Before two of its alleged members were arrested and charged in Australia last month, the hacker group known as TeamPCP carried out a hacking spree unlike any other in history. It tainted hundreds of open-source programs with its malware, stole developer accounts to perpetuate that software supply-chain hacking, and even released a Dune-themed self-spreading worm to automate the process, ultimately breaching more than a thousand companies.

Now Google’s threat intelligence group has revealed that during a key moment of TeamPCP’s rampage, the company’s own undercover researcher had infiltrated the group—allowing Google to monitor the hacking spree from the inside, warn breach targets, and even help disrupt the group’s attempts to exploit those victims.

In a talk at security firm SentinelOne's LABScon research conference today, Google Threat Intelligence Group researcher Austin Larsen will present details on the company’s investigation—and infiltration—of TeamPCP amidst the group’s unprecedented, chaotic supply-chain hacking campaign. According to Larsen, Google eventually followed a trail of operational security mistakes allegedly made by one of the two Australians now accused of being leading members of the hacker group and passed on key identifying details to law enforcement. The company also received intelligence from ShinyHunters, another infamous cybercriminal group that TeamPCP partnered with, but which later turned on the supply-chain hackers. And perhaps most surprisingly, Larsen says that Google’s security subsidiary Mandiant had an undercover analyst—not himself—within the group’s inner circle from almost the beginning of TeamPCP’s time in the spotlight.

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Learning another language is a highly complex mental activity. It requires people to remember words, distinguish unfamiliar sounds, recognize patterns, work out grammatical rules, and retrieve the right expression at the right moment. All of this happens while listening, interpreting, and preparing a response.

Could all this mental activity also help keep an aging brain healthier? Research suggests it can.

Concerns about memory and dementia can send aging adults looking for ways to exercise their brain and maintain cognitive function, whether it is solving crossword puzzles or playing a musical instrument. Language learning might not seem like the same kind of brain exercise, but it is a complex activity that engages several mental processes at once.

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A Chinese optical engineer is the winner of this year's Small World in Motion competition, sponsored by Nikon. Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in Beijing beat out 346 other video entries from 40 different countries with his super-resolution video (above) of the abnormal beating of cilia in the airways of a child with a rare genetic respiratory disorder.

Founded in 2011, the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is a spinoff of the company's Small World Photomicrography Competition, which has been around since 1974. Both are meant "to showcase the beauty and complexity of things seen through the light microscope"—one through still photographs, the other through photovideography, taking advantage of all the technological advances that now allow users to make movies or time-lapse images through the microscope.

Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a genetic disorder that adversely affects the tiny hairlike structures that line the lungs, among other areas. Their wavelike motion helps move around germs, mucus, dust, and other irritants so the body can dispel them via coughing or sneezing. In people born with PCD, there is something wrong with those cilia, so those irritants build up, causing respiratory infections, among other complications. The cilia might be the wrong size, the wrong shape, or missing altogether. They might move abnormally or not move at all.

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Cyber researchers broke into OpenAI using its key rival Anthropic’s software, highlighting vulnerabilities in the ChatGPT maker’s security as leading AI companies face mounting scrutiny over safety.

A small cyber security group gained access to an OpenAI employee’s ChatGPT account, which permitted them to read private software information and suggest changes.

The researchers had been given access to an Anthropic tool specifically designed for security professionals, and were paid for the work as part of a program to find vulnerabilities before they could be exploited by bad actors.

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As European militaries adapt to the use of AI and drones in modern warfare, a NATO-backed startup is helping to deploy AI-driven target detection and selection that can run on small drones for surveillance and attack missions.

The company, Scaleout Systems, was originally founded by researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden in 2018, and initially focused on training and deploying machine learning models directly on the hardware available in commercial trucks and other vehicles. But once Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the company pivoted toward defense applications.

“With the war in Ukraine and a shifting world, we realized that this technology can be very important to operationalize edge data and sensor data for machine learning to make sure that NATO allies have found that strategic advantage,” Andreas Hellander, cofounder and CEO of Scaleout Systems, told Ars.

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For years, Microsoft and OpenAI have fought to keep certain information out of the public eye in their fight with news organizations that have accused the AI firms of teaming up to violate copyright laws by stealing tons of news content to train AI.

However, now the details that should never have been marked confidential are starting to leak. In a motion for summary judgment that was unsealed Thursday from news plaintiffs led by The New York Times, internal documents are exposed that news groups alleged show exactly how Microsoft and OpenAI viewed the threat to news before unleashing new AI products like ChatGPT and Copilot.

Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”

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