The FCC is proposing (PDF) a public "robocall mitigation scorecard" that would grade phone companies on how well they block illegal spam calls while avoiding false positives on the legitimate ones. "The Scorecard will empower consumers and encourage providers to continue to combat illegal robocalls by providing the public with an assessment of the effectiveness of voice service providers' efforts to protect consumers from illegal robocalls," the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said in a public notice. Ars Technica reports: The scorecards could include call-blocking statistics along with data on customer complaints and enforcement actions. The FCC said scorecards could grade providers on a number scale, with letter grades, or by classifying providers as low risk, medium risk, or high risk. The proposed tool would rate wireless, wireline, and VoIP providers on efforts to block robocalls and their "actual results in protecting [consumers] from illegal robocalls," the FCC said. "In practice, that means moving beyond a simple administrative checklist (i.e., did the provider file the right paperwork, did they offer the right tools) and toward a composite set of metrics that reflects both operational practices and measurable outcomes, including how often legitimate calls are blocked."

Whether the tool is useful for consumers will depend on how it's designed, how easy each provider's scorecard is to find, and what data sources it relies on. The proposed scorecard would apply to domestic voice service providers with retail customers, but not telcos that operate solely as wholesale or intermediate providers. "Combatting the scourge of illegal robocalls remains the FCC's top consumer protection priority... As proposed in today's public notice, the FCC aims to develop a scorecard that will give consumers more information about the measures providers are taking to fight illegal robocalls, and it will also incentivize providers to improve their efforts," FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a press release.

A dark-web identity theft service called Nexus claims to be selling scans of more than 153 million U.S. and Canadian driver's licenses, along with millions of other identity documents. "Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase through the service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely used Louisiana-based identity verification company," reports KrebsOnSecurity. The outlet also reports that the FBI's New Orleans field office has launched an official inquiry into the source of the images. From the report: On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit. The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.

[...] The people behind Nexus claim the license images are coming from an active breach at "a major identity verification company" whose customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies. "We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database," the service enthused in its introductory post on Exploit. "Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available." Indeed, over the past 24 hours, the number of drivers license records listed as available in Nexus has increased by nearly 400,000, suggesting that freshly stolen license data is being harvested and uploaded to this service on a semi-regular basis. KrebsOnSecurity traced the apparent source by comparing timestamps on stolen license images with when their owners had their IDs scanned, including at Hertz rental counters and a Planet13 dispensary. Both companies use identity-verification services from Louisiana-based idscan.net, whose technology also scans IDs using infrared and ultraviolet light.

Since the story was published, Krebs reports that the Nexus identity theft service website "vanished from the darkweb, replacing its login page with a plain text message that reads, 'This service is no longer available.'"

Anthropic has released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, two versions of the same underlying model aimed at longer-running agentic work. "For enterprise buyers, however, the release is about more than another round of benchmark gains," reports VentureBeat. "Anthropic is simultaneously changing the economics of running persistent agents, reducing the cost of cached context by 75%, and introducing a new security architecture called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, or EFS, designed to let organizations retain monitoring data inside infrastructure they control." From the report: Those changes arrive at a particularly consequential moment. Over the past several weeks, Anthropic and the U.K. AI Security Institute have disclosed incidents in which earlier Claude models, running under unusually permissive cybersecurity evaluation conditions, took unauthorized actions against real systems. Anthropic temporarily paused external cyber evaluations and has since introduced additional containment and monitoring before resuming them.

Taken together, Fable 5.1 looks less like a conventional model refresh than an attempt to solve three increasingly intertwined enterprise problems: how to make agents capable enough to finish difficult work, economical enough to leave running for hours, and governable enough to give access to sensitive systems.

Broadcom is launching "TrueSource," an effort to curate and secure open-source components used with its Tanzu platform, including Spring, RabbitMQ, and libraries across Java, Python, and Node.js. "The idea is to provide a set of solutions focused on providing clean and secure artefacts," Purnima Padmanabhan, vice president of Broadcom's Tanzu Division, told The Register. "We choose and build every Spring library, databases, other Java components," she said. The Register reports: Padmanabhan said that promise means VMware will also provide "TrueSource trusted artifacts" for code that is not part of Spring, including the wider Java ecosystem, Python, and Node.js. "Broadcom's curation process ensures that the libraries conform to a reference architecture and are supportable by the maintainers of record," according to a company statement. "Thousands of engineers across Broadcom's software divisions scan, fix, contribute to, and consume them every day."

