Deep Learning | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Italy's data protection watchdog has blocked Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek's service within the country, citing a lack of information on its use of users' personal data. The development comes days after the authority, the Garante, sent a series of questions to DeepSeek, asking about its data handling practices and where it obtained its training data. In particular, it wanted to know what personal data is collected by its web platform and mobile app, from which sources, for what purposes, on what legal basis, and whether it is stored in China. In a statement issued January 30, 2025, the Garante said it arrived at the decision after DeepSeek provided information that it said was "completely insufficient." The entities behind the service, Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, have "declared that they do not operate in Italy and that European legislation does not apply to them," it...

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that has captured much of the artificial intelligence (AI) buzz in recent days, said it's restricting registrations on the service, citing malicious attacks. "Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek's services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service," the company said in an incident report page. "Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support." Users attempting to sign up for an account are being displayed a similar message, stating "registration may be busy" and that they should wait and try again. "With the popularity of DeepSeek growing, it's not a big surprise that they are being targeted by malicious web traffic," Erich Kron, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "These sorts of attacks could be a way to extort an organization by promising to stop attacks and rest...

Google has announced that it's open-sourcing  Magika , an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool to identify file types, to help defenders accurately detect binary and textual file types. "Magika outperforms conventional file identification methods providing an overall 30% accuracy boost and up to 95% higher precision on traditionally hard to identify, but potentially problematic content such as VBA, JavaScript, and Powershell," the company  said . The software uses a "custom, highly optimized deep-learning model" that enables the precise identification of file types within milliseconds. Magika implements inference functions using the Open Neural Network Exchange ( ONNX ). Google said it internally uses Magika at scale to help improve users' safety by routing Gmail, Drive, and Safe Browsing files to the proper security and content policy scanners. In November 2023, the tech giant unveiled  RETVec  (short for Resilient and Efficient Text Vectorizer),...

Detecting leaked credentials is only half the battle. The real challenge—and often the neglected half of the equation—is what happens after detection. New research from GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2025 report reveals a disturbing trend: the vast majority of exposed company secrets discovered in public repositories remain valid for years after detection, creating an expanding attack surface that many organizations are failing to address. According to GitGuardian's analysis of exposed secrets across public GitHub repositories, an alarming percentage of credentials detected as far back as 2022 remain valid today: "Detecting a leaked secret is just the first step," says GitGuardian's research team. "The true challenge lies in swift remediation." Why Exposed Secrets Remain Valid This persistent validity suggests two troubling possibilities: either organizations are unaware their credentials have been exposed (a security visibility problem),...

Medieval castles stood as impregnable fortresses for centuries, thanks to their meticulous design. Fast forward to the digital age, and this medieval wisdom still echoes in cybersecurity. Like castles with strategic layouts to withstand attacks, the Defense-in-Depth strategy is the modern counterpart — a multi-layered approach with strategic redundancy and a blend of passive and active security controls.  However, the evolving cyber threat landscape can challenge even the most fortified defenses. Despite the widespread adoption of the Defense-in-Depth strategy, cyber threats persist. Fortunately, the Defense-in-Depth strategy can be augmented using Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS), an automated tool that assesses and improves every security control in each layer. Defense-in-Depth: False Sense of Security with Layers Also known as multi-layered defense, the defense-in-depth strategy has been widely adopted by organizations since the early 2000s. It's based on the assumption th...

A group of academics has devised a "deep learning-based acoustic side-channel attack" that can be used to classify laptop keystrokes that are recorded using a nearby phone with 95% accuracy. "When trained on keystrokes recorded using the video conferencing software Zoom, an accuracy of 93% was achieved, a new best for the medium," researchers Joshua Harrison, Ehsan Toreini, and Maryam Mehrnezhad  said  in a new study published last week. Side-channel attacks  refer  to a class of  security exploits  that aim to glean insights from a system by monitoring and measuring its physical effects during the processing of sensitive data. Some of the common observable effects include runtime behavior, power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, acoustics, and cache accesses. Although a completely side-channel-free implementation does not exist, practical attacks of this kind can have damaging consequences for user privacy and security as they could be weaponize...