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Google has announced that it's expanding its Vulnerability Rewards Program ( VRP ) to compensate researchers for finding attack scenarios tailored to generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems in an effort to  bolster AI safety and security . "Generative AI raises new and different concerns than traditional digital security, such as the potential for unfair bias, model manipulation or misinterpretations of data (hallucinations)," Google's Laurie Richardson and Royal Hansen  said . Some of the categories that are in scope  include  prompt injections, leakage of sensitive data from training datasets, model manipulation, adversarial perturbation attacks that trigger misclassification, and model theft. It's worth noting that Google earlier this July instituted an  AI Red Team  to help address threats to AI systems as part of its Secure AI Framework ( SAIF ). Also announced as part of its commitment to secure AI are efforts to strengthen the AI supply...

F5 has alerted customers of a critical security vulnerability impacting BIG-IP that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution. The issue, rooted in the configuration utility component, has been assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2023-46747 , and carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10. "This vulnerability may allow an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the BIG-IP system through the management port and/or self IP addresses to execute arbitrary system commands," F5  said  in an advisory released Thursday. "There is no data plane exposure; this is a control plane issue only." The following versions of BIG-IP have been found to be vulnerable - 17.1.0 (Fixed in 17.1.0.3 + Hotfix-BIGIP-17.1.0.3.0.75.4-ENG) 16.1.0 - 16.1.4 (Fixed in 16.1.4.1 + Hotfix-BIGIP-16.1.4.1.0.50.5-ENG) 15.1.0 - 15.1.10 (Fixed in 15.1.10.2 + Hotfix-BIGIP-15.1.10.2.0.44.2-ENG) 14.1.0 - 14.1.5 (Fixed in 14.1.5.6 + Hotfix-BIGIP-14.1.5.6.0.10.6-ENG) 13.1.0 - ...

A group of academics has devised a novel side-channel attack dubbed  iLeakage  that exploits a weakness in the A- and M-series CPUs running on Apple iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices, enabling the extraction of sensitive information from the Safari web browser. "An attacker can induce Safari to render an arbitrary webpage, subsequently recovering sensitive information present within it using speculative execution," researchers Jason Kim, Stephan van Schaik, Daniel Genkin, and Yuval Yarom  said  in a new study. In a practical attack scenario, the weakness could be exploited using a malicious web page to recover Gmail inbox content and even recover passwords that are autofilled by credential managers. iLeakage, besides being the first case of a  Spectre-style   speculative execution   attack  against Apple Silicon CPUs, also works against all third-party web browsers available for iOS and iPadOS owing to Apple's App Store policy that mandates all b...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

The prolific threat actor known as  Scattered Spider  has been observed impersonating newly hired employees in targeted firms as a ploy to blend into normal on-hire processes and takeover accounts and breach organizations across the world. Microsoft, which disclosed the activities of the financially motivated hacking crew, described the adversary as "one of the most dangerous financial criminal groups," calling out its operational fluidity and its ability to incorporate SMS phishing, SIM swapping, and help desk fraud into its attack model. "Octo Tempest is a financially motivated collective of native English-speaking threat actors known for launching wide-ranging campaigns that prominently feature adversary-in-the-middle ( AiTM ) techniques, social engineering, and SIM swapping capabilities," the company  said . It's worth noting that the activity represented by  Octo Tempest  is tracked by other cybersecurity companies under various monikers, including 0kta...

Cloudflare on Thursday said it mitigated thousands of hyper-volumetric HTTP distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that exploited a recently disclosed flaw called  HTTP/2 Rapid Reset , 89 of which exceeded 100 million requests per second (RPS). "The campaign contributed to an overall increase of 65% in HTTP DDoS attack traffic in Q3 compared to the previous quarter ," the web infrastructure and security company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Similarly,  L3/4 DDoS attacks  also increased by 14%." The total number of HTTP DDoS attack requests in the quarter surged to 8.9 trillion, up from 5.4 trillion in Q2 2023 and 4.7 trillion in Q1 2023. The number of attack requests in Q4 2022 stood at 6.5 trillion. HTTP/2 Rapid Reset (CVE-2023-44487) came to light earlier this month following an industry-wide coordinated disclosure that delved into DDoS attacks orchestrated by an unknown actor by leveraging the flaw to target various providers such as ...

