Author: user
Cloud data company Snowflake signed a $200 million multi-year AI contract with OpenAI on Monday, the latest sign that enterprise AI competition continues to heat up. The deal gives Snowflake’s 12,600 customers access to OpenAI models from all three major cloud providers. Snowflake employees also have access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. The companies are also partnering to build new AI agents and other AI products. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said in a press release: “By bringing OpenAI models to enterprise data, Snowflake enables organizations to build and deploy AI on top of their most valuable assets using a secure, governed…
The developer of Notepad++, a popular open-source text editor, confirmed that hackers took over the software in 2025 and distributed malicious updates to users over several months. In a blog post published on Monday, Notepad++ developer Dong Ho said the cyberattack was likely carried out by Chinese government-affiliated hackers between June and December 2025, citing multiple analyzes by security experts who examined the malware’s payload and attack pattern. Ho said this “would explain the very selective targeting” seen during the campaign. Rapid7, which investigated the incident, said the hack was the work of Lotus Blossom, a long-running spy group known…
A security audit of ClawHub’s 2,857 skills uncovered 341 malicious skills across multiple campaigns, exposing users to new supply chain risks, according to new findings from Koui Security. ClawHub is a marketplace designed to help OpenClaw users easily find and install third-party skills. It is an extension of the OpenClaw project, a self-hosted artificial intelligence (AI) assistant previously known as both Clawdbot and Moltbot. This analysis, conducted by Koi with the help of an OpenClaw bot named Alex, found that 335 skills were using bogus prerequisites to install an Apple macOS stealer named Atomic Stealer (AMOS). The code name for…
A social network built specifically for artificial intelligence (AI) bots has sparked viral claims that a machine revolt is imminent. But experts are not convinced, with some denouncing the site as an elaborate marketing hoax and a major cybersecurity risk.Moltbook, a Reddit-inspired site that allows AI agents to post, comment, and interact with each other, has exploded in popularity since its launch on January 28th. As of today (February 2), the site claims to have over 1.5 million AI agents, with humans only allowed as observers.But the site’s rapid spread is due to bots talking to each other (ostensibly of…
A new study has found that a huge chunk deep underground in Hawaii appears to be solid and rich in iron.This blob (scientifically known as the giant hyperslow zone) may be anchoring Hawaii’s hotspot, a region where hot material rises through the mantle and triggers the volcanic activity that formed the Hawaiian Islands.”Because it’s an iron-rich material, it’s going to be more electrically conductive, and that’s actually going to promote heat transfer, so that could actually help localize the plume and make it last longer,” said Doyoung Kim, a seismologist at Imperial College London and lead author of the new…
Ravi LakshmananFebruary 2, 2026Vulnerability / Artificial Intelligence A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in OpenClaw (previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot) that could allow remote code execution (RCE) via a crafted malicious link. This issue is tracked as CVE-2026-25253 (CVSS score: 8.8) and is resolved in version 2026.1.29, released on January 30, 2026. The issue is described as a token extraction vulnerability that could lead to a compromise of the entire gateway. “The Control UI will trust the gatewayUrl from the query string without validation, auto-connect on load, and send the stored gateway token to the WebSocket connection payload,”…
Ravi LakshmananFebruary 2, 2026Kerberos / Enterprise Security Microsoft has announced a three-phase approach to phasing out New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) as part of its efforts to migrate Windows environments to more powerful Kerberos-based options. The development comes more than two years after the tech giant revealed plans to retire its legacy technology due to vulnerabilities that could facilitate relay attacks and allow malicious parties to gain unauthorized access to network resources. NTLM will be officially deprecated in June 2024 and will no longer receive updates. “NTLM consists of security protocols originally designed to provide authentication, integrity, and confidentiality to…
Ring’s AI-powered “Search Party” feature, which leverages the company’s camera network to find lost dogs, is now available to all Ring customers in the United States. For the first time, this feature will be available to those who don’t own a Ring camera. Launched last fall, Search Party uses AI to find potential matches for lost dogs in neighborhood camera footage. When a neighbor reports a lost dog in the Ring app, nearby outdoor cameras use AI to scan for potential matches. If a match is found, the owner of that camera will receive an alert and can optionally choose…
It is up to the farmer’s eye to determine which weeds need to be removed from the field and which do not. And now it’s up to Carbon Robotics’ new AI model. Carbon Robotics, the Seattle-based company behind the LaserWeeder robots that use lasers to kill weeds, on Monday announced a new AI model called the Large Plant Model (LPM). The model instantly recognizes plant species, allowing farmers to target new weeds without retraining the robot. LPM is trained on more than 150 million photos and data points collected by the company’s machines on more than 100 farms in 15…
A coalition of nonprofit organizations is calling on the U.S. government to immediately halt the deployment of Grok, a chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, in federal agencies, including the Department of Defense. The open letter, shared exclusively with TechCrunch, tracks a number of concerning behaviors by large-scale language models over the past year, including a recent trend of X users asking Grok to convert photos of real women and, in some cases, children into sexualized images without their consent. According to some reports, Grok generated thousands of non-consensual and explicit images every hour, which were widely distributed on Musk’s…