College Kid Brings Down a Botnet

Benjamin Brundage is a computer-science major at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This is an edition of the WSJ Technology newsletter, a weekly digest of tech columns, big stories and personal tech advice. If you're not subscribed, sign up here. I cover cybersecurity. That means I write a lot of stories about young men who do bad things on the internet. But this week I wrote about a 22-year-old college student who just might have saved the internet. Meet Benjamin Brundage, Rochester Institute of Technology class of 2026. In September, he stumbled upon the largest cyber weapon the world has ever seen. A botnet called Kimwolf that was firing off tens of thousands of cyberattacks, some big enough to knock small countries offline. Brundage joined a team of internet wizards at some of the largest tech companies and helped them -- along with the U.S. government -- take Kimwolf down. It turns out that Kimwolf was the symptom of a growing problem that affects tens of millions of people. Maybe even you. Every year millions of dodgy apps and cheapo internet-connected devices ship with an unadvertised back door called residential proxy software. It gives anyone access to your home internet connection. By anyone, I mean website scrapers, scammers, criminals and the like. And Kimwolf's creators had figured out a way to hack residential proxy software on a grand scale. You can read the wild story of how Brundage balanced this high-stakes internet investigation with the pressures of completing his final year at school. (It seemed to make some readers feel better about Gen Z.) And if you're worried that you may have this residential proxy software on your home network, here's how to check. -- Bob is a tech reporter based in San Francisco. As the lab technician prepared my vials, I told him, "I'm going to upload my blood work to AI!" His response: "Oh boy." I let Claude and Perplexity access my health data to search for hidden patterns in my personal metrics, and better understand what the risks are. After lots of prompting, I found that the bots are expert explainers, though occasionally prone to overstatement. Inside a room filled with objects that would make every Apple nerd's brain explode, the guts of the very first iPhone were splayed out in front of Tim Cook. Apple's CEO was staring at something that he hadn't seen in decades. Before him was a tangle of circuit boards the size of a cutting board -- big enough to slice a few Granny Smiths. The last time he looked at it was before everything was miniaturized and crammed into the iPhone. It was so long ago that the prototype was still waiting to be transformed into Apple's most valuable product. Andrew Castellano had tough news for his parents over the winter break: He was taking a leave of absence from Harvard University halfway through his sophomore year to work full-time on his AI startup. His mother cried. His venture capital backers saw an opportunity. OpenAI is trying to change long-established habits around how people interact with technology, and fight growing anxiety about the impact that AI will have on the workforce and society writ large. Within Silicon Valley, it is battling for mind-share among young startup founders, software engineers and tech executives whose perceptions are largely shaped by what they see on social media -- specifically X. That is where "TBPN" comes in. Taking a Pause: OpenAI's product and business chief Fidji Simo is taking medical leave from the company for several weeks, an absence that comes as the startup revamps its leadership ranks and prepares to make its public market debut. Plugging a Leak: Anthropic raced to contain the fallout after accidentally exposing the underlying instructions it uses to direct Claude Code, the popular AI agent app that has won the company an edge with developers and businesses. Copying an Adversary: The powerful, low-cost attack drone the U.S. is using in its war with Iran doesn't come from one of America's more than 400 venture-backed drone startups. And it isn't the product of Silicon Valley ingenuity. Feeding the Beast: A $10 billion startup that pays contractors to give feedback on the output of AI models recently began offering a new way to make money: selling their prior work materials. But that work might belong to their previous employers. ...when we're just 36 years away from the era of the Jetsons and we still don't have a decent personal robot or fold-up flying car! The Technology newsletter is a weekly digest of tech reviews, columns and headlines from Deputy Tech & Media Editor Wilson Rothman and Deputy Tech Bureau Chief Brad Olson. Write to Wilson at wilson.rothman@wsj.com and Brad at bradley.olson@wsj.com. Got a tip for us? Here's how to submit.