While cyberattacks on websites receive much attention, there are often unaddressed risks that can lead to businesses facing lawsuits and privacy violations even in the absence of hacking incidents. A new case study highlights one of these more common cases.  Download the full case study here . It's a scenario that could have affected any type of company, from healthcare to finance, e-commerce to insurance, or any other industry. Recently, Reflectiz, an advanced website security solution provider, released a  case study  focusing on a forgotten and misconfigured pixel that had been associated with a leading global healthcare provider. This overlooked piece of code surreptitiously gathered private data without user consent, potentially exposing the company to substantial fines and damage to its reputation. Nowadays, it has become common practice for companies to embed such pixels into their websites. For instance, the TikTok Pixel is a typical example, added to web...

The Iranian threat actor known as  Tortoiseshell  has been attributed to a new wave of watering hole attacks that are designed to deploy a malware dubbed IMAPLoader. "IMAPLoader is a .NET malware that has the ability to fingerprint victim systems using native Windows utilities and acts as a downloader for further payloads," the PwC Threat Intelligence team  said  in a Wednesday analysis. "It uses email as a [command-and-control] channel and is able to execute payloads extracted from email attachments and is executed via new service deployments." Active since at least 2018, Tortoiseshell has a history of using strategic website compromises as a ploy to facilitate the distribution of malware. Earlier this May, ClearSky  linked the group  to the breach of eight websites associated with shipping, logistics, and financial services companies in Israel. The threat actor is  aligned  with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ( IRGC ) and is also tr...

Users of  Mirth Connect , an open-source data integration platform from NextGen HealthCare, are being urged to update to the latest version following the discovery of an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability. Tracked as  CVE-2023-43208 , the vulnerability has been addressed in  version 4.4.1  released on October 6, 2023. "This is an easily exploitable, unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability," Horizon3.ai's Naveen Sunkavally  said  in a Wednesday report. "Attackers would most likely exploit this vulnerability for initial access or to compromise sensitive healthcare data." Called the "Swiss Army knife of healthcare integration," Mirth Connect is a cross-platform interface engine used in the healthcare industry to communicate and exchange data between disparate systems in a  standardized manner . Additional technical details about the flaw have been withheld in light of the fact that Mirth Connect versions going as far bac...

A relatively new threat actor known as  YoroTrooper  is likely made up of operators originating from Kazakhstan. The assessment, which comes from Cisco Talos, is based on their fluency in Kazakh and Russian, use of Tenge to pay for operating infrastructure, and very limited targeting of Kazakhstani entities, barring the government's Anti-Corruption Agency. "YoroTrooper attempts to obfuscate the origin of their operations, employing various tactics to make its malicious activity appear to emanate from Azerbaijan, such as using VPN exit nodes local to that region," security researchers Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura  said . First documented by the cybersecurity company in March 2023, the adversary is  known to be active  since at least June 2022, singling out various state-owned entities in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET is tracking the activity under the name  SturgeonPhisher . YoroTrooper's at...

The threat actor known as  Winter Vivern  has been observed exploiting a zero-day flaw in Roundcube webmail software on October 11, 2023, to harvest email messages from victims' accounts. "Winter Vivern has stepped up its operations by using a zero-day vulnerability in Roundcube," ESET security researcher Matthieu Faou  said  in a new report published today. Previously, it was using known vulnerabilities in Roundcube and Zimbra, for which proofs-of-concept are available online." Winter Vivern, also known as TA473 and UAC-0114, is an  adversarial collective  whose objectives align with that of Belarus and Russia. Over the past few months, it has been attributed to attacks against Ukraine and Poland, as well as government entities across Europe and India. The group is also assessed to have exploited another flaw Roundcube as recently as August and September (CVE-2020-35730), making it the  second nation-state group after APT28  to target the op...