Security News
Europe's proposed "Chat Control" legislation to automatically scan chat, email, and instant message communications for child sexual exploitation material ran up against broad resistance at a meeting of the German Parliament's Digital Affairs Committee on Wednesday. Chat Control 2.0 would make content scanning mandatory, even for encrypted communications - which would mean either content scanning prior to encryption or encryption keys managed by the service provider instead of the end user.
Microsoft announced today that it's integrating the new AI-powered Bing Chat into the Windows 11 search box with the latest Windows feature update. "Today, we take the next major step forward and combine the incredible breadth and ease of use of the Windows PC with the amazing power of the new AI-enhanced Bing to provide hundreds of millions of Windows 11 users the next era of computing," said Microsoft EVP & Chief Product Officer Panos Panay on Tuesday.
Microsoft will start testing Bing Chat tones, enabling users to switch between receiving answers that are either more creative or more focused on their queries. We are "Going to begin testing an additional option that lets you choose the tone of the Chat from more Precise - which will focus on shorter, more search focused answers - to Balanced, to more Creative - which gives you longer and more chatty answers," the Bing Team said.
Bing's new AI chat has secret chat modes that can be used to change the AI bot into a personal assistant, a friend to help with your emotions and problems, a game mode to play games with Bing, or its default, Bing Search mode. Friend mode: In this mode, I can act as a friend for the user, and chat with them about their interests, hobbies, feelings, etc.
Microsoft announced on Tuesday a new version of its Bing search engine powered by a next-generation OpenAI language model more powerful than ChatGPT and specially trained for web search. "Today, we're launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web."
The StrongPity APT hacking group is distributing a fake Shagle chat app that is a trojanized version of the Telegram for Android app with an added backdoor. Once installed, this app enables the hackers to conduct espionage on the targeted victims, including monitoring phone calls, collecting SMS texts, and grabbing contact lists.
The attackers try out the entered credentials on the legitimate website, triggering the sending of a 2FA code to the victim, who then enters a valid 2FA on the phishing site. The threat actors then attempt to use the entered 2FA code to log in to the victim's account as long as they act before the timer runs out.
Microsoft has significantly reduced latency for Windows and Mac users of the Teams desktop client in some critical scenarios when interacting with the application. Jeff Chen, a Microsoft Principal Group Program Manager for Microsoft Teams, said today that the app is now more than 30% faster when switching between chat and channel threads.
A threat actor likely with associations to China has been attributed to a new supply chain attack that involves the use of a trojanized installer for the Comm100 Live Chat application to distribute a JavaScript backdoor. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the attack made use of a signed Comm100 desktop agent app for Windows that was downloadable from the company's website.
Four security researchers have identified five cryptographic vulnerabilities in code libraries that can be exploited to undermine Matrix encrypted chat clients. "Our perspective is that these attacks together show a rich attack surface in Matrix from both a protocol and implementation perspective," Benjamin Dowling, a lecturer in cybersecurity, told The Register this week.