Is Your Security System Watching or Reasoning? A Look at Ambient.ai’s Pulsar Release

Estimated Read Time: 5 Minutes

Intro

In the physical security world, "noise" is the enemy. Whether it’s a motion sensor triggered by a swaying tree or a legacy analytics system flagging every shadow as a threat, false alarms are the quickest way to burn out a Global Security Operations Center (GSOC).

At CG Security Consulting, we constantly preach the value of cutting through the noise. We believe technology should be a force multiplier, not a distraction. That is why we are paying close attention to Ambient.ai’s latest release: Pulsar.

This isn’t just another camera upgrade. It is a shift from systems that simply see pixels to systems that understand context. Here is our breakdown of what Pulsar is, why it matters, and how it teeters on the edge of a new era for physical security.

The Core Shift: From Vision to "Vision-Language"

To understand why Pulsar is different, you have to look under the hood—but just briefly.

Most traditional video analytics rely on "detectors." They are trained to recognize specific shapes: a car, a person, a bag. If a person stands near a door, the detector says, "Person detected." It doesn't know if that person is a delivery driver waiting to be buzzed in or a threat actor attempting to tailgate.

Pulsar utilizes a Vision Language Model (VLM). This is the same class of AI technology that powers tools like ChatGPT, but applied to video. Instead of just drawing a box around a person, the system can "describe" what it is seeing in real-time. It combines visual perception with semantic understanding.

In non-technical terms: Your camera system stops acting like a motion sensor and starts acting like a rookie security guard who never blinks. It can reason that "a person loitering by the back door at 2 AM" is different from "a person taking a smoke break at 2 PM," even if the pixels look similar.

Key Features That Caught Our Eye

Ambient.ai’s launch highlighted several features that directly address the efficiency problems we see in our client’s security operations.

1. Semantic Search (The "Google" for Your Video Footage)

If you have ever tried to find a specific incident in hours of footage, you know the pain. Usually, you are scrubbing through timelines looking for movement. With Pulsar, operators can use natural language queries. You can type, "Show me a person in a red shirt carrying a backpack near the loading dock," and the system retrieves those specific instances. This drastically reduces investigation time from hours to minutes, directly improving the ROI of your security labor.

2. Agentic Video Walls

The traditional video wall—a grid of 50 live streams that human eyes eventually glaze over—is dead. Pulsar introduces "Agentic" walls that change dynamically. The AI highlights streams where relevant activity is happening right now. It prioritizes the feed that needs attention, effectively telling the operator, "Look here, not there."

3. Contextual Intent Recognition

This is the "technical" feature with the biggest "non-technical" impact. Pulsar is designed to understand intent. It attempts to distinguish between harmless behavior (someone holding a door for a colleague) and risky behavior (unauthorized tailgating). By processing these nuances at the edge, it aims to eliminate the nuisance alarms that plague most SOCs.

Why This Matters for Your Organization

You don't need to be a tech giant to benefit from this kind of intelligence. Whether you are a municipality managing public safety or a manufacturing plant protecting intellectual property, the implications are clear:

• Reduced Fatigue: When your operators aren't chasing false alarms, they are sharper for real threats.

• Faster Forensics: Liability claims and investigations can be resolved in minutes, not days.

• Proactive vs. Reactive: The shift to "Agentic" security means the system is working with you, alerting you to anomalies you didn't even know to look for.

The CG Security Consulting Take

We often warn our clients about "shiny object syndrome"—buying technology just because it's new. However, Ambient.ai’s Pulsar represents a fundamental shift in how we treat video data. It moves us away from passive recording toward active reasoning.

If your current security strategy feels like it involves more "reacting" than "preventing," it might be time to audit your technology stack.

Ready to see if your security infrastructure is ready for AI? At CG Security Consulting, we help you navigate these complex choices to find the solution that fits your budget and your risk profile. Contact us today for a consultation.

More info & tools to check out

Ambient.ai Online Keynote

Check out Ambient.ai’s Pulsar playground, where you can upload video clips and compare the video analysis to other top VLM models: Pulsar Playground.

The Monthly Phish Fry: October 2025

Intro

We’re back! And yes, we’re a little later than usual. Our apologies—you could blame our calendar management, or you could blame the digital apocalypse that took down half the internet. (We’re definitely blaming the digital apocalypse.)

Who’s to say, really?

