News
- A new Linux malware variant offers advanced features and evasion mechanisms
- It has already infected thousands of devices around the world
- Passwords, credit card info, and more, at risk
A brand new Linux malware has been found infecting thousands of computers around the world, stealing people’s login credentials, payment information, and browser cookies, security researchers are warning.
SentinelLabs and Beazley Security issued a joint report detailing the activities of PXA Stealer, a new Python-based infostealer for the Linux platform.
It was first spotted in late 2024, and has since grown into a formidable threat, successfully evading defense tools while wreaking havoc across the globe.
Side-loadingSince its inception, PSA Stealer has seen multiple iterations, with the latest one stealing information from roughly 40 browsers - saved passwords, cookies, personally identifiable information (PII), autofill data, authentication tokens, and more.
It can target browser extensions for various crypto wallets, including Exodus, Magic Eden, Crypto.com, and many others, and can pull data from sites such as Coinbase, Kraken, and PayPal. Finally, it can inject a DLL into running browser instances to bypass encryption mechanisms.
PSA Stealer is apparently being distributed through phishing emails and malicious landing pages. The malicious attachments contain a legitimate program (such as a PDF reader) and a weaponized DLL. The program sideloads the DLL, successfully deploying the malware while not raising any alarms.
More than 4,000 computers were infected with PSA Stealer in 62 countries, the two companies said, suggesting that the campaign is rather successful.
However, the attackers - who seem to be of Vietnamese origin - aren’t interested in using the stolen data themselves, and instead are selling it on the black market - in a Telegram group.
The majority of the victims are located in South Korea, the US, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Austria.
"Initially surfacing in late 2024, this threat has since matured into a highly evasive, multi-stage operation driven by Vietnamese-speaking actors with apparent ties to an organized cybercriminal Telegram-based marketplace that sells stolen victim data," the researchers explained. So far, more than 200,000 were stolen passwords, as well as hundreds of credit card information and more than four million cookies.
Via The Register
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- Battlefield 6 will be a "gritty and real" experience like earlier entries in the series
- Battlefield Studios UX director Alan Pimm said the game will have a different atmosphere to Battlefield 2042
- The developer also said it's "not a military sim" but "it's got enough of that grit that you feel it's believable"
According to EA, Battlefield 6 will be a modern military shooter inspired by earlier entries in the series and designed to be a "gritty and real" experience for players.
Speaking in an interview with TechRadar Gaming at the Battlefield 6 multiplayer reveal event, Battlefield Studios user experience director Alan Pimm said that the game's return to a modern setting after the futuristic Battlefield 2042 was something that the studio knew players wanted.
"Battlefield 3 and 4 were our strongest muses," Pimm said. "They were the ones that were in that same kind of modern frame, which is what people want. They don't want ultra-modern or futuristic. They want the weapons of today, that was the strong thing that came out of the research."
The developer said the upcoming shooter will look very different from 2042, particularly in terms of color palette and overall atmosphere, and will return "back to the grit" the series is best known for.
(Image credit: EA)"It's remembering that dirt should be dirty. We're not a pristine, sterile environment anymore. You've got the dust, the particles, the mud... You're not running around in a hero cape," Pimm explained.
"You're not running around in a hero cape. You know you are the soldier on the battlefield with your friends in amongst the muck and the dust and the explosions. The fiber of everything we've done in this is going 'let's make it gritty. Let's make it gritty and real.'
"It's not military sim, that's not where we go, it's fun still, but it's got enough of that grit that you feel it's believable."
Battlefield 6 will launch on October 10, 2025, for PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC.
An early access period will begin on August 7-8, followed by open beta weekends on August 9-10 and on August 14-17.
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- Perplexity seen to be ignoring signals like robot.txt to scrape online sites
- It even found protected and hidden test sites from Cloudflare
- OpenAI adheres to responsible crawling, but Perplexity quiet for now
Cloudflare has accused AI giant Perplexity of scraping websites which explicitly disallowed crawling via robots.txt and other network-level rules by hiding its identity and conducting obfuscated crawling activity.
Researchers from the company said they observed Perplexity using multiple user agents, including one impersonating Google Chrome on macOS, as well as rotating IP addresses and ASNs to evade detection.
