News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

RIOTS IN LOS ANGELES

Waymo Responds to Cars Being Set on Fire in Los Angeles

Waymo has responded after several of its vehicles were set on fire by protestors during the Los Angeles ICE riots.

The self-driving car company told Newsweek that they are "in touch with law enforcement", after footage of the riots showed several Waymo vehicles on fire near the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.

The Context

Clashes between protesters and government forces have intensified in Los Angeles as at least 2,000 National Guard troops arrived over the weekend to counter demonstrations against President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement policies. The protests have drawn national attention, with images of burning Waymo robotaxis in the city becoming one of the defining images of the clash.

What To Know

A spokesperson for Waymo told Newsweek that "we are in touch with law enforcement", after several of their vehicles were caught in the vicinity of protestors in downtown Los Angeles.

WHOLE FOODS DISTRIBUTOR CYBERATTACKED

Whole Foods' distributor UNFI hit with cyberattack, forcing system shutdowns

United Natural Foods, INC (UNFI), the main supplier for Whole Foods, on Monday said it is contending with an active cyber incident and has proactively taken some of its systems offline.

“We have identified unauthorized activity in our systems and have proactively taken some systems offline while we investigate,” the Providence, Rhode Island–based natural and organic food distributor said in a statement sent to Cybernews.

UNFI did not say when it first discovered the intrusion, but that law enforcement has been notified and leading forensics experts are assessing the “unauthorized activity” and helping to “restore our systems to safely bring them back online.”

UNFI is the largest full-service distributor in North America, and besides being the leading distributor for Whole Foods Markets, also supplies food and specialty products for all commissaries and retail exchanges across all four branches of the US Armed Forces.

Dr. Darren Williams, founder and CEO of ransomware prevention firm BlackFog, says the cyberattack on UNFI is a stark reminder of the escalating risks facing the food distribution supply chain.

“When attackers infiltrate backend systems, they can paralyze operations,” Williams said, adding that “while it’s not yet clear if data was exfiltrated, these kinds of incidents can disrupt critical logistics and jeopardize timely food access for millions.”

The full-service food supply chain purveyor has distribution centers in over 40 locations across the US, works with its own network of UNFI suppliers, and has retail technology management software used by clients.

Attacks on grocery retail sector hits home

The UNFI cyberattack follows a spate of ransomware attacks on the UK retail sector, impacting Marks & Spencer and its branded food stores. The month-long attack on M&S, resulting from a third-party vendor phishing attack by the Scattered Spider ransomware group, took place easter weekend, and has cost the company over $400 million in damages.

Also claimed by Scattered Spider, attacks on Harrods and Co-op quickly followed those on M&S, leaving the UK retail sector reeling from systemwide shutdowns, customer data being stolen, thousands of cancelled online orders, and empty shelves across hundreds of stores.

ITALY ON ISRAELI SPYWARE

Italy cuts ties with Israeli spyware company after claims of spying on journalists and activists

Italy has terminated a contract with Israeli spyware maker Paragon, a parliamentary document showed on Monday, following allegations that the Italian government used its technology to hack critics' phones.

Paragon did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Meta's WhatsApp chat service said earlier this year Paragon spyware had targeted scores of users, including a journalist and members of the Mediterranea migrant sea rescue charity critical of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

The government said in February that seven mobile phone users in Italy had been targeted by the spyware. Rome denied any involvement in illicit activities and said it had asked the National Cybersecurity Agency to look into the affair.

A newly published report from the parliamentary committee on security, COPASIR, showed that Italian intelligence services had initially put on hold and then ended their contract with Paragon following the media outcry.

The report said Italy's domestic and foreign intelligence agencies had activated contracts with Paragon in 2023 and 2024 respectively and used it on a very limited number of people, with permission from a prosecutor.

The foreign intelligence agency used the spyware to search for fugitives, counter illegal immigration, alleged terrorism, organised crime, fuel smuggling and counter-espionage and internal security activities, COPASIR said.

It said members of the Mediterranea charity were spied on "not as human rights activists, but in reference to their activities potentially related to irregular immigration", with permission from the government.

CRYPTO CURRENCY & $8.4M EXPLOIT

Bitcoin DeFi protocol loses $8M in exploit, launches compensation program

In another example of how some exploited crypto projects strive to compensate their affected users, a bitcoin-powered decentralized finance (DeFi) project has announced a program to support users after a multimillion-dollar exploit.

