The Department of Homeland Security struck a $1 billion purchasing agreement with Palantir last week, further reinforcing the software company’s role in the federal agency that oversees the nation’s immigration enforcement.

According to contracting documents published last week, the blanket purchase agreement (BPA) awarded “is to provide Palantir commercial software licenses, maintenance, and implementation services department wide.” The agreement simplifies how DHS buys software from Palantir, allowing DHS agencies like Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to essentially skip the competitive bidding process for new purchases of up to $1 billion in products and services from the company.

Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Palantir announced the agreement internally on Friday. It comes as the company is struggling to address growing tensions among staff over its relationship with DHS and ICE. After Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed in January, Palantir staffers flooded company Slack channels demanding information on how the tech they build empowers US immigration enforcement. Since then, the company has updated its internal wiki, offering few unreported details about its work with ICE, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp recorded a video for employees where he attempted to justify the company’s immigration work, as WIRED reported last week. Throughout a nearly hourlong conversation with Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, Karp failed to address direct questions about how the company’s tech powers ICE. Instead, he said workers could sign nondisclosure agreements for more detailed information.

Akash Jain, Palantir’s chief technology officer and president of Palantir US Government Partners, which works with US government agencies, acknowledged these concerns in the email announcing the company’s new agreement with DHS. “I recognize that this comes at a time of increased concern, both externally and internally, around our existing work with ICE,” Jain wrote. “While we don’t normally send out updates on new contract vehicles, in this moment it felt especially important to provide context to help inform your understanding of what this means—and what it doesn’t. There will be opportunities we run toward, and others we decline—that discipline is part of what has earned us DHS’s trust.”

In the Friday email, Jain suggests that the five-year agreement could allow the company to expand its reach across DHS into agencies like the US Secret Service (USSS), Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Jain also argued that Palantir’s software could strengthen protections for US citizens. “These protections help enable accountability through strict controls and auditing capabilities, and support adherence to constitutional protections, especially the Fourth Amendment,” Jain wrote. (Palantir’s critics have argued that the company’s tools create a massive surveillance dragnet, which could ultimately harm civil liberties.)

Over the last year, Palantir’s work with ICE has grown tremendously. Last April, WIRED reported that ICE paid Palantir $30 million to build “ImmigrationOS,” which would provide “near real-time visibility” on immigrants self-deporting from the US. Since then, it’s been reported that the company has also developed a new tool called Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) which creates maps of potential deportation targets, pulling data from DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Closing his Friday email to staff, Jain suggested that staffers curious about the new DHS agreement come work on it themselves. “As Palantirians, the best way to understand the work is to engage on the work directly. If you are interested in helping shape and deliver the next chapter of Palantir’s work across DHS, please reach out,” Jain wrote to employees, who are sometimes referred to internally as fictional creatures from The Lord of the Rings. “There will be a massive need for committed hobbits to turn this momentum into mission outcomes.”

An Android-specific malware targeting mobile device takeover appears to use generative AI (GenAI) services in its execution flows to maintain persistence on the victim’s smartphone, researchers at ESET have reported.

The raison d’être of the newly-discovered PromptSpy malware is to deploy and run a virtual network computing (VNC) module on the victim’s device, enabling attackers to capture lockscreen data, gather device information, take screenshots and record activity, and block uninstallation.

But to do so it must first establish persistence on the device, and it is here that GenAI comes into play, said the ESET team. They claimed that PromptSpy uses the onboard Google Gemini service to interpret onscreen elements and provide it with dynamic instructions on how to execute a specific gesture that will enable it to remain in the device’s recent app list. This, in theory, stops it being easily swiped away by the user or killed by the system.

ESET researcher Lukáš Štefanko said that while GenAI plays only a minor role in PromptSpy’s execution flow it could have a significant impact on the malware’s potential adaptability.

“Since Android malware often relies on UI-based navigation, leveraging generative AI enables threat actors to adapt to more or less any device, layout, or operation system version, which can greatly increase the pool of potential victims,” he said.

“Even though PromptSpy uses Gemini in just one of its features, it still demonstrates how implementing these tools can make malware more dynamic, giving threat actors ways to automate actions that would normally be more difficult with traditional scripting.”

Štefanko said that based on localisation clues and distribution vectors, PromptSpy seems to be run by a financially-motivated threat actor, exploits Morgan Chase branding, and may primarily target users in Argentina.

However, he also stressed that the malware has not yet popped up in ESET’s wider telemetry, which may suggest it is a proof of concept (PoC) at this point in time. Nor has it been observed on the Google Play store – it can only be downloaded by a dedicated website that its victims would need to be conned into visiting.

Computer Weekly understands that Štefanko’s discovery has been shared with Google via the App Defense Alliance programme, and Android users should already be automatically protected against known versions of it by the Google Play Protect service.

In the unlikely event that PromptSpy has somehow infected their device, victims can remove it by rebooting their phone into Safe Mode, which disables third-party applications and enables them to be uninstalled normally.