News

• Hackers exploited trusted software updates to deliver malware directly into car head units
• Kaspersky says this is the first campaign tailored specifically for vehicle head units
• The malware can run silently without showing drivers any visible interface

Car head units are now being drawn into a growing wave of Android malware campaigns built for connected vehicle systems, experts have warned.

A newly discovered malware campaign is infecting these head units directly, systems that combine multimedia functions with, in some models, vehicle control.

According to Kaspersky, this campaign marks the first documented case of malware built specifically for this type of infection chain.

Researchers believe the activity can likely be traced back to the MoYu Group, a threat actor closely tied to the well-known BadBox botnet, which spread through the legitimate update mechanisms built directly into the firmware of Android-based head units manufactured by DoFun.

The infection chain originates from TWCore, a legitimate system app that is normally responsible for collecting analytics and updating head unit software remotely.

Attackers hijacked this trusted update channel using a specialized dropper called JarService to deliver previously unknown malware directly onto a range of affected devices.

Once successfully installed, the malware operated quietly as a regular background application without ever displaying any visible user interface.

Kaspersky identified nine distinct remote commands built into the malware, capable of displaying unwanted ads and executing various forms of ad fraud.

The malware also actively collected sensitive device information, including display resolution, device model, Wi-Fi network identifier, and the device's MAC address.

Investigators found clear technical links between this campaign and prior attacks launched against TV set-top boxes tied to the same broader threat group.

The research team claims that the botnet's administration panel shares embedded URLs with residential proxy service websites PXYEDGE and ProxyForU.

BadBox itself operates as a large, sprawling network of hijacked Android devices, including streaming boxes, phones, and tablets that arrive pre-infected from the factory.

Kaspersky has already formally notified the vendor about this ongoing abuse of its legitimate software distribution channel and update infrastructure.

According to statements from DoFun, the underlying issue has since been resolved across most affected devices currently deployed in the field.

Car head units can arrive factory-installed directly from the manufacturer or get added later to older vehicles as aftermarket upgrades.

Manufacturers frequently rely heavily on the Android operating system because it simplifies interface customization and essential system integration work considerably.

This widespread industry reliance means most standard Android applications, along with most existing Android malware, can potentially run on these devices.

Head units rarely store sensitive personal data directly on board, which on the surface might suggest only limited appeal to attackers.

However, they typically include active SIM card slots and maintain constant internet connectivity for navigation services and routine software updates.

That particular combination of persistent connectivity and comparatively weak security oversight makes these systems a genuinely attractive prospect for attackers going forward.

The overall scale of this particular campaign remains genuinely unclear, and whether other head unit manufacturers face similar exposure is not yet known.

• AMD says its rack-scale AI systems are now about four times more energy-efficient than its 2024 baseline, beating its own threefold interim target by 33%
• The company offers two alternative outcomes for that gain: the same compute in far fewer racks, or twenty times more compute for the same power, something that
• AMD's own figures can also be reverse-engineered to imply that each 2030 rack draws roughly 14.25x the power of a 2024 one

AMD has published a progress report on the efficiency goals it set in June 2025, revealing the numbers are already better than the company was aiming for.

Against a 2024 baseline, AMD says its rack-scale AI systems are now roughly four times more energy efficient, ahead of the three times it had projected for this point, a trend that, by its own calculations, represents more than double the historical industry trendline.

This aligns with a six-year commitment by the chip design giant, in which it has pledged to deliver a twenty-fold improvement in rack-scale energy efficiency for AI training and inference by 2030.

This is not the first time AMD has set itself a performance and efficiency goal. Its previous target, internally known as 30x25, aimed at a thirtyfold node-level improvement between 2020 and 2025, and the chipmaker finished ahead of its projections, clocking in at 38x,

AMD's efficiency and performance gains, if they hold as intended at 20x, can be flipped two ways: one could consider sizing down to larger, but singular racks to get their job done versus legacy hardware.

