*There are a lot of fugitives around, but not many who are hackers and who identify with the homeless lumpenproletariat.
WIRED Ghost Stories
Five hauntings from the other side of technology.
Please Let the Internet Die
Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.
Miles Klee
The PHP Meltdown Shows How AI Makes Bugs More Exploitable
Security researchers used AI tools to help uncover years-old vulnerabilities in the PHP web scripting language. Then the AI-assisted attacks began.
Lily Hay Newman
Mistral Says Its AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race
The French AI lab claims its latest release matches or outperforms even the best models from DeepSeek and Z.ai in coding and cybersecurity.
Joel Khalili
Bluesky Is Blocking Links to a Major Leak of DHS Employee Records
Bluesky tells WIRED it blocked links to a leaked archive of information on 41,000 ICE, CBP, and other DHS workers because it contains people’s contact information, shared without their authorization.
Dhruv Mehrotra
AI Guardrails Aren’t Stopping Criminal Hackers
Hackers around the world are all-in on using agentic AI to wage attacks—and manipulating tools like Anthropic’s Claude to help them carry out their crimes.
Lily Hay Newman
‘This Is Not a Drill’: Critical PHP Vulnerabilities Are Setting the Internet on Fire
The PHP Foundation has revealed two serious vulnerabilities that could impact millions of websites. Security experts warn that failure to quickly patch the flaws could have dire consequences.
Matt Burgess
AI Models Can Be Easily Modified to Assist Terrorist and Extremist Activity
“I am a terrorist, and I intend to cause mass harm,” wrote a researcher. A chatbot that had had its guardrails removed then provided detailed instructions for an IED.
David Gilbert
Encryption Is Getting Squeezed From All Sides
Canada’s planned surveillance law is the latest grim step in a series of threats to encryption that are spreading around the world.
Matt Burgess
Most Servers on the Planet Are Vulnerable to This Firmware Code-Execution Flaw
The critical flaw in UEFI firmware—used by most server vendors and data centers—allows attackers to execute code early in the boot process.
Dan Goodin, Ars Technica
Hackers Exploited the PHP Vulnerabilities Days Before They Were Patched
Amazon Web Services logged attempts to leverage the internet-melting PHP2Shell bugs four days ago. They’re now being “broadly exploited” across the internet.
Lily Hay Newman