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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have issued alerts about the presence of hidden functionality in Contec CMS8000 patient monitors and Epsimed MN-120 patient monitors. The vulnerability , tracked as CVE-2025-0626 , carries a CVSS v4 score of 7.7 on a scale of 10.0. The flaw, alongside two other issues, was reported to CISA by an anonymous external researcher. "The affected product sends out remote access requests to a hard-coded IP address, bypassing existing device network settings to do so," CISA said in an advisory. "This could serve as a backdoor and lead to a malicious actor being able to upload and overwrite files on the device." "The reverse backdoor provides automated connectivity to a hard-coded IP address from the Contec CMS8000 devices, allowing the device to download and execute unverified remote files. Publicly available records show that the IP address is not associa...

Social engineering has long been an effective tactic because of how it focuses on human vulnerabilities. There's no brute-force 'spray and pray' password guessing. No scouring systems for unpatched software. Instead, it simply relies on manipulating emotions such as trust, fear, and respect for authority, usually with the goal of gaining access to sensitive information or protected systems. Traditionally that meant researching and manually engaging individual targets, which took up time and resources. However, the advent of AI has now made it possible to launch social engineering attacks in different ways, at scale, and often without psychological expertise. This article will cover five ways that AI is powering a new wave of social engineering attacks. The audio deepfake that may have influenced Slovakia elections Ahead of Slovakian parliamentary elections in 2023, a recording emerged that appeared to feature candidate Michal Simecka in conversation with a well-known journalist, M...

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...

Google said it blocked over 2.36 million policy-violating Android apps from being published to the Google Play app marketplace in 2024 and banned more than 158,000 bad developer accounts that attempted to publish such harmful apps. The tech giant also noted it prevented 1.3 million apps from getting excessive or unnecessary access to sensitive user data during the time period by working with third-party app developers. Furthermore, Google Play Protect, a security feature that's enabled by default on Android devices to flag novel threats, identified 13 million new malicious apps from outside of the official app store. "As a result of partnering closely with developers, over 91% of app installs on the Google Play Store now use the latest protections of Android 13 or newer," Bethel Otuteye and Khawaja Shams from the Android Security and Privacy Team, and Ron Aquino from Google Play Trust and Safety said . In comparison, the company blocked 1.43 million and 2.28 millio...

Broadcom has released security updates to patch five security flaws impacting VMware Aria Operations and Aria Operations for Logs, warning customers that attackers could exploit them to gain elevated access or obtain sensitive information. The list of identified flaws, which impact versions 8.x of the software, is below - CVE-2025-22218 (CVSS score: 8.5) - A malicious actor with View Only Admin permissions may be able to read the credentials of a VMware product integrated with VMware Aria Operations for Logs CVE-2025-22219 (CVSS score: 6.8) - A malicious actor with non-administrative privileges may be able to inject a malicious script that may lead to arbitrary operations as admin user via a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) attack CVE-2025-22220 (CVSS score: 4.3) - A malicious actor with non-administrative privileges and network access to Aria Operations for Logs API may be able to perform certain operations in the context of an admin user CVE-2025-22221 (CVSS score: 5.2) ...

Over 57 distinct threat actors with ties to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia have been observed using artificial intelligence (AI) technology powered by Google to further enable their malicious cyber and information operations. "Threat actors are experimenting with Gemini to enable their operations, finding productivity gains but not yet developing novel capabilities," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a new report. "At present, they primarily use AI for research, troubleshooting code, and creating and localizing content." Government-backed attackers, otherwise known as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups, have sought to use its tools to bolster multiple phases of the attack cycle, including coding and scripting tasks, payload development, gathering information about potential targets, researching publicly known vulnerabilities, and enabling post-compromise activities, such as defense evasion. Describing Iranian APT actors as the "he...

An international law enforcement operation has dismantled the domains associated with various online platforms linked to cybercrime such as Cracked, Nulled, Sellix, and StarkRDP. The effort, which took place between January 28 and 30, 2025, targeted the following domains - www.cracked.io www.nulled.to www.mysellix.io www.sellix.io www.starkrdp.io Visitors to these websites are now greeted by a seizure banner that says they were confiscated as part of Operation Talent that involved authorities from Australia, France, Greece, Italy, Romania, Spain, and the United States, along with Europol. "This website, as well as the information on the customers and victims of the website, has been seized by international law enforcement partners," the message reads. Operational since at 2015 and 2018, both Nulled and Cracked have been used to peddle various hack tools, such as ScrubCrypt, a malware obfuscation engine that has been observed delivering stealer malware in the pas...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw in the Lightning AI Studio development platform that, if successfully exploited, could have allowed for remote code execution. The vulnerability, rated a CVSS score of 9.4, enables "attackers to potentially execute arbitrary commands with root privileges" by exploiting a hidden URL parameter, application security firm Noma said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This level of access could hypothetically be leveraged for a range of malicious activities, including the extraction of sensitive keys from targeted accounts," researchers Sasi Levi, Alon Tron, and Gal Moyal said. The issue is embedded in a piece of JavaScript code that could facilitate unfettered access to a victim's development environment, as well as run arbitrary commands on an authenticated target in a privileged context. Noma said it found a hidden parameter called "command" in user-specific URLs – e.g., ...

The job of a SOC analyst has never been easy. Faced with an overwhelming flood of daily alerts, analysts (and sometimes IT teams who are doubling as SecOps) must try and triage thousands of security alerts—often false positives—just to identify a handful of real threats. This relentless, 24/7 work leads to alert fatigue, desensitization, and increased risk of missing critical security incidents. Studies show that 70% of SOC analysts experience severe stress, and 65% consider leaving their jobs within a year . This makes retention a major challenge for security teams, especially in light of the existing shortage of skilled security analysts . On the operational side, analysts spend more time on repetitive, manual tasks like investigating alerts, and resolving and documenting incidents than they do on proactive security measures. Security teams struggle with configuring and maintaining SOAR playbooks as the cyber landscape rapidly changes. To top this all off, tool overload and siloed ...

Buzzy Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek , which has had a meteoric rise in popularity in recent days, left one of its databases exposed on the internet, which could have allowed malicious actors to gain access to sensitive data. The ClickHouse database "allows full control over database operations, including the ability to access internal data," Wiz security researcher Gal Nagli said . The exposure also includes more than a million lines of log streams containing chat history, secret keys, backend details, and other highly sensitive information, such as API Secrets and operational metadata. DeepSeek has since plugged the security hole following attempts by the cloud security firm to contact them. The database, hosted at oauth2callback.deepseek[.]com:9000 and dev.deepseek[.]com:9000, is said to have enabled unauthorized access to a wide range of information. The exposure, Wiz noted, allowed for complete database control and potential privilege escalati...

Three security flaws have been disclosed in the open-source PHP package Voyager that could be exploited by an attacker to achieve one-click remote code execution on affected instances. "When an authenticated Voyager user clicks on a malicious link, attackers can execute arbitrary code on the server," Sonar researcher Yaniv Nizry said in a write-up published earlier this week. The identified issues, which remain unpatched to date despite responsible disclosure on September 11, 2024, are listed below - CVE-2024-55417 - An arbitrary file write vulnerability in the "/admin/media/upload" endpoint CVE-2024-55416 - A reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the "/admin/compass" endpoint CVE-2024-55415 - An arbitrary file leak and deletion vulnerability  A malicious attacker could leverage Voyager's media upload feature to upload a malicious file in a manner that bypasses MIME type verification, and make use of a polyglot file that ap...