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Tech Industry Leaders Endorse Regulating Artificial Intelligence at Rare Summit in Washington

The nation’s biggest technology executives on Wednesday loosely endorsed the idea of government regulations for artificial intelligence at an unusual closed-door meeting in the U.S. Senate. But there is little consensus on what regulation would look like, and the political path for legislation is difficult. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who organized the private forum on Capitol Hill as part of a push to legislate artificial intelligence, said he asked everyone in the room —…

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Zero Day Summer: Microsoft Warns of Fresh New Software Exploits

Microsoft’s struggles with zero-day exploits rolled into a new month with a fresh warning that two new Windows vulnerabilities are being targeted by malware attacks in the wild. As part of its scheduled batch of Patch Tuesday security fixes, Redmond’s security response team flagged the two zero-days — CVE-2023-36761 and CVE-2023-36802 — in the “exploitation detected” category and urged Windows sysadmins to urgently apply available fixes. The most serious of the two bugs is described…

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MGM Resorts Confirms ‘Cybersecurity Issue’, Shuts Down Systems

Hospitality and entertainment giant MGM Resorts on Monday said a “cybersecurity issue” forced the shutdown of certain computer systems, including the websites for some of the biggest Las Vegas and New York properties. A brief note posted to X (the website formerly known as Twitter) said external cybersecurity experts and law enforcement are involved in an investigation that has all the hallmarks of a ransomware extortion attack. Here’s the full MGM Resorts statement: “MGM Resorts…

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Powerful Ethnic Militia in Myanmar Repatriates 1,200 Chinese Suspected of Involvement in Cybercrime

One of Myanmar’s biggest and most powerful ethnic minority militias has arrested and repatriated more than 1,200 Chinese nationals allegedly involved in criminal online scam operations, an official of the group said Saturday. The arrests were carried out in territory controlled by the United Wa State Army, or UWSA, in eastern Shan state in raids on Tuesday and Wednesday, Nyi Rang, a liaison officer from the militia, told The Associated Press. He said in a…

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Cisco ASA Zero-Day Exploited in Akira Ransomware Attacks

Cisco this week raised the alarm on a zero-day in Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) software that has been exploited in Akira ransomware attacks since August. Tracked as CVE-2023-20269 (CVSS score of 5.0, medium severity), the issue exists in the remote access VPN feature of Cisco ASA and FTD and can be exploited remotely, without authentication, in brute force attacks.  “This vulnerability is due to improper separation of authentication, authorization, and…

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New Phishing Campaign Launched via Google Looker Studio

Cybersecurity firm Check Point is warning of a new type of phishing attacks that abuse Google Looker Studio to bypass protections. Google Looker Studio is a legitimate online tool for creating customizable reports, including charts and graphs, that can be easily shared with others. As part of the observed attacks, threat actors are using Google Looker Studio to create fake crypto pages that are then delivered to the intended victims in emails sent from the…

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Apple Patches Actively Exploited iOS, macOS Zero-Days

Apple on Thursday pushed out an urgent point-update to its flagship iOS and macOS platforms to fix a pair of security defects being exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities, fixed in the latest iOS 16.6.1 and macOS Ventura 13.5.2 releases, are credited to the Citizen Lab at The University of Torontoʼs Munk School, suggesting exploitation in commercial surveillance spyware products. The Citizen Lab at The University of Torontoʼs Munk School actively tracks PSOAs (private sector…

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Crash Dump Error: How a Chinese Espionage Group Exploited Microsoft’s Mistakes

Microsoft has published a post-mortem detailing multiple errors that led to Chinese cyberspies hacking into US government emails, blaming the embarrassing incident on a crash dump stolen from a hacked engineer’s corporate account. The crash dump, which dated back to April 2021, contained a Microsoft account (MSA) consumer key that was used to forge tokens to break into OWA and Outlook.com accounts. “Our investigation found that a consumer signing system crash in April of 2021…

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CISA Hires ‘Mudge’ to Work on Security-by-Design Principles

The U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency CISA on Monday confirmed the addition of Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko to its roster of prominent voices preaching the gospel of security-by-design and secure-by-default development principles. Zatko, most recently the CISO at Twitter who blew the whistle on the social media giant’s security shortcomings, is joining the agency in a part-time capacity to work on the “security and resilience by design” pillar of the Biden administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy. A statement…

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Exploit Code Published for Critical-Severity VMware Security Defect

Just days after shipping a major security update to correct vulnerabilities in its Aria Operations for Networks product line, VMWare is warning that exploit code has been published online. In an updated advisory, the virtualization technology giant confirmed the public release of exploit code that provides a roadmap for hackers to bypass SSH authentication and gain access to the Aria Operations for Networks command line interface. The exploit code and root-cause analysis, released by SinSinology…

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