David Strom – SiliconANGLE

It’s time to put an end to the NTLM network authentication protocol

David Strom — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 15:27:45 +0000

An ancient network authentication protocol has received its first death notice. The protocol, which has roots going back to the first local area network days of the 1980s, is called Microsoft NTLM, which stands for New Technology LAN Manager. Microsoft Corp.’s Matthew Palko charted its evolution – and hopeful eventual demise — in a blog […]

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The Hamas-Israeli war is also being fought in cyberspace

David Strom — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 20:09:25 +0000

The war between Hamas and Israel is also raging across the cybersecurity realm, with various malware exploits, disinformation campaigns and recruitment of citizen hackers seen on both sides of the conflict. It’s difficult to obtain independently verified information because of the dynamic situation, and because many Israelis have been deployed to active duty since the war […]

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New Magecart malware concealment tactics, hiding inside web status page

David Strom — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 14:34:13 +0000

The malware group behind Magecart continues to be on the cutting edge of hiding in plain sight. A report this week from Roman Lvovsky, an Israeli security researcher at Akamai Technology, demonstrates three obfuscation techniques that have been recently spotted by their telemetry. Magecart has been operating for years infecting various e-commerce websites, most notably […]

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Distributed denial-of-service attacks are growing bigger and more lethal

David Strom — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 15:59:09 +0000

A sad and scary new record was set this past week, with the latest and biggest distributed denial-of-service attack. The network security provider Cloudflare Inc. posted on its blog today that it had observed and repelled the attack in August. The previous volumetric record was set in February, the August attack was three times as much. […]

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The Predator Files describe another nefarious global spyware campaign

David Strom — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 16:40:35 +0000

A group of journalists and researchers today released evidence of a massive campaign to spy on numerous political leaders across the globe. Called “The Predator Files,” the project covers the use of potent spyware that targeted more than 50 social media accounts in 10 countries beginning in February. It documents the reports from dozens of […]

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Red Cross aims to make civilian wartime hacking more humanitarian

David Strom — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 16:58:40 +0000

The role of civilian hackers during warfare continues to expand, and now at least one group is trying to set up some rules of engagement. But whether the proposal from the International Committee of the Red Cross announced Wednesday will gain any traction and make these attempts more humane is anyone’s guess. Civilian hackers have participated […]

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The rise and fall of Clearview.AI and the evolution of facial recognition

David Strom — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 22:16:45 +0000

Facial recognition software has come full circle, from tech darling to tech disaster. Now, its rise and fall have been chronicled by Kashmir Hill (pictured below), a technology reporter for the New York Times who has tracked its potential and problems through one of its major innovators, Clearview AI Inc. Her new book, “Your Face Belongs […]

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After 10 years of crypto scammers, there’s still a rocky road ahead

David Strom — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 21:00:29 +0000

Running a criminal cryptocurrency enterprise has certainly gotten more complicated. It was 10 years ago this week when Ross Ulbricht walked into a branch of the San Francisco public library to spend another day running the Silk Road, his marketplace for buying and selling illegal and questionable goods. He walked out in handcuffs after an […]

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Zero-trust networking creator John Kindervag joins Illumio as chief evangelist

David Strom — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 16:07:59 +0000

John Kindervag, the originator of the term zero-trust networking, has joined Illumio Inc. as its chief evangelist. Kindervag, whose appointment was announced Monday, has had a long and successful career in information security, including serving on various advisory boards and more than eight years working for Forrester Research as an analyst. He was at Forrester where […]

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How ‘purple teams’ collaborate to assess cybersecurity threats

David Strom — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 14:35:03 +0000

Security penetration testing provider SpecterOps Inc. today became the latest company to offer a “purple team” assessment, a sign that the collaborative approach to cybersecurity is catching on. The concept refers to using both defensive and offensive measures to understand the weak spots in a customer’s infrastructure, and to shore up defenses to prevent future […]

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Security threats of AI large language models are mounting, spurring efforts to fix them

David Strom — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 16:41:03 +0000

A new report on the security of artificial intelligence large language models, including OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT, shows a series of poor application development decisions that carry weaknesses in protecting enterprise data privacy and security. The report is just one of many examples of mounting evidence of security problems with LLMs that have appeared recently, demonstrating […]

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Yet another hack hits NFT marketplace OpenSea

David Strom — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 19:01:07 +0000

One of the largest nonfungible token marketplaces OpenSea was hacked once again this week. The hack follows two other attacks, the last back in June 2022, when a third-party contractor was able to download emails of its users and newsletter subscribers and provide a copy to an unauthorized party. An earlier phishing attack in February […]

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Passkeys gain steam: new product from 1Password, Yubico goes public

David Strom — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 13:45:43 +0000

Today is a big day for passkeys as two leaders in the market, 1Password and Yubico AB, announced milestones of a different sort for the growing security method. 1Password became the latest security provider to embrace passkeys — mostly, since this is just another example of how passkeys are more of a journey than a […]

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A new study finds ChatGPT is quite gender-biased

David Strom — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 17:41:33 +0000

Two Oxford, U.K.-based organizations today released a study examining the inherent gender bias of 13 AI-based chatbots, and the results aren’t encouraging. The study examined the responses to various prompts and ranked them according to professional bias of women and men in a workplace content and in telling stories about fictional protagonists. Calling out bias […]

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CrowdStrike adds new cybersecurity protective tools – and Bionic.ai – to its Falcon lineup

David Strom — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 17:00:26 +0000

CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. today announced new products extending its Falcon protection line and highlighted various threat research results from its annual Threat Hunting Report released last month. Also announced at the company’s annual Fal.con user group conference was the acquisition of Bionic.ai for cash and stock for an undisclosed amount. The companies expect this transaction to […]

