Despite significant external volatility, artificial intelligence continues to be a major driver of Ireland’s economy.

Ibec, the group representing Irish business, has today (16 July) published its latest Quarterly Economic Outlook report, which explores many of the issues impacting Ireland’s economy. 

It found that despite significant pressures and global volatility affecting growth, AI-related investment, investment in public infrastructure and resilient consumer spending are all continuing to support the economy.

Gerard Brady, Ibec chief economist and head of national policy, explained that we are seeing early evidence of the impact artificial intelligence is having on the country’s economic figures. He said that total trade in AI-related goods to and from Ireland is on track to double across five years, reaching €56bn annually. 

He explained that there has been a significant investment in ICT equipment and software, to the value of almost €6bn in the past year, which is a 50pc increase compared to 2025 and double the amount from 2024. He said that within business, the impact of AI on the competitive environment, investment, trade and the labour market is clear, that these figures will only grow over time.

Commenting on the report, Brady said, “Given that we are only at the foothills of understanding the impact of AI on our economy, the full picture has yet to emerge. We may not be at the forefront of developing new AI models, but early evidence suggests we have an opportunity to be a central node in AI-related supply chains. 

“We also have a massive opportunity to be the country with the best-prepared workforce for the generational change in work and skills currently underway. However, our participation in lifelong learning hovers around the EU average, well below where we want to be for an open, global and sophisticated economy.”

He explained that Ireland’s current economic success is firmly rooted in its commitment to investing in a manner that enables the country to be at the forefront of new technological shifts in the global economy. 

“We have a tangible opportunity to get ahead of other countries because we have a large training fund, in the form of the National Training Fund, paid for by employers, with a €2bn surplus. This cannot be left idle,” he said. “This fund must be deployed to support the workforce transition, prepare us for change and set Ireland up as a frontrunner in the emerging global economy.”

For Ireland, despite global pressures – such as the US-Iran ceasefire collapse, US tariffs and the uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz – exports have remained relatively resilient. However, Ibec did find that it will be 2027 and beyond before we can fully understand the true impact of tariffs on Ireland’s exporting sectors. 

Brady said, “We expect exports, which grew by around 7.5pc in 2025, to rise only marginally in 2026 as a consequence of this ‘whiplash’ effect. However, exports are projected to resume strong growth at 4pc in 2027. The story within the domestic economy is more prosaic. Consumer spending is holding up, but inflation will dent its trajectory.

“While the labour market is showing signs of softening, investment remains strong. Most of the levers to support long-term economic development, such as infrastructure delivery, skills development, regulation, and supporting innovation and digitalisation, remain firmly within our control.”

Ibec also recently issued a new report exploring the correlation between workplace AI and consistent learning strategies. The ‘Skills for all, skills for life’ report warned that unless there is a deliberate shift in the national approach to lifelong learning, Ireland will fail to capitalise on the long-term economic potential of AI. 

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But there’s something about a fully manual turntable from assembling and calibrating (and testing one’s patience) to cleaning a record every time you put a new one on. Convenient is not necessarily a word that I would use for this process. But it is a bit meditative. More importantly, the audio quality you get a step above with that analog warmth that the best turntables are known for, while not adding unnecessary distortion that may make your vinyl also sound a bit unintentionally lo-fi.

If there is a driving theme to The Java Story documentary, which debuted Friday on YouTube, it would be that even some of the most important and popular technologies come from humble beginnings. In this case, we’re talking about a language that started life as a failed attempt at set-top box dominance and required a massive rewrite just days before its big conference debut.

Today, Java consistently hovers near the top of the TIOBE programming language popularity index and remains widely used for large enterprise applications.

But at one point in 1994, Sun Microsystems was just about to abandon the effort. Tim Lindholm, who was hired to polish up a virtual machine runtime for what would become Java, told The Register, “I was one of the last people hired before the whole thing fell apart.”

It wouldn’t be the last time Java outlived its detractors. 

