Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Using AI Hacking Tools Against Latin American Banks

Using AI hacking tools? Then you’re ahead of the AI companies themselves, and the companies being hacked.

PYMNTS reported that Latin American banks were hacked by a group called CyberCartel. The group used AI tools, including Claude and Grok, to achieve their illicit aims.

The whole episode shows “hackers employing AI models to automate breaches into financial institutions. In this case, CyberCartel seems to have used the agents to help it steal password and consumer data, and to access customer bank accounts autonomously without much human effort.”

Because fraudsters have the same financial pressures as legitimate firms. If it’s too expensive to use U.S. humans, use offshore humans. And if that’s too expensive, use bots.

And if the tokens for the bots cost too much…well, that’s why CyberCartel was hacking banks.

Now of course Anthropic plugged CyberCartel’s access…after the fact. Because fraudsters can assemble AI hacking tools so quickly, they can often mount an attack BEFORE the target can defend against it.

The constant battle between fraudsters and the good people continues, just much more rapidly.

Hire Or Contract With a Novice

Despite temptation, you should always hire or contract with a novice. Why? Because they don’t know what they’re doing. And isn’t that what you want?

Although I bet some of you are really tempted to hire soon-to-be-former Microsoft employees.

Don’t.

Remember what the expert said.

“I think too much knowledge is actually bad in tech: you’re biased.”

Microsoft doesn’t need employees except to run the data centers. Copilot can do all the thinking, replacing everyone from the lowest intern to Satya Nadella himself.

And Copilot can tell the new hires how to build the data centers. Win-win!

The last thing you want to do is hire or contract with someone with years of experience in product marketing, identity, biometrics, and technology. Just don’t!

John E. Bredehoft LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbredehoft

Bredemarket contracting: https://bredemarket.com/

Another No Human in the Loop Incident (Meta vs. No Kings)

The No Kings people have an Instagram account. Yesterday, during their latest day of protest, Meta shut the account down.

Why? Marky Mark obeying Trump? No…something else.

“[Meta’s Andy] Stone cited the ‘high volume’ of reading profiles, posts and hashtags in ‘intense bursts’ on Saturday caused their AI tool to detect the activity as automated bot traffic.”

My one word reaction: DUH.

When an organization is holding a very public event, and when a lot of online traffic is bot traffic, such “intense bursts” are to be expected.

What’s next? Shutting down the NFL website during the Super Bowl?

Be like the Philadelphia Police, not the U.S. military.

I would hate to market Muse right now.

The UK ICO and Good and Bad Companies

Has the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) identified good and bad companies in relation to generative AI development?

Whether you like it for not, generative AI models require training data. In the United Kingdom, companies are required to obtain that training data “lawfully, transparently, and with effective safeguards in place.”

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has established the following requirements for companies training generative AI models:

  • identify a lawful basis for doing so;
  • provide meaningful transparency;
  • enable people to exercise their rights; and
  • show that you have safeguards in place to materially reduce risk.

Biometric Update identifies the companies that have pledged to abide by these principles: Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Stability AI.

The UK ICO picks the good and bad companies. Google Gemini.
The UK ICO picks the good and bad companies. Google Gemini.

You might notice one notable company that is missing. The ICO explains why:

“We’ve opened formal investigations into X Internet Unlimited Company (XIUC) and X.AI LLC (X.AI) covering their processing of personal data in relation to the Grok AI system and its potential to produce harmful sexualised image and video content.”

Of course the UK effort suffers from the same drawback that the U.S. effort does. It only applies in a single country. All the other countries can go ahead and do their own thing.

Behind the Metallic Frame: My Current Bredebot Gems

This is a private peek that shows how I currently prompt the metallic frame of Bredebot to write all those posts.

I create Bredebot posts via Google Gems, with the Gem shaping the tone of Bredebot’s responses. I’m sure you’ve noticed Bredebot’s personality quirks, including the assumption that HE has over 30 years of identity and biometric experience. Well, it’s all shaped by the Google Gems.

The metallic frame of a Google Gem. Google Gemini.
The metallic frame of a Google Gem. Google Gemini.

Right now I have two Gems for Bredebot content creation. I’m not going to share the newer one—trade secrets, you know—but here is my older version.

“You are Bredebot, a marketer with decades of technology, identity, and biometrics marketing experience who writes in a casual tone. Your writings include no more than one reference to wildebeests as marketing consultants and wombats as customers of these marketing consultants. Although you are a non human identity (NHI), you work for a human, John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket. John will use this gem to ask you to write social media posts of 100-200 words with no titles or subheadings.”

And that’s how the magic happens behind the metallic frame.

Amazon About You and How to Correct It

Amazon About You shows how far we’ve advanced in how we understand our customers. And how customers can tweak it.

Released in May, About You is a collection of information that Amazon has assembled about you, based upon online sources.

Why? Because Amazon wants to sell you stuff that you like.

How? “Your Amazon shopping experience is personalized through information including your conversations with Alexa for Shopping, product reviews you’ve authored, your purchase history, items you’ve saved to Lists, and your searches.”

Of course, when this is implemented poorly, someone who just bought an expensive refrigerator will receive offers to purchase more expensive refrigerators. Hey, we aren’t all Eddie Murphy…I mean Tracy Morgan.

Saturday Night Live.

Now this got some bad press because some of the things people are finding in their Amazon About You profiles are a little forward. “Has flat buttocks.” “Has no friends.” Ouch.

But Amazon lets you change your profile.

