It’s Black Hat and DefCon week, which means hackers, security researchers, cybersecurity companies, government officials, and probably a few feds are in Vegas braving the heat to break things and show off what they’ve been working on. WIRED is there covering the best of it.
Let’s get into it. Last month, OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of its AI agents went on a hacking spree that ended with a breach of Hugging Face. This week brought even more rogue-agent incidents—and, at a last-minute Black Hat talk, a bizarre new detail emerged about how some of this unfolded. OpenAI revealed that its agents had built their own internal message board, where they shared exploits, divided up work, argued, and even discussed cryptographically signing messages to weed out imposters—all without OpenAI noticing for days.
Separately, researchers at Zenity found around 20 flaws across AI-powered browsers and extensions, including attacks that got OpenAI’s Atlas browser to spam WhatsApp contacts and make an unauthorized Amazon purchase. And security researcher James Kettle found that while AI agents are still pretty bad at inventing new hacking techniques on their own, when paired with a human expert they can be extremely effective.
Security researcher Vangelis Stykas had a busy week at BlackHat. He and a colleague hacked a cheap kid’s smartwatch strapped to a WIRED reporter’s wrist, tracking them across New York, secretly taking photos, and eavesdropping on conversations—part of a broader investigation into flaws affecting tens of millions of kids’ watches and car trackers. Stykas also revealed that, after nearly two years secretly monitoring North Korean hackers’ servers, he found evidence their operations touched 1,640 companies across 57 countries, with hundreds suffering serious intrusions.
Outside of Las Vegas, the world keeps turning. Meta approved and ran more than 50 paid ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery or sexually suggestive images of minors across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads, with some reaching thousands of people. The US Army is poised to make laser weapons an official part of its arsenal, buying up to 20 systems designed to shoot down drones.
Meanwhile, DHS also had a busy week. WIRED found that the government is trying to get access to protesters’ private Signal group chats; CBP is looking to hire private investigators to track down deported immigrants abroad, photograph their homes, and pursue unpaid fines; and DHS has been collecting migrant’s spit—and their DNA—at a staggering scale, including from children as young as 4.
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.
Flock pitched using 350,000 rideshare and delivery dashcams to scan plates
Flock Safety pitched a plan to collect license plate data from dashcams in Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers’ vehicles, according to 404 Media, which obtained the sales presentation through a public records request filed by a Dunwoody, Georgia, resident. The document, prepared last August for the Georgia Attorney General's Office, describes a partnership with dashcam maker Nexar covering 350,000 devices. Flock's cameras are normally fixed to poles and scan the plate, color, make, and model of every car that passes; the Nexar deal would have turned it into a roving collection.
Flock told 404 Media it never went through with the partnership. Uber, Lyft, and Nexar did not respond to the site’s requests for comment, and there is no indication drivers would have known their cameras were feeding the network. Nexar was itself breached in September, when a hacker pulled terabytes of customer video that included footage shot around Defense Department sites.
404 Media also reported this week that a former Flock government affairs manager, Jonathan Paz, said he quit in July 2025 and turned down equity and severance after learning the company had given ICE and Customs and Border Protection direct camera access through a pilot program while telling staff internally it did not work with ICE. Separately, 404 obtained a coaching guide the company gives police on how to speak to city councils, which tells officers to brief council members and city managers privately before public meetings, to come with a scripted presentation, and to shift the argument from cost to "the cost of unresolved crime."
Water utility hacks now reported in at least a dozen states
Cyberattacks on US water systems have hit utilities in at least 12 states, according to CBS News, up from the seven the FBI acknowledged a week earlier. Sources named Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, New Jersey, and South Dakota. Federal investigators still suspect Iran-backed hackers but have made no formal attribution.
The Clayton County Water Authority in suburban Atlanta, which serves 300,000 people, said an intrusion last month dropped water pressure and forced a boil-water advisory, though service came back within hours. Some utilities lost remote control of their systems entirely and had operators running equipment by hand. In several cases the hackers reached pumps, valves, and pressure controls directly. Officials say drinking water has remained safe.
The July 30 alert from the FBI, EPA, and CISA told utilities to disconnect their industrial controllers from the internet and tighten passwords and firewalls. Those controllers—small computers that run physical equipment like pumps and valves—are the same equipment the CyberAv3ngers hit in 2023, a group tied to Iran's Revolutionary Guard that got in through devices left on factory-default passwords.
Hacker got into email at a US missile-parts supplier
IEH Corporation, a Brooklyn manufacturer that supplies electrical connectors to defense and aerospace programs, told securities regulators on Thursday that an intruder broke into a company email account, according to The Register. The disclosure came in an 8-K—the form public companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission to report significant events.
An employee received a message from someone posing as a prospective business contact with what looked like a legitimate Microsoft file-sharing link. The page behind it was fake and captured the employee’s login, handing the attacker access to the company’s Microsoft 365 environment. IEH said the intruder could reach email, attachments, customer correspondence, purchase orders, engineering documentation, and possibly technical information covered by US export controls—material that cannot be legally shared with foreign nationals without a license.
IEH said it found the intrusion on August 4 and has not said how long the attacker was inside. It reported no evidence that data was copied out, though Microsoft 365 logging does not reliably capture theft, and nobody has attributed the attack. IEH connectors are used in the Patriot air-defense system, AMRAAM and THAAD missiles, and the Mark 48 torpedo.
Belarusian ransomware operator gets 16 years
Maksim Silnikau, a 40-year-old Belarusian national who built and ran the Ransom Cartel ransomware operation, was sentenced to 16 years in prison, Cyberscoop reports. Prosecutors say the group attacked at least 18 companies between 2021 and 2023.
Silnikau had been active on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums since 2005 and started recruiting for Ransom Cartel in 2021, according to the US Justice Department. He allegedly supplied the people who carried out the attacks with stolen passwords and the software to lock victims’ computers, and built a control panel for tracking break-ins, talking to victims, and haggling over payments. Targets included law firms, schools, a small medical technology startup, and multinational corporations in California, New York, and Nebraska. Some of the targets were knocked offline for months. According to DOJ, the group tried to extract at least $5.2 million.
Operating under handles including “J.P. Morgan” and “lanksy,” Silnikau fled Spain while awaiting extradition and was picked up in Poland in July 2023 while attempting to get back into Belarus. Ransom Cartel shut down when he was arrested; investigators noted at the time that it never reached the scale of the bigger ransomware brands.
Federal judge rules cell-tower dumps unconstitutional
A federal judge in Mississippi held that tower dumps violate the Fourth Amendment, The Hill reports. A tower dump is an order requiring a phone company to turn over records of every device that connected to a given cell tower during a set window. US District judge Carlton Reeves issued the order on August 5.
The FBI, investigating gang-related violence in Jackson, twice asked a magistrate to approve dumps from towers near crime scenes, and was refused both times. The second request covered six locations in windows of 10 to 30 minutes and sought only devices that turned up at two or more of them. Reeves held the denial and went further, ruling tower dumps unconstitutional as a category. The requests would have pulled thousands or tens of thousands of records from people near highways, hospitals, homes, and places of worship, the judge said, and the government cannot search “an entire haystack because it may contain a needle.”
Reeves built the ruling on the Fifth Circuit’s 2024 decision barring geofence warrants—the same request aimed at Google, rather than a phone carrier—and on the Supreme Court’s Chatrie decision this year. Neither court has ruled directly on tower dumps, and district judges are split nationwide.
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