Java chronicled

If the idea of a professionally produced documentary about a programming language sounds familiar, then you’ve probably seen the ones on C++, Python or React. These were the work of tech job site Honeypot.io, which funded the documentaries to build a user base. 

In 2019, Honeypot was acquired by XING (which rebranded as New Work SE). However, founder Emma Tracey was more interested in the documentary side of things and bought the production shop back from New Work, reuniting the original gang and rebranding their efforts as Cult.Repo (short for Culture Repository). The Java Story is the first product of the newly liberated media company. 

The documentary features many of Java’s prime movers, including creator James Gosling and senior Oracle Java architects Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz.

While it may have taken a Hollywood-style effort to construct a Hero’s Journey around the plodding progress of Python, Java is a veritable Love Island of dramas, some of which were this documentary captured. 

The project that almost wasn’t

Lindholm strayed into the computing field only as a result of the brutally cold winter of Minnesota, where he was living in a tent. He realized he would need someplace warmer and so scored an internship at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. There, he gained early experience with virtual machines thanks to the lab’s use of Prolog. 

His goal was not to be a programmer, but a mathematician. “Computer science was for people who couldn’t be real mathematicians,” he said.

But he learned the craft of implementing Prolog.

“I learned to write to very high-quality virtual machines with things like garbage collection and embeddability,” he said. The VM experience led him to subsequent jobs at Xerox PARC and eventually Sun.

When Lindholm arrived 1994, it was to work for an experimental “spin-in” subsidiary called FirstPerson. At the time, Sun made bank selling high-end workstations to engineers, but it wanted to build software for devices outside the typical workstation and PC market.

FirstPerson’s chief concern was a bid from Time Warner to provide the interactive video-on-demand software for television set top boxes. Gosling wrote a language and runtime for the project, called Oak.

The contract ultimately went to late bidder Silicon Graphics – a Sun rival commonly known as SGI. In a lesson of not always getting what you want, the Time Warner project struggled for a few years before the plug was pulled in 1997, which didn’t do the already-struggling SGI any financial favors.   

But at the time, Sun took the defeat hard, laying off most of the FirstPerson staff.  Lindholm had been there for only a month and wasn’t overly invested in the set top box. “I’ll do whatever comes next,” he recalled.

Sun kept only 12 engineers to work on Oak, including Gosling and project manager Kim Polese. But for Lindholm, the future didn’t look promising.

“We were like refugees in a bombed-out bunker,” he said. Those who were laid off tossed their office gear out into the hallways. Lindholm felt like “dead meat” at the Sun office, just waiting to get laid off himself. 

Pivot to the Web

It was purely serendipitous that the project moved to the then-nascent web. One of the surviving engineers had been playing with the recently released Mosaic browser and suggested the World Wide Web should be Oak’s next target. This was a year before Windows 95 brought the internet and web browsing to the masses.

The team built a Mosaic clone called WebRunner on Oak that would run animations. It would be the precursor to what would become Java applets. 

After that, events moved quickly, Lindholm recalled. Oak was renamed Java in early 1995, supposedly as a nod to the engineering team’s coffee consumption. “It took off like a friggin’ rocket. It was just crazy. We were all stressed,” he said. 

An early wave of web developers was rapidly discovering the limits of creating web pages using HTML, which, after all, is a markup language.

Lindholm said that his job, alongside , was

Gosling and the crew had assembled a rough prototype, but it fell to Lindholm, alongside fellow new hire and Lisp expert Frank Yellin “to make this thing actually work.”  The pair were in charge of the commercial grade implementation, ensuring that the advanced concepts Gosling had outlined, such as threading and garbage collection, functioned in the real world.  Lindholm and Yellin later co-authored the original JVM specification. 

Threading at the time was particularly new. There were no libraries they could use to implement the idea, and Lindholm knew relatively little about the concept.

