Hacking groups are always working on new ways to perpetrate attacks, and now there’s evidence that a Russian outfit known as Turla has figured out a method of using Instagram to carry out its activities. Earlier this week, a report was published that suggests Britney Spears’ account on the photo-sharing service was used as a staging area for a Trojan attack.
The information published by antivirus developer Eset revolves around a Firefox browser extension, according to a report from Ars Technica. The extension purported to offer enhanced security, but in fact served to give the hackers a method of seizing control over an infected system.
A bit.ly URL directed the extension toward its command and control server, but the address was not actually present in its source code. Instead, it was hidden away in a seemingly random comment on one of Spears’ Instagram posts.
The extension would pore over each photo’s comments, computing a custom hash value for each string of text. When it found the comment with a hash that matched with the stipulated value of 183, it ran a regular expression — a sequence of characters that defines a search pattern — on the comment to translate it into the URL.
Eset researchers managed to discover a bit.ly URL hidden in this manner, which linked to a domain that has been used by Turla in the past.
The URL in question only received a small number of visits around the time when the Instagram post was published, which can be interpreted either as a sign that the malware is still being put through its paces, or that the attack was highly targeted.
Firefox developers are apparently in the process of tweaking the browser so that the current implementation of this attack won’t work in the future.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.