AI NewsChinese hackers spied on thousands of companies after breaching IT giant ConnectWise

Chinese hackers spied on thousands of companies after breaching IT giant ConnectWise

11:41 PM IST · October 22, 2026

Thebad week for cybersecurityjust got worse for thousands more companies, who were spied on by Chinese hackers following the breach of IT management and remote access giant ConnectWise. Security researchers at Microsoft saythe China state-aligned hackers broke into ConnectWise’s cloud backup service and stole application credentials that are used to establish data links between ConnectWise and its corporate customers, who rely on the cloud service to back up their company’s data. By stealing the credentials, the hackers could log in to the customer’s Microsoft-hosted environment as if they were an authorized user and access their emails and other files. According to Microsoft, the hackers used AI agents to rapidly hack into around 2,250 organizations at a rate of almost 3,000 attempted sign-ins per minute. Microsoft said this speed gives defenders “little time to detect and respond.” The speed of the mass-hacks was attributed to the use of AI agents, specifically ARTEX, an open source AI framework that works with AI models to stress-test cyber defenses. The same AI software wasused in a recent compromiseof South Korea’s financial systems, many of which hadweak securityand lacked multi-factor authentication. ConnectWisesaidit’s paused access to its cloud backup system and is investigating the breach. As of Thursday, the company said it was working on restoring the service.

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Meta wants to pay for its broad AI buildout with a newly created class of stock

Meta is making a big push into AI, and it’s creating a new kind of stock that could help pay for it. On Wednesday, as the company reported its third-quarter earnings, Semaforreportedthe company might issue non-voting stock, meaning shares that don’t give their owners a vote on company decisions, to help fund its push into artificial intelligence. During Meta’s earnings call, the company confirmed that reporting. Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, said the company plans to “create a new class of non-voting capital stock, which will be distributed to all existing shareholders through a stock dividend.” Li later added that the company “created this new class of shares with the purpose of creating a publicly traded non-voting stock usable for capital raising, employee compensation, acquisitions, and other general corporate purposes while preserving the voting power of existing Class A and B shareholders.” The shares will allow the company to maintain its current “founder-led structure,” she added. They will also expand its “funding tools and give us flexibility to invest behind the unprecedented momentum we’re seeing across every part of our business, driven by AI.” Meta’s earnings were strong this past quarter, beating Wall Street expectations. The company made $64 billion in revenue, a jump of 26% from a year earlier. Its costs and expenses also rose, however, by 68% year-over-year. Reality Labs, the division responsible for Meta’s AR glasses, VR headsets, and VR software, continues to lose money, though less than it used to. The company said in its earnings report that it expects the division’s losses to shrink from its 2025 levels to between $18 billion and $19 billion. Meta has made a big push into AI over the past year. The company has released several AI models, including Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer earlier this year. In recent weeks, it addedMuse Wonderand Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model whose underlying parameters are publicly available for outsiders to use and build on. Meta also launcheda coding agentfor software developers called Muse Code. At its Meta Connect event this year, the company announced a new line of cute and cuddly avatars for AI assistant, Meta Muse, in a push to make its AI services more relatable (and alsomeme-able). As far as can be discerned, those AI products are doing well. “In just a month and a half, more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada have set up Muse personal agents,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during Wednesday’s earnings call. “Growth continues to be strong, and we have been number one in the App Store almost every day.” “Now that Muse has clear product-market fit, we are entering a new phase and a more operational phase that is focused on scaling it,” Zuckerberg added, claiming later that the company expects to grow the product’s appeal to eventually “serve billions of people.” The company also noted that certain storm clouds linger on the horizon in the form of ongoing regulatory and legal issues. “We continue to monitor active legal and regulatory matters that could significantly impact our business and financial results,” said Li. “For example, we continue to see scrutiny on youth-related issues in several markets, and have a number of youth-related trials scheduled in the coming months in the United States.”

