Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Ravie LakshmananSep 23, 2026Zero-Day / Vulnerability A Chinese threat actor codenamed UTA0565 has been observed exploiting the recently disclosed Google Chrome-Microsoft Windows exploit chain as zero-days through fake websites. The attacks, detected on September 3 and 4, 2026, involved the chaining of two vulnerabilities in Chrome (CVE-2026-85046, CVE-2026-87491) and one impacting Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call (CVE-2026-85880) to break out of the browser’s sandbox and achieve remote code execution. “UTA0565 masqueraded as various entities including media organizations and a non-governmental organization (NGO),” Volexity researchers Damien Cash and Tom Lancaster said in an analysis published this week. “Notably, this threat actor’s…

Bitcoin traded just above $84,000 on Friday, flat over 24 hours after falling below that level on Wednesday, CoinDesk data show. Most major tokens moved less than 2%. Smaller names did the running, with ONDO up 27% to about 54 cents and Quant up 39% to nearly $100.Bonds found a floor in Asia. The 10-year Treasury yield slipped two basis points to 5.17% after jumping more than 20 basis points over the previous two sessions, and Brent fell 1% to about $105 a barrel on reports that Washington and Tehran are exploring a phased deal to reopen the Strait of…

If you visit Scandinavia you are likely to find yourself at an exhibition about Vikings. There are many to choose from. The National History Museum in Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen, houses a major permanent exhibition on Viking. The Swedish History Museum in Stockholm boasts the largest Viking Age exhibition in the world. And the new Norwegian Museum of the Viking Age in Oslo, set to open in 2027, promises to be the world’s leading Viking museum. In the meantime, a temporary exhibition displays highlights of Viking Age archaeological finds at the Museum of Cultural History. Obviously, Scandinavian national museums expect that…

Manicures have been whispering messages about the wearer’s position in society for as long as they have existed, according to fashion journalist Suzanne E. Shapiro.”Women’s bodies – and sense of self-presentation – have always held huge political and cultural significance,” Shapiro, who wrote Nails: The Story of The Modern Manicure, tells the BBC.Even back in 13th century Imperial China, the lengthy talons grown by nobility and the delicately carved brass nail shields which usually guarded them were a symbol of a life unmarred by manual labour.A single layer of the rose-tinted waxy salves which were popular in the 1800s was…

The largest global coral reef assessment finds that average hard coral cover has declined 9.5% relative to a three-decade reference period spanning 1980-2009.A fourth global bleaching event in 2023-2025 drove a record 8.9% one-year loss, though its full effects are not captured in this analysis, which ends in 2024.Reefs can recover after bleaching events, but increasingly frequent marine heat waves are shortening their recovery window.Scientists say local management can strengthen reef resilience, but rapid greenhouse gas emission cuts remain essential to prevent further widespread losses.See All Key Ideas The world’s coral reefs are losing both hard coral cover…

Furious, the first season of which finished on Hulu in late August, made me pay close attention to its characters’ eyes. They may not be a window into the soul, but they offer a glimpse into the incandescent anger that propels most of the main characters. On several occasions, the camera lingers on a close-up of FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) as she contemplates whether, this time, she can face getting in the shower—the place where, for years, beatings from her former boyfriend and fellow cop (Jake Lacy) often began. In episode four of eight, it cuts to Sex…

In the Texas Senate race, comments Republican Ken Paxton made in 2022 about the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, are circulating on social media, thanks to posts by his opponent, Democrat James Talarico, and the Democratic Party. But their posts use just a snippet of Paxton’s remarks, depriving voters of the full context. Talarico’s campaign posted on X on Aug. 2: “Ken Paxton said the Uvalde shooting was part of a ‘plan’ by ‘God.’ 21 elementary school children and teachers were murdered in the shooting.” The campaign similarly cited those words in a post in early…

The head of Yemen’s governing body on Friday called for a general mobilisation to counter the Iran-backed Houthis, as the group ramps up attacks on government forces and their Saudi backer. His call comes weeks after Yemen’s fragmented government was dealt a major blow by the Houthis, who seized control of the country’s entire Red Sea coast and are still fighting its forces in Yemen and attacking Saudi ships and territory. “I call upon the sons of our great people to engage in general mobilisation and national mobilisation, to rally around their armed and security forces,” Rashid al-Alimi, who heads…

Crusoe, a Denver-based AI data center startup that recently raised $3.9 billion, has ended plans to use a new line of stationary power plants developed by fellow Denver company Boom Supersonic. Founded in 2018 as a bitcoin miner that ran on excess natural gas from oil fields, Crusoe has since become one of the biggest builders of AI data centers, including a massive campus in Abilene, Texas, that supplies computing power to OpenAI. Boom Supersonic, which is developing a supersonic passenger jet called Overture, launched a new business last year to sell a version of the engine it’s developing for…

Liquid AI has announced LFM2.5-VL-3B-DSpark, an experimental speculative-decoding draft model for its LFM2.5-VL-3B vision-language model. The drafter adds about 280M parameters and speeds up decoding without changing the model’s output. Liquid AI team reports up to 3.13x faster decoding on Apple silicon and up to 2.66x on an NVIDIA H100. Is it deployable? Yes, Weights are live on Hugging Face in Safetensors and GGUF, with day-one support in SGLang, MLX-VLM, and llama.cpp. Liquid AI team labels the release experimental, and it ships under the LFM Open License v1.0, which allows free commercial use only for companies under $10M in annual…