AI Ethics | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Apple has publicly made available its Private Cloud Compute (PCC) Virtual Research Environment (VRE), allowing the research community to inspect and verify the privacy and security guarantees of its offering. PCC, which Apple unveiled earlier this June, has been marketed as the "most advanced security architecture ever deployed for cloud AI compute at scale." With the new technology, the idea is to offload computationally complex Apple Intelligence requests to the cloud in a manner that doesn't sacrifice user privacy. Apple said it's inviting "all security and privacy researchers — or anyone with interest and a technical curiosity — to learn more about PCC and perform their own independent verification of our claims." To further incentivize research, the iPhone maker said it's expanding the Apple Security Bounty program to include PCC by offering monetary payouts ranging from $50,000 to $1,000,000 for security vulnerabilities identified in it. Th...

OpenAI on Friday said it banned a set of accounts linked to what it said was an Iranian covert influence operation that leveraged ChatGPT to generate content that, among other things, focused on the upcoming U.S. presidential election. "This week we identified and took down a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that were generating content for a covert Iranian influence operation identified as Storm-2035," OpenAI said . "The operation used ChatGPT to generate content focused on a number of topics — including commentary on candidates on both sides in the U.S. presidential election – which it then shared via social media accounts and websites." The artificial intelligence (AI) company said the content did not achieve any meaningful engagement, with a majority of the social media posts receiving negligible to no likes, shares, and comments. It further noted it had found little evidence that the long-form articles created using ChatGPT were shared on social media platforms....

Are you using the cloud or thinking about transitioning? Undoubtedly, multi-cloud and hybrid environments offer numerous benefits for organizations. However, the cloud's flexibility, scalability, and efficiency come with significant risk — an expanded attack surface. The decentralization that comes with utilizing multi-cloud environments can also lead to limited visibility into user activity and poor access management.  Privileged accounts with access to your critical systems and sensitive data are among the most vulnerable elements in cloud setups. When mismanaged, these accounts open the doors to unauthorized access, potential malicious activity, and data breaches. That's why strong privileged access management (PAM) is indispensable. PAM plays an essential role in addressing the security challenges of complex infrastructures by enforcing strict access controls and managing the life cycle of privileged accounts. By employing PAM in hybrid and cloud environments, you're not...

Meta has suspended the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in Brazil after the country's data protection authority issued a preliminary ban objecting to its new privacy policy. The development was first reported by news agency Reuters. The company said it has decided to suspend the tools while it is in talks with Brazil's National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) to address the agency's concerns over its use of GenAI technology. Earlier this month, ANPD halted with immediate effect the social media giant's new privacy policy that granted the company access to users' personal data to train its GenAI systems. The decision stems from "the imminent risk of serious and irreparable damage or difficult-to-repair damage to the fundamental rights of the affected data subjects," the agency said. It further set a daily fine of 50,000 reais (about $9,100 as of July 18) in case of non-compliance. Last week, it gave Meta "five more days to p...

Large language models (LLMs) powering artificial intelligence (AI) tools today could be exploited to develop self-augmenting malware capable of bypassing YARA rules. "Generative AI can be used to evade string-based YARA rules by augmenting the source code of small malware variants, effectively lowering detection rates," Recorded Future  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The findings are part of a red teaming exercise designed to uncover malicious use cases for AI technologies, which are  already being experimented  with by threat actors to create malware code snippets, generate phishing emails, and conduct reconnaissance on potential targets. The cybersecurity firm said it submitted to an LLM a known piece of malware called  STEELHOOK  that's associated with the APT28 hacking group, alongside its YARA rules, asking it to modify the source code to sidestep detection such that the original functionality remained intact and the gene...