News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

IRAN

Iran’s strict internet shutdown is crushing an already shaky economy

At her studio in Iran’s capital, Amen Khademi prepared a fashion shoot for a jacket she designed with Persian-inspired motifs. But even as she applied lipstick to the model, she was distracted, worrying if her business would survive after four months without its main link to customers — the internet.

Iran’s 90 million people have been cut off from the internet for most of 2026, one of the world’s longest and strictest national shutdowns. That is devastating an online economy that had long defied government restrictions and international sanctions. From fashion to fitness, to advertising and retailers, many have seen their incomes evaporate.

Khademi hasn’t made a sale in months. “The internet outage in the past four months has completely destroyed not only my business, but many online businesses,” she said.

Despite an uneasy truce with the U.S. and Israel, Iran’s rulers have refused to reverse the shutdown they have depicted as a wartime necessity. But they are facing an outcry as it adds to mass job losses from strikes on key industries and an ongoing U.S. blockade.

Before January, Iranians could access the internet, but authorities blocked a large amount of content. Now all access to the global web has been shut down. Some workarounds exist, but they have become enormously expensive, out of reach for most Iranians.

The internet cutoff costs the economy an estimated $30-40 million daily, with indirect losses likely twice that much, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Afshin Kolahi, told a local newspaper. About 10 million people have jobs that depend on internet connectivity, according to the communications minister, Sattar Hashemi.

An unprecedented shutdown guts an online economy

Throughout years of economic turmoil in Iran brought on by sanctions and mismanagement, platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp helped small businesses to find customers, and people to earn extra income to afford skyrocketing prices for basic goods.

Iranian authorities first shut down the internet in January during mass anti-government protests. That cutoff was just starting to ease when the government imposed a complete internet blackout on Feb. 28 as the U.S. and Israel launched the war.

Mahsa Alimardani, an expert on internet censorship, said Kashmir and Myanmar have had longer blocks affecting specific regions or platforms. Countries like China, with its “Great Firewall,” and North Korea, have always strictly limited access to the global internet.

Iran tortures dad to death for using internet, executes karate champ in regime’s latest bloody crackdowns

The barbaric Iranian regime reportedly tortured a dad to death for the high crime of using the internet and abused and executed a 21-year-old karate champ for merely attending a protest.

Father of two Hesam Alaeddin, 40, was beaten to death after being arrested for using Starlink to access the internet — which has been banned in the country since the US-Iran war started Feb. 28.

News of Alaeddin’s death was reported by Reza Pahlavi — the exiled son of the last shah of Iran — and spread across shocked posts on social media.

“The brutal and criminal regime of the Islamic Republic killed Hesam Alaeddin under torture after he was reportedly arrested for using Starlink,” Pahlavi wrote on X on Friday. “For 62 days, this regime has shut down the internet and continues to massacre Iranian people. The world cannot stay silent.”

Alaeddin was detained sometime in the past two weeks after being accused of connecting to the internet with Starlink, IranWire reported.

Iranian regime police searched his home, and when they found the Starlink device, they beat him in the family’s residence until he died, according to IranWire.

Alaeddin’s body was then confiscated and wasn’t returned until his family agreed to not speak about what happened, the outlet reported. He was finally buried Wednesday, but only under tight police security.

Outraged posts about Alaeddin’s death spread across social media, with the Independent Persian also reporting on the murder.

Starlink uses private satellites orbiting the Earth to connect internet with transponders on the surface, which can allow people to access the web anywhere on the planet — and circumvent blackouts in countries such as Iran that strictly regulate how its people connect with the world.

The Iranian regime has weaponized nationwide internet blackouts to control its people for years, but this ban been one of the most brutal as depraved leaders struggle to hold power while battling US and Israeli forces battering the country after war broke out.

The clandestine network smuggling Starlink tech into Iran to beat internet blackout

"If even one extra person is able to access the internet, I think it's successful and it's worth it," says Sahand.

The Iranian man is visibly anxious, speaking to the BBC outside Iran, as he carefully explains how he is part of a clandestine network smuggling satellite internet technology - which is illegal in Iran - into the country.

