Month: May 2024

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Cybercriminals and spies working for nation-states are surreptitiously coexisting inside the same compromised name-brand routers as they use the devices to disguise attacks motivated both by financial gain and strategic espionage, researchers said.

In some cases, the coexistence is peaceful, as financially motivated hackers provide spies with access to already compromised routers in exchange for a fee, researchers from security firm Trend Micro reported Wednesday. In other cases, hackers working in nation-state-backed advanced persistent threat groups take control of devices previously hacked by the cybercrime groups. Sometimes the devices are independently compromised multiple times by different groups. The result is a free-for-all inside routers and, to a lesser extent, VPN devices and virtual private servers provided by hosting companies.

“Cybercriminals and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors share a common interest in proxy anonymization layers and Virtual Private Network (VPN) nodes to hide traces of their presence and make detection of malicious activities more difficult,” Trend Micro researchers Feike Hacquebord and Fernando Merces wrote. “This shared interest results in malicious internet traffic blending financial and espionage motives.”

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Streaming services like Netflix and Peacock have already found multiple ways to aggravate paying subscribers this week.

The streaming industry has been heating up. As media giants rush to establish a successful video streaming business, they often make platform changes that test subscribers' patience and the value of streaming.

Below is a look at the most exasperating news from streaming services from this week. The scale of this article demonstrates how fast and frequently disappointing streaming news arises. Coincidentally, as we wrote this article, another price hike was announced.

Enlarge / The Claude AI iOS app running on an iPhone. (credit: Anthropic)

On Wednesday, Anthropic announced the launch of an iOS mobile app for its Claude 3 AI language models that are similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. It also introduced a new subscription tier designed for group collaboration. Before the app launch, Claude was only available through a website, an API, and other apps that integrated Claude through API.

Like the ChatGPT app, Claude's new mobile app serves as a gateway to chatbot interactions, and it also allows uploading photos for analysis. While it's only available on Apple devices for now, Anthropic says that an Android app is coming soon.

Anthropic rolled out the Claude 3 large language model (LLM) family in March, featuring three different model sizes: Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, and Claude Haiku. Currently, the app utilizes Sonnet for regular users and Opus for Pro users.