On Sunday, the team behind Alex Protocol detailed its Treasury Grant Program, meant to compensate users after the protocol was exploited this past Friday to the tune of around $8.4 million.

The exploiter managed to drain several types of tokens, such as stacks (STX), stablecoins, and tokenized versions of bitcoin (BTC), from the protocol's liquidity pools, where users contribute their funds to provide liquidity and be rewarded in return.

The team claims that, using the Alex Lab Foundation treasury, they will cover 100% of each affected user's loss, paid in the USD coin (USDC) stablecoin.

"To calculate each reimbursement, we will use the average of on-chain exchange rates taken between 10:00 UTC and 14:00 UTC on June 6th, 2025," they said, adding that users need to complete the claim form and confirm their receiving wallet address by June 10th, 23:59 UTC.

The funds are promised to be distributed within seven days after the claim. Meanwhile, as scammers often try to trick victims by pretending to be the affected project and later stealing their funds, Alex reminds users to stay cautious and use only the official website of the project to submit their claim.

"Do not connect to any other sites or apps; do not trust anyone offering 'to help,' providing a Zoom link, or asking for remote access. Do not share or enter your seed phrase on any site. Even on official ALEX channels, ensure you verify their username with official tags for authenticity," they warned.

UK: HACKED AMAZON FIRE STICKS & JAIL TIME

Hacked Fire Sticks now come with more than just malware – a possible jail sentence

Millions of people in the UK using jailbroken or hacked Amazon Fire Sticks could face jail time in a latest nationwide crackdown.

In an investigation by the Mirror, millions of Brits are believed to be using jailbroken or hacked Amazon Fire Sticks that allow users to stream popular services for a fraction of the cost.

However, the price of using a hacked Fire Stick is higher than the low cost of a streaming subscription, as these dodgy devices may allow bad actors to do all manner of things, from installing malware to committing identity theft.

This is because restrictions set up by the manufacturer are disabled, which allows users to install third-party applications.

The issue here is that users could download malicious third-party applications designed to harvest their personal information or install malware onto their devices.

Not only do individual users risk having their personal data stolen, but they are also, perhaps unknowingly, funding the multi-billion-pound illegal TV streaming industry estimated by the Mirror to cost up to £21 billion ($28.5 billion).

There are supposedly tens of thousands of adverts on Facebook for pirated services.

These include Fire Stick bundles, which offer thousands of popular channels from Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV, for as little as £2.50 ($3) per month.

BLITZ MALWARE FOR GAME CHEATERS

Game cheaters getting hacked: dangerous malware controls computer, spies, and syphons crypto

Video game cheaters are under attack by Blitz, a new Windows malware distributed via backdoored game cheat packages, Unit 42, a security arm of Palo Alto Networks, has warned. Android gamers are lured into gaining an unfair advantage on computers using emulators.

Blitz malware was first detected in 2024, and campaigns with new versions are ongoing to this day.

The Blitz malware should not be confused with Blitz.gg, a widely used game overlay and companion app that provides players with real-time stats and other recommendations.

Blitz malware is disseminated as part of backdoored video game cheats. It operates in two stages: a downloader fetches a bot payload that gives hackers extensive remote access and control over the computer.

Cybercriminals also abuse legitimate code repositories to disseminate their fake cheats. The malware has been hosted on Hugging Face Spaces, an artificial intelligence (AI) code repository. The hackers have also been very active on Telegram and other social media.

“The person behind Blitz malware appears to be a Russian speaker who uses the moniker sw1zzx on social media platforms. This malware operator is likely the developer of Blitz. For the initial infection vector, sw1zzx has used Telegram to distribute these backdoored game cheats,” researchers at Unit 42 explained in a report.

At least two campaigns have distributed Blitz malware. The first one disseminated Blitz through software packages pretending to be cracked installers for legitimate programs. Later, the crooks switched to distribution through game cheat packages.

The hackers mostly targeted players of Standoff 2, a popular mobile multiplayer game with over 100 million downloads.

DOGE, STARLINK & WHITE HOUSE

Starlink in the White House is a security nightmare, but DOGE staff installed it anyway – media

Starlink internet services were installed in the White House despite concerns over data breaches and security risks.

Before the feud between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man seemed to have free rein in the White House.

So much so that representatives from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Musk used to head, installed Starlink internet services without informing the White House communications team, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

Those managing the systems were seemingly unaware that DOGE representatives had installed the hardware on the roof next to the Einsenhow Executive Office Building in February.

