{"@attributes":{"version":"2.0"},"channel":{"title":"Security News - Software vulnerabilities, data leaks, malware, viruses","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/rss-feed\/security-news\/","language":"en-us","description":"The latest news on cyber security, network security, software vulnerabilities, data leaks, malware, and viruses","item":[{"title":"AI worm adapts across networks, turning any online device into potential target","description":"A team of researchers at the University of Toronto has discovered a new class of cyberthreat that gives hackers more power and reach at far less cost. It can be built with free AI models. Every online device is a potential target. And current cyber defenses are not yet ready for it.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-06-ai-worm-networks-online-device.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:40:08 EDT","guid":"news699787261"},{"title":"A retention-aware system turns a computer's storage chip into a cybersecurity shield","description":"Hackers are ruthless. They can take control of your computer, delete files and disappear without a trace. However, FIU cybersecurity researcher Weidong Zhu has discovered a way to transform a computer's storage chip into an additional tool for cyber defense. Working with collaborators at the University of Florida, Zhu created a system that makes data on these chips last longer\u2014extending the lifespan of your files in the critical window after your computer is compromised. The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-06-retention-aware-storage-chip-cybersecurity.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:00:03 EDT","guid":"news699548041"},{"title":"AI and ultralow-energy lasers enable an ultrafast authentication system","description":"The security of modern communications heavily relies on systems that can rapidly and reliably verify users and the devices they are using. This process, known as authentication, essentially entails confirming that users or devices are legitimate (i.e., who or what they claim to be).","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-ai-ultralow-energy-lasers-enable.html","category":"Electronics & Semiconductors","pubDate":"Fri, 29 May 2026 09:40:01 EDT","guid":"news699246329"},{"title":"Breaking the optical barrier: Terahertz tech could help enable quantum internet security","description":"A new method to distribute cryptographic keys using terahertz waves could help enable secure communication in the quantum-powered internet of the future, researchers say. Engineers from the University of Glasgow are pioneering the development of a new method of quantum key distribution (QKD) using terahertz waves transmitted with a wireless communications system adapted from mobile and WiFi networks.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-optical-barrier-terahertz-tech-enable.html","category":"Internet","pubDate":"Wed, 27 May 2026 10:20:03 EDT","guid":"news699092848"},{"title":"New earphone design verifies users by their heartbeat, simplifying authentication","description":"The use of biometric data in personal devices has been popular with consumers for tracking things like heart rate and sleep stages, but it is becoming increasingly common for identification purposes too. Identifying data can be used for device security authentication, secure access control and identity verification for financial transactions, which can make everyday activities like making purchases, using devices or entering your home more convenient, while providing enhanced security.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-earphone-users-heartbeat-authentication.html","category":"Hi Tech & Innovation","pubDate":"Thu, 21 May 2026 13:50:01 EDT","guid":"news698589354"},{"title":"Watching the detectors: Researchers probe efficacy\u2014and danger\u2014of AI detection tools","description":"Patrick Traynor, Ph.D., has questions. When the professor and interim chair of the University of Florida Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering saw reports in the media positing that scientific literature is increasingly being generated by artificial intelligence, he wondered, \"How do they know?\"","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-detectors-probe-efficacy-danger-ai.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Wed, 20 May 2026 13:20:07 EDT","guid":"news698500982"},{"title":"AI can seem more human than real humans in a classic Turing test","description":"A new University of California San Diego study unveils the first empirical evidence that a modern artificial intelligence system can pass the Turing test\u2014a major scientific benchmark that asks whether a machine can imitate human conversation so convincingly that people can't reliably tell it apart from a real person. In a series of experiments, people were often unable to tell the difference between humans and advanced large language models (LLMs).","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-ai-human-real-humans-classic.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Tue, 19 May 2026 17:40:06 EDT","guid":"news698430421"},{"title":"Should you accept internet cookies? Researchers say the open web could suffer without them","description":"It's a choice you may face multiple times a day\u2014and, at this point, your reaction is probably reflexive. Are you going to accept those internet cookies, reject them, or spend a little time customizing your settings?","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-internet-cookies-web.html","category":"Internet","pubDate":"Mon, 18 May 2026 14:10:01 EDT","guid":"news698331560"},{"title":"Google disrupts hackers using AI to exploit an unknown weakness in a company's digital defense","description":"Google said Monday that it had disrupted a criminal group's attempt to use artificial intelligence to exploit another company's previously unknown digital vulnerability, adding to heightened worries across government and private industry about AI's risks for cybersecurity.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-google-disrupts-hackers-ai-exploit.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Mon, 11 May 2026 13:00:08 EDT","guid":"news697722295"},{"title":"Your conversations with AI may not be as private as you think","description":"A study conducted by researchers at IMDEA Networks Institute has revealed that ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Grok, and Perplexity AI use different types of trackers from Meta, Google, TikTok and other companies, potentially exposing data about users' conversations and activity.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-conversations-ai-private.