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California stays ahead on state privacy protection

David Strom — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 20:28:48 +0000

California has become the latest state to enact a special law regulating how consumers can remove themselves from data brokers. The Delete Act was passed this week and it’s now up to Governor Gavin Newsom to sign it into law. But it has already led to similar laws and bills being proposed in other states […]

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Deepfake cyberthreats keep rising. Here’s how to prevent them

David Strom — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 22:51:59 +0000

As expected, this summer has seen a rise in various cybersecurity threats based on deepfake audio and video impersonations. Despite warnings from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in June, it’s now quite common to experience these types of threats. The fakes are used to lend credibility to larger exploits, such as for a phishing email […]

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A network observability protocol standard gets a big boost

David Strom — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 17:38:03 +0000

A networking protocol that has been under development for four years got a boost from both F5 Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. this week. Called OpenTelemetry — OTel or OTLP for short — the protocol has been endorsed by dozens of vendors and has a curious mixture of open- and closed-source code to help advance the cause […]

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Cloud-based security threats on the rise, according to new IBM X-Force data

David Strom — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 11:00:55 +0000

IBM Corp.’s X-Force security consultancy annual 2023 Cloud Threat Landscape Report is out today, and it’s not a pretty picture. Based on several collections of threat intelligence data compiled from June 2022 to June 2023, the report reveals that 82% of data breaches in its investigations involved various cloud data compromises. IBM found that cloud-related vulnerabilities […]

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Beware of insecure networked printers

David Strom — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 21:04:39 +0000

Despite promises of a paperless office that have origins in the 1970s, the printer is still very much a security problem in the modern office. And even if Microsoft Corp. will succeed in its efforts to eradicate the universe of third-party printer drivers from its various Windows products, the printer will still be the bane […]

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It’s the end of the line for outdated internet encryption protocols

David Strom — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 17:27:34 +0000

An aging core internet protocol is finally getting the ax by Microsoft Corp. But it wasn’t just last month’s announcement that the software vendor was ending support for versions 1.0 and 1.1 of Transport Layer Security, or TLS, but that it was actually dropping the support from the impending release of the latest beta version […]

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New charges filed against Trickbot ransomware gang

David Strom — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 17:09:16 +0000

The malware gang behind the Trickbot ransomware exploits, also known as Conti, faces a new series of charges by both the U.S. and the U.K. governments. The charges, filed yesterday, reveal the actual identities of the criminals, who will probably never see a courtroom, let alone a prison, anywhere in the world. Nevertheless, they represent a continued law enforcement […]

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Software supply chain attacks are multiplying, but so are strategies to avoid them

David Strom — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 18:12:08 +0000

By now most information technology managers are painfully aware of the consequences of software supply chain attacks. Thanks to exploits affecting the supply chains of SolarWinds, Log4Shell and 3CX, the power and widespread damage inflicted by these attacks on thousands of businesses are certainly well-known. To try to remedy things, a raft of new supply […]

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Well-known security consultant ‘Mudge’ is once again on the move

David Strom — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:26:19 +0000

The former hacker known as Mudge is once again on the move. Mudge, the alias for Peiter Zatko (pictured, center), was the former head of security back when X Corp. was known as Twitter. He is now a consultant for the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Washington Post reported yesterday. Zatko has worked […]

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It’s the summer of adversarial chatbots. Here’s how to defend against them

David Strom — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:00:25 +0000

This has been the summer of adversarial chatbots. Researchers from SlashNext Inc. and Netenrich discovered two such efforts, named WormGPT and FraudGPT. These cyberattack weapons are certainly just the beginning in a long line of products that will be developed for nefarious purposes such as creating very targeted phishing emails and new hacking tools. Both are […]

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How Kremlin-backed social media campaigns continue to spread disinformation

David Strom — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 15:44:00 +0000

A new report sponsored by the European Commission has found that social media has played a key role in the spread of Russian-backed disinformation campaigns since their war with Ukraine began. “Over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe,” the researchers stated in the […]

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Google’s new use of generative AI could boost ‘fuzzing,’ a longtime cybersecurity defense tool

David Strom — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 18:22:22 +0000

Google LLC’s new application of generative AI to a tried-and-true cybersecurity method called fuzzing could help elevate it into the top tray of enterprises’ defensive tool chests. Fuzzing is the process by which security researchers use various automated tools to cycle rapidly through random data inputs to make the target code crash or yield unexpected […]

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Phishing as a service continues to plague business users

David Strom — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 18:48:30 +0000

Greatness isn’t always a good thing. This past year has seen a lot of it — that is, in the form of an innovative phishing-as-a-service malware construction kit of the same name now in active usage. The Greatness malware attempts to put everything an attacker needs into one tidy package, so that anyone can fill […]

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North Korea Lazarus Group beefs up its malware attacks once again

David Strom — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 20:58:16 +0000

A group of North Korean hackers group continues to threaten networks and businesses around the world, now with ever more sophisticated new attacks. Lazarus has been behind some very nasty exploits, including the double software supply chain attack on 3CX this past March and one of the largest thefts of cryptocurrency from the Ronin Network in […]

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Pam Baker’s new book ‘ChatGPT for Dummies’ illuminates chatbots for pros and neophytes alike

David Strom — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 20:02:48 +0000

Readers who have somehow escaped learning about ChatGPT and other AI-based chatbots should read a new book by my longtime freelancing colleague Pam Baker, “ChatGPT for Dummies.” Baker has been covering various AI-related topics for nearly a decade, including writing several books on machine learning and data science. She has a long business-to-business tech resume, […]

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