A VMware spokesperson told The Register the Broadcom business unit "will work with and support maintainers on open source software and we will provide fixes to open source upstream for any active projects." "With Spring and RabbitMQ, we are the maintainers. For other open source software, we will work with the maintainers. We believe that the community maintainers must remain the source of truth," the spokesperson said.

This is just the sort of contribution that the open-source community wants vendors to do to reflect the value they extract from software they did not create alone. It's also the sort of thing vendors sometimes conclude they need to do to keep products based on FOSS viable.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Berlin is being blackmailed by hackers who were able to compromise city systems and steal data earlier this month, its mayor has said. Kai Wegner said officials would not cave in to the ransom demand, which came on Thursday evening. He did not say how much was being sought, though Der Spiegel reports the hackers are demanding 30 bitcoin, worth around 2 million euros. Some of the German capital's online systems were forced to close down as a result of the attack, while investigators were working to understand what data had been taken.

The Rhysida group, which is thought to operate from Russia and eastern Europe, and was behind a previous attack on the British Museum, has reportedly taken responsibility. It has said on its website it intends to begin auctioning the 5.79 terabytes of data it was able to steal from Berlin in seven days' time, according to news agency Reuters. [...] Officials for the city-state said an initial data leak occurred between August 7 and 12. Then, on August 14, two department networks were shut down, making applications for housing benefits and payments impossible for several days. "Berlin will not be blackmailed," Wegner said on Friday.

He said state police, prosecutors and federal security services were working to investigate the suspected perpetrators "with the utmost urgency," adding that inquiries into the "content and scope of the compromised data are being pursued with great intensity."

Citrix's Desktop as a Service (DaaS) product includes a lightweight, hardened second operating system called UniconOS (once called "eLux") to offer Windows customers a write-protected file system Citrix says is secure against computer viruses and other malware. Nerds.xyz reports: According to the company, the environment remains isolated from the Windows filesystem and uses Secure Boot protections covering the shim, bootloader, kernel, and initial RAM filesystem. That separation matters when ransomware encrypts Windows or a faulty update leaves the operating system trapped in a boot loop. Instead of repairing Windows immediately, an employee can boot into UniconOS and use Citrix DaaS to access virtual applications and desktops.

Citrix SecurAccess with Chrome Enterprise provides access to internal web applications under the organization's existing security policies. In other words, UniconOS does not actually fix the damaged Windows installation. It gives employees another route to their applications while the IT department investigates or repairs Windows... [T]he installer shrinks the Windows volume, creates a new partition, copies UniconOS onto it, and registers the necessary boot entries. Windows remains the default operating system during ordinary use, although administrators can configure boot delays and fallback behavior...

The approach could prove useful following a widespread ransomware attack or another defective Windows update resembling the CrowdStrike incident of 2024. Recovery would happen independently on every compatible endpoint instead of requiring IT employees to physically handle thousands of computers.
Thanks to Slashdot reader BrianFagioli for sharing the news.

Phoronix reports on Greg Kroah-Hartman's recent slide from his upcoming talk in Paris at Kernel Recipes 2026 (September 21 to 23): With the proliferation of AI/LLM models analyzing the Linux kernel's vast codebase, there has been a surge in the number of CVEs per kernel release. After typically being around 500 CVEs fixed per release, we are now approaching 2,000 CVEs fixed per release and perhaps will break that threshold for Linux 7.3... Fortunately, most often they end up being lower priority vulnerabilities and often within old/obscure driver code, so the impact is often minimal.

