Security News > 2024 > March
Three cybersecurity researchers discovered close to 19 million plaintext passwords exposed on the public internet by misconfigured instances of Firebase, a Google platform for hosting databases, cloud computing, and app development. The researchers started looking on the public web for personally identifiable information exposed via vulnerable Firebase instances.
NVIDIA's newest GPU platform is the Blackwell, which companies including AWS, Microsoft and Google plan to adopt for generative AI and other modern computing tasks, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced during the keynote at the NVIDIA GTC conference on March 18 in San Jose, California. Along with the Blackwell GPUs, the company announced the NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which links two NVIDIA B200 Tensor Core GPUs to the NVIDIA Grace CPU - providing a new, combined platform for LLM inference.
"Drinking water and wastewater systems are a lifeline for communities, but many systems have not adopted important cybersecurity practices to thwart potential cyberattacks," said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan. The National Security Council and the Environmental Protection Agency have invited governors to a virtual meeting on March 21 to strengthen collaboration between government entities and water systems and establish a Water Sector Cybersecurity Task Force.
The Cyber Crime Center of the U.S. Department of Defense says it has reached the milestone of processing its 50,000th vulnerability report submitted by 5,635 researchers since its inception in November 2016. The federal agency launched its Vulnerability Disclosure Program 7.5 years ago following a bug bounty event called 'Hack-the-Pentagon,' to engage crowd-sourced vulnerability reports that could help bolster its cyber defenses.
Chinese cyberspies have compromised at least 70 organizations, mostly government entities, and targeted more than 116 victims across the globe, according to security researchers. "One of the threat actor's favorite tactics involves using its malicious access to government infrastructure to attack other government entities, abusing the infrastructure to host malicious payloads, proxy attack traffic, and send spear-phishing emails to government-related targets using compromised government email accounts," Joseph Chen and Daniel Lunghi said in research published on Monday.
CISA, the NSA, the FBI, and several other agencies in the U.S. and worldwide warned critical infrastructure leaders to protect their systems against the Chinese Volt Typhoon hacking group. Together with the NSA, the FBI, other U.S. government agencies, and partner Five Eyes cybersecurity agencies, including cybersecurity agencies from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, it also issued defense tips on detecting and defending against Volt Typhoon attacks.
The FBI warned of increases in crypto scams in March last year, saying most begin with some sort of social engineering, like a romance or confidence scam, which then evolve into crypto investment fraud. The total losses from investment fraud also beat those incurred by ransomware across the country, according to the latest report [PDF] from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission warned today that scammers are impersonating its employees to steal thousands of dollars from Americans. FTC says its staff has received numerous reports from consumers who have fallen victim to scams in which fraudsters exploited the identities of agency personnel to coerce them into transferring or wiring money.
The Ukrainian cyber police, in collaboration with investigators from the national police, have arrested three individuals who are accused of hijacking over 100 million emails and Instagram accounts worldwide. The arrested cybercriminals monetized their illicit activities by selling access to compromised accounts to various fraud groups on the darknet.
Oracle warned Apple customers to delay installing the latest macOS 14.4 Sonoma update because it will break Java on ARM-based Macs. According to Garcia-Ribeyro, since the Java Virtual Machine uses dynamic code generation and accesses memory in protected memory regions to ensure correctness and performance, its process will be terminated after deploying the macOS 14.4 update.