13 hours ago
Episode 258 - Meta Hacked by AI Help Desk, Fired for Polymarket Futures, AI Layoff Hiring Boomerang, a Billion Mosquitoes
Welcome to this week's episode of the PEBCAK Podcast! We’ve got four amazing stories this week so sit back, relax, and keep being awesome! Be sure to stick around for our Dad Joke of the Week. (DJOW)
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Meta's AI support bot was weaponized to hijack Instagram accounts, including the Obama White House page, by tricking it into adding attacker-controlled emails during password resets.
- https://x.com/zachxbt/status/2061251183675949365?s=46
- https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/instagram-users-locked-out-after-meta-ai-abused-to-steal-accounts/
- https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/06/hackers-used-metas-ai-support-bot-to-seize-instagram-accounts/
- Meta's AI customer support bot was socially engineered into resetting account passwords for targets, exposing the new attack surface that AI-powered support creates — and enabling hijacks that MFA would have blocked.
A Google security engineer was arrested and charged with insider trading after using confidential "Year in Search" data to pocket $1.2M on the prediction market Polymarket.
- https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/us-charges-google-security-engineer-with-polymarket-insider-trading/
- Operating under the alias "AlphaRaccoon," Michele Spagnuolo went 22-for-23 on Google search trend bets using nonpublic internal data — marking the second high-profile Polymarket insider trading arrest this year, following a Special Forces soldier who bet on the Maduro raid he was part of.
New data shows 55% of companies regret their AI-driven layoffs, with half already quietly reversing them — the so-called "Layoff Boomerang."
- https://medium.com/@curiouser.ai/the-great-ai-layoff-boomerang-68e38c88fa7d
- Forrester, Gartner, and PwC data confirm the "replace humans with AI" thesis is failing: companies that cut aggressively are scrambling to rehire at higher cost, while firms that augmented their workers are seeing 3x revenue growth per employee.
Google's Verily is seeking EPA approval to release up to 64 million Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes in Florida and California to crash disease-carrying mosquito populations.
- https://x.com/bulltheoryio/status/2060810332831129782?s=46
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2026/06/04/google-mosquito-release-florida-california/90384899007/
- The Debug Project's sterile male mosquitoes mate with wild females but produce no viable eggs — a technique that's already shown 80–90% suppression of Aedes aegypti in prior trials and has the internet predictably losing its mind.
Dad Joke of the Week (DJOW)
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