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In the first half of 2026, we discovered activity by the East Asian threat group FamousSparrow. Its attacks targeted several countries in South Asia and Europe. In these attacks, the threat actor used its own malware: a heavily reworked variant of the modular SparrowDoor backdoor and a new backdoor that we named SquawkDoor.

FamousSparrow, also known as Salt Typhoon and Earth Estries, is an East Asian threat group that has been active since 2019. The group is known for using its proprietary SparrowDoor backdoor and initially focused on attacks against hotels worldwide, as well as government and international organizations. Later, FamousSparrow began actively targeting telecommunications companies and internet service providers, apparently seeking long-term access to lawful communications intercept systems.

In these attacks, the threat actor used both malicious LNK files and a website compromise vector involving malicious JavaScript. The injected script displayed a fake error message when a user visited the page and prompted them to download a new certificate. In reality, the download was a malicious executable that led to backdoor infection. The attacks were tailored to specific countries: the JavaScript samples and payloads contained text customized for the target country.

Codex CLI sessions are easy to manage when only one task is active. The workflow becomes less predictable when several sessions operate in different repositories or terminal tabs. A task may be blocked on an approval while another is still running and a third is ready for review.

I write about the point where software abstractions meet irreversible authority, with an emphasis on threat models, negative tests, and systems that fail closed.

For several weeks, I logged every moment when understanding our system required asking another person instead of reading code, documentation, dashboards, or configuration. What started as a small experiment turned into a surprisingly useful map of hidden knowledge dependencies. The biggest risk was not missing documentation. It was that some parts of the system effectively existed inside one engineer's head.

Due to recent rapid progress in the field of large language models (LLMs), many have speculated about artificial general intelligence (AGI). This paper addresses the keystone question: Are LLMs capable of transitioning to AGI? The paper presents a framework for estimating the logical limits of cognitive systems, which highlights the conflicting design requirement, namely, being able to proficiently execute both strict and loose logic. LLMs are gravitating towards loose logic and that inhibits their ability to grasp the essence of complex topics.