The brief

Friday, August 7, 2026

US data labeling firms are simultaneously selling AI training datasets to American labs and Chinese competitors, creating counterintelligence risks. A critical KVM escape vulnerability, Chinese router backdoor, GitHub outage, Snowflake breaches affecting 165+ companies, and coordinated PE firm attacks demand immediate infrastructure review and vendor risk reassessment.

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Today's stories

China launches a formal national security review of Palo Alto Networks products sold in the Chinese market, citing a need to protect critical infrastructure (Alan Wong/Bloomberg)
Biggest backdoor yet found in Chinese routers sold under multiple brand names
Hacker pleads guilty to stealing data from more than 165 Snowflake customers
Zapscape (CVE-2026-64561)
Google and data: hackers used phone calls, phishing websites, and "meticulous" tactics to target dozens of US PE firms and other businesses over the past month (Reuters)
GitHub Is Experiencing Difficulties
Docs: US data labeling companies, like Surge AI and Mercor, that sell training datasets to US AI labs and the government are also selling them to Chinese labs (Anna Tong/Forbes)
Google says hackers are calling financial firm employees to hack and extort victims
China-linked LightSpy spyware caught targeting victims in 13 countries, including the US
Large genome models used to design new viruses
GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability
Framework discloses data breach via Metabase 0-day

Worth a listen

How Open-Source AI Became Critical Infrastructure
AI without adult supervision.
Google’s AI Leadership Shakeup: Disaster or Exactly What It Needs?

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