By Karolis Arbaciauskas, head of business product at NordPass
Google recently announced it enabled Gemini AI to access and interact with third-party apps on Android — so far, only a handful, including Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and utilities on your phone. But I’m sure the scope will expand.
Elon Musk also recently took to his X account to announce that xAI’s chatbot is coming to Teslas. The announcement came after quite a rough week for Grok, which experienced a sort of meltdown, praising Adolf Hitler and instructing users on how to commit sexual assault.
In the early years of large language models (LLMs), when discussing language models vs. artificial general intelligence (AGI), I remember people joking that you wouldn’t want your chatbot driving your Tesla. It’s not funny anymore. The sight of people saying, “Grok, park my car and keep it cool till I come back,” is probably not that far away.
Agents and passwords
It’s only a matter of time before our aspirations to further empower AI agents emerge. The use case where AI agents use password managers and even banking apps on behalf of the user is probably in the very near future. Prompt “calculate and pay the utility bills while I go for a run” sounds appealing, doesn’t it?
In principle, we can already send agents to password vaults, allow them to retrieve passwords, and perform certain operations. There are ways to do that, and they work. However, at this point it is extremely unsafe.
In the near future, AI agents (operators) will likely be able to retrieve passwords or other secrets from password vaults through API integrations without compromising their own login credentials. Such a model of machine-to-machine authentication is already working in other scenarios. It is also secure in principle. The only questions are how much control will the AI have and if it or threat actors will be able to somehow exploit this access further?
We were promised robots but got social networks instead
Do we want this to happen? I think we do. Pop culture – especially books, movies and games – has long created expectations for this. And in recent years businesses, with the help of the media, have been fueling these expectations. So people in general, or should I say we as a humanity, seem to be waiting for AGI, even though we worry about our privacy and are a little afraid of it. Agentic AI is the closest thing we have right now, so I’m sure the technology will catch on and evolve further.
Especially seeing how much money venture capital is pouring into AI startups. According to PitchBook, in the first half of 2025 more than half of all venture capital dollars globally, and 64% in the US, went to AI startups. Over the same period, AI helped 36 tech companies achieve unicorn status.
I won’t go into technology adoption theories (such as Diffusion of innovation or TAM), but KPMG is right in saying that agentic AI deployment will accelerate despite its risks. Why? Because if businesses want it, and people want it, it will happen. We just need to be careful about potential vulnerabilities and how much control we give away to AI agents. We still don’t know what might happen when the real AGI emerges.
Let’s not forget that passwords to all our accounts (via access to password managers) and banking data are among the most important and most valuable, to us, to AI agents (because when we give them access to our credentials, their capabilities grow significantly), and to criminals. At the same time, the metadata of our interactions with AI agents is very valuable for companies that created those agents.
ABOUT NORDPASS
NordPass is a password manager for both business and consumer clients. It’s powered by the latest technology for the utmost security. Developed with affordability, simplicity, and ease of use in mind, NordPass allows users to securely access their passwords on desktop, mobile, and browsers. All passwords are encrypted on the device, so only the user can access them. NordPass was created by the experts behind NordVPN – the advanced security and privacy app trusted by more than 14 million customers worldwide. For more information: nordpass.com.
The ASUS Security Situation Is Actually Way Worse Than I Thought
Posted in Commentary on July 21, 2025 by itnerdA few months ago, I posted a story on ASUS having vulnerabilities in their router products that could lead to you not only getting pwned, but your ASUS router being part of a botnet. Related to that, I offered up some advice as to how to check if you’ve been pwned. But this was the second time this year that ASUS has found itself in a situation where their had serous security vulnerabilities. Because earlier this year ASUS had to fess up to the fact that their AI Cloud feature which allows for remote access to their routers was vulnerable to being pwned.
A couple of days ago, things got way worse for ASUS. YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, who had previously called out ASUS for their shady warranty practices did a video on a number of other vulnerabilities that have been discovered in a variety of ASUS products. If you want to watch the video, here it is:
For those of you who want to skip past watching the video, here’s the TL:DR.
Security researcher Paul “Mr. Bruh” discovered a zero-click remote code execution vulnerability in Asus DriverHub and hardcoded administrator credentials within MyAsus and the RMA portal—exposing user data including names, birthdates, addresses, and phone numbers. As it stands, ASUS claims to have fixed this.
Cisco Talos researcher Marson Icewall Noga also documented two kernel-level exploits in Armory Crate’s ASIO3 driver, enabling physical memory mapping and low-level hardware access. It gets worse because Armory Crate is built into to ASUS motherboards. Which means that even if you nuke Windows and reinstall it, Armory Crate will simply reinstall itself unless you dig into your BIOS and turn off the ability for it to install. For those of you who have Armory Crate installed, removing it is the recommended way to protect yourself. Another reason why you should get rid of Armory Crate is that I noted that when I was testing HYAS Protect At Home, I noted that Armory Crate which was on the ASUS PC that I owned at the time, sent and received a lot of data to and from the Internet for reasons that I couldn’t discern. But given that ASUS seems to have other security problems, that’s another reason why you should strongly consider removing their software ASAP.
And that’s on top of their router issues. And I have to admit, that was one of the motivating factors that made me dump this router from ASUS for this Unifi router. Currently the only ASUS product that I have left on my network is a pair of Zen WiFiXT8’s that I am using in access point mode. I am currently researching how to replace them with Unifi products that have as good or ideally better performance in a mesh setup. But given how bad ASUS security is, I am now making that a today problem Because clearly ASUS is really dropping the ball when it comes to security. And that is on top of their RMA issues and their technical support issues. Which the TL:DR on that is that ASUS tech support is horrifically bad.
The bottom line is that ASUS is really becoming a company to avoid. I don’t know how how else to put it. And honestly the sooner that ASUS products are gone from my network, the better off that I will be be. And if you own ASUS products, you might want to consider getting rid of them as well as you’ll likely be better off as well.
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