In any case, the fryers are hot and we're ready to serve up this month's catch. It's a weird one, folks. We've got stories that blur the line between the digital and the physical, and others that are just plain bizarre. On the menu for this Monthly Phish Fry:

• Cyber-physical tech: What happens when a hacker can literally unlock your front door?

• AI Juries: We'll look at the disturbing trend of AI infiltrating the courtroom.

• Pixnapping: The bizarre new ransom tactic you need to know about.

• How Amazon Broke the Internet: And, of course, the main course. We’ll untangle the technical mess that led to the great outage... and why it will probably happen again.

Grab a fork and let's dig in!

One Security Bot Served Up Raw

Remember that "cyber-physical tech" we promised to fry up? Well, we're starting with a fresh catch called ARGUS, a new robotic security guard that’s being sold as the ultimate hybrid hunter. It's not just a camera on wheels; this bot roams your halls using AI to spot faces and weapons, while also sniffing your network traffic for things like port scans. The big sales pitch is that it can correlate a physical intruder with a digital attack in real-time.

Here's the fishy part: while it’s busy correlating two attack surfaces into one, the researchers themselves admit its accuracy plummets in poor lighting. More importantly, they note that "future work" is still needed to defend it from deepfakes, spoofing, and "adversarial compromise." In other words, we’re building a "security" robot that can't reliably see in the dark, can be fooled by a fake face, and hasn't yet been secured from being tampered with. It's the perfect cyber-physical storm: a "guard" that could be turned into the most sophisticated Trojan horse you’ve ever paid for.

Sounds like a fun game of tag, except the robot is "it" and you're fighting the hacker for the controller. Hey, maybe there’s an idea for your computer science program.

Figure 1. ARGUS prototype equipped with LiDAR, RGB/IR cameras, and IDS modules, designed for hybrid threat detection in cyber-physical environments. Notes: LiDAR = Light Detection and Ranging; IDS = Intrusion Detection System; IR = Infrared. Click the image to see the original paper.

A Jury of… Artificial Peers?

Next up on the menu is that "AI Jury" we promised, and it’s even fishier than it sounds. A law school in North Carolina thought it was a good idea to run a mock trial, replacing a jury of peers with a panel of bots: ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude. The AIs were fed a real-time transcript to "deliberate," and the results were, predictably, a disaster.

A post-trial panel of actual humans was "intensely critical," pointing out that the bots couldn't read body language, lacked any human experience, and are famous for—you know—hallucinating facts. To make it even more absurd, one of the AI "jurors" was Grok, the same bot that once had a public meltdown and started calling itself "MechaHitler."

But the truly scary part isn't that the bots were bad; it's the warning from one professor that the tech industry's "instinct to repair" is the real danger. They won't just stop; they'll "fix" the problem by giving the bots video feeds and "backstories" until they have recursively "repaired" their way right into a real jury box.

As if the legal system wasn’t enough of a circus.

This Month's Crispiest Con: "Pixnapping"

"Pixnapping", a particularly greasy con served up fresh for Android users. This isn't your garden-variety phishing; it’s a patient, slow-cooked attack. A malicious app, running without any special permissions, uses a clever side-channel trick to essentially ask your phone's graphics processor what it's rendering. It then "naps" the data from your screen, one pixel at a time. It may be slow, but it's fast enough to read the 2FA codes right out of your Google Authenticator or peek at your bank app. It's a resurrected vulnerability (CVE-2025-48561) that's already found a workaround for Google's first patch, proving that even old, "fried" attacks can be served up again while they're still hot.

To make matters worse, this is effective against the latest operating system, Android 16.

Full paper: here

This month’s Catch of the Day: How Amazon Broke the Internet

Alright, it’s time for the main course! This is the "catch of the day" we all got to experience, whether we wanted to or not: the great AWS outage. Yes, this is the story of how Amazon broke the internet and why you couldn't use your Ring doorbell, send a Snapchat, or even play Wordle. It turns out "the cloud" isn't some magical sky-computer; it's mostly a bunch of servers in Northern Virginia, and one of them (the all-important US-EAST-1 region) finally got fried.

So what exactly did they overcook? The problem wasn't a cyberattack, but something much more mundane and terrifying: a DNS failure. Think of DNS as the Internet’s phone book. A faulty update to a key database (DynamoDB) essentially set that phone book on fire. Suddenly, apps couldn't find the numbers for the servers they needed to talk to.

