I’ve gotten nearly 2,000 campaign fundraising texts that were meant for someone else. I tried to find out why—and uncovered a labyrinth of politicians, data brokers, and shady tactics.

WIRED uncovered some 400 apps and websites linked to Chinese-language developers that look like regular AI tools but had secret features that let users create violent AI-generated images and video.

Named Volta-Autodoxer, the recently uncovered malware uses AI tools to collect troves of data about victims, from login credentials and credit card numbers to Discord sessions and UberEats receipts.

Thanks to a lucky break, flawed code in a tainted Claude extension prevented the attacker from fully worming their way into some 5,000 developer machines.