All news in category “AI and Security Pulse”

🚨 Inside Beverly Hills High School, an array of AI-driven surveillance tools is being used to monitor students and campus activity. Video cameras run facial recognition and behavior-analysis models, a smoke-detector-shaped device captures audio for distress sounds, drones stand ready for aerial intel, and license-plate readers from Flock Safety track vehicles. The deployment raises questions about privacy, oversight, and the normalization of commercial surveillance in schools.

🔒 In conversations with Southeast Asia CISOs, leaders forecast 2026 as a year when AI and cloud become prime attack surfaces, forcing a shift from perimeter defenses to identity- and resilience-centered strategies. They emphasize hardening cloud and AI infrastructure, treating identity as the active perimeter, instrumenting browsers and agents for forensic clarity, and operationalizing resilience both as capability and — in some financial institutions — as a product. Supply‑chain fragility, agentic AI autonomy, session hijacking, and IT‑OT convergence are highlighted as priority risks demanding continuous verification, scoped agent controls, and stronger vendor governance.

🎵 OpenAI has started using new hostnames—sonata.openai.com and sonata.api.openai.com—spotted on 15–16 January 2026, suggesting work on a service codenamed Sonata. A new subdomain typically signals a web-facing product, internal tool, or API, but the codename alone doesn't confirm functionality. OpenAI recently improved ChatGPT's reference chat history retrieval and expanded dictation, which could align with audio or transcription enhancements.

🔍 OpenAI is internally testing a web update for ChatGPT that it plans to roll out gradually in the coming weeks. Leaked references highlight a new task-oriented feature codenamed Salute, an "is model preferred" flag intended to improve local business and map results, and a secure tunnel option for MCP servers. The company is also trialing inline editable code and math blocks to expand the existing formatting block functionality. Collectively, these changes aim to streamline file-based workflows, enhance location-specific answers, and simplify secure enterprise connectivity.

🤖 Google is testing new Skills for its Gemini AI in Chrome that enable the assistant to perform tasks automatically inside the browser. A hidden page, chrome://skills, has been identified and appears to let users add Skills with a name and instructions while the feature is being internally tested. Currently, Gemini in Chrome acts as a helper on desktop in the US, summarizing pages, explaining content, and combining information from multiple tabs. Google plans to evolve Gemini into an agent that will work more closely with apps like Calendar, YouTube, and Maps, though rollout timing is still unclear.

🔔 OpenAI has rolled out the $8 ChatGPT Go subscription globally, offering users 10× more messages, increased file uploads, expanded image creation, longer memory, and a larger context window than the free tier. Go provides access to the latest GPT-5.2 Instant but does not include the higher-tier "reasoning" models reserved for paid plans. The Go tier displays ads; upgrading to GPT Plus ($20) or GPT Pro ($200) removes them and restores advanced model access.

🔐 Tom Curry and Anton Chuvakin from Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO present practical guidance for implementing the Secure AI Framework (SAIF) on Google Cloud. The piece emphasizes three operational principles: treat data as the perimeter, treat prompts like code, and require identity propagation for agentic AI. It maps 15 common AI risks to controls and highlights concrete tools and patterns—IAM, Dataplex, Vertex AI, Model Armor, Gemini, Apigee, and the Agent Development Kit—to operationalize SAIF.

🔐 Researchers at Varonis Threat Labs uncovered 'Reprompt', a one-click attack that abuses Microsoft Copilot Personal by embedding prompts in URLs and using follow-up server requests to exfiltrate data. It combines a URL 'q' parameter injection, a double-request bypass of initial sanitization, and chained server instructions to siphon conversation history and files without further user interaction. Microsoft issued a patch; organizations should treat prefilled prompts as untrusted and enforce continuous authentication, least privilege, prompt hygiene, auditing, and anomaly detection.

🔍 OpenAI is rolling out an upgrade to ChatGPT that improves chat-history search and recall. The new reference chat history option lets ChatGPT more reliably find details from past conversations and marks any past chat used to answer queries as a source you can open and review. The feature is currently rolling out to Plus and Pro subscribers. OpenAI also updated personality controls and improved dictation accuracy for all logged-in users.

⚠️Researchers in 2025 discovered multiple unsecured databases of AI-generated images and videos, many depicting sexualized or fabricated nudes created from everyday photos. Analysis pointed to third-party generative tools such as MagicEdit and DreamPal, which offered explicit editing, face‑swap and clothing‑change features and, in some cases, disabled filters for erotic content. The exposure highlights how generative AI lowers the barrier to producing convincing fake intimate images and broadens the pool of potential sextortion victims. The post urges tightening social media privacy, using tools like Privacy Checker, and monitoring children with Kaspersky Safe Kids.

