Author: HackWatchit

Meta has unleashed a groundbreaking feature that transforms Instagram from a photo-sharing platform into a real-time location broadcaster. While the company promises enhanced connectivity, cybersecurity experts are sounding alarm bells about potential dangers lurking beneath this seemingly innocent update.  Understanding the Digital Surveillance Landscape Instagram’s freshly minted “Map” functionality represents a seismic shift in social media architecture. Unlike traditional posting where you deliberately choose what to share, this feature operates as an always-on location transmitter that continuously broadcasts your whereabouts to selected contacts whenever you launch the application.  The mechanism mirrors Snapchat’s infamous Snap Map, but with Instagram’s massive user…

One of the most pressing cyber threats businesses face today is the rampant rise in compromised credentials. Data from Check Point External Risk Management (previously known as Cyberint), reveals a staggering 160% increase in compromised credentials so far in 2025 compared to 2024. This isn’t just a statistic; it’s a direct threat to your organization’s security. Late last year, we reported 14,000 cases in just 1 month where our customers’ employee credentials, even those adhering to company password policies, were exposed in data breaches – a clear indicator of real and present risk. Where in the World are Credentials Most…

Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel reportedly said that the United States needs to invest in passport and immigration booths at airports to help reverse a decline in foreign tourists. “It can be very aggravating to come to the U.S. because the first thing you see is a long queue,” Fogel told the Financial Times (FT) in a report published Friday (Aug. 8). Fogel added that the country’s airports “need to be in shape” before the upcoming 2026 Fifa World Cup and 2028 Summer Olympics events that are to be held in the U.S., according to the report. The number of foreign travelers arriving in…

OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, overpromised on GPT-5, and real-life results are underwhelming, but it looks like a new update is rolling out that might address some of the concerns. GPT-5 is a state-of-the-art model. In our tests, BleepingComputer found that GPT-5 does really well in coding. It was significantly faster than the other OpenAI models, including o3. However, GPT-5 struggles to be ‘creative’ in writing, and it also often fails to switch to its new reasoning capabilities when users expect. On top of it, we’ve observed that GPT-5 often produces short content when it’s explicitly asked to give more details.…

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) within the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), published a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to address performance-based regulations to enable the design and operation of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) at low altitudes beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) and for third-party services, including UAS Traffic Management (UTM), that support these operations. Operators and service providers are now expected to develop their cybersecurity standards rooted in the NIST cybersecurity framework for conducting risk assessments, while also embedding secure-by-design principles into their systems…

interface for interacting with LLMs is through the classic chat UI found in ChatGPT, Gemini, or DeepSeek. The interface is quite simple, where the user inputs a body of text and the model responds with another body, which may or may not follow a specific structure. Since humans can understand unstructured natural language, this interface is suitable and quite effective for the target audience it was designed for. However, the user base of LLMs is much larger than the 8 billion humans living on Earth. It expands to millions of software programs that can potentially harness the power of such…

A new documentary series about cybercrime airing next month on HBO Max features interviews with Yours Truly. The four-part series follows the exploits of Julius Kivimäki, a prolific Finnish hacker recently convicted of leaking tens of thousands of patient records from an online psychotherapy practice while attempting to extort the clinic and its patients. The documentary, “Most Wanted: Teen Hacker,” explores the 27-year-old Kivimäki’s lengthy and increasingly destructive career, one that was marked by cyber attacks designed to result in real-world physical impacts on their targets. By the age of 14, Kivimäki had fallen in with a group of criminal…

Can Stratospheric Aircraft Solve the Global Connectivity Crisis? 3 billion people still do not have internet access. In many regions, building cell towers is not financially or environmentally sustainable. What if instead of building more towers, telecom companies could float above the problem, literally? That is the approach being taken by World Mobile and Protelindo, through their joint venture in Combined Space Technologies (CST). With the launch of World Mobile Stratospheric, they aim to replace the telecom tower model with hydrogen-powered aircraft that beam internet directly to smartphones, from 20,000 meters in the sky.This move has significant implications for mobile…

Columbia University data breach impacted 868,969 people Pierluigi Paganini August 08, 2025 Columbia University was hit by a cyberattack, exposing personal data of over 860,000 students, applicants, and employees. Columbia University suffered a cyberattack that exposed the personal data of students, applicants, and employees. According to the data breach notification sent to the Maine Attorney’s General Office, the incident impacted 868,969 people. The organization quickly notified law enforcement. A recent technical outage affecting parts of the university’s IT systems was found to be caused by unauthorized access. The University investigated the incident with the help of external cybersecurity experts and discovered…