Smashing Security

How websites are tracking you with silence

When a chap called Matt noticed his Bluetooth headphones wouldn't switch to his phone, he was surprised to realise the reason was a single AliExpress webpage sitting open

This AI helps thieves steal your iPhone

You've had your iPhone stolen. A day later, you get a text from Apple saying they've found it, and a very helpful woman called Alice from Apple Support calls to walk you

This hacker leaked GTA 6 - and launched their own cryptocurrency

A hacker calling themselves "CYBERLEEK" has been leaking gameplay footage from GTA 6 ahead of its official reveal this week - but they're not asking Rockstar Games for a

Never say this to a robot dog

At Black Hat this month, a group of security researchers took a $9,000 robot dog, plugged Google's AI into its brain, and jailbroke it by telling it - with a completely s

This is the AI service you should never sign up to

Would you like access to Anthropic's Claude at 90% off the normal price? All you have to do is redirect your traffic to a mysterious service called "Poison Claude". Only

How a fake police officer nearly stole Graham's cryptocurrency

Graham gets a phone call from the police. Well, someone who sounds convincingly like the police. There's just one small problem: what they really want is the 24-word seed

This job interview could destroy your company

You've been headhunted for a great job in cryptocurrency. All you have to do is complete a short online assessment - with your webcam on, of course, so they can verify wh

How 14 orders of chicken McNuggets helped nail a suspected Russian hacker

A Russian intelligence-linked hacker is arrested in Thailand while enjoying a beach holiday - and the trail of evidence that nailed him to the Russian government includes

Remote-control rickshaws and rogue book marketers

An app has appeared in India that lets anyone with a smartphone stop a passing e-rickshaw dead in its tracks - no login, no passwords, no permissions needed.  Meanwhile,

JadePuffer - the AI that ran a ransomware attack all by itself

A 15-year-old boy asked a chatbot for help - and cancelled nearly 47,000 anime streaming subscriptions in under four hours. Meanwhile, researchers have documented the fir

Polymarket can predict the future. So how did it miss this hack?

Polymarket has built an entire business on predicting the future. So how did it manage to spectacularly fail to predict its own hack? Plus, the Google engineer with a mil

How a hacker could have Rickrolled the entire World Cup

A polite caller from your bank says there is a problem with your account. Don't worry - they'll send someone round to help. They'll even take your cards away to keep them

AI gets hacked, and BitLocker gets bypassed

What if your AI coding assistant could be tricked into stealing your own company's secrets - by reading a single booby-trapped bug report? No phishing email. No malware.

This AI worm just rewrote its own rules

Researchers at the University of Toronto have built a worm that thinks for itself. Using free off-the-shelf AI models it works out how to break into each new computer it

This AI security flaw might be impossible to fix

A website called "UK visa portal" has been quietly collecting passport scans, selfies, and personal data from thousands of travellers who thought they were applying throu

What your Oura ring won't tell you

CISA, the US government agency whose entire job is keeping America's critical infrastructure safe from hackers, has had a contractor publish dozens of plain-text credenti

High-speed train hacks and homicidal lawnmowers

A 23-year-old radio enthusiast spent £300 on a piece of kit from the internet, and used it to bring four packed high-speed trains to a screeching halt. His defence in cou

How ShinyHunters hacked the world's biggest universities

Welcome to the largest educational data breach in history - affecting nearly 9,000 institutions, every Ivy League university, and 30 million students mid-finals. When Can

Meta sees everything, Copy Fail, and a deepfake gets hired

Meta's smart glasses promise privacy "designed for you" - but everything they record was being beamed off to workers in Nairobi to label by hand. When those workers blew

This developer wanted to cheat at Roblox. It cost millions

A developer at an AI startup wanted to cheat at Roblox. They downloaded a dodgy script on their work laptop. That one decision triggered a cascade of failures that ended