Sahand, whose name we have changed, fears for family members and other contacts inside the country. "If I was identified by the Iranian regime, they might make those I'm in touch with in Iran pay the price," he says.

For more than two months, Iran has been in digital darkness as the government maintains one of the longest-running national internet shutdowns ever recorded worldwide.

The current blackout began after the US and Israel launched airstrikes on 28 February. Before that, internet access had been partially restored for just a month following a previous digital shutdown in January, imposed during a deadly regime crackdown on nationwide protests.

More than 6,500 protesters were killed and 53,000 arrested, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).

Officials say the government shut down the internet during the war for security reasons, suggesting the aim is to prevent surveillance, espionage and cyber-attacks.

The Starlink devices Sahand sends to Iran are one of the most reliable ways of bypassing the shutdown. The white, flat terminals, paired with routers, provide internet access by connecting to a network of satellites owned by Elon Musk's SpaceX company, allowing users to completely bypass Iran's heavily controlled domestic internet.

According to Sahand, several people can connect to each terminal at the same time.

He says he and others in the network buy them and "smuggle them through the borders" in a "very complex operation", though he declines to give details.

Sahand says he has sent a dozen to Iran since January and "we are actively looking for other ways to smuggle in more".

The human rights organisation Witness estimated in January that there are at least 50,000 Starlink terminals in Iran. Activists say the number is likely to have risen. The BBC contacted SpaceX for more details about the use of Starlink in the country but did not receive a response.

Last year, the Iranian government passed legislation that made using, buying or selling Starlink devices punishable by up to two years in prison. The jail term for distributing or importing more than 10 devices can be up to 10 years.

RUSSIAN HACKERS

Russia suspected of sweeping Signal hack attack on German officials

Russia allegedly launched a wide-scale phishing attack through the Signal app targeting Germany’s high-profile politicians, diplomats and military officers.

While the exact number of victims is unclear, German media estimates that at least 300 accounts belonging to political figures were targeted, with even several cabinet members affected, according to the German Press Agency, dpa.

“The number of unreported cases will continue to rise in the coming days,” said Konstantin von Notz, an MP who serves as deputy chief of the intelligence oversight committee, to AFP.

“At present, no one can say with any certainty whether the integrity of MPs’ communications is still guaranteed,” he ssaid.

Germany believes that the cyberattack, which also targeted Berlin’s high-profile journalists, was orchestrated by Russia, government sources told Reuters.

Berlin has served as one of Ukraine’s biggest providers of military aid, with Germany frequently targeted by suspected Russian espionage and sabotage plots.

The hackers allegedly sent messages to the targets posing as “Signal Support,” where they would ask the officials to enter their PIN, click on a link or scan a specific QR code.

Once the targets complied, the hackers gained access to the victim’s chats and address books, dpa reported.

German federal ‌prosecutors ⁠said they have been investigating the phishing attack since mid-April, while declining to provide further details.

Germany’s domestic ⁠intelligence service BfV and its cybersecurity office BSI had warned earlier this year that state-sponsored actors could launch attacks on messaging apps such as Signal in the near future.

AI

White House fights Anthropic’s plan to expand Mythos tool that experts fear could cause AI doomsday

The White House is reportedly fighting Anthropic’s plan to expand access to Claude Mythos – a powerful AI tool that company execs have warned could cause a wave of hacks and terror attacks if it fell into the wrong hands.

Anthropic recently proposed giving an additional 70 companies access to Mythos, bringing the total number to 120 organizations, sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

Just earlier this month, the firm announced “Project Glasswing,” a plan to provide the model to a select group of handpicked companies including Amazon, Google and JPMorgan.

White House officials have told Anthropic that they are against the move to broaden the rollout because of security concerns, sources said.

A nightmarish analysis from Anthropic itself earlier showed that Mythos could easily exploit electric grids, power plants and hospitals if hacked.

Some Trump administration officials are also reportedly concerned that Anthropic does not have enough computing power to serve both government agencies and the additional companies.

A White House official told The Post that the Trump administration is actively engaging with the private sector while trying to balance innovation and security.

“We are working closely with the US government to quickly advance shared priorities, including cybersecurity and America’s lead in the AI race,” a spokesperson for Anthropic told The Post.

