Security Experts Flag Chrome Extension Using AI Engine to Act Without User Input
AI agents are projected to revolutionize the AI online experience, performing tasks and chores we’ve asked them to do in the background while we’re doing something more productive or enjoyable. However, it has recently been proven that AI agent infrastructure could be used to perform unsolicited actions on our behalf. A group of security researchers at ExtensionTotal has found a suspicious Google Chrome extension that can perform actions without requiring any permission from the user or being spotted by Chrome’s security measures.
How to prevent your streaming device from tracking your viewing habits (and why it makes a difference)
Whenever I hear about consumer data tracking, my half-century-old brain dredges up that Hall and Oates hit called “Private Eyes” with the refrain “they’re watching you.” I don’t mean to incite Big Brother paranoia; I know I’m not being spied on everywhere I go, especially not in the seclusion of my home. But while using streaming devices, you can almost guarantee that your entertainment and advertisement preferences are being tracked. The culprit is better known as Big Data — arguably less invasive and sinister, but still annoying to some people — and there are ways to mitigate that on your streaming devices if you’re one of them.
In the age of AI, we must protect human creativity as a natural resource
Ironically, our present AI age has shone a bright spotlight on the immense value of human creativity as breakthroughs in technology threaten to undermine it. As tech giants rush to build newer AI models, their web crawlers vacuum up creative content, and those same models spew floods of synthetic media, risking drowning out the human creative spark in an ocean of pablum. Given this trajectory, AI-generated content may soon exceed the entire corpus of historical human creative works, making the preservation of the human creative ecosystem not just an ethical concern but an urgent imperative. The alternative is nothing less than a gradual homogenization of our cultural landscape, where machine learning flattens the richness of human expression into a mediocre statistical average.
US Data Breach Lawsuits Total $155M Amid Cybersecurity Failures
New research by cybersecurity firm Panaseer has found that US companies paid out a total of $155m in class action lawsuits related to data breaches over the last six months. In an examination of all data breach class action filings from ClassActions.org and settlements from Top Class Actions between August 2024 and February 2025, the company found that 43 lawsuits were filed, and 73 settlements were reached. Settlements averaged around $3m, with the largest reaching $21m. Individual payouts to affected employees or customers ranged from $150 to $12,000.
Phishing Kit Darcula Gets Lethal AI Upgrade
It would be easy to dismiss Darcula as some vampire-adjacent goof, but there’s nothing silly about the new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities just added to the potent Chinese-language phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform powering global SMS-based smishing cyberattacks. Researchers at Netcraft have been tracking activities across the Darcula operation for the past year and found an update to the phishing suite this week that included generative AI. When the Netcraft team first reported on Darcula in March 2024, they noted the toolkit was being used across more than 20,000 phishing domains. That number is poised to explode, they say.
