This is yet another insecure Internet-of-things story, this one about wireless gear shifters for bicycles. These gear shifters are used in big-money professional bicycle races like the Tour de France, which provides an incentive to actually implement this attack. Research paper. Another news story. Slashdot thread. [...]

Enlarge When Ryan Castellucci recently acquired solar panels and a battery storage system for their home just outside of London, they were drawn to the ability to use an open source dashboard to monitor and control the flow of electricity being generated. Instead, they gained much, much more—some …

When an airplane crashes, impartial investigatory bodies leap into action, empowered by law to unearth what happened and why. But there is no such empowered and impartial body to investigate CrowdStrike’s faulty update that recently unfolded, ensnarling banks, airlines, and emergency services to the tune of billions of …

Some scholars are inflating their reference counts by sneaking them into metadata: Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors’ names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored …

Interesting : By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by …

Enlarge A critical vulnerability recently discovered in a widely used piece of software is putting huge swaths of the Internet at risk of devastating hacks, and attackers have already begun actively trying to exploit it in real-world attacks, researchers warn. The software, known as MOVEit and sold by Progress …

Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shift from imperfect but broad cultural narratives to a proliferation of niche groups, who are …

Cybercrime group ShinyHunters reportedly demanding £400,000 ransom to prevent data being sold Ticketmaster has been targeted in a cyber-attack, with hackers allegedly offering to sell customer data on the dark web, its parent company, Live Nation, has confirmed. The ShinyHunters hacking group is reportedly demanding about £400,000 …

Enlarge (credit: Flavio Coelho/Getty Images) Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down. Michael, who is based in Europe and asked …

Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain Crunch cereal worked to make the right …

Exclusive: Defence ministry was told in recent days that staff details accessed but sources say SSCL knew in February The IT company targeted in a Chinese hack that accessed the data of hundreds of thousands of Ministry of Defence staff failed to report the breach for months, the Guardian …

Defence secretary to address MPs after names and bank details of armed forces members targeted by unnamed attacker The Ministry of Defence has suffered a significant data breach and the personal information of UK military personnel has been hacked. A third-party payroll system used by the MoD, which includes …

Defence secretary to address MPs after names and bank details of armed forces members targeted by unnamed attacker The Ministry of Defence has suffered a significant data breach and the personal information of UK military personnel has been hacked. A third-party payroll system used by the MoD, which includes …

Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) As many as 91,000 LG TVs face the risk of being commandeered unless they receive a just-released security update patching four critical vulnerabilities discovered late last year. The vulnerabilities are found in four LG TV models that collectively comprise slightly more than 88,000 …

US Cyber Safety Review Board released a report on the summer 2023 hack of Microsoft Exchange by China. It was a serious attack by the Chinese government that accessed the emails of senior U.S. government officials. From the executive summary: The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable …

Enlarge / Downtown Kansas City, Missouri, which is part of Jackson County. (credit: Eric Rogers ) Jackson County, Missouri, has declared a state of emergency and closed key offices indefinitely as it responds to what officials believe is a ransomware attack that has made some of its IT systems inoperable. "Jackson …

The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica : Malicious code added to xz …

It’s pretty devastating : Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of Saflok-brand RFID-based keycard …

Enlarge (credit: peterschreiber.media | Getty Images) The US Justice Department on Monday unsealed an indictment charging seven men with hacking or attempting to hack dozens of US companies in a 14-year campaign furthering an economic espionage and foreign intelligence gathering by the Chinese government. All seven defendants, federal prosecutors …

LockBit was a sophisticated criminal operation, offering the tools needed to steal a company’s data and hold it to ransom. Then it was itself hacked. Alex Hern reports A ransomware site on the dark web has allowed criminals to extort hospitals, businesses and schools for years. By encrypting …

Researchers have demonstrated that putting words in ASCII art can cause LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2—to ignore their safety instructions. Research paper. [...]

Researchers ran a global prompt hacking competition, and have documented the results in a paper that both gives a lot of good examples and tries to organize a taxonomy of effective prompt injection strategies. It seems as if the most common successful strategy is the “compound instruction attack,” as …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Code uploaded to AI developer platform Hugging Face covertly installed backdoors and other types of malware on end-user machines, researchers from security firm JFrog said Thursday in a report that’s a likely harbinger of what’s to come. In all, JFrog researchers said, they …

Last week, someone posted something like 570 files, images and chat logs from a Chinese company called I-Soon. I-Soon sells hacking and espionage services to Chinese national and local government. Lots of details in the news articles. These aren’t details about the tools or techniques, more the inner …