Monday, December 23

Tag: security roundup

Google Just Denied Cops a Key Surveillance Tool
16Dec By adminNo Comments
Technology

Google Just Denied Cops a Key Surveillance Tool

A hacker group calling itself Solntsepek, previously linked to the infamous Russian military hacking unit Sandworm, took credit this week for a disruptive attack on the Ukrainian internet and mobile service provider Kyivstar. As Russia’s kinetic war against Ukraine has dragged on, inflicting what the World Bank estimates to be around $410 billion in recovery costs for Ukraine, the country has launched an official crowdfunding platform known as United24 as a means of raising awareness and rebuilding.Kytch, the small company that aimed to fix McDonald’s notably often-broken ice cream machines, claims it has discovered a “smoking gun” email from the CEO of McDonald’s ice cream machine manufacturer that Kytch's lawyers say suggests an alleged plan to undermine Kytch as a potential competitor....
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ChatGPT Spit Out Sensitive Data When Told to Repeat ‘Poem’ Forever
2Dec By adminNo Comments
Technology

ChatGPT Spit Out Sensitive Data When Told to Repeat ‘Poem’ Forever

OpenAI didn't immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment on the researchers' findings. When we tried the “repeat ‘poem’ forever" and “repeat ‘book’ forever” prompts ourselves, they didn't produce training data but instead threw up flags for a potential violation of ChatGPT's terms of use, suggesting at least some instances of the problem may have been fixed.In a sprawling bust that spanned multiple Ukrainian cities, at least five key members of a ransomware gang were arrested this week in raids coordinated by Europol along with law enforcement agents from Ukraine, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and other European countries. The group's members are accused of deploying multiple ransomware variants including LockerGoga, Hive, MegaCortex, and Dharma. According to Ukrainian police, ...
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Google’s Ad Blocker Crackdown Is Growing
25Nov By adminNo Comments
Technology

Google’s Ad Blocker Crackdown Is Growing

Google proposed putting restrictions on this API but has relaxed these somewhat in the new version of Manifest V3. It originally planned to allow browser extensions to make 5,000 content-filtering “rules,” but it has now increased this to 30,000 rules. AdGuard, an ad blocker, has tentatively welcomed some of the revised changes. Elsewhere, uBlock Origin, which uses around 300,000 filtering rules, has created a “lite” version of its extension in response to Manifest V3. The developer behind uBlock Origin says the lite version is not as “capable” as the full version. Meanwhile, browser makers Brave and Firefox say they are introducing work-arounds to stop ad blockers from being impacted by the changes.Supply chain attacks, where malware is implanted in a company's legitimate software and sp...
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The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry
19Nov By adminNo Comments
Technology

The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry

If you’re looking for a long read to while away your weekend, we’ve got you covered. First up, WIRED senior reporter Andy Greenberg reveals the wild story behind the three teenage hackers who created the Mirai botnet code that ultimately took down a huge swath of the internet in 2016. WIRED contributor Garrett Graff pulls from his new book on UFOs to lay out the proof that the 1947 “discovery” of aliens in Roswell, New Mexico, never really happened. And finally, we take a deep dive into the communities that are solving cold cases using face recognition and other AI.That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy stories we didn’t report in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.For years, mercenary hacker companies like NSO G...
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This Cheap Hacking Device Can Crash Your iPhone With Pop-Ups
5Nov By adminNo Comments
Technology

This Cheap Hacking Device Can Crash Your iPhone With Pop-Ups

As the Israel-Hamas war continues, with Israeli troops moving into the Gaza Strip and encircling Gaza City, one piece of technology is having an outsized impact on how we see and understand the war. Messaging app Telegram, which has a history of lax moderation, has been used by Hamas to share gruesome images and videos. The information has then spread to other social networks and millions more eyeballs. Sources tell WIRED that Telegram has been weaponized to spread horrific propaganda.Microsoft has had a hard few months when it comes to the company’s own security, with Chinese-backed hackers stealing its cryptographic signing key, continued issues with Microsoft Exchange Servers, and its customers being impacted by failings. The company has now unveiled a plan to deal with the ever-growin...
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This Cryptomining Tool Is Stealing Secrets
28Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

This Cryptomining Tool Is Stealing Secrets

As the Israel-Hamas war raged on this week and Israel expanded its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, the territory's compromised internet infrastructure and access to connectivity went fully dark on Friday, leaving Palestinians without access to ground or mobile data connections. Meanwhile, researchers are bracing for the fallout if Hamas makes good on its threats to distribute hostage execution videos online. And TikTokkers are using a niche livestreaming feature and exploiting the Israeli-Hamas conflict to collect virtual gifts from viewers, a portion of which goes to the social media company as a fee.As the worst mass shooting in Maine's history unfolded this week and the gunman remained at large, disinformation about the situation and the suspect flooded social media, adding to the a...
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The 23andMe User Data Leak May Be Far Worse Than Believed
21Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

The 23andMe User Data Leak May Be Far Worse Than Believed

With the Israel-Hamas war intensifying by the day, many people are desperate for accurate information about the conflict. Getting it has proven difficult. This has been most apparent on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, where insiders say even the company’s primary fact-checking tool, Community Notes, has been a source of disinformation and is at risk of coordinated manipulation.Case in point: An explosion at a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday was followed by a wave of mis- and disinformation around the cause. In the hours following the explosion, Hamas blamed Israel, Israel blamed militants in Gaza, mainstream media outlets repeated both sides’ claims without confirmation either way, and people posing as open source intelligence experts rushed out dubious analyses. The result was a toxic mix o...
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The US Congress Was Targeted With Predator Spyware
15Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

The US Congress Was Targeted With Predator Spyware

The media consortium, along with security researchers from Amnesty International and Google’s Threat Analysis Group, were able to show Vietnam’s connection to the Predator hacking campaign through documents they obtained that detail the Vietnamese government’s contract with Intellexa in 2020, and later an extension of the deal to allow the use of the Predator software. The internal documents went so far as to capture the response of Intellexa’s founder, Israeli former military hacker turned entrepreneur Tal Dilian, when the deal was announced: “Wooow!!!!” Vietnam’s government would later target French officials with Predator before this year’s campaign targeting US congressmen.Despite efforts by Israel and other nations to cut off funding to Hamas in recent years, the group raised million...
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Apple’s Encryption Is Under Attack by a Mysterious Group
8Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

Apple’s Encryption Is Under Attack by a Mysterious Group

Does the public have a right to see gruesome photos of animal test subjects taken by a public university?That question underpins an ongoing court battle between UC Davis and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an animal welfare group, which is fighting for the release of photos of dead monkeys used in tests of Elon Musk–owned Neuralink’s brain-chip implants. A WIRED investigation this week revealed the extent to which Neuralink and UC Davis have gone to keep images of the tests secret.Also this week, an investigation by the Markup, copublished with WIRED, analyzed crime predictions by Geolitica (formerly PredPol) in Plainfield, New Jersey, and found that they accurately predicted crime less than 1 percent of the time. As WIRED previously reported, Geolitica is shutting down...
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