All posts tagged: exploited

Mythos autonomously exploited vulnerabilities that survived 27 years of human review. Security teams need a new detection playbook

Mythos autonomously exploited vulnerabilities that survived 27 years of human review. Security teams need a new detection playbook

Published by skeptic

A 27-year-old bug sat inside OpenBSD’s TCP stack while auditors reviewed the code, fuzzers ran against it, and the operating system earned its reputation as one of the most security-hardened platforms on earth. Two packets could crash any server running it. Finding that bug cost a single Anthropic discovery campaign approximately $20,000. The specific model run that surfaced the flaw cost under $50. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview found it. Autonomously. No human guided the discovery after the initial prompt. The capability jump is not incremental On Firefox 147 exploit writing, Mythos succeeded 181 times versus 2 for Claude Opus 4.6. A 90x improvement in a single generation. SWE-bench Pro: 77.8% versus 53.4%. CyberGym vulnerability reproduction: 83.1% versus 66.6%. Mythos saturated Anthropic’s Cybench CTF at 100%, forcing the red team to shift to real-world zero-day discovery as the only meaningful evaluation left. Then it surfaced thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and every major browser, many one to two decades old. Anthropic engineers with no formal security training asked Mythos to find remote …

How Jeffrey Epstein exploited philanthropy in science : NPR

How Jeffrey Epstein exploited philanthropy in science : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

A sizeable share of funding for science comes through philanthropy, which comes under little scrutiny. Jeffrey Epstein used this fact to cultivate scientists and launder his reputation, experts say. Hanna Barczyk for NPR hide caption toggle caption Hanna Barczyk for NPR When the Epstein files were released earlier this year, Scott Aaronson was surprised to find his own name in them. “This was something that I’d completely forgotten about,” says Aaronson, “until I saw that I’m in the Epstein files like, 26 times.” Aaronson, a computer scientist, never met or associated with Jeffrey Epstein. He was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 when a proxy for Epstein reached out to him about potentially funding a research project. At the time, Aaronson had never heard of Jeffrey Epstein, and he forwarded the query to a person he knew to be a good judge of character: his mom. “My mom sent an email that said, ‘Be careful of getting sucked into this slime machine,’” recounts Aaronson. “You don’t care that much about money,” she …

‘Grey Gardens’ at 50: Were Little Edie and Big Edie Exploited, or In On the Fun?

‘Grey Gardens’ at 50: Were Little Edie and Big Edie Exploited, or In On the Fun?

Published by Sam Flores

In the few short months leading up to its wide release, the filmmakers behind Grey Gardens were in a frantic state of damage control. Albert and David Maysles’s now iconic documentary, chronicling the eccentric lives of high-society dropouts “Big” and “Little” Edith Bouvier Beale—Jackie O’s aunt and first cousin—had been courting controversy even before its fall 1975 debut at the New York Film Festival. Critics at its first press screening called the film disgusting, accusing it of exploiting both its oblivious subjects and the beloved former first lady. “You just sloughed off Jackie Kennedy,” reviewer Rex Reed spat at the Maysles brothers as they took the stage after the credits rolled. The Trenton Times gossiped that the film “nearly provoked a fight.” Grey Gardens was hardly the Maysles’s first foray into controversy, but their latest feature-length film was also their first to feature female subjects as main characters. The filmmakers’ timing—smack-dab in the middle of the women’s lib movement—was either impeccable or atrocious, depending entirely on whom you were asking. Those interpretations hinge upon how …

As trade envoy, Prince Andrew promoted Britain and exploited his access

As trade envoy, Prince Andrew promoted Britain and exploited his access

Published by Sam Flores

LONDON — Reaching for a role beyond his birthright as the monarchy’s spare, Prince Andrew took on one of the British government’s most outward-facing posts: trade envoy. From 2001 to 2011, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known, hopscotched the globe not as a royal but as an official representative for trade and investment, courting presidents, ministers and chief executives and cooking up deals that at times made his family cringe. Source link

The Workers Building Labubus Are Allegedly Being Horribly Exploited

The Workers Building Labubus Are Allegedly Being Horribly Exploited

Published by José Betancourt

Edward Berthelot/Getty Images You know those small, gremlin-like plushies called Labubus that have taken over the globe by storm, launching a Beanie Baby-esque secondary market with soaring prices? While “blind boxes” — where buyers aren’t clued in to which one they’re getting — can go for as little as $20, more sought-after models are selling for up to $10,000. But beyond their sky-high resale price, the viral collectibles may come with a steep humanitarian cost as well. As The Guardian reports, New York-based labor rights group China Labor Watch (CLW) has accused the toys’ maker, Chinese toy manufacturer Pop Mart, of employing 16- and 17-year-olds without offering them the necessary labor protections required by Chinese law. The group also alleges that these young workers aren’t given adequate health and safety training, among other labor rights violations at the company’s factory in Jiangxi province. The facility employs more than 4,500 workers and is a “key supplier” for Pop Mart’s Labubus, according to CLW. As detailed in a press release, the non-governmental organization sent representatives to the …

How the Louvre thieves exploited human psychology to avoid suspicion – and what it reveals about AI

How the Louvre thieves exploited human psychology to avoid suspicion – and what it reveals about AI

Published by skeptic

On a sunny morning on October 19 2025, four men allegedly walked into the world’s most-visited museum and left, minutes later, with crown jewels worth €88 million (£76 million). The theft from Paris’s Louvre Museum – one of the world’s most surveilled cultural institutions – took just under eight minutes. Visitors kept browsing. Security didn’t react (until alarms were triggered). The men disappeared into the city’s traffic before anyone realised what had happened. Investigators later revealed that the thieves wore hi-vis vests, disguising themselves as construction workers. They arrived with a furniture lift, a common sight in Paris’s narrow streets, and used it to reach a balcony overlooking the Seine. Dressed as workers, they looked as if they belonged. This strategy worked because we don’t see the world objectively. We see it through categories – through what we expect to see. The thieves understood the social categories that we perceive as “normal” and exploited them to avoid suspicion. Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems work in the same way and are vulnerable to the same kinds …