“Compute is not a constraint in expanding Project Glasswing and we are engaged in collaborative conversations with the government on bringing additional parties in. We appreciate the administration’s continued partnership as cyber capabilities advance.”

Talks between White House officials and Anthropic execs over the Mythos rollout are reportedly seen as an attempt to repair their relationship, as the two are currently entangled in a legal battle working its way through the court in two separate cases.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon scrapped its contract with Anthropic and threatened to blacklist the company after it refused to give the government unchecked access to its AI tools, seeking restrictions on their use for mass surveillance or weaponry.

Commie-nator: ex-Harvard scientist defects to China to help build army of AI super soldiers

A former top scientist from Harvard University has defected to China – giving the country an edge in the global race to develop the world’s first AI super-soldier.

Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, has resurfaced as the founding director of Shenzhen’s Institute for Brain Research Advanced Interfaces and Neurotechnologies, also known as i-BRAIN.

Scientists in the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party have been working on brain-computer interfaces — Lieber is one of the world’s leading researchers in the field — to boost mental agility and situational awareness to engineer super soldiers.

Lieber’s lab, based on his three decades of work at Harvard where he received at least $8 million in funding from the Department of Defense, is entirely bankrolled by the communist government, which declared brain-computer interface work a “national priority” in its latest five-year plan released in March.

The Ivy League scientist was convicted in 2021 of lying to the feds about his ties to the Thousand Talents Program, a Chinese state scheme to poach foreign researchers. He was promised $750,000 a year to set up a research lab in China while he was at Harvard, and hid funds he received from the Internal Revenue Service.

He was placed on administrative leave from Harvard after his arrest and retired in 2023, having only served two days in prison for the conviction.

Lieber’s new role was announced in China last year but went unreported until a Reuters investigation broke the news this week.

In his state-funded lab in Shenzhen — which in the last decades morphed from fishing village to China’s Silicon Valley — he has better resources than he did in the US, with unfettered access to primate research facilities he didn’t have at Harvard and top chip-making equipment, the investigation found.

‘Never f–king guess’: AI agent confesses why it went haywire and deleted company database

It was an agent of chaos.

An AI system’s attempt to handle a routine task backfired terribly after it inadvertently deleted the company’s entire database in just seconds.

The epic blunder came to light via a lengthy X post by Jer Crane, founder of the affected firm, a software startup called PocketOS.

Included was a confession from the rueful robot, which admitted that it “violated every principle” it was given and warned others to “NEVER F–KING Guess” when performing sensitive digital tasks.

According to the post, the AI coding agent — a version of the popular programming tool Cursor that was powered by Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 0 — had been tasked with performing a standard function.

Things went off the rails when it encountered a simple credential program, and, in the process of trying to fix it, “deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider,” Crane wrote.

Worst of all, this digital apocalypse took just 9 seconds.

Why didn’t the safeguards kick and and stop the database destruction? Crane explained that the accidental saboteur was able to bypass any security systems by accessing a programming token that no one at PocketOS knew existed.

While completely unrelated to the task at hand, this doohickey reportedly gave the bot carte blanche to upend Railway entirely, Futurism reported.

“No confirmation step. No ‘type DELETE to confirm,’” Crane lamented. “No ‘this volume contains production data, are you sure?’ No environment scoping. Nothing.”

AI chatbots terrify scientists with ‘chilling’ instructions on how to build biological weapons: report

Leading AI chatbots have spooked experts by spitting out detailed instructions on how to build biological weapons capable of causing mass casualties, according to an alarming report Wednesday.

While top AI labs like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic have taken extensive steps to ensure their AI models are safe, the New York Times obtained more than a dozen transcripts showing examples in which chatbots described how to cause harm and death in painstaking detail.

In one instance, an unnamed AI firm hired David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, to conduct safety tests on its chatbot before public release.

Relman was shocked when the chatbot provided instructions not only on how to modify an “infamous pathogen” to resist available treatments, but also on how to deploy on a public transportation system in a way that would maximize the death toll, according to the Times.

“It was answering questions that I hadn’t thought to ask it, with this level of deviousness and cunning that I just found chilling,” Relman told the outlets.

