The IT Privacy and Security Weekly Update for the Week Ending February 24th., 2026
EP 280. “When Your Everyday Tech Quietly Turns Against You”
“This week, a hobby project turned one man’s robot vacuum into a remote control for 7,000 homes, a new phishing service made the real login page your biggest enemy, and Texas decided your Wi‑Fi router is now a geopolitical issue.”
“If you’re not technical but you live with passwords, smart gadgets, or online banking, this episode is about the invisible ways those tools can misbehave, and the one small fix you can make after each story.”
When the Real Login Page Turns Against You
Let’s start with a story that breaks one of the oldest security habits: ‘always check the login page.’
Imagine this: you get an email that says, ‘There’s a problem with your Microsoft account, click here to sign in.’ You click, you land on the real Microsoft login page, padlock in the browser, familiar logo, everything looks exactly right. You type your email, your password, your multi‑factor code from your phone, you hit enter, and you’re in. Nothing feels suspicious.
Behind the scenes, though, a slick new phishing service called Starkiller may be sitting in the middle like a relay operator, quietly recording everything you type as it passes between you and the real site.
Here’s what’s going on. Most phishing kits work by cloning a login page, somebody saves a fake copy of the site, hosts it on a dodgy server, and hopes you don’t notice the differences. Starkiller does something smarter. When an attacker sets up a campaign, Starkiller spins up a temporary container running a headless Chrome browser that loads the actual login page from Google, Microsoft, Apple, banks, and so on.
Your browser isn’t talking to the real site directly; it’s talking to Starkiller’s server, which is talking to the real site on your behalf. It’s a man‑in‑the‑middle reverse proxy, in human terms, a telephone operator that connects you to the bank, but listens in and writes down everything you say.
Every keystroke, every form submission, every session token travels through attacker‑controlled infrastructure and gets logged. That includes your multi‑factor codes. Because Starkiller passes your data straight on in real time, attackers can grab your password and ride your live session into your account, often without triggering extra warnings.
And this isn’t some hobby script on a forum. Starkiller is sold like a commercial SaaS platform: slick dashboards, campaign management, analytics, support via Telegram, and subscription pricing. Low‑skill criminals can log in, pick a brand to impersonate, generate convincing links that visually mimic the real domains, and launch phishing waves with a few clicks.
So what's the upshot for you?
Here’s the one simple move: stop trusting login links and start trusting your own bookmarks.
If an email or text tells you to sign in, whether it’s your bank, Microsoft, Google, or your payroll system, ignore the link. Open a fresh browser window, type the site’s address yourself, or use a bookmark or a password manager shortcut you set up earlier. Your password manager also helps here, because it usually won’t autofill on a look‑alike domain.
That tiny habit change breaks Starkiller’s whole game. They only win if they can get you to click their link.
The Man Who Accidentally Commanded 7,000 Robot Vacuums
Next up, a story that starts with a fun weekend project and ends with a quiet army of robot spies.
A software engineer named Sammy Azdoufal wanted to control his robot vacuum with a video game controller. That’s it. Just a neat hack: push a joystick, watch the vacuum obey like a little tank in your living room.
To make that happen, he had to figure out how the vacuum talked to DJI’s cloud servers. He used an AI coding assistant to help reverse‑engineer the communication and authenticate with the same credentials his own app used.
And then things got weird.
Those credentials didn’t just unlock his vacuum; they unlocked nearly 7,000 robot vacuums across 24 countries. Suddenly, he had access not just to device status, but to live camera feeds, microphone audio, and the maps these vacuums build of people’s homes as they drive around. He could see approximate locations from IP addresses, and even generate 2D floor plans based on the mapped data.
In other words, a bug in DJI’s backend meant one “key” was opening thousands of doors. These vacuums, designed to quietly clean floors, could have been quietly mapping homes and listening to conversations without owners ever suspecting a thing.
