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When’s the best time to splurge on something nice for yourself? If you ask me, it’s Black Friday—or more specifically, the days leading up to Black Friday. There are already some hot deals going on, but one that catches my eye is this Sony WH-1000XM5 deal on Amazon. It’s one of the best wireless noise-canceling headphones ever, and the price is right now that it’s just $298 (that’s $100 off). View this Amazon deal The noise-canceling technology is superb in these cans, with Sony using two processors that control eight different microphones for precise wave cancellation. Whether you want to block out your chattering coworkers or just want some peace and quite while commuting, these Sony headphones are an excellent pick and well worth it. They’re fully wireless and pair easily via Bluetooth, and they can connect to two devices at once. That means you can listen to music on your laptop, then instantly take a call on your phone. The over-ear design makes it easy to isolate yourself from the world and focus on the voice of whomever you’re talking to. There are also convenient touch controls that you can use to control volume and playback, answer or reject calls, and even activate your phone’s voice assistant. What about battery life? No worries there. The Sony WH-1000XM5 lasts up to 30 hours of active playback on a single charge, and when you realize you’re running on fumes, a quick 3-minute charge can give you another 3 hours of playback. (Just enough to make it back home and give it a proper charge back up to full.) Our friends at TechAdvisor reviewed these headphones and gave them a stunning 5-star rating and their Editors’ Choice award. These are as good as it gets for the price, so snag a pair for just $298 while you can! Save $100 on one of the greatest wireless noise-canceling headphonesBuy now at Amazon Read...

Back in February 2025, several media outlets warned of a new threat targeting users of Google’s Gmail email service. Attackers used AI technology to perfect phishing emails and make them look more convincing. To do this, the AI collected freely available data from social networks, websites, and online forums on the internet and used this information to formulate a deceptively genuine-looking email that pretended to come from an acquaintance, family member, or superior. What’s more, to ensure that the message actually looked deceptively genuine, the AI also generated suitable domains as senders for the emails. The scam was dubbed “Deepphish”—a portmanteau of the terms deep learning and phishing. Even if the report mentioned at the beginning raises some questions—such as why Gmail users in particular were affected by the Deepphish attack—it nevertheless highlights a development that experts had been expecting for some time: criminal groups are increasingly using AI tools to perfect their attacks. Domains created with AI One of the weak points of conventional phishing attacks has always been the sender address. Most phishing emails can be easily identified by the sender . For example, a message from a streaming service such as Netflix or Disney with an address like andy@brandbot.com is almost certainly a fake—no matter how perfect the rest of the presentation may be. In the AI-supported variant of a phishing attack, on the other hand, new types of algorithms are used that generate a sender address with a matching URL that is adapted to the text of the email. A research group led by Alejandro Correa Bahnsen at the US company Cyxtera Technologies, an operator of data centers, investigated how effective these algorithms can be. They developed an algorithm called Deepphish, which was trained to suggest suitable URLs for phishing attacks. To do this, they fed a neural network with more than one million URLs that had been set up for phishing via email in the past and used them to train their algorithm. In doing so, they specified two different profiles for the actors behind the phishing attack. Phishing emails can often be recognized by the sender addresses. If, as in this case, a message purporting to be from Disney comes from andy@ brandbot.com, something is wrong.Foundry With the AI-generated addresses, they achieved an increase in attack efficiency from 0.69 to 20.9 percent for one profile and from 4.91 to 36.28 percent for the other. They published their results in a stud you can find here. While Deepphish originally only referred to the algorithm developed at Cyxtera, it’s now used in most cases for AI-supported phishing attacks in general. How a Deepphish attack works Deepphish attacks follow a standardized pattern. The first step is to research the target’s social environment: Where does she live? Where does she work? What are the names of their family members? What are their friends’ names? What are the names of their colleagues and superiors? What are their email addresses, how close are they to the target person? The AI uses social networks and online forums as sources, as well as data published by hackers