https://techxplore.com/rss-feed/security-news/ en-us The latest news on cyber security, network security, software vulnerabilities, data leaks, malware, and viruses Large language models (LLMs), the models that underpin platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini, are now used daily by more than a billion people worldwide. Some computer scientists have also been combining several of these models to create multi-agent systems (MAS), in which many LLM-based agents work together to tackle complex problems. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-peering-llm-based-multi-agent.html Security Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:20:02 EDT news705585057 Subscriber Identity Modules (SIMs), secure elements used to connect devices to a mobile network, can pose severe security risks when compromised. A malicious SIM could allow attackers to gather information about a device, interfere with its connectivity and serve as an entry point for further cyberattacks. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-malicious-sim-cards-hijack-smartphones.html Hardware Mon, 10 Aug 2026 03:00:02 EDT news705321541 Chipmakers and operating system developers have spent years building defenses. A new study from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) shows that a key assumption behind many of them doesn't hold. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-latest-defenses-built-processor.html Computer Sciences Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:40:02 EDT news705309959 URL scanning services are now a common component of modern security workflows. They help detect phishing websites or malware early and warn users before they visit a URL. However, the practice of some of these services—publishing scanned URLs—can inadvertently expose sensitive user data. CISPA researcher Ali Mustafa, together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy and Ca' Foscari University of Venice, conducted the first systematic investigation of the risks arising from this practice. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-factor-privacy-url-scanning.html Software Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:40:09 EDT news705323885 The protection of personal data is now a key part of individual literacy in everyday life. Nevertheless, researchers regularly observe a contradiction among the general public, which they describe as the "privacy paradox." There is often a wide gap between the concerns expressed about protecting personal data and people's actual behavior when handling such data. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-four-questions-to-know-your.html Security Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:20:04 EDT news705255181 New data released this week show 54% of Australian children and teens use artificial intelligence tools for personal and social reasons. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-australian-children-teens-ai-personal.html Internet Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:40:05 EDT news705249362 Research in the International Journal of Materials and Product Technology describes a responsive printing system designed to make anti-counterfeit labels more durable, easier to produce at scale and simpler to verify with a smartphone. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-anti-counterfeit-easier.html Hi Tech & Innovation Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:20:05 EDT news705154737 Hackers tried to break into at least 30 municipal water systems in Minnesota on July 26–27, 2026. Since then, Michigan and five other states have reported similar cyberattacks. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-hackers-municipal-vulnerable.html Security Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:20:04 EDT news705139322 When employees in Østre Toten Municipality turned on their computers on Jan. 9, 2021, they were met with a digital blackout. Systems were down, data were encrypted and the municipality was paralyzed. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-municipalities-cybersecurity.html Security Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:40:03 EDT news705056553 Videoconferencing facilitates communication between different locations while still allowing people to look each other in the eye. However, increasingly, we have to question whether the other person's eyes are real. This is because deepfake technologies are now capable of falsifying voices and images in real time more realistically than ever. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-real-fake-videoconferences.html Security Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:20:09 EDT news704970122 Queues at sports events can be very long, even at large venues with many entrance gates. To speed things up, Geelong Football Club recently introduced an "express lane" option for club members. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-sports-venues-facial-recognition-people.html Hi Tech & Innovation Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:20:02 EDT news704697901 In a nondescript Idaho Falls warehouse, a nuclear nonproliferation researcher at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) picks up a small plastic bottle and pours tiny bits of rounded black glass across a worktable. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-vacuum-nuclear-fallout.html Engineering Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:00:03 EDT news704648401 One year after unveiling a first-of-its-kind "microwave brain" microchip capable of computing on ultrafast data and wireless signals, researchers from the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering have shown how the chip can encode information into its own language. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-microwave-neural-network-method-compress.html Telecom Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:20:07 EDT news704643121 When people hear the word cyberattack, they usually imagine someone guessing a password, planting malware, stealing a computer, hacking an organization's network or exploiting a flaw in software. A side-channel attack works differently. It looks for clues a computer gives away while doing ordinary work. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-sidechannel-scientist-leak-secrets-hacked.html Security Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:00:10 EDT news704632982 OpenAI's AI models recently escaped their constraints during an internal cybersecurity evaluation and broke into the production systems of Hugging Face—a popular machine learning platform and community used across the AI industry. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-openai-safety-realworld-cyberattack-platform.html Security Thu, 30 Jul 2026 08:40:04 EDT news704618881 University of Wisconsin–Madison and Princeton University nuclear engineers have identified a major blind spot in nuclear accounting with global nuclear security implications. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-massive-quantities-undeclared-uranium-exported.html Energy & Green Tech Thu, 30 Jul 2026 05:00:07 EDT news704536228 KAIST researchers have developed a safety verification technology that uncovers roughly seven times more hidden vulnerabilities in AI than existing methods. The technology is expected to serve as a foundation for developing safer, more trustworthy AI. