News

At least not until Redmond's government edition is ready to roll

Staff working at the US House Of Representatives have been barred from using Microsoft's Copilot chatbot and AI productivity tools, pending the launch of a version tailored to the needs of government users.…

This time, we got lucky. It mostly affected bleeding-edge distros. But that's not a defense strategy

Analysis  The discovery last week of a backdoor in a widely used open source compression library called xz could have been a security disaster had it not been caught by luck and atypical curiosity about latency from a Microsoft engineer.…

Also, TheMoon botnet back for EoL SOHO routers, Sellafield to be prosecuted for 'infosec failures', plus critical vulns

Infosec in brief  Nearly a year on from the discovery of a massive data theft at healthcare biz Harvard Pilgrim, and the number of victims has now risen to nearly 2.9 million people in all US states.…

Theresa Payton on why US needs a national privacy law

Interview  Congress is mulling legislation that will require TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance to cut ties with the video-sharing mega-app, or the social network will be banned in the USA.…

Time to update that password - and four-digit account pin, which was also among the pilfered records

That rumored AT&T dark web customer data dump from mid-March has been confirmed, and it's a whopper: A total of more than 73 million current and former customers are included in the cache, AT&T confirmed over the weekend.…

Code shines up nicely in production, says Chocolate Factory's Bergstrom

Echoing the past two years of Rust evangelism and C/C++ ennui, Google reports that Rust shines in production, to the point that its developers are twice as productive using the language compared to C++.…

Red Hat in all caps says STOP USAGE OF ANY FEDORA RAWHIDE INSTANCES

Red Hat on Friday warned that a malicious backdoor found in the widely used data compression library xz may be present in the upcoming Fedora Linux 40 and in the Fedora Rawhide developer distribution.…

CVE-2024-1086 turns the page tables on system admins

A Linux privilege-escalation proof-of-concept exploit has been published that, according to the bug hunter who developed it, typically works effortlessly on kernel versions between at least 5.14 and 6.6.14. …

Vendor takes hardline approach to patch disclosure to new levels

JetBrains TeamCity users are urged to apply the latest version upgrade this week after the vendor disclosed 26 new security issues in the CI/CD web application.…

Could have been worse: Prosecutors wanted decades more

Fallen crypto-king Sam Bankman-Fried has been jailed for 25 years after New York federal judge Lewis Kaplan expressed disbelief at almost every argument from his legal team.…

Flaws enable privilege escalation and remote code execution

Nvidia's AI-powered ChatRTX app launched just six week ago but already has received patches for two security vulnerabilities that enabled attack vectors, including privilege escalation and remote code execution.…

After all, it's only about keeping the essentials on – no rush

America's long-awaited cyber attack reporting rules for critical infrastructure operators are inching closer to implementation, after the Feds posted a notice of proposed rulemaking for the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA).…

In happier news, Ubuntu Pro extended support now goes up to 12 years

After multiple waves of cryptocurrency credential-stealing apps were uploaded to the Snap store, Canonical is changing its policies.…

Sensitive documents dumped on leak site amid claims of 3 TB of data stolen in total

NHS Scotland says it managed to contain a ransomware group's malware to a regional branch, preventing the spread of infection across the entire institution.…

One might say this is a wurst case scenario

The German Federal Office for Information Security (BIS) has issued an urgent alert about the poor state of Microsoft Exchange Server patching in the country.…

Simply look out for libraries imagined by ML and make them real, with actual malicious code. No wait, don't do that

In-depth  Several big businesses have published source code that incorporates a software package previously hallucinated by generative AI.…

Government issues stern warning over despot money-making scheme

Two executives were issued arrest warrants in Japan on Wednesday, reportedly for charges related to establishing a business that outsourced work to North Korean IT engineers.…

Report claims Beijing is most displaced by junta's failure to address slave labor scam settlements

The military junta controlling Myanmar has struggled to control all of its territory thanks in part to China backing rebel forces as a way of expressing its displeasure about cyberscam centers operating from the country.…

Beware support calls offering a fix

Apple device owners, consider yourselves warned: A targeted multi-factor authentication bombing campaign is going around with the goal of exhausting iUsers into accidentally allowing a password reset.…

We're dreaming of a white list, because we're just like the ones you used to know

More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters.…