Ring is rolling out a new default encryption system called TAKE, or "Throw Away the Key Encryption," that rotates video keys every five minutes and permanently deletes Ring's copy after 24 hours. The system is designed to preserve cloud features such as smart alerts and AI video search while limiting what Ring can provide under legal process to non-video account information and encrypted footage. The Verge reports: Ring says TAKE uses unique, rotating encryption keys for your footage, stored in a secure enclave and accessible only under strict conditions -- based on the features you enable on your account. Currently, footage captured by Ring cameras is encrypted in transit to the cloud and at rest, and then decrypted for Ring to process for those smart features. With TAKE, the encryption keys change for every five minutes of footage. Ring stores copies of those keys to decrypt the footage, but throws away each copy within 24 hours, "leaving you with the keys and full control of your videos," according to Ring.

TAKE was developed using Messaging Layer Security, an open standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force, according to Ring. The company says it is "inspired by the privacy principles of E2EE (end-to-end encryption)," which Ring offers on some of its cameras. However, the two systems work differently. With E2EE, Ring never has the keys and can't process your video for cloud-based features. Both options are available on newer cameras that encrypt on-device, and you can switch between the two. Older cameras encrypt at cloud ingress and only support TAKE.

According to a white paper the company published today, Ring's copy of those keys is managed inside an AWS Nitro Enclave, to which Ring's access is restricted by "access controls, cryptography, and hardware isolation." The company claims there is no persistent storage and no way for a Ring employee to access it. The stored keys can only be unlocked by the enclave through cryptographic attestation that proves it's running the exact software image Ring approved. The enclave releases a temporary key when an enabled service requests it. When asked about what happens if Ring is subpoenaed by law enforcement, a spokesperson for the company said: "Where TAKE is enabled, Ring will only be able to provide non-video information (such as basic subscriber information) and encrypted video files in response to the valid legal process. We have updated our Law Enforcement Guidelines to reflect this change."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents [including Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Nous Research's Hermes]. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware.

The potentially dangerous content is in llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, an emerging convention websites employ to provide machine-readable summaries of the site's content and its high-level structure. These files are the AI equivalent of the robots.txt standard that instructs search engines how to index the site's content. Google Lighthouse, a tool for helping web developers, has more here. Correctly configured llms.txt and llms-full.txt files for Cloudflare are here and here. "The trust model is broken," Alon Hertz, one of the researchers, wrote in an interview. "Agents treat vendor docs as ground truth and don't question them -- and neither do the humans supervising them. Agentic AI usage is exploding, and agents are spreading across every layer -- SaaS, cloud, endpoint. As they multiply, so does the supply-chain surface, and today's guards don't cover it."

"An agent doesn't distinguish between a page and a command," the researchers wrote Thursday. "Everything it reads is input, and every input is a potential instruction. Which means the entire corpus of published data that agents are now wired to consume has silently become an execution surface -- and almost none of it carries the integrity guarantees we apply to actual code."

CISA says more than 100 internet-exposed U.S. water and wastewater systems were targeted in July, often through programmable logic controllers connected directly to cellular modems. "That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group," reports The Register. From the report: Suspected Iranian attackers targeted water and wastewater facilities across at least a dozen states in July, including internet-exposed PLCs. While neither federal nor state officials have identified all 12, we know that the cyberattacks occurred at mostly small, rural utilities in Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, South Dakota, and New Jersey. "This is very serious. What stands out isn't any single incident. It's the scale," Matt Hartman, chief strategy officer at the Merlin Group and CISA's former acting head of cyber, told The Register.

"More than 100 water systems with internet-exposed assets were hit in a single month, which points to a systemic vulnerability across the sector, not a run of isolated, unlucky targets," Hartman said. "Much of this infrastructure runs on operational technology that was built for closed, physical environments. It was never designed with the assumption that it would be reachable from the open internet."

John Gallagher, VP at Viakoo, an OT and IoT cybersecurity provider, told us that while 100 systems represent a small fraction - only about 0.5 percent - of water utilities in the US, the "real threat is that these are test runs for a larger-scale attack." While the 100-plus water incidents occurred in July, just last week five US federal agencies warned that attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities.

"This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs," Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser told The Register a week ago. "Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society," Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director, added. CISA urges organizations to keep PLCs off the public internet, route remote access through VPNs or gateways, replace default passwords, enable stronger authentication, and restrict access to allowlisted IP addresses from trusted OT systems.