The company planned to introduce Java at the 1995 SunWorld convention, the precursor to JavaOne. But the runtime was crashing badly. After much sleuthing, Lindholm figured out Java’s threading model was “fundamentally broken. It was totally screwed up,” he said. 

The problem was that system interrupts were being issued while the SPARC processor was executing an instruction. This proved disastrous because the system could not recover the state that had been flushed from memory and would therefore “die horribly.”

Lindholm realized you could only have the interrupts happen at certain points. So, three days before the conference, he rewrote the entire threads package. At the conference, when then Sun CEO Scott McNealy showed off Java, Lindholm sat in the audience dreading the worst. Thankfully, the rewrite worked.   

Before open source

Lindholm was also in charge of the language’s first attempt at open source, years before Eric Raymond made the term common. The company offered the binary Java runtime as a free download, but the company gave away “the sources,” as Lindholm put it, to anyone who requested it. Thousands did. 

The documentary retells a story that the Java Internet domain was getting so much traffic – more than Sun.com itself – that the Java team ran a pirate T3 line into the office. Such were the days before the cloud. 

At the time, Lindholm viewed giving away the source as a good career move. Should he ever get the ax, perhaps some other company would pick up the code and run with it. They also found outsiders could fix bugs and even extend the software to other platforms. 

The “source” program wasn’t formalized, however. Sun did have Richard Stallman come to talk, but he seemed “too radical” for the Sun execs, Lindholm recalled. Sun would not actually decide to officially release Java as open source for another decade. 

Ironically enough, Java applets were only modestly adopted for the web, as other technologies such as ColdFusion and Netscape’s JavaScript project ended up doing the heavy lifting for Web programmers. But applets were a gateway to the real action, namely powering the back-end servers. 

The evil empire

Then, Microsoft started paying attention. It saw the runtime as a potential threat to Windows itself, particularly for the fledgling Windows NT, which was starting to make headway into the enterprise. 

For today’s younger generation of IT pros, it is hard to overstate how aggressive and hyper-competent Microsoft could be at that time. In 1996, the company licensed Java for Windows, but then added some additional APIs and declined to support a few others (Anyone remember Microsoft’s J++?). Sun alleged that Microsoft’s changes were intended to undermine Java’s cross-platform compatibility and steer developers toward Microsoft’s Windows-specific implementation.

The years-long court case zapped the development team’s energy, diverting resources away from Java.

“I spent days in deposition talking about this under oath,” Lindholm recalled. The disputes ended with Microsoft paying Sun nearly $2 billion through a series of settlements. “It was personal for us,” he said. 

A wild ride

The documentary goes on to cover the following decades of the language’s growth through to the present day, including the over-engineered era of J2EE and Java EE 5, the glimmer of hope provided by the Spring framework, Sun’s implosion and subsequent acquisition by Oracle, and the flourishing of JVM languages following the release of OpenJDK.

Java continued to be a success for Sun, even as its chief business of selling SPARC-based Internet servers fizzled thanks to the influx of low-cost Linux x86 boxes. Lindholm noted that the Java team grew so large that it took over Sun’s headquarters and eventually had to move into the old Apple headquarters.

But Lindholm’s passion for Java evaporated by the early 2000s, swamped by the increasingly corporate environment, and so he left for Google, where he would spend the next 20 years until his retirement earlier this year. 

Looking back to his early involvement, Lindholm admitted “it was kind of a random thing. You can never tell what parts of your life will end up being really significant for whatever reason.”

Others agreed that Java has been a wild ride.

As Java creator James Gosling said in the doc, “What excites me most about the future is the unknown. Lots of things happen, and mostly the interesting ones are the ones you could never predict.” ®

Public exploits have been released for the critical “wp2shell” remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting WordPress Core, making it imperative that administrators patch their sites immediately.

The wp2shell attack consists of two flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137, that can be chained together to achieve pre-authentication remote code execution against WordPress installs running versions 6.9.x and 7.0.x.

The flaws were discovered by Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber, which says an unauthenticated attacker can exploit them against a default WordPress installation.