from intrusions into company networks and websites. The more data collected in this way, the more precisely the phishing email can be tailored to the victim. In a study, employees at Cyxtera investigated how the success rate of phishing emails can be increased by selecting an AI-generated sender address. Foundry The next step is to register a suitable domain and generate a sender address using an algorithm such as Deepphish. The AI then writes the text of the email. Using the information collected, it generates a suitable subject line, a salutation tailored to the recipient and content that is worded correctly and could actually have been written by the supposed sender. Due to the precise personalization, the message appears considerably more credible than a standard phishing email. But what do the criminals want to achieve with their deepphish attacks? They want to inspire so much confidence with their forgeries that the recipient is prepared to click on a file attachment or an embedded link. Everything else happens automatically: the file attachment then usually downloads and installs malware. The link, on the other hand, leads to another fake website that requests credit card details or login information for a streaming service, for example. AI-supported phishing emails However, the Deepphish algorithm is just the beginning. There is now a whole range of tools that do all the work for criminals when formulating phishing messages. The programs are called FraudGPT, WormGPT, or GhostGPT. They formulate phishing emails that are targeted at individuals or specific companies. For example, the user can instruct these programs to generate a Netflix-style email with a request to enter account details on a fake website. Or they can have questions answered such as “How do I hack a Wi-Fi password?”. Or they can instruct the AI to program a software keylogger that forwards all keystrokes on a computer to a server address via the internet. Hacking tools such as WormGPT use AI to generate convincing-looking and well-formulated phishing emails. In most cases, they target specific individuals or companies. Foundry ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) have in-built filters so that they do not respond to such requests. As ChatGPT does not disclose its code, there is nothing that can be done about this. However, it is possible to use instructions from the darknet to confuse LLMs such as ChatGPT via certain prompt sequences so that they are then prepared to disregard their in-built filters. At the same time, some criminal groups have switched to LLMs from the open source scene and removed the corresponding filters. AI generates malware The Stopwatch AI website demonstrates just how far the possibilities of AI-generated malware already go. It shows how AI can be used in three simple steps to program malware that specifically undermines the protective shield of the major antivirus tools. In the first step, called “Choose Platform”, you select the operating system of the computer you want to attack. You can choose from Mac, Windows, Linux, AWS (Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud service), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s professional cloud service. The Stopwatch AI website demonstrates how malware can be programmed in a few simple steps with the help of AI tools. The first step is to select the operating system to be attacked. Foundry The second step is called “Choose Defence” and offers nine antivirus tools, including Microsoft Defender, Eset Endpoint Protection Advanced, McAfee Endpoint Security, Symantec Endpoint Security, and Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business. In the second step, Stopwatch AI users select the antivirus program whose weaknesses they want to exploit with their malware attack. Microsoft Defender is also listed here.Foundry In the third step, “Choose Attack”, you specify the type of virus you want to create. The selection ranges from adware and spyware to ransomware and keylogging through to data exfiltration, i.e. data theft. Stopwatch AI offers ten different types of malware, from keyloggers to ransomware. The user must register in order to implement the selected malware. Foundry After clicking on a form of attack, Stopwatch AI asks for log-in details. It is possible to register with the site using a Google, Github, or Microsoft account. As soon as registration is complete, the AI starts programming the desired malware. In order to use the site, the user must agree to the terms of use, which exclude attacks against other systems. This is because Stopwatch AI is only intended for studying malware development with AI. Critically, all projects are assigned to the respective user and saved. How to recognize AI-generated phishing emails Always take a look at the sender address of incoming emails and consider whether it is plausible. Also look out for the following features: Become wary of emails from people you are not normally in contact with or have not heard from in a while. This is