A free Grok add-on can reach every Google Doc, and old shop freezer controllers were hacked

Grok, Elon Musk's chatbot, has been a free add-on for Docs, Sheets and Slides since July. It opens in a side panel and drafts text, fills formulas and builds slides inside the file. The install screen asks for far more than that one file: permission to see, edit, create and delete every Google Doc and every Slides presentation in the person's account. Its access to Sheets is narrower, limited to the spreadsheets where it is installed.

Unless an administrator has changed the default, any employee can install an add-on and approve that screen alone. The access then covers everything in that person's Docs and Slides, whatever file was open at the time. A sales manager who wants help tidying one proposal also gives the board presentation, the draft contracts and the notes from staff reviews in her Drive to a service that nobody in the company chose.

A panel that writes inside the file is useful, because it ends the copying between a document and a ChatGPT tab that many staff do all day. The decision is which assistant gets that reach. In the Google Admin console, an administrator can allow only approved add-ons, and a page on third-party app access lists every app that staff have already approved and how many people use each one. Both take less than an hour. After that, choosing Grok, Gemini or any other assistant is one decision, made once by someone who read the screen.

The controllers let a refrigeration contractor check a store's cold rooms from afar. Many were old Danfoss and Copeland models that no longer get security updates, reachable from the internet with factory passwords. AI makes finding forgotten devices like these much cheaper.

Equipment like this rarely appears on an IT list, because it arrives with a maintenance contract. Ask the contractor: can it be reached from the internet, does it still get security updates, and has the factory password been changed? If the first answer is yes, disconnect it until it can be reached only through a VPN.

Artex connects AI models to more than 150 security tools and runs much of a break-in with little human help. Its author took the code down in October after it was used in attacks, but dozens of copies remain on code-sharing sites.

Most of those attacks got in through a weak or known password on an account without a second sign-in step. A machine can try every login a company has in the time a person tries three. The shared accounts, such as the finance inbox or an old admin login, are often the first to fall, because several people use them and nobody set up the second step.

A security fix shows exactly which code was wrong, and AI can read the fix and write an attack on the same weakness. This summer, one attacker took nine hours to go from a critical flaw's disclosure to working attack code. The median company takes 43 days to fully fix a flaw that attackers are already using.

Monthly patch days were designed for attackers who needed weeks. Laptops and browsers can update themselves on the day a fix appears. For systems that cannot, the protection that counts is keeping them out of reach from the internet.

Until this month, Cursor, the AI coding tool, wrote the code and left the hosting to someone else. Its cloud agent now sets up a database, a sign-in and hosting and publishes the app at a link.

Handing an app to IT for hosting was also how someone learned that it existed. Now a depot's shift swap app can be copied by four other depots without anyone hearing of it, until nobody knows which copy holds the real rota. The cheapest moment to decide when an app will be switched off is the day it is published.

Business spending on AI tokens grew just 1.5% across August and September combined, after growing 42% in July alone, while the amount used kept climbing. Price cuts from OpenAI and Anthropic explain much of the gap. The median company spends $12 to $15 per employee a month. When the price of each task keeps falling, a renewal that commits to more volume at today's rate pays this year's price for next year's work.