The first known ‘agentic ransomware’ has arrived

Good morning. Familiar with the automotive brand Polestar? Not for long, at least if you’re American.

The U.S. Commerce Department has banned the Swedish electric automaker from selling its vehicles in the U.S. starting with the 2027 model year. Though the company is associated with Swedish sibling Volvo, which owns a minority stake, its largest shareholder—Hangzhou’s Geely—is Chinese, violating a Biden-era policy called the Connected Vehicle Rule. 

(Volvo is also majority-owned by Geely, but it was able to secure a legacy exemption that upstart Polestar was not.)

Our condolences to the hardworking folks staffing the dozens of soon-to-be-shuttered Polestar dealerships across the U.S., though we hear Volvo’s hiring. 

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From the Dept. of Keeps You Up at Night: Researchers believe they’ve identified the first example of agentic ransomware in the wild.

Dubbed “JadePuffer,” the operation was conducted entirely by a large language model agent, according to security firm Sysdig. That’s a big change from a type of attack that has always required a human at a keyboard.

“The most striking characteristic, however, was the LLM's behavior,” wrote threat director Michael Clark in a memo. “Jadepuffer's own payloads were self-narrating. They contained natural language reasoning, target prioritization, and the kind of detailed annotations that human operators don’t often write but LLM-generated code produces reflexively.”

What’s more, Clark added, the agent “adapted in real time, retrying failed steps within refined parameters. In one sequence, it went from a failed login to a working fix in 31 seconds.”

The actual observed attack involved a since-fixed vulnerability in Langflow, a popular open-source framework used for building LLM applications. But the ramifications are not to be understated, Clark warned.

“Jadepuffer is a warning sign,” he wrote. “It’s a marker of where extortion tradecraft is heading. An autonomous agent reasoned about its targets, harvested and reused credentials, moved laterally, established persistence, and destroyed a database, narrating its own intent the entire way.”

None of the techniques were novel or sophisticated, he added, but the capability to string them together into a complete operation makes ransomware available to anyone who can afford to run an agent.

“Defenders should expect the volume and breadth of such campaigns to rise as agentic tooling matures,” Clark wrote. Suit up, security pros. —AN

If the long-rumored foldable iPhone indeed becomes real, just how many is Apple prepared to sell at the launch of its next-generation iPhone 18?

According to a recent survey by TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, none—and that’s less a comment about its potential appeal or cost than it is one about how Apple is wading through an extraordinary situation for its supply chain.

“My latest industry survey indicates that assembly shipments for the foldable iPhone in 2H26 will be roughly 7–8 million units, with 3Q26 shipments at 0.5–1 million units, or about 10% of the total,” Kuo writes. “By comparison, estimated 3Q26 shipments of the iPhone 18 Pro / Pro Max total roughly 20–22 million units, significantly higher than the foldable iPhone and already meeting the inventory requirement for an official launch.”

What that ultimately means is that the so-called iPhone Fold may repeat the launch cadence of the difficult-to-manufacture iPhone X in 2017, wherein it’s announced at the same time as the iPhone 18 models but doesn’t sell or ship until substantially later. (It took Apple an extra six weeks after the sales date of the iPhone 8 before it would accept reservations for the iPhone X.)

Even at a rumored price of around $2,000—double the price of today’s iPhone 17 Pro—Kuo believes demand will be strong through the end of the year. 

“The foldable iPhone could sell out immediately after pre-orders open, with delivery lead times quickly stretching to 4–6 weeks or longer and remaining there through December,” he writes. “Scarce initial supply, a highly recognizable design, and an innovative user experience should all support a short-term resale premium; resale prices 50–100% above the official price would not be out of the question.” 

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the favorite targets of U.S. economic sanctions—Iran, Russia, North Korea, etc.—are leaning into the use of virtual currencies as a way to get around the penalties. 

What might: The amount of money flowing through those channels has topped $100 billion, according to new estimates, aided by a willingness by those entities in creating their own tokens and exchanges to facilitate transactions. 

That’s eight times as much as 2024, by the way.

The Wall Street Journal digs into the phenomenon in a new report showing that the target nations are using digital currencies to buy fuel and weapons, pay smugglers, and otherwise evade traditional banks that are better positioned to police such activity.

“Getting a firm grip on the market is nearly impossible,” the Journal writes, “because much of the industry isn’t regulated, and transactions can be done anonymously, making them hard to trace.”

The usual cat-and-mouse game continues, albeit in new environments. In May, the U.K. blacklisted the crypto exchange HTX on allegations of ties to Russia’s government. In June, the U.S. sanctioned Iran’s largest crypto exchange, Nobitex, and seized $1 billion in crypto from the country. 

But it’s getting more difficult—in part because of the sanctions in question.

“In Iran, dozens of crypto exchanges have popped up in recent years,” the paper writes, “driven in part by demand from everyday citizens who need ways to transfer money and build savings amid a weakened rial currency and Western sanctions.” Ah, well. —AN

—Europe’s “smart border” tech was supposed to catch criminals but it’s mostly delaying passengers.

—Tesla rolls out robotaxi service in Miami, its fifth city.

—Alibaba and ByteDance disable humanlike agents before China's anthropomorphic AI interaction rules take effect.

—Foxconn reports a 40% jump in quarterly sales. The Apple and Nvidia supplier said the growth was bigger than expected thanks to AI sales.

—R.I.P. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which will no longer accept new customers from July 30.

—Alibaba gets a reprieve on a de facto U.S. lobbying ban tied to a Pentagon blacklist.

—Tired? Prep school. Wired? AI-powered, personalized curricula for high-income families.