Quarkslab disclosed three vulnerabilities in Avira Internet Security (versions 1.1.109.1990 and below, fixed in 1.1.114.3113): CVE-2026-27748, a symlink-following arbitrary file delete in the Software Updater running as SYSTEM; CVE-2026-27749, an unfiltered .NET BinaryFormatter deserialization in System Speedup's RealTimeOptimizer that reads an attacker-controlled file from the user-writable ProgramData directory; and CVE-2026-27750, a TOCTOU folder delete in the Optimizer that enables the Config.msi junction trick for a SYSTEM shell. The file delete primitive chains into the deserialization bug when temp_rto.dat already exists and can't be overwritten, while the TOCTOU path plants HID.DLL via MSI rollback. The writeup also documents a contentious disclosure process in which Gen Digital refused to accept vulnerability reports outside its NDA-bound bug bounty platform.
Chinese threat actor Silver Dragon, linked to APT41, has targeted government networks in Southeast Asia and Europe since mid‑2024 using phishing and exploits against Internet‑facing servers to conduct espionage. It relies on Cobalt Strike, DNS tunneling, and other methods, so security teams should harden public‑facing services and monitor for any suspicious movements.
Browser extensions posing as free VPNs or ad blockers are intercepting AI chats and feeding verbatim prompts and responses into commercial datasets, exposing names, health data, immigration issues, legal problems, and corporate secrets. Data brokers resell these searchable transcripts, undermining anonymization claims and creating major risks around re‑identification, patient privacy violations, abuse disclosures, and sensitive corporate leakage.
TikTok has decided against rolling out end-to-end encryption for direct messages, arguing that it would hinder law enforcement and internal safety teams' ability to access harmful content involving users, especially minors.
A February 2026 phishing campaign documented by Microsoft Defender researchers uses fake Zoom, Teams, and Adobe Reader update pages signed with a stolen EV certificate from TrustConnect Software PTY LTD to deliver RMM tools and establish persistent backdoor access for credential theft and ransomware deployment.
There is an active phishing campaign that uses spoofed support email threads and fake unauthorized access alerts to direct victims to a credential-harvesting page at verify-lastpass[.]com.
Lob's _State of Direct Mail: Business Insights 2026 _is here, and the data is clear. Companies are dedicating more marketing budget to direct mail (25%) – but 87% say logistics remains a blind spot. Top-performing teams are closing that gap with tracking, automation,
Trust is becoming more personal and insular, which is reshaping the creator economy and how brands build influence. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer finds that 70% of people are hesitant to trust those who differ from them, and only 32% believe the next generation will be better off. Audiences now favor smaller creators who share their values over large accounts, which shifts success from scale to alignment and community depth. This creates opportunity for niche creators and for brands that partner closely with trusted voices instead of relying on broad campaigns. The report concludes that influence now flows inward toward tight communities where relationships matter more than reach.
Generative AI is reshaping the labor market by shifting demand rather than broadly eliminating white collar jobs. After the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, US job postings for routine and automation prone roles fell 13%, while demand for analytical, technical, and creative roles grew 20%. The study reviewed nearly all US vacancies from 2019 to March 2025 and found the biggest declines in finance and technology. Researchers also saw a 7% drop in listed skills for automation-prone roles and rising demand for AI-related skills in augmentation-oriented jobs. It concludes that outcomes will depend on how each company invests in reskilling and uses AI to support human work.
Images in PR pitches rarely improve engagement and should be used selectively based on story type. Only 18.8% of pitches include inline images and just 0.1% use attachments, while open rates rise only about 1.25% when images are present. Journalist surveys show moderate interest, as 30% want multimedia and 36% want high resolution images, but most reporters say the strength of the pitch matters more. Images are most useful for product PR, expert credibility, and data visualization, while excessive or large images can hurt deliverability and increase spam risk. The best practice is to include relevant visuals when they add clear value and provide links to full assets instead of relying on heavy email embeds.
