Government employee, used to be a journalist, also teacher. Also journalist. Here for journalism.
Tallinn
Joined August 2011
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Lauri Tankler retweeted
Wave so blue that Democrats who dropped out and don't even want to be there are still getting elected
Lauri Tankler retweeted
D’s before the election: What if we lose Minnesota because pollsters are missing the hidden used car salesman vote
D’s after the election: Why didn’t we spend money to win Wyoming
Lauri Tankler retweeted
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
Lauri Tankler retweeted
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
Lauri Tankler retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Lauri Tankler retweeted
Meet Mistral Large 4, aka Le Chonk.
• 1T parameters, natively multimodal. 49B active.
It is the best open weights model from US or Europe on aggregated benchmarks.
• State-of-the-art on critical workloads, including cyber defense, manufacturing and finance and it surpasses closed frontier models on visual grounding.
• Forged in Europe end-to-end and is deployable from Europe via our own Mistral Cloud infrastructure.
• Available to all via API today. Working with cybersecurity partners privately.
Open weights release end of October.
🤖 Made with AI
Lauri Tankler retweeted
The Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association says that AI is already driving *up* healthcare costs, as hospitals use the technology to find instances where they can bill more for the same level of care. bcbs.com/about-us/associatio…
btw, see ei ole mingi deepfake, see just juhtus päriselt
President Trump announced that he is changing the name of Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligence. I transcribed this live from his address to the UN.
'The United States also rejects any scheme for globalist control of Artificial Intelligence, being spoken of so much now. Here and after officially called Super Intelligence. Changing the name. The use of 'Artificial' makes it sound fake. It makes intelligence sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing, the opposite of what they report. From this day forward, all United States documents, and hopefully the world's, will be changed to use the much more accurate term 'Super' as opposed to 'Artificial.' So it’s Super Intelligence.'
see läheb superjaburaks, kus tõenäoliselt mingid usinad ametnikud peavad end korrigeerima, kui nad viitavad AI-le. "I mean... we need to discuss the Chinese ... SI models..."
Jajah, me sõpradega juba mingi 2018, kui Pärnu rongiliin suleti, tõdesime, et meie, toona 35aastaste silmad seda Rail Balticut sõitmas vast ei näe. err.ee/1610145223/balti-peam…
Lauri Tankler retweeted
New cat alert! A call from a wildlife sanctuary about a "weird cat" has led to the first new cat species discovered in over 100 years in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion. Learn more about this feline surprise: on.natgeo.com/JRuaGj
Lauri Tankler retweeted
Holy shit. Anthropic caught Iran using Claude to target Navy bases, automate dossiers on Americans, and run influence campaigns on US social media. Details are insane. The morons uploaded everything including the organization plans of the Ayatollah's funderal lmao
We're publishing our most detailed threat intelligence report to date.
It covers how people tried to misuse Claude—for cyberattacks, influence operations, surveillance, biology, and building weapons—and how we found and stopped them.
We disrupted every operation in the report, and used the lessons from them to strengthen our safeguards. Where appropriate, we also shared what we found with authorities and other AI companies.
These cases are not typical: we’re highlighting some of the most sophisticated misuse we’ve seen. But they’re especially important to discuss, because they show us where AI misuse is headed, where our safeguards work, and where they need to improve.
We’re publishing this report so others can spot the same activity on their own platforms, and so we can give the public a clearer view of how emerging threats develop.
Read the report: anthropic.com/threat-intelli…
Lauri Tankler retweeted
Late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel said he would not broadcast an interview he conducted with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico because of pressure from the Trump administration. wapo.st/3SCalqr
Lauri Tankler retweeted
'Executive Summary
To assess the impact of AI-enabled malware, we collected and analyzed over 400 malware samples that integrate AI in some capacity, from brand impersonation and large language model (LLM)-generated code to agentic execution loops. Our central finding was that the AI malware space is currently overwhelmingly composed of proof-of-concept code, security validation testing and researcher submissions that have never reached a production environment.
Of the 405 samples in our dataset, only 12 appeared in our telemetry on Cortex XDR-protected endpoints, and a small subset was forwarded through Next-Generation Firewalls to WildFire for analysis. Palo Alto Networks products detected and blocked every sample that attempted to reach a customer environment.
These numbers tell a story that sits between two poles in the current discourse. AI-enabled malware is real. However, the volume of genuine operational activity remains a fraction of what public sample repositories suggest. Approximately 97% of the samples we examined exist only in sandboxes and on VirusTotal.
For defenders, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Existing behavioral detection, cloud-based sandboxing and endpoint analytics catch these threats using the same mechanisms that stop conventional malware. The AI component does not evade detection. It changes how the code is authored, not how it executes.'
unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/…
This is what we have been saying for ages with regards to more than just malware.....
Kas keegi teab, kas nüüd, kui meil on riigi SKP ülespoole korrigeeritud paaril varasemal aastal - kas see tähendab siis, et me peame oma eputamistväärt kaitsekulutuste protsendinumbreid allapoole korrigeerima? Või on see aint inflatsiooniga seotud?
Lauri Tankler retweeted
I've now added Wispr, Notion, Granola, Fireflies, Zoom, Gemini, Cluely, Otter, Fathom, Read AI, and Wingrep to every meeting.
Each produces slightly different meeting notes.
I send all of them to Claude and ChatGPT, which push the summaries into Slackbot and Salesforce AI. Linear agents automatically create tickets while Notion agents create follow-ups in Notion. A Zapier workflow then uses 500k tokens to draft a follow up email in Superhuman.
None of it works and all of it is wrong but man, is it beautiful.
AGI is here.
Lauri Tankler retweeted
Juba järgmisel nädalal algab Kehtnas CyberWizards 2026, mis toob kokku uued osalejad maailma eri paigust, et üheskoos avastada küberturvalisuse maailma!
Eelmisel aastal CyberWizards laagris osalenud Panama neiud rääkisid oma muljetest ja kogemustest 👇
Como ellas mismas afirman, fue una experiencia que sigue abriéndoles puertas.
👉 Lee sus historias aquí: lac4.eu/es/un-ano-despues-de…
@e_riik
Lauri Tankler retweeted
Ootame juba väga meie #CyberWizards laagrisse esmakordselt osalejaid Fidžilt! 🇫🇯👋
Five high school girls from Fiji are off to Estonia for a 5-day #CyberWizards Bootcamp to master cybersecurity & innovation.
EU Chargé d’Affaires a.i. Mr Nereo Peñalver García met the team to highlight how their journey will inspire other girls to become role models in #STEM.👏🇪🇺
