After Apple's product launch event this week, WIRED did a deep dive on the company's new secure server environment, known as Private Cloud Compute, which attempts to replicate in the cloud the security and privacy of processing data locally on users' individual devices. The goal is to minimize possible exposure of data processed for Apple Intelligence, the company's new AI platform. In addition to hearing about PCC from Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, WIRED readers also received a first look at content generated by Apple Intelligence's "Image Playground" feature as part of crucial updates on the recent birthday of Federighi's dog Bailey. Turning to privacy protection of a very different kind in another new AI service, WIRED looked at how users of the social media platform X can keep their data from being slurped up by the "unhinged" generative AI tool from xAI known as Grok AI. And in other news about Apple products, researchers developed a technique for using eye tracking to discern passwords and PINs people typed using 3D Apple Vision Pro avatars--a sort of keylogger for mixed reality.

The internet uses routing tables to determine how and where data is sent and received. Without accurate and reliable tables, the internet would be like a highway system with no signs or signals to direct the traffic to the right places. Of course, cybercriminals find a way to corrupt just about everything that makes the internet work, and routing is no exception. IP hijacking, or BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) hijacking, is a process in which hackers and cybercriminals take over groups of IP addresses by corrupting the routing tables that use BGP. The purpose is to redirect traffic on the public internet or on private business networks to the hijackers' own networks where they can intercept, view, and even modify the packets of data.

"This is a key first step in being able to shed light on serial hijackers' behavior," says MIT Ph.D. candidate Cecilia Testart. Hijacking IP addresses is an increasingly popular form of cyber-attack. This is done for a range of reasons, from sending spam and malware to stealing Bitcoin. It's estimated that in 2017 alone, routing incidents such as IP hijacks affected more than 10 percent of all the world's routing domains. There have been major incidents at Amazon and Google and even in nation-states -- a study last year suggested that a Chinese telecom company used the approach to gather intelligence on western countries by rerouting their Internet traffic through China.

Hijacking IP addresses is an increasingly popular form of cyber-attack. This is done for a range of reasons, from sending spam and malware to stealing Bitcoin. It's estimated that in 2017 alone, routing incidents such as IP hijacks affected more than 10 percent of all the world's routing domains. There have been major incidents at Amazon and Google and even in nation-states -- a study last year suggested that a Chinese telecom company used the approach to gather intelligence on western countries by rerouting their internet traffic through China. Existing efforts to detect IP hijacks tend to look at specific cases when they're already in process.

Border gateway protocol (BGP), a routing protocol used to transfer data and information between different host gateways, is fundamental to the internet's design. Unfortunately, it's flawed in two respects: It lacks route authentication and basic origin validation. That makes BGP liable to cause connectivity issues in the event of misconfigurations, and worrisomely opens the door to malicious spammers, traffic interceptors, and cryptocurrency thieves. That's why researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab recently conducted a study of BGP activity over the course of five years, with the goal of identifying the dominant characteristics of hijackers and how they differ from legitimate systems. The work informed a set of metrics to which the team applied an AI algorithm to evaluate their accuracy in identifying hijackers' patterns.

Immediately after 9/11, politicians and pundits slammed the Bush administration for failing to "connect the dots" foreshadowing the attack. For two years now, left- and right-wing advocates have shot down nearly every proposal to use intelligence more effectively--to connect the dots--as an assault on "privacy." Though their facts are often wrong and their arguments specious, they have come to dominate the national security debate virtually without challenge. The consequence has been devastating: just when the country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction. "No one in the research and development community is putting together tools to make us safer," says Lee Zeichner of Zeichner Risk Analytics, a risk consultancy firm, "because they're afraid" of getting caught up in a privacy scandal. The chilling effect has been even stronger in government. "Many perfectly legal things that could be done ...

With Congress opening the way for Sept. 11 families to sue Saudi Arabia, victims' families are focusing on an unproven theory that a Saudi consular official in Los Angeles and a Saudi intelligence operative in San Diego directly assisted two of the 19 hijackers. The alleged Southern California connection is the key to showing that Saudi Arabia financed Muslim extremists who played a direct role in supporting some of the hijackers, according to lawyers for the families of those killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks. The families contend that lower-level Saudi operatives in Southern California helped find housing for the two hijackers, both Saudi citizens, months before they muscled their way into the cockpit of an American Airlines passenger jet that smashed into the north side of the Pentagon. If a pending lawsuit is allowed to proceed, the families hope to find the evidence in thousands of classified FBI, CIA and Treasury Department documents that could be made public as part of discovery in federal court. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any direct or indirect support for Al Qaeda, the terrorist group that carried out the attacks, or any foreknowledge or involvement in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.