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Thu, 07 May 2026 09:40:04 EDT","guid":"news697365181"},{"title":"Can AI ascertain our personality traits from our ChatGPT history?","description":"Large language models (LLMs), the computational models underpinning the functioning of ChatGPT, Gemini, and similar conversational platforms, are now used daily by many people worldwide. As these models can rapidly answer queries about most topics, many users use them to source information related to their personal and professional lives, sometimes sharing information about themselves.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-ai-personality-traits-chatgpt-history.html","category":"Consumer & Gadgets","pubDate":"Tue, 05 May 2026 10:00:11 EDT","guid":"news697193407"},{"title":"No digital content is safe from generative AI, researchers say","description":"A research team led by Virginia Tech cybersecurity expert Bimal Viswanath has found a critical blind spot in today's image protection techniques designed to prevent bad actors from stealing online content for unauthorized artificial intelligence training, style mimicry, and deepfake manipulations. The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-digital-content-safe-generative-ai.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Mon, 04 May 2026 15:40:03 EDT","guid":"news697125482"},{"title":"AI fails to make inroads with cybercriminals, study finds","description":"Cybercriminals have been struggling to adopt AI in their work, reports the first-of-its-kind study that analyzed a dataset of 100 million posts from underground cybercrime communities. The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-05-ai-inroads-cybercriminals.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Mon, 04 May 2026 15:00:06 EDT","guid":"news697124462"},{"title":"Evolving AI may arrive before AGI and create hard-to-control risks","description":"Evolutionary biology holds clues for the future of AI, argue researchers from the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research, E\u00f6tv\u00f6s Lor\u00e1nd University, and the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. In a new Perspective published April 20 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team warn that evolvable AI (eAI) systems that can undergo Darwinian evolution may soon emerge, and they will generate special risks that can be understood, and mitigated, based on insights from evolutionary biology.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-04-evolving-ai-agi-hard.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:20:09 EDT","guid":"news696701761"},{"title":"Needle-tip chip can secure pacemakers and insulin pumps against quantum attacks","description":"As quantum computers advance, they are expected to be able to break tried-and-true security schemes that currently keep most sensitive data secure from attackers. Scientists and policymakers are working to design and implement post-quantum cryptography to defend against these future attacks.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-04-needle-chip-pacemakers-insulin-quantum.html","category":"Hi Tech & Innovation","pubDate":"Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:00:03 EDT","guid":"news696174481"},{"title":"Generative AI may cut costs in machine-learning systems, but it increases risks of cyberattacks and data leaks","description":"Using generative AI to design, train, or perform steps within a machine-learning system is risky, argues computer scientist Micheal Lones in a paper appearing in Patterns. Though large language models (LLMs) could expand the capabilities of machine-learning systems and decrease costs and labor needs, Lones warns that using them reduces transparency and control for the people developing and using these systems and increases the risk of malicious cyberattacks, data leaks, and bias against underrepresented groups.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-04-generative-ai-machine-cyberattacks-leaks.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:00:09 EDT","guid":"news695918949"},{"title":"Making AI safer for victims of intimate partner violence","description":"Conversational AI tools denied blunt requests for harmful content by researchers posing as intimate partner abusers, but these guardrails were easily circumvented when they requested the content under false pretenses, a new Cornell Tech study has found.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-04-ai-safer-victims-intimate-partner.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:40:09 EDT","guid":"news695560863"},{"title":"Memristor chip combines security and compute-in-memory for edge devices","description":"A cross-institutional research team has developed Co-Located Authentication and Processing (CLAP), a privacy-preserving system that overcomes the trade-off between security and performance in edge computing devices. The study, titled \"Privacy-preserving data analysis using a memristor chip with co-located authentication and processing,\" is published in Science Advances. The team was led by Professor Ngai Wong and Dr. Zhengwu Liu from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with Tsinghua University and the Southern University of Science and Technology.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-04-memristor-chip-combines-memory-edge.html","category":"Hardware","pubDate":"Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:20:04 EDT","guid":"news694695661"},{"title":"Vibrations in your skull may be your next password","description":"A team led by Rutgers University researchers has developed a security system that could change how people log in to virtual and augmented reality platforms by eliminating passwords, personal identification numbers and eye scans and replacing them with something far more seamless.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-vibrations-skull-password.html","category":"Hi Tech & Innovation","pubDate":"Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:39:38 EDT","guid":"news694157757"},{"title":"Hybrid AI tool unmasks hidden digital abuse to transform forensic investigations","description":"Researchers from the University of Huddersfield have developed a hybrid AI tool to detect patterns of psychological abuse, including coercive control, in a bid to transform digital forensic investigations and mental health research.This innovation was developed as a primary outcome of Researcher Dhruv Patel's Ph.D. work under the mentorship of senior lecturer Dr. Anju Johnson and is designed to address a bottleneck in modern digital forensic investigations, integrating insights from a broader research team to ensure its real-world application.