Author: HackWatchit
A wave of layoffs has swept through the tech industry, leaving IT teams in a rush to revoke all access those employees may have had. Additionally, 54% of tech hiring managers say their companies are likely to conduct layoffs within the next year, and 45% say employees whose roles can be replaced by AI are most likely to be let go, according to General Assembly. Taking away access to company data the moment someone leaves might seem harsh, but it’s an important step to protect against security risks. Not everyone leaves on good terms. For example, a 39-year-old man accessed…
xAI, founded by Elon Musk, is preparing to launch Grok 3.5, the company’s next state-of-the-art AI model. Grok AI has been around for a year now. While it was late to the game, the Grok model is pretty decent, and it’s quite impressive what the company has achieved in a limited time. Right now, xAI offers Grok 3 to free and paid customers, but it has been planning to launch Grok 3.5 for a while now. In fact, Grok 3.5 was planned for release in May 2025, but we haven’t seen any announcements from the company. However, it looks like…
Carrie Roberts* // Can you think of a reason why you might want to put a lengthy comment into the properties of an MS Office document? If you can, then you might like this PowerShell script that will put a comment of any length into this field you. Microsoft limits the length of comments that can be inserted when using the application (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint), but this script gets you past that limitation. The animation below shows the script in action. The script also includes a “Sanitize” option that will clear out the values for the “Author” and “Last Modified By”…
Fake software activation videos on TikTok spread Vidar, StealC Pierluigi Paganini May 26, 2025 Crooks use TikTok videos with fake tips to trick users into running commands that install Vidar and StealC malware in ClickFix attacks. Cybercriminals leverage AI-generated TikTok videos in ClickFix attacks to spread Vidar and StealC malware, reports Trend Micro. These videos trick users into running PowerShell commands disguised as software activation steps for tools like Windows, Office, CapCut, or Spotify. The researchers pointed out that come videos have reached over 500,000 views, increasing the threat’s reach via TikTok’s algorithm. “Threat actors are now using TikTok videos…
LlamaFirewall is a system-level security framework for LLM-powered applications, built with a modular design to support layered, adaptive defense. It is designed to mitigate a wide spectrum of AI agent security risks including jailbreaking and indirect prompt injection, goal hijacking, and insecure code outputs. Why Meta created LlamaFirewall LLMs are moving far beyond simple chatbot use cases and becoming core components of high-trust, autonomous systems. With this growing sophistication comes a corresponding rise in security risk. “LLMs have advanced to the point where they can function as autonomous agents, yet existing safety measures were never designed with this level of…
The following is a guest post and opinion of Sveinn Valfells, Co-founder of Monerium.Mario Draghi is right. Europe hobbles itself with substantial tariffs, including regulations on “the most innovative part of the service sector – digital”. The European Union has done just that by creating tariffs on stablecoins, a practical form of digital money could provide a significant positive impact on GDP.The Promise of Stablecoins for EuropeStablecoins are digital money on blockchains – dollars, euros, or sterling as cryptographic coins. They are the new “killer app” of fintech, programmable cash which moves peer-to-peer without intermediaries – instantly at virtually no…
In this episode, we explore an incident where Anthropic’s AI, Claude, didn’t just resist shutdown but allegedly blackmailed its engineers. Is this a glitch or the beginning of an AI uprising? Along with co-host Kevin Johnson, we reminisce about past episodes, discuss AI safety and ethics, and examine the implications of AI mimicking human behaviors like blackmail. Join us for an in-depth conversation on the future of AI and its potential risks. ** Links mentioned on the show ** Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offlinehttps://techcrunch.com/2025/05/22/anthropics-new-ai-model-turns-to-blackmail-when-engineers-try-to-take-it-offline/ ** Watch this episode on YouTube **…
The government is giving up on an important part of the cybersecurity workforce “An individual on the spectrum that gets one of these jobs meets all of the same criteria that anybody else who applies for the job has to meet,” said Jim Cook. Terry Gerton May 6, 2025 1:42 pm 5 min read Guest: Jim Cook Title: Board Director, Melwood Summary: During the first Trump administration, MITRE led a team that proposed a new solution to the shortage of cybersecurity analysts–hiring neurodistinct individuals. The team launched successful pilot projects with NGA and then CISA. The new Trump administration terminated…
Joff Thyer // If you have been penetration testing a while, you likely have ended up in a Red Team situation or will be engaged in it soon enough. From a command channel perspective, the work that Raphael Mudge has put into Cobalt Strike makes it an attractive platform for teamwork. Unlike traditional methods of using things like Linux “screen” with PowerShell Empire, and/or Metasploit, Cobalt Strike allows for the setup of an operational attack infrastructure that further promotes real threat emulation possibilities. One of the Black Hills friends in the community (Lee Kagan) contributed an excellent blog post which…