Security News

A now-patched security flaw in Microsoft Outlook could be exploited by threat actors to access NT LAN Manager (NTLM) v2 hashed passwords when opening a specially crafted file. The issue, tracked...

Security researchers analyzing the activity of the recently emerged 3AM ransomware operation uncovered close connections with infamous groups, such as the Conti syndicate and the Royal ransomware gang. The 3AM ransomware gang's activity was first documented publicly in mid-September when the Threat Hunter Team at Symantec, now part of Broadcom, revealed that they noticed threat actors switching to ThreeAM ransomware after failing to deploy the LockBit malware.

Microsoft says that a subgroup of the notorious APT35 Iranian-backed state hackers are targeting high-profile employees of research organizations and universities across Europe and the United States in spearphishing attacks pushing new MediaPL backdoor malware. MediaPL is a highly sophisticated malware strain designed to compromise the security of researchers and their data. The attackers have specifically targeted individuals involved in cutting-edge research, seeking unauthorized access to sensitive information. Microsoft's dedicated security teams have dissected the malware to better understand its functionality and devise effective countermeasures.

Ransomware victims already reeling from potential biz disruption and the cost of resolving the matter are now being subjected to follow-on extortion attempts by criminals posing as helpful security researchers. Researchers at Arctic Wolf Labs publicized two cases in which casulaties of the Royal and Akira ransomware gangs were targeted by a third party, believed to be the same individual or group in both scenarios, and extorted by a fake cyber samaritan.

A team of computer scientists led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced a new method for automatically generating whole proofs that can be used to prevent software bugs and verify that the underlying code is correct. "Reducing bugs in software, or even producing bug-free software, has been a holy grail of systems building for decades unfortunately, the state-of-the-practice in our society is that we expect all software to have bugs. Building bug-free software is just an incredibly difficult challenge."

When organizations get hit by ransomware and pay the crooks to decrypt the encrypted data and delete the stolen data, they can never be entirely sure the criminals will do as they promised. Even if an organization gets its data decrypted, they cannot be sure the stolen data has indeed been wiped and won't subsequently be used or sold.

Tactical and targeting overlaps have been discovered between the enigmatic advanced persistent threat (APT) called Sandman and a China-based threat cluster that's known to use a backdoor known as...

Threat hunters have unmasked the latest tricks adopted by a malware strain called GuLoader in an effort to make analysis more challenging. "While GuLoader's core functionality hasn't changed...

AI security researchers from Robust Intelligence and Yale University have designed a machine learning technique that can speedily jailbreak large language models in an automated fashion. "The method, known as the Tree of Attacks with Pruning, can be used to induce sophisticated models like GPT-4 and Llama-2 to produce hundreds of toxic, harmful, and otherwise unsafe responses to a user query in mere minutes," Robust Intelligence researchers have noted.

The conversation also touches on the broader ethical considerations in cybersecurity and the impact of emerging technologies on vulnerability disclosure practices and offers advice for cybersecurity professionals grappling with these critical decisions. Some might argue that in the interest of the public, public disclosure is the most ethical approach as it ensures the issue is closed as quick as possible.