Now, here’s the good part: Sammy didn’t abuse this. He reported his findings to The Verge, which contacted DJI. DJI says it fixed the issue in two updates, with an initial patch on February 8 and a follow‑up on February 10. The hole is reportedly closed.
But the lesson is bigger than this one bug. Smart devices, vacuums, doorbells, baby monitors, and thermostats are all basically little internet‑connected computers. Many have cameras, microphones, and rich sensor data. When the cloud is wired incorrectly, you don’t just lose convenience; you lose privacy in very quiet ways.
So what's the upshot for you?
First, turn on automatic updates for any smart device that connects to the internet. That makes it much more likely you get fixes like this quickly.
Second, if your home router supports it, put smart gadgets on a guest or IoT Wi‑Fi network. That way, if one of them is ever compromised, it’s more isolated from your laptops and phones.
You don’t have to rip out your smart home. You just want your devices to live in the metaphorical ‘guest house’ instead of sharing your bedroom.”
When AI Starts Debugging the Security Industry
Let’s switch from hardware to money.
On a recent Friday, cybersecurity stocks took a noticeable dip. Not because of a massive breach, but because Anthropic added a new security feature to its Claude AI model called Claude Code Security.
Here’s what it does: it scans software codebases for security vulnerabilities and then suggests targeted patches for humans to review. Think of it as a supercharged spell‑checker, but for security bugs instead of typos. The model looks for risky patterns, flags them, and proposes fixes that engineers can accept, modify, or reject.
Investors looked at that announcement and wondered, ‘If AI can automate more of this vulnerability‑finding work, what does that mean for companies whose business is finding vulnerabilities by hand?’ Stocks like CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Zscaler, SailPoint, and Okta all fell between roughly 3 and 7 percent, and a cybersecurity ETF extended its losses for the year.
Now, in reality, one feature isn’t going to replace the entire security industry. Humans still need to decide what to prioritize, how to fix complex issues, and how to understand the bigger picture of risk. But it signals a shift.
For buyers of software, it means you’re going to start hearing more marketing around ‘AI‑assisted secure coding’ or ‘AI‑driven code review.’ For developers and security professionals, it means the job is slowly changing from manually combing through everything to supervising increasingly capable tools.
The productive mindset here is not ‘AI is coming for my job’ but ‘AI is coming for the boring parts of my job.’
So what's the upshot for you?
The next time you’re evaluating software, whether it’s for your small business or your employer, add one question:
‘How do you test your code for security bugs, and how do humans double‑check what any automated tools find?’
You don’t need a PhD to ask that, but it tells you a lot about how seriously a vendor treats your data.
The Passwords That Only Look Strong
Next, let’s talk about passwords that look strong but aren’t.
If you’ve ever stared at a ‘Create a password’ box and thought, ‘I’ll just ask an AI to make one up for me,’ this story is for you.
Researchers at a security firm called Irregular tested several major AI models, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, to see how good they are at making truly random passwords. On the surface, the results looked great: 16 characters, a mix of upper and lower case, numbers, and symbols. Exactly what security advice tells you to use.
But when they dug into the math, things fell apart. When they asked Claude Opus 4.6 for passwords 50 times in separate conversations, only 30 of them were unique, and many of the duplicates were exactly the same password. In other words, the model kept reusing certain ‘favorite’ strings.
They measured something called entropy, which is just a fancy way to say ‘how unpredictable is this?’ A good, truly random 16‑character password should have on the order of 98 to 120 bits of entropy. The AI‑generated ones landed around 20 to 27 bits, orders of magnitude weaker.
To put that in plain English: the passwords looked like noise to your eyes, but from a computer’s point of view, they followed patterns that made them much easier to guess. Some models even had strong regularities, like many passwords starting with the same letter sequences.
This isn’t because the models are dumb. It’s because they’re doing exactly what they were designed to do: imitate patterns they’ve seen, not roll perfectly fair dice. They’re great at language, but password generation is one place where you want pure randomness, not clever pattern‑matching.