This triggered a massive, cascading failure that took everything down with it. We’re talking Roblox, Fortnite, Canva, Coinbase, and even airlines. It was a stark reminder that the entire digital world is basically balanced on one or two plates, and this time, Amazon dropped the whole platter. It's the ultimate example of "concentration risk," and we all got to feel what happens when the central kitchen has a grease fire.

If you want a short and frosty breakdown of this internet-wide brain freeze, check out this video.

The After-Dinner Mint (That Tastes Like Malware)

First up, a tasty little morsel about that expensive gaming mouse you love. Its high-performance sensor is so good, it can pick up vibrations from your desk, allowing AI to listen to everything you say. Yes, your mouse is now a microphone. Delicious.

Next, a new hacker gang hit a "new low" by stealing 8,000 children's photos from a nursery for ransom. They quickly apologized and backpedaled after the public backlash, proving even criminals, it seems, are worried about their brand. How touching.

And for the final bite, a reminder that the future is here and it's terrifying. Law enforcement is sounding the alarm that they're being flooded with untraceable, 3D-printed "ghost guns" that can be made by anyone with a printer and a blueprint. Sweet dreams.

The Monthly Phish Fry: September 2025

Intro

This September was a heavy month. Compounded by the anniversary of the events that took place on September 11th, 2001, this month was a resounding reminder to never forget. As tensions rise globally, we cannot afford to let our adversaries penetrate and divide us from within, as they are blatantly keen on achieving. Remember, we are the UNITED states, and united is how we will overcome these trying times.

With that being said, let’s dig into what nation-state actors are up to this month, how AI is getting scarier and scarier, and we’ll take a look at some surprising vulnerabilities that might hit a little closer to home than you’d like. Let’s dig in…

Attacks by Sea, Air, and homeland

Nigerian Princes Have Upped Their Game

With 80% of the world's trade carried by sea, cyber-attacks on shipping are a growing concern. Nigerian organized criminal organizations have pivoted to this seemingly soft target, utilizing man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept communications of ships and ports. According to a research group at the Netherlands' NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, cyber attacks on the shipping industry rose from 10 in 2021 to over 64 in 2024. Partly to explain the rise in cyber incidents is the increased connectivity, highlighted by the incident last year, where a US Navy Chief was relieved of her duties after installing a Starlink satellite on a warship so she and others could access the internet.

The average cost to deal with a maritime cyber-attack doubled between 2022 and 2023 to $550,000, and the average ransom payment is now a staggering $3.2 million. This escalating threat highlights the vulnerability of our global supply chain.

Not So Friendly Skies Over Europe

The skies are also proving to be a new frontier for cyber warfare. In a concerning incident, the GPS navigation system of a plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was jammed as it approached its destination. The pilots were forced to revert to traditional paper maps to safely land the aircraft, a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities in our modern aviation systems. Bulgarian authorities suspect the jamming was a deliberate act of interference by Russia, a claim that underscores the growing threat of "hybrid warfare" tactics.

In response to this and other similar events, the European Union has announced plans to bolster its satellite defenses to better detect and counteract such disruptions, aiming to safeguard the integrity of air travel across the continent. But will these “bolstered defenses” be enough? As highlighted recently by security researchers Andrzej Olchawa and Milenko Starcik, the cybersecurity of space systems has long been overlooked and is “low-hanging fruit.”

DHS Security Fumble

Back on solid ground, a serious data breach has shaken the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. For several weeks, a hacker had undetected access to the sensitive personal information of employees at both the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Customs and Border Protection. This prolonged intrusion was ultimately attributed to "severe lapses in security," ranging from a lack of multi-factor authentication implementation to failure to address known and critical vulnerabilities, leading to the dismissal of two dozen FEMA IT personnel, including senior executives. The breach serves as a critical wake-up call about the internal vulnerabilities that can exist within even the most sensitive government agencies, emphasizing the paramount importance of robust internal security protocols and vigilant oversight to protect national security interests.

One Step Closer to the matrix

Get ready for this one, because it’s going to be a stretch… stretchy, wearable computers that is.

A futuristic look of a person inside a simulation, wearing neural link clothing

The line between our world and a digital simulation is growing thinner every day, with new technologies pushing us closer to a future straight out of science fiction. The first piece of the puzzle is the creation of the simulation itself. Artificial intelligence is now developing "world models," sophisticated systems that learn the rules of our physical reality to predict outcomes. This is the foundational step for an AI that can not only understand our world but potentially create a simulated one indistinguishable from it.