The flipside is easy to make at a time when everyone from AI startups to hyperscalers is pushing to increase compute whenever possible. AMD's efficiency gains could, in principle, allow its latest offerings in 2030 to deliver 20x the compute for the same power draw.

At a time when nobody in the industry is trying to buy less compute, AMD's offerings might be particularly appealing thanks to their efficiency gains, as projections indicate global data center electricity demand will more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours, roughly what Japan uses today as a nation.

AMD's gains come from its newest GPUs being an order of magnitude more efficient than their predecessors; the MI300X that anchors the baseline was a 750-watt part delivering up to 2.6 petaFLOPS of dense FP8.

For context, each current-generation MI455X in Helios offers between 7.7 and 15.4 times the floating-point performance, 2.25 times the HBM, 4.4 times the memory bandwidth, and four times the chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth, while consuming three times the power.

Its chief sustainability officer, Justin Murrill, told Trellis that every AMD team carries efficiency-per-watt targets for new products and that progress is tied to company-wide bonuses.

For now, AMD is ahead of schedule on a real, well-documented engineering goal. Hitting it, however, will not reduce the amount of electricity the AI industry consumes, as the efficiency and performance gains it offers will only fuel more demand for AI hardware that can use the saved power, even as demand for AI compute power continues to soar.

• Ultra Maritime pairs its Sea Spear passive sonar array with the AN/SSQ-125B active sonobuoy at the US Navy's Lanternfish 2026 exercise in a bid to detect underwater drones
• While neither sonar type is new, the distributed architecture that links both to Anduril's Seabed Sentry and the Navy's command systems generates usable, precise readings for unmanned underwater vehicles
• The chain detects and then alerts operators to the presence of potential hostile naval assets in the vicinity of sensors that work in tandem to generate more reliable information

The threat that keeps modern navies awake at night is no longer a single, quiet submarine that gave regular defenses the slip, but a plethora of cheap drones that come in all shapes and sizes and could target anything from a pier to an undersea cable or a pipeline, for example.

While modern navies use sonar to track larger submarines, small drones are much harder to track reliably, even as Ultra Maritime, a defense tech company, says it has an answer.

The company showed that a pairing of its Sea Spear, a deployable passive sonar array, with the AN/SSQ-125B, its active sonobuoy offering, could, when working in tandem, track unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) better.

It is important to know that neither of the hardware solutions used, passive sonar arrays or active sonobuoys, is a new creation; they have been deployed for years by the US Navy and many of its counterparts across the world since World War II to detect and track submarines.

The underlying approaches are even older: Passive listening and active pinging are two of the oldest techniques in the business, and both have existed since the First World War.

The intriguing part is the integration at play here and why it is tactically sound: Passive sonar is quiet, and it gives up nothing for the information it collects, including the listener's position, but it does get a bearing on any potential craft it does detect. Active sonar can then be used to determine range and location; however, for modern naval units, it is a double-edged sword, as it essentially announces one's presence in the region.

The tech essentially figures out whether anything is worth detecting by leveraging the first, then turns to the second to determine its specific location when needed. The company's Ocean of Things concept extends that to a mesh of autonomous sensors seeded from crewed and uncrewed platforms.

Ultramarine's approach allowed it to detect and classify UUVs of various sizes and sophistication in the US Navy's 2026 Lanternfish exercise. It has also announced that its Sea Spear is working with Anduril's Seabed Sentry to detect the same.

The timing is excellent for its buyer: defense contractor Lockheed Martin recently agreed to purchase Ultra Maritime from its private equity owner Advent for $3.45 billion, essentially adding it to the former's Rotary and Mission Systems division.

With navies struggling to identify and stop underwater drones that pose a persistent threat to their operations and defensive capabilities, Ultra Maritime's two-pronged approach seems like an interesting play to adopt. It combines already-existing scalable seabed infrastructure with a mesh of cheap listening arrays and expendable pinging buoys to get the job done.

