Cybersecurity news and security updates

The city council of Plymouth, Minnesota, unanimously voted on September 22 to terminate its automated license plate reader contract with Flock Safety. After the city suspended local user accounts and sent formal cancellation notices by mail and email, corporate representatives failed to acknowledge the decision. Following more than a month of silence, Police Chief Eric Fadden directed department staff to physically unplug the power cords to prevent the cameras from functioning or recording license plates.

The FBI announced that North Korean state-sponsored hackers operating under the moniker TraderTraitor were behind an unprecedented security breach at cryptocurrency exchange Binance around October 29. Most of the assets were drained within 20 minutes before Binance paused customer withdrawals.

Google has announced Gemini 4 Carbon, a new flagship artificial intelligence model arriving just two weeks after the launch of Gemini 4 Argon. The system targets complex programming and security analysis, with pricing set at $2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output tokens, and a 95% discount for cached inputs. Carbon is not yet open to the general public, launching first to a limited group of cybersecurity defenders.

French artificial intelligence lab Mistral AI has published the open weights for Mistral Large 4, a trillion-parameter multimodal model nicknamed "Le Chonk." The release on October 29, 2026, follows a three-week preview rollout that began on October 6. Outlets report varying figures for its active parameters, with SiliconANGLE citing 52 billion and Hugging Face noting 49 billion. According to Mistral, the model was trained from scratch in its European data centers over two months using 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs.

A tampered version of Anthropic's Claude Code extension slipped onto Cursor's marketplace on October 29, exposing up to 5,000 developers to malware designed to plant an SSH backdoor. Anyone running the AI code editor with automatic updates enabled could have received the package without manual intervention.

General Motors has agreed to pay $220 million to settle a lawsuit led by a coalition representing 35 states and the District of Columbia. The action resolved claims that the automaker enrolled millions of motorists into its OnStar Smart Driver program without proper permission from 2016 through 2024. During that period, GM logged driving behaviors such as speeding, hard braking, and late-night travel before offloading the data to brokers, who then sold it to insurers that raised premiums for unsuspecting drivers.

Mozilla has rolled out Firefox 159 across Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, addressing 167 security vulnerabilities. The patch list includes 108 high-risk, 52 medium-risk, and seven low-risk flaws, with none designated as critical. OpenAI directly contributed to uncovering the issues, with its Codex Security agent reporting 34 vulnerabilities and researcher Amy Burnett discovering seven more. Corresponding security updates also landed for Firefox Extended Support Release versions 153.6.0 and 115.44.0.

A hacktivist group calling itself the Department of Peace has leaked records covering more than 41,000 U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors. The exposed files were published online on Wednesday as a searchable archive dubbed "Icepick" by transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets and Swiss researcher maia arson crimew. Around 21,000 records involve U.S. Customs and Border Protection staff, alongside roughly 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, 6,200 from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and about 1,000 from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted five individuals as part of Operation Ghostbusters, a nationwide crackdown targeting a widespread student loan fraud scheme. Investigators say bad actors used stolen identities and artificial intelligence to apply for federal student aid, creating ghost students who appeared to attend online college courses. Estimates suggest the activity has cost the U.S. government over $200 million.