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-stable-gflownet-uncovers-hidden-weaknesses.html Security Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:40:05 EDT news704552567 AI company Anthropic has announced that its unreleased model, Claude Mythos Preview, has discovered previously unknown mathematical weaknesses in cryptographic algorithms that human researchers had missed for years. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-claude-ai-cryptography-weaknesses-human.html Security Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:10:05 EDT news704550454 ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has revealed that an autonomous artificial intelligence agent that hacked a popular platform for computer programmers also attempted to breach four other companies during the incident. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-openai-rogue-ai-agent-companies.html Security Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:43:37 EDT news704540592 Deletion is a common part of modern life. We send files and folders to the recycle bin all the time and often get rid of unwanted personal accounts. But do you know what really happens when you hit the "delete" button? https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-click-delete.html Security Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:00:03 EDT news704525401 Protecting sensitive, precision-timed computing systems requires understanding the nature of cyberthreats. So researchers from Washington State University teamed up with experts at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and Metro State University to design an attack—dubbed NosyNeighbor—that lurks on the sidelines of time- and safety-critical computer systems, "infers" what's happening inside and adapts its malicious approach. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-scientists-cyberattack-cyberattacks.html Security Tue, 28 Jul 2026 10:00:28 EDT news704451489 In an increasingly competitive job market, some applicants are quietly trying to outsmart AI hiring tools. Now, new research focused on rooting out the practice of "prompt injection" shows how widespread this tactic is. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-thwarting-hidden-resume-hacks-ai.html Business Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:20:07 EDT news703947962 At least 2.2 million cars on the road today are vulnerable to an attack that allows thieves to lock and unlock doors and immobilize vehicle engines remotely via a Bluetooth connection, computer scientists at the University of California San Diego have found. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-million-cars-anti-theft-dealers.html Security Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:00:05 EDT news703864561 A comprehensive analysis of age assurance technologies co-authored by CISPA faculty member Dr. Wouter Lueks concludes that many currently proposed systems for protecting minors online come with significant trade-offs for privacy, security, accessibility and civil liberties. The study "Assessing Age Assurance Technologies: Effectiveness, Side-Effects, and Acceptance," conducted with colleagues from the University of Hamburg and the Leibniz Institute for Media Research, evaluates a broad range of approaches currently being debated by policymakers and platforms worldwide. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-size-age-verification-online.html Internet Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:00:02 EDT news703748544 Large language models (LLMs), the computational algorithms underpinning ChatGPT, Gemini and other artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversational platforms, are now widely used worldwide. These models can rapidly answer questions, source information online, assist users with specific tasks and produce text tailored for specific purposes. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-hidden-prompts-false-memories-ai.html Security Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:20:01 EDT news703427290 So-called deepfakes, that is, images and videos generated with the help of artificial intelligence, are becoming increasingly difficult to detect. An international research team from the University of Tokyo and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, has developed a method that identifies manipulated videos more reliably than previous approaches—not by searching for visual artifacts, but by analyzing the naturalness of facial expressions. In tests on established benchmark datasets, the approach achieved an average detection accuracy of more than 95 percent and successfully identified manipulations that caused many existing detectors to fail. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-facial-movement-analysis-deepfake-videos.html Security Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:20:09 EDT news703417834 For a paper published in the International Journal of Applied Cryptography, a team compared 11 leading large language models (LLMs) for software security. They found that no single system consistently outperforms its rivals in detecting vulnerabilities. This, they suggest, means organizations must select such tools according to the specific software they are analyzing. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-ai-unreliable-size-code-tool.html Security Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:00:04 EDT news703346049 While security systems based on pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) have been developed to secure information use, they produce sequences that are not truly random and suffer from inherent vulnerabilities and security breaches. To overcome these limitations, a true random number generator (TRNG) that exploits diverse sources of physical entropy has emerged as an alternative technology. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-driven-random-generator-image.html Hi Tech & Innovation Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:00:01 EDT news703144518 Recently, Andrew Charlton, the federal assistant minister for science and technology, issued a stark warning about artificial intelligence (AI). Speaking at the AI Safety Forum at the University of Sydney, he said powerful AI models "are already doing things their creators never intended: cheating, deceiving, going their own way." https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-australia-woken-ai-ambition.html Security Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:20:05 EDT news702893402 Many digital users rely on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to combat security threats, allowing the application to view, intercept and handle all user traffic in return for hiding identifying information from third parties. Yet a new mobile VPN security testing framework—MVPNalyzer—found many popular VPNs breach user trust, according to a University of Michigan Engineering study. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-mobile-vpn-strong-advertised.html Internet Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:07:10 EDT news702648411