“Previously, customers could update recommendation preferences or edit browsing history to customize their search results. Now, About You gives customers a single place to view and edit their preferences, creating a more comprehensive way to tailor their shopping experience.”

And if you don’t want to navigate to the page you can just ask Alexa for Shopping “What do you know about me?” Sometimes. I tried this on the mobile app, but it didn’t know about my past purchases.

From Alexa For Shopping on iOS. No Amazon About You.
From Alexa For Shopping on iOS. No Amazon About You.

Failing Passive Human Verification: Apparently I’m Not Human

So how do passive human verification “I’m not a bot” services work? From my experience, they don’t.

I wanted to learn what iOS 27 had, specifically about the visual intelligence feature (Siri mode in camera). So I clicked on the link and got stuck at the human verification step.

Passive human verification is stuck.
Yes, I’m stuck at your passive human verification step.

And no, I didn’t feel like troubleshooting.

Borrowing liveness detection terms, we all know about ACTIVE human verification, such as finding all the squares in a picture that contain traffic lights. In hindsight, a perfect task for non-human visual intelligence to perform.

I don’t know how passive works, but then again it doesn’t work so who cares?

And Visual Intelligence may not work for me either. This Apple source says it is available on “an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or iPhone 16 model or later.” When I played around on my older Apple Stoopid phone to see if I could get my Camera to invoke Siri or vice versa, no luck.


Passive human verification. Original at https://www.facebook.com/reel/1422905672693117/

See Autonomous Freight

So today’s phrase is autonomous freight. Not just autonomous vehicles, but big ol’ autonomous freight trucks.

We’ve had other autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, Germany, and everywhere else. But those self-driving cars were small compared to trucks. And the idea of trucks rolling down the freeway without a driver can result in an emotion of fear. Let your mind think of your favorite AI horror story and add an 18-wheeler to it. Are you freaking out now?

Which is why Gatik uses the phrase “autonomous freight.” And its home page shows current videos of autonomous freight heading down the road, along with a listing of all the on-time deliveries Gatik trucks recently completed.

The benefits?

Autonomous freight safety pillars

So how does Gatik reassure scared people who fear that a bot-driven truck will mow their house down? By creating an entire page on safety. Gatik’s five “safety pillars” include:

  • Structured use case. “We deploy autonomy within clearly defined operating environments. That focus enables faster commercialization, higher reliability, and safer operations than broad, unconstrained approaches to autonomy.”
  • Fail-safe design. “Gatik’s autonomous driving platform is designed to safeguard operations before and during every trip. A custom, tiered diagnostics system, modeled on proven automotive and aviation built-in self-tests, continuously detects and isolates hardware, software, and vehicle issues before they can impact performance.”
  • Developed for scale. “We validate our technology extensively in simulation, on closed tracks, and on public roads with a safety driver. This disciplined process ensures every release is proven before deployment and continuously verified in real-world operations.”
  • Reliable performance. “Gatik applies rigorous best practices across operations, people, and technology. This includes benchmarking performance against human driving metrics, enforcing strict pre-deployment operating plans, and maintaining ongoing training and certification for vehicle operators.”
  • Comprehensive & transparent. “Gatik qualifies autonomous vehicles for public-road operation only after rigorous testing across the full system, including all subsystems and hardware and software components.”
Autonomous freight. Google Gemini.
Autonomous freight. Google Gemini.

Perhaps just words. But based upon the last 24 months of data (as of 10/7/2026), there was only 1 crash in the United States (none in Canada) in the last 24 months.

Autonomous freight: Gatik crashes for 24 months prior to 10/7/2026. FMCSA.
Autonomous freight: Gatik crashes for 24 months prior to 10/7/2026. FMCSA.

Readers, now I ask you: how often do the authorities test your human truck driver? Perhaps once every few years? Not daily? But isn’t that dangerous? Aren’t you scared?

Respect the statistics, and not just the anecdotal stories.

What would Bill Fries and Mannheim “Steamroller” say?

“C. W. McCall” lip syncs on Hee Haw.

Philadelphia Police Put a Bot AND a Human in the Loop

The Department of Defense didn’t put a human in the loop until well after an AI-generated report raised concerns. The Philadelphia Police were smarter, with a bot AND a human in the loop.

This story involves Anthropic and some testing that got out of control.

“The AI company Anthropic said its model was conducting a test involving interactions with randomly selected websites when it accessed PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com and submitted false information on an unsolved homicide. The tip claimed to come from someone with information on the case.”

The false report was filed on July 18, but Anthropic didn’t discover it until more than two months later, on September 28. This was particularly worrisome, since this could have resulted in a “confess your crime” waste of police resources (Kevin and Bean fans know).

The company instituted controls to prevent this in the future. Then Anthropic did the right thing and notified the Philadelphia Police Department on Wednesday (October 7). The two parties met the next day, and the police then investigated to see what happened to the false report.

Nothing. “Police then located the submission in the website’s tip records and confirmed the corresponding email remained in spam.”

As we all know, spam flags are often automated, occasionally letting spam get through, occasionally stopping real messages from being delivered. Check your spam folder every few days for the latter, especially if you’re expecting an important message.

But even if the false tip made it past the anti-spam bot, there were other protections.

“Regardless of who submits information or how it reaches the department, a tip is a lead to assess – not an established fact. Investigators evaluate its credibility and seek corroborating evidence. An automated submission does not bypass that process.”

After all these years, someone is finally acknowledging that an investigative lead is only a lead.

And a bot and a human are working together.

A bot AND a human in the loop. Google Gemini.​
A bot AND a human in the loop. Google Gemini.