Author: TechBrunch

The North Korean government is reportedly establishing a new hacking group within the Intelligence Reporting Agency's General Reconnaissance Bureau (RGB). Daily NK, a news outlet focusing on North Korea, reported last week that a new hacking unit called Research Centre 227 will focus on research to develop “offensive hacking techniques and programs” citing sources within the administration. Sources said the Research Center 227 will work to investigate cybersecurity systems and computer networks in the western region, strengthen the administration's ability to steal digital assets, develop AI-based technologies for information theft, and respond to information from North Korea's overseas hacking units.…

Germany's Munich RE has signed a decisive agreement to acquire digital insurance company Next Insurance for $2.6 billion, the company announced Thursday. Founded in 2016, Next Insurance, based in Palo Alto, focuses on providing insurance to small and medium-sized businesses. It was last valued at $2.5 billion when it raised $265 million in late 2023. The following insurance supporters include Group 11, Allstate, Allianz X, Battery Ventures, Capital G, Redpoint Ventures, Nationwide, Amex Ventures, Ribbit Capital and others. According to CrunchBase, the company has raised nearly $1.2 billion in its lifetime. Like many fintechs, the next insurance rating has been…

Google is rolling out a new Gmail update designed to help you find the email you're looking for faster. On Thursday, the company announced that it will use AI to consider factors such as remency, most clicked emails, and frequent contacts when surfing emails based on search queries. Until now, Gmail would simply display chronological emails based on keywords. “This update will make the email you're looking for much more likely to be at the top of your search results. It will save you valuable time and help you find important information more easily,” he wrote in a blog post.…

CoreWeave said Wednesday it hopes to sell its first public shares between $47 and $55 per share, and it hopes to place the gold between about $2.2 billion and $2.6 billion. The word on the street is that CoreWeave wanted at least $3 billion, perhaps more than $4 billion. But price range announcements are always a bit of a game. The scope announced is often lower than bankers think the company really can get. The company then officially sets a high price. Doing that will help build excitement on the first day of the transaction, telling retail investors that they…

Claude, Anthropic's AI-powered chatbot, can now search the web. This is a feature that has been escaped for a long time. Web search is currently available in previews of paid Claude users in the US, and Humanity said on its blog that free users and additional countries support are coming soon. Users can toggle web searches in Profile Settings from the Claude Web App, and Claude automatically searches between sites to notify you of specific responses. For now, web search only works with the latest human models powered by Claude, Claude 3.7 sonnets, humanity said. “When Claude incorporates information from…

Meta's social networking threads are X-competitors with over 320 million active users per month, rolling out new features related to topics, replies controls, and app video playback. The company also says it is personalizing political content proposals to users. When combined, this feature is intended to relate the app to the user and make users engage in content on the network when X is no longer the sole competitor of the thread. Today, Meta is facing the rise of alternative networks like BlueSky. Bluesky has a platform with over 33 million users and an exciting rival on Instagram. To help…

Open Source X rival social network BlueSky has made changes to allow publishers to better track referral traffic that comes from posts on the platform. According to a comment from Bluesky employee Emily Liu, the company currently sends referral traffic through Bluesky's “Go” subdomain, allowing publishers to easily track when visitors to the site come to the site via links shared on social networks. You can see that when you click on a link shared on Bluesky it will easily appear as the “go.bsky.app” URL before landing on the publisher's own domain. This allows the publisher's analytics system to determine…

Hackers are bolstering attempts to exploit Servanno's trio of vulnerabilities a year ago to infiltrate unpublished company instances, security researchers warned this week. Threat intelligence startup Greynoise said in a blog post Tuesday it observed a “salient revival of wild activity” targeting three ServiceNow vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2024-4879, CVE-2024-5178 and CVE-2024-5217. The vulnerability was first disclosed by AssetNote researchers in May 2024 and was patched by ServiceNow in July 2024. Greynoise said all three flaws had been revived last week in an attempt to target exploitation. While it's not exactly clear what's behind this latest wave of targeting, Greynoise says…

Open source data athletics company Airbyte is launching additional connectors to make data better accessible to businesses in the age of AI without eroding data sovereignty. The San Francisco-based startup announced Thursday that it is releasing a number of new features designed to allow customers to safely move corporate data without tapping on SaaS applications. New features include support for transferring unstructured data from applications such as Google Drive and SharePoint, and compatibility with Apache Iceberg, an open source format for large analytics tables. Airbyte also launches connector bundles for enterprise customers, including data connector pipelines for applications such as…

Venture capital investments in European startups exceeded $52 billion last year, reflecting the outsize peaks between 2021 and 2022 (driven primarily by the Covid-19 pandemic), and the market's long-term growth trajectory and gradual stabilization following the slump in 2023, according to a new report. Although political and regulatory disruptions have been seen in 2024, the European talent pool continues to rise even as the European talent pool, which has covered 2024, according to a new “Trade Flow” report from the world law firm Orrick. Last year, an analysis of over 375 VC and growth equity investments in Europe revealed a…