Bad data was only generated if the query ran on a part of the cluster which had been updated. As a result, every five minutes there was a chance of either a good or a bad set of configuration files being generated and rapidly propagated across the network.”

This fluctuation initially “led us to believe this might be caused by an attack. Eventually, every ClickHouse node was generating the bad configuration file and the fluctuation stabilized in the failing state,” he wrote.

Prince said that Cloudflare “solved the problem by stopping the generation and propagation of the bad feature file and manually inserting a known good file into the feature file distribution queue,” and then “forcing a restart of our core proxy.” The team then worked on “restarting remaining services that had entered a bad state” until the 5xx error code volume returned to normal later in the day.

Prince said the outage was Cloudflare’s worst since 2019 and that the firm is taking steps to protect against similar failures in the future. Cloudflare will work on “hardening ingestion of Cloudflare-generated configuration files in the same way we would for user-generated input; enabling more global kill switches for features; eliminating the ability for core dumps or other error reports to overwhelm system resources; [and] reviewing failure modes for error conditions across all core proxy modules,” according to Prince.

While Prince can’t promise that Cloudflare will never have another outage of the same scale, he said that previous outages have “always led to us building new, more resilient systems.”

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