Video doorbells used to be fixtures in sci-fi media as futuristic tech, but fast-forward to 2026, almost anyone can install one in their home for not much money or effort, with a lot of the best video doorbells making for an easy home security upgrade.

But if you still find those options a bit pricey, the Blink Video Doorbell System discounted to just AU$27.99 ahead of Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days sale next week, should certainly make for a no-brainer addition to your home.

In our Blink Video Doorbell review, we called it one of the easiest security systems to install, with two different mounting options to suit any household, and setting it up within the Blink mobile app with the included Sync Module Core (which serves as the central system hub) takes just three steps.

Our tester found that it has good image quality at 1440p resolution and 30 frames per second, stable video connection, a wide 150º horizontal field of view and battery life rated for up to two years via three AA lithium batteries.

There’s no included indoor chime, but you can pair this doorbell with a Blink Mini camera that’s sold separately (but you can also buy a bundle with two Blink Mini 2K+ cameras for AU$48) or connect via the Alexa app on your phone to an Amazon Fire Stick or Amazon Echo Show to let you see who’s at your door on your TV or smart display.

As mentioned above, lots of features are locked behind a subscription plan, including video recording, cloud video storage, video sharing, person and vehicle detection, even photo capture. The Blink Basic Plan applies to just one device for AU$4.95 per month or AU$49.95 per year, while Blink Plus lets you add an unlimited number of Blink devices for AU$15 per month or AU$150 per year. For most households, though, the former is a good starting point at a reasonable price, which is made even more enticing by the device’s whopping 72% price drop.

Want to explore your options? Amazon has also discounted more Blink video doorbell models and cameras here.

• One simple prompt could lead to swathes of downstream compute, experts warn
• Attackers could even exploit your uncontrolled AI to run up costs
• Greater visibility and circuit breakers are two solutions

Data security company Forcepoint has revealed a major issue with AI agents, but unlike many AI security threats, it doesn't involve stealing data or compromising the model.

Instead, if left to its own devices, Forcepoint says agentic AI could actually consume excessive amounts of compute, tokens, API calls or other resources if sufficient safeguards and limits aren't in place, leading to higher-than-anticipated enterprise cloud bills.

Moreover, the company's research argues that the problem has become more important as AI has become more complex.

Enterprises warned to keep an eye on AI agent compute usage

The result of overwhelmingly complex agentic AI systems is that one single and apparently simply user request could lead to tens or hundreds of downstream operations. Forcepoint labels this as 'unbound consumption'.

Crucially, the analysis found that high compute and token consumption could actually be pretty hard to detect and existing security protocols are unlikely to pick it up, because there doesn't even need to be an attacker for the impacts to take place. All you need is a badly configured automation or a long-running AI session to accidentally lead to runaway costs.

However, Forcepoint worries that attackers can indeed step in to exploit this vulnerability, with malicious users generating huge workloads and consuming massive compute for their own benefit after obtaining an enterprise's credentials, letting them pick up the bill.

Solutions can be as complex as agentic AI itself, but they're now more necessary than ever. Firstly, companies should set budgets at multiple, finer levels, such as API keys, individual users and teams. They should also have greater monitoring powers over where costs are attributed to.

But Forcepoint also calls for agentic circuit breakers to prevent workload and costs from compounding.

"Security teams rarely watch cloud billing dashboards. Finance rarely reviews prompt patterns or agent design," security researcher Jyotika Singh wrote in an urge for enterprises to take the risk more seriously.

• 66% of UK AI users have discussed highly sensitive topics with a chatbot
• Yet, 64% of respondents are worried that chats will be used to profile them
• Proton's privacy-first chatbot, Lumo, aims to fix this trust gap

Late at night, when you need to vent about a relationship, ask for career advice, or check a worrying health symptom, who do you turn to? For a rapidly growing number of people, it isn't a friend, family member, or doctor; it's a chatbot.

A new piece of research published today by Proton, the Swiss tech firm behind some of the best VPN services on the market, reveals that a staggering 66% of British AI users have discussed at least one sensitive topic with an artificial intelligence assistant.

However, there is a massive contradiction at the heart of this new digital relationship: we are pouring our hearts out to these chatbots, but we do not actually trust them. According to the survey, 42% of UK users have little or no trust in AI companies to protect their private information, and 11% don't trust them at all.

Despite these glaring privacy reservations, 55% of Brits admit that AI has fundamentally changed their everyday decision-making.

The ultimate judgment-free zone

So, why are we sharing our most intimate thoughts with machines we don't trust? The answer is simple: freedom from judgment.

