CyberSecurity Updates

Researchers at Wiz have flagged another major security misstep at Microsoft that caused the exposure of 38 terabytes of private data during a routine open source AI training material update on GitHub. The exposed data includes a disk backup of two employees’ workstations, corporate secrets, private keys, passwords, and over 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages, Wiz said in a note documenting the discovery. Wiz, a cloud data security startup founded by ex-Microsoft software engineers, said…

You may not know it, but thousands of often shadowy companies routinely traffic in personal data you probably never agreed to share — everything from your real-time location information to private financial details. Even if you could identify these data brokers, there isn’t much you can do about their activities, including in California, which has some of the strongest digital privacy laws in the U.S. That’s on the verge of changing. Both houses of the…

Russian hacker Dariy Pankov has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and now faces a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison, according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Pankov, who was extradited from the Eastern European country of Georgia earlier this year, was charged with developing and selling a piece of malware called NLBrute that was used in cybercriminal activities. As part of a plea deal, the government said Pankov will forfeit…

The US Department of Defense (DoD) this week published an unclassified summary of its 2023 Cyber Strategy, outlining plans for both offensive and defensive efforts. One key focus of the 2023 Cyber Strategy is the commitment to boost the cyber capabilities of allies and partners, and to increase collective resilience against cyberattacks. This includes augmenting the capacity of partners and expanding their access to cybersecurity infrastructure, as well as helping them mature their cyber workforce…