especially true if these messages contain unusual requests or enquiries. Hover your mouse over any links and check where they lead to. If the address does not match the sender of the email or the text of the message, it is often a scam. No bank, streaming service, or public authority ever asks for your password or wants to know your account details via email. Be suspicious of emails that put you under time pressure or claim a high level of urgency. Tricking antivirus tools with AI Every antivirus program downloads the latest virus definitions from the manufacturer’s server at least once a day. They describe the characteristics of the new malware variants discovered in the last few hours so that the software on the user’s computer can reliably detect the malware. However, this protective shield has become increasingly fragile. The reason: virus construction kits that allow hobby programmers to create functioning malware even without AI have been circulating on the darknet for decades—but not only there. Many of these malware programs are simply minimally modified variants of already known viruses. The author often only has to change the signature for his malware to be counted as a new virus. This is the only way to explain why antivirus manufacturers report 560,000 new malware programs every day. In the age of AI, the production of malware variants has taken on a new quality. This is because security manufacturers had taught their antivirus programs to recognize and isolate the variants of already known malware. With AI support, it’s now possible to manipulate existing malware in a targeted manner so that it is no longer recognized by the virus watchdogs. The tool manufacturer Acronis demonstrated this in a presentation using a malware sample that it had uploaded to Google’s detection service Virustotal. While it was initially recognized as malware by nine of the antivirus programs used there, only one virus guard was able to identify the malware as such after it had been reworked by Grok3’s AI. When the researchers had the sample code processed by Gemini 2.0 Flash and Deepseek R1, the virus was no longer detected by any of the programs at Virustotal. Depending on which AI software is used, the hacker can manipulate existing malware in such a way that it remains almost or even completely undetected by Virustotal. Foundry Nevertheless, the heuristic and behavior-based methods of antivirus programs also work with malware whose code has been modified with the help of AI. Email spoofing The falsification of email addresses, known as email spoofing, hardly occurs any more. Since 2014, the SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication methods have gradually been defined as standards and subsequently implemented by email providers. Since then, it is no longer possible to falsify the domain information in an email address. For an address such as “magazine@pcworld.com”, for example, the domain is pcworld.com. If the aforementioned authentication procedures are deactivated by a provider, these mails are normally sorted out as spam by the recipient. Spoofing attempts still exist, however. The sender’s name can be changed in many e-mail clients, for example in classic Outlook via File -> Account settings -> Account settings -> Change -> Your name. However, this does not affect the email address. In the case of hacker attacks, the reply address is sometimes changed at the same point. In this way, all replies to the emails sent are sent to the hacker’s address. Another trick is to use a similar-looking domain, such as “magazine@pcworlde.com“. Read...

To make our PCWorld best VPN list a VPN needs to offer a comprehensive list of features. There are many features that make up a VPN but the most important among them directly impact a VPN’s performance, privacy, and security. Here is my short list of the top six features to look for. 1. No-logs policy A VPN prevents others from seeing the websites that you visit, but the VPN provider can still see those URLs. An unscrupulous VPN provider can keep a record of your browsing activity and pass it along to a third party such as advertisers or law enforcement. In light of this, most VPNs claim to have a no-logs policy as an assurance to consumers. No-logs means the VPN does not keep any record of your web activity or when you log on and off. In reality, however, those claims aren’t always true — there have been cases of VPNs logging user data despite what they say, so it pays to do your research to find a legitimate no-logs policy — i.e. one that’s been independently verified — before you sign up to any service. 