VisionHeight, an Israeli threat intelligence firm, uncovered a network of hyperlocal websites spanning at least 14 US states, built to influence how AI chatbots answer questions about local and state races. Sites with names like "Wolverine State Report", "Peach State Bulletin" and "Tarheel State Report" repeat hundreds of near-identical s…
GreyNoise observed automated scanners impersonating the web crawlers of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Amazon while requesting environment files, cloud access keys, private keys and password stores. A cluster of 13 forged AI crawler names from eight companies was seen; six names (belonging to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google…
F5 Labs' 2025 Advanced Persistent Bots Report analyzes more than 200 billion web and mobile API transactions from F5 Bot Defense customers between November 2023 and September 2024. It finds that 10.2% (21.22 billion) of requests were bots or automation. Of these, 4.8% were unwanted bots mitigated by F5, 3.5% were flagged automation and 2.…
WhatsApp help pages carried hidden instructions for its WhatsApp Support with AI chatbot. They told it not to recommend a data protection authority to users who could not delete their accounts, and not to cite privacy laws such as the GDPR once a user mentioned a lawyer, lawsuit or court. This contradicts WhatsApp's privacy policy for Eur…