• Sextortion scams evolve with personalized tactics and heightened intimidation.
• Threat actors exploit invoicing platforms to bypass email security filters.
• Robust email filters and training help counter sextortion threats effectively.

Sextortion scams are becoming more complex and personal as the scams now frequently target individuals across different sectors with greater precision creating a sense of immediate threat.

Cofense Phish Defense Center (PDC) recently observed a notable evolution in sextortion scams, which unlike earlier versions, which relied primarily on generic scare tactics, now use more sophisticated strategies, often bypassing traditional security measures.

TerraPower, a nuclear energy startup founded by Bill Gates, struck a deal this week with one of the largest data center developers in the US to deploy advanced nuclear reactors. TerraPower and Sabey Data Centers (SDC) are working together on a plan to run existing and future facilities on nuclear energy from small reactors.

Tech companies are scrambling to determine where to get all the electricity they’ll need for energy-hungry AI data centers that are putting growing pressure on power grids. They’re increasingly turning to nuclear energy, including next-generation reactors that startups like TerraPower are developing.

“The energy sector is transforming at an unprecedented pace after decades of business as usual, and meaningful progress will require strategic collaboration across industries,” TerraPower President and CEO Chris Levesque said in a press release.

A memorandum of understanding signed by the two companies establishes a “strategic collaboration” that’ll initially look into the potential for new nuclear power plants in Texas and the Rocky Mountain region that would power SDC’s data centers.

There’s still a long road ahead before that can become a reality. The technology TerraPower and similar nuclear energy startups are developing still have to make it through regulatory hurdles and prove that they can be commercially viable.

Compared to older, larger nuclear power plants, the next generation of reactors are supposed to be smaller and easier to site. Nuclear energy is seen as an alternative to fossil fuels that are causing climate change. But it still faces opposition from some advocates concerned about the impact of uranium mining and storing radioactive waste near communities.

“I’m a big believer that nuclear energy can help us solve the climate problem, which is very, very important. There are designs that, in terms of their safety or fuel use or how they handle waste, I think, minimize those problems,” Gates told The Verge last year.

TerraPower’s reactor design for this collaboration, Natrium, is the only advanced technology of its kind with a construction permit application for a commercial reactor pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to the company. The company just broke ground on a demonstration project in Wyoming last year, and expects it to come online in 2030.

Microsoft made a deal in September to help restart a retired reactor at Three Mile Island. Both Google and Amazon, meanwhile, announced plans last year to support the development of advanced reactors to power their data centers.

While Meta lures TikTok creators to Instagram and Facebook with cash bonuses, its X competitor Instagram Threads is now making things easier for creators, brands, and others who need more professional tools to manage their presence on the app. On Thursday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced a small handful of new features coming to Threads, including a way to schedule posts and view more metrics within Insights.

In a post on the social network, Mosseri shared that users would now be able to schedule posts on Threads and view the metrics for individual posts within the Insights dashboard which offers a way for Threads users to track trends including their views, number of followers and geographic demographics, number and type of interactions, and more, for a given time period.

In addition, he said that Threads is adding a new feature that allows users to “markup” a post they’re resharing so they include their own creative take. While Mosseri didn’t elaborate on what that means or share an example, earlier findings from tech enthusiast Chris Messina indicate that Threads will add a new icon next to the buttons for adding photos, GIFs, voice, hashtags, and more that provide access to this feature.

The squiggle icon, when clicked, takes users to a screen where they can choose between tools like a highlighter pen or arrow tool, that would allow them to draw directly on a Thread post. This feature was also spotted last week by Lindsey Gamble, who posted on Threads to show the feature in action.

It’s an odd sort of addition for Threads, given that users are more often sharing something clipped from the web, like a news article, where they’ve added a highlight or underline in a screenshot. There hasn’t been much consumer demand for a tool to mark up Threads’ posts directly.

However, the feature does offer Threads users something unique, when compared with social networking rivals like X, Bluesky, and Mastodon — and that could be the point.

• Cloudflare AI Audit offers analytics to track and monetize content usage
• Creators regain control with automated tools and fair compensation
• Cloudflare bridges creators and AI firms for balanced content use

As artificial intelligence use cases continue to evolve, there is a growing concern from website owners and content creators over the unauthorized use of their content by AI bots.