2. Fast speeds A VPN has to encrypt your web traffic and divert it through its own server before sending it to its destination. That means your internet speeds will be slowed down slightly when using a VPN. Different VPNs will do this at varying speeds with some being faster than others. The fastest VPNs are those with the lowest impact on your download speeds and latency. You can check our reviews to gauge the fastest VPNs among the ones we test. 3. A wide server network A VPN’s server network is a list of the proxy IP addresses the VPN makes available to its users. A large server network means there are more servers to connect to and more opportunities to unblock content. The closer you are to a VPN’s server the faster your connection will be, so you should pick a VPN with a large network and connect to a server near you. Pexels: Dan Nelson 4. A kill switch A VPN kill switch is a failsafe that prevents VPN users from accidently leaking data in the event the VPN connection drops out unexpectedly. An active kill switch will shut off your internet connection so you’re not exposed online. There are also kill switches that prevent you from going online at all unless the VPN connection is activated. 5. Content-unblocking ability Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and other platforms will block VPNs for content distribution and copyright reasons, but a good VPN should be able to skirt around the blocks. Ideally, a good VPN should be able to unblock streaming services from multiple IP addresses, unblocking content libraries available in different locations. 6. Anonymous DNS Servers DNS (Domain Name System) is the technology that connects URLs with servers to bring up the websites you’re looking for. VPNs that use public DNS servers risk sending your request outside the encrypted tunnel, making your IP address readable. This is known as a DNS leak. To avoid a DNS leak, ideally you want a VPN that resolves requests with its own private DNS servers. Related content Best VPN services: 8 top picks for every VPN need 5 VPN features you need to start using today Does a VPN make you anonymous? Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Thunderbolt 5 Integrated M.2 slot for an SSD Dedicated function keys Dock will charge without need for a laptop connection Unusually varied ports (optical, CompactFlash) Generally stable Cons Some trouble connecting to displays after a restart/resume Extremely high price Our Verdict Kensington’s EQ Pro Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station (SD7100TS) aggressively chases the premium dock category, with unusual features that cater to a creative professional. The price tag will be a big roadblock, but those with a generous IT budget will be rewarded. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Kensington SD7100T5 EQ Pro 19-in-1 Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station  Retailer Price Kensington $449.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices Editor’s Note: At press time, Kensington had only begun shipping the version of this dock designed for the Apple Mac. The Amazon link above points at that version, while the Kensington shopping link above does not yet have availability. You should be able to use the “Mac” version of this dock referenced above by just downloading the Windows software package. Kensington’s EQ Pro Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station, also known as the SD7100TS, is a monster of a dock, whose $450 price is roughly double what some manufacturers charge for the current generation of Thunderbolt 4 docks. It’s a hefty investment, but this 19-in-1 docking station also offers features that rival laptop docking stations simply do not. It’s worth noting, though, that this is a Thunderbolt 5 dock, a technology we’ve been talking about since 2023. However, the 2026 laptop platforms for all three PC processor makers, including Intel’s Panther Lake, will not support Thunderbolt 5 except via a more expensive discrete chip. That likely makes Thunderbolt 5 a niche technology. (Yes, you can future-proof your desk with this dock. But if you want to save in the short term, you might want to look elsewhere in our list of the best laptop docking stations.) With that said, Kensington still offers numerous selling points: a CompactFlash slot, something that photographers might appreciate; a dedicated (and empty) M.2 slot to insert an SSD; an optical audio input; and two dedicated hot keys on the top of the dock which can be used for multiple purposes. Kensington sells a version of this dock for Macs for the same price; there, those keys are used for kicking off a dedicated photo backup. Kensington’s EQ Pro Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station certainly isn’t for the average user. But it’s hard to imagine creative professionals not falling in love with high-end features you’ll struggle to find anywhere else. Otherwise, the dock includes three Thunderbolt 5 ports for connecting displays. (Note that you’ll need to invest a bit more in display cables/adapters if your displays lack USB-C or Thunderbolt input, about $18 or so. to connect to a 4K display at 60Hz, or $24 for a 4K240 gaming display.) The dock includes four 10Gbps USB-A ports and two 10Gbps USB-C ports, with a USB-C port capable of outputting 30W for charging a phone. Some newer phones require 40W or more to fast-charge, however. However, this dock has a “KonstantCharge” feature which