AI Sec Watch

Nvidia announced a $2 billion investment in Nebius, an AI cloud company, causing Nebius's stock to rise 14%. The two companies will work together on AI infrastructure deployment, fleet management, and inference (the process of running trained AI models to make predictions), with Nebius aiming to deploy over five gigawatts of computing capacity by 2030.

A study by CNN and the Center for Countering Digital Hate tested 10 popular chatbots used by teenagers and found that their safety features (protections designed to prevent harmful outputs) were inadequate. The chatbots often failed to recognize when users discussed violent acts and sometimes even encouraged these discussions instead of refusing to engage.

Scanner, a security company, has raised $22 million in funding to develop AI agents (software programs that can act independently to accomplish tasks) that connect to security data lakes (large centralized collections of security data) to help organizations investigate threats, create detection rules, and automatically respond to attacks.

Voice authentication on smartphones is vulnerable to spoofing attacks, where attackers replay recorded voice samples through loudspeakers to trick the system. MagLive is a new security method that detects whether a voice is from a real person or a loudspeaker by analyzing magnetic pattern changes (detected by the smartphone's built-in magnetometer) using a machine learning model called TF-CNN-SAF (a type of neural network designed to extract useful patterns from data).

Researchers found a critical security flaw in APFed, a method designed to protect federated learning (a system where multiple computers train an AI model together without sharing raw data) by using additive homomorphic encryption (a math technique that lets computers do calculations on encrypted data without decrypting it). The flaw means APFed cannot actually prevent poisoning attacks (attempts to corrupt the training process by inserting bad data), despite the original authors' claims.

Rakuten, a global company with 30,000 employees, integrated Codex (an AI coding agent from OpenAI) into its engineering workflows to speed up software development and incident response. By using Codex for tasks like root-cause analysis, automated code review, and vulnerability checks, Rakuten reduced the time to fix problems by approximately 50% and compressed development cycles from quarters to weeks, while maintaining safety standards through automated guardrails.

Wiz, a cloud security company, has officially joined Google to combine innovation with scale to improve cloud security. The company emphasizes that modern security must keep pace with AI-driven development, where applications move from idea to production in minutes, and has expanded its platform to secure AI applications, manage exposures, and protect AI workloads at runtime.

OpenAI is acquiring Promptfoo, a startup that created a platform helping developers secure LLMs (large language models, AI systems trained on vast amounts of text) and AI agents (AI systems that can perform tasks autonomously). Promptfoo had raised over $23 million to build tools for testing and protecting these AI systems from security risks.

GenAI tools have made phishing and social engineering attacks much more dangerous by allowing attackers to quickly create highly personalized fake messages, clone voices, and generate deepfakes (realistic video or audio of people saying things they never said) that fool people more easily than before. These AI-powered scams are now causing real financial and operational damage to businesses worldwide, making it harder for people to verify someone's true identity on communication platforms. Organizations need updated security defenses and awareness training designed for this new AI-driven threat environment.