“Searchlight Cyber’s security research team has discovered a pre-authentication RCE in WordPress Core,” explained Searchlight Cyber.

“The attack has no preconditions and can be exploited by an anonymous user in a stock install of WordPress with no plugins.”

Searchlight Cyber estimates that more than 500 million websites use WordPress, giving the vulnerability a potentially massive impact, especially now that public proof-of-concept exploits have been released.

Due to the severity of the vulnerabilities, the WordPress security team has enabled forced automatic security updates for supported installations running affected versions, urging site owners to update to WordPress 7.0.2 or 6.9.5 immediately.

“Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately,” WordPress said in its security announcement.

“Due to the severity, the WordPress.org team have enabled forced updates via the auto-update system for sites running affected versions.”

The issue is not a single vulnerability but rather two independent flaws that can be combined into an unauthenticated remote code execution chain.

The first flaw, CVE-2026-63030, is a REST API batch-route confusion vulnerability introduced in WordPress 6.9. According to the GitHub advisory, the flaw can be combined with the SQL injection issue to achieve remote code execution.

The second vulnerability, CVE-2026-60137, is an SQL injection flaw in the ‘author__not_in‘ parameter of ‘WP_Query'. WordPress describes it as a high-severity SQL injection vulnerability affecting WordPress 6.8 and later.

According to the WordPress advisories, the complete RCE chain affects WordPress 6.9.0 through 6.9.4 and WordPress 7.0.0 through 7.0.1.

The SQL injection vulnerability also affects WordPress 6.8.0 through 6.8.5, but cannot be chained to remote code execution because the REST API batch-route confusion bug was added in WordPress 6.9.

The full wp2shell attack chain has been fixed in WordPress 6.9.5 and 7.0.2.

Searchlight Cyber is currently withholding technical details to give administrators time to patch, instead creating the wp2shell.com website, which allows admins to test whether their WordPress installations are vulnerable.

For organizations unable to immediately update, Searchlight Cyber recommends:

• Installing a plugin that blocks anonymous access to the REST API entirely; or
• Blocking /wp-json/batch/v1 and ?rest_route=/batch/v1 at a WAF level.

The company warns these mitigations should only be used as a temporary measure until systems can be updated.

Cloudflare also announced that it has deployed Web Application Firewall (WAF) protections for both vulnerabilities across all plans, including free accounts, that are proxied behind its platform.

According to Cloudflare, the rules block attempts to exploit both the SQL injection flaw (CVE-2026-60137) and the REST API batch-route confusion vulnerability (CVE-2026-63030).

“WAF protections reduce exposure while customers update, but they are not a substitute for patching,” Cloudflare said.

Public PoC exploits released

While Searchlight Cyber delayed releasing technical details to give administrators time to patch, multiple public proof-of-concept exploits have since been published on GitHub.

Some publicly available exploits combine the two vulnerabilities to extract WordPress password hashes via SQL injection, then crack an administrator password to log in, upload a malicious plugin, and execute commands.

However, other proof-of-concept exploits claim to achieve pre-authentication remote code execution without requiring administrator credentials, which is more in line with Searchlight Cyber’s description of the flaws.

BleepingComputer has contacted Searchlight Cyber to confirm that its attack chain does not require an administrator password.

Security firm watchTowr says it has already seen in-the-wild exploitation after the public exploits were released.

“WordPress gets a bad rap for security. But the reality is that a highly impactful, unauthenticated SQL injection or remote code execution vulnerability in WordPress core is actually fairly rare,” watchTowr CEO Benjamin Harris told BleepingComputer via email.

“That is exactly what makes this one different, and why everyone is scrambling to patch before widespread exploitation takes hold. The watchTowr team is already seeing PoC exploits in circulation, and we are beginning to see the first signs of in-the-wild exploitation.”