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Spotify’s current AI bet is about being the music service that agents choose

Spotify had a strongthird quarter, reaching 788 million monthly active users and generating nearly €5 billion (around $5.6 billion USD) in revenue. But the more interesting takeaway from its earnings call was how the company sees people listening to music in the future, and why the rise of AI agents could be good news for its business. Co-CEO Gustav Söderström thinks the music streaming giant is particularly well-suited to this shift. “Spotify is in one of the few categories that actually stands to thrive in the agentic age,” Söderström tells investors. “This is because agents excel at replacing and taking care of things people would rather not do. People love getting rid of chores. But entertainment is the opposite. Nobody asks an agent to ‘summarize a song’ for them.” Instead of opening Spotify, searching for an artist, and building a playlist themselves, listeners could ask an AI assistant to do the work for them. They might want music for a run, a podcast about something they’ve been discussing with an AI, or an audiobook recap that picks up exactly where they left off. Spotify wants to be the service those agents turn to, letting people discover music and interact with Spotify through conversations rather than just its own app. Notably, Spotify was the first music service to integrate withMeta’s Muse assistant, and it also integrates with ChatGPT and Claude. “Our goal is to be the media service that you use from any agent, really turning the growth of agents into a tailwind rather than a headwind. That is exactly what we are seeing now. We are seeing really good adoption of Spotify inside these agents. While other companies are maybe trying to figure out what to do and many are leaning out, we are actually leaning in and participating in the growth instead of standing by the roadside and looking at it,” said Söderström. The market is already showing signs of friction over how agents access third-party services.Amazon, for example, has blocked Meta’s Muse from shopping on its platform, illustrating how major players may restrict outside agents when questions arise around access, security, privacy, or commercial control. Spotify’s pitch isn’t just that AI should just make entertainment easier to find. It should make the experience more personal, too. Söderström describes Spotify today as “an intelligent media service encapsulated as an agent, whether you use it directly through our application or via another agent…Spotify is now an agent that you can not only click on in our app, but talk to, ask questions of, and instruct. We can do things today that no other media services can do,” he said. “For example, you can ask Spotify to go through your listening history song by song back to 2008, picking your true favorites, beat-stretching them by speeding them up or down, and then sorting them by key and BPM. Then you can ask it to mix them together into the perfect running playlist at your exact cadence,” Söderström explained. Spotify has years of listening history to draw on, including the artists people return to, the songs they skip, and the music they discover. That information can help it make recommendations that feel more personal than a generic playlist generated by an AI assistant that doesn’t know much about someone’s tastes. However, Söderström also emphasized that Spotify isn’t sending its listener data to partners. Instead, the agent asks Spotify for something, and Spotify uses its own systems to reason about the request and choose what to play.

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Uber puts all 30,000 employees on ChatGPT Work

Uber and OpenAI announced an expansion of their partnership on Thursday, with the ride-share giant telling TechCrunch that its entire global workforce — some 30,000 people — will now be using ChatGPT Work. ChatGPT Work was introduced in July as an enterprise-focused AI agent that corporate teams could deploy for various workflows. Uber originally piloted ChatGPT Work with 1,000 employees earlier this year but has now scaled up its usage to the entire company. That earlier pilot was deployed to workers from across Uber’s various departments, including finance, operations, and product. Indeed, a majority of the early adopters — some 80% — were non-engineers, Sumanth Sukumar, Uber’s VP of engineering, told TechCrunch. “They used it for a wide range of tasks: analyzing complex data from our operations to identify trends and develop recommendations; localizing training materials for different markets and languages; and building personalized interactive dashboards to manage their daily work,” he said. Yet while the ride-share giant is now going all in on ChatGPT, it has not settled on exactly how employees will use it. “Our approach is to make powerful AI tools available across Uber while giving teams room to experiment,” Sukumar said. “For example, earlier this year we paired 30 AI engineers with teams across Uber and gave them two weeks to automate key parts of their job. Those ‘AI pods’ showed us how much opportunity there is when you combine technical expertise with a deep understanding of a particular job.” Uber didn’t disclose how much it’s spending on the new rollout of the chatbot. Instead, Sukumar said the company will track how employees use the tool. “We’ll look at how employees are using the technology, the kinds of workflows they develop and how it helps them work more effectively. We’ll evaluate those outcomes and use what we learn to guide how we deploy AI across the business,” he said. Uber says OpenAI worked closely with the company on integrating the chatbot. OpenAI has moved quickly toscale up its enterprise businessas it competes with its chief competitor, Anthropic. Once known largely as a consumer brand, the ChatGPT creator has swiftlygained a loyal followingwith business customers, while other AI companies have struggled to keep up.

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