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December 21, 2025Ravi LakshmananMalware/Cyber Espionage Nearly five years after the hacking group was observed targeting victims in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Turkey, threat hunters have discovered new activity linked to the Iranian threat actor known as Infy (also known as Prince of Persia). “The scale of Prince of Persia’s activities is more significant than we originally anticipated,” Tomer Barr, vice president of security research at SafeBreach, said in a technical breakdown shared with Hacker News. “This threat group remains active, relevant, and dangerous.” According to a report published by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in May 2016, Infy is one…
According to Business Insider, a law firm representing Google and Apple has warned employees who need a visa stamp to re-enter the United States to avoid leaving the country because the visa process will take longer than usual. BI said it had seen notes from BAL Immigration Law (representing Google) and Fragomen (representing Apple). “Given recent updates and the potential for unpredictable and lengthy delays in returning to the United States, we strongly recommend that employees without a valid H-1B visa stamp avoid international travel for the time being,” Fragomen’s memo said. A State Department spokesperson told BI that the…
When iRobot filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last Sunday, it marked the end of an era for one of America’s most beloved robotics companies. The Roomba maker, which had sold over 50 million robots since its 2002 launch, had survived 35 years of near-death experiences and technical challenges only to be undone by what founder Colin Angle calls “avoidable” regulatory opposition. The collapse followed Amazon’s January 2024 decision to scuttle its $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot after 18 months of investigation by the FTC and European regulators. In this candid conversation, Angle reflects on what he describes as a profoundly…
Governor Kathy Hochul signed the RAISE Act, making New York the second state in the U.S. to enact major AI safety legislation. The state Legislature passed the RAISE Act in June, but Hochul proposed changes to scale back the bill after lobbying from the technology industry. The New York Times reported that Hochul ultimately agreed to sign the original bill and that lawmakers agreed to implement the changes she requested next year. The bill would require large-scale AI developers to publicly disclose information about their safety protocols and report safety incidents to the state within 72 hours. It will also…
December 20, 2025Ravi LakshmananCybercrime/ATM Security The US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced this week that it has indicted 54 people in connection with a multi-million dollar ATM jackpot scheme. This massive conspiracy involved deploying malware named Ploutus to hack Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) across the United States and force them to withdraw cash. The indicted members are alleged to be members of the Venezuelan gang Torren de Aragua (TdA, Spanish for “Aragua Train”), which is listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. In July 2025, the U.S. government announced sanctions against the group’s head, Hector Rustenford…
This week’s science news featured some amazing innovations, including the development of a new type of quantum processor that will last 15 times longer than those used by Google and IBM.Manufactured from the rare earth element tantalum, this processor is an important step toward stable quantum computing. But scientists must overcome significant challenges, including the processor’s millisecond decoherence time and tantalum’s extreme rarity.Elsewhere, scientists said they had taken inspiration from snakes’ thermal vision to build an imaging system that could one day be installed in smartphones, and Japan’s military tested a 100-kilowatt laser weapon that can cut through metal and…
After building a new kind of architecture, silicon quantum computing physicists have developed what they claim is the most accurate quantum computing chip ever designed.Representatives of the Sydney-based startup say its silicon-based atomic quantum computing chips have advantages over other types of quantum processing units (QPUs). That’s because the chip is based on a new architecture called “14/15” that places phosphorus atoms within silicon (so named because phosphorus atoms are the 14th and 15th elements on the periodic table). They outlined their findings in a new study published Dec. 17 in the journal Nature.SQC achieved 99.5% to 99.99% fidelity on…
Astronomers hoping to observe planets around nearby stars have witnessed an “unprecedented astronomical phenomenon” that is much rarer, the researchers said. It is the violent aftermath of not one, but two collisions between the planet’s rocky components.Over the past two decades, astronomers have witnessed two catastrophic collisions around the star Fomalhaut, located just 25 light-years away in the constellation Austrinus Pisces. The detection occurred after planetesimals (rocky fragments of unformed planets), much larger than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, collided with each other, creating giant clouds of shimmering debris.Fomalhaut systems are not immune to such crashes. It is…
If you have teenagers or were once a teenager yourself, you’ve probably experienced this. Your child’s jeans may have fit perfectly in September, but by December they’re showing their ankles. Growth during adolescence can seem surprisingly rapid, with some teens growing 4 to 5 inches (10 to 13 centimeters) per year. But is this really humanity’s most rapid period of growth?Surprisingly, that’s not the case. The teenage growth spurt is only the second-fastest a human can grow.”We’ve been tracking children’s growth from birth to adulthood, and the fastest growth period is clearly the first few years of infancy,” Professor Sean…
Sean Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, is once again drawing unwanted attention to his high-profile venture firm after falsely accusing a Palestinian student of involvement in the Dec. 13 Brown University shooting and subsequent killing of an MIT professor. In a since-deleted post to X, Maguire noted that Brown was “actively erasing his online presence” and speculated that it “seems very likely” that the student was the perpetrator. In fact, authorities identified the gunman as 48-year-old Portuguese Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who was later found dead in a storage facility in New Hampshire. Brown officials said they removed the…