Given the availability of public proof-of-concept exploits and the first reported signs of in-the-wild exploitation, administrators should ensure their sites are updated to WordPress 7.0.2 or 6.9.5 as soon as possible.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

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It’s pretty clear that EVs and software defined vehicles (SDVs) go hand-in-hand these days, and while Tesla paved the way with the Model 3 back in 2017, Rivian, Lucid, and Chinese manufacturers quickly followed. The legacy car manufacturers are taking a while longer to get on board, but are finally catching up. Companies like Hyundai Motor Group, General Motors, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz are starting to launch full SDVs.

SDVs for the win

Kini is very reliable. I tested it in a drawer and a cabinet, and it always alerted me when they were opened. It also keeps a log with times listed. While alerts go via the cloud, maker Kinisium says it doesn’t collect data, and you can turn off logging entirely if you prefer. Kini also has a Stasis mode, so you can reverse it and have it alert you when there has been no movement for a set period. This makes it a versatile monitoring device, and you could use this mode to ensure an elderly relative opens their medicine cabinet each day or check what time your dog walker opened a door. Kini is also compatible with IFTTT for automation, and there’s even a webhook integration that can send notifications to a custom URL.

More Motion Sensors

There are loads of other motion sensors that can alert you to motion or presence in an area or room and trigger lighting, but the right one for you depends on your current smart-home setup.

I really like the Eve Motion Sensor, but if you want it to trigger alerts, you need a smart-home hub, and you must set up an automation. It’s a reliable sensor that works indoors or out. I tested it with a Google Home system.

The Aqara FP2 Presence Sensor ($83) has many features, including zonal and multiple person detection, and is compatible with all the major smart-home ecosystems, though it’s not always very accurate at identifying the number of people in the room. The more affordable Aqara FP300 ($50) is a good enough presence detector for most folks and can also track light, temperature, and humidity.

The Switchbot Presence Sensor ($30) is the most affordable sensor I tested and has a similar feature set, but you will need a Switchbot hub if you want alerts, and there’s a lag between it detecting and alerting.

The Philips Hue Outdoor Motion Sensor is excellent, but only if you already have a Hue setup, because it needs a Hue Bridge to connect to. I installed the sensor in my backyard and tested it with the Bridge Pro. It reliably detects people with few false positives. I configured my outdoor sensor to turn on a backyard light strip (not Hue) after sunset and send me a notification when triggered between specific hours (midnight and 6 am) using Google Gemini.

There’s also a Philips Hue Indoor Motion Sensor and a Contact Sensor ($40) for doors and windows. Both are very reliable and can be configured to trigger alerts.

Smart Light Sensing

As an interesting alternative to dedicated motion sensors, you can also use some smart lights for detect presence and motion indoors.

Wiz SpaceSense

If you have a few Wiz lights, you can try SpaceSense, which uses Wi-Fi to detect motion in rooms. I wasn’t that impressed when I tried SpaceSense, but how effectively it works depends on how many Wiz lights you have and where they are located. I was also testing it as a way to automatically turn lights on, and there’s some lag that limits its usefulness on that score. But as a security alert that can tell you when there’s motion in your home when you’re away, it could be very useful. If you already have Wiz lights, you may as well try it, as it doesn’t require a subscription.

Philips Hue MotionAware

Signify is the parent company of Wiz and Philips Hue, and MotionAware is very similar to SpaceSense, but it uses Zigbee, rather than Wi-Fi. Again, how well it works depends on the number of Philips Hue lights you have and their layout. Unfortunately, it does require a subscription if you want to receive alerts. MotionAware can trigger lights at no extra cost, but if you want motion alerts, you must pay $1 per month or $10 for the year. It is also included in Hue Secure subscriptions from $4 per month.

More Security System Alternatives

SimpliSafe

8-Piece Wireless Home Security System

You might consider a modular security system. We like the Simplisafe system, which offers a base station, keypad, and a range of sensors. You can also find modular systems from security stalwarts like ADT and Vivint, and security camera makers like Eufy and Arlo.