Many websites, ranging from large media corporations to small personal blogs, are being scanned by AI models without the creators’ knowledge or compensation, not only affecting businesses but also diminishing the value of online content.

Perplexity has turned its AI “answer engine” into a mobile assistant on Android. The new assistant can answer general questions and perform tasks on your behalf, such as writing an email, setting a reminder, booking dinners, and more.

It’s also multimodal, meaning you can ask it questions about what’s on your screen as well as have it open your camera and “see” what’s in front of you. In an example shared by Perplexity, a user asks the assistant to “get me a ride.” Once it learns where the user wants to go, the assistant automatically opens Uber with available rides to that destination.

I tried it out for myself, and it is kind of neat. When I asked it to “open up a good podcast,” my phone started playing the latest episode of The Joe Rogan Experience on YouTube. It worked rather quickly, even though its taste may be questionable.

Using my phone’s camera, Perplexity’s assistant successfully identified the promotional Pokémon pack I got in a McDonald’s Happy Meal (don’t judge), which I found impressive since the promotion only started a couple of days ago. It also helped me write and send a text to a family member using the information in my contacts.

Alongside Samsung’s announcement of the Gemini-equipped Galaxy S25, Google revealed that its AI assistant can now complete tasks across multiple apps, as well as complete multimodal requests.

But Perplexity’s assistant doesn’t work across every app and with every feature. It’s not able to access Slack or Reddit, for example, and I also couldn’t use it to leave a comment on a YouTube video. Right now, the assistant supports Spotify, YouTube, and Uber, along with email, messaging, and clock apps, according to Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platick. “We’re continuing to add support for more apps and more functionality though, so this is just the starting point,” Platnick adds.

You can enable the assistant through the Perplexity app, which prompts you to replace your phone’s default assistant with Perplexity. From there, you can swipe up on the left corner of your screen or hold down your home button to access the assistant.

It’s currently not available on the iPhone, however. “If Apple gives us the right permissions, we’ll make it happen,” Platnick says.

Oil and gas isn’t the only source of energy lurking under our feet. Drill deep enough and the Earth’s temperature stays consistent enough that it can be a source of heating and cooling for homes, offices, and data centers.

But in many regions, geothermal wells today bottom out at around 500 feet, a limitation that is largely dictated by the sort of drilling equipment that’s typically used. 

“It’s pretty shallow, and you’re going to need two or three times the amount of space if you only go to those depths,” Joselyn Lai, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Energy, told TechCrunch. 

To minimize geothermal’s footprint, Bedrock drills deeper.

“In a cooling dominant location that can very well be 800 to 1,000 feet, which is three times more space efficient. And in a heating dominant location, that can very well be 1,000 to 1,200 feet or even more, which is two times more space efficient,” Lai said.

Because it doesn’t need as much land, Bedrock has been targeting commercial buildings where land tends to be at a premium. It completed its first two installations last year, one at an office building in Austin, Texas, and another at a resort in Utah. For installations like these, Lai said that the company expects to be profitable on a project basis in the next year.

Bedrock has also started to explore applying geothermal cooling to data centers. Last fall, the startup partnered with Dominion Energy to study the space.

One of the main challenges is that data centers are one-way users of geothermal energy. Since servers generate heat 24/7, data centers would be dumping heat into the ground year round. Contrast that with other users like office buildings, which tend to cool in the summer and heat in the winter, leading to a more balanced annual energy budget.

Still, it’s looking promising, Lai said. What’s underground can make a difference: fast flowing ground water, for example, can cool things off more quickly. The boreholes would need to be spread out compared with other installations, raising overall costs. But Bedrock’s data analysis, developed with experience gleaned from the oil and gas sector, suggests that geothermal would be a good fit for data centers, especially when paired with solar farms, which also need large tracts of land.

“Broadly speaking, cooling with geothermal is about twice as efficient as cooling with water and air, especially at the hottest times of the day when it’s very, very humid, which is what happens in a lot of states that have data centers,” Lai said.

Geothermal’s other benefit is how consistently it uses electricity. Because the Earth’s temperature is relatively stable, the heat pumps that transfer energy to or from a geothermal reservoir don’t have to ramp up or down to compensate for changes in air temperature, as air-source heat pumps do. For large electricity users like office buildings and data centers, that can be a boon to the bottom line since utilities typically charge heavy users more when their demand spikes.