But a simulation is useless without a way to plug in. Scientists have now developed the ultimate interface: an entire computer crammed into a single fiber of clothing. This washable, wearable tech that can stretch up to 60% represents a future where the boundary between human and machine dissolves. Embedded within these fibers are photodetectors, temperature sensors, an accelerometer, and a photoplethysmogram sensor (which measures changes in light absorption by the skin). If AI is building the digital world, these intelligent fibers are the neural links, seamlessly integrating technology with our bodies and making the digital experience an extension of our own senses.

If they can’t stick you in a comfy, high-tech sweater, this new technology called Pulse-Fi might do the trick. Pulse-Fi can now monitor a person's heart rate using only Wi-Fi signals, without any physical contact. This leap in remote biological sensing is reminiscent of the machines monitoring humans in their pods. Each of these breakthroughs is remarkable on its own, but together, they paint a startling picture: an AI that builds a virtual world, technology to seamlessly connect us to it, and a network that can monitor our very life force within that system. The Matrix isn't just a movie anymore; it's becoming a technological roadmap.

Don’t let your computer look?

As if cyber attacks were not prolific enough, a new wave of threats is emerging where malicious images and clever pixel manipulation can "hack" AI agents, making them execute unwanted commands. As Scientific American recently highlighted, these subtle visual attacks pose a serious risk to everything from self-driving cars to advanced security systems.

The danger lies in the very nature of how AI "sees" and learns, making it vulnerable to deception that the human eye might miss. These adversarial attacks can be as simple as a sticker on a stop sign, yet they can have catastrophic consequences. What’s worse is that these types of attacks can self-proliferate, meaning that if an AI agent receives the prompt injection, it could be instructed to distribute the poisoned image via social media, email, etc. If the person on the other end has an AI agent also running, it starts the cycle over again.

How do you protect your digital companions from seeing (and acting on) the wrong things? While AI agents are still being adopted, this is a key security pivot point that should be addressed.

A person blocking their computer from “seeing”

And it's not just about what a computer sees on a screen. As a recent IEEE Spectrum article revealed, even sophisticated robots like Unitree's humanoids can be completely taken over through a simple exploit, turning a helpful assistant into a remotely controlled puppet. Utilizing the Bluetooth (BLE) Wi-Fi configuration interface, attackers can inject code, resulting in a root-level takeover. Even worse, the vulnerability can become wormable, simply by infected robots scanning for other robots in BLE range. Now we’re talking about a robot bot-net (robot-net?).

Imagine a robot in your home or workplace suddenly acting on a hacker's commands, all because of a vulnerability in its "nervous system."

It doesn’t stop there for the robots. Researchers at the University of Waterloo have uncovered a startling privacy flaw in modern robots. They found that even with fully encrypted commands, a hacker can determine what a robot is doing with 97% accuracy simply by analyzing the patterns of data traffic. This "side-channel" attack means that without ever breaking the encryption, malicious actors could deduce sensitive information—from manufacturing secrets in a factory to confidential patient care details in a hospital.

These threats are no longer theoretical; they are here, and they highlight the urgent need to secure the entire robotic and AI ecosystem, from their visual sensors to their core programming.

You’re tracking your Bluetooth tag, but who’s tracking you?

A person finds their lost keys with a Bluetooth tag while being stalked

The Tile tracker on your keys is supposed to bring you peace of mind, but a shocking security flaw may be putting you at risk. As reported by Wired, researchers have discovered that Tile's tracking tags, from parent company Life360, broadcast unencrypted data, allowing anyone with basic tech skills to monitor your movements indefinitely. Unlike competitors who have addressed this vulnerability, Tile's design could be exploited by tech-savvy stalkers, who can even bypass the device's anti-stalking features. Researchers claim the information is stored in cleartext, making it easily accessible. Moreover, anyone with a radio frequency scanner can intercept the information during transmission. Even if some security changes are made, such as not transmitting the MAC address, it’s possible an attacker could still identify the device with a single message due to the predictability of the rotating IDs Tile utilizes.

The flaw is so significant that it could essentially turn Tile's entire network into a global surveillance system, raising serious questions about user privacy and safety. Suddenly, the tracker in your pocket has become the target on your back.