As generative AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini become more advanced, they are increasingly being put to work. Startups and tech companies are building AI agents and ecosystems on top of the systems that can complete boring chores for you: think automatically making calendar bookings and potentially buying products. But as the tools are given more freedom, it also increases the potential ways they can be attacked. Now, in a demonstration of the risks of connected, autonomous AI ecosystems, a group of researchers have created one of what they claim are the first generative AI worms--which can spread from one system to another, potentially stealing data or deploying malware in the process. "It basically means that now you have the ability to conduct or to perform a new kind of cyberattack that hasn't been seen before," says Ben Nassi, a Cornell Tech researcher behind the research.

The most paranoid among us already know the checklist to avoid modern audio eavesdropping: Sweep your home or office for bugs. Put your phone in a Faraday bag--or a fridge. Consider even stripping internal microphones from your devices. Now one group of researchers offers a surprising addition to that list: Remove every lightweight, metallic object from the room that's visible from a window. At the Black Hat Asia hacker conference in Singapore in May, researchers from Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev plan to present a new surveillance technique, designed to allow anyone with off-the-shelf equipment to eavesdrop on conversations if they can merely find a line of sight through a window to any of a wide variety of reflective objects in a given room. By pointing an optical sensor attached to a telescope at one of those shiny objects--the researchers tested their technique with everything from an aluminum trash can to a metallic Rubik's cube--they could detect visible vibrations on an object's surface that allowed them to derive sounds and thus listen to speech inside the room.

As flying, camera-wielding machines get ever cheaper and more ubiquitous, inventors of anti-drone technologies are marketing every possible idea for protection from hovering eyes in the sky: Drone-spotting radar. Now one group of Israeli researchers has developed a new technique for that drone-control arsenal--one that can not only detect that a drone is nearby, but determine with surprising precision if it's spying on you, your home, or your high-security facility. Researchers at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel have built a proof-of-concept system for counter-surveillance against spy drones that demonstrates a clever, if not exactly simple, way to determine whether a certain person or object is under aerial surveillance. They first generate a recognizable pattern on whatever subject--a window, say--someone might want to guard from potential surveillance. Then they remotely intercept a drone's radio signals to look for that pattern in the streaming video the drone sends back to its operator.