This meant that the people managing the White House’s systems couldn’t monitor Starlink’s connections, making it impossible to stop the flow of sensitive information leaving the campus or prevent hackers from breaking in.

The White House is the official residence and workplace of the President of the United States, so highly classified information critical to US national security is stored there.

Therefore, the installation of such technology could potentially undermine the country’s national security, as Stephen F. Lynch, the US representative of Massachusetts, told The Washington Post in an email.

The communication restrictions enforced by the Pentagon’s Defense Information Systems Agency are described by The Post as “severe.”

No unapproved devices can be used within the complex, and approved devices can only access official resources.

AI

College professors don't know how to catch students cheating with AI

Leo Goldsmith, an assistant professor of screen studies at the New School, can tell when you use AI to cheat on an assignment. There's just no good way for him to prove it.

"I know a lot of examples where educators, and I've had this experience too, where they receive an assignment from a student, they're like, 'This is gotta be AI,' and then they don't have" any simple way of proving that, Goldsmith told me. "This is true with all kinds of cheating: The process itself is quite a lot of work, and if the goal of that process is to get an undergraduate, for example, kicked out of school, very few people want to do this."

This is the underlying hum AI has created in academia: my students are using AI to cheat, and there's not much I can do about it. When I asked one professor, who asked to be anonymous, how he catches students using AI to cheat, he said, "I don't. I'm not a cop." Another replied that it's the students' choice if they want to learn in class or not.

Leo Goldsmith, an assistant professor of screen studies at the New School, can tell when you use AI to cheat on an assignment. There's just no good way for him to prove it.

"I know a lot of examples where educators, and I've had this experience too, where they receive an assignment from a student, they're like, 'This is gotta be AI,' and then they don't have" any simple way of proving that, Goldsmith told me. "This is true with all kinds of cheating: The process itself is quite a lot of work, and if the goal of that process is to get an undergraduate, for example, kicked out of school, very few people want to do this."

This is the underlying hum AI has created in academia: my students are using AI to cheat, and there's not much I can do about it. When I asked one professor, who asked to be anonymous, how he catches students using AI to cheat, he said, "I don't. I'm not a cop." Another replied that it's the students' choice if they want to learn in class or not.

AI is a relatively new problem in academia — and not one that educators are particularly armed to combat. Despite the rapid rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, most professors and academic institutions are still resoundingly unequipped, technically and culturally, to detect AI-assisted cheating, while students are increasingly incentivized to use it.

Patty Machelor, a journalism and writing professor at the University of Arizona, didn't expect her students to use AI to cheat on assignments. She teaches advanced reporting and writing classes in the honors college — courses intended for students who are interested in developing their writing skills. So when a student turned in a piece clearly written by AI, she didn't realize it right away; she just knew it wasn't the student's work.

"I looked at it and I thought, oh my gosh, is this plagiarism?" she told Mashable.

The work clearly wasn't written by the student, whose work she had gotten to know well. And it didn't follow the journalistic guidelines of the course, either; instead, it sounded more like a research paper. Then, she read it out loud to her husband.

"And my husband immediately said, 'That's artificial intelligence,'" she said. "I was like, 'Of course.'"

So, she told the student to try again. She gave them an extension. And then the second draft came in, still littered with AI. The student even left in some of the prompts.

Sparky, Walmart’s new money-burning AI bot

Walmart has announced its “Ask Sparky” feature, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent to help you burn through your paycheck.

In the AI age, more and more companies are employing AI agents to help customers spend more money with them.

But in this economy, the need to be frugal with your funds means not pouring money in the pockets of massive corporations.

That’s maybe one of the reasons why shopping giant Walmart has launched its new AI agent, Sparky.

Starting this week, customers can use Sparky in the Walmart app. Walmart claims it will help users “search and find items, synthesize reviews, and offer insights to prepare for any occasion."

For example, if a user is wondering what the weather is like at the beach, Sparky can look up the information and direct customers to outfits perfect for the occasion – but only at Walmart.

Major retailers that use AI are seemingly being propped up by bots guiding customers through their purchases.

In turn, this is helping users spend more money on stuff they don’t necessarily need, instead of just helping customers “make informed choices.”

The bot, “designed to be a trusted partner,” will soon do even more for customers, from automatically reordering household items to booking services that will make spending your hard-earned cash even easier.

