Cybersecurity
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Live in the Waters of Western Australia
Evidence of them has been found by analyzing DNA in the seawater. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy.
Your Purple Team Isn't Purple — It's Just Red and Blue in the Same Room
Defending a network at 2 am looks a lot like this: an analyst copy-pasting a hash from a PDF into a SIEM query. A red team script is being rewritten by hand so the blue team can use it. A patch waiting on a change-approval window that's longer than the exploitation window itself. Nobody in that chain is incompetent. Every…
Fake OpenAI Privacy Filter Repo Hits #1 on Hugging Face, Draws 244K Downloads
A malicious Hugging Face repository managed to take a spot in the platform's trending list by impersonating OpenAI's Privacy Filter open-weight model to deliver a Rust-based information stealer to Windows users. The project, named Open-OSS/privacy-filter, masqueraded as its legitimate counterpart released by OpenAI late last month (openai/privacy-filter), including copying the entire description
Cyber Espionage Group Targets Aviation Firms to Steal Map Data
The campaign quietly compromises aerospace and drone operators to exfiltrate GIS files, terrain models, and GPS data and gain a clear picture of adversaries' world view.
Poor security left hackers inside water company network for nearly two years
The UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), fined South Staffordshire Water’s parent company £963,900 over security failures linked to a cyberattack that exposed the personal data of 633,887 people. According to the ICO, the South Staffordshire breach began in September 2020 with a phishing email that tricked an employee into opening an attachment, allowing attackers to install…
Tech Can't Stop These Threats — Your People Can
Security controls can do only so much. Here are four attacks where your employees are usually your first, and only, line of cyber defense.
Why patching SLAs should be the floor, not the strategy
I’ve been a CISO for two separate companies, know several CISOs personally, and interact with many others through various cybersecurity forums. We all have one thing in common. We can tell you our patching SLA numbers off the top of our heads. Ninety-five percent of criticals closed in 14 days. Eighty-something on highs. The board slide is green. The auditors…
What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity
Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced that its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, can autonomously find and weaponize software vulnerabilities, turning them into working exploits without expert guidance. These were vulnerabilities in key software like operating systems and internet infrastructure that thousands of software developers working on those systems failed to find. This capability will have major security implications, compromising the…
Fast16 Malware
Researchers have reverse-engineered a piece of malware named Fast16. It’s almost certainly state-sponsored, probably US in origin, and was deployed against Iran years before Stuxnet: “…the Fast16 malware was designed to carry out the most subtle form of sabotage ever seen in an in-the-wild malware tool: By automatically spreading across networks and then silently manipulating computation processes in certain software…