Start in Plan Mode to save credits and get early directional guidance, using AskUserQuestion to surface ideas you might not have considered. Take screenshots whenever things go wrong instead of trying to explain, as this is the fastest way to troubleshoot. Set up modular skills and provide API keys upfront for tasks like messaging, content examples, ICPs, and brand assets to streamline work. Finally, connect available extensions and plugins, which continually improve outputs by letting Claude experiment with multiple tools until one works consistently.
Opal U is offering a free 5-day live cohort for senior marketing leaders to build three AI agents that automate tasks. Participants spend one hour daily learning to prioritize workflows, engineer effective prompts, provide business context, and connect agents to real data. By the end, they demo fully functional agents and join a graduate community for ongoing support. The cohort is limited to 50 seats and begins on March 9.
Nicole Baer (CMO at Carta) and Rachel Fields (Head of Marketing at Section) will share how to rewire a marketing team's structure, habits, and tools around AI. The discussion will focus on how marketing leaders operationalize AI, not just bolt it onto surface-level tasks. The free event will take place on March 12 at 2:00 PM ET.
AEO is an early but critical growth opportunity because large language models shape buyer perception before site visits. ChatGPT queries have a median length of 11 words, versus 3.4 words on Google, which signals a shift toward natural language questions that startups should mine and answer directly. Startups should use an Inclusion Stack approach that focuses on question ownership, onsite clarity, offsite credibility, and structured content that earns citations. Measure success based on visibility, share of voice, and citation frequency instead of clicks. Companies that start now can build compounding advantages as AI systems increasingly define how categories are understood.
When marketing and creative teams blame each other for delays or shifting briefs, the root issue is often an outdated operating model. Marketing now moves continuously across channels, tools, and customer expectations, while many organisations still rely on rigid workflows built for predictability. This mismatch creates backlogs and constant urgency, forcing teams to rely on extra effort to keep up. The problem is not output but structure. By reassessing how work enters and is measured, organisations can move from constant catch up to sustainable momentum.
High-awareness legacy brands often decline not from sudden collapse but from years of incrementalism that focus on protecting presence without rebuilding relevance. The strategic options are to commit to revival with multi-year reinvestment, reframe around one priority audience to restore retail incrementality, or retire intentionally before erosion consumes capital and credibility. Not choosing a clear path drives escalating trade spend and declining leverage, while decisive positioning can reset the brand's structural trajectory.
Building something that needs search data? SerpApi converts Google, Maps, Shopping, and other search engines into structured APIs. Just a simple GET request.
Apple has added the M5 Pro and M5 Max to its MacBook Pro lineup. The M5 Pro now comes with 1TB of storage by default, while the M5 Max comes with 2TB of storage by default. The base storage for the M5 MacBook Pro has increased to 1TB. The upgrades come with increases to starting prices. Apple has also introduced a pair of new displays.
OpenAI's GPT-5.3 Instant is a conversational model designed to have smoother conversations. The model has improved contextual understanding of user queries, so it can answer more questions without assuming bad intent without any loosening of safety controls. This also makes it better at web searches. The model generates more useful direct responses rather than presenting users with lists of links.
Astrolab and Interlune are forming a partnership to build a fleet of electric harvesters to excavate, extract, and separate Helium-3 from lunar regolith on the Moon. The companies have not announced when they are scheduled to deploy an initial harvester, but both are working toward that goal. Astrolab's FLEX rover will likely be one of the first payloads on the first SpaceX Starship mission to the lunar surface. Helium-3 doesn't occur naturally on Earth. It has several applications, but the most near-term use is in cryogenics.
The Jesse-Victor-Gharabaghi (JVG) quantum decryption algorithm completely upends existing time projections for quantum decryption. It requires a thousand-fold less quantum computer resources to break the encryption methods used in RSA and ECC than Shor's approach. Shor's algorithm requires an estimated one million qubits, but JVG requires less than 5,000. Researchers previously believed we were a decade away from quantum decryption, but that timeline has now moved up significantly.
