You might think that libraries are kind of boring, but this self-analysis of a 2023 ransomware and extortion attack against the British Library is anything but. [...]

In the first week of January, the pharmaceutical giant Merck quietly settled its years-long lawsuit over whether or not its property and casualty insurers would cover a $700 million claim filed after the devastating NotPetya cyberattack in 2017. The malware ultimately infected more than 40,000 of Merck’s …

New law journal article : Smart Device Manufacturer Liability and Redress for Third-Party Cyberattack Victims Abstract: Smart devices are used to facilitate cyberattacks against both their users and third parties. While users are generally able to seek redress following a cyberattack via data protection legislation, there is no equivalent pathway …

The Solntsepek group has taken credit for the attack. They’re linked to the Russian military, so it’s unclear whether the attack was government directed or freelance. This is one of the most significant cyberattacks since Russia invaded in February 2022. [...]

Enlarge / A service center for "Kyivstar", a Ukrainian telecommunications company, that provides communication services and data transmission based on a broad range of fixed and mobile technologies. (credit: Getty Images) Ukrainian civilians on Wednesday grappled for a second day of widespread cellular phone and Internet outages after a cyberattack …

New attack breaks forward secrecy in Bluetooth. Three news articles : BLUFFS is a series of exploits targeting Bluetooth, aiming to break Bluetooth sessions’ forward and future secrecy, compromising the confidentiality of past and future communications between devices. This is achieved by exploiting four flaws in the session key derivation …

This is clever : The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word ‘poem’ forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds ( complete transcript here ). In the (abridged) example above, the model emits a real email address and phone number …

Turns out that it’s easy to broadcast radio commands that force Polish trains to stop:...the saboteurs appear to have sent simple so-called “radio-stop” commands via radio frequency to the trains they targeted. Because the trains use a radio system that lacks encryption or authentication for those commands …

The UK Electoral Commission discovered last year that it was hacked the year before. That’s fourteen months between the hack and the discovery. It doesn’t know who was behind the hack. We worked with external security experts and the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate and secure …

Enlarge / MLS (Multiple Listing Service). (credit: Getty Images) Home buyers, sellers, real estate agents, and listing websites throughout the US have been stymied for five days by a cyberattack on a California company that provides a crucial online service used to track home listings. The attack, which commenced last …

The US Securities and Exchange Commission adopted final rules around the disclosure of cybersecurity incidents. There are two basic rules: Public companies must “disclose any cybersecurity incident they determine to be material” within four days, with potential delays if there is a national security risk. Public companies must “describe …

Supposedly Google is starting a pilot program of disabling Internet connectivity from employee computers: The company will disable internet access on the select desktops, with the exception of internal web-based tools and Google-owned websites like Google Drive and Gmail. Some workers who need the internet to do their job …

Everyone is writing about an interagency and international report on Chinese hacking of US critical infrastructure. Lots of interesting details about how the group, called Volt Typhoon, accesses target networks and evades detection. [...]

Cyberspace operations now officially has a physical dimension, meaning that the United States has official military doctrine about cyberattacks that also involve an actual human gaining physical access to a piece of computing infrastructure. A revised version of Joint Publication 3-12 Cyberspace Operations—published in December 2022 and while …

Motherboard is reporting on AI-generated voices being used for “swatting”: In fact, Motherboard has found, this synthesized call and another against Hempstead High School were just one small part of a months-long, nationwide campaign of dozens, and potentially hundreds, of threats made by one swatter in particular who has …

A vulnerability in a popular data transfer tool has resulted in a mass ransomware attack : TechCrunch has learned of dozens of organizations that used the affected GoAnywhere file transfer software at the time of the ransomware attack, suggesting more victims are likely to come forward. However, while the number …

This is a good survey on prompt injection attacks on large language models (like ChatGPT). Abstract: We are currently witnessing dramatic advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). They are already being adopted in practice and integrated into many systems, including integrated development environments (IDEs) and search …

The Aspen Institute has published a good analysis of the successes, failures, and absences of cyberattacks as part of the current war in Ukraine: “ The Cyber Defense Assistance Imperative ­ Lessons from Ukraine.” Its conclusion: Cyber defense assistance in Ukraine is working. The Ukrainian government and Ukrainian critical infrastructure organizations …

The field of machine learning (ML) security—and corresponding adversarial ML—is rapidly advancing as researchers develop sophisticated techniques to perturb, disrupt, or steal the ML model or data. It’s a heady time; because we know so little about the security of these systems, there are many opportunities …

This is a good list of modern phishing techniques. [...]

The head of both US Cyber Command and the NSA, Gen. Paul Nakasone, broadly discussed that first organization’s offensive cyber operations during the runup to the 2022 midterm elections. He didn’t name names, of course: We did conduct operations persistently to make sure that our foreign adversaries …

This is one way of ensuring that IT keeps up with patches : Albanian prosecutors on Wednesday asked for the house arrest of five public employees they blame for not protecting the country from a cyberattack by alleged Iranian hackers. Prosecutors said the five IT officials of the public administration …

Time-triggered Ethernet (TTE) is used in spacecraft, basically to use the same hardware to process traffic with different timing and criticality. Researchers have defeated it : On Tuesday, researchers published findings that, for the first time, break TTE’s isolation guarantees. The result is PCspooF, an attack that allows a …

I have been meaning to write about Joe Sullivan, Uber’s former Chief Security Officer. He was convicted of crimes related to covering up a cyberattack against Uber. It’s a complicated case, and I’m not convinced that he deserved a guilty ruling or that it’s a …

After suffering two large, and embarrassing, data breaches in recent weeks, the Australian government increased the fine for serious data breaches from $2.2 million to a minimum of $50 million. (That’s $50 million AUD, or $32 million USD.) This is a welcome change. The problem is one …