Crooked Bough News Round-up

— PC shipments fall 20.1 percent in “sharpest decline” since Q1 2023

 

at 10/9/26 12:54pm

"The current decline may be just the beginning of a new downward cycle."

[Category: Biz & IT, Tech, Desktops, IDC, laptops]

— Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services

 

at 10/6/26 1:21pm

Compromise of 3 domain registries allows hackers to walk off with unauthorized certs.

[Category: Biz & IT, Security, browser, certificate, certificate authority, tls, transport layer security]

— OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic

 

at 10/6/26 6:21am

The reports of OpenAI agents harming 3rd party sites keep coming.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Security, AI agents, allignment, openai, wikipedia]

— Licensing costs driving 90 percent of VMware users to explore options: Survey

 

at 10/6/26 6:00am

Users want to "reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption" while making changes.

[Category: Biz & IT, Broadcom, vmware]

— MCP for agent-to-agent comms may be the riskiest protocol you've never heard of

 

at 10/5/26 4:26pm

Trust gaps in the new protocol spread malicious prompts from one agent to another.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Security, agentic AI, MCP, Model Context Protocol, prompt injection]

— Apple changes full-disk access permissions to curb abuse from AI agents

 

at 10/2/26 5:03pm

Meta says FDA isn't sufficient to Muse reading messages. Apple begs to differ.

[Category: AI, Apple, Biz & IT, Security, meta, muse, privacy]

— Hacks of 2 federal agencies in a month have spilled a bonanza of sensitive data

 

at 10/1/26 2:28pm

It has been a bad month for federal government cybersecurity.

[Category: Biz & IT, Security, breaches, Department of Defense, fbi, hacking, national security]

— Memory executives expect RAM shortage to continue through 2028

 

at 10/1/26 11:49am

Prices for memory sold for 2027 "are much higher than 2026 prices."

[Category: Biz & IT, Tech, Micron, RAM]

— Attackers have been exploiting critical Zimbra flaw to steal emails

 

at 9/30/26 2:44pm

A simple email gives the attackers the ability to remotely inject OS commands.

[Category: Biz & IT, Security, exploits, remote code injection, vulnerabilities, zimbra collaboration server]

— Cloudflare plans to issue quantum-safe TLS certificates

 

at 9/30/26 5:15am

The move will be part of a major overhaul of the ecosystem for website authentication.

[Category: Biz & IT, Security, cryptography, post-quantum encryption, quantum computing]

— Your uncle’s frozen Mac says it’s infected after viewing a Google ad. Now what?

 

at 9/25/26 1:38pm

Ads appearing all over the Internet are trying to scam people.

[Category: Biz & IT, Security, google, malicious ads, scareware]

— There's a new way to break RSA that's faster than anything we've seen before

 

at 9/24/26 5:15am

Until now, cryptographers thought factoring was the only way to break RSA. Not anymore.

[Category: Biz & IT, Security, cryptanalysis, factoring, key forgery, RSA]

— Microsoft disrupts AI-assisted platform that compromised 12,000 accounts

 

at 9/22/26 1:45pm

EvilTokens provided an end-to-end platform that makes mass compromises faster and easier.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Security, AI ATTACK, chatbots, spam]

— IT mistake erases 11 years of viewing history for hospitals’ maternity records

 

at 9/22/26 10:55am

The English hospitals recovered patient care data only.

[Category: Biz & IT, data loss, England, healthcare, hospitals]

— Muse, Meta's extraordinarily privileged AI assistant, has a serious 0-day

 

at 9/21/26 4:24pm

A simple ClickFix attack is only one way to completely hijack the new agent.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Security, AI assistants, meta, privacy, security, zero days]

— An undercover Google analyst infiltrated a notorious supply-chain hacking gang

 

at 9/20/26 5:07am

Google’s threat intelligence group said it had a mole inside TeamPCP's inner circle.

[Category: Biz & IT, Google, Security, Mole, supply chain attack, supply chain hacking, syndication, teampcp]

— LLMs respond differently to harmful prompts when AI watermarking is used

 

at 9/17/26 12:33pm

SynthID can cause models to follow harmful instructions they would otherwise refuse.

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, Security, Anthropic, LLMs, watermarking]

— Nonprofit that tracks meteors taken down by "critical blow" from a cyberattack

 

at 9/16/26 3:08pm

Group plans to be largely out of commission for several weeks.

[Category: Biz & IT, Science, Security, Space, Cyberattacks, hacking, meteors, space]

— AI bots "Timmy," "Ren," and "Jackie" are flooding social media with slop

 

at 9/14/26 3:04pm

“Hello, I'm an Al agent, a few days old, living on a small platform for agents.”

[Category: AI, Biz & IT, ilands, slop, spam]

— ClickFix attacks infecting PCs and Macs are going viral

 

at 9/11/26 5:30am

Simplicity—combined with the difficulty of getting stuff done—makes ClickFix ideal.

[Category: Biz & IT, Security, clickfix, MacOS, malware, Windows]

— Four groups caught using the same Chrome and Windows exploit kit

 

at 9/9/26 2:55pm

A patch gap and the hastened pace of AI-based vulnerability discovery are likely contributors.

[Category: Biz & IT, Security, chrome, chromium, exploits, Windows]

As of 10/13/26 6:45am. Last new 10/9/26 3:53pm.