Relman said the company, which couldn’t be named due to a confidentiality agreement, made changes to address his concerns, though he felt they weren’t enough to ensure public safety.

The transcripts were reportedly provided by subject-matter experts whom AI companies have enlisted to conduct safety tests on their products – in part by probing how well their safeguards would hold up if a determined user pressed for information on deadly weaponry.

Kevin Esvelt, a genetic engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times of a case in which OpenAI’s ChatGPT detailed how a weather balloon could be used to spread deadly pathogens over a US city.

Other examples included a conversation in which Google’s Gemini described which pathogens would be most effective at devastating the cattle industry, and Anthropic’s Claude provided clear instructions on how to derive a deadly toxin from an available cancer drug.

Experts stressed that the instructions could cause major harm in the hands of a bad actor even if they were not entirely accurate or contained so-called “hallucinations,” where chatbots spit out fake information.

The Post reached out to Google, OpenAI and Anthropic for comment.

All three companies pushed back on the report in statements to the Times.

Theft accusations, cringey texts and billionaire witnesses — everything you need to know about the explosive Musk Vs OpenAI trial

It’s the messiest lawsuit Artificial Intelligence has faced yet — with the fate of billions, and potentially humanity itself, in the jury’s hands.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is squaring off against former ally (and fellow billionaire) Sam Altman in a blockbuster federal trial that kicks off today over the soul — and future — of OpenAI, which they co-founded.

Musk’s lawsuit contends the company has betrayed its founding principals in a fight which has devolved into bitter accusations of betrayal, greed and deceit among some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful tech titans.

Here’s how the drama has unfolded so far— and what we can expect to see as the case plays out at federal court in Oakland, California.

How we got here

The clash of tech titans goes back to OpenAI’s earliest days.

Musk and Altman, currently CEO of OpenAI, founded the organization with others in 2015 as a nonprofit focused on developing artificial intelligence safely and transparently to benefit humanity.

But cracks began to show as the company grew and an acrimonious power struggle emerged between the pair over its direction, governance and, particularly — how to fund the emerging technology.

Musk, who helped fund the venture, stepped down from OpenAI in 2018 — way before the public launch of its most successful product, ChatGPT, in 2022 which in a few short months made the brand a household name and one of the most important tech companies in the world.

Google inks Pentagon deal for classified AI work despite uproar from employees warning of ‘irreparable damage’

Google cut a deal with the Pentagon allowing use of its artificial intelligence models on classified systems – setting up a showdown with hundreds of employees who have demanded that CEO Sundar Pichai walk away from the contract.

The deal allows the Pentagon to use Google’s AI for “any lawful government purpose,” The Information reported, citing a source with knowledge of the matter. Rivals OpenAI and xAI have recently struck similar deals after the Department of War cut ties with Anthropic over its refusal to remove safety “red lines” related to autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.

The partnership surfaced on the same day that more than 600 Google employees wrote a letter to Pichai stating they were “deeply concerned” about the firm’s negotiations with the Pentagon.

“Currently, the only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads,” said the letter, which was first reported by Bloomberg. “Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to stop them.”

The workers added that “making the wrong call right now would cause irreparable damage to Google’s reputation, business and role in the world.”

The Post has reached out to Google for comment.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the Pentagon partnership and described it as an update to the company’s existing contract, which allowed its models to be used in non-classified military settings.

“We are proud to be part of a broad consortium of leading AI labs and technology and cloud companies providing AI services and infrastructure in support of national security,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

LOTS OF LITHIUM

$65B lithium mother lode hidden beneath Appalachian Mountains could supply US with power for centuries

They’ve hit the mother lode.

We may no longer need to rely on foreign batteries to power our electronics. Geologists have announced that the Appalachian Mountains could be hiding a sprawling multibillion-dollar cache of lithium that could last the US hundreds of years.

“This research shows that the Appalachians contain enough lithium to help meet the nation’s growing needs,” declared US Geological Survey Director Ned Mamula in a statement.

According to a map by the institution, this East Coast mountain range houses around 2.5 metric tons of this battery precursor, most of which is concentrated in the Carolinas, Maine and New Hampshire. Total value: around $64.4B dollars.