TechCrunch reports that OpenAI released its official report Wednesday on the Hugging Face breach, "offering the clearest picture yet of how an unusual chain of events allowed an AI model to escape its testing environment and triggered a sprawling cybersecurity incident." The AI company says the breach began when an unreleased cyber model, tested without normal production safeguards, encountered an impossible task and chained together previously unknown exploits to escape its environment and compromise systems at OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors. "This incident reflects misaligned behavior in an outlier scenario involving a rare and unexpected confluence of events: the presence of impossible tasks in the ExploitGym evaluation, model persistence over long task horizons, and messages to peer models that caused those models to deviate from their goal," the report reads. From the report: Many of the details in OpenAI's report were previously made public in a Black Hat presentation on August 6, but OpenAI's official report gives a more thorough accounting of the incident, including more detail on the testing that initiated it. The report also gives critical new detail into how OpenAI aims to prevent future incidents, including chain-of-thought monitoring and a more advanced system for halting rogue agents." METR and Redwood Research also conducted third-party assessments of the models' behavior during the incident; both groups are planning to publish their own reports on the incident on it.

In broad strokes, the report describes how an OpenAI model was presented with an unsolvable problem in testing and proceeded to chain together previously undiscovered exploits in order to bypass security measures and complete its task. The model initially compromised the Artifactory package management tool in order to gain access to the internet, then compromised various systems across OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors.

The report gives critical new details about the models that carried out the breach. The primary model was from the same family as OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model, although the report emphasizes that it was "a distinct model with different post-training, where much of a model's behavior is shaped." Because OpenAI was testing the model's capabilities, it was also unrestrained by the normal classifiers meant to prevent models from compromising digital infrastructure. "OpenAI estimates maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without the production classifiers intended to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity," the report explains. "These evaluations are important so that OpenAI can measure models' underlying capabilities and design appropriate safeguards." OpenAI says it is adding 24/7 escalation, stronger containment tools, and more chain-of-thought monitoring, which it claims would have flagged the activity more than a day before Hugging Face was breached.

"The Register has a story about a Windows backdoor that waits silently in memory for a 'magic packet' before springing into action," writes Slashdot reader fred133. "No outgoing traffic, just waiting..." From the report: Like a sleeper cell awaiting activation, a never-before-seen Windows backdoor dubbed Sleepwalker waits silently in memory for one specifically crafted network packet to wake it up and deliver commands using the malware's 23-instruction language. The commands can do everything from running code directly in memory to moving data off the computer. Malware researcher Dominik Reichel discovered the passive backdoor, which also has its own command language, and detailed Sleepwalker in a technical analysis on Monday. "What makes it worth writing up is what that packet carries: not a readable command, but a short program written in a command language of the backdoor's own design," Reichel said. "Its 23 instructions cover scheduling, several ways to move data, staged file delivery and running code directly in memory. Recovering the encryption key is not enough to understand one of these programs. The internal command language must be reverse engineered as well."

In addition to having its own command language, it's also notable that the remote host can be a VMware VMCI target instead of a normal network address. "Taken as a whole, the approach here is consistent with a targeted, well-resourced operation rather than an opportunistic one," Reichel wrote. The malware, hidden inside a 64-bit Windows DLL file, impersonates Microsoft's dpapi.dll, part of Windows' data protection API for protecting sensitive data. It exports the same seven functions as the real dpapi.dll, but attempts to forward calls to a file named dpapisvc.dll, which is not a real Windows component. The file also has a forged ESET Management Agent version resource, and loads via side-loading into ERAAgent.exe, the Windows executable for ESET Management Agent. After confirming that its host process is named ERAAgent.exe, Sleepwalker goes to sleep inside the computer's memory, which also helps it remain hidden from traditional anti-virus tools.

Unlike most backdoors, which call back to an attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) server and start receiving commands, Sleepwalker lies in wait, checking every packet that passes through the network looking for a specific pattern - this is called a magic packet. Once it sniffs out a packet that matches the exact pattern, the backdoor decrypts the data and treats it as a command. "Because the backdoor never sends anything out on its own and does not open any obvious listening port by default, tools that watch for connections to known-bad domains or unusual outbound traffic will not see anything unusual," Reichel wrote. "The absence of outbound connections to known-bad infrastructure does not rule out an infection, either. A machine can be fully compromised by this backdoor while producing nothing at all for a network monitor to flag."

