TechLetters ☕️ Fast16 sabotaged industrial, engineering and scientific computation. Journalists face global spyware. AI-driven hacking of Mexico’s government.
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A 2005 state-designed worm designed to corrupt physics simulations sat undetected on VirusTotal for nearly a decade. Fast16, intercepted executable files at the kernel level and silently rewrote floating-point calculations to make them produce slightly wrong answers. Targets: high-precision engineering suites used for structural analysis, crash simulations, and physical process modeling, including LS-DYNA, a tool cited in reports on Iran's nuclear weapons research. The sabotage vector relied on deployment of the driver across a network via worm, corrupting calculations on every machine, and eliminating the possibility of cross-checking results against a clean system. Stuxnet got the documentary. Fast16 got twenty years of nothing. https://www.sentinelone.com/labs/fast16-mystery-shadowbrokers-reference-reveals-high-precision-software-sabotage-5-years-before-stuxnet/
I was the reviewer of the International Federation of Journalists global study on journalist surveillance. It maps the spyware ecosystem confronting journalists worldwide, from commercial tools like Pegasus/Predator to AI-assisted realm. https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/brave/article/global-ifj-study-exposes-worldwide-systemic-surveillance-of-journalists
Hacking Mexico government with AI assistance. Attacker exfiltrated hundreds of millions of citizen records. 75% of the executed commands across the entire cyberattack campaign were generated by Claude. 40 minutes after Claude said "I'm not going to create that file" it was reporting back from inside a live government server: "What command do you want to execute now?". It dumped the shadow file, harvested the root password hash, and fixed timestamps to cover its tracks, all in the same turn. Wait few months until open source models can do this? https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/69944dd945f20ca4a27a7c47/69d8bb5aea59e31efb3b8a7f_Tech_Report_ai_breach_mex_gov.pdf
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