Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash

U.S. Financial Regulator Reports Cyberattack Exposing Sensitive Email Data

• Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
• Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) disclosed on Tuesday that a cybersecurity breach in February exposed sensitive data related to financial entities. The incident, which involved unauthorized access to email accounts of OCC executives and staff, has been mitigated, and the financial regulator has released further details about the vulnerability.

• The OCC disclosed a cybersecurity breach that took place in February targeting its email system.
• The agency reported the attack as a “major information security incident” to Congress.
• Hackers got access to employees’ and executives’ emails, as well as sensitive financial information.

In an official announcement , the OCC—the agency that supervises and regulates banks in the country—explained that, as required by the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, it has reported a “major information security incident” to Congress.

The OCC explained that on February 11, it learned about unauthorized access from emails and email attachments and, after confirming unapproved interactions on February 12, immediately activated security protocols, disabling the compromised accounts and terminating the unauthorized access.

The investigation pursued by the OCC and independent third-party cybersecurity experts revealed that malicious actors got access to employees’ and executives’ emails with “highly sensitive information relating to the financial condition of federally regulated financial institutions.”

The agency first reported the email system incident on February 26 to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, clarifying that it had no impact on the financial sector. The threat has been mitigated, but evaluations and updates are ongoing.

“I have taken immediate steps to determine the full extent of the breach and to remedy the long-held organizational and structural deficiencies that contributed to this incident,” said Acting Comptroller of the Currency Rodney E. Hood. “There will be full accountability for the vulnerabilities identified and any missed internal findings that led to the unauthorized access.”

The OCC is currently analysing its IT security policies and procedures, and looking for alternatives to prevent similar incidents and enhance security.

Several cyberattacks targeting email users and systems have been reported this month. A few days ago, cybersecurity firm Symantec revealed a phishing campaign using fake shipping emails and a disguised screensaver file, and ASEC identified another cyberattack targeting job seekers .

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

New AI Company Deep Cogito Releases First Hybrid AI Models

• Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
• Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager

The new American AI company Deep Cogito released its first open large language models (LLMs) called Cogito v1 on Tuesday. The startup claims its open-source and hybrid models outperform similar open AI models, including DeepSeek, Qwen, and Meta’s LLaMA.

In a rush? Here are the quick facts:

• Deep Cogito released its first LLM called Cogito v1 this Tuesday.
• The new American company claims its model outperforms equivalent open source models, including Qwen, DeepSeek, and Meta’s LLaMA.
• Cogito v1 models function in reasoning and standard mode, and have been optimized for function calling, coding, and agentic use.

Deep Cogito, headquartered in San Francisco, introduced Cogito v1 through an official announcement on its website, including details of its LLMs, its performance, and upcoming releases.

“We are releasing the strongest LLMs of sizes 3B, 8B, 14B, 32B, and 70B under open license,” states the document. “Each model outperforms the best available open models of the same size, including counterparts from LLaMA, DeepSeek, and Qwen, across most standard benchmarks. In particular, the 70B model also outperforms the newly released Llama 4 109B MoE model.”

The new model has been trained with the Iterated Distillation and Amplification (IDA), a framework that trains AI models to build aligned systems for general superintelligence, and includes “reasoning” features. All models can function in reasoning and standard mode—a hybrid modality—and have been optimized for function calling, coding, and agentic use.

According to the startup’s research and results, Cogito v1 outperformed most equivalent models in direct and reasoning modes, considering popular benchmarks. The company expects to launch larger models in the next few months.

“Our next release will feature updated checkpoints for each model size (3B to 70B), with extended training periods, as well as larger models in the coming weeks and months,” wrote the company. “All models will be open source.”

Cogito v1 can be downloaded on Ollama or Hugging Face, or accessed through APIs on Together AI or Fireworks AI.

Cogito v1 Preview is now live on Together AI ✨ These open models from Deep Cogito push the boundaries of reasoning and alignment, with options up to 70B parameters. Available now via Together Dedicated Endpoints. pic.twitter.com/hc0gYXU7x1 — Together AI (@togethercompute) April 8, 2025

According to TechCrunch , Deep Cogito was founded in June 2024 by Drishan Arora and Dhruv Malhotra—both former Google employees. The company is backed by South Park Commons, and its main goal is to build a general superintelligence that can outperform humans.

The new AI model arrives to keep up with the intensity and speed of the AI market and to join the open-source trend. The Chinese search engine giant Baidu announced a new upcoming open-source AI model in February, and DeepSeek shared more details and a transparency initiative for its code just a few weeks ago.