"I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic."
-- George Carlin, who died 2008Why All The Conspiracy Movies Right Now?
Assume You Will Be Hacked
The Atlantic [no paywall] – AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before. “AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before…As AI tools have become extremely good at writing code, they’ve also become extremely good at pulling off cyberattacks. (Malware, after all, is still software.) The result has been a change in the scale, speed, and sophistication of hacks that is difficult to overstate:
Among its tens of thousands of clients, the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks identified a fourfold increase in daily attacks from 2024 to 2025. Hackers are developing AI-enhanced computer viruses that adapt on the fly to avoid detection. They are automating cyber-espionage campaigns on foreign governments. They are stealing data in minutes instead of hours.
“There’s a crazy amount of offensive activity happening right now,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer of Yahoo and Facebook, told me. “Companies are getting hacked every single day.”
White House App Uses Code From Tech Vendor Still Operating in Russia
The Newsground: “Leaked Russian records obtained by The Newsground show that the founders of a technology company embedded in the White House’s official mobile application continued using sanctioned Russian banks after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Following the invasion, its founders continued to travel to Russia, even after one of them complained on Telegram that Russian tax authorities had issued him a subpoena regarding a related business.
The company, Elfsight, markets itself as a European company headquartered in Andorra, where its founders now appear to reside. But records reviewed by The Newsground show that the company’s Russian operations continue. Elfsight is a software vendor that supplies pre-built, embeddable widgets such as social media feeds, image galleries, and forms for websites and apps that load directly from Elfsight’s servers.
According to a network traffic analysis by the security research firm Atomic Computer, Elfsight’s code runs inside the White House app and is served through a broad network of Elfsight-controlled domains. The app is now reportedly mandatedfor government employees’ phones.
NOTUS, a nonprofit newsroom, previously reported that security researchers had raised alarms about the White House app’s use of Elfsight and that the integration had already exposed personal details of some White House staffers through the app’s network traffic…”
