https://techxplore.com/rss-feed/security-news/ en-us The latest news on cyber security, network security, software vulnerabilities, data leaks, malware, and viruses Nearly a third of adults in the U.S. do not get enough sleep. A recent surge in attention to this issue raises serious concerns about its long-term health implications, and new research suggests that it can lead to hazardous outcomes, especially in the context of "phishing" emails. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-11-modest-loss-people-vulnerable-email.html Internet Mon, 09 Nov 2026 15:00:21 EST news713437923 Researchers have demonstrated a new password authentication technique for use in virtual reality (VR) settings, which allows users to choose directions rather than numbers. The approach supports the same number of possible combinations as a six-digit numeric password, but is much easier for users to remember. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-11-vr-passwords-recall.html Hi Tech & Innovation Mon, 09 Nov 2026 13:40:15 EST news713449561 Researchers have demonstrated three new techniques to prevent so-called "backdoor attacks," which induce malicious or undesirable behavior in AI models. The researchers have also proposed a concept that would repurpose backdoor attack techniques to create an additional layer of security for users. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-11-techniques-hidden-ai-backdoors-major.html Security Fri, 06 Nov 2026 14:00:06 EST news713195101 Binance released on Tuesday a detailed investigation into the $6 billion hack of its cryptocurrency platform, showing how attackers used fake job interviews and malicious code to steal the funds. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-11-binance-reveals-hackers-fake-job.html Security Tue, 03 Nov 2026 13:20:25 EST news712934033 Governments use them to track phones. Criminals drive them through city streets and send texts that look like they came from your bank. For 20 years, researchers have been building tools to catch these fake cell towers. They have tested those tools mostly against fake towers they built themselves. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-11-devilray-exposes-fake-cell-tower.html Security Tue, 03 Nov 2026 11:40:06 EST news712926664 Picture this: You post photos online from a trip to Brazil. The next day, an email arrives from the hotel where you stayed, thanking you for your visit and offering a special discount on your next stay. The email references your recent trip, the hotel's name looks right and the link looks legitimate. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-11-social-media-fuel-ai-scam.html Security Tue, 03 Nov 2026 09:40:28 EST news712920959 Nearly all personal information is stored electronically in our digital age. This sensitive data is protected by digital keys unique to each device that would take today's computers billions of years to crack through brute-force hacking attacks. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-11-future-proof-bitcoin-lightning-network.html Business Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:20:26 EST news712841760 Binance, the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, said Friday that hackers stole more than $6 billion in what appears to be the largest cryptocurrency heist on record. Blockchain firms have pointed to the attack coming from a North Korean hacking unit. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-63b-hack-binance-biggest-crypto.html Security Sat, 31 Oct 2026 06:32:25 EDT news712647118 Thousands of deceptive advertisements have slipped through Google's advertising safeguards, exposing internet users to fake virus warnings, misleading software promises and potentially dangerous downloads, according to new research from NYU Tandon and Radboud University in the Netherlands. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-thousands-deceptive-ads-evade-google.html Internet Fri, 30 Oct 2026 09:20:11 EDT news712569604 Curtin University researchers may have found a new way to help police trace 3D-printed firearms, after developing a new method of analyzing the plastic used to make them. Homemade plastic weapons present a growing challenge for law enforcement globally, due to being privately manufactured without the serial numbers and registration used to trace conventional firearms. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-police-3d-ghost-guns.html Hi Tech & Innovation Thu, 29 Oct 2026 09:40:06 EDT news712484461 Reading a conversation and deciding whether a chatbot wrote it can be surprisingly difficult. In a study involving more than 72,000 judgments of human and AI responses, participants frequently mistook machine-generated captions, word associations and conversational replies for human work. However, in a smaller experiment, direct questioning proved more successful at exposing a chatbot, though even that comes with caveats. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-ai-human.html Security Thu, 29 Oct 2026 08:20:04 EDT news712468770 The famous "Turing test" of computer science comes from a 1950 paper written by the British computer scientist (and war hero) Alan Turing. There are many variants, but perhaps the most common involves a human asking questions of "someone" behind a screen. The test is: Can the human consistently determine if the answerer is a human or a machine? https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-ais-reliably-reverse-turing.html Security Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:00:01 EDT news712244525 In Lewis Carroll's "Alice Through the Looking Glass," the eponymous heroine encounters the Red Queen, who involves her in a frantic race. In this curious country, Alice learns, you have to run as fast as you possibly can only to remain in the same place. Christoph Landolt draws on the image of this Red Queen's Race to describe the situation of software vendors in the AI era. As the cyber capabilities of frontier models continue to grow, the potential for attacks is multiplying at speed too. Using an approach from game theory, Landolt and his co-authors have calculated how the release of new AI models could be sequenced to give software vendors a strategic head start over cybercriminals. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-red-queen-game-theory-cybersecurity.html Security Mon, 26 Oct 2026 13:20:30 EDT news712234968 Deleting a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant may not erase everything the assistant remembers. Georgia Tech researchers have developed a tool that can recover deleted conversations from AI assistants running on Android phones. The tool, called ORISA, can also rebuild the recovered information into a working AI session. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-deleted-ai-chats-clues.html Security Mon, 26 Oct 2026 13:00:02 EDT news712235401 A new radiation detection method correctly identified single and mixed radioactive sources during six-second helicopter flyovers, according to a University of Michigan Engineering and Paul Scherrer Institute study. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-faster-accurate-airborne-helicopter-flyovers.html Engineering Mon, 26 Oct 2026 12:20:27 EDT news712234801 Governments and organizations around the world began scrambling on Oct. 21, 2026, to fix a vulnerability in software that runs their websites, a bug that could give hackers access to data and control of websites. The flaw in PHP, the programming language that powers much of today's web, prompted urgent warnings from the U.S. National Security Agency, cybersecurity agencies and software vendors. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-ai-discovery-exposes-decade-php.html Security Mon, 26 Oct 2026 09:50:20 EDT news712226787 Anthropic's Claude AI model bypassed a paywall and accessed publicly available voter data in the U.S. state of Georgia without human authorization, Axios reported on Sunday. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-anthropic-ai-accessed-voter.html Security Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:49:10 EDT news712212516 Hundreds of the nation's computer scientists gathered for a conference in Denver last fall, and Tuan Tran had a big test for them: Could they tell the difference between the real Brad Pitt and an AI-generated version of him? https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-ai-deepfakes-realistic-scientists.html Security Fri, 23 Oct 2026 13:45:03 EDT news711981838 Governments and corporations worked throughout the night on urgent security updates after the AI-assisted discovery of vulnerabilities in a programming language vital to 70% of websites globally. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-patch-software-vulnerability-impact-websites.html Security Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:40:21 EDT news711894562 OpenAI has revealed that two of its artificial intelligence agents disabled or weakened systems built to catch them misbehaving, with one later denying it had done so. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-openai-ai-agents-disabled-safety.html Security Thu, 22 Oct 2026 05:30:06 EDT news711864065 An AI-assisted discovery of vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language led governments and other organizations in Europe and the U.S. to take their websites offline temporarily Wednesday as they scrambled to make security updates. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-websites-dark-ai-flaw-web.html Security Thu, 22 Oct 2026 04:39:08 EDT news711862708 Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google Gemini are increasingly being used to help robots perform tasks, but what if LLMs could be exploited to turn helpful robots into harmful robots? https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-secret-trigger-words-ai-powered.html Robotics Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:40:14 EDT news711732961 With the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), transportation and power systems are increasingly closely interconnected, driving innovation but also introducing new vulnerabilities. Researchers at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) have uncovered a novel cross-domain cyberattack whereby, rather than breaching a heavily guarded power communication network, an attacker need only manipulate EV charging navigation systems to redirect large numbers of vehicles to the same charging station, concentrating demand in a short period of time and potentially triggering local power outages or degrading grid reliability. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-discovery-domain-cyberattack-electric-vehicle.html Security Tue, 20 Oct 2026 14:40:12 EDT news711720260 A car is a computer on wheels. It communicates with the car manufacturer's cloud services, the driver's phone and charging stations, and when children stream movies in the back seat, data travels over the internet. All these connections can become entry points for hackers into the car. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-car-weakest.html Software Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:00:28 EDT news711626101 Imagine sitting in your home, listening to what you think is a run-of-the-mill advertisement or perhaps a piece of music you enjoy. But while you hum along, that audio file is sending a secret, malicious audio message—imperceptible to human ears—telling your home assistant to unlock your door or maybe transfer money from your bank account. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-ai-trillions-variants-mass-voice.html Security Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:00:13 EDT news711378610 University of British Columbia researchers have uncovered a vulnerability that could allow hackers to target and disrupt critical infrastructure such as water treatment plants and energy grids without needing to break into a facility's own systems or crack its encryption. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-cyber-threat-exposes-limits-encryption.html Security Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:40:15 EDT news711296572 A research team has developed a new biometric authentication technology that can identify users without storing their fingerprint information as digital data. The study is published in Nature Sensors. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-fingerprint-authentication-ultrasound-biometric-digital.html Hi Tech & Innovation Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:00:11 EDT news711295501 The standard data migration tools offered by major Android manufacturers such as Samsung, Google and Xiaomi pose security risks, as researchers from the Institute of Information Security at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) and Zentrum für sichere Informationstechnologie (A-SIT) have revealed in a recent study. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-clone2pwn-android-migration-flaws-wi.html Consumer & Gadgets Thu, 15 Oct 2026 11:00:25 EDT news711279715 Some information, such as exam questions or bid prices, must remain unreadable until an agreed time, even if it has already been delivered. KAIST researchers have used changes in the electric current inside a semiconductor to develop encryption in which information is revealed only after a set amount of time has passed, or can be read correctly only at a specific time. In addition to the key needed to restore the original information, the technology adds a second condition: when the information is read. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-hardware-method-condition-decoding-encrypted.html Hardware Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:20:15 EDT news711206350 Small artificial intelligence models may be only months away from being able to behave like a computer worm, copying themselves from one internet-connected gadget to the next without human help, Anthropic said. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-anthropic-ai-worms-smart-gadgets.html Security Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:50:01 EDT news711113802