One Hacker, 1,200 Sites, $5,000
A hacker pointed AI agents at 1,200 shopping sites and reached sites at more than 100 companies. Musk promised every American kid a SpaceX share, and Apple set October 28 for its next Mac event.
Good morning. One hacker pointed AI agents at 1,200 shopping sites, Musk promised every American kid a SpaceX share, and Apple picked a date for its next Mac event.
One Hacker Pointed AI Agents at 1,200 Websites and Reached Sites at 100+ Companies
Security firm NorForge published a report Monday on Cairn, an open-source platform that coordinates teams of AI agents. A Chinese-speaking operator used it against more than 1,200 shopping sites in the US, Canada, Japan and Australia. Reuters says the agents reached sites at over 100 companies. It couldn't determine how much data, if any, was taken.
NorForge puts the cost at about $5 a task and roughly $5,000 for the campaign. About 10% of tasks reached their goal. Researcher Snorre Fagerland calls that about $50 per successful hack, a rough figure. Deere says it took remediation steps and saw no sign sensitive data was accessed. SharkNinja says a standalone support site was hit and contained. Cummins is investigating a possible attack on a vendor's site. Cairn's author says he didn't design it for hacking.
At $50 a break-in, small sites become worth the effort. If you run a store or a support portal, check your file-upload endpoints and rotate exposed keys this week.
Sources: Reuters, NorForge, The Next Web
Elon's Next Millionaires Start October 24?
Tesla made 5,000+ of its own employees millionaires. SpaceX minted 4,400 in a single day.
Now Elon's gearing up for his biggest venture yet. It's powered by an obscure AI firm he's relied on since 2012. Former Wall Street CEO Dylan Jovine calls it "Elon's 100X AI Stock."
His research says it could mint a whole new class of millionaires starting October 24. This time, you could be one of them.
Musk Pledges a SpaceX Share to "Every Kid in America" in 2027
Elon Musk said in an X post Monday that he'll give one SpaceX share to every kid in America in 2027. At about $146 a share and more than 70 million children, that's over $10 billion. He gave no mechanism and called it the first of many gifts.
He was answering Anthropic, which said Sunday it will commit 5% of its shares to a new public benefit fund. Musk's reply recommended giving shares directly to the public. Anthropic hasn't said whether it will.
Nothing is promised in writing yet. Watch for details from SpaceX this week. Until then, it's a post.
Sources: TechCrunch, CNBC, Fox Business
Intel Shows a GPU With Up to 480GB of Laptop-Class Memory
Intel detailed its GPU D-series, codenamed Crescent Island, for AI inference. Partner-built cards carry up to 480GB of LPDDR5X, the memory type used in laptops. Intel quotes 1.5TB/s of bandwidth, 1.3 petaflops of FP8 and 350W on an air-cooled PCIe card. Intel's own card has 160GB.
Those are Intel's numbers, with no independent benchmarks. StorageReview notes the bandwidth sits well below HBM-class accelerators. Customers are sampling now. Intel hasn't given a price or a ship date.
The pitch is capacity, not speed. If you're buying inference hardware this quarter, ask vendors for price per gigabyte of memory.
Sources: TechRadar, StorageReview, TechSpot
Apple Sets "Pro and Tell" for Wednesday, October 28
Apple will hold an event called Pro and Tell on Wednesday, October 28, at 10 a.m. Pacific. Greg Joswiak teased it on X Monday. Apple confirmed only the name, date, time and place. Macworld says it's a hands-on media event, not a livestreamed keynote.
Products are rumor. Macworld lists a touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro with M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, an M6 MacBook Pro, an M6 iMac and an iPad mini. Apple hasn't confirmed any of them.
If you're about to buy a MacBook Pro or iPad mini, eight days is a short wait.
Sources: Macworld, MacDailyNews, The Mac Observer
World Launches Human-Verification Tools for Banks
World, the identity company Sam Altman co-founded, launched World ID for banking and finance at Money20/20 in Las Vegas. It bundles the World ID app, World ID for Agents and World ID for Zoom. The Zoom tool, which helps confirm a caller is a person and not a deepfake, is now generally available.
Design partners include OpenExchange, Bain Capital, VanEck, Outtake and Pantera Capital. No bank is named. World's release cites a Deloitte forecast that US AI-enabled fraud losses could reach $40 billion by 2027, up from $12.3 billion in 2023. Pricing wasn't disclosed.
If your team approves payments over video calls, ask whether this fits your Zoom setup.
Sources: The Block, PR Newswire, CoinMarketCap
Tenstorrent Raises $1.5 Billion at a $6.2 Billion Valuation
Jim Keller's AI chip startup Tenstorrent raised a $1.5 billion Series E led by Trace Capital and Innovation X. Reuters says that more than doubles its valuation to $6.2 billion. Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, ARK Invest and T. Rowe Price also took part.
The Toronto company sells Galaxy servers and Blackhole cards built on open RISC-V designs. Virtu Financial runs trading agents on Galaxy servers, and Equinix offers them to enterprises. The money goes to Galaxy production, RISC-V research and hiring.
It's a funded Nvidia alternative with paying customers. If you're negotiating GPU capacity, you now have a name to cite.
Sources: Bloomberg, Reuters, SiliconANGLE
Elon Musk’s Fourth Wealth Window Set to Open by October 30
This Cybercab you see in this image is taking me to Elon Musk’s new project…
Which he called “the most epic AI project in history.”
This is so big that I believe it will open a brand-new “generational wealth window…”
And whenever Elon opens one of those windows, people get rich.
Microsoft: It added agent risk scoring alongside Project Perception, and says its tools now find 60 types of AI agents on employee PCs, including Claude Code, Codex and GitHub Copilot. Ask your admin what's visible.
Anthropic: The Wall Street Journal profiled the opaque five-member Long-Term Benefit Trust that shapes the company's governance as an IPO nears.
CyberSN: US cybersecurity job postings fell 26.4% year over year to 235,786 from January to September, a four-year low. AI security engineer postings rose 268%.
Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.