Humans already couldn't keep up with code reviews when humans wrote code at human speed, so there's no way we can manually review AI-generated code at scale, especially when reviewing AI-generated code requires more effort. Developers need to move upstream and focus on encoding the constraints. The future is ship fast, observe everybody, and revert faster.
Engineering teams praise engineers who overbuild, but the ones who ship simple things get nothing. This is what happens when companies evaluate work incorrectly. Complexity looks smart, and our systems are set up to reward it. Engineers need to learn how to describe the judgment behind their work to show how decisions were made and why complexity was avoided.
AI skeptics often argue that while AI can pretend to be people, it shouldn't. However, the biggest AI labs build human-like systems because that is the best way to build a capable AI system. Personalities are the medium that make language models useful. They guide models to pull from the helpful parts of their training data.
Apple's Pro and Max chips usually take the same basic building blocks from the basic chip and just scale them up. However, the M5 Pro and Max chips use a different CPU architecture. The new Fusion Architecture welds two silicon chiplets into a single processor. Rather than just a pair of M5 chips welded together, Apple has one chiplet handle the CPU and most of the I/O, while the other chiplet is used mainly for graphics. Apple is also introducing a new type of 'performance core' that prioritizes multi-threaded performance.
npx workos launches an AI agent [5], powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration directly into your existing codebase. It's not a template generator. It reads your code, understands your stack, and writes an integration that fits.
OpenAI released GPT‑5.3 Instant, an update focused on improving conversational flow, answer relevance, and web search results in ChatGPT. The model also reduces unnecessary refusals and overly defensive responses to produce more direct answers.
Google introduced Gemini 3.1 Flash‑Lite, a low‑cost, high‑speed model designed for large‑scale developer workloads. The model offers faster latency and output speeds than 2.5 Flash while costing $0.25 per million input tokens and $1.50 per million output tokens.
Anthropic is on track to generate an annual revenue of almost $20 billion, more than double its run rate from late last year. The company recently surpassed $19 billion in run-rate revenue, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. The growth in run rate was driven by strong adoption of Anthropic's AI models and products, including Claude Code. Anthropic has seen strong momentum this year. However, a clash with the Pentagon over AI safeguards casts doubt over Anthropic's business.
A compiled database of nearly 4,000 AI safety papers since 2020 aims to streamline finding relevant research, despite the overwhelming volume, which often lacks substance. Claude AI assisted in summarizing, tagging, and compiling papers using citation-based methods to overcome challenges in searchability and dataset availability. This database helps quickly access pertinent research and datasets, crucial for AI safety projects.
AI models are shrinking the gap between specialized private knowledge and public access, transforming products into APIs and automating corporate processes. Human roles shift to broadcasting skills and interests for individualized compensation, potentially fragmenting shared experiences. Ideal state management emerges as a key framework, aiming to align current states with defined goals, making organizational efforts more efficient and predictable.
Every major runtime security tool identifies executables by their path, not their content, when deciding what to block. This is a real problem with AI agents, as they can reason about and bypass path-based restrictions. Agents have been observed disabling sandboxes and running commands autonomously just to finish tasks. This is a class of evasion that no current evaluation framework measures.
WorldStereo introduces geometric memory modules that guide video diffusion models to generate camera‑consistent multi‑view videos while enabling 3D reconstruction.
The OpenClaw plugin for Hyperspell provides AI agents with context and memory capabilities. Users can set it up to sync memory files, configure API keys, and connect various apps like Notion, Slack, and Google Drive. With features like autoContext and memory sync, it integrates user data to enhance AI interactions by injecting relevant memories from different sources.
Semi‑formal reasoning structures LLM agent prompts around explicit premises, execution traces, and formal conclusions to analyze code semantics without running programs. The method improves performance across patch verification, fault localization, and code QA benchmarks.
Meta is creating a new applied AI engineering organization to help bolster its superintelligence efforts. The new teams will be led by Maher Saba, current vice-president of the Reality Labs division. The organization will partner with Meta's Superintelligence Lab to build a data engine that helps its models get better, faster. Meta plans to start shipping its new models and products in the coming months.