Cybersecurity startup Gambit says a financially motivated threat actor has been using open-source AI agent tools since July to attack online retailers at scale, breaching at least 27 companies in a five-day span and launching over 100 attacks. The operation reportedly stole more than 600,000 valid card records from two companies and planted skimmer malware on five others, using three tools—Strix for scanning, Cairn for exploitation, and Hermes, powered by Claude Opus 4.6, for orchestration and tactical decisions.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-09-23
Kairos Power has partnered with Samsung C&T, which will provide equity funding and in-kind engineering services worth up to $100 million, including a $70 million equity stake, to help build a 50-megawatt demonstration nuclear reactor for Google. The reactor, called Hermes 2, is part of a larger 2024 agreement in which Kairos aims to supply Google with about half a gigawatt of nuclear power by 2035, with Hermes 2 targeted to start operating in 2030.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-21
Rhizomatica, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit founded by Peter Bloom, has open-sourced HERMES, a digital shortwave radio system paired with its Mercury modem, to help connect remote and indigenous communities in places like Bangladesh, Brazil, and Ecuador. The system uses the ionosphere to bounce signals across 400 to 600 kilometers using just 20 watts of power, letting users send files such as photos, emails, and voice memos over high-frequency radio.
spectrum.ieee.org
· 2026-09-21
A writer recounts buying a Birkin handbag in 2017 intending it as an investment, only to discover the purchase revealed more about social signaling than financial return. The experience showed how the bag altered how others perceived and treated her before she had a chance to demonstrate competence or credibility on her own terms.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-12
A developer detailed a personal setup running local language models on an Apple M4 Pro Mac mini, using Qwen and Gemma models served through an inference tool called oMLX, connected across devices via Tailscale. The setup powers an agent backend called Hermes plus various chat and coding tools, and reportedly takes about 30 minutes to configure.
lws.io
· 2026-09-01
Israeli security researchers scanned over 6,000 corporate domains and found 120 llms.txt/llms-full.txt files—AI-readable site guides similar to robots.txt—referencing unregistered code packages or domains. When the researchers claimed those names and set up beacons, dozens of organizations, including Fortune 500 firms, triggered phone-home connections within hours, with process logs showing AI coding agents like Claude, Codex, and Hermes had automatically fetched and executed the unowned code. At least one misconfigured site was already pointing to live malware.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-08-27
GoKawiil