For years, North Korea's stealthy hackers and scam IT workers have infiltrated companies, stealing corporate secrets and plundering billions in cryptocurrency to help fund the totalitarian regime and its weapons programs. Now, a security researcher who has spent almost two years inside the systems belonging to a group of those North Korean hackers is raising the alarm on just how effective and far reaching the targeting of individual employees and contractors has been in breaching organizations across the globe. Since Greece-based cybersecurity researcher Vangelis Stykas gained access to North Korean systems 22 months ago, he says, he has found evidence that 1,640 companies across 57 countries have been impacted by the country's hacking operations. Among these, Stykas will detail at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today, around 700 to 800 of the impacted organizations have had 'really damaging' intrusions. 'It's company access, it's root access to servers, it's root access to AWS,' the researcher tells WIRED, referring to Amazon Web Services and the term 'root' to mean the highest level of permissions in a computer system. 'For crypto companies, it's keys, it's blockchain access'it's ridiculous access.'...

Agentic AI has permanently changed cybersecurity by making it quicker and easier to discover vulnerabilities in software and fix them'or develop so-called exploits to weaponize them. But longtime web security researcher James Kettle wanted to look beyond the bug-hunting apocalypse to explore a question that has taken on even more urgency as major AI organizations disclose real-world examples of rogue AI hacking: Can agentic AI develop novel, abstract hacking methods, from concept through to practical attacks' At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Kettle presented his findings, which illustrate both AI's rapidly advancing cybersecurity capabilities and its limitations. For now, the answer to Kettle's question is nuanced. He concluded that AI is perhaps minimally capable but extremely limited in its ability to devise new attack paths in a fully autonomous way. Importantly, though, when paired with human guidance and insight in key moments, Kettle found that AI is an extremely powerful partner in conceptualizing and uncovering new strategies for hacking....

On July 26, 1951, the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy signed a charter establishing Project Lincoln, an R&D program managed by MIT to develop the nation's first continent-wide air defense system, SAGE. The charter called for a research center to be opened within the towns of Bedford, Lincoln, and Lexington, Massachusetts, to support Project Lincoln, which was subsequently renamed MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Seventy-five years later, Lincoln Laboratory ' operating as a U.S. Department of War (DoW) federally funded research and development center managed by MIT ' continues to innovate technology solutions to pressing national security challenges in partnership with government, industry, and academia. These innovations have at once protected the war fighter and U.S. homeland while impacting society. To commemorate the lab's 75th anniversary, 10 staff members reflect below on key technology impacts. Additional technology impacts, both past and present, are featured on the laboratory's historical timeline and in its 2025 Impact Report....

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide, affecting 15 million people each year and leaving 5 million with long-term impairments. There's also a growing shortage of physical therapists, making it harder for patients to access consistent, high-quality care. 'Our goal is to teach robots how to assist with physical and occupational therapy, not to replace therapists, but to extend their reach,' explains Johannes Lachner, who completed this work as a MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. 'A core innovation of our system is that physical therapists can train their own robot using AI, enabling personalized, scalable support tailored to each patient's needs.' Lachner, now an assistant professor at Purdue University, and Noah Geiger, a Junior Managers Program Trainee (AI/IT Track) at Robert Bosch GmbH and former visiting student at MIT, developed a robotic therapy system that learns from physical therapists to adaptively support stroke patients. Combining transformer-based diffusion models with real-time force feedback, the dual-arm robot safely adjusts assistance based on each patient's capabilities....