The Department of Justice says that federal employees can now download TikTok on their government devices, according to Reuters.

A 2022 law banned federal employees from using the short-form video app on those devices, but the DOJ reportedly says the law no longer applies, thanks to a deal transferring ownership of TikTok’s U.S. operations to a joint venture backed by Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. (Oracle serves as the security partner for the new joint venture, while previous owner ByteDance retains a 19.9% stake.)

The DOJ memo reportedly says President Donald Trump has cleared “employees of Executive Branch agencies” to “download TikTok onto their official devices, subject ​to the agency’s discretion and consistent with all applicable workplace policies.”

Following the ban focused on government employees and devices, the app was banned more broadly across the United States. But just as the law took effect early last year, the app only went down briefly before Trump repeatedly delayed the move and urged service providers to restore access.

Kylian Mbappe is set to face Real Madrid team-mate Jude Bellingham as France take on England in the FIFA World Cup 2026 third place play-off in Miami — and you can live stream the game around the world for free.

Les Bleus were many people’s favourites to win the tournament, but a deeply disappointing 2-0 defeat by Spain in the semi-finals ended their hopes of lifting the World Cup for a third time. While a bronze medal would feel like scant consolation, France will nonetheless be motivated to triumph. Manager Didier Deschamps ends a hugely successful 14-year spell in charge of Les Bleus after this game and he will be keen to finish on a high, while captain Mbappe heads into the last weekend of the tournament level on eight goals with Lionel Messi in the race for the Golden Boot.

Hours of San Francisco Police Department drone video footage exposed on the open web illustrates a new era of incredibly granular—and consequential—urban surveillance. Meanwhile, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google this week demanding that the tech giants delete 13 AI nudifying “face-swap” apps from their app stores that are almost exclusively used to target women and girls.

Since WIRED first reported in June about Meta’s NameTag face-recognition system, company executives have made opaque and conflicting comments about whether the feature even exists. We took a step back to lay out both the claims and the facts about the very real system.

In a speech on Thursday, President Donald Trump continued to push unsubstantiated and thoroughly debunked claims about interference in the 2020 US election. He even promised massive revelations in a trove of documents posted to the White House website, but the files did not prove his assertions—and in some cases actually contradicted Trump’s claims.

As adoption of AI tools rapidly expands and their capabilities increase, the tech giant Anthropic continued a push to get US states to regulate AI. Speaking about AI transparency requirements in California and New York from last year, Anthropic’s head of US state and local government relations, Cesar Fernandez, told WIRED this week, “The transparency-focused safety bills of 2025 were a really important start, but as the capabilities of AI systems continue to advance quickly—the policy responses need to match.”

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

The astrology-themed period tracker Stardust sends users’ reproductive health details—birth control type, pregnancy status, moods, and symptoms as specific as tender breasts and stomach cramps—to a data firm not named in its privacy policy, according to the BBC, which first reported a Mozilla Foundation audit of six popular trackers produced in partnership with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center.

Stardust scored 2 out of 10, the worst of the group. Mozilla researcher Shoshana Wodinsky found the app pings third-party trackers from the moment it opens, before a user enters anything; the instant she logged a symptom, the details went to analytics firm RudderStack alongside a persistent user ID, with no in-app way to shut the sharing off. RudderStack is built to route data onward to destinations Mozilla couldn’t observe. Stardust also hands Facebook an ad identifier that ties in-app behavior to the platform’s existing profiles. The company told TechCrunch it has never received a legal demand for user data.

Euki, a nonprofit-run tracker, earned a perfect 10: no account required, health data never leaves the phone, and users can set a PIN, schedule automatic deletion, or pull up a decoy screen if someone forces the phone open. Its one soft spot is an in-app browser for educational pages that loads the usual web trackers, but it also resets identifiers between visits.

