Insights

Who is Alleged Medibank Hacker Aleksandr Ermakov?

Authorities in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States this week levied financial sanctions against a Russian man accused of stealing data on nearly 10 million customers of the Australian health insurance giant Medibank. 33-year-old Aleksandr Ermakov allegedly stole and leaked the Medibank data while working with one of Russia’s most destructive ransomware groups, but little more is shared about the accused. Here’s a closer look at the activities of Mr. Ermakov’s alleged hacker…

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Guidance: Assembling a Group of Products for SBOM

Today, CISA published Guidance on Assembling a Group of Products created by the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) Tooling & Implementation Working Group, one of the five SBOM community-driven workstreams facilitated by CISA. CISA’s community-driven working groups publish documents and reports to advance and refine SBOM and ultimately promote adoption. Specifically, software producers often need to assemble and test products together before releasing them to customers. These products may contain components that experience version changes over time,…

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Using Google Search to Find Software Can Be Risky

Google continues to struggle with cybercriminals running malicious ads on its search platform to trick people into downloading booby-trapped copies of popular free software applications. The malicious ads, which appear above organic search results and often precede links to legitimate sources of the same software, can make searching for software on Google a dicey affair. Google says keeping users safe is a top priority, and that the company has a team of thousands working around…

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Cisco Releases Security Advisory for Multiple Unified Communications and Contact Center Solutions Products

Cisco released a security advisory to address a vulnerability (CVE-2024-20253) affecting multiple Unified Communications Products. A cyber threat actor could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system. CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Cisco Unified Communications Products Remote Code Execution Vulnerability advisory and apply the necessary updates.

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New Year, New Initiatives for the NIST Privacy Framework!

 It’s been four years since the release of The NIST Privacy Framework: A Tool for Improving Privacy Through Enterprise Risk Management, Version 1.0. Since then, many organizations have found it highly valuable for building or improving their privacy programs. We’ve also been able to add a variety of resources to support its implementation. Credit: NIST We’re proud of how much has been accomplished in just a few short years, but we’re not resting on our…

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Privacy Attacks in Federated Learning

Our first post in the series introduced the concept of federated learning—an approach for training AI models on distributed data by sharing model updates instead of training data. At first glance, federated learning seems to be a perfect fit for privacy since it completely avoids sharing data. However, recent work on privacy attacks has shown that it’s possible to extract a surprising amount of information about the training data, even when federated learning is used.…

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CISA Joins ACSC-led Guidance on How to Use AI Systems Securely

CISA has collaborated with the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ASD’s ACSC) on Engaging with Artificial Intelligence—joint guidance, led by ACSC, on how to use AI systems securely. The following organizations also collaborated with ACSC on the guidance: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National Security Agency (NSA) United Kingdom (UK) National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-UK) Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NZ) and CERT NZ Germany Federal…

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Canadian Man Stuck in Triangle of E-Commerce Fraud

A Canadian man who says he’s been falsely charged with orchestrating a complex e-commerce scam is seeking to clear his name. His case appears to involve “triangulation fraud,” which occurs when a consumer purchases something online — from a seller on Amazon or eBay, for example — but the seller doesn’t actually own the item for sale. Instead, the seller purchases the item from an online retailer using stolen payment card data. In this scam,…

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CISA Issues Emergency Directive on Ivanti Vulnerabilities

CISA has issued Emergency Directive (ED) 24-01 Mitigate Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure Vulnerabilities in response to active vulnerabilities in the following Ivanti products: Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure. ED 24-01 directs all Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies running Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure to: Implement the mitigations as detailed in the ED. Report indications of compromise to CISA. Remove compromised products from agency networks and follow the…

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