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Microsoft on Tuesday  confirmed  that the LAPSUS$ extortion-focused hacking crew had gained "limited access" to its systems, as authentication services provider Okta revealed that nearly 2.5% of its customers have been potentially impacted in the wake of the breach. "No customer code or data was involved in the observed activities," Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said, adding that the breach was facilitated by means of a single compromised account that has since been remediated to prevent further malicious activity. The Windows maker, which was already tracking the group under the moniker DEV-0537 prior to the public disclosure,  said  it "does not rely on the secrecy of code as a security measure and viewing source code does not lead to elevation of risk." "This public disclosure escalated our action allowing our team to intervene and interrupt the actor mid-operation, limiting broader impact," the company's security

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it has detained a "hacker" who offered technical assistance to the invading Russian troops by providing mobile communication services inside the Ukrainian territory. The anonymous suspect is said to have broadcasted text messages to Ukrainian officials, including security officers and civil servants, proposing that they surrender and take the side of Russia. The individual has also been accused of routing phone calls from Russia to the mobile phones of Russian troops in Ukraine. "Up to a thousand calls were made through this hacker in one day. Many of them are from the top leadership of the enemy army," the SBU  alleged , adding it confiscated the equipment that was used to pull off the operation. Besides implicating the hacker for helping Russia make anonymous phone calls to its military forces based in Ukraine, the agency said the hacker passed commands and instructions to different groups of "Russian invaders.&

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) on Tuesday slapped Facebook and WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms a fine of €17 million (~$18.6 million) for a series of security lapses that occurred in violation of the European Union's  GDPR laws  in the region. "The DPC found that Meta Platforms failed to have in place appropriate technical and organizational measures which would enable it to readily demonstrate the security measures that it implemented in practice to protect EU users' data, in the context of the twelve personal data breaches," the watchdog  said  in a press release. The decision follows the regulator's investigation into 12  data   breach   notifications  it received over the course of a six-month period between June 7 and December 4, 2018. "This fine is about record keeping practices from 2018 that we have since updated, not a failure to protect people's information," Meta  said  in a statement shared with the Associated Press. "

French video game company Ubisoft on Friday confirmed it was a victim of a "cyber security incident," causing temporary disruptions to its games, systems, and services. The Montreuil-headquartered firm said that an investigation into the breach was underway and that it has initiated a company-wide password reset as a precautionary measure. "Also, we can confirm that all our games and services are functioning normally and that at this time there is no evidence any player personal information was accessed or exposed as a by-product of this incident," the company  said  in a statement. The news of the hack comes amid a string of high-profile attacks targeting  NVIDIA ,  Samsung ,  Mercado Libre , and  Vodafone  in recent weeks. While the extortionist gang LAPSUS$ claimed responsibility for these attacks, it's not immediately clear if the group is behind the Ubisoft breach as well. Technology news site The Verge, which first  reported  the development, said th

French data protection regulators on Thursday found the use of Google Analytics a breach of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws in the country, almost a month after a  similar decision  was reached in Austria. To that end, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) ruled that the transatlantic movement of Google Analytics data to the U.S. is not "sufficiently regulated" citing a violation of  Articles 44 et seq.  of the data protection decree, which govern the transfers of personal data to third countries or international entities. Specifically the independent administrative regulatory body highlighted the lack of equivalent privacy protections and the risk that "American intelligence services would access personal data transferred to the United States if the transfers were not properly regulated." "[A]lthough Google has adopted additional measures to regulate data transfers in the context of the Google An

The wide-ranging adoption of cloud facilities and the subsequent mushrooming of organizations' networks, combined with the recent migration to remote work, had the direct consequence of a massive expansion of organizations' attack surface and led to a growing number of blind spots in connected architectures. The unforeseen  results of this expanded and attack surface  with fragmented monitoring has been a marked increase in the number of successful cyber-attacks, most notoriously, ransomware, but covering a range of other types of attacks as well. The main issues are unmonitored blind spots used by cyber-attackers to breach organizations' infrastructure and escalate their attack or move laterally, seeking valuable information.  The problem lies in discovery. Most organizations have evolved faster than their ability to keep track of all the moving parts involved and to catch up to catalog all past and present assets is often viewed as a complex and resource-heavy task wit

We hear about the need for better visibility in the cybersecurity space – detecting threats earlier and more accurately. We often hear about the dwell time and the time to identify and contain a data breach. Many of us are familiar with IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report that has been tracking this statistic for years. In the 2021 report, IBM found that, on average, it takes an average of 212 days to identify a breach and then another 75 days to contain the breach, for a total of 287 days. A new  solution overview document  provides insights on how XDR provider Cynet tackles the difficult problem of greatly improving threat visibility. Cynet takes a modern approach that includes a greater level of native technology integration and advanced automation purposely designed for organizations with smaller security teams than Fortune 500 organizations. A live webinar will discuss the same topic ( Register here ) Cynet's Keys for Threat Visibility Einstein said that the definition of i

Gone are the days when ransomware operators were happy with encrypting files on-site and more or less discretely charged their victims money for a decryption key. What we commonly find now is encryption with the additional threat of leaking stolen data, generally called Double-Extortion (or, as we like to call it: Cyber Extortion or Cy-X). This is a unique form of cybercrime in that we can observe and analyze some of the criminal action via 'victim shaming' leak sites. Since January 2020, we have applied ourselves to identifying as many of these sites as possible to record and document the victims who feature on them. Adding our own research, analyzing, and enriching data scraped from the various Cy-X operators and market sites, we can provide direct insights into the victimology from this specific perspective. We must be clear that what we are analyzing is a limited perspective on the crime. Nevertheless, the data gleaned from an analysis of the leak-threats proves to be ex