Russia’s FSB has long had a reputation for highly sophisticated cyberespionage, leaving disruptive cyberattacks to its fellow hackers in the country’s GRU military intelligence agency. But sanctions from the EU and UK this week, along with an advisory from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI, and the NSA, pinned a cyberattack against the Polish electric grid on Center 16 of the FSB, a rare example of the Kremlin agency carrying out a cyberattack that nearly caused outages in the country’s electric and water utilities. The attack, which the Polish government has said came “very close” to causing a blackout, was initially attributed by cybersecurity firms Dragos and ESET to Sandworm, also known as Unit 74455 of the GRU, a more usual suspect in infrastructure hacking given its active role in Russia’s long-running cyberwar against Ukraine. But the Polish computer emergency response team at the time disputed that finding and tied the attack to the FSB, a conclusion now supported by a wide consensus of Western governments. The incident suggests that the FSB may be taking on some of the reckless, highly aggressive tendencies—and targeting—of its GRU coworkers.

For years, the Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky has been alleged to have ties to the Russian government, including by US officials who banned use of the company’s products within the US government and eventually by all American customers. Yet overt evidence of those connections has been scarce. Now Reuters reports that Denis Obrezko, a Russian man facing hacking charges in Boston and an alleged member of a hacker group known as Void Blizzard or Laundry Bear, spent two years working at Kaspersky. His stint at the company took place just before he joined another cybersecurity company, Yutek-NN, where he allegedly took part in the group’s hacking campaign that stole data and communications from numerous NATO governments and at least 11 US companies, according to US prosecutors. Prior to Kaspersky, Obrevko also allegedly worked at the FSB, neatly bookending his time at the company with apparent work for Russia’s intelligence services.

Obrevko has pleaded not guilty to the hacking charges. Kaspersky responded in a statement to Reuters that “the offenses charged cannot be related to the individual’s role or responsibilities during the employment at Kaspersky.”

In an incident that will induce anxiety in anyone responsible for assessing suspicious network activity, DHS officials ruled—twice—that signs of a hacker breach in its data-sharing Homeland Security Information Network platform were false positives when they were, in fact, signs of a very real intrusion. HSIN, used for sharing unclassified data between state, local, and federal agencies, as well as foreign partners, was breached by hackers two months ago, according to reporting from Nextgov/FCW. Analysts at the Federal Emergency Management Agency spotted signs of hacker activity in mid-May—altering files and code, hijacking a legitimate web server, and deleting logs of their behavior—but the findings were dismissed as a false positive.

In the weeks that followed, the hackers returned, were again detected, and were again dismissed as a mirage. It’s not clear why the signs of the breach were misjudged, but the incidents may represent federal analysts’ increasing challenges in detecting “living off the land” hacking techniques that use legitimate features of networks to access target assets on a network rather than planting more easily spotted malware. While the HSIN houses only unclassified data, the information is “highly sensitive,” Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Mark Warner said in a statement following the report of the breach, and “its exposure risks national security.”

The AI music startup Suno scraped millions of songs, lyrics, and podcasts from YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius, and a string of stock-audio libraries to train its models, according to 404 Media, which reviewed internal data provided by a hacker who breached the company. The intrusion also exposed account information for hundreds of thousands of customers, including emails, phone numbers, and Stripe payment records.

Dataset notes in source code apparently from 2023 and 2024 tally 113,879 hours of YouTube Music audio alone, plus tens of thousands more from Pond5, Deezer, and other libraries—decades of music in total. Other files show Suno routing its YouTube scraping through Bright Data proxies and using PodcastIndex to target roughly 1 million hours of podcasts. The hacker, who goes by ellie.191, says they broke in by compromising an employee with the Shai-Hulud worm.

The files seemingly corroborate the record industry’s central allegation that Suno pulled songs directly from YouTube. The company, which argues that its training qualifies as fair use and settled with Warner Music Group last November, said the breach involved outdated code and no sensitive personal information—though customers whose data appeared in a sample shared with 404 Media said they were never notified.

The original lawsuit was filed in 2023 and claimed Twitter hosted thousands of cases of copyright infringement.