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🗞️ In this edition
A Hacker Broke Into 100 Companies For $5,000
Sponsored: Hightouch
Microsoft Built A Way To Stop Your Agents
Washington Ordered DeepSeek Pulled Out
🔌 MCP CORNER Three servers worth wiring up this week.
⚡ YOUR MOVE For people building the life they want, now.
In other AI news:
Canada's Biggest Publishers Sued Anthropic
Meta Opened Up Its Million Chip Cluster
A Tractor Maker Hired Humanoids
4 must-try AI tools
One person broke into more than a hundred companies and barely wrote any of it. Microsoft now wants a leash on every agent inside your building. And Washington ordered DeepSeek torn out of federal systems.
Keep reading.
Source: Cybersecuritynews.com
WHAT HAPPENED
Security researchers traced a campaign in which one operator pointed freely available agent software at online shops in four countries and told it what to find. The agents hunted for weak spots, posted what they turned up to a shared board, and tried another route whenever one failed. Most attempts got nowhere. The ones that worked cost about fifty dollars each.
WHY IT MATTERS
Breaking into a company used to take a person with real skill and real time. This campaign replaced both with a budget, which means the ceiling on how many companies get attacked is now the price of tokens rather than the supply of people who can do it. Every defence built on the quiet assumption that attackers are scarce was priced wrong.
OUR TAKE
The obvious read is that AI made attackers more dangerous. We think it made them ordinary, and the giveaway is the failure rate. Most of these attempts did not work and nobody minded, because a failed attempt now costs almost nothing. Skill was what you needed back when you could only afford a few tries.
Watch whether the next campaign like this one has a name attached. If researchers cannot tie it to any known group, this is a tool anybody can pick up and the volume is about to change. If it traces back to a familiar crew, this was a well funded team trying a cheaper method.
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Source: Microsoft.com
It is calling them your newest insiders.
Microsoft announced controls that treat the software agents running inside a company the way security teams already treat staff. Every agent gets an identity and a risk score that updates while it works, and policy can narrow what it reaches, demand a human signature before anything consequential, or halt it where it stands. Its own scanning now recognises sixty kinds of agent sitting on company machines.
If you could only keep one, which would you want?
Source: Securitymagazine.com
The order was signed in June. Nobody outside government saw it until now.
Homeland Security has barred civilian federal agencies from using DeepSeek, telling them to keep it out of future purchases and strip out anything already installed. One security analyst reading the notice said the restriction reaches products other vendors built on top of DeepSeek, not only the company's own. The notice went into the government's public record this week, months after it was signed.
🔌 MCP CORNER
THREE SERVERS WORTH WIRING UP THIS WEEK.
An MCP server plugs your assistant into another app, so it stops describing the work and starts doing it.
E2B MCP: Gives your agent a throwaway machine to run its own code on, so a bad script breaks nothing of yours.
Stripe MCP Server: Opens your real payment records to your assistant, so the billing question gets answered instead of escalated.
GitHub MCP Server: Hands your repos, issues and pull requests to your assistant, so the review starts before you sit down.
⚡️ YOUR MOVE
FOR PEOPLE BUILDING THE LIFE THEY WANT, NOW.
🏎️ Inception shipped Mercury 3, a model that writes by refining whole blocks of text at once instead of one word after another, and clocks 1,068 tokens a second. It runs at $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 output, halved for launch, with 100 million free tokens to test it. → Clock it against yours
💸 MiniMax says M3.1 Flash cuts agent running costs by 70%, and an independent lab measured cost per task falling from about $0.51 to $0.22. The same lab clocked a 93% hallucination rate, because the model almost always guesses rather than admit it does not know. Weights are promised on October 23. → Read the caveat first
🧮 The open serving stack llm-d hit 1.0, with upgrades that do not drop traffic and routing that keeps a multi turn agent on the machine already holding its cache. In one demonstration 3,000 coding agents ran self hosted at five to ten times less than renting the same open model. → Price your own serving
🔧 Amazon put TorchNeuron into public beta today, so PyTorch code runs on its own Trainium chips by sending the model to a different device, with no rewrite and Hugging Face models loading straight in. One early user reports about 60% more audio processed per dollar than its graphics card baseline. → Move one workload
Canada's Biggest Publishers Sued Anthropic – Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and the Canadian Press filed in Ontario, claiming Anthropic got round their copying protections to train Claude on their journalism and keeps scraping it to answer user prompts, allegations the company has not yet answered in court.
Meta Opened Up Its Million Chip Cluster – The Ohio site already runs hundreds of thousands of chips across linked buildings and is heading for roughly a million, and Meta says it cut training interruptions by 99% since last year to get its newest models trained on it.
A Tractor Maker Hired Humanoids – Farm equipment maker AGCO signed a commercial deal to put Agility's two legged Digit robots on a Kansas production line from 2027, starting with sorting parts and stacking totes, with no money disclosed.
Cursor: Writes the code alongside you instead of making you paste it between tabs.
GPT Researcher: Goes and reads the twenty sources you were never going to open.
Vidu AI Video Generator: Shoots the scene you cannot afford to film, from a sentence.
Transcript.LOL: Turns the hour long video into the four lines you actually needed.
Three stories about the off switch, and who gets to reach it. One operator worked out that attacking a hundred companies no longer takes a hundred people, only a budget. Microsoft is now selling the ability to stop an agent in the middle of its work, which is not something you sell if anyone already had it. And Washington picked the bluntest switch on offer, which is to pull the thing out of the building.
Find out where yours is.
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