News

Don't worry, there's a twist at the end

Opinion  Agatha Christie stuck a dagger in the notion that crime doesn't pay. With sales of between two and four billion books – fittingly, the exact number is a mystery – she built a career out of murder that out-bloodied Jack the Ripper. It's a fair bet that had she chosen to write about accountancy fraud instead, her sales would be between two and four billion fewer. Some crime is sexy. Some is not.…

Trust and believe – AI models trained to see 'legal' doc as super legit

Researchers at security firm Pangea have discovered yet another way to trivially trick large language models (LLMs) into ignoring their guardrails. Stick your adversarial instructions somewhere in a legal document to give them an air of unearned legitimacy – a trick familiar to lawyers the world over.…

Sites at yourcountry.gov may also not bother with HTTPs

Internet traffic to government domains often flows across borders, relies on a worryingly small number of network connections, or does not require encryption, according to new research.…

PLUS: Microsoft ends no-MFA Azure access; WorkDay attack diverts payments; FreePBX warns of CVSS 10 flaw; and more

Infosec In brief  A flaw in Meta's WhatsApp app “may have been exploited in a sophisticated attack against specific targeted users.”…

The admin controls were left wide open on Pudu's robots

A researcher caught the world’s leading supplier of commercial service robots using shoddy admin security that let attackers redirect the delivery machines to anywhere and make them follow any command.…

Look who's visiting the watering hole these days

Amazon today said it disrupted an intel-gathering attempt by Russia's APT29 to trick Microsoft users into unwittingly granting the Kremlin-backed cyberspies access to their accounts and data.…

Up to 29,000 organizations and potentially 370,000 security and IT pros affected

Australian development house Click Studios has warned users of its Passwordstate enterprise password management platform to update immediately if not sooner, following the discovery of an authentication bypass vulnerability that opens the doors to an emergency administration account with nothing more than a "carefully crafted URL."…

Senior officials summoned to science and tech committee to explain further

Senior officials are being summoned to the UK's Science, Innovation and Technology Committee to explain why the government has not fully implemented the security recommendations made in a secret review following the 2021 Afghan data breach.…

Plus millions of other people across 80+ countries

China's Salt Typhoon cyberspies hoovered up information belonging to millions of people in the United States over the course of the years-long intrusion into telecommunications networks, according to a top FBI cyber official.…

Our drones are OK, but those other drones?

The US Department of Homeland Security has revealed plans to spend more than $100 million on systems designed to take out hostile drones.  …

Web browsing belongs to the people, not the bots

Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Norway-based browser maker Vivaldi, believes the tech industry's efforts to automate web browsing using generative AI models have gone too far.…

$6.4M VerifTools marketplace offline

The FBI and Dutch police today said that they seized two domains and a blog tied to VerifTools, an international criminal marketplace that sold identity documents for as little as $9.…

'The homeland is no longer secure,' says Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency leader

The Pentagon outfit responsible for preventing foriegn agents from infiltrating defense agencies says the US isn't doing a very good job of preventing state secrets from falling into Chinese hands.…

Your passwords may already be at risk.

Partner Content  Ever felt that gut punch after losing something important, like your house keys? Now picture those, along with 184 million others, resting in plain sight at the wildest equivalent of Comic-Con for criminals.…

Regulator points to lack of 'basic access controls' between internet-facing systems, internal network

South Korea's privacy watchdog has slapped SK Telecom with a record ₩134.5 billion ($97 million) fine after finding that the mobile giant left its network wide open to hackers through a catalog of bungles.…

Credit agency offers own services as compensation

Credit scoring and monitoring biz TransUnion says that it recently suffered a breach affecting nearly 4.5 million individuals.…

Shadowserver counts more than 13,000 appliances still wide open – including thousands in US, Germany, and UK

Thousands of Citrix NetScaler appliances remain exposed to a trio of security flaws that the vendor patched this week, one of which is already being actively exploited in the wild.…

Miljödata meltdown leaves 200 local authorities scrambling over 1.5 BTC

Sweden's municipal governments have been knocked offline after ransomware crooks hit IT supplier Miljödata, reportedly demanding the bargain-basement sum of $168,000.…

US payments platform back in action, says it's informing affected customers

Shoppers and merchants in Germany found themselves dealing with billions of euros in frozen transactions this week, thanks to an apparent failure in PayPal's fraud-detection systems.…

Apology issued after names tied to redress scheme revealed in mass mailing

A London law firm leaked the details of nearly 200 people who requested to receive updates about the redress scheme set up for victims of abuse at the hands of the Church of England (CoE).…