steganography2 articles
Anthropic quietly buried hidden tracking code in Claude Code. Now it's removing it.
Anthropic has announced it will remove hidden steganographic code from its Claude Code tool, which was secretly embedded in system prompts to detect and flag unauthorized resellers and rival AI companies — particularly Chinese labs — attempting to copy its models through repeated queries. A developer discovered the concealed mechanism, which used invisible Unicode markers, XOR encoding, and base64 to hide a domain blacklist, raising concerns about transparency in a tool that asks users for trust. Anthropic says stronger anti-distillation measures are already in place and the code removal was merged and scheduled for release on July 1st.
Ousaban Banking Trojan Is Hunting Iberian Bank Customers via Fake PDF Lures
Ousaban, a Brazilian banking trojan also known as Javali, is targeting Windows users in Spain and Portugal through phishing PDFs that trick victims into downloading malware hidden inside an image file using steganography. Once installed, it monitors banking activity, capturing keystrokes and screenshots, and gives attackers remote control to hijack live banking sessions at over two dozen Iberian banks. The campaign uses geofencing to restrict delivery to genuine targets in the two countries, and evades detection through a rotating daily command server address and a custom encryption scheme that has proved resilient for years.