Lai said that the outlook for geothermal remains promising enough that the company continues to invest in expanding operations and research and development, focusing on automation to speed installations. To support that growth, Bedrock recently raised a $12 million Series A led by Titanium Ventures. Energy Impact Partners, and Sustainable Future Ventures with participation from Cantos, Elemental Capital, First Star Ventures, Overture Ventures, Toba Capital, and Wireframe Ventures.

The number of phishing emails received by Australians surged by 30% last year, new research by security firm Abnormal Security has found. Cybercriminals have increasingly targeted the Asia-Pacific region, partly because it is becoming a larger player in critical industries like data centres and telecoms.

For APAC as a whole, credential phishing attacks rose by 30.5% between 2023 and 2024, according to the research. New Zealand saw a 30% rise, while for Japan and Singapore, it was 37%. Out of all the types of advanced email attacks, including business email compromise and malware deployment, phishing saw the biggest increase.

“The surge in attack volume across the APAC region can likely be attributed to several factors, including the strategic significance of its countries as epicentres for trade, finance, and defence,” said Tim Bentley, Vice President of APJ at Abnormal Security said in a press release.

“This makes organisations in the region attractive targets for complex email campaigns designed to exploit economic dynamics, disrupt essential industries, and steal sensitive data.”

SEE: 80% of Critical National Infrastructure Companies Experienced an Email Security Breach in Last Year

Between 2023 and 2024, the median monthly rate of all advanced email attacks rose by 26.9% across all of APAC, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore. This encompassed a 16% increase from Q1 to Q2 2024, and a 20% increase from Q2 to Q3.

While phishing was the dominant attack type, BEC attacks — including executive impersonation and payment fraud — also grew by 6% year-over-year in APAC. According to Abnormal Security, the average cost associated with one successful BEC attack exceeded USD $137,000 in 2023.

Australia’s cyber immaturity and the AI boom are causing a perfect storm

The news that Australia is prone to cyber attack is not entirely new. A Rubrik survey from last year found that Australian organisations reported the highest rate of data breaches compared with global markets in 2023.

Antoine Le Tard, vice president – of Asia-Pacific and Japan at Rubrik, said at the time that Australia was a favourite target partly because the country “is a mature market and early adopter of cloud and enterprise security technologies,” and therefore may have prioritised rapid deployment over comprehensive security.

At a national level, the approach to cyber security has been a bit slow off the mark. The Australian Signals Directorate reported that only 15% of government agencies achieved the minimum level of cyber security in 2024 — a sharp decline from 25% in 2023. Such entities have also proven reluctant to adopt passkey authentication methods, stemming from cyber security maturity in the public sector and the perception that implementing it is complex.

There is also the AI factor, which is influencing the security landscape globally. The ease of access to chatbots, both regular and jailbroken for nefarious purposes, makes it faster to generate material for phishing emails and lowers the barrier to entry, as no technical knowledge is required to use them. AI-powered chatbots were named one of 2025’s top AI threats for Australian cyber professionals, for that reason.

SEE: Impacts of AI on Cyber Security Landscape

The number of BEC attacks detected by security firm Vipre in the second quarter of 2024 was 20% higher than the same period in 2023 — and two-fifths of them were generated by AI. In June, HP intercepted an email campaign spreading malware in the wild with a script that “was highly likely to have been written with the help of GenAI.”

Furthermore, adversaries have begun using AI chatbots to build trust with victims and ultimately scam them. The technique mimics how an enterprise may use AI to combine human-driven interaction with the AI chatbot to engage and “convert” a person.

A day on from Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked, I’m genuinely impressed with a Samsung event for the first time in my life. You see, I’ve been an iPhone user since 2010, when I was 15 years old, and while I write about tech for a living, the most I’ve come to using Android daily is a week or so for an experiment.

After watching Galaxy Unpacked and the unveiling of Samsung’s Galaxy S25 lineup of smartphones, I’m not only intrigued by the Android phones on offer, but I’m starting to think I should really give the South Korean tech giant’s flagship a try.