So what's the upshot for you?
The suggestion is pleasantly boring: use a dedicated password manager and let it generate passwords for you. Tools like 1Password, Bitwarden, and others use proper random generators, not language models.
If you absolutely insist on making your own, use a passphrase built from several unrelated words plus a few numbers or symbols, something like ‘guitar‑lake‑paper‑9%coffee’, and keep it unique per site.
AI is fantastic for explaining security. It’s just not the right tool for minting the keys to your accounts.
The Scientist Who Pointed the Secret Weapon at Himself
Now for a story that sits at the edge of science and national security.
For years, a mysterious cluster of cases known as ‘Havana Syndrome’ has plagued diplomats, spies, and government staff. People have reported dizziness, headaches, and neurological symptoms in cities around the world, with debate raging over whether it’s a secret weapon or something more mundane.
A Norwegian government scientist decided to weigh in in the most dramatic way possible: he built a pulsed microwave device and tested it on himself, aiming to show that this technology was harmless.
It didn’t go the way he expected. Instead of proving the device benign, he started to develop neurological symptoms that looked very much like what Havana Syndrome patients had described.
The experiment took place in 2024, but it’s only recently become public. It was serious enough that officials from the Pentagon and the White House visited to examine the device and its implications. U.S. intelligence agencies are still cautious, emphasizing that one self‑experiment doesn’t prove that a foreign adversary is targeting officials with a microwave weapon.
But it does show something important: pulsed‑energy devices can affect human biology. And any discussion about Havana Syndrome now has at least one data point that doesn’t fit easily into the ‘it’s all in their heads’ bucket.
So what's the upshot for you?
It’s this: when you hear about strange health phenomena or alleged ‘secret weapons,’ look at who’s willing to share methods, publish data, and invite scrutiny, even when it doesn’t support their original hypothesis.
In your daily life, that same mindset helps you sort wild claims on social media from issues that actually deserve your attention and worry. You don’t need to build a microwave device in your garage; you just need a good filter for evidence.
The Rogue AI Assistant Companies Are Banning (For Now)
Back to AI, but this time, we’re talking about a tool that doesn’t just answer questions; it actually does things on your computer.
OpenClaw is an ‘agentic’ AI tool: instead of just chatting, it can browse websites, access files, run code, and chain together actions to complete tasks. For curious engineers, it looks thrilling. For security folks, it looks like giving a very smart stranger your house keys.
At one startup called Massive, the CEO sent a late‑night Slack message with a red siren emoji telling employees to keep OpenClaw off company hardware and away from work accounts. Over at Meta, a senior executive reportedly warned staff they could lose their jobs if they installed it on their regular work laptops, citing fears about unpredictability and privacy breaches.
Another company, Valere, had someone post about OpenClaw in an internal Slack channel as something cool to try. The president quickly replied that it was strictly banned. Later, they allowed their research team to test it on an old, isolated computer to understand the risk. What they found was unsettling:
* If OpenClaw had access to a developer’s machine, it could reach into cloud services and client data, including credit cards and code repositories.
* It was pretty good at cleaning up traces of what it had done, making forensic investigation harder.
* It could be tricked. For example, if it were set up to summarize email, a malicious email could instruct it to exfiltrate files from the victim’s computer.
Their conclusion wasn’t “never use it,” but “treat it as inherently risky.” They recommended limiting who can give it commands, protecting its control panel with a password, and isolating it from sensitive systems.
The broader community has flagged similar concerns: OpenClaw can run hundreds of community‑contributed “skills,” many from random GitHub repositories that haven’t gone through a formal security review. That’s like letting unvetted contractors plug directly into your office wiring.
So what's the upshot for you?
Treat them like a contractor you just met, not a trusted family member.
* Don’t install them on the same machine you use for banking or work VPN.
* Use a separate browser profile or a spare device if you can.