🔒 Cybersecurity researchers disclosed a novel method called Reprompt that can enable single-click data exfiltration from AI chatbots, notably Microsoft Copilot, while bypassing typical enterprise controls. The technique exploits the Copilot q URL parameter to inject instructions from a link, then uses repeated requests and a remote attacker server to continue covert fetching and return of sensitive data with no further user interaction. Microsoft says it addressed the issue and that Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise customers are not affected, but researchers warn the approach turns Copilot into an invisible exfiltration channel.

🔍 Episode 450 explores confusion after claims that data linked to 17.5 million Instagram accounts was put up for sale — a story driven by a vague post, conflicting statements, and an unexpected flood of password‑reset emails. The episode also examines Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, after it generated sexualised images of women and children, raising urgent questions about guardrails and accountability. Hosts discuss why simple censorship is not a solution.

🔐 The post argues that traditional vulnerability-sharing frameworks built around software flaws are inadequate for adversarial AI threats such as poisoning and inference attacks that target models and data rather than code. It recommends bridging existing cyber infrastructure — including the CVE Program, CVSS, CNAs, the NVD and CISA’s KEV Catalog — with new standards for AI artifacts like poisoned datasets and backdoored models. Palo Alto Networks supports the White House AI Action Plan and the proposed AI-ISAC to accelerate adoption, coordinate disclosure, and help operationalize AI-specific vulnerability management.

🛡️As AI copilots and assistants are embedded into daily work, recent incidents show the primary risk lies in surrounding workflows rather than in the models themselves. Malicious Chrome extensions that exfiltrated ChatGPT and DeepSeek chats and prompt injections that tricked an AI coding assistant into executing malware exploited integration contexts, not model internals. The piece advises mapping AI usage, applying least-privilege, enforcing middleware guardrails to scan outputs, and using dynamic SaaS platforms like Reco to detect and control risky workflows.

🔍Generative AI is transforming fuzzing by automating test generation, expanding input diversity, and enabling scalable discovery of bugs and logic flaws. Security teams and consulting firms use models to create behavioral variants, convert breach data into scenarios, and prototype fuzzing harnesses to exercise code and APIs at scale. Attackers likewise leverage uncensored or fine‑tuned models to automate complex, high‑throughput attacks, forcing defenders to continuously fuzz guardrails and address LLM nondeterminism and prompt injection.

🔍 OpenAI is internally testing a feature codenamed Agora, with references appearing in its web, Android, and iOS apps. The clues point to a potential cross-platform capability — possibly a unified client, a social or group interaction layer (reflecting the Greek meaning of 'agora'), or a communications feature that may leverage agora.ai's audio/video SDK. Observers also link the work to OpenAI's hardware experiments, and a recent update improved ChatGPT's dictation accuracy for logged-in users.

🤖 Google is testing integration of Gemini into Chrome for Android, with Chromium source references indicating an agentic feature codenamed Glic. A Google engineer noted the browser binary increases because of the added support code, suggesting significant new functionality. The integration may provide contextual, agent-like actions such as page summaries and follow-up queries, similar to mobile copilots. No release timetable has been announced.

🔐 Google is rolling out a new Personal Intelligence capability in Gemini that can access information from Gmail, Google Photos, Search, YouTube and other Google products to generate more personalized responses. The feature is opt-in, off by default, and users can choose which apps to connect, disconnect them, or turn the feature off at any time. Google illustrates uses such as pulling tire specifications from photos and emails or extracting a license plate from an image to confirm vehicle details. The functionality is launching as a U.S. beta for eligible subscribers, and Google warns that the model can still produce inaccuracies or over-personalization, inviting users to provide feedback.

🌐 OpenAI has quietly launched ChatGPT Translate, a web-based translation tool accessible at chatgpt.com/translate and available to all users without a paid account. It supports typed text, photo uploads, voice input, and file attachments, automatically detecting language or allowing manual source/target selection. The tool emphasizes preserving meaning over literal translations and lets users request tones like “business formal” or “explain like a child,” with the added benefit of continuing the conversation to refine results. ChatGPT’s Android and iOS apps do not yet expose the translate toggle.

🛡️ Tenzai's December 2025 assessment found that five popular vibe coding tools — Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Replit, and Devin — frequently generate insecure code when given common programming prompts. Across 15 generated applications the researchers identified 69 vulnerabilities, many low‑to‑medium but several rated high and six rated critical. The most serious flaws involved API authorization and business‑logic failures; by contrast, the tools avoided classic issues such as SQLi and XSS. Tenzai concluded human oversight, targeted testing, and embedding security into AI development workflows remain essential.