Not long ago, I rented an SUV from a well-known car rental company. Within hours of an employee scanning my driver's license, a high-resolution scan of my ID was available for sale on the dark web.

An exposé published Tuesday by KrebsOnSecurity reports that my license was one of more than 153 million that were available through Nexus, the name of the new ID theft service. Like other driver's licenses available there—including some belonging to journalist Brian Krebs, his mother, an FBI assistant director, and several security researchers—my license was purported to include multiple image files showing both the front and back of the ID. Besides a basic image scan, the files also captured the images in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. Presumably, the additional formats may allow cloned-based counterfeit IDs to pass hologram tests.

Growing by the day

Besides advertising the availability of driver's licenses, Nexus offered to sell a bevy of other forms of ID. They included:

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Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware.

The potentially dangerous content is in llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, an emerging convention websites employ to provide machine-readable summaries of the site’s content and its high-level structure. These files are the AI equivalent of the robots.txt standard that instructs search engines how to index the site's content. Google Lighthouse, a tool for helping web developers, has more here. Correctly configured llms.txt and llms-full.txt files for Cloudflare are here and here.

How the researchers found it

Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Nous Research's Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

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By Amber Atherton, early stage investor, partner at Patron For decades, science fiction has imagined the future of robotics as a single humanoid capable of doing everything around the home. Silicon Valley has largely adopted the same vision. Every few months brings another humanoid demo, followed by predictions that one general-purpose machine will absorb countless […]

Waymo has revealed new technical details about the onboard computing system that powers its autonomous driving technology, including a purpose-built 5 nm ASIC delivering more than 1,000 TOPS of machine learning performance. The company says its latest compute architecture is designed to provide millisecond-level response times while operating under the vibration, temperature extremes and other […]

Saminda Wattuhewa, senior lecturer and course leader in cyber security, University of Portsmouth A construction site is one of the worst places to rely on GPS. Concrete floors stack overhead, steel frames scatter the signal, and basements block it outright. Yet this is exactly the environment where autonomous robots are increasingly expected to work precisely […]

Soft robots that provide patients with tailored support during rehabilitation, gain a sense of touch to safely handle delicate objects, and switch between soft and rigid states depending on the task: these are among the ambitions of RESSORT, a new European research project led by Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Funded by the European Union’s Horizon […]

As robots become more intelligent, autonomous and connected, much of the attention naturally falls on increasingly powerful AI models. But underneath those models is an increasingly complex collection of sensors, processors, control systems and security hardware that must operate reliably – often within strict limits on power consumption, size and heat. Lattice Semiconductor is one […]

Northrop Grumman has launched a sophisticated robotic spacecraft designed to service satellites in orbit, potentially allowing expensive space assets to be repaired, upgraded, moved and kept operational long after their original fuel supplies have been depleted. The company’s Mission Robotic Vehicle, or MRV, launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 […]

Whatever happened to ASIMO? Honda’s famous humanoid robot (pictured below with what we believe is an actual human female) disappeared from public view several years ago, just before an extraordinary new wave of humanoid development swept through the robotics industry. But Honda didn’t abandon humanoid robotics. Instead, much of the technology and expertise accumulated through […]

Terabytes worth of credentials, many belonging to the world’s biggest and most sensitive organizations, have been exposed in a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM, an open source tool that streamlines AI-driven software development. Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Samsung, and Salesforce are only a handful of the entities whose access secrets were exposed.

The revelation was posted on Tuesday and Wednesday by security firms CloudSEK and Hudson Rock. CloudSEK said it found cloud keys, repository tokens, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, package publishing credentials, environment variables, and AI provider keys that could allow attackers to gain access to more than 2,500 organizations.

40 minutes is all it takes

The credentials were extracted during a 40-minute window in March while the victims used compromised versions of LiteLLM downloaded from the package’s official location in the Python Package Index repository. Hudson Rock said it made the discovery after analyzing a 195TB file that it obtained. Neither firm identified the source of the information.

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Last week, a researcher outlined what he said was a “novel attack surface” in passkeys, the new authentication paradigm that offers a more secure alternative to password-based methods. In fact, the attacks demonstrated in the post are neither novel nor unique to passkeys. This distinction is important because the research has generated confusion among end users and security professionals as they assess whether this new mechanism is truly safe to use.

The attack is called Pass-ta-key—a blending of the word passkey with the phrase “pass the key” and a nod to a plate of pasta. Arie Olshtein, a researcher at security firm Palo Alto Networks, described in a post last week how Pass-ta-key could obtain all passkeys stored in the Google Password Manager app (GPM) for Windows when it’s running on a machine infected with malware.

This came as a surprise to many people because they believed passkeys are stored exclusively in the trusted platform manager (TPM), the locked-down enclave in a hardened silicon chip that’s reserved for storing cryptographic keys and other highly sensitive information on Windows machines. If passkeys are stored in the TPM, then how was Pass-ta-key able to extract the entire set of passkeys stored by the app, they wanted to know.

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While generative AI has dominated much of the technology debate in recent years, the next major phase of development may increasingly involve AI systems that can perceive, interact with and act in the physical world. The IEEE’s new Technology Megatrends 2030 report identifies physical AI and robotics as one of the areas with the greatest […]

While much of the current discussion around physical AI focuses on technologies still moving from prototype to commercial deployment, AES has already put robots to work on utility-scale solar construction sites. The global energy company developed Maximo, an AI-powered robotic system designed to automate one of the most physically demanding stages of solar construction: lifting […]

As governments and private companies accelerate plans for commercial space stations, orbital manufacturing and eventually lunar infrastructure, one question is becoming increasingly important: who – or what – will do the work in space?  Brooklyn-based startup Icarus Robotics believes much of that work will be carried out by intelligent robotic workers. Founded in 2024, the […]

The British Antarctic Survey says autonomous vehicles are ‘transforming polar science’ A robot is cruising beneath Antarctic sea ice. Another is bolted to the face of a collapsing Greenland glacier. A third is silently counting penguins on a remote, windswept beach. None of them has a human operator nearby. Across the Arctic and Antarctic, autonomous […]

Newly developed control method overcomes unexpected movements, improving disturbance rejection and reducing X-axis position error by 53.1 percent Small flapping-wing (FW) robots could support applications such as inspection and search and rescue. However, they are highly susceptible to disturbances such as wind gusts, making stable flight challenging. Researchers from Japan’s Chiba University investigated the flight […]

Arduino has spent more than two decades making electronics and embedded programming accessible to students, hobbyists, engineers and product developers around the world. What began as an open-source microcontroller platform has evolved into a widely used development ecosystem, with its technology now helping to prototype products across industries ranging from automotive and industrial automation to […]

The humanoid robotics industry is transitioning from prototype development and demonstrations toward structured pilot deployments and early commercial adoption. The new IDTechEx report Materials for Humanoid Robots 2026-2036: Technologies, Players, Forecasts expects 2026-2027 to represent key transition years, with more players moving from pilot testing toward production readiness and early-scale rollout. A major component at the […]

Many people are starting to buy massage chairs for their homes but not everyone really knows why, except that “it massages”. It is not just “a chair that massages”, it is a relaxation tool that is beneficial for improving physical and mental conditions as well. A massage chair is a therapeutic relaxation tool that can […]