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Google on Tuesday unveiled a new privacy-enhancing technology called Private AI Compute to process artificial intelligence (AI) queries in a secure platform in the cloud. The company said it has built Private AI Compute to "unlock the full speed and power of Gemini cloud models for AI experiences, while ensuring your personal data stays private to you and is not accessible to anyone else, not even Google." Private AI Compute has been described as a "secure, fortified space" for processing sensitive user data in a manner that's analogous to on-device processing but with extended AI capabilities. It's powered by Trillium Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Titanium Intelligence Enclaves (TIE), allowing the company to use its frontier models without sacrificing on security and privacy. In other words, the privacy infrastructure is designed to take advantage of the computational speed and power of the cloud while retaining the security and privacy assuran...

Microsoft has disclosed details of a novel side-channel attack targeting remote language models that could enable a passive adversary with capabilities to observe network traffic to glean details about model conversation topics despite encryption protections under certain circumstances. This leakage of data exchanged between humans and streaming-mode language models could pose serious risks to the privacy of user and enterprise communications, the company noted. The attack has been codenamed Whisper Leak . "Cyber attackers in a position to observe the encrypted traffic (for example, a nation-state actor at the internet service provider layer, someone on the local network, or someone connected to the same Wi-Fi router) could use this cyber attack to infer if the user's prompt is on a specific topic," security researchers Jonathan Bar Or and Geoff McDonald, along with the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team, said . Put differently, the attack allows an attacker t...

A design firm is editing a new campaign video on a MacBook Pro. The creative director opens a collaboration app that quietly requests microphone and camera permissions. MacOS is supposed to flag that, but in this case, the checks are loose. The app gets access anyway. On another Mac in the same office, file sharing is enabled through an old protocol called SMB version one. It's fast and convenient—but outdated and vulnerable. Attackers can exploit it in minutes if the endpoint is exposed to the internet. These are the kinds of configuration oversights that happen every day, even in organizations that take security seriously. They're not failures of hardware or antivirus software. They're configuration gaps that open doors to attackers, and they often go unnoticed because nobody is looking for them. That's where Defense Against Configurations (DAC) comes in. Misconfigurations are a gift to attackers: default settings left open, remote access that should be off (like outdated netwo...

A group of academic researchers from Georgia Tech, Purdue University, and Synkhronix have developed a side-channel attack called TEE.Fail that allows for the extraction of secrets from the trusted execution environment (TEE) in a computer's main processor, including Intel's Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) and Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) and AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) and Ciphertext Hiding . The attack, at its core, involves the use of an interposition device built using off-the-shelf electronic equipment that costs under $1,000 and makes it possible to physically inspect all memory traffic inside a DDR5 server. "This allows us for the first time to extract cryptographic keys from Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP with Ciphertext Hiding, including in some cases secret attestation keys from fully updated machines in trusted status," the researchers noted on an informational site. "Beyond breaking CPU-based TEEs, we...

SonicWall on Wednesday disclosed that an unauthorized party accessed firewall configuration backup files for all customers who have used the cloud backup service. "The files contain encrypted credentials and configuration data; while encryption remains in place, possession of these files could increase the risk of targeted attacks," the company said . It also noted that it's working to notify all partners and customers, adding it has released tools to assist with device assessment and remediation. The company is also urging users to log in and check for their devices. The development comes a couple of weeks after SonicWall urged customers to perform a credential reset after their firewall configuration backup files were exposed in a security breach impacting MySonicWall accounts. The list of impacted devices available on the MySonicWall portal has been assigned a priority level to help customers prioritize remediation efforts. The labels are as follows - Active –...