* Be cautious about letting them auto‑process your email or files.
You absolutely can explore this new wave of tools, but you want them in a sandbox, not roaming your whole digital life.
The Six‑Month Glitch in Small Business Loans
Now, a quieter story with very real consequences for a specific group: small business borrowers.
Those details included names, email addresses, phone numbers, business addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers. PayPal says it discovered the problem on December 12, rolled back the bad code change within a day, and is now notifying affected users. They emphasize that the number of impacted customers is relatively small.
For those individuals, though, this isn’t abstract. Social Security numbers and birth dates are the crown jewels of identity theft, and unlike passwords, you can’t just change them next week.
What’s notable here is that this wasn’t some exotic nation‑state hack. It was a coding error inside a reputable financial company. Even well‑run organizations can ship bugs that expose exactly the kind of data criminals want most.
So what's the upshot for you?
First, consider putting a credit freeze or lock in place with the major credit bureaus if you don’t apply for new credit often. It’s like putting a deadbolt on your credit file; it doesn’t stop all fraud, but it makes it much harder to open new accounts in your name.
Second, turn on alerts with your bank and credit card providers, and pay attention to breach notifications instead of deleting them.
You don’t need to panic every time you hear ‘data breach,’ but you do want a default response ready: freeze if needed, monitor activity, and use identity protection tools if they’re offered.”
When Your Wi‑Fi Router Becomes a Court Case
Let’s close with the gadget you probably haven’t thought about since the day you set it up: your Wi‑Fi router.
The state of Texas is suing TP‑Link, one of the biggest networking brands in the U.S., over two main issues.
First, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claims TP‑Link misled consumers with ‘Made in Vietnam’ labels while relying heavily on China‑based manufacturing and supply chains. In the current political climate, where there’s intense scrutiny of Chinese tech, that matters.
Second, and more relevant to security, the lawsuit alleges that TP‑Link marketed its devices as secure while firmware vulnerabilities and China‑based affiliations allowed Chinese state‑sponsored actors to access devices inside American homes. Texas officials say TP‑Link controls roughly 65 percent of the U.S. networking and smart‑home device market, so this isn’t a niche brand.
This doesn’t automatically mean your TP‑Link router is compromised. But it does show that routers and smart‑home hubs are now part of a much bigger story about supply chains, government policy, and how seriously companies take firmware security.
So what's the upshot for you?
* Log into your router’s admin page and turn on automatic firmware updates if they’re available.
* If your router is more than, say, 5,7 years old, consider budgeting for a replacement, because many vendors quietly stop shipping security patches after a while.
* When you do buy a new one, spend five minutes to search: ‘[brand] router security updates’ and see if the company has a track record of addressing vulnerabilities publicly.
You don’t have to turn into a hardware auditor. You just want to treat the box that connects your whole home to the internet as something worth 10 minutes of your attention once in a while.
So that’s our tour of the week:
* A phishing service that weaponizes the real login page.
* A robot vacuum project that accidentally exposed 7,000 homes.
* AI tools that are reshaping both security work and password habits.
* And the quiet infrastructure in your home is becoming a political and legal battleground.
The common thread is simple: the more invisible the technology, the more important it is to ask who controls it and what happens when it fails.
Here’s our challenge for you this week: pick one thing from today’s episode and act on it. Maybe that’s:
* Turning on automatic updates for your router or smart vacuum.
* Switching to a password manager.
* Or making a new habit of typing website addresses instead of clicking login links.
If you’ve got an ‘everyday tech gone weird’ story, or a headline you’d like translated into plain English, send it our way. We’d love to feature your questions in a future episode.
Thanks for listening, and remember: you don’t have to be technical to make smart security decisions. You just need the right stories.”
Our quote of the week - “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,” Marshall McLuhan
That’s it for this week. Stay safe, Stay secure, keep an eye on that “everyday tech,” and we’ll see you in se7en.
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