While friends and family remain the preferred choice for most sensitive discussions, AI offers a 24/7 digital confidant that won't react with surprise or embarrassment.

Proton's data shows personal finance is the most commonly discussed sensitive topic (33%), followed closely by work or career problems (32%), mental health struggles (27%), and relationship issues (20%).

"AI is learning far more about us than a search engine ever could," said Eamonn Maguire, Director of AI Engineering at Proton. "We’re not just asking questions. We’re sharing deeply personal context about our health, finances and relationships. And when technology knows that much about us, privacy can't be an afterthought."

The primary worry isn't just about the AI remembering a single chat, or even the risk of human reviewers reading your logs. Users are increasingly terrified of the bigger picture.

In the UK, 64% of respondents are concerned that their vulnerable conversations are being weaponized to build detailed advertising or marketing profiles. Meanwhile, 52% are worried their secrets are being fed back into the machine to train future AI models.

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How Lumo promises a private alternative

Despite these valid fears, Brits are highly receptive to a more secure way forward. A massive 82% of users said they would be more likely to use an AI chatbot specifically designed around privacy, and 44% would be far more willing to share sensitive information if they were given a cast-iron guarantee that their chats wouldn't be used for AI training.

This is exactly where Proton hopes to fill the gap with Lumo. Built with the same end-to-end encryption ethos as the company's famous email client, Lumo is an open-source, privacy-first ChatGPT alternative.

To help users understand the scale of their digital footprint, Proton recently launched AI Paper Trail, a tool from Lumo that visually demonstrates exactly how much personal information an average AI conversation leaks about a user's inner life.

"People have already decided that AI is useful enough to hear their money worries, doubts and everyday concerns. They are handing AI companies their inner lives and biggest secrets on the assumption that they will protect them when it's actually the opposite. AI's business model depends on learning from them" Maguire added.

• WordPress Core flaw CVE‑2026‑87902 (path traversal, 8.1 severity) enables PHP file inclusion and possible RCE
• Patch released in v7.1.2 and backported to 4.7+; exploitation began within hours, now widespread
• Admins must urgently update; interim mitigations include blocking traversal sequences and disabling risky ARP/PHP settings

Hackers are actively exploiting a high severity vulnerability in WordPress that can lead to full website takeover, researchers are saying. A patch is available, and WordPress users are urged to upgrade immediately or risk losing access to their assets.

Discovered by security researcher Robert Ressl, the vulnerability in question is tracked as CVE-2026-87902. It is an 8.1/10 (high severity) unauthenticated path traversal flaw affecting WordPress Core. According to WordPress itself, as well as the National Vulnerability Database, the bug can lead to local PHP file inclusion and, in certain scenarios, remote code execution (RCE).

"An unauthenticated attacker can make get_page_template() page-template resolution include a chosen readable local .php file outside the active theme directories," it was said in the official security advisory.

Achieving RCE

WordPress is the world’s number one website hosting and builder platform, powering more than half of all websites active on the internet right now. However, that doesn’t mean all of them are susceptible to RCE. Only websites ticking these boxes are at risk:

Sites with parent or child themes that have a top-level directory with a name starting with ‘page-’ (for example, ‘page-templates).

Threat actors must target a local .PHP file that exists and is readable by the web server

The web server account must be able to read the included file (for example, pearcmd.php, if PHP’s register_argc_argv setting is active)

WordPress said that both the official PHP image for Docker, and the default cPanel configuration, are affected (users must be running a PHP version before 8.5, though).

The issue was fixed in version 7.1.2, which is now available for download. Fixes were also backported to older versions up to 4.7. Releases before 4.8 are not supported, it was said, and will not be getting a fix.

Attacking vulnerable websites

Wordpress security company Patchstack said the first exploitation attempts started roughly five hours after the patch was released, and these were primarily reconnaissance efforts. In the hours to follow, malicious activity increased tenfold, it was said, as crooks started attempting to deliver malicious payloads to vulnerable websites, as well.

“When this post first went up, every request we had seen was reconnaissance against harmless core files,” Patchstack said. “That is no longer true. Attackers are now including pearcmd.php and using it to write PHP files to disk, and public scanning tooling for this CVE is in circulation.”

