Data Breaches

The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in late December 2022 was filled with a host of military-related cybersecurity provisions. One little-noticed provision in the bill called for a study of cybersecurity and national security threats posed by foreign-manufactured cranes at United States ports. Under this provision, the Maritime Administrator, working with Homeland Security, the Pentagon, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is required to…

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ChatGPT, OpenAI’s free chatbot based on GPT-3.5, was released on 30 November 2022 and racked up a million users in five days. It is capable of writing emails, essays, code and phishing emails, if the user knows how to ask. By comparison, it took Twitter two years to reach a million users. Facebook took ten months, Dropbox seven months, Spotify five months, Instagram six weeks. Pokemon Go took ten hours, so don’t break out the…

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In December network security vendor Fortinet disclosed that a critical vulnerability in its FortiOS operating system was being exploited by attackers in the wild. This week, after additional analysis, the company released more details about a sophisticated malware implant that those attackers deployed through the flaw. Based on currently available information, the original zero-day attack was highly targeted to government-related entities. However, since the vulnerability has been known for over a month, all customers should…

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The Royal ransomware group is believed to be actively exploiting a critical security flaw affecting Citrix systems, according to the cyber research team at cyber insurance provider At-Bay. Announced by Citrix on November 8, 2022, the vulnerability, identified as CVE-2022-27510, allows for the potential bypass of authentication measures on two Citrix products: the Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway. There were no known instances of the vulnerability being exploited in the wild at the time…

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Cybersecurity firm CloudSek has launched BeVigil, a tool that can tell users how safe the apps installed on their phone are, and helps users and developers win bug bounty by helping them identify and report bugs in the code. BeVigil scans all the apps installed on a user’s phone and rates them as dangerous, risky, or safe. Running as a web application for the past one year, BeVigil has already scanned over a million apps…

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Now that everyone, their brother, sister, and dog have chimed in on cybersecurity predictions for 2023, here are a few observations based on some recent ESG research. First the numbers: 53% of organizations will increase IT spending in 2023, 30% say IT spending will remain flat in 2023, and 18% forecast a decrease in IT spending. As for cybersecurity, 65% of organizations plan to increase cybersecurity spending in 2023. These numbers mean that some organizations…

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The Scattered Spider cybercrime group has recently been observed attempting to deploy a malicious kernel driver using a tactic called bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) — a warning to security professionals that the technique, which exploits longstanding deficiencies in Windows kernel protections, is still being employed by cybercriminals, according to cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. In this latest BYOVD attack, which was observed and stopped by CrowdStrike’s Falcon security system, Scattered Spider attempted to deploy a…

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Security researchers have used the GPT-3 natural language generation model and the ChatGPT chatbot based on it to show how such deep learning models can be used to make social engineering attacks such as phishing or business email compromise scams harder to detect and easier to pull off. The study, by researchers with security firm WithSecure, demonstrates that not only can attackers generate unique variations of the same phishing lure with grammatically correct and human-like…

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