Scattered Spider is focus of NCA inquiry into cyber-attacks against UK retailers

A hacker community known as Scattered Spider is a key suspect in a criminal inquiry into cyber-attacks against UK retailers including Marks & Spencer, detectives have said.Scattered Spider, a loose collective of native English-speaking cybercriminals, has been strongly linked with hacks against M&S, the Co-op and Harrods. M&S said on Wednesday it will take an estimated £300m hit to profits after its systems were hacked last month.The UK’s National Crime Agency, whose remit includes combating cybercrime, said the group was a focus in its investigations.“We are looking at the group that is publicly known as Scattered Spider, but we’ve got a range of different hypotheses and we’ll follow the evidence to get to the offenders,” Paul Foster, the head of the NCA’s national cybercrime unit, told the BBC

Most AI chatbots easily tricked into giving dangerous responses, study finds

Hacked AI-powered chatbots threaten to make dangerous knowledge readily available by churning out illicit information the programs absorb during training, researchers say.The warning comes amid a disturbing trend for chatbots that have been “jailbroken” to circumvent their built-in safety controls. The restrictions are supposed to prevent the programs from providing harmful, biased or inappropriate responses to users’ questions.The engines that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude – large language models (LLMs) – are fed vast amounts of material from the internet.Despite efforts to strip harmful text from the training data, LLMs can still absorb information about illegal activities such as hacking, money laundering, insider trading and bomb-making

‘Every person that clashed with him has left’: the rise, fall and spectacular comeback of Sam Altman

From Elon Musk to his own board, anyone who has come up against the OpenAI CEO has lost. In a gripping new account of the battle for AI supremacy, writer Karen Hao says we should all be wary of the power he now wieldsThe short-lived firing of Sam Altman, the CEO of possibly the world’s most important AI company, was sensational. When he was sacked by OpenAI’s board members, some of them believed the stakes could not have been higher – the future of humanity – if the organisation continued under Altman. Imagine Succession, with added apocalypse vibes. In early November 2023, after three weeks of secret calls and varying degrees of paranoia, the OpenAI board agreed: Altman had to go

Elon Musk claims he will step back from political donations in near future

Elon Musk claimed on Tuesday that he would decrease the amount of money he spends on politics for the foreseeable future. If true, the reduction would represent a significant turnaround after the world’s richest person positioned himself as the Republican party’s most enthusiastic donor over the last year.“I think, in terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” Musk said during a video interview with Bloomberg News at the Qatar Economic Forum.Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain asked the Tesla CEO if he had decided how much to spend on midterm elections, which elicited Musk’s response. When asked why he was pulling back, Musk said flatly: “I think I’ve done enough” – drawing laughs from the audience, although it was unclear if he was joking

Almost half of young people would prefer a world without internet, UK study finds

Almost half of young people would rather live in a world where the internet does not exist, according to a new survey.The research reveals that nearly 70% of 16- to 21-year-olds feel worse about themselves after spending time on social media. Half (50%) would support a “digital curfew” that would restrict their access to certain apps and sites past 10pm, while 46% said they would rather be young in a world without the internet altogether.A quarter of respondents spent four or more hours a day on social media, while 42% of those surveyed admitted to lying to their parents and guardians about what they do online.While online, 42% said they had lied about their age, 40% admitted to having a decoy or “burner” account, and 27% said they pretended to be a different person completely

Microsoft employee interrupts CEO’s keynote with pro-Palestinian protest

A Microsoft employee disrupted a keynote speech by the company’s chief executive with a pro-Palestinian protest at the company’s annual developer conference on Monday.Joe Lopez, a Microsoft firmware engineer who worked on parts of the company’s cloud-computing platform, Azure, was escorted out the Build conference by security nearly immediately after he confronted Satya Nadella.“Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians,” Lopez yelled. “How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?”After the disruption, Lopez sent an all-staff email explaining his decision to stage a protest.“As one of the largest companies in the world, Microsoft has immeasurable power to do the right thing: demand an end to this senseless tragedy, or we will cease our technological support for Israel,” read the email, which has also been published on Medium