At first, Patchstack said the attacks were coming from a handful of IP addresses, and advised website admins to simply block them. However, the attacks have now become rather widespread, meaning blocking individual addresses is no longer a viable strategy. They urge everyone to apply the patch without delay:

“The first evening came from a small cluster of addresses. It is now spread across a few hundred, so blocklisting individual sources is not a strategy. The heaviest talkers at the time of writing:

43.250.53.42

180.251.159.243

195.178.110.247

107.189.14.87

45.61.184.170

92.246.130.76

The file write attempts specifically come from a much smaller subset of those addresses, which is the usual pattern of a few operators acting on results that a much larger scanning population produced.”

Those that cannot update immediately should reject traversal sequences in the pagename parameter, Patchstack added. A real page slug never contains one, they added, meaning it can be blocked without affecting normal traffic. Furthermore, disabling register_argc_argv does not fix the inclusion but it does break the pearcmd chain, which is the difference between an information leak and code execution.

Via BleepingComputer

• Gambit researchers uncovered ongoing AI‑driven skimming campaign stealing 600,000+ payment records since July 2026
• Attackers used three autonomous harnesses (Strix, Cairn, Hermes) to compromise dozens of retail sites cheaply
• Victims include major US firms; campaign shows AI enables faster, persistent, low‑cost cyberattacks at scale

In July 2026, a hacker tasked autonomous AI agents to attack retail organizations around the world, deploy credit card skimmers, and steal payment data.

Since then, the bots launched hundreds of attack projects, compromised dozens of organizations, and stole at least 600,000 payment records - and to make matters worse, the campaign is still live, attacking and breaking into websites as we speak.

All of this was reported by security researchers Gambit, who said they managed to recover the operator’s staging server and through it - reconstruct the ongoing campaign. They also saw the skimmers live on victim websites, and sifted through logs and AI claims found on the attacker’s server. In just five days, between September 10 and 15, the agents made 105 attack waves and compromised 27 organizations “to varying degrees.”

Among the victims are a Fortune 500 hospitality company, a “major” US airline, a large private US industrial supplies distributor, and a US online fashion retailer. One of the AI tools would use a website ranking service to produce a list of potential targets, focusing primarily on those running custom-built software.

A fistful of dollars

But the victims are not the “interesting” part of this story - the attackers are. Gambit believes they are financially motivated Chinese threat actors. They are using three AI “harnesses” (frameworks, essentially), which can run almost the entire attack chain autonomously, striking around 10 companies a day, for a handful of dollars per company.

In four weeks, the attackers spent around $7,000, meaning that their entire cost for the operation so far was no more than $18,000. Breaking it down, it means that the attacker spent around $25 per target.

“Spread over the companies attacked, this is a marginal cost of a few US dollars to a few tens of US dollars for each targeted company,” Gambit’s researchers said. “The operator’s own cost review gives a similar figure, a mean of $25.46 over 101 completed scans, from $3.13 for the cheapest target to $79.31 for the most expensive.”

“Where access was achieved, it usually took less than a day, and in many cases just a few hours. We also detected instructions in the attacker’s playbook that could disrupt the operations of a company as a result of data deletion or cleanup procedures run by the agent - and this has indeed happened in some of the breaches,” Gambit said.

The three harnesses

The three harnesses are called Strix, Cairn, and Hermes.

Gambit describes Hermes as an open source autonomous AI agent with a persistent memory, skills that the agent wrote and edited itself, a searchable archive of past sessions, scheduled jobs, and a web console. On the staging server the researchers analyzed, it loaded a Chinese system persona called “SOUL - Red Team Operator”, which contained 121 skills (78 attack skills).

“Hermes is the operator’s console for orchestrating the activity and for direct hacking activities,” Gambit explained. “It used Anthropic’s opus-4.6 (after newer models refused its requests), with 1,951 prompts typed by the human across 260 sessions - only a few prompts per target. The human prompts are short instructions in Chinese, usually launching an attack, tasking the agent with a general next step, or what to do next after achieving access.”

Strix is an open-source AI pentest tool, while Cairn is an autonomous pentest engine. It receives target domains and an objective, such as to get a shell or admin access, then runs for hours until it achieves the objective, times out, or is stopped. Cairn used DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, it was said.

Gambit’s researchers seem to be rather impressed with the campaign. They described it as very low cost, with a level of patience, persistence, and creativity that most human attackers would be “unlikely to sustain”, managing to achieve “far greater results, far faster.”

They have also called to arms, urging organizations to “adapt to a reality where attacks are significantly faster and more comprehensive.” To do that, they must adopt a resilience-first mentality and deploy a security stack that can match the AI on speed.

Many of the affected organizations were notified, and the skimmers were removed, they said.