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-hybrid-ai-tool-unmasks-hidden.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:00:08 EDT","guid":"news693663961"},{"title":"Thousands of websites are accidentally broadcasting sensitive data, study finds","description":"Researchers have discovered a major security leak hiding in plain sight on the internet that could expose the personal data and financial records of millions of people. In a paper published on the arXiv preprint server, Nurullah Demir of Stanford University and colleagues analyzed 10 million websites to see how often API (application programming interfaces) credentials are exposed. These are digital keys or tokens that enable different software programs to communicate and are often used to process bank payments and access cloud storage.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-thousands-websites-accidentally-sensitive.html","category":"Internet","pubDate":"Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:40:04 EDT","guid":"news693658041"},{"title":"Study finds AI privacy leaks hinge on a few high-impact neural network weights","description":"Researchers have discovered that some of the elements of AI neural networks that contribute to data-privacy vulnerabilities are also key to the performance of those models. The researchers used this new information to develop a technique that better balances performance and privacy protection in these models.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-ai-privacy-leaks-hinge-high.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:00:01 EDT","guid":"news693570229"},{"title":"Sensor chips help identify deepfakes by adding cryptographic signatures to camera data","description":"AI-generated images and videos pose a threat to democratic processes and undermine trust within society. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now developed chip technology that enables verification of the authenticity of sensor data including images or videos. Their study is published in the journal Nature Electronics.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-sensor-chips-deepfakes-adding-cryptographic.html","category":"Hardware","pubDate":"Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:30:10 EDT","guid":"news693565096"},{"title":"'Neuron-freezing' technique can stop LLMs from giving users unsafe responses","description":"Researchers have identified key components in large language models (LLMs) that play a critical role in ensuring these AI systems provide safe responses to user queries. The researchers used these insights to develop and demonstrate AI training techniques that improve LLM safety while minimizing the \"alignment tax,\" meaning the AI becomes safer without significantly affecting performance.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-neuron-technique-llms-users-unsafe.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:10:01 EDT","guid":"news693484740"},{"title":"AI agents can autonomously coordinate propaganda campaigns without human direction","description":"Imagine it is two weeks before a major election in a closely contested state. A controversial ballot measure is on the line. Suddenly, a wave of posts floods X, Reddit, and Facebook, all pushing the same narrative, all amplifying each other, all generating the appearance of a massive grassroots movement. Except none of it is real.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-ai-agents-autonomously-propaganda-campaigns.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:40:05 EDT","guid":"news692544181"},{"title":"'Privacy by design': Tech protects against identity leaking during AI photo editing","description":"Consumers, businesses, and institutions may soon have private, secure, and trustworthy generative AI tools for editing and sharing profile photos, ID images, and personal pictures without exposing their private identities to external platforms. Purdue University researchers Vaneet Aggarwal, Dipesh Tamboli, and Vineet Punyamoorty have developed the patent-pending system, which is utilized before and after photos are uploaded to an AI editing platform.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-privacy-tech-identity-leaking-ai.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:20:05 EDT","guid":"news692543641"},{"title":"AI-powered defense system stops 5G cyber-attacks in a fraction of a second","description":"An AI defense system has successfully detected and neutralized sophisticated 5G cyber-attacks in less than a tenth of a second, paving the way for more secure 5G and future 6G mobile networks, say researchers at the University of Surrey.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-ai-powered-defense-5g-cyber.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:20:07 EDT","guid":"news692359742"},{"title":"New 'negative light' technology hides data transfers in plain sight","description":"Engineers at UNSW Sydney and Monash have developed an innovative way of sending hidden information that's hard to intercept. Using a phenomenon known as \"negative luminescence,\" the system works by making signals blend perfectly into the background of natural heat radiation, such as can be seen with a thermal camera.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-negative-technology-plain-sight.html","category":"Telecom","pubDate":"Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:00:03 EDT","guid":"news692270762"},{"title":"AI fake-news detectors may look accurate but fail in real use, study finds","description":"A dubious link from a friend. A headline too sensational to be true. A video that seems fake but you can't be sure. As online misinformation grows harder to detect, new artificial-intelligence tools promise to help us separate fact from fiction. But do they actually work?","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-ai-fake-news-detectors-accurate.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Mon, 09 Mar 2026 08:20:01 EDT","guid":"news692262086"},{"title":"How AI could end online anonymity","description":"The internet is rife with anonymous accounts as users adopt pseudonyms, sometimes for genuine reasons like speaking freely, and other times for nefarious ones. But this era of online privacy could be coming to a close. In a study available on the arXiv preprint server, researchers demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) can identify the people behind these accounts at scale.","link":"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2026-03-ai-online-anonymity.html","category":"Security","pubDate":"Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:40:04 EST","guid":"news691850205"}]}}