allows devices to be charged even when the dock isn’t connected to a laptop, which is rather neat. It works, too, on all the ports I tried. (The 30W charging port delivered 28.6 watts under load, and the other USB-C port provided about 6 watts. The (upstream) Thunderbolt 5 port delivered 13.6W, while the downstream Thunderbolt 5 port to the laptop provided a maximum of 85 watts of power. (We’ll revisit this, below.) The front of the Kensington EQ Pro Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station includes USB-C ports, including one for charging; USB-A; and even a CompactFlash card slot.Foundry / Mark Hachman The dock also includes a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, as well as some oddities: Instead of a single 3.5mm mic/headphone jack, the dock has separate mic, speaker, and headphone I/O ports, plus an optical connection! The latter can be used to pass uncompressed audio to some high-end audio systems. Digital photographers may also benefit from the inclusion of a CompactFlash card slot, something that I haven’t seen for years, in addition to the miniSD and SD card slots. I honestly didn’t expect an optical connection, so I was totally unable to test that. All of the other audio connections worked as expected. The two hotkeys add an additional layer of functionality, although they’re not really necessary. By default, they’re configured to lock your PC and to trigger the Copilot app, although my review unit still included the “photos” icon that I believe ships with the Mac version. There’s a small catch: You’ll need to have the Kensington Konnect software installed for the buttons to work at all, and Kensington also recommends that you install its Dockworks software too for the best connectivity. Everything else, however, works right out of the box. A small white LED on the dock lights while the hot key is active. By default, the two hotkeys on the Kensington SD7100TS are configured for Copilot and to lock your PC, but the Kensington Konnect software offers all sorts of alternatives. I honestly don’t see a whole lot of use for the hotkeys, since you’ll probably have already memorized the keyboard shortcuts instead. But they’re just another option, just like a laptop touchpad supplements a mouse. The entire dock connects to the laptop via a one-meter cable. This dock supports Thunderbolt 5’s capability to deliver 140W of power, but I haven’t found a laptop equipped with Thunderbolt 5 that accepts that level of power. I detected about 80W of power being passed between the dock to my test laptop, about the same as every other Thunderbolt 5 dock I’ve tested. On the rear of the Kensington EQ Pro Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station is the power button, which is a bit unusual. And, yes, that’s an optical connection!Foundry / Mark Hachman Kensington implemented an interesting way to add an M.2 SSD. Perhaps because of its institutional focus on safety (the dock includes a pair of Kensington lock slots, after all), the SSD compartment is secured by a screw on one side of the dock itself. Only then can the compartment be detached from the bottom of the dock and the M.2 SSD screw removed before it can all be put back together. (Fortunately, the dock screw appears to be optional, as the M.2 compartment seems like it’s securely clipped in.) Make sure you power off the dock, disconnect it, and then add the SSD. I much preferred the way Razer implemented the SSD installation inside the Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma…though the SSD ended up getting stuck inside it and required some force to dislodge it. The dock itself is made from partially recycled aluminum and never became warm enough to worry about. Some docks have included an active fan for cooling purposes, but not this one. On one side of the Kensington EQ Pro Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station is the access screw (removed) to open the dock and insert an SSD, plus the Kensington locks.Foundry / Mark Hachman Kensington EQ Pro Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station (SD7100TS) performance Laptops equipped with Thunderbolt 5 ports are still somewhat rare, so finding a proper test bed has been a consistent challenge. My recent reviews have used a Razer Blade 18, on loan from Razer. My recent review of Razer’s Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma simply wouldn’t deliver power while gaming, a black mark against it. Kensington’s SD7100TS dock provided a steady 80 to 85 watts of power while under normal load. On one occasion, Kensington’s dock also failed to deliver power while gaming, while connected to Blade 18’s Thunderbolt 5 port, but generally delivered consistent power to the laptop’s Thunderbolt 5 port as well as the separate Thunderbolt 4 port. That makes me think that the Blade laptop might still have a lingering issue that needs to be addressed. Kensington’s dock is rated to deliver up to 140W to a connected laptop, which must support the USB-C PD 3.1 EPR standard to accept that much