"Iran shut down a British power plant for four days in an unprecedented cyber attack," reports the Telegraph.

More details from the BBC: The government said that at no point was there a risk to the UK's energy system, but the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has contacted power companies to advise them about the risk of cyber attacks... DESNZ said the incident had affected a small-scale generator and at no point had there been a risk to the wider energy system. The UK's power network has a number of smaller gas generators which provide short-term power when needed.
Thanks to Alain Williams (Slashdot reader #2,972) for sharing the news.

Slovakia acquired speed cameras to modernize its traffic control-- but there was a surprise. Tom's Hardware cites this story from the Risky Bulletin Newsletter: Unfortunately, the country's national security service, the NBU, has discovered that the cameras have multiple security issues. Firstly, they have SMS-activated Russian backdoors. Secondly, live camera feeds can be accessed by anyone with the device IP, no password necessary...

[The cameras] are thought to be rebranded Russian CORDON PRO.M traffic cameras, produced by a St. Petersburg-based firm called Semicon... reportedly bought via a Cyprus-based shell company with fake certifications. Reports also suggest that pressure from the opposition political party in Slovakia led to the NBU investigations... Probably most seriously, in terms of national security, these cameras contain a hardcoded list of Russian phone numbers, which can be used to open a backdoor. An SMS from one of these numbers can open shell and network access... [T]he SecureBoot feature is ineffective, and the web management portal can be accessed, exposing live streams, by anyone with the camera IP.

Cameras that have been installed and set up have since been deactivated by the Slovak Ministry of the Interior. Meanwhile, for due diligence, an independent auditor will be called in to confirm the NBU's findings. It is thought that Croatia, and some other countries in Eastern Europe, may have undiscovered issues with traffic control cameras of similar origin.

"There is still no sign of economy-wide job destruction," says economist Erik Brynjolfsson. Working with researchers at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Brynjolfsson has determined an AI "job apocalypse" is unlikely, reports the Washington Post, "even though it will likely impact entry-level jobs."

And Brynjolfsson "predicts that demand for experienced workers such as senior coders will still be high even if AI takes on more routine knowledge and coding work in the future." Earlier this month, Brynjolfsson and his colleagues at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab updated their widely publicized report, "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence," to reflect that they do not see widespread, economy-wide job displacement associated with AI...

Brynjolfsson: What has moved on the upside is productivity. Nonfarm business productivity growth is running over 2 percent, the best sustained stretch since the late-1990s boom... The gains show up years after the investment, and they're starting to show up... By 2030, we will have enormously more capable AI, meaningfully faster productivity growth and an unemployment rate that looks unremarkable — somewhere in its historical range. That surprises people, but it's what the mechanism implies... [T]he technology is becoming much more powerful, and it's going to be even more powerful.

Secondly, there are huge implications for business and the economy, including some increases in living standards, but also, potentially, job disruption. And then, thirdly, we must act now to address this gap. We can't just sit back and wait for the tsunami to hit us. And one of the things we can do is put in place institutions, policies and research to make the technology more complementary — using AI to complement people so it creates more jobs. A common misconception among business managers is AI, in order to be effective, has to reduce jobs. That's just not true. You can use AI to increase employment and productivity at the same time. It's kind of a win-win...

Right now, tax policy is very skewed toward favoring capital versus labor — and, as a consequence, a lot of entrepreneurs and managers, they're basically being guided by the federal government to replace workers with machines. And I don't think that's necessarily what we'd like to have happen. From an economist's perspective, what you want to be doing is not mimicking and replacing things. You want to be extending and complementing — have humans do new things they never could have done before.
He acknowledges "real, persistent and widening" effects on entry-level jobs, with a labor market "closing the on-ramp for people starting their careers... If companies don't hire people at the base of the pyramid, then they're not going to have those people later when they need them."

One he points out that one company is instead using AI to speed up its training of young employees.