• VK wants Apple to restore its apps or face millions in daily fines
• The Russian company is demanding 58 million rubles ($696,000) every day
• Apple removed several major VK apps following European Union sanctions

Russian firm VK has filed a lawsuit against Apple in a Moscow arbitration court, seeking restoration of several removed applications from the App Store.

Court records dated August 19 2026 show that the Russian technology company wants its applications restored to the platform without further delay.

Apple removed a range of VK-owned applications recently, including VKontakte, VK Messenger, VK Video, Odnoklassniki, Zen, Mail Cloud, Mail, Skillbox, and Youla, saying it was following sanctions imposed by the European Union against VK and its messaging subsidiary, Communication Platform LLC.

VK is asking the court to impose penalties of 58 million rubles per day, equivalent to roughly $696,000, if Apple fails to comply.

That figure breaks down across three services, with VKontakte accounting for 50 million rubles, or about $600,000, in daily fines.

VK Music would carry a penalty of 5 million rubles, or nearly $60,000, while Odnoklassniki would draw 3 million rubles, close to $36,000 daily.

The lawsuit names three separate Apple entities as defendants, including Apple Rus LLC, Apple Inc., and Apple Distribution International Ltd.

VK has requested that the daily fines begin accruing six days after the court issues its complete and final ruling in this case.

The European Union's sanctions accused VK and its messaging subsidiary of enabling surveillance, censorship, and the identification of government critics inside Russia.

Apple removed the applications from the App Store following that designation, and the same titles later disappeared from Google Play as well.

The Kremlin responded sharply to Apple's decision, with spokesperson Dmitry Peskov publicly demanding a formal explanation from the company itself.

Peskov argued that the removals called into question Apple's "reliability as a provider of commercial services" inside the Russian market.

The dispute unfolds against a broader pattern of legal friction between Western technology companies and Russian government authorities in recent years.

The Tagansky District Court recently fined Apple 500 thousand rubles (~$6,000) for a repeated violation of Russian federal legislation.

Similarly, a Moscow arbitration court ordered Google Ireland Limited to return more than $2.1 billion to Google's bankrupt Russian subsidiary.

That earlier ruling found the payments in question constituted unjust enrichment under Russian commercial law at the time of the case.

VK's case against Apple follows a similar legal strategy, relying on domestic courts to challenge decisions made by foreign firms.

Whether Moscow's arbitration system can meaningfully compel compliance from Apple, given its shrinking footprint in Russia, remains a genuinely open question.

Via United24media

There is no such thing as a stupid idea in Stuart Fails to Save the Universe — and I'm starting to think that there's no such thing as a boring idea, either.

As the gang leave behind their tribal oasis from episode 5 — which, let's face it, they ruined — we're back in a familiar suburban setting this week. The difference? Everyone eats plants and grass as if they were a Happy Meal at McDonald's.

No fast food favoritism here, but you get the idea. So, when does Stuart Fails to Save the Universe episode 6 arrive on HBO Max?

For US viewers, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe episode 6 will drop on Thursday, August 27 at 6pm PT/ 9pm ET.

Internationally, you're looking out for these timings:

• US – Thursday, August 27 at 6pm PT / 9pm ET
• Canada – Thursday, August 27 at 6pm PT / 9pm ET
• UK – Friday, August 28 at 2am BST
• India – Friday, August 28 at 6:30am IST
• Singapore – Friday, August 28 at 9am SGT
• Australia – Friday, August 28 at 11am AEST
• New Zealand – Friday, August 28 at 1pm NZST

New episodes of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe will make landfall every Thursday in the US and on Fridays everywhere else. Here are the all-important dates you need to know about:

• Episode 1: out now
• Episode 2: out now
• Episode 3: out now
• Episode 4: out now
• Episode 5: out now
• Episode 6: August 27
• Episode 7: September 3
• Episode 8: September 10
• Episode 9: September 17
• Episode 10: September 24