Alarmingly, Cloudflare detected millions of daily requests across tens of thousands of domains, highlighting the sheer scale of illegitimate scraping by one of the biggest companies in the space.
Perplexity is scraping sites it shouldn't beAccording to Cloudflare's analysis, in many cases, Perplexity ignored or didn't fetch robots.txt files - which are plain-text files placed at the root of a site to tell automated agents (like search engines, AI crawlers and link checkers) which URLs may or may not be fetched.
Tellingly, Perplexity also attempted to access test websites Cloudflare created, even though they were blocked via robots.txt and not publicly discoverable, while using undeclared crawlers that weren't even associated with its official IP range.
"Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences," the researchers write.
In response to its findings, Cloudflare has de-listed Perplexity's bots from its verified bots list. The company has also added new managed rule heuristics to detect and block stealth crawling.
In contrast, OpenAI's crawlers have so far respected robots.txt and block pages, using transparent identifiers and documented behavior to obtain information.
Perplexity denied wrongdoing, calling Cloudflare's post a "sales pitch", adding the identified bots weren't even theirs. TechRadar Pro has asked Perplexity for its comment.
Cloudflare urges bot operators to respect website preferences by being transparent, being well-behaved netizens, serving a clear purpose, using separate bots for separate activities and following rules and signals like robots.txt.
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- Clues in Windows 11 previews hint that AI is coming to the taskbar
- This could be in the form of an 'agentic AI' companion
- Exactly what its purpose would be is far from clear at this point
Microsoft could be planning to add an AI element to the taskbar in Windows 11, based on clues in preview builds and theorizing from the rumor mill.
27914 LXP changes. As always, some of these mentions already exist in beta/dev"Taskbar Companion" is mentioned in settingsConfirmation for various disk/partition tasks are now mentioned in settingsNumber and Currency formats mentioned under region1/2July 31, 2025
Windows Latest flagged that well-known leaker Xeno posted on X that they've found a 'Taskbar Companion' feature, which is mentioned in settings (as well as some other bits and pieces, including gaming-related capabilities).
There's no explicit mention of AI here, but Windows Latest notes that it has previously heard Microsoft was thinking about adding AI actions to the taskbar, and that this could be the mentioned companion(s).
The site says that another regular leaker of Windows-related happenings on X, PhantomOfEarth, has pointed out that references to companions were in a Windows Server preview build last month - and that Windows 11 previews have witnessed a mention of 'agentic companions' for the taskbar.
Windows Latest also brings our attention to a string in a recent Windows 11 preview build that's related to controlling 'visibility of agentic companions on the taskbar'.
Consider all this together, and the obvious theory – remembering that it is just speculation which needs to be heavily seasoned at this point – is that the taskbar companion functionality is tied in with agentic AI in some way.
That term refers to an AI agent, or helper, that would be fired up via the taskbar.
Analysis: double agent(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)If you want to get an idea of what might be in store for the taskbar, look no further than the Settings app in Windows 11, which has just got an AI agent (for Copilot+ PCs only). This facilitates an intelligent search to find the options you need to tinker with in Settings, so you can throw out a query such as 'How do I change the speed that my mouse pointer moves at?' and the AI will find that option for you - and maybe even offer a recommended setting in some scenarios.
That's useful, no doubt, but the question is: how might AI functionality such as this work in the taskbar? At this point, your guess is as good as mine, but if you want the latter, it could be tied into managing notifications or the calendar (off the system tray).
Alternatively, as Windows Latest hints, it might power some form of recommendations, like apps you might want to install, or websites you may want to visit, which could be piped to you via the taskbar (Microsoft already has this kind of functionality in the Start menu, of course). I sincerely hope that isn't the case, but this is a concept Microsoft has toyed with a bit for the taskbar in the past.
The worrying thing for me is that I'm struggling to think of something that could be genuinely useful in this theorized AI-infused taskbar scenario (whereas the agent in Settings has some clear value in terms of pepping up search functionality). The concern, then, is that this would be a case of more AI just for the sake of it.
At any rate, we are still in the very early stages of progress here, with only the vaguest clues in the background of Windows 11 that something might be happening with AI agents in the taskbar. So, it's far from clear that Microsoft has any such plans - but then again, the addition of more AI in Windows 11 would hardly be a surprise (perhaps for Copilot+ PCs only, as is the case with the Settings agent).
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