OpenAI is letting some users try a new ChatGPT feature that uses its artificial intelligence to operate a web browser to book trips, buy groceries, hunt for bargains, and do many other online chores.

The new tool, called Operator, is an AI agent: It relies on an AI model trained on both text and images to interpret commands and figure out how to use a web browser to execute them. OpenAI claims it has the potential to automate many day-to-day tasks and workday errands.

OpenAI’s Operator follows rival releases by both Google and Anthropic, which have demonstrated ones capable of using the web. AI agents are widely seen as the next evolutionary stage for AI following chatbots, and many companies have hopped on the hype train by touting them. In most cases, these are very limited in their abilities and simply use a language model to automate things normally done with regular software.

“AI is evolving from this tool that could answer your questions to one that is also able to take action in the world, carrying out complex, multistep workflows,” says Peter Welinder, VP of product at OpenAI. “We’ll see a lot of impact on people’s productivity—but also the quality of work that people are able to accomplish.”

OpenAI admits that giving ChatGPT access to a web browser does introduce new risks, and it says that Operator may sometimes misbehave. It says it has implemented various new safeguards and plans to extend Operator’s capabilities gradually.

Welinder and Yash Kumar, product and engineering lead for OpenAI’s Computer Using Agent, say the plan is to learn from how people use the tool. They acknowledge that the tool could make unwanted bookings or purchases but add that a lot of work has gone into ensuring that it asks before doing anything risky. “It will come back to me and ask for confirmations before taking steps that might be irreversible,” Kumar says.

OpenAI today also released a new “system card” outlining the problems that might arrive with Operator. These include the potential for it to misunderstand commands or diverge from what a user asks; to be misused by users; or to be targeted by cybercriminals.

“It also poses an incredible amount of safety challenges,” Kumar says. “Because your attack vector area and your risk vector area increase quite significantly.”

Operator will initially be available as a “research preview” for ChatGPT users with a Pro account, which costs a hefty $200 per month. The company says it plans to expand access while rolling the tool out slowly, because it will inevitably make some mistakes along the way.

In several demonstrations, Operator showed the potential for AI to take on a more active role as a web helper. The tool features a remote web browser and a chat window for communicating with a user.

At WIRED’s request, Operator was asked to book an Amtrak train trip from New Haven, Connecticut, to Washington, DC. It went to the right website and entered the necessary information correctly to bring up the timetable, then asked for further instruction. If a user were logged in to the Amtrak website or into a browser profile with stored credit card information, Operator would be able to go ahead and book a ticket—although it is designed to ask for permission first.

Kumar asked Operator to book a table at Beretta, a restaurant in San Francisco. The program went to the OpenTable website, found the correct restaurant, and looked up availability before asking what to do next. OpenAI says it has partnered with a number of popular sites, including OpenTable, to ensure that Operator works smoothly on them.

The new tool is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI model, which can perceive a browser and web page and converse in typed text. The tool incorporates additional training designed to help it understand how to execute tasks online. OpenAI will also make its Computer Use Agent available through its API.

After revealing its next Doom game last summer, id Software is almost ready to release it: the studio announced that Doom: The Dark Ages is launching on May 15th.

The news came as part of Xbox’s most recent Developer Direct livestream, which provided the best look yet at the prequel. As the name implies, The Dark Ages is set in a medieval fantasy realm and takes place long before the events of Doom Eternal and the franchise’s 2016 reboot. The developers say that the new game features a much bigger world with a larger emphasis on story — including plenty of cutscenes — but the most important changes appear to be with how The Dark Ages will play.

A big focus this time around is on melee combat. Since this is a Doom set in medieval times, that means players will get access to brutal new melee weapons like a spiked mace and iron flail. The scale of battles also seems to have ramped up. We already knew that players would get a mount in the form of a cybernetic dragon, but today’s reveal also showed off a skyscraper-sized mech suit so that the Doomslayer can fight enemies the size of kaiju.

Another big change is a greater emphasis on accessibility through a series of gameplay sliders. These let you adjust things like the game speed or parry timing, either ramping them up or down. Essentially, these options should give players the ability to really customize the experience, either making it more approachable or a whole lot harder. There are standard difficulty options as well.

Doom: The Dark Ages is coming to the PS5, Xbox, and PC when it launches in May.