Chinese AI Tried to Phone Home. Nobody Knows Why | Threat Wire

What happens when a Chinese AI model tries to contact a server in China—and even the researchers can’t explain why? In this episode of Hak5 Threat Wire, we investigate suspicious behavior in an open-weight AI model, Samsung Smart TV privacy concerns, and the growing restrictions on AI-powered hacking and reverse engineering. Plus, we break down critical Tailscale SSH vulnerabilities and the AWS outage that disrupted services across the internet.

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LINKS
🔗 Story 1: Chinese Models Found Moving Files
https://venturebeat.com/security/deepseek-injects-50-more-security-bugs-when-prompted-with-chinese-political
https://cohere.com/blog/concerning-behaviour-popular-open-weight-ai-model
🔗 Story 2: The Smart Remote Saga
https://cybernews.com/privacy/samsung-smart-tv-spying-microphones-ai/
https://x.com/0x0SojalSec/status/2113208608980898022
https://x.com/sairahul1/status/2114038005795291637
https://x.com/karpathy/status/2116957135661945283
https://pasqualepillitteri.it/en/news/26796/samsung-tvs-researcher-claims-microphone-always-on
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1xbtl8w/the_dream_is_dead_reverse_engineer_anything_rea/
🔗 Story 3: Tailscale
https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/tailscale-patches-ssh-flaws-that-could.html
https://x.com/skeptrune/status/2113110197157982533
https://tailworm.com/#executive-summary-for-business-readers
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tailscale-warns-of-serious-ssh-flaws-allowing-root-privilege-escalation/
🔗 Story 4: Throw back story: What Brought AWS Down?
https://www.theverge.com/news/802486/aws-outage-alexa-fortnite-snapchat-offline
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/amazon-dns-outage-breaks-much-of-the-internet/
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
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