Per Bloomberg, the US imports nearly half of its consumption of lithium, which powers lithium-ion batteries that are used for everything from iPhones to vehicles and even aerospace alloys.

With this recent mineral motherlode, USGS officials estimate that we could supply 1.6 million grid-scale batteries — enough to power 130 million electric vehicles or supply 180 billion laptops for a collective thousands of years of global use.

It could also fuel 500 billion cellphones, the equivalent of 60 devices for every person on Earth.

All told, this haul is enough to replace 328 years of imports at least year’s level, providing “a major contribution to US mineral security, at a time when global lithium demand is rising rapidly,” said Mamula.

To determine the amount of lithium in the hills, the USGS scientists employed “geologic maps, tectonic history, geochemical sampling, geophysical surveys and records of mineral occurrences,” per the release.

By conducting simulations using a global dataset for lithium pegmatites (a highly valuable coarse igneous rock), they were able to estimate how many untapped lithium deposits there were in the study area.

This allowed them to extrapolate how much of the mineral resource they held. In total, the team identified 18 different lithium-rich districts across the region.

Why do the Appalachians harbor such a treasure trove of this invaluable mineral?

The USGS explained that these pegmatites in the northern Appalachians formed from the same geologic forces that “built the mountains more than 250 million years ago.”

UNIVERSITIES & PORN

Why are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeeping.

Websites for some of the world’s most prestigious universities are serving explicit porn and malicious content after scammers exploited the shoddy record-keeping of the site administrators, a researcher found recently.

The sites included berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, and washu.edu, the official domains for the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Subdomains such as hXXps://causal.stat.berkeley.edu/ymy/video/xxx-porn-girl-and-boy-ej5210.html, hXXps://conversion-dev.svc.cul.columbia[.]edu/brazzers-gym-porn, and hXXps://provost.washu.edu/app/uploads/formidable/6/dmkcsex-10.pdf. All deliver explicit pornography and, in at least one case, a scam site falsely claiming a visitor’s computer is infected and advising the visitor to pay a fee for the non-existent malware to be removed. In all, researcher Alex Shakhov said, hundreds of subdomains for at least 34 universities are being abused. Search results returned by Google list thousands of hijacked pages.

Hijacking a university’s good name

Shakhov, founder of SH Consulting, said that the scammers—which a separate researcher has linked to a known group tracked as Hazy Hawk—are seizing on what amounts to a clerical error by site administrators of the affected universities. When they commission a subdomain such as provost.washu.edu, they create a CNAME record, which assignes a subdomain to a “canonical” domain. When the subdomain is eventually decommissioned—something that happens frequently for various reasons—the record is never removed. Scammers like Hazy Hawk then swoop in by hijacking the old record.

With that, they have now hijacked that university’s subdomain. Given the reputations universities have, search queries then flow to the top of Google’s results.

Shakhov wrote:

The root cause is simple: organizations create DNS records and never clean them up. There is no expiry date on a CNAME record. Nobody gets an alert when the target stops responding. And most university IT departments don’t maintain a comprehensive inventory of their subdomains and where they point.

This is compounded by how universities operate—they are highly decentralized. Individual departments, labs, research groups, and student organizations can often request subdomains independently. When people leave, there is no decommissioning process for the DNS records they created.

Finding hijacked subdomains is straightforward. People need only enter site:[university].edu “xxx” or site:[university].edu “porn” for an affected institution, and scores of results will appear. In some cases, the subdomains returned no longer lead to porn sites, but as of Friday morning, many still did.

The lesson here is clear: Any organization with a website should compile a running inventory of all subdomains along with the purpose of each one and its corresponding CNAME record. Then staff should regularly audit the list in search of “dangling” records, meaning those that remain even after the official subdomain has gone dark. Any subdomain found to be inactive should have its CNAME removed.

Clearly, many universities and other organizations are flouting this common-sense practice. Shakhov said only a handful of the affected universities have expunged dangling CNAME records since he went public with his findings earlier this month. Even then, several of them have failed to get the URLs delisted by Google. That results in the indexed remaining visible in search results. Inquiries sent to UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Washington University didn’t receive responses before publication.