power. It’s not clear whether Razer’s Blade 18 does so, which means that I wasn’t able to test this capability thoroughly. It’s important, however, because some laptops will demand that much power — or more — while gaming. Kensington’s dock did deliver power consistently to other laptops I tested, however, all of which had Thunderbolt 4 ports. From a stability standpoint, the dock was slightly disappointing. Kensington recommends that you install its Dockworks software, which allows for a few features, like automatic switching to Wi-Fi when the dock and an Ethernet connection are switched off. On one occasion, the dock had trouble connecting to a second display, only doing so after restarting the PC, and then waiting some time. Kensington’s docks are usually quite stable, and aside from the aforementioned issue, that was true. I tested the SD7100TS for a period of several days, and the dock was absolutely stable during normal use. It was just after resuming or restarting that I noticed these issues. From a performance standpoint, Kensington’s dock was slightly slower than other Thunderbolt 5 docks I’ve tested: The Sonnet Echo 13 transferred data from our test SSD at about 436MB/s, while the Plugable TBT-UDT3 was about the same. Kensington’s drive transferred data at 398MB/s, or 9 percent slower. All of these tests were conducted using UL’s PCMark 10 benchmark, as per my docking station testing methodology. Kensington’s dock also streamed a pair of 4K streams without any issue at all. When I reran the SSD data transfer test, performance dropped to 378MB/s, a bit more than usual. Deep inside the Kensington EQ Pro Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station is the M.2 slot., into which I’ve inserted an SSD (with a bit of residue from the heatsink of a competing dock).Foundry / Mark Hachman I then copied multiple gigabytes of data from a folder on my desktop to the SSD attached to the dock. The dock performed normally, taking about 16 seconds. (Sonnet’s dock is the fastest here, at about 14 seconds.) While streaming, that dropped to 17.3 seconds. Obviously, that difference would enlarge the more data you transferred at a time. Like the Chroma, the Kensington EQ Pro Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station includes an M.2 slot, into which you can insert an SSD. My tests found that that SSD inside Kensington’s dock performed essentially the same as the Razer Thunderbolt Dock Chroma, another Thunderbolt 5 dock with an M.2. SSD slot, when performing a folder copy: 16.8 seconds by itself, and 17.5 seconds while streaming 4K video. On the PCMark storage test, Kensington’s dock performed about the same: 426MB/s, up from 423MB/s for Razer’s dock, and 408MB/s while streaming versus 415MB/s for Razer. Should you buy the Kensington EQ Pro Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station (SD7100TS)? Well, sure. That’s what second mortgages are for. Seriously, this dock is substantially more than the $250 or so I expect as the price of a Thunderbolt 4 dock. I get it — Thunderbolt 5’s component costs are higher than Thunderbolt 4, and premium features like the optical connection, CompactFlash slot, and the M.2 SSD repository cost more to engineer in. Truly, though, this dock caters to the high-end creative professional: The CompactFlash slot for the photography hobby on the side; the high-end optical connection for a set of studio speakers on the desk; the power of Thunderbolt 5 alongside the hidden M.2 slot. For me, this dock is too expensive to recommend to the average user. But as a premium dock aimed at a professional, certainly. Just make sure to put it on the expense account. Read...

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Rejoice! Valve has officially resurrected the Steam Machine, a compact gaming PC made to be played on your living room TV. Not only does it (supposedly!) run quietly, but it can also handle 4K gaming at 60 frames per second with AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling technology. Seems like Valve’s really throwing its hat into the ring as far as hybrid gaming consoles go, yeah? The cube-like device, which stands about 6 inches tall, will run Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS 3. According to Valve, it’s “six times more powerful than the Steam Deck.” With the Proton compatibility layer built in, it can run most Windows games natively—a huge deal because compatibility issues were the main culprit behind the failure of the 2015-era Steam Machines (back before the Proton layer was even a thing). The newest version of the Steam Machine will have two configurations: 512GB and 2TB. Inside, it’s got a custom AMD Zen 4 chip with 6 cores and 12 threads, plus a custom RDNA 3 GPU. Translation? You can expect console-level power in a wee little package.  Valve also showed off a new Steam Controller and the Steam Frame, a standalone VR headset running a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor. No word on price yet, but all three should hit sometime in early 2026. Read...