TheRegister
When AI is trained for treachery, it becomes the perfect agent
Opinion Last year, The Register reported on AI sleeper agents. A major academic study explored how to train an LLM to hide destructive behavior from its users, and how to find it before it triggered. The answers were unambiguously asymmetric — the first is easy, the second very difficult. Not what anyone wanted to hear.…
Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe
Who, Me? The Register has very few rules, but one we always observe on a Monday morning is to present a new installment of Who, Me? – the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of breaking the rules, without breaking your career in the process.…
NASA administrator says US should have ‘village’ on Moon in a decade
IAC 2025 If the USA’s space strategy succeeds, it will run a “village” on the moon in a decade, NASA administrator Sean Duffy told the International Aeronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney today.…
Trump demands Microsoft fire its head of global affairs
US President Donald Trump has demanded Microsoft fire its recently appointed head of global affairs Lisa Monaco.…
Dutch teen duo arrested over alleged 'Wi-Fi sniffing' for Russia
Infosec In Brief Police in the Netherlands arrested two 17-year-olds last week over claims that Russian intelligence recruited them to spy on the headquarters of European law enforcement agencies.…
Datacenter fire takes 647 South Korean government services offline
Asia In Brief Over 600 e-government services operated by South Korea’s government are offline after a datacenter fire disrupted operations.…
Trump’s tariff‑shaped stick can’t beat reality on US chip fabbing
Comment Ending America's reliance on foreign chip fabs remains a high priority for Uncle Sam, but the Trump administration's "my way or the highway" approach to the issue threatens to do more harm than good.…
Hunt for RedNovember: Beijing hacked critical orgs in year-long snooping campaign
RedNovember, a Chinese state-sponsored cyberspy group, targeted government and critical private-sector networks around the globe between June 2024 and July 2025, exploiting buggy internet-facing appliances to deploy a Go-based backdoor called Pantegana and other offensive security tools, including Cobalt Strike and SparkRAT.…
Alibaba unveils $53B global AI plan – but it will need GPUs to back it up
Analysis Alibaba this week opened an AI war chest containing tens of billions of dollars, a revamped LLM lineup, and plans for AI datacenters in Europe. But it also prompted a flurry of questions over how it will achieve all this in an increasingly fragmented IT landscape, when critical resources are in short supply.…
Many employees are using AI to create 'workslop,' Stanford study says
ai-pocalypse Workers are getting lazy about using AI to do their jobs for them, and the results are both costly and increasing distrust in the workplace.…
Cyber threat-sharing law set to shut down, along with US government
Barring a last-minute deal, the US federal government would shut down on Wednesday, October 1, and the 2015 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act would lapse at the same time, threatening what many consider a critical plank of US cybersecurity policy.…
If you can't use AI then it's bye bye, Accenture tells staff
ai-pocalypse AI is proving to be a gold mine for mega tech consultancy Accenture, but if staff can't use it, then it's time to pack up their desks.…
Federal agencies DOGE questions about what cost-cutting team is doing
A trio of federal executive agencies targeted by DOGE cost-cutters either don't know or won't say what the group is doing inside their operations, according to a Senate investigation that concludes DOGE is acting without legal authority or oversight.…
NASA and Sierra Space clip Dream Chaser's ISS wings
NASA and Sierra Space have modified the Commercial Resupply Services-2 contract, which originally called for the Dream Chaser spaceplane to be used to supply the International Space Station (ISS).…
Renewables blow past nuclear when it comes to cheap datacenter juice
Renewable energy sources could power datacenters at a lower cost than relying on nuclear generation from small modular reactors (SMRs), claims a recently revealed study.…
Microsoft spots fresh XCSSET malware strain hiding in Apple dev projects
The long-running XCSSET malware strain has evolved again, with Microsoft warning of a new macOS variant that expands its bag of tricks while continuing to target developers.…
Salesforce facing multiple lawsuits after Salesloft breach
Salesforce is facing a wave of lawsuits in the wake of a cyberattack that exposed customer data.…
Google fuses SQL, Python, and Spark in Colab Enterprise push
Google is promising a single notebook environment for machine learning and data analytics, integrating SQL, Python, and Apache Spark in one place.…
‘An attacker's playground:’ Crims exploit GoAnywhere perfect-10 bug
Security researchers have confirmed that threat actors have exploited the maximum-severity vulnerability affecting Fortra's GoAnywhere managed file transfer (MFT), and chastised the vendor for a lack of transparency.…
LockBit's new variant is 'most dangerous yet,' hitting Windows, Linux and VMware ESXi
Trend Micro has sounded the alarm over the new LockBit 5.0 ransomware strain, which it warns is "significantly more dangerous" than past versions due to its newfound ability to simultaneously target Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi environments. …