Apple navigates AI and regulatory challenges while courting software developers

Apple is facing an unprecedented set of technical and regulatory challenges as some of its key executives are set to take the stage on Monday at the company's annual software developer conference.

On the technical side, many of the long-awaited artificial-intelligence features Apple promised at the same conference a year ago have been delayed until next year, even as its rivals such as Alphabet's Google and Microsoft woo developers with a bevvy of new AI features. Those unfulfilled promises included key improvements to Siri, its digital assistant.

On the regulatory front, courts in the US and Europe are poised to pull down the lucrative walls around Apple's App Store as even some of the company's former supporters question whether its fees are justified.

Those challenges are coming to a head at the same time US President Donald Trump has threatened 25% tariffs on Apple's best-selling iPhone. Apple's shares are down more than 40% since the start of the year, a sharper decline than Google and also lagging the AI-driven gains in Microsoft shares.

Apple has launched some of the AI features it promised last year, including a set of writing tools and image-generation tools, but it still relies on partners such as ChatGPT creator OpenAI for some of those capabilities. Bloomberg has reported that Apple may open up in-house AI models to developers this year.

But analysts do not believe Apple yet has what technologists call a "multi-modal" model - that is, one capable of understanding imagery, audio and language at the same time - that could power a pair of smart glasses, a category that has become a runaway hit for Meta Platforms. Google said last month it would jump back in to this category, with partners.

Such glasses, which are far lighter and cheaper than Apple's Vision Pro headset, could become useful because they would understand what the user is looking at and could help answer questions about it.

While Apple has focused on its $3,500 Vision Pro headset, Google and Meta have seized on the smart glasses as a cheaper way to deploy their AI software prowess against Apple in its stronghold of hardware. Meta Ray-Bans all sell for less than $400.

AI reasoning models are not that capable, actually, Apple says

The race to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) still has a long way to run. In a new study, Apple researchers say they found that leading AI models still have trouble reasoning and, in fact, collapse completely when faced with increasingly complex problems.

In a paper titled “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strength and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity,” Apple says that AI models geared towards reasoning – large reasoning models (LRMs) – had clear gaps in the quality of their reasoning and failed to develop general problem-solving capabilities.

They reached the conclusion after testing LRMs such as OpenAI’s O1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking, and Gemini Thinking through increasingly complex problems, which also deviated from standard AI testing benchmarks.

Apple actually hits the industry of state-of-the-art LRMs – which are included in the latest large language models and are characterized by their “thinking” mechanisms – pretty hard.

“They still fail to develop generalizable problem-solving capabilities, with accuracy ultimately collapsing to zero beyond certain complexities across different environments,” Apple researchers wrote.

“Frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities,” they add before devastatingly pointing out that the models simply mimic reasoning patterns without truly internalizing or generalizing them.

Now, the conclusions laid out in the paper contrast radically with all those expectations – voiced by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for instance – that we’ll reach AGI, the holy grail of AI development, within the next few years.

In January, Altman said OpenAI was closer to building AGI than ever before, writing in a blog post: “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.”

Getty's landmark UK lawsuit on AI and copyright set to begin

Getty Images' landmark copyright lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Stability AI begins at London's High Court on Monday, with the photo provider's case likely to set a key precedent for the law on AI.

The Seattle-based company, which produces editorial content and creative stock images and video, accuses Stability AI of breaching its copyright by using its images to "train" its Stable Diffusion system, which can generate images from text inputs.

Getty, which is bringing a parallel lawsuit against Stability AI in the United States, says Stability AI unlawfully scraped millions of images from its websites and used them to train and develop Stable Diffusion.

Stability AI – which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and in March announced investment by the world's largest advertising company, WPP – is fighting the case and denies infringing any of Getty's rights.

A Stability AI spokesperson said that "the wider dispute is about technological innovation and freedom of ideas," adding: "Artists using our tools are producing works built upon collective human knowledge, which is at the core of fair use and freedom of expression."

Getty's case is one of several lawsuits brought in Britain, the US and elsewhere over the use of copyright-protected material to train AI models, after ChatGPT and other AI tools became widely available more than two years ago.

Wider Impact

Creative industries are grappling with the legal and ethical implications of AI models that can produce their own work after being trained on existing material. Prominent figures including Elton John have called for greater protections for artists.

Lawyers say Getty's case will have a major impact on the law, as well as potentially informing government policy on copyright protections relating to AI.