Author: HackWatchit

Britain targets Kyrgyz financial institutions, crypto networks aiding Kremlin Pierluigi Paganini August 20, 2025 The UK has imposed new sanctions on Kyrgyz financial institutions and crypto networks accused of helping Russia evade restrictions. The UK imposed sanctions on Kyrgyz financial institutions and crypto networks accused of aiding Russian sanctions evasion, war funding, and ransomware activities. The U.K. imposed new sanctions on Kyrgyzstan’s Capital Bank and director Kantemir Chalbayev, accused of helping Russia pay for military goods. The British authorities have frozen U.K. assets. The Record Media reported that sanctions minister Stephen Doughty warned Moscow is using “dodgy crypto networks” to…

In brief Eight Sleep landed a $100M Series D from Founders Fund, Y Combinator, and F1 investors, pushing sales past $500M It’s AI “Sleep Agent” system adjusts temperature and heart rate, but users gripe about leaks, glitches, and black-box data Celebrity fan club includes Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Scarlett Johansson—while Reddit calls it a “glorified water bed” Eight Sleep, a startup that sells $3,000 AI-powered mattresses with a monthly subscription fee, just raised $100 million in Series D funding, hoping to bolster a relatively novel idea within the consumer discretionary sector.The round—led by Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Valor Equity…

United States Custom and Border Protection officials have sweeping powers to search anyone’s phone when they are entering the country—including US citizens. Newly released figures show that over the past three months, CBP officials have been searching more phones and other devices than ever before.From April through June this year, CBP searched 14,899 devices carried by international travelers, according to stats published on the agency’s website. While the figures aren’t broken down by device type, the CBP has the ability to search phones, computers, cameras, and other electronics. The April-June spike tops the previous highest quarterly figure of at least…

BBC iPlayer is home to popular shows including Call the Midwife, Doctor Who, EastEnders, and Peaky Blinders. Better still, it’s completely free to watch. The caveat is that BBC iPlayer is only available in the UK. Fortunately, you can watch BBC iPlayer online from anywhere with a VPN – but what if your VPN doesn’t work with BBC iPlayer? Then you’ll come across an error message that says “BBC iPlayer only works in the UK. Sorry, it’s due to rights issues.” Total VPN worked well with BBC iPlayer in our most recent unblocking tests. That’s not to say that occasional issues can’t arise. Even…

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman told reporters that GPT-6 is already in the works, and it’ll not take as long as GPT-5. The GPT-6 announcement doesn’t surprise me because OpenAI is slowly becoming a product-first company rather than research-focused. There’s no denying that OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman overhyped GPT-5 and underdelivered. While GPT-5 isn’t exactly bad and actually offers significant improvements over GPT-4 or o3 for coding, the rollout wasn’t smooth and some people were expecting more than gradual improvements. OpenAI CEO believes the company will do better next time and GPT-5 wasn’t really as bad some people claimed. “I like…

Introducing a New Angle on LLM Safety Many publications have discussed the issues with tricking LLMs into responding to harmful requests. Our most recent academic research offers a new way to think about these issues, and it speaks to how defenders could improve LLM safety as well. The key is to consider some fundamental qualities of how safety features are built into LLM models. LLMs are designed to refuse harmful queries through “alignment” training, a process that aims to make refusal responses far more likely than affirmative ones for unsafe prompts. A technical aspect of this process is the use…

learning data analysis, I was overly obsessed with the tools and the glamor that might come with the title of being a data analyst. My internship started, and I had one goal in mind: to develop my technical skills. I mean, everyone wants to make their LinkedIn profile decorated with skills and certifications. What I didn’t expect, though, was that my most valuable lesson wouldn’t come from a tool or tutorial. It came from something much more human: collaboration. Initially, I attempted to tackle everything on my own, viewing each task as a personal challenge. Little did I know, my…

American contract research organization Inotiv disclosed Monday that it became aware of a cybersecurity incident affecting certain of its systems and data earlier this month. Its preliminary investigation determined that a threat actor gained unauthorized access to, and encrypted certain of, the company’s systems, while investigations into the incident are ongoing.  “Upon identifying encrypted systems, the Company took steps to contain, assess, and remediate the cybersecurity incident, including initiating an investigation, engaging external cybersecurity specialists, and restricting access to certain of its systems,” Beth A. Taylor, chief financial officer and executive vice president at Inotiv, disclosed in a Form 8-K…

Enterprise security and networking teams need details fast, and we work hard to make sure your SASE admin experience is as streamlined as possible. But sometimes it’s better to integrate data into the tools you already use. Introducing the Harmony SASE MCP Server: the bridge between the AI tools you use every day and Harmony SASE. What is MCP (Model Context Protocol)? MCP is an open standard that lets AI and IDE assistants (Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, etc.) connect to external tools